American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865 by Joseph FrankReview by: Robert L. BelknapThe Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Summer, 1988), pp. 317-318Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/308899 .

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Reviews 317

The other analyses similarly employ microreadings to support one or two central theses that are always profound and often provocative. The readings of Pasternak's "MWalis' zvezdy .. ." and of Axmatova's "Iz cikla 'Talkentskie stranicy"' were particularly enlightening. In some cases not all the elements in an analysis seemed to meld together as successfully as they might. Thus the chapter devoted to Nekrasov's "Utrennjaja progulka" contains sharp observations about the work's formal elements, but the macroreading-here, the effort to relate the poem to myth-while it works as a kind of tour de force, seems less convincing than most of the others in the book. A different kind of problem occurs in the section of Fet's "Moego tut bezumstva lelal ..." and on Cvetaeva's "Zanaves." In both cases the argument is constructed so that the microreadings predominate at the very end. Usually Venclova goes from the general to the specific and back to the general; in these cases, though, ending with the specific creates a less satisfying effect. And a few comments in the microreadings could be questioned or extended. For instance, the meter in the third and sixth poems of Brodskij's "Litovskij diver- tisment" could have been described as dol'niki (171), and it would have been worthwhile to comment on the highly unusual rhythm of the trochaic pentameter in the Pasternak poem.

But these quibbles hardly detract from Venclova's overall achievement. The technique that he employs offers a model for the analysis of poems and poetic cycles. As it turns out, though, the success of this volume probably depends less on the theoretical positions of the Tartu school than on the erudition and imaginativeness that Venclova brings to his task. While others may be able to learn the theory, few can bring such an impressive combination of knowledge and sensitivity to the study of poetry.

Barry P. Scherr, Dartmouth College

Joseph Frank. Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986. xv, 395 pp., $29.95 (cloth).

Joseph Frank's magisterial study of Dostoevskij has passed its half-way point. Volume 3 covers the years 1860-65, when Dostoevskij became an active participant in the world in which Frank is at his best, the world of intellectual history. Some, in fact, will read the book for the rich background it gives about the journalistic scene, the relations between Russia and Europe, the interplay between the Alexandrine reforms and the intellectual world, or such causes c6lbres of the period as the Petersburg fires, the Polish uprising, or the appearance of arche- typal texts like Fathers and Children, or What Is to Be Done. Such a response would miss the central value of the book, which gathers in one place the fruits of the latest generation of scholarship, some of the best of it by Frank himself, and turns that large body of knowledge into a coherent picture of a single career. Many years ago, for example, in the Sewanee Review (69[1969]:1-33), Frank's article on Nihilism and "The Notes from Underground" had argued that the Underground Man is not so much Dostoevskij's spokesman as his example of where Nihilism must lead a man who is not stupid. Frank's third volume sets that perception in the context of Dostoevskij's rhetoric as it evolves in the "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions," where the speaker uses an "inverted irony" which "cuts two ways, being directed both against himself (for having somehow failed to measure up to Europe) and against the reader (for being unable to tolerate any but a hackneyed and conventional point of view)" (236). This kind of rhetorical relationship between Dostoevskij's texts becomes a part of his literary and intel- lectual development. In general, Frank provides a strong antidote to the position of aesthetes like Nabokov who decry the journalistic quality of Dostoevskij's work. Frank considers Dosto- evskij's polemical style and concern with current issues to be central elements in his greatness.

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318 Slavic and East European Journal

Like the first two volumes, this one rejects the older picture of Dostoevskij as an inveterate reactionary or a broken radical driven to religion and political appeasement by years of impris- onment. It emphasizes Dostoevskij's closeness to the radicals of the early 1860s in his view of what was wrong with Russia and what the country should be like. The finest Soviet scholars have used this emphasis to justify Dostoevskij's return to the properly published and examined canon after 1956, and like them, Frank may play down the hostility between Dostoevskij and ternygevskij a little too consistently; but this volume certainly alerts us to the danger of projecting the attitudes of later periods back onto the early 1860s.

No major book is perfect. The fifteen pages (163-78) on Turgenev's Fathers and Children are arguably too long, and the characterization of Pavel Kirsanov there as "totally lacking in sentiment" would provoke hot disagreement in some subtle readers. In dating Dostoevskij's first explicit reference to Lermontov to the 1860s, Frank makes the misquotation "Why am I not a bird, not a bird of prey," less obvious than it probably would have been to those Russians in the mid-1840s who read it on the first page of Poor Folk. "Never does it occur to [the Underground Man] that he might really try to help [the prostitute]" may be a third example of a negation so broad that it vitiates the very vacillations Frank is describing (342). But the only serious flaw in the volume may well be primarily the fault of the Princeton University Press: the slovenly index. To find a passage in a book that will be mined for information as well as insights for generations, scholars will have to subtract a couple of pages, usually, but not always, from the number given in the index.

Every generation or two, a field of study has to grow up all over again. Dostoevskij studies grew up in the 1920s with the new access to his notebooks, letters, and many of the memoirs about him. In recent years, the new Soviet edition and a body of serious scholarship in Russia and the West have demystified him as a cultural, religious, and political figure. Frank's breadth of reference, sophistication of reading, and clarity of exposition will set an example and provide a foundation for much of the future work done on Dostoevskij and on the history of European thought.

Robert L. Belknap, Columbia University

Liza Knapp, ed. and trans. Dostoevsky as Reformer: The Petrashevsky Case. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1987. 127 pp., $25.00 (cloth).

Dostoevskij's involvement in the Petragevskij affair has always been one of the most fascinating aspects of his biography, probably because the official documents relating to the case under- standably conceal as much as, if not more than, they reveal. In his depositions and testimony, Dostoevskij repeatedly emphasizes his innocent attendance (as well as the innocent attendance of the other defendants) of the Petragevskij and other circles. Over and over Dostoevskij states that he does not know, he does not remember, he is not certain. He sounds much like a witness called by a Congressional committee investigating a cover-up. The interrogators' summaries of Dostoevskij's testimony, however, do not significantly differ from Dostoevskij's own, there being no evidence against him other than what he himself had freely confessed to. (Since there were so many witnesses to this evidence, there was little point in denial.)

Dostoevskij was officially condemned for disseminating and reading (on three different occasions) the "criminal" letter of Belinskij to Gogol', for being present at the reading of a subversive work by a fellow defendant by the name of Grigor'ev; and for knowing about-but not revealing to the authorities-a proposal to establish a private printing press for the dis- semination of articles directed against the government. The most intriguing documents relating to Dostoevskij's activities during 1849 are not the records of the case itself, but the accounts-

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