A dialogue with Dostoevsky: extremism, media and polyphony*

ABSTRACT

In this article, I aim to demonstrate how a contemporary novelist can write about extremism in the social media age and in the process engage with the literary consciousness of the past. Although several novelists have written about extremism in recent years – notably Kamila Shamsie in Home Fire (2017), Guy Gunaratne in In Our Mad and Furious City (2018) and John Wray in Godsend (2019) – few efforts have yet been made to show how it relates to the experience of life online. I argue that for a novelist wanting to explore extremism today the precursor it would be most valuable to revisit is Fyodor Dostoevsky. He perceived how in mid-nineteenth-century Russia the new mass medium of the newspaper was transforming consciousness and heightening radical sentiment, and explored this in Crime and Punishment (1866) and Demons (1871). Through a sustained engagement with these works, I interrogate the opportunities offered by entering into dialogue with him and consider how his most important narrative technique, polyphony, can be reimagined in the social media age.

KEYWORDS:

• Extremism
• radicalisation
• social media
• contemporary literature
• fiction
• Dostoevsky

  The fire is in people’s minds, not on the rooftops.

  – Dostoevsky, Demons ([1871] 1994, 516)

Introduction

Over the past two decades the hopes that early cyberspace theorists such as John Perry Barlow (1996) and Bruce Sterling (1993) had for the internet – that it would allow people to explore who they were, live multiple lives and express themselves free of any pressure to conform, that it would encourage self-invention and self-inconsistency – have melted away. The anonymous online environments of the late nineties and early noughties have been superseded by de-anonymized social media environments, such as Facebook and Twitter, in which wholeness and consistency are required.

In order to maintain a popular profile on these platforms, with a reliable revenue stream of likes, it is architecturally necessary to choose a target audience, a tribe, and play to it, day in, day out. This locks users in ideological echo chambers and leads them to express ever more fanatical views, as the currency of shock or virtue signalling upon which social media capital rests is always in danger of being devalued (Nagle 2017, 22) and, therefore, to read ever more fanatical views too, their news feeds and timelines populated with content shared by others under the same market pressure.

The platforms are pushing thought polewards, eliminating the possibility for individuals to be allies in some circumstances yet adversaries in others – thereby weakening the ‘cohesive glue’ of ‘cross-cutting’ conflicts (Törnberg 2022, 2) – and contributing to a rising tide of religious and far-right extremism.

In this article, I will interrogate how a contemporary novelist can write about extremism in the social media age and in the process ‘develop or procure the [literary] consciousness of the past’ (Eliot [1919] 1975, 40). Hanif Kureishi and John Updike present themselves as possible precursors it would be valuable to revisit, having explored extremism in The Black Album (1995) and The Terrorist (2006) respectively. But neither novel considers the experience of life online and both were written before the rise of social media. More recently, Kamila Shamsie and Guy Gunaratne explored extremism, too, in Home Fire (2017) and In Our Mad and Furious City (2018). But neither novel considers the experience of life online either; social media appears only in the form of background detail, for example, references to trending topics or characters’ tweets. In all four books, the radicalisation takes place offline: it is not shown to be related to the experience of life online. I believe that the precursor it would be most valuable for a novelist wanting to explore extremism today to revisit is Fyodor Dostoevsky.

In 1850s and 1860s Russia, the press proliferated, spreading European ideas of materialist atheism and utopian socialism through St. Petersburg and producing ‘a profoundly disorienting effect on metropolitan intellectual life’ (Klioutchkine 2002, 88). Dostoevsky had been exiled to Siberia in 1849 for reading Vissarion Belinsky’s ‘Letter to N. V. Gogol’ in a meeting of the seditious Petrashevsky circle but returned in 1859 to find himself a political moderate. A passionate newspaper reader and journalist, he perceived how the mass medium was transforming consciousness and catalysing a new stronger wave of radicalism, and set out to investigate this in Crime and Punishment (1866) and Demons (1871).

Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment is a former law student who theorises that there are two classes of people: the ordinary and the extraordinary. Whereas the ordinary exist only to reproduce, the extraordinary have the right to break laws for the benefit of society.

If circumstances had been such that Kepler’s and Newton’s discoveries could not have become known to the world, otherwise than through the sacrifice of the lives of one, or ten, or a hundred or more people … then Newton would have had the right, indeed the duty … to eliminate those ten or a hundred people. (Dostoevsky [1866] 2017, 230)

Desperate to prove that he is extraordinary, he murders a ‘foul, malignant’ pawnbroker, with the intention of taking her money and using it to perform a myriad good deeds (Dostoevsky [1866] 2017, 460). Yet he never even manages to open her purse. What should be simple arithmetic – ‘one death, in exchange for thousands of lives’ (60) – is resisted by something in him. Despite finding no logical flaws in his reasoning, he endures terrible torment and finally confesses.

Demons takes places in a provincial Russian town facing an infection of ideas from St. Petersburg and Western Europe. It portrays 1840s radicalism in the character of Stepan Verkhovensky, a pompous liberal, and multiple faces of 1860s radicalism in the characters of Pyotr Verkhovensky, a Machiavellian ringleader of a revolutionary cell, which he claims to be connected to a vast conspiracy to overthrow the tsar and establish socialism in Russia; Stavrogin, a charismatic nihilist with the desire to eliminate the distinction between good and evil; Shigalev, whose research has led him to conclude that 90 per cent of humanity must be enslaved so that the useful 10 per cent can rule and achieve social progress; and Kirillov, an engineer willing to commit suicide to show the supremacy of the human will and initiate the era of the Man-god. While Stepan laments how the ‘great idea’ of his generation has been ‘picked up by some bunglers and dragged into the street’ and is now ‘unrecognizable, dirty, askew, absurdly presented, without proportion’ (Dostoevsky [1871] 1994, 26), Pyotr and his fellow 1860s radicals are fed up with talking and want to see concrete action: ‘We can’t babble for another thirty years as we’ve been babbling for the past thirty (408).’ Their ‘quick solution’ plunges the town into chaos (408).

