28B: December 28, 10:15 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.
Slot: 28B-1 Dec.
28, 10:15 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.
Panel: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: The Self, the
Word and Power
Chair: Liza Knapp, Columbia University
Title: “Мёртвые пчёлы”? — Prince Myshkin’s
Anti-Logos Stance in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot
Author: Ani Kokobobo, Columbia University
Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin seems to be
positively aching to speak at the start of The Idiot, but, at the start of Part II, after a
few months in society, he reveals a shift in his verbal behavior. He appears not as the loquacious
“philosopher” of the Epanchin parlor, but rather as the laconic “sphinx.” As the narrator confirms, Myshkin – in
a tone much reminiscent of Fyodor Tiutchev's "Silentium!" – confides
in Prince Shch. that “he had to restrain himself and keep silent because he had
no right to humiliate a thought by stating it.” Myshkin proves incapable of utter verbal restraint and
occasionally gives in to his impulses to verbalize, thus zigzagging from
silence to loquaciousness. It
seems to me that this character’s reaction to language, his reticence and
frequent reliance on gesture and facial readings, tells of a non-logocentric,
Tiutchevian mode of being that challenges the word’s primacy and diverges from
the Bakhtinian dialogic model of the vibrant and “embodied” word. To use Osip Mandelstam’s metaphors,
both in the loudest of conversations and during his own verbal outpourings,
Myshkin seems to construe words as washed out dead bees, he ignores their buzz,
instead weaving them into a gestural, perfunctory necklace.
This paper
begins by treating Bakhtin’s “brief” analysis of The Idiot in Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics and discuss the ways in which the
novel’s Swiss prehistory, often referred to by Myshkin as his “inarticulate”
past, sets this character apart from standard extracts of “slum
naturalism.” This hints at the
limitations of Bakhtin’s dialogic and significantly logocentric model. This paper considers Myshkin’s almost
deviant verbal behavior in the carnivalesque scandal scene where, in direct
opposition to characters like Ganya Epanchin who display an acute (almost
pathological) attention to words, he neither internalizes nor engages the
verbal medium, but rather metalingually distorts and objectifies words, often
taking what seem to be key prophetic insights, and making them interrogative,
or, worse still, using the word as a mere building block in syllogisms. The character’s own speech (both inner
and outer) is marked by a vagueness and almost gesture-like quality. Instead of engaging the other and
shaping inter-subjectivity, Myshkin’s speech searches for a different dimension
of interaction, often struggling to attain sincerity and objectivity.
References
Bakhtin, M. M. Problems of
Dostoyevsky's Poetics. Minneapolis, London: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984.
De Man, Paul. "Dialogue and Dialogism." In Emerson C., Morson G.
S. Rethinking Bakhtin.
Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989.
Emerson C., Morson G. S. Creation of a Prosaics.
Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Rice, James. Dostoyevsky and the Healing Art.
Ardis, Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1985.
Seifrid, Thomas. The Word Made Self.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.
Title: «Я вот он. А я вот он»: Megalomania and
Homecoming in War and Peace
Author: Emma Lieber, Columbia University
Readers of War and Peace have long taken Napoleon to be, if not
quite the villain of the novel, than at least the laughingstock, a
megalomaniacal baby engaged in a narcissistic project. Tolstoy’s savage
portrait of Napoleon rests in part upon a theory of history in which individual
agency is limited and heroic deeds are always partly illusory. In war, as in history as a whole, any
single event is made up of so many individual wills, causes, and occurrences
that the outcome could never have been planned or predicted. We are all small,
insignificant units, and the attainment of maturity means the relinquishing of
self-love and omnipotent fantasies.
Yet though
Napoleon seems fully worthy of the author’s contempt, it has not gone unnoticed
that the most admirable characters in the War and Peace (notably Pierre and Andrei) possess
worldly ambitions that resemble and even are figured by Napoleon’s. Indeed, critics
have pointed out that such drives account for the epic qualities of the novel.
This paper suggests a reading of War and Peace that is based on this paradox, and on
the suggestion that a grandiose sense of self, though repudiated in the figure
of Napoleon, is at the same time associated with the heights of moral and
spiritual accomplishment.
Throughout the novel, characters experience, specifically in memories of
childhood, domestic life, family harmony, and maternal care, intimations of
immortality. That is, in recollections of the time of life when we were all,
properly, little Napoleons immersed in adoration and infantile satisfaction,
they catch glimpses of the celestial home from which we all originated and to
which we all will return. In this sense,
perhaps it is the status of War and Peace as a novel—the
literary genre that puts the smallest of us in the spotlight, makes heroes of
us all, and takes us as seriously as we deserve to take ourselves—that the most
noble and uplifting qualities of heroism can be most deeply felt.
Jackson, Robert. “Napoleon in Russian Literature.” Yale French Studies 1960: 107-118.
Tolstoi, Lev Nikolaevich. Voina i mir.
Moscow: Eksmo, 2003.
Title: Reading Dostoevsky in the Shadow of the
Holocaust
Author: Gina Kovarsky, Virginia Commonwealth
University
As Robert L. Jackson writes, “Dostoevsky
is still ‘becoming,’ and we keep discovering, or rediscovering, in him
dimensions that both embrace and go beyond his relevance to the nearly
apocalyptic events of the twentieth century” (2). From within the frame of Dostoevsky’s 19th
century consciousness, The Idiot
explores the horror of death overwhelming the meaning of life. The Holocaust went even beyond the
worst of what Dostoevsky could have imagined. And yet, despite that inevitable gap, Dostoevsky’s concerns
resonate with those taken up in the literature that responds to the Holocaust.
Can a
representation of such extreme inhumanity and suffering ever be
commensurate? Indeed, as Langer
notes, “some still believe that it is impossible to write about the Holocaust
and that silence is the only fitting response” (3). Readers of The Idiot will remember Ippolit’s confrontation with a related
question: “Can one conceive as an
image [obraz] that
which has no image?” That question
and the passage on the Holbein Christ offer a way into considering the idea,
voiced by Lyotard and others, that the Holocaust is “the endpoint of the
historical process as well as of rational reason” (Kaes 207).
Yet it is also
in the Holocaust’s shadow that we may be better able to discern the relevance,
not only of Dostoevsky’s acknowledgment of language’s limits, but also of his
insight into a restorative principle kept alive through communication. Reading him through the prism of
witness accounts can broaden our vision of the ethical significance of
narration for Dostoevsky. The
paper will also show that in focusing on Dostoevsky’s concern with “gesture”
and “measure,” we may become better readers of Levi and Spiegelman, both of
whom reveal a similar preoccupation with narrative decorum.
References
Jackson, Robert Louis. Dialogues with Dostoevsky: The
Overwhelming Questions. Stanford UP, 1993.
Kaes, Anton. “Holocaust and the End of
History: Postmodern Historiography in Cinema.” in Saul Friedlander, ed. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the
Final Solution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1992.
Langer, Lawrence L. Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust
Anthology. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.
Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity.
Trans. Stuart Woolf. New
York: Collier, 1993.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale.
Volume I: My Father Bleeds History and Volume II: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.