Abstract:

Drawing on both direct personal experience and literary precedent (Radcliffe, Maturin, Dickens, Dumas and Hugo), Dostoevsky adapted the spaces of the cell and scaffold into a chronotope adequate to the novelistic depiction of the existential - namely, the protagonist's solitary confrontation with the paradoxical threshold at the far edge of the temporal, and his divergent spiritual reactions to the possibility of the eternal beyond it, as he passes judgment on himself and the meaning and value of his existence. This dissertation discusses this "closed threshold" chronotope - particularly in the urban novel - in the context of Russian religious and existential philosophy (Berdyaev, E. Trubetskoi, S. Frank, and Shestov) and with an eye towards its later adaptations in 20th century literature. Chapter one moves from Bakhtin's emphasis on the public threshold in Dostoevsky to the private, closed threshold: the wall of one's room regarded symbolically as the "outer wall" of the temporal. Chapters two and three describe the two variations of the closed threshold - the cell and scaffold - in both Dostoevsky and his literary predecessors, building upon his metaphors of the "arshin of space" of the cell (non-movement or aimless and repetitive circular movement, a dearth of space and a glut of time) and the "Muhammad's pitcher" of the scaffold (movement towards an endpoint, a dearth of time that promises to expand into infinite spiritual movement). Chapters four and five, focusing on Hippolyte and Raskolnikov, respectively, reexamine these two thresholds in terms of their dialogic and spiritual implications, as rival points of view on life, and as hellish quantitative parodies of the eternal, both presenting opposite "dead ends" of the temporal. The conclusion discusses the attempt to "smuggle" the knowledge won upon these thresholds back into biographical time - attempts which, by their very hopelessness, speak to a tremendous faith that is arguably the primary engine driving all of Dostoevsky's writing.