Dostoevskii's Overcoat: Influence, Comparison, and Transposition

352 Pages·2013·14.01 MB·English

by  Joe Professor Andrew

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Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013
Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3793-9
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1041-6
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013
Printed in the Netherlands
Contents
Introduction: Dostoevskii’s Overcoat
JOE ANDREW 1
1 Dostoevskii’s Hermeneutic Autotextuality: The Meek Girl
and The Idiot
RADOSVET KOLAROV 27
2 Dostoevskii as Zuboskalov: the Case of How Dangerous
It Is to Succumb to Ambitious Dreams
MICHAEL PURSGLOVE 39
3 Mirroring the World of the Novel: Poetry in Humiliated
and Insulted
ERIC DE HAARD 63
4 A Kiss from Turgenev
RICHARD FREEBORN 87
5 Shkliarevskii and Russian Detective Fiction: (cid:87)he Influence
of Dostoevskii
CLAIRE WHITEHEAD 101
6 Pushkin as a Cultural Myth: Dostoevskii’s Pushkin Speech
and Its Legacy in Russian Modernism
ALEXANDRA SMITH 123
7 Andrei Belyi and Dostoevskii: from Demons to The
Silver Dove
MICHAEL BASKER 149
8 A New Kind of Brotherhood: Dostoevskii, Suslova and
Rozanov
HENRIETTA MONDRY 205
9 Dostoevskii as Seen by Dmitrii Merezhkovskii
ANDRZEJ DUDEK 221
10 Orhan Pamuk and Vladimir Nabokov on Dostoevskii
NEIL CORNWELL 233
11 To stage or not to stage? Adapting Dostoevskii’s Novels
CYNTHIA MARSH 249
12 Narrators from Underground
DEBORAH A. MARTINSEN 261
13 The Grand Inquisitor Scene in Dystopian Literature and Film
ROBERT REID 275
14 The Idiocy of Compassion: Akira Kurosawa’s Tale of
Prince Myshkin
ANDREA HACKER 297
15 Bresson and Dostoevskii: Crimes and Punishments
OLGA PETERS HASTY 317
16 Crime and Punishment as a Comic Book
IRINA MAKOVEEVA 335
Introduction: Dostoevskii’s Overcoat
Joe Andrew
One of the most famous quotations in the history of Russian literature,
albeit an apocryphal one, is Fedor Dostoevskii’s alleged assertion that
‘We have all come out from underneath Gogol’s Overcoat’.1 Even if
Dostoevskii never said this, there is a great deal of truth in the comment.
As has been a commonplace of Dostoevskian criticism from his own
lifetime onwards, Gogol, especially the Gogol of The Overcoat, has been
seen as a profound and seminal influence on his oeuvre, especially pre-
exile work, as well as that of many others who began their literary
careers within or under the sway of the ‘natural school’. Gogol was very
far from being the only major influence on Dostoevskii, of course; more
broadly, the nature and range of influences on Dostoevskii has been
central to our understanding of him for a very long time.2
Part of our current project will be to locate Dostoevskii in
relationship, both personal and creative, to his immediate predecessors
and contemporaries. However, the primary aim of the present work is to
turn the oft-quoted apocryphal comment on its head as it were, that is, to
see the profound influence Dostoevskii has had, both within his own
lifetime and since, on the lives, work and thought of his contemporaries
and successors. This influence, moreover, extends far beyond Russia and
beyond literature. For some Dostoevskii should be seen as the single
greatest influence on the sensibilities of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. It is within this context that we have chosen our title. To a
greater or lesser extent, that is, those concerned with the creative arts in
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have all come out from under
Dostoevskii’s ‘Overcoat’. I will first consider Dostoevskii’s overall
influence on modern sensibilities, then that of specific works, before
offering an overview of the arguments that will be developed in the 16
chapters that follow.
Echoing ideas developed by others, the then Archbishop of
Canterbury, Rowan Williams, writes in 2008 about the ‘uncomfortably
contemporary feel’ of ‘the issues that arise in Dostoevsky’s fiction’.3
Indeed, he opens the Introduction to his book on the Russian writer with
the following arresting statement:
2 Joe Andrew
Terrorism, child abuse, absent fathers and the fragmentation of
the family, the secularization and sexualization of culture, the
future of liberal democracy, the clash of cultures and the nature
of national identity - so many of the anxieties that we think of as
