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Reading Backwards

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Muireann Maguire
, 
Timothy Langen

II. Dostoevsky

5. Notes from the Other Side of the Chronotope: Dostoevsky Anticipating Petrushevskaia

Inna Tigountsova

Texte intégral

  • 1 Pierre Bayard, Le Plagiat par anticipation (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2009), p. 22. I would li (...)
  • 2 On Cubo-Futurists, see A. Kruchenykh and others, Slovo kak takovoe (Moscow: [n. pub], 1913).
  • 3 On Transfurists, see I. Tigountsova, ‘Handmade Books and Visual Poems of Sergei Sigei—a Russian Tra (...)
  • 4 The Dostoevsky citation is from F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, e (...)
  • 5 See, for example, Sally Laird’s 1994 translation of Liudmila Petrushevskaya’s Vremia noch’ as The T (...)

1The contraintes, or formal rules for literary games, invented by the Oulipo group are nothing new in literature, as the group’s historian Pierre Bayard has noted.1 Russian literature offers many other examples of invented rules. Amongst these are the militant manifestos of the Cubo-Futurists; for instance, Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov’s Word as Such (Slovo kak takovoe, 1913).2 A parallel from the 1980s, the Transfurist or Neofuturist grouping, included Sergei Sigei who invented a technique of writing poetry in so-bukvy (ligatures).3 Yet another form of innovation is attained by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) with his ‘realism in the higher sense’ and his experimental récit Notes from Underground (Zapiski iz podpol’ia, 1864).4 Dostoevsky’s life spans only sixty years. Despite the fact that he is often considered to be, with Tolstoy, one of the two canonical Russian Realist writers, I will show how Dostoevsky’s experimental use of narrative in Notes from Undergound anticipates and plagiarizes Time: Night (Vremia noch’, 1992) by the contemporary writer Liudmila Petrushevskaia. While Dostoevsky’s well-known novella needs very little introduction, Petrushevskaia’s family tale told by a Soviet-era matriarch still has a limited readership in foreign translation.5

  • 6 I thank one of this volume’s anonymous readers for this suggestion.

2In this chapter, I shall approach Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Petrushevskaia’s Time: Night in light of the ideas of anticipatory plagiarism and polyvalent hybrid authorship proposed by Pierre Bayard. I suggest that in view of the similarities between Notes from Underground and Time: Night, Dostoevsky’s Notes can indeed be considered a case of anticipatory plagiarism. I also argue that Bayard’s model biography of a writer called ‘Tolstoevsky’ (blending Dostoevsky with Tolstoy) is especially fruitful for analysing the peculiarities of the Notes and Time: Night. By analogy with the ‘Homeric hymns’, a term that attributes poems written over several centuries to a single author,6 I propose to explore both texts as if they had been written by one hybrid author: ‘Petroevsky’ (or ‘Dostoshevskaia’). The collected works of Petroevsky also include Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk (Bednye liudi, 1846), Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866) and Petrushevskaia’s novella ‘Our Crowd’ (‘Svoi krug’, 1990).

Authorial Merging: The Chronotope of Petroevsky

  • 7 Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 154. I am grateful to Rolf Hellebust for assisting with my translations from (...)
  • 8 Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Lit (...)
  • 9 Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 118. Mikhail Bakhtin’s essay ‘Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane: Ocherki p (...)
  • 10 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. by Julie Rivk (...)

3Bayard’s notion of anticipatory plagiarism (‘the act of being inspired, whilst concealing the fact, by the works of a later writer’7) may at first strike us in the same way as Gary Saul Morson’s suggestion that Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer (Dnevnik pisatelia, 1873–81) is ‘an integral (if idiosyncratic) literary work’— that is, as something quite improbable.8 If we take a closer look, however, Dostoevsky’s intention (as both author and editor) to present the Diary as a unified work becomes essential for our exploration of its structure and content. Another notion that might initially seem improbable is Bayard’s idea of a literary history capable of mobility (a history which is subject to temporal recombination and rearrangement), which I suggest develops Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope (a literary unity of time and space where time has the more significant role) in a non-linear, “rhizomatic” way.9 In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe two modes of social organization and reality, including literary reality: ‘One is arboresque and favors order and hierarchy. The other is rhizomatic and favors an undoing of all such orders and hierarchies.’10 If we accept their second mode as a viable literary reality, then the borrowing of ideas from future texts begins to appear sensible. Such a multi-directional, non-hierarchical chronotope informs what Bayard calls ‘the mobility of the new literary history’, with its chronologies that

  • 11 ‘... ne sauraient être fixes dans la mesure où toute nouvelle œuvre—et, plus encore, toute œuvre d’ (...)

cannot be fixed insofar as any new work—and moreover, any work of importance—displaces the whole of the constituted chronology and makes the existing literary panorama appear in a new light.11

  • 12 Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (London: Bantam Books, 2 (...)

4Who are we, after all, in the post-Stephen Hawking universe, to claim we know exactly which way time flows? Hawking postulates that if the universe was meant to ‘finish up in a state of high order… disorder would decrease with time’; he argues that in that case human beings ‘would have a psychological arrow of time that was backward’.12 The concept of an a-chronological literary history with its inevitable updates is also mentioned by T. S. Eliot, for whom it takes into account complex networks of interconnected textual dialogue among culturally significant artefacts from different historical periods:

  • 13 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays (Mine (...)

Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.13

5In his book on anticipatory plagiarism Bayard highlights its usefulness as a pedagogical tool:

  • 14 ‘Quand cette notion de plagiat par anticipation sera admise, il est vraisemblable que l’ensemble de (...)

When this notion of anticipatory plagiarism is accepted, it is conceivable that our whole conception of literary history—as taught in educational establishments or universities and presented in textbooks—will have to be altered.14

  • 15 Pierre Bayard, L’Énigme Tolstoïevski (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2017), pp. 13–16.
  • 16 Consider digital art experiments that take text beyond the book, in database, data visualization, a (...)

6Bayard’s theory of anticipatory plagiarism, supported by his idea of the polyvalent personalities of both writers and their characters, allows us to take a fresh look at older texts and to re-position contemporary ones, re-contextualizing both.15 When I was an undergraduate student of English, my Foreign Literature professor said that although James Joyce’s Ulysses was mentioned on the reading list, we should wait to read it since we would be not able to understand all the allusions involved. Naturally, I read it right away. Perhaps I did not grasp the intertextual connections, but the idea of their presence in the work has been imprinted on my mind ever since that rather unorthodox request from my professor. If we consider the possibility of the digital mapping of an eternally changing network of past and contemporary texts as well as texts yet to come as components of one data map with mobile links between shimmering literary and ‘geographical’ (spatial) destinations, we will arrive at a different reading of the classics, and our conceptual understanding of them may change.16

  • 17 Bayard, Tolstoïevski.
  • 18 The exact origins of the Tolstoievskii witticism are hard to pinpoint, but it was used as a pseudon (...)

7How does our perception change if we see the New Testament as an older version of The Idiot (Idiot, 1869)? Or Crime and Punishment as borrowing a topos from Petrushevskaia’s Number One, or In The Gardens of Other Opportunities (Nomer Odin, 2004) in its entrance-way and attic scenes? What if we imagine that Dostoevsky and Petrushevskaia are indeed one and the same writer, whom we might call ‘Petroevsky’ and whom we have mistakenly considered separate people, as Bayard does with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in his recent book on ‘Tolstoevsky’?17 Based on the greater number of similarities and overlapping themes in their writing, would it not make even more sense than Bayard’s investigation of Tolstoevsky? After all, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, even though they merged in a national mytheme well before Bayard, do exhibit significant differences in their writing styles and ideologies.18

  • 19 Eric Naiman, ‘What If Nabokov Had Written “Dvoinik”? Reading Literature Preposterously’, The Russia (...)

