Getting the Story Straight: The Poetics of Non‐Euclidean Space in Dostoevsky's “The Grand Inquisitor” and Kaverin's “The Eleventh Axiom”

Abstract

Nikolay Lobachevsky's groundbreaking work in the field of geometry influenced–directly or in mediated ways–late nineteenth‐century literary authors such as Dostoevsky. His “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” nested in book V of The Brothers Karamazov, explores the ethical consequences that allowing multiple geometrical systems, as long as they are coherent and cohesive, may entail. Dostoevsky was familiar with Lobachevsky's theories through their German reception. The mathematician became known in his motherland only at the end of the nineteenth century, long after his death, when his articles were translated back from German. In the 1910s and 1920s, Russian artists and writers with a more or less solid mathematical background saluted Lobachevsky's theories with considerable enthusiasm. Among the most imaginative literary expressions of his axiom on parallels ranks Veniamin Kaverin's first piece of prose, the short story “The Eleventh Axiom” (“Odinnadtsataia aksioma,” 1920), enthusiastically received by Shklovsky, Eikhenbaum, and Gorky, and published only in 1998 among other archival materials. This article shows how the cultural and epistemological bearing of Lobachevsky's formulations informs Dostoevsky's and Kaverin's texts on a structural, stylistic, and rhetorical level; how physical space and diegetic space interact in these authors’ storytelling endeavors; and how a poetics of non‐Euclidean geometry emerges from their writings.