REVIEWS 335 Holland, Kate. The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre in the 1870s. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2013. ix + 251 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00. This book is distinguished from other studies of Dostoevskii in two ways: first, it offers an in-depth analysis of two rarely examined texts: The Adolescent and A Writer’s Diary. Second, the book examines Dostoevskii’s poetics of the 1870s with detailed references to historical, literary and religious documents, arguing that his work is a conscious response to social disintegrations and an expression of his wish for unities. Alongside other texts discussed in the book, i.e., Demons, the journal The Citizen and The Brothers Karamazov, Holland shows that the 1870s texts can be re-read as a new genre which contains two contradictory impulses. This genre is seen as Dostoevskii’s experiment in responding to the chaos arising in the age of modernization. The book is structured in two parts: two chapters on historical contexts and three chapters on textual analysis. Holland examines the extent to which plot and character can be rethought under the framework of social disintegrations and unifications. Central to the book’s argument is that there is a crisis of form in the 1870s. Classical Russian literature fails to represent the complexity of the disintegrated society: hence Dostoevskii’s notes quoted in the introduction: ‘“Article about the diversity of modern society, people have lost their forms; they have been obliterated all at once, and the new ones are still in hiding’” (p. 3). The root of disintegration begins to grow under the Great Reforms in the 1860s, which include the emancipation of the serfs, restructuring of the judiciary system, local government, army, education and censorship (p. 4). Transformed into novels, these changes find their expressions in a cacophony of contradictory voices and ideas. This disintegrating impulse is countered by an opposing impulse toward formal unity, which is often expressed via the ideal figure of Christ. The latter impulse is based on the imagined harmony of the pre-Petrine nation. In chapter three, The Adolescent is read against Tolstoi’s Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. The latter is a typical ‘noble family novel’, which fails to depict the people living in the age of disintegration. Only through ‘underground’ characters like Arkadii in The Adolescent — who deals with his relationship with two fathers, one legitimate and the other not — can the reader get closer to the psychology of these people. Arkadii’s narrative is internally split between a confirming and a disconfirming tendency with regard to his hybrid identity. This split is also read as a symbolic conflict of old and new literary genres. To that end, the novel not only depicts a schismatic psychology, but it also demonstrates a new genre for understanding chaos. SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 336 InAWriter’sDiarydiscussedinchapterfour,Dostoevskiire-imaginesaworld which unifies disparate ideologies. Holland argues that the work is permeated by the tension between irony and utopianism with references to Russia’s social and political conditions. She examines how Dostoevskii the diarist alternates between these two positions in his writings in the light of Bakhtin’s idea of heteroglossia. Another set of oppositions found in the Diary is that of the novelistic and the journalistic. The former is a dialogic tendency which focuses on individual consciousness and how it may connect with the universal. The latter, however, appeals to universal (monological) understanding of things and discourages the value of isolated consciousness. An individual appearing in journalistic writing, for instance, should look typical and is expected to be symptomatic of all the other people in his social class (p. 145). Holland argues that through the journalistic Dostoevskii finds his platform to express his messianic and nationalistic view. The Diary is therefore read as his struggle in oscillating between his artistic tendency for polyphony and his sentiment about Russia’s future. The work has its ‘artistic flaws’, but it is an apt response to the ‘chaotic cacophony of discordant social, cultural and literary discourses’ of his age (p. 161). The last chapter deals with the tension between the novelistic and the hagiographic. In The...