8Or what if we imagined that Fyodor Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail were the same person, since Fyodor Dostoevsky assumed Mikhail’s financial responsibilities after his death and continued writing his multi-narrated texts throughout his life, as is especially evident in Diary of a Writer? In the spirit of Eric Naiman’s counterfactual question, ‘What if Nabokov had written “Dvoinik”?’,19 let us consider how we would read the Notes from Underground if Petrushevskaia had written it. Would we demand more from the character of Liza the prostitute, and expect her counter-narrative to be incorporated in the text? Would we expect the Underground Man to be a closeted bisexual or homosexual? Would we anticipate more societal disapproval of Liza, or argue that the relative lack of such disapproval—societal indifference—is more telling than condemnation? I suggest that Notes from Underground and Time: Night are the quintessential works of ‘Petroevsky’, who has benefited from the Russian nineteenth-century canon but also from the postmodern tradition, still populated by representatives of the Underground Man type, involving the ideal of Sodom and fragmented narratives. The further asymmetrical development of one element of Petroevsky’s polyvalent personality—that of Petrushevskaia—supports Bayard’s idea of anticipatory (or reciprocal) plagiarism in a different way.

  • 20 ‘… Tolstoïevski est multiple parce qu’il est composé de plusieurs personnalités qui ne communiquent (...)
  • 21 Ibid.
  • 22 Zagadka Tolstoevskogo, trans. by Elena Morozova (Moscow: Tekst, 2019), p. 106.
  • 23 M. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1963), pp. 355–57. For an En (...)

9Bayard argues in favour of Tolstoevsky and his characters having polyvalent personalities: ‘Tolstoevsky is multiple, because he is composed of several personalities who are not necessarily in communication with one another, and whose person consists of the conflictual merger of these personalities’.20 Once again, a Bakhtinian concept relates to Bayard’s psychoanalytical literary theory (the Russian translation of Bayard’s French original gives ‘réunion conflictuelle’21 as ‘raznogolosoe ob’’edinenie’,22 recalling Bakhtin’s raznogolosost’, or vari-voicedness). Bakhtin considers the multi-voicedness and vari-voicedness (mnogogolosost’ i raznogolosost’) of Dostoevsky’s discourse to be its principal features, enabling the exploration of different aspects of a theme from multiple points of view, as well as serving as a pivotal compositional device.23

  • 24 F. M. Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia, p. 99. On the literary type in general, as a social model (...)

10Le Plagiat par anticipation discusses Oedipus Rex (429 BC) and Hamlet (1609) as examples of literary works that are key to re-writing literary history if we accept the idea of anticipatory plagiarism. Following Bayard, I designate Petroevsky’s Notes from Underground as another of those key texts that requires us to re-assemble the system of literary works, since this text was treated as an outsider in the literary compendium of nineteenth-century literature and arguably received the most criticism during that era of all of Dostoevsky’s oeuvre. The Notes would be much better placed in the context of the twentieth century, as they are in close dialogue with works by Robert Walser (The Child (Das Kind, 1924, in Die Rose)), Ralph Ellison (The Invisible Man, 1952), Evgenii Zamiatin (We (My, 1924)), Jean-Paul Sartre (Erostratus, 1939), Vladimir Makanin (Underground, or A Hero of Our Time (Andegraund, ili geroi nashego vremeni, 1998)), and possibly Woody Allen (Notes from the Overfed, 1968), amongst others. Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s prose has a special place in this literary web, as Dostoevsky’s Notes are much closer to her work than to that of any other twentieth- or twenty-first-century writer. In spite of Dostoevsky-the-editor’s footnote to Notes to the effect that the Underground Man is a necessary feature of Russian society of his time, the latter lacks companions from his own generation, even if one could argue that the Underground Man is a variation on two nineteenth-century types: the ‘superfluous man’ and the ‘little man’.24 It is, after all, the latter two types as such that populate nineteenth-century Russian novels and verse. The Underground Man type is distinctly out of place, dissonant with his own time. He is probably the Dostoevsky character least appreciated by nineteenth-century readers; yet we in the twenty-first century easily accept him as a popular type.

Petroevsky’s Narrators

  • 25 Helena Goscilo, Liudmila Petrushevskaia, in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Russian Writers Since (...)

11A particularly Dostoevskian Russian writer, Liudmila Petrushevskaia, was born at the height of the Stalinist purges in 1938 and survived family traumas, extreme poverty, near-starvation, and displacement, including a period in a children’s home where she was placed by her mother in order to avoid desperate circumstances. Her family was ruined by the purges; Petrushevskaia’s father left before she was born. Perhaps in part thanks to her family history, Petrushevskaia can be said to ‘ [chart] the daily psychic monstrosities of a spiritual wasteland populated by victims and victimizers bound by an endless chain of universal suffering and abuse’ in The Time: Night and other works.25

  • 26 Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 136.
  • 27 ‘… takie litsa, kak sochinitel’ takikh zapisok, ne tol’ko mogut, no dazhe dolzhny sushchestvovat’ v (...)
  • 28 N. V. Baranskaia, Nedelia kak nedelia (A Week Like Any Other) (London: Bristol Classical Press, 199 (...)

12Thus in many ways Dostoevsky and Petrushevskaia share a single outlook on the human condition; they are precisely the sort of writers about whom one can easily imagine, with Bayard, ‘that they have found a means of traversing the interval of time separating them so as to work together’.26 What reader of contemporary Russian literature can peruse Dostoevsky’s famously provocative Notes from Underground and not think of the protagonist of Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s novella The Time: Night? The image of the notoriously unattractive, manipulative narrator who twists and turns the textual fabric of Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella to suit his own needs is refreshed in the reader’s mind by Petrushevskaia’s 1992 publication. The narrator of Notes from Underground, a nameless antisocial paradoxalist intellectual, philosophizes in the plotless first part of his text (‘The Underground’), using the second part (‘Apropos the Wet Snow’) to recall a series of events from his past. ‘Apropos the Wet Snow’ introduces his so-called friends; a prostitute, Liza, who takes pity on him; and his parodically named servant, Apollon, with whom the narrator squabbles over petty matters. Though not a mouthpiece for the nineteenth-century classic writer, the Underground Man still anticipates posterity on his creator’s behalf by claiming superior intelligence. As Dostoevsky-the-editor writes in his footnote to the Notes from Underground: ‘… such persons as the creator of such notes not only can but even should exist in our society… ’.27 By leaving the Underground Man’s notes ostensibly unfinished, Dostoevsky invites his fellow woman writer and her female narrator to complete his tale with a story just like his own, or to borrow a phrase from the Soviet-era author Natalia Baranskaia, ‘a story like any other’.28

  • 29 For more on the Underground Man’s ‘word with a loophole’, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevs (...)

13What if Petrushevskaia, or indeed one of her heroines, were to finish the Notes—which Dostoevsky never provided with a satisfactory conclusion? In his tortured discourse, which Bakhtin called ‘the word with a loophole’ (‘slovo s lazeikoi’), the Underground Man, as a marginalized intellectual, takes a position analogous to that of Petrushevskaia’s Anna Andrianovna writing her notes ‘at the edge of the table’ in Time: Night.29 In this late twentieth-century Ich-Erzählung, Anna Andrianovna narrates events from the life of four generations of her family, in which the misfortunes of its predominantly female members (Anna Andrianovna herself, Anna’s mother Serafima, Anna’s daughter Alena and son Andrei, her feminized grandson Timochka, and Alena’s other assorted offspring) appear to be almost congenital. Parallels with Dostoevsky’s nineteenth-century text include narrative structure, type of protagonist, the prevailing poetics of ugliness and disorder, a shared chronotope depicting the family home as dystopic, and the excessive use of colloquial language with diminutives.

