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The Tolstoy Connection in Bakhtin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Caryl Emerson
Caryl Emerson*
Affiliation:
Cornell University Ithaca, New York
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Abstract

Mikhail Bakhtin's work on Dostoevsky is well known. Less familiar, perhaps, is Bakhtin's attitude toward the other great Russian nineteenth-century novelist, Leo Tolstoy. This essay explores that “Tolstoy connection,” both as a means for interrogating Bakhtin's analytic categories and as a focus for evaluating the larger tradition of “Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky.” Bakhtin is not a particularly good reader of Tolstoy. But he does make provocative use of the familiar binary model to pursue his most insistent concerns: monologism versus dialogism, the relationship of authors to their characters, the role of death in literature and life, and the concept of the self. Bakhtin's comments on these two novelists serve as a good starting point for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the Bakhtinian model in general and suggest ways one might recast the dialogue between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky on somewhat different, more productive ground.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 100 , Issue 1 , January 1985 , pp. 68 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1985

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