Visual Polyphony: The Role of Vision in Dostoevsky’s Poetics

Michael M. Ossorgin VIII

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2017
 © 2017

Michael M. Ossorgin VIII

All Rights Reserved

 ABSTRACT

Visual Polyphony: The Role of Vision in Dostoevsky’s Poetics

Michael M. Ossorgin VIII

For Fyodor Dostoevsky, ways of seeing reflect ways of thinking about the world. This

dissertation complements Mikhail Bakhtin’s analyses of Dostoevsky’s poetics by taking a visual-

aesthetic approach and exploring “visual polyphony,” a concept that Bakhtin used but did not

develop at length. When Dostoevsky returned from nearly ten years in exile (1849-1858), his

interest in aesthetics was acute. He had intended to write a treatise on art and Christianity, but

that project never materialized. Dostoevsky did, however, explore visual matters in essays of the

1860s. And vision figures prominently in his post-Siberian fiction.

Each of the three chapters in this dissertation focuses on vision in Dostoevsky’s writing.

The first chapter analyzes two important aesthetic statements of Dostoevsky’s journal Vremia.

The first is “Petersburg Visions: In Prose and Verse” wherein Dostoevsky’s narrator declares

that he is a “dreamer,” a claim that also reveals the role of imagination in Dostoevsky’s special

brand of realism. In “Exhibition at the Academy of the Arts: 1860-1861,” Dostoevsky takes

issue with the realism of the Academy’s prized painting, Valery Yakobi’s Prisoners’ Halt, for

being too photographic in its servility to visual objectivity and outward appearance. These

writings display Dostoevsky’s fascination with vision not as a passive observation, but as an
active, subjective and complex process in which empirical data blends with existing narratives

that dictate what the seer sees.

In the second chapter, I show how Dostoevsky renders prison convicts empirically, yet

empathetically in Notes from the house of the Dead (1861). The narrator Gorianchikov describes

the eponymous notes as “scenes.” Through Gorianchikov, Dostoevsky maintains an exterior

perspective relative to the peasant convicts’ thoughts. In this sense, Gorianchikov assumes the

perspective of a realist painter, yet he manages to humanize the prisoners where Yakobi’s

painting fails. This is especially evident in my analysis of what Gorianchikov calls a “strange

picture,” which is his description of the prisoners gathered in anticipation of their annual

Christmas theater performance. The characters of this novel number among the least

psychologically penetrated in his fiction, yet Dostoevsky manages to indicate their interiority

from without.

In the third and final chapter, I examine Dostoevsky’s use of Holbein’s Dead Christ

(1521) in The Idiot (1868). Drawing from Pavel Florensky’s explanations of Realism in visual

art and reverse perspective in iconography from his article “Reverse Perspective,” I show how

the Dead Christ combines Realist and reverse perspectival qualities. I use Bakhtin’s term “visual

polyphony” to explain the special capacity of this painting to convey conflicting messages about

Christ’s death and to elicit conflicting worldviews from Ippolit, Rogozhin and Myshkkin. The

visually polyphonic painting plays a critical role in The Idiot, the most polyphonic of

Dostoevsky’s novels. It reveals the visual dimensions to Dostoevsky’s polyphony: things look

differently from different perspectives.

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

A Note on Transliteration........................................................................................................ii

Acknowledgements.................................................................................................................iii

Introduction.............................................................................................................................1

Chapter 1: Returning from his Exile in Siberia, Dostoevsky Firmly Distinguishes his Literary
Aesthetics From a Prevailing form of Realism that was Limited by the Laws of Sight.........8

Chapter 2: Gorianchikov’s Depiction of Peasant Convicts in Notes From the Dead House Is
Visually Oriented, But Does Not Objectify............................................................................48

Chapter 3: Holbein’s Visually Polyphonic Dead Christ Reveals Ippolit’s, Rogozhin’s and
Myshkin’s Contrasting Perspectives in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot............................................76

Conclusion..............................................................................................................................145

Works Cited............................................................................................................................149

Appendix.................................................................................................................................160

i
 A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION

Throughout the dissertation I use the Library of Congress system of transliteration except for the

last names of well-known Russian writers and literary critics, and common first names that end

in “ii.” Therefore, I transliterate Gorianchikov, but write Gogol rather than Gogol’ and

Dostoevsky rather than Dostoevskii. When providing bibliographic information, I use the

Library of Congress system, except when citing English-language translations. There I cite the

author’s name as transliterated by the translator (for example, Fyodor Dostoevsky). Although I

will principally use existing translations, I translate from the original either when I have

determined that linguistic nuances in Russian are essential to my analysis and understanding of

the text or when there are no English translations available. These I will use in the parenthetical

in-text citation of the Russian.

ii
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to a community of scholars and writers. I began to think about the visual roots of

polyphony in what proved to be a pivotal course for my continued studies: Caryl Emerson’s

Bakhtin course at Princeton. Liza Knapp advised my M.A. thesis and dissertation, both on

Dostoevsky, and her course on Russian religious philosophy introduced me to Florensky’s work.

Jacques Catteau’s Dostoevsky and the Process of Literary Creation deepened my understanding

of the role of aesthetics in Dostoevsky’s creative process. I continue to draw inspiration from

Robert Louis Jackson’s writing on Dostoevsky’s poetics. His Quest for Form guided my

understanding of Dostoevsky’s ideas about beauty, visual and otherwise. I am also indebted to

Robin Feuer Miller’s Dostoevsky and the Idiot: Author, Narrator, and Reader and Dostoevsky’s

Unfinished Journey.

I learned a great deal from Cathy Popkin, Irina Reyfman, Deborah Martinsen and Catherine

Evtukhov and would like to thank them for their feedback as members of my dissertation

committee.

Two excellent readers contributed a great deal of thought and time to refining and developing

this dissertation: Eliza Serna and Natasha Ermolaev. I am grateful for their commitment to my

learning and their interest in my ideas.

Finally, I am deeply humbled to have worked with Liza Knapp on this dissertation. Her wisdom,

scholarship, diligence and patience never failed me.

iii
 INTRODUCTION

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—

why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with dim eyes and threadbare art
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

-Epilogue, Robert Lowell

The painterly aspects of Dostoevsky’s work -- his imagery, ekphrases, visual descriptions

-- are potent, generative forces in his fiction. Evocative and powerful images help him make the

central philosophical claims in some of his best known work: for example, in The Brothers

Karamazov, the image of Christ kissing the Grand Inquisitor counters Ivan’s logical treatise on

man’s alleged longing for spiritual enslavement, while in Crime and Punishment the vision of

the pawnbroker’s innocent half-sister Lizaveta Ivanova protecting her pregnant belly sharply

contrasts to Raskolnikov’s rationalization of murder. He also uses visual works to provide an

image of characters and thus to add another dimension to their characterizations: Ivan

1
Kramskoy’s Contemplator reveals the essence of Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov (PSS

14:117), and Dostoevsky uses Raphael’s Sistine Madonna as a model for Sonia Marmeladova’s

innocent beauty in Crime and Punishment.1 But despite such shifts to visual imagery at key

moments in some of his best-known fictional works, the importance of both visual imagery and

of vision in Dostoevsky’s poetics is generally overlooked.

