Slot: 30B–1 Dec.
30, 10:15 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.
Title: Reading Dostoevsky
Chair: Nina Perlina, Indiana University
Title: Dostoevsky's Selo Stepanchikovo – A Case of Literary Transference?
Author: Kristin Vitalich, University of
California, Los Angeles
Dostoevsky wrote his Siberian novellas in
relative professional isolation and with them reemerged onto a literary scene
that had changed dramatically from the one he left behind. These works indicate
not only the return of a talented writer but a sea change in Dostoevsky’s
writing -- the first step on the road to his great novels and his novel
literary idiom. This paper will argue that Selo Stepanchikovo functions in the author’s oeuvre as a cathartic work, one in which
Dostoevsky exorcises the ghost of Gogol′ that had dominated his early reputation and literary
imagination.
Dostoevsky’s
early relationship to Gogol′
enjoys many telling similarities to Jacques Lacan’s account of the neurotic’s
relationship to his symbolic other (often a father figure), whom he regards
with a mixture of love and hate. This paper will suggest that Selo reveals that Dostoevsky has undergone a jouissance crisis in his neurosis, a point at which
his pathological relationship to Gogol′ is collapsing – a crisis perhaps (or even likely) prompted
by the emblematic role his mentor played in his arrest and imprisonment.
In Tynianov's study
of the novella he famously observes that, with this work, Dostoevsky moves from
his earlier stylization of Gogolian types to parody. This paper will build on
Tynianov's observations with a Lacanian reading of the novel's rhetorical
shift, in which this transition into a parodic mode reveals that the author has
undergone transference. The tyranni-comical Opiskin stands in for Gogol′ in this quasi-analytical encounter,
enabling Dostoevsky to achieve transference by playing with Gogol′’s words and thereby moving their
conflict into the sphere of language (where Dostoevsky would enjoy far greater
control over Gogol′’s
influence on his work).
Tynianov,
Yuri. Dostoevskii i Gogol′: k teorii parodii. 1921.
Title: “The Golden Pot” and The Idiot: Structure Revised
Author: Lioudmila Fedorova, Georgetown University
The connections between Dostoevsky’s and
E.T.A. Hoffman’s texts have been extensively studied, especially as concerns
the motif of doubles. However, I would like to examine a plot parallel that has
so far escaped scholars' attention between the tale “The Golden Pot” and the
novel The Idiot.
Though
V.Soloviev’s very popular translation of the Hoffman's tale into Russian was
published only in 1880, Dostoevsky definitely knew Hoffman's text by the time
he wrote The Idiot
(1868) as he mentions reading Hoffman in the early letters to his brother.
The plot of The
Idiot, particularly the
set-up, has much in common with the plot of "The Golden Pot." In
simplest terms it appears as follows: the main hero is a skillful calligrapher
who is hired by a noble man, the father of three daughters. The hero is a man
with a pure heart and his mission is to save the world. He falls in love with
one of the daughters and is loved by her, they get engaged. But he is also
involved in a love affair with another heroine representing an alternative set
of social values.
The calligrapher
figure (a humble image of a “little man”) has a predecessor in classical
Russian literature in Gogol’s Bashmachkin; however his place in the system of
images demonstrates that the Hoffman parallel is more relevant.
I would like to
concentrate on the way Dostoevsky rearranges Hoffman's structure: in Dostoevsky
the three sisters and their father are closer to the philistine world with
Aglaya corresponding to Hoffman's Veronika, while Serpentina, the seductive
serpent figure possessing magical powers, is represented by Nastasja
Filippovna. This rearrangement signifies that the happy course of Hoffman's
tale cannot be repeated.
Recognizing this
connection also allows us to follow another crucial parallel: the archetype of
Amur and Psyche from Apuleius’s The Golden Ass through Hoffman's "The Golden
Pot" to Dostoevsky's The Idiot.
Title: The Weight of Stone in Dostoevsky’s Besy
Author: Marcus C. Levitt, University of Southern
California
Claude Lorraine’s painting "Acis and
Galatea" (1657), cited by both Veresilov in "Podrostok" and
Stavrogin in Besy and
an evident source for the Ridiculous Man’s dream, suggests the ideal of
mankind’s lost “golden age.” Yet in the darker background of the canvass lurks
Polyphemous, who in the myth retold by Ovid, tears off a corner of the mountain
on which his sheep are grazing and crushes Acis to a pulp. This paper explores the images of
“being crushed by a stone” which punctuate Besy, and which suggest that for every
suggestion of utopia, destruction looms not far behind.
Artistotle
likens ethics to a falling stone, as something established by habit. Yet the
stone’s materiality and downward thrust may suggest the inevitability of evil
even more strongly. Recall Pechorin’s strange questions in “Taman′”: “Why did fate throw me into the
peaceful circle of honest smugglers? Like a stone, thrown into a still spring,
I disturbed their calm, and like a stone, almost went to the bottom myself!”
In Besy, a novel of extreme opinions, ideas,
like stones, have the power to crush, and their victims can only wriggle
helplessly under them. Shatov is
one such character, and his dead body is later weighted down by stones and
thrown into a pond. Being crushed by a stone, and fearing pain, also figure
into Kirillov’s speculations on suicide.
Stone also describes the relative (spiritual and material) stability of
Europe and Russia, as Peter Verkhovenskii agrees that soon “everything will
crumble into dirt. Holy Russia has less power of resistance than anything in
the world.” In contrast, stone imagery serves contrasting functions in Brat′ia
Karamazovy. While Smerdiakov may challenge the
notion that “faith moves mountains,” the final “speech by the stone” suggests
the possibility of a new habituation of virtue.
Title: Spotting Dostoevsky in a “Dark Alley
amongst Broken Fences and Chagall’s Cows”: Beat Author John Clellon Holmes
Rewriting The Possessed
Author: Jesse Menefee, Princeton University
Jack Kerouac, clearly obsessed with
Dostoevsky and claiming that he could even recognize him “in a dark alley
amongst broken fences and Chagall’s cows” (Kerouac, 386), urged his younger colleague and friend,
John Clellon Holmes, to tell the story of the Beat generation and describe the
“big swirling vortexes” (Kerouac, 200) of their shared experiences with an eye
turned toward one of Dostoevskii’s greatest works, The Possessed.
Holmes then enacted this suggestion with his first published novel, Go, admitting briefly his debt to
Dostoevsky in the foreword to his book (Holmes, xxii).
An examination
of Go reveals a score
of subtle, yet significant, parallels permeating the work both on a strictly
content-oriented level as well as in more abstract considerations of form and
narrative technique. By
concentrating specifically on The Possessed, one of Dostoevsky’s more turbulent
plunges into the multi-voiced “polyphonic” style of prose so loudly trumpeted
by Bakhtin, Holmes thrusts himself into an inheritance of this very same mode
of novelistic discourse. Not only
does Holmes stretch the face of Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin like a mask across the
face of one of his contemporaries, but the novel’s events and the voices of its
characters all merge into a cacophony of contradictory ideas not unlike the
mosaic of communal madness that we encounter in The Possessed.
This paper
charts the more revealing points of convergence and divergence between the two
works as Go
constitutes a bold recontextualization of Dostoevsky’s literature or, as the
critic Harold Bloom would say, a “creative misreading” of Dostoevsky in the
context of the hedonistic excesses of an underground, bohemian community in
post-World War II America.
References
Kerouac, Jack. “To John Clellon Holmes.” 24 June 1949 and 8 December
1964. Jack Kerouac: Selected
Letters 1957-1969. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Viking, 1999.
Holmes, John Clellon. Go. New
York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1952.