Ziolkowski-Dost ... ianTradition-2001-p156.pdf

Reading and incarnation in Dostoevsky
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token, Perlina has already performed a great service for students o f
The Brothers Karamazov by demonstrating from a Bakhtinian perspective
that ‘quotation organizes the whole architectonics o f [that]
novel’.5
However, even the critical contributions o f Bakhtin and the
further application o f his theories by Perlina cannot exhaust the
matter o f literary and biblical citations in Dostoevsky. After identifying
such citations, interpreting their bearing upon characterisation,
and settling the question o f their pertinence to narrative form,
we would be left with a still more fundamental question. Citations of
written texts presuppose reading. W hy do Dostoevsky’s characters
read in the first place? Or, what is the significance o f reading as an
act in Dostoevsky’s fiction?
In this chapter I suggest that the act o f reading by Dostoevsky’s
protagonists, especially when they read or recite aloud, bears directly
upon a constant compulsion o f his narratives towards intimating and
depicting the phenomenon o f incarnation - a term I shall use
primarily in a distinct literary sense adopted from Bakhtin’s Brazilian-born
Spanish contemporary, the Hispanist A m érico Castro
(1885-1972), but also, ultimately, in the theological sense bequeathed
by the Gospel o f John.6 W hile Russian piety may be primarily rooted
in the ocular reverence o f the icon, the spirits and whole inner
beings o f Dostoevsky’s protagonists often prove to be decisively
affected or even shaped through some form o f the act o f reading, or
through hearing some form o f recitation or reading aloud.
For a reason that will soon become clear, I wish to begin by
directing our attention back to a familiar figure from late antiquity.
AUGUSTINE, ZOSIMA AND THE QUESTION OF READING
In his Confessions (written 397-401 a d ), St Augustine famously recalls
having pondered as a young man why St Ambrose, the great
Catholic bishop o f M ilan whom he sometimes observed reading,
never read aloud. Perhaps, Augustine conjectures, Ambrose worried
that if he read aloud, some difficult passage he recited might stir a
listener’s curiosity, and Ambrose might be asked to pause to expound
it and thus be prevented from reading as much as he desired. O r
perhaps he read to himself simply to preserve his voice (6,3).
W hatever the case was, there can be no denying the extraordinariness
o f Am brose’s behaviour, given that it was evidently customary