We Call upon the Author: Contemporary Biofiction and Fyodor Dostoevsky

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We Call upon the Author

Contemporary Biofiction and Fyodor Dostoevsky

Henrik Christensen

Henrik Christensen We Call upon the Author

Stockholm Slavic Papers 30

Doctoral Thesis in Slavic Languages at Stockholm University, Sweden 2021

Department of Slavic and Baltic Studies, Finnish, Dutch and German

ISBN 978-91-7911-404-6 ISSN 0347-7002

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We Call upon the Author

Henrik Christensen

Academic dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Slavic Languages at Stockholm University to be publicly defended on Thursday 25 February 2021 at 15.00 digitally via

Zoom. Public link will be made available at https://www.su.se/slabafinety/.

Abstract

This thesis studies fictional representations of Fyodor Dostoevsky in contemporary biofiction. The aim of the study is to present an intermedial theoretical framework for biofiction, a genre defined as fictional biographical and often metafictional narratives in which a biographical subject serves as the focal point for the story or plays a role integral to the narrative. Drawing on contributions from prior studies within different areas—biopics, the biographical novel, intermediality, transmedial narratology—the thesis identifies the most salient tenets of an increasingly important and ubiquitous genre—its fictional, intermedial, and metafictional properties—to suggest a medium-spanning definition. From this intermedial definition of the genre, it is suggested that biofiction studies should move beyond medium-specific analysis.

By situating the genre firmly within the realm of fiction, the thesis underlines the fact that it is exactly the fictional element that allows the genre to open up important ways to engage with a certain biographical subject. Overall, the biofiction definition presented in the thesis is inspired by Jacques Derrida’s différance.

Arguing that contemporary biofiction arose from the larger aporetic shift in theory and fiction in the 1960s, which was directed toward various presuppositions undergirding epistemological, metaphysical, and ontological projects, it is contended that biofiction fictionalizes subjects to engage with and reassess the assumptions that suffuse our understanding of the subject. From their metafictional perspective, biofictions also employ subjects for various purposes to interrogate contemporary issues. Biofictions are thus turned toward both a historical moment and its own contemporary context.

Buttressed by the intermedial perspective, it is argued that biofictions often employ sustained intermedial strategies—for instance, intermedial references and formal imitation—to engage not only with artistic subjects such as Dostoevsky and their work but also with the premises of creating art.

The thesis centers on five Dostoevsky biofictions within film and literature: Aleksandr Zarkhi’s biopic Twenty-Six Days from the Life of Dostoevsky (1980), Leonid Tsypkin’s novel Summer in Baden-Baden (1982), J. M. Coetzee’s novel The Master of Petersburg (1994), Lara Vapnyar’s novel Memoirs of a Muse (2006), and Vladimir Khotinenko’s television series Dostoevsky (2010). As contemporary biofictions, these fictional representations of Dostoevsky were all produced or written in the wake of the aforementioned aporetic shift and therefore comprise examples of the reflexive and metacritical form of biofiction that is discussed in the thesis. The inclusion of Dostoevsky biofictions is, in part, connected with the various critical perceptions of the writer; it is maintained that biofictions such as those analyzed in the thesis proffer new readings of issues that have been overlooked or have not received due attention, such as how Dostoevsky engaged with and augmented the rivalry polemics of his day; the ways in which his conceptualization of Russian identity rested as much on inclusion as exclusion; how Dostoevsky has been employed to propagate certain models of the muse, the genius, and canonicity; and how, in today’s Russia, the writer is employed to embody and express the hyperreal politics of Vladimir Putin’s administration.

Keywords: Biofiction, contemporary biofiction, Fyodor Dostoevsky, biopic, biographical novel, intermediality, transmediality, Zarkhi, Tsypkin, Coetzee, Vapnyar, Khotinenko, différance, ideology, gender, post-colonialism, hyperreality, phenomenology, ethics.

Stockholm 2021

http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-187980

ISBN 978-91-7911-404-6 ISBN 978-91-7911-405-3 ISSN 0347-7002

Department of Slavic and Baltic Studies, Finnish, Dutch, and German

Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm

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WE CALL UPON THE AUTHOR

Henrik Christensen

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We Call upon the Author

Henrik Christensen

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©Henrik Christensen, Stockholm University 2021 ISBN print 978-91-7911-404-6

ISBN PDF 978-91-7911-405-3 ISSN 0347-7002

Cover illustration: ©Hosein Ghazinoury, Gnoori Design.

Printed in Sweden by Universitetsservice US-AB, Stockholm 2021

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For Sofia and Maj

"You are my center when I spin away"

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Acknowledgements

This thesis is the result of the hard work, dedication, passion, and commitment of many people whom I have been fortunate to meet and work with over the past six years. I can only hope to acknowledge here my debt and gratitude to those who have showed their unwavering support of this project.

Thank you, professor Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre, for your faith in a project that was, for quite some time, an opaque notion concerning biographical fiction in relation to Fyodor Dostoevsky. Your openness to new ideas, no matter how far outside of your own area of expertise, and confidence in the capabil- ities of your students are qualities that I can only hope to emulate in the future.

Without your hard, diligent work, seemingly endless patience, and broad knowledge, this thesis would never have taken shape in the first place, let alone become a book intended for readers. Special thanks are also due to my two other supervisors, professor Jørgen Bruhn and associate professor Su- sanna Witt. Jørgen, thank you for kindling my initial interest in all things intermedial. Your willingness to cross borders, whether of medium or genre, has stimulated me enormously; the tentative steps taken in this thesis toward an intermedial approach to biofiction would not have been possible without your perceptive comments. Sanna, thank you for sharing your vast knowledge of Russian and Soviet culture; without your expertise, the contextualization of the following analyses would have been considerably less accurate and coherent. To all three supervisors, without you spurring me to develop and reflect upon my scattered ideas, this work would never have been possible. Thank you all for undertaking this journey with me.

