Dostoevsky's 'Idiot': Dialogue and the Spiritually Good Life by Bruce A. s> French (review)

Abstract

5I6 SEER, 8o, 3, 2002 African-American scholars to the work of Russian literary theorists, and particularly, the influence of Bakhtin in the 'foregrounding [. . .] of AfroAmericanexpressiveculture '(pp. I90-9 i). The volume also includesdetailed notes which provide additional commentary and suggestions for further reading. In his prologue, Peterson asks whether it is possible to 'invent a medium of modern literacythat can accommodate the competing realitiesof ethnic identity and diasporic multiculturalism',one that can 'assertcultural difference and yet be legible to outsiders' (p. I3). Peterson's study demonstratesthat it is possible, at the same time offering a means of accessing the 'vastunmapped spaces'of literaturesthat 'wereonce assumedto be blankand without significance'(p. 13).This is an importantworkof value not merely to scholars of Russian and/or African-American literature, but to all those interestedin the comparativestudyof culturalaesthetics. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies BARBARA WYLLIE University College London French,BruceA. Dostoevsky's 'Idiot'. Dialogue andtheSpiritually Good Life.Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 200I. XV+ 2I8 pp. Notes. Bibliography. $69.95. WHILE some critics evidently find TheIdiottoo unmanageable (or unpalatable) to merit detailed attention, others have devoted entire monographs to this one fascinating novel. The result has been some of the most challenging and influential of modern North American contributions to Dostoevsky studies. This new book by Bruce French is both intelligent and important, and deserves to be ranked among the best. Its three chapters are devoted to an impressive close reading of the novel under the headings 'The Narrator and His Various Modes of Existence', 'The Inserted Narratives' and 'Monologue, Dialogue and Dialogical Living'. French's principal theoretical model derives from Bakhtin, and pivots, as he says himself in his introduction, on subject-toobject and subject-to-subject relationships. Central to the analysis is a negative view of 'storiness' (siuzhetnost'),a vision of life that forms as a result of seeing people and the world as object. 'Storiness', says French, 'is that which tends towards fixity, rigidity, predictability, causality, predetermination, inflexibility [... ] The narrative structure of The Idiot is greatly affected by a fear of storiness' (p. x). Storiness, then, relates to the monological principle in Bakhtin. But it is not only the narrative structure which is affected by its blight. All the major characters apart from Myshkin are trapped in storiness, and even he is not immune to its lure. In essence, however, Myshkin 'is almost always "with others" (u drugikh),in a dialogical relationship with others. He transgresses the laws of knowledge by being undefinable, unclassifiable, and unlabelable' (p. I36). 'It is the prince's lack of storiness, made possible by his dialogical relationship with the world, that is fundamental in his being able to live fully, morally and religiously' (p. I99). This last word points forward to the substance of the third chapter, in which French attempts to capture the nature of Myshkin's dialogical spirituality. In the process he comes close to defining a new doctrine of the Trinity. Controversial though this may be, it REVIEWS 5 I 7 constitutes a commendably serious attempt to understand the religious dimension of Dostoevsky'snovel, and to do so without reducingit eitherto the Orthodox tradition, or to psychology, or some other system of thought with which Dostoevsky(andMyshkin)would be fundamentallyout of sympathy. French'sbook is not only a close readingwith a powerfultheoreticaldrive, it is also a polemic with a number of strong, mostly American, precursors. Chief among these is Robin FeuerMillerwhose highly regardedDostoevsky and 'TheIdiot'.Author, Narrator andReader(Cambridge, MA, 198I) is constantly referredto in the early chapters, almost alwaysfor the purpose of expressing disagreement. Michael Holquist, who is more sympathetically treated, is subjectedto a specialcritiquein severalsectionsof the lastchapter.Othersare mentioned less frequently in passing. Elizabeth Dalton is included in the bibliographybut not mentioned in the text. While the polemic is an inessential part of the study, it nevertheless has the merit of situating French'swork in relation to that of leading English-speakingcontemporaries.'Contemporary', however, has to be taken in a special sense for which the book gives no explanation, for it is curiousthat an academic workwhich takesitsprecursors so seriouslyshould make no discerniblereference, either in the text or in the otherwiseconscientiousbibliography,to anythingpublishedsince I983. Much...