'Ia gorazdo umnee napisannogo': On Apophatic Strategies and Verbal Experiments in Dostoevskii's "A Raw Youth"

Abstract

SEER,Vol. 79,JNo. 2, April200 I 'Ia gorazdo umnee napisannogo': On Apophatic Strategies and Verbal Experiments in Dostoevskii's A Raw routh INGUNN LUNDE A RAW YOUTH (Podrostok, I875) is Arkadii Makarovich Dolgorukii's storyof his transitionfrom adolescence to manhood; a narrativein the first person, written by a young man of twenty, which describes a sequence of events which took place about six months earlier. His autobiographicalenterprisepresents the earnest narratorwith certain fundamentalproblems, the most obvious of which is to 'pin down' in words, and make sense of, the flux of reality:hence, Arkadii'snarrative moves constantly ontheborder of the unsayable, thus reflecting on the verbal level the characteristic liminal, or threshold situation of the novel.' The problem of the inadequacy of language to expressreality, or truth,is not only thematizedin Arkadii'saccount, but conspicuously demonstrated by Dostoevskii in the novel's design as a whole. In his discussion of discursivestructuresin A Raw Youth, Aage Hansen-Love linksthis particularfacet of the novel to the traditionof apophaticism, with its focus on the inexpressibilityof the essential.2In the present essay I concur, aiming at the same time to develop in more detail the analysisof the novel's verbal make-up.I take as my point of departure certainkey featuresof the apophatic approachin the context of verbal representation and examine their realization in the narrative.I then proceed to a discussionof some of the less obvious implicationsof the novel's 'apophatic rhetoric'. More specifically, my analysis traces its linkto two non-verbalcontexts:first,the motif of the sunor lightof the Ingunn Lunde is a postdoctoral Research Fellowvin the Department of Russiani Studies, University of Bergen, Norway. I wish to thank Peter Alberg Jensen, Tine Roesen and William Mills Todd III for their reading of earlier Xversions of this essay and their valuable comments. My thanks also to the anonymous readers of SEER for their useful suggestions. i Horst-Jurgen Gerigk formulates the main objective ofA Rawl"outh as 'The representation of a pubescent mind in the midst of its possible ways of development'. It is this goal, according to Gerigk, which determines the narrative mode (Erzahlhaltung) of the novel; compare Horst-Jurgen Gerigk, Versuch iberDostoevskijs Jilagling,Forum Slavicum, 4, lunich, I965 (hereafterVersuch), p. 17, n. 6. Oge Khansen-Leve [A. Hansen-L,ve], 'Diskursivnye protsessy v romane Dostoevskogo Podhostok' (hereafter 'Diskursivnye protsessy') in Vol'f Shmid [WIolfSchmid] and XT. \I. M4arkovich(eds), Avtori tekst,St Petersburg, I996, pp. 229- 67. APOPHATIC STRATEGIES IN A RAW YOUTH 265 sun, and in particular, the slanting rays of the setting sun, a central symbol in Dostoevskii's ceuvre;3 and second, the visual realm of pictures, icons, and photographs, associated most clearly with Arkadii's mother, Sofiia Andreevna. Both contexts display, on closer examination , interesting correspondences with the overall apophatic character of Arkadii's discourse, self-representation, and quest. Towardsa Literary Rhetoric ofApophaticism Apophasisis not 'to say nothing', nor is it 'absence of discourse'. Neither does apophaticism necessarily imply a distrust of language. But an apophatic approach inevitably involves a concern with language and with rhetoric. From early Christianity onwards, theologians, legislators and poets alike were constantly confronted with the problem of referring to and representing divine or sacred reality by means of a human discourse. Whilst the direct linking of the theological and conceptual approach with the verbal and rhetorical is not unproblematic , I think it is valid,4 partly because of the church fathers' own awareness of and concern with the problem of linguistic representation; moreover, the very fact that divine truth may be represented by means of a human discourse was frequently justified by reference to the incarnation of Christ. Similarly, the depiction of Christ in icons was made possible, it was argued, by the Son of God having been born in the flesh, or, the Wordhavingbeenmadeflesh.Thus conceived, language and rhetoric represented a reflection of the divine Logos,the paradox of the Incarnation mirrored by the paradox of its verbal and visual representation. The problem of representation could be used creatively, and explored as a means of intensifying the rhetorical effect, as a method of amplification. In fact, by describing and depicting 'the essential' while presenting the utterance itself as inadequate, the...