Illusion and Instrument: Problems of Mimetic Characterization in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy

This dissertation focuses new critical attention on a problem central to the history and theory of the novel, but so far remarkably underexplored: the mimetic illusion that realist characters exist independently from the author’s control, and even from the constraints of form itself. How is this illusion of “life” produced? What conditions maintain it, and at what points does it start to falter? My study investigates the character-systems of three Russian realist novels with widely differing narrative structures — Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865–1869), and Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent (1875) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880) — that offer rich ground for exploring the sources and limits of mimetic illusion. I suggest, moreover, that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky themselves were preoccupied with this question. Their novels take shape around ambitious projects of characterization that carry them toward the edges of the realist tradition, where the novel begins to give way to other forms of art and thought. Reaching beyond the sway of the illusions their novels cast, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky thus each raise questions about where that illusion comes from and how far it extends. My analyses trace the fault lines within techniques that at once intensify the impression of a populated, self-contained fictional world, and push readers past its formal and generic bounds./nChapter One deals with techniques of mimetic characterization rooted in the stable omniscient narrative of Tolstoy’s major novels, and in particular War and Peace. I survey the narrative devices cultivating the illusion that the characters of War and Peace live independently of device, dependent on persistent contrasts throughout the novel’s system of named characters. An unconventional problem taxes this system past its limits: how to represent the lives of the crowds of unnamed figures tangential to the narrative, but ever more central to Tolstoy’s conception of his mimetic project. I suggest that War and Peace’s notorious digressions are an attempt, in part, to work out a logic of representation beyond the novelistic character-system./nChapters Two and Three consider Dostoevsky’s techniques of characterization, cut off from the dual anchor of Tolstoy’s: the social order of “landowner literature,” and the narrative and mimetic order of omniscience. The Adolescent illustrates the formal chaos this condition creates, suggesting the fullness of its characters’ lives just by the degree to which the language of its illegitimate, incompetent narrator-hero appears to screen them. In The Brothers Karamazov, destabilizing methods of characterization invite a kind of transcendence. Each Karamazov, left to negotiate his “own” fluid position in relation to a family identity, opens a site for a redemptive narrative of religious experience for which the secular forms of the nineteenth century Anglo-European novel must be reworked. But the mythical sweep of this narrative is threatened by the textbound character-system that structures the Karamazovs’ plot. Like Tolstoy’s, Dostoevsky’s late novels thus evidence a distrust of the limitations of novel form and mimetic character, balanced only precariously with techniques that fit the novel genre for a new kind of story./nChapter Four examines the place of Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s characters in the seminal novel theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Georg Lukács. I argue that both theorists inherited a paradox from the novels they analyze. The “living” novelistic character bears moral, political, and social significance for Lukács and Bakhtin (as for the theory of the novel that developed in their wake). But read closely, their theories consistently link that effect of “life” with attributes of the novel as a self-sufficient and self-contained aesthetic form. Bakhtin and Lukács thus open rather than resolve the tension this dissertation explores, between the compellingly constructed illusion of a character’s independent “life,” and the dream — written into Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s novels themselves — of making that illusion into a path leading out from the fictional text. Exploring the lifelike quality of Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s characters as a product of language and aesthetic experience, I aim to illuminate more fully the inviting but uncertain passage between the realist novel and its readers’ world.

Advisor: Paperno, Irina