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DOSTOEVSKIJ AND THE BELINSKIJ SCHOOL OF LITERARY CRITICISM
SLAVISTIC PRINTINGS AND REPRINTINGS
edited by
C. H. VAN SCHOONEVELD Indiana University
64
1969
MOUTON THE HAGUE • PARIS
DOSTOEVSKIJ AND THE BELINSKIJ SCHOOL OF LITERARY CRITICISM by
THELWALL PROCTOR Humboldt State College
1969
MOUTON THE HAGUE • PARIS
© Copyright 1969 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague.
No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 68-57402
Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague.
for my aunt Jennelle Porter Proctor
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author embraces this opportunity to express his appreciation to those members of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California whose counsel and support abetted his work in its early stages: the late Professor Waciaw Lednicki, Professor Francis J. Whitfield, and, most especially, Professor Emeritus Gleb Struve, under whose direction the original version of this work was completed. The author’s thanks for courteous and helpful assistance are also due to the staffs of the Library of the University of California, of the Reading Room of the British Museum, of the Bayerische Staats bibliothek, of the Slavic collections of the New York Public Library and of the Library of Congress, where the bulk of the research for this work was accomplished. To the publishers Harper and Row I am indebted for gracious per mission to use the quotation from Aldous Huxley’s The Genius and the Goddess.
FOREWORD
This work is an attempt to study the literary criticism of a relatively limited group of eminent critics, Belinskij, Čemyševskij, Dobroljubov, Pisarev, and Mixajlovskij, representative of that current of socioliterary criticism which was such a prominent feature of the history of Russian nineteenth century literature and which, in a somewhat dif ferent form, continues to be predominant in Soviet criticism, with particular attention to the theoretical and practical problems involved in the mutual relationships of writer, critic, and reader, illustrated by the treatment accorded by these critics to the work of Fedor Mixajlovič Dostoevskij. Dostoevskij’s work was chosen to illustrate the practice of these critics for two reasons. First, with the exception of Čemyševskij, all of them wrote influential articles on Dostoevskij; it is thus possible to compare and contrast their treatment of him. Second, the equivocal character of Dostoevskij’s work lends itself to a variety of interpreta tions. The German novelist, Hermann Hesse, speaking of The Brothers Karamazov, remarks, “Jedes Symbol hat hundert Deutungen, deren jede richtig sein kann. Auch die Karamasoffs haben hundert Deutungen, meine ist nur eine davon, eine von hundert.” 1 Aldous Huxley doubtless had something similar in mind when he began a recent novel in the following fashion: “The trouble with fiction”, said John Rivers, “is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.” “Never?” I questioned. “Maybe from God’s view”, he conceded. “Never from ours. Fiction has unity, fiction has style. Facts possess neither. In the raw, existence is always one damned thing after another, and each of the damned things is simultaneously Thurber and Michelangelo, simultaneously 1 Hesse, Blick ins Chaos, p. 12.
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FOREWORD
Mickey Spillane and Thomas à Kempis. The criterion of reality is its intrinsic irrelevance.” And when I asked, “To what?” he waved a square brown hand in the direction of the bookshelves, “To the Best that has been Thought and Said”, he declaimed with mock port