The logo-centric emphasis in Dostoevsky studies may stem from incomplete

interpretation and understanding of critic and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, whose notion of

polyphony inspired much of the scholarship in the decades that followed the publication of his

Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (1963).2 On the one hand, Bakhtin’s polyphony highlights the

importance of dialogue -- which the reader experiences as a written, verbal phenomenon -- to

Dostoevsky’s novels. For Bakhtin, polyphony occurs in Dostoevsky’s fiction when multiple

characters or “voices” engage in dialogue in his novels without any single character or “voice”

taking the lead. On the other hand, Bakhtin conceived of “voice” in visual terms. As Caryl

1
F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, ed. V. G. Bazanov et al. (Leningrad:
Izdatel’stvo “Nauka,” 1972-1990). Konstantin Barscht points out the similarity between Dostoevsky’s
sketch of Sonia Marmeladova’s face and that of Raphael’s Madonna in his notebooks for Crime and
Punishment. Konstantin Barsht, “Defining the Face: Observations on Dostoevskii’s Creative Processes,”
in Russian Literature, Modernism and the Visual Arts, ed. Catriona Kelly and Stephen Lovell (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 35-36. From now on, all references to Dostoevsky’s works will be
given parenthetically in the text, with the first number indicating the volume and the second, the page. I
cite all quotations of Dostoevsky from PSS by volume, book number (where relevant) and page number(s)
after the colon.
2
The 1963 Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo was Bakhtin’s significantly altered and expanded revision of
his original 1929 publication Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo. I cite the 1963 version in this
dissertation. Bakhtin scholarship flourished in English in 1968. For the critical reception of Bakhtin in
Russia and abroad, see Caryl Emerson’s The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton UP, 1997). For more on the proliferation of Bakhtin’s work along with the misunderstandings
propagated by translation difficulties, see Craig Brandist, “Problems of Publication and Translation” in
The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics (London: Pluto, 2002). Bakhtin proposes the idea of
polyphony in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. He writes, “a plurality of independent and unmerged
voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of
Dostoevsky’s novels.” Caryl Emerson, trans., Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. (Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota, 1984) 6. Hereafter PDP.

2
Emerson points out, “voice” is not a strictly verbal phenomenon, but rather a way of seeing the

world. She writes, “Bakhtin visualizes voices, he senses their proximity and interaction as

bodies. A voice, Bakhtin everywhere tells us, is not just words or ideas strung together: it is a

‘semantic position,’ a point of view on the world, it is one personality orienting itself among

other personalities within a limited field” (Emerson, introduction, xxxvi). Robin Feuer Miller has

called attention to the narrator’s constantly shifting perspective in The Idiot. She argues that it

demands that the reader piece together the story on his or her own. She writes, “The

kaleidoscopic mode of narration forces the reader to work.”3

This dissertation complements Bakhtin’s analyses of Dostoevsky’s poetics with a visual-

aesthetic approach. I develop Bakhtin’s lesser-known notion of “visual polyphony,” a term that

he uses to describe Ernst Neizvestny’s art that was inspired by Dostoevsky’s novels. I expand it

to demonstrate the critical function of Holbein’s Dead Christ in The Idiot.4 The ekphrasis, or

“the verbal representation of graphic representation,” of the painting in Dostoevsky’s fiction

provides the open, yet structured, literary space that enables his characters to communicate their

inner worlds to one another and to the reader. 5 Polyphony becomes possible when two or more

characters voice what they see from their different perspectives, even and especially when they

are looking at this painting.

3
Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky and the Idiot: Author, Narrator, and Reader (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1981), 230.
4
I am borrowing an idea from Bakhtin, when he commented on the Russian-American graphic artist
Ernst Neizvestny’s works of art which were his visual responses to Dostoevsky’s novels. Bakhtin wrote
that these works—black and white drawings—were “Not at all illustrations.” Instead, he argues, “they are
a continuation of Dostoevsky’s world and images into another sphere, the sphere of graphics.” See
Bakhtin’s interview in Per Dalgaard, "Neizvestny’s Dostoevsky Illustrations: Bakhtinian Polyphony
Applied to Visual Art.” Russian Language Journal / Russkii iazyk 40, no. 136/137 (1986): 133-34. This is
my translation of Bakhtin’s Russian quoted in the interview.
5
This is James Heffernan’s definition of the term. See James A. W. Heffernan, “Ekphrasis and
Representation.” New Literary History 22.2 (1991): 297-316.

3
 Dostoevsky developed his visual theories for quite some time. Before embarking on his

career in fiction, he trained as an engineer and was versed in the laws of perspective. Joseph

Frank asserts, “the excellent drawings and sketches in his notebooks—both of European

architecture, as well as visualizations of his characters—prove that he acquired considerable skill

in this branch of the fine arts.”6 Dostoevsky became neither an architect nor a painter, but the

graphic mode of representation left a lasting impact on his literary realism, and the visual origins

of his poetics reverberate throughout his fiction.

Dostoevsky began his career as an image-driven novelist with Poor Folk in 1846. The

images that he conjured up through words caught the attention of the most widely read literary

critic of the 1840s, Vissarion Belinsky, whose praise of Poor Folk launched Dostoevsky’s career

as a novelist. Dostoevsky recalls that Belinsky specifically praised him for capturing “in an

image” what other writers and critics had been attempting “in words” (PSS 3:186).7 But it was

not until after Dostoevsky’s first trip to Europe in 1862 that he began to incorporate paintings

into his work. There are seven major paintings that Dostoevsky incorporates into his novels via

ekphrasis. The paintings are by six different painters (two by Hans Holbein the Younger) and

belong to various styles that span four centuries, ranging from the High-Renaissance Raphael to

the late nineteenth century Peredvizhniki (Wanderers) art of Nikolai N. Ge and Ivan Kramskoy.

Dostoevsky begins to use the literary technique of ekphrasis in Notes From Underground (1862)

and continues in every major novel thereafter.

The visual complexity of the paintings that Dostoevsky incorporates into his novels

provides fertile ground for his fictional imagination. These paintings capture visually what

6
Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1976), 92.
7
Konstantin Barsht has published the images and discussed their role in Dostoevsky’s creative process.
See K. A. Barsht, Risunki v rukopisiakh Dostoevskogo (Sankt-Peterburg: “Formika”, 1996).

4
narratives struggle to express verbally. Dostoevsky’s own struggles to understand the content of

these paintings, born out of his personal encounters with them, took lasting hold of his

imagination and contributed to his own fictions.8 Moreover, on the level of literary form,

Dostoevsky imitates the means of representing narratives by using words to create lasting,

polysemous images that simultaneously create the conditions for his characters to reveal their

unique personalities and leave room for his readers to do the same as they bring their own

personal interpretations to bear on the images and paintings that shape dialogue. The paintings

referred to in Dostoevsky’s fiction, therefore, introduce, reproduce and re-envision the polysemy

that his verbal art is known for. Paintings are a visual portal to the novel that informs the text on

aesthetic, structural, philosophical and psychological levels.

I develop my notion of visual polyphony by building on the scholarship on Dostoevsky’s

visual aesthetics, which tends to focus on the icon.9 In this study, I look not only to iconography,

8
Anna Grigorievna Dostoevsky mentions the special impact that one such painting, Raphael’s Sistine
Madonna, had on Dostoevsky. She recalls the great lengths that Countess Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya went
to in order to ship a life-sized copy of Raphael’s Madonna from Germany to Russia because of
Dostoevsky’s obsession with the painting. Anna Grigorievna writes, “How many times during that last
year of his life I found him standing before that great picture in such deep contemplation that he did not
hear me come in; and I, not wishing to disrupt his prayerful mood, would quietly leave the room” (326).
This painting served as a source of personal contemplation for Dostoevsky and made two direct
appearances in his fiction. Anna G. Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences, trans. Beatrice Stillman,
(New York: Liveright, 1975).
9
For example, Roger Anderson finds that Dostoevsky adapts “some visual and homiletic properties of the
icon to the composition of Crime and Punishment” in his chapter, “The Optics of Narration: Visual
Composition in Crime and Punishment,” in Russian Narrative & Visual Art: Varieties of Seeing, ed. Paul
Debreczeny and Roger B. Anderson (Gainesville, Florida, 1994), 85. Other scholars that have engaged
the visual component of Dostoevsky’s poetics include, but are not limited to: Robert Louis Jackson,
Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1966); Robert
Louis Jackson, The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1981);
Konstantin Barsht, “Defining the Face: Observations on Dostoevskii’s Creative Processes,” in Russian
Literature, Modernism and the Visual Arts, ed. Catriona Kelly and Stephen Lovell (Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 23-58. On the overlap between ekphrasis and icons in The Idiot, see
Ganna Bograd’s “Funkstsii proizvedenii izobrazitl’nogo iskusstva v tvorchestve Dostoevskogo,” in
Transactions of the Association of Russian-American Scholars in the U.S.A. 28 (1996-97), 313-52. The
comparison of literature and visual arts in general dates back to Aristotle. For more on this, see Jean H.

