Everything that he sees and observes—the Petersburg slums and the monumental Petersburg, all his random encounters and petty incidents—all this is brought into dialogue, responds to his questions, poses new ones before him, provokes him, argues with him or confirms his thoughts.
For Bakhtin Dostoyevsky is not only a great novelist but also the creator of a new type of artistic expression and, more broadly, of a new artistic model of the world. Using Dostoyevsky’s works as an example, Bakhtin tries to solve the general problems of human intercourse: “Only with an inner receptivity to dialogue does my word find itself in the closest connection with another’s word, but at the same time it does not blend into it, does not engulf it, and does not dissolve its significance, that is, it preserves fully its independence as a word.”
Bakhtin’s call for dialogue, understanding, and attention to “another’s word” could be construed as a political statement, but it appeared at a time when any meaningful discourse was becoming more and more problematic. Bakhtin’s book on Dostoyevsky was published in May 1929, a few months after the author had been arrested during a secret police dragnet to liquidate underground philosophical and religious circles in Leningrad. The fact that the book came out anyway speaks of the comparative lack of teeth in Soviet cultural policy in that period. Lunacharsky, living out his final days at his post as the cultural czar, even published a lengthy and on the whole positive review of Bakhtin’s work. A surviving copy of the book, which had belonged to Lunacharsky, has a marginal note that reads, “But the problems are posed in an interesting way, and work on them could lead far.”
It is quite probable that Lunacharsky’s intercession saved Bakhtin from death in a labor camp; he was “merely” exiled to Kazakhstan—his work did “lead far,” but not in the sense Lunacharsky meant—where seventy-five years earlier, during the reign of Nicholas I, the subject of Bakhtin’s research, Dostoyevsky, had spent his exile. Unlike Dostoyevsky, however, Bakhtin never returned to the city on the Neva. The last few years of his life (he died in 1975) were spent in Moscow in an apartment obtained for him by the members of the “new” Bakhtin circle. He had lived long enough to see the beginnings of his international fame and recognition.
Bakhtin’s best work stylistically,
Rozanov’s writing style is quite similar to Bakhtin’s manner of expression. In both cases, the reader seems to hear the author’s voice intoning his text with extreme conviction, sometimes sharpening his thought to the point of paradox for better effect. But for Bakhtin refinement and paradox were not an end in themselves. With Rozanov, this did happen. However Rozanov, an unattractive individual who lisped, drooled, twitched his knees and shook his red beard in conversation, went decidedly beyond any other Russian philosopher in the attempt to capture on paper barely perceptible emotional states and feelings, the “cobwebs of life,” as he put it.
Rozanov developed (not without Nietzche’s influence) an aphoristic style that had an enormous impact on the new Petersburg prose. In his later books he created, in fact, a new literary genre. According to Shklovsky, who studied Rozanov closely, it was a sort of novel of the parodic type: “‘Yes’ and ‘no’ exist simultaneously on one page—a biographical fact elevated to the rank of stylistic fact.”
The Petersburg modernists esteemed Rozanov highly, despite his political cynicism and anti-Semitism. Mandelstam wrote almost lovingly of him,
An anarchic attitude toward everything, total confusion, nothing counts, there’s only one thing I can’t do without—that’s living without words, I cannot survive separation from the word! That is an approximation of Rozanov’s spiritual organization. That anarchic and nihilistic spirit recognized but one authority—the magic of language, the power of the word.
Right after the revolution Rozanov began to speak of an iron curtain:
With creaks, screeches, and clanks an iron curtain descends over Russian History.
“The show is over.”
The audience rises.
“Time to put on your fur coats and go back home.”
They look around.
But their fur coats and homes are gone.
