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Dostoevskii's Geography: Centers, Peripheries, and Networks in Demons

2007; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 66; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/20060218

2325-7784

Anne Lounsbery,

Literature, Language, and Rhetoric Studies

Demons takes an infamous real-life Moscow event (the “Nechaev Affair“) and moves it to a nameless provincial city. What can this geographic shift tell us about both Fedor Dostoevskii's novel and the particular vision of Russian geographic space that informs it? Anne Lounsbery argues that Demons’ representation of the provinces responds to a certain imaginary geography of Russia, one that can locate meaning only in a center. The ideological implications of this geography are played out in Dostoevskii's representation of the railroad as a sinister and ever-widening network extending across a blank landscape. The interlocking rail lines “covering Russia like a spider web” reflect the provincial revolutionaries’ paranoid political vision as well as their inability to see themselves as anything but tiny points on this network, insignificant without the web's power to connect them to a hub of meaning. Lounsbery relates Dostoevskii's geographic vision to patterns that structure the representation of Russian space in works by many nineteenth-century writers, including Nikolai Gogol', Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Anton Chekhov.