5
but also to the visual traditions of Realism and photography. All of these images reinforce and

deepen Dostoevsky’s problem-based poetics. Dostoevsky, as I will elaborate, embeds the multi-

perspectival way of seeing characteristic of the icon into his poetics on a structural level. In

Dostoevsky’s fiction, truth comes from the interplay between several characters who voice what

they see from their unique perspectives. To demonstrate this, I focus on four of Dostoevsky’s

texts and three paintings. In chapter one, I examine Dostoevsky’s mock-feuilleton “Petersburg

Visions” (1861) for the origins of the principles that govern Dostoevsky’s visually-based realism

throughout his career; I also study the essay “The Exhibition at the Academy of the Arts in 1860-

1861” (1861), where his critique of the artist Valery Yakobi’s Prisoners’ Halt (1861) contains a

significant aesthetic statement concerning the role of vision and the visual in his literary realism.

Chapter two shows how visual imagery propels observation, objectivity and empathy in his novel

Notes from the Dead House (1860-61). In chapter three I turn to what is arguably Dostoevsky’s

most profound and challenging use of visual art to underscore his ethical, even metaphysical,

position: German artist Hans Holbein The Younger’s (1497-1543) Dead Christ (1521) in The

Idiot (1869).10 The Russian religious thinker Pavel Florensky’s (1882-1937) influential essay

“Reverse Perspective” (1920) helps me show how Holbein’s painting reveals some of the formal

Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to
Gray (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago, 1958). For the ancient tradition of comparisons between the arts, see
especially pp. 3-36; and S. H. Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art: With a Critical Text
and Translation of the Poetics 4th ed. (New York: Dover Publications, 1951); Mario Praz, Mnemosyne:
The Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970).
10
Chapter 3 of this dissertation incorporates the major secondary literature on Holbein in The Idiot. The
foundational study of the painting is in Robert Louis Jackson’s Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form. Jackson has
revisited the Holbein painting in his article, "Once Again About Dostoevsky’s Response to Hans Holbein
the Younger’s Dead Christ in the Tomb" in Dostoevsky beyond Dostoevsky: Science, Religion,
Philosophy, ed. Svetlana Evdokima and Vladimir Golstein (S.l.: Academic Studies, 2016), 179-91. Olga
Meerson “Ivolgin and Holbein: Non-Christ Risen vs. Christ Non-Risen” in The Slavic and East European
Journal (39.2, 1995), 200-13; and Jefferson J. A. Gatrall’s article "The Icon In the Picture: Reframing the
Question of Dostoevsky’s Modernist Iconography" in Slavic and East European Journal (48.1, 2004), 1-
25.

6
and aesthetic features at the core of Dostoevsky’s poetics. The way that Dostoevsky uses the

painting in the novel is the premier example of visual polyphony.

My overall goal in this dissertation is to reveal the equal importance of the image and the

written word in Dostoevsky’s poetics.11 In contrast to the numerous studies that have explored

the influence and incorporation of the work of other writers into Dostoevsky’s fiction, this

dissertation shows how Dostoevsky adapts his verbal medium in response to visual modes of

representation. It exposes the complex role of vision in Dostoevsky’s fiction.

11
For more on the visual arts in Dostoevsky, see Jacques Catteau’s Dostoevsky and the Process of
Literary Creation, trans. Audrey Littlewood, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989). For an analysis of
sacred paintings in nineteenth century European literature, including a special section on Russian
literature and the Holbein painting, see Jefferson J. A. Gatrall’s The Real and the Sacred: Picturing Jesus
in Nineteenth-century Fiction (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2014). For the most recent study of ekphrasis
in nineteenth century Russian literature, see Molly Jo Brunson’s Russian Realisms: Literature and
Painting, 1840-1890 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois UP, 2016).

7
 CHAPTER 1

Returning from his Exile in Siberia, Dostoevsky Firmly Distinguishes his Literary

Aesthetics from the Prevailing Form of Realism that was Limited by the Laws of Sight

During his exile in Siberia, Dostoevsky envisioned writing a comprehensive treatise on

art that he described in a letter to his brother Mikhail in 1856 as “the fruit of a decade of careful

thought”12 (PSS 28, 1:228-229). This treatise was never written, but Dostoevsky’s writings in the

three years immediately following his return from exile in Siberia in 1858 abound with insight

into his artistic principles.13 It is as if the treatise that Dostoevsky had worked out in his mind

was fractured and interspersed in his journal articles and fictional writings in the early 1860s.

This chapter focuses on two works that Dostoevsky wrote between 1860-1862, a time during

which he began to articulate the role of vision in his poetics. The two works are the mock

feuilleton “Petersburg Visions in Verse and Prose” and an article of art criticism entitled “The

Exhibition at the Academy of the Arts: 1860-1861” (PSS 18:269).14

12
In this letter, he also mentions that his proposed treatise on art, “Pis’ma ob iskusstve” (Letters on Art),
is “actually about the mission of Christianity in art.” Letter to A. Y. Vrangel 13 Apr. 1856.
13
Dostoevsky was arrested in April of 1849 as a political criminal for his associations with the
Petrashevsky circle. He was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted on December 23, 1849.
His arrest and sentencing were part of the campaign to quell revolutionary thought that threatened the
stability of Nicholas I’s empire. For a detailed analysis of Dostoevsky’s testimony, letters and deposition,
see Liza Knapp, Dostoevsky as Reformer: The Petrashevsky Case (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1987). For a
comprehensive accounting of his time and the conditions of life in Siberia, see Joseph Frank. The Years of
Ordeal: 1850-1859 (Princeton, N.J: Princeton UP, 1983).
14
The article appears in conjunction with a series of critical articles on Russian literature (Riad statei o
russkoi literature -1861). The series includes the article “G-n —bov i vopros ob iskusstve” (published in
Vremia, 1861, No.2, February 9), in which Dostoevsky advocates the autonomy of art in opposition to
writers such as Vissarion Belinsky (1811-1848) and Mikhail Petrashevsky (1821-1866) and Nikolai
Dobroliubov (1836-1861) who called for the strictly utilitarian application of art to serve social functions.
Dobroliubov is the eponymous “–bov” of Dostoevsky’s article title. In the article, Dostoevsky points to

8
 Dostoevsky founded the literary journal Vremia (Time) with his brother Mikhail after

returning from a nearly ten-year exile in Siberia (1849-58).15 The press culture had grown

increasingly polarized during his absence, with each thick journal expressing a certain

napravlenie (tendency), the common term for an ideological or aesthetic position. On the left

was the journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary), whose materialist-utilitarian perspective was

shaped by such Westernizing thinkers as Nikolai Nekrasov, Nikolai Chernyhevsky, Vissarion

Belinsky and Nikolai Dobroliubov. On the far left stood Russkoe slovo (The Russian Word),

guided by the predominantly nihilistic philosophy of Dimitry Pisarev. On the conservative right

stood the primary journals of the Slavophiles, Russkaia beseda (The Russian Colloquy) and Den’

(The Day), which sought to articulate and thereby cultivate a uniquely Russian religious national

identity. The Dostoevsky brothers conceived of Vremia as a literary journal that could occupy

the middle ground between ideological conservatism and radical progressivism. They espoused a

philosophy of pochvennichestvo (from pochva, “soil”), which proposed an organic connection to

the national tradition, but didn’t entirely reject philosophies coming to Russia from the West.16

