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PARTISAN REVIEW
means by it is the way in which human experience of time and space
is imagined. Dostoevsky's chronotope is a place where two or more
consciousnesses meet, a liminal place, in a condition of crisis.
Dostoevsky's crucial scenes take place on thresholds, platforms,
stairways, crossroads, railroad stations, public squares, or living
rooms that resemble public squares more closely than they do pri–
vate quarters. And they take place at a time of crisis, when a whole
lifetime is concentrated in the outcome of a moment. In Dostoevsky's
novels, scandalous outbreaks and reversals, as well as an ubiquitous
heteroglossia, carry the traces of carnival, while recurrent moments
of crisis and climax belie the notion of a meaningful gradual un–
folding in "biographical time" such as constitutes the chronotope
characteristic of the bildungsroman or the novels of Tolstoy . Discon–
tinuities, reversals, the perpetually unexpected, characterize Dosto–
evsky's as they do the traditional adventure novel. The image of
gradual historical or biological maturation, as a
being
is seen to
become more and more fully and tI'uly
itself,
is absolutely foreign to a
Dostoevsky novel, as it is central to Tolstoy.
Tolstoy is obsessed with death, and it is characteristic of him
that he tries to get
inside
the experience of dying, to follow it by
stream-of-consciouness techniques as in
The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Nothing could be more foreign to Dostoevsky, Bakhtin points out.
His novels are full of violent deaths, whether by disease, murder or
suicide. But these are always viewed from without, in terms of their
impact on others. For Dostoevsky, Bakhtin claims, "personality,"
"consciousness," that which constitutes the "voice," that which in–
terests him the most, is precisely what does not "die," but is seen to
live on in the speech, external and internal, of others.
• • •
Coming to Joseph Frank's massive biography of Dostoev–
sky after reading Bakhtin, one cannot help reflecting on such matters
as the crisis chronotope . Since the degree to which the pattern of
Dostoevsky's life seems to follow that of his novels is striking, one
must confront the fact that it is a life that does not easily lend itself to
traditional biography. True, Frank wrote in the introduction to his
first volume: "... I see Dostoevsky's work as a brilliant synthesis of
the major issues of his time, a personal utterance to be sure, but one,
more than most, oriented by concerns outside himself." He has there–
fore concentrated his efforts on Dostoevsky's relationship to the ma–
jor social and intellectual movements of his time. In doing so, he ex-