From the ‘On Crime’ article Raskolnikov has published in the Periodical Review – and the inspector, Porfiry, has crucially read – to the exaggerated and unfounded newspapers reports that sow panic among the inhabitants of the provincial town, Crime and Punishment and Demons forcefully evoke the media environment of 1860s Russia. At the level of poetics, they are profoundly shaped by it too. In both novels, Dostoevsky presents ‘a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses’ (Bakhtin [1963] 1984, 6). This technique of polyphony was forged in response to the newspaper page, which is a ‘living reflection of the contradictions of contemporary society in the cross-section of a single day, where the most diverse and contradictory material is laid out, extensively, side by side and one side against the other’ (30).

The ‘fantastic’ or ‘prophetic’ nature of Dostoevsky’s realism also has its roots in the media environment of 1860s Russia (Jackson 2013). In his assiduous cover-to-cover reading of newspapers it was exceptional stories that most engrossed him. A monk beating to death a ten-year-old in the presence of witnesses in a famous monastery did not reflect day-to-day reality, far from it, but it could open up a new perspective on the ‘depths of the human spirit and character – general, eternal, and, I think, never to be fully explored’ (Dostoevsky [1873–1876] 1997, 223) – and give a glimpse into the future. He made it his aim to clarify the societal possibilities implicit in such statistically infrequent events.¹ The result was fiction in which the foundations of the modern world are visible and that offers as much illumination of far-right and Islamist extremists as the radicals of his age.

I will consider the opportunities offered by entering into dialogue with Dostoevsky and how his most important narrative technique, polyphony, can be reimagined in the social media age. Doing so, I will adopt the view that an author is ‘not a lexicon or a set of stylistic principles, but a genus or kind of writing … an adaptive principle that might speak or write in a different way in response to changing circumstances’ (Burrow 2019, 176).

Extremism and media

‘Men are in general divided by a law of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to say, material that serves only to reproduce its kind, and men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word’ (Dostoevsky [1866] 2017, 16). Raskolnikov wills to believe that he belongs to the second: those who have the talent to utter a new word. But with the proliferation of the press having created a thick smog of words, everyone now has something to say in an environment where everything seems already to have been said. As a writer, Raskolnikov wades through the ‘stinking, dusty, city-contaminated air’ (139), but can come up only with spiritless echos. This experience is captured in a feuilleton from the time.² ‘Petersburg summers are always suffocating, but people condemned to the studious reading of books, newspapers, and journals are especially stifled … They are engulfed by an ocean of empty speech, banality, falsehood, and meaningless phrases’ (‘Smes: Nashi domashnie dela’, quoted in Klioutchkine 2002, 103). The murder is, in a sense, a response to this, a way to ‘transcend the cycle of reproduction’ and demonstrate his uniqueness (105). In the tavern scene Raskolnikov happens to hear ‘precisely’ the same idea that he has been stewing over in his room spoken about at a nearby table. ‘If you killed her and took her money, and used it to devote yourself to serving all humanity and the common good: what do you think, wouldn’t those thousands of good deeds wipe out that one tiny little crime?’ (Dostoevsky [1866] 2017, 59–60). The same actors: Lizaveta and the pawnbroker. The same utilitarian rationale. If Raskolnikov wants to stand out, he has to take the next step.

A similar urge motivates Kirillov in Demons. In his last conversation with Pyotr before committing suicide, he laments the realm of words: ‘All my life I did not want it to be only words. This is why I lived, because I kept not wanting it. And now, too, every day I want it not to be words’ (Dostoevsky [1871] 1994, 615). There are people out there who have reached the same conclusion, on how to become a Man-god, but none has enacted it; if he enacts it, he will be the one to save humanity, not them. Like Raskolnikov, it is only through action that he feels he can demonstrate his uniqueness and slake his delusions of grandeur. ‘Can it be that no one on the whole planet, having ended God and believed in self-will, dares to proclaim self-will to the fullest point? … I want to proclaim self-will. I may be the only one, but I’ll do it’ (617).

This fear of one’s words disappearing in a world of endless, meaningless discourse is also a motivating factor for the move from extremist thinking to violence today. The messages extremists post online might be far removed from those that would be posted in mainstream circles, but within their own echo chambers, they are unlikely to be breaking much ground; a quick hashtag search for #whitegenocide, for example, will return tweets identical in sentiment and near-identical in formulation from a string of different users without the need for much scrolling – inevitable as the far-right community on Twitter almost certainly runs into the millions (Berger 2018, 51). So although someone might feel unique posting their first ‘radical’ tweet, the sense of uniqueness is unlikely to last long; translating sentiment into action becomes a way of restoring that sense of uniqueness. This is why so many terrorists’ last messages emphasise that they are stepping over some sort of line – uttering a new word in the only way they now regard as worthwhile. Dylan Roof, who took nine Black lives in a church in 2015 posted this before committing his crime: ‘We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me’ (quoted in Neiwert 2017). Robert Bowers, who took eleven Jewish lives in a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, posted this on GAB two hours before: ‘I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in’ (quoted in Beckett 2018). Brenton Tarrant, who took fifty-one Muslim lives in two Christchurch mosques in 2019, posted this on 8chan beforehand: ‘Well lads, it’s time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort post’ (quoted in Daisley 2019). These messages are a rebuke to words – and those who live by words – as much as anything else.

A question concerning the move to violence is why those who commit terror attacks almost never take small steps beforehand to benefit the community they supposedly represent. In Jihad and Death, Olivier Roy (2017, 46) notes that none of the jihadis he studied – whether a born Muslim or a convert – had campaigned for a pro-Palestine movement or indeed belonged to an Islamic NGO or any form of association combatting Islamophobia. Like Raskolnikov, who speaks of using the old woman’s money to save thousands of lives but never reflects on the charitable acts he could instead perform, these terrorists think of action only in solipsistic, extravagant terms.