I am also greatly indebted to associate professor Tine Roesen at the Uni- versity of Copenhagen, whose comments at my final seminar proved invalua- ble for finishing the thesis. Tine, thank you for taking the time and effort, first at the seminar and then again for suggesting further revisions at the final stages. Your keen readings and suggestions made it possible to finally find the focus and balance that this thesis needed.

Thank you, professor Anna Ljunggren, for guiding me through my bache- lor and master theses with your erudition and love for Russian literature. With- out your initial belief in my interest in biofiction, this book would never have materialized.

My gratitude also goes to assistant professor Markus Huss, whose succinct comments on very rough and raw drafts of several of the chapters made me

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see much more clearly what this thesis was actually about. Without your critical and always helpful observations, I would most likely still be floundering.

I want to thank my colleagues who read individual chapters as I was finishing the manuscript. Emma-Lina Löflund, your reading of my introductory chapter late in the editing process helped me through the championship rounds, to borrow an expression from the sweet science. More importantly, thank you for your friendship and for being a sister-in-arms from the very beginning of our doctoral studies. Lisa Mendoza Åsberg read and commented on a late draft of chapter five. Thank you, Lisa, for being a friend who is willing to open up and share generously with others. Aleksei Semenenko read and suggested changes for chapter six. Thank you, Aleksei, for the many stimulat- ing and thought-provoking conversations during my time at the department.

I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude toward all my dear colleagues, teachers, fellow PhD students, and friends at what was in the first stage of my graduate work the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and then later the Department of Slavic and Baltic Studies, Finnish, Dutch, and Ger- man. Thank you, professor emeritus Per-Arne Bodin, for your astute comments at seminars and never-ceasing passion for everything Slavic, including Ukrainian meme cats. As a student, I always appreciated that you took the time to discuss any topic or to help us find our way in the disheartening maze of the university’s nooks and crannies. Thank you, professor emeritus Peter Alberg Jensen, for your deep and inspiring knowledge of Russian literature and literary theory, and for always being willing to share that knowledge with us students. I very much appreciated the Dostoevsky course that you designed for me and the discussions we have had over the years. Thank you, Tora He- din, for always being a humane and encouraging presence at the department;

Karin Grelz, for all your support and for emboldening us students; professor Liudmila Pöppel, for all your kindness and warm humor; Renata Ingbrant, for making our department feel so much more like an actual home and for the many pleasant lunch conversations we have shared; associate professor emerita Elisabeth Löfstrand, without whose inspirational love for Russian history, culture, and language, we PhD students in Slavic languages would most likely never get the notion to pursue graduate studies in the first place.

I would also like to thank my fellow doctoral students at the department:

Cecilia Dilworth—your dedication and passion for our field and for Dostoev- sky are inspirational; thank you for making our visit to Boston and the Dosto- evsky Symposium an enjoyable and considerably less daunting experience;

Mattias Ågren, you were already at the final stages of your own doctoral work when I began, but, fortunately for me and the department, you remained as a highly appreciated colleague and teacher; Henrike Carolin Bohlin, for your boundless energy and contagious laughter; Hans Andersson, for your always pithy readings and comments and for inspiring chats in the corridors; Larisa

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Korobenko, for sharing an otherwise abandoned office on level four on mul- tiple occasions, for countless breaks over pitch-black coffee and encourage- ment as our respective thesis work drew to a close; Irina Malaxos, for always being there for your fellow graduate students and helping them at seminars and defenses; Thomas Samuelsson, with whom I have attended more courses in Russian over the years than I can remember and with whom I was glad to be, finally, a colleague as well; and Joanna Zatorska-Rosén, for your opti- mism, kindness, and warmth.

Thank you all, teachers and colleagues, for all your hard work and innu- merable inspirational conversations; thank you for making my stay at the department a memory for life: Åke Zimmermann Bjersby, Gunnela Mogensen, Natalia Galatsky, Natalia Ringblom, Alla Bernar, Fredrik Dufwa, Zhanna Lundman, Alexander Pereswetoff-Morath, Jonas Thal, Maria Zadencka, Irene Elmerot, Kerstin Olofsson, and Nadezjda Zorikhina Nilsson. I hope to see you all again in the near future.

This thesis finally saw the light of day thanks to generous contributions from several foundations. A travel grant from the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities made it possible for me to travel to the XVII International Dostoevsky Symposium in Boston in 2019, a conference which was very fruitful for the last phase of my studies. Substantial grants from the Johan and Jakob Söderberg Foundation and the Elisabeth and Herman Rhodin Memorial Foundation were crucial for revising, editing, and finishing the manuscript after my final seminar.

Dr. Angela Terrill proofread and edited the manuscript and suggested revisions that made the language in this thesis decidedly more readable, correct, and natural. My sincerest gratitude for your work. Whatever infelicities and errors that remain are all mine.

I would not have been where I am today without friends and loved ones.

Thank you, Bokcirkeln, for making Stockholm a home when I first began studying at the university: Abbe, Ana, Karin, Lars, Mattias, and Mia. To all my friends from Gothenburg, with whom I have shared so much over the last twenty years: Calle, Daniel, Fredrik, Lesi, and Olof.