  • 30 ‘… histoire littéraire mobile’, Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 113. Also translated as ‘mobile literary his (...)
  • 31 Inna Tigountsova, The Ugly in Russian Literature: Dostoevsky’s Influence on Iurii Mamleev, Liudmila (...)
  • 32 Ibid.

14The Notes are the most popular of Dostoevsky’s texts in North American university curricula (thanks to their reputation as a ‘short novel’, their status as a quintessential Dostoevsky text, and because their author prefigures—or, in Bayardian terms, draws upon—so many twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers in his narrative). This makes me wonder if the idea of the Underground Man as the man of the majority has been somewhat artificially realized among our contemporaries, or—taking into account Bayard’s concept of a mobile literary history30—if Dostoevsky in fact anticipates posterity in this particular text to a greater degree than anywhere else in his writings. Ironically, Dostoevsky occupies a far more significant literary-historical place (especially in Western scholarship) than Russia’s national poet Aleksandr Pushkin, who was Dostoevsky’s own ideal of what a writer should be. This is in part because of the difficulty of doing justice to poetry in translation, but mainly because of Dostoevsky’s affinities with those late-twentieth and twenty-first-century writers who belong to the postmodern (and post-postmodern) period. As I have argued elsewhere, it is the very concept of the ugly (bezobraznoe), depicted so well in Dostoevsky’s literary universe, that allows him to take his rightful place in the world of our contemporaries.31 A literary tradition, in this case that of Dostoevsky (continuing the Gogolian line) and Petrushevskaia, leads us from the proto-modern, protean Dostoevsky to the omnivorous postmodern end of the twentieth century, with Petrushevskaia’s dark realism.32

15Bearing in mind the near-ubiquity of Dostoevsky’s novella in post-nineteenth-century cultural discourse (literary and beyond), it would be perverse to discount the significance of influence in what Bayard would call the ‘classical’ direction. In discussing the status of Tristan and Iseult (12th Century) as an outlier in the Middle Ages with regard to its treatment of the themes of love and death, he contends that the authors of the legend must have been inspired by the Romantics. At the same time, Bayard concedes that they have ‘exerted considerable influence upon a whole swathe of Western literature, including the Romantic writers’:

  • 33 “Ainsi convient-il d’admettre qu’il puisse, dans certains cas, y avoir à la fois plagiat et plagiat (...)

Thus it may be appropriate to admit that in certain cases there can occur simultaneously plagiarism and anticipatory plagiarism – or, if you like, reciprocal plagiarism. There is little doubt that the Tristan authors drew upon the Romantic imagination; but it is also likely that the latter were for their part equally inspired by Tristan, as if in some way, these authors, surmounting the barriers of time, had been influenced by each other.33

  • 34 Ibid., p. 137. [Volodine is a contemporary Russian-French novelist — I. T.]
  • 35 F. M. Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 30 vols (...)

16Discussing the anticipatory side of this special category of ‘reciprocal plagiarism’, Bayard focusses on the element of dissonance: ‘But here again the feeling of dissonance—Kafka stands alone whilst Volodine is part of a generation marked by totalitarianism and genocides—incites us to see him [Kafka] as plagiarist rather than plagiarized.’34 Indeed, dissonance seems to be the most important feature in Bayard’s classification of the elements of anticipatory plagiarism. The Underground Man, too, is out of place in his historical epoch, contrary to Dostoevsky’s provocative note about such men being typical of contemporary society.35 Only after Hesse, French existentialism and Petrushevskaia’s postmodern black realism in Time: Night (along with the magic realism/horror hybrid of her novel Number One, or In The Gardens of Other Opportunities), can we truly see the significance of this type for literature of the twentieth century and beyond.

Narrative Space in Petroevsky

17In the chronotope of the metafiction of the Petroevskian world, the squalid dwelling of the Underground Man is borrowed from the topos of Time: Night. The deviations from linear chronos that we see in Notes from Underground appear even more pronounced in Petrushevskaia’s Time: Night, with its own cyclical time where family history repeats itself through generations of (mainly) female characters.

  • 36 Ibid., p. 152.
  • 37 The Russian expression nizmennye pobuzhdeniia (‘vile or base motives’) is almost a cliché.

18A typical Petroevskian topos is found in the ugly interior of the brothel visited by the Underground Man, in its messiness and disorder. The description of the room where he sees Liza echoes his psychological landscape: ‘In the narrow, cramped, low-ceilinged room, cluttered with a huge wardrobe and with cardboard boxes strewn about and all sorts of rags and clothing rubbish, it was almost completely dark.’36 The space is claustrophobic and chaotic, with a low ceiling alluding to the low motives of the protagonist.37

  • 38 ‘… bol’shaia komnata, no chrezvychaino nizkaia… Sonina komnata pokhodila kak budto na sarai, imela (...)
  • 39 Ibid.

19Crime and Punishment offers more details of St Petersburg flats than Notes from Underground. This narrative space is just as distorted as in the shorter work: ‘… a large room, but very low… Sonia’s room resembled a shed; it had the look of an irregular rectangle, and this made it seem deformed… monstrously obtuse.’38 This description of Sonia’s room (like Liza, she is a prostitute; her relationship with Raskolnikov resembles Liza’s with the Underground Man) includes a striking number of corners and angles, acute and obtuse, ugly and irregular.39 Like Raskol’nikov’s own coffin-like room, Sonia’s has a low ceiling; and though it is large, it is sparsely furnished and misshapen. Poverty is everywhere, and two different words for ‘ugly’ feature in the passage above: urodlivyi and bezobrazno. There are doors leading directly to another rented room, eliminating any feeling of privacy. Sonia’s room is like the marketplace on Sennaia Square, a place of chaos and bezobrazie.

  • 40 Monika Katz, ‘The Other Woman: Character Portrayal and the Narrative Voice in the Short Stories of (...)

20Women, including characters like Sonia, make up the majority of the protagonists in Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s texts, which mainly deal with specifically female problems and thus fit Monika Katz’s definition of ‘women’s literature’.40 In the nineteenth century, the image of the strong woman (Turgenev’s heroines, for example) was created as a complement to that of the superfluous man, self-focused and looking for his place in society. In Petroevsky’s prose, in the particular case of Liza and the Underground Man (a sub-type of the superfluous man), the paragon of a strong woman proves to be a prostitute—traditionally a weak and degraded member of society. However, despite filling the lowest social role imaginable, she proves to have more common sense and compassion than the Underground Man.

  • 41 See N. V. Baranskaia, Nedelia kak nedelia.
  • 42 L. S. Petrushevskaia, Vremia noch’, in Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, 5 vols (Moscow: TKO ACT, (...)
  • 43 Ibid., p. 366.
  • 44 Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia, p. 151.

