MEDIATED TRANSCENDENCE:

REALISM AND REVELATION IN RUSSIAN FICTION, 1863-1898

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF

SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES

OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Thomas Lee Roberts

August 2010

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/

This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/mq244xb5337

© 2010 by Thomas Lee Roberts. All Rights Reserved.

Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

ii

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequatein scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Monika Greenleaf, Co-Adviser

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequatein scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Gabriella Safran, Co-Adviser

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequatein scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Johannes Gumbrecht

Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies.

Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education

This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file inUniversity Archives.

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I hear and behold God in every object, yet I understand God not in the least,

Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day? I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each

moment then, In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in

the glass; I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d

by God’s name, And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go, Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,”

from Leaves of Grass, Section 48

*****

“In every expression of art, something is revealed, is known, is recognized…At the same time, the claim of the Christian message transcends this and points in the opposite direction: it shows what we cannot achieve.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Aesthetic and Religious Experience”

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Abstract

“Mediated Transcendence: Realism and Revelation in Russian Fiction, 1863-

1898” investigates the relationship between literary form and transcendence in

representative texts of the Russian Realist tradition. The author identifies scenes of

literary transcendence, spanning transformative religious and psychological

experiences, as epiphanies, which display a unique confluence of content and form –

at once a narrative event, in the life of the character, and a locus of literary devices.

The project proceeds from the premise that the ineffable content of epiphany exceeds

the verisimilar parameters of literary realism, and even the semiotic capacity of prose

language. In response to this representational problem, the authors analyzed elaborate

narrative and poetic strategies for the purposes of framing transcendence, augmenting

discursive representation with performative presentation. Beginning with Tolstoy’s

model of the literary epiphany in War and Peace in the introduction, the dissertation

subsequently explores the theme and forms of transcendence in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s

The Idiot, Nikolai Leskov’s The Sealed Angel, and selected stories of Anton Chekhov.

Incorporating elements of theology, phenomenology, and critical theory, these

individual readings reveal the aesthetic nature of visionary experience, and the way

such experience is conveyed by the appropriately aesthetic means and potential of the

literary text. In challenging notions of the empirical and positivist biases of Realism,

the dissertation reevaluates the historical position of the movement, indicating its

formal and theoretical debt to Romanticism, as well as its subsequent influence on

Modernism.

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Acknowledgments

It is my immodest hope that this dissertation reflect, if slightly, the unique and

varied community of Stanford University. Above all, I thank my remarkable

committee. Monika Greenleaf has been a friend and mentor throughout graduate

school, providing both broad inspiration, and innumerable individual insights – if

some of these should go unacknowledged below, it is only limit the number of

footnotes, and the incredible frequency of her name therein. Gabriella Safran has been

a peerless adviser in every possible respect, nurturing my academic, pedagogical, and

professional development, as well as an exemplary model of scholarship and teaching.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht inspired much of the project methodology, and provided

remarkable feedback on drafts and ideas these last three years.

My professors and colleagues in the Stanford Slavic department have likewise

shaped this dissertation significantly. Gregory Freidin helped me to clarify and

articulate its scope, and his seminars have shaped my thoughts on literature and

theory. Similarly, Lazar Fleishman’s courses have enabled my understanding of

Russian poetry. Nariman Skakov has proven a close friend and interlocutor since his

recent and timely arrival. Among all of my wonderful colleagues in the department, I

extend particular thanks to Irina Erman, Ilja Gruen, and Katya Nekhlyudova. I also

wish to thank the members of the Orthodoxy Reading Group, and particularly Martha

Kelly, for contributing to my understanding of this theological tradition. Outside of the

Slavic department, Bissera Pentcheva, of Art History, and Thomas Sheehan and Brent

Sockness, of Religious Studies, have shaped my thinking on aesthetic, philosophical,

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and theological topics integral to my analysis. Finally, looking beyond California, I am

gratefully indebted to my mentors at Middlebury College, including my dear friend

Michael Katz, and Alya Baker, who initiated my love of the Russian language.

There is no adequate way to express my gratitude to my parents, Jane and Paul

Roberts, so I will simply state that every page that follows reflects their incomparable

caring, kindness, and support: they are truly proof that love is a sincere source of

inspiration. I am similarly indebted to my brothers, James and Tim Roberts, who have

inspired me throughout my life. I likewise thank friends in Atlanta, Berkeley, Chicago,

Moscow, New York, and San Francisco. Among these individuals, too many to

enumerate, I thank Corey Bills, Eric Lindell, and Ben Tausig for years of friendship

and support. Giorgio Alberti, Sarah Hamill, Michael Kunichika, Chris Lakey, and

Miriam Neirick have likewise shaped my time in California in innumerable ways. And

last, but certainly not least, I thank Emily Sims; for though she has only recently

entered my life, her miraculous love and creativity could not be more appropriate to

the theme of this dissertation.

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Contents

Abstract v Acknowledgements vi Introduction: Mediating the Transcendent 1

The Transcendent as Linguistic and Aesthetic Conundrum Representing Transcendence: From Language to Literature A Theoretical Model of the Literary Epiphany Epiphanic Precedent: Augustine and Rousseau Russian Cultural Background and Context Chapter Outline

Chapter 1: The Possibility and Paradox of Epiphany in The Idiot 33

Transcendence in the Novel: Problem and Potential The “Other World” of Visionary Experience Visionary Moment as Narrative Lacuna Narrating the Ineffable: Representational Strategies Ending as Ground of Meaning Illumination: Faith Hypostasized Ippolit, and the Failure of Empirical Vision Faith, Imagination, and the Challenge of Holbein’s Dead Christ The Rejection of Vertical Transcendence Holbein’s Painting as Hermeneutic Model

Chapter 2: Alterity and Transcendence in Leskov’s The Sealed Angel 110

Sign, Sense, and the Ineffable Apophasis and the Critique of Sensible Form Figuring the “Heavenly Face” Alterity: The Visual, Verbal, and Ontological Other

Chapter 3: Christian Aesthetics as Theme and Modeling Principle in 163

Chekhov’s Fiction

“Khudozhestvo”: Epiphany Exposed “Panikhida” and “The Student”: Narrative, Time, and Transcendence

Conclusion: Between Decadence and Iconoclasm 213 Works Cited 222

1

Introduction: Mediating the Transcendent

Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Voina i mir, 1863-69) contains numerous

scenes, among the most famous in the novel, of intense transformation, at once

mysterious and revelatory, in the lives of protagonists such as Pierre Bezukhov,

Andrei Bolkonsky, and Natasha Rostova. Such moments of “epiphany,” as they are

commonly identified, interpolate aspects of character development, as well as thematic

issues central to the text. In the case of Tolstoy, these scenes also typically display a

concentration of stylistic devices, denoting the significance of the moment. Such

passages often create a textual, aesthetic approximation of the epiphany, providing the

reader with an experience analogous to that of the character. The literary epiphany, in

other words, is bivalent: it pertains to the represented experience of the Tolstoyan

character, in fictional life; and to the aesthetically-induced experience of the Tolstoyan

reader, in literary art.

To provide an example of this unique phenomenon, I refer briefly to the scene

of Prince Andrei’s conversation with Pierre, as the two cross the flooded river at

Bogucharovo in the second volume of the novel. In the context of the narrative,

Andrei has withdrawn to his estate, following his wounding at the Battle of Austerlitz,

and the death of his wife in labor. Pierre, by comparison, inspired by his recent interest

in Masonry, articulates the necessity of the individual's participation in the world,

inspiring Andrei's renewed sense of the significance of the same “high, eternal sky”

first perceived at Austerlitz. Initially dismissive of Pierre's perspective, Andrei rejects

Pierre's provisions of the afterlife and man's eternal soul as justification for his wife's

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suffering, and his own loss, asserting that there can be no sufficient “answer” to such

injustice. The response that Andrei awaits, however, is manifest environmentally, and

it is his sensory experience of his environment that enables an epiphany of his integral

place in the world:

“If there is God and if there is a future life, then there is truth, there is virtue; and man's highest happiness consists in striving to attain them. We must live, we must love, we must believe,” said Pierre, “that we do not live only today on this scrap of earth, but have lived and will live eternally there, in the all” (he pointed to the sky). Prince Andrei stood with his elbow resting on the rail of the ferry, and, listening to Pierre, did not take his eyes off the red gleam of the sun on the blue floodwaters. Pierre fell silent. It was completely still. The ferry had long been moored, and only the waves of the current lapped with a faint sound against the ferry’s bottom. It seemed to Prince Andrei that this splash of waves made a refrain to Pierre’s words, saying: “It’s true, believe it.” Prince Andrei sighed, and with a luminous, childlike, tender gaze looked into the flushed, rapturous face of Pierre, who still felt timid before his superior friend. “Yes, if only it were so!” he said. “Anyhow, let’s go and get in,” Prince Andrei added and, stepping off the ferry, he looked at the sky Pierre had pointed to, and for the first time since Austerlitz saw that high, eternal sky he had seen as he lay on the battlefield, and something long asleep, something that was best in him, suddenly awakened joyful and young in his soul. This feeling disappeared as soon as Prince Andrei re-entered the habitual conditions of life, but he knew that this feeling, which he did not know how to develop, lived in him. The meeting with Pierre marked an epoch for Prince Andrei, from which began what, while outwardly the same, was in his inner world a new life.1

1 The passage in the original Russian reads:

«Ежели есть бог и есть будущая жизнь, то есть истина, есть добродетель; и высшее счастье человека состоит в том, чтобы стремиться к достижению их. Надо жить, надо любить, надо верить, — говорил Пьер, — что живем не нынче только на этом клочке земли, а жили и будем жить вечно там, во всем (он указал на небо). Князь Андрей стоял, облокотившись на перила парома, и, слушая Пьера, не спуская глаз, смотрел на красный отблеск солнца по синеющему разливу. Пьер замолк. Было совершенно тихо. Паром давно пристал, и только волны теченья с слабым звуком ударялись о дно парома. Князю Андрею казалось, что это полосканье волн к словам Пьера приговаривало: «Правда, верь этому».

Князь Андрей вздохнул и лучистым, детским, нежным взглядом взглянул в раскрасневшееся восторженное, но все робкое перед первенствующим другом, лицо Пьера.

— Да, коли бы это так было! — сказал он. — Однако пойдем садиться, — прибавил князь Андрей, и, выходя с парома, он поглядел на небо, на которое указал ему Пьер, и в первый раз после Аустерлица он увидал то высокое, вечное небо, которое он

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Gazing at the water as he listens to Pierre, Andrei intuits the idea that the water, in

fact, agrees with his companion, ascribing to the rhythm of the waves the imperative:

“It's true, believe it” (Pravda, ver' etomu). Meanwhile, the rhythmic lapping of the

waves, to which Andrei attributes the capacity for speech, is already poetically

manifest in the metric configurations employed in the description of the waves

themselves. This passage begins with the trochaic meter of the simple sentence: Bylo

sovershenno tikho (“It was completely still”), which then transitions to an iambic

meter in the following sentence: Parom davno pristal, i tol’ko volny techen’ia s

slabym zvukom udarialis’ o dno paroma (“The ferry had long been moored, and only

the waves of the current lapped with a faint sound against the ferry’s bottom”). The

alternating binary rhythms of the passage embody the “faint sound” of the waves as

they lap against the side of the boat, rendering a poetic equivalent to the very sound

described in the passage itself. As his attention drifts upward to the mysterious sky, it

is as if Andrei begins to ascend, propelled by the unfolding trochees and iambs of

Tolstoy's metrical prose.2 As at Austerlitz, Andrei's revelation relates to his discovery

of nature, and his place within it, even as the sky suggests his longing for another,

видел, лежа на Аустерлицком поле, и что-то давно заснувшее, что-то лучшее, что было в нем, вдруг радостно и молодо проснулось в его душе. Чувство это исчезло, как скоро князь Андрей вступил опять в привычные условия жизни, но он знал, что это чувство, которое он не умел развить, жило в нем. Свидание с Пьером было для князя Андрея эпохой, с которой началась хотя во внешности и та же самая, но во внутреннем мире его новая жизнь.»

See Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 10 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1930), 117-18. English translation, cited above, in Tolstoy, War and Peace, Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 389. Italics are added, in both citations, to highlight segments explored in my analysis. 2 I am grateful to Monika Greenleaf for her identification of the propulsive potential of the passage’s binary meters.

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transcendent realm.3 Meanwhile, if Andrei may be said to hear and feel the rhythm of

the waves, the reader is made to experience the same rhythm in the binary meter of its

description, fostering an auditory approximation of the water in the world of the

reader.

The word est' (“there is,” derivative of the verb byt', or “to be”), meanwhile,

appears four times in the first sentence, the opening of Pierre’s statement. In the

following sentence, nado (“(one) must,” an impersonal form of imperative) appears

three times, while infinitive and conjugated forms of the verb zhit’ (“to live”) figure

four times in the same sentence. This example of Tolstoy’s trademark repetition serves

a similarly rhythmic, poetic function, in iteration and syntactic parallelism, to that of

the aforementioned metrical lines. The device likewise serves a semantic function,

drawing attention to key lexical units, related to the theme of the passage: Pierre's

message, appropriately, is the necessity (nado) of being (est') and living (zhit') in the

world. As if to confirm and validate this point, the passage (and the chapter) concludes

with reference to Andrei's novaia zhizn' (“new life”), as if Pierre’s emphasis were

effectively internalized by the initially skeptical Bolkonsky.

Similarly expressive, performative strategies are an essential aspect of

Tolstoy's prose in scenes of epiphany, in which they often assume a more auspicious,

even dominant function, saturating the text with acoustical, rhythmic, and syntactic

3 Richard Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 64. Andrei’s realization is also consistent with Martin Bidney’s proposal that the essential meaning of all character epiphanies in War and Peace is “the harmonious, unforced unity of the individual with the rhythms of the greater cosmic totality.” See Bidney, Patterns of Epiphany: From Wordsworth to Tolstoy, Pater, and Barret Browning (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 159.

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effects.4 I return to Tolstoy's handling of the literary epiphany below, and cite this

concise example to illustrate how Tolstoy resorts to formal, as well as descriptive

techniques in order to convey the elusive quality of Andrei's experience. This

dimension of Tolstoy's project, in turn, exemplifies the scope of my dissertation. The

theme of this project, simply put, is how Russian prose writers of the nineteenth-

century attempt to represent the transcendent in their fiction. I define the transcendent

literally, and thus broadly, as that which exceeds the immediate, everyday reality of

the experiencing subject. While the transcendent will, in some cases, be synonymous

with the divine, the category will include both traditional forms of religious experience

and hierophany, Mircea Eliade’s term for a manifestation of the sacred in immanent

human reality; and more ambiguous categories of charismatic or visionary experience,

such as we find above in Tolstoy.5

Given the breadth and trajectory of his career, the analysis of Tolstoy will

bookend the discussion, as War and Peace and his later, polemical writings on art

serve as chronological and methodological points of origin and culmination,

respectively, for the structure of the dissertation. Each chapter, meanwhile, will

explore this phenomenon in a different writer of the Realist prose tradition,

approaching representative texts by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Leskov, and Anton

Chekhov. As I will demonstrate, however, the topic of literary transcendence, as both

representational problem and object of study, is far from simple, and even verges on

4 In the aforementioned scene at Austerlitz, for example, Tolstoy employs such rhetorical devices as imitative syntax, repetition, and homeoteleuton (the clustering of words of a common grammatical ending), as well as poetic devices such as alliteration and syllabic iteration. See Tolstoy, Sobranie sochinenii v dvadsati tomakh, Vol. 4, 380. English translation in Tolstoy, War and Peace, 281. 5 Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, Trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 11.

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the paradoxical. For the transcendent, as that which exceeds immanent, human reality,

likewise exceeds the conventional parameters of prose fiction, and even, theoretically,

language itself. These four authors, in other words, attempt to render in their fiction

that which defies representation. The outcome, appropriately, will prove far from

conventional.

The Transcendent as Linguistic and Aesthetic Conundrum

The problem of representing the transcendent probes the very basis and

boundaries of mimesis, and thus claims a precedent in Western philosophical and

religious discourses. Whereas Plato, in Book X of The Republic, places mimetic art, as

the mere “imitation of appearance,” at a third remove from reality, and thus from the

contemplation of higher truth, Christian Incarnational theology, as expressed in the

Johannine conceit of “the Word made flesh,” would later restore meaning to sensible

form.6 The relationship between art and religion in Christian culture is of course a

complex one, varying significantly by denomination and historical context. In theory,

however, the Incarnation ascribes a fundamental meaning to sensible form, as a

potential vessel of divine content. Appropriately, art has often played a significant role

in Christian liturgies, thus valorizing the sensorial, aesthetic dimension of religious

experience, and has in turn influenced the development of artistic forms, such as

narrative.7 Subsequent theories of artistic mimesis, emerging from the scriptural

6 See Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 2003), 339-40; and John 1: 1 (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”), in the Oxford NIV Scofield Study Bible, Ed. C. I. Scofield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 1093. Subsequent biblical citations are taken from this edition. 7 Relevant examples include Erich Auerbach’s formulation of narrative’s “figural” relationship to the biblical narrative of Christ’s life and resurrection, and Northrop Frye’s identification of the Bible as a

7

tradition and historical legacy of Christianity, have attributed cultural relevance, and

even soteriological purpose, to narrative itself.8

The relationship between form and transcendence is not only complex,

however, but adumbrates the paradox inherent to the Incarnation – the immanent and

imminent manifestation of that which literally transcends space and time. As such, the

intended object of formal representation necessarily exceeds representational

practices; for that which transcends the phenomenal world naturally transcends man’s

means of figuring the world in language, sound, or image. The transcendent thereby

constitutes an “aporia,” an irresolvable dilemma or contradiction – it is beyond names,

yet named, by necessity of human cognition, and social institutions.9 This essential

paradox – the naming of the unnamable transcendent – is recurrent in Christian

scriptural and patristic texts, including the Pauline epistles and teachings and the Book

of Revelation, and the later writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, such as On the Divine

Names and Mystical Theology.10 Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologiæ, even

“mythological framework” for Western literature. See Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984): 11-76, and Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans Willard R. Trask (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) and The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982). I return to Auerbach’s concept of “figuration” in chapter 2, in my analysis of Leskov. 8 As Michael Edwards, following Auerbach, remarks, the correspondence between narration (as a temporal, diachronic art) and the teleological progression of Christian history assigns transcendental significance to narrative as such, enabling literary characters, and their respective fictional worlds, to “inhabit the glory of form.” See Edwards, “Story: Towards a Christian Theory of Narrative,” in Images of Belief in Literature, ed. David Jasper (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 179-90; 182. 9 Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 2. 10 The relevant New Testament texts, with corresponding page numbers in the Oxford NIV Scofield Study Bible, are Acts 17:22-32 (1156-57), the First Epistle to Timothy (1259-63), and Revelation 19:12 (1334). There was initially believed to be a historical connection between Paul and Pseudo-Dionysius, as the latter’s conversion was allegedly prompted by Paul’s sermon on Mars’ Hill (the Areopagus) in the above-cited passage from the Acts of the Apostles – hence his initial name, Dionysius the

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concedes this conundrum, advancing a theory of analogy in response to this apparent

paradox.11 Aquinas’ methodology limits mimetic approaches to the transcendent to

semiotic figuration, thereby proscribing its direct representation. His theory, in

essence, constitutes the basis of Christian praxis, considering the typically analogical

nature of liturgical traditions.12

If Christianity, irrespective of denomination, is a religion of “revealed truth,”

its actual forms of revelation, situated chronologically between the Incarnation and

Second Coming, are consistently problematized by theories of representation, and

attendant notions of verisimilitude and mimesis. In some cases, such limited potential Areopagite. It is now believed that the author in question was in fact an anonymous Christian Neo-Platonist writing in the late fifth or early sixth century, resulting in his designation as Pseudo-Dionysius. 11 The corresponding section heading in the Summa, appropriately, asserts: “We can talk about God but not define him” (§13: 1-12). See Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, Ed. Timothy McDermott (Allen, TX: Christian Classics, 1991), 30-35. 12 The Roman Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist, with its basis in the doctrine of transubstantiation, is a singular exception, insofar as it presupposes the actual presence of the divine, i.e. the transmutation of representational figure (bread) to manifest essence (Christ’s body). Naturally, the sensible form of the Eucharist remains figural, with any claims to an essential transformation predicated, again, upon institutional authority. By comparison, in Protestant denominations the Eucharist remains a symbolic, non-essentialist practice. While Eastern Orthodox Churches do maintain the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, they typically refrain from dogmatic statements on the subject, as put forward in the Roman Catholic theology of transubstantiation. As John Meyendorff points out, the Orthodox theology of the Eucharist in some ways falls between these opposing traditions of Catholic essentialism and Protestant symbolism, by emphasizing the presence of Christ’s incarnate, human form in the sacrament, as opposed to his divine essence. As such, Orthodox theology favors terms such as “trans-elementation” and “re-ordination” over the more contentious transubstantiation. See Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (New York: Fordham University Press, 1979), 202-04. For extended discussion, pertaining to the historical development of Orthodox theology, see also Jaroslav Pelikan, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600-1700), Vol. 2 in his five-volume The Christian Tradition: A History in the Development of Doctrine (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977). Orthodox Churches, including the Russian Orthodox Church, advance various theological arguments for the presence of the divine in human reality, to which I return in the discussion below. In his related discussion of the “disembodying” effects of hermeneutics and metaphysics over the course of Western modernity, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht discusses how the medieval (Catholic) Eucharist predates this transition to symbolic representation, as manifest in early modern (Protestant) theological perspectives on the sacrament. As Gumbrecht remarks, the Catholic Eucharist is actually based on the Aristotelian concept of the sign, which “brings together a substance (i.e., that which is present because it demands a space) and a form (i.e., that through which a substance becomes perceptible), aspects that include a conception of ‘meaning’ unfamiliar to us.” See Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 29. Gumbrecht’s insights, gleaned from his scholarship and consultations, have shaped and informed many aspects of this dissertation.

9

for religious representation even dictates religious practice, as evident in mystical

approaches to the ineffable. For example, monastic practices of quietism concede, in

the renunciation of language, its referential limitations. Apophatic theology,

meanwhile, extends this conceit, in maintaining the absolute incommensurability of

linguistic sign and transcendent signified: rather than ascribing characteristics to the

divine referent, apophasis (literally, a “saying away” or “unsaying”) approaches the

transcendent via gestures of negation (the assertion of that which the divine is not), in

an effort to suspend semiotic predication.13

Interestingly, similar concerns inform the “linguistic turn” of modern critical

theory and philosophy, as evident in Deconstruction, which carries such operations of

negation to a logical, “deconstructive” extreme. If apophasis concedes the inability of

language to perfectly signify the transcendent, Deconstruction, in essence, identifies

the inability of language to properly signify anything. As Jacques Derrida points out,

the manifest absence of a transcendental signified, in a world bereft of divine

presence, leads to an infinity of substitutions, a literal “play” of signification that can

never, by definition, constitute the absent referent.14 The resulting “thematic of broken

immediacy” denotes the absence of a true center or ground for any act of signification,

insofar as the relationship between sign and signified is not essential or inherent, but

assigned, contingent, and ultimately arbitrary.

13 Apophatic approaches to language span various religious and philosophical traditions, including Eastern Orthodoxy. I resume discussion of apophasis, as well as the Orthodox quietist tradition of Hesychasm, in chapter 2. 14 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278-93; 280.

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Representing Transcendence: From Language to Literature

If language is incapable of conveying the nature of transcendence, it

necessarily follows that literature, as a linguistic construct, will inevitably fall short of

the same goal. The expressive inadequacy of literature, arguably, is all the more

evident in the case of prose fiction, historically conceived of as a “low” (prosaic)

literary genre. While the reevaluated status of prose itself would benefit from modern

literary aesthetics, culminating in the nineteenth-century European novel, the medium

remains grounded, in principle, in immanent human life. As Ian Watt has

demonstrated, the “rise of the novel” was itself an outgrowth of empirical tendencies

basic to the European Enlightenment: in theory, the genre aspired to a similarly

empirical documentation of physical and social existence, as most literally embodied

later in French Naturalism.15 More broadly, the post-Romantic novel would typically

align itself with realist claims to representational verisimilitude, a tendency

exemplified (though also, notably, interrogated) during the aesthetic ascendance of

Russian Realism in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

The mimetic authenticity of the “realist” novel has long been beleaguered:

grounded in verisimilar technique, the genre of course offers the impression or illusion

of the real, as opposed a document of reality itself.16 Compounding this problem, of

course, is the difficulty, and even impossibility, of elaborating a universal definition of

15 Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957). Naturally, there are as many exceptions to the empirical scope of the novel as there are examples. Still, Watt’s analysis not only identifies an important philosophical basis of the genre, but likewise denotes the popular conception of the novel, and thus generic expectations, among writers and readers alike. 16 Lilian R. Furst, All is True: The Strategies and Claims of Realist Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 2, 6.

11

reality, as such: As Alain Robbe-Grillet would later suggest, “all writers believe they

are realists,” though “each one has different ideas about reality.”17 If the novel,

meanwhile, fails to capture the immanent, what claims can it make to representing the

transcendent? As Georg Lukács contends in his celebrated Theory of the Novel, the

genre itself, in embodying temporality, exemplifies the contingent, arbitrary nature of

modern existence. For Lukács, the novel is the formal expression of man's

“transcendental homelessness,” positing a generic opposition to the “transcendental

topography” intrinsic to the epic, of meaning and divine presence assumed in the

human world, a worldview embodied in epic form. The novel, Lukács argues, like

modern, secular life, is bereft of the presence of the transcendent.18

Jay Clayton has characterized the novel in similar terms, as a literary genre

particularly ill-suited to moments of transcendence:

More than any other form, the classical novel has recounted the adventures of recognizable men and women in society. Hence the disruptiveness of transcendence is especially visible in this genre. It stands out in relief, as it were, against the prevailing social fabric. More important, it tends to conflict with those aspects of the work that create the illusion of a coherent fictional world. To represent a visionary experience, some element in the novel must transgress the very limits of the world that the rest of the novel has established.19

In staging the extraordinary amidst the ordinary, and the visionary amidst the typically

social, the transcendent violates novelistic conventions. But it is precisely this

violation that bears the trace of the transcendent itself. Scenes of transcendence,

insofar as they defy representation, necessitate a normative background of setting, 17 Robbe-Grillet, “From Realism to Reality,” in For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 157-168; 157-8. 18 Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978). See especially chapter 3, “The Epic and the Novel,” 56-70. 19 Clayton, Romantic Vision and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1-2.

12

action, and narration, simply to bear their elusive mark, in “breaking the frame” of

novelistic reality. In Yuri Lotman’s terminology, such moments unite the

mythological and plot-based, diachronic typologies of narrative texts, engendering the

hybrid form of modern narrative.20 Prose fiction, meanwhile, provides an ironically

appropriate context for scenes of transcendence, precisely because of its “prosaic”

features: it offers a mundane background, against which the extraordinary event of

transcendence proves all the more palpable, and even visceral.

Because the transcendent exceeds narrative description, it must be positioned,

Clayton argues, in a narrative “gap” or “lacuna,” conspicuous in its representational

absence, in its inscription, so to speak, of an “articulate” negativity in the text.21 As

Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser suggest, “negativity can only be described in terms

of its operations, and not by any means in terms of a graspable entity.”22 Ironically, it

is precisely such “disruptions” and “transgressions,” as operations, which suggest a

potential strategy for approaching this basic paradox of the represented transcendent:

namely, if normative conventions are intended to correspond to reality as such, the

violation of established form approximates the ontological rupture of the transcendent

in immanent reality. This proposed model of aesthetic rupture broadly corresponds to

Viktor Shklovsky’s category of ostranenie, or “estrangement,” as a descriptive

strategy rendering textual objects palpable to the reader. In instances of literary

20 “The translation of a mythological text into linear narrative raised the possibility of the reciprocal influence of two diametrically opposed types of text – the one describing the regular course of events, and the other, chance deviations from that course. This interaction determined in large measure the later fates of the narrative genre.” See Lotman, “The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology,” trans. Julian Graffy, in Poetics Today, Vol. 1, No. 1/2 (Autumn 1979): 161-184; 170. 21 Clayton, Romantic Vision and the Novel, 9. 22 Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, “The Critical Turn: Toward ‘Negativity’ and the ‘Unsayable,’” in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, xii-xiii.

13

epiphany, such “defamiliarizing” strategies may range from grammatical and lexical

aspects of the text, to the very genre of a given work.23 The immanent eruption of

transcendence, in other words, by definition unconventional, demands appropriately

unconventional forms of figuration.

A Theoretical Model of the Literary Epiphany The analysis of such forms, evident in a variety of literary devices, and their

relationship to thematic issues, constitutes the investigatory scope of this dissertation,

probing those “forms of transcendence” elaborated by several writers, classed broadly

in the Russian Realist literary tradition. Following Mikhail Bakhtin’s suggestion of the

novel as an evolving, and thus experimental genre, one lacking a fixed form, the novel

will here be approached as field of formal experimentation, in this case compelled by

the paradox of literary transcendence.24 However, despite the formal hegemony of the

novel in this period, the late nineteenth century, the ensuing analysis is by no means

limited to the novel itself: while Tolstoy and Dostoevsky favored the genre (and

contributed significantly to its formal development), Leskov and Chekhov clearly

excelled in shorter narrative forms. Still, I contend that difficulties inherent to

representing the transcendent in the novel likewise apply to other prose genres, such as

the story or novella. Just as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky will be seen to employ formal

innovation within the novel, Leskov and Chekhov both wield the formal particularities

23 Shklovsky, “Iskusstvo kak priem,” in O teorii prozy (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929), 7-23; 14-17. Shklovsky, of course, famously cites Tolstoy as exemplary of literary ostranenie. 24 Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 3-40.

14

of their chosen genres (the novella and story, respectively), to better accommodate the

representation of transcendence.

A primary heuristic tool in my project, as indicated above, will be the analysis

of scenes of epiphany, which typically serve to focalize the object of investigation,

constituting a confluence of theme and formal innovation. Returning to my opening

discussion of Tolstoy, I define Andrei Bolkonsky's experience as a moment of

epiphany, both because it discloses to him a particular content, as a sudden realization;

and because the scene incorporates numerous formal devices, for the purposes of

representing this experience to the reader. In this respect, the literary epiphany is both

a narrative event (Andrei's visionary experience), and a representational strategy, a

“coping mechanism” developed by Tolstoy for the task of rendering the charismatic

and ineffable in narrative.25 Tolstoy does employ discursive language to present

Andrei’s experience; yet he also, acknowledging the limitations of conventional

description, attempts to “perform” this experience in a manner that exceeds the

semantic and ideational parameters of the novel – approximating the rhythm of the

waves, and the sensation of physical presence engendered by acoustical devices.

Tolstoy achieves an effect that is analogous, though not equivalent, to the transcendent

content of Andrei’s moment of epiphany.

If the transcendent fosters a representational problem, the epiphany poses a

literary solution to this conundrum. One would be mistaken, however, to define this

response as a purely defensive gesture, as implied by the phrase “coping mechanism”

– the literary epiphany, that is, as a mere retreat, a form of aesthetic circumvention. 25 On the epiphany as literary “coping mechanism,” see Marina Ludwigs, Epiphanies in Literature and Narrative Meaning (PhD Diss., University of California, Irvine, 2007).

15

Projecting Derrida’s linguistic category of the “play of signification” into the realm of

literature suggests the revelatory, even joyful dimension of the endeavor.26 In fact, the

epiphany could be said to recuperate an aesthetic dimension to prose language,

exceeding its semantic foundation, and mimetic function, in linguistic semiosis,

gesturing toward a more autonomous or “pure” form of language per se. In other

words, if language typically refers to the world, in signification (“naming,” in the most

literal sense), it likewise serves to constitute a world (which again, as Derrida points

out, is only arbitrarily related to the one we inhabit). In this respect, language as an

aesthetic (as opposed to purely semantic) construct claims an authority derived,

perhaps ironically, from religious theories of language, epitomized in the Johannine

formulation of a transcendent, a priori “Word.” As an original or transcendental

signifier, such a “Word” would, in essence, stand alone, as if speaking itself, insofar as

it would rely on none of the contingent features (context, function, audience, etc.)

common to signification.

To clarify this proposal, and its relationship to the literary epiphany, I refer to

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s related discussions of religious art and language. As he

26 Derrida writes:

Turned towards the lost or impossible presence of the absent origin, this stucturalist thematic of broken immediacy is therefore the saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play whose other side would be the Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. This affirmation then determines the noncenter otherwise than as loss of the center. And it plays without security. For there is a sure play: that which is limited to the substitution of given and existing, present, pieces. In absolute chance, affirmation also surrenders itself to genetic indetermination, to the seminal adventure of the trace.

See “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” 292. Italics in original, boldface added for emphasis.

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suggests in his essay “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” “the ontological function of

the beautiful is to bridge the chasm between the ideal and the real,” a formulation that

not only confirms the religious function of art, but denotes an essential feature of all

artistic practice.27 Elsewhere, in “Aesthetic and Religious Experience,” Gadamer

grounds this common characteristic in the original, autonomous nature of any true

“text,” which performs itself, rather than referring back to some primary (i.e.

transcendent) statement or speaker; not merely mimetic or referential, the “text,”

whether religious or secular, is purely constitutive.28 In other words, the “text” does

not simply signify, gesturing elsewhere, but is, ontologically existent in its own right.

Similarly, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests, it is the function of art to capture “the

world’s instant,” to express the process of perception and appearance itself, as

opposed to a mere posterior recapitulation.29

These phenomenological concepts relate to basic issues in literary aesthetics,

and particularly theories of realism. In her study of realist truth claims, Lilian Furst

distinguishes between “referentiality” and “textuality”: between the text as a

secondary, contingent entity, referencing the “matter” of the world beyond it, and the

text as an actual embodiment of the world as verbal product, derived from the

27 Gadamer, “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3-53; 15. 28 “A genuine text…is exactly what the word literally says: a woven texture that holds together. Such language, if it really is a proper text, holds together in such a way that it ‘stands’ in its own right and no longer refers back to an original, more authentic saying, nor points beyond itself to a more authentic experience of reality.” See Gadamer, “Aesthetic and Religious Experience,” in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, 142. 29 See Merleau-Ponty’s essays “Cézanne’s Doubt” and “Eye and Mind,” included in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson, trans. Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 59-75; 121-49. The two passages referenced above appear on pages 130, and 65-66, respectively.

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“manner” of technique.30 The effect of prose fiction is predicated on the tension

derived from these two competing functions. Narrative, meanwhile, constitutes an

important component of textuality, as the aesthetic imposition of form and meaning

upon the “stuff” of the referenced world. In fact, as Roland Barthes suggests, narrative

itself is fundamentally opposed to mimesis: if representation denotes repetition (as

indicated by the prefix each term shares), narrative embodies a moment of

“becoming,” constitutive, at the level of reception, of an aesthetic event.31 Similarly,

as Robbe-Grillet asserts, describing his practice of “immediate” (as opposed to

“referential”) signification: “I do not transcribe, I construct.”32

Such modern critical approaches to language propose its liberation from mere

referential service, or, as Michel Foucault suggests “the return of language” to a more

essential or autonomous form. Foucault, in fact, even dates this development to the

early nineteenth-century, denoting a historical shift prescient to the scope of my

analysis:

The threshold between Classicism and modernity (though the terms themselves have no importance – let us say between our prehistory and what is still contemporary) had been definitively crossed when words ceased to intersect with representations and to provide a spontaneous grid for the knowledge of things. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, they rediscovered their ancient, enigmatic density: though not in order to restore the curve of the world which had harboured them during the Renaissance, nor in order to mingle with things in a circular system of signs. Once detached from representation, language has existed, right up to our own day, only in a dispersed way: for philologists, words are like so many objects formed and deposited by history; for those who wish to achieve a formalization, language must strip itself of its concrete content and leave nothing visible but those forms of discourse that are universally valid; if one’s intent is to interpret, then words become a text to be

30 Furst, All is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction, x, 2. 31 Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in Image – Music – Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 79-124; 124. 32 Robbe-Grillet, “From Realism to Reality,” 162.

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broken down, so as to allow that other meaning hidden in them to emerge and become clearly visible; lastly, language may sometimes arise for its own sake in an act of writing that designates nothing other than itself. This dispersion imposes upon language, if not a privileged position, at least a destiny that seems singular when compared with that of labour or of life.33

Significantly, Foucault traces this final instantiation of language to written forms,

thereby extending the “creative” capacity typically ascribed to literature beyond mere

representation: literary language thus achieves a constructive, literally “poetic”

function, as opposed to a merely mimetic one. This conception of language is basic to

modern critical approaches to poetry, as evident in Roman Jakobson’s conception of

the shift, in poetic language, from the referential function of language to the poetic

utterance itself.34 However, as the initial example from Tolstoy should illustrate, this

“poetic” capacity is by no means limited to poetry itself, a compartmentalization of

literary genre that would assign prose to the category of “ordinary language.”35

Relating Foucault’s insight, meanwhile, to the above discussion of Christian

aesthetics, literary language may be seen to reenact, as the local, phenomenal level, the

mythic events of creation and incarnation, as an instance of becoming. While

ideational world creation is basic to fictional representation, the literary epiphany

activates, as it were, an additional dimension of this imagined world, in aesthetic,

sensorial immediacy. To refer, again, to the Bogucharovo scene in War and Peace, 33 Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), 304. Italics added. 34 Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 62-94. 35 As Mary Louise Pratt demonstrates, it is difficult to maintain, in light of modern socio-linguistics, distinctions between “ordinary” and “literary” variants of language. For Pratt’s critique of the ‘Formalist “‘poetic language’ fallacy,” see Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977), 3-37. In the spirit of Pratt’s proposal that language be characterized on the basis of function and context, I would emphasize both the significance of literary devices (poetic, narrational, etc.) in establishing linguistic function, as well as the non-exclusive nature of such devices within a given literary genre.

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Tolstoy’s poetic prose engenders the effect of Andrei’s physical environment by

approximating those sounds and rhythms that he himself feels. The device fosters a

spatial dynamic, intended to displace the reader into an aesthetic model of Andrei’s

world, as opposed to merely approaching it from the detached perspective.36 For

heuristic purposes, we may oppose Tolstoy’s aural devices to the visual paradigm that

is both a model of Western epistemology, and a metaphor for the distance (between

subject and object, “viewer” and “viewed”) in the representational project.37 Similarly,

Martin Heidegger contends that “the fundamental event of the modern age,”

delineating it from previous epochs of human history, “is the conquest of the world as

picture,” a conquest according the human subject a detached, objectifying perspective

on the world, and thereby enabling the very phenomenon of a “worldview.”38 This

process, which begins with Descartes’ metaphysical grounding of man as subject (and

continues, Heidegger suggests, throughout modern Western philosophy, through

Nietzsche), establishes the human subject as the relational center of the lived world,

engendering, ironically, the subject’s experience of a “detached I-ness” in relation to

its surroundings. The subject, meanwhile, proceeds to objectify and structure the

world in the form of the “world picture,” a process of “representation” (literally, in

36 My reading of this aspect of Tolstoy is informed by Gustafson’s discussion of the novel’s engendering of the “effect of presence,” which itself follows Pavel Gromov’s identification of the effekt prisutstviia, and the incorporation of poetic devices, in Tolstoy’s fiction. See Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger, 375-391; and Gromov, O stile L’va Tolstogo: Stanovlenie “dialektiki dushi”, 130ff. 37 For discussion of visual hegemony and “ocularcentrism” in Western culture, and its critique in twentieth-century theory and philosophy, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 38 Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York and London: Garland, 1977), 116-154; 134.

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this instance, re-presentation), which sets objects “over and against” the Cartesian

subject:

When, accordingly, the picture character of the world is made clear as the representedness of that which is, then in order fully to grasp the modern essence of representedness we must track out and expose the original naming power of the worn-out word and concept ‘to represent’ [vorstellen]: to set out before oneself and to set forth in relation to oneself. Through this, whatever is comes to a stand as object and in that way alone receives the seal of Being. That the world becomes picture is one and the same event with the event of man’s becoming subiectum [subject] in the midst of that which is.39 This modern perspective on the world as “picture,” structured and “arrested”

by the human subject, Heidegger observes, originates in man’s “emancipation” from

the Christian doctrine of revelation.40 Truth, in this new configuration, is not revealed

to, but, rather, structured by the human subject, heralding the transition from medieval

to modern epochs of Western history, and the coordinate philosophical ascendancy of

human subjectivity. Such subjectivity, however, ultimately fosters a disembodied,

non-participatory subject. The literary epiphany, I will argue, seeks to reinsert this

subject into the literary “world picture,” through the process of aesthetic experience.

Epiphanic Precedent: Augustine and Rousseau

If Andrei's experience at Bogucharovo (like Heidegger's philosophical

metaphor) articulates the spatial aspects of the literary epiphany, other precedents,

outlined below, reveal a comparably important temporal dimension. In his classic

study of Romanticism, the literary movement directly preceding and impacting

39 Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 132. 40 Ibid., 148.

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Realism, M. H. Abrams defines a heightened experience of the “moment,” essential to

Romantic art and theory:

Many Romantic writers testified to a deeply significant experience in which an instant of consciousness, or else an ordinary object or event, blazes into revelation; the unsustainable moment seems to arrest what is passing, and is often described as an intersection of eternity with time.41

In the late nineteenth century, this emphasis on the singular, efficacious moment

would be theorized by the English writer Walter Horatio Pater (a contemporary,

incidentally, of the Russian authors discussed in this dissertation). Pater treats the

distilled moment, suffused with impressions, as the basis of an aesthetic philosophy,

most famously articulated in the conclusion to his collection of essays The

Renaissance (1873), and likewise explored in his novel Marius the Epicurean

(1885).42

Abrams identifies a venerable prototype for the phenomenon in Augustine's

Confessions, which imbues a distinctly theological, revelatory dimension to the

event.43 In Book X, as Augustine and his mother Monica converse at Ostia on the

Tiber, they experience a moment of transcendence, a foretaste of the eternal:

And still we went upward, meditating and speaking and looking with wonder at your works, and we came to our own souls, and we went beyond our souls to reach that region of never-failing plenty where Thou feedest Israel forever with

41 Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1973), 385. Abrams’ discussion of the “moment” corresponds to Frye’s definition of epiphany as “the symbolic presentation of the point at which the undisplaced apocalyptic world and the cyclical world of nature come into alignment.” See Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, 203. Such alignment, of time and eternity, will be central to my analysis of The Idiot in chapter 1. 42 See Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 186-190, and especially 188; and Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas (New York: A. L. Burt, 1902), 130-42. 43 The Confessions is considered a hallmark of the literary epiphany, though commentary typically focuses on Augustine’s experience in the garden, prompting his conversion. On this, see Ashton Nichols, The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Modern Literary Moment (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1987), 14-16.

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food of truth and where life is that Wisdom by whom all these things are made, both what is past and what is to come; but Wisdom herself is not made; she is as she has been and will be forever; or rather, there is no place in her for 'to have been' or 'to be going to be'; one can only say 'to be,' since she is eternal and 'have been' and 'going to be' are not eternal. And as we talked, yearning toward this Wisdom, we did, with the whole strength of our hearts' impulse, just lightly come into touch with her, and we sighed and we left bound there the first fruits of the Spirit, and we returned to the sounds made by our mouths, where a word has a beginning and an ending. And how unlike is this to your Word, our Lord, you who abide in yourself forever, without becoming old, making all things new!44

Augustine proceeds to postulate that the transcendence of self, and thus bodily,

physical reality, enables man to ascend to the presence of divine wisdom, to hear “His

word,” an ultimate reality made tenable, it is assumed, only at death, or in the

Apocalypse.45

An additional precedent for the literary epiphany, devised under rather

different conditions, can be traced to another great Western author of confessions,

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1776-78). In his “Fifth

Walk,” describing his brief sojourn on St. Peter’s Island in Switzerland in 1765,

Rousseau elaborates his experience of a state of “reverie,” amidst contemplative

moments on a lakeshore, integral to achieving the illusive “sentiment of existence.”46

As the term “reverie” would suggest, Rousseau describes a type of meditative state or

trance, whereby the self achieves equilibrium with its surroundings, and thereby frees

itself from the emotional or cognitive preoccupations typical of human

44 Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin, 1963), 201. Italics in original. 45 Ibid., 201-2. Augustine’s speculation also foreshadows his mother’s imminent death, and thus, presumably, her final passing into the realm described. 46 Rousseau also discusses the “sentiment of existence” in Émile (1762).

23

consciousness.47 And while the experience is not a momentary one (on the contrary, it

is potentially open-ended), it allows for a dilation of the present moment, enabling an

awareness of existence itself. Rousseau writes:

But if there is a state in which the soul finds a solid enough base to rest itself on entirely and to gather its whole being into, without needing to recall the past or encroach upon the future; in which time is nothing for it; in which the present lasts forever without, however, making its duration noticed and without any trace of time’s passage; without any other sentiment of deprivation or of enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear, except that of our existence, and having this sentiment alone fill it completely; as long as this state lasts, he who finds himself in it can call himself happy, not with an imperfect, poor, and relative happiness such as one finds in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, perfect, and full happiness which leaves the soul no emptiness it might feel a need to fill.48

By contrast with the experience of Augustine, Rousseau’s lacks any transcendental

correlate (i.e. any reference to another, higher reality, realm). As Abrams describes,

“Rousseau…naturalized these traditional apices of experience by describing them not

as the breakthrough to an eternity that exists otherwhere and afterward, but in purely

empirical terms.”49 In this respect, he offers an epiphanic model in counterpoint to

Augustine, yet still concerned with the experience of the eternal in the human moment.

Moreover, there is a distinctly aesthetic dimension to the category of experience

elaborated by Rousseau: not only is reverie aesthetically-induced (in the deliberate

coordination of self with environment), but the unique distension of the present

moment allows for a heightened concentration on external objects of experience.

47 Richard Velkley describes this cessation of thought and emotion as a “prediscursive sentiment,” which displaces intellectual apprehension in the moment of reverie. See Velkley, Being after Rousseau (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5. 48 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 68-9. Italics added. 49 Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 386.

24

While Augustine and Rousseau offer varying, even antithetical models of

epiphany, they provide two potential poles, and thus an interpretive axis, for the

literary epiphany, ranging from the traditionally revelatory, “theophanic” experience

of Augustine at Ostia; to the secular, subjective experience of Rousseau on St. Peter’s

Island. Similarly, the literary epiphany unites a range of spatial and temporal effects,

consistent with its goal of approximating the fictional world of literary characters in

the spatio-temporal reality of the reader.

Russian Cultural Background and Context As the examples of Augustine and Rousseau demonstrate, instances of

epiphany range from the traditionally religious, to more secular forms of interior

experience. Still, as demonstrated above, aspects of Christian theology inform, and

even enable such instances of literary transcendence in Western culture. As such,

broadly Christian themes, motifs, and settings provide the context and background of

the ensuing discussion. Naturally, aspects of Russian Orthodoxy will prove most

prevalent within the Christian denominational spectrum, though the relationship of

each of the authors discussed to the official church varies significantly. Tolstoy,

initially ambivalent in his affiliation, would undergo excommunication from the

Russian Orthodox Church in 1901, amidst his evolution toward an austere, even

primitive variant of Protestantism. Leskov, similarly, would forsake Orthodoxy in

pursuit of his own growing interest in Protestant thought, and eventually embrace

Tolstoyanism. Dostoevsky, the former radical, would prove a conservative supporter

of Orthodoxy (and the most ostensibly “Orthodox” of the authors here discussed).

25

Chekhov, steeped in the liturgical practices of his religious upbringing, would bluntly

state his lack of religious faith, though frequently resorting to Orthodox themes and

settings in his writings.

The nature, however, of each writer’s personal religiosity, Orthodox or

otherwise, and even those religious ideas manifest in their writings, will be limited in

the subsequent analysis. Given the critical statue of the writers discussed, there exists

ample scholarship along such biographical and thematic lines, enumerating religious

and philosophical influences and motifs.50 These ideas, and their relevant critical

50 Many of these studies are cited in the ensuing analysis, and are here mentioned to provide a broad scope of the existing critical field. Studies of religious topics in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are predictably numerous, so I have limited my purview to the most relevant and useful. Gustafson’s Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger remains the most valuable study of the influence of Russian Orthodoxy on Tolstoy’s art and thought, while Inessa Medzhibovskaya’s Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time: A Biography of a Long Conversion, 1845-1887 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008) traces the development of Tolstoy’s religious ideas more broadly and diachronically. The classic volume O religii L’va Tolstogo (Moscow: Put’, 1912; reprinted in Paris: YMCA Press, 1978) collects essays on Tolstoy by Russian religious philosophers and Symbolists, while the recent Khristianskaia etika L. N. Tolstogo (Moscow: Nauka, 2006) adopts a syncretic approach to Tolstoy’s Christian philosophy. Alternatively, Donna Tussing Orwin’s Tolstoy’s Art and Thought: 1847-1880 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) explores the influence of Western secular philosophy on Tolstoy’s thought. In the field of Dostoevsky studies, Joseph Frank’s five-volume critical biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976-2002) remains an indispensable reference work. Malcolm Jones’ Dostoevsky and the Dynamics of Religious Experience (London: Anthem Press, 1905) collects numerous insightful essays on the topic, as does the volume Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition, ed. George Pattison and Diane Oenning Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). In Dostoevsky’s Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), Steven Cassedy demonstrates the heterogeneity of Dostoevsky’s religious purview. A recent issue of Dostoevsky Studies (13, ed. Susan McReynolds) explores the topic “Dostoevsky and Christianity” in articles by Cassedy, McReynolds, Nariman Skakov and others. Several studies of Dostoevsky in relation to religious, and specifically biblical themes, can be found in Evangel’skii tekst v russkoi literature XVIII-XX vekov, 3 Vol., ed. V. N. Zakharov (Petrazavodsk: Izdatel’stvo Petrozavodskogo universiteta, 1994-2001). Also exemplary among recent Russian criticism are several studies of religious and philosophical issues in Dostoevsky by Tat’iana Kasatkina, including ““Kristos vne istiny” v tvorchestve Dostoevskogo,” in Dostoevskii i mirovaia kul’tura 11 (1998): 113-20; and O tvoriashchei prirode slova: Ontologichnost’ slova v tvorchestve F. M. Dostoevskogo kak osnova “realisma v vysshem smysle” (Moscow: UMLI RAN, 2004). The Kasatkina-edited volume Roman F. M. Dostoevskogo “Idiot”: Sovremennoe sostoianie izucheniia (Moscow: Nasledie, 2001) probes a variety of Christian and biblical themes in The Idiot, specifically. Though Leskov, by comparison, receives less critical attention, the prevalence of religious themes and motifs in his writings has elicited topical scholarship. Knut Andreas Grimstad’s Styling Russia: Multiculture in the Prose of Nikolai Leskov, Slavica Bergensia 7 (Bergen, Norway: University of Bergen, 2007) approaches religious themes in both the multicultural dimension of Leskov’s fiction,

26

investigations, will figure here as they relate to the intersection of aesthetic practice

and metaphysical program; similarly, my own analysis will only pertain to a given

author’s religious or philosophical beliefs insofar as they impact his literary project.