To my loving family, thank you for always being there and for supporting me in everything: mum, dad, Emelie, Louise, Alve, Elliott, and Vidde. And to my ever-growing extended family, I am so very grateful for having you in my life: Erik, Kenneth, Susanne, Magnus, Maja, Jasmin, Jonas, and Siri.

Lastly, to those for whom thanks simply do not suffice. To my wife Sofia, whose support over the years has been beyond what can ever be expressed in words; thank you for sharing your life with me. To my daughter Maj, who was not born when this project commenced but is now such a caring little human being, full of life, love, curiosity, and will; thank you, love of my life, for effortlessly creating wondrous new worlds and realities every day. I love you both immensely; this is all for you, now and forever.

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A Note on Transliteration and Translation

Throughout the thesis I have used the Library of Congress (LOC) system of transliteration. The exception to this rule is proper names and concepts that have standardized English spellings (e.g., Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anna Grigo- ryevna, the Petrashevsky Circle). In transliterations of original titles in Rus- sian, however, names have been transliterated according to LOC (e.g., Fedor Dostoevskii) so as to avoid mistaking Russian titles for English. I have omitted diacritics in order to make the text more accessible and legible for non-Slavi- cist readers. The soft and hard signs have generally been omitted, but are re- placed with an -i in pre-vowel positions (e.g., Prokofievna). All citations in Russian in the main text have been translated, with the translations being mine unless otherwise noted. All references to Russian sources cite, whenever possible, English translations. The exception to this rule is references to Dosto- evsky’s works, which I quote from the writer’s collected works in Russian—

Fedor Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, edited by Vasilii Bazanov et al., 30 volumes (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–1990). Translit- erated words and names in citations have been preserved as they appear in the original.

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1. Introduction

What we once thought we had we didn’t

And what we have now will never be that way again So we call upon the author to explain

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

The importance and ubiquity of contemporary biofiction have generated a steadily growing interest among scholars. This is perhaps most evident in the recent upsurge in critical works that examine biopics, or biographical films, and biographical novels, biofiction’s arguably most widespread forms. For instance, Michael Lackey terms the biographical novel “a dominant literary form” (2016c). David Lodge echoes this statement, noting that the biographical novel “has become a very fashionable form of literary fiction in the last decade or so” (2006, 8).¹ In regard to the literary biopic (a biographical film that takes a writer as its subject), Hila Shachar writes:

While literary biopics have always featured in cinematic history, it is only in recent times that they have boomed into a considerable cinematic trend that is worthy of investigation and exploration in and of itself through detailed, fo- cused analyses of certain representative films within this trend. (2019, 2)

Biofiction has, however, been discussed primarily within the context of a single genre or medium. In this thesis, I propose a conceptualization of biofiction that builds upon and develops prior research from several different fields into a more coherent theoretical framework. Thus, I define biofiction as fictional biographical and often metafictional narratives in which a biographical subject serves as the focal point for the story or plays a role integral to the narrative.

By proposing for the first time an intermedial theoretical framework for biofiction, the present study seeks to contribute to earlier research and suggest

1 Recent commentary has emphasized the importance of not only contemporary biofiction, which is the topic of this thesis, but in other historical eras as well. Nora Goldschmidt argues that “[a]ncient readers and writers—like modern authors of biofiction—invented stories to fill lacunae, skirting over the flimsy borderline of verifiable historicity into the realms of imagina- tive fiction” (2019, 5). She sees biofiction as “a core mode of the reception of Roman poetry”

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new ways of conceptualizing and analyzing an important contemporary fictional genre.

There are several important reasons for studying contemporary works of biofiction. In contrast to biography, biofiction engages with how biographical subjects are constructed, a strategy which is often foregrounded in biofictions.² As fiction that perpetually reads and rereads history and biography, biofiction straddles fiction and criticism in unique ways: its “impulse to fictionalize, and thus change, manipulate, interpret biographical data runs parallel to that of rereading and rewriting” (Savu 2009, 13). By engaging fictionally with historical and biographical facts, biofiction opens up new vantage points from which we can see biographical subjects anew. Hence, the significance of biofiction lies, partly, in how fiction can contribute to critical readings and reas- sessments not only of the biographical subjects themselves but of their artistic work. Indeed, the very term biofiction conflates fiction and criticism. Alt- hough a form firmly grounded in fiction, biofiction maintains a relation to and tension with biography criticism regarding its subjects, which is indicated by the subservience of the adjective bio to the noun fiction, its main operative term. This is an important reason why I focus on contemporary biofictions that center on the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881): I contend that these works engage with their subject, his works, and Dostoevsky criticism by fictionalizing and rereading the writer.

Furthermore, biofiction coalesced into its contemporary form in the wake of the larger turn in theory and fiction that originated in the 1960s, an aporetic shift which was largely turned toward the epistemological, metaphysical, and ontological presumptions suffusing our culture. This theoretical critique en- tailed new ways of conceptualizing the subject, language, and representation.³

2 In this thesis, biography is seen as a form of discourse that constructs and delimits the subject;

it should therefore be understood as, in Michael J. Shapiro’s terms, a knowledge agent: “The creation of identities by knowledge is, according to Foucault, disciplinary in a sense similar to the discipline emanating from what are recognized as social-control agents. Knowledge agents, the human sciences in particular, act as relays for power by both monopolizing the discourse controlling what can be said and by whom and by helping to script the kind of identity or self- understanding that is docile in the face of demands from controlling social, political, and administrative institutions” (1988, 18).

