THE POETICS OF QUOTATION

No study of The Brothers Karamazov based on Bakhtinian principles can afford to neglect Nina Perlina's book on quotation in the novel. Its implications are much wider than the title would suggest. Perlina adopts and modifies Bakhtin and although her modifications diverge from mine and her conclusions might seem to contradict them, there is no doubt that she makes out a powerful and impressive case. For Perlina, Dostoyevsky's last novel is indeed polyphonic, but formally it is different from all the other novels, for ‘it is only in The Brothers Karamazov that quotation organizes the whole architectonics of the novel’. Moreover quotations, and indeed all the discourse of characters, are organized hierarchically as it were on the ascending and descending slopes of a ladder. It would appear therefore that if Perlina is right The Brothers Karamazov does, despite its polyphony (and the relativity this may seem to imply), contain an irresistible hierarchy of values privileging Holy Writ and its most faithful exponents Zosima and Alyosha:

In the text of the novel, quotations from Holy Scripture appear as words of unshakable truth, and as ‘living bond’ between the eternal and the temporal … In Dostoyevsky's multileveled hierarchy of quotations, the highest level is occupied by the authoritative word of the Holy Writ.