The journal began publication in January of 1861, just before Alexander II’s emancipation

legislation went into effect on February 19, 1861, marking the official, but by no means

Fet’s poem “Diana,” the Apollo Belvedere and Homer’s The Iliad as models of a certain kind of beauty,
attainable through art that edifies as it inspires and pleases aesthetically. In these articles, Dostoevsky
takes interest in the arts broadly speaking. His critical writing turns increasingly towards literature after
his articles in 1861 on art as such. For more on the broad scope of Dostoevsky’s aesthetic writings at this
time, see commentary on this article in (PSS 18:237).
15
For more on the history of the journal and its reception, see Sarah Hudspith’s article “Dostoevsky’s
Journalism in the 1860s,” in Dostoevsky in Context, ed. Deborah Martinsen and Olga Maiorova,
(Cambridge UP, 2015), 280-87.
16
For more on this concept in Dostoevky’s journal writings, see Ellen Chances, “Pochvennichestvo:
Ideology in Dostoevsky’s Periodicals” in Mosaic 7, no. 2 (January 1, 1974), 71-88; and Inessa
Medzhibovskaya’s chapter, “Education” in Dostoevsky in Context, edited by D. A. Martinsen and O.
Maiorova, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 106-113.

9
practical, end of serfdom as an institution in Russia. As a recently released political prisoner who

had spent just under five years alongside criminals from every walk of life in prison camp in

Siberia, Dostoevsky was uniquely positioned between the upper and lower classes.17 Drawing on

this experience, Dostoevsky collaborated with like-minded thinkers including his brother

Mikhail, the philosopher and critic Nikolai Strakhov, and the poet and critic Apollon Grigoryev

to occupy a middle perspective between the surrounding left and right camps. Collectively, the

thick journals competed for the role of mediator and social advisor for the Russian reading

public.

Dostoevsky Learns to See in “Petersburg Visions in Verse and Prose”

Dostoevsky’s mock-feuilleton, “Petersburg Visions in Verse and Prose,” was published

in the first issue of Vremia (January 1860) and not again until 1918 (PSS 19:262). The narrator is

a fel’tonist, a writer of feuilletons. The details of the feuilleton writer’s life are taken from

Dostoevsky’s biography, such as his obsession with reading Schiller and Hoffman and the fact

that Dostoevsky was a practiced feuilleton writer (he had written four in his pre-Siberian writing

career).18 Using his feuilletonist narrator in “Petersburg Visions,” Dostoevsky lays the ground

rules for his personal brand of literary realism. Dostoevsky’s feuilleton writer is a self-

acknowledged fantazer, that is, a “dreamer” or “visionary,” as well as a mistik, “mystic.” This

moniker is not entirely dreamed up by the narrator. In having his narrator assume the title,

Dostoevsky responds to an old dysphemism bestowed upon him by Vissarion Belinsky whose

17
Dostoevsky was released from prison camp in early 1854 and spent the next 5 years serving in the
Siberian Seventh Line Battalion stationed in Semipalatinsk, first as a private, then as non-commissioned
officer and eventually as warrant officer. For more on the details of Dostoevsky’s exile see Joseph Frank,
The Years of Ordeal: 1850-1859 (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1983).
18
For an analysis of the feuilleton and its impact on Dostoevsky’s aesthetics, see Joseph Frank, “The
Petersburg Feuilletons,” in Dostoevsky: New Perspectives, ed. Robert Louis Jackson, (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984), 35-55.

10
social realist criticism shaped Sovremennik’s ideology during the 1840s. After Belinsky had

embraced Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk (1846) as emblematic of the Natural School aesthetic and

ideology, which sought to reflect the reality of the marginalized Russian people in vivid detail,

he disavowed Dostoevsky’s next novel, The Double (1846), calling it the ramblings of a madman

fit for the insane asylum.19 In “Petersburg Visions,” Dostoevsky absorbs Belinsky’s fourteen-

year-old critique of his fantastic writing style into the title as a way of taking ownership of his

uniquely imaginative aesthetic. The feuilleton writer declares that he is a “visionary,” that is, one

who envisions reality as a merging of the empirical world available to the physical eye with the

world of imagination and cognition. The mock-feuilleton is written in such a way as to exemplify

this aesthetic stance. By placing it in the very first publication of Vremia, Dostoevsky both

declares his personal poetic aims and establishes the napravlenie (aesthetic/philosophical

inclination) of his thick journal.

The translation of the word snovideniia in Dostoevsky’s feuilleton as “visions” is

partially misleading, but in a way that aptly reinforces the blurred line between literal and

metaphorical vision that characterizes Dostoevsky’s fiction. As in English, the root word videnie

on its own refers primarily to plain “vision” or “sight” of the visible world during the waking

state and secondarily to visions in various modes of consciousness. The added prefix sno-,

derived from son meaning “dream” or “sleep,” gives the root videnie a decidedly hybrid meaning

akin to “dream vision.” A snovidenie is an immersive and subjective experience that one has

either in dreams while sleeping or in the waking equivalent of daydreams. It is an imaginative

occurrence. The feuilleton heightens the interconnection between the words snovidenie and

19
See commentary on Belinsky’s article on Poor Folk (PSS 19:265-66).

11
videnie, as if to purposely reinforce their interdependence. He refers to the eponymous

Petersburg visions interchangeably as snovideniia and videniia.

The central and formative “vision” in the feuilleton refers to a rather unassuming

childhood experience that proves consequential in the feuilleton writer’s life. At the core of this

vision is an oshchushchenie, meaning variously “feeling,” “sensation,” “sense,” “perception,”

and “experience.” He writes, “And ever since then, from that very vision (videnie) (I call my

oshchushchenie on the Neva a vision [videnie]), very strange things started to happen with me”20

(Katz 101; PSS 19:69). The original incident is nothing extraordinary, as the feuilleton writer

admits: “What was the incident? What happened there? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was

merely a sensation (oshchushchenie), and all the rest turned out fine” (Katz 101; PSS 19:69). The

emphasis on the oshchushchenie as a vision shifts attention away from the empirically

observable event, the sunset, and towards the introspective experience of it.

A simple report of the empirical event is that the feuilleton writer witnessed a sunset, but

the moment in which he claims that “his existence began” (nachalos’ moe sushchestvovanie)

emerges from his imaginative interpretation of the sunset. The feuilleton writer describes the

events that lead up to this moment when as an adolescent he saw pillars of smoke rising from the

tops of the St. Petersburg buildings. The rising columns of smoke appeared to form a second city

in the sky that loosely resembled the city of St. Petersburg. In the feuilleton writer’s words:

The tense air trembled at the slightest sound; columns of smoke rose like giants from all
the roofs on both embankments and rushed upward through the cold sky, twining and
untwining along the way making it seem as if new buildings were forming over old ones
and a new city was forming in the air (kazalos’, novye zdaniia vstavali nad starymi, novyi
gorod skladyvalsia v vozdukhe)… (Katz, 101; PSS 19:69)

20
English translations belong to Michael R. Katz. Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Petersburg Visions in Prose and
Verse,” trans. Michael R. Katz, New England Review 1990 24.4 (2003), 99-116. Throughout the Chapter
1 quote Katz’s translation, providing page numbers from his translation, followed by those from
Dostoevsky’s PSS.

12
The vision appears for an instant to the feuilleton writer as young man, but remains with him as

an older man (he admits to having gray hair at the time of writing the feuilleton). This is the

moment when the feuilleton writer’s own aesthetics crystallized in an image, which, to be

precise, is the appearance of an instantaneous city of smoke over the city of St. Petersburg itself.