3 Throughout this thesis, questions pertaining to the subject occupy a highly significant role.

With the term subject, and its concomitant subjectivity, I intend the modern subject that sees itself as central to its own Weltanschauung: “The concept of the individual subject as subjectum is a distinctly modern formulation which is tied to the commencement of an age where the self becomes the Archimedean point from which the world achieves meaning. It is the subject that is posited as the focal point, the origin of truth claims, and knowledge becomes specifically human knowledge. It is also the subject who becomes the central reference point for political theory as questions of contract and right, submission and consent, sovereignty and freedom take on an explicitly human dimension, that is, the concept of the subject is politicized, it becomes subsumed by the political. These two moments, epistemological and political, could not have

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Contemporary biofiction is highly inflected by this general skepticism toward realism, positivism, and objectivism, a distrust which can be gleaned from how biofictions not only concede the impossibility of exhaustively represent- ing its subject but also in their metafictional play on the inadequacy and limi- tations of language and, by extension, representation and fiction.⁴

To reflect the deep interconnectedness of contemporary biofiction and these theoretical and fictional developments, I consider biofiction from a perspective that is influenced by Jacques Derrida’s conception of language in terms of différance, a conceptualization that disrupts the stability between sig- nifier and signified.⁵ For Derrida, meaning is always deferred and postponed, much like the subject in biofiction, which remains elusive. Thus, the subject is perpetually postponed in a chain of new readings that reframe, recontextualize, and reimagine but never fully enclose it. This conception, of the fictionalized subject as always deeply affected by the adapting context, informs my view of biofictions as readings: in fictionalizing a specific subject, the subject is reread from new perspectives.

Although I will not employ a strictly deconstructive analysis in this thesis, I argue that biofictions, seen as readings and rereadings, epitomize and play on Derridean différance: in fictionalizing a biographical subject, they accen- tuate the impossibility of wholly knowing any one subject in all its aspects and complexities; and that the perhaps most productive way to face the issue is to admit the impossibility and give it central representational significance in a continual play of signs that follow and supplant one another. I do not argue that every biofiction is intrinsically deconstructive; rather, by enacting diffé- rance, biofictions pry loose and wrest control of the subject from prior con- ceptualizations of it. The subject thus becomes unmoored from earlier readings. Biofictions therefore serve as critiques of our conceptualizations of his- toriography, biography, and other forms of epistemological projects that argue for the existence of a transcendental signified—the presence of an essence that may somehow be completely known and encompassed by a master signifier.

taken place without the structural transformations which, broadly speaking, mark the late seventeenth century [italics in the original]” (Williams 2001, 4).

4 Although there are a few important differences in our respective views, my theoretical outlook on biofiction and its historical place hews close to Laura E. Savu’s in Postmortem Postmodern- ists: The Afterlife of the Author in Recent Narrative (2009), a study of writers as characters in biographical novels (or “author fictions”). Savu, too, sees the genre as originating with the

“three interrelated crises—of the subject, of the author, and of representation” (2009, 13). In contrast to Savu, however, I avoid the term postmodernism because it is too burdened with certain assumptions, whether in relation to fiction (for instance, the linking of postmodernist culture to experimental metafictional literature) or theory (for example, the collapsing of highly distinct theoretical works into categories such as structuralist, poststructuralist, or postmodernist theory).

5 I consequently write the term with acute accent and italicized: différance. In the various translations of Derrida’s works and other comments on his work, I cite the term as it is rendered, for instance differance or différance.

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Biofiction gives the lie to such assertions: there is no bobbin that can be un- spooled to reveal a firm center.⁶

Lastly, biofiction is a fictional form that should be situated within the larger field of intermedial studies, a field which is concerned with how media inter- sect and transform in various ways. The advantages of an intermedial approach to biofiction are several. Biofictions tend to take creative artists as subject and employ intermedial strategies in order to engage with the subject and its work, a move that often entails the implicit and explicit representation of one medium within another, as in the representation of a writer at work in film where literary activity is conveyed through cinematic means. Another benefit of an intermedial approach is that it helps us understand the ways in which we culturally interact with biographical subjects: from our own culturally en- trenched perceptions of a subject, we construct biographical narratives that transcend medium and genre. That is, biofiction should be considered a transmedial phenomenon, whose meaning, form, and content may exist in several different media and can be explicated with intermedial theories. This is sup- ported by the profusion of fictional biographical narratives across cultures, genres, and media, which reflect an unwaning desire for engaging with the subjects of the past.

The small but significant body of biofictions which I have included in my material comprises Aleksandr Zarkhi’s biopic Twenty-Six Days from the Life of Dostoevsky (Dvadtsat shest dnei iz zhizni Dostoevskogo, 1980), Leonid Tsypkin’s biographical novel Summer in Baden-Baden (Leto v Badene, 1982), J. M. Coetzee’s novel The Master of Petersburg (1994), Lara Vapnyar’s bio- graphical novel Memoirs of a Muse (2006), and Vladimir Khotinenko’s tele- vision series Dostoevsky (Dostoevskii, 2010). Spanning the last three decades in the evolution of contemporary biofiction, these biofictions are important to research for several different reasons. They form part of the aforementioned general reflexive turn within biofiction toward metafiction; they are turned both toward Dostoevsky and their own cultural contexts.⁷ As contemporary

6 I here follow both Alain Buisine (1991), who first coined the term biofiction and aligned it with the theoretical challenges generated by postmodernist theory, and Liz Stanley, who, in her critique of modern biography, argues against the notion of the discrete biographical subject—

the desire for “a coherent, essentially unchanging and unitary self which can be referentially captured by its methods” (1992, 8).

