Marullo, Thomas Gaiton Heroine Abuse: Dostoevsky's ‘Netochka Nezvanova’ and the Poetics of Codependency Marullo, Thomas Gaiton Fyodor Dostoevsky — In the Beginning, 1821–1845: A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism (review)

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REVIEWS 337 Marullo, Thomas Gaiton. Heroine Abuse: Dostoevsky’s ‘Netochka Nezvanova’ and the Poetics of Codependency. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2015. xv + 204 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $35.00. Marullo, Thomas Gaiton. Fyodor Dostoevsky — In the Beginning, 1821–1845: A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2016. xi + 293 pp. Directory of Prominent Names. Notes. Source Notes. Index. $59.00. Dostoevskii’s first attempt at a full-scale novel, Netochka Nezvanova, abandoned unfinished at the time of the author’s arrest in 1849, has never received the same level of critical attention as Poor Folk or The Double. It seldom merits more than passing mention in studies of Dostoevskii’s oeuvre as a whole, and has only infrequently been the subject of essays and articles in its own right. This is surprising, given the novella’s importance both as a Russian Bildungsroman, and for its development of the themes we associate with the mature Dostoevskii, not least that of the suffering and innocent child. Thomas Gaiton Marullo has long bucked this trend, with occasional articles on the novella dating as far back as the mid-1980s. The ideas he initially set out therein — in which Netochka herself was generally not the primary focus — have now received significant further development and recasting to centralize the heroine, in a short but very welcome first monograph on the text, Heroine Abuse: Dostoevsky’s ‘Netochka Nezvanova’ and the Poetics of Codependency. The book’s corny title notwithstanding, co-dependency proves a very useful concept for analysing Dostoevskii’s only female narrator and precursor to many of the female characters we see in in his post-Siberian works. Marullo is not the first critic to use co-dependency as an interpretative tool; Catherine MacGregor has previously analysed co-dependency in Crime and Punishment (in a doctoral thesis from the University of Ottawa and two articles that are not cited in the present work). However, her focus remains firmly on the question of alcoholism, rather than the range of addictive behaviours and damaging relationships Marullo addresses here. Co-dependency, as Marullo outlines it, takes the form of passive-aggressive relationship addiction, leading to the erasure of boundaries between self and other, ‘in individuals who seek skewed or inordinate fulfilment in people, place, and things apart from themselves’ (p. 1). Indeed, Marullo’s identification of five symptoms of co-dependency (pp. 1–3) resembles a check-list of Dostoevskian character traits: a confused or lost sense of selfhood; problems in discerning and expressing experiences of the world, including an inability to distinguish dreams from reality; exaggerated reactions to events and a tendency to live life at the extremes; a reluctance to acknowledge needs or desires, leading to a refusal to accept anything but their absolute fulfilment; and a tendency to repress a sense of inner inadequacy by demanding perfection from the self. SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 338 Marullo constructs his interpretation through a straightforwardly chronological analysis of the three family relationships Netochka Nezvanova depicts, showing how the same pattern of morbid co-dependency is translated from one situation and set of characters to another. As her step-father Efimov’s appalling treatment of his family distorts the young girl’s worldview, he sets in train a series of events that replicate the original abusive relationship. The interpretation establishes the link between alcohol abuse and the physical and emotional abuse of children in a way that enables a fuller understanding of the significance of the ‘accidental family’ in Dostoevskii’s fictional universe. But occasionally the analysis goes too far. There is a good deal of merit, for example, in the idea that the landowner in whose serf orchestra Efimov played exhibits co-dependent traits, and that like the musician B., and Netochka’s mother, he adds fuel to the fire of Efimov’s addictive personality. But when Princess Katia’s father, Prince X., and even her bulldog Falstaff, received the co-dependency diagnosis, the present reader at least was more sceptical. The Prince’s unmasking as a much less benign character than we may be inclined to think is undoubtedly thought-provoking, but ultimately he appears too briefly, and...