Dostoevsky in Dostoevsky. M. Bakhtin and the methodological turnaround in the 1910s–1920s

Abstract

The history of Dostoevsky’s reception knows a relatively brief but extremely intense and productive period of ‘paradigm shifting:’ displacing the philosophical journalism of Rozanov, Merezhkovsky, Shestov and others in the 1910s and 1920s was literary criticism proper. The paper is concerned with this methodological turnaround in Dostoevsky studies. Inspired by V. I. Ivanov’s article ‘Dostoevsky and the novel-tragedy’ [‘Dostoevsky i roman-tragediya’] (1911), young scholars of the day (V. Komarovich, L. Grossman, B. Engelgardt, and M. Bakhtin, among others) attempted to comprehend ‘Dostoevsky in Dostoevsky,’ i. e., interpret his novels’ ‘ideology’ in terms of his poetics rather than in abstraction. The author suggests that the main problem in all Dostoevsky-centred polemics since the 1910s–1920s and to this day remains twofold: on the one hand, it is a problem of the writer’s attitude to his characters; on the other, it is a challenge of identifying the genre of Dostoevsky’s novels. Citing Bakhtin’s monograph (1929, 1963), the article sets out to disprove Ivanov’s term of ‘novel-tragedy’ in reference to the nonclassic nature of Dostoevsky’s novels.