Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov by Spektor Alexander (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 339 What Deification in Russian Religious Thought ultimately points to, therefore, is not just the deification spectrum and narrative of late imperial Russia. It also gestures toward a decentred, open-ended contest over what is and what is not Russian Orthodox, an interpretative contest which captures historical actors, theologians, and scholars of Russian Orthodoxy, including the book’s author and this reviewer, in a hermeneutic circle to which we all belong and from which we cannot escape. Department of Religious Studies Patrick Lally Michelson Indiana University Spektor, Alexander. Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2020. xii + 243 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $120.00: $39.95. Nabokov’s dislike of Dostoevskii is well-known. And yet, Nabokov’s and Dostoevskii’s ethics and metaphysics have much in common. In Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov, Alexander Spektor makes a persuasive case that the deepest link that connects Nabokov to Dostoevskii is a shared commitment to personal freedom and moral responsibility, and that this first principle of their philosophy becomes visible when viewed through the lens of narrative ethics. But how to represent personal freedom and nurture moral responsibility in a domain where characters have no freedom (Nabokov called them ‘galley slaves’) and readers have so much of it that authors cannot count on them to respond predictably to moral guidance? If we begin at the point where Spektor’s book ends, we might conclude that freedom is illusory and moral responsibility a mirage. Inspired by the ‘dark’ materialsinBakhtin’swartimenotebooks,Spektorseesnarrativerepresentation as an instrument of power that always tilts towards violence. Though the rest of Spektor’s book is significantly less dispiriting, the compact between narrative and violence remains a theoretical given. The main trajectory of Spektor’s book shows how Dostoevskii’s and Nabokov’s aesthetics (understood as the formal inventiveness of their fictions) enacts an ethics (understood as the distribution of power). Readers’ moral sense is said to become activated when they become aware of the violence that narrative enacts upon the self and others. According to Spektor, Dostoevskii’s and Nabokov’s formal innovations are designed to overcome the tyranny and violence intrinsic to linguistic representation. Spektor’s main claim is that Bakhtin’s influential work on Dostoevskii that preceded his ‘dark’ writings from the 1940s provides us with SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 340 the conceptual scaffolding for staging a non-coercive yet ethically charged encounter among the various stakeholders of fiction, which include characters, narrators, authors and — most significantly since Bakhtin did not concern himself with them — readers. The figure of the reader as ‘accomplice’ in the narrative allocation of power is the most original and important element of the book. To bring it off, Spektor offers a bracing reassessment of Bakhtin’s understanding of polyphony. Bakhtin used the term to describe what he saw as Dostoevskii’s resistance of the absolute power vested in the authorial voice. In Spektor’s reformulation of this Bakhtinian concept, Dostoevskii’s ‘dialogic imagination’ asserts itself most powerfully not in the author’s tolerance for his characters’ competing ideological positions, but in the struggle between speech and silence that he dramatizes in his fictions. Unlike discourse, which is always on the lookout to appropriate more power, silence becomes emblematic of the will’s freedom to perform moral actions. For Spektor, such self-sacrificing and compassionate acts are an integral part of Dostoevskii’s Christian faith and serve as a moral compass for his characters and readers in his post-Siberian work. By becoming aware of the coercive nature of discourse, Dostoevskii’s readers are incited to close off dialogue with the text and become moral actors in ‘real’ life (p. 42). As Spektor frequently reminds us, the analytical apparatus he establishes in his readings of ‘The Meek One’, The Idiot, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister can be fruitfully applied to other works by Dostoevskii and Nabokov. Still, it is surprising that Spektor does not apply it himself to the two texts that make complicity a central moral problematic and dramatize the perils of ‘bad’ reading with such compelling force...