11 - The unity of thought in the novel

Summary

Trying to understand the structure of The Divine Comedy, I came to the conclusion that the whole poem is a single united and unbreakable strophe. Or, more exactly, it is not a verse strophe, but a crystallographic figure, a solid.

Osip Mandelstam, Conversation about Dante

A genius, in Dostoyevsky's eyes, is someone who brings a ‘new word’ (novoe slovo). The new word is a message, though it may be in the shape of a question, as well as a new vision of the world and the creation of a universe. The best illustration appears in the famous lecture on Pushkin, 8 June 1880. Dostoyevsky took the poet's work as a whole in all its protean shapes, a whole whose meaning seemed so clear to him that he condensed it into four basic points in the ‘word of explanation’ which acted as preface for the publication of the lecture in the only issue of Diary of a Writer for 1880. We are concerned only with his approach, which was the same as that he adopted towards Cervantes, George Sand and Nekrasov. For Dostoyevsky, every great writer gave birth to a total work, whose vector, perfectly drawn at the moment of death, was constantly present at each stage of his evolution. Dostoyevsky always analysed with a view to synthesis. We may go on to consider his attitude towards his own work. Was he creating a unity? Was he, like Dante in The Divine Comedy, Balzac in The Human Comedy and Proust in Recollections of Time Past, pursuing a great continuous design throughout his work? Would he have wished to do so, even if it had been possible?