The vision of the new city above the old sets in motion a train of thought in the mind of

the young writer. Although the feuilleton writer is Dostoevsky’s invented persona and not to be

equated with Dostoevsky, the feuilleton writer’s aesthetic observations of his "vision" illustrates

several important features of Dostoevsky’s poetics. The feuilleton writer describes the beginning

of his existence as follows:

It seemed, finally, that this whole world with all its inhabitants, strong and weak, with all
their dwellings, shelters of the poor or gilded mansions, at that twilight hour resembled a
fantastic, magical vision (fantasticheskuiu, volshebnuiu grezu), a daydream (son) which
in turn would vanish instantly and rise up like steam into the dark-blue sky. Some strange
thought suddenly stirred within me. I shuddered and at that moment my heart seemed to
be flooded with a warm rush of blood that boiled up suddenly from the surge of a
powerful, previously unknown sensation. It was as if at that moment I came to understand
something that until then had only been stirring vaguely within me, and had yet to be
comprehended; it was as if my eyes were opened to something new (kak-budto prozrel vo
chto-to novoe), to a completely new world, unfamiliar to me and known only from
obscure rumors and some mysterious signs. I suppose it was precisely at that moment that
my existence began. . . (Katz 101; PSS 19:69)

Firstly, the vision that alters the young feuilleton writer’s life is not a single vision, but rather a

multifaceted experience involving multiple visions. The first vision is that of St. Petersburg

before him. This vision is a view of the city rooted in empirical observation. His second vision of

St. Petersburg in the smoke is still rooted in the empirical realm. Yet the smoke takes on the

shape of the city as a product of empirical observation compounded by the transmuting effect of

his imagination. This second vision prompts the stirring experience of the third vision, this time,

a “greza.” A greza is a daydream, a form of vision available to the waking mind, the conscious

13
imagination or reverie. Having seen the vision of the city of smoke, he redirects his gaze to the

city of St. Petersburg, and then re-imagines it as the second vision (made of smoke). This yields

an insight: St. Petersburg, like the city of smoke, is a vanishing vision. The daydream is the

experience of the two cities merging in his mind. The city of smoke makes him conscious of the

impermanence of the city of St. Petersburg. More importantly, he becomes conscious of the way

in which St. Petersburg is fashioned by him. Once conceived, the daydream reverberates

throughout his body as a "sensation" (oshchushchenie), a warmth that pulses through his heart

and fills his chest. This life-altering moment fittingly requires four multivalent terms

(snovideniia, videnie, oshchushchenie and greza) in order to express the range of impressions

that cascade through the young feuilleton writer’s mind and body. Looking at the event in light

of early twentieth-century Russian literary theory, we might just as readily replace the feuilleton

writer’s word "sensation" with "estrangement" because as the young feuilleton writer moves

from seeing the city to feeling its recreation in his body, he experiences the perception of an

object of thought for the first time. This is the young feuilleton writer’s first encounter with the

meaning-making potential of fiction, whereby he constructs an image in his mind that

corresponds to the city itself and then compares the image in his mind to what he sees in front of

him. When writing about it years later, he uses poetic language to recreate that initial sensation

of conceiving St. Petersburg as both a literal and fantastical vision.21

The daydream coincides with the young feuilleton writer’s “opening of his eyes” to

something new. The verb that the mature feuilleton writer uses to describe this awakening is

21
John Berger begins his classic art criticism, Ways of Seeing, with a description of the interplay between
narrative and seeing as rooted in childhood: “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes
before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which
establishes our place in the surrounding words, we explain that world with words, but words can never
undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never
settled.” John Berger, Ways of Seeing, (Penguin: 1972).

14
prozret’, the imperfective of prozrevat’, which signifies both the literal meaning of “to regain

sight, to begin to see clearly, to see through” and the metaphorical meaning of “to see the light”

in the sense of reaching an understanding of something. This type of vision differs from “looking

at” an object of sight. In fact, the Russian word for clairvoyance (prozorlivost’) derives from this

verb.22 The sensation that stirs in the young feuilleton writer’s body completes an important

component of the experience of art, whether plastic, visual or verbal. For Dostoevsky, it is not

enough for art to be seen, it must also be felt. The feuilleton writer’s description of his younger

self’s snovidenie-videnie-greza-oshchushchenie illustrates a progression that reappears

throughout Dostoevsky’s fiction: prompted by and rooted in visible, empirical analysis,

Dostoevsky crafts his way towards meaning, which is ultimately achieved through a creative

synthesis of empirical data in the imagination of an embodied observer.23

The feuilleton writer projects fictional constructs from his reading onto the characters that

he sees roaming the streets of St. Petersburg without rendering his vision of them any less

realistic. Instead, his description is self-aware. In his feuilleton, he describes the process by

which he cognizes the people that he sees.

22
In The Brothers Karamazov, Father Zosima attains prozorlivost’ after a lifetime of receiving
confessions; he is rumored to see his confessee’s sins before the penitent articulates them (38.I.2.1). This
special verb of sight denoted by prozrevat’ pertains to insight.

23
Jacques Catteau has written about Dostoevsky’s fascination with Thomas De Quincey’s similarly
multifaceted opium-induced visions in his novel Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821). He
describes his hallucinations as overwhelming sensory experiences, which Catteau compares to
Dostoevsky’s epilepsy-induced visions. Catteau writes, “Through De Quincey, [Dostoevsky] discovered
that the imagination was no longer a pale and extravagant rival of reality, but was capable of building
surreal universes to be experienced by body and soul. He realized that these so-called deviations,
pathological or not, were also ways of penetrating man’s mystery and sources of truth and knowledge”
(58). The vision of Dostoevsky’s feuilleton writer recalls De Quincey’s opium-inspired visions of
London. For more on the role of De Quincey’s novel in shaping Dostoevsky’s realism, Jacques Catteau’s
chapter “The Heritage: Literature,” in Dostoevsky and the Process of Literary Creation, trans. Audrey
Littlewood, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989).

15
 I began to look around and suddenly noticed some strange faces. They were all strange,
bizarre figures, completely prosaic, no longer [Schiller’s] Don Carloses and Pozas, but
now all titular councilors, and, at the same time, they were all fantastical titular
councilors. Someone was making faces in front of me, concealing himself behind this
entire fantastical crowd, yanking on some strings, springs, and all these little puppets
were moving, and he was laughing and laughing! (Katz 103; PSS 19:71)

Who is this “someone” laughing? Perhaps Gogol, whose fiction championed the plight of the

titular councilor? Why does the feuilleton writer see literary characters instead of ordinary

people? In order to make sense of both the literary characters from his memory and the people

that he sees on the streets, he compares them to one another, just as he compared the city of St.

Petersburg to the city of smoke. The veracity of this type of report does not pertain to the

empirical verisimilitude of the Petersburg inhabitants or even to a strictly factual account of

them, but rather to the truth of cognition, and the relevant memories, including literary and

artistic ones, that inform his vision. Instead of an empirical report, the feuilleton writer delights

in the discovery of cognition, and one senses that as he gazes at St. Petersburg and its

inhabitants, he is becoming aware of his own hand in the creative act of seeing. Behind the

previous storytellers of St. Petersburg, the feuilleton writer is the “concealed person” pulling the

strings of the characters in his own fictional St. Petersburg.

