Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity ed. by Katherine Bowers and Kate Holland

Reviewed by: Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity ed. by Katherine Bowers and Kate Holland Christina Karakepeli Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity. Ed. by Katherine Bowers and Kate Holland. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2021. x+254 pp. $75. ISBN 978–1–4875–0863–0. This volume marks the bicentennial of Fedor Dostoevskii’s birth. It includes ten chapters by Dostoevskii scholars treating modernity and formal representation in the writer’s fiction, all offering different perspectives on how Dostoevskii reacted to ‘the sense of a new temporality’ and ‘experience of acceleration’ (p. 3) introduced by the radical reforms which restructured mid-nineteenth-century Russian society. Each contributor aims to ‘situate Dostoevskii’s formal choices of narrative, plot, genre, and characterization within modernity’ to show how his fiction both embraces and challenges the peculiarities of modern life, focusing on his major novels (p. 11). Kate Holland’s chapter discusses the duel plot in Notes from Underground and The Adolescent. Holland suggests that Dostoevskii’s heroes are experiencing a ‘semiotic crisis’ (p. 21), guided by an honour system that has lost its symbolic powers. The motifs of the slap and the duel are subverted and ‘repurposed [. . .] for a new historical moment [. . .] that yearns for the order of the honour code’ (p. 26). Anna Berman focuses on Dostoevskii’s ‘distinctive conception of the family’, arguing that he rejects the marriage plot by undermining the ‘standard family plot of matrimony and reproduction’ (p. 42). She analyses ‘queerness’ in Dostoevskii’s depiction of non-conventional families constructed not through ‘heterosexual reproduction but through active love’ (p. 50). Vadim Shneyder examines two female characters— Alena Ivanovna, the pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment, and Grushenka, the love interest of both Dmitrii Karamazov and his father—to describe how ‘money, gender and power interact in Dostoevskii’s fiction’ (p. 62). Melissa Frazier’s and Alexey Vdovin’s chapters both discuss Dostoevskii’s engagement with nineteenth-century natural sciences, respectively the ‘physiological psychologist’ George Henry Lewes (Frazier, p. 82) and Ivan Sechenov’s physiological treatise Reflexes of the Brain (Vdovin). Sarah J. Young looks at sense perception—specifically hearing and vision—in Crime and Punishment and The Adolescent to describe how the senses in Dostoevskii’s fiction ‘embody not only the perceiving consciousness but also the object of their perception’ (p. 119), reifying experience in order to access ‘the material world beneath the surface of reality’ (p. 123). Katherine Bowers’s chapter examines links between the Gothic genre and The Idiot in Dostoevskii’s use of Gothic narrative markers to generate affective experience for both characters and readers. Bowers centres her chapter on the recurring image of the so-called Gothic corpse [End Page 728] as depicted in Holbein’s painting Dead Christ and throughout the novel. Greta Matzner-Gore takes up Dostoevskii’s fascination with ‘moral statistics’ (p. 160), arguing that Dostoevskii creates a ‘poetics of improbability’ in both Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground which challenges statistical determinism. Chloë Kitzinger discusses the notion of illegitimacy in The Adolescent. Following Lukács and Bakhtin, she describes how Dostoevskii creates the illusion of realism in his novels by disguising illegitimacy as ‘mimetic completeness’ (p. 178). Finally, Ilya Kliger examines Dostoevskii’s ‘imaginaries of sovereignty’ (p. 213) in the characters of Raskolnikov and Stavrogin. While some chapters are more tangential to the overarching theme of modernity and form than the editors might have intended (and the frequent references to The Adolescent might confuse readers not familiar with Dostoevskii’s arguably least-known novel), Dostoevsky at 200 is an important addition to Dostoevskii scholarship. By eschewing psychological or strictly narratological analyses, the contributors espouse a turn to the external world, whether this signifies Dostoevskii’s engagement with science, his characters’ reactions to the material world, or their positioning within societal structures. Rather than limiting their focus to Dostoevskii and modernity, the authors collected in this volume achieve something else: they offer different assessments of the writer’s experience of reality and its reinvention in his novels in order to describe how realism succeeded in making ‘the fantastic and imaginary more real’ than the everyday (p. 120). As this volume argues, Dostoevskii’s fictionalization...

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