7 The term metafiction has been utilized for highly different purposes in different fields and my inclusion of the term in my definition of biofiction therefore merits a clarification. Metafiction is perhaps most closely associated with studies of self-reflexive experimental prose (Alter 1975, Scholes 1979, Waugh 1984, Hutcheon 1984, Currie 1995, Quendler 2001, and Macrae 2019).

For rare examples of non-literary studies that employ the term, see Stam (1992) and Bruhn (2016). There are also several studies that focus on metafiction in various Russian literary contexts, from Soviet to postmodernist fiction (Shepherd 1992, Roberts 1997, and Kolesnikoff 2011). Although very important for shedding light on how metafictional strategies allow writers to reflect on the premises of literature, reading, and writing fiction, most studies are to a certain degree hampered by their singular focus on a narrow selection of fictional literary works. For

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biofictions, they also indicate a larger cultural interest in writers, an interest that was arguably only deepened by the theoretical challenges toward the position and status of the writer posed since the 1960s. Also, by analyzing these highly different, but in some regards similar works, I want to showcase bio- fiction’s central characteristics. Lastly, the release of Twenty-Six Days from the Life of Dostoevsky in 1980 marks a renewed interest for fictionalizing Dos- toevsky which has not yet abated, as evidenced by the production of the Dos- toevsky series in 2010.

The inclusion of Fyodor Dostoevsky biofictions here is in no way arbitrary.

The works that I analyze present readings of Dostoevsky that confront and interact in sometimes surprising ways with several different, already estab- lished images of the writer. Dostoevsky’s role in Russian and Soviet literature and criticism has been both significant and fraught. Already in the 1880s, shortly after his death in 1881, critics were decidedly divided regarding his literary legacy; the image of Dostoevsky as a reactionary proved controversial in the increasingly radicalized political climate of Russia during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In the Soviet Union, he was an ideological anathema and persona non grata for much of the twentieth century.⁸ And, after the col- lapse of the Soviet state, he has, like many other writers and people considered culturally distinguished, been employed in the ideological and political reimagining of Russian national identity under Vladimir Putin.⁹ Today, within Russian Dostoevsky studies, biographical readings of the writer prevail. In the West, the critical perception of Dostoevsky has been, to a large degree, influenced and even dominated by Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism, which has become something of an axiom in Dostoevsky studies. The dissemination of Bakhtin’s ideas by many prominent Dostoevsky scholars, both through

example, Currie argues that metafiction can be defined “as a borderline discourse, as a kind of writing which places itself on the border between fiction and criticism, and which takes that border as its subject” (1995, 2). Waugh, in a similar vein, maintains that “[m]etafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality”

(1984, 2). Or as Hutcheon suggests: “‘Metafiction,’ as it has now been named, is fiction about fiction—that is, fiction that includes within itself a commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic identity” (1984, 1). Rather than seeing metafiction as the trait of a certain genre or medium, I use the term to indicate biofiction’s general reflexive awareness of and play with its own status as fiction, the suppositions underlying our understanding of what fiction is, the premises on which fiction is made, and the overall constructedness not only of fiction but any narrative, whether historical, biographical, or even scholarly.

8 For more on the reception of Dostoevsky in Russian criticism, see Seduro (1969, 1975).

9 For the constitution of a new, post-Soviet national identity in Putin’s Russia, see, for instance Boym (2001), Brock (2015), and Wijermars (2019). For the important role of culture in this process, see Condee (2009) and Norris (2012).

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translations and in their own work, has had a profound influence on the field.¹⁰ Biofictions, I argue, interact, enter into dialogue with, perturb, and even critique these prior understandings of Dostoevsky, whether constructed within criticism or in the general collective view of the writer.

These biofictions do not, as mentioned above, engage solely with contemporary views of Dostoevsky. With his place in the public debates in Russian modernity, Dostoevsky’s historical context plays an important role for each representation of the writer. As a contributor to the construction of the modern subject and its relation to modern society, in his fictional works as well as in his journalism, Dostoevsky offers possibilities to engage fictionally with historical ideas and understandings regarding culture and society. In our engage- ment with the writer and his novels, these views of the subject in modernity

10 What is problematic with Bakhtin’s view of Dostoevsky and its subsequent influence on Dostoevsky studies, as I see it, is that it bestows upon Dostoevsky and, partly, the novel transcendental powers of dialogue which are infused with a certain political ideology by which dialogism becomes “a kind of magical substance or activity which will transform society from without” (Hirschkop 1999, 6). For instance, in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, 1963), Bakhtin argues: “A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky's novels. What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event” (Bakhtin 1984, 6). Bakhtin clearly taxes Dostoevsky, his works, the novel at large, and language in general with qualities that simply cannot inhere in them: texts do not contain fully conscious beings, somehow detached from the mind of their creator. To arrive at his notion of Dostoevsky’s novels as intrinsically dialogic, Bakhtin must “endow language with some kind of inner political impetus”; he “is forced to smuggle into it social and political attributes which really don’t belong there, or which can’t be assumed to follow from the mere act of speech” (Hirschkop 1992, 106). For his theory of dialogism as a central tenet of Dostoevsky’s work, Bakhtin is reliant on, on the one hand, Kantian ethics, that takes into ac- count responsibility and respect for alterity and, on the other hand, a Buberian notion of social space and community. As Hirschkop points out, what is important to note with regards to Bakh- tin’s reading of Dostoevsky is that it rests on this highly particular political and ideological understanding of the latter; and also that we keep in mind that Bakhtin’s Kantian and Buberian projects are exactly that— “projects with an interesting and chequered political history, not realisations of ontological attributes of language” (Hirschkop 1992, 106). The Dostoevsky one often encounters in Dostoevsky studies is very much a product of this distinct socio-political project that endows Dostoevsky’s literary works with dialogic properties that come from Bakh- tin rather than from the works themselves. It is difficult to see how Dostoevsky’s brand of realism, regardless of its originality and individuality, would radically differ from all other nineteenth-century realism. Such an assertion requires a sleight of hand by which any trace of the, in my opinion, rather strong ideological, polemical, and political aspects of Dostoevsky’s works evaporates. For more on the issue of Bakhtinian polyphony and its place in Dostoevsky studies, see critique from both Dostoevsky scholars, such as Wellek (1980), Ginzburg (1982), Peace (1993), and Gasparov (2004), and Bakhtin scholars like Bialostosky (1992), Brandist (1999), and Titunik (1986).