Rather, I emphasize how transcendental issues – frequently, but not necessarily

religious in nature – are approached, navigated, and even reconciled through aesthetic

form in the literary text. Russian Orthodox theology and practice remains a necessary

background and cultural context to my analysis; its manifest influence, meanwhile,

will range from the literal (Leskov, Chekhov), to the general or atmospheric

(Dostoevsky, Tolstoy). whereas Irmhild Christina Sperrle’s expansive The Organic Worldview of Nikolai Leskov (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002) employs a unified approach to Leskov’s philosophical worldview. A similarly broad study of mythopoetic elements in Leskov’s fiction can be found in G. A. Shkuta, Mifopoeticheskie siuzhety i motivy v tvorchestve N. S. Leskova (Rubtsovsk: Universitet Rossiiskoi akademii obrazovaniia, Rubtsovskii filial, 2005). James Y. Muckle’s Nikolai Leskov and the “Spirit of Protestantism”, Birmingham Slavonic Monographs, No. 4 (Birmingham, U.K.: University of Birmingham, 1978) is a focused study of Leskov’s later interest in Protestant theology, which Sperrle also addresses, particularly in relation to the writer’s attraction to Tolstoyan thought. Russian scholarship on Leskov and religion typically highlights either Leskov’s personal religiosity and its evolution, or his broad, ethnographic interest in religious cultures, manifest in his fiction. Recent, focused studies include Agnes Dukkon, “Uskusstvo i religiia v povesti Zapechatlennyi angel N. S. Leskova,” Studia Slavica Hung. Vol. 48, No. 1-3 (2003): 33-40, which explores Leskov’s position on the Old Believers and their conversion in the text; and B. Troianovska, “Nikolai Leskov i narodnoe pravoslavie,” in Leskovskii sbornik, 2007: Materiali mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii, ed. M. V. Antonova (Orel: Izdatel’stvo Orlovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2006), 36-41,which traces how elements of Leskov’s fiction relate to Russian folk Christianity. Finally, while much Chekhov criticism overlooks the religious dimensions of his work, numerous studies by Robert Louis Jackson, cited below, have helped to initiate this area of investigation. In Chekhov – s glazu na glaz: Istoriia odnoi oderzhimosti A. P. Chekhova (Opyt fenomenologii tvorchestva) (St. Petersburg: Dmitri Bulanin, 1994), Savely Senderovich explores the theme of St. George in Chekhov’s fiction. A. S. Sobennikov’s “Bibleiskii obraz v proze A. P. Chekhova (aksiologiia i poetika),” in O poetike A. P. Chekhova: Sbornik nauchnik trudov (Irkutsk: Izdatel’stvo Irkutskogo universiteta, 1993), 23-38, explores the prevalence of biblical imagery in Chekhov, while the same author’s Mezhdu “est’ Bog” i “net Boga” (o religiozna-filosofskikh traditsiiakh v tvorchestve A. P. Chekhova) (Irkutsk: Izdatel’stvo Irkutskogo universiteta, 1997) explores Chekhov’s relationship to religion more broadly. Mark Stanley Swift’s Biblical Subtexts in Works of Anton Chekhov (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), like Sobennikov’s article, explores Biblical elements of Chekhov’s fiction, while Willa Chamberlain Axelrod’s Russian Orthodoxy in the Life and Fiction of A. P. Chekhov (PhD Diss., Yale University, 1991) reveals Chekhov’s considerable knowledge of Orthodoxy, and its influence on his fiction. In a similar, though more focused manner, Julie W. de Sherbinin’s Chekhov and Russian Religious Culture: The Poetics of the Marian Paradigm (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997) explores how Chekhov reconfigures elements of the Russian religious tradition in his elaboration of the “Marian paradigm” in his fiction.

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In situating these authors in their historical context, it is likewise crucial to

acknowledge their relationship to contemporaneous aesthetic polemics. Among other

things, these texts share a fraught relationship with the predominantly liberal critical

establishment of the period, which favored tendency and didacticism over

metaphysics, advancing mimesis as a means of social exposé and critique. Initiated by

Visarion Belinsky in the 1840s, this critical strain would reach its apogee with the

“civic critics” of the 1860s, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Dmitri Pisarev, and Nikolai

Dobroliubov, all broadly ideological opponents of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Leskov;

and the subsequent “populist” criticism of Nikolai Mikhailovsky, who consistently

derided Chekhov throughout his career. In his programmatic Esteticheskie otnosheniia

iskusstva k deistvitel’nosti (“The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality,” 1855),

Chernyshevsky proposes that nature exceeds art in beauty, and the latter can only, at

best, hope to approximate the value of reality in its faithful reproduction. This critical

ideology naturally held little sympathy for more stylized or abstract texts, such as

those concerned with literary transcendence. As Simon Karlinsky argues, assessing

this critical tradition:

Because a soberly realistic depiction of Russian life had been assumed since the days of Belinsky to be the most effective way of exposing social shortcomings, the critics of the 1860s, ‘70s and ‘80s fought an unending battle against fantasy, imagination, poetry, mysticism, against excessive depth in psychological perception, against all joy and humor that was not topical or satirical, and above all against any formal or stylistic innovations in literature and literary craftsmanship in general. Their rationale was that all these things could detract from the ideological message that was the sole aim of literature.51

51 Karlinsky, “The Gentle Subversive,” introduction to Chekhov, Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary, ed. Simon Karlinsky, trans. Michael Henry Heim (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 1-32; 7.

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Karlinsky characterizes these liberal critics as a secondary form of censorship, in

addition to those maintained by the tsarist autocracy. This ironic outcome, of

ostensibly liberal critics limiting the scope of acceptable literary content, would

impact the critical reception of the writers explored here, to varying degrees, in the

nineteenth century.52

This tendentious critical ideology only further demonstrates the extent to

which Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Leskov, and Chekhov challenged existing aesthetic

practices and normative conventions. Similarly, as suggested above, the very basis of

the Realist novel was a sober, critical empiricism, an orientation clearly at variance

with the theme of literary transcendence. Ironically, the mimetic imperative articulated

by the liberal critics would often fall short of this goal, resorting to utopian visions,

representing an ideal reality, as opposed to actuality. Nowhere is this tendency more

evident than in Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel Chto delat’? (What is to Be Done?), a

work subsequently ridiculed in Dostoevsky’s Zapiski iz podpol’ia (Notes from

Underground, 1864). Interestingly, scenes of literary epiphany, as explored below,

manifest a similar utopian tendency, oriented not toward an ideal social future, but an

ideal, transcendent reality.53 These writers assume the task of articulating the

ineffable, and thereby propose an alternative form of mimesis, anticipating later

aesthetic theories such as Modernism.54 Approaches to this problem will vary

52 This would particularly prove to be the case with Leskov, who was essentially banned from the major literary journals for ridiculing the Nihilist movement in the ideological novels Nekuda (No Way Out, 1864) and Na nozhakh (At Daggers Drawn, 1870-71). 53 This theme of “literary utopianism” figures most prominently in relation to Dostoevsky, and his “thematic of endings,” as discussed below in chapter 1. 54 An excellent theoretical model, interrogating traditional conceptions of mimesis, is Michael Taussig’s Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York and London: Routledge,

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significantly between writers and individual texts, while the very prevalence of the

issue confirms its status as a common thematic and methodological concern in the

epoch of Russian Realism.

Chapter Outline

Admittedly, no study of transcendence in Russian Realism should overlook

Tolstoy, considering how central the literary epiphany is to many of his writings.

However, precisely because of the scope of such a topic, which justifies a full-length

study, as well as the existence of related critical studies, I have chosen to limit my

discussion of Tolstoy to the introduction and conclusion of the dissertation.55 The

intersection of form and transcendence, aesthetics and metaphysics, central to my

project, has received less critical attension in relation to Dostoevsky, and especially

Leskov and Chekhov.56 Moreover, the comparative study of these three writers will be

seen to yield a broader, more dynamic view of the development of this theme in late

nineteenth-century Russian literary aesthetics. Still, I will proceed with a few

additional preliminary comments on Tolstoy (to whom I return in the conclusion),

before outlining the three primary chapters.

1993). Taussig combines anthropological research and Frankfurt School aesthetics to propose a mimetic desire to become “other,” as suggested in the title of his study. I return to Taussig in my analysis of Leskov in chapter 2. 55 The topic of Tolstoyan epiphany is most literally addressed by Martin Bidney in his Patterns of Epiphany: From Wordsworth to Tolstoy, Pater, and Barret Browning, referenced above. Richard Gustafson adumbrates similar theoretical concerns in his discussion of the performative quality of Tolstoy’s prose in Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger. 56 One notable exception is Robert Louis Jackson’s Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966). While Jackson’s study investigates the theory informing Dostoevsky’s aesthetic project, it pertains primarily to the influence of German Idealist and Romantic philosophy.

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If War and Peace provides a starting point for the study of literary

transcendence in Russian Realism, it likewise reveals vestiges of Romanticism

pertinent to the present analysis. The very topic of literary transcendence, essentially

contrary to the positivist scope of Realism, evokes Romantic approaches to the

irrational and ineffable in poetry. Andrei's experience at Bogucharovo, in fact,

exemplifies this theme: if his character's predominantly rational, analytical tendencies

place him at a critical distance from his own life, the sensory nature of his epiphany

reestablishes his spatial position in the world, the realm of nature valorized in

Romantic theory.57 At the general level, epiphany itself reveals a lyrical tendency

latent to Realism, which endeavors to “speak” the transcendent in an adapted prose

language. Meanwhile, Tolstoy's application of poetic techniques suggests a more

literal debt to Romanticism. Boris Eikhenbaum attributes the markedly poetic nature

of Tolstoy's prose to the decline of poetry in the mid-nineteenth century, and the

concurent ascendancy of prose forms, asserting that: “in transitional periods prose

borrows some of the devices of the poetic language: a special, musical prose is formed

whose connection with verse is still apparent.”58 Eikhenbaum goes on to reference

Tolstoy's diary of 1851, in which the young writer questions the very border between

prose and poetry. The theme is ironic, as Eikhenbaum identifies Tolstoy's attempt in

57 Andrei’s detached intellectualism is remarked by Donna Tussing Orwin in Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847-1880, 129. Scenes of epiphany in Tolstoy typically transpire in natural settings, denoting Tolstoy’s most obvious debt to Romanticism, and the movement’s predecessor Rousseau. 58 “Проза и стих — отчасти враждебные друг к другу формы, так что период развития прозы обычно совпадает с упадком стиха. В переходные эпохи проза заимстувует некоторые приемы стихотворного языка — образуется особая музыкальная проза, связь которой со стихом еще заметна.» See Eikhenbaum, Molodoi Tolstoy (St. Petersburg and Berlin: Gruzhebina, 1922), 26. Translation quoted above in Eikhenbaum, The Young Tolstoi, trans Gary Kern (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1972), 33.

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this period to overcome the Romantic legacy. Still, the lyrical nature of his prose is

indelible, and even focalized in episodes such as Andrei's.

******

I reference these aspects of Tolstoy's stylistic development both to clarify the

nature of Tolstoyan epiphany, and to establish a broader context, and diachronic

trajectory, in relation to those aspects of Russian Realism explored below. While

Dostoevsky would likewise bear the influence of Romanticism, particularly in his

early writings, chapter 1 will explore the writer’s narrative strategies for conveying the

content of Myshkin’s epileptic aura in The Idiot (1867-1868).59 While the novel

inscribes the ineffable dimension of Myshkin’s experience, in all manner of narrative

“lacunae” (referential ambiguity, descriptive obscurity, elided scenes), it likewise

approximates key aspects of this experience (sudden cognitive “revelations,” temporal

dilation, access to a transcendent perspective) through discrete narrational strategies.

Wary of the epistemological and aesthetic challenges to accessing the transcendent,

Dostoevsky’s work poses a model of faith in the face of paradox, a “faith-based

hermeneutics” focalized in the textual interpolation of Holbein’s painting The Body of

the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521-22).

Chapter 2 explores how Leskov in Zapechatlennyi angel (The Sealed Angel,

1873) establishes a dialectic between form and transcendence, extending throughout

the novella. The work’s mystical, apophatic subtext suggests the inaccessible nature of

the divine, problematizing the formal rigor of the Old Believers, Leskov’s sectarian

59 On Dostoevsky’s relationship to Romanticism, see Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965).

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subjects. Yet, the alternative themes of ekphrasis and confession provide a means of

figuring the transcendent, and lend an analogously performative quality to Leskov’s

text. Chapter 3 discusses several of Chekhov’s “liturgical” stories, which employ

Russian Orthodoxy as both fictional setting and aesthetic model. While Chekhov

likewise thematizes the problem of transcendence, he reveals the mutual inflection of

aesthetic and liturgical practices in his subtle, deliberate presentation of Orthodox

ritual. Though secular in orientation, Chekhov, like the other authors explored, reveals

how art may induce a transfigured moment of transcendence. As the concluding

discussion of Tolstoy’s Chto takoe iskusstvo? (What is Art?, 1897-98) will

demonstrate, the relationship between form and transcendence remains a prevalent

concern in Tolstoy’s later, polemical writings, in turn impacting aesthetic

developments of the twentieth century.

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Chapter 1: The Possibility and Paradox of Epiphany in The Idiot

Moments of visionary experience, or transcendence, figure prominently in the

major novels of Dostoevsky’s post-exilic period, and particularly The Idiot (1867-68),

a peculiar work, in form and content, even by Dostoevsky’s eccentric standards. The

novel narrates the return to Russia, and subsequent social career, of Prince Lev

Nikolaevich Myshkin, the first in a line of major characters to share the disease of

epilepsy with the author himself.1 Myshkin’s illness, however, seems to relate to his

visionary capacity, fostering a close relationship between epilepsy and epiphany in the

novel. The primary passages pertaining to this complex occur in part II, chapter 5, as

the culmination of the peculiar course of events opening the novel's second part.2

Returning to St. Petersburg after a six-month absence, Myshkin pays a series of visits,

and eventually finds himself wandering the city, pursued by the murderous Rogozhin,

whose attempt on his life prompts both an epileptic seizure, and the visionary moment

of pre-epileptic “aura.”

The second part of The Idiot marks a series of significant transitions in the

novel, including shifts in basic plot constituents (time and setting); the behavior and

circumstances of Dostoevsky’s characters; and even the style and tone of the narration.

It is also the point at which Dostoevsky introduces this visionary dimension of

1 Myshkin is not, however, the first epileptic to appear in Dostoevsky’s fiction. Murin, in the early “Khoziaika” (“The Landlady,” 1847) suffers from the disease, while later incarnations, subsequent to Myshkin, include Kirillov, in Besy (The Demons, 1872) and Smerdyakov, in Brat’ia Karamazovy (The Brothers Karamazov, 1880). 2 Joseph Frank refers to this five-chapter sequence as a “curious intermezzo,” as it stands in marked contrast with the “self-contained unity” of the novel’s first part, and presents several characters (Myshkin, Rogozhin, Lebedev) in unexpected and modified forms. See Frank, “A Reading of The Idiot,” Southern Review, Vol. 5, No. 2 (April 1969): 303-31; 313-4.

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Myshkin’s experience, which clearly entails certain artistic challenges. In a notebook

entry from June 11, 1868, amidst the planning and composition of this section of the

novel, Dostoevsky drafts the following considerations of the narrator:

Let us bring to an end the story of a person who has perhaps not been worthy of so much of the reader’s attention – we agree to that.

Reality above everything. It is true perhaps that we have a different conception of reality, a thousand souls [thoughts?], prophesy – a fantastic reality. It may be that in the Idiot man is visible in a truer light.

Furthermore, we admit that we may be told: “That’s all very well, you are right, but you haven’t succeeded in presenting the thing, in justifying the facts, you are a bad artist.” But as to that, of course, there’s nothing to be done.3

Culminating in an ironic, imagined dialogue, between narrator and implied reader, the

passage succinctly references problems of narrative closure and finality; literary

realism and representation; and reader interest and reception, all recurrent ideas in the

notebooks, and eventually the novel itself. These narrative ruminations appear,

meanwhile, amidst the planning of basic plot constituents – fragments of dialogue, and

shorthand descriptions of action and setting. The troubled compositional history of

The Idiot has been well documented: facing the threat of debtor's prison in Russia,

Dostoevsky fled abroad, writing the novel in Western Europe, in the face of poverty, 3 The Russian original reads:

Доскажем же конец лица, который, может быть, и не стоил бы такого внимания

читателей, - соглашаемся с этим. Действительность выше всего. Правда, может быть, у нас другой взгляд на

действительность 1000 душ [дум?], пророчества – фантасти<ческая> действит<ельность>. Может быть, в Идиоте человек-то более действит<елен>.

Впрочем, согласны, что нам могут сказать: «Все это так, вы правы, но вы не умели выставить дела, оправдать факты, вы художник плохой». Ну тут же, конечно, нечего делать. See F. M. Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972-1990), Vol. 9, 276. English translation, here slightly modified, in Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for ‘The Idiot’, trans. Katharine Strelsky, ed. Edward Wasiolek (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 228. Subsequent citations from Dostoevsky’s fiction, notebooks, and correspondence will parenthetically reference the appropriate volume and page number from the Academy edition, as well as the source of English translation, where necessary.

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the aggravation of his epileptic condition, and even the death of his infant daughter

Sonya. Having struggled through the process of character development in the planning

of part I, Dostoevsky is still, at this point, elaborating the continuation of the novel's

plot.4 Yet, as the passage reveals, thematic and formal concerns nonetheless occupy

Dostoevsky at this stage, demonstrating their integral relationship to the development

of the work's plot.

The intersection of Dostoevsky's poetic and dramatic agendas in The Idiot may

be located in the passage's overarching concern with the problem of representation.

References to the issue of representation increase amidst notes, such as the one above,

for the novel's second part, while the published version of this section, as earlier

suggested, introduces the theme of transcendence in the novel. In other words,

precisely as Dostoevsky was planning the staging of Myshkin's visionary experience,

the notebooks demonstrate a concern with such presentation as a literary problem. In

this respect, the notebooks for The Idiot serve not only to reinforce material present in

the published novel, but to open up critical vistas only implicit in the novel, prompting

scholarly consideration of the notebooks as a “penumbral text.”5 In this particular

example, the authorial concern with representation in the notebook gives way to an

attempted representation, and accompanying narrative discourse, in the novel's

presentation of Myshkin's experience. Facetious though the narrator's renunciation, in 4 On Dostoevsky’s creative process, in developing The Idiot, see Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky and ‘The Idiot’: Author, Narrator, and Reader, (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1981), 46-89 and Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 241-315. 5 The phrase is Gary Saul Morson’s. As he aptly observes, the notebooks for The Idiot assume a more “hermeneutically significant” role in the interpretation of the novel than drafts typically do in relation to fiction. See Morson, “Tempics and The Idiot,” in Celebrating Creativity: Essays in Honour of Jostein Børtnes, ed. Knut Andreas Grimstad and Ingunn Lunde (Bergen: University of Bergen, 1997): 108-134; 118, 121-2.

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the notebook citation, of literary acumen may be, Dostoevsky's concern with

“presenting the thing” is indeed urgent, as evidenced by the iteration of the concern

elsewhere in the notebooks, and an equivalent, metaphorical preoccupation with

expression and communication in the novel itself.

Advancing from the perspective of this conjoined problem, of representation

and visionary experience, this chapter explores how The Idiot both addresses and

thematizes the problem of mediating character encounters with the transcendent in

prose fiction.6 While I refer here to such experience as “transcendent” or “visionary,”

on account of its ambiguous jurisdiction, the ensuing discussion will ultimately

address the complex religious thematic in Dostoevsky's novel. Focusing primarily on

Prince Myshkin, my analysis will elucidate the content of his experience, and how it

relates to broader thematic and structural concerns in the novel. Myshkin's experience

corresponds to my preliminary model of the literary epiphany, outlined in the

introduction: this elusive moment discloses to him a particular content, as a sudden

realization, and likewise incorporates numerous formal devices, for the purposes of

representing this visionary experience to the reader. In this respect, the literary

epiphany is both a narrative event (Myshkin's visionary experience), and a

6 Two recent, excellent studies address this aspect of Dostoevsky’s project in the novel, investigating what could be termed the “apophatic” dimension of the work, the point at which language falters (whether in falling silent, or opting for self-cancellation) before the expression of religious experience. See Nancy Ruttenburg, Dostoevsky’s Democracy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), 1-28; and Nariman Skakov, “Dostoevsky’s Christ and Silence at the Margins of The Idiot”, Dostoevsky Studies 13 (2009): 121-40. For a more theoretical and ideological approach to this issue, exploring the related problems of deferral and “recessive action,” in English and French Romanticism, see Anne-Lise François’ recent Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

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representational strategy, a developed by Dostoevsky for the task of rendering the

charismatic and ineffable in narrative.7

As this bivalent aspect of Myshkin’s epiphany demonstrates, the aesthetic and

religious dimensions of The Idiot are essentially coextensive. Appropriately,

Myshkin's experience of transcendence, though a discrete event, also serves as the

locus and structuring principle of key themes in the novel. First, the eschatological

coloration of Myshkin's visionary experience both exemplifies, and clarifies, the

prevalent theme of endings (whether social, or metaphysical) in the work. Second,

Myshkin's experience of faith in the moment of epiphany posits a positive model of

Christian belief, which figures repeatedly throughout the novel; in orienting the

subject toward an object of faith, positioned beyond the field of empirical evidence

and knowledge, this discourse on faith relates back to the novel's aforementioned

teleological theme. Meanwhile, Myshkin's epiphany also relates to basic elements of

the novel's plot, and localizes a cycle of sudden disclosure that is recurrent throughout

the novel; this abrupt, disclosive aspect of epiphany is in fact integral to the macro-

level of the work's novelistic structure.8 As Robin Feuer Miller observes, oscillation

between “enigma and explanation” is intrinsic to the very narration of The Idiot.9

7 Dostoevsky’s commitment to developing specifically formal, aesthetic means of communicating transcendent experience to the reader also indicates his concern with reception. On Dostoevsky’s concern with the reader, and its narrative manifestation, see Miller, Dostoevsky and ‘The Idiot’: Author, Narrator, and Reader, 11-45. 8 M. H. Abrams identifies this essential dynamic as a common feature of Modernist fiction. Discussing the analogous category of the “Moment,” he writes: “…the Moment of consciousness, the abrupt illumination in an arrest of time, has become a familiar component in modern fiction, where it sometimes functions…as a principle of literary organization, by signaling the essential discoveries or precipitating the narrative resolution.” See Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 418-9. This same feature, I will argue, obtains in Dostoevsky’s novel, demonstrating his anticipation of a central Modernist device. 9 Miller, Dostoevsky and ‘The Idiot’: Author, Narrator, and Reader, 78.

38

Appropriately, there is a corresponding emphasis on mystery, and sudden revelation,

in the notebooks for the novel. While such preponderance of “enigma” serves an

important dramatic function in the novel, it also, I will argue, allows for the very

possibility of transcendence, erupting out of mystery, in the everyday life of

Dostoevsky’s characters.10

Transcendence in the Novel: Problem and Potential

As suggested above in the introduction, the genre of the novel contains various

representational limitations, boundaries made all the more evident in their

transgression, as evidenced by the presentation of Myshkin's visionary experience.

Dostoevsky’s project in The Idiot is framing transcendence in narrative, an endeavor

that not only violates the normative social reality of the novel, but even exceeds the

descriptive, predicative functions of language. With its traditional commitment to

mimetic realism, and focus on conventional social reality, the novel is at face value a

literary genre particularly ill-suited to moments of transcendence. However, in The

Idiot, Dostoevsky not only attempts to surmount the representational problem of the

10 My approach to the relationship between mystery and transcendence in Dostoevsky is informed by Erich Auerbach’s discussion of “background” in Old Testament narrative, in the opening chapter of his classic Mimesis. As Auerbach contends, the very prominence of narrative obscurity in the story of Abraham and Isaac both compels exegetical truth claims, and allows for the coincidence of transcendent divinity and immanent reality. He writes: “The sublime influence of God here reaches so deeply into the everyday that the two realms of the sublime and the everyday are not only actually unseparated but basically inseparable.” See Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 22-3.

Similarly, Robert Louis Jackson identifies Dostoevsky’s use of fantasy as “the aesthetic concomitant of an idealistic or religious world outlook,” demonstrating how Dostoevsky develops an aesthetic, novelistic approach for the possibility of divine presence in the human world. See Jackson, The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 288. Jackson citation is taken from Liza Knapp, The Annihilation of Inertia: Dostoevsky and Metaphysics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 67.

39

genre, but even problematizes novelistic tropes and conventions, in adapting the genre

to his literary agenda.

In an oft-cited letter to his niece Sofia Ivanova, written as Dostoevsky was

completing the novel's first part, he puts forward the now-famous maxim that “[t]he

main idea of the novel is to portray a positively beautiful person” (28.2: 251, letter

332).11 Existing criticism, as such, has often centered on the success of Dostoevsky's

attempted creation, drawing comparisons to Myshkin's religious and literary

prototypes (the Johannine Christ, Don Quixote, Dickens' Pickwick, Hugo's Jean

Valjean), and critiquing Myshkin's ability to influence the lives of those around him.

In this respect, Dostoevsky's protagonist is frequently judged by the viability of his

character, while the efficacy of his experience is appraised on the ground of his

medical condition and, moreover, his social career in the novel, and his ultimate

failure to enact positive change in the lives of those around him.12 The issue of

representation, as such, is often limited to character typology, while more formal

approaches define the novel's shortcomings in rendering Myshkin's character and his

experience. In his reading of the novel, Konstantin Mochulsky, citing the same letter

to Sofia Ivanova, asserts that “Christ only is holy, but a novel about Christ is

11 The letter, written in Geneva, is dated January 1/13, 1868. English translation in Dostoevsky, Complete Letters, Vol. III, trans. David A. Love (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1990), 17. 12 There are, of course, numerous literary prototypes, both for Myshkin’s experience, and the typology of his character. The most famous examples, cited above, are actually identified by Dostoevsky himself, in the same letter to Sofia Ivanova. Frank, meanwhile, identifies two protagonists from novels in Balzac’s Comédie Humaine – the titular characters of Louis Lambert (1832) and Séraphita (1835); as well as two partial models in Dostoevsky’s own writings – Colonel Rostanev in Selo Stepanchikovo (The Village of Stepanchikovo, 1859), and Alyosha Valkovsky of Unizhennye i oskorblennye (The Insulted and Injured, 1861). Similarly, Jacques Catteau draws attention to the fantastic and pathological antecedents of E. T. A. Hoffman's Kater Murr (1819-21) and Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) as well as the character of Murin (also, like Myshkin, an epileptic) in “The Landlady.” See Frank, “A Reading of The Idiot,” 304-5; and Catteau, Dostoyevsky and the Process of Literary Creation, trans. Audrey Littlewood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 57-62.

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impossible.”13 Similarly, Michael Holquist, following Mochulsky, discusses the

novel's “pattern of failed epiphanies,” predicated upon the fact that transcendent

experience, the “kairotic moment,” in Holquist's formulation, will invariably fail to

efface chronology, or even enact sustainable change, across the propulsive, diachronic

breadth of the novel.14 Moments of epiphany, in other words, will always succumb to

the slow march of time, their immediacy and efficacy lost.

But these observations, I contend, invalidate neither the content of Myshkin's

epiphany, nor its efficacy in the novel. In elaborating his reading of The Idiot, Holquist

relies on Georg Lukács' celebrated Theory of the Novel, in which the novel, as a

diachronic genre, exemplifies the contingency inherent to secular modernity, and

articulates the tragedy of man's “transcendental homelessness.” However, as Renato

Poggioli remarks, Dostoevsky is too “idealistic” for Lukács’ formal schema, and

notably claims no place in the latter’s Studies in European Realism.15 On the contrary,

Lukács even concludes The Theory of the Novel with a brief discussion of Dostoevsky,

suggesting that Dostoevsky did not, in fact, even write novels, by the terms of Lukács'

definition: if the novel is essentially an expression of disillusionment, reflecting the

existential contingency, and spiritual displacement, of modernity, then Dostoevsky’s

works, gesturing toward a utopian future, constitute a new genre, emblematic of a new 13 Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans. Michael A. Minihan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 346. While I agree with Mochulsky’s basic premise, I do not think Dostoevsky intended The Idiot to be read as “a novel about Christ.” More recent criticism of the novel, including the work of Joseph Frank and Harriet Murav, likewise challenges the reading of Myshkin as “Prince Christ.” My own analysis will focus more on Myshkin’s very human experiences of doubt, anxiety, and faith. 14 “It could in fact be said that the form of Dostoevskian time, his plots, is set up to do nothing else so relentlessly as to dramatize the absence of essence in chronology, the separation of moment and sequence.” See Holquist, Dostoevsky and the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 108, 110. 15 Poggioli, The Phoenix and the Spider (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 2.

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age.16 Short of following Lukács to his logical conclusion, and denying Dostoevsky

the title of novelist, I nonetheless disagree with Holquist’s essential claim that

Myshkin’s mission fails in the novel precisely because this mission is novelized – that

kairotic immediacy is distended, and thus lost, across the span of chronos.17 As

readings of Dostoevsky’s “utopian” orientation suggest, the efficacy of Myshkin’s

epiphany should be gauged not by the success of his mission in the dramatized social

reality of the novel (that meaningless, contingent sphere of Lukács’ Marxist schema).

Rather, Myshkin’s epiphany speaks to the momentary experience, and future

possibility of transcendent experience in the everyday world, as opposed to the actual,

permanent transfiguration of that world – the latter would, of course, exceed the

representational potential of the novel, inasmuch as it lacks any reference point in

existing reality, the necessary substrate of the novel itself. The Idiot suggests that

transcendence subtends the dark, obscure corners of the everyday, and may burst forth,

at moments, into visible reality.

As I will demonstrate below, the teleological orientation of Dostoevsky’s

characters, and the novel as a whole, as well as the work’s discourse on faith and

16 Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 152-3. Notably, Lukács’ discussion of Dostoevsky follows his analysis of Tolstoy, who, like Flaubert, exemplifies the disillusionment inherent to novelistic form. Dostoevsky, by comparison, positions his textual reality on the verge of the possible (as opposed to fixating on the past), with thematic, as well as formal ramifications for his writing, which I address below. At the risk of exaggerating this formal dichotomy, it is notable that Tolstoy and Flaubert each produced significant works of historical fiction in the 1860s (War and Peace; and Salammbo and The Sentimental Education, respectively). Dostoevsky, by comparison, typically absconds from historical subjects (and even, largely, nostalgia), alternately engaging contemporary polemics, or tending forward, particularly in his more religious subjects, such as The Idiot. 17 Ironically, Holquist’s reading of The Idiot more closely resembles Lukács’ interpretation of Tolstoy, whose characters, the latter suggests, ultimately fail to sustain the perspective gained in moments of epiphany. Referencing Anna Karenina and War and Peace, Lukács writes: “But Anna recovers and Andrei [Bolkonsky] returns to life, and the great moments vanish without trace. Life goes on in the world of [social] convention, an aimless, inessential life.” See Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 149. (Bracketed words added here to provide context.)

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imagination, serve to engender this possibility of transcendence, in orienting

perception toward some future, possible event, beyond the scope of reality, and even

the novel itself. In this respect, The Idiot actually opposes the social reality typical of

the novel, rather than mirroring it, substituting anticipation for mimesis. This

challenge to normative social reality figures in numerous areas of the work, including,

most literally, the consistent unsettling of social hierarchies, as characters from

different strata interact with an unlikely degree of frequency and intimacy.

Dostoevsky’s predilection for “improbable possibility” in the novel reflects his typical

device of “fantastic realism,” which likewise, of course, challenges any naturalistic or

deterministic conception of reality.18 Moreover, the essentially irrational model of

faith given expression in Myshkin’s epiphany (as well as his behavior), will be

revealed to actually oppose empirical reality, to reject what is seen and heard, in favor

of belief.

In such instances as these, Dostoevsky’s narrative verges on the metaphysical,

exceeding the traditional social realities of narrative fiction. Still, the normative world

of the novel remains crucial to Dostoevsky’s project, in providing a social background

for metaphysical drama. If a key theme in The Idiot is the interpenetration of the

transcendent and the mundane, then the novel provides a necessary, quotidian canvas

for this project, against which Dostoevsky elaborates Myshkin’s visionary experience,

18 On Dostoevsky’s “fantastic realism,” particularly in relation to The Idiot, see Malcolm Jones, Dostoyevsky after Bakhtin: Readings in Dostoyevsky’s Fantastic Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1-33, 113-145; Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 300-15; and Knapp, The Annihilation of Inertia, 66-7. For a more general survey of the phenomenon, see Jones, “The Evolution of Fantastic Realism in Russian Literature: Gogol’, Dostoevskii and Bulgakov,” in Celebrating Creativity: Essays in Honour of Jostein Børtnes, ed. Knut Andreas Grimstad and Ingunn Lunde (Bergen: University of Bergen, 1997): 58-69.

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which I discuss in the next section. Myshkin, meanwhile, as figural representative of

this metaphysical project, necessarily finds himself in conflict with social reality: his

behavior frequently evokes the approbation of other characters (Dr. Schneider, the

Epanchins, Evgenii Radomsky, etc.), and even induces the bewilderment of the

narrator, who seems, in the novel’s final chapters, to find Myshkin’s behavior

increasingly incomprehensible.19 Ultimately, Myshkin, and the thematic valences of

his character, are drawn at odds with the very world he inhabits. This conflict remains

unresolved in the novel, prompting the reader to choose between varying perspectives

(Myshkin and society; metaphysical and social realms; etc.), consistent with Bakhtin’s

model of novelistic polyphony. Such polyphony, meanwhile, figures in possible

interpretations of his visionary experience. Myshkin’s epiphany, after all, is

inextricably linked with his epileptic condition: as Harriet Murav observes, the reader

is left to choose between the saintly and the pathological, as potential readings of his

experience.20 Similarly, I would argue that Myshkin’s visionary experience, even

beyond the problematic scope of his illness, falls between two precedents of epiphany:

traditional narratives of religious revelation, and more secular, subjective moments of

19 Harriet Murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 84-8. 20 Ibid., 88. As Murav points out, drawing on Catteau’s research (Dostoeyevsky and the Process of Literary Creation, 132-4), the epileptic aura experienced by Myshkin is, apparently, a fictional construct. See Holy Foolishness, 77. Catteau likewise draws attention to two accounts of Dostoevsky’s own epileptic fits: the first, an eyewitness account of N. N. Strakhov, dating from 1883; the second, iterating Dostoevsky’s description of a seizure, recounted in Sofiia Kovalevskaia’s memoirs, of 1887. Both accounts record Dostoevsky’s testimony to the experience of a moment of “aura” markedly similar to Myshkin’s. In light of Catteau’s other findings, it is possible that Dostoevsky mythologized the nature of his own illness, both for the purposes of his own artistic persona, and the later interpretation of his fiction, and Myshkin specifically. Catteau provides the translated text of both accounts, in parallel, in Dostoyevsky and the Process of Literary Creation, 114-5.

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clarity, often identified with Romanticism.21 The Idiot preempts any clear, and even

unified interpretation of the basis of Myshkin’s epiphany, while this dynamic mirrors

the challenge to empirical reality put forward in Myshkin’s character, in his reliance

on irrational faith. In this respect, I would argue that Dostoevsky’s achieved

polyphony does not sustain suspended judgment in all aspects of the novel. In this

particular example, the clear relationship between the absence of hermeneutic closure,

and the problematizing of empirical reality, implies a de facto endorsement of

Myshkin’s faith-based opposition to any finalized reality. In other words, Myshkin’s

model of faith, elaborated below, exemplifies Bakhtin’s emphasis on the open-ended,

unfinalized nature of Dostoevsky’s fictional world, suggesting the implicit

endorsement of such faith, over and against social reality, and irrespective of

Myshkin’s medical condition.

The “Other World” of Visionary Experience

Similar to the passage at the beginning of this chapter, two additional citations

signal Dostoevsky's preoccupation with the problem of representation in The Idiot. In

one scene, sketching Rogozhin's presentation of the murdered Nastasya Filippovna's

corpse to Myshkin, the latter contends: “It seems to me that every man has visions, but

what he sees another man cannot even imagine” (9: 221; 171).22 Similarly, a

subsequent scene, related to Ippolit Terent'ev's “explanation,” contains the note: “The

21 I address these precedents for the literary epiphany in greater detail in the introduction, establishing a heuristic axis between religious and secular models, with examples from Augustine’s Confessions and Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker, respectively. 22 «Мне кажется, что всякому человеку что-нибудь да мерещится, но такого, чего уж другому и вообразиться не может.»

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other world. / The depiction of that world, illustrations” (9: 223; 173).23 Though

devised in conjunction with different episodes in the novel, these notations are both

dated March 12, 1868, at a relatively early point in the planning and composition of

Part 2.

Approaching these fragments as related concepts, we may deduce that one

man's experience constitutes an autonomous world – both in the sense of the

“visionary” subject's personal, totalizing field of experience; but also of that “world”

as a realm inaccessible to others, consistent with the novel's theme of the difficulty of

expression and communication.24 However, if each individual's experience is

necessarily alien, in nature, to the perception of another, then the experience of Prince

Myshkin is radically so; the alien quality of Myshkin's experience is grounded in his

medical condition, as epileptic, but also derives from the unique, charismatic, and

utterly subjective nature of this experience, irrespective of its basis in illness. I will

begin with an analyis of the content of Myshkin's experience of the epileptic aura,

proceeding to a close reading of its framing and presentation, thereby illuminating the

devices employed to render this vision, this “other world,” to the Dostoevskian reader.

Myshkin spends much of part II, chapter 5 wandering the Petersburg streets in

the throes of his epileptic prodromata, the depressive, confused state directly

preceding the onset of an attack. Despite periodic foreshadowing, earlier in part II, of

the return of his epilepsy (including his own mention of the illness, during a visit to

23 «Тот свет. / Представление того света, картинка.» 24 I propose this conjoined reading (“other world” as another man’s “visions”) of the passages without striking the more obvious referent of the latter citation (i.e. “other world” as the Christian afterlife, heaven, etc.). I wish to sustain the bivalency of Dostoevsky’s ambiguous fragment, as this will ultimately contribute to my reading of the deliberately ambiguous constitution of Myshkin’s “visionary” experience.

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Rogozhin), the situation is only confirmed amidst Myshkin's thoughts on his present

state, as he provides a rather lucid description of his forthcoming epiphany. As his

condition intensifies, he reflects on this, the moment preceding the actual fit:

He remembered among other things that he always had one phase just before the epileptic fit (if it came on while he was awake), when suddenly in the midst of sadness, spiritual darkness and oppression, there seemed at moments a flash of light in his brain, and with extraordinary impetus all his vital forces suddenly began working at their highest tension. The sense of life, the consciousness of self, were multiplied ten times at these moments which passed like a flash of lightning. His mind and his heart were flooded with extraordinary light; all his uneasiness, all his doubts, all his anxieties were relieved at once; they were all merged in a lofty calm, full of clear, harmonious joy and hope, full of understanding and [knowledge of] the final cause. But these moments, these flashes, were only the prelude of that final second (it was never more than a second), with which the fit began. That second was, of course, unendurable.25

Myshkin's initial description stresses the sudden, unexpected nature of the occurrence,

and the leitmotif of light and illumination (contrasted with the preceding “spiritual

darkness”). His feelings of doubt and anxiety are resolved, replaced by joy and hope,

as he ascends to an eschatological cognition of the “final cause.” And though he

proceeds to question the event’s validity, on the basis of its relation to his medical

25 English translation in The Idiot, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Bantam, 1981), 218. The Garnett translation is here modified, where appropriate, for accuracy, and will hereafter be cited parenthetically. This passage appears on page 218. The Russian original reads:

Он задумался, между прочим, о том, что в эпилептическом состоянии его была одна степень почти пред самым припадком (если только припакок приходил наяву), когда вдруг, среди грусти, душевного мрака, давления, мгновениями как бы воспламенялся его мозг и с необыкновенным порывом напрягались разом все жизненые силы его. Ощущение жизни, самосознания почти удесятерялось в эти мгновения, продолжавшиеся как молния. Ум, сердце озарялись необыкновенным светом; все волнения, все сомнения его, все беспокойства как бы умиротворялись разом, разрешались в какое-то высшее спокойствие, полное ясной, гармоничной радости и надежды, полное разума и окончательной причины. Но эти моменты, эти проблески были еще только предчувствием той окончательной секунды (никогда не более секунды), с которой начинался самый припадок. Эта секунда была, конечно, невыносима. (8: 187-88)

Curiously, in her translation, Garnett elides the clause “full of understanding and [knowledge of] the final cause” (…polnoe razuma i okonchatel'noi prichiny), which is clearly central to the passage.

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condition, he concludes that the experience nonetheless constitutes “the highest degree

of harmony and beauty, and gives a feeling, unknown and undivined till then, of

completeness, of proportion, of reconciliation, and of ecstatic devotional merging in

the highest synthesis of life” (8: 188; 218).26

The content of Myshkin's visionary experience, or epiphany, may be succinctly

described as a sudden moment of illumination, enabling a fleeting apprehension of the

eternal, and the eschatological nature of the transcendent. As the culminating emphasis

on “harmony and beauty” suggest, Myshkin’s experience is utterly immediate, despite

its seemingly transcendent, otherworldly orientation. This self-conscious aesthetic

moment is grounded in a profound heightening of awareness, and specifically self-

awareness; indeed, he delineates the moment not as one of self-abandonment, an

escape to another realm of experience, but rather an intensification of the present

experience of both self and world. In this respect, Myshkin’s experience provides a

privileged aperture to the present moment, a profound focus or attention that typically

eludes the subject in its everyday encounters with the world and its objects. As the

narrator explains: “These moments were only an extraordinary quickening of self-

consciousness – if the condition was to be expressed in one word – and at the same

time of the direct sensation of existence in the most intense degree” (8: 188; 218-

219).27 The passage’s leitmotif of light assumes a related, if unexpected function in

this dynamic: compared to its traditional role, as a topos of religious (and particularly

26 «…высш[ая] степен[ь] гармонией, красотой, дает неслыханное и негаданное дотоле чувство полноты, меры, примирения и восторженного молитвенного слития с самым высшим синтезом жизни.» 27 «Мгновения эти были имено одним только необыкновенным усилением самосознания, – если бы надо было выразить это состояние одним словом, – самосознания и в то же время самоощущения в высшей степени непосредственного.»

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conversional) narrative; and even, similarly, an Enlightenment-period metaphor for

disclosure, light serves here not simply to illuminate a particular content (though it

does, we will see, accomplish this as well). Rather, its literal function (later theorized

by Impressionism), as a ground or condition for sight – for seeing things, precisely, in

their present aspect – contributes to Myshkin’s superlative “sensation of existence.” In

other words, his experience of light is significant not only for what it illuminates, but

simply that it illuminates, enabling his heightened apprehension of his immediate

surroundings.

Paradoxically, Myshkin’s experience is purely immanent, illuminating the

present condition of self and surroundings; but it is also transcendent, allowing him to

move beyond his typical perspective on the world, and even to exceed his everyday

self. Likewise, adumbrating a specifically temporal paradox, Myshkin's intense

experience of self and existence in the present moment is related to his apprehension,

in the thrall of epileptic aura, of the final moment, as yet forthcoming, as an

eschatological motif pervades the entirety of his experience. In this respect, the “final

second” preceding Myshkin’s epileptic fit prefigures the final moment of Christian

time in the Apocalypse, just as Myshkin has periodic “flashes” (probleski) of

illumination, anticipating this “final moment,” in the hours leading up to the fit. The

narrator exploits lexical ambiguity to conflate these two moments, thereby

strengthening the parallel between Myshkin’s aura and the Apocalypse, as in the

obscure reference to his sudden grasp of “the final cause.” However, the actual

apocalyptic motif is made more explicit at the end of the passage, as Myshkin

concludes his reflections with the recollection of a conversation with Rogozhin, in

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which the former claims: “at that moment I seem somehow to understand the

extraordinary saying that there shall be time no more,” a citation from Revelation 10:

6 (8: 189; 219).28 In other words, Myshkin’s experience not only employs the

Apocalypse as a figural model, but actually partakes of its essence. His own “final

moment” prefigures the onset of Christian eternity during end times, in the anticipated

destruction or displacement of chronological time.

Though it anticipates eternity, Myshkin’s visionary experience likewise

witnesses the eruption of eternity into the present moment, as time seems to dissolve

in the single, distended instant of his perception. In this, and other respects, Myshkin’s

vision evokes an essentially Christian conception of time, as Incarnational theology

imparts to revelation and salvation “an essential anchorage in time.”29 Like the

Incarnation itself, which unities human and divine principles, Myshkin’s experience

adumbrates numerous paradoxes, including the present example of the “eternal

moment,” combining the temporal categories of present and future; and the

aforementioned intermingling of the immanent and transcendent (figured in the

28 «…в этот момент мне как-то становится понятно необычайное слово о том, что времени больше не будет.» Italics in original. The same quotation is later iterated by Ippolit, as a prefatory comment to his “explanation,” and is also cited by Kirillov, in conversation with Stavrogin, in Demons (10: 188). 29 Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History, trans. Floyd V. Filson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1950), 38. Despite the evident paradox, between finite, human time and eternity, Cullmann proceeds to explain how “…in the Primitive Christian conception time is not a thing opposed to God, but is rather the means of which God makes use in order to reveal his gracious working” (51). While Cullmann, in discussing “Primitive Christianity,” addresses an early, developmental phase of Christian history, he here identifies a theological tenet central to Christian thought across its history. The Incarnation provides not only the temporal model for Myshkin’s experience, but also the aesthetic model, whereby Christ, representative of an infinite, transcendent principle, assumes finite, aesthetic form. As Robert Louis Jackson suggests, in the preface to his classic study of Dostoevsky’s aesthetics: “Faith in Christ is faith in embodied form, in an image of beauty, perfection, and transfiguration.” See Jackson, Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art, xi.

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recurrent spatial metaphor of “heaven on earth”).30 Such paradoxes are meant to

challenge basic, propositional logic, and ultimately assume a crucial thematic function

in the novel. The present example, meanwhile, reveals a pragmatic function to the

apparent temporal paradox, related to the general and pervasive theme of “endings” in

the novel. Namely, the eruption of eternity into the present actually enables Myshkin’s

heightened awareness, resolving the seeming paradox between present focus and

anticipatory apprehension in the moment of aura. Myshkin discerns synthesis, an

aesthetic totality, amidst objects of perception, because they are organized in relation

to the apprehended “final cause,” achieving transcendent meaning in the certainty that

they will be redeemed (i.e. assigned ultimate meaning) in the Apocalypse. The

projected ending, in other words, structures the present: telos enables kairos.

Moreover, Myshkin’s intense experience of the present enacts the very destruction of

time he anticipates: for in partaking of this “frozen” moment, and thus deferring

chronological progression, Myshkin is able to focus on the world as is, to look at an

object (whether self, or other) in stasis, rather than simply looking forward, in

anticipation. Paradoxically, such deferral, and the resulting dilation of time, is possible

only in the context of Myshkin's eschatological apprehension, as looking forward to an

ultimate endpoint (the Parousia) lends a structuring principle to present perception

and interpretation. Ending (Apocalypse, death) and “middle” (existence) are

experienced concurrently, as it were, demonstrating their integral relationship.

30 While Myshkin’s visionary experience, and general discourse, frequently implies this latter motif, it is most explicitly identified, and extensively discussed, in his conversation with Prince Shch. (betrothed of Adelaida Epanchina), who critiques the concept (8: 282).

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Visionary Moment as Narrative Lacuna This motif of apprehending an ending in order to more fully grasp the present

constitutes the pervasive “ending thematic” in The Idiot, to which I return in greater

detail below. Meanwhile, the actual narration of Myshkin’s visionary experience

mirrors this same anticipatory tendency in the novel. The exposition of Myshkin's

epileptic aura, the “final moment” encapsulating his visionary experience, occurs well

in advance of the event itself – the two passages (the first a moment of reflection,

discussed above; the second the experience of the content of that reflection) are

positioned at opposite ends of chapter 5, and transpire several hours apart, in narrative

time. The event is explained before it is actually staged; the device generates

anticipation of its actual occurrence, but also reflects problems inherent to the staging

itself. Because Myshkin’s visionary experience is sudden and momentary, it cannot be

explained, discursively, at the actual point of its occurrence, without threatening the

temporal integrity of the event. Rather, the presentation of the “final moment” must be

carefully prepared: the reader is initially provided with an extensive description,

generating anticipation of this inevitable event, and providing details which will later

be evoked to augment the presentation of Myshkin’s experience during the literal

narrative moment of its execution.

When Myshkin’s experience of the “final moment” does occur, in the

culminating scene of Rogozhin’s attempt on his life, its narrative presentation is as

sudden and brief as its initial description had suggested:

Then suddenly something seemed torn asunder before him; his soul was flooded with intense inner light. The moment lasted perhaps half a second, yet he clearly and consciously remembered the beginning, the first sound of the

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fearful scream which broke of itself from his breast and which he could not have checked by any effort. Then his consciousness was instantly extinguished and complete darkness followed. (8: 195; 227)31

Given Myshkin's repeated emphasis on the brevity of the experience, its succint

presentation here is fitting; likewise, the interior nature of the event is consistent, as

well as the light motif, which here relates, at the narrative level, to the final

“illumination” of Rogozhin’s plot. Still, for an event touted as “the highest degree of

harmony and beauty,” Myshkin’s internal experience appears conspicuously

unremarkable, a quality potentially, but not necessarily mitigated by the scene’s

dramatic context.

However, this presentation of the “final moment” does not simply falter in

approaching the ineffable, as if falling short of its intended mark; rather, Dostoevsky’s

narrative performs the very impossibility of rendering Myshkin’s transcendent

moment, in turn rendering conspicuous its very ineffability. In stark contrast to the

narrator’s previous description, drawn from Myshkin’s thoughts, of the content of this

visionary experience (illumination; a sense of the eternal and the “final cause”), the

experience here seems ostensibly devoid of any content whatsoever.32 On the contrary,

the few details provided are essentially self-reflexive, even meta-narrational. The

narrator remarks the sudden onset (vdrug) of the event; proceeds to denote its

duration, of half a second; and is then, by the passage’s mid-point, beyond the moment 31 «Затем вдруг как бы что-то разверзлось пред ним; необычайный внутренний свет озарил его душу. Это мгновение продолжалось, может быть, полсекунды; но он, однако же, ясно и сознательно помнил начало, самый первый звук своего страшного вопля, который вырвался из груди его сам собой и который никакою силой он не мог бы остановить. Затем сознание его угасло мгновенно, и наступил полный мрак.» 32 The passage is thus consistent with Clayton’s argument that “visionary moments [in literature] often have no specific content.” See Romantic Vision and the Novel, 5. While Clayton’s criterion applies to this particular instance, there is indeed a specific content to Myshkin’s visionary experience, only presented earlier, in his expository account of such an experience.

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itself, as Myshkin reflects on the beginning of the moment, now past (on…pomnil

nachalo). In other words, narration itself is all the passage puts forward, while what is

actually narrated, that which apparently begins, proceeds, and concludes, remains

elusive. Though the experience of the “inner light” is remarked, it is simply a motif, a

vacant signifier: figuratively speaking, there is no immediate reference to the object

such light illuminates.33 Appropriately, much of the passage is occupied with the

circumstances of Myshkin’s scream – a metaphor of inarticulateness, expressing the

nonverbal, and even prediscursive nature of his experience.

As I have suggested above, the timeless and transcendent features of

Myshkin’s visionary experience challenge both the time-bound and referential aspects

of language, as well as the diachronic and finite dimensions of the novelistic world. A

strategy for representing such events, Clayton proposes, is for the novelist to locate

them within a textual “lacuna,” for “only a ‘negative presentation’ of the infinite can

be carried over into the determinate, social world of the novel.”34 Without literally

eliding Myshkin’s experience from the narrative, Dostoevsky nonetheless positions

the event in a semantic gap, mirroring Myshkin’s obscure experience with elliptical,

essentially empty forms of signification. In fact, this lacuna even figures in the passage

itself, in the cryptic “something was torn asunder” (chto-to razverzlos’) that initiates 33 This “light,” of course, does serve to illuminate Rogozhin’s plot, rendered metonymically in the flash of the knife in the light of the window. I return to the bivalent function of illumination below, in addressing the actual, transcendent content illuminated in Myshkin’s epiphany. 34 Clatyton, Romantic Vision and the Novel, 9, 6. Clayton derives the phrase “negative presentation” from Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). The passage, which appears in Kant’s famous “Analytic of the Sublime,” reads: “…the imagination, although it certainly finds nothing beyond the sensible to which it can attach itself, nevertheless feels itself to be unbounded precisely because of this elimination of the limits of sensibility; and that separation is thus a presentation of the infinite, which for that very reason can never be anything other than a merely negative presentation, which nevertheless expands the soul.” See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 156.

