Metaphor is to dostoevskii as metonymy is to tolstoi

Slavic Review

Volumn 61, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 109-126

  Curtis, James M ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950523080     PISSN: 00376779     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2696985     Document Type: Article

References (80)

1. See Lev Shestov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche (Athens, Ohio, 1969); this translation conveniently brings together Shestov's two books Dobro v uchenii gr. Tolstogo iF. Nitshe and Dostoevskii i Nitsshe:Filosofiia tragedii.
2. See also Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Tolstoy as Man and Artist: With an Essay on Dostoevsky (1902; reprint, Westport, Conn., 1970);
3. George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (New York, 1959).
4. Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens and Gogol (Cambridge, Mass., 1965)
5. and Gary Saul Morson, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in War and Peace (Stanford, 1987).
6. I have confirmed that this (usually unarticulated) sense of the difference between Tolstoi and Dostoevskii extends even to individual sentences. At the final meeting of an undergraduate class on Tolstoi and Dostoevskii that I teach, I distribute to the students a sheet of paper containing two sentences, one from War and Peace and one from The Brothers Karamazov. These sentences contain no place names, names of characters, or any other identifying features and are chosen by someone who has never read either novel. I then ask the students to guess which sentence was written by Tolstoi and which one was written by Dostoevskii. Most students are able to identify correctly the author of each sentence.
7. For an early, and historically important, statement of these principles, see Noam Chomsky, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (London, 1964).
8. See Richard Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy, Resident and Stranger: A Study in Fiction and Theology (Princeton, 1986).
9. Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Tvorchestvo L. Tolstogo i Dosloevskogo, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii Dmitriia Sergeevicha Merezhkovskogo (Moscow, 1914), vol.4, pt. 2:93.
10. On the monological word, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Problemy poeliki Dostoevskogo, 2d ed. (Moscow, 1972), 132-141
11. Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, 9.
12. Or, more generally, does the oeuvre of a great artist exhibit endlessly random variations? Is each work totally discrete from every other work? If so, then no valid generalizations may be permitted. I believe, however, that the oeuvre of Tolstoi and the oeuvre of Dostoevskii have an internal consistency that may be described by means of generalizations that are neither universal (they allow for exceptions and differences between phases of the artist's development) nor limited to only one work.
13. Roman Jakobson, "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances," in Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamenlah of Language (S-Gravenhage, 1956), 55-82.
14. See Willard Bohn, "Roman Jakobson's Theory of Metaphor and Metonymy: An Annotated Bibliography," Style 18, no. 4 (Fall 1984): 534-50.
15. Leon Surette, "Metaphor and Metonymy: Jakobson Reconsidered," University of Toronto Quarterly 56, no. 4 (Summer 1987): 551.
16. See David Lodge, The Modes of Modem Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (Ithaca, 1977).
17. See, in particular, "Part Two: Metaphor and Metonymy," 73-124.
18. Jakobson, "Two Aspects of Language," 60.
19. Jakobson, "Two Aspects of Language," Ibid., 60, 77.
20. Northrop Frye makes a comment that has great relevance here: "There are no rights and wrongs in such matters, but it seems useful to me to separate both the language of immanence, which is founded on metaphor, and the language of transcendence, which is founded on metonymy in my sense, from descriptive language." Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York, 1982), 15. It makes a great deal of sense to say that Dostoevskii, a metaphorical writer, uses the "language of immanence," whereas Tolstoi, a metonymical writer, uses the "language of transcendence."
21. Jakobson, "Two Aspects of Language," 78.
22. The most explicit statement that a homogeneous relationship obtains between two entities is an equals sign, and War and Peace is probably the only nineteenth-century novel that contains an equation. In one of the historical essays, Tolstoi describes an imaginary battle: "Consequenüy, four were equal to fifteen, and, consequenüy, 4x = 15y. Consequently, x:y = 15:4. The equation does not give the value of the unknown, but it gives the relationship between the two unknowns." L. N. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii v dvadtsati tomakh, ed. N. P. Akopova et al. (Moscow, 1960-1965), 7:142.
23. It will be apparent to the thoughtful reader that I am extending Bakhtin's association of the polyphonic word with Dostoevskii and the monological word with Tolstoi. Using metaphor and metonymy to make the comparison frees it from Bakhtin's verbally elite analysis. Since Bakhtin thinks only in terms of discourse, he has nothing to say about issues such as Dostoevskii's use of painting.
24. Hayden White, Metahisłory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), ix.
25. Hayden White, Metahisłory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973), Ibid., 177.
26. Hayden White, Metahisłory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973), Ibid., 190.
27. Hayden White, Metahisłory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973), Ibid., 187.
