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The Strange Relationship of Stavrogin and Stepan Trofimovich as Told by Anton Lavrent'evich G-v
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
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The first-person narrative form is notoriously problematic. Throughout the history of the novel, it has both repelled authors due to the obvious limitations imposed by its restriction to a single consciousness and attracted them because of the apparent veracity it imparts to psychological portrayal. In the most conscientiously constructed examples of the type, the first-person narrator is able to portray directly the thoughts of a single character only, that is, himself. Of other characters, he can only report actions and surmise motives, and these characters to whom the reader does not have cognitive privilege may appear to be two-dimensional or even come off as caricatures.
Fedor Dostoevskii's Besy (Demons, 1871-72) is a first-person memoir novel. My thesis is that the novel's narrative form itself involves the reader psychologically and morally in problems that occupied Dostoevskii throughout his life—problems of freedom, contingency, and eternity.
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References
1. For this reason, George Orwell rejects the form outright, “But in general an T novel is simply the story of one person—a three-dimensional figure among caricatures— & therefore cannot be a true novel.” Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian, eds., The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 4 vols. (New York, 1968), 4:512 Google Scholar
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4. Gene Fitzgerald, Malcolm Jones, and Adam Weiner likewise distinguish G-v's narrating and experiencing selves, and Jones argues for not one but two narrating selves and two experiencing selves. See Fitzgerald, Gene, “Anton Lavrent'evich G-v: The Narrator as Re-Creator in Dostoevskyij's The Possessed ,” in Gutsche, G.J. and Leighton, L., eds., New Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Russian Prose (Columbus, 1982), 121-34Google Scholar; Malcolm Jones, 'The Narrator and Narrative Technique of Dostoevsky's TheDevils,” in W.J. Leatherbarrow, ed., Dostoevsky's The Devils: A Critical Companion (Evanston, 1999), 100-118; and Weiner, Adam, By Authors Possessed: The Demonic Novel in Russia from Gogol to Nabokov (Evanston, 1998)Google Scholar. Weiner refers to the two narrative entities as “the two hypostases of G-v,” the character and the narrator (116).
5. Zundelovich is typical: ‘The novel's varying styles—evidence of a flawed design— manifest themselves primarily in the fact that the author and the chronicler have no fixed boundaries, so that the narration switches from the chronicler's to the author's frequently and unexpectedly. Thus, the chronicler appears to have several faces or masks. It is precisely because in Besy there is no clear division [between author and narrator] that the novel falls into two parts of unequal value (two spheres of pamphleteering).” See Zundelovich, la. O., “Pamfletnyi stroi romana Besy,” Romany Dostoevskogo: Stat'i (Tashkent, 1963), 109-10Google Scholar; Jones, Malcolm V., Dostoyevsky: The Novel of Discord (London, 1976), 147 Google Scholar; Matlaw, Ralph, ‘The Chronicler of The Possessed: Character and Function,” Dostoevsky Studies 5 (1984): 37–47 Google Scholar; and Gus, Mikhail, Idei i obrazyF. M. Dostoevskogo (Moscow, 1971), 396–408 Google Scholar.
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7. Wayne Booth makes the useful distinction between the author and the implied author in his classic study of narrative: ‘The implied author includes not only the extractable meanings but also the moral and emotional content of each bit of action and suffering of all of the characters. It includes, in short, the intuitive apprehension of a completed artistic whole; the chief value to which this implied author is committed, regardless of what party his creator belongs to in real life.” See Booth, , The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1983), 73–74 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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18. Ibid., 10:347.
19. Ibid., 10:123.
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27. Even Maria Shatova at the end—she incarnates this betrayal in simple, trashy, seductive terms.
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30. Ibid., 10:189.
31. Ibid., 10:195.
32. Ibid., 10:196.
33. Ibid., 10:198.
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39. Ibid., 10:481.
40. Ibid., 10:494.
41. Ibid., 10:195.
42. Michael Holquist has observed that at the end of Crime and Punishment the detective story gives way to the wisdom tale. The last pages of the novel, he writes, are told in a different kind of time: “The ‘correct’ answer is not a solution, but the reminder of another and greater mystery.” See Holquist, Michael, Dostoevsky and the Novel (Princeton, 1977), 101 Google Scholar.
43. Dostoevskii, , Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10:415 Google Scholar.
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45. Ibid., 10:394. Gene Moore hints at G-v's demonism. See Moore, , “The Voices of Legion: The Narrator of The Possessed ,” Dostoevsky Studies 6 (1985): 51–66 Google Scholar. Weiner and Vladimir Padunov diabolize G-v to an extreme. Wiener, By Authors Possessed, and Vladimir Padunov, “Dostoevsky's ‘Devils': A Polemical Aesthetics” (manuscript under consideration).
46. Dostoevskii, , Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 21:129 Google Scholar. Emphasis in the original.