This feuilleton writer’s complex vision cannot be attributed to the delusions of an insane

person. We know that he has not lost his mind in part because he distances himself from a

delusional character that is modeled after Gogol’s Poprishchin from Zapiski sumasshedshego

(Diary of a Madman -1835). The feuilleton writer defines his madman’s delusion that he is the

great Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi in Gogolian fashion:

It had occurred to him that he was none other than Garibaldi! Yes! The civil servants, his
co-workers, all remarked that for the last two weeks he’d been preoccupied by that
thought; he’d read something in a newspaper that just happened to turn up on a table.
Before then he’d hardly spoken with anyone; suddenly he began to get agitated, became
confused, asked all about Garibaldi and Italian affairs, just as [Gogol’s] Poprishchin did

16
 about Spanish affairs.... Gradually, a little at a time, the incontrovertible conviction began
to take shape in his head that he was none other than Garibaldi, a freebooter and
destroyer of the natural order of things. (Katz 104; PSS 19:72) 24

The feuilleton writer can see this man’s madness, yet he includes him in order to illustrate the

mind’s capacity to completely overtake the vision process. The vision of Dostoevsky’s narrator

and that of the Garibaldi impostor exist on a spectrum, with the difference being that the narrator

acknowledges that the city in the sky is a construct, while the impostor remains imprisoned in his

delusion. In the words of the feuilleton writer, “The whole of God’s world glided by before his

eyes and vanished somewhere, the earth slipped from under his feet” (Katz 104; PSS 19:72).25

Whereas the feuilleton writer returns to the earth through his body after experiencing his

daydream, the madman loses track of the earth and never returns from the daydream. On the one

hand, the feuilleton writer gives his critics a real madman. On the other, he lays bare his own

cognitive process, whereby he draws from a store of previously read fictions in order to create

his own. He uses an existing memory of Poprishchin, who is completely unmoored from his

physical body and his surroundings, in order to make sense of the townsman. And the townsman

fleshes out the previous memory of Poprishchin in turn. This reciprocal action between

24
The ghost of Garibaldi lingered in Dostoevsky’s imagination long after writing “Petersburg Visions.”
In 1867, as Dostoevsky was writing The Idiot, he mentions Garibaldi in a letter to his niece, Sofiia
Aleksandrovna Ivanova. He was struck by the appearance of Garibaldi at the First (Genevan) Congress of
the League of Peace and Freedom in 1867. Up to that point, Garibaldi had only existed for Dostoevsky in
books and newspaper articles; at this moment he walked out of the books and into a shared room. Yet
Dostoevsky still has unfavorable things to say about Garibaldi, who becomes emblematic of the
unthinking revolutionaries at the Congress who seek to replace the Christian faith with what Dostoevsky
believes are false, utopic solutions to address poverty and social ills. See Letter to S. A. Ivanova, 29 Sep.
1867, (PSS 28, 2:224).
25
At the end of Gogol’s short story, Poprishchin literally flies over his Russian maternal village on the
way to Spain. Before taking off he prays, “Save me! Carry me away! Give me three steeds swift as the
wind! Mount your seat, coachman, ring bells, gallop horses, and carry me straight out of this world.
Farther, ever farther, till nothing more is to be seen!” Nikolai Gogol, The Mantle, and Other Stories,
trans. Claud Field, (Freeport, NY: for Libraries, 1971). Www.gutenberg.net.

17
imagination and observation generates a creative torque that impels Dostoevsky’s mock-

feuilleton forward.

The Feuilleton Writer Scoffs at The Idea of Subsuming Multiple Perspectives into One

“Petersburg Visions” illustrates another aesthetic principle of Dostoevsky’s, namely, his

rejection of the idea that multiple perspectives can be subsumed into a single totalizing

perspective. The feuilleton writer scoffs at Andrei Kraevsky’s proposed Encyclopedic Dictionary

for this reason. After paying lip service to Kraevsky’s contributions to the advancement of

Russian literature for his entrepreneurship during the 1840s and 1850s, the feuilleton writer takes

issue with his latest enterprise to edit and publish a comprehensive encyclopedia that

incorporates much more than literature.26 He cannot imagine a perspective so all embracing as to

be capable of collecting information about every specialized field of knowledge, which is

precisely what Kraevsky intends to do. The feuilleton writer writes:

If [Kraevsky] says that he assumed moral responsibility for the articles in the
[Encyclopedic Dictionary]; that he will peruse articles in all branches of knowledge—
philosophy, natural science, history, literature, and mathematics; that he will revise,
condense, and supplement these articles as necessary: then we will have to be forgiven at
least for our astonishment. That would even be a bit embarrassing. That would make
people laugh; that would even serve to discredit him! I think that if Francis Bacon
himself were to publish the Encyclopedic Dictionary making such claims of
responsibility, even he would make people laugh. It’s impossible to know everything, all
fields of knowledge on earth! It’s impossible to know how to do everything. (Katz 114;
PSS 19:82)

That one person could have such a vast range and depth of knowledge of so many different

disciplines strikes the feuilleton writer as absurd. Such a totalizing project stands in opposition to

26
Dostoevsky was not only familiar with Kraevsky as a public figure in the literary scene, but Kraevsky
was also Dostoevsky’s former editor at Notes of the Fatherland (1839-1867).

18
the personalized descriptions of St. Petersburg and its inhabitants that he offers in his feuilleton.

The feuilleton writer cannot conceive of an all-embracing thinker who could verify such a

diverse multiplicity of perspectives with his own. The feuilleton writer’s skepticism of

Kraevsky’s proposed project resembles Dostoevsky’s life-long opposition to similar such

totalizing perspectives of thinkers who lay false claim to objectivity and the scientific authority

associated with it.27

As a writer of fiction, Dostoevsky employed various means to remind the reader that

knowledge does not appear on its own from some mythical perspectival-free space. He

constantly reminds the reader that knowledge emerges from a particular place of seeing and is

therefore limited by the idiosyncrasies of individual perspective. “Petersburg Visions,” as a

mock-feuilleton, particularly contrasts with Kraevsky’s proposed encyclopedia insofar as the

feuilleton writer transparently admits the peculiarity of his own vision, that is, he lays bare the

process that makes his vision possible. This transparency places the substance of the “Petersburg

Visions” somewhere in between St. Petersburg the city and St. Petersburg the vision. The

feuilleton writer’s vision is partially quixotic—modern and local belles-lettres occupy his

imagination in place of chivalric romances—yet he retains an awareness of his quixotic ways in

his writing. He writes lucidly about his quixotic leanings while clearly distinguishing himself

from the more quixotic characters of his fictional Kraevsky and Garibaldi who equate their

individual perspectives with reality.

27
The most explicit contestation of systematization occurs in Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground
(1864). He parodies Chernyshevsky’s rationalist-utilitarian philosophy in the character of the
underground man, who attempts to internalize it but instinctively rejects it. And Dostoevsky makes an
image of Chernyshevsky’s materialist-utopia in the form of the Crystal Palace, where fixed rational laws
predetermine its inhabitants every best interest. Dostoevsky famously rejects the Palace in favor of the
capacity to exercise free will, the best of all best interests. Dostoevsky clearly favors individual
perspective over the allegedly objective system that makes universal claims for truth and the general
good. In Demons, Liza Tushina’s proposed almanac, often seen as a blueprint for Dostoevsky’s Dnevnik
pisatelia (Diary of a Writer), also favors a more subjective principle of selection.

19
 The heterogeneous form of the feuilleton matched Dostoevsky’s penchant for a range of

diverse perspectives. The feuilleton was both a familiar and developing genre that combined

satire with news, gossip, anecdotes, literary criticism and scientific findings. The fluidity of the

genre freed Dostoevsky from the constraints of a single way of thinking and writing about

contemporary events to begin with, but he also further tested the limits of the feuilleton.

