Ilya Kliger

Minding the Gap: Toward a Historical Poetics of Estrangement

Under different names, alienation has been around for a long time. However, Immanuel Kant’s Copernican revolution marks a new and deeper degree of alienation. Kant’s definition of the subject—denied contact with the world as such and forced constantly to synthesize the immediacy of intuitions with the lawfulness of concepts—is a hopelessly riven ‘‘I-think.’’ Reading Kant was a traumatic event for contemporaries, especially for philosophers, who attempted to make the world whole again by formulating new versions of absolute unity. It wasWilhelm vonHumboldt who theorized a way both to accept the gap in Kantian epistemology and, at least partially—through language understood as inner speech—to overcome the gap. Reacting to later appropriations of von Humboldt, Russian linguists and such literary theorists as Victor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Sergej Karcevskij, and Mikhail Bakhtin explored the complexity of alienation in language and offered proposals for negotiating it in different versions of literariness. Over the millennia, there have been many definitions of estrangement. All these different understandings of the category nevertheless have certain features in common; if this were not the case, we could not think of it as a category at all. In this essaywe examine some of the differentways estrangement has been conceived of in the past while at the same time concentrating on the core of sameness that holds these disparate conceptions together in the present.We believe that the best way to lay out a structural history of Poetics Today 26:4 (Winter 2005). Copyright

Shapes of History and the Enigmatic Hero in Dostoevsky: The Case of Crime and Punishment

THIS ESSAY STUDIES A CRUCIAL FEATURE of Dostoevsky’s novelistic poetics, and the poetics of Crime and Punishment (1866) in particular, in light of contemporaneous debates regarding the historical fate of Russia. The novel, I argue, is a thought experiment exploring the emerging condition of multihistoricity — that is, a simultaneity of multiple emplotment possibilities for the Russian nation.1 In order to bring these possibilities to light, I read the novel with an eye on Dostoevsky’s journalism from the earlyto mid-sixties, a period characterized by an urgent recognition of the openness of Russia’s historical future.2 Although critics have long recognized that “the central problems which preoccupy Dostoevsky in the nonfiction are the same as those that preoccupy his characters in the fiction” (Kabat 113), reading fiction and journalism side by side does raise a number of methodological problems. Chief among them is the problem of translation or transposition: how does one mediate between fiction and nonfiction without resorting to reductive procedures that posit the epistemological priority of one over the other? In what follows I attempt to effect this transposition with the help of the formal (narratological) categories of character and emplotment. I suggest, in other words, that there exists a fundamental isomorphism in Dostoevsky’s journalism and fiction between historical and novelistic constructions of “personality” or selfhood, and that a similar isomorphism can be observed between his historical and novelistic “temporal imaginations.” I argue that his journalistic articulation of Russia’s “national personality” as an enigmatic puzzle to be solved corresponds to his construction of the novelistic protagonist as a mystery to himself and to others, a mystery the resolution of