The Carnivalesque Spirit of the Eighteenth-Century Russian Novel

Abstract

A lthough Mikhail Bakhtin never applied concept of carnival to eighteenth-century Russian novel, his writings virtually guarantee success of such an undertaking. In major studies such as The Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Discourse in Novel and Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin shows a predilection for illuminating his theories with two types of primary text. Within Russian culture he concentrates on Gogol and Dostoevsky. When dealing with prose fiction of Western Europe, his attention is most frequently drawn to writers who stand at beginning of tradition of novel writing. The monograph on Rabelais and frequent references to Cervantes take him to very inception of genre, and his interest in Fielding, Smollett and Sterne focuses on modern incarnation of novel in eighteenth-century England. At intersection of these two lines of inquiry stands work of figures like Mikhail Chulkov and Matvei Komarov. Preceding Gogol and Dostoevsky by less than seventy years, these writers helped to lay foundation of novel in Russia. Even though their work is most often simply dismissed, their historical and cultural lineage strongly suggests that they are a missing link in our perception of development of genre in Russia. Bakhtin's conception of novel emphasizes tendency of this genre to refract and challenge dominant discourse of its day. In Discourse in Novel he associates this approach to language and literature with what he terms second line of novel. Beginning with Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, its practitioners include, among others, Cervantes, Lesage, Sterne, Dostoevsky and Dickens. In each instance these authors use open-ended structure of novel to expose spurious motivations and self-serving goals of any language that represents the going point of view and going value.1 From Rabelais's carnivalesque mockery of sententiousness of church and state to competing chords of polyphony in Dostoevsky, Bakhtin views novel as a direct assault against any discourse that claims