being quintessentially features of the early twenty-first century
are pretty well omnipresent in the work of Dostoevsky, his
letters, his journalism, and above all his fiction.4
And, indeed, Williams will end his work on the very same note,
observing that Dostoevskii’s deep and abiding concern with what it
means to be human ‘is a question which is at once literary, theological
and political, and unmistakably contemporary.’5
Following on from this, as Robert Reid notes in his Introduction
to the companion to the present volume, his continuing relevance with
both critics and the general reader lies in the fact that the ideas of his
works ‘are “actual” for us today’.6 Reid also notes how others have
acclaimed Dostoevskii as a prophet who ‘foresaw’, inter alia,
fundamentalist terrorism.7 Among other issues that still resonate today,
as evidenced by the very existence of Rowan Williams’ book, is the
place of faith in a secular world - and this applies as much to the role of
Islam in Turkey and Egypt, for example, in the second decade of the
twenty-first century as it does to the role of Christianity.
Others have observed the very magnitude of Dostoevskii’s
stature in the modern world. For example, Robert Louis Jackson notes
his explicitly iconic status: ‘Dostoevsky has become an icon - in some
respects a cliché - for twentieth-century consciousness: to know him has
been to know ourselves and our century’.8 Malcolm Jones has made a
similar point:
It is not [...] difficult to conceive of Dostoevsky as a precursor
of modernism and post-modernism, and it is perhaps surprising
that so little recent Dostoevsky criticism has taken up the
challenge, when so many modernist and post-modernist writers,
both in Russia and abroad, are so clearly and avowedly in his
debt.9
There is really no doubt, then, that Dostoevskii still looms very
large, well over a century after his death. It would be little exaggeration
to say that, beginning with the Russian Symbolists and Modernists
Introduction 3
shortly after his death, almost every major writer in Russia and
throughout the world bears his imprint. And this, in fact, goes well
beyond ‘high’ art, and literature as such. For example, the popular
detective series Columbo may trace its shambolic eponymous hero to
Porfirii Petrovich in Crime and Punishment, while Dostoevskian threads
may easily be discerned in the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the novels
of Patricia Highsmith, and there are close connections between their
work as well, of course. (Dostoevskii’s impact on cinema is an important
aspect of several chapters in the present volume: we will also examine
his influence on comics).
Turning to specific schools and writers, René Wellek, as long
ago as 1962, noted the profound significance Dostoevskii had for French
Existentialists: for them ‘Dostoevsky appears as a forerunner and crown-
witness’.10 Equally, Wellek later notes that ‘Dostoevsky’s effect on
creative German literature was hardly less than his effect on the
French’.11 For example, the German expressionist poets acclaimed him
as a ‘prophet of universal brotherhood’.12 Many twentieth-century
German writers bear the imprint of Dostoevskii, most notably Kafka,
Hesse and Thomas Mann.
In England and English literature, as is well known, reactions
were more mixed, with some writers rejecting Dostoevskii’s excesses
(Galsworthy, for example, and ‘honorary’ English writers Henry James
and Joseph Conrad), while others of a slightly later generation came
more under his aegis: one thinks of Aldous Huxley in particular.13 In
Leatherbarrow’s view there was even something of ‘an extravagant
Dostoevskii cult between 1912 and the early 1920s’.14 Leatherbarrow
also nicely places the impact that Dostoevskii had on twentieth-century
English literature, and culture more broadly, in a wider context:
His influence on world literature in the twentieth century has
been [...] so immense that to pursue further his meaning for
British writers would be at the same time both parochial and a
task rendered impossible by its very enormity. Suffice to say that
literary responses to Dostoevskii in England, as elsewhere, were
as universal as they were diverse.15
Leatherbarrow also notes the paradox that, although Turgenev had far
more contact with England than Dostoevskii, and was initially more
admired, in the end Dostoevskii’s influence was probably more