Dostoevsky’s Provocateurs.

Lynn Patyk discussed her recent book Dostoevsky’s Provocateurs at Bloggers Karamazov (The Official Blog of The North American Dostoevsky Society), and I found her ideas new and worth sharing:

KB: You write that provocation is “the key artistic mechanism of Dostoevsky’s creation” (p. 9). Why is provocation such an important aspect of Dostoevsky’s work?

LP: I think Dostoevsky dreaded boredom and being boring, and as I just said, provocation is a key communicative tactic to avoid that. Dostoevsky avoided becoming an engineer (so as to avoid being boring) but I often think of him as engineering his fiction – his communicative/plot situations – to keep things moving. I often refer to provocation this way in my book, as the primum mobile, or perpetuum mobile, or the moving mover. It’s a key reason why Dostoevsky’s fiction is so breathless and dynamic. Provocation also hits the ball into the other’s court, with all the suspense and uncertainty that that entails. So every time there is a provocation, there is the breathless “what will the reaction be?” and this opens a space… which in fiction approximates the space of possibility and freedom, as if there is no author and all of the characters are autonomous agents reacting spontaneously and “in the moment.”

KB: What is ‘provocation’ in the Dostoevskian sense? Is all communication provocation to some degree? How does provocation tie into Dostoevsky’s broader philosophical project?

LP: A lot of communication has a provocative element to it, in that we communicate to elicit a response, and often a particular, desired response, from our interlocutor. I am not a scholar of communication, although all of my work (as a literary scholar and as a scholar of terrorism) is fundamentally about communication. Communication performs a lot of functions, and sometimes it provokes no response (think of Chekhov’s plays where no one responds to anyone!), nor is it intended to. I can only comment on Dostoevsky’s broader philosophical project in so far as I understand it (as it has been interpreted by the scholars upon whom I rely), but Dostoevsky’s fundamental aim of revealing the “man in man” in his own terms can only be accomplished by “getting that man to talk” – a lot. This is a complete paraphrase and simplication of what Bakhtin says, but I agree with him. So how, as an author, do you do that? And on another level, how do you engage a bystander’s interest and profound investment to the point where they might form an opinion, pass judgement, or even relate the proceedings to themselves? If you think about real life, we’re frequently bored or annoyed by other people’s conversations, no matter how engrossing those conversations are to them. We’re not interested; we just want them to shut up. So how does Dostoevsky rope us in and get us involved, too?

KB: How does labeling Nastasya Filippovna in The Idiot as a provocateur change the way we understand her as a character? Does female provocation differ from its male counterpart?

LP: Well, I was seriously annoyed by the way that a lot (not all) of the criticism treats (or doesn’t) Nastasya. She’s such a powerful character, with precocious feminist arguments, and she makes these arguments by provoking the self-exposure of characters who embody the patriarchal structures that have victimized not only the female characters, but the younger generation of males. She’s really in command of the narrative and pushing all of the characters’ buttons to the end. She orchestrates her demise and Rogozhin is her tool, as he is throughout the novel. For women, provocation is a highly risky business, and Dostoevsky is supremely aware of this, and he demonstrates that Nastasya is fully aware of the risks as well. This is because the ultimate purpose of adversarial provocation is to escalate the conflict until the eruption of violence, and we all know how women are positioned with regard to male violence in the world. Dostoevsky shows this to us multiple times throughout the novel, and he also shows Myshkin anticipating and attempting to intercept this violence (serve as a surrogate, a sacrifice). But when it comes down to it, Nastasya refuses Myshkin’s self-sacrifice (his marriage to her) because she views it as her destruction of him, and she won’t do that. There are male characters in Dostoevsky who will “sacrifice” others for their projects (I won’t name names), but Nastasya doesn’t do that, at least not directly.

When I reread The Idiot (which I wrote about here) I will bear her ideas in mind and probably come to a fairer appreciation.

Unrelated, but I can’t resist mentioning even though it’s not worth a post of its own: the Lithuanian verb mir̃ti ‘to die’ is used only for humans and bees.