21Russian literature of the Soviet period depicted women as superheroes, or, indeed, supermen. The true Soviet woman, such as Baranskaia’s heroine in the story ‘A Week Like Any Other’ (‘Nedelia kak nedelia’, 1969) mentioned above, has to be productive for society both in the private and public sphere, that is, she bears a double burden of responsibility.41 In post-Soviet literature, the ‘strong woman’ motif still exists, although it is treated differently. In Petroevsky’s prose public life is given little emphasis; the daily life of the female characters is emphasized. Petroevsky’s heroines have to struggle to survive, overcoming numerous obstacles in order to feed their children: ‘Everything was hanging in the air like a sword, all our life, ready to crash […]. Are there powers in the world that can stop a woman who has to feed a child?’42 For these women, life is a battlefield: ‘No, you can’t move in here, again faces distorted with hatred, seen in our mirror in the hall; we always have rows in the hall, the bridgehead of military actions.’43 And it is not clear who is winning the battle with the ‘loved ones’. In this permanent struggle, family members cannot help but be affected by their dehumanized environment. They lose their capacity for compassion and consideration; violation of human dignity becomes normal for them. In Petroevsky’s depiction of the human face, natural features appear beautiful and artificial ones ugly; Liza’s artificial smile in the Notes is a distorted, ugly facial expression provoked by the Underground Man, whose own face is repulsive and distorted: ‘My disturbed face seemed to me repulsive in the extreme: pale, malicious, vile, with unkempt hair. “Let it be, I’m glad of it,” I thought, “I’m glad precisely that I’ll seem repulsive to her; that pleases me…”’44

  • 45 L. Petrushevskaia, Vremia noch’, https://libking.ru/books/prose-/prose-contemporary/42569-26-lyudmi (...)
  • 46 Ibid., p. 385.

22Space in Time: Night is restricted to a two-room flat, which for the members of this family is an object of residential claims. This flat cannot house eight people (including a mentally-ill elderly woman, a disabled alcoholic with a criminal past, two small children and a newborn). The adults in the group fight for shelter. Anna Andrianovna is unable to make the people closest to her secure; she loses everybody in the end.45 In Bayard’s reverse chronology, her ugly and distorted dreams inspire those of the Underground Man. Both characters exaggerate the effect which they think they have on people around them. Both have a high opinion of themselves and are ugly in the celebration of their righteousness: the Underground Man in his speech to the prostitute Liza, and Anna Andrianovna in her real or imaginary conversations with her children—particularly her daughter Alena, who inherits some of the underground features. Alena is consistently described as being in a pit; both her psychological state and real-life accommodation belong to the underground: ‘From what terrible dungeons (podzemelii) has she surfaced if a room of eighteen square metres for four people seems a refuge to her!’46

  • 47 Morson, Boundaries of Genre, pp. 36–37. [Emphasis mine. — I. T.]

23Petroevsky obliquely addresses the utopian notion of the Crystal Palace in most of his fictional works, through depictions of his characters’ Petersburg dwellings. Morson calls Notes from Underground and The Possessed (Besy, 1872) ‘two of the most influential anti-utopias in European literature.’47 The dwellings in Petroevsky’s texts are the exact opposite of the Crystal Palace in the architectural sense: windows in the cramped rooms of the Petroevskian world are small and the walls are misshapen; galleries (mentioned, for example, in Crime and Punishment) are narrow, dark, labyrinthine passages. Consider the following extract from this novel:

  • 48 ‘Otyskav v uglu na dvore vkhod na uzkuiu i temnuiu lestnitsu, on podnialsia, nakonets, vo vtoroi et (...)

Having found the entrance onto the narrow and dark staircase in the corner of the courtyard, he ascended, finally, to the second storey and came out into a gallery, framing the storey from the side of the yard. For the moment he was wandering in darkness and confusion…48

  • 49 Josephine Woll, ‘The Minotaur in the Maze: Remarks on Liudmila Petrushevskaia’, World Literature To (...)

24Woll writes that ‘all of Petrushevskaia’s characters inhabit spaces that steadily shrink’. In this connection, she draws a parallel between Petrushevskaia’s texts and ‘Dostoevsky’s abrasive Underground Man, trapped in his miserable cellar flat, and Raskol’nikov, entombed in his coffinlike room in the Petersburg slums’. As she also notes, twentieth-century Russian writers, in depicting urban dwellings, reflect the actual material constraints of their time. Cramped Soviet flats are a reality of Russia of the twentieth century and beyond, yet they ‘resonate within the Russian [nineteenth-century] literary tradition’.49 The way space is portrayed in Notes from Underground and Time: Night clearly marks these texts as belonging to the same two authors, fused into one as Petroevsky.

Petroevsky’s Poetics of Time

25Morson has discussed the structure of Dostoevsky’s ‘generically problematic and formally anomalous works’, writing that

  • 50 Morson, Boundaries of Genre, p. 8.

As Dostoevsky was well aware, his novels were likely to appear shapeless to most readers––‘loose and baggy monsters’—as Henry James was to call them—and he therefore outlined a theory of realistic art to justify, and to aid in the development of, his aesthetic practice. Like the novels themselves, which have had such great influence on twentieth-century European literature, this theory seems remarkably modern […] by the mid-1870s Dostoevsky had come to believe that social ‘disintegration’, ‘fragmentation’, and ‘dissociation’ […] were, in all probability, literally apocalyptic in extent […].50

  • 51 Inna Tigountsova, The Ugly, p. 154.
  • 52 Arkadii Klioutchanskii, ‘On the Chronology of Besy’, paper delivered at the annual meeting of the C (...)

26Petroevsky also finds ways to write about ugly themes; their (I use this pronoun as a polyvalent hybrid of his and her) narratives reflect fragmented social situations. Fragmentation is related to the problem of memory: we write the way we remember things and we remember them differently every time, bringing the truth into question; and the chronotope of Petroevsky’s narratives, in aiming to represent this truth mimetically, thus appears even more rhizomatic. In my previous work, I have argued that Dostoevsky’s treatment of time belongs outside of his historical epoch, suggesting that he offers a proto-modern understanding of narrative time.51 However, we can equally well argue that Dostoevsky offers a postmodern treatment of memory and time, as in the multiplydeviated narrative time we see in works such as The Possessed.52 Time deviates in similar ways in Time: Night, when the narrator attempts to record her past.

  • 53 F. M. Dostoevskii, ‘Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniakh’, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridt (...)

27In terms of narrative structure, Petroevsky’s works often feature digressions, dialogic monologues, beginnings in medias res, editorial comments, and diaries. Time: Night, for example, features an apologue and at least three diaries. Its narrative structure is messy in a Petroevskian way: Alena’s diary, one of its constituents, is an example of Petroevskian confessional-type Ich-Erzählung, woven into a quilted narrative consisting of the ‘ten little sheets’ of Alena’s diary, the inclusions of Anna Andrianovna’s comments on the diary contents, Anna Andrianovna’s own textual shreds in verse and prose, the diary entries that she writes on behalf of her daughter, and her own distorted narrative of the story of Time: Night, dating from various points in time. The presence of Alena’s diary, Alena’s voice, and the comments of the editor make this novella fundamentally polyphonic. The text also contains short, apparently randomly inserted narratives unconnected to the story of Anna Andrianovna’s family, such as a tale about a ‘late abortion’. Structurally, such inclusions are found elsewhere in the works of Petroevsky, for example in their ‘Winter Notes on Summer Impressions’ (‘Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh’, 1863): ‘And by the way, can you possibly think that I am getting into Russian literature instead of writing about Paris? That I am writing a critical article? No, I am only doing this from having nothing better to do’.53

28Alena finds Anna Andrianovna’s diary after her death and mails it to a stranger, presumably an editor, lending her diary, titled ‘Notes on the Edge of the Table’ (‘Zapiski na kraiu stola’), a found-manuscript provenance analogous to that of Gorianchikov’s notes in Petroevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead (Zapiski iz mertvogo doma), written by the Dostoevsky part of Petroevsky in 1862. The title of the diary in Time: Night thus recalls many other editions of Notes written by Petroevsky. There are also parallels between the ‘editor’ present in the text of Notes from Underground and in Time: Night. Both texts include a forced interruption of the narrative, which is caused by the death of the author in both Time: Night and Notes from the House of the Dead, as well as by the decision of the ‘editor’ in Notes from Underground to break off the narrative at an arbitrary point. Time: Night also has an introductory editorial comment by way of an epigraph, a typically Petroevskian feature from which the reader learns that the diary was written on disparate sheets of paper, school notebooks, even telegram forms, a combination that makes this physically multi-layered narrative remarkably postmodern.

