Dostoevsky and the Realists

Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover

Dostoevsky and the Realists

Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy

PETER LANG

New York • Bern • Berlin

Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Vladiv-Glover, Slobodanka, author.

Title: Dostoevsky and the realists: Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy / Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover.

Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2019. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018039553 | ISBN 978-1-4331-5223-8 (hardback: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4331-5225-2 (ebook pdf)

ISBN 978-1-4331-5226-9 (epub) | ISBN 978-1-4331-5227-6 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821–1881—Criticism and interpretation.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821–1881—Aesthetics.

Realism in literature.

Manners and customs in literature.

Canon (Literature)—History—19th century.

Literature and society—Europe—History—19th century.

Classification: LCC PG3328.Z7 R388 | DDC 891.73/3—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018039553

DOI 10.3726/b14603

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

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Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.

About the author

Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover is Adjunct Associate Professor (Research) in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia). She taught in Monash’s Slavic Studies and the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies until 2013. Apart from Dostoevsky, her research is in the poetics of Modernism and Postmodernism in Russian and Slavic literatures, in the context of European phenomenology and psychoanalytic theory. She is a co-author of Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (1999 and 2016) with Mikhail Epstein and Alexander Genis. She is on the executive boards of the Australasian Association for Communist and Post-communist Studies (AACPCS) and the North American Serbian Studies Society (NASSS) and is regional representative for Australia of the International Dostoevsky Society (IDS). She is chief editor of The Dostoevsky Journal: A Comparative Literature Review.

About the book

Dostoevsky and the Realists: Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy offers a radical redefinition of Realism as a historical phenomenon, grounded in the literary manifestoes of the 1840s in three national literary canons (English, French and Russian) which issue a call to writers to record the manners and mores of their societies for posterity and thus to become “local historians.” The sketch of manners becomes the instituting genre of Realism but is transformed in the major novels of the Realists into history as genealogy and into a phenomenology of modern subjectivity. Dickens, Flaubert and Tolstoy are brought into relation with Dostoevsky via a shared poetics as well as through a deconstructive and/or psychoanalytic analysis of their respective novels, which are interpreted in the context of various doctrines of Beauty, including Dostoevsky’s own artistic credo of 1860. In this broad context of European aesthetics and the European literary canon, Dostoevsky’s own view of history is illuminated in a new perspective, in which his concept of the “soil” is stripped of its conservative mask behind which emerges a (post-exile) Dostoevsky with socialist, pan-European views. The portrait of Dostoevsky which thus emerges from the present study is that of a European writer with a radically modern aesthetics and with a progressivist political orientation which is in consonance with his pre-exile affiliation with utopian socialism.

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Table of contents

ChapterList of Illustrations

ChapterAcknowledgements

ChapterIntroduction: Dostoevsky and the Realists: Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy

Chapter 1: Manifestoes of Realism and the Sketch of Manners: Capturing a Moment in Time

Chapter 2: Dostoevsky’s Doctrine of Beauty as Desire of the Age

Chapter 3: Dostoevsky’s “Pochva” [“Soil”] and the ‘Genealogy’ of Russian History in The Possessed

Chapter 4: Polyphony and the Gaze in Phenomenology

Chapter 5: Sexuality, (Un-)Reason and Goliadkin as Kant’s Subject of Taste

Chapter 6: Dickens the Painter of Modern Life and the Unconscious

Chapter 7: Flaubert and the Sketch of Manners

Chapter 8: Tolstoy’s Mikhailov, the Painter of Modern Life

Chapter 9: The “Accidental Family” and Wittgenstein’s ‘Familienähnlichkeiten’←vii | viii→

ChapterBibliography

ChapterIndex←viii | ix→

Illustrations

Figure I.1. Nikolai Ge, “What is Truth? Christ and Pilate” (1890)

Figure 1.1. Gustave Courbet, “The Meeting” (1853)

Figure 1.2. Ilya Repin, “They did not expect him” (1884)

Figure 6.1. Max Ernst, “Oedipus Rex” (1922)←ix | x→ ←x | xi→

Acknowledgements

In the writing of this book, I was assisted by discussions with colleagues from Hungary and New Zealand, Dr Géza S. Horváth (Pázmány Péter Catholic University) and Dr Irene Zohrab (Victoria University of Wellington), whose feedback on my Dostoevsky research and encouragement was invaluable. I also wish to thank the Ada Booth Slavic Librarian at Monash University, Ms Anna Rubinowski for assisting with my library requests. I would like to express my debt to my University of Melbourne mentor, the late Dr Dmitry Vladimirovich Grishin, whose work on the young Dostoevsky still informs my own research, as well as to Professor Wolf Schmid (Hamburg University), who offered encouraging comments at the Bakhtin 120 Conference (Vezsprem, 2015). I also wish to thank my student, Dr Lara Jakica, for helping with the bibliography. Finally, I owe thanks to Meagan Simpson, the Commissioning Editor of Peter Lang Publishing (NY), for her systematic support of this project.←xi | xii→ ←xii | 1→

Introduction

Dostoevsky and the Realists:
Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy

Denn dies Innerliche ist glaichfalls, wie die Bilder der Aussendinge, ein im Bewusstsein Vorhandenes und geht in seiner Unabhängigkeit von dem Äusserlichen von sich selbst aus. Ist nun die Bedeutung in dieser Weise das Anfangende, so erscheint der Ausdruck, die Realität, als das Mittel, das aus der konkreten Welt herbeigenommen wird, um die Bedeuting als den abstrakten Inhalt vorstellig, anschaulich und sinnlich zu machen.

G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I¹