“Petersburg Visions” is a mock-feuilleton, and not simply a feuilleton; Dostoevsky continues to

stretch and bend an already very flexible form as he writes within it. His mock-feuilleton

contains gossip and pokes anecdotal fun at what passes for news in other thick journals of the

time. The feuilleton writer reports as a documentary journalist on the one hand and as a

daydreamer on the other. The full title of the piece (“Petersburg Visions in Poetry and Prose”)

alludes to the hybrid nature of this particular feuilleton insofar as the feuilleton writer conveys

his eponymous “visions” through the mediums of both poetry and prose.28

The Feuilleton Writer is a Dreamer

The explicitly stated aesthetic position of the feuilleton writer of “Petersburg Visions”

(and of Vremia by extension) remains pertinent to Dostoevsky’s fiction from the time of its

publication in 1861 until the end of his career. The feuilleton writer articulates this aesthetic

position in the following passage:

And there, right before me in the crowd flashed some figure, not real, but fantastic (ne
deisvitel’naia, a fantasticheskaia). I simply can’t forswear a fantastic frame of mind
(fanticheskoe nastroenie). Back in the 1840s people called me a dreamer (fantazer) and
teased me for it. However, at that time, I’d yet to crawl through a single hole. Now, it
goes without saying, gray hair, life experience, etc., etc., and all the same, I’ve remained
a dreamer. (105; PSS 19:73)

28
The multifaceted genre of the feuilleton during the 1840s-1860s offered a loose model for the category-
defying, visually impressionistic notes of his post-Siberian novel Notes From the House of the Dead
(1860-62, discussed in Chapter 2 of this dissertation). Joseph Frank argues that Dostoevsky never quite
abandoned certain aspects of the genre and that it shaped the writing of his later novels. Frank, “The
Petersburg Feuilletons” (See footnote 5).

20
This is an unabashedly autobiographical insert taken straight from Dostoevsky’s recent

experience in exile. Dostoevsky was sorely wounded by Belinsky’s rejection of his second novel,

The Double, as the fantastical ramblings of a mad man. He would have nearly ten years to brood

over this criticism in combined prison and forced military servitude. Belinsky died in 1848, the

year before Dostoevsky was arrested. If Belinsky thought that Dostoevsky was a dreamer before

he served time, then one can only imagine what he would have said of this “dreamer” who was

confined to overcrowded barracks for four years, followed by five years of compulsory military

service in a remote town within an already remote region of Siberia. Deprived of the freedom to

set his eyes on new sights and forced to look at the sordid conditions around him, he instead

grew acutely aware of the mechanics of his hypertrophic imagination and its vision-shaping

power. As we know, Dostoevsky had a "fantastic frame of mind" to begin with.29 He was an

epileptic, who described the moment before his seizures both as overwhelmingly imaginative

and as an embodied experience of philosophical illumination.30 He admits that this frame of

29
Dostoevsky wrote the autobiographical sketch, “The Peasant Marei” (“Muzhik Marei” 1876), in which
he confesses to having an auditory hallucination at the age of nine, a phenomenon he subsequently
outgrew. The eponymous Marei consoled the young Dostoevsky, who had been alone in the forest and
heard a voice that said “Volk bezhit!” (“A wolf is running!” PSS 22:49). The nine-year-old Dostoevsky
runs to a peasant who consoles him and quiets him with a sign of the cross over his lips. Dostoevsky was
fifty-five years old when he published the sketch in the February 1876 issue of his Dnevnik Pisatelia
(Diary of a Writer, 1873-1881). This moment would resurface in his life as a way to relate to the peasant
cellmates that he was forced to live with during his exile and imprisonment in Siberia beginning at the age
of twenty-nine. For more on this chapter of the sketch, see Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky: The Stir of
Liberation 1860-65, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1986), 213-323; and Harriet Murav’s
article “Dostoevsky in Siberia: Remembering the Past” in Slavic Review 50, no. 4 (1991), 858-66.
30
Looking back on his life in 1870, Dostoevsky estimated that beginning at the age of twenty six, he had
suffered an epileptic seizure once every three weeks. Dostoevsky was arrested in April of 1848, at the age
of twenty seven and exiled in December of the same year at the age of 28. See James Rice, “Dostoevsky’s
Medical History: Diagnosis and Dialectic” in The Russian Review 42.2 (1983): 131–161; 132.
Dostoevsky also created at least five fictional characters who suffered from epilepsy over the course of
his career, ranging from the old landlord Murin in The Landlady (1847) to the bastard child Smerdiakov
in The Brothers Karamazov (1880). The others were the orphan Nellie in The Insulted and Injured
(1861), the “positively beautiful” Prince Myshkin in The Idiot (1868) and the suicidal Kirilov in Demons

21
mind is inseparable from his way of seeing the world, but he does not believe that it mind

hinders him from seeing reality.

Dostoevsky anticipates criticism of the fantastical style of the feuilleton from Nikolai

Dobroliubov, one of the leading contributors to Sovremennik and critical successor of Belinsky.

Dostoevsky makes the narrator conscious of this anticipated criticism and the narrator stands by

the fantastical frame of mind that has been with him since adolescence. The narrator writes, “If I

hadn’t been afraid of offending Mr. [Dobroliu]-bov’s delicate sensibility, at the time I’d have

prescribed for myself a remedy of birch rods to counteract my gloomy tendency.” The fueiileton

writer claims that Dobroliubov will argue that his “gloomy tendency” (mrachnoe napravlenie)

towards fantasy should have been whipped out of him with birch branches at a young age (Katz

101; PSS 19:69). The feuilleton writer is proud to announce that this “gloomy tendency” was

never whipped out of him and, for Dostoevsky, this "gloomy tendency" became the foundation

for the reality in which his literary production is rooted.31 The feuilleton writer preemptively

welcomes Dobroliubov’s hypothetical accusation with a renewed sense of conviction in his own

aesthetic outlook as that of a dreamer that corresponds to Dostoevsky’s. Through the persona of

the feuilleton writer in “Petersburg Visions,” Dostoevsky carefully redefines the dreamer,

purging it of the negative connotations that it carries with Dobroliubov. Dostoevsky’s own

(1872). There is a debate as to when he began experiencing epileptic fits. Some sources indicate that he
suffered the fits as early as the late 1830s during his adolescence. The earliest authoritative account comes
from his fellow student and roommate Dmitri Grigorovich at the Academy of Engineers in October of
1844, when Dostoevsky was twenty two years old. See Peter Sekirin’s section on Grigorovich (pp. 63-68)
in The Dostoevsky Archive: Firsthand Accounts of the Novelist from Contemporaries’ Memoirs and Rare
Periodicals, Most Translated into English for the First Time, with a Detailed Lifetime Chronology and
Annotated Bibliography (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997). For more on the clinical history and various
accounts of Dostoevsky’s epilepsy, see Ivan Iniesta’s “Epilepsy in Dostoevsky” in Progress in Brain
Research, ed. Anne Stiles, Stanley Finger, and Francois Boller (2013), 277-93.
31
In his mock-feuilleton, he includes the great lyric poet Afanasy Fet (1820-1892) in the category of
“dreamers,” and directly quotes his poetry as an example of what such “dreamers” who are allegedly in
need of birching can accomplish (Katz 115; PSS 19:84).

22
aesthetic statement shines through the feuilleton writer’s: Dostoevsky is not only a dreamer, but

he is also a visionary.