  • 54 Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dicken (...)

29To differentiate among postmodernism, post-postmodernism, protomodernism, and various other ‘-isms’ is only useful or, indeed, viable within the wider context provided by all of them taken together, and by the web of literary theory. As a point of literary exercise in the spirit of Oulipo, it may be even more productive to modify the context in order to see how the technical features of the ‘-isms’ work in different epochs, in order to find out more about them and the eras with which they are conventionally associated. Romanticism, for example, appears to be a point of both arrival and departure for Dostoevsky; and the influence of European Romanticism, as well as that of Nikolai Gogol’s native combination of Romanticism and Realism, are among the reasons for Donald Fanger’s classification of Dostoevsky as a ‘Romantic Realist’.54

Ugliness and Dialogicity in Petroevsky

30In his post-exile Notes from Underground, Petroevsky has his protagonist condemn dreams as Romantic and repulsive. The Underground Man attacks Schillerian Romanticism, and labels mirages and fantasies (both typical of Romanticism) as repulsive and ugly. Criticism and ridicule of Schillerian Romanticism is expressed already in the Insulted and Injured (Unizhennye i oskorblennye, 1861), and continues in Notes from Underground, where it combines with the Underground Man’s disorderly thoughts of revenge against his successful former classmate Zverkov and the rest of humanity:

  • 55 ‘Na koleniakh umoliat’ o moei druzhbe—oni ne stanut. Eto mirazh, poshlyi mirazh, otvratitel’nyi, ro (...)

They won’t go begging on their knees for my friendship. That’s a mirage, a banal mirage, revolting, romantic and fantastic––just the same ball at Lake Como. And that’s why I must give Zverkov a slap in the face!55

  • 56 Ibid., p. 166. Note that an archaic meaning of ‘poganyi’ is ‘pagan’, ‘foreign’, or ‘non-Christian.’ (...)

31This adds to the Underground Man’s negative characteristics: the “dreamer” side of his character becomes part of his ugly nature—a significant change in the evolution of the dreamer-type protagonist. Sentimentality, which is in general a synonym for Schillerian Romanticism in Notes from Underground, is referred to as ugliness (poganost’): ‘… damned romanticism… Oh the nastiness, oh the stupidity, oh, the narrowness of all these “ugly [poganykh] sentimental souls”!’56 The ‘poshlyi mirazh’ (‘banal/low mirage’) of the Underground Man links the realm of fantasy with the low and vulgar.

32Petroevsky parodies Romanticism in Notes from Underground in an anticipation of postmodern irony which plays with Romantic ideas as it does with all the rest. By the end of the twentieth century, literature strives for fragmentation rather than congruency, a tendency that the Dostoevsky element in the Petroevsky polyvalent personality plagiarizes from the Petrushevskaia one, as he does the emphasis on multi-layered narratives. Dostoevskian ‘loose and baggy monsters’ become the artistic norm; fragments become whole works.

  • 57 F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (St Petersburg: A.F. Marks, 1894–1895). Further bibli (...)

33The 1894 edition (but not the later, Russian Academy of Sciences edition of the Complete Works of Dostoevsky which I cite in this chapter) erroneously claims that Notes from Underground first came out in the journal Time (Vremia) in 1846 (I, II, IV), that is, at the height of Russian literary Romanticism and eighteen years earlier than its actual publication date.57 Had this been true, it would have provided grounds for a different reading in itself, since its use of Romantic discourse could then have been read non-ironically.

  • 58 From a close reading of the 1894 and 1972–1987 editions of Dostoevsky’s Sobraniie sochinenii (Compl (...)
  • 59 Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia, p. 100.
  • 60 Ibid.

34Speaking of discourse, the language of Petroevsky’s Notes is more colloquial than modern readers often realize, with vocabulary such as ‘ni shisha’ (‘zilch’), ‘nagadil’ (‘messed up’) and so on.58 In the early Petroevsky novel Poor Folk, the protagonist Makar Devushkin anticipates the Underground Man’s diminutives. These often occur in unexpected contexts: for example, when the Underground Man explains that he is not, in fact, an angry man (and ‘not even embittered’), claiming that a mere child’s toy or a warming drink would suffice to distract him from his rage: ‘I might be foaming at the mouth; but bring me some sort of dolly (‘kukolku’) or give me a little tea with a bit of sugar (‘chaiku s sakhartsem’) and I’ll most likely calm down’. He goes on to assert that he would be almost religiously affected (‘dushoi umilius’’).59 Then, however, he admits: ‘I’ll probably gnash my teeth at myself and suffer insomnia from the shame for months thereafter. That’s how I am’.60

  • 61 Bakhtin, ‘Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane: ocherki po istoricheskoi poetike’, in Voprosy litera (...)
  • 62 L. Petrushevskaia, Vremia noch’, https://libking.ru/books/prose-/prosecontemporary/42569-lyudmila-p (...)

35Based on the narrative of the Notes, the experience of this gnashing of teeth typically occurs at night, which may well be when the Underground Man is telling us his stories. This is when he is embarrassed by his philosophizing and his admission of personal vulnerabilities, his confession of sorts, especially with regard to Liza. The emphasis on night as the time of writing, confession, and helpless teeth grinding is clearly filched from Time: Night, where the articulation of temporality is stronger than that of topos, in accordance with Bakhtin’s classic formulation of the more significant role of chronos in chronotope.61 The Dostoevsky personality in Petroevsky also plagiarizes the skaz features of Time: Night which include colloquialisms and diminutives, for example, ‘vazochki, statuetki, flakonchiki’ [little vases, statuettes, small bottles].62

  • 63 ‘ “Ia chelovek zhestkii, zhestokii, vsegda s ulybkoi na polnykh, rumianykh gubakh, vsegda ko vsem s (...)
  • 64 Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 136.

36In the Petroevsky hybrid, Dostoevsky’s discredited narrator who claims to be smart is borrowed from Petrushevskaia’s ‘Our Crowd’, a story whose narrator-protagonist is similar to Anna Andrianovna of Time: Night. ‘I’m a very clever woman’, she states.63 The Underground Man identifies the paradox of ‘double temporality’64 in claiming that he himself could not have become anything on account of his being clever, as dictated by his time:

  • 65 ‘Teper’ zhe dozhivaiu v svoem uglu, draznia sebia zlobnym i ni k chemu ne sluzhashchim utesheniem, (...)

Now I’m living out my life in my corner, teasing myself with the malicious and useless consolation that a clever person cannot seriously make anything of himself; it’s only a fool who can do this. Yes, a person of the nineteenth century should and is morally obliged to be a creature substantially without character…65

  • 66 Petrushevskaia, Vremia noch’, p. 315.

37Petroevsky’s Anna Andrianovna emphasizes her superior intellect in her notes as well; for example, when remarking on how a famous line from the children’s poet Agniia Barto is not recognized by other characters.66

  • 67 Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia, p. 103–04.

38Another instance of the Underground Man’s claim to superior intellectual capacity occurs in the following passage of the Notes: ‘I am, in the first place, to blame because I am smarter than all those surrounding me. (I’ve constantly considered myself smarter than all those surrounding me, and, would you believe it, sometimes I’ve been ashamed of it…)’. This is followed by yet another connection between past, present, and future, when Dostoevsky purloins the Faustian notion of the ‘person made in a retort’ (‘retortnyi chelovek’), harking both backward to Goethe and forward to the clones of the twenty-first century.67

  • 68 Iu. G. Kudriavtsev, Tri kruga Dostoevskogo (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1979), p (...)

