The Politics of Polyphony: Dangerous Modernity and the Structure of the Novel in Dostoevsky and Bakhtin

ABSTRACT

This article offers the hypothesis that, from the standpoint of the “sociological poetics” of the 1920s and contemporary literary epistemology, the structure of the polyphonic novel that Dostoevsky created and Bakhtin conceptualized (firstly in his 1929 book Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art [Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo]) enables a reconstruing of the principles governing the writer’s social imagination along with the political thinking and priorities associated with them. From this standpoint, polyphony can be seen as one of the most fruitful and wholistic artistic interpretations of modern sociality experienced in an era of catastrophe, a sociality requiring a rejection of political action aimed at social change.

KEYWORDS:

• polyphonic novel
• epistemology of literature
• social imagination
• Dostoevsky
• Bakhtin
• “nihilism”
• “reaction”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

^1. See, for example, Richter, Schönert, and Titzmann, 1997; Vogl, 2002; Gess and Janßen, 2014; and Hufnagel and Ventarola, 2015.

^2. It is interesting that even Patrick Seriot, who is quite skeptical toward the heuristic value of these theories (especially those of Voloshinov) says that such “Marxism” can be viewed as a specific “theory of perception” (Seriot, 2010, p. 57).

^3. Here and wherever the 1929 edition of Bakhtin’s work (Bakhtin, 2000) coincides with the 1963 version translated by Caryl Emerson (Bakhtin, 1999), her wording is quoted. Where portions of the 1929 text are quoted that were not included in Bakhtin’s 1963 revision, translations are my own—Trans.

^4. See an interesting interpretation of the connection between form and social media context that can be traced back to the concept of “coupling” (Kopplung) in N. Luhmann (Shvets, 2018, p. 47).

^5. At the same time, in Bakhtin we see a rather consistent distinction between the intention embodied in an artistic construction and what is imagined to be embodied there, which subsequently will be thoroughly reflected by representatives of the receptive aesthetic (cf., W. Iser’s “das Fiktive” and “das Imaginäre”).

^6. On the intelligentsia’s shifting and inconsistent social self-definition, see Sdvizhkov, 2012, pp. 426–27.

^7. As is well-known, Bakhtin actively uses this metaphor, which proves exceptionally important for the sociological description of modernity–from Marx to Bauman (Bauman, 2008, p. 9).

^8. It is presumed that Nietzsche found the well-known concept of “ressentiment” in the French translation of Zapiski iz podpol’ia, where it corresponded to the Russian word zloba (Poljakova, 2013, p. 457).

^9. We can see how Bakhtin the theorist resisted the idea that a focus on the social in Dostoevsky’s novel is completely replaced by the religious/aesthetic and/or moved to a strictly aesthetic plane: in an early version of the book he compared realism to non-sociality–to the writer’s asocial utopianism; later, working on the second edition, he would talk about a new (internal) sociality, open to the polyphonic novel.

^10. Editor’s note: See in this issue [Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie no. 155 1/2019, available at: https://www.nlobooks.ru/magazines/novoe_literaturnoe_obozrenie/155_nlo_1_2019/] Jens Herlth’s article about the idea of a nation as an immediately affective ethical community that Dostoevsky developed. This idea is the exact political equivalent of what Bakhtin considered a religious utopian community beyond the social.