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The Realization of the Collective Self: The Rebirth of Religious Autobiography in Dostoevskii's Zapiski iz Mertvogo Doma

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Gary Rosenshield
Gary Rosenshield*
Affiliation:
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Extract

Fedor Dostoevskii was at least as great and ingenious a renovator of old forms as he was a creator of the revolutionary new form, the polyphonic novel. However fond Dostoevskii may have been of old, often "outdated" modes and genres, he never accepted or used them as he found them; rather he seems to have been attracted to them primarily for the possibilities they offered for literary experimentation. Often overlooked, at least in this regard, is Dostoevskii's great semiautobiographical novel Zapiski iz Mertvogo doma. Perhaps in no other work did Dostoevskii perform as daring a literary experiment in the renewal of an "outmoded" genre–in this case, the religious autobiography. Lev Tolstoi, who himself, according to Prince Dmitrii Mirsky, years later wrote a confession on a par with the Book of Job, thought Zapiski the best thing that Dostoevskii ever did, and one of the greatest Christian works of its time. Uplifting, universal, and "infectious," Zapiski iz Mertvogo doma met all of Tolstoi's criteria for great art.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , Summer 1991 , pp. 317 - 327
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1991

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References

1. For Dostoevskii's literary experiment combining sentimentalism with “Russian naturalism” in his first work, Bednye liudi, see Vinogradov, V. V., “Shkola sentimental'nogo naturalizma: Roman Dostoevskogo ‘Bednye liudi’ na fone literaturnoi evoliutsii 40-kh godov,” Evoliutsiia russkogo naturalizma: Gogol’ i Dostoevskii (Leningrad: Akademiia, 1929 Google Scholar; Rosenshield, Gary, “GorSkov in Poor Folk: An Analysis of an Early Dostoevskian ‘Double, '” Slavic and East European Journal 26, 2(1982): 149–162 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosenshield, Gary, “Old Pokrovskij: Technique and Meaning in a Character Foil in Dostoevskij's Poor Folk ,” New Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Russian Prose, ed. Gutsche, George J. and Leighton, Lauren G. (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1982), 99–110.Google Scholar

2. The most notable work on Zapiski iz Mertvogo doma has been done by Robert Louis Jackson. See especially his Art of Dostoevsky (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), 5-133.

3. Mirsky, D. S., A History of Russian Literature (1926; rep. ed. New York: Knopf, 1966), 299 Google Scholar.

4. For a discussion of Tolstoi's appreciation of Zapiski, see Iakubovich, I. D., “Primechaniia,” in Dostoevskii, F. M., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. Bazanov, V. G. et al., 30 vols. (Leningrad: Akademiia nauk, 1972) 4: 297–298 Google Scholar. Further citations from this volume will be followed by the page number in the text. Tolstoi wrote, “Ne ton, a tochka zreniia udivitel'naia — iskrennaia, estestvennaia i khristianskaia. Khoroshaia, nazidatel'naia kniga.” Tolstoi, L. N., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 90 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury (GIKhL), 1928-1964) 63: 24.Google Scholar

5. Here is not the place to attempt to solve the notoriously difficult problem of defining autobiography. It will prove more fruitful in the examination of Zapiski to work not with a definition of autobiography per se, but with several distinctions that are frequently made between the older religious or spiritual autobiography and the modern autobiography (although undoubtedly the former laid the groundwork for the latter).

6. Morson, Gary, The Boundaries of Genre (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 48–49.Google Scholar

7. While recognizing that Zapiski is a novel in only a “limited Bakhtinian sense,” Lewis Bagby in “Dostoevsky's Notes from A Dead House: The Poetics of the Introductory Paragraph,” Modern Language Review 81 (1986): 140, attempts a reinterpretation of the work based on essentially novelistic assumptions. See also his “On Dostoevsky's Conversion: The Introduction to Notes from a Dead House,” Symposium 39 (1985): 3-18.

8. Frank, Joseph, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 216-217, 220-222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Bakhtin's concept of novelization, however, does not imply loss of a genre's former identity; thus it leaves room for the interpretation of novel as autobiography and autobiography as novel. “Therefore, the novelization of other genres does not imply their subjection to an alien generic canon; on the contrary, novelization imples their liberation from all that serves as a brake on their unique development” ; see M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 39. In fact, the reinterpretation of Zapiski as a novel, in light of autobiography, is the subject of an article—eventually to be a book chapter—I am currently writing.