39An entirely new area of anticipated posterity opens up if we consider the twentieth-century political overtones of ‘podpol’shchik’ (a member of a political resistance group; this word is a cognate of ‘podpol’e’ (underground)), a word that Iurii Kudriavtsev uses in his study of Notes from Underground (the title of which is more accurately rendered in French, for example, as Les Carnets du sous-sol).68 The meaning of political resistance, often through non-resistance, by an intellectual in the English translation—and in the Russian study by Kudriavtsev— recalls the anticipatory posterity of political concepts, as when Kafka is revealed by Bayard to have borrowed from the future of ideas concerning the two totalitarian states of the mid-twentieth century.

Conclusion

  • 69 Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 120.
  • 70 Ibid., p. 109. [Italics in the original].
  • 71 Ibid., p. 136.
  • 72 See Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Unive (...)
  • 73 Lubomír Doležel, ‘Mimesis and Possible Worlds’, Poetics Today, 9: 3 (1988), 475–96 (p. 481).
  • 74 Ibid., p. 147.

40The narratives in Notes from Underground and Time: Night are neither linear nor chronological, and their rhizomatic atemporality contributes to our perception of them as simultaneously similar and postmodern. Thinking along the lines of Bayard’s reader-response-based theory of anticipatory plagiarism, we discover three main connections between Dostoevsky’s Notes and Petrushevskaia’s Time: Night (and also her novella ‘Our Crowd’). These include: the type of the hero/anti-hero (the main point of anticipatory/reciprocal plagiarism here); the poetics, especially the rhizomatic chronotope of the novella (povest’), of notes as novella; and the element of dialogicity. The complex of plagiarism here is thus threefold. The innovative quality of Dostoevsky’s Notes means that since he has already availed himself of the favoured tricks of the postmodern trade he is posterior to it, in the same way that Sterne is posterior to Joyce or Woolf, according to Bayard.69 In this chronology of literary interconnections, ‘the after may be situated before the before’, which is logical, if anti-Hegelian.70 Dostoevsky after postmodernism, and especially after Petrushevskaia, is a different Dostoevsky, whether Petrushevskaia is regarded as a true postmodern writer or not. In the new mobile literary history which will focus on the future as well as the past, I would place Dostoevsky in the late-twentieth century; he was born in the nineteenth century, but his Other Self (in Proustian terms) clearly does not belong there. If we follow the traditional linear literary-historical path and explore the closeness of the two texts in question through the prism of literary influence, then the question of why this influence occurs in a particular epoch (in our case—the late-twentieth through twenty-first centuries) remains unanswered. If we approach these texts from the viewpoint of ‘posterity by anticipation’, then this question is moot, as it then becomes rather ‘why was Dostoevsky born in the nineteenth century where he does not belong?’ There is also a certain local-only significance, a particular temporal provincialism, if the emphasis is placed on the study of Dostoevsky as a solely nineteenth-century writer. My preference is therefore for a rhizomatic literary history with an ever-changing chronology. Bayard’s ‘heart of a double temporality’71 within the oeuvre of each author also comes close to the principle behind the Czech Canadian literary theorist Lubomír Doležel’s idea of fictional worlds.72 As the latter writes, ‘A radical alternative to mimesis will be a fictional semantics defined within a multiple-world model frame, ’73 which offers us a blueprint for how multiple fictional worlds and their creators might intersect. Doležel’s idea could explain both the appearance of the Petroevsky hybrid within the space of intersecting fictional worlds of Dostoevsky and Petrushevskaia, and Bayard’s point about reciprocal plagiarism. This type of plagiarism promises to help us read differently, from the perspective of the future, and to find this future-in-the-past in texts of profound originality. For Dostoevsky and Petrushevskaia, these texts coexist in an imaginary space of time-night, an example of the variety of ‘curvatures of time’ which appear if we are willing to read in ‘the other direction’.74

41With this notion of reading backwards, Bayard offers a fresh, anti-Hegelian approach to literary history (and a relevant one, since literary trends overlap and inform one another significantly). A dual chronology for the writer’s persona—his Other Self—may apply when s/he does not fit the contemporary canon and needs to be counted elsewhere, as in the case of Sophocles, Stern, Kafka—and Dostoevsky. Instead of focussing either on what is often called the ‘prophetic’ vision of Dostoevsky in current scholarship from his native land, or on what Nikolai Mikhailovsky famously called his ‘cruel talent’,75 I have attempted to outline a new epistemological approach that, in view of the technical aspects of his work, treats Dostoevsky’s Notes as part of a literary framework belonging to the future.

  • 76 Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 139.
  • 77 Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia, p. 103.
  • 78 I refer to Stephen Hawking’s discussion of the inference from radiation analysis that black holes m (...)

42Of particular interest in the Russian literature that is to be written in this future is the issue of gender. Discussing the German-language literature of Kafka’s era, Bayard asserts that the paucity of contemporary women writers whose influence could account for the ‘feminine element’ in the works of the author of The Castle tempts us to search for traces of such influence ‘in the future’.76 This provokes us to consider the analogous situation of Dostoevsky’s Russian nineteenth century. Bayard’s analysis of Kafka’s treatment of ‘feminine subjugation’ recalls the rejection of the masculine Bykov type—the man of action—in Dostoevsky’s texts, as well as his handling of the prostitute type, of which Liza in the Notes from Underground is a significant example. Originating in Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk, the Bykov type reappears in Notes from Underground: ‘Such a gentleman simply pushes his way forward to his goal like an enraged bull, horns lowered, perhaps with only a wall to stop him’.77 To evoke the black hole effect, we could predict more changes in the realm of gender or gender-specific writing, and suppose that the more significant future fields of influence for anticipatory plagiarism will be gender studies and pedagogy.78

  • 79 Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia, p. 119.

43This theoretical framework, although achronological from the traditional linear point of view, is fruitful for teaching as well as for reconfiguring the literary-theoretical system of links amongst authors so as to arrive at a new understanding of classic texts. The principle of anticipatory plagiarism is based on the hermeneutic or epistemological differences between a history based on events and literary history (or the history of art more generally); and the theory offered by Bayard suggests that chronology is not adequate for an analytical approach to the literary text—only for a historical-philological one. It is a brave attempt to predict the literature that is yet to come by shifting the gears of chronology into reverse. Reciprocal plagiarism rather than influence implies a conversation, an exchange, a multi-directional dialogue amongst authors and their texts; and in the case of Petroevsky (or Dostoshevskaia), we may anticipate more texts in their style by women writers, or texts in which notions of gender are more fluid, in the future Russian prose. Bayard’s idea of anticipatory plagiarism may be paradoxical, but as the paradoxalist narrator from Notes from Underground insists, ‘two times two equals five can be a most lovely little thing’.79

Notes

1 Pierre Bayard, Le Plagiat par anticipation (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2009), p. 22. I would like to thank Muireann Maguire and Timothy Langen for their patient and thoughtful reading of numerous drafts of this chapter, and for giving me the possibility of bouncing my most extravagant ideas off them. I would also like to thank my generous anonymous reviewers for their kind words and suggestions, and assure readers that any remaining faults in this text are but my own. I am also grateful to my Russian novel students at Queen Mary University of London, who were a part of an experiment involving the idea of hybrid authorship, to Muireann Maguire for her initial introduction to the fascinating world of Pierre Bayard, and to Rolf Hellebust for continuous intellectual support and firm belief in the success of this text.