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and its place in the world continue to exert an influence on our cultural imag- ination. Contemporary biofiction represents one important site for assessing and interrogating this influence.

I use the term modernity on several occasions throughout the thesis and, as the term is used ambiguously and with shifting connotations by different critics, a few words are merited to clarify my view of it. In line with Michel Fou- cault, I believe that it is futile to think of it as a specific time in history that can be pinpointed. Of course, modernity follows the Renaissance and the En- lightenment, although any clearly distinct periodization will fail to encapsu- late how they intertwine and depend on one another.¹¹ The same is also true of its relation to postmodernism, a term arguably even more difficult to charac- terize and insert into a neat historical narrative. I therefore view modernity with Foucault “rather as an attitude than as a period of history”; modernity entails a certain

mode of relation to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting, and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and pre- sents itself as a task. (Foucault 1984, 38)¹²

In Russia, and this is important for understanding Dostoevsky’s decisive role in the country’s modern history, modernity arguably made its entrance with first Peter the Great’s reforms in the late 1600s and early 1700s, including administrative reforms and the introduction of the so-called Table of Ranks

11 Of course, in Russia, where the Renaissance period was belated in comparison with the West, the demarcation between modernity and preceding eras becomes even more opaque. As Su- sanna Rabow-Edling notes in her study on the Slavophile movement and its relation to nation- alism: “Russia did not experience the Renaissance until the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, at least two centuries after Western Europe. Not until Peter the Great ‘cut a win- dow into Europe’ was Russian society introduced to Western culture on a wide scale” (2006, 28).

12 William E. Connolly summarizes this attitude of modernity thus: “In modernity, the insist- ence upon taking charge of the world comes into its own. Nature becomes a set of laws suscep- tible to human knowledge, a deposit of resources for potential use or a set of vistas for aesthetic appreciation. While each of these orientations jostles with the others for priority, they all tend to place nature at the disposal of humanity. Human and non-human nature become material to work on. The world loses its earlier property as a text upon which the will of God is inscribed and through which humans can come to a more profound understanding of their proper place in the order of things. But, ironically, in a world governed by the drive for mastery, any absence of control is experienced as unfreedom and imposition: the experiences of alienation, estrange- ment, repression, authoritarianism, depression, underdevelopment, intolerance, powerlessness and discrimination thereby become extended and intensified in modern life. The drive to mastery intensifies the subordination of many, and recurrent encounters with the limits to mastery make even masters feel constrained and confined. These experiences in turn accelerate drives to change, control, free, organize, produce, correct, order, empower, rationalize, liberate, im- prove and revolutionize selves and institutions” (Connolly 1993, 2).

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(Tabel o rangakh), which made positions in the military, government, and court that had been hereditary available to commoners. Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, his reforms also included a strengthening of the serf system.

The process of modernizing the country was then furthered by Catherine the Great in the latter half of the eighteenth century, an era heavily influenced by Enlightenment ideas. However, the westernization and modernization of Rus- sia led to a widening gap between the ruling classes, and later the intelligentsia of the 1800s, and the majority of the population, including the serfs.¹³ Indeed, Russian modernity can to a large degree be described in terms of “disintegration and atomization,” a process that Kate Holland argues “is fundamental to the experience of modernity [in Russia]” (2013, 2).¹⁴ Indeed, after the 1860s, when Dostoevsky wrote many of his best-known works, Russia was a country beset by disillusionment over changes that had failed to materialize:

So many Russians had hoped fervently that [the] emancipation [of the serfs]

would usher in an age of brotherhood and social regeneration and make Russia a beacon for the modern world; a modified but basically unchanged caste society was what they got instead. The hopes were unrealistic—it is easy to see this

13 The Russian intelligentsia plays an important role in several of the following analyses and therefore warrants some clarification. The problem is that there is no agreed upon definition of the term, which roughly refers to Russian intellectuals. In general, it refers to either the educated part of the population or is used to designate a certain political faction of the citizenry that was

“critical of the Russian social system, of the Orthodox Church and of the tsarist government”

(Hamburg 2010, 46). This class of intellectuals or intelligenty came into being either in the eighteenth century or as late as the 1840s or 1860s, depending on how they are defined. In line with G. M. Hamburg, I regard the intelligentsia from a broad perspective that includes numer- ous separate but connected intelligentsias, whose existence was made possible due to the soci- etal and cultural changes effected by modernity. G. M. Hamburg identifies such disparate groups as “‘an early intelligentsia’” of the eighteenth century; “a ‘classical intelligentsia’ which originated in the nineteenth century at some point between 1815 and 1860”; “a ‘revolutionary intelligentsia’ which was a subset of the classical intelligentsia”; “a ‘zemstvo intelligentsia’

