Is Dostoevsky truly dialogic?
This article offers an intertextual analysis of ‘sound-images’ in V Nabokov’s novel Despair and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, with special reference to the motif of ‘despair’. It challenges (with Wolf Schmid, 1998) the idea that Dostoevsky’s prose is ‘dialogic’ in Bakhtin’s sense. Instead, it claims that a “highly structured” novel such as Crime and Punishment relies on a single “linguistic persona” (iazykovaia lichnost’), whose “inner drama” develops in an extensive (propositional) form within the text. This unified linguistic persona is manifested through the unconscious – via automatised repetitions of sound-images organised along the motif of despair. The same device used more explicitly by Nabokov adds authority to this interpretation.