2 On Cubo-Futurists, see A. Kruchenykh and others, Slovo kak takovoe (Moscow: [n. pub], 1913).

3 On Transfurists, see I. Tigountsova, ‘Handmade Books and Visual Poems of Sergei Sigei—a Russian Transfurist’, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 36: 4 (Winter 2002), 471–83, https://doi.org/10.1163/221023902X00072.

4 The Dostoevsky citation is from F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, ed. by V. G. Bazanov and others, 30 vols (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–90), XXVII: Dnevnik pisatel’ia (1984), p. 65. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

5 See, for example, Sally Laird’s 1994 translation of Liudmila Petrushevskaya’s Vremia noch’ as The Time: Night (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000).

6 I thank one of this volume’s anonymous readers for this suggestion.

7 Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 154. I am grateful to Rolf Hellebust for assisting with my translations from French.

8 Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1981), p. xi.

9 Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 118. Mikhail Bakhtin’s essay ‘Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane: Ocherki po istoricheskoi poetike’, in M. Bakhtin, Voprosy literatury i estetiki: Issledovaniia raznykh let (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975), pp. 234–407 (p. 256). Although originally a botanical term that refers to a type of a root that sprouts shoots in any direction and at any point along its line, this became a notion explored by post-structuralist literary theory and criticism, starting with G. Deleuze and F. Guattari’s On the Line, trans. by John Johnston (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). It was re-worked as A Thousand Plateaus, to which I refer immediately below.

10 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Maldon; Oxford; Carlton: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 278–86 (p. 378).

11 ‘... ne sauraient être fixes dans la mesure où toute nouvelle œuvre—et, plus encore, toute œuvre d’importance—déplace l’ensemble de la chronologie constituée et fait apparaître sous un nouveau jour le panorama littéraire existant.’ Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 118.

12 Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (London: Bantam Books, 2011), pp. 165–66.

13 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998), pp. 27–33 (p. 28).

14 ‘Quand cette notion de plagiat par anticipation sera admise, il est vraisemblable que l’ensemble de notre conception de l’histoire littéraire— telle qu’elle est enseignée dans les établissements scolaires ou les universités et présentée dans les manuels—devra être modifiée.’ Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 105.

15 Pierre Bayard, L’Énigme Tolstoïevski (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2017), pp. 13–16.

16 Consider digital art experiments that take text beyond the book, in database, data visualization, and mapping projects, as discussed for example in Christiane Paul, Digital Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), pp. 174–96.

17 Bayard, Tolstoïevski.

18 The exact origins of the Tolstoievskii witticism are hard to pinpoint, but it was used as a pseudonym by Ilf’ and Petrov in the late 1920s, and was also mentioned by Kornei Chukovskii, Abram Terz, and Vladimir Nabokov. I. F. Masanov, Slovar’ psevdonimov russkikh pisatelei, uchenykh i obshchestvennykh deiatelei, 4 vols (Moscow: Vsesoiuznaia knizhnaia palata, 1958), III, p. 170. See also Liudmila Saraskina, ‘ “Pri diktature proletariata satira opolchaetsia… ’’ F. Tolstoevskii protiv Dostoevskogo na territorii Il’fa i Petrova’, in Dostoevskii v sozvuchiiakh i pritiazheniiakh (ot Pushkina do Solzhenitsyna) (Moscow: Russkii put’, 2006), pp. 483–509.

19 Eric Naiman, ‘What If Nabokov Had Written “Dvoinik”? Reading Literature Preposterously’, The Russian Review, 64: 4 (October 2005), 575–89, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9434.2005.00375.x.

20 ‘… Tolstoïevski est multiple parce qu’il est composé de plusieurs personnalités qui ne communiquent pas nécessairement entre elles et dont la réunion conflictuelle constitue sa personne.’ Bayard, Tolstoïevski, p. 87.

21 Ibid.

22 Zagadka Tolstoevskogo, trans. by Elena Morozova (Moscow: Tekst, 2019), p. 106.

23 M. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1963), pp. 355–57. For an English translation see Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, MN; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), especially pp. 263–65.

24 F. M. Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia, p. 99. On the literary type in general, as a social model worthy of imitation and as a key concept in the nineteenth-century European (and Soviet) realist novel, see Rene Wellek, Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 242–46. On the specifically Russian variants of the superfluous and little man, see Andrew Kahn, et al., A History of Russian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 461–66 and 471–72, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199663941.001.0001.

25 Helena Goscilo, Liudmila Petrushevskaia, in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Russian Writers Since 1980, CCLXXXV, ed. by Marina Balina and Mark Lipovetsky (Detroit: Gale, 2003), pp. 220–29 (p. 221).

26 Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 136.

27 ‘… takie litsa, kak sochinitel’ takikh zapisok, ne tol’ko mogut, no dazhe dolzhny sushchestvovat’ v nashem obshchestve… ’ (F. M. Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 30 vols (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–90), V (1973), p. 99.)

28 N. V. Baranskaia, Nedelia kak nedelia (A Week Like Any Other) (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993).

29 For more on the Underground Man’s ‘word with a loophole’, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, MN; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 232–35; M. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1963), pp. 312–16. Here is Bakhtin’s explanation of the loophole (p. 313): ‘Lazeika – eto ostavlenie za soboi vozmozhnosti izmenit’ poslednii, okonchatel’nyi smysl svoego slova… Po svoemu smyslu slovo s lazeikoi dolzhno byt’ poslednim slovom i vydaet sebia za takoe, no na samom dele ono iavliaetsia lish’ predposlednim slovom i stavit posle sebia lish’ uslovnuiu, ne okonchatel’nuiu tochku.’ Or as Caryl Emerson translates (p. 233): ‘A loophole is the retention for oneself of the possibility for altering the ultimate, final meaning of one’s own words… Judged by its meaning alone, the word with a loophole should be an ultimate word and does present itself as such, but in fact it is only the penultimate word and places after itself only a conditional, not a final, period.’

30 ‘… histoire littéraire mobile’, Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 113. Also translated as ‘mobile literary history’ by Jeffrey Mehlman in his ‘Anticipatory Plagiarism: Pierre Bayard: For an Autonomous Literary History’, New Literary History, 44: 2 (Spring 2013), 231–50, https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2013.0019.

31 Inna Tigountsova, The Ugly in Russian Literature: Dostoevsky’s Influence on Iurii Mamleev, Liudmila Petrushevskaia, and Tatiana Tolstaia (Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010).

32 Ibid.

33 “Ainsi convient-il d’admettre qu’il puisse, dans certains cas, y avoir à la fois plagiat et plagiat par anticipation, ou, si l’on préfère, plagiat réciproque. Il ne fait guère de doute que les auteurs de Tristan ont puisé dans l’imaginaire des Romantiques, mais il est vraisemblable que ceux-ci, en retour, se sont également inspirés de Tristan, comme si, d’une certaine manière, ces auteurs, surmontant les barrières du temps, s’étaient influencés les uns les autres.” Bayard, Le Plagiat, pp. 53–54. [Italics in the original].

34 Ibid., p. 137. [Volodine is a contemporary Russian-French novelist — I. T.]

35 F. M. Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 30 vols (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–90), V, p. 99.

36 Ibid., p. 152.

37 The Russian expression nizmennye pobuzhdeniia (‘vile or base motives’) is almost a cliché.

38 ‘… bol’shaia komnata, no chrezvychaino nizkaia… Sonina komnata pokhodila kak budto na sarai, imela vid ves’ma nepravil’nogo chetyrekhugol’nika, i eto pridavalo ei chto-to urodlivoe… uzhe slishkom bezobrazno tupoi’. F. M. Dostoevskii, Prestuplenie i nakazanie, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 30 vols (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–90), VI (1973), pp. 241–42.