The Un-seeing Eye in Yakobi’s Painting Prisoners’ Halt

Fig. 1. Valery Yakobi’s Prival arestantov, Prisoners’ Halt (1861)32

The second piece of writing that clarifies the role of vision in Dostoevsky’s poetics

during the early 1860s is “Exhibition at the Academy of the Arts: 1860-1861.” Ostensibly an

article of visual art criticism in a literary journal, essentially, it is another fragment from the

32
Valery Ivanovich Yakobi, Prisoners’ Halt (1861). Digital image. Commons.wikimedia.org.

23
proposed book on art that Dostoevsky never wrote.33 The article was one of several published in

Russian journals of the time on the topic of the annual exhibition (held in 1861 on September 10)

at The Academy of Arts.34 It opens with Dostoevsky’s art criticism of Valery Yakobi’s (1834-

1932) well-known realist painting Prival Arestantov (Prisoners’ Halt; 1861), a painting

emblematic of a prevailing form of literary realism that Dostoevsky vehemently opposed. The

artistic notion of realism in both the plastic arts and belles-lettres was experiencing a powerful

shift towards the visual in light of the recent invention of the daguerreotype (discussed in the

following section) and its remarkable capacity for reproducing the visual world with

unprecedented verisimilitude. Upon returning from Siberia after ten years in exile, Dostoevsky

found himself out of step with this visual trend in realism. In his critique of Yakobi’s painting, he

elucidates the importance of the “body’s eyes,” his term for an embodied gaze (PSS 19:154). He

33
The article was published in the Dostoevsky brothers’ journal Vremia without authorial attribution.
Nonetheless, it is overwhelmingly accepted by modern scholarship as written by Dostoevsky and
included in his collected works. One of the leading skeptics of Dostoevsky’s exclusive authorship is Vera
S. Nechaeva, who argues that it was coauthored with Russian writer Pavel M. Kovalevskii, yet even she
does not doubt that the pages devoted to the art criticism of Yakobi’s Prisoners Halt are Dostoevsky’s. V.
S. Nechaeva, Zhurnal M.M. i F.M. Dostoevskikh Vremia, 1861-1863. (Moskva: “Nauka,” 1972), 264.
Georgii M. Fridlender argues that “the principle aesthetic positions […] of the article, unquestionably
belong to Dostoevsky” (my translation; PSS 19:319). See more about the scholarship on the article in
PSS, 19:314-30. The Norwegian scholar Geir Kjetsaa attempted to settle the dispute through a statistical
linguistic analysis (as opposed to an ideological or stylistic analysis) of several of Dostoevky’s disputed
texts. He concludes that the author of “The Exhibition” article “must have been another person than
Dostoevsky,” however, he analyzes the article as a whole, and does not differentiate between the opening
pages that include the section on Yakobi and the remaining 22 pages of the article, which are the disputed
pages (30). See Geir Kjetsaa, “Written by Dostoevsky?” in Association for Literary and Linguistic
Computing Journal 2.1 (1981), 25-38. Fridlender, in the PSS commentary, enumerates eight primary
reasons in support of Dostoevsky’s authorship. My application of the aesthetic principles stated in the
article to Dostoevsky’s novel Notes From the House of the Dead (1860-62, see Chapter 2 of this
dissertation) accepts Dostoevsky’s authorship.
34
Fridlender cites at least five reviews written around the time of the exhibit in various journals: by
Averkiev in Russkii invalid (19 Sep. No. 204), Kovalevskii in Sovremennik (no. 9 otd. 2, 71-82),
Rozengeim in Notes From the Fatherland (No. 10, otd. 3, 34-41), Minaev in Russkoe slovo (No. 10 otd.
5, 1-22) and Petrov in Illustrations (14 and 21 of September, no. 186, 187). The articles reflect a
widespread interest among the journals at the time to discover a homegrown Russian painting tradition,
which was lagging behind Russian literature as an art form. For further information on the publication
and content of these articles, see PSS 19:319-24.

24
also explains the artistic limits of verisimilitude, arguing that for a hypothetical, ideal artist,

whom he calls the “true artist,” or istinnyi khudozhnik, verisimilitude is a means to an end of

artistic expression. For Dostoevsky, the visual artist cannot accurately depict human subjects by

effacing himself behind the well-crafted lens required to execute visually realistic painting, but

rather, his “true artist” must portray the human subject in such a way as to express both his own

and his subjects’ inner complexity from an imaginative place of understanding, that is, with sight

and in-sight. For Dostoevsky, the lesser artist neglects his personhood by imitating the imagined

objectivity of the camera lens, which diminishes the likelihood of viewers experiencing catharsis.

Although the subject matter of Prisoners’ Halt is overtly political, Yakobi’s painting

caught the attention of Dostoevsky primarily for aesthetic and philosophical reasons. Historian

Richard Stites describes the scenario within the painting succinctly: “One of the very first public

depictions of exile, it is a harrowing scene of crowds of suffering convicts and families—with a

dying man, obviously a member of the intelligentsia, perhaps a radical—stretched out on a

wagon.”35 Dostoevsky does not overtly draw attention to his exile experience, but focuses his

critique primarily on the dynamic between the officer and the prisoner in the right hand side of

the painting, particularly the prisoner’s eye. He also discusses the prisoner wearing shackles in

the lower-right foreground of the painting. His analysis of these depictions within the

objectifying context of the realist style is unfavorable to say the least.36

35
Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power (New
Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2005), 414.
36
In contrast to Dostoevsky’s distaste for the painting, the novelist and art critic Pavel Kovalevskii wrote
in his review of the same exhibition for Sovremennik that it represented a “big step forward” for Russian
art. He adds that the several artists including Yakobi were “embarking on a realistic path (na real’nyi
put’) and inspired with a sense of modernism.” He finds the content refreshing when set against the
antiquated styles that have dominated the art of the Academy since its inception. He writes: “On the
canvas, where mighty heavens and lofty worlds were once painted […] now there appear random clerks,
officers, their wives, matchmakers and a distinct servant [various servants – chelaiad is collective; and the

25
 Dostoevsky’s extended critique of Prisoners’ Halt is expressed in ocular terms. He sees

indifference in every set of eyes within the painting. He notices it first in the gaze of the officer

who forcibly opens a prisoner’s eyelid to check for signs of life. Dostoevsky writes:

An officer is standing near the same wagon [on which the prisoner rests]. With one hand
he is opening one eye of the deceased, apparently in order to make certain of his death.
The big eye of the dead man is open, with his pupil skewed downwards. The officer, very
indifferently (ochen’ ravnodushno) smoking a pipe, calmly looks at the dimmed eye, and
precisely nothing appears on his callous face (na cherstvom litse): not concern, nor
compassion, nor surprise, absolutely nothing, as if he were looking at a dead cat or
roadside bird. He is even much more engaged with his pipe, than he is with the deceased,
at whom he looked passingly in the eye.37 (PSS 19:152)

The officer’s unfeeling way of looking at the prisoner, who is dead according to Dostoevsky’s

interpretation, is unsettling. The officer’s examination of the prisoner lacks any outward

indication of pathos. He may have glanced at the eye “passingly,” but the eye remains cruelly

opened for the viewer of the painting. Indeed the officer looks at the prisoner as if from a

removed perspective, like that of the realist painter Yakobi who stands outside of the painted

world. Dostoevsky describes the officer’s way of seeing tellingly, such as how the officer

“coolly/calmly looks” at the prisoner’s dead eye while “indifferently smoking a pipe.” He

interprets the officer’s face as “hard-hearted or calloused” adding that it expresses “absolutely

nothing.”38 The examining officer personifies Yakobi’s passive way of looking and consequently

idea is that they are all different], muzhiks and peasant women, dancing at the tavern, prisoners on the
road to Siberia” (my translation; Kovalevskii 71). I’m indebted to Fridlender’s commentary (PSS 19:319-
20) for collating the various Russian reviews of the exhibition at the time. This excerpt is from a section
on contemporary arts co-authored by Pavel M. Kovalevskii and Ivan Panaev, “Peterburgskaia zhizn’.
Zametki novogo poeta” in Sovremennik 9.II (1861), 71-92. Fridlender attributes the art criticism (71-82)
in particular to Kovalevskii in PSS 19:319.
37
All English translations of "The Exhibition" article are mine.
38
In her article, “The Face of the Other in The Idiot,” Leslie A. Johnson reveals the inseparable link
between ethics and the human face in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot: “Dostoevsky’s notion of good in this, his
most ethical novel, is a way of seeing the face of the other” (867). Slavic Review, 50.4 (1991), 867-878.

26
depicting the scene. There is no indication of feeling on the officer’s face and he remains

indifferent to the loss of life.

For Dostoevsky, the vacant gaze reappears in the other guards of the detachment. He

presