“The Truth Had Been Twisted and Contorted”: Toward a Pragmatics of F. M. Dostoevsky’s The Landlady

ABSTRACT

This article examines the poetics of Dostoevsky’s novella The Landlady (1847) from a pragmatic perspective, approaching it as a literary utterance that manifests a new depictive technique and defends the autonomy of the professional writer within the emerging Russian literary industry. The story’s eventive incoherence, which critics and scholars have seen as a failed literary experiment, is the story’s organizing principle. The perspicacity of an artist capable of penetrating the protagonists’ psychology while avoiding aesthetic convention sets the work apart from both Hoffmanesque fantasy and the factographic precision of the natural school. Dostoevsky’s experiment centers on the figure of the main protagonist, a dilletante scholar who combines features of the university intellectual and the unfettered artist. Ordynov’s drama echoes Dostoevsky’s own—his need to choose between an independent aesthetic position and a place in his era’s literary hierarchy.

KEYWORDS:

• pragmatics
• fictionality
• Dostoevsky
• The Landlady
• Belinsky
• Herzen
• Turgenev
• fictional utterance
• 1840s

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

^1. See Belinsky’s November 1847 letter to V.P. Botkin (Belinsky, 1956, p. 421).

^2. Cf. Herzen’s characterization of Shelling as “vates [bard or seer] of science,” compared to Goethe’s concept of the “thinking artist” (Gertsen, 1954, pp. 114–15).

^3. For a discussion of the hierarchical position of the role of Dostoevsky versus the role played by Nekrasov in the politics of the renewed Sovremennik see Makeev, 2009, pp. 85–93.

^4. See Belinsky’s article, “Mentsel’, kritik Gete” (1840) in Belinsky, 1953, p. 416. See also Shpet, 2009, p. 169.