39 Ibid.

40 Monika Katz, ‘The Other Woman: Character Portrayal and the Narrative Voice in the Short Stories of Liudmila Petrushevskaia’, in Women and Russian Culture: Projections and Self-Perceptions, ed. by Rosalind Marsh (Oxford: Berghahn, 1998), pp. 188–97 (p. 189).

41 See N. V. Baranskaia, Nedelia kak nedelia.

42 L. S. Petrushevskaia, Vremia noch’, in Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, 5 vols (Moscow: TKO ACT, 1996), I, pp. 311–98 (pp. 340, 369). (In my translation of Petrushevskaia, I have retained her language irregularities where possible; however, some sacrifices have had to be made to preserve comprehensibility — I. T.)

43 Ibid., p. 366.

44 Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia, p. 151.

45 L. Petrushevskaia, Vremia noch’, https://libking.ru/books/prose-/prose-contemporary/42569-26-lyudmila-petrushevskaya-vremya-noch.html#book [accessed 27 May 2020].

46 Ibid., p. 385.

47 Morson, Boundaries of Genre, pp. 36–37. [Emphasis mine. — I. T.]

48 ‘Otyskav v uglu na dvore vkhod na uzkuiu i temnuiu lestnitsu, on podnialsia, nakonets, vo vtoroi etazh i vyshel na galereiu, obkhodivshuiu ego so storony dvora. Pokamest on brodil v temnote i nedoumenii… ’ (Dostoevskii, Prestuplenie i nakazanie, p. 241.) For more dark and confused spaces, see p. 188.

49 Josephine Woll, ‘The Minotaur in the Maze: Remarks on Liudmila Petrushevskaia’, World Literature Today, 67 (Winter 1993), pp. 125–30 (p. 125), https://doi.org/10.2307/40148873.

50 Morson, Boundaries of Genre, p. 8.

51 Inna Tigountsova, The Ugly, p. 154.

52 Arkadii Klioutchanskii, ‘On the Chronology of Besy’, paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Slavists (5 May, 2001).

53 F. M. Dostoevskii, ‘Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniakh’, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 30 vols (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–90), V (1973), pp. 46–98 (p. 51).

54 Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol’ (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 101.

55 ‘Na koleniakh umoliat’ o moei druzhbe—oni ne stanut. Eto mirazh, poshlyi mirazh, otvratitel’nyi, romanticheskii i fantasticheskii; tot zhe bal na ozere Komo. I potomu ia dolzhen dat’ Zverkovu poshchechiny! ’ (Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia, p. 149.)

56 Ibid., p. 166. Note that an archaic meaning of ‘poganyi’ is ‘pagan’, ‘foreign’, or ‘non-Christian.’ ‘Poganyi’ in the sense of ‘pagan’ fits into Berdiaev’s explanation of the changes in Dostoevsky’s view—from humanistic to religious. (See Nikolai Berdiaev, Mirosozertsanie Dostoevskogo (Prague: YMCA, 1923), p. 20.) The word ‘nemets’ (‘German, ’ or, in an archaic sense, a ‘foreigner’ or ‘pagan’) is also frequently used in criticism of Schillerian idealism in Notes from Underground. (Cf. Nikolai Gogol’’s ‘Night before Christmas’, in which the devil is called ‘nemets’.)

57 F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (St Petersburg: A.F. Marks, 1894–1895). Further bibliographic information is unavailable due to libraries’ closure during the Covid-19 pandemic. Notes from Underground first appeared in Epokha in 1864.

58 From a close reading of the 1894 and 1972–1987 editions of Dostoevsky’s Sobraniie sochinenii (Complete Works), the colloquial features of the skaz style seem more evident in the older orthography, which visually emphasizes it.

59 Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia, p. 100.

60 Ibid.

61 Bakhtin, ‘Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane: ocherki po istoricheskoi poetike’, in Voprosy literatury i estetiki: issledovaniia raznykh let (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975), pp. 234–407 (p. 239).

62 L. Petrushevskaia, Vremia noch’, https://libking.ru/books/prose-/prosecontemporary/42569-lyudmila-petrushevskaya-vremya-noch.html[accessed 27 Apr. 2020]

63 ‘ “Ia chelovek zhestkii, zhestokii, vsegda s ulybkoi na polnykh, rumianykh gubakh, vsegda ko vsem s nasmeshkoi… Ne dlia moego, koroche govoria, ponimaniia, a ia ochen’ umnaia. To, chto ne ponimaiu, togo ne sushchestvuet voobshche.”’ (‘“I am a coarse person, a cruel person, always with a smile on my full, rosy lips, always with a snigger at all of them… In short, not for my understanding, and I am very smart. What I do not understand does not exist at all.”’) L. Petrushevskaia, ‘Svoi krug’, in Kolybel’naia ptich’ei rodiny (St Petersburg: Amfora, 2008), pp. 84–118 (p. 84).

64 Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 136.

65 ‘Teper’ zhe dozhivaiu v svoem uglu, draznia sebia zlobnym i ni k chemu ne sluzhashchim utesheniem, chto umnyi chelovek i ne mozhet ser’ezno chem-nibud’ sdelat’sia, a delaetsia chem-nibud’ tol’ko durak. Da-s, chelovek deviatnadtsatogo stoletiia dolzhen i nravstvenno obiazan byt’ sushchestvom preimushchestvenno bezkharakternym… ’ Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia, p. 100.

66 Petrushevskaia, Vremia noch’, p. 315.

67 Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia, p. 103–04.

68 Iu. G. Kudriavtsev, Tri kruga Dostoevskogo (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1979), p. 230.

69 Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 120.

70 Ibid., p. 109. [Italics in the original].

71 Ibid., p. 136.

72 See Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

73 Lubomír Doležel, ‘Mimesis and Possible Worlds’, Poetics Today, 9: 3 (1988), 475–96 (p. 481).

74 Ibid., p. 147.

75 N. K. Mikhailovskii, ‘Zhestokii talant’, http://az.lib.ru/m/mihajlowskij_n_k/text_0042.shtml [accessed 27 May 2020].

76 Bayard, Le Plagiat, p. 139.

77 Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia, p. 103.

78 I refer to Stephen Hawking’s discussion of the inference from radiation analysis that black holes must exist. See Hawking, A Brief History of Time (pp. 91–112).

79 Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol’ia, p. 119.

Auteur

Holds degrees in Romano-Germanic Philology and Translation (Russian/English/German/Polish) from the Federal Baltic State University (Kaliningrad) and in Mediaeval Studies from the Central European University in Budapest. She received her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto, held a postdoctoral fellowship at Memorial University, and has taught in Canada, the US, and the UK. Her first book The Ugly in Russian Literature: Dostoevsky’s Influence on Iurii Mamleev, Liudmila Petrushevskaia, and Tatiana Tolstaia (2009) was well-reviewed, and her second—Death and Disorder: Dostoevsky in the Context of Petrushevskaia and Goethe—is under contract with Academic Studies Press’ Studies in Comparative Literature and Intellectual History series, edited by Galin Tihanov. She has also published in The Dostoevsky Journal: A Comparative Literature Review; Modern Language Review; Slavic and East European Journal; Canadian Slavonic Papers; Ulbandus: The Slavic Review of Columbia University; Studies in Slavic Cultures; Canadian-American Slavic Studies, and elsewhere. Tigountsova’s translations include works by Dmitrii Prigov, Liudmila Petrushevskaia, and Alexander Piatigorsky.

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