28. F. M. Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh, L. P. Grossman et al., eds. (Moscow, 1956-1958), 6:438-71, 9:309-32. The Brothers Karamazov makes explicit its combinations of heterogeneous elements in its complex systems of interrelated chapter titles. Tolstoi's metonymical relationships pervade his entire work, so he never uses such a system of chapter titles. Anna Karenina has one chapter called "Death"; this chapter title is one of the novel's several metaphorical elements that appear in Tolstoi's work for the first time. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 9:79-86.
29. See Iu. Tynianov, "Dostoevskii i Gogol' (K teorii parodii)," in V. A. Kaverin and A. S. Miasnikov, eds., Poetika. Istoriia literaíury. Kino (Moscow, 1977), 198-226.
30. Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:47,5:492.
31. Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, Ibid., 6:680
32. Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, Ibid., 6:215.
33. Such research reached a certain culmination in Nina Perlina, Varieties of Poetic Utterances: The Poetics of Quotation in "The Brothers Karamazov" (Lanham, Md., 1985).
34. Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:275,6:88.
35. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:356-368 This is not to say that no one has ever tried to identify the opera. On this interesting issue
36. see Edgar Lehrman, A Guide to the Russian Texts of Tolstoy's War and Peace (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1980).
37. Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:79,9:247.
38. Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, Ibid., 5:177.
39. James M. Curtis, "Spatial Form as the Intrinsic Genre of Dostoevsky's Novels," Modern Fiction Studies 18, no. 2 (Summer 1972): 135-54.
40. Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9:26.
41. Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, Ibid., 10:180-181
42. Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, Ibid., 1:168, 5:38, 10:227-233
43. See Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, 437.
44. Jakobson, "Two Aspects of Language," 62-63.
45. See, for example, Dostoevski], Sobranie sochinenii, 9:176-182
46. Lodge, Modes of Modern Writing, 109.
47. The point here is that although War and Peace contains letters and diaries, it also contains essays, historical documents, and the like. Tolstoi never inserted a single example of a contrasting genre whose uniqueness makes it distinctive in the larger work.
48. See Gleb Struve, "Monologue interieure: The Origins of the Formula and the First State of the Possibilities," PMLA 69 (1954): 1101-1111
49. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 6:230-233
50. Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:51; emphasis in the original.
51. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:221.
52. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, Ibid., 8:81.
53. Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:260.
54. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 6:72.
55. Morson, Hidden in Plain View, 15.
56. Morson, Hidden in Plain View, Ibid., 188; emphasis in the original.
57. Morson, Hidden in Plain View, Ibid., 228.
58. Viktor Shklovskii, "Iskusstvo kak priem," O teorii prozy, 2d ed. (Moscow, 1929), 14.
59. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:360. For Shklovskii's comments on this passage
60. see Viktor Shklovskii, Malerïal i stiľ v romane ľva Tohtogo "Voina i mir" (Moscow, 1928), 118.
61. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 4:255; emphasis in the original. What Shklovskii does not say about estrangement is that a similar process takes place in the hunt scene, which is related to all the battle scenes: "Nikolai had never seen Ilagin, but, knowing no middle ground, as always in his judgments and feelings, from the rumors of the wildness and capriciousness of this landowner, hated him with all his soul and considered him a most vicious enemy . . . He had hardly ridden out into an opening of the forest when he saw a fat nobleman in a beaver hat riding toward him ... Instead of an enemy, Nikolai saw in Ilagin a polite, presentable nobleman who especially wanted to meet a young count." Ibid., 5:285-286
62. Shklovskii, Mater'ial i stiľ, 113.
63. Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, vii.
64. Morson, Hidden in Plain View, 2.
65. See Shklovskii, Mater'ial i stiľ, 126.
66. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 6:264; emphasis added.
67. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, Ibid., 6:268-269
68. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, Ibid., 6:261.
69. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, Ibid., 6:228.
70. Cf. Lodge's comment: "We would expect the writer who is working in the me-tonymic mode to use metaphorical devices sparingly; to make them subject to the control of context-either by elaborating details of the context into symbols, or by drawing analogies from a semantic field into the context." Lodge, Modes of Modern Writing, 113. By making the contiguity of the dead soldier and the new-mown hay meaningful, Tolstoi is drawing analogies from a semantic field into the context.
71. Morson, Hidden in Plain View, 98.
72. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:251 and 8:124.
73. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, Ibid., 7:259.
74. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, Ibid., 7:285.
75. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, Ibid., 8:465-466
76. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, Ibid., 5:348.
77. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, Ibid., 5:349.
78. Ibid., 5:360-65, 8:121.
79. There are no murders in Tolstoi's work before the 1880s. Even during his battle scenes, no soldier ever aims a rifle and kills a member of the opposing army. When soldiers such as Andrei Bolkonskii are wounded, they are always wounded by shells or shrapnel fired by distant unseen hands.
80. Although the narrator in the Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth trilogy has brothers, they are of limited importance.