There was an anxiety in mid-nineteenth century Russia that ideas were somehow like contagious viruses, and that the media was spreading them; anyone who came into contact with one could be infected. For many, the idea was an alien concept, transmitted from Europe to Russia, with the help of newspapers such as Herzen and Ogaryov’s Kolokol, which was published in London and prohibited in Russia but regularly smuggled into the country through Asia; 100,000 copies were confiscated in a single police raid in Nijni-Novgorod in 1859 (Reddick 1944). The idea had the dangerous characteristic that it could evolve in different carriers. There was nothing eternal about ideas, unlike the words of the Bible, which made them unpredictable, uncontrollable.³ As John Gray (2003, 21) writes in Al Qaeda & What It Means to be Modern: ‘The history of ideas obeys a law of irony. Ideas have consequences; but rarely those their authors expect or desire, and never only those.’

This concern as to their changeability is conveyed in the way the central utilitarian idea in Crime and Punishment ‘sounds with a different tonality’ and occasions different symptoms as it comes into contact with different ‘life-positions’ (Bakhtin [1963] 1984, 89): Raskolnikov’s, Svidrigailov’s, Porfiry’s, Sonya’s. The press brought all manner of ideas into common circulation and – the air thick with these germs – some people succumbed almost passively to them. This is illustrated by the tavern scene.

As many in the 1860s feared the spread of ideas in the press, many today fear the spread of ideas on social media. Richard Dawkins coined the term ‘meme’ in 1976 to denote a cultural analogue to a gene; a meme transmits cultural information from person to person (Dawkins 2016). The comparison is not airtight – whereas memes tend to thrive on mutation, genes do not – but the term stuck. Internet memes are ‘multimodal artifacts remixed by countless participants, employing popular culture for public commentary’ (Milner 2013, 2357). They can be ‘any digital unit of expression’, from hashtags to GIFs, (Denisova 2019, 28) and most famously take the form of a still image, which remains consistent, together with a phrase, which is altered; this is an ‘image-macro meme’ (Donovan, Dreyfuss, and Friedberg 2022). Notable examples are the ‘distracted boyfriend’ and ‘change my mind’ memes. They belong to no one and constantly evolve.

A successful tactic of the alt-right has been to take innocuous cartoon characters and transform them into symbols of white supremacy. The tactic – subverting popular culture by inverting the meaning of well-known images and texts and inviting audiences to see reality in a new darker light – owes much to Dada and Situationism (Bonnett 1992). Created by Matt Furie for his comic strip Boy’s Club, Pepe the Frog had become the most popular meme on Tumblr by 2015, reinterpreted in endless ways and tweeted by celebrities such as Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj. But in late 2015, a scheme was hatched on the social media platform 4Chan’s /r9k/ board to create and popularise Nazi versions of the meme and, thereby, desensitise ‘normies’ to anti-Semitic ideas (Nuzzi 2016). It was remarkably effective. So deeply did this new version of Pepe enter the public consciousness that by September 2016 Hilary Clinton’s campaign felt compelled to post an ‘explainer’ of the meme (Robertson 2016). This was exactly what the alt-right were hoping for: the Overton Window had been shifted. As Jessie Daniels (2018, 64) writes: ‘Among White supremacists, the thinking goes: if today we can get “normies” talking about Pepe the Frog, then tomorrow we can get them to ask the other questions on our agenda: “Are Jews people?” or “What about black on white crime?”’ An idea influences everyone it touches.

In his characterisation of extremists, Dostoevsky captures how they live by idea-feelings, how ‘Their ideas become part of their personalities, to such an extent, indeed, that neither exists independently of the other’ (Frank 2009, 4). Their lives before coming across their idea become meaningless for them, either time squandered or, more charitably, spent subconsciously waiting for it. This is part of the reason there are so few biographical details in Dostoevsky’s work; we learn next-to nothing about the early lives of Raskolnikov or the extremists in Demons, as these characters no longer care about how they spent their childhoods – all they care about is getting their thoughts straight and doing their ideas justice. (Some, especially Raskolnikov, could not afford to think about their early lives anymore, even if they saw value in doing so, as the emotional sensibilities that first drew them to the idea now need to be suppressed to see it through.) This complete break with the past is undertaken by jihadis and far-right extremists today too. In The Way of the Strangers, Graeme Wood (2016) details how ISIS supporters, who may previously have lived dissolute lives – smoking, drinking alcohol, singing along to pop songs in nightclubs – never deviated from the ‘true path’ from the moment they realised the error of their ways and pledged allegiance to the Caliphate. They disavowed who they once were and never looked back. Their mental landscapes had no room for that. Where would quotidian memories fit in next to questions of final battles and the apocalypse?

An issue such individuals today have to contend with, however, is the possibility that incriminating evidence from their past may exist online somewhere, and could be used against them: ‘The internet subverts the traditional unities of time and space. It telescopes space, making us virtual neighbors, but it also concertinas time. Once something is up there online, it is usually there forever’ (Ash 2016, 16). Far-right extremists critical of The Daily Stormer hunted out photographs of its editor, Andrew Anglin, wearing a hoodie with a ‘fuck-racism’ patch, then a teenager, and shared them online, questioning his commitment to the cause (O’Brien 2017). He stood firm; a common response by those ashamed of their pasts is to marinate themselves even more richly in ideology, ‘dipping as far as back as possible into philosophy and history, so that no one could possibly question the authenticity’ of their positions (Wood 2016, 95). They shrug off the significance of their pasts; only what they believe now matters, and they make that clear at every possibility opportunity.

In this vein, Dostoevsky’s characters never argue ‘over separate points, but always over whole points of view, inserting themselves and their entire idea into even the briefest exchange’ (Bakhtin [1963] 1984, 96, original emphasis). A fine example of this is a conversation Raskolnikov has with Sonia. It begins with his telling her that Amalia Ivanovna is evicting Katerina Ivanovna and the children from their lodgings, but within a page it has segued to utilitarian philosophy: ‘Is Luzhin to live and commit vile deeds, or does Katerina Ivanovna have to die? So, how would you decide? Which of them is to die? That’s what I’m asking you’ (Dostoevsky [1866] 2017, 361). And Sonia isn’t even surprised by this: ‘I had a feeling that you’d ask me something like that’ (361). The same dynamics can be seen on Twitter. When extremists step outside their echo chamber – say, searching for the latest news via catch-all hashtags, such as #trump or #tommyrobinson, which are used in roughly equal measure by both sides (Berger 2018, 33) – and reply to a tweet that vexes them, they might enter into argument about a particular point, but they will still use hashtags to bring in their whole point of view. For example, they might end their message with #trump #maga #fakenews #itsokaytobewhite or #freetommy #edl #christian #england.

Another comparison that can be drawn between the extremists of the 1860s and those today is a generational element to the rebellion. Dostoevsky renders this in the out-and-out scorn Pyotr has for his father, Stepan. He regards him, like the other liberals of the 1840s, as overly refined and verbose, an idealist who enjoys the sound of his own voice too much.

‘My, my, what foolishness a man can drive himself into!’ Pyotr Stepanovich was even surprised. ‘Well, goodbye, old man, I’ll never come to you again. Send your article ahead of time, don’t forget, and try to do it without any humbug, if you can: facts, facts, facts, and, above all, make it short.’ (Dostoevsky [1871] 1994, 306)

The ex-jihadist David Vallet sees a similar rejection of authority and allegation of cowardice among jihadis today. Whereas the Islam of their parents is that of ‘those who bow down and obey’, theirs is that ‘of combatants, of blood, of resistance’ (Vallet, quoted in Roy 2017, 25). It is easy to imagine a radicalised second-generation Muslim immigrant in London sounding like Pyotr when mocking their more-liberal Muslim parents from Pakistan. And vice versa: It is easy to imagine a liberal first-generation Muslim from Pakistan sounding like Stepan when speaking about their radicalised son: ‘“I agree that the … basic idea is correct,” he said to me feverishly, “but so much the more horrible for that! … God, how, it’s all perverted, distorted, mutilated! … Who can recognize the initial thought here?”’ (Dostoevsky [1871] 1994, 304). Among young alt-right extremists, a generational element exists as well, but is more complicated; the alt-right has adopted the aesthetics of ‘counterculture, transgression and nonconformity’ and has ‘more in common with the 1968 left’s slogan “It is forbidden to forbid” than it does with anything most recognize as part of any traditional right’ (Nagle 2017, 28). These young alt-right extremists respect their parents’ principles and contributions to their country, but are injecting punk into the proceedings.

For all of these similarities between the extremists of the 1860s and those today, there are, however, also profound differences. Notably, whereas the former looked forward to a golden future, the latter hope to restore an allegedly golden past. The vade mecum for radical students in the 1860s was Chernyshevsky’s ‘The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy’ (1953), which preached a strict materialism underlining humans’ subservience to the laws of nature. It dismissed the notion of free will; defined good and evil in terms of utility; and argued that humans do what satisfies their self-interest, but, being rational, can come to realise that their self-interest is bound up with that of others. When an individual arrives at this realisation, they achieve enlightenment and are elevated to the position of a selfishly unselfish ‘rational egoism’ – for Chernyshevsky, the highest form of human development (Frank 2009, 283). How exactly rational egoism would usher in the future earthly paradise was unclear, but students were convinced that it would; one step at a time, the fine print could be worked out later. As Gray (2003, 21) writes: ‘The dislocated students who took to terror as a political weapon did not hark back to a mythical past – as the millenarian cults did in Bohemia and Germany several centuries earlier. Modern men and women, they looked instead to a mythical future.’ In stark contrast, Islamists and far-right nationalists today know exactly what their earthly paradise looks like. Because it has existed before. ISIS supporters, for example, want the return of laws and forms of government used 1,400 years ago, which they believe are meant for all times (Wood 2016, 102).

A consequence of this attachment to an allegedly golden past is that some extremists today experience a sharp disconnect between who they are online and offline. They can live online with their community, harking back to a non-modern world, but then offline still need to serve chips to kuffar with a liberal TV news channel on in the background. And this in turn can lead to the dangerous dream of oneness and the move from extremism to terrorism. ISIS played heavily on this dream of oneness when recruiting foreigners to the Caliphate. Its Twitter accounts were populated with pictures of jihadis wielding Kalashnikovs, waving flags, mounting horses and engaging in seventh-century religious rituals. There were no pictures of jihadis in downtime. The suggestion was that, there, these foreigners could live whole, unitary lives; no longer would their lives need to be divided. It is not hard to imagine how belonging to a virtual Caliphate would affect and amplify the humiliation of working in a fast-food shop, squidging out burger sauce onto a rude, condescending customer’s chips, seeing a notification that a contact tweeted calling for the End of Days, and then having to obsequiously hand over the polystyrene box to the rude, condescending customer.

Another difference lies in the individualism of Dostoevsky’s extremists as compared to the collectivism of those today. Raskolnikov wants to leave the herd behind and establish himself as a Napoleonic figure. Kirillov wants to become a Man-god. Pyotr revels only in his manipulation of others; he couldn’t care less about anyone in the group of five following him. This differs sharply from extremists today, who speak not in the register of I but we – a reflection of the new media environment and the tribalism its architecture promotes (a far cry from the individualism promoted by the feuilleton). ISIS’s propaganda campaigns frequently emphasise brotherhood and the solidarity of the ummah (Ebner 2017, 65). Similarly, far-right nationalists cooperate internationally, banding together on social media platforms, providing rhetorical support in each other’s local conflicts and revelling in each other’s local successes; #freetommy was the second most used hashtag by alt-right supporters worldwide in Berger’s (2018) Twitter census. Today’s extremists are not looking to leave the herd behind and demonstrate their uniqueness: they are looking to join the herd.

This collectivism means that the landscape of extremism today, and its interrelationships, is also more complicated than it was in the 1860s, when, in the main, the extremists were represented by individualist, atheist radicals, who opposed the tsar and Orthodoxy. Today, there are two sets of extremists, Islamists and far-right nationalists, who oppose each other, but also oppose mainstream society, and, therefore, are in some senses ‘rhetorical allies’ (Ebner 2017, 159). They both feel betrayed by modernity and believe that Islam and the West are incompatible. And even mainstream society has its own divisions, with ‘social justice warriors’ and ‘social order warriors’ opposing each other and blaming each other for the success of the two sets of radicals. This makes for a complex web of ‘reciprocal radicalization’ at different levels and an ‘unwitting cooperation of ever-escalating extremes’ (155).

Exploring extremism and media in fiction

Polyphony

In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics Mikhail Bakhtin ([1963] 1984, 28) asserts that Dostoevsky’s ‘mode of artistic visualizing was not evolution, but coexistence and interaction …  He shows all things side by side and simultaneous, as if they existed in space and not in time.’ This flows naturally from his being a newspaper reader. Just scanning a page, his eyes might have run over stories about marriage, financial ruin, a windfall, murder, suicide and more. While in Geneva, he read Golos, Moskovskie vedomosti and Santktpeterburgskie vedomosti cover to cover between five and seven p.m; by the time he went for his evening walk, he would have come into contact with a diverse range of opinions on a diverse range of topics, and the ‘collective soul’ of Russia (Catteau 1989, 180).

He sought to convey this experience in his fiction using the technique of polyphony, the creation of which Bakhtin ([1963] 1984, 49) considers to be equal to the ‘Copernican revolution’ in the history of the novel. It transforms the novel into a church ‘where sinners and righteous men come together’ and express themselves freely on their own terms (26–27). The characters in a polyphonic novel have the ideological authenticity and agency to clash with their author should they choose to, and suffer from no informational disadvantage; they know the ideological positions and material circumstances of all the other characters. The author ‘never retains any essential “surplus” of meaning, but only that indispensable minimum of pragmatic, purely information-bearing “surplus” necessary to carry forward the story’ (73). The playing field is level.

To put this into context, in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky’s first polyphonic work, Raskolnikov represents the 1860s utilitarian philosophy and radicalism Dostoevsky despised, but is nonetheless given the freedom to try to make it work as best he can, and, to that end, is made aware from the outset of all that he will have to engage with and overcome: he learns everything essential of his mother’s situation, his sister’s situation, Svidrigailov, Luzhin, Marmeladov and Sonya within the first thirty-five pages, certainly enough to correctly intuit the personalities of each of them.

As the novel progresses, each character becomes ‘an embodied solution to his [Raskolnikov’s] own personal question, a solution different from the one at which he himself had arrived’ (Bakhtin [1963] 1984, 238). This enables him to meet whom he could become and discourse with them in the present, something that deepens his self-understanding and forces him to painstakingly analyse himself and his idea from every conceivable angle. As quasi-doubles of him, Svidrigailov and Sonya represent two extremes, the two exit-ramps he could take: gluttonous egoism and dissolution or self-sacrificing Christianity. His encounters with them, in particular, structure the novel, knocking his thoughts into new constellations and, thereby, moving the plot forwards.

Key is how he internalises their voices and ‘life-positions’ and battles fiercely with them in his own mind ([1963] 1984, 89) – undertaking a ‘fundamental and intense interior dialogue with them, a dialogue of ultimate questions and ultimate life decisions’ (74). This is the second way in which polyphony operates in Dostoevsky’s world. All the words in Raskolnikov’s interior dialogue are double-voiced; as an example, Sonya’s words are recreated true to her life-position but are overlaid and interrupted at times by his own intonations of irony and indignation.

Polyphony operating on these two levels, macro and micro, ensures that the idea at the heart of the novel is ‘a live event, played out at the point of dialogic meeting between two or several consciousnesses’ ([1963] 1984, 88, original emphasis). The result is Raskolnikov’s mind becoming the locus for a cacophony of conflicting voices. But this is not comparable to an episode of Question Time. It is not a courteous, intelligent and productive exchange of views, participants briefly piping up to say their bit and then settling back into a composed silence. It is a hectic, hysterical clash in which everything is at stake and participants are permitted no rest, even when solitary. The description Alyosha provides of Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov (1880) would fit as well for Raskolnikov, Stavrogin or Kirillov: ‘Ah, Misha, his is a stormy soul. His mind is held captive. There is a great and unresolved thought in him. He’s one of those who don’t need millions, but need to resolve their thought’ (Dostoevsky [1880] 1997, 81).

In an age of echo chambers – and, indeed, novels written solely to push a pre-determined political agenda – the technique of polyphony could benefit both contemporary novelists and their readers. The creative process entails exposure to different ideas and a readiness to let them stand on their own terms. Like Dostoevsky, a contemporary novelist could enter the creative process sure of their own convictions, but they would need to follow them through to their logical conclusions and test them mercilessly. This might lead to those convictions being strengthened or it might lead to them being weakened; either way, it would lead to them being clarified, and that must be considered a positive outcome. What John Stuart Mill argues in On Liberty (1859) and succinctly writes in The Principles of Political Economy (1848) remains equally true today:

It is impossible to overrate the value, in the present state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar … Such communication has always been … one of the primary sources of progress. (Mill [1848] 2004, 543)

Our twenty-first century understanding of freedom of speech is shaped by two concepts from ancient Athens: isegoria, which concerns the equal right of citizens to participate in public debate and attempt to persuade others, and parrhesia, which concerns the right of citizens to speak without restraints, even if doing so causes offense (Bejan 2019, 97). The controversies that have lit up the culture wars in the West in recent years relate to which of these concepts freedom of speech truly entails. The technique of polyphony implicitly promotes the importance of both isegoria and parrhesia. In Crime and Punishment marginalised characters such as Sonya are heard on an equal footing with privileged characters such as Svidrigailov and allowed to express their ideas fully.

The technique also enables individuals to be put into genuine dialogic contact in a way that they rarely are. As Bakhtin ([1963] 1984, 91) notes, Dostoevsky brought together ‘ideas and worldviews, which in real life were absolutely estranged and deaf to one another, and forced them to quarrel … he anticipated future dialogic encounters between ideas which in his time were still disassociated.’ This impulse, to create new constellations around ideas, is the reason for the abundance of mass scenes in his novels, scenes in which hordes of people are forced into the same room, street or square and made to lock horns; he concentrated ‘in a single moment the greatest possible qualitative diversity’ (28).

A contemporary novelist writing about extremism could in this vein bring together, say, a liberal white boomer, a woke white Gen Zer, a first-generation Iranian immigrant who fled their birthplace after the Islamic Revolution, and a second-generation immigrant desperate for a sense of identity. In Demons the pampered, privileged Stepan finally encounters the peasants after a life spent speaking extravagantly about their virtues, and total bewilderment ensues:

‘No, I’m not actually a merchant, I … I … moi c’est autre chose,’ Stepan Trofimovich parried anyhow, and, just in case dropped behind a little to the rear of the cart, so that he was now walking next to the cow.

‘Must be from the gentlefolk,’ the peasant decided, hearing non-Russian words, and pulled on the nag.

‘So here, to look at you, it’s as if you’re out for a walk?’ the wench began to pry again.

‘Is it … is it me you’re asking?’

‘There’s visiting foreigners come by rail sometimes, you’re not from these parts with boots like that … ’

‘Military-type,’ the peasant put in, complacently and significantly.

‘No, I’m not actually from the military, I … ’

‘What a curious wench,’ Stepan Trofimovich thought vexedly, ‘and how they’re studying me … mais enfin …  Strange, in a word, just as if I were guilty before them, yet I’m not guilty of anything before them.’ (Dostoevsky [1871] 1994, 634)

A contemporary novelist could interrogate whether such encounters would be any different today. But this brings us to the question of how polyphony needs to be adapted to serve the social media age. In Ciceronianus (1528) Erasmus contends that someone who wants to emulate Cicero should not speak like him, because he would no longer speak like that. Thomas Greene (1982, 98) endorses this in Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry: the beginning of creativity lies ‘in a double groping – towards the otherness of the ancient text and toward a modern sensibility, a modern voice, that can mediate the ancient.’ If a contemporary novelist were to use polyphony exactly as Dostoevsky did, they would turn it into a dead technique.

In Crime and Punishment and Demons, the discussions of utilitarian philosophy and radicalism that drive polyphony forward at a macro level frequently last more than five pages. There are long, uninterrupted stretches of dialogue during which the narrator steps aside, and characters remain attentive throughout. The internal reflection that drives polyphony forward at a micro level is similarly exhaustive, structured as well-focused, coherent direct interior monologue. While this overt, sustained engagement with the realm of ideas chimes with the media environment of the 1860s, it would not chime with our media environment. A 280-character limit forces Twitter users to share ideas in their most distilled, digestible form. Even on Instagram, which has no character limit, multiple-line captions frequently elicit a ‘tl; dr’ (too long; didn’t read) reaction. In a conversation with Porfiry and Razumikhin, Raskolnikov speaks about his superman theory for seventy-seven lines without interruption (Dostoevsky [1866] 2017, 229–231). If a contemporary novelist were to include such slabs of dialogue alongside social media posts, their fictional universe would lack symmetry.

The narrative conventions for dialogue have also simply changed since the 1860s. All dialogue in fiction necessarily has an artificial quality – it would be intolerable to read otherwise – but there has been a significant shift away from the tradition of Plato towards more mimetic representation, especially in regard to the speed of exchanges. In line with this, readers’ expectations and the extent to which they are willing to suspend their disbelief have shifted too. Quarles in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928) notes that ‘people who reel off neatly formulated notions aren’t quite real; they’re slightly monstrous’ (Huxley [1928] 2018, 386) – a character in a contemporary novel engaging fluently with ideas for seventy-seven lines would likely be shrugged off in a similar manner.

A novelist wanting to use polyphony today would then need to adapt it in several ways. The discussions their characters have over ideas should be streamlined, with shorter stretches of dialogue, interspersed with physical descriptions and surrounded by comments of a less conceptual nature; and not all characters should be attentive throughout the discussions – the protagonist could, for example, listen to someone for a while, take out their phone, check their social media feed, and then continue listening. This would help to maintain credibility, logic and harmony in the fictional universe. They could also use free indirect style to sparingly render internal reflections and unique life-positions in the course of actions; the technique allows characters’ subjectivity to shine through third-person narration (Cowan [2011] 2013, 139–140; Wood [2008] 2009, 8–10). An example: ‘While writing his manifesto, Tom shamefully listened to a “Pure Party” playlist.’ ‘While writing his manifesto, Tom listened to a … “Pure Party” playlist’ is provided by the narrator and ‘shamefully’ by the character. This reads more smoothly than a nineteenth-century direct speech version would – ‘While writing his manifesto, Tom listened to a “Pure Party” playlist. “It’s shameful to be listening to music like this,” he thought. “But oh well.”’ – and matches the pace of the social media age.

There are, however, logistical issues for a contemporary novelist using polyphony to consider too. How can it be employed in a world of echo chambers? Dostoevsky’s use of polyphony is made possible by three factors. The first is physical proximity. Svidrigailov lodges in the same building as Sonia; Luzhin lodges in the same building as Katerina Ivanovna; and Raskolnikov brushes shoulders with all of the major characters in and around the Haymarket. The second is common frames of references. Porfiry has read Raskolnikov’s article on crime in a journal; everyone has read about the murder of the old woman and Lizaveta in the newspapers. The third is the unfinalisability of Dostoevsky’s major characters. Dialogism, macro and micro, is bound up with their being, at the time of the narrative, still in the process of becoming – as fervently as they hope that they are right, they fear they may be wrong, and remain open to that possibility (Bakhtin [1963] 1984, 59).

As regards physical proximity, a contemporary novelist could set the narrative in London, with conservative Muslims, liberal Muslims, racists and far-right extremists all living in a deprived outer borough. On a character’s walk home from a Tube station, they could plausibly pass a mosque, a pub, a kebab shop and a newsagent and be required to take underpasses, where all sorts of kids could hang out. The structures of family and school could provide further dialogic opportunities. A character could attend a local state school in the outer borough, but also spend time in an up-and-coming, fashionable borough where one parent has moved with a new partner. When the action takes place online, a common meeting place could be a comments section on the Guardian. The comments section for a review of an album by an artist with politically controversial opinions would draw haters (who want to celebrate a negative review they feel is deserved) as well as loyal fans (who want to defend the artist and their right to hold politically controversial opinions, if not the opinions themselves). Any of the characters could conceivably find their way here.

As regards significant common frames of reference, things become more tricky. The ‘architecture of serendipity’ of the 1860s – an architecture replete with chance encounters – has now fallen away in favour of an ‘architecture of control’ where people have the freedom to choose what they are exposed to (Sunstein 2017, 1). This has led to a decrease in the common frames of reference in society and the likelihood of someone having come across a viewpoint they disagree with, as Porfiry does in Crime and Punishment. Even the murder of the old woman and Lizaveta might not be a common frame of reference in today’s media environment; some violent crimes allegedly committed by ‘illegal aliens’ are reported on by Breitbart but not the mainstream media, and, vice versa, some positive stories about refugees are reported on by the mainstream media but not Breitbart. Generally, a contemporary novelist would have to establish significant common frames of reference before the protagonist has radicalised. An opportunity exists, however, in the the landscape of extremism now being more complicated than it was in the 1860s. The protagonist could swing from the left to the far right (as, for example, Anne Marie Waters has: she began her political life in the Labour party, campaigned for LGBT rights and secularist causes, and then went on to establish For Britain). This would provide the protagonist with maximum exposure to different frames of reference throughout the novel (plus proximity to a wider array of people).

As regards the unfinalisability of characters, today’s media environment is not conducive to an exhaustive process of becoming. The structure of social media resists it. Even after Raskolnikov has radicalised, become obsessed by his idea, and brutally enacted it, he reserves the right ‘to outgrow, as it were, from within, and to render untrue any externalizing and finalizing definition’ of him (Bakhtin [1963] 1984, 59). He remains, mentally, ‘poised on the threshold’ (63). Unlike Raskolnikov, however, a contemporary novelist’s protagonist could not remain mentally poised on the threshold. They would need to be consistent and unwavering in their views to maintain popularity in their echo chamber; they would need to show that they are wholly committed and ready for any externalising and finalising definition of them to be made. The polyphonic part of the novel would, therefore, need to end once the protagonist has radicalised and ensconced themselves in an echo chamber: the echo chamber is, by its very nature, monologic.

Exploring extremism and media in fiction

A way out of polyphony

The epilogue to Crime and Punishment is ‘conventionally monologic’ (Bakhtin [1963] 1984, 92). It is, as Michael Holquist (1977, 80) writes, a ‘wisdom tale’ occurring in ‘vertical time’ in stark contrast to the ‘horizontal’ time of the racy, polyphonic whydunit. ‘That evening he [Raskolnikov] wasn’t capable of thinking long and coherently about anything, nor concentrating his thoughts; in fact he wouldn’t have wanted any conscious thoughts; all he could do was feel. The dialectic had given place to life’ (Dostoevsky [1866] 2017, 486). The voices in Raskolnikov’s head have fallen silent. He has stopped philosophising. And a glimmer of an eternally calm, peaceful future has presented itself to him:

The bank was high, with a distant view all round. Far away on the opposite bank, he could just make out the sound of singing. There, on the wide stretches of the steppe, bathed in sunlight, the nomads’ yurts showed as barely visible dots. There was freedom out there, and different people, nothing like the people back here; out there, time seemed to have stopped, as if the age of Abraham and his flocks had never passed away. Raskolnikov sat without moving and looked out without shifting his gaze. (Dostoevsky [1866] 2017, 484)

Throughout the novel, Dostoevsky counterposes the whirlwind pace of violence and brutality with moments of tranquillity, when time seems to stand still (Tucker 2009, 450). We can consider, for example, the dream Raskolnikov has right before the murder; in the dream he is ‘somewhere in Africa, in Egypt, by an oasis. The caravan is resting, the camels lying quietly, there’s a circle of palm trees around them, and everyone is eating their midday meal. He himself is drinking water, straight from a brook that flows and gurgles along just beside him’ (Dostoevsky [1866] 2017, 62). He is stirred out of this by a clock striking six and thrust into a ‘strange state of feverish, confused, frantic haste’ with his heart ‘pounding, thumping so hard’ he can barely breathe as he rushes out of his room (62) and plummets into the crime sections of the newspapers. Another example is Raskolnikov’s confession-rehearsal visit to Sonya, in which he paces back and forth for five minutes, without speaking or looking at her, feverishly, eyes blazing, before sitting ‘motionless’ while she reads to him from ‘the eternal book’ the story of the raising of Lazarus (291). And then there are, of course, the many instances the characters simply stare into each other’s eyes for prolonged periods, searching for something more than words. In the epilogue, this Biblical ‘timeless present tense’ finally wins out (Tucker 2009, 450).

As a technique, polyphony can be tremendously productive for the author and the reader, but for the characters who experience it, it is dizzying and damaging. As Caryl Emerson (1997, 153) writes: ‘If I proudly internalize all dialogue … I will never be alone or at peace again.’ In the polyphonic body of Crime and Punishment, characters have the authority and agency to lock horns with each other on equal terms. But this makes for an array of individuals essentially cannibalising each other, squeezing everything they can out of each other without regard for the impact it has on others (Corrigan 2017, 102), and then retreating into themselves to chew over what they have learnt in the hope it might provide a definitive answer to their ideological dilemmas. To demonstrate how ‘disastrous this reflex [internalizing all dialogue] is, be it voluntary or not, is part of Dostoevsky’s larger purpose’ (Emerson 1997, 152). There has to be a way out of the ‘solitary vortex’ (152). Dostoevsky puts forward the monologism of a faith community, the sobornost. Which is to say, everyone singing the same song in the same way (Anderson 1986, 132).

How would this compare to a contemporary novelist using polyphony? For a contemporary novelist, the monologism of a faith-based community (or race-based community) would equally be a way out of polyphony, but, rather than presenting this as a positive and necessary end to hyperactive unfinalisability, they could show the consequences this monologism can have. After swinging from the left to the right, their protagonist could find themselves needing to find a new tribe online, a new target audience, and gradually move further and further right under the pressures of social media’s like economy, until they start retweeting members of Generation Identity. Everyone who used to follow the protagonist, while they were on the left, would stop following them. They could then end up in a totally monologic echo chamber where everyone is, indeed, singing the same song in the same way. But this song would be a nationalist one.

Like Dostoevsky, a contemporary novelist could counterpose the whirlwind pace of violence and brutality with moments of tranquillity, when time seems to stand still. In their novel, however, whirlwind pace could be associated with the experience of life on social media and time standing still with polyphonic moments offline. A scene in which the protagonist participates in a coordinated online hate campaign – similar to the YouTube ‘raids’ or ‘sniper missions’ carried out by Reconquista Germanica (Kreißel et al. 2018, 17) – could be followed by one in which family members calmly discuss the news over dinner. Eventually, spending more and more time online, in a monologic echo chamber, the protagonist could come to believe in the ‘great replacement’ theory and desperately, worriedly plan a far-right terror attack. Having finalised the plan and acquired a weapon on the dark web, they could fall ill. Taking care of them, their mother could see an opportunity to try to get through to them and remind them of incidents from their past in an attempt to convince them of the absurdity of their Islamophobic views, but it could prove too late.

In ‘The Crippled Epistemology of Extremism’ Russell Hardin (2002, 15) writes:

Members of isolated extremist groups can do things that seem extraordinary to others, as though they were audacious beyond measure. But the individuals in an isolated group are not so clearly audacious in their actual context. They merely do what people in their groups do. Such action, if undertaken by an ordinary person whose life is wholly within the larger community, would be audacious.

The monologic echo chamber would provide the ‘protection against corrosive contrary knowledge’ (Hardin 2002, 13) – needed to commit an act that would seem extraordinary to polyphonic mainstream society.⁴ We can consider, for example, the terror attack committed by David Sonboly in Munich in 2016. He lured teenagers of Turkish and Arab origin to a McDonald’s and, there, took nine lives. Because he was a second-generation immigrant from Iran acting in the name of Aryanism, he was thought to be ‘insane’ and immediately labelled a ‘psychopath’ (Roy 2017, 73). But he would not have seemed insane to extremists who had ensconced themselves in social media circles that subscribe to the Aryan racial theory, which asserts that Iranians, Indians and Europeans share a genetic lineage distinguishing them from Arabs and Turks (Shams 2016).

Crime and Punishment generates a claustrophobic atmosphere from page one and sustains it until the Haymarket scene, when Raskolnikov finally takes Sonia’s advice and goes ‘straight for where the crowd was thickest’ (Dostoevsky [1866] 2017, 465). In contrast, a contemporary novel could open with plenty of breathing space. Yet as the protagonist enters a right-wing echo chamber, joins an isolated extremist group and engages in media guerrilla warfare – all from a cupboard-like bedroom – a claustrophobic atmosphere could grow and grow, climaxing in the final scene, when they commit a terror attack and are stuck in a halal restaurant with the bodies of their victims.

When a writer enters into dialogue with a precursor, they initiate ‘a process of mutual criticism. Every creative imitation mingles filial rejection with respect, just as every parody pays its own oblique homage’ (Greene 1982, 98). In this receptive but creative and transformative spirit of mutual criticism, a contemporary novelist could challenge the safety that Dostoevsky suggests there to be in everyone singing the same song in the same way and show that monologism is not necessarily a safe way out. The twenty-first century media environment has made monologism easier than ever to realise, and its lure is irresistible for many. But it can come at a high price.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-east England.

Notes on contributors

Nicolas Padamsee

Nicolas Padamsee holds a Creative Writing: Prose Fiction MA and a Creative & Critical Writing PhD (for which he was awarded a CHASE studentship) from the University of East Anglia.

The creative element of his thesis is a novel, England Is Mine, exploring the process of radicalisation online, the experience of life on the fringes, and the struggle for identity and belonging among second-generation immigrants. It was published by Serpent's Tail in April 2024, and chosen as one of the Observer's best debut novels for 2024. The critical element engages with the work of Dostoevsky and the media environment in which he wrote that work, presenting him as a uniquely instructive model for a novelist wanting to contribute to the study of extremism today.

He edits www.artsagainstextremism.org, which promotes literature as a means of investigating, understanding and countering extremism, and splits his time between London and Norwich.

Notes

1 Crime and Punishment was inspired by the case of Pierre-François Lacenaire, an elegant, handsome, well-educated poet who embraced rational egoism, brutally murdered a man and his mother, tried to rob a collection clerk and then seemed to crave conviction; in his trial he happily, enthusiastically corrected mistakes made by the prosecution, at considerable cost (Birmingham 2021). The spark for Demons was provided by Sergei Nechaev, who wrote the first comprehensive plan for underground revolutionary societies, formed the People’s Retribution cell and, when a former ally challenged his authority, shot them and hid their body in a frozen pond through a hole in the ice (Vinokur 2020).

2 The feuilleton was of the most popular features of the newspaper in the 1860s, a regular column at the bottom of the front page, which served as a down-to-earth guide to popular culture. In this ‘idiosyncratic textual melange’, a writer would discuss literature, local incidents, politics, rumours, everything; they would act as a chronicler, a flâneur, a gossip of sorts, who would gather and interpret information for the general reading public, shaping their worldview in the process. The informal nature of the column, and the fact that it tended to be published anonymously, ‘liberated the writer from the demands of intellectual responsibility and rhetorical consistency’ (Klioutchkine 2016).

3 A popular myth was that in the fifteenth century Russia managed to overcome the invading Mongal hordes and save Europe from becoming a Muslim empire because princes in the Slavic princedoms put a stop to political infighting and submitted unconditionally to the rule of the tsar. Now in the nineteenth century there was a new threat: revolutionary ideas, to which Europe had already succumbed. It was up to Russia to protect Christian civilisation for a second time (Birmingham 2021, 73).

4 In an echo chamber, an extremist would not be wholly isolated from alternative worldviews, but they would encounter them in their most absurd, unconvincing form – snippets carefully selected and shared by contacts to demonstrate the danger of the mainstream and/or extremists on the other side. What’s more, as Zeynep Tufekci has written, when we encounter alternative views on social media it is very different to sitting on our own in a cafe and reading them in a newspaper. ‘It’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium’ (Tufekci 2018).