(zemskaia intelligentsia) generated between 1864 and 1900”; “a ‘professional intelligentsia’

which encompassed the zemstvo intelligentsia, urban professionals hired by elected city coun- cils and privately employed professionals”; “a pre-1861 ‘serf intelligentsia’ (krepostnaia intel- ligentsiia) consisting of serfs trained as sophisticated artisans or as traders”; “a post-1861 ‘vil- lage intelligentsia’ (sel’skaia intelligentsiia) composed of literate peasants, such as village scribes, local school trustees and village priests”; “a post-1900 ‘intelligentsia from the people’

(narodnaia intelligentsiia)”; and, lastly, “a ‘new’ or ‘religious intelligentsia’ which appeared in the late 1890s/first decade of the twentieth century” (Hamburg 2010, 47).

14 Holland’s view of modernity is close to Marshall Berman’s in his study on the modernization process, where disintegration is also posited as central to the experience of modernity: “Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all man- kind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of per- petual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air’"

(Berman 1988, 15).

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9 a century afterward. But the bitterness that followed the failure of these hopes was decisive in shaping Russian culture and politics for the next fifty years.

(Berman 1988, 213)

It was this experience and sense of upheaval and fragmentation that Dostoev- sky and other intellectuals in his time addressed in their search for a unitary modern Russian identity and nation, a search which lies at the very center of Russia’s modernization.

Dostoevsky’s role as a writer is also of significance. The reassessment and critique of language and representation in criticism and fiction alike, as I mentioned above, has been directed toward the writer and the subjectivity of the writer, as manifested perhaps most prominently in the debates surrounding

“the death of the author.” By taking as their subject a writer such as Dostoev- sky, the works that I analyze in this thesis explore our cultural conceptions of the writer-subject, its place in history as well as its contemporary position. By entering into the mind of Dostoevsky as a writer, these biofictions explore various facets of the writer’s creativity; and by reconsidering aspects of his work, they reexamine in new light various dimensions of Dostoevsky’s fiction.¹⁵

Lastly, Dostoevsky is also a highly illuminating and important biofiction subject for the substantial intermedial interest in his person and in his works.

The wealth of adaptations of his stories reflects an unceasing interest in trans- posing his works to not only film but also theater, comics, and opera. And, as I intend to show in this thesis, the intermedial appeal of the writer is extended to his life as well. The appeal of Dostoevsky’s personal life is unparalleled in comparison with other Russian writers. Globally, only writers such as William Shakespeare and Jane Austen have been more frequently represented in biofiction. The intermedial appeal of Dostoevsky’s life and works has, however, thus far not garnered much scholarly attention, either in Slavistics or in Dos- toevsky studies. A number of recent studies nevertheless indicate a positive and growing influence on Slavistics from intermedial, adaptation, and biofiction studies. Closely related to the question of Dostoevsky’s historical context are the specificities of his biography. The intermedial interest in the writer’s life and work, in adaptations as well as in biofictions, bespeaks a desire for a life that had ample drama and action: his pre-Siberian years of initial literary renown; his acquaintance with several of the most important literary figures of the day; the tacitly insurgent literary evenings with the Petrashevtsy circle; the mock-execution; the years in prison-camp followed by mandated army service; his love-affair with Polina Suslova; his meeting and falling in

15 Although the writer, in the general sense, occupies a highly important role in Western culture, the writer-subject played a crucial role in creating a modern Russian and, later, Soviet identity.

Andrew Baruch Wachtel contends that “the majority of East European countries were in substantial measure invented by writers. Literature here, far from being a reflection of reality, was very frequently a creator of new identities and new social and political realities” (2006, 12).

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love with Anna Grigoryevna, the stenographer whom he hired to finish The Gambler (Igrok, 1867) in less than a month; the success of the post-Siberian novels; his consolidation as a Russian prophet; and his death from pulmonary hemorrhage at the age of fifty-nine. All these aspects are, in various ways, utilized and brought to life in the biofictions that I analyze.

Aim of This Thesis

The term biofiction has gained traction recently among scholars. Regardless of the lack of a coherent theoretical framework, much important work on biofiction has been carried out, primarily concerning biopics and biographical novels. What I hope to achieve in this study is to draw on these important contributions from various fields and present a definition that is as inclusive as possible. This is important in order not only to understand the variegated reasons for engaging fictionally with biographical subjects, but also for gain- ing insight into how fictional biographical narratives are represented across genres and media. Thus, I define biofiction as fictional biographical and often metafictional narratives in which a biographical subject serves as the focal point for the story or plays a role integral to the narrative. These narratives, in turn, comprise a biofiction genre whose shared characteristics and properties inhere primarily in how biographical subjects are fictionalized and metafictionally reassessed.

The aim of this thesis is to present a definition of biofiction and to suggest a theoretical framework for what I argue is a distinct genre. The proliferation of contemporary biofictions across different media have in the last decades seen a concomitant increase in scholarly attention to biofiction. Most analyses, however, focus on biofictions within a single medium. What is needed is an intermedial conceptualization of biofiction that builds upon and expands prior definitions to reflect the ways in which biographical narratives are constructed, regardless of medium or genre. In suggesting a new definition and theoretical basis for biofiction, I hope to contribute to the nascent field of biofiction studies, which, in turn, can be situated within intermedial studies.

By focusing on Fyodor Dostoevsky biofictions published or released between 1980 and 2010, I seek to showcase biofiction’s most important characteristics—its fictionality, its reflexivity, and its metafictionality. I contend that biofiction consolidated into its present form and acquired its characteristics from the aforementioned larger theoretical turn that began in the 1960s. Bio- fictions can be considered forms of reading that reread, recontextualize, and reappraise biographical subjects in a continual play of signs that engender new and important perspectives on biographical subjects. What is dramatized in a particular biofiction is therefore the very act of constructing the subject from a particular point of view, which is not seldom done in productive and critical

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dialogue with past readings, a process often playfully foregrounded and flaunted in biofictions. I am therefore also interested in the ideological con- cerns and interests underlying individual biofictions and their representation of biographical subjects.

With Dostoevsky as my main biofiction example, the goals of the thesis can be summarized thus:

- I propose a definition and an intermedial theoretical framework for biofiction that seeks to encompass different forms of fictional biographical narratives, regardless of medium.

- I establish how biofictions utilize biographical subjects to reflect on that subject’s life and works; and how they fictionalize a biographical subject in order to reflect upon the cultural and historical context of the biofictional work itself—in this case a period of upheavals that involve the transition from a Cold-War world to a new globalized, post-Soviet, post-Berlin Wall reality.

From these general aims, I seek to contribute to Slavistics and Dostoevsky studies an intermedial perspective on Dostoevsky that has hitherto been broached but where much work yet remains. In contending that biofiction engages reflexively and often metafictionally with its subject, I argue, too, that Dostoevsky biofictions present valuable critical perspectives on prior readings, not only of the writer’s biography but also of his work. Engaging with the construction and constructedness of the subject, the biofictions analyzed in this thesis pose questions that concern how Dostoevsky himself partook in the construction of the modern subject in his own life and in his work; and how we can, in turn, read and interpret this central concern in our contemporary context.

Next, by surveying already existent research on biofiction, I will explicate in further detail the aspects of the proposed definition of biofiction—its fictional, intermedial, and metafictional components. This overview will therefore serve as an introduction to both biofiction itself and to the theoretical insights already proffered by scholars who have studied biofiction in its various forms. In so doing, I hope to make visible what I argue is an incipient field of biofiction studies and, setting forth from the insights of earlier studies, contribute an inclusive definition that can open up for future theoretical consider- ations of the biofiction genre.

Previous Research

Intermediality studies in Slavistics remain a left-field subject. Adaptations, for instance, have been considered primarily in stand-alone chapters and articles

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in various books and journals.¹⁶ There are also studies that analyze in depth a single adaptation.¹⁷ Aside from these isolated adaptation analyses, two book- length studies has been devoted to Russian and Soviet adaptations: Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of Literature, 1900–2001: Screening the Word (Hutchings and Vernitski 2005) and Border Crossing: Russian Literature into Film (Burry and White 2016). The former anthology, spanning almost the en- tire history of Russian cinema, brings together chapters that underscore both the importance of adaptations in Russian and Soviet film and the ambivalence displayed toward the genre by Russian filmmakers. The latter anthology is intertextually broader in its approach; the contributors discuss films from across the globe that either adapt Russian literature or incorporate Russian literary works in a more intertextually diffuse manner by borrowing plot points or alluding to certain themes. It thus points to the many ways in which Russian literature has spread across both geographical and media borders, and how the intermedial interest in Russian literature persists.

Biofictions in a Russian or Soviet context have arguably been even more understudied than adaptations. As with the latter, biofictions, primarily bio- pics, are now generally included in anthologies, such as Directory of World Cinema: Russia (Beumers 2011, 2015). Aside from a single entry in this an- thology, biopics have been briefly broached, for instance, in Soviet film jour- nals. In an article in Iskusstvo kino (The Art of Film), director Grigorii Roshal discusses the Soviet biopic from an expectedly ideological point of view. For Roshal, the role of the critic, and especially criticism from the Communist Party, in the production of a biopic is to ensure the factual (ideological) cor- rectness of the film (1949, 17–20). In a later article, fellow director Iurii Vinokurov discusses Soviet biopics from a similarly prescriptive perspective:

Groundbreaking audacity and the public importance of the accomplishments of the exceptional person, the living spirit of the epoch, the difficult but joyous inspiration of artistic struggle—all these components must be included in the biographical film. (Vinokurov 1952, 61)

16 See, for example, White (2016) and Mulcahy (2013). Henriette Cederlöf (2014) devotes part of her thesis on the Strugatsky brothers to adaptions of their work. For adaptation in general overviews, see Beumers (2011, 2016) and Salys (2013a, 2013b). Outside of Russian studies, recent contributions include Bubeníček (2017).

17 See Youngblood (2014). While providing much valuable information on the intricacies of bringing Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace (Voina i mir, 1865–67) to the silver screen, Denise J. Youngblood unfortunately overlooks much recent progress within the adaptation field. For example, she devotes one whole chapter to discussing the film’s fidelity to the source material without mentioning how contested and, indeed, rejected the notion of fidelity is in adaptation studies today. This becomes clear from her failing to mention important theoretical contributions from scholars such as Linda Hutcheon, Thomas Leitch, Robert Stam, Kamilla Elliot, and Deborah Cartmell.

We Call upon the Author: Contemporary Biofiction and Fyodor Dostoevsky

We Call upon the Author

We Call upon the Author

We Call upon the Author

Henrik Christensen

Acknowledgements

A Note on Transliteration and Translation

Contents

1. Introduction