This collection of articles on Fedor Dostoevskii, as the editors Katherine Bowers and Kate Holland note, represents the refined versions of essays first presented at a workshop hosted by Green College at the University of British Columbia in August of 2018. The articles reflect the varied interests of its participants regarding the poetics of Dostoevskii's major novels, including such oft-studied areas of Dostoevskii scholarship as money, science, gender, politics, plot, characterization, ekphrasis, sociology, theology, and the poetics of space.
Kate Holland in “The Poetics of the Slap” deals with the employment of “the slap”—the precursor in Romantic poetics of an ensuing duel—in three of Dostoevskii's novels, Notes from the Underground, The Possessed, and A Raw Youth. Holland shows how Dostoevskii in each case disrupts the normal sequence of such narratives for his own artistic purposes. In Notes from the Underground, there is not even a slap, just the idea of a slap and only an imagined duel; in The Possessed it is a pulled ear, not Shatov's famous slap, that elicits the duel; and in A Raw Youth, the duel over a slap is contemplated but never occurs.
In “Dostoevsky and the (Missing) Marriage Plot,” Anna Berman notes that “neither marriage nor reproduction seem to be of great concern to Dostoevskii's heroes. They resist the genealogical imperative” (43). Berman broaches, but in the end discounts, the idea that the queer theory often used in Anglo-American criticism can provide an interpretive tool in novels, like Dostoevskii's, where there is a lack of emphasis on “reproductive futurity.”
Using the pawnbroker Aliona Ivanovna from Crime and Punishment and Grushenka from The Brothers Karamazov, Vadim Shneyder attempts to show the ways in which Dostoevskii's businesswomen differ from their male counterparts.
Melissa Frazier in “Allegories of the Material World: Dostoevsky and Nineteenth-Century Science” argues that the scientist George Lewes's physiological psychology—which he called “reasoned realism”—offers a fruitful scientific and phenomenological model for understanding Dostoevskii's “representation of bodies and minds in his novels” (90).
In another article dealing with Dostoevskii's reactions to nineteenth-century science, Alexey Volovin (“Dostoevsky, Sechenov, and the Reflexes of the Brain”) discusses how Dostoevskii in Notes from the Underground might have used the analytic methods of the materialist-determinist Sechenov paradoxically to undercut his denial of free will.
Sarah J. Young (“Deferred Senses and Distanced Spaces”) attempts to shows how Raskolnikov's distorted sense perception leads to his failure to recognize the reality of bodies, which results in his tendency to view human beings as abstractions; and further, how “third persons” breach barriers to communication by opening up novelistic space.
Katherine Bowers (“Under the Floorboards, Over the Door: The Gothic Corpse and Writing Fear in The Idiot”) shows how a “gothic narrative force punctuates the novelistic fabric of The Idiot in three key episodes that evoke Holbein's painting” (142), all of which involve a clearly gothic representation of the dead body, whose main function may be to elicit existential terror in the characters of the novel as well as its readers.
Dostoevskii would often say his extraordinary contemporary types prefigured the average and normal in the next generation. Greta Matzner-Gore, (“The Improbable Poetics of Crime and Punishment”) argues that Dostoevskii's preference for the extraordinary both in plot and character were in part a reaction against the vogue in his time of statistical sociology, which not only sought the statistical average but privileged it.
Chloë Kitzinger (“Characterization in Dostoevsky's The Adolescent”) shows how in A Raw Youth, Dostoevskii attempts a different method of novelistic narration, which, in effect, means “replacing the imitation of ‘embodiedness’ with the longing for it” (179), replacing ordered forms with forms that resist order, forms which look beyond the novel of the present to the novel of the future.
Ilya Kliger, (“Sovereignty and the Novel: Dostoevsky's Political Theology”) focuses on some of the transgressive aspects of the Dostoevskian novel by showing how it often seems on the verge of departing from its status as a nineteenth century novel (which emphasizes people in their social relations) and of entering into the realm of state power (Raskolnikov as Napoleonic usurper and lawgiver), the realm of the ode and tragedy.
For those wanting to get a better idea of the interests and methodologies of some of the younger generation of Dostoevskii scholars, this fine collection of well-researched articles is a good place to start.
