Novelizing Religious Experience: The Generic Landscape of The Brothers Karamazov

Abstract

In this article, Kate Holland examines the significance of Christian legend in The Brothers Karamazov. Arguing that the novel's main creative mission was the reincorporation of religious experience into the novelistic form, Holland explores how Fedor Dostoevskii integrates the worldviews of hagiography, apocrypha, and folk legend into the novel through the generic identities of the Karamazov brothers. Similarities and differences on die level of character are expressed in the conflict between genres, leading to an examination of the novel's own generic assumptions, and a genre memory of its roots within medieval religious and vernacular works. Holland locates this interest within the critical and theoretical debates on the nature of the novel taking place in Russian academic and critical circles as Dostoevskii was writing the novel. The heterogeneous nature of the religious worldviews modeled by Dostoevskii subverts the conventional view of the novel as an expression of Orthodoxy and constitutes a radical experiment in novelistic form.