Chloe Kitzinger's study is an ambitious project that in 160 pages discusses the major novels of Lev Tolstoi and Fedor Dostoevskii with their armies of characters, while developing some theoretical issues pertaining to the mimesis in literature. These issues relate to technical aspects of mimesis, and to the predicament of the authors who strove to combine mimetic realism with the didactic goals of transforming their audience.
The style is dense, abstract, and sometimes hard to follow, as the focus of the study is less the narrative choices of authors or moral choices of characters, but rather theorizing on what the realistic presentation of characters implies, both in terms of possibilities and limitations: “we see not just the conditions that create the effect of lifelong persons, but also the conditions that contain it: a collision between the plenitude and the discontent of mimesis” (26). Undoubtedly, such probing authors as Tolstoi and Dostoevskii were bound to find discontent everywhere; for Kitzinger, it is primarily the discontent of “mimesis” that they explore by forever beating against its limits.
The opening of the study declares “the power of mimetic characters has its limits as a direct source of spiritual, social and political change” (5), while the conclusion suggests that, “the illusion of the character's life set boundary around the reader's encounter with him, which limits the novelist's power to turn this encounter toward lasting spiritual or social change” (156). We also learn that Tolstoi's frustration with mimetic limits forced him to quit writing novels: “Tolstoy's turn away from the novel after writing Anna Karenina bears witness to this limit: a realist so falling into vivid particularity that it resists its longed for dissolution in the real” (124). Surely both Tolstoi and Dostoevskii hoped to “move beyond the limits of realist character-systems themselves” (18); surely Tolstoi tried to tax “conventional character-system past its limits” (22); still, one feels that tracing what these authors have done within the limits of their verbal arts is more productive than theorizing on their unrealizable desires to move beyond them.
The practical side of the book is more rewarding than this theoretical “limitology.” Kitzinger explores narrative techniques, which create a complicated network of meanings, produced by various modes of character presentation. As a point of departure she takes Alex Woloch's The One vs. The Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (2003), which proposes to arrange the characters, according to their “degrees of protagonicity” along the axis of narrative center/periphery; the minor characters are suppressed and fragmented in contrast with more “complete” protagonists placed closer to “the vivifying center,” as opposed to “formulaic margins” (9).
Kitzinger's insights into the arrangement of Tolstoi's major and minor characters are illuminating. While main protagonists exhibit “autonomous embodied existence in and for himself independent of the narrative” (36), minor characters, in contrast, exhibit formulaic, mechanistic, ghostlike or fragmentary existence” (36). Their purpose is to “sustain fictional plot” (55). To push this comparison further, Kitzinger focuses on Dolokhov and Sonya, doomed to be “minor” by the rules that Tolstoi sets up for himself in the novel: “telling Pierre's story has to exclude telling Dolokhov's” (48). “Minor” characters become “minor” due to their moral flaws: “what links Napoleon and Dolokhov is their reliance on plotting—their belief in their own capacity to influence and direct others’ actions, which for Tolstoi results in “minorness” (57).
For anyone trying to come to terms Tolstoi's hundreds of characters and his ever-changing perspective on what constitutes a true hero, such analysis is highly productive, as it accounts for all sorts of paradigms in Tolstoi, be it Prince Kasatsky's transformation into Father Sergius and a nameless wanderer in “Father Sergius,” or the inverse proportion between moral goodness and narrative space allotted to the characters of “Three Deaths.”
I would add that Woloch's spatial metaphors (center, periphery) prove indispensable when analyzing Tolstoi's fiction, since his texts tend to be organized according to various spatial principles and utilize various angles and “shots.” Tolstoi's narrative gaze zooms, pans, focuses, and provides close ups, while constantly playing with space, hierarchy, and proportions. Kitzinger highlights some of these moments: Natasha bursts into the room on her name day; Princess Marya Bolkonsky emerges on the scene as the figure in “the background” of her father's entourage; Andrew and Pierre discuss the meaning of life on a bridge. Natasha even thinks of her suitors spatially (Boris is narrow, Pierre wide). These explorations can surely be pushed further, since Tolstoi's spatial and artistic imagination utilizes the notions of center, periphery, flow, and trajectory, not only on the narrative but also physical level.
When it comes to Dostoevskii, one feels that neither the novels nor the intellectual preoccupations of their author benefits from theoretical schemes imposed upon them. Any theory of literature, and not just mimesis, finds Dostoevskii a harder nut to crack. His characters are notoriously unhinged, decentered, autonomous, self-aware, and do anything they can to violate theoretical schemes imposed upon them. Consequently, all sorts of theoreticians, from Gyorgy Lukács to Mikhail Bakhtin and Rene Girard, invented new theories to explain Dostoevskii and his unwieldy oeuvre. Not intimidated by the crowded field, Kitzinger introduces one more theoretical construct, the concept of “illegitimacy,” the “master trope for representing both the loss and the spiritual potential of the absent foundation, “which opens a character to ‘tempest and disorder’ on the one hand and to Christ on the other” (81).
Dostoevskii's project of “transforming the novel for the spiritual demands of a disordered and chaotic post-reform Russia” (80) can be theorized in all sorts of way, as does his desire to bridge the gap between didactic and mimetic; but does the concept of “illegitimacy” create a better framework for exploring his novels, than, say, “alienation.” The trope, however, remains important for Kitzinger, as she exerts a lot of effort to explain its applicability first to The Adolescent and then to The Brothers Karamazov, using it as a cornerstone for her interpretation of the novel.
The discussion of Dostoevskii's last novel does provide intriguing and illuminating insights into the dialogue between Tolstoi and Dostoevskii. It embraces the comparison of The Adolescent's fluid characters to Tolstoi's more recognizable types, continuing to Dostoevskii's decision to utilize a strong family as the narrative vehicle for his last novel, resulting in the Karamazovs’ dominance over the novel, and in the patterning of the three Karamazov brothers on the three Levin brothers: spiritual seeker, Konstantin, philosopher and writer, Koznyshev, and the passionate and rebellious Nikolai.
The desire to build upon the metaphor of “illegitimacy” forces Kitzinger, however, to construct her interpretation upon some radical difference between illegitimate Smerdiakov and his half-brothers. For Kitzinger, the epiphanies and transformations of the three brothers require their temporal lapse from their Karamazov nature, which they transcend by becoming at a certain moment “non-Karamazovs,” experiencing therefore existential crises and consequent epiphanies. Smerdiakov is doomed because he cannot transcend his origins: he is an illegitimate Karamazov, a non-Karamazov. This construct hardly works in the case of Ivan, whose delirium does not represent any meaningful transformation, nor does it recognize the importance of Zosima as the alternative center of the novel, connected to the epiphanies of various characters not related to Karamazov.
Granted that some of its thought provoking readings are not always convincing, this nuanced and sophisticated study with its illuminating application of Woloch's model will be of great use to anyone interested in the European novel, while literary theorists would surely benefit from its analysis of mimesis and its scope.