10. The “easiest” way out of the hermeneutical dilemma posed by Zapiski is to see it, as many have, as a “mixed form” (Frank, Stir, 222). Such a designation makes the understanding of the work in strict genre categories less necessary. Most of those who have written about Zapiski have taken a biographical or literarybiographical approach and have seen in Zapiski a crucial document of Dostoevskii's ideological and political conversion or an important creative laboratory for his later fiction, in which crime and the people play important roles. For several representative examples of this approach, see Simmons, Ernest J., Dostoevsky: The Making of a Novelist (1940; rep. ed. London: Lehmann, 1950), 83–93 Google Scholar; Mochulsky, Konstantin, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans. Minihan, Michael A. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), 192—197 Google Scholar; Shklovskii, V. B., Za iprotiv (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1957), 124–164 Google Scholar; FridJender, G. M., Realizm Dostoevskogo (Moscow: Nauka, 1964), 92–109 Google Scholar; Kirpotin, K. V., Dostoevskii v shestidesiatye gody (Moscow: GIKhL, 1966), 326–388 Google Scholar; Il'ia Serman, “Tema narodnosti v Zapiskakh iz Mertvogo doma,” Dostoevsky Studies 3 (1982): 101-144. For the most detailed and insightful discussion of Dostoevskii's years in prison and exile, from both a biographical and ideological point of view, see Frank, Joseph, Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Jackson, Art.

11. Spacks, Patricia Meyer, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. Fedor Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii 4: 232.

13. Jackson, Art, 68.

14. See Maurois's remarks on fiction being essential in biography in order to give an inner view (his remarks apply equally to autobiography); Maurois, Andre, Aspects of Biography (New York: Ungar, 1966), 183–185.Google Scholar

15. Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 28. Though few critics would go as far as Lejeune, his views are presupposed in much autobiographical criticism. See also May, Georges, L’ autobiographie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979), 180 Google Scholar; Hart, Francis, “Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography,” New Literary History 1, 3(1970): 488 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shapiro, Stephen A., “The Dark Continent of Literature: Autobiography,” Comparative Literature Studies 5, 4(1968): 454 Google Scholar; Mandel, Barrett J., “The Autobiographer's Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 27, 2(1968): 220 Google Scholar; Shumaker, Wayne— English Autobiography: Its Emergence, Materials and Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954 Google Scholar, 105—argues that the autobiography, since it is professedly truthful, “excludes metaphorical and Active analogues.”

16. Both Jackson, Art, 33-35, and Bagby, “Conversion” and “Poetics,” while recognizing various dualities and inconsistencies in the introduction, nevertheless argue a position diametrically opposite to the one I will be setting out in the following paragraphs. They argue that the introduction is not only an integral part of the “novel,” but the key to the entire work.

17. In his notes to the Academy edition of Zapiski (PSS 283-284), I. D. Iakubovich states that one of the most evident and frequent changes that Dostoevskii made in transforming his experiences into art was to alter, for reasons of censorship, the nature of the crimes of his prototypes. See also Fridlender, Realizm, 97.

18. Frank, Stir, 219, noting the same discrepancy and viewing the introduction as a device for avoiding trouble with the censor, suggests that the introduction is the same type of transparent dodge used by other nineteenth century Russian writers of memoirs.

19. Dostoevskii remarked in Dnevnikpisatelia: “ ‘Zapiski zhe iz Mertvogo doma’ napisal, piatnadtsat’ let nazad, ot litsa vymyshlennogo, ot prestupnika, budto by ubivshego svoiu zhenu. Kstati pribavliu kak podrobnost', chto s tekh por menia ochen’ mnogie dumaiut i utverzhdaiut dazhe i teper', chto ia soslan byl za ubiistvo zheny moei.” PSS 22: 47.

20. Bagby, “Conversion,” 14, not wholly successfully, it seems to me, attempts to interpret the inconsistency between the narrator as political prisoner and uxoricide as essentially metaphorical.

21. Interpreting the introduction as an integral part of Zapiski, Shklovskii, Za iprotiv, 101-102, 109, must view the narrator of the novel as deceived in his belief that he has been resurrected from the dead.

22. Frank, Years, 125.

23. For various formulations concerning the particular preoccupations of the self in modern autobiography, see Olney, James, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), 21-38, 331–335 Google Scholar; Shapiro, “Dark Continent,” 444-454; Curtin, John Claude, “Autobiography and the Dialectic of Consciousness,” International Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1974): 343–346 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pascal, Roy, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 179–195 Google Scholar; Spender, Stephen, “Confessions and Autobiography,” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. Olney, James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 115–122 Google Scholar; Weintraub, Karl Joachim, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 336–379 Google Scholar; Kazin, Alfred, “Autobiography as Narrative,” Michigan Quarterly Review 3, 4(1964): 210–216 Google Scholar; Heidi Stull, I., The Evolution of the Autobiography from 1770-1850: A Comparative Study and Analysis (New York: Lang, 1985), 37 Google Scholar. For the English precursors of the modern tradition in autobiography, see Morris, John N., Version of the (New York: Basic, 1966 Google ScholarPubMed.

24. Relatively few critics emphasize the importance of “the other” in autobiography, but Janet Varner Gunn—Autobiography: Toward a Poetics of Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 62—emphasizes “the risk of Narcissus” that the autobiographer runs when he loses sight of “otherness” and when he fails to understand that “self-realization must be gained from the ways the self is known to others” (141).

25. Jackson, Art, 57-58.

26. Ibid., 57.

27. Fridlender, Realizm, 98, points out that Dostoevskii's contemporaries took Zapiski to be about Dostoevskii himself and the success of the book owed a great deal to that perception. It might be added that the young Anna Grigor'evna Snitkina's initial attraction to Dostoevskii could be largely ascribed to her idealization of and compassion for the political martyr and author of her beloved Zapiski iz Mertvogo doma.

28. If one accepts Jackson's triple vision interpretation of Dostoevskii's “Muzhik Marei” (Art, 20-32), then “Muzhik Marei” —like Zapiski partly an imaginative recollection of Dostoevskii's prison experiences— might be considered a continuation of the autobiography. Dostoevskii himself alludes to Zapiski in the story itself. Moreover, the story is introduced in Dnevnik pisatelia—a quintessential boundary work, as Morson has shown—as Dostoevskii's contribution to the true understanding of the Russian people. For a biographical interpretation of “Muzhik Marei,” treated in terms of a conversion experience, see Frank, Years, 116-127.

29. John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, ed. A. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton, 1956), 227. Gunn, Autobiography, 25, states: “The classical autobiographical self … wins eternity but loses the possibility of meaning that resides only in time.”

30. Gunn, Autobiography, 119. In a similar vein, see Pascal, Design, 97, 111. While recognizing the dangers of ideology, Shapiro, “Dark Continent,” 417, can also argue the case, within limits, for ideology: “The feeling that some autobiographers have—the feeling that man must and can do something to change the world—brings autobiography much closer to the world of action, and sometimes propaganda, than some critics might feel is happy for the aesthetic function of literature. But a sword or shield can be beautiful, and literature can include among its several functions that of more or less directly moving men to action.” For a similar view, see the article on the role of autobiography in the building of America by Robert F. Sayer, “Autobiography and the Making of America,” Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed., Olney 146-168.

31. For the importance of process in modern autobiography, see Pascal, Design, 182-183; William C. Spengemann, The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), 22.

32. Jackson, Art, 42.

33. Perhaps not only Dnevnikpisatelia and “Muzhik Marei,” but all Dostoevskii's narratives in which the conversion experience is foregrounded need to be reexamined in terms of autobiography as boundary genre.

34. Georges Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. Olney, 44. For autobiography as an exercise in aesthetic incompletion or open form, see James Olney, “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment,” Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. Olney, 22-27. Dostoevskii seems to insist as much on the absence of closure—continuation—in his pure novels as he does in Zapiski. In Prestuplenie i nakazanie, the process is relegated to “the subject of another story,” and in Brat'ia Karamazovy, the process is postponed to “the second novel,” which Dostoevskii, of course, never wrote.

35. Roger Rosenblatt, “Black Autobiography: Life as the Death Weapon,” Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. Olney, 179, notes a perhaps not unsimilar characteristic in the work of the black autobiographer, who tends to see his personal story in the history and future of his people: “The future, which is not solely his own, but that of his people and national ideals, generally seems more important to him than the life he has gone to such pains to record.”

36. The question of Tolstoi and autobiography constitutes another subject entirely, but perhaps it would be worth while to treat some of Tolstoi's fiction (Voskresenie, for example) not so much as autobiographical but as literary autobiography; that is, autobiography as genre. It might be argued that, at least in terms of Russian literature, the whole subject of literary autobiography as a boundary genre needs to be more carefully and extensively addressed.