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the moment: in addition to denoting the spatio-temporal displacement integral to

Myshkin’s vision (as eternity enters the moment, and infinity enters finite space), this

“something,” emblematic of the experience itself, contains an ineffable content (as

grammatically-rendered in its indefinite, pronominal status).35 Appropriately, upon

considering the nature of the event in a mental, discursive manner, in his earlier

exposition, Myshkin even critiques his own, attempted articulation: “these vague

expressions seemed to him very comprehensible, though too weak” (8: 188; 218).36

His own formulations (and, by extension, language itself), are qualified as “vague” or

“hazy,” and thereby positioned in direct opposition to the super-linguistic clarity of his

visionary experience.37

Narrating the Ineffable: Representational Strategies In addition to inscribing this visionary gap, and its attendant representational

issues, in the chapter’s climactic scene, the passage of Myshkin’s “final moment” also

marks a shift in the style of narration. Having narrated Myshkin’s perspective on this

culminating moment, the passage abruptly shifts to an objective, external standpoint,

35 The obscure mention of something “torn asunder” may refer to the curtain of the temple, which was torn in two at the precise moment of Christ’s death. The passage is mentioned in Matthew 27: 51 and Luke 23: 45. As the editors of the Oxford NIV Scofield Study Bible observe, the tearing of the curtain, a figure of Christ’s body, symbolizes humanity’s direct access to divine presence, achieved in Christ’s sacrifice. The connection, between Christ’s body and the curtain, is made explicit in Hebrews 10: 19-22. See the Oxford NIV Scofield Study Bible, 1023, note 4. In the case of Myshkin, this biblical reference seems apt, as his visionary experience does open up a momentary aperture to the transcendent. 36 «Эти туманные выражения казались ему самому очень понятными, хотя еще слишком слабыми.» 37 As Nancy Ruttenburg remarks of The Idiot, adapting Donald Fanger’s concept of the ne to, or “not that” in Gogol: “The ‘that,’ the to, stands in for the positive content of religious belief which cannot be positively named but only negatively indicated by means of the demonstrative pronoun that gestures, vaguely, elsewhere.” See Ruttenburg, Dostoevsky’s Democracy, 19. Again, I refer the reader to Ruttenburg’s book, and Skakov’s article, “Dostoevsky’s Christ and Silence at the Margin of The Idiot,” on the related phenomenon of silence and negation in Dostoevsky.

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accompanied by a matter-of-fact, nearly scientific tone. Appropriately, the narrator

abandons Myshkin’s perspective, just as the protagonist loses consciousness

(preempting, of course, the character’s feasible retention of any perspective

whatsoever). Having narrated the entirety of Myshkin’s epileptic prodromata from the

protagonist’s perspective, the narrator suddenly objectifies the seizure itself.38

Announcing the fit abruptly, and literally (“It was an epileptic fit…”), the narrator’s

observational position stresses the horrific spectacle of Myshkin’s illness, while there

is a generalizing, sociological clarity and detachment in his phrasing (“That is how

many people have described their impression. The sight of a man in an epileptic fit

fills many people with positive and unbearable horror…”) (8: 195; 227).39 Also, the

narrator shifts to presenting events in a far more lucid and straightforward manner,

even providing causal explanations (why, for example, Myshkin is spared Rogozhin’s

knife), as the episode, and subsequently the chapter, speed to a close.

This shift in narrative tone and perspective stands in sharp contrast with the

narrator’s previous comportment, which relates integrally to Dostoevsky’s attempted

representation of Myshkin’s experience. Dorrit Cohn, in outlining potential variants in

the psychic relationship of narrator and character, delineates between a “consonant”

narrator, who frequently merges with narrated consciousness, and a dissonant one,

38 The narrator’s perspectival shift exemplifies Dostoevsky’s strategy, identified by Murav, of sustaining multiple potential interpretations of Myshkin. In this instance, the internal perspective, sustained for most of the chapter, valorizes Myshkin’s experience as visionary, while the sudden shift to narrative objectivity frames his condition as sick, and even demonic. 39 «Многие, по крайней мере, изъясняли так свое впечатление, на многих же вид человека в падучей производит решительный и невыносимый ужас…»

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who maintains objective distance from his subject.40 With the onset of Myshkin’s

epileptic seizure, this transition, from consonance to dissonance, is suddenly enacted.

Moreover, the degree of psychic consonance shared by Myshkin and the narrator for

the majority of chapter 5 far exceeds that of any other section of the novel, including

the preceding sections of part II. While the relationship of Myshkin to the narrator, as

well as the figure of the narrator himself, are complex issues in the novel, and the

subject of existing criticism, I will focus here on the formal features of this narrator-

protagonist consonance over the course of Myshkin’s epileptic prodromata, as a

means of approaching Dostoevsky’s representational strategies.41 The degree of

intimacy achieved, as well as its unique, bilateral quality, contributes to the narrator’s

project of representing Myshkin’s visionary experience in narrative.

Despite the attendant difficulties (and the alleged contradiction) of attempting

to represent visionary experience in the finite, temporal realm of the novel, the genre

likewise contains formal advantages for such a project, including the narrative staging

of character consciousness, or “psycho-narration.”42 Myshkin’s experience, over the

course of chapter 5, is profoundly interior and subjective, and only occasionally

references the external world, making such psycho-narration an entirely appropriate

narrative device. Moreover, it is also a deliberate strategy for representing Myshkin’s

visionary experience. As suggested above, Myshkin’s epiphany comprises the sense of

sudden illumination; temporal dilation; and an eschatological apprehension of the final

40 Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 26-33. 41 The cornerstone for the study of the narrator in The Idiot is Miller’s Dostoevsky and ‘The Idiot’: Author, Narrator, and Reader. 42 The term is also Dorrit Cohn’s.

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cause. In addition, however, to describing these features discursively (as occurs in the

exposition of the epileptic aura), Dostoevsky exploits narrative structure in creating an

aesthetic equivalent of each essential characteristic of Myshkin’s epiphany.

I. The Literal Epiphany: Obfuscation and Disclosure Beginning with the narrative performance of visionary illumination,

Dostoevsky employs the psychic consonance of Myshkin and the narrator, in order to

reproduce the protagonist’s psychological state on the basic level of plot, essentially

performing Myshkin’s condition in the narrative presentation of action. Myshkin

oscillates, throughout this section, between a general state of confusion, and

occasional moments of clarity; between a primarily interior state, predominated by

reflection and recollection, and a periodic fixation on external objects. The interior,

psychological quality of narration aptly mirrors these cognitive and perceptual

fluctuations. On the basis of its object of representation, this narrative mimesis of

consciousness is generally elliptical and opaque, a morass of details and actions, as

appropriate to Myshkin’s condition. For example, there is seldom any attempt to

bridge (and, at moments, to even delineate) Myshkin’s thoughts and actions, leading to

a series of abrupt or obscure transitions; moreover, there is a conspicuous absence of

the causal explanation common to more naturalistic variants of the novel (and even

more naturalistic passages of The Idiot itself). This latter feature may be deemed

representative of the novel’s achieved realism, for Myshkin himself seems to have

little sense of the reason for his actions, affording even this privileged, omniscient

narrator little insight. Yet, this very mimesis of confusion and obscurity demonstrates

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how consonant the two, character and narrator, are throughout this sequence; narrative

obfuscation ensues as a matter of course.

There is also, still more conspicuously, a frequent suspension of identification

in this section, as objects remain unnamed, relegated to vague categories, or simple,

pronominal status. The device figures at the most basic level of action, as Myshkin

endeavors to make sense of what is happening: the owner of “those eyes” in pursuit of

him; the identity, and eventual function, of that “object” in the cutler’s window; even

the source of Myshkin’s confusion, as a function of his epileptic condition.43 The

reader, of course, is perfectly aware of the identity of such plot constituents

(Rogozhin’s eyes; the knife; his epilepsy), as even Myshkin himself is, before the

onset of his pre-epileptic stupor in chapter 5 – during his visit to Rogozhin, he pairs

the eyes with the host, finds the same knife marking the pages of a book, and identifies

the medical cause of his confusion. The narrative function, therefore, of this later

semantic ambiguity is not the traditional generation of novelistic suspense, but simply

to allow for such identification as a subtle, cognitive analogue for Myshkin’s own,

sudden realizations, and his ultimate visionary experience. In other words, confusion

and obscurity are deliberately promulgated to allow for eventual clarification and

resolution, which even proceeds in cycles – the eyes, for example, are mysterious, on

Myshkin’s arrival in Petersburg; subsequently connected to Rogozhin; again

mysterious, amid the pre-epileptic stupor; and ultimately identified with the murderous

character.

43 In the case of the knife, the device is deliberately, even absurdly evident, in the narrative effort to circumvent the naming of the object; we learn of the knife’s handle, it’s cost, and even its position in a cutler’s window, though it stubbornly persists beneath the narrative rubric of “object” (predmet).

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The same basic effect is evident in the proliferation of pronouns, pronominal

adjectives and other indefinite grammatical constructions in this section, deployed to

the same end of enabling an eventual narrative clarity in the simple act of predication.

For example, at the beginning of his visit to Rogozhin, Myshkin has the following

experience: “Something seemed to pierce Myshkin, in connection with which

something seemed to be remembered – recent, painful, and gloomy” (8: 171).44 The

passage immediately follows Myshkin’s recognition of Rogozhin’s gaze: in fact, the

words “glance” (vzgliad) and “something” (chto-to) assume a literal sequence on the

page, separated only by punctuation; and the connection between Myshkin’s memory

and the eyes is made explicit only lines later. However, the accumulation of three

pronouns (including one relative pronoun), as well as the iteration of the particle kak

by (denoting an impressionistic quality; here rendered as “seemed”), lend a

deliberately vague character to the sentence as a whole – like the representational

lacuna, constituting Myshkin’s visionary experience, the sentence posits a semantic

gap amidst more substantive, definitive statements.

Similarly, and in conjunction with the same basic realization, the narrator

records the following psychological event, following Myshkin’s aborted attempt to

depart for Pavlovsk, at the beginning of chapter 5:

Sometime later in the street he seemed suddenly to recall something; he seemed suddenly to grasp something very strange, something that had long worried him. He suddenly realized that he had been doing something, which

44 «Что-то как бы пронзило князя и вместе с тем как бы что-то ему припомнилось – недавнее, тяжелое, мрачное.» Italics are added in both Russian and English variants. I have provided a more literal (if more awkward) translation than Garnett's, in order to demonstrate the prince's passive grammatical function, in relation to a series of indefinite and obscure subjects.

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he had been doing for a long time, though he had not been aware of it till that minute... (8: 186-7; 216-7)45

The passage proceeds to immediately identify the content of Myshkin's realization, his

apprehension (figured in the tendency to suspiciously appraise his surroundings),

which relates to the same dawning awareness of Rogozhin's plot. As before, I have

italicized similar instances of pronouns and indefinite particles, which occur here in

still greater frequency. I have also marked, in bold, temporal adverbs and adverbial

phrases, likewise prevalent, which foster a dichomy between the abrupt, sudden nature

of Myshkin's realization, and the extended, diachronic nature of the activity,

heretofore performed unconsciously. Just as the narrative oscillation, between

obscurity and clarity, concealment and disclosure, circumlocution and identification,

engenders an aesthetic concomitant of both Myshkin's basic, plot-related realizations

and his visionary experience (the sudden “flash” of illumination), these temporal

markers serve as the grammatical embodiment of the temporal nature of such

moments, explored in greater detail in the next section. As the present phenomenon,

meanwhile, aptly demonstrates, Dostoevsky adapts novelistic form, via narrative

convention, to approximate the nature of Myshkin's revelations. In a pertinent

notebook entry, Lebedev speaks of Myshkin, citing a passage from the Gospel of

Luke: “What he has hidden from wise men and sages, he has revealed to the young”

(9: 252; 204).46 As Lebedev’s comment suggests, there is a potentially transcendent

45 «Несколько времени спустя, на улице, он вдруг как бы что-то припомнил, как бы что-то внезапно сообразил, очень странное, что-то уж долго его беспокоившее. Ему вдруг пришлось сознательно поймать себя на одном занятии, уже давно продолжавшемся, но которого он всë не замечал до самой этой минуты…» Italics and bold-face added here, as well. 46 «Утаил от премудрых и разумных и открыл еси то младенцам.» The cited passage, from Luke 10: 21, reads: “At that time Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, ‘I praise you father, Lord of

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source to Myshkin’s revelation, mirrored here in the literal disclosure of information

to the reader.

II. Temporal Dilation in Narrative Myshkin’s tendency toward sudden and unexpected realizations is a consistent

feature of the novel as a whole (and even, arguably, much of Dostoevsky’s fiction):

characters are often privy, for better or worse, to abrupt insights and revelations,

consistent with the dramatic nature of the plot; and the general movement, between

obfuscation and disclosure, is a key feature of Dostoevsky’s narrative poetics. As in

other respects, Myshkin’s experience, in this, temporal capacity, focalizes a more

general phenomenon in the novel. For Myshkin, however, the subjective experience of

time, and particularly its dilation or suspension, is a key component of his visionary

experience; and the interior monologue is again employed to render this experience

palpable.

The mimesis of consciousness enabled by the narrator’s consonance with

Myshkin, and his general omniscience, is essential to rendering his subjective

experience of time. Myshkin’s experience of time is in fact so subjective, over the

course of the epileptic prodromata, that he seems to occupy his own temporal

dimension, only occasionally intersecting the chronological plane of objective,

Petersburg reality, the normative basis of plot time. Just as Myshkin moves between

the contemplative modes of reflection and recollection, and external awareness, the

narrative reflects this psychological odyssey, in which interiority overwhelmingly

heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.’” See the Oxford NIV Scofield Study Bible, 1067.

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displaces external action. Meanwhile, “clock time” is casually, and literally remarked,

at precisely such moments as Myshkin emerges from his stupor. We learn, for

example, that it is 7 pm, when it is also suddenly revealed that Myshkin is seated in

the Summer Garden; however, there is no narrative preparation for this temporal

marker (and, it initially seems, no narrative function), just as there is no mention of

Myshkin’s transition from train station to park bench, as such action has been replaced

by interior monologue (comprising, in this case, Myshkin’s explanation of the

epileptic aura). In other words, “clock time” simply elapses, with little apparent

connection, and only occasional intersections, with Myshkin’s mental state. His

experience, however, of an internal, indeterminate, “psychological time,” may be seen

as a structurally analogous to eternal, eschatological time, as both are only

momentarily synchronous with objective time. In other words, just as Myshkin’s

sudden realizations serve as minor pre-enactments for the illumination of visionary

experience, his intersection with “clock time,” as in the Summer Gardens, prefigures

the eruption of eschatological time in the “final moment” before his seizure.

Meanwhile, throughout this section, temporal dilation is intrinsic to the

narration itself, in its seemingly compromised attempt to even convey the basic plot

through the haze of Myshkin’s stupor. Cohn, again, in denoting the “unlimited

temporal flexibility” of psycho-narration, provides a useful rubric, delineating

temporal “summary” and “expansion” in narrative art; and the section in question,

predictably, utilizes and even exemplifies the latter technique.47 The strategies for

enacting temporal expansion in narrative are numerous; and some, in this instance, are

47 Cohn, Transparent Minds, 33-46.

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more closely related to the autonomous narrative discourse: Dostoevsky’s narrator, for

example, occasionally resorts to casual digressions of little relation to the immediate

action, as when he pauses to reflect on the Petersburg weather.

Primarily, however, temporal dilation remains grounded in psycho-narration,

which here amounts to the mimesis of a character consciousness that is inherently

digressive. As we have seen, Myshkin’s compromised grasp of reality sends his

thoughts reeling across memory, contemplation, and speculation, with only periodic

markers of external action. Even when reality does intrude, meanwhile, its temporal

effect is likewise dilatory. When Myshkin pauses, for example, to contemplate the

knife in the shop window, its presentation is so detailed as to arrest the reader’s

attention, a narrative lingering prompting the reader’s imagining of the object, before

the novel proceeds. This image conceit is recurrent in this section, as are Myshkin’s

innumerable mental digressions (including, most notably, his extended pause to

explain the nature of the epileptic aura itself). Finally, temporal dilation is manifest on

a broader narrative level, in its tendency toward cycles of repetition and return.

Myshkin, of course, is forever returning to the same thoughts, concerning Rogozhin

and Nastasya Filippovna; but he also literally performs the same actions, as when he

returns to the shop window, to contemplate the knife; or sets out repeatedly for both

his hotel, and the Petersburg suburbs, before actually seeing the action to completion.

The device engenders a “looped” phenomenon of narrative action, whereby actions are

repeated, or require multiple attempts at completion. Finally, Myshkin’s confused

state, which brings him periodically to points of literal stasis, provides a figural pre-

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enactment of the epiphanic “frozen moment,” in the character’s experience of

momentary paralysis.

These devices function as a set of directives to Dostoevsky’s reader, serving to

either deflect attention from the action at hand; to arrest focus on an object or conceit;

or even to literally repeat a previously undertaken or accomplished thought or action.

These strategies contribute to the reader’s sense of temporal expansion, of time

decelerated, a spell only periodically broken in the aforementioned markers of “clock

time” and external action. For while the reader reads forward in time, there is a general

sense that time has slowed, precisely because the novel has slowed. This, again,

constitutes an aesthetic, narrative approximation of Myshkin’s visionary content; and

it demonstrates how Dostoevsky exploits novelistic technique for unusual

representational purposes.48 Though Dostoevsky cannot literally reproduce the

paradoxical experience of the eternal in the present moment, consistent with

Myshkin’s vision, he does gesture toward this paradox by expanding the

48 Worth mentioning, in this respect, is one of the novel’s primary intertexts, Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829). Hugo’s novella is a virtual compendium of narrative techniques for temporal expansion: it narrates only several hours (albeit crucial ones) in actual time, and exploits similar techniques (mental digressions, image conceits, physical illness) to this achieved end. Notably, the most explicit reference to Hugo’s novella, in Myshkin’s own earlier narration, at the Epanchins’, of two separate execution scenarios (culled, of course, from Dostoevsky’s own experience), is also the scene of the novel’s primary discourse on temporal dilation. I return to Myshkin’s execution narratives below.

Conceivably the most foregrounded of the novel’s intertexts, Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man has received ample critical attention. Knapp discusses how Hugo’s novella contributes to Dostoevsky’s conception of “fantastic realism,” as a model of both interior monologue, and its attempt to narrate the approaching experience of death. See Knapp, The Annihilation of Inertia, 66-75. For additional discussions of Dostoevsky’s relationship to Hugo’s novella, and his writings in general, see Larry R. Andrews, “Dostoevskij and Hugo’s Le Dernier Jour D’un Condamné,” Comparative Literature, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Winter 1977): 1-16. For a more general consideration of Hugo’s influence on Dostoevsky’s poetics (with particular attention to Hugo’s delineation between “grotesque” and “sublime” features of literature, set forward in the programmatic Préface de Cromwell of 1827), see Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol, especially 19-20, 228-40.

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representational parameters of the novel, such that it approximates, and even embodies

Myshkin’s temporal experience.

III. The “final cause”: Discerning Transcendental Design In addition to employing narrative strategies of sudden disclosure and temporal

dilation, Dostoevsky likewise exploits psycho-narration to render Myshkin’s

apprehension of the “final cause,” the point of entry to the eschatological theme in the

novel. As a pre-figuration of the Apocalypse itself, Myshkin’s visionary experience

elevates him to a trans-temporal perspective, or “God’s eye view,” on the world

around him, which in turn reveals the world as beautiful, harmonious, and meaningful,

a perspective typically denied to finite, human consciousness. Though Myshkin

achieves this perspective only momentarily, in the thrall of his epileptic aura, it is

carefully prepared over the course of his epileptic prodromata, as well as more

thematic references to the content of the moment, such as his earlier discussion of

temporal dilation in the moments before death.49 Myshkin’s eschatological

apprehension, in the moment of visionary experience, exemplifies the broader

phenomenon of prefiguration in the novel, mirrored in the momentary “flashes” he

experiences twice during the prodromata, anticipating the ultimate illumination of his

49 Features of Myshkin’s visionary experience also appear in the notebooks, at a very early stage in the novel’s planning, in a passage sketching the character of the “uncle’s son,” which reads: “The son preaches about how there is a great deal of happiness in life, that each moment is a happiness; self-expression and self-awareness. (Other people have undergone a long period of scattered energies, then a sudden concentration)” (Syn propoveduet, chto v zhizni mnogo schastia, kazhdaia minuta – schast’e; samozaiavlenie i samooshchushchenie. (U drugikh liudei dolgaia rastiazhimost’ i vdrug kontsentrirovanie)) (9: 152; 42). This vaguely-defined character does not appear, of course, in the novel; and some of his features are later transferred to Myshkin. Still, it is interesting how these initial, as yet static and disembodied ideas (temporal dilation; self-awareness; the “sudden concentration” of energies) are later dramatized in Myshkin’s visionary experience, by way of integrating them into the narrative.

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aura, as well as his seemingly prophetic anticipation of various developments in the

plot.50 These instances of phenomenal prefiguration, meanwhile, are part of the

broader phenomenon of privileged character perception in the novel, which ranges

from basic psychological intuition or insight (and even seemingly, at times,

clairvoyance), to the ability to discern structure and meaning in the present

environment, to read and decode incidental signs and details.

Such privileged perception, whether intuitive or anticipatory, is enjoyed by

numerous characters in The Idiot, a feature contributing to the fantastic, metaphysical

nature of the novel. At a relatively basic level, the three Epanchin sisters are

frequently said to share an unspoken understanding, while their mother declares

herself “doomed…to notice and foresee everything.” Meanwhile, the same theme

often relates to the unfolding tragedy of Nastasya Filippovna. Rogozhin, for example,

seems to enjoy access to Myshkin’s thoughts, as when he (accurately) accuses

Myshkin of considering him a future murderer.51 And Nastasya Filippovna herself

seems to anticipate her own, pending murder.52 With Myshkin, however, this trait is

50 The same phenomenon is also, more generally manifest in the narrator’s denoting of character anxiety or anticipation, later resolved in event and/or realization. This cycle (coextensive with the narrative oscillation, remarked above, between obscurity and clarity), is shared by many of Dostoevsky’s characters in the novel, but most pronounced in Myshkin. 51 “It may be that you didn’t come with that idea and that wasn’t in your mind, but now it certainly has become your idea. Ha-ha!” (Eto mozhet, chto ne za tem i ne to v ume bylo, a tol’ko teper’ ono uzh naberno stalo za tem, kh-he!) (8: 180; 209). Rogozhin’s insight occurs during Myshkin’s visit to his home, two chapters before his attempt on Myshkin’s life, and the latter’s epileptic fit. 52 While Nastasya Filippovna may of course be said to will her own death, as an act of self-destruction, her murder also contains an air of inevitability, projected in the novel’s consistent foreshadowing of the event, and suggestive of the idea that this tragic heroine does not will her own fate, but rather submits herself to the fate she has discerned. By this logic, Nastasya Filippovna seems closest to Myshkin’s level of awareness and apprehension, among characters in the novel. Her level of insight, however, is only suggested, as the psycho-narration employed to render Myshkin’s consciousness is never applied to Nastasya Filippovna, who is only presented from an external perspective. On a related note, there is a subtle parallel between Nastasya Filippovna, in her initial description, and Pushkin’s Tatiana, in Eugene Onegin. In the account of her upbringing, and

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both frequently denoted, and particularly pronounced. In social encounters, he

typically penetrates the motives, and even the thoughts of others; and he seems to

enjoy a near-proleptic purview of forthcoming events. The considerable extent of

Myshkin’s insight and knowledge is clearly integral to Dostoevsky’s conception of his

protagonist: in a notebook entry, explicitly concerned with Myshkin’s character, it is

noted that he “sees reasons everywhere” (on…vidit vezde prichiny), and the notebooks

frequently mention that “he is aware of everything” (emu vse izvestno) (9: 218, 233-4).

As these instances demonstrate, Myshkin enjoys (and, alternately, suffers) a

penetrating insight into the motives of others, and the world as a whole. That Myshkin

recognizes and values his heightened perspective is likewise denoted, as he decries the

absence of absolute knowledge and transparency in social relations.53

Myshkin, however, not only achieves insight within his surroundings in the

novelistic world, but seems, rather, to transcend his immediate environment, attaining

a higher level of understanding. In fact, throughout his epileptic prodromata, he seems

to grasp his situation, and pending crises, at the level of the author, gaining momentary

exploitation, at the hands of Totsky, it is remarked at one point that Nastasya Filippovna’s knowledge far exceeds that of her “young lady’s library,” evoking the image of her bookish, literary forbear, who likewise advances from the reading of books, to the reading and interpretation of her environment. As Monika Greenleaf suggests, Tatiana seeks “some sign that what she desires is what is meant to be; that some force larger than herself is writing her narrative.” See Greenleaf, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 265. Greenleaf’s insight is the starting point for my own thoughts on the metaliterary dimension of Eugene Onegin, and likewise contributes to my reading of The Idiot – namely, the idea that characters (Myshkin, and potentially Nastasya Filippovna), in discerning a greater structural totality to lived existence, actually ascend to the ontological level of the work’s composition. 53 Amidst the experience of the epileptic prodromata, Myshkin conveys a desire for transparency in his relations with Rogozhin, claiming: “it was necessary now, to make everything clear, so that each could read the other more clearly” (nado, chtoby teper' vse bylo iasno postavleno, chtoby vse iasno chitali drug v druge) (8: 191). However, in a later conversation with Radomsky, following his renunciation of Aglaya, Myshkin seems to acknowledge the impossibility of such interpersonal transparency, saying “…here it is necessary to know everything…why can we never know everything about another person…” (…tut nado znat' vse….pochemy my nikogda ne mozhem vsego uznat' pro drugogo…) (8: 484).

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access to this ultimate, compositional knowledge of the unfolding plot. Building on V.

N. Voloshinov’s identification of the interpenetration of the speech of hero and author

in this section of the novel, Arpad Kovacs has argued that the narrative in this

sequence is deliberately constructed, through a proliferation of “epic details,” to bring

Myshkin to an awareness beyond his own cognitive capacity, accessing knowledge

otherwise (and typically) only available to the author.54 Such “epic details” include

Rogozhin’s eyes and the knife; and their appearance is so frequent and deliberate as to

exceed the merely coincidental (though the narrator nonetheless presents them as a

matter of course, without commentary). Rather, it is as if the greater design of the plot

were momentarily presented to Myshkin, in the “flashes” of such images.55 The plot

itself, meanwhile, assumes an air of inevitability, as Myshkin’s encounters, and even

his surroundings, appear coordinated to the purpose of prompting his realization. Even

the weather seems to contribute to the effect: it is bright and still, as if facilitating his

perception; while the narrator, more significantly, casually mentions: “As though on

purpose [kak narochno] this was one of those days” (8: 186). While the source of such

54 Kovacs, “Poetika romana Idiota (K probleme zhanrovogo myshleniia Dostoevskogo),” Hungaro-Slavica (1978): 149-64; 162. In the referenced discussion, Voloshinov invokes the same passage of Myshkin’s epileptic prodromata, in elaborating the category of “preset direct discourse”:

In this chapter, Prince Myshkin’s directly reported speech resounds within his self-enclosed world, since the author narrates within the confines of his, Myshkin’s purview. Half the apperceptive background created for the “other speaker’s” utterance here belongs to that other speaker (the hero), and half to the author.

See Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1986), 134. Voloshinov’s insight resembles Bakhtin’s classic discussion of discourse in Dostoevsky, and the categories of “double-voiced discourse” and “foreign speech.” On this, see Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 181-269. 55 As if to reinforce the parallel, between “epic detail” and Myshkin’s sudden realizations, the two coincide with the “flashing” of Rogozhin’s knife as it is raised against Myshkin: here, the “flashes” of epiphanic illumination are lexically evoked, as it is noted that the knife itself “flashed” in the light.

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“purpose” is not identified, it would seem to suggest some external, transcendent

force, contributing to the narrative task of inducing Myshkin’s insight into Rogozhin’s

plot, and his own epileptic condition.

The basic idea that the narrator leads Myshkin to knowledge of the “author’s

plot” is all the more striking, in light of Myshkin’s diminished contact with the outside

world. Not only is Myshkin’s knowledge of Rogozhin’s machinations beyond the

scope of the probable or empirical, but it is gained amidst a relative paucity of

empirical experience, as Myshkin seems to barely register the outside world during

this sequence. Rather, the plot unfolds in his mind. Myshkin apprehends the “epic

details” laid out before him, but also seems to transcend his situated, phenomenal

perspective; for just as the narrator enjoys unbounded access in this sequence to

Myshkin’s consciousness, Myshkin himself seems to obtain the purview of the

narrating consciousness, thereby approaching the work’s compositional level.56 In

other words, despite the seemingly inevitable nature of the unfolding plot, Myshkin

retains psychological autonomy and deliberation as a character, as this transcendent

perspective is never itself the content of a full and sustained realization, but simply

manifest in scattered moments of clarity. They enable, meanwhile, improbable but

necessary narrative events, as when Myshkin, for example locates Rogozhin’s house,

without knowing its actual address.57 Finally, as he returns to his hotel, in the

56 Voloshinov, appropriately, stresses the bilateral nature of such shared consciousness (in comparison with the unilateral basis of “monologic” psycho-narration), referring to the “mutual exchange of intonations, a sort of reciprocal infectiousness between the reporting context and the reported speech.” See Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 133. Italics added. 57 It is possible that the same force is at work when he locates the home of Lebedev’s relation, Felissova, in search of Nastasya Filippovna. Before setting off for the house, the narrator makes the cryptic remark: “He had long known the address” (8: 189), though there is no indication of how he has

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culminating scene of the sequence, Myshkin notes incredulously that he “[believes] in

every presentiment today” (8: 194). By this point, it has become clear that his

presentiments are, in fact, prefigurations, intended to disclose the nature of his

situation, and its pending danger – if only at moments, he “sees” things that narratives

typically disclose, in foreshadowing, to the reader alone.

Myshkin’s aperture to the higher logic structuring his existence is a

metaliterary one, whereby he gains access to the principle logic structuring the novel

itself: as Kovacs formulates this dynamic, “a model of fate is constructed, fate as a

macrostructure of genre…”58 Myshkin, in other words, transcends his own, bounded

perspective as a character, to assume the purview of the author who has structured his

plot.59 His realization, again, is neither absolute, nor even fully conscious (as such

awareness, carried to its logical extreme, would entail Myshkin’s apprehension of his

own ontological status as a fictional character). Such formal, metaliterary

transcendence, meanwhile, is analogous to Myshkin’s apprehension of the “final

cause” in the throes of the epileptic aura. In both cases, he exceeds his own, situated

arrived at this knowledge, and we know that he has not been there before (due to his prolonged absence from Petersburg). 58 Kovacs, “Poetika romana Idiota,” 163. Partial English translation, cited here, by Caryl Emerson, in “The Poetics of The Idiot,” in Critical Essays on Dostoevsky, ed. Robin Feuer Miller (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1986), 116-26; 123. 59 Myshkin’s apprehension is all the more striking, when one considers Dostoevsky’s essentially parallel path to his own ongoing discovery of the novel’s plot. As he describes his creative process in a letter to Apollon Maikov, while working the first part of the novel:

…many seeds of artistic thoughts always flash and make themselves felt (u menia mel’kaet i daet sebia chuvstvovat’) both in my head and in my heart. But after all, it only occurs in a flash (no ved’ tol’ko mel’kaet), but what is needed is a complete realization (polnoe voploshchenie), which always occurs unexpectedly and suddenly, but you can’t calculate when precisely it will occur; and then finally, after receiving the complete image in your heart, you can undertake its artistic realization. (28.2: 239, letter 330)

English translation, here modified, in Dostoevsky, Complete Letters, Vol. II, trans. David A. Love (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1989), 295-6.

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perspective for the momentary glimpse of a higher, noumenal one. If the author-deity

analogy is always implicit to fiction, it is here rendered explicit, and figured in

conjunction with the parallel analogy of character-human being. Myshkin discerns, if

momentarily, and obscurely, the organizing principle of his experience, the “final

cause” of his very existence; and he glimpses the “final moment” of his own plot, even

as he moves toward it. Dostoevsky, again, employs the form of the novel both to

enable such disclosure, and to render it to his reader. Meanwhile, Myshkin’s tendency

to look “beyond” his own, immanent reality reflects a broader, thematic concern with

endings in the novel, relating to the ultimate meaning of Myshkin’s epiphany.

Ending as Ground of Meaning Myshkin's compulsion toward literal and metaphysical endpoints, I have

suggested, hints at the intervention of a higher (divine/authorial) power, enabling his

fleeting, yet transcendent apprehension of the ending itself. This feature is indicative

of Dostoevsky's elaboration of a pervasive “ending thematic” in The Idiot. While this

phenomenon entails moral and aesthetic rammifications for Myshkin's character, it

also provides a phenomenological model of how consciousness, in general, makes

sense of the everyday world. As Heidegger argues in Being and Time, we make sense

of the world's objects by projecting them forward, teleologically, in relation to some

anticipated goal or end; the human subject, as a result, is forever living or “thrown”

forward, as it were, into the future, and thus detached from the present reality of self

and surroundings. Having apprehended, however, this elevated, end-point perspective

(as Myshkin essentially does, during his visionary experience), the subject achieves a

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more basic, immediate, and even primordial (i.e. non-teleological) experience of the

present: objects, as such, are suddenly registered as “ready-to-hand” (zuhanden), in

their true essence, rather than simply “present-at-hand” (vorhanden), as the subject

typically encounters them in everyday reality.60 In other words, though the human

subject necessarily lives teleologically, the actual apprehension of telos enables a

basic, phenomenological experience of kairos in the present moment.

Among the various endings anticipated in The Idiot, the Apocalypse remains

primary, a point of concern shared by numerous characters. Lebedev, most

prominently, declares himself an “interpreter” of The Book of Revelation, which he

references at several points in the novel. Ippolit also repeatedly invokes the

Apocalypse in relation to his “explanation”: he cites the same passage from Revelation

10: 6 (“there shall be time no more…”), previously employed by Myshkin in

explaining his epileptic aura, and even clarifies the passage’s precise biblical context

(8: 318-9); and the epigraph to the document, “Après moi le déluge,” may be a

reference to the flood of the Apocalypse (8: 321).61 Myshkin, of course, partakes of

the same eschatological orientation, as evident in his visionary experience. Similarly,

in one of the notebook entries, there is a reference to Myshkin reading to a group of

60 In Heidegger’s discussion, the transition from Vorhandenheit to Zuhandenheit is elicited in the context of a functional “break-down,” when an object (a tool, for example), cannot perform its expected function, leading to the subject’s apprehension of the object “in itself,” as opposed to its projected purpose in some greater teleological schema. Still, Heidegger’s basic distinction is a useful means of grasping the pragmatic dimension of Myshkin’s experience, as it relates to his present experience of the world. On Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit, see Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Malden, Mass. & Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 95-107. 61 Robert Hollander, “The Apocalyptic Framework of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot,” Mosaic 6, No. 2 (1974): 123-39; 134. The apocalyptic theme in the novel is pervasive, and the subject of ample critical inquiry; I have included these particular examples in reference to the more general discourse on endings in the novel. For more on the apocalyptic theme itself, see Hollander’s article, as well as David M. Bethea, The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 62-104 and Liza Knapp, The Annihilation of Inertia: Dostoevsky and Metaphysics, 66-101.

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children of the “future bliss,” as if foretelling the rapture of salvation (9: 202).62

Dostoevsky’s eschatological motif functions, meanwhile, as a structuring principle for

the general ending thematic in the text: as the ultimate end-point, the pinnacle of

closure and finality, the Apocalypse promises an ultimate meaning to the present

moment. The Parousia remains, however, the most elusive of all end-points: in the

Christian worldview of Dostoevsky and his characters, it holds the promise of

salvation and finalization; yet, it also remains in suspense, a moment now delayed two

millennia. As Frank Kermode has argued, this transition, from a “predictive”

apocalypse, to a sense of the event as forever forthcoming, has led to an eschatological

conception of history itself, of a “potential” ending now shrouded in doubt and

uncertainty, which he identifies as the modern sense of “crisis” in the present

moment.63 The perpetual delaying of this ending, in other words, leads to an increased

urgency and inflection in the present.

In this respect, Myshkin’s eschatological anxiety, and the novel’s overarching

eschatological motif, exemplifies a more general concern with endings in The Idiot,

ranging from character psychology to thematic valences, and even structural

features.64 Consistent with Dostoevsky’s poetics of sudden, dramatic disclosure, the

62 In early plans for the novel, Myshkin assembles a children’s club, a subplot developed subsequently in The Brothers Karamazov, but only referenced in passing amidst the details of Myshkin’s time in Switzerland in the published text of The Idiot. 63 See Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 25-6. On the specifically Christian dimension to this problem, and the shift from a predictive apocalypse to an “ongoing eschatology,” see Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology (Edinburgh: University Press, 1957). 64 The relationship between the eschatological motif, and the general theme of endings, is itself thematized, and ironized, in Lizaveta Prokof’evna Epanchina’s comment to Myshkin: “Don’t forget it. I waited for you as for Providence (you were not worth it!)” (Zarubi zhe. Ia tebia kak providenie zhdala (ne stoil ty togo!)) (8: 265). Here, as elsewhere, Epanchina provides comic iteration of key themes in the novel, a character function remarked by Hollander. See “The Apocalyptic Framework of

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notebooks contain references to “the very last moment,” suggestive of a culminating

point of narrative closure and finality; and characters in the completed novel,

consistently, await “the hour that would decide everything.” The qualities of anxiety

and expectation are most prominent in Myshkin, and the notebooks reveal that they

were intrinsic to the very conception of his character.65 Myshkin, however,

exemplifies the anxiety that is common to nearly all the major characters in the novel

– they anticipate weddings, catastrophe, and other forms of denouement, as if seeking

the very novelistic closure and “finalization” that Bakhtinian polyphony denies them.66

Meanwhile, such anxiety often occurs in proximity to an anticipated ending: in the

passage cited above, referencing Myshkin’s discussion of the Apocalypse with the

Dostoevsky’s The Idiot,” 132. Also, notably, the Russian for “Providence” (providenie) is synonymous (save for differences in stressing) with the word for “foresight” or “vision,” imparting an interesting bivalency to her statement, consistent with the teleological theme in the novel, and its modeling on eschatological apprehension. 65 Anxiety even, in fact, figures in Myshkin’s visionary experience before his seizure. In her introduction to the recent publication of the novel in the nine-volume edition of Dostoevsky’s works (Moscow: Astrel’, 2004), Tat’iana Kasatkina identifies a textological error in the passage, as it appears in the Academy edition, cited here. The passage in question, discussed above, states that Myshkin’s experience embodies “the highest degree of harmony and beauty, and gives a feeling, unknown and undivined till then, of completeness, of proportion, of reconciliation, and of ecstatic devotional merging in the highest synthesis of life” (vyssh[aia] stepen[‘] garmoniei, krasotoi, daet neslykhannoe i negadannoe dotole chuvstvo polnoty, mery, primireniia i vostorzhennogo molitvennogo slitiia s samym vysshim sintezom zhizni) (8: 188; 218). However, as Kasatkina points out, the passage, as originally written and published, describes such “devotional merging” (molitvennogo slitiia) not as “ecstatic” (vostorzhennogo), but rather as “frightened” or “alarmed” (vstrevozhennogo). The Russian vstrevozhennii, notably, has the same etymological root as trevozhnii (“anxious,” “uneasy”), and both clearly relate to Myshkin’s experience of the aura. As Kasatkina explains, the error derived from the attempt, by the editors of the Academy edition, to elide instances of referential ambiguity or bivalency from the text. However, Dostoevsky clearly intended to impart this ambiguous, bivalent quality to Myshkin’s experience. See Kasatkina’s introduction to the novel, 6. I am grateful to my colleague William Leidy for introducing me to Kasatkina’s discussion, and helping to develop this aspect of my argument. 66 Skakov observes how the motif of silence in the novel serves a similar function of disallowing novelistic closure: “Rogozhin’s refusal to speak and to dispute infinitely defers, as it were, the discursive closure of the novel. Silence in this case is an inherently non-affirmative form of speaking – it is not a mere empty space but a meaningful void which leaves the ending unfinalized.” See Skakov, “Dostoevsky’s Christ and Silence at the Margins of The Idiot,” 135.

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children, his mention of the “future bliss” is immediately followed by a reference to

his many “doubts” and lack of knowledge.67

While the correlation between anxiety and anticipation is an entirely practical

one, it nonetheless confirms how integral their relationship is to a key theme in the

novel: just as endings are necessary (whether to characters, novelists, or readers),

some degree of anxiety or fear, an uncertainty related to how, or even if an ending will

occur, is necessary to inject meaning into the present moment. Kermode’s concept of

“crisis,” in this respect, assumes a central function in the novel – though literally,

dramatically present in the general prevalence of calamity in Dostoevsky’s fiction,

such “crisis” is made immediate to characters such as Myshkin in the necessary

oscillation between doubt and certainty, in relation to an anticipated ending, which

thereby carries forward into the present moment. Dostoevsky’s characters exhibit a

marked tendency to look forward, anticipating future outcomes of various

(eschatological, utopian, social, pragmatic) kinds; and the same tendency figures in the

reader’s experience of the text. As a diachronic medium, the novel inevitably stretches

forward into the future, propelling the reader toward an anticipated ending that will

impart meaning to the totality of the work. The novel therefore, in Hayden White’s

formulation, reflects a “narrativizing” impulse, innate to human consciousness, which

seeks to impose structure and meaning upon the sequence of human events.68

67 “He sometimes suddenly begins to read to all [the children] of the future bliss. He doesn’t know certain things, has doubts, is on a completely even level [with the children]” (On vdrug inogda nachnet chitat’ vsem o budushchem blazhenstve. Inoe ne znaet, somneniia, sovershenno na ravnoi noge) (9: 202). 68 Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 1-23; 20.

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Similarly, in the spirit of Kermode’s analysis, Peter Brooks observes that the

imposition of endings enables us to impart meaning to previous events, which may be

said to account for the human attraction to narrative itself.69 In this respect,

Dostoevsky thematizes, in narrative, and exemplifies, in character experience, a

feature intrinsic to the novel as a genre, and common to our own hermeneutic

tendencies.

Illumination: Faith Hypostasized As these literary critics demonstrate (and Heidegger theorizes), human

consciousness is intrinsically oriented toward future events; and the novel both reflects

and manipulates this reality. While this feature is common to the novel as a genre, The

Idiot deliberately exploits this tenet as a representational strategy and an aspect of the

work’s religious discourse. Turning now to the latter, the very prevalence of doubt and

anxiety amongst Dostoevsky’s characters, the sense of trepidation before an uncertain

ending, figures in the pervasive theme of religious faith in the novel. It is faith,

ultimately, that reconciles the conflict between doubt and certainty, by transcending

the epistemological basis of the conflict itself; but it is also an elusive and hard-earned

category, as Dostoevsky demonstrates, with characters typically in the process of

either losing faith, or struggling to regain it. In the narrative plane of The Idiot, a lack

of faith in self or other is frequently emblematic of a lack of faith in Christ. This

quality is particularly evident in Nastasya Filippovna, in her disbelief in her own

69 Peter Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot: Questions of Narrative,” in Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 280-300; 283-4. Brooks expands on the topic, in specific relation to novelistic plots, in his later study Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984).

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potential regeneration, and in Rogozhin, in his disbelief in Nastasya Filippovna’s

constancy, and in his own moral goodness: in both cases, their doubt is representative

of a more generalized doubt in the potential of salvation and resurrection. In the case

of the consumptive Ippolit, meanwhile, his literal lack of faith derives from the

perceived inability of the individual to surmount the inevitability of death and

destruction, imposed by both nature and human logic, as well as his own, cognitive

inability to discern meaning in this fate.70

This crisis of faith is likewise evident in Myshkin, despite his apparently pious

orientation. Though evident in his constant tendency of anxiety and uncertainty, this

issue is both central to Myshkin’s character, and the very core of the novel itself. To

refer, once again, to the notebooks, Dostoevsky remarks of Myshkin: “A Christian,

and at the same time does not believe. The dualism of a deep nature” (9: 185; italics in

original).71 Though it would be an exaggeration, ultimately, to suggest that Myshkin

entirely lacks faith (and he is even, at moments, a positive model of belief), this initial

character sketch nonetheless anticipates his crisis of faith in the published novel.72

Like other characters in the novel, Myshkin’s crisis of faith is dramatized in his

relationships with others, particularly in the cases of Nastasya Filippovna and

Rogozhin, as he figures intimately in the spiritual experiences of each. Meanwhile,

70 Knapp, The Annihilation of Inertia: Dostoevsky and Metaphysics, 89. I return to the discussion of Ippolit’s crisis of faith below. 71 «Христианин и в то же время не верит. Двойственностъ глубокой натуры.» 72 To clarify the extreme disbelief suggested by the present notebook citation, Mochulsky points out that several character traits, initially assigned to Myshkin, were later transferred to Stavrogin in the development of Demons, as the planning for this subsequent novel overlapped with planning for The Idiot. See Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, 340. Still, the present reference to disbelief demonstrates not only the original conception of Myshkin’s character, but a feature retained, in mitigated form, in his final manifestation in the novel.

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Myshkin’s struggle for faith likewise figures in his visionary experience: his

experience of faith, in fact, may be said to constitute the culmination and ultimate

content of his epiphany, as focalized in his developing appraisal of Rogozhin. I have

suggested above that Myshkin, over the course of his epileptic prodramata, achieves a

gradual awareness of forthcoming plot events, namely Rogozhin’s attempt on his life

(and, later, Nastasya Filippovna), and his own resurgent epilepsy. However,

Myshkin’s actual “flashes,” in which the light motif is invoked, serve not to illuminate

such later moments, but to contradict them. Rather, at such moments, Myshkin

experiences a restorative faith in Rogozhin, increasingly at odds with empirical reality:

paradoxically, these moments induce Myshkin’s certainty that Rogozhin is neither his

“rival” nor a murderer, but his “brother,” in the face of mounting evidence directly to

the contrary, and even, it seems, the revelation of Rogozhin’s murderous intent.

Myshkin experiences the first such moment at the train station, when “for one

moment the darkness in which his soul languished was illuminated by a bright light”

(8: 186).73 Though this moment is itself vaguely defined, it seems to coincide with his

realization that he is being followed, and his decision to remain in Petersburg,

suggesting a counterintuitive faith in Rogozhin, despite knowledge of the latter’s

pursuit. The connection, however, is made more explicit in the next instance:

Yes, his illness was coming back, there was no doubt of that; perhaps he would even have the fit that day. All this darkness was owing to the fit, and his “idea”! Now the darkness was dispelled, the demon had been driven away, doubt did not exist, there was joy in his heart! And – it was so long since he had seen her, he wanted to see her, and… yes, he would have liked to meet Rogozhin now; he would have taken him by the hand and they would have

73 «...и на мгновение ярким светом озарился мрак, в котором тосковала душа его.»

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gone together. His heart was pure; was he really Rogozhin’s rival? (8: 191; 222)74

Myshkin's revelation, as the passage demonstrates, directly contradicts reality. The

illumination he experiences embodies faith and imagination, enabling brotherhood and

selfless love; in narrative terms, it corresponds to the prospect of Nastasya

Filippovna's regeneration, and Myshkin's reconciliation with the estranged Rogozhin.

As such, the faith/illumination complex stands in opposition to the motif of darkness,

concomitant with Myshkin's very realistic “idea,” which simultaneously denotes

Rogozhin’s jealous rage, Nastasya Filippovna’s progression toward madness and

death, and the return of his own epilepsy. Unfortunately for Dostoevsky’s cast, of

course, the plot of the novel adheres closer to the realism of the “idea.”

However, far from simply demonstrating Myshkin’s delusional comprehension

of reality, his vision of illumination demonstrates a sudden groundswell of faith, so

strong as to engender paradox, in its direct contradiction of reality. Even when the

dark “idea” is finally confirmed, as Rogozhin, now recognized, raises the knife against

Myshkin, he exclaims: “Parfyon, I don’t believe it!” More than a mere expression of

surprise, it is clear that Myshkin still, even now, does not believe Rogozhin capable of

murder, even as he knows it to be true, positing faith and knowledge in direct

opposition. Appropriately, the “final moment” before the onset of Myshkin’s fit, the

apotheosis of his visionary experience, with its “intense inner light,” immediately

follows the exclamation; for Myshkin’s statement is itself the metaphorical

74 «Да, болезнь его возвращается, это несомненно; может быть, припадок с ним будет пепременно сегодня. Чрез припадок и весь этот мрак, чрез припадок и «идея»! Теперь мрак рассеян, демон прогнан, сомнений не существует, и его сердце радость! И – он так давно не видал ее, ему надо ее увидеть, и… да, он желал бы теперь встретить Рогожина, он бы взял его за руку, и они бы пошли вместе…Сердце его чисто; разве он соперник Рогожину?»

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articulation of this light, an absolute challenge to reality, tantamount to his experience

of faith at this precise moment. Ironically, should we interpret Myshkin’s epileptic

aura, and subsequent seizure, as the manifestation of his ultimate, momentary

experience of faith, it may even be said to alter the very reality it challenges, as the

startled Rogozhin retreats from the scene, his identify as murderer momentarily

effaced.

Myshkin’s exclamation – a refusal to believe that which challenges belief itself

– constitutes a tautological expression of faith. The same sentiment arises in his earlier

conversation with the Epanchin women, on the psychological experience of the

condemned man: reflecting sadly on man's inability to live “counting each minute,” he

nonetheless concludes: “but all the same, it somehow is not to be believed…” (a vse-

taki kak-to ne veritsia) (8: 53). Myshkin’s obscure statement reflects the same faith-

based opposition to reality, while the impersonal, reflexive construction suggests the

potentially broad adoption of such visionary disbelief, by people at large. Notably, in

this instance, Myshkin’s faith in the impossible relates to a specific aspect of his

visionary experience, the eruption of time amidst eternity, reinforcing the relevance of

faith to his experience of the pre-epileptic aura. Meanwhile, just as he shares the

experience of temporal dilation with the condemned man of his tale, the latter likewise

partakes of a vision of light, prompting his own implied experience of fate. In the

same passage, Myshkin relates how the condemned noticed light flashing from the

roof of a church, and anticipated merging with this light after his approaching death;

the light precipitates an act of faith, defiant of reality, which seems to guarantee his

continued existence after death. The thematic complex also illustrates the enabling

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power of faith, which allows for the eruption of eternity in the moment, and the

survival of the individual beyond death – phenomena that defy spatio-temporal reality.

With this elaboration of a discourse on faith, Myshkin’s epiphany (and the

shared experience of the condemned man) leads onto the specifically Christian nature

of the work’s religious dimension. Such faith, in the literal face of death, evokes

Christ’s Resurrection, which is itself the basis of Christian faith. The Resurrection,

likewise, not only defies space and time, but manifests paradox, in its performance of

the impossible. As such, it serves as the necessary background and basis of epiphany:

it guarantees, like the Incarnation, the coincidence of the eternal and momentary,

heaven and earth, only glimpsed in visionary experience. Likewise, in addition to

engendering faith, it provides a model of the paradox that faith must confront, in

transcending the empirical in the direction of the possible.

The discourse on faith in the novel likewise figures in the theme of feeling and

impulse, which posits an additional challenge to the empirical. In an early notebook

sketch for the character of Ganya, Dostoevsky writes: “…he is well-educated and

reflective. But feeling dominates his nature. He lives by feelings. He lives ardently and

passionately. In a word, his is a Christian nature. He loves the Idiot and forgives him,

but does not agree with him” (9: 170; 84; italics in original).75 While the description

itself would ultimately, as elsewhere, be transferred to Myshkin’s character (and

Ganya himself, obviously, turns out rather differently), the passage posits feeling as

the basis of lived Christianity, and also iterates the notion of such feeling as contrary

75 «…образован и мыслил. Но чувство преобладает в натуре. Живет чувством. Живет сильно и страстно. Одним словом, натура христианская. Идиота любит и прощает, но не соглашается с ним.»

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to logic (in Ganya’s love for, but disagreement with, this initial version of the Idiot).

In the novel itself, Myshkin expounds upon the relationship between faith and feeling

directly, as in his discussion with Rogozhin, prompted by the pair’s viewing of the

reproduction of Holbein the Younger’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb

(1521-2). Here, Myshkin provides two examples of religious faith contradicted in

action: a peasant, who prays for forgiveness at the very moment of murdering a friend

for his watch; and the drunken solider, who sells Myshkin his own cross for an

inflated sum.76 From these examples, Myshkin extrapolates that “the essence of

religious feeling” is entirely separate of logic and judgment, and the narrative itself

provides several examples in support of his argument: the condemned man, mounting

the scaffold, kisses the cross “greedily,” with no apparently conscious religious

orientation; and Rogozhin’s senile mother blesses Myshkin on the basis of such

impulse, lacking any apparent reason, or even understanding of the immediate

situation. By defining faith as an essentially noetic, impulsive experience, Myshkin

also puts forward a rebuttal of atheism, on the basis of its very grounding in logic.77 In

other words, Myshkin both expounds, and exemplifies a faith-based form of religiosity

that exceeds both human reason, and the empirical evidence of reality; religious faith,

76 Dostoevsky seemed to have a particular interest in such paradoxical scenarios – of faith sustained in direct contradiction to an undertaken action. Similarly, in his Diary of a Writer, he discusses the news event of a poor seamstress, who committed suicide by jumping from a fourth-story window with an icon in her hands (23: 146). 77 “The essence of religious feeling does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanours. There is something else here, and there will always be something else – something that the atheists will for ever slur over; they will always be speaking not of that” (213). («…сущность рилигиозного чувства ни под какие рассуждения, ни под какие проступки и преступления и ни под какие атеизмы не подходит; тут что-то не то, и вечно будет не то; тут что-то такое, обо что вечно будут скользить атеизмы и вечно будут не про то говотить») (8: 184).

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rather, is an internal, impulsive, and ultimately paradoxical phenomenon, much like

the “intense inner light” it evokes.78

Ippolit, and the Failure of Empirical Vision

Myshkin’s challenge to atheism evokes his figural antithesis in the novel,

Ippolit, who in turn constitutes both a challenge to the ideal of faith, and a failure to

achieve its stipulated terms. Ippolit, however, does not assume an atheistic platform;

on the contrary, as he contends, at the conclusion of his “explanation”:

And yet, in spite of all my desire to do it, I could never conceive of there being no future life, no Providence. It seems most likely that they do exist, but that we don’t understand anything about the future life or its laws. But if this is so difficult and impossible to understand, surely I shan’t be held responsible for not being able to comprehend the inconceivable? (8: 344; 401)79

Ippolit’s existential revolt derives from man’s inability to discern the contours of the

future world, and, for that matter, the logic and structuring principle of the present,

phenomenal world, organized by the same accepted, yet obscure divine force. Ippolit,

like the later Ivan Karamazov, challenges not the existence of God, but the obscurity

of God’s plan, which has evidently condemned him to death. Though he claims that

not logic, but “disgust” has brought him to this conclusion, such disgust is prompted

by the lack of logic he discerns in the world, as well as the lack of any evidence of a

greater structural totality, or plan – his crisis, as such, is essentially empirical.

78 As Frank suggests: “For Dostoevsky, faith has thus now become completely internal, irrational, non-utilitarian; its truth could not be impugned by a failure to effect worldly changes, nor should it be defended rationally, as it were, because of the moral-psychological assuagements it might offer for human misery.” See Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871, 310. 79 «А между тем я никогда, несмотря даже на всë желание мое, не мог представить себе, что будущей жизни и провидения нет. Вернее всего, что всë это есть, но что мы ничего не понимаем в будущей жизни и в законах ее. Но если это так трудно и совершенно даже невозможно понять, то неужели я буду отвечать за то, что не в силах был осмыслить не постижимое?»

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Discussing morality, in the context of his own narrative of philanthropic activity (his

assistance to the provincial doctor), Ippolit decries man’s inability to discern the

influence of his own actions in the world; the manifestations of such action contribute

to a whole that cannot, in its totality, be discerned by humanity. Thus does he refer to

life as “an infinite multitude of ramifications hidden from us”: Ippolit desires that this

“multitude of ramifications” be exposed, providing him a privileged, transcendent

perspective on the whole of life itself. Though he earlier employs the metaphor of

Columbus, ranking the process of discovery above the goal itself, it is nonetheless

with the apparent caveat that there be an attainable, comprehensible goal, effacing

man’s typical perspective on arbitrary, contingent existence in everyday life.

Ippolit also displays the teleological orientation of Dostoevsky’s characters,

the longing for an end-point that will assign retrospective meaning and cohesion to the

preceding whole. Like Myshkin, he seeks evidence of this whole; however, he varies

from Myshkin in his unwillingness to simply accept, on the basis of faith, that the

greater design to his existence is adequate to his own, logical criteria. Ippolit even

explicitly identifies Myshkin with this opposing perspective, as his “explanation”

draws to a close. The difference between the two characters, meanwhile, is even more

striking, when one considers that Myshkin does, at moments, see the “whole”

illuminated, in the visionary moments of his epileptic prodromata. However, as we

have seen, the content of Myshkin’s visions are not simply the empirical cause and

effect that Ippolit seeks to discern in the world; on the contrary, Myshkin’s “flashes”

of faith constitute an impulse that directly contradicts, and thus redeems, this “dark”

reality. In typical Dostoevskian fashion, both characters encounter a world that is, at

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face value, grotesque, and even deplorable – Myshkin, in the mounting tragedy of

Nastasya Filippovna and Rogozhin; and Ippolit, in his own approaching death. In this,

each confronts the logical paradox of theodicy. However, as paradox, it defies logic

itself, prompting either acceptance or rebellion, the diverging paths chosen by

Myshkin and Ippolit, respectively. Meanwhile, the faith-based intuition of this

meaningful totality itself proceeds solely by way of feeling, but never rational

appraisal.80

Though Ippolit longs for empirical evidence of a transcendent unity, capable of

redeeming his tragic fate, he likewise demonstrates, ironically, the devastating reality

of knowing, let alone determining, one’s own “ending.” Ippolit knows that his death is

imminent and inevitable, and thus plans to take his own life, rather than submitting to

the imposition of a seemingly senseless fate. In essence, however, his initiative is

more a function of pride, a demonstration of free will, extending from his

metaphysical rebellion. To know his end approaches, in either fashion, forces him to

view his life as a completed totality, and thus to seek evidence of meaning, where

there evidently is none. In discerning his own end, Ippolit truly does “know

everything,” a dubious achievement that he shares, among other features, with the

condemned man, whose execution scenario is described by Myshkin, as a potential

subject for a painting, in his first meeting with the Epanchin women. Myshkin actually

80 My conclusion, on this point, essentially corresponds to the reading of Liza Knapp, who outlines a similar positing of faith, though in specific response to the “dead” world of science and technology. As she contends, “the argument underlying The Idiot is that time and space may not be destroyed by technology but only possibly by faith in Christ and the Second Coming.” See Knapp, The Annihilation of Inertia, 88. Elsewhere, Knapp suggests that this attempted “annihilation of inertia,” throughout Dostoevsky’s writings, proceeds from the individual’s sense of “God’s presence,” adumbrating the same basis of faith in feeling, and the attempt to sense some higher, organizing principle amidst phenomenal existence. See The Annihilation of Inertia, 13.

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describes two such scenarios to the Epanchinas: one, referenced above, in which the

condemned is granted a reprieve, which serves as a model for some of Myshkin's own

visionary experience; and a second, in which the execution is inevitable, and

prefigures Ippolit’s fate in the novel.81 In the former scenario, notably, the

condemned’s final moments (before his last-minute reprieve) are characterized by

epistemological uncertainty, and a corresponding imposition of imagination: faced

with his pending transition, at death, to an unknown ontological status, he endeavors

to imagine how such a transition could be possible:

He wanted to imagine as quickly and clearly as possible how it could be that now he existed and was living and in three minutes he would be something – someone or something. But what? Where? He meant to decide all that in those two minutes. (8: 52; 57)82

Facing death, the condemned man attempts to imagine that, which he cannot know,

the nature of the afterlife. Imagination, however, carries him beyond this

epistemological concern, and the narrative abruptly transitions to his contemplation of

reflected light, emblematic, as suggested above, of his experience of faith in his own

resurrection, in the afterlife. This continued existence, after death, cannot be known;

but it is refracted, as it were, in the light of faith here encountered. Imagination,

81 In fact, Myshkin’s conglomerate discourse on execution, during this first visit to the Epanchin home, is even more elaborate and protracted. First, on his arrival, he describes an execution he witnessed in France, to the family’s footman (8: 19-21). Later, in the family’s drawing room, he reprises the subject, first in a seemingly arbitrary reference to an imprisoned man, subsequently released, and treated in Schneider’s hospital (51); this quickly transitions to the story of another acquaintance, who received a last-minute reprieve from the death sentence (51-2). Finally, in providing Adelaida Epanchina with a subject for her painting, he describes yet another execution, this time lacking the possibility of reversal (55-6). It is this, ultimate description that provides a psychological model for Ippolit’s later suffering, though the description also invokes certain traits, and a few specific details (the description of the condemned’s face; his sudden weeping), from Myshkin’s initial discussion with the footman. 82 «…ему всë хотелось представить себе как можно скорее и ярче, что вот как же это так: он теперь есть и живет, а через три минуты будет уже нечто, кто-то или что-то – так кто же? где же? Всë это он думал в эти две минуты решить!»

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meanwhile, is posited as the cognitive concomitant of faith, as both enable the

individual’s transcendence of the empirical.

By comparison, in the latter scenario, presented as Myshkin’s sketch for a

potential painting, there is repeated emphasis on the fact that the condemned man

“knows everything” in the moments preceding his death. This motif of absolute

knowledge evokes Myshkin’s earlier description to the footman of the witnessed

execution (the memory of which he seems to draw upon, in sketching the premise for

the painting), when he discourses at length upon the psychological cruelty of certain

knowledge of one’s own death (8: 20-1).83 For such knowledge is at once absolute,

and devastating. Whereas the first prisoner, in choosing faith, embraces the unknown,

and the possibility of continued life (a possibility realized, in narrative, in his

reprieve), the second prisoner, like Ippolit, views his approaching end as absolute,

thereby casting the whole of empirical reality in the same conclusive light. Reality is

rendered naked, as it were, apprehended in its entirety, with no potential for

redemption. Appropriately, Myshkin prescribes an aesthetic equivalent of blunt, total

realism for the painting’s execution, even demanding that events preceding the

scaffold scene be rendered. As he instructs Adelaida: “You know, it is necessary to

show everything that happened before, everything, everything” (8: 55).84

Notably, at the onset of Myshkin’s sketch for the painting, he obliquely

references his recent encounter with a similar painting, likewise depicting execution,

in Basel; and while his actual description of the painting is humorously deferred 83 Knapp likewise remarks the correspondence between Ippolit’s situation, and the theme of certain death, embodied in the abundance of “death sentences” in the novel. See The Annihilation of Inertia, 89. 84 «Знаете, тут нужно всë представить, что было заранее, всë, всë.»

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(twice, no less) by Adelaida, it may be assumed that Myshkin’s ekphrasis of the

painting contributes to his sketch for Adelaida’s future project. As the editors of the

Academy edition observe, Myshkin likely refers here to the Hans Fries painting The

Beheading of John the Baptist (1514), in the collection of the Kunstmuseum in Basel

(9: 433). In light of the elaborated parallel, between Ippolit and the execution scenario

of Myshkin’s ekphrasis, it is interesting to likewise consider Ippolit in relation to the

subject of the Fries painting. While it would be an exaggeration to suggest that Ippolit

is closely modeled on the figure of John the Baptist, there are aspects of the latter’s

biblical presentation that ramify the thematic complex embodied by Ippolit. On the

one hand, John the Baptist serves as a “forerunner” to the values and salvation

manifest in Jesus: John anticipates Christ’s mission, yet falls short, chronologically, of

any full participation in Christ’s message. Similarly, Ippolit embodies significant

qualities (critical reason, philanthropy, love of life), many shared with Myshkin, which

nonetheless fall short of ensuring his salvation.

In another parallel more significant to the present discussion, John the Baptist

likewise experiences a momentary lapse in faith, despite an otherwise exemplary

record of service in the Gospels. In an episode recorded in two of the synoptic

Gospels, an imprisoned John sends his own disciples to Jesus to inquire if he is in fact

the messiah, or if another should be expected.85 The episode is meant to demonstrate

the difficulty of John’s position, anticipating possible execution; and in both variants,

Christ’s reproving of his disbelief is understated, overshadowed by his praise of

John’s service. Still, the episode demonstrates that even such a laudatory figure 85 This passage can be found in Matthew 11: 2-19 and Luke 7: 18-35. See the Oxford NIV Scofield Study Bible, 986-87, 1060-61

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wavers in faith (a tendency later reprised by the apostle Peter).86 Moreover, and most

importantly, the event demonstrates just how challenging faith is in John’s position:

not only does John, at this moment, live in imposed solitude, separated from the

unfolding salvation narrative; he in fact lives, and dies, before the culmination of this

narrative, when Christ ensures redemption for humanity in his Crucifixion and

Resurrection. In other words, John the Baptist is expected to maintain faith in an event

that has not yet occurred. As “forerunner,” John is a transitional figure in religious

history; however, unlike every subsequent follower of Christ, he is denied access to

the historical event at the center of Christian belief, and the basis of Christian faith, the

Resurrection. John the Baptist, ultimately, is a model for the most difficult form of

faith – a faith without precedent, or even any historical (let alone institutional)

foundation.

86 John’s momentary lapse in faith is, alternatively, still more profound when one considers his witnessing of the miraculous. It is John’s baptism of Christ, after all, which entails the descent of the heavenly dove, emblematic of the grace imparted by Christ to the world, and later present in the form of the Holy Spirit. Similarly, the Gospel of John reports that John the Baptist only recognized Jesus as God on account of the dove’s descent. As John the Baptist claims:

“I myself did not know him, but the reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be revealed to Israel.” Then John gave this testimony: “I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. I would not have known him, except that the one who sent me to baptize with water told me, ‘The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is he who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.’ I have seen and I testify that this is the Son of God” (John 1: 31-34).

See the Oxford NIV Scofield Study Bible, 1095. Notably, John’s testimony twice refers to his not knowing Christ: this problem of recognition prefigures John’s later questioning of Christ’s divinity, and also assigns a cognitive, epistemological dimension to his attempt to discern Christ. Meanwhile, it is also significant that John, in baptizing Christ, participates in the public, liturgical disclosure of Christ’s divinity, as this event serves as the biblical foundation for the Orthodox feast of Theophany (in Russian, Bogoiavlenie). The feast celebrates the interpenetration of transcendent and human realms, as Jesus reveals himself, as messiah, to the gathered elect. In Western churches, the equivalent feast is Epiphany, which celebrates the disclosure of the infant Christ’s divinity to the Magi. In the Orthodox feast, however, the representation of transcendent forces is far more extensive.

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Faith, Imagination, and the Challenge of Holbein’s Dead Christ

The implied relationship between Ippolit and both the condemned man, and

John the Baptist, reinforces the difficulty of faith in Ippolit’s position: deprived, by

fate, of the possibility of a human, temporal future, he subsequently loses faith in the

possibility of a meaningful future beyond death.87 Having rejected the higher power

that condemned him to death, he takes no comfort in its provision of redemption. As

suggested above, meanwhile, it is imagination that allows for this possibility of a

future life, carrying the subject beyond the threshold of death. If Ippolit discerns a

tragic opposition, between devastating empirical knowledge (the evidence of his

imposed fate), and radical freedom (his rebellion, in attempted suicide, against that

fate), then faith and imagination provide a conjoined middle course, enabling man to

maintain autonomy vis-à-vis the possible – that which is neither confirmed, nor

disallowed by empirical evidence. For both faith and imagination, similarly, allow the

87 Despite their evident differences, there are other traits, shared by Ippolit and John the Baptist, though they exceed the present discussion of challenged faith. Most notably, each exemplifies an experience of profound isolation – John in his hermetic life in the desert, and subsequent imprisonment; Ippolit in the confinement of his room. Ippolit even contrasts the site of his literal and psychological enclosure, rendered metonymically in the image of “Meyer’s wall” (a neighboring building, viewed from his window), with the broader phenomena of nature and society, to which his fate has denied him admission. Finally, Dostoevsky’s paralleling of Ippolit and John the Baptist clearly implies an analogous relationship of Myshkin to Christ himself, a figural relationship extensively addressed in existing secondary literature, and even suggested in Dostoevsky’s notes for the novel. In the specific context, however, of the Christ-John dynamic, and the metaphor of the “forerunner,” it is interesting to consider Ippolit as one who anticipates, yet fails to fully achieve, the faith brought forward in the character of Myshkin. To this end, there is a marked parallel between Christ’s learning of the death of John, and Myshkin’s state following the presentation of Ippolit’s “explanation,” and his thwarted suicide attempt. As Matthew 14: 13 reports, Christ responds to the report of John’s death by withdrawing to a “solitary place.” See the Oxford NIV Scofield Study Bible, 994. Myshkin, similarly, experiences a longing for withdrawal and solitude. Notably, Myshkin also reflects on his own sense of solitude and isolation, as a point of identity with Ippolit; and just as Christ, one assumes, withdraws to mourn John’s death, it is also, perhaps, his awareness of sharing John’s fate that he adjourns to contemplate. In other words, in both scenarios there is a sense of identity with the deceased (or, in Ippolit’s case, the soon to be deceased), as well as an imperative to transcend the “forerunner” in the direction of a more positive spiritual model.

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subject to transcend a discerned, tragic ending, in death, to reach a different ending,

far superior precisely because of its indeterminate, and even elusive nature.

Appropriately, Dostoevsky’s discourse on imagination is first introduced in relation to

death, as Myshkin discusses the witnessed execution with the Epanchins' footman. In

the course of their conversation, Myshkin repeatedly invokes imagination as a means

of apprehending the horror of certain knowledge of one’s own death, as in the case of

execution. Here, however, imagination is posited as a corrective to such certain

knowledge, as it is also subsequently characterized in Myshkin’s discussion of the

reprieved convict. As if to stress the innate, universal character of the faculty,

Myshkin refers to his imagination, and implores the footman to employ his own in

conjuring the horror of the scenario; meanwhile, the narrator corroborates this shared

faculty, describing the footman thusly: “perhaps, he too was a man with imagination,

and the capacity for thought” (8: 20).

The crux, however, of the novel’s discourse on imagination, as well as its most

powerful challenge to imagination’s redemptive potential, centers around discussion

of Holbein’s Dead Christ. Like the aforementioned painting of his contemporary

Fries, Holbein’s is located in the same Basel museum, where Dostoevsky viewed both

in 1867, shortly before beginning work on the novel. Whereas Fries portrays a human

on the verge of imminent death, Holbein renders the incarnate God on the other side of

this threshold, following execution, in the confines of his tomb. The body of Holbein’s

Christ displays evidence of the Passion, as well as possible signs of the corruption of

the corpse; as such, it presents a visual, empirical challenge to the possibility of the

Resurrection, and thus to the faith of its audience. Appropriately, discussion of the

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Holbein figures in relation to Rogozhin and Ippolit, who each suffer from a loss of

faith, as if prompted and given expression by the painting itself. Ippolit stresses the

exemplary, naturalistic realism of the painting, which presents “in full view” (v

polnom vide) the apparent, empirical evidence of Christ’s failure in death, and the

triumph of insensate nature. In other words, the Holbein is representative of a tragic

reality that defies faith.

Yet, Dostoevsky’s novel posits, as we have seen, a model of faith in open

contradiction to natural reality, in Myshkin’s “flashes” of illumination amidst the

epileptic prodromata. Like Myshkin’s knowledge of Rogozhin’s plot, the Holbein

presents empirical evidence of a terrible “idea” or “thought,” consistent with the

cognitive, logical basis of doubt and despair in the example of Ippolit. However, just

as Myshkin’s flashes defy reality, the possibility of the Resurrection defies the reality

of nature. If resurrection (whether divine, or personal) is for the believer the supreme

imaginative act, then it is likewise imagination that can carry the viewer beyond the

demoralizing “truth” of the Holbein. As Julia Kristeva observes, in her discussion of

the painting, “the imaginative capability of Western man, which is fulfilled within

Christianity, is the ability to transfer meaning to the very place where it was lost in

death and/or nonmeaning.”88 The Holbein, to be sure, offers an extreme challenge to

this imaginative capacity, giving expression to the very death of meaning, the divine

Logos of Christ himself. However, consistent with Dostoevsky’s practice in the novel,

the painting serves to heighten the logical contradiction, between external evidence

and internal belief, to the point of inducing paradox; it is left, I will suggest, to 88 Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 103.

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Dostoevsky’s characters, and his readers, to move beyond such paradox, by way of

faith and imagination.

The Rejection of Vertical Transcendence

The Holbein proves central to a broader thematic complex, manifest in a series

of binary oppositions in the novel. Notably, it is also in Basel, the location of the Fries

and Holbein paintings, where Myshkin is roused from his epileptic stupor and

depression by the braying of a donkey, which seems to impart mental clarity, and

initiates his tenure in Switzerland, in the years predating narrative action. Though

Myshkin reflects fondly upon his time in Switzerland, his experience there ultimately

assumes an inferior, and even negative coloration, in opposition to the spiritual values

associated with Russia.

Myshkin’s narrative of his time abroad centers primarily on his compassion for

the marginalized Swiss girl Marie, and his rallying of the local children in her support,

comprising the majority of part I, chapter 6 (8: 57-65). Marie, a consumptive, had

been seduced away from the village by a French traveler, returning later to the

unanimous castigation of the community, and even her own mother. While the

episode, in itself, demonstrates Myshkin’s significant compassion, it also exposes the

inhuman moralism of the village’s Protestant culture, in its vicious attack on the girl:

even the village pastor joins in her deriding, blaming the mother’s subsequent death on

her adulterous behavior. In addition to this, more subtle critique, Dostoevsky’s

conglomerate attack on Western Christianity in the novel includes Myshkin’s later

invective against the Roman Catholic Church, at his “engagement party” (8: 450-53).

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Meanwhile, the children themselves, before their embracing of Marie, are ruthless in

their own attack: it is only their innate, pre-socialized goodness (typical of

Dostoevskian children) that allows them to transcend the culturally normative

persecution of the girl. Still, even the children fail to discern the basis of Myshkin’s

love for the victimized Marie, interpreting his humanitarian impulse as a romantic one.

The Marie episode focalizes certain thematic valences associated with

Switzerland in the novel. Namely, it is the romantic, and specifically sublime features

of the Swiss landscape, which give figural expression to both literary and spiritual

dimensions of Western culture that Dostoevsky views as problematic. During his

initial months in the village, Myshkin spends much time alone in the mountains,

before making the acquaintance of the local children. As the setting suggests, and his

description confirms (“I used to go brooding alone in the mountains” – ia ukhodil

toskovat’ odin v gory), there is a Byronic posture to Myshkin’s initial behavior,

appropriate to the environment. This tendency, of course, is inherently solitary, and

non-participatory. Appropriately, when Myshkin later reflects on his time in

Switzerland, as he awaits Aglaya Epanchina in the park in Pavlovsk, his memory is

prefaced by a longing for withdrawal, as if to return to this Western site of

disengagement. Overall, his Swiss idyll is predominantly a period of isolation, in

marked contrast with the onset of his “public career,” at the novel’s opening, and his

subsequent engagement in Russian social life.

Meanwhile, Dostoevsky’s criticism of Western spiritual culture is projected,

literally, on the sublime Swiss landscape. As if in parody of Western literary models,

Myshkin spends his time amidst mountains and waterfalls, crumbling castles and

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towering pines, all emblematic of a sublime, vertical orientation.89 Significantly, in his

first description of the Swiss terrain, his enumeration of these vertical phenomena, he

draws attention to the restlessness these surroundings evoked in him, as if actually

compelling him forward, and elsewhere (8: 50-51). Surprisingly, Myshkin seems to

identify the shortcomings of his environment; such characterization, however, in light

of Dostoevsky’s religious thematic, is entirely cogent. This sublime landscape

provides a literal, empirical experience of grandeur; it contradicts the internal values

of faith and imagination, and is therefore deemed a diminutive, and even illusory

encounter with the transcendent. The sublime, after all, as Kant postulates, is entirely

grounded in human reason: its effect is induced by the logical attempt to encompass,

in rational terms (the concepts of infinity, the absolute, etc.), that which “surpasses

every measure of the senses.”90 Moreover, as traditional theories of the sublime

maintain, it is a “radically privative” event, essentially commandeering the perception

of the subject.91 Though edifying, the experience of the sublime is ultimately passive,

empirical, and grounded in human logic, lacking any true correlation with the

transcendent.

89 Mountains function as a synecdoche for Switzerland throughout the novel. Consider this amusing excerpt from Myshkin’s initial, abrupt conversation with Kolya, on moving into the Ivolgin home:

- Ganya says you’ve just arrived from Switzerland? - Yes. - Is it nice in Switzerland? - Very. - Mountains? - Yes. - I’ll bring you your bundle now (8: 78).

90 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 134. 91 Harsha Ram provides an excellent survey of theories of the sublime, from Longinus to Hegel, though with greater attention to its aesthetic application to Russian poetry, in The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 11-17.

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Given the terms of Dostoevsky’s religious discourse, the sublime is thus

conceived as an artificial or facile mode of perceptual access to the transcendent,

which even revokes the individual’s autonomy and imaginative capacity. In addition

to embodying these critiqued features of the sublime, the vertical orientation of the

Swiss landscape also gives figural expression to certain Christian valences, which

Dostoevsky likewise targets for criticism. Namely, verticality maps the redemptive

metaphor of the cross, a parallel made explicit in the story of Marie. Myshkin reports

how Marie, in the final stages of her illness, would sit flushed against a “sheer, nearly

vertical rock” for hours at a time. Marie’s pose, in the context of her persecution, is

clearly meant to evoke the Crucifixion. Without in any way ironizing Marie’s tragedy

(or, for that matter, Christ’s), Dostoevsky does critique the Christian tradition’s

configuration of the cross as a symbol of triumph over death. The cross, like the Swiss

mountains, is simply picturesque, as Marie’s narrative, though truly unfortunate,

seems drawn from some Rousseauian idyll. In other words, as a visual leitmotif of the

Christian liturgical environment, the cross aestheticizes, and thus diminishes,

transcendent experience. The cross itself, moreover, belongs to material, empirical

reality – it survives Christ’s death, as figural testimony to his sacrifice. Though

ostensibly a symbol of the Crucifixion, emphasis has shifted, over the course of

Christian history, to a more triumphant interpretation of this visual symbol (just as

Christianity itself, and specifically Roman Catholicism, Dostoevsky suggests, in its

historical ascendancy has assumed a position of temporal authority). As such, the

cross requires neither faith nor imagination for its activation, having replaced this need

with an elaborated institutional history.

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By comparison, Holbein’s painting essentially opposes those valences

adumbrated in the Swiss landscape, substituting horizontality for verticality, and harsh

realism for romantic fantasy. It is ironic that the Holbein is itself located in

Switzerland, and the work of a German artist, as it here serves to focalize

Dostoevsky’s critical response to Western spiritual values.92 The painting’s highly

unusual dimensions (30.5 x 200 cm; approximately 1 x 6.5 ft) emphasize the

horizontal orientation of the supine Christ, who is rendered to scale.93 The corpse,

meanwhile, is fully and evenly lit, illuminating the onset of the body's decay,

consistent with the painting's stark, unflinching verisimilitude. Far from the

redemptive, vertical pose of the cross, Holbein confines Christ in a horizontal tomb,

calling into question the very possibility of resurrection, as the body apparently

succumbs to the fate of organic matter. Consistent with Myshkin's directive to

Adelaida, to “show everything” in her painting of the execution, Holbein's Dead

Christ is the artistic equivalent of empirical reality, seemingly bereft of future

possibility.

Yet, Dostoevsky posits the Holbein as an ultimate hurdle to faith, and thus a

gateway, through paradox, to faith itself. Though the painting, in itself, may be

92 Appropriately, however, Holbein’s painting is a product of the Protestant Reformation, and thus emerges from a rebellion with institutional religious norms. On the history of the work, and analysis of Holbein himself, see Kristeva, Black Sun, 105-38. 93 During Myshkin’s encounter with the painting, the narrator gauges its dimensions to be 2.5 arshins x 6 vershoks (approximately 5.8 x .9 ft). Though less than the parameters of the actual painting, the discrepancy may be attributed to an error in the narrator's calculation; the fact that it is a reproduction, and potentially smaller; or simply Dostoevsky's own lack of knowledge of the precise dimensions, as he was presumably working from memory. The dimensions provided, in any event, are close to those of the original, and nonethess convey the painting's horizontal orientation. In fact, the narrator first mentions the paintings width, and draws attention to its low height (“no more than 6 vershoks in height” – ne bolee shesti vershkov v vysoty), as if to stress this unusual, though significant aspect of the composition.

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interpreted as a statement of atheism, its function and potential are contextually

reconfigured in The Idiot. The novel, I have argued, elaborates a paradigm of faith in

complete opposition to empirical reality, and this same impulse, Dostoevsky suggests,

should inform the response to the painting – to accept Christ as risen, and humanity as

redeemed, in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Far from any triumphant, sublime

iteration of Christian belief, the Holbein calls the viewer to follow Christ underground,

as it were, into the darkness of the tomb. If institutional Christianity, providing the

comfort of tradition and community, allows the subject to circumvent the essential

paradox of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, The Body of the Dead Christ in the

Tomb, an image free of institional rhetoric, demands a direct and solitary encounter

with this paradox, prompting either atheism (or, relatedly, madness), or faith. “Les

extrêmités,” Ippolit suggests, in the context of these alternatives, “se touchent” (8:

338).94

94 In contrast with the Holbein’s bright, devastating realism, and rejection of institutional rhetoric, it is noteworthy that in Rogozhin’s dark drawing-room, the location of the reproduction, Myshkin likewise notices “a few pictures, all portraits of bishops and landscapes, in which it was impossible to discern anything” (neskol’ko kartin, vse portrety arkhiereev i peizazhi, na kotorykh nichego nel’zia bylo razlichit’) (8: 181). The Holbein nonetheless emerges clearly in this environment, as if to further impress the extent of its realism, in apparent opposition to the representational obscurity of images of institutional religious authority, and presumably picturesque landscapes. Though the precise type of landscape, obviously, is not identified, it is tempting to interpret this reference as a subtle, aesthetic extension of Dostoevsky’s critique, by way of the Holbein, of both institutional religion, and the metaphorical valences of the sublime landscape. If the Holbein, again, exposes everything, demanding a sustained faith in spite of what is seen, these alternative aesthetic models (and institutional Christianity) show little, allowing the viewer to avoid any true challenge. Moreover, though the denomination of the represented bishops is also not identified, it is interesting that they reside in the home of Rogozhin, who suffers, arguably, from the most complete collapse of faith in the novel, and whose family is frequently associated with strains of sectarian belief. While Dostoevsky does not, I think, develop the sectarian motif fully in the novel, it is possible, in the context of the present discussion, to incorporate Orthodox sectarianism in Dostoevsky’s wide-ranging critique of institutional Christianity. Russian sectarians (such as the Old Believers (Starovery, or Staroobiadtsy), with whom Rogozhin is associated) place significant emphasis on the tradition and external forms of religious belief, contrary to Dostoevsky’s emphasis upon the internal, individual nature of faith. I return to the discussion of Old Believers in the next chapter, in my analysis of Leskov’s The Sealed Angel. Dostoevsky’s critique is, perhaps, not simply a de facto attack on Western

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This horizontal paradigm given expression in the Holbein corresponds to the

perfectly flat landscape of Russia, to which Myshkin returns at the opening of the

novel. In relating his impressions of the Swiss sublime, Myshkin reports how in the

mountains he seemed to hear a “call,” drawing him forward along a horizontal axis, to

the point of the horizon itself. This mysterious “call” also marks a shift from a vertical

to horizontal orientation in Myshkin’s perceptions (figured literally in the horizon,

“the line…where earth and sky meet”), anticipating his parallel transition from

Switzerland to Russia. While the cause of Myshkin’s departure for Switzerland, his

medical condition, is evident, the reason for his return to Russia is relatively obscure.

Though he returns, ostensibly, to claim his inheritance, he seems to care little about

the details; on the contrary, as he discloses to the Epanchin women, “Now I am going

among people” (teper’ ia k liudiam idu), imparting a vocational quality to his

experience, consistent with the aforementioned “call.”95 Following the solitary nature

of his life in Switzerland, Myshkin returns to embrace a role of participation, and even

influence: no longer among children, as in Switzerland, he enters adult society.

Myshkin suggests, meanwhile, in his letter to Aglaya, that he feels at home in Russia,

no longer a foreigner, following his alienated experience of Switzerland (8: 264).

Christianity (as the barbed references to Protestantism and Roman Catholicism might suggest), but a more general assessment of a particular shortcoming of institutional religion. Notably, though Russia is posited as a positive alternative to Western spiritual values, which I discuss below, it is not in the context of Russian Orthodoxy per se, which figures relatively little in the novel. In other words, Dostoevsky’s critique of institutional Christianity is relatively broad, potentially encompassing Russian models, even as aspects of Russian culture and psychology are deemed superior to Western variants. 95 In a notebook entry, designated as “the main idea of the first section of the second part,” Dostoevsky writes: “The Prince returns bewildered by the immensity of his new impressions of Russia, his anxieties, ideas, his state of mind, and what there is to do” (Kniaz’ vozvrashchaetsia, smushchennyi gromadnostiiu novykh vpechatlenii o Rossii, zabot, idei, sostoianiia, i chto delat’) (9: 256; 208; italics in original). The passage evokes the same notion of an ambiguous mission or vocation, related to Myshkin's return to Russia.

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Moreover, Mme. Epanchina even suggests, in her first meeting with Myshkin, that his

return was fated for her benefit, claiming: “I believe that God brought you from

Switzerland to Petersburg precisely for my sake…God planned it precisely in this

manner” (8: 70).96 Epanchina, as elsewhere, gives an ironic cast to the notion of

Myshkin’s “fated” return, but nonetheless conveys the idea that he has returned for

some, perhaps inevitable cause.

Notably, it is the Russian climate, Myshkin suggests, that contributes to his

epileptic fits, accounting for his original departure, and the recurrence of the illness,

with his return to Russia. It is hardly circumstantial, meanwhile, that Myshkin’s

visionary capacity is implicitly connected to his epileptic condition, irrespective of the

dubious providence of the experience itself. Russia, in other words, is the site of

Myshkin’s epiphanies, and they may only, it is suggested, occur on Russian soil. To

return, briefly, to Myshkin’s visionary experience, in the climactic scene of part II,

chapter 5, it seems that Dostoevsky here employs a vertical motif, in order to

ultimately undermine it. Entering the hotel in pursuit of Rogozhin, Myshkin

immediately climbs the dark, narrow staircase; his ascent, however, is interrupted by

Rogozhin’s emergence from a niche on the first landing – a horizontal plane abruptly

intersecting the vertical. It is precisely this intersection, however, in the confrontation,

which illuminates Rogozhin’s plot, and prompts Myshkin’s epiphany itself.

Appropriately, Myshkin subsequently slides down the stairs, during his fit, returning

to the ground floor. Though moments of epiphany, as Northrop Frye suggests, are

typically associated with figures of height in Western literature, Dostoevsky 96 «…я верую, что вас именно для меня бог привел в Петербург из Швейцарии…Бог именно так рассчитал.»

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deliberately subverts this commonplace, in elaborating an alternative, horizontal

model of faith, as well as epiphany.97

This contributes, of course, to a more general conception of Russia as a

spiritual alternative to Europe, emerging in the nineteenth century, and projected,

metaphorically, onto the national landscape. As Christopher Ely observes, over the

course of the nineteenth century, the deficiencies of Russia’s ostensibly unremarkable

(and essentially horizontal) landscape were in fact ascribed value in the culturally-

mediated, aesthetic constitution of a Russian national landscape, contributing to a

developing sense of Russian exceptionalism.98 Not surprisingly, in light of the

simultaneously creative and ideological parameters of such a project, political

nationalists, such as the “Native Soil” conservatives, or Pochvenniki, a group

including Dostoevsky, would proceed to apply a metaphysical interpretation of this

elaborated Russian landscape.99 This strategy is evident in Dostoevsky’s famous

Pushkin Speech of 1880, in which repeated references to the Russian “soil” (pochva)

and the mythologized narod, or Russian people, constitute the basis of Dostoevsky’s

challenge to Western ideals, as well as those members of the Russian intelligentsia

(including, notably, Tolstoy and Turgenev) who seek to “elevate” the narod, rather

97 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, 204. 98 “The very lack of picturesque scenery…became a prized attribute of Russia’s national landscape. What came to be valorized in its place was the vast openness of the level, unforested steppes and plains, the uncultivated, unmanicured nature of dense forests only lightly brushed by human inhabitation, the seasonal extremes, and even the distinctive emptiness and impoverishment of the stubborn agricultural lands.” See Ely, This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002), 7, 23. 99 Ibid., 25, 226.

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than coexisting with them in horizontal universality (26: 144).100 Meanwhile,

Dostoevsky also applies the Russian Orthodox ideal of kenosis (or spiritual self-

abasement, modeled on Christ) to the “destitute” Russian land, citing Tiutchev’s

famous poem “These poor settlements” [Eti bednye selen’ia] (26: 148). Employing

what Marcus Levitt defines as a “rhetoric of paradox,” Dostoevsky interprets such

destitution as an actual qualification for Russia’s spiritual superiority, and its God-

bearing, messianic role among nations.101

As the Pushkin Speech exemplifies, Dostoevsky intentionally denies the

Russian landscape the grandeur of its European counterpart, while projecting

alternative, superior values on the vast Russian horizon.102 Consistent with

Dostoevsky's kenotic coloration of the Russian people and landscape, the horizontal

motif, focalized in the Holbein, stresses Christ's descent and humanity, his life on the

shared plane of human existence; by comparison, the vertical Christian motif stresses

Christ's divinity and ascent, in an image of triumph (which the Holbein literally

subverts, by situating Christ underground). Meanwhile, the notion of endless

horizontal breadth corresponds to the linear, diachronic progression of human time, a

progression Christ shares in the course of his incarnate, human life. In fact, the

100 The Pushkin Speech was published subsequently in the August 1880 edition of the Diary of a Writer, and can be found in PSS 26: 136-49. 101 Marcus Levitt, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 130-1. Levitt continues: “For Dostoevsky…Russia’s squalor and backwardness were the very things that keep pure the ideal of Christ, spoiled elsewhere, and indicated God’s special plans for the nation.” 102 Interestingly, Levitt remarks how Dostoevsky frequently employs the vertical image of the Tower of Babel in his attacks on the logical predilections, and spiritual downfall, of Western culture, a motif with apocalyptic associations. See ibid., 136.

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horizontal motif is even explicitly evoked in relation to the Incarnation, in the Gospel

of Luke; foretelling Christ's arrival, John the Baptsist proclaims:

As is written in the book of the words of Isaiah [40: 3-5] the prophet: “A voice of one calling in the dessert, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him. Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill made low. The crooked roads shall become straight, the rough ways smooth. And all mankind will see God’s salvation.’” (Luke 3: 4-6)103

As the passage from Luke suggests, Christ will actually serve to level the landscape, a

metaphor intended to convey that salvation shall be visible, and thus available to all.

Notably, when Myshkin describes his experience of the “call,” prompting his

transition from the Swiss sublime, to the Russian horizontal, he proceeds immediately,

even abruptly, to discussion of the first (reprieved) prisoner, remarking: “it seemed to

me that in prison one might also find an immense life” (8: 51).104 The organization of

Myshkin’s narration is significant, of course, as it fosters a paradoxical equivalency

between horizontal immensity and confinement – both features of Holbein’s Dead

Christ. The endless horizon, like prison, is bereft of any means of triumph or descent;

inhabitants of the horizontal are thus further from heaven, as it were, denied the

sublime approximation of the transcendent. Yet, like Myshkin’s stubborn opposition

to empirically induced despair, the condemned offers a model of faith that may, in

turn, be seen as an interpretive model for the Holbein: facing his own certain death

and “entombment,” the convict maintains belief in his own resurrection, secured on

the basis of belief in Christ’s Resurrection. The condemned man exemplifies a

103 Oxford NIV Scofield Study Bible, 1053. 104 «…мне казалось, что и в тюрьме можно огромную жизнь найти.»

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particular and necessary form of vision, thematized in Myshkin’s conversation with

Adelaida, and her own admission that she does not know “how to look.”

In The Idiot, “knowing how to look” entails knowing how to look beyond what

is seen, to sustain belief in that which exceeds representation, or even contradicts the

represented. The Holbein painting is itself the most extreme “call” to such vision and

faith, in its radical challenge to faith on the basis of empirical vision. In the context of

the novel, the painting exemplifies the paradoxical nature of faith, demanding that the

viewer see Christ’s death, and even decay, yet believe in his Resurrection. Ironically,

the Holbein is a model of Russian faith, which seems to typically prompt its Russian

viewers in the novel to lose their faith, only heightening its paradoxical function in the

text.105 In this respect, it contributes to the general prevalence of paradox in the novel.

As suggested above, there are paradoxical features, modeled on the Apocalypse,

inherent to Myshkin’s visionary experience (coincidence of the eternal and temporal;

heaven and earth), and even the basis of such experience, simultaneously the function

of illness, and a means of access to the transcendent. Paradox even figures at the

narrative level, when one considers the “two loves” motif, and Myshkin’s socially

incomprehensible “courtship” of two women, which necessarily culminates in tragedy.

The novel deliberately cultivates paradox, to force the reader to move beyond it, just

105 While the Holbein is meant to function as an absolute challenge to faith, and thus, paradoxically, to in fact instill faith, in imagination, I believe there are still narrative hints, prompting the reader to a positive, redeeming encounter with the work. The first description of the painting, notably, is from the perspective of the narrator, who identifies the subject as the “Savior” (Spasitel’), rather than Jesus or Christ, a nomenclature predicated on the belief that the Resurrection was, in fact, accomplished, as if the narrator maintains such a perspective (8: 181). Similarly, when Ippolit describes his response to the painting, he decries how nature, though possibly created for the sake of the Incarnation, could proceed to destroy Christ (8: 339). Yet, as the formulation itself reveals, nature remains secondary to Christ, guaranteeing his ability to overcome it in the Resurrection. Both details, I think, imply a faith-based narrative perspective on Holbein’s faith-challenging work.

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as Dostoevsky’s characters are expected to transcend the empirical in the direction of

faith. Improbably, Dostoevsky elicits his audience to read against the apparent reality

of the novel.106

Holbein’s Painting as Hermeneutic Model Ironically, The Idiot is the aesthetic antinomy of Holbein's Dead Christ.

Whereas Holbein resorts to a devastating naturalism, revealing everything,

Dostoevsky's novel reveals little, leaving much shrouded in obscurity. This contrast

demonstrates Dostoevsky's essential variance from more mimetic approaches to

literary realsm, as exemplified by such naturalists as Flaubert and Zola, and also

evident, in mitigated form, in the novels of Turgenev and Tolstoy.107 While this

reflects Dostoevky's favoring of “fantastic realism” in his fiction, I wish to emphasize

how Dostoevsky’s aesthetics contributes, in this respect, to consideration of the

religious thematic in his work. As I have demonstrated, Dostoevsky’s novelistic

world, as well as his religious paradigm, is predicated upon the necessary condition of

“something else” lying beyond the perceptual field, whether situated in the interstices

of narrative, beyond its temporal scope, or even beyond the material world. This 106 I wish to thank Monika Greenleaf for inspiring and prompting so many of my ideas on The Idiot, and particularly the function of the Holbein painting, and the metaphysical valences assigned to landscape in the novel. The latter concepts originated in her insights and suggestions during a crucial meeting in Spring 2009, forming the basis for much of the present chapter. 107 Consideration of Dostoevsky’s “realism” far exceeds the scope of the present discussion. However, it is notable that Dostoevsky adheres to most (though not all) of the “normative” criteria of Russian Realism, specifically, as elaborated by John Mersereau in his article “Toward a Normative Definition of Russian Realism,” in California Slavic Studies, Vol. 6 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1971). Still, it is undeniable that Dostoevsky, given his stature, played a significant role in defining the canon of Russian Realist conventions; Mersereau’s stipulation, for example, that possibility supplants probability as the determinant of events, is primarily grounded in the precedents of Gogol and Dostoevsky. Moreover, Dostoevsky’s adherence to such normative criteria is seldom absolute or consistent; in The Idiot, for example, one could not maintain that narrative devices are always imperceptible, that the narrative voice is always (or even mostly) homogeneous, or that the story material itself is consistently motivated.

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propulsive, and even proleptic tendency, a teleological grasping at the possible, is

prevalent in all of Dostoevsky’s characters, while it also maps onto the greater

narrative plane of the novel, which seems to literally gesture beyond itself, to that

which was not included (and even, perhaps, could not be). This orientation,

apparently, was integral to Dostoevsky’s conception not only of literary realism, but

even of reality itself. As he remarks, in a famous passage from the Diary of a Writer of

1876:

…of course we are never able to exhaust the whole of a phenomenon, to penetrate to its end and its beginning. We are familiar only with what is immediately visible and present, and see that only from the surface in passing, whereas the ends and beginnings – they are all for the time being fantastic for man.” (23: 144-45).108

This passage appears in Dostoevsky's article “Dva samoubiistva” (“Two Suicides”)

amidst more general considerations of the difficulty of representing reality in literature

– a problem The Idiot thematizes, on the semantic level, and attempts to address, on

the poetic level, in its presentation of Myshkin’s unique epiphanic experience. The

passage also, meanwhile, references that which exceeds this reality, those elusive

“ends and beginnings” of a given phenomenon; it is a function of Dostoevsky’s

literary world to gesture beyond the middle, or represented, toward such endings, as

well as to demonstrate how they impact the present, as telos – imparting meaning and

structure, anxiety and expectation. This tendency lends a special quality to

Dostoevskian reality, which L. P. Grossman terms “prophetic,” and Joseph Brodsky,

similarly, identifies as a challenge to mimetic realism itself: 108 «…разумеется, никогда нам не исчерпать всего явления, не добраться до конца и начало его. Нам знакома одно лишь насущное видимо-текущее, да и то по-наглядке, а концы и начала – это всë еще пока для человека фантастическое.» Original citation in Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 315.

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[Dostoevsky’s] art was anything but mimetic: it wasn’t imitating reality; it was creating, or better still, reaching for one. In this vector of his he was effectively straying from Orthodoxy (or for that matter from any creed). He simply felt that art is not about life, if only because life is not about life.109

In reaching for a future reality, however, Dostoevsky by no means leaves the reader

with an impoverished version of the present. On the contrary, it is precisely such

reaching that enables the transcendent moments of epiphany, such as Myshkin

experiences, and such as The Idiot, ultimately, if obliquely, prescribes. In Dostoevsky,

the “middle” is a dark, yet sanctified realm, illuminated by sudden “flashes” of faith,

sudden eruptions within the breadth of horizontal reality.110

Holbein’s Dead Christ provides its own stark internal light; yet it requires this

illuminating spark of faith, to bring the viewer to the other side of represented despair

and atrocity, imparting a bivalent capacity to the motif of light itself. By placing the

Holbein within The Idiot, Dostoevsky conforms the painting to his own aesthetic

program, enabling the contextual reconfiguration of the painting’s content. The

Holbein also functions as a figural model for another tragic corpse, the body of the

murdered Nastasya Filippovna; the painting’s location, in Rogozhin’s home, is

significant not only as a statement of his collapsed faith, but as a foreshadowing of her

109 Brodsky, “Catastrophes in the Air,” in Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 268-303; 278. The Grossman citation is taken from Jackson, Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form, 242-3, note 2. 110 Marcus Levitt identifies Pentecost, the event marking the descent of the Holy Spirit to earth, as the basis of Dostoevsky’s belief in the sanctified nature of reality. He writes: “In Dostoevsky’s view, since the miracle of Pentacost the whole world has been infused with the Holy Spirit and thus contains the possibility of divine transfiguration within itself.” See Levitt, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880, 134. I would only add to Levitt’s excellent observation that this Pentecostal motif exemplifies a more general emphasis in Russian Orthodoxy, on the grace suffusing the material, human world. Moreover, the symbol of the Holy Spirit is already present in the aforementioned iconography of the Feast of Theophany, in the descent of the dove to Christ during his baptism at the hands of John. The Holy Spirit itself, moreover, is meant to adumbrate and extend the redemptive potential already accomplished in the Incarnation.

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horizontal “interment,” in the novel’s climactic scene. Rogozhin’s room, the site of the

corpse, is meant to serve as a tomb (and he appears, fittingly, to have no intention of

removing the corpse from it). Though dark, the room acquires its own, externally

imposed lighting, like the Holbein, in the form of the vernal Petersburg moon. Most

significantly, the corpse, like Holbein’s Christ, stands at the threshold of corruption –

it is possible, though unclear, if the body has begun to decay, allowing for either

interpretation. Yet, the novel’s succinct conclusion elides the details of the police’s

actual discovery of Myshkin, Rogozhin, and the corpse, transitioning directly from

their entry to the “tomb” to Rogozhin’s trial; in other words, the “smell” they

presumably encountered remains unmentioned, and unconfirmed.

The staging of the vigil, and the details of the corpse, is meant to allow for the

symbolic possibility of resurrection – of faith sustained, of life beyond death. As

frequently observed, Nastasya Filippovna’s given name (from the Greek Anastasiia –

“resurrection”) conveys a promise of resurrection; critics, therefore, have interpreted

the ultimate failure of her own resurrection, in the restoring of her faith, as a testament

to the failure of Myshkin’s project in the novel. However, I interpret Nastasya

Filippovna’s promise of resurrection as a universal one, as well as a challenge: like the

Holbein, her corpse is a test of the viewer’s faith.111 As such, it requires the same,

111 This reading, I realize, assigns an instrumental, contingent role to Nastasya Filippovna’s character, inasmuch as her personal redemption, as living character, is never a possibility, her death an a priori necessity of narrative function. This interpretation is justified, however, on the basis of the frequent foreshadowing of her death, and the air of inevitability it assumes over the course of the novel; as well as the essentially static nature of her character, following the novel’s first part. Nastasya Filippovna appears very infrequently in the novel, following her name-day party at the end of part I, while her murder is essentially confirmed, as we’ve seen, in Myshkin’s epileptic prodromata, and culminating epiphany, in the beginning of part II. Moreover, her character develops little beyond the first part (in fact, it is repeatedly suggested she is insane), compared to the primary figures of Myshkin, Rogozhin,

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concomitant “flash” of faith and imagination – to envisage her own, continued

existence, in the afterlife; and, more importantly, to sustain the idea that there is some

greater structure and meaning behind perceptible reality, if it can allow for such

tragedy. Despite the evident absence of this illuminating moment in the narrative, it is

significant that Myshkin, again, finds himself on the verge of an epileptic fit upon

viewing the corpse, a source of considerable practical concern for Rogozhin, as

evident in his repeated references to a potential seizure. As Myshkin’s condition

carries the potential of transcendence, it is appropriate that it should happen here,

when faith and imagination are both most necessary, and most challenging to sustain.

As with the Holbein, the epiphanic “clarity” of sustained faith, and madness, are the

two alternative responses to viewing Nastasya Filippovna’s corpse; Myshkin and

Rogozhin, it seems, elect the latter.112 And while it is even possible that the model of

faith put forward in the novel is in fact a form of madness, in its proposed rejection of

empirical reality, The Idiot nonetheless suggests that such faith and imagination be

brought to the reading of its final pages, in believing that Dostoevsky’s surviving

characters, against all odds, will be redeemed. In this culminating gesture, eliciting a

challenge to the represented reality in its own pages, Dostoevsky’s novel challenges

the mimetic conceit at the very foundation of the novelistic genre.

Ippolit, and Aglaya. Rather, her seemingly “necessary” death suggests a form of self-sacrifice, modeled on Christ himself. 112 The notion of madness as a form of escape is thematized in the figure of Rogozhin’s mother, as it is suggested, in the conclusion, that madness spares her any awareness of her son’s heinous crime.

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Chapter 2: Alterity and Transcendence in Leskov’s Zapechatlennyi angel In The Idiot, Dostoevsky develops unique devices for representing the

transcendent nature of Myshkin’s experience in the novel. This project entails

Dostoevsky’s necessary violation of the conventional form and content of the novel

genre, in turn experimenting and wielding novelistic form to his advantage. Turning to

Dostoevsky’s younger contemporary Nikolai Leskov, we encounter a very different

approach to the transcendent. Facetiously described by one critic as “Dostoevsky

without the epileptic fits,”1 the comparably irascible Leskov maintained a difficult and

at times hostile relationship with the older writer, derived from creative and

ideological differences, and manifest in mutual criticism.2

In this chapter, I will explore the nature of Leskov’s approach to the

transcendent in his work Zapechatlennyi angel (The Sealed Angel, 1873). Whereas

Dostoevsky addresses transcendence in the context of the novel, Leskov expressed

dissatisfaction with the novel form, and primarily pursued other prose genres,

including the short story, fable, sketch, chronicle, biography, and povest’, or novella,

which will occupy the present analysis.3 Leskov’s eclecticism, however, is not limited

1 V. S. Pritchett, “A Russian Outsider,” in The Living Novel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 423. 2 On the relationship between the two writers, see V. V. Vinogradov, “Dostoevsky i Leskov v 70-e gody XIX veka,” in Problema avtorstva i teoriia stilei. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1961), 487-554; and Iu. Seleznev, “Leskov i Dostoevsky,” in V mire Leskova: sbornik statei (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1983), 123-48. 3 For discussion of Leskov’s “mistrust in the novel,” and his formal preferences, see Aleksej B. Ansberg, “Frame Story and First-Person Story in N. S. Leskov,” in Scando-Slavica 3 (1957): 49-73; 53. Hugh McLean, similarly, identifies Leskov’s “polemic against the structural unity of the mid-nineteenth-century novel,” suggesting that the dominance of the genre (favored by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev) in the period partially accounts for Leskov’s lack of critical notoriety and popularity. See McLean, Nikolai Leskov: The Man and His Art (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1977), ix, 252. Leskov did produce several novels, including the aforementioned No Way Out and At

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to his interests in disparate prose genres, but also manifests in a stylistic heterogeneity,

and an abundance of literary references, within specific texts.4 In the context of

nineteenth-century Russian literature, meanwhile, Leskov departs not only from

established form, but also from conventional content. Though Dostoevsky explores

varying social strata previously foreign to Russian prose fiction, Leskov addressed still

more exotic and often unprecedented subject matter, including the Orthodox clergy,

religious sectarians, and ethnic minorities within the Russian empire.5

Compared to the secular setting of Myshkin’s transcendental experiences in

The Idiot, much of Leskov’s fiction, including the text explored here, deals more

overtly with religious topics, often (though not exclusively) situated in the context of

Russian Orthodoxy.6 In fact, Orthodox themes and scenarios are particularly prevalent

in Leskov’s fiction of the early 1870s: The Sealed Angel details the hardships of a

sectarian community of Old Believers, and their eventual reconciliation with the

Russian Orthodox Church; Ocharovannyi strannik (The Enchanted Wanderer, 1873)

narrates the eccentric journey of a runaway peasant, to his destination in an Orthodox

monastery; and Soboriane (Cathedral Folk, 1872) provides a portrait of the provincial

Orthodox clergy. While each of these texts contains criticism of the church, Leskov

still at this time considered the institution a potential force of social and spiritual

Daggers Drawn, and Soboriane (Cathedral Folk, 1872), though they are typically appraised less highly than his shorter works. 4 Knut Andreas Grimstad similarly highlights “the creative potential of Leskov’s synchronization of heterogeneous styles” in Styling Russia: Multiculture in the Prose of Nikolai Leskov, 35. 5 By inaugurating the Orthodox clergy, specifically, as a topic in prose fiction, Leskov influenced the writings of Chekhov, to whom I return in the next chapter. Leskov’s topical ingenuity, and influence on Chekhov, is noted in Irmhild Christina Sperrle, The Organic Worldview of Nikolai Leskov, 6. 6 Admittedly, institutional representatives of Russian Orthodoxy do figure more prominently in later works by Dostoevsky, particularly The Brothers Karamazov.

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good.7 The grandson of an Orthodox priest, Leskov had a raznochinets background

that contributed to his intimate knowledge of the texts and traditions of Orthodoxy and

this often figures in his writing. Meanwhile, Leskov would later grow disenchanted

with Russian Orthodoxy, prompting his break with the official church, and a growing

interest in Protestantism culminating in his acceptance of Tolstoyanism in the 1890s.8

Still, religious topics, addressing broadly Christian issues of belief and

morality, figure in Leskov’s fiction throughout his career; moreover, even at the apex

of Leskov’s literary interest in Russian Orthodoxy, the church functions primarily as

the context for the spiritual experiences of individuals (and secondarily, I would argue,

as the target of institutional critique).9 This primacy of the individual’s relationship to

the transcendent is intrinsic to the structure of The Sealed Angel, which provides a

direct, first-person narration of experience, framed by a secondary narrator,

fortuitously present at the protagonist’s delivery of the speech event.10 Leskov

frequently resorted to the genre of the frame story, and a full 22.5% of the fictional

output collected in the 11-volume Soviet “Khudozhestvennaia literatura” edition of his

collected works published in the 1950s contains this “double-I” structure of two

7 McLean, Nikolai Leskov: The Man and His Art, 237-9. McLean makes similar observations in his earlier article “Russia, the Love-Hate Pendulum, and The Sealed Angel.” 8 For discussion of Leskov’s attraction to Protestant theology and practice, see James Y. Muckle, Nikolai Leskov and the “Spirit of Protestantism”. 9 For discussion of Leskov’s idiosyncratic, subjective approach to Christianity, see Sperrle, The Organic Worldview of Nikolai Leskov, especially chapter 1. I discussed Leskov’s criticism of the Orthodox Church in the conference paper “Narrative Strategy and Religious Discourse in Leskov’s Ocharovannyi strannik,” presented at the Eastern Orthodoxy and Literature Conference at Stanford University in March 2006. 10 It is of course an intentional fallacy to identify such unmediated speech as necessarily “authentic,” as if free of the manipulation of frame narrator or implied author, or even the “self-fashioning” commonly recognized as basic to autobiography. Rather, the critical distinction here is between the illusion of direct psychological presentation in the first-person literary speech event, typical of Leskov, and third-person forms of “psycho-narration” more common to the novel, as found in The Idiot.

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distinct narrative voices.11 Leskov’s preference for this uncommon narrative structure

is consistent with his tendency to create unique narrative voices, and his interest in

spoken language: he is rightly considered a master of the skaz form, with its basis in

orality. Meanwhile, it is significant that The Sealed Angel is not merely narrated in

distinctly “marked” language, but emerges from a speech event; this structure

necessitates the physical presence of the embedded narrator-protagonist, as well as the

frame narrator, who functions dramatically as both auditor and stenographer of the

narrative utterance. Typical of Leskov, the idiosyncrasies of this central, embedded

narrator are by no means limited to speech alone, but likewise manifest in personal

experience and identity, as here evident in protagonist Mark Alexandrovich’s

miraculous adventures and extensive knowledge of Orthodox iconography.

Mark Alexandrovich, and other characters in Leskov’s povest’ seek and

discern manifest traces of the transcendent in their lives, a theme that will structure my

analysis of The Sealed Angel. This motif, in fact, even figures in the title of the work:

the angel is both an iconographic image (the “sealing” of which, in its confiscation,

drives the plot), and a source of divine guidance and protection. This theme informs a

discursive tension between form and the ineffable, prompting the question of whether

the transcendent may assume a form sensible to the human subject. The centrality of

iconographic media in The Sealed Angel, therefore, focalizes this discourse on form

11 See Tom Eekman, “The Authorial Voice in Leskov’s Work,” In Semantic Analysis of Literary Texts: To Honour Jan van der Eng on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. Eric De Haard, Thomas Langerak, and Willem G. Weststeijn (Amsterdam and New York: Elsevier, 1990), 125-132; 127. As Eekman points out, this edition of Leskov’s writings was censored, and thus incomplete. A complete, 30-volume edition of Leskov’s collected works is presently being published by Terra; 10 volumes have appeared to date, collecting Leskov’s output through 1871.

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and transcendence, utilizing an exemplary model of sensible access to the

transcendent, the Orthodox icon.12

Leskov’s concern with such “forms of transcendence” implicitly approaches

the issue of literary representation that I explored in relation to The Idiot. Here

likewise persists the problem of narrating religious experience, as Mark attempts to

relate moments of transcendence in his individual life, primarily in the form of

witnessed instances of epiphany in the lives of others. In Christian culture, the Gospels

provide a formal prototype for the narration of transcendence, and Mark, notably,

shares his given name, unusual in Russian, with one of the evangelists.13 Despite the

abundance of Gospel motifs and biblical references in the work, Leskov models

neither protagonist nor plot on the life of Christ; like his evangelical namesake,

Mark’s role is clearly to transcribe the momentary in-break of transcendence in his

worldly life. Still, I would argue that this tension, between transcendence and literary

representation, figures in Mark’s unprecedented, unusual characteristics, and in

Leskov’s attempts to render his own fictional subject, one of the “exotic” figures so

celebrated in his prose. In other words, in The Sealed Angel there is an implied

relationship between transcendence and alterity, localized in varying attempts to

12 There are striking similarities, both structural and thematic, between The Sealed Angel and Leskov’s povest’ The Enchanted Wanderer, also published in 1873. The latter text also features a framed, first-person narration, in this case rendered by runaway peasant Ivan Fliagin. Though different from Mark’s more bookish language, Ivan’s colloquial dialect is similarly “marked,” as indicative of Leskovian skaz. Moreover, Ivan likewise discerns forces of transcendence at work in his life, guiding his “enchanted” journey. These congruities demonstrate the prevalence of such formal and thematic issues in Leskov’s fiction of the period. 13 Leskov had demonstrated an impressive knowledge of the Bible, and Christian religious literature, in general, as well as the ecclesiastical Church Slavonic of the Russian Orthodox liturgy. As James Muckle points out, Leskov, like Tolstoy, places the Bible at the center of Christian belief, which Muckle cites as evidence of both writers’ affinity for Protestantism. See Nikolai Leskov and the “Spirit of Protestantism”, 69.

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inscribe a textual “other” (whether cultural, ethnographic, or ontological) in

representational language. The transcendent simply carries alterity to its furthest

extreme, as evident in Rudolf Otto’s famous characterization of the numinous as

“wholly other.”14 As Michael Taussig argues, alterity is central to the very practice of

mimesis, manifest in representational attempts to appropriate the power of the

depicted object.15 Without ascribing any transcendental qualities to the characters

themselves, I will argue that their fictional presentations involve some of the same

representational problems and strategies as the literary representation of the

transcendent itself.

To this end, Leskov exploits formal devices in order to bring the transcendent

“other” of literary representation within more immanent proximity to the reader,

rendering the mimetic object sensibly palpable, if only momentarily, in a “flash” of

recognition analogous to the manifestation of transcendence itself.16 In pursuit of this

14 “Taken in the religious sense, that which is ‘mysterious’ is – to give it perhaps the most striking expression – the ‘wholly other’…, that which is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible, and the familiar, which therefore falls quite outside the limits of the ‘canny,’ and is contrasted with it, filling the mind with blank wonder and astonishment.” See Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey, 2nd Ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 26. 15 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, 13, 16. 16 This notion of the mimetically induced “flash” is articulated by Walter Benjamin: “The perception of similarity is in every case bound to be an instantaneous flash.” See Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” trans. Knut Tarnowski, in New German Critique, No. 17 (Spring 1979): 65-69; 66. Benjamin elaborates on this idea in a later, developed version of the same essay, asserting:

Thus the coherence of words or sentences is the bearer through which, like a flash, similarity appears. For its production by man – like its perception by him – is in many cases, and particularly the most important, limited to flashes. It flits past. It is not improbable that the rapidity of writing and reading heightens the fusion of the semiotic and the mimetic in the sphere of language.

See Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1986), 333-36; 335. Notably, Benjamin also wrote perceptively on Leskov, in his 1936 article “The Storyteller.” While Benjamin’s theories of mimesis do not figure in his analysis of Leskov, it does not seem coincidental that he would turn his critical attention to a writer so evocative of his views of mimesis.

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phenomenon, I identity two strategies essential to Leskov’s formal project: his

recourse to ekphrasis, “the verbal representation of graphic representation”; and his

use of oral speech, and a confessional model.17 In different ways, these two techniques

attempt to transcend the confines of literary representation, displacing aesthetic objects

(image, word) from the ideational reality of narrative to the sensible reality of

presence and immediacy: of an image viewed in space, of language heard in time.

Naturally, the literary operations of ekphrasis and speech event are merely aesthetic

approximations of the sensible, manipulated effects inscribed in narrative.

Analogously, Vladimir Lossky describes the Orthodox theological distinction between

the essence of divinity, which remains absolutely transcendent, and the energies of the

godhead, which permeate the material world. In this respect, Leskov literalizes, in

aesthetic practice, a tenet of Orthodox theology.18 Meanwhile, the technique

underscores the distancing essential to any form of representation, and even basic to

the term (“re-presentation”) itself, as a necessarily posterior, recuperative event. As

Arne Melberg theorizes, this dynamic is intrinsic to the operations of mimesis,

prompting an interplay between similarity and difference, proximity and distance,

presence and absence.19 If such distancing is inherent to any mimetic practice, it is

compounded in the categories of ekphrasis and stylized speech: each, after all, is meta-

representational, the representation of a representation, extending the hall of mirrors

17 This precise articulation of ekphrasis is put forward by James A. W. Heffernan in “Ekphrasis and Representation,” New Literary History, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Spring, 1991): 297-316; 299. I provide more extensive discussion of this contentious term as a literary mode in the analysis below. 18 Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Cambridge and London: James Clark & Co., 1968), 68-9. 19 Melberg’s Deconstructive methodology, drawing on theories of Derrida and de Man, is put forward in the introduction to his Theories of Mimesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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figuration, away from any original or exemplar, which recedes further from sensible

grasp, even as it seems to draw closer.20 Such illusion is integral to Leskov’s project,

and will figure in his handling of transcendence.21

Sign, Sense, and the Ineffable

In The Sealed Angel, Leskov thematizes this interplay, between sensible form

and the transcendent, which even serves as a structuring principle for the narrative.

Published in Katkov’s Russkii vestnik (Russian Messenger) in January 1873 (the same

journal that had published The Idiot), the povest’ narrates the adventures of a group of

Old Believers (Starovery, or Starovertsy; also known as “Old Ritualists,” or

Staroobriadtsy), a sectarian Orthodox group that challenged the church reforms of

Patriarch Nikon between 1654 and 1666, leading to their schism from the Russian

Orthodox Church.22 Striving to maintain the pre-Nikonian liturgical and iconographic

traditions of Orthodoxy, Old Believers suffered considerable persecution at the hands

of the Russian imperial government, though the work’s setting and publication

coincided with a period of increased religious tolerance: beginning in 1858, a series of

reforms were passed on behalf of the Old Believers, providing them with greater

20 Heffernan highlights this aspect of ekphrasis, which “explicitly represents representation itself. What ekphrasis represents in words, therefore, must itself be representational.” See “Ekphrasis and Representation,” 300. J. Alexander Ogden makes a similar point, in his discussion of the stylization of peasant speech in Russian literature, which he identifies as “the imitation of someone else’s imitation of nature.” See Ogden, “The Impossible Peasant Voice in Russian Culture: Stylization and Mimicry,” Slavic Review Vol. 64, No. 3 (Fall 2005): 517-37; 520-21. 21 This notion of the “illusory” nature of Leskov’s representational practices (basic, naturally, to any representational art) references Boris Eikhenbaum’s 1924 article “Illiuziia skaza” (“The Illusion of Skaz”), in which he discusses how the skaz form provides the aesthetic illusion of spoken language. Eikhenbaum also wrote extensively on Leskov, whom he identified as exemplary of skaz technique, and thus integral to the development of twentieth-century Russian prose. See Eikhenbaum, “Illiuziia skaza,” in Skvoz’ literaturu: Sbornik statei (Leningrad: Academia, 1924), 152-56. 22 As such, official documents often referred to the Old Believers as “schismatics” (raskol’niki). See Roy R. Robson, Old Believers in Modern Russia (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995), xi.

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economic and religious rights.23 While Leskov had previously depicted the Old

Believers somewhat critically, or at least ambivalently, the narrative perspective in

The Sealed Angel accords a degree of respect and even nobility to the sectarian

group.24

The novella opens in a provincial Russian inn, where travelers huddle in

shelter from a blizzard. Unable to sleep in the crowded, stuffy setting, the group

consents to listen to Mark Alexandrovich’s story, prompting the speech act that

comprises the narrative proper, and advancing the text beyond the preliminary

narrative frame. Mark discloses how his cohort of Old Believer craftsman had traveled

to Kiev, accepting work in the construction of the stone bridge spanning the Dniepr

River. Notably, in accepting the work in Kiev, the group finds itself in the cradle of

pre-Muscovite Russian religiosity (and Leskov himself, a former resident of Kiev,

knew the city well). While the Old Believers initially find peace and stability in their

temporary home, they eventually fall under the scrutiny of local authorities, when one

member of the group, in attempting to curry the favor of an official’s wife,

inadvertently angers her instead. The group is subjected to a raid of their living

quarters, whereby soldiers confiscate their sizable collection of Russian icons, sealing

23 These reforms took place under Alexander II, the “tsar-liberator” responsible for the Emancipation Reform of 1861. Renewed repression of the Old Believers was instituted by his successor, the reactionary Alexander III. See Peter Waldron, “Religious Toleration in Late Imperial Russia,” in Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, ed. Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 103-19; 110-14. Waldron reports that an estimated 11 million Old Believers were living in Russia in the early twentieth century, so their presence was substantial. 24 McLean, Nikolai Leskov: The Man and His Art, 231. As McLean elsewhere remarks, it is likely that Leskov’s attitude toward the group was improved by his interest in Orthodox icons in the period. See McLean, “Russia, the Love-Hate Pendulum, and The Sealed Angel,” 1330. For extended discussion of Leskov’s interest in the Old Belief, culling material from archived letters and documents, see E. A. Ageeva, “Leskov i Staraia Vera (po materialam sobraniia pisatelia v RGALI,” in Leskovskii sbornik, 2007: Materiali mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii, ed. M. V. Antonova (Orel: Izdatel’stvo Orlovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2006), 126-31.

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them with wax. Among these is the angel of the work’s title, cherished above all

others, a sort of palladium of the traveling sectarians; its confiscation drives the plot of

Mark’s narrative, as the group attempts to retrieve it from the authorities. To this end,

Mark and his companion Levontii travel in search of a skilled iconographer, capable

of producing an exact replica of the angel, which the Old Believers plan to substitute

for the original icon. Though the substitution is itself accomplished, at the story’s

climax, the sealing wax applied to the replacement slips from the image, revealing it to

be a forgery. Interpreting the event as a miracle sanctioning the Russian Orthodox

Church, the Old Believers convert to the official church in the story’s conclusion.25

In addition to motivating Mark’s narrative and the adventures therein, the

angel functions as a locus of central thematic issues in the text. It is a discussion of

guardian angels in the inn, during the initial framing of the narrative, which prompts

Mark’s speech act, as he remarks “that not everyone [can] see the angel’s path, and

that only a genuine man of experience [can] truly comprehend it.”26 This early passage

25 The sectarians’ ultimate conversion to official Orthodoxy has proven controversial and subject to diverse interpretations, especially in light of Leskov’s contentious relationship with the Orthodox Church. In this respect, it is possible to read the conclusion as an ironic one, considering the seemingly arbitrary, incidental pretense for the conversion itself. It has been suggested that this ultimate, ambivalent endorsement of Orthodoxy, and the general tone of Russian nationalism in the story, were intended to appease the conservative Katkov, who published the work; Leskov may have implied this in a later comment, suggesting that he would have written the ending differently at a later stage of his career, in addition to the fact that Leskov broke with Katkov shortly after the publication of The Sealed Angel. However, McLean contends that the conversion is prepared throughout the narrative, and observes that the work predates Leskov’s break with Orthodoxy, emerging from a period when he still considered the official church a vehicle of potential moral good. See McLean, Nikolai Leskov: The Man and His Art, 237-39. Knut Grimstad, similarly, interprets Mark’s “journey” to conversion as consistent with recurrent motifs of crossing and passage in the text, and Leskov’s favoring of binary structuring principles in the narrative. See Grimstad, Styling Russia: Multiculture in the Prose of Nikolai Leskov, 154-55, 158-60. I return to the sectarians’ conversion in the concluding pages of the chapter. 26 «…ангельский путь не всякому зрим и об этом только настоящий практик может получитъ понятие.» Leskov, Sobranie sochinenii v 11 tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1958), Vol. 4, 322. English translation in Leskov, The Sealed Angel and Other Stories. Ed. and Trans. K. A.

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initiates the treatment of the angel throughout the ensuing narrative: the plot is based

around an iconographic representation, sensibly immanent, of a transcendent force at

work in the lives of men. The icon images the transcendent, though it will not prove to

be the exclusive mode of such representation in Zapechatlennyi angel. Rather,

Leskov’s text inscribes a complex interplay between categories of form and

appearance, broadly defined (including artistry, ritual, and tradition), and those that

elude form, extending into faith-based, mystical, and even supra-linguistic realms. The

angel, meanwhile, as bi-referential (both icon and transcendental force) mediates this

interplay. In a letter to Alexei Suvorin, friend and publisher of Chekhov, dated

December 11, 1888, Leskov asserts: “I simply love to know how people imagine the

divine being and its participation in the fates of humankind, and I myself know a thing

or two about this” (Ia prosto liubliu znat’, kak liudi predstavliaiut cebe bozhestvo i

ego uchastie v sud’bakh chelovecheskikh, i koe-chto v etom znaiu) (11: 406).27 The

Sealed Angel exemplifies this claim, narrating how individuals perceive, literally and

figuratively, the presence of the transcendent. Meanwhile, the narrative in turn

focalizes artistic issues of representation (and its limits) in the context of religious life;

religion, in other words, functions as an occasion for aesthetic discourse, exploring

issues of representation and mimesis, and their point of intersection with metaphysics.

Lantz (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 7. Subsequent citations from these two editions will appear parenthetically in the text. 27 Citation and translation in Sperrle, The Organic Worldview of Nikolai Leskov, 20. The comment appears in the context of Leskov’s discussion of biblical Apocrypha, and how their contents contributed to the language and iconographic descriptions of The Sealed Angel.

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Apophasis and the Critique of Sensible Form The difficulties attendant on perceiving and representing the divine are

consistently articulated over the course of the narrative, particularly in relation to the

shortcomings of language: as in The Idiot, the text contains frequent references to the

inadequacy of expression and description. Mark repeatedly qualifies the collection of

icons, and particularly the angel, as “indescribable,” and even undermines his own

narrative capacity, promising, at the outset, to relate his story “as best I’m able.”

Similarly, Mikhailitsa, wife of the group’s foreman Luka Kirilov, deems herself

incapable of relating the tragic turn of the soldiers’ arrival; and later in the same

episode, the Old Believer Maroi, the first to greet the soldiers, is incapable of

communicating with them, hindered by a speech impediment and non-standard

language. Significantly, the content of Maroi’s failed statement is an explanation for

the absence of clergy among the priest-less sectarians.28 If the clergy may be said to

serve a mediating role between the congregation and the divine, and, as is more

relevant here, between the community and secular authority, its absence denotes a

failure of language to achieve its own, mediating function.29

The numerous references to expressive inadequacy in The Sealed Angel locate

a mystical problem in the sphere of language, in the tradition of apophatic theological

discourse, initially referenced above in the introduction. Insofar as the transcendent 28 As Robson points out, no Orthodox bishops consecrated new hierarchs according to the old ritual, following the formalizing of the schism in 1666. See Old Believers in Modern Russia, 15. Mark later references the similar absence of bishops in the Old Believer communities in discussion with “Iakov Iakovlevich,” the English foreman of the construction project. 29 By comparison, Chris J. Chulos has described how the rural clergy in the Russian Orthodox Church often functioned as a mediating channel between peasant communities and political authority, as clergymen often assumed bureaucratic responsibilities, such as record keeping, and the oversight of economic transactions. See Chulos, Converging Worlds: Religion and Community in Peasant Russia, 1861-1917 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 55-57.

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exceeds human systems of representation, including language, mystical apophasis

functions to liberate language from its intrinsic kataphatic contours, as a semiotic

system based in predication. Apophasis, indicative of “negative theology,” consists of

negation, the disruption of semiotic equivalency, in order to avoid the reification of the

transcendent, which results from man’s cognitive and linguistic tendency toward

referential closure. As Timothy Ware asserts:

Since God cannot be properly comprehended by the human mind, all language that is applied to Him is inevitably inexact. It is therefore less misleading to use negative language about God rather than positive – to refuse to say what God is, and to state simply what He is not. 30 In The Sealed Angel, the same essential problem, of the inability of language to

articulate mystical content, is addressed by a silence, a deferral from any speech

whatsoever, whether predication or negation, which constitutes an additional

apophatic strategy. As Derrida, whose own program of Deconstruction addresses

similar, fundamental pitfalls in language, states:

Negative theology consists of considering that every predicative language is inadequate to the essence, in truth to the hyperessentiality (the being beyond Being) of God; consequently, only a negative (“apophatic”) attribution can claim to approach God, and to prepare us for a silent intuition of God.31

30 See Ware, The Orthodox Church (London and New York: Penguin, 1967), 63. Of course, in order to perform such “referential openness,” apophatic contradiction or negation necessarily follows kataphatic affirmation, which provides the grammatical object of negation. A simple example would be: “God is glorious, God is not glorious,” a statement which suggests a predicate, yet avoids its delimiting potential, insofar as glory is a category of human derivation, and therefore contingent. This complex topic exceeds the scope of the present discussion, which is intended to provide an example of mystical approaches to the problem of language. However, as Michael A. Sells has demonstrated, mystical writers in various traditions (including Plotinus, John the Scot Eriugena, Ibn Arabi, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart) have elaborated various apophatic techniques for “performing” mystical content in language. For extensive discussion of apophasis in the aforementioned authors, see Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying, and especially his introduction (1-13), which provides a succinct explanation of the phenomenon. 31 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” In Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, 3-70; 4.

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This apophatic strategy of silence, of language faltering before the divine, is common

to many religious traditions; it likewise has a strong pedigree in Eastern Christianity,

and particularly Russian Orthodoxy. Foundational to the apophatic theology of

Orthodoxy are the works of Pseudo-Dionysius, author of On the Divine Names.

Subsequently, Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Thessalonica, would draw on the

writings of the Church Fathers, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Maximus the Confessor in

writing his Theophanes, a contribution to theological debates within the Eastern

Orthodox Church in the middle of the fourteenth century. These debates, known as the

Hesychast Controversy, consisted of doctrinal debates on the potential for experiential

knowledge of the divine, and whether such experience is better achieved in study or

contemplation. The ultimate victory of Hesychasm, a form of spiritual quietism

endorsed by Palamas, would influence the subsequent development of Eastern

Christianity, and would likewise contribute to the development of Russian

monasticism in the sixteenth century.32 Emerging first in the Trans-Volgan Elder

communities, Russian Hesychasm continued its evolution under the initiatives of

Sergius of Radonezh, a key figure in the theory and practice of modern Russian

monasticism, who also advocated solitude and contemplation over religious

instruction, in the tradition of Orthodox eremitism.

The influence of Russian Hesychasm is evident in The Sealed Angel, and

central to the work’s apophatic subtext. This theme is primarily explored in the

subplot of Levontii, Mark’s travel companion on his quest for an iconographer

32 For discussion of the influence of Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory Palamas, and apophatic approaches to the divine in the Orthodox tradition, as well as the Hesychast Controversy, see Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 67-90; and Ware, The Orthodox Church, 61-72.

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qualified to reproduce the confiscated angel. Following initial, unsuccessful visits to

Klintsy, Zlynka, and Orel, the pair visits Moscow, where they are appalled by the

vulgar tendencies of the Old Believer community, and its deceptive, opportunistic

iconographers, who seem primarily concerned with extorting money from their

customers.33 Ashamed by the spectacle, the two elect to remain silent on the topic in

one another’s presence, and Levontii, moreover, begins to seek solitude. When

Levontii subsequently reveals an interest in meeting the famous Pamva, an elder

(starets) and anchorite monk in the official church, the two sectarians begin to debate

the ignorance of members of the church (with Mark expressing a number of amusing

and irrational criticisms, including the charge that Orthodox churchmen drink coffee).

Levontii proves emblematic of an apophatic impulse in the narrative, which comes

fully to fruition when the traveling sectarians encounter the aforementioned Pamva in

a forest. Suddenly taken sick, Levontii collapses on the ground, though assuring the

frightened Mark that divine protection is ensured. When the latter, however, climbs

into a nearby tree, for fear of an approaching noise, he witnesses the arrival of Pamva,

who leads away the silent, seemingly enchanted Levontii.

In the ensuing episode, Mark follows Levontii and Pamva to the anchorite’s

cell, where Levontii submits to the elder’s will, undergoes a secret conversion to the

official church, and mysteriously dies. In addition to staging (and perhaps validating)

33 To extend the geographic metaphor, initiated above, the sectarians identification with Kiev, the site of origin for Russian Christianity, and its early-medieval development, is situated in opposition to Moscow, seat of the official, “reformed” Orthodox Church (and, in the pre-Petrine context of the Nikonian reforms responsible for the church schism, of the imperial government). This binary opposition supplements those identified by Grimstad, such as past/present, rural/urban, and native/foreign, in his discussion of the sectarians’ relationship to mainstream Russian culture. See Grimstad, Styling Russia: Multiculture in the Prose of Nikolai Leskov, 148, 155-60.

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the ultimate conversion of his fellow Old Believers, Levontii’s experience, as narrated

by Mark, elaborates the narrative critique of signification (and, by extension, sense

perception). Though he does speak, Pamva is significantly characterized as “quiet,”

and his departure from external forms of representation is strikingly evident. When

Mark asks the elder his name, he responds evasively, in a manner reminiscent of the

Orthodox tradition of the iurodovyi, or “holy fool.”34 Pamva’s response, the dated

colloquialism Zovut menia zovutkoiu, a velichaiut utkoiu, is literally stylized nonsense,

approximately equivalent to “They call me a caller, and they call me a duck.”35 In his

narration, Mark characterizes the response as “empty words” (s etimi pustimi slovami),

which is presumably deliberate, on Pamva’s part: for the elder, all language is

“empty,” lacking any essential content. Phonetically, the statement exploits the

repetition of the syllable “ut,” which appears four times, and even employs an iambic

metrical rhythm, engendering a pure sonority consistent with the alleged semantic

“emptiness” of the couplet, and suggestive of the inarticulate sounds of a duck. Yet,

semantic elements persist, if only to confirm the apophatic nature of the comment. The

idiom puns on the word zovut (“they call”), which forms the core of the word zovutka

34 Ewa M. Thompson cites the frequent appearance of the “holy fool” type in Leskov’s fiction, in her study of the phenomenon in Russian culture. While she considers Leskov’s treatment of the typology as “less sophisticated” than in that of his contemporaries, such as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, her analysis of Leskov is cursory, and her assessment seems to stem largely from her opinion of Leskov as a “lesser” writer, an unfortunate trend in comparative criticism. Notably, her analysis does not include discussion of The Sealed Angel. See Thompson, Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), 148, 158. Given the frequency of the “holy fool” character in Leskov’s fiction, it is surprising that there is no extensive study of the typology, such as Harriet Murav’s treatment of the subject in Dostoevsky’s fiction. See Murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique (discussed above, in chapter 1). 35 My own translation, provided here, is necessarily imprecise, insofar as zovutka is not an actual word, but simply a pun on zovut, the third-person plural of zvat’ (“to call”). Lantz translates the idiom as “Some calls me duck, some calls me drake,” which is still more imprecise, rendering the phrase more coherent and symmetrical than it actually is. As a pun, Pamva’s colloquialism essentially defies translation.

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(a neologism, here translated as “a caller”), engendering an elliptical quality to the first

phrase, reinforced by the rhyme achieved in the second phrase. Moreover, the

statement implies Pamva’s relinquishing of an essential self, just as he evades the

imposition of a name. A linguistic performance of both radical epistemological

skepticism and religious faith, Pamva turns the apophatic critique of language on his

very self: not only does language fail to “name” the divine, but it ultimately fails to

perfectly signify anything.

Similarly, Mark notes the absence of icons in Pamva’s cell, and questions “by

what books” the anchorite prays, indicating his departure from conventional, sensible

representations of the transcendent. In these and other aspects, Pamva displays

essential characteristics of Hesychast monasticism, including its programmatic

demotion of sensory experience, in favor of an internal, mystical experience of the

divine. Levontii himself, meanwhile, remains silent throughout the episode, and

speaks but once more, and only then to ask for Pamva’s blessing, in the moment

preceding his death. (Moreover, when a vision of the deceased Levontii appears in the

work’s culminating scene, he gestures silently to Mark.) During the night they spend

in the elder’s cell, Mark witness a “silent conversation” between Levontii and Pamva:

…and then suddenly I seem to hear a conversation, and the most inexplicable kind of conversation. It appeared as if Levontii had gone in to see the old man, and that they are talking about religion, only without words, just looking at one another and understanding. And it seemed to me that this went on for a long time, and I had already forgotten about repeating the Credo and am listening to the old man tell the lad: “Go and cleanse thyself,” and he answers: “I shall be cleansed.” And even now I cannot tell you whether it was a dream or not, only I slept for a long time after that. (4: 363; 48)36

36 «…а потом вдруг будто начал слышаться разговор, и какой…самый необъяснимый: будто вошел к старцу Левонтий, и они говорят о вере, но без слов, а так, смотрят друг на друга и помимают. И это долго мне представлялось, я уже «Верую» позабыл твердить, а слушаю, как

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Whether this episode was a dream or not has little bearing upon its thematic

significance: their “conversation” demonstrates an instance of communication that

transcends the sensible form of spoken language. Moreover, not only do Levontii and

Pamva seem to understand one another, but even Mark reports his ability to “hear”

their conversation, enabling him to provide an alleged (if admittedly speculative)

account of the dialogue. While the lexicon of spoken language persists in Mark’s

narration (“talking,” “listening,” “answers”), it is clear that these terms assume an

analogical meaning here, separate from their conventional connotations in the context

of sensory experience. Mark himself, meanwhile, significantly falls silent in view of

the spectacle, suspending his prayer – a literally formal utterance, the old-style, pre-

Nikonian Credo, integral to the identity of the Old Believers. The Russian title of the

prayer, Veruiu (literally, like the Latin credo, “I believe”), underscores the distinction

between Mark’s ritualized behavior, and the mystical behavior of Levontii and Pamva,

who likewise “speak” of belief (o vere). Meanwhile, the lexical link between the elder

(starets) and the Old Believers (starovery) suggests a potential for spiritual common

ground, realized in the mystical communion of Levontii and Pamva.37

The mysterious conversation between Pamva and Levontii (which apparently

culminates in the latter’s conversion) provides an alternative model to sensible

expression and perception, consistent with the thematic valences ascribed to Pamva,

and eventually Levontii, in the narrative. Many of Pamva’s cryptic statements refer to

будто старец говорит отроку: «Поди очистись», а тот отвечает: «и очищусь». И теперь вам не скажу, все это было сне или не во сне…» 37 Moreover, Russian Hesychasm, like many instantiations of Russian monasticism, predates the Nikonian reforms, and the subsequent church schism. Though emblematic of the “corrupted” modern church, an anchorite monk such as Pamva is in essence connected to the same spiritual roots as the Old Believers.

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manifestations of the divine, as when he informs Mark that “The Lord leadeth us all”

(vsekh gospod’ vedet) and later asserts that “everyone seeks the Lord’s path” (vse puti

gospodnego ishchut). It is suggested, however, that this “path” is not available to the

human senses, but only to an interior, mystical form of perception. Similarly, when

Mark tells Pamva of the tragic confiscation of the icon, and their attempt to recover

the “sealed angel,” the anchorite replies:

“The angel is quiet, the angel is meek, and he clothes himself as the Lord bids. And he is charged, so he doeth. Such is the angel! He lives in the hearts of men, besealed by the vanity of the world. But love will smash the seal…” (4: 366; 51)38

Pamva’s assertion that the angel resides “in the hearts of men,” coupled with the

absence of icons in his cell, amounts to a criticism of Mark’s insistence on seeking the

sensible form of the angel, when it in fact maintains an invisible presence; by

extension, the comment implies a critique of external forms of piety, as observed by

Mark and his brethren in the Old Belief. The same subtext figures in Pamva’s

suggestion that Mark “[hastens] to build Babel” in his confused lingering after

Levontii’s death, a reference to the idolatrous construction project prevented by

linguistic confusion, as documented in Genesis 11: 4-9: Mark’s “vanity” and idolatry,

it is implied, consists in his attachment to sensible form, which may only lead to the

“confusion” of sincere religious experience. This reference to Babel also implies the

existence of a pure, non-contingent form of expression or communication, such as that

which preceded the confusion of the biblical episode, and the resulting social division

38 «Ангел тих, ангел кроток, во что ему повелит господь, он в то и одеется; что ему укажет, то он сотворит. Вот ангел! Он в душе человечьей живет, суемудрием запечатлен, но любовь сокрушит печать.»

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of linguistic differentiation. Elsewhere in The Sealed Angel, Leskov will suggest a

potential source for such pure signification.

Figuring the “Heavenly Face” Mark’s suspicion, on departing from Pamva, that the anchorite is himself an

angel, would seem to validate the monk’s criticism, insofar as the sectarian ironically

continues to seek the sensible, physical form of the angel. Yet, it would be misleading

to consider Pamva’s perspective unchallenged within the text. As initially suggested,

the tension between form and the ineffable in The Sealed Angel goes unresolved, and

narrative discourse on the topic remains ambivalent; sensible form and sensory

experience, as a conjoined thematic complex, are alternately validated and undercut.

While the figures of Pamva and Levontii would seem to diminish the efficacy of form

in religious experience, in favor of models of faith and mysticism, the text likewise

posits a number of counterpoints. In fact, the discursive ambivalence toward this issue

in The Sealed Angel mirrors the acceptance of a mystical antinomy within Orthodox

theology, based in biblical and doctrinal writings. As Vladimir Lossky suggests:

It would be possible to draw up two sets of texts taken from the Bible and the Fathers, contradictory to one another; the first to show the inaccessible character of the divine nature, the second asserting that God does communicate Himself, can be known experimentally, and can really be attained in union… God is thus at the same time totally inaccessible and really communicable to created beings; neither of the terms of this antinomy excluded or minimized in any way.39

39 Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 68.

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If Pamva, therefore, is emblematic of an apophatic approach to union with the divine,

the text likewise demonstrates how such communion may be available to sensory

experience.40

At the structural level, the shared context of Mark’s oral delivery of the

narrative, the narrative climax itself, and Leskov’s publication of the povest’, would

seem to validate the potential of a sensible manifestation of the transcendent: all three

events take place during the Christmas season, clearly referencing the model of

Christ’s assumption of physical form in his birth, the historical basis of Christian

Incarnational theology.41 The theme of manifestation figures repeatedly in The Sealed

Angel, primarily in relation to evidence of divine will, and the attempt to discern a

determined course of events. There are numerous references to “God’s will” (bogu

izvolisia), “divine providence” (bozhie smotrenie) and even the “manifestation” of

40 Notably, Hesychasm itself, ostensibly opposed to the sensible knowledge of God, would actually influence aesthetic aspects of Russian iconography and hagiography, promoting a type of “Medieval Expressionism” in icon painting, with more emotive imagery, and the imposition of rhetorical devices (repetition, epithets, paronomasia) in hagiographic writing. The object, in both arts, was to “dazzle” the audience by means of aesthetic impact, designed to approximate mystical experience of the transcendent. This experimental, formal approach to mystical content resembles that of the authors discussed by Michael Sells (who does not, incidentally, mention the Orthodox tradition), referenced above in note 30. These insights were provided by Victor Zhivov in his seminar “Old Russian Literature” at Stanford University in Spring 2005. Zhivov posits that the influence of Hesychasm in Russia was limited to aesthetic and monastic spheres, as opposed to doctrinal or theological ones. 41 As Grimstad remarks, the Orthodox period of Sviatki, situated between Christmas proper and Epiphany, constitutes a period of “religious encounter with an ontological other,” thereby mirroring the inn of the story’s frame setting as a site of encounter with the cultural other (and, for that matter, the text as a whole as a site of aesthetic encounter with the religious other, or Orthodox sectarian). See Grimstad, Styling Russia: Multiculture in the Prose of Nikolai Leskov, 146. I return to this issue in my discussion of alterity and representation below. For additional discussion of Orthodox Sviatki, see N. N. Starygina, “Sviatochnyi rasskaz kak zhanr,” in Problemy istoricheskoi poetiki, Vyp. 2: Khudozhestvennyi i nauchnye kategorii (sbornik nauchnyk trudov), ed. V. N. Zakharov (Petrozavodsk: Izdatel’stvo Petrozavodskogo Universiteta, 1992), 113-27; 113-14.

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miracles.42 Following the confiscation of the angel, the sectarians remark on numerous

“signs” (znameniia), including abrupt changes in the weather, creating problems on

the bridge construction; and the mysterious marks that suddenly appear on Pimen,

whose meddling in secular affairs leads to the group’s problems with the authorities.43

Not only the Old Believers, meanwhile, seek and interpret such signs, as some of the

sectarians’ English employers begin to view the group as cursed, and thereby

hindering the project.

The primary vehicle of divine will, of course, is the angel: Mark contends at

the beginning of his narrative, that “the angel of the Lord had led us to a good place”

(privel nas gospoden’ angel v dobroe mesto) in drawing them to Kiev, and the angel is

conceived as a source of guidance throughout their travels. Mark’s initial comment in

the framing of his narrative, that “not everyone could see the angel’s path, and…only

a genuine man of experience could truly comprehend it,” suggests that not only is it

possible to “see” this path, but that such vision may be facilitated and even enabled by

“experience” in the world. Mark even employs a leitmotif of the “vessel” (sosud) or

“empty crock” (pustosha) in his narrative, in reference to individuals manifesting

divine will, thereby (literally) embodying the transcendent.

Mark’s references to the sensible recognition of divine will suggest a

coordinated effort of faith and sense perception in religious experience; this discourse

imparts a hermeneutic dimension to the process, as well, as the religious subject must

42 “But the hour came for it all to be made manifest and for one kind of miracle to be replaced by another” (No nastal chas vsemu etomu oblichit’sia i premenit’sia odnim divesam na drugie) (4: 330, 15). 43 The unusual name Pimen may reference the monk and chronicler of the same name in Pushkin’s Boris Godunov (1825). The reference focalizes the potential identification of the spots on Pimen’s body as constitutive of a written text, available to reading and interpretation.

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interpret the object of vision in the proper manner, identifying a given “vessel” of

divine will, or the proper meaning of a miracle. Of course, it is just as possible to

succumb to a rigid formalism in religious practice, to allow sensible form to

predominate, as it is to interpret phenomena incorrectly. And the potential for such

formalism is a particular risk among Old Believers, whose quarrel with the church

derives essentially from disagreements over conventions of practice.44 Such

conventions, in fact, are integral to the sectarians’ identity, dictating the language of

prayers, ritual behavior, and modes of iconographic representation.45 It is possible to

observe such conventions slavishly, and Leskov’s previous depictions of the Old

Believers as stubborn confirms his awareness of this potential; yet, neither does The

Sealed Angel necessarily endorse a hermetic disavowal of all formal conventions, as

represented by Pamva.46 Rather, The Sealed Angel, in sketching a nearly dialectical

relationship between form and the ineffable, seems to suggest a middle course,

44 Levontii, in fact, seems to reference this issue shortly before his conversion to official Russian Orthodoxy. Before their departure from Moscow, Mark finds Levontii weeping, and singing “Joseph’s Lament,” a religious hymn based on the biblical narrative of Joseph’s enslavement in Egypt in the book of Genesis. The song includes the phrase (highlighted in Mark’s narrative): “My brethren have sold me into slavery” (Prodasha mia moi bratiia). This allusion to a sense of entrapment, clearly referencing the traditions of his “brethren,” immediately precedes his request to seek out Pamva. Similarly, the “blindness” that afflicts the Old Believers, the result of excessive weeping, may not result from the “blinding” of the angel, in its sealing, as much as it articulates their figurative blindness to the true “path” of the angel, in their obsessive attention to the icon alone. 45 These formal conventions include the proper spelling of Christ’s name, the number of fingers used in the signing of the cross, and, as relevant to the present discussion, the purity of medieval Russian iconographic form, before its “corruption” under the influence of Western art, beginning in the sixteenth century. See Robson, Old Believers in Modern Russia, 14-15; and James Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 121. 46In fact, as Sperrle remarks, Leskov did not generally favor monastic models of withdrawal and world-renunciation, preferring a program of moral engagement with the social world. See Sperrle, The Organic Worldview of Nikolai Leskov, 29-30. Leskov’s seeming ambivalence on this point is in some ways similar to that of Dostoevsky, who likewise creates positive monastic figures (Tikhon in Demons, Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov), alongside his active, secular heroes, exemplified by Alyosha Karamazov, who is instructed by Zosima to leave the monastery to participate in family and social relationships.

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whereby sensible form contributes to religious experience, and faith, conversely,

informs sensory experience.

The most evident validation of sensible form in The Sealed Angel, of course, is

the Orthodox icon, the extensive and poetic treatment of which has contributed to the

particular popularity of the povest’ within Leskov’s body of work. Leskov was himself

quite knowledgeable about iconography, and even collected icons; moreover, in the

period of his work on The Sealed Angel in 1872, he befriended an iconographer of the

Old Believer community in St. Petersburg, Nikita Savostianovich Racheiskov, and

later claimed to have written much of the story in the artist’s workroom.47

The icon, meanwhile, is a narrative device particularly well suited to a text

approaching the relationship between immanent and transcendent realities: in

Orthodox Christian belief, the icon is conceptualized as a medium of sensible access

to the divine, an actual imaging of the transcendent. As Hans Belting remarks,

Common to the most diverse of attitudes [regarding iconography] is a recognition of the cult image not as an aesthetic illusion or as the work of an artist but as a manifestation of a higher reality – indeed, as an instrument of supernatural power.48

In fact, early iconographic theory implied the very presence of the transcendent in its

material representation, on the basis of a similar orientation toward relics and icons in

early Christian culture. As Charles Barber points out, this led to a dual (and dynamic)

conceptualization of the icon, as both depiction and relic, as an object to be looked at,

47 McLean, Nikolai Leskov: The Man and His Art, 232-3. As McLean points out, Leskov’s claim to having composed the narrative in Racheiskov’s studio is likely an exaggeration. 48 Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 47.

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as well as a medium to be looked through, in enabling access to the prototype of the

image.49 He continues:

…the duplication of the icon by copying has no effect upon its power to make present, as each reiteration does not create a separate and different entity. Rather, the reiteration remains bound by a formal relationship that in its action of transformation builds a chain of identity. It is possible, therefore, to argue that in the century before iconoclasm, the icon was understood in terms prescribed by the cult of relics. It marked a trace of a continuing presence of the holy in the world and was deemed a truthful material manifestation of historical persons and events.50

This essentialist notion (i.e. the transcendent as sensibly manifest in its essence) would

fall under attack during the Byzantine Iconoclasm of the eighth and ninth centuries,

leading to ultimate revisions in the Orthodox theology of the icon.51 However, a

miraculous image, such as the “sealed” angel, even after Iconoclasm, implied the

presence of the represented, which worked miracles through the icon.52 The icon,

meanwhile, miraculous or otherwise, would emerge from Iconoclasm as a valid form

of theological knowledge, primarily on the basis of Incarnational theology, and the

intrinsic historicity of Christianity, a religion tracing its conception, continuity, and

expected culmination across phenomenal, human time. In the post-Iconoclastic, non-

essentialist theology of the icon (which persists today, in Orthodox Christianity), the

image and its archetype are united not in nature or substance, but by a common form:

the transcendent referent, in other words, is not “circumscribed” in the image, but is

49 Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 29. 50 Ibid., 36-37. 51 Significantly, the theological position of the iconoclasts may be defined as apophatic, as they “privileged an apophatic relation to God that emphasized the invisible, eternal, and limitless Godhead.” See Barber, Figure and Likeness, 57. The tension between form and transcendence in The Sealed Angel, therefore, mirrors the essential debates of Iconoclasm. The absence of icons in Pamva’s cell ramifies this parallel, casting the monk as an ersatz spokesman for Iconoclasm. 52 Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, 47.

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effectively evoked in visual form.53 The icon, therefore, serves as both exemplar and

limit case for the potential validity of representation in religious practice, for the

capacity of form to articulate the transcendent.

This formal connection, of course, between icon and prototype, necessitates the

existence of a correct, singular form, subject to theological regulation. What follows is

a strict mimetic imperative, essential to iconographic practice, whereby:

…the ontological relation between likeness and model made the portrait subject to the criterion of authenticity. What mattered was not whether the depiction of a saint was beautiful, but whether it was correct. Therefore, there could not be several authentic portraits, but only one. It was then necessary to establish which was the true one.54

The production of icons, therefore, requires the strict observance of visual conventions

in the painting of the image.55 Rather than prizing formal innovation, as typical of

modern, secular theories of artistic practice, iconography valorizes the faithful

iteration of traditional forms. While this mimetic imperative serves a dramatic

function in Leskov’s narrative (insofar as the commissioned copy of the angel must 53 This revised theological perspective of iconographic formalism was articulated by the iconophile Patriarch Nikephoros, writing around 820. See Barber, Figure and Likeness, 116-17. 54 See Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, 47. Belting proceeds to outline how such claims to authenticity derive from the legends of “unpainted” or original cult images. The former category of acheiropoietic (“not made by hand”) items include images created by physical contact with the model, such as the imprint of Christ’s face on St. Veronika’s cloth. The second category, apparently limited to images of the Virgin, posit St. Luke the Evangelist as the original iconographer, ascribing the same representational authority to those icons attributed to him as the Gospel of Luke, and asserting that the Virgin actually sat for her own iconographic portrait. See Belting, 49-59. Both categories, significantly, ground the authenticity of the image in claims to the presence of the model (Christ, the Virgin) during the process of “composition.” Similar to Barber’s point above in note 48, Belting’s observation denotes the close relationship between icons and relics in Christian practice, a distinction further blurred in the case of the acheiropoietic image. Mark references such acheiropoietic (in Russian, nerukotrovennyi) in his initial cataloguing of the Old Believers’ collection of icons, which includes a painted icon of Christ modeled upon such an image. 55 The iconographic canon was itself regulated by the Russian Orthodox Church, primarily in the documentation of the pre-schism Stoglav (“Hundred Chapters”) Council, held in Moscow in 1551. The council mandated that icons should follow the models of the Orthodox canon, upholding the significance of church tradition, while dismissing the very possibility of imaginative subjectivity in the creative process. On the Stoglav Council, see Leonid Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, 2 Vol., trans. Anthony Gythiel (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992), 2: 289-303.

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precisely imitate the original, “as one drop of water to another,” in order to deceive the

authorities), it is in fact this very adherence to the images, prayers, and rituals of the

“old faith” that delineate the Old Believers from the official Russian Orthodox

Church. In other words, the visual representation of the transcendent is achieved via

specific, canonical forms, as opposed to post-Romantic notions of inspiration and

innovation. It is mimesis, ultimately, which evokes the transcendent. And the Old

Belief, in stressing the preservation of traditional iconographic forms, simply carries

this mimetic imperative to a dogmatic extreme.

The strict conventionality, in turn, of Orthodox iconography, contributes to the

revelation of Christian truth. Vladimir Lossky distinguishes between the individual

traditions comprising ritual and the concept of “Tradition,” which he compares to

Scripture as dual aspects of Orthodox belief: whereas Scripture is the “revealed

content” of Christian Revelation, Tradition is “the unique mode of receiving

Revelation.” Lossky imbues Tradition with an inherent dynamism via the perpetual,

eternal revelation of truth.56 The Old Believer position, similarly, maintains the

necessity of preserving a tradition sanctioned by its correlation to divinity. However,

the nature of such mimesis, particularly in relation to the Old Belief, merits

clarification. As opposed to the naturalist correspondence of mimetic practice and

verisimilitude, iconographic mimesis comprises the imitation of existing formal

56 See Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, ed. John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 141-168, esp. 151, 154-55, 159-60. The dynamism Lossky ascribes to such static entities (scripture, icon) implies the necessary position of the religious subject in the process of revelation, as this participant is the primary variable. I highlight this implication as it seems to potentially impact, by analogy, the conceptualization of aesthetic experience: revelation, in other words, is contingent upon the variable of the religious subject, and his “perspective” in faith, just as aesthetic experience relies on the perspective of the aesthetic subject.

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conventions, as opposed to the alleged imitation of reality.57 In fact, traditional

Russian iconography, such as that upheld by the Old Believers, rejected such

representational practices, introduced under the influence of Western art in the

sixteenth century, which began to figure prominently in the iconography of the official

Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These Western

influences included aspects of Mannerist and Baroque art, following on the technical

advances of the Renaissance, and ranged from an emphasis on figural realism and

naturalism, to the presence of visual ornamentation. However, as Oleg Tarasov

reports, these innovations likewise prompted a coordinate increase in iconographic

symbolism and didacticism, whereby “the image was [increasingly] oriented towards

rhetoric rather than metaphysics.”58 From a representational standpoint, these

developments may be interpreted as diminishing the transcendental efficacy attributed

to traditional iconographic form. In other words, icons produced in the post-Nikonian

epoch of Western pictographic influence would prove increasingly semantic, a source

of theological information, as opposed to an aperture to divine presence – closer, in

essence, to sermon than sacrament.

These semantic shifts highlight, by contrast, the unique representational quality

of medieval, pre-Nikonian icons, which aspire to an actual “re-presentation” of

57 In this respect, iconographic theory challenges Victor Shklovsky’s contention that art develops through the “dynamism” of parody, in aesthetic rupture and reconfiguration. While Shklovsky’s rejection of a “mimetic imperative” in art is specific to his discussion of the development of prose literature, it provides, I think, an interesting counterpoint to the aesthetics of the icon. See Peter Hodgson, “Victor Shklovsky and the Formalist Legacy: Imitation / Stylization in Narrative Fiction,” in Russian Formalism: A Retrospective Glance. A Festschrift in Honor of Victor Erlich, ed. Robert Louis Jackson and Stephen Rudy (New Haven: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1985), 195-212. 58 Tarasov, Icon and Devotion: Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia, trans. Robin Milner-Gulland (London: Reaktion, 2002), 203-4, 210.

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referent; in other words, rather than merely articulating theology, in a didactic,

discursive manner, icons “perform” it, in the aesthetic simulation of metaphysical

reality.59 Icons produced within Old Believer communities display a commitment to

the traditional rendering of canonical iconographic programs, whether drawing on

biblical material or more prominent Orthodox saints and historical events for their

subject matter. The stylistic aspects of these icons largely avoided this shift in the

icon’s theological content, maintaining the spiritual, metaphysical emphasis

abandoned by concurrent trends in popular iconography, sanctioned by the Nikonian

New Ritual. Icons produced and venerated within Old Believer communities are

therefore closer, in style and content, to those of Andrei Rublev, Daniil Chorny, and

other medieval Russian masters of the form. One famous example of the metaphysical

nature of medieval Russian iconography is the technique of “reverse perspective,”

which seeks to draw the viewer into the represented reality of the icon.60 This practice,

of course, is at variance with Western, post-Renaissance techniques of

perspectivalism, which have become prevalent in contemporary iconography.

Significantly, reverse perspective seeks to incorporate the viewer in represented

reality, whereas perspectivalism organizes representation in relation to the viewer,

thereby enforcing the subject’s position as separate and detached.61 In other words,

reverse iconographic perspective organizes represented reality in relation to the

59 I reference here Bissera V. Pentcheva’s concept of the “performative icon,” elaborated in her programmatic article “The Performative Icon,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 88. No. 4 (December 2006): 631-655. I return to this concept, and Pentcheva’s scholarship, in the following chapter on Chekhov. 60 For detailed discussion of reverse perspective, see Boris Uspensky, Semiotics of the Russian Icon, ed. Stephen Rudy (Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press, 1976). 61 In this respect, the icon challenges, in visual technique, the metaphysical detachment Heidegger identifies in Western secular culture. I discuss this issue, in relation to Heidegger’s “The Age of the World Picture,” in the introduction above.

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transcendent, whereas verisimilar approaches to painterly perspective organize

depicted space in relation to the viewer, as “relational center.”62 As such, the

traditional Orthodox icon draws the viewer into representational space, as if

simultaneously “viewed” by the divine, enabling an ideational encounter with the

transcendent, by way of the image.63

The titular angel of Leskov’s text refers, of course, to both the confiscated,

“sealed” icon, and to the protective presence of the guardian angel (that ultimately, it

is suggested, leads the sectarians to conversion). The icon is clearly construed as

invested with the presence and efficacy of the angel itself; as such, it not only

represents metaphysical reality, but creates it, on the human plane of existence. The

Old Believer community’s love of the icon is elegantly conveyed by Mark, who

describes the icon at length at the outset of his narrative:

And the other one was a guardian angel, Stroganov work…and what a joy it was to gaze upon the angel! This angel verily was something indescribable. His countenance, as I see it now, is most radiantly divine and swift to succor, as we say; his gaze is tender; his ears are with ribands as a sign of his ability to hear in all places and directions; his raiment burns with light, his robes glitter with golden ornaments, his armor is of mail, his shoulders begirt; on his bosom is an image of the child Emmanuel; in his right hand he bears a cross and in his left a flaming sword. A marvel it was to see, good sirs, a marvel indeed! The hair on his wee head is a light brown and each single hair has been traced out with a needle. His wings are spread and are white as snow, and the undersides

62 The medieval icon thereby challenges, in visual technique, the metaphysical detachment Heidegger identifies in Western secular culture, which I discuss above in the introduction. Heidegger’s metaphor of the “world picture” is apt to the present discussion, as it conveys the subject’s mental, and thereby disembodied relationship to the world. This formulation corresponds to the dynamic engendered by modern painterly perspective – as “relational center,” this Cartesian subject finds itself, ironically, “nowhere,” denied participation, sidelined by its own dominating perspective. 63 There is a parallel, admittedly broad, between this transition in the theological content of the icon, and the revised approach to the Eucharist initiated in the Protestant Reformation, which I discuss above in the introduction. Just as the medieval Russian icon seeks to simulate the presence of metaphysical reality, the medieval, transubstantiated Eucharist asserts the presence of the divine essence in the matter of bread and wine. By comparison, modern icons, like the modern (Protestant) theology of the Eucharist, merely gesture toward the absent transcendent, by way of representational signification.

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are bright azure and each feature painted separately so you can make out every single barb in each tuft of feather. When you look at those wings every bit of your fear just vanishes away: you pray “Guard me in Thy bosom” and at once calm falls over you and peace comes into your soul. That was an icon indeed! (4: 324; 9)64

The detail of the portrait of the infant Christ, on the angel’s breast, iterates the

Incarnational theology at the basis of the icon’s efficacy, referenced by way of an

image of Christ at the time of the Incarnation itself. Christ is also, of course,

referenced in the image of the cross, borne by the angel in his right hand. Meanwhile,

Mark’s seemingly casual mention of the “indescribable” quality of the icon not only

extends the apophatic subtext to the narrative, explored above, but likewise accords an

expressive power to the image that is evidently lacking in language. This valence is

consistent with the pragmatic function of the icons, meant to serve as “aids to faith”

for the illiterate, and therefore conceptualized in opposition to scripture, historically

accessible to an educated minority, and requiring, moreover, the hermeneutic skills

64 «…а другая ангел-хранитель, Строганова дела. Изрещи нельзя, что это было за искусство в сих обеих святынях! Глянешь на владычицу, как пред ее чистотою бездушные древеса преклонились, сердце тает и трепецет; глянешь на ангела…радость! Сей ангел воистину был что-то неописуемое. Лик у него, как сейчас вижу, самый светлобожественный и этакий скоропомощный; взор умелен; ушки с тороцами, в знак повсеместного отвсюду слышания; одеянье горит, рясны златыми преиспещрено; доспех пернает, рамена препоясаны; на персях младенческий лик Эмануелев; в правой руке крест, в левой огнепалящий меч. Дивно! дивно!... Власы на головке кудреваты и русы, с ушей повились и проведены волосок к волоску иголочкой. Крылья же пространны и белы как снег, а испод лазурь светлая, перо к перу, и в каждой бородке пера усик к усику. Глянешь на эти крылья, и где твой весь страх денется: молишься «осени», и сейчас весь стишаешь, и в душе станет мир. Вот это была какая икона!»

A. A. Gorelov has suggested that the angel itself, and its features and attributes, are modeled on the Archangel Michael. See Gorelov, N. S. Leskov i narodnaia kul’tura (Leningrad: Nauka, 1988), 159-66. Citation in O. E. Maiorova, “’Neponiatnoe’ u N. S. Leskova: O funktsii mistifitsirovannykh tsitat,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, No. 6 (1993-94): 59-66; 61.

McLean identifies this passage as exemplary of Mark’s heterogeneous stylistic register, which incorporates Church Slavonic, liturgical phrases, archaisms, and colloquial Russian. See McLean, “Russia, the Love-Hate Pendulum, and The Sealed Angel,” 1333-34.

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elaborated in the exegetical tradition.65 However, it likewise suggests that the icon, in

its physical presence, achieves an efficacy that is unique to visual representation, and

therefore lacking in language. Mark’s description includes references to the angel’s

gaze and ears, in turn valorizing sensory experience, registers of present activity, in

the anthropomorphizing of the transcendent being. Moreover, the icon may be defined

as a “natural sign,” in the sense that the image’s relationship to its referent is a

necessary one (i.e. the sign is a visual approximation of the visual appearance of the

signified), whereas language is a system of “arbitrary signs,” its constituent words

possessing a merely contingent relationship to its referent.66 In other words, we know

whether a painting resembles its model, whereas the relationship between a given

word and its actual referent, much like currency, carries value solely in a community

of linguistic practitioners.67

As a form of visual representation, the icon claims this pure semiotic capacity.

Moreover, it is an immanent, spatial object, prompting the viewer’s actual, physical

encounter with the sign, and by extension, the transcendent. As such, the icon is an

65 As Mark later asserts, discussing this pedagogical feature of the icon with Iakov Iakovlevich, “not everyone is given to comprehend Scripture” (pisanie ne vsiakomu dano razumet’) (4: 351; 36), proceeding to offer examples of liturgical misunderstanding. 66 On this distinction, see Murray Krieger, “The Problem of Ekphrasis: Image and Words, Space and Time – and the Literary Work,” in Pictures into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis, ed. Valerie Robillard and Els Jongeneel (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1998), 3-20; 3. 67 This distinction is problematized, of course, when the visual referent is an angel, which has no empirically-verifiable characteristics. Yet I would contend the absolute authority claimed by religion in matters of representation sufficiently ensures even images of the transcendent to be “natural signs,” insofar as religious traditions claim transcendental sanction. Would not an institution, claiming the doctrinal approval of the divine, be assured of the visual characteristics of the divine and its representatives, such as angels? Save for certain ancient languages, as well as language employed in particular ritual contexts, modern languages lack the guarantee of an absolute correspondence between word and referent. The complexity of this issue of course exceeds the parameters of the present discussion. However, the general, implicit acceptance of the distinction between “natural” and “arbitrary” signs in Western culture is sufficient to ascribe this semiotic immediacy to visual, rather than verbal representation.

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exemplary formal entity, providing a counterpoint, in the validation of sensible form,

to the critique of sensory experience and expression (primarily linguistic) elsewhere in

The Sealed Angel. The image is an atemporal, spatial form of representation,

encountered in immediacy; language, by comparison, is a temporal, mediating,

ideational system, as exemplified by written narrative.68 Yet, Leskov’s ekphrastic

attempt to present the image in language, by way of Mark’s description, clearly seeks

to resolve this opposition, lending the efficacy of the visual to narrative language.

Ekphrasis itself, variously defined as an autonomous art and a rhetorical mode,

likewise has a precedent in Orthodox Christianity. While modern discussions of

ekphrasis trace it to Horace’s famous ut pictura poesis, in the Ars Poetica, and

Gotthold Lessing’s later critique of the phenomenon in his Laokoön, it was likewise a

practice in Byzantine culture, in which ekphrasis referred broadly to the rhetorical

category of formal description.69 While most critical applications of ekphrasis employ

the concept in approaches to the representation of objects, artistic and otherwise, in

poetry, I will here explore how the device is exploited in Leskov’s prose text.70

68 As W. J. T. Mitchell argues: “If writing is the medium of absence and artifice, the image is the medium of presence and nature, sometimes cozening us with illusion, sometimes with powerful recollection and sensory immediacy.” See Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 114. 69 As Henry Maguire points out, Byzantine ekphrasis could potentially describe any number of things, while buildings (including churches) and works of art (including icons) were particularly popular ekphrastic subjects. The primary object of ekphrasis in the Byzantine context was to lend a more vivid quality to verbal description, suggesting the aesthetic primacy of the visual, as a mode of representation and perception, in Byzantine culture. See Maguire, Art and Eloquence in Byzantium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 22. This notion of visual representational strategies in language, as well as the spatial aspect of Byzantine ekphrasis, in the description of architecture, will figure in the analysis below. 70 Examples of ekphrasis in literature approach both “real,” ontologically-existent objects, including works of art and everyday objects, and fictional entities, prompting John Hollander’s identification of “notional ekphrasis,” for instances of the latter. See Hollander, “The Poetics of Ekphrasis,” Word & Image, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1988): 209-217; 209.

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If a primary means of delineating linguistic and visual representation, as

suggested above, is the static, spatial, present quality of the latter, ekphrasis is often

employed to the advantage of lending such features to literature by way of aesthetic

illusion, thereby defying “the mediating properties and the temporality of language.”71

Returning to Mark’s extensive presentation of the image of the angel, we discern a

similar process at work. While the symbolic characteristics of the angel’s appearance

(his wings, armor, facial features, etc.) refer figuratively to narrative potential (sensory

acuity, martial strength, divine sanction, etc.), in his capacity for action, the

enumeration of characteristics contributes to the verbal composition of a single image.

The reader is expected to imaginatively constitute the image, an effect facilitated by

Mark’s ekphrasis of a known iconographic type, likely familiar to much of Leskov’s

contemporaneous Russian audience. Leskov, naturally, exploits a visual lexicon in the

passage, as the “gaze” (glianesh’) of the viewer/reader meets the “gaze” (vzor) of the

angel, in a pairing and confluence of sight. Viewer and viewed encounter one another

in the ideational space of the image, evocative of the angel’s participation in the events

of the narrative.

Without necessarily imposing a visual paradigm on the totality of the narrative,

Leskov’s selective use of the “ekphrastic principle” functions to punctuate the

For pioneering discussion of specifically poetic applications of ekphrasis, see Murray

Krieger’s “Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry: Or, Laokoön Revisited,” in In The Poet as Critic, ed. Frederick P. W. McDowell (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 3-26. 71 See Krieger, “The Problem of Ekphrasis: Image and Words, Space and Time – and the Literary Work,” 12. By comparison, James Heffernan challenges Krieger’s typology with his discussion of occasional (though not exclusive) narrative elements in ekphrasis, which release an “embryonically narrative impulse” in visual representation. See Heffernan, “Ekphrasis and Representation,” 307. Heffernan’s argument is persuasive, particularly in light of the undeniable persistence of narrative elements in much visual art, including iconography. Still, as Heffernan concedes, his observations do not invalidate those of Krieger, but serve to supplement the definition of ekphrasis, which still functions to impose temporal and spatial fixity upon language.

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temporal progression of verbal narrative with a momentary visual effect. In the context

of Mark’s initial discourse on icons, which includes his ekphrasis of the angel, his

extensive description of the image interrupts his own cataloguing of the diverse

iconographic types in the possession of the sectarians, a descriptive pause prompting,

in turn, a lingering of attention in the reader. The description seeks to simulate the

non-mediated, physical presence of the visual object, while highlighting a single,

effervescent moment of vision. Appropriately, the physicality of the icon itself is

stressed throughout the narrative, in the sectarians’ cautious preservation of the object,

and the treatment to which it is later subjected, in its sealing and confiscation.

Meanwhile, its function as an imaging of the transcendent figures in the angel’s

interpreted manifestations in the reality of the Old Believers. Just as such

manifestations of the angel are evanescent, the textual effects of iconographic

physicality and visual stasis are, of course, illusory: reading itself never ceases to be a

diachronic activity, regardless of whether it should entail propulsive narration, or

detailed description. Still, what results is a spatialization of narrative, whereby space

momentarily predominates over time, as the primary category of aesthetic experience

in the reading act.72

72 Dostoevsky’s deployment of the Holbein painting in The Idiot serves a similar structural and thematic function to Leskov’s treatment of the angel here. While likewise instances of literary ekphrasis, Dostoevsky’s descriptions of the Holbein are, for various reasons (their brevity, placement in reported dialogue, subjective basis, etc.), less effective as moments of narrative spatialization, though the difference is one of degree. Notably, Bakhtin identifies a different principle of spatialization in Dostoevsky, in his famous device of polyphony, and his preference for more dramatic techniques, such as simultaneity, juxtaposition, and counterposing. As such, Bakhtin identifies the preponderance of space over time in Dostoevsky, and his concentration on the single moment. See Problems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 28. Dostoevsky’s spatializing techniques are also evident in the devices of temporal dilation, repetition, and narrative retardation, which I discuss in chapter 1.

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I have emphasized this particular aspect of the text, in order to elucidate a

parallel between Leskov’s thematic treatment of the angel icon within The Sealed

Angel, and the reader’s encounter with the description of the image: just as the icon, in

the context of Orthodox belief (as well as the context of textual reality), is believed to

figure the transcendent, to ascribe it sensible form, the spatializing effect of Mark’s

presentation of the icon lends a momentary physicality and presence to the immaterial

language of narrative. As such, the text performs, in aesthetic analogy, its own

thematic reconciliation of sensible form and transcendent reality. The transcendent

exceeds representation, just as the visual exceeds linguistic expression, yet these very

antinomies find resolution in iconography and ekphrasis, respectively. These aesthetic

practices face the same, paradoxical basis of the Incarnation as that expressed (or

rendered mute) in apophatic discourse, but put forward a different response:

iconography offers “a painting of that which cannot be painted,” while ekphrasis

provides a verbal description of that which, theoretically, is only available to sight.73

Ultimately, there is an ideal, “orthodox” experience of the icon and Leskov’s

text, which Mark later explains in a discursive manner. Expounding upon the art of

iconography in conversation with “Iakov Iakovlevich,” the English foreman of the

construction project, Mark outlines, in great detail, various schools, practitioners and

techniques of Russian icon painting, proceeding to discuss the potentially profound

encounter between supplicant and icon in the religious context. This technical

73 The quoted phrase is from Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm, 26. Ironically, the text provides a more literal example of such a phenomenon, a “painting of that which cannot be painted,” when the iconographer Sebastian produces a tiny, four-panel icon in remarkable detail.

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emphasis provides a type of general ekphrasis of the iconographic canvas, which he

contrasts with secular artistry:

Nowadays, I tell him, those worldly artists don’t have the same kind of art. They use oil paints, while the icon painter mixes his delicate colors with egg. Your regular painter daubs on his colors just so that they look natural only from afar off, but the true icon painter builds his up slowly in layers and they are clear and real from as close up as you care to get. (4: 348; 33)74

Lantz’s translation of this passage takes some lexical liberties in order to more fully

delineate these two, opposed categories of artistry, and thereby emphasize Mark’s

essential point. Mark stresses the technical “realism” achieved in iconography, which

further elicits the contrast between the medium, and its transcendent referent. The

specificity of his description, meanwhile, constitutes a veritable phenomenology of the

canvas: the reader may more palpably conceive of this abstract canvas (and apply its

characteristics to the specific canvas of the Stroganov angel), by virtue of this

information on the “depth” of the layered canvas. In practice, this characteristic

“building up” of the iconographic image challenges the metaphorical conception of the

iconography as the skillful “revealing” of an existing, eternal image – with each

brushstroke’s addition of paint, ironically, visual obstructions are “removed” by way

of the spectator’s faith. This paradox, however, simply iterates the same antinomy at

the basis of the representational practice of iconography, and the theological tenet of

the Incarnation. The image, after all, is meant to be physically available to the viewer,

even as it transcends the canvas itself.

74 «…ноне, мол, у светских художников не то искусство: у ник краски масляные, а там вапы на яйце растворенные и нежные, в живописи письмо мазоное, чтобы только на даль натурально показывало, а тут письмо плавкое и на самую близь явственно…»

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Mark’s reference to the “worldly” (svetskii) artist, meanwhile, serves to

explicate the higher vocation of the iconographer. At the beginning of his exposition,

Mark refers to art itself as “Godly” (bozhestvennoe), and later discusses the necessity

of “lofty inspiration” (vysokoe vdokhnovenie) in artistic production. There is a strong

religious dimension to the creative process itself, which clearly facilitates the artist’s

goal of accessing divine form in the act of representation. He continues to delineate

the worldly and religious artist:

And your worldly artist, I tell him, won’t even manage to make a job of copying the outline, because he has been taught to portray what is contained in the earthly body of a man who loves this earthly life. But sacred Russian icon painting shows the heaven-dwelling type of face of which even a devout material man cannot have the least inkling. (4: 348; 33)75

This “heaven-dwelling type of face” (tip litsa nebozhitel’nyi) is a transcendent form,

the figuring of which, in iconography, enables a similar “ascent,” in the “heavenly

direction,” in the moment of aesthetic experience. Asked to describe “an inspired work

of art” (vdokhnovennoe izobrazhenie), Mark discourses at length:

Now, my dear sirs, that is a rather perplexing question for a simple man, but what was I to do? So I started in telling him how the starry sky was painted in a Novgorod cathedral, and then began explaining about the paintings in St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev where at the sides of Jehovah Sabaoth stand seven winged archangels… and on the thresholds of the vestibule the prophets and patriarchs; a step lower is Moses with his tablets, still lower is Aaron in a mitre and with a flowering rod; on other steps are King David in a crown, the prophet Isaiah with a scroll, Ezekiel with locked gates and Daniel with a stone. And around these intercessors pointing out the way of Heaven are displayed God’s gifts through which man might somehow attain this glorious path: a book with seven seals – the seal of wisdom; a seven-branched candlestick – the gift of reason; seven eyes – the gift of counsel; seven trumpets – the gift of fortitude; a right hand amid seven stars – the gift of sight; seven censers – the

75 «…и светскому художнику, говорю, и в переводе самого рисунка не потрафить, потому что они изучены представлять то, что в теле земного, животолюбивого человека содержится, а в священной русской иконописи узображается тип лица небожительный, насчет коего материальный человек даже истового воображения иметь не может.»

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gift of piety; seven bolts of lightning – the gift of fear of God. “That,” I say, “is painting to elevate the spirit!” (4: 351; 36)76

Mark’s culminating pun on how the painting may “elevate the spirit” is of course

deliberate, as he describes a fresco in Kiev’s St. Sophia Cathedral representing the

path to heaven. Mark subsequently asserts that “such painting speaks clearly to the

soul and tells a Christian that he must pray and thirst in order to ascend from the earth

toward the inexpressible glory of God” (takovoe izobrazhenie iavstvenno dushe

govorit…, khristianinu nadlezhit molit’ i zhazhdat’, daby ot zemli k neizrechennoi

slave boga voznestis’), invoking the same vertical motif of devotional ascent. The

work, dynamically, depicts this “way to Heaven” (in the gifts of God, and the

fulfillment of Old Testament prophesy), even as it ensures the supplicant that a

meditative viewing of the painting itself will likewise enable ascent; simultaneously

sign and aesthetic surface, the murals achieve the illusive goal of “at once representing

an object and being an object.”77 The painting is to be read, semantically, as well as

contemplated aesthetically, as suggested by the detail of the seven eyes within the

painting. Meanwhile, Mark’s ekphrasis, like the work it describes, achieves a similar

semiotic dynamism, as both sign and signified.

76 «Вопрос, милостивые государи, для простого человека доволньно затрудительный, но я, нечего делать, начал и рассказал, как писано в Новегороде звездное небо, а потом стал излагать про киевское изображение в Софийском храме, где по сторонам бога Саваофа стоят седмь крылатых архистратигов…; а на порогах сени пророки и праотцы; ниже ступенью Моисей со скрижалию; еще ниже Аарон в митре и с жезлом прозябщим; на других ступенях царь Давид в венце, Исаия-пророк с хартией, Иезекииль с затворенными вратами, Даниил с камнем, и вокруг сих предстоятелей, указующих путь на небо, изображены дарования, коими сего славного пути человек достигать может, как-то: книга с семью печатями – дар премудрости; седмисвещный подсвечник – дар разума; седмь очес – дар совета; седмь трубных рогов – дар крепости; десная рука посреди седми звезд – дар видения; седмь круильниц – дар благочестия; седмь молоний – дар страха божия. «Вот, – говорю, – таковое изображение гореносно!»» 77 Murray Krieger, “The Problem of Ekphrasis: Image and Words, Space and Time – and the Literary Work,” 18.

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Mark’s description embodies the painting for his audience (and the reader),

just as the painting itself manifests a transcendent force. Appropriately, an

Incarnational motif is recurrent in the painting, despite the figural absence of Christ

himself.78 The St. Sophia fresco includes images of Old Testament prophets (Isaiah,

Ezekiel, Daniel) later interpreted, in Christian exegesis, to foretell the coming of

Christ. Significantly, each prophet is accompanied by an emblem of his respective

prophesy of Christ’s birth in the Incarnation – Isaiah with a scroll, Ezekiel with locked

gates, and Daniel with a stone.79 The painting also includes other Old Testament

patriarchs, such as Moses, Aaron, and David, subsequently interpreted as prefiguring

the coming of Christ.80 Compared with his earlier description of the icon, however,

Mark’s ekphrasis pertains to the architectural interior of the cathedral, manifesting the

sacred space in language. Beginning at the image of Jehovah, Mark’s description

descends down the thresholds of the vestibule, and the steps of the cathedral, as if

tracing backwards the ascent, in perception and prayer, of the viewer within the

78 God himself is represented, however, in the image of Jehovah Sabaoth. 79 Isaiah’s scroll likely refers to his literal prophesy of a child born of a Virgin (7:14: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.”). Ezekiel’s locked gate is a symbol of the Virgin, “opened” with the birth of Christ (44: 2-3: “The Lord said to me, “This gate is to remain shut. It must not be opened; no one may enter through it. It is to remain shut because the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered through it. The prince himself is the only one who may site inside the gateway to eat in the presence of the Lord.”). Daniel’s stone refers to Christ himself, and his dispersing of false idols (2: 34-5: “While you were watching, a rock was cut out, but not by human hands. It struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and smashed them. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the gold were broken to pieces at the same time and became like chaff on a threshing floor in the summer. The wind swept them away without leaving a trace. But the rock that struck the statue became a huge mountain and filled the whole earth.”). See Oxford NIV Scofield Study Bible, 685, 864, 874. All three prophets, notably, are celebrated in Orthodox Christianity. 80 I refer here to Erich Auerbach’s extended discussion of biblical “figuration” in his essay “Figura,” referenced above in the introduction. This classic discussion of the “figural” relationship between Old and New Testament figures is relevant to the present discussion, and Leskov’s handling of the theme of manifestation, particularly in Auerbach’s emphasis on the historicity of both entities, “figure” and “fulfillment,” within this relationship.

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church. Additionally, the description frames a perceptual movement through space,

and thereby inscribes the audience within the ekphrastic spatial field. And because

Mark’s original ekphrasis transpired in Kiev (as opposed to its subsequent presentation

in his narrational speech act in the inn), the space itself would be accessible to Iakov

Iakovlevich, in order to verify the description, and experience the cathedral itself.81

Mark’s ekphrasis of the Kievan church evokes the comparative absence of a

fixed liturgical space among the Old Believers, who no longer encounter the St.

Sophia Cathedral as a ritual site. The sectarians transport their own tabernacle from

place to place, erecting a temporary structure to house their icons, subsequently

violated by the Kievan authorities. Even here, a vertical orientation dictates the

arranging of icons beneath the crucifix, thereby orienting, in turn, the contemplative

“ascent” of the supplicant within the makeshift site of veneration and prayer. In the

same discussion with Iakov Iakovlevich, Mark reflects sadly on how the group’s ties

with the traditions of its ancestors are all broken, and how everything, as a result,

seems “fresh-made” (vse kazalos’ obnovlennee). Despite Mark’s elegiac tone, his

comment likewise allows for a positive interpretation: the group’s improvisational

capacity, as well as the efficacy accorded to the icon, suggests a sustained immediacy

and palpability to religious experience. The Old Believer supplicant ascends anew

with each contemplation of the iconostasis, and even the individual image, an

immediacy that Leskov seeks here to convey by way of Mark’s ekphrastic

81 In fact, the St. Sophia Cathedral, built in the eleventh century, in the period of the Kievan Rus’, still exists today. Notably, debates over control of the cathedral were renewed in the post-Soviet period, as numerous Orthodox churches lay claim to the church structure.

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descriptions. Bereft of the past, the Old Believers partake of an eternal present, and

transcendental presence, inscribed in the literal “forms” of religiosity.82

Alterity: The Visual, Verbal, and Ontological Other The image, however, is not the sole means of figuring the transcendent in The

Sealed Angel. As if to issue a more literal challenge to the apophatic silence of

Levontii and Pamva, lending additional validation to sensible form, the text likewise

proposes spoken language as a means of expressing the transcendent. Just as

Orthodoxy cites Incarnational theology as theological justification for iconographic

representation, language enjoys a valorized status across Christian theology, as evident

in the Bible, and the Johannine characterization of Christ himself as the “Word made

flesh.” Leskov, meanwhile, ascribes efficacy to spoken language, specifically. The

theme is most readily evident in the leitmotif of prophesy in the text; just as the icon

inscribes the transcendent in visual form, prophesy quite literally “speaks” the

transcendent, lending sensible form to the divine message. Appropriately, Mark draws

attention to the depiction of the Old Testament prophets Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel in

his description of the St. Sophia Cathedral, discussed above; and he likewise

references the prophet Amos, in his earlier conversation with Pimen.

82 This reading stands in tension, obviously, with the Old Believers’ simultaneous fixation on the pre-Nikonian, pre-schism past of a unified Russian Orthodoxy, as well as the sacramental efficacy drawn from this past, as articulated by Lossky in his concept of “Tradition.” Still, like other ambivalent dimensions of The Sealed Angel, such as the aforementioned tension between form and the ineffable, Leskov allows this (admittedly irreconcilable) antinomy to persist in sketching the temporal dimensions of the Old Belief.

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The Old Believer community even counts a prophet among its ranks, the

blacksmith Maroi, who provides literal embodiment to the theme of prophesy in the

text:

Maroi was a simple soul who couldn’t even read or write, a rare thing to find among the Old Believers. But he was an uncommon fellow: clumsy in appearance, like unto the drumbledary camel he was, and bebosomed like the wild boar – his chest alone was the compass of man’s arms and half again – and his forehead all overgrown with thick, shaggy locks just like the mermecolion of old, while on his very crown was shaved a tonsure. His speech was dull and scarcely to be made out, as if he were chewing on his words; and his mind was dim, and he was so incompetent at everything that he was not even able to learn his prayers by memory but would just go on repeating one same word of his own again and again. But he had premonitions about the future and had the gift of prophesy and would give us inklings of things that later came to pass.83

Despite his apparent simplicity, Maroi manages to produce innovative solutions to

difficulties encountered on the construction project, even leading to the interpretation,

beyond the Old Believer community, that he is a vehicle for miracles. Maroi is later

sent for, in order to interpret the mysterious fall of the Stroganov angel during the

night, though his interpretation is preempted by the arrival of soldiers, and the onset of

the sectarians’ conflict with the secular authorities. Maroi is likewise present, and

praying before the angel, when the soldiers return on the following day to confiscate

the icons. In this later episode, as mentioned above, Maroi is incapable of explaining

the absence of clergy among the Old Believers: though unable to invest his speech

with any basic, literal meaning, he is nonetheless capable of “speaking” a divine

83 «Марой был совсем простец, даже неграмотный, что по старообрядчеству даже редкость, но он был человек особенный: видом неуклюж, наподобие вельблуда, и недрист как кабан – одна пазуха в полтара обхвата, а лоб весь заросший крутою космой и точно мраволев старый, а середь головы на маковке гуменцо простигал. Речь он имел тупую и невразумительную, все шавкал губами, и ум у него был тугой и для всего столь нескладный, что он даже заучить на память молитв не умел, а только все, бывало, ондо какое-нибудь слово твердисловит, но был на предбудущее прозорлив, и имел дар вещевать, и мог сбывчивые намеки подавать.»

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message at other moments. This unique combination, of expressive incoherence and

prophetic capacity, suggests a super-semantic dimension to spoken language, which

Maroi is able to channel.84 Meanwhile, just as Maroi is able to invest the transcendent

with sensible form, in speech, he is also able to discern its formal manifestation: in the

culminating scene of the narrative, as the sectarians attempt to replace the confiscated

icon with the commissioned reproduction, Maroi proves the sole character to visually

discern the influence of the angel upon the course of events. As Luka Kirilov traverses

the bridge chains to deliver the replacement icon, Maroi claims to witness the light of

angels illuminating his way, and assuring his safe passage.

Ultimately, just as Pamva embodies the apophatic subtext of The Sealed Angel,

Maroi embodies the theme of prophesy, emblematic of a bilateral ability to accord

form to the transcendent, and to discern its formal manifestations. Maroi functions, in

this respect, as a textual cipher for Leskov himself; and it is hardly surprising, as

Irmhild Christina Sperrle reports, that Leskov conceived of the writer as a form of

prophet.85 The specifically spoken quality of prophecy, meanwhile, suggests an

additional, more important textual parallel with Maroi, in the form of Mark

Alexandrov himself, whose very name is reminiscent of Maroi’s.86 Mark’s narrative is

entirely oral, delivered in a single sitting before his fellow travelers in the snow-bound

84 On the level of reception, an equivalent capacity may be evident in the wife of Iakov Iakovlevich, who eavesdrops on the conversation between her husband and Mark on the topic of religious belief, as well as Mark himself. Incredibly, Mark suggests, “although she didn’t speak much of our language she understood everything” (i khotia ne mnogo po-nashemu govorila, no vse ponimala) (4: 352; 37). Similarly, when the husband and wife subsequently begin speaking English, Mark is somehow able to intuit the meaning of their speech. 85 Sperrle, The Organic Worldview of Nikolai Leskov, 45. 86 The similarity is still more evident in the diminutive form of Mark’s name, Marochka, by which Mikhailitsa refers to him.

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inn. His mixed register of colloquialisms, archaisms, and Church Slavonicisms

indicates Leskov’s knowledge of liturgical and technical language, as well as his

remarkable mastery of Russian speech dialects, derived from his extensive travels

across Russia.87 Such stylized, idiosyncratic language lends the impression of

verisimilitude and authenticity to the narrative (which is all the more necessary,

arguably, in light of its miraculous nature).88 More relevant, however, to the present

discussion, is the isomorphic function of speech in the text: it literally constitutes the

narrative itself, in Mark’s speech act, and likewise functions as a formal embodiment

of religious experience. Just as icon and prophecy lend form to the transcendent,

Mark’s language lends form to an immanent encounter with the transcendent,

mediating the relationship between form and transcendence in the text.

Central to this effect is the aesthetic immediacy implied by spoken, as opposed

to written language. Spoken language, after all, necessitates the presence of the

speaker, just as sound itself necessitates a source, and is therefore indicative of present

activity.89 Appropriately, Walter Benjamin, in his essay on Leskov, postulates how the

technique fosters a sense of “companionship,” shared by audience and “storyteller.”90

As such, Leskov exemplifies Emile Benveniste’s classic definition of literary 87 “Leskov more than once remarked that during his journeys through Russia he listened carefully to the pronunciation and speech of the people among whom he stayed. His use of distorted words was occasioned by his interest in dialects.” See C.G. Schwenke, “Some Remarks on the Use of Dialects in Leskov’s Prose,” Slavonic and East European Review 46 (1968): 333-52; 334. 88 As I. Z. Serman points out in his commentary to Leskov’s Sobranie sochinenii v 11 tomakh (4: 544), Dostoevsky disagreed (despite his generally positive assessment of the work), critiquing the improbable nature of Mark’s language, which he characterizes as “essentializing” and overly bookish, in his Diary of a Writer. For additional analysis of Dostoevsky’s review, see Vinogradov, “Dostoevsky i Leskov v 70-e gody XIX veka,” 524-29. 89 Walter J Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967), 114. 90 Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 83-109; 100.

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discourse, which assumes both speaker and hearer, and first-person locution, in the

narrative event.91 In other words, just as the image achieves a greater semiotic

immediacy than language, speech achieves a potentially greater sensory immediacy

than written language. Both strategies, meanwhile, contribute to Leskov’s attempt to

ascribe a heightened immediacy to his own literary text, analogous to those scenes of

transcendence represented therein.

Mark’s speech act, as well as Leskov’s text, thus correspond to J. L. Austin’s

linguistic category of the “performative utterance,” or “illocutionary” mode, which

shifts the function of language from its meaning to its potential “force” or influence

upon the addressee.92 This is not to suggest that Mark’s speech or Leskov’s narrative

lack semantic content, as both clearly cohere as traditional narrative structures. Rather,

Austin’s illocutionary model highlights the present, performative quality of Mark’s

narrative presentation, an unmediated quality that Leskov seeks to appropriate, as

evident in his favoring of the skaz form. This effect, of course, like that of textual

spatiality, is illusory: Leskov’s text doesn’t cease to be written any more than it

enables the actual, physical appearance of Mark before the reader. Despite Bakhtin’s

dismissive characterization of Leskov as a “writer monologist,” Leskov’s narrative

technique in the story clearly corresponds to Bakhtin’s category of “double-voiced

discourse,” in which “semantic authority” is “achieved with the assistance of other’s

91 Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971), 188. 92 Austin, “Performative Utterances,” in Philosophical Papers, 2nd Edition, ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 233-52; 235, 251. Austin discusses this category in greater detail in his classic How to Do Things with Words, 2nd Edition, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).

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words.” 93 Appropriately, in The Sealed Angel authorial intension is achieved by way

of the “foreign word” (chuzhoe slovo) of the narrator-protagonist. However, the

“authority achieved” is not merely semantic, as Mark’s speech is wielded not only for

the purpose of authorial discourse, but to foster the authentic presence of a speaking

voice.

Leskov’s representation of Mark’s speech, however realistic, is clearly a

stylization, consistent with J. Alexander Ogden’s definition of the equivalent Russian

term, stilizatsia, which denotes “the purposeful reproduction of someone else’s style as

a defined aesthetic and ideological position in a new artistic context.”94 Ogden’s

emphasis on the appropriated nature of such discourse is significant, as it underlines

the alien quality of the reproduced speech. This improbable quality to Mark’s speech,

however, serves a dual function: it is meant to imply his physical presence, in the

approximation of a speaking voice; but it also fosters an aesthetic distance in its very

incomprehensibility. As such, the device simultaneously suggests the proximity and

withdrawal of the speaking subject. By the terms of Victor Shklovsky’s concept of

ostranenie, or “estrangement,” such aesthetic rupture may be seen to contribute to the

palpable quality of the language, suggesting a mutual inflection of the two effects.

Still, as suggested above, the irrevocable “otherness” of Leskov’s sectarian subjects,

rendered in narrative content and the medium of Mark’s language, is emblematic of

Leskov’s theme of representing the transcendent. The Old Believer, as cultural,

historical, and linguistic other, transcends the referential field of Leskov’s audience, 93 Leskov’s “monologic” shortcomings, of course, as interpreted by Bakhtin, are posited in opposition to Dostoevskian polyphony. See Problems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 182, 188. 94 Ogden, “The Impossible Peasant Voice in Russian Culture: Stylization and Mimicry,” 517. Italics in original.

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and the representational field of Russian literature of the period. Alterity, therefore,

lends an additional, figurative expression to the theme of transcendence in The Sealed

Angel.

The textual manifestation of alterity, however, is by no means limited to

speech, and even represented cultural traditions such as the Old Belief, but permeates

still further into the work. The concept is central to W. J. T. Mitchell’s discussion of

ekphrasis, which he locates in the attempt to overcome, and even repress the visual

“other” in language.95 In this respect, “ekphrastic hope” derives from the desire to

limit the power of the image, to mediate its potential force and efficacy in language.

By analogy, Leskov’s project, in cultural, and even political terms, could be

interpreted as a literary attempt to regulate the efficacy and influence of the Old

Belief. Though at variance with his evident sympathy for the sectarians in the text, this

polemical reading gains plausibility in light of their culminating conversion to the

official church, especially considering the ironic, incidental nature of the conversion

itself. Moreover, it is to be noted that The Sealed Angel was written at the height of

Leskov’s “sympathy” for the Russian Orthodox Church, such as it was. In this respect,

the text may be seen as an attempt to inscribe the Old Believers, bastions of religious

formalism, within the formal parameters of language, even to the extent of

appropriating the sectarians’ unusual linguistic traits. As Taussig argues, this impulse

is coextensive with any mimetic impulse, which seeks to appropriate the power of the

model in the act of representation.96 Leskov’s narrative, therefore, appropriates the

95 Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, 156, 173. 96 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, 16.

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expressive power of the Old Believers, just as the official church legitimates its own

institutional authority by incorporating the sectarians in the act of conversion, thereby

validating its own dogmatic agenda. In both cases, appropriation enables a neutralizing

of the alterior threat of dissent.

Persuasive as arguments for Leskov’s artistic endorsement of official Russian

Orthodoxy may be, The Sealed Angel remains, as elsewhere, ambivalent on this point

of interpretation, as evident in the abrupt and ambiguous nature of the sectarians’

conversion. That alterity is central to Leskov’s project is undeniable, given its stylistic

aspects, and plot constituents. Still, it is likewise possible to discern the author’s

genuine admiration for his subject matter, as well as a potential autonomy accorded to

Mark’s narrational speech act. There are numerous details characterizing Mark’s

autobiographical narrative as a confessional one, even beyond the first-person form at

the base of the confessional genre. In the preliminary conversation prompting his

narrative, Mark expresses the desire to narrate his experience on his knees, arguing

that his tale is “more seemly to relate while on my knees, since it concerns a matter

most sacred and even awesome” (…pristoinee na koleniakh stoia skazyvat’, potomu

chto eto delo ves’ma sviashchennoe i dazhe strashnoe) (4: 322; 7). Though clearly

grounded in his sense of the awesome character of his story, the gesture also suggests

that his narrative be interpreted as a form of religious confession. Given that Mark’s

speech act transpires after his conversion, and is presumably delivered to an audience

of members of the official church, his description of the Old Belief, and his former

life, appear in a new light, as a previous sin to be renounced. As we later learn, in the

novella’s conclusion, Mark and his sectarian cohort submit to confession with the

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bishop at the time of their conversion. The entirety of Mark’s narrative, therefore, may

be viewed retroactively as the iteration of this previous conversion, since

narrativized.97 This detail, in turn, imparts a circularity to the narrative, as if each

iteration of Mark’s narrative (potentially preceding and/or succeeding the present

performance) begins at this point of conclusion, in his conversional confession. By

ritualizing his own, iterative confession, as narrative impulse, it extends infinitely

beyond the given narrative occasion.

Confession, moreover, may be linked to alterity, in their mutual implication of

marginality. As Jeremy Tambling suggests, confession is itself a “marginal discourse”:

The history of confession is that of power at the centre inducing people at the margins to internalize what is said about them – to accept that discourse and to live it, and thereby to live their oppression. The creation of the confessing personality may be defined as the production of the reactive spirit: focused on guilt, weakness, and on the need for reparation. It produces, indeed, the death of the speaking subject. Confession, a speaking into the silence, defers contact, a sense of the other…98

Tambling’s identification of the power relationship foundational to confession is

certainly consistent with the subservient role assumed by Leskov’s sectarians, in

relation to the “forgiving” official church, as well as their delimiting inscription in the

text itself. Meanwhile, this reading of the self-erasure inherent to confession

corresponds to Foucault’s discussion of self-renunciation as the basis of Christian

confession. Foucault writes, in a spirit prescient to the present context: “Penance is the

affect of change, of rupture with self, past, and world… Self-revelation is at the same

97 It is tempting to consider the ritual formalism of the sectarians as extending to this practice within the New Ritual, as if forced to eternally seek absolution, without advancing to the promised, “positive” content of their new faith. Likewise, this notion of “eternal penance” implies the Orthodox phenomenon of kenoticism, or “self-emptying,” as a form of piety. 98 Tambling, Confession: Sexuality, Sin, the Subject (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 6-7.

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time self-destruction.”99 However, Foucault concludes his study with reference to a

more positive, creative form of confession, beginning in the eighteenth century, in

which similar techniques of disclosure and verbalization allow, conversely, for the

actual construction of the self.100

As such, there is a potentially creative dimension to Mark’s confession, which

proves constitutive of a new, conglomerate self and identity, analogous to the

embodiment enabled by spoken language. His speech, in other words, is not merely an

appropriated force, but remains independent, and even subversive, in its own right. As

a genre, confession suggests the authenticity of the speaking subject, but this certainly

does not disallow the confessant’s creative impulse.101 On the contrary, as Nadiezda

Kizenko observes, in her study of records of nineteenth-century written confessions in

the Russian Orthodox Church, there is an interesting relationship between the

confessional “script,” and the liberties assumed by the penitent in the construction of

sacred narrative.102 Confession, therefore, is not solely mimetic, but also poetic.

Moreover, as Peter Brooks remarks, it is the act of confession, as opposed to its

content, that is typically deemed efficacious.103 This tenet further underlines the

99 Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 16-49; 43. 100 Ibid., 49. This latter category presumably comprises secular confessional variants, such as Rousseau’s Confessions (1769). 101 Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 4. 102 Nadieszda Kizenko, “Written Confessions and the Construction of Sacred Narrative,” in Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia, ed. Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007), 93-118; 94. 103 Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature, 95.

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performative, embodying quality of the confessional speech act, while ceding control

of confessional content to the creative impulse of the speaking subject.

Whether Mark’s narrative corresponds to this creative, post-Enlightenment

model of confession, or a more conventional notion of penitential subservience is

likewise subject to dispute. His speech, of course, still evinces his sectarian

background, as does the content of his narrative, both of which are here put to creative

purpose. Though no longer a member of the Old Belief, its cultural trace remains

indelible; moreover, there is the implication that Mark has not integrated entirely in

the New Ritual: his confessional gesture of kneeling entails a decision to remain

separate from his audience (and possibly, by extension, the ruling church). Still, the

nature of Mark’s underlying psychology, like the thematic mediation of form and

transcendence, challenges conclusive interpretation. Given the inherently performative

quality of Leskovian skaz, it is possible to approach The Sealed Angel, like Mark’s

confession, as grounding its efficacy in the narrative event itself, as speech act, as

opposed to its specific content. In this respect, it is notable that the authorial voice is

less evident in Leskov’s fiction than in that of his contemporaries.104 Similarly, as

Benjamin remarks, Leskov does not display the explanatory tendencies common to the

novel.105 In fact, as Sperrle argues, Leskov’s frequent ambivalence, his hesitancy to

explain in his fiction, may even be indicative of an apophatic inclination in his own

literary project.106

104 Ansberg, “Frame Story and First Person Story in N. S. Leskov,” 57. 105 Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 88-9. 106 Sperrle, The Organic Worldview of Nikolai Leskov, 61. These critical readings, like my own, obviously challenge Tom Eekman’s assertion that “Leskov evinced the desire to communicate and

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In addition to corresponding to the apophatic subtext of The Sealed Angel,

Leskov’s discursive ambivalence penetrates to the dramatic apex of the narrative – the

events suddenly prompting, en masse, the conversion of the Old Believers. Though the

sectarians interpret Luka Kirilov’s safe passage across the Dniepr, and the unsealing of

the icon, as miraculous manifestations of the angel, meant to “guide” them to the

official church, it is just as possible to read the conclusion as a farcical one, prompted

by misinterpretation: Mark’s acceptance of a naturalistic explanation of the events,

including Maroi’s alleged witnessing of the angel, seems to endorse this possibility.

For ultimately it is only Maroi who claims to see the transcendent itself: his brethren

only claim to behold the force or effect of the transcendent, as opposed to its essence;

and such manifestations are subject to belief and interpretation. This ambiguous

conclusion, however, is appropriate to the text’s thematizing of the formal

manifestation of the transcendent, and whether such forms merit the efficacy they

claim. As in the icon, form and essence remain delineated, and it is left to the subject

to determine if such form corresponds to a transcendent model.

explain everything, to round off his story nicely, leaving little to the reader’s imagination.” See Eekman, “The Authorial Voice in Leskov’s Work,” 130.

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Chapter 3: Christian Aesthetics as Theme and Modeling Principle in Chekhov’s Fiction The correlation of Chekhov with the literary epiphany is by now a critical

truism, such that one can scarcely discuss his short fiction, especially in the context of

modernism, without reference to the phenomenon. In one critic’s concise formulation,

the modernist epiphany is “knowledge…received as revelation rather than

experience,” and is thus integral to the modern short story, insofar as it dispenses with

the broader narrative canvas of the novel, in favor of the singular, momentary event.1

To be sure, Chekhov pioneers and exploits this formal feature of the short story,

exerting a considerable influence on the development of modernism.2 Telling, in this

respect, is the number of major modernists to make statements on Chekhov’s art,

ranging from Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf, to Vladimir Mayakovsky and

Vladimir Nabokov.3

Rather, however, than discuss Chekhov’s position at the beginning of one

trajectory, I will here approach his fiction as the culmination of a different line,

Russian Realism. As witnessed in the discussion of Dostoevsky, the novel is a genre

ill disposed to the transcendent moment of epiphany, prompting a creative response

from the novelist in the staging of transcendence. The short story, by comparison (and

in many ways thanks to Chekhov’s own formal innovations), would seem to be

1 Rachel Falconer, “Telescoping Timescapes: Short Fiction and the Contemporary Sense of Time,” in Moments of Moment: Aspects of the Literary Epiphany, ed. Wim Tigges (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999), 445-466; 452. 2 Chekhov’s influence on James Joyce, the most famous practitioner of the literary epiphany (and originator of the term), is discussed in Irene Hendry, “Joyce’s Epiphanies” The Sewanee Review, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Jul. – Sept. 1946): 449-467; 452-54. 3 References to these individual texts are included below in the chapter bibliography.

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intrinsically, structurally oriented toward such evanescent moments. As Mary Louise

Pratt observes, whereas the novel is modeled on the complete life of an individual, the

short story focuses on a mere “fragment of life,” calling attention to a peak moment.4

In this respect, the short story essentially transcends narrative temporality, the

diachronic progression seen to challenge novelistic epiphany.5 This same tendency,

toward “temporal stasis,” is likewise identified as the basis of the short story’s

relationship to the lyric, which in turn compounds the individual, subjective

orientation of the short story genre.6 The lyrical dimension of the short story is

particularly crucial to the moment of epiphany, as the revelation staged dramatically in

the narrative is in turn imparted to the reader, demonstrating the bivalency of

epiphany, as narrative event and aesthetic construct. Meanwhile, the compact nature of

the story reinforces this bivalent aspect: in Bakhtinian terms, the “reader-text

chronotope, or space-time where text and reader meet, is especially heightened in the

4 Pratt, “The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It,” in Poetics 10 (1981): 175-194; 182. Pratt defines the short story as a marked and dependent “countergenre” in relation to the normative, dominant genre of the novel. From this perspective, it is tempting to consider Chekhov’s technique as a response to those shortcomings of the novel outlined above – namely, it’s difficulty in capturing the revelatory moment. Osip Mandel’stam offers a related insight, suggesting that the decline of the novel in the twentieth century derived from a general, waning interest in biography, and related notions of the efficacy of the individual, and the relationship of the subject to his/her social and physical environment. Mandel’stam’s explanation of the transition to more compact literary genres (short fiction, lyric poetry, dramaturgy, etc.) coalesces with the general epistemology of modernism – namely, that the increasingly fragmentary nature of existence, and even the subject, demanded representative literary forms, capable of expressing this orientation. See “Konets romana” (“The End of the Novel,” 1928) in Osip Mandel’stam, Stikhotvoreniia i proza (Moscow: Biblioteka poeta), 464-468. 5 Charles E. May, “Introduction” to The New Short Story Theories, ed. Charles E. May (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994), xix. Original citation in Falconer, op. cit.. This aspect of the novel is discussed in Michael Holquist’s analysis of Dostoevsky, which I discuss in chapter 1. 6 Karl D. Kramer, The Chameleon and the Dream: The Image of Reality in Cexov’s Stories (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), 12-13.

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short story,” enabling this simultaneity of character (figural) and reader (aesthetic)

epiphanies.7

Ultimately, irrespective of its subject matter, the short story may be said to

transcend, in structural terms, the diachronic succession of novelistic reality, and thus,

to a certain extent, the quotidian nature of this reality. As Boris Eikhenbaum posits, in

his classic study of the story genre: “The novel is a long walk through various

localities with a peaceful return trip assumed; the short story – a climb up a mountain,

the aim of which is a view from on high.”8 Eikhenbaum’s metaphor of ascent is

appropriate to the cognitive revelation imparted in the epiphanic short story, which

typically discloses a sudden truth or psychological essence. While this purely secular,

psychological dimension of epiphany is indeed integral to Chekhov’s poetics,

Chekhov also at times deploys scenes of epiphany in the terms described in previous

chapters – as a moment of access to the transcendent.9 Deprived of the novel’s “force

of totality,” the short story necessarily gestures beyond itself, glancing to some

broader context or framework, and thereby partaking of a necessary relationship with

7 Falconer, 460. Similarly, as Horst Ruthrof contends: “Dialectically interacting as are the structures of narrative text and reading act, identification with the implied reader of the boundary situation story means a radical bracketing of the actual reader’s consciousness of a permanently present and all-embracing social reality.” See “Bracketed World and Reader Construction in the Modern Short Story,” The Reader’s Construction of Narrative (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 97-109; 105. 8 Eikhenbaum, O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story, trans. I. R. Titunik (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions, 1968), 4. 9 While it is difficult to uphold rigid distinctions between realist and modernist forms of epiphany, for the purposes of my study I maintain that realist epiphanies enable the character’s experience of the transcendent (even if such experience is ironized, or ambivalently sanctioned, in a given text), whereas such moments in modernist prose are typically psychologized in a predominantly interior, secular manner. Chekhov, I will argue, effectively straddles these two approaches to character experience, justifying his simultaneous designation as the “last great Russian realist,” and a crucial forerunner of literary modernism.

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external, and potentially transcendent realms.10 In addition to such structural features,

intrinsic to the short story, the frequently oblique, referential nature of Chekhov’s

fiction often, likewise, gestures beyond the spatio-temporal parameters of textual

reality. Meanwhile, on the level of represented reality, Chekhov’s characters

experience moments of transcendence of several varieties, including religious practice,

aesthetic experience, and even more subtle, minute instances of the mundane

transfigured. In other words, there are various forms of “transcendence” in Chekhov’s

fiction and drama; however, as I will demonstrate below, the manner of rendering such

moments is largely consistent, disclosing an essential dimension of Chekhov’s poetics,

as well as his innate grasp of the related operations of liturgical and aesthetic

experience.

The discussion of transcendence in Chekhov, naturally, begs the question of

the writer’s personal religiosity; however, it is not my goal here to characterize

Chekhov as a religious writer, pace prevailing critical notions, and the writer’s own

statements on the topic. Though less associated with Russian Orthodoxy, and religion

generally, than other nineteenth-century Russian authors (and particularly the other

writers discussed in this dissertation), it has been suggested that “Chekhov was the

Russian writer most conversant with the rites and texts of Orthodoxy,” an assertion

grounded in the depth and intensity of his religious upbringing.11 Raised in a lower-

middle class family in the southern port town of Taganrog, Chekhov’s childhood

10 In the most literal, structural sense, the story gestures toward a broader narrative framework that “transcends” the limited temporal continuity of the story itself, namely the past and future histories of characters, as well as additional dimensions of characters themselves. This feature is particularly evident in Chekhov, who substitutes suggestion for description in his terse prose manner. 11 Julie W. de Sherbinin, Chekhov and Russian Religious Culture: The Poetics of the Marian Paradigm, 1.

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consisted of enforced religious piety, inextricably linked with the severe disciplinary

measures of his father, Pavel. As Pavel served as choirmaster for several Orthodox

churches in Taganrog, a young Chekhov and his two older brothers, Aleksandr and

Kolia, were for years enlisted to sing in the church choir, often twice daily, in addition

to the thrashings regularly meted out by their father.12 Chekhov would later attribute

his renunciation of religious belief to the dour nature of his childhood, as repeatedly

expressed in his personal correspondence.13 Yet, Chekhov’s extended exposure to the

Orthodox rite would bear an indelible influence on his writing; as Willa Chamberlain

Axelrod points out, Chekhov remained Orthodox not in his beliefs (which are

ultimately inscrutable), but by his “upbringing and knowledge.”14 His religious

background would persist in his general interest in religious topics, and he would

retain his love of Orthodox Church ritual throughout his life.15 Moreover, Chekhov’s

authoritative knowledge of the tradition and culture of Russian Orthodoxy frequently

figures in the subject matter of his fiction: like Leskov before him, Chekhov

12 Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 13. 13 See especially Chekhov’s letter of March 9, 1892 to Ivan Scheglov (“I have no religion now.”), and his similar letter, dated January 21, 1895, to Alexei Suvorin, in Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 30 tomakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1974), Pis’ma 5:20; 6: 17-19. Subsequent citations to this edition will be abbreviated to PSSiP, delineating, as here, between references to Chekhov’s works (Sochineniia) and correspondence (Pis’ma). English translation in Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary, 217-9; 265-68. 14 Axelrod, Russian Orthodoxy in the Life and Fiction of A. P. Chekhov, 7. 15 Donald Rayfield, “Chekhov and the Literary Tradition,” A Chekhov Companion, ed. Toby W. Clyman (Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood Press, 1985), 35-51; 38. As Rayfield elsewhere reports, as an example of Chekhov’s affinity for Orthodox ritual: “During his adult life, right up until his death, [Chekhov] would rarely spend an Easter night in bed; instead he would wander the streets, listening to the church bells.” See Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life, 13. While Rayfield emphasizes Chekhov’s love and knowledge of Russian church music (and the Orthodox liturgy, notably, is sung), his comparable knowledge of the textual and iconographic traditions of Orthodoxy, as well as the Bible, are likewise manifest in his writings.

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repeatedly casts the Orthodoxy clergy as characters, and likewise depicts liturgical

scenes in his stories.

Chekhov’s religious background, and his treatment of Orthodox subject matter,

speaks to his nuanced relationship to Russian Orthodoxy, leading to a critical interest

in the writer’s predominantly sociological understanding of religious experience, and

to his poetic interpolation of Orthodox themes, motifs, and settings. As Robert Louis

Jackson remarks, “The real question is not so much Chekhov’s personal religious

beliefs (though this is not an isolated question), but the relation of Chekhov the artist

to biblical and liturgical culture and tradition.”16 Following in this vein of inquiry, this

chapter explores how Chekhov incorporates religious media (both liturgical and

scriptural) in several representative texts. Though referencing scenes in other works,

my analysis will focus on three individual stories: “Khudozhestvo” (“Artistry,” 1886),

“Panikhida” (1886), and “Student” (“The Student,” 1894). Beginning with my reading

of “Khudozhestvo,” I will first examine how Chekhov characterizes Russian Orthodox

liturgical practice, and his particular attention to its social and aesthetic aspects.17

Here, as elsewhere, Chekhov emphasizes the centrality of art in Orthodox theology

and praxis, in turn identifying the unique efficacy of aesthetic experience in a ritual

context. While Chekhov thematizes this phenomenon in numerous texts, I believe he

also exploits the parameters of Orthodox Christian aesthetics as a modeling principle

for his own writings. Namely, just as Christian art enables an aesthetic mode of access

to the transcendent, Chekhov configures his stories not simply referentially, as 16 Jackson, “Introduction” to Reading Chekhov’s Text, ed. Robert Louis Jackson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 8. 17 References to “Khudozhestvo” will retain the Russian title, as the English “artistry” loses certain lexical valences of the original, as discussed below.

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vehicles for representation and verisimilitude, but as an iconological means of

inducing analogous forms of epiphany in the reader, establishing an isomorphic

relationship between fictional (character) and aesthetic (reader) subjects. I will then

pursue this inquiry into my analysis of religious experience in “Panikhida” and “The

Student,” contending that the treatment of narrative in each story is objectified at their

respective structural levels, enabling analogous, aesthetic forms of disclosure.

To return to my initial discussion, I seek to enhance critical understanding of

the Chekhovian epiphany by identifying a possible template for this phenomenon in

Chekhov’s knowledge of Russian Orthodoxy, and his deployment of its liturgical and

scriptural traditions in his writings. In brief, I propose that Chekhov represents an ideal

of religious experience as a model for the reader’s ideal encounter with his short

stories. This parallel is most immediately evident in Chekhov’s consistent attention to

the aesthetic nature of religious experience, and the materiality of religious media.

This theme in Chekhov’s writings may be said to highlight (and, in turn, deconstruct)

an aesthetic orientation intrinsic to Russian Orthodoxy. William James, in his classic

The Varieties of Religious Experience, identifies the aesthetic orientation as innate to

the religious psychology of certain individuals, as well as particular religious

traditions;18 and Orthodox Christianity may arguably be placed in such a category. As

Chekhov himself once asserted, “A village’s church is the only place where the

peasant, not to mention other things, can get even a few aesthetic impressions.”19 This

18 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin, 1985), 459-60. 19 «Церковь в деревне – это единственное место, где мужик, не говоря о прочем, получает хоть какиe-нибудь эстетическиe впечатления.» See A. Izmailov, Chekhov, 1860-1904: biograficheskii nabrosok (Moscow: I.D. Sytina, 1916), 552. Original citation, and English translation, in Julie W. de Sherbinin, “Chekhov and Christianity: The Critical Evolution,” in Chekhov Then and Now: The

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citation, like the stories themselves, acknowledges alternative values to religious

experience; and while Chekhov’s orientation is by no means a decadent one, he clearly

conceives of the aesthetic as an integral, and necessary dimension of religious

experience. As Chekhov formulated, in an earlier letter to Ivan Scheglov, human

morality gave Christ to the world, not vice versa.20 Inasmuch as Chekhov here, with

sociological acuity, grounds religiosity in a preexisting social and psychological

disposition, the formulation may be adapted to assert that man’s aesthetic orientation

inspired Christianity itself.21

Such a perspective, of course, implies a rather detached orientation toward

religion; and inasmuch as Chekhov does not approach his material from the standpoint

of belief, this is certainly true.22 As Thomas Mann suggests, in his essay on Chekhov,

“the truth is by nature ironical,” and Chekhov’s ironic (though by no means cynical)

treatment of Russian Orthodoxy penetrates to deeper truths on the nature of both

religious and aesthetic experience.23 These stories exemplify the primacy Chekhov

Reception of Chekhov in World Culture, ed. J. Douglas Clayton (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 285-299; 288. 20 Chekhov, PSSiP [Pis’ma] 4: 44; Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought 163. 21 Chekhov’s critical orientation toward religion, as a human institution, suggests his intellectual affinity for the “second order” tradition of religious studies, including thinkers as diverse as Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and William James. While Chekhov does not appear to have been intimately familiar with any of these thinkers, they were his contemporaries, and shared with the writer an empirical approach to the topic of religion. Given the relevance of these scholars to the issues explored here, their ideas will figure periodically in the ensuing discussion. 22 I agree with Savely Senderovich, in this respect, who characterizes Chekhov as a “religious phenomenologist.” See Senderovich, Chekhov – s glazu n glaz: Istoriia odnoi oderzhimosti A. P. Chekhova (Opyt fenomenologii tvorchestva), 185-86. 23 Mann, “Chekhov,” trans. Tania and James Stern, in Last Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), 178-203; 191. Chekhov’s handling of Russian Orthodoxy concedes, and even elevates its aesthetic and social points of efficacy. I thus disagree with critics casting Chekhov as an outright opponent or critic of Orthodoxy. Edmund Wilson, for example, writing of Chekhov’s later story “Arkhierei” [“The Bishop,” 1902] claims that Chekhov here presents “a specimen of the not quite diseased yet not very vigorous tissue of the Greek Orthodox Church.” See Wilson, “Seeing Chekhov Plain,” in A Window on Russia: For the Use of Foreign Readers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 52-68; 62.

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accords, in secular and religious art alike, to individual, subjective experience,

reflected in his personalized approach to religion.24 Meanwhile, and most

significantly, this critical perspective on religious experience leads Chekhov to

displace revelatory priority from religion to art – whether liturgy, scripture, or the

epiphanic short story. As Jackson elsewhere observes of Chekhov, the ideal in his

stories is never given a priori, as it would be in a religious world view (such as

Dostoevsky’s), but remains, rather, something to be discovered.25 As such, it remains

the function of the Chekhovian story to disclose this ideal, even as this function is

itself thematized on the level of narrative discourse. If Chekhov’s stories, therefore,

lack the a priori supposition of a higher power, they maintain a faith in the power of

the evanescent moment, and the ability of art to capture this moment, and disclose its

content. Ultimately, Chekhov identifies this capacity in religious media, even as he

performs it in his own art.

24 Conversely, Chekhov’s emphasis on subjectivity suggests his skepticism of empiricism, despite his scientific background. As Susan McReynolds and Cathy Popkin write: “So far from manifesting ‘objectivity’ as serene detachment…Chekhov’s writings indicate the beleaguered status of the concept even before the arrival in Russia of modernist ideas in the early twentieth century.” See “The Objective Eye and the Common Good,” in Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 1881-1940, ed. Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 57-105; 98. Popkin also explores the related issue of epistemology in Chekhov’s writings in her article “Historia Morbi and the ‘Holy of Holies’ – Scientific and Religious Discourse in Cechov’s Epistemology,” in Anton P. Cechov – Philosophische und Religiöse Dimensionen im Leben und im Werk, ed. Vladimir B. Kataev, Rolf-Dieter Kluge, and Regine Nohejl (Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1997), 365-74.

Related issues have been explored under the rubric of Chekhov’s alleged “literary impressionism.” The topic has generated voluminous criticism, including Dmitri Chizhevsky’s endorsement of the characterization, and Thomas Eekman’s rejection of the category. See Chizhevsky, “Chekhov and the Development of Russian Literature,” in Chekhov: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Louis Jackson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 49-61; Eekman, “Cekhov – An Impressionist?”, Russian Literature XV, No. 2 (1984): 203-222). For further discussion, see Bitsilli, “Impressionism,” in Chekhov’s Art: A Stylistic Analysis, trans. Toby W. Clyman and Edwina Jannie Cruise (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1983), 44-73; and Savely Senderovich, “Chekhov and Impressionism: An Attempt at a Systematic Approach to the Problem,” in Chekhov’s Art of Writing: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Paul Debreczeny and Thomas Eekman (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1977), 134-152. 25 Jackson, “Perspectives on Chekhov,” in Chekhov: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Louis Jackson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1967), 1-20; 7.

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To be sure, there are also pragmatic aspects to Chekhov’s deployment of

Russian Orthodoxy in his stories. Writing of Chekhov’s frequent use of Christian

motifs, Marianna Raneva-Ivanova discusses how references to Christianity, in light of

the assumed familiarity of the audience, are well suited to the structural economy of

the short story, and therefore function as a device of expedience.26 The same may

likewise be said of Chekhov’s motives in the works discussed below, as the

represented episodes would certainly have been familiar to a contemporary audience.

Moreover, Chekhov frequently exploited the literal, seasonal context invoked in his

stories: like other Russian writers, such as Leskov, he frequently produced Christmas

and Easter stories, and two of the stories explored here, “Khudozhestvo” and “The

Student,” were published to coincide with the Orthodox holidays represented therein.27

While this combination, of subject matter and publication context, is logical enough, it

reinforces how fully Chekhov thought to invoke the valences associated with a given

religious event. Though it would be difficult to gauge the extent of religious belief

among Chekhov’s intended audience, it is reasonable to assume familiarity with the

subject matter among his contemporaneous Russian readership.

26 “In its capacity as a motif which is already familiar to the reader, and which therefore represents both a ready-made plot and a philosophical statement, the Christian motif is value-charged, and is especially suitable for the short literary genre because of its utmost economy of means.” See Raneva-Ivanova, “The Transfiguration of a Christian Motif in Chekhov’s Short Story ‘Dreams,’” in Cultural Discontinuity and Reconstruction: The Byzanto-Slav Heritage and the Creation of a Russian National Literature in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Jostein Børtnes and Ingunn Lunde (Oslo: Solum forlag a/s, 1997), 237-246; 238. 27 “Khudozhestvo,” which narrates preparations for the Orthodox feast of Epiphany, was published in Peterburgskaia gazeta on January 6, the date of Epiphany itself. “The Student,” an Easter story, was appropriately published in April in Russkie vedomosti (The Russian Gazette). The Sealed Angel, as noted above, is likewise a Christmas story. As N. N. Starygina points out, most nineteenth-century Russian authors publishing in newspaper periodicals produced Christmas stories, including, in addition to Leskov and Chekhov, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, B. G. Korolenko, and A. M. Gorky. See “Sviatochnyi rasskaz kak zhanr,” 116.

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Meanwhile, these stories clearly represent a belief system that informs the

reception of Orthodox religious art, which I explore in my discussion of

“Khudozhestvo.” Namely, Eastern Orthodoxy conceives of the aesthetic as a point of

access to divine reality, according a unique efficacy to aesthetic experience. Chekhov

is clearly fascinated with this tenet, which suggests a type of ultimate aesthetic model,

grounded in a guarantee of transcendence, at the intersection of aesthetic and

theological thought. In a way, Chekhov fashions his own stories on such a model – as

an aesthetic mode of access to something greater, something transcending the humble

parameters of the story itself. As A. C. Sobennikov observes, Chekhov’s “religion” is

humanist, not transcendental, in outlook; however, Chekhov clearly exploits the

transcendental basis of Orthodoxy, as it is focalized in religious art.28 In fact, Chekhov

even seems to transfer the religious functions of disclosure and revelation to the

literary artist, consistent with Max Weber’s suggestion of the modern artist’s

appropriation of the traditional charisma of religion.29

While literary-critical and sociological discourses on Western culture tend to

perceive the arts in a state of competition with religion, as exemplified by Weber’s

typology, it is necessary to denote characteristics shared by religious and aesthetic

practices.30 In light of the crucial role of art in most religions, and particularly the

28 See Sobennikov, “Bibleiskii obraz v proze A. P. Chekhova (aksiologiia i poetika),” 24. As Sobennikov elsewhere remarks, along similar lines, as a literary artist Chekhov is concerned with phenomenal reality, as opposed to the transcendental or noumenal. See Mezhdu “est’ Bog” i “net Boga” (o religiozna-filosofskikh traditsiiakh v tvorchestve A. P. Chekhova), 124. 29 Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 323-359; 342. 30 In addition to the aforementioned sociological tradition, most discussions of the emerging tensions between art and religion in the nineteenth century figure in the voluminous critical literature on the process of secularization in this period, such as Owen Chadwick’s The Secularization of the European

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Christian tradition,31 the very interpolation of artistic media in religious praxis denotes

an analogous set of methodological concerns. Insofar as religion typically employs art

as a means of expressing various theological tenets, and even the transcendent itself, it

ascribes to art an active function in religious revelation, ranging from liturgical

practices to biblical narrative. In Russian Orthodoxy, particularly, this function is not

merely one of representation, a figurative referencing of the transcendent, but rather an

attempt to bring the faithful into actual contact with the transcendent within a liturgical

context. Operating under the same essential principle of the medieval Eucharist, of the

transcendent rendered immanent in regular miracle, religious art seeks to produce the

effect of the transcendent by means of aesthetic experience. To relate this more closely

to the terms of literary studies, religious aesthetics likewise abscond from paradigms

of mimesis and verisimilitude, just as prose fiction, as I attempt to demonstrate

throughout this dissertation, attempts to exceed such paradigms in the performative

efficacy of epiphany.

From a phenomenological perspective, religious art delivers not the

transcendent, but an aesthetic equivalent, through the deliberate manipulation of the

human senses. Ironically, however, this equivalent is not merely contingent, but

manifests autonomy in its aesthetic impact. I refer again to Gadamer’s correlation of

religious language and authentic “textuality,” and Foucault’s similar discussion of the

“return of language,” explored above in the introduction. Prose language, I maintain,

Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). For an example of the “secularization thesis” applied to literary studies, see J. Hillis Miller’s The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (New York: Schocken, 1965). 31 See, for example, Gadamer’s analysis of Christianity’s legitimating of art in his “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” 3-5.

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achieves this autonomy by exceeding the assumed mimetic purpose of literary realism,

by engendering a textual effect that is not merely reflective or poster, but “present” in

immanent and imminent ways.

If these considerations apply broadly to prose fiction, meanwhile, they are

particularly relevant to discussions of the short story. For whereas the realist novel

relies heavily on claims to verisimilitude and referential practice, the story, as it were,

“bears the device” of its constructed nature, as an isolated moment transfigured in

form. As Lukács suggests, defining the short story in opposition to his focal genre of

the novel: “The subject’s form-giving, structuring, delimiting act, his sovereign

dominance over the created object, is the lyricism of those epic forms which are

without totality,” according such lyrical forms “an independent life,” at variance with

the more contingent status of the novel.32 On account of this principle of selection, and

the limited scope of short fiction, the short story typically centers on a single narrative

event. On the basis of such brevity, the reader’s aesthetic encounter with the story may

likewise be defined as an “event,” while the Chekhovian story exploits this “event

model” in additional, more cognitive and aesthetic capacities. As Horst Ruthrof

argues, the “represented crisis” in short fiction is often transformed “into the

existential experience of the act of reading.”33 Ruthrof’s formulation is equivalent to

the aesthetic bivalency I have defined as fundamental to the literary epiphany, and the

“performative” nature of Chekhov’s stories essentially enables this aesthetic effect.

32 Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 51. 33 Ruthrof, The Reader’s Construction of Narrative, 108.

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Meanwhile, not only does Chekhov’s fiction center on a single event; it

deforms the very category of the narrative event in such a manner as to force the

reader to grasp precisely what is “eventful” about a given situation. In her study The

Pragmatics of Insignificance, Cathy Popkin outlines Chekhov’s various techniques for

challenging and reconfiguring the definition of narrative significance. As Popkin

argues, this effect is derived from Chekhov’s manipulation of audience expectations,

enabling the production of narrative event through the very violation of established

conventions:

It is the socio-cultural norms of classification that bear the brunt of the jolt…It is Chekhov’s achievement that he makes these norms of significant and tellable action manifest. He does so by manipulating the dimensions of the narrative event, leaving the reader with a fresh perception of the prevailing order and a need to reevaluate what might actually constitute a “significant” event in that context.34

Challenging critics, such as Krystyna Pomorska, who define Chekhov’s prose as

“eventless,” Popkin adheres to Tzvetan Todorov’s minimal criteria for a complete

plot, defined simply as “a shift from one equilibrium to another.”35 What is crucial,

however, to the present analysis is that this “shift” in equilibrium occurs in the

consciousness of the reader, as an aspect of the aesthetic encounter with the text.

Such features contribute to the singularly engaging, even absorbing quality of

Chekhov’s fiction. For if the novel is said to reaffirm the world, in reproducing its

34 Popkin, The Pragmatics of Insignificance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Gogol (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 10. 35 Pomorska, “On the Structure of Modern Prose: Chekhov and Solzhenitsyn,” PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature, Vol. 1, No. 3 (October, 1976): 459-465; 459-60. Similar discussions of Chekhov’s “plotless” fiction can be found in Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971), 48-9; and Boris Eikhenbaum, “Chekhov at Large,” in Chekhov: A Collection of Critical Essays, 21- 31; 28. For Todorov’s discussion of plot, see “Structural Analysis of Narrative,” trans. Arnold Weinstein, in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Autumn, 1969): 70-76; 75.

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social conventions and temporal dimensions, the story may be said to defamiliarize

existence, rendering it available to a renewed perception.36 As Charles May contends,

this quality actually renders the story a “mythic and spiritual” form, a quality he

grounds in both the genre’s oral basis, and his application of Ernst’s Cassirer’s

concept of “mythic perception.”37 In Language and Myth, Cassirer discusses the

affective and expressive tendencies innate to human consciousness, and basic to

religious and aesthetic experience, both of which derive from a “mythic” cast of mind

that is pre-cognitive and pre-linguistic. In moments of intense concentration, including

aesthetic experience, there appears:

…something purely instantaneous, a fleeting, emerging and vanishing mental content, whose objectification and outward discharge produce the image of the “momentary deity.” Every impression that man receives, every wish that stirs in him, every danger that threatens him can affect him thus religiously.38

In the subject’s elevation of an object of perception, enabling the constitution of this

“momentary deity,” focus intensifies to the point of “annihilating” the outside world,

without necessarily assigning the object religious value.39 In other words, Cassirer

defines a cognitive tendency to think religiously, as it were, beyond the parameters of

actual religion, in turn identifying an essential characteristic of religious and aesthetic

experience alike. The story, moreover, as a lyrical, intensive, centripetal form, enables

an absorptive aesthetic response, May suggests, analogous to such “mythic

36 Charles E. May, “The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction,” in The New Short Story Theories, 131-43; 133. 37 Ibid., 133, 139. 38 Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer (New York: Dover, 1946), 18. 39 Ibid., 32-33. Cassirer proceeds to outline how this process can, in periods of cultural formation, lead to the development of actual religion: “When external reality is not merely viewed and contemplated, but overcomes a man in sheer immediacy, with emotions of fear or hope, terror or wish fulfillment: then the sparks jumps somehow across, as the subjective excitement becomes objectified, and confronts the mind as a god or daemon.”

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perception.” Chekhov, I would suggest, seems to recognize this quality, common to

religious and aesthetic activity. Meanwhile, in manifesting this phenomenon of an

aesthetically induced transcendence, Chekhov reveals the short story as a genre

intrinsically oriented toward the transcendent moment; it facilitates an instant that the

novel, by comparison, complicates and even compromises.40

“Khudozhestvo”: Epiphany Exposed

The title of Chekhov’s early liturgical story “Khudozhestvo” (“Art,” or

“Artistry”) is of course apt, rendering explicit the relationship between aesthetic and

religious experience in his writings. A humorous vignette detailing preparations for a

village celebration of the Orthodox Feast of Epiphany, “Khudozhestvo” has received

surprisingly little critical attention.41 The story centers around the village artist

Serezhka, derided by the narrator as a lazy, irascible, and even drunken individual, and

his construction of a figurative “Jordan” (the biblical site of Christ’s baptism) as

setting for the ceremonial Blessing of the Waters on the morning of the feast.

However, as its title suggests, the story focuses on the artistic production enabling the

celebration, revealing, in turn, the material substrate of liturgy, and the aesthetic basis

of religious experience. In its narrative focus on the construction of the liturgical

setting for the ceremony, and its culminating reception by the village community, the

40 George Pahomov ascribes a similar effect to Chekhov’s fiction, outlining how various stylistic tendencies in Chekhov, particularly his use of non-sequitur visual tags, enables a form of “pure perception” that preempts the audience’s process of signification in the reading act. See Pahomov, “Essential Perception: Cechov and Modern Art,” Russian Literature XXXV (1994): 195-202; 201. 41 Andrew R. Durkin discusses the story, but abstracts the work from its Orthodox context, analyzing the influence of the “Wanderer” (Peredvizhniki) movement on Chekhov’s conception of the artist. See Durkin, “Cechov’s Art in Cechov’s ‘Art,’” in Anton P. Cechov – Philosophische und Religiöse Dimensionen im Leben und im Werk, 575-579. Donald Rayfield also discusses the story briefly in Chekhov: The Evolution of his Art (London: Paul Elek, 1975), 41.

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story renders a humane phenomenology of religious experience, grounded in the

sensory experience of Serezhka’s artistry, and the unity engendered by way of this

communal experience.

I propose here to outline the story’s implicit, narrative commentary on the

mutually social and aesthetic nature of Orthodox religious experience. In his nearly

exclusive attention to the artistic creation, and aesthetic effect of the liturgical setting,

Chekhov situates, and ultimately demythologizes, the liturgical event such artistry

serves; in this respect, the “baring of the device” of Epiphany, and its attendant liturgy,

constitutes the substance of the narrative itself. While occluding the transcendental

dimension of the event, “Khudozhestvo,” with its “behind the scenes” approach to

organized religion, does not attempt to critique religion, nor to efface the efficacy and

immediacy of the experience described. Rather, religion remains a positive experience,

both socially and aesthetically engaging, even as Chekhov stages a literal deus ex

machina through the deliberate focus of the narrative siuzhet, which underscores the

“irony of origins” (to adapt Gary Saul Morson’s critical terminology), intrinsic to any

artistic staging of the transcendent.42

My discussion begins with a few comments on Orthodox Epiphany and its

underlying theology. The feast commemorates the adult Christ’s baptism by John the

Baptist, and thus celebrates the revelation, and phenomenal manifestation, of his

divine nature.43 Epiphany denotes the interpenetration of divine and human elements

in a single, historical event, which in turn imparts salvation to the material world. 42 Morson, Hidden in Plain View, Narrative and Creative Potentials in ‘War and Peace’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 17. 43 The Gospel accounts of this episode appear in Matthew 3: 13-17 and Mark 1: 9-11. See the Oxford NIV Scofield Study Bible, 973, 1022.

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Appropriately, the Orthodox liturgy for the feast employs this motif of redemption, as

well as abundant imagery of light and illumination; likewise, the coalescence of divine

and human principles structures iconographic representations of the episode.44 The

Russian Orthodox feast itself reinforces the tenet of sanctification, in the ceremonial

Blessing of Waters, or Vodosviatie, which proceeds outdoors, following the church

liturgy. In emphasizing the divine presence in the human world, the feast evokes the

Incarnation. Christ’s incarnation, meanwhile, as the “showing forth” of his divinity,

proves significant to Orthodox theological aesthetics, in the implicit assertion that

sensible form (in this case, Christ’s body) may enclose, and disclose, the

transcendental. While icons are the most famous artistic example of the transcendental

efficacy accorded to sensible form, the phenomenon is evident in the significant role

of aesthetic experience throughout Orthodox practice, including the liturgy. As

Vladimir Lossky asserts, the theology of icons “[affirms] the possibility of the

expression through a material medium of the divine realities.”45 While this model of

theological aesthetics may be assumed to inform the traditional reception of

Serezhka’s religious artistry, it is also subtly deconstructed in Chekhov’s narrative.

In light of the biblical basis and theological nature of Orthodox Epiphany, the

narrative scope of “Khudozhestvo” is, perhaps ironically, appropriate to the feast

itself. The majority of Chekhov’s story transpires on the eve of the feast, as Serezhka

performs his craft, in preparation for the celebration. With the assistance of the church

44 For a transcription of the liturgy of the Feast of Theophany, see Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church, trans. Isabel Florence Hapgood (Englewood, N.J.: Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese, 1996), 182-197. For discussion of the feast’s traditional iconography, see John Baggley, Festival Icons for the Christian Year (London: Mowbray, 2000), 48-57, and the example of Plate 9. 45 Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 10.

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sexton, Matvei, Serezhka cuts a large, circular hole in the frozen river Bystrianka:

while the hole will eventually serve as the site of the Blessing of the Waters, with the

dipping of the ceremonial cross, it is meanwhile covered with a large, painted wooden

ring, containing pegs that, when distributed to the faithful, promise luck for the

coming year. Meanwhile, in the vicinity of the hole, the pair constructs an elaborate

lectern and cross of wood and ice, adorning the former with the inlaid images of cross

and gospel, and the latter with a dove sculpted of ice. Finally, Serezhka derives

pigments from community contributions, such as beetroot leaves and onion peels, for

the coloration of the constructed ceremonial objects.

The narrative attention to Serezhka’s creative process places an implicit

emphasis upon the constructed, material basis of liturgical media, as well as its

essentially human, artistic providence. Appropriately, the story is thoroughly grounded

in the realm of matter, exemplifying Chudakov’s discussion of the consistent presence

and primacy of the physical world in Chekhov’s poetics.46 Beyond merely asserting,

however, man’s phenomenological relationship to the physical world (which is the

main thrust of Chudakov’s analysis), “Khudozhestvo” highlights how matter is

harnessed and shaped in the service of religious art. The materials employed by

Serezhka, including ice, wood, and vegetable refuse, are appropriately elemental, as

are his tools of crowbar, chisel, and makeshift compass. The organic nature of such

materials also underscores the impermanent, temporary nature of the project. In one

46 «У Чехова нет такой ситуации, ради которой был бы забыт окружающий человека предметный мир. Человек Чехова не может быть выключен из этого конкретного случайностного мира предметов ни за столом, ни в момент философского размышления или диспута, ни во время любовного объяснения, ни перед лицом смерти.» Chudakov, Poetika Chekhova (Moscow: Nauka, 1971), 163.

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scene, during the construction of the Jordan, Serezhka threatens to smash his artistry:

though seemingly a mere display of self-aggrandizement, his threat reinforces the

fragile constitution of the production. Surely as ice melts, and vegetation decomposes,

the form of religious expression is here contrasted with the timeless, transcendental

message it is intended to convey.

Yet, having established the commonplace nature of Serezhka’s artistic media,

the narrative subsequently demonstrates his dynamic elevation of such materials,

through creative activity, to the level of spectacle and ceremonial significance. This

accomplishment is conveyed most decidedly in the story’s culminating scene, when

Serezhka’s artistry is revealed to the enthralled congregation; yet, the artist’s intent is

denoted earlier in the story, by the narrator, who anticipates the glistening of the

colorful display in the morning light:

Behind the lectern there is to be a high cross to be seen by all the crowd and to glitter in the sun as though sprinkled with diamonds and rubies. On the cross is to be a dove carved out of ice. The path from the church to the Jordan is to be strewn with branches of fir and juniper. All this is their task.47 За аналоем будет стоять высокий крест, видимый всей толпе и играющий на солнце, как осыпанный алмазами и рубинами. На кресте голубь, выточенный из льда. Путь от церкви к Иордани вудет посыпан елками и можжевельником. Такова задача. (PSSiP [Sochineniia] 4: 290; italics added)

I have here included the Russian original, footnoted elsewhere, as well as the English

translation, to facilitate a stylistic analysis of Chekhov’s prose. The passage initially

evokes diamonds and rubies as a simile for the splendor of the display. This theme,

however, of the quotidian transfigured in spectacle, is likewise conveyed stylistically,

47 English translation in Chekhov, Early Short Stories: 1883-1888, trans. Constance Garnett, ed. Shelby Foote (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 114. Italics added.

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as Chekhov grammatically buttresses the thematic equation of the mundane and the

magisterial. These phrases, here emphasized in bold, each begin with a perfective,

passive verbal participle, derived from the root verb sypat' (to pour, to rain down),

followed by a pair of instrumental-case nouns; this use of syntactic parallelism iterates

the thematic elevation of the commonplace in the heightened aesthetic context of

liturgical experience (by correlating, syntactically, spruce and juniper boughs, with

diamonds and rubies). Thus does Chekhov subtly prefigure the aesthetic

transfiguration of matter, and the triumph of Serezhka's humble means of expression,

in the climactic unveiling of the Jordan.

Consistent with Chekhov’s stress on the transformation of these materials, the

narrative, appropriately, favors creative process to finished product: the story begins

with a description of the action undertaken by Serezhka and Matvei, in advance of any

description of its purpose, while the difficult, physical nature of the work is remarked

throughout. The project, however, though in the service of the village church,

proceeds entirely beyond the walls of the church building. The structure remains

peripheral throughout the story, and is first mentioned seemingly in passing,

enumerated among other village buildings, as if standing in the background of the very

project it has occasioned. Moreover, the church is situated firmly in the natural world,

as the narrator remarks the jackdaws circling its golden cross. Just as the story,

therefore, exposes the aesthetic basis of liturgical experience, it grounds the church, as

mediating institution, between human and divine realms, amidst everyday, physical

reality. However, even this mediating function seems diminished by the story’s

narrative focus: the attention to the mundane providence of Serezhka’s materials

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articulates not only the project’s materiality and impermanence, but also the

community’s contribution to the production. This sense of communal investment is

made explicit, as the narrator remarks how “all feel, that the artistry is not his

[Serezhka’s] personal concern, but a general, popular one” (4: 291).48 Without

suggesting, of course, a divorcing of the church from religious experience, Chekhov

emphasizes the human dimension of such experience in the configuration of the

narrative siuzhet. This emphasis is sustained through the story’s culmination, on the

morning of Epiphany.

Serezhka, trembling, pulls away the mat…and the people behold something extraordinary. The lectern, the wooden ring, the pegs, and the cross in the ice are iridescent with thousands of colors. The cross and the dove glitter so dazzlingly that it hurts the eyes to look at them. Merciful God, how fine it is! A murmur of wonder and delight runs through the crowd; the bells peal more loudly still, the day grows brighter; the banners oscillate and move over the crowd as over the waves. The procession, glittering with the settings of the ikons and the vestments of the clergy, comes slowly down the road and turns toward the Jordan. Hands are waved to the belfry for the ringing to cease, and the blessing of the water begins. The priests conduct the service slowly, deliberately, evidently trying to prolong the ceremony and the joy of praying all together. There is perfect stillness. But now they plunge the cross in, and the air echoes with an extraordinary din. Guns are fired, the bells peal furiously, loud exclamations of delight, shouts, and a rush to get the pegs. Serezhka listends to this uproar, sees thousands of eyes fixed upon him, and the lazy fellow's soul is filled with a sense of glory and triumph. (4: 291-2; italics added)49

48 «…все чувствуют, что художество ест; не его личное, а общее, народное дело.» 49 The passage also appears on page 115 in the Garnett translation. The Russian original reads:

«Сережка дрожащей рукой сдергивает рогожи…и нарад видит нечто необычайное. Аналой, деревянный круг, колышки и крест на льду переливают тысячами красок. Крест и голобь испускают из себя такие лучи, что смотреть больно…Боже милостивый, как хорошо! В толпе пробегает гул, удивления и восторга; трезвон делается еще громче, день еще яснее. Хоругви колышатся и двигаются над толпой, точно по волнам. Крестный ход, сияя ризами икон и духовенства, медленно сходит вниз по дороге и направляется к Иордани. Машут колокольне руками, чтобы там перестали звонит, и водосвятие начинается. Служат долго, медленно, видимо стараясь продлить торжество и радость общей народной молитвы. Тишина.

Но вот погружают крест, и воздух оглашается необыкновенным гулом. Пальба из ружей, трезвон, громкие выражения восторга, крики и давка в погоне за колышками. Сережка

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As the scene begins, narrative focus remains on Serezhka, and thus outside of the

church, even as the Divine Liturgy, preceding the Blessing of the Waters, takes place

within the building. In fact, the scene climaxes precisely as the congregation exits the

church, advancing to the river. The clergy, moreover, though institutional

representatives, contribute to a spectacle associated primarily, from the narrative

perspective, with Serezhka’s artistry: the icons and vestments of the clerical

procession, like the ice sculptures, glitter in the morning sun, while the clergy, it is

suggested, even attempt to prolong the ceremony, on account of the splendor and

beauty of Serezhka’s accomplishment.

Following the exposition of Serezhka’s craft, this climactic episode documents

its effect on the church congregation, as his artistry is activated, as it were, in the

ceremonial context. The induced experience, as Serezhka removes the matting from

his work, is that of triumph and rapture; the narrator, otherwise laconic, and frequently

critical of Serezhka, betrays his own enthusiasm for the display, exclaiming “Bozhe

milostivyi, kak khorosho!” (4: 291). The lectern, cross and dove, shot through with the

morning sun, “glisten with thousands of colors,” as the congregation stands in

aesthetic thrall to the display; the effect, in fact, is so powerful, that it is even

characterized as difficult to behold (“smotret’ bol’no”). In the longer, central passage

cited above, I have emphasized, with italics, constructions denoting amplitude,

intensity, and communality in the passage, to denote their prevalence. Serezhka’s ice

sculptures collaborate with the icons and clerical vestments to engender a dazzling and

dynamic visual display. This visual complex, meanwhile, contributes to the прислушивается к этому гулу, видит тысячи устремленных на него глаз, и душа лентяя наполняется чувством славы и торжества.»

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synaesthetic nature of the overall event, likewise manifest in sound (the knelling of the

church bells; the “hum,” and eventual uproar of the crowd; and the firing of guns), as

well as movement (the liturgical procession to the river; the waving of banners; the

dipping of the ceremonial cross; and even the shifting colors of the glimmering ice

sculptures).50

In offering a very particular perspective on the experience of the Feast of

Epiphany (as well as preparing this perspective, in the initial narration of Serezhka’s

creative activity), Chekhov offers an implicit, subtle commentary on the nature of

religious experience. On the one hand, the experience is essentially communal: just as

the community assumes a shared sense of responsibility for the project, it stands

united in a shared sense of elation, on the unveiling of the Jordan, as expressed in the

undifferentiated response of the gathered congregation. In this respect, the story

exemplifies Durkheim’s theory that religious experience, including the

conceptualization of the divine, is in fact a reification of the collective force of

society.51 Simultaneously, the narrative foregrounds the aesthetic dimension of

religious experience, in highlighting the artistry that enables this experience – first in

the process of its creation, and secondly in its induced effect on the gathered

community. While the narrative emphasis upon art, of course, is reflected in the title of

Chekhov’s story, it is important to note that the Russian khudozhestvo likewise

conveys the colloquial meaning of “trick,” a semantic valence that a synonym such as

50 A similarly phenomenological and sociological description of Orthodox liturgy, with particular attention to its richly sensual aspects, is central to Chekhov’s story “Sviatoiu noch’iu” (“Holy Night,” 1886), as well as his novella Step’ (The Steppe, 1888). 51 “Religious force is none other than the feeling that the collectivity inspires in its members, but projected outside the minds that experience them, and objectified.” See Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 230.

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iskusstvo does not contain. I do not believe, however, that Chekhov intends a

pejorative characterization of the story’s central activity, but wish to suggest that this

secondary definition reinforces the narrative exposure of the deliberate, constructed

nature of liturgical experience. In “Khudozhestvo,” religious experience, in its public,

communal instantiation, is defined as an induced response, and the story succinctly

frames the means of inducing it.

Chekhov’s essentially materialist approach to the nature of religious

experience precludes consideration of the transcendental reference point intrinsic to

religious belief (and the question of belief is almost entirely bracketed out, remaining

beyond the scope of the story); yet, “Khudozhestvo” nonetheless reflects aspects of

Russian Orthodox tradition, and even exemplifies, in some respects, the theological

aesthetics of Orthodoxy. Serezhka’s endeavor corresponds to the practice of hierotopy,

which the Byzantine scholar Alexei Lidov defines as the human creation of sacred

space. As Lidov argues, Orthodox hierotopy, in addition to its conventional

manifestations, encompasses the re-creation of sacred space outside of the church

environment, citing the ice architecture of Russian Epiphany celebrations as

exemplary of this practice.52 Moreover, Chekhov’s story may be said to highlight the

intrinsic aesthetic orientation of Russian Orthodoxy. As “Khudozhestvo”

demonstrates, Orthodox practice manipulates sensory experience in a deliberately

aesthetic manner. As suggested above, this aesthetic, formal dimension of Orthodoxy

is appropriate to the story’s focal feast of the Epiphany, which functions as a

52 Lidov, “Hierotopy: The Creation of Sacred Spaces as a Form of Creativity and Subject of Cultural History,” in Hierotopiia: sozdanie sakral’nykh prostranstv v Vizantii i drevnei Rusi, ed. Alexei Lidov (Moscow: Indrik, 2006), 32-58; 33, 44.

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celebration, and figural reenactment of the phenomenal manifestation of divinity. And

though Chekhov’s story centers solely on this phenomenal component, preempting

any supposition of divine presence, it aptly demonstrates how aesthetic experience,

when employed in a religious context, strives to effect a surrogate, sensorial

immediacy, analogous to such divine presence.

In this particular respect, Chekhov’s model of religious artistry corresponds to

the tradition of Orthodox iconography, despite clear differences in the definition of

artist and artwork this model puts forward. Though likewise an artist in the service of

the church, the flamboyant Serezhka certainly absconds from the moral strictures

traditionally observed by iconographers. Moreover, whereas icons are presumed to

function as “windows to the divine,” thereby enabling human communion with the

divine or saintly prototype of the image, Serezhka’s figural, metaphorical artistry

provides a conglomeration of visual symbols, referring their viewer to particular

theological concepts (e.g. the cross as emblem of the crucifixion; the dove as referent

to the Holy Spirit; etc.). Yet, despite such conceptual differences, Serezhka’s ice

sculptures, like the icon, in its “performative,” liturgical context, attempts to

approximate the intensity of transcendental experience by means of aesthetic response.

As Bissera Pentcheva has demonstrated, the liturgical icon was traditionally

coordinated with other sensory aspects of the liturgy (including sight, sound, smell,

and movement), contributing to a rich, synaesthetic experience. Paradoxically,

Pentcheva writes, “in saturating the material and sensorial to excess, the experience of

the icon led to a transcendence of this very materiality and gave access to the

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intangible, invisible, and noetic.”53 As we have seen, the same dynamic intensity of

sensory experience is present in the culminating scene of “Khudozhestvo.” Describing

the visual effect of Serezhka’s sculptures, Chekhov’s narrator resorts to hyperbole,

remarking the multitude of colors emitted by the display, as well as its overwhelming

intensity. Moreover, the aforementioned reference to the processional icons, which

interact similarly with the light, establishes a parallel between these two forms of

religious art. Finally, this visual complex, working in conjunction with the sounds and

movements of the celebration, likewise employs the saturation of the senses, in the

engendering of a powerful conglomerate experience, at once personal (in its intensity

and immediacy) and corporal (in the shared, communal experience of the event).

Ultimately, the effect of Serezhka’s artistry may be said to far exceed its own

parameters: though ostensibly referential, in its figural, symbolic properties, his

sculpture achieves its own performative immediacy in the story’s climax, conveying

an immediacy of aesthetic experience to the audience. Ironically, while gesturing to

divine reality, the induced effect brings the audience into closer proximity to present

reality, inasmuch as the effect is enacted by the coordination of everyday, physical

materials, and activated, most significantly, by the effervescent play of sunlight. While

the psychological efficacy of the experience, from the audience perspective, is derived

from the Incarnational theology at the base of Orthodox Epiphany, and its supposition

of divine presence, Chekhov clearly accords the means of achieving this effect to the

artist: as “bozhii sluga,” Serezhka manipulates matter to create the sensory impression

of access to the transcendental. As such, he achieves a basic, but fundamental aspect

53 Bissera V. Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” 631.

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of the artistic project, consistent with George Steiner’s definition of all successful art

as: “the maximalization of semantic incommensurability in respect to the formal

means of expression. Here an object, the description of whose formal components can

be finite, demands and produces infinite response.”54 While such a response, in the

instance of “Khudozhestvo,” is dependent upon the liturgical context, the story

nonetheless reveals the manifestation of the transcendental to consist of ice, wood, and

vegetable pigment.

“Panikhida” and “The Student”: Narrative, Time, and Transcendence

Chekhov’s stories, similarly, often gesture beyond the text, in the direction of

transcendent spatial, temporal, and even ontological realms. However, as I have

suggested, these stories often achieve a performative efficacy, a “presence” of speech

inscribed in narrative structure. While this effect is recurrent in stories dealing with

religious scenes and themes, it is often, ironically, focalized in the text itself, or in

narrative broadly, as if transferring the role of revelation from religious to artistic

spheres.

Simultaneously, Chekhov’s fiction often asserts the chasm separating human

and transcendent realms, a theme articulated in his characterization of church

structures in several of his liturgical stories, in which he frequently represents the

church interior as an isolated, even desolate space.55 This narrative orientation

54 Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 83. Italics in original. 55 As Axelrod remarks: “…often the formal church [in Chekhov] represents…the inaccessible or ideal which is distant from and juxtaposed to reality.” See Russian Orthodoxy in the Life and Fiction of A. P. Chekhov, 43-4.

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predominates in “Panikhida” (1886), the first story that Chekhov would publish under

his actual name, after years of using the penname of Antosha Chekhonte.56 In the

story, the village shop keeper Andrei Andreich attends the singing of an Orthodox

requiem (panikhida) in memory of his deceased daughter Maria; however, in his

original request for prayers for the deceased, he refers to his daughter as a “harlot”

(bludnitsa), on account of her work as an actress, and in reference to the saintly

“harlot” Mary of Egypt. The shopkeeper’s indiscretion prompts a censoring from the

priest, Father Grigory, which initially propels the narrative. Significantly, the story

opens at the literal conclusion of mass, with the village community exiting the church.

The church is characterized as “completely deserted” in the wake of the community’s

egress; while subsequently (following the priest’s reprimanding of Andrei Andreich) Typical of Chekhov’s treatment of church space is the Easter story “Na Strastnoi nedele” (“In Passion Week,” 1887), which concerns a young communicant’s attendance at confession in the days before Easter. Consider the protagonist Fedia’s narration of his entry into the church:

The church porch was sunny and dry. Not a soul was there; I opened the door and irresolutely entered the building. There, in the dim light more fraught with melancholy and gloom for me than ever before, I became overwhelmed by the consciousness of my wickedness and sin. The first object that met my sight was a huge crucifixion with the Virgin and John the Evangelist on either side of the cross. The lustres and shutters were hung with mourning black, the icon lamps were glimmering faintly, and the sun seemed to be purposefully avoiding the church windows. («Церковная паперть суха и залита солнечным светом. На ней ни души. Нерешительно я открываю дверь и вхожу в церковь. Тут в сумеркак, которые кажутся мне густыми и мрачными, как никогда, мною овладелвает сознание греховности и ничтожества. Прежде всего бросаются в глаза большое распятие и по сторонам его божия матерь и Иоанн Богослов. Паникадила и ставники одеты в черные, траудные чехлы, лампадки мерцают тускло и робко, а солнце как будто умышленно минует церковные окна.»)

See PSSiP [Sochineniia] 6: 141-2. English translation in Chekhov, Russian Silhouettes; More Stories of Russian Life, trans. Marian Fell (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 47. 56 As its publication marked Chekhov’s abandonment of his penname, Senderovich designates “Panikhida” as worthy of special consideration. However, Chekhov did publish a few stories, earlier in his career, under his given name, while still writing exclusively for humorous publications. Michael C. Finke thus reserves this distinction for the earlier “V more” (“At Sea,” 1883), the first story published under Chekhov’s name by his own initiative, citing how Chekhov’s decision to abandon his penname with “Panikhida” was prompted by Suvorin’s insistence. See Senderovich, Chekhov – s glazu n glaz: Istoriia odnoi oderzhimosti A. P. Chekhova, 177-8; and Finke, Seeing Chekhov: Life and Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 38.

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attention is drawn to the silence of the space. Throughout, Chekhov imparts a

mournful atmosphere to the church, even remarking its “gloomy, lifeless emptiness”

(mrachnaia, bezzhiznennaia pustota) in the final paragraph. Though befitting, perhaps,

of the occasion, it is significant that the physical church space, rather than engendering

community, reinforces a sense of isolation and despair.57

If Chekhov’s presentation of religious experience proceeds from a purely

sociological perspective, beyond the suppositions of actual belief, his metaphorical

presentation of the church space both localizes, and intensifies this theme, as we again

encounter a space devoid of the divine presence typically assumed in a liturgical

space. The rendering of such absence is not in itself, however, the primary object of

Chekhov’s story; rather, it is a necessary function of his post-religious approach to

religious practice. As Savely Senderovich has suggested, the characters in Chekhov’s

story attempt to “fill” the empty space in various ways: the congregation fills it with

its physical presence; the priest and deacon with liturgical song and incense smoke;

and Andrei Andreich with his own religious convictions.58 I would argue, however,

that this desolate liturgical space is effectively redeemed by religious art, which

provides a point of access to memory and emotion, and enables a reconciliation of past

and present. As typical of Chekhov, the story sustains an ambivalent perspective on its

protagonist, neither condemning nor elevating (though, at moments, ironizing) the

behavior of Andrei Andreich. Still, the shopkeeper’s experience of the panikhida, sung

in memory of his daughter, is undeniably moving, ascribing efficacy to the event. 57 In fact, the interior church space even stands in negative opposition to the landscape, which receives an elegiac description from Maria in her final conversation with her father. This juxtaposition is consistent with Chekhov’s treatment of the church, and elevation of nature, in much of his fiction. 58 Senderovich, Chekhov – s glazu n glaz: Istoriia odnoi oderzhimosti A. P. Chekhova, 183.

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Andrei Andreich’s experience, meanwhile, thematizes the analogous efficacy of

narrative, which is in turn mirrored by the structure of the story. As such, I will begin

by analyzing the nature of Andrei Andreich’s experience in “Panikhida,” proceeding

to discuss how the narrative itself is structured to both enable his epiphany, and to

convey it to the reader.

In addition to the emptiness ascribed to the church interior, Chekhov

emphasizes the cyclicality and regularity of the liturgical setting, as projected through

the cognition and perception of the story’s protagonist. As Andrei Andreich awaits the

onset of the requiem service, at the beginning of the story, the narrator stresses his

familiarity with the figures and objects within the church. This detail is intended to

mirror the uniformity, and even ignorance of the shopkeeper’s thinking, a feature

given further, figural expression in the motif of stasis: as his patronymic implies,

Andrei Andreich is named after his own father, denoting a static consistency across

generations; while Father Grigory will later refer to him as a “statue” or “sculpture”

(izvaianie).59 In thought and emotion, Andrei Andreich succumbs to a dead,

unthinking monotony, a feature further manifest in the frequent references to his

inability to notice what is happening before his eyes. He fails to discern the cause of

the priest’s initial agitation, just he fails to notice, and even recognize his daughter as

she is growing up, and even continues to refer to her as a “harlot” in his prayers,

despite the priest’s earlier censoring of his behavior. This trope of non-recognition

59 It is also to be assumed that Andrei Andreich was born into serfdom, before the Emancipation of 1861, as evidenced by the historical context of the story, as well as the rearing of his daughter by the family of his former master. Without overly emphasizing this detail, I would suggest that it could be said to contribute to the restricted, “subservient” psychology of the story’s protagonist.

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assigns an additional, pejorative valence to the lifeless expanse of the church interior,

which both informs, and sustains the repetitive thinking of the pietistic shopkeeper.

Against this background of monotony and convention, redemption exists in the

singularity and immediacy of aesthetic response, which likewise endeavors,

ultimately, to fill the empty expanse of the church. Art figures in various guises in

“Panikhida,” from the deceased Maria’s acting career, which actually alienates her

from her father; to the liturgical singing of the deacon in the requiem service. It is the

latter, however, which redeems Andrei Andreich’s experience in the church, despite

the narrator’s identification of the poor quality of the singing. While little attention is

accorded to the singing itself, the narrator remarks how the melody and words of the

panikhida plunge Andrei Andreich into a sorrowful mnemonic reverie. Accessing

stories and images of Mashutka, the shopkeeper momentarily transcends his self and

surroundings, attaining to a genuine, personalized mourning for his deceased daughter.

Significantly, this experience of grief-stricken reverie (which spans nearly two of the

story’s five pages) is interrupted only when Andrei Andreich deliberately begins

crossing himself “in order to stifle the painful memories” (chtob vyglushit’ tiazhelie

vospominaniia), as rote sacramentalism, a device of emotional detachment, reasserts

itself. The gesture recalls the bows demanded of Andrei Andreich by the priest, as

penance, accompanied by the command that he “think as others do” (mysli po primeru

prochikh). Father Grigory, in other words, demands a behavioral and psychological

homogeny that is consistent with Andrei Andreich’s tendencies, yet markedly at

variance with his experience during the panikhida, which is profoundly interior,

personal, and singular. As if to emphasize this point, Chekhov denotes the presence of

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two other people in the congregation for the requiem – the midwife Makar’evna, and

her crippled son Mit’ka. While we are offered no explanation for their attendance, or

the nature of their experience during the service, it is suggested that each enjoys a

quietly personal response, as “Makar’evna sighs and whispers something, sucking in

air, Mit'ka with the paralyzed arm ponders something” (Makar’evna vzykhaet i chto-to

shepchet, vtiagivaia v sebia vozdukh, sukhorukii Mit’ka o chem.-to zadumalsia).

In essence, Andrei Andreich’s experience during the panikhida lacks any

literal religious dimension: he meditates solely on the earthly life of his daughter,

rather than the redemption of her soul, or any other ostensibly religious subject. Yet, it

is the Orthodox liturgical setting that occasions this experience, despite the absence of

any clear transcendental correlate. While “Panikhida” ridicules blind, unthinking

pietism, it demonstrates, as in “Khudozhestvo,” the human value of liturgical

experience, and the manner in which religious art may facilitate this. As befitting of

the church setting, there are numerous references to the transcendent in the story. As

the requiem service itself concerns the repose of the soul, it is fundamentally oriented

toward the transcendent, the destination of the departed, as a future “citizen of

Paradise.” Significantly, the sole phrase reproduced in the story from the deacon’s

intoning of the panikhida is “…where there is no sickness, sorrow or sighing”

(…idezhe nest’ bolezni, pechalei, i vozdykhaniia…), a phrase that is repeated six times

over the course of the requiem service.60 The deliberate inclusion of this liturgical

fragment positions the destination of Mariia’s soul in direct opposition to the reality of

the story, which actually includes the sick (Mit’ka), sorrowful (Andrei Andreich), and 60 For the full English text of the panikhida, see Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church, 564-69.

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sighing (Makar’evna). The phrase designates the site of the transcendent, as well as a

frustrated longing to reach this destination. As such, the statement denotes, yet fails to

fulfill the function of liturgical media, as a point of access to the transcendent.

Similarly, the story contains numerous references to iconographic art, including

mention of the church’s icon stands and iconostasis, and even the dedication of the

church itself, the “Hodigitria,” named in honor of an iconographic type in which the

Virgin Mary indicates the path to salvation to the viewer by gesturing toward the

infant Christ.61

This “path,” of course, to the transcendent is not designated by Chekhov’s

narrative, as his characters remain fettered within the phenomenal present. However,

as suggested above, the experience of the panikhida does seem to allow Andrei

Andreich to transcend, if momentarily, his own small-mindedness, and even the

spatio-temporal reality of the church setting. While this is initially facilitated by his

aesthetic response to the deacon’s singing, those memories prompted by the liturgy

constitute a selective, personal biography of his daughter’s life, imparting an important

narrative dimension to the story’s thematic of art. By essentially narrativizing his

daughter’s life, Andrei Andreich assigns it meaning relative to himself, and even

literally re-positions himself in a life from which he was largely absent during its

duration. While it may not reconcile him to his deceased daughter, his narrative does 61 “Hodigitria” translates as “she who shows the way,” which Chekhov, versed in Greek, as well as the Orthodox iconographic tradition, would presumably have known. The “Guide” icon, as it is commonly known, was believed to have been painted by St. Luke the Evangelist. On the history of the “Hodigitria” icon, see Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, 73-77.

It is also to be noted that the deceased is buried in the Orthodox rite with an icon of Christ in hand, as well as chaplet, or strip containing the iconographic triptych of Christ, the Virgin, and John the Baptist, draped across the brow. See Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church, 610.

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reconcile him with his own past, and even redeems time itself: in place of the dull,

static monotony of his existence, characterized by commerce and ritual observance,

moments are extracted from this diachronic progression, achieving meaning in

narrative aggregation and reorganization. It is this impulse, this narrative and

mnemonic project, which enables Andrei Andreich to personalize his religious

experience in a meaningful way. Meanwhile, it is significant that this project proceeds

in an aesthetic, and thus reflexive sphere. By comparison, Andrei Andreich’s earlier

attempt to personalize his religious life, by likening his daughter to the “harlot” Mary

of Egypt, produces no such efficacious result: motivated by his unique combination of

ignorance and pretension, this initial act of interpretation alienates the shopkeeper

from Father Grigory, and even, potentially, the memory of his deceased daughter.62

As if to reinforce the redemptive capacity of narrative, Andrei Andreich’s

memories of his daughter include a reference to how he would teach the young

Mashutka prayers and scripture. Whereas “she yawned repeating prayers after him

[…] when he began telling her stories, stammering and adding flowery

embellishments, she turned all ears.”63 Notably, it is the narrative dimension of

62 Senderovich suggests that Andrei Andreich’s appropriation of the word “harlot” denotes the personal, individual nature of religious experience, and thus underscores, if ironically, a positive aspect of religious psychology. Julie de Sherbinin, conversely, argues that the shopkeeper’s “translation” of the word suggests a dangerous tendency among Chekhov’s characters to distort meaning via semantic appropriation. See Chekhov – s glazu n glaz: Istoriia odnoi oderzhimosti A. P. Chekhova, 181; and de Sherbinin, Chekhov and Russian Religious Culture: The Poetics of the Marian Paradigm, 87. While I find both readings plausible, my argument seeks to shift focus to the reflexive, aesthetic dimension of religious experience, rather than the religious subject’s hermeneutic procedures, as the site of spiritual efficacy in Chekhov’s writings. 63 «Молитвы повторяла она за ним зевая, но зато, когда он, заикаясь и стараясь выражаться пофигуристее, начинал рассказывать ей истории, она вся превращалась в слух.» PSSiP [Sochineniia] 4: 354. English translation in Chekhov, Stories, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Bantam, 2000), 24. Translated passages from “Panikhida” and “The Student” are drawn from this edition, and will subsequently be cited parenthetically.

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religious tradition that captivates the young girl, and even prompts a rare moment of

emotional continuity between father and daughter. This detail also suggests Andrei

Andreich’s talent as a storyteller, for conveying (and constructing) narrative in a

captivating manner. In addition to buttressing the general significance of narrative in

the story, it implies a specific quality to biblical narrative, and its impact upon an

audience: namely, the subject of such narrative is able to project herself into the

eschatological drama of scripture, to experience via aesthetic ideation the interaction

of the transcendent and the immanent, the divine and the human, the mythic and the

mundane. Like the liturgy, scripture entails a unique, transcendent correlate as art, a

divine guarantee of its soteriological significance; and while this informs the religious

subject’s experience of scripture, the genre nonetheless employs basic elements of

narrative art, for the sake of aesthetic effect.

Chekhov’s thematization of narrative in “Panikhida” is also significant at the

structural level of the text, which mirrors and performs those processes described

within the story: the church interior is not only the site of Andrei Andreich’s narration

of his daughter’s life, but Chekhov’s narration of the story itself. “Panikhida”

describes a particular, transitional moment in its protagonist’s life: Andrei Andreich’s

experience of grief for his daughter’s alienation and death.64 Chekhov, meanwhile,

employs various narrative devices to the end of capturing this moment, and effectively

conveying the protagonist’s epiphany to the reader. The story is narrated in the present

64 In this respect, the initial, ironic conflict of Andrei Andreich’s conversation with Father Grigory serves namely to provide background on the former’s character, as opposed to contributing significantly to the story’s dramatic arc. This “bait and switch” technique is of course central to the achieved effect of Chekhov’s story. It also exemplifies Popkin’s thesis, regarding Chekhov’s reconfiguration of the categories of narrative significance, as discussed above.

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tense, dramatizing the contrast between present and remembered experience, as

Andrei Andreich resorts to memories of his daughter, rendered in the past tense.

Seemingly incidental, the device is crucial to the work’s effect, as it allows Chekhov’s

story, this single moment of the protagonist’s life, to achieve temporal depth via

memory: the story, like Andrei Andreich’s ruminations, spans time, yet remains

immediate, filtered through the present moment. A similar effect is achieved through

Chekhov’s incorporations of religious and biblical intertexts, which here include

references to the “Hodigitria” iconographic model, the text of the panikhida liturgy

itself, and the Old Testament narratives of Esau’s selling of his birthright, the

destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the ordeals of Joseph, which he relates to his

young daughter.65 As in his fusing of temporal planes, the technique enables Chekhov

to smuggle additional themes and narrative trajectories in the story, thereby expanding

the text’s semantic purview significantly. More important, however, than the mere

enabling of plot, is the “iconological” or “indexical” purpose served by such

techniques. Consistent with religious models of art, the story functions as an aperture

to something that transcends its immediate dimensions, drawing the reader into a

human drama that exceeds the limited scope of the narrated episode. However,

because the story genre remains limited, in contrast with the extensive, centrifugal

65 The referenced biblical passages appear in Genesis 25: 29-34, Genesis 18:20 - 19:29, and Genesis 37. The corresponding page numbers, in the Oxford NIV Scofield Study Bible, are 35, 26-29, and 49-51, respectively. Chekhov’s reference to these specific stories is of course deliberate, ramifying themes elaborated in “Panikhida” itself. While a full analysis of these biblical intertexts exceeds the scope of the present discussion, it is noteworthy that all three episodes involve familial relations (Esau’s relationship to his brother and father; Lot’s relationship to his daughters, as well as Abraham; Joseph’s conflict with his brothers); the motif of the disguised personage, who remains unrecognized by others (Jacob’s disguising of himself as Esau; the angels who arrive unannounced to destroy Sodom; Joseph’s concealment of his later identity from his brothers); and the theme of mourning (Esau will come to mourn his lost birthright; Lot’s wife looks back at Sodom in mourning, and is reduced to a pillar of salt; Jacob mourns the presumed death of Joseph).

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tendencies of the novel, its intensive, centripetal presentation enables an immediacy of

aesthetic impact: just as Andrei Andreich experiences a cross-section of remembered

history in the compressed time frame of the requiem, the Chekhovian reader

encounters a similarly compressed narrative of a life, as projected through the singular

moment of Andrei Andreich’s epiphany.

As is typical in Chekhov, a deliberate narrative structure facilitates the reader’s

concomitant epiphany of the story’s significance. In this particular instance, moreover,

the thematized role of narrative, as epiphanic mode, exemplifies and reinforces what is

already implicit in the text’s narrative structure. Moreover, “Panikhida” exploits a

particular narrative structure to impart the immediacy of character revelation to the

reader. In his discussion of the reader’s aesthetic constitution, or “bracketing” of the

short story, Ruthrof outlines three narrative structures employed in the staging of

“boundary situations,” moments of transitional narrative import conveyed aesthetically

to the reader (and thus analogous to the literary epiphany, as presently defined).

Among these three (linear, circular, and focalized) structures, Ruthrof describes how

the second category frequently projects past events into the narrated present,

engendering a type of temporal palimpsest, and with it a trans-temporal immediacy in

the act of reading.66 Chekhov clearly utilizes such “temporal thematization” in

“Panikhida,” and I will return below to his implementation of a similar strategy in

“Student.” Meanwhile, it is important to realize that the efficacy of this structure is not

limited to the coalescence of competing temporal planes, as here; rather, the same

essential dynamic functions in any story incorporating an embedded narrative,

66 Ruthrof, The Reader’s Construction of Narrative, 105-8.

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recourse to imagination, or even basic external reference. The key point is to invoke

the synthesizing, homogenizing capacity of the reader within the framework of a genre

that is deliberately compressed and, in terms of narrative action, temporally restricted;

for this device is itself the manifestation, or incarnation, that Chekhov thematizes in

his art – the coalescence of time, or even simply image, in a moment of heightened

awareness and significance.

Ultimately, Chekhov attributes a revelatory capacity to narrative structure,

modeled on the aesthetic conventions of religious art. By extension, such powers of

disclosure are naturally, though subtly evident in the narrative voice of “Panikhida.”

If, for example, the function of Andrei Andreich’s epiphany is to enable some insight

into his relationship to his daughter, to finally “recognize” something of significance

amidst his routinized existence, a similar function is performed by the story’s narrator.

While this project, of enabling insight, is intrinsic to the narration of the story as a

whole, it figures on the local level in the proliferation of strategic details, selective

metonymies embedded to convey elements of character and narrative action (such as

Andrei Andreich’s galoshes, Father Grigory’s furrowed brow, the deacon’s poor

singing, etc.). Such details engender an immediacy of aesthetic perception at variance

with the perceptive monotony experienced by Andrei Andreich at the story’s

opening.67 These flourishes likewise, by momentarily asserting the primacy of

Chekhov’s typically subtle, objective narrators, reveal the constructed, mediated

67 Pahomov describes these predominantly visual details as “accent pieces,” intended to fix the image in the reader’s mind, and thereby facilitate aesthetic perception. See Pahomov, “Essential Perception: Cechov and Modern Art,” 196-7.

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nature of aesthetic epiphany, in the enabling function of the narrative voice. This

device is particularly evident in the striking “lyrical coda” to the story:

Bluish smoke streams from the censer and bathes in a wide, slanting ray of sunlight that crosses the gloomy, lifeless emptiness of the church. And it seems that, together with the smoke, the soul of the departed woman herself hovers in the ray of sunlight. The streams of smoke, looking like a child’s curls, twist, rush upwards to the window and seem to shun the dejection and grief that fill this poor soul. (4: 355; 25-26)68

In a departing image of hope, the passage incorporates motifs of ascent and

illumination, as the actress escapes the suffering of human life, and the shopkeeper, if

momentarily, escapes the pain of grief. The movement of the smoke toward the

window suggests, if not the possibility of a transcendent realm, free of “sickness,

sorrow, or sighing,” beyond the gloom of the church, it nonetheless demonstrates a

necessary human aspiration toward such a realm.

This concluding passage employs Chekhov’s narrative trademark of free

indirect discourse: it imparts a poetic perception, and lyrical diction, elsewhere absent

in the story; yet, the twice-mentioned simile of the smoke suggests the persistence of

the shopkeepers’s perspective. In other words, the likening of the smoke to a child’s

curls, specifically, suggest that it is his image of Mashutka, presently activated in

memory, which contributes to the figure. Andrei Andreich has constructed a narrative

of his daughter’s life and death from memory; and this narrative imparts significance

to his experience. Meanwhile, the interpenetration of character consciousness and

narrative voice intimates the meaning achieved by the narration of the story itself.

68 «Из кадила струится синеватый дымок и купается в широком, косом луче, пересекающем мрачную, безжизненную пустоту церкви. И кажется, вместе с дымом носится в луче душа самой усопшей. Струйки дыма, похожие на кудри ребенка, кружатся, несутся вверх к окну и словно сторонятся уныния и скорби, которыми полна эта бедная душа.»

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There is indeed a sense of redemption implied in this final paragraph, though not only

for the soul of the deceased, as the narrative suggests. Andrei Andreich accesses a

sense of emotional continuity with his daughter by way of narrative, with the story that

becomes the actual object of his experience of the requiem mass. Again, as in

“Khudozhestvo,” Chekhov reveals art’s function as a human means of “ascent” to the

transcendent. Liturgical space, meanwhile, though ostensibly devoid of divine

presence, functions as a site for narration – whether in the scriptural narratives

endemic to this space; the liturgical practices performed therein; or the mnemonic and

lyrical impulses of protagonist and narrator, respectively.

******

While “Panikhida” shares numerous themes and devices with the later

“Student,” it is notable that the narrative, like “Khudozhestvo,” transpires beyond the

confines of the church space. The story, famously designated by Chekhov as his

personal favorite, relates a transitional moment in the life of the seminarian Ivan

Velikopol’sky: returning from a hunting trip at dusk on Good Friday, he encounters

two peasant women, the widows Vasilisa and Luker’ia, pausing to recount the biblical

narrative of Peter’s renunciation of Christ, witnessing the edifying effect of his

rendering on the two women. Given the positive valences typically ascribed to nature

in Chekhov’s writings, as well as the onomastic significance of Ivan’s surname

(“Velikopol’sky” translates as “of the great fields”), the setting carries more positive

potential than the “desolate” atmosphere of the church interior. Moreover, it is even

possible that Ivan has absconded from Good Friday services in order to go fowling – a

transgression, ostensibly, which nonetheless allows for a significant experience within

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the natural environs.69 Still, despite the natural setting, the story begins on a note of

pessimism: racked with hunger, and a sense of apparent despair, Ivan views the forest,

still besieged by winter weather, as “inhospitable, cold, and desolate” (neuiutno,

glukho, i neliudimo) (PSSiP [Sochineniia] 8: 306).

The seasonal setting of the story, at the point of transition from winter to

spring, carries the promise of renewal, a promise withheld with the apparent reversion

to winter denoted in the story’s opening, which finds parallel expression in the

simultaneous onset of evening. This literal chronotope, of persistent winter and

descending night, contextualizes Ivan’s sense of despair, which is subsequently reified

in his conviction that suffering persists in the world, and time has failed to improve the

lot of humanity. The setting of Good Friday, meanwhile, both reinforces, and

overturns this pessimism: it is the anniversary of Christ’s death (which occurs,

significantly, at roughly the same time of day as Chekhov’s narrative); yet it also

carries the promise of resurrection, just as Easter stands beyond the narrated time of

the story.70 The story’s setting is thus highly appropriate to the experience of

epiphany, as it is positioned in a period in which miracle is awaited and expected. This

anticipated resurrection, contingent upon diachronic progression (the passage from

Good Friday to Easter), is symbolically compromised by competing notions of

temporal regression (the reversion of spring to winter) and stasis (Ivan’s intuition that

human life will not improve). However, Ivan’s sense of the violation of “order and

harmony” (poriadok i soglasie) in nature in itself carries the supposition of such order 69 Rosamund Bartlett, Chekhov: Scenes from a Life (London: Free Press, 1004), 267. 70 As Finke points out, the setting of the story between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection references both the infernal journey and ascent of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the legend of Christ’s “harrowing of hell” following his death. See Finke, Seeing Chekhov: Life and Art, 160-61.

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and harmony, and his experience in the narrative comprises an effort to reconstitute

this idea, achieved in his positive encounter with religious narrative.

Ivan’s initial, pessimistic ruminations invoke Russian historical figures (Rurik,

Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great) as reference points in his conception of the static

nature of history, and the lack of improvement in human life. Notably, he shares his

given name with Ivan the Terrible, suggesting a negative point of identification with

his own national history. “Ivan” is also the modern Russian variant for John, the most

beloved of Christ’s apostles, and, as is still more pertinent to Chekhov’s protagonist,

the name of the fourth evangelist. Just as John narrates the episode of Peter’s

renunciation of Christ (John 13: 36-38; 18: 15-27), Ivan will relate the same episode to

the two women. Meanwhile, Ivan’s initial pessimism, tantamount to a departure from

faith, associates Ivan with Peter, as well. As such, Ivan is aligned with both secular

and religious conceptions of history, and “Student” essentially charts his transition

from the former perspective to the latter. If secular history, the narrative suggests, is

arbitrarily linear, progressing nowhere, and enabling neither improvement nor

culmination, then religious history, as conceptualized by Christian metaphysics,

promises an ultimate meaning and vindication, of chronological time redeemed at the

kairotic onset of eternity. The transition, from political to eschatological conceptions

of historical progression, is already implicit, of course, in the story’s Easter setting.71

This is not to suggest, however, that Chekhov is himself imposing an apocalyptic, or

even religious framework upon the narrative itself. Rather, the discourse elaborated in

71 It is also augmented by Ivan’s onomastic relationship to John the Evangelist, specifically, as the Book of Revelation is attributed to the same author. Moreover, John’s Gospel, as discussed above in the introduction, contains greater emphasis on the Incarnational theology of Christianity.

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“The Student” asserts the necessity and efficacy of narrative, however defined, in

human life. The Christian eschatological drama is merely a single example, if an

ultimate one: like any narrative, it enables meaning in the imposition of a totalizing

structural framework, made manifest in the point of culmination or ending.72 In his

initial, negative conception of history, Ivan divests chronological progression of this

redemptive, narrative potential. However, by story’s end, he regains his ability to

conceive of a positive future, as yet unknown, just as Easter stands before him in time.

The promise of resurrection, in other words, is merely the promise of ending and

meaning in general, rendering “Student” a metaliterary commentary on narrative itself.

As in “Panikhida,” Chekhov continues in “The Student” to exploit the motif of

non-recognition: Ivan fails to initially discern harmony and meaning in the world, just

as Vasilisa fails to recognize Ivan when he joins them at the fire.73 It is the communal

experience of the biblical narrative, however, that serves to restore recognition and

vision. Given the central role of this narrative in the story, Donald Rayfield has

suggested that the story itself is a parable about the power of art, asserting that art

achieves its purest form in Chekhov’s writings within an ecclesiastical context.74 The

fact that the biblical account serves as a representative form of art is itself significant,

as the Gospels constitute a narrative document of the transcendent made immanent in

the world, just as Chekhov’s story itself seeks to reconcile the temporal and the

72 I explore this “teleological” aspect of narrative in far greater theoretical detail in my discussion of Dostoevsky in chapter 1. 73 The motif, of course, also figures in the biblical narrative, in which Peter pretends not to recognize Christ. 74 Rayfield, Chekhov: The Evolution of his Art, 152-3. Rayfield elsewhere contends that Chekhov establishes a parallel between the roles of priest and creative writer in the story. See Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life, 314.

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eternal.75 As a model for narrative art, the Bible is effectively supported by a

transcendental guarantee of its meaning and validity, buttressed by an exegetical

tradition in support of such claims.

Yet, it is suggested that the original content of the biblical narrative is not the

sole, or even primary efficacious aspect of the experience engendered by Ivan’s

oration in the story. Though Ivan ultimately renounces his ability as a storyteller, his

statement is, on Chekhov’s part, a red herring (and on Ivan’s, a gesture of humility). In

fact, Ivan’s narration of the Peter story is itself an edifying rhetorical performance,

consistent with his vocational training as a future priest. Ivan’s narrative combines two

stylistic registers: a “formal, archaic, literary” tendency, drawing on the Church

Slavonic of the gospel accounts; and an “informal, modern, colloquial” form of

speech.76 In this respect, his performance effectively unites the functions of sermon

and translation, balancing the solemn, ecclesiastical effect of a sermon with the

contemporary immediacy of translation. Moreover, though Ivan claims to draw

directly on the text of the Twelve Gospels, the Good Friday service that Vasilisa and

Luker’ia have recently attended (and Ivan, we recall, decided to forego), David Martin

points out that the student draws freely on the various gospel accounts, including

sections not read in the service.77 Whereas Chekhov typically incorporates realia in

75 Daria A. Kirjanov, Chekhov and the Poetics of Memory (New York: Peter Lang, 200), 24. Similarly, as C. J. G. Turner remarks, in his analysis of the story, the gospel account itself adumbrates a paradox (intrinsic, more broadly, to Incarnational theology) by situating the eschatological drama in a particular historical moment. See Turner, Time and Temporal Structure in Chekhov (Birmingham, U.K.: University of Birmingham Press, 1994), 91. 76 Michael L. O’Toole, “Structure and Style in the Short Story: Chekhov’s ‘Student,’” The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 49, No. 114 (January, 1971): 45-67; 62. 77 Martin, “Realia and Chekhov’s ‘The Student,’” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 12, No. 2 (Summer 1978): 266-73; 269.

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his writings, factually verifiable material drawn from life, his departure from this

compositional principle in “Student” serves to heighten the emotional content of

Ivan’s narrative.78 Even Ivan’s concluding statement, which combines a biblical

citation of Peter’s sobbing with his own poetic, imagistic impression of the scene,

denotes a deliberate, aesthetic orientation in his composition and performance of the

narrative.

In his study of the story, Michael L. O’Toole has convincingly argued that

Ivan’s account of Peter’s denial, insofar as its ending is already known to the

audience, exemplifies an Aristotelian model of catharsis: “the essential theme” of

“The Student,” therefore, “is not the power of faith, but the power of tragedy.”79

O’Toole’s observation is significant not only because it denotes the centrality of art in

the story, but because it likewise demonstrates Chekhov’s narrative emphasis on the

effect of art. Appropriately, Chekhov more closely documents the aesthetic experience

of Ivan’s audience, as opposed to Ivan himself. As suggested above, Ivan’s initial

lapse in faith denotes his identification with Peter, a parallel strengthened, implicitly,

by his decision to approach the fire and warm himself. Still, Chekhov implies a

stronger sense of identification with Peter is shared by the two women. Ivan’s account

is segmented only by the narrator’s indication of Lukeria’s intensifying interest in the

story. As Ivan concludes his narrative, however, its effect is described at length:

The student sighed and fell to thinking. Still smiling, Vasilisa suddenly choked, and big, abundant tears rolled down her cheeks. She shielded her face from the fire with her sleeve, as if ashamed of her tears, and Luker’ia, gazing

78 Ibid., 273. Chekhov’s adherence to the specific field of religious realia is elsewhere diligent, as we see in his verisimilar presentation of the Blessing of the Waters in “Khudozhestvo.” 79 O’Toole, “Structure and Style in the Short Story: Chekhov’s ‘Student,’” 47.

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fixedly at the student, flushed, and her expression became heavy, strained, as in someone who is trying to suppress intense pain. (8: 308; 265)80

The dynamic in this scene is fascinating, especially when considered in relation to the

equivalent episode in “Panikhida.” As in the earlier story, the narrator remarks the

impact of aesthetic experience upon two secondary characters; and similarly, because

the consciousness of these figures, in both stories, is not focalized, the reader is denied

insight into the precise nature of such experience. However, whereas in “Panikhida”

we are privileged with access to Andrei Andreich’s experience of the liturgy, there is

no indication of the impact of Peter’s story on Ivan. Rather, Ivan is affected not by the

story itself (which he narrates), but by its impression on the audience – his own

epiphany is based on what he observes in the two peasant women. In other words, it is

not the content of aesthetic experience, which remains inscrutable, but its very

possibility that redeems the experience for Ivan.

Moving on from his encounter with the two women, Ivan crosses the river by

ferry, indicative of his internal transition, and undertakes a symbolic ascent, gaining an

elevated, illuminated perspective of his native village. These movements coincide with

the student’s epiphanic realization of the “unbroken chain” of history, enabling Ivan to

view his surroundings in their entirety, just as he is able to impose a narrative totality

upon past events. As his encounter with the women demonstrates, the events of the

past find culmination in their meaning in the present; the perspective is still

teleological, yet based less upon his certainty a future moment of culmination, than his

80 «Студент вздохнул и задумался. Продолжая улыбаться, Василиса вдруг всхлипнула, слезы, крупные, изобильные, потекли у нее по щекам, и она заслонила рукавом лицо от огня, как бы стыдясь своих слез, а Лукерья, глядя неподвижно на студента, покраснела, и выражение у нее стало тяжелым, напряженным, как у человека, который сдерживает сильную боль.»

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empirical knowledge that such a future is possible, even likely, on the basis of his

experience in the story. Significantly, it is his witnessing of the impact of narrative

that brings him to an understanding of the significance of narrative itself. If Ivan’s

“faith” is restored, it is through this imposition of a narratological framework, assuring

him that life is “delightful, wondrous, and filled with lofty meaning” (zhizn’ kazalas’

emu voskhititel’noi, chudesnoi, i polnoi vysokogo smysla). The future, significantly,

remains unknown, as implied by its “wondrous” quality; yet it is guaranteed to achieve

“lofty meaning.”

By concluding on this moment of hope, “The Student” gestures toward a future

that transcends narrative time. As Popkin suggests, it is impossible to discern if the

efficacy of Ivan’s epiphany will hold, or if, alternatively, it is “simply a transitory

result of his youthful impetuosity, a phase of no lasting significance.”81 However, the

situating of Ivan’s “peak moment” in the context of short fiction, as opposed to longer

narrative forms, allows Chekhov to invest this moment with a type of aesthetic

immortality: the reader’s knowledge is simply curtailed in advance of Ivan’s probable

return to disillusionment. That “The Student,” like “Panikhida,” concludes in a

similarly lyrical tone, and centers on the efficacy of narrative, reinforces this

culminating effect. The story’s final paragraph, in fact, is a single long, complex

sentence, an unusual phenomenon in Chekhov: the technique draws attention to the

literary, narrated dimension of the story (far more than the restrained, objective

narrators typical of Chekhov); and likewise suggests that this fluid prose may continue

beyond the scope of the narrative itself, into an undefined future. In other words, in

81 Popkin, The Pragmatics of Insignificance, 33.

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foregrounding the aesthetic dimension of the narrative, "The Student" mirrors the

same narrative efficacy that it thematizes in Ivan's experience in the story.

Temporal thematization likewise contributes to the performative quality of

narrative in “The Student.” However, the effect is engendered not in the transposition

of various time periods (the story is narrated entirely in the past tense, and only

pertains to a short span of time), as in Andrei Andreich’s memories of his daughter,

but rather in Chekhov’s integration of the biblical intertext in Ivan’s performance. As

if to reinforce Chekhov’s emphasis on the potential of epiphany in everyday

experience, the story draws on well-known material: Chekhov abstains from complex

symbolism and allusion, as if to render the narrative itself transparent. This emphasis,

meanwhile, on immediate apprehension and intelligibility facilitates an aesthetic

immediacy comparable to that experienced by Vasilisa and Luker’ia: the story is

effective because it is recognizable, drawing upon common mnemonic currency of

Christian culture. The chronotope of Chekhov’s story, Sobennikov suggests, is both

historical and mythical, enabling a similar integration of diverse temporal material in

the narrative.82 It is this mythical dimension, meanwhile, as Yuri Lotman contends,

that is most readily personalized by an audience.83 Such does Chekhov, with an

impressive economy of means, manage to induce the reader’s experience of the story’s

essential theme – the significance of narrative in human existence, as a source of

meaning, and a structuring principle. While “The Student” itself defies, I believe, any

82 Sobennikov, Mezhdu “est’ Bog” i “net Boga” (o religiozna-filosofskikh traditsiiakh v tvorchestve A. P. Chekhova), 137. 83 “Myth always speaks about me. ‘News,’ an anecdote, speaks about somebody else. The first organizes the hearer’s world, the second adds interesting details to his knowledge of this world.” See Lotman, “The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology,” 163.

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stridently religious interpretation of its theme, it achieves its principle impact in its

adaptation of biblical narrative, and, more importantly, its appropriation of liturgical

effect: rather than signifying or representing a transcendental meaning, it constitutes

this statement in the aesthetic dimensions of the text. As such, it exemplifies

Chekhov’s intuitive understanding of the workings of Russian Orthodoxy, and his

ability to employ this knowledge to aesthetic purpose in his writings.

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Conclusion: Between Decadence and Iconoclasm

Though he was an espoused non-believer, Chekhov’s frequent presentation of

liturgical scenes demonstrates his awareness of both the sociological significance and

aesthetic nature of religion. Chekhov’s sensitive, though seemingly detached

perspective on transcendence seems appropriate to his unique, transitional position in

literary history: he stands among the last generation of Russian Realism, but is also

identified as a progenitor of literary Modernism, in everything from narrative manner

and tone, to the structure of his drama and fiction. His approach to literary

transcendence, appropriately, denotes a similarly pivotal role in aesthetic practice,

insofar as the Chekhovian epiphany still invokes the fictional context of transcendence

(typically by way of Orthodox liturgical settings), yet anticipates internalized,

psychologized models of epiphany in the twentieth century.1 Chekhov’s aesthetic

purview, therefore, stretches in two directions, encompassing the literary past and

future.

Regarding Chekhov’s relationship to the preceding generation of writers, it is

appropriate that he should provide commentary on Tolstoy in the latter stages of the

great author’s career. That Tolstoy should outlive his contemporaries Dostoevsky and

Leskov, and even survive the younger Chekhov by six years, is an appropriate 1 Scholarship on Modernist epiphany is quite developed, compared to the relative paucity of critical studies of epiphany in the nineteenth century. Among Russian Modernists, Andrei Bely, Isaac Babel, Andrei Platonov, and Vladimir Nabokov would each develop unique models of epiphany in their fiction. In the broader European context, the device is most commonly associated with James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka, among others. Notably, among all these writers, only Bely could be said to address transcendental issues in his Symbolist prose. For broad studies of Modernist epiphany, primarily pertaining to the Western tradition, see Morris Beja’s Epiphany in the Modern Novel, and the latter chapters of Ashton Nichols’ The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Modern Literary Moment.

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metaphor for how his project, in historical and theoretical purview, circumscribes

those of the other authors discussed above. Of course, by the time of Tolstoy’s

friendship with Chekhov, initiated by the latter’s visit to Tolstoy’s estate of Yasnaia

Poliana in 1895, Tolstoy was certainly a different writer than the one responsible for

War and Peace and Anna Karenina (1873-77). Following his famous spiritual crisis of

the late 1870s, subsequent to the writing of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s novel Ispoved’

(Confession, 1882) marked his transition to more tendentious topics, a course pursued

for much of the remaining three decades of his career. While this dramatic evolution

initially led to bifurcated critical approaches to “early” and “late” Tolstoy, much

secondary literature maintains a consistent approach to Tolstoy across the breadth of

this trajectory, a methodology to which I am amenable, in light of my own perspective

on Tolstoy’s approach to transcendence in literature.2

While the scope of Tolstoy’s polemical writings is broad, I will here focus

briefly on his contentious aesthetic study, Chto takoe iskusstvo? (What is Art?, 1897-

98), which discursively recapitulates ideas explored throughout this dissertation. In

essence, Tolstoy’s tract consigns much of the Western artistic canon to the category of

“bad art,” while the entire tradition of philosophical aesthetics is summarized and

dismissed on the grounds of its subjective orientation and suggestion of a detached,

pleasure-based experience of the aesthetic object. In Tolstoy’s pithy formulation:

To call up in oneself a feeling once experienced and, having called it up, to convey it by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, images expressed in words, so that other experience the same feeling – in this consists the activity of art. Art is that human activity which consists in one man’s consciously

2 Foremost among such arguments for a “unified Tolstoy” are Richard Gustafson’s Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger, and Morson’s Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in ‘War and ‘Peace’.

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conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.3

If Tolstoy’s category of “infection” (zarazhenie) pertains to all effective art, the

evaluative criteria for a given work is the value of the feeling conveyed. From this

results Tolstoy’s famous rejection of Shakespeare, Beethoven, and others, as well as

much of his own literary output, including War and Peace and Anna Karenina. By

comparison, those works qualifying as “good” art inspire useful feelings, and in turn

unite humanity, with religious art positioned at the apex of this canon.

Returning momentarily to Chekhov, Tolstoy’s relationship to the younger

writer was a complicated one, manifesting mutual respect and criticism alike.4 Both

are evident in Chekhov’s correspondence with others, which contains numerous

comments and insights on the monolithic writer. Most pertinently, Chekhov would

offer a critical assessment of What is Art?, in a letter to Alexander Ertel dated April

17, 1897, at the time of Tolstoy’s work on the tract:

Tolstoy is writing a book on art. He visited me at the clinic and told me that he’d abandoned his Resurrection because he didn’t like it and that he was now writing exclusively about art and had read sixty books on the subject. His idea is not new; it’s been reiterated in various forms by clever old men in every century. Old men have always been inclined to think the end of the world is at hand and to assert that morals have fallen to the nec plus ultra, that art has

3 «Вызвать в себе раз испытанное чувство и, вызвав его в себе, посредством движений, линий, красок, звуков, образов, выраженных словами, передать это чувство так, чтобы другуе испытали то же чувство, – в этом состоит деятельность искусства. Искусство есть деятельность человеческая, состоящая в том, что один человек сознательно известными внешними знаками передает другим испытываемые им чувства, а другие люди заражаются этими чувствами и переживают их.»

See Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 30 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1951), 65. Italics throughout the original, as here. English translation in Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 39-40. 4 For analysis of the relationship between the two writers, see Vladimir Lakshin, Tolstoi i Chekhov, 2nd Ed. (Moscow: Sovietskii pisatel’, 1975), and Logan Speirs, Tolstoy and Chekhov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 1-8.

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grown shallow and threadbare, that people have grown weak, and so on and so forth. Lev Nikolaevich is out to convince everybody in his book that art has in our time entered upon its final phase, that it is stuck in a blind alley from which it has no way out [forward].5

Chekhov correctly identifies the iconoclastic nature of Tolstoy’s discourse, as well as

the nearly millenarian tone of his invective, a product of the moralizing agenda of

much of Tolstoy’s output in the period. Chekhov’s criticism, however, only applies to

certain aspects of Tolstoy’s argument – a reasonable perspective, considering the work

was still in progress, and Chekhov only apparently knew it by Tolstoy’s verbal

description. Interestingly, it is possible to glean Chekhov’s potential opinion on other

dimensions of Tolstoy’s aesthetics in other correspondence. Despite clear

disagreements with many of the older writer’s views, Chekhov clearly held Tolstoy in

high esteem, even articulating his fear of Tolstoy’s death in a later letter to Mikhail

Menshikov, a concern predicated on his love for the writer, and his acknowledgment

of his remarkable stature in Russian letters.6 Moreover, in an earlier letter to Suvorin,

dated March 27, 1894, Chekhov asserts his loss of interest in Tolstoy’s moral

philosophy, and even mocks it, while conceding that he had previously, in the late

1880s, been captivated by such ideas. Most strikingly, Chekhov reveals little

5 «Толстой пишет книжку об искусстве. Он был у меня в клинике и говорил, что поветь свою «Воскресение» он забросил, так как она ему не нравится, пишет же только об искусстве и прочел об искусстве 60 книг. Мысль н него не новая; ее на разные лады повторяли все умные старики во все века. Всегда старики склонны были ведеть конец мира и говорили, что нравственность пала до nec plus ultra, что искусство измельчало, износилось, что люди ослабели и проч. и проч. Лев Николаевич в своей книжке хочет убидеть, что в настоящее время искусство вступило в свой окончательный фазис, в тупой переулок, из которого ему нет выхода [вперед].» See PSSiP [Pis'ma] 6: 333. English translation in Chekhov, Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary, 302-03. As Karlinsky remarks in his commentary to the letter, Chekhov’s opinion did not improve with the work’s publication the following year. Voskresenie (Resurrection) is the title of a later Tolstoy novel, which he did go on to complete and publish in 1899. 6 The letter is dated January 28, 1900. See PSSiP [Pis’ma] 9: 29-30.

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sympathy with the content of Tolstoy’s philosophy, even in this earlier period of

fascination, but rather grounds his interest in Tolstoy’s manner of expressing himself:

But Tolstoy's philosophy moved me deeply and possessed me for six or seven years. It was not so much his basic postulates that had an effect on me – I had been familiar with them before – it was his way of expressing himself, his common sense, and probably a sort of hypnotism as well.7

Tolstoy’s philosophy, Chekhov suggests, asserted its influence formally – not on the

basis of its ideas per se, but the manner of their presentation.

Chekhov’s passing assessment of Tolstoyan moral philosophy not only

prefigures an important element of What is Art?, but in fact ascribes this quality to

Tolstoy’s writings. Whether Tolstoy achieves this effective distillation of form and

content in his later writings is subject to debate, and is not moreover particularly

relevant to the present analysis.8 What is more significant is that Tolstoy both aspired

to and advocated this program, and that Chekhov, in denoting its effectiveness,

valorizes the tendency from his own, critical perspective. Moreover, Tolstoy’s

proposed union of form and content is intended as an expressive mode for conveying

religious sentiment, specifically, enabling the simultaneous experience of communal

and individual feeling in the audience.9 Tolstoy’s aesthetic model endorses an artistic

primitivism, and a concomitant iconoclasm aimed at “decadent” forms, promoting

7 «Но толстовская философия сильно трогала меня, владела мною лет 6 – 7, и действовали на меня не основные положения, которые были мне известны и раньше, а толстовская манера выражаться, рассудительность и, вероятно, гипнотизм своего рода.» See PSSiP [Pis’ma] 5: 283. English translation in Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Correspondence, 261. Italics added in both citations. 8 Gustafson, however, does effectively read What is Art? backwards into Tolstoy’s writings, demonstrating how War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Kreitserova sonata (The Kreutzer Sonata, 1889) effectively embody the program of the later work. See the section “The Art of Infection” in Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger, 369-91. 9 Emerson, “Tolstoy’s Aesthetics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, ed. Donna Tussing Orwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 237-51; 245.

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peasant ballads over Beethoven and Shakespeare. Though Tolstoy’s essentially

positivist, utilitarian project derives from an attempt to “overcome metaphysics,” his

identification of aesthetic and religious experience clearly problematizes this

endeavor.10 Moreover, it denotes his continuing concern with artistic forms of

transcendence, already evident in his earlier writings, and exemplified by War and

Peace. Despite the immanentist, humanist scope of Tolstoy’s late-career religious

philosophy, his advocacy of aesthetic, rather than discursive media, as well as his

emphasis on the emotive capacity of art, affirms the ability of art to convey that which

transcends other forms of discourse. Whether such art expresses the ineffable or the

emotional is, in a sense, immaterial; Tolstoy’s ideal work of art wields form to convey

a content that exceeds the purely semantic or logical.11

****** In What is Art?, Tolstoy effectively recapitulates the central theme of this

dissertation, carrying the literary project of representing transcendence to the cusp of

the twentieth century. In a manner consistent with his own aesthetic tendencies of the

1890s, Tolstoy articulates a theme common to Dostoevsky, Leskov, and Chekhov

(and, for that matter, the Tolstoy of War and Peace). In The Idiot and The Sealed

Angel, like Tolstoy’s novel, Dostoevsky and Leskov manipulate forms of narrative and

language in order to indicate and represent the ineffable. While their methods and

10 Elsewhere, in my 2005 Stanford MA thesis (“Metaphysical Limitations to Tolstoy’s Post-Metaphysical Project: Making Room for Kant and Schelling in the Aesthetic Program of What is Art?”), I explore the latent influence of Idealist metaphysics on Tolstoy’s aesthetic model. 11 Whether Tolstoy himself realized this is debatable. As R.F. Christian observes, Tolstoy “willfully [confuses] the two subjects of ethics and aesthetics, or moral and aesthetic argument,” for whereas the ethical entails a rational decision, the aesthetic is limited to perception. See Christian, Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 252.

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results vary considerably, it is interesting that both authors resort to ekphrasis, as if

circumventing the expressive limitations of language with the imposition of image. A

similar emphasis on visual media is at the center of Chekhov’s “Khudozhestvo” as

well, demonstrating how all three authors rely on visual paradigms in their prose, as if

to literalize, in turn, the “visionary” component of transcendental experience.

While the scope of Chekhov’s fictional reality, by comparison, is limited to the

immanent, his writings analyzed here thematize the same problem of representing the

transcendent. All four authors share a thematic concern with the transcendent as a

representational problem, and all four manifest a concomitant critique of the capacity

and shortcomings of language. Theological issues, such as Dostoevsky’s discourse on

faith, only compound this literary and linguistic challenge, invoking the paradox of

figuring transcendence. Russian Orthodoxy, however, as an elaborated theological

aesthetics, in the texts of Leskov and Chekhov provides an aid to such representation

in the artistic dimensions of iconography, song, and liturgical setting. Just as Orthodox

theology, I have suggested, allows for the manifestation of the transcendent in human

life, the interpolation of such Orthodox artistic media extends the representational

limits of prose language.

Most common, however, to the four writers is a metaliterary concern with

artistic form, concentrated in the topic of literary transcendence. Whether in the

repeated discussions of artistic practice in The Idiot; the scrupulous attention to artistic

process in The Sealed Angel and Chekhov’s stories; or the literal, essayistic approach

of What is Art?, there persists a deliberate attention to the literal media of art, and its

conglomerate formal contours. In the latter instance, this discourse anticipates later

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aesthetic developments that might have surprised (and perturbed) Tolstoy himself: for

just as Tolstoy himself would grow increasingly religious in his later years, his

approach to religion in art would inspire other, explicitly aesthetic programs

(demonstrating, in turn, features common to religious and aesthetic practices).

Tolstoy’s conjoined approach to literary form and content anticipates essential tenets

of Russian Formalism, a movement with little explicit interest in literary tendency,

religious or otherwise.12 Appropriately, many of the devices employed by these Realist

authors in approaching the transcendent, especially in narrative structure, anticipate

developments in Modernist prose technique (in which the very concept of

transcendence is radically reconfigured, in both artistic and philosophical spheres).

The shadow these four authors cast upon the twentieth century is indelible, ranging

from Tolstoy’s impact on the mutually antithetical movements of Formalism and

Socialist Realism, and Dostoevsky’s influence upon writers as diverse as Yuri Olesha,

Andrei Platonov, and Mikhail Bulgakov; to Leskov’s inspiration of an adapted skaz

technique among Mikhail Zoshchenko and the Serapion Brothers, and Chekhov’s

justifiable designation as the progenitor of the Modernist short story.

The issue of transcendence in Russian Realism is a broad topic, and I have here

elected to approach representative texts, by diverse authors, as a means of illuminating

both shared and individual approaches among these four authors. While the discourse

of literary transcendence itself would assert a literal influence, for example, on

Russian Symbolism, with its own elaborated goal of invoking the transcendent in 12 I am grateful to Gregory Freidin for pointing out this essential shared feature of Tolstoy’s aesthetics and Formalist theory. Beyond the specific impact of What is Art?, the respect accorded to Tolstoy by the Formalists is of course evident in Eikhenbaum’s monumental study of the author, as well as Shklovky’s famous discussion of ostranenie in “Art as Device.”

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poetry, this explicitly formal influence on Modernism exemplifies the extent to which

this topic relates to technical issues in the Realist project. The formal analysis of

transcendental experience in Realist prose is thus, implicitly, a study of Realist prose

per se, explicating its conventions and boundaries alike. Though transcendence

provides a limit case for its representational potential, its analysis provides an aperture

to greater formal and thematic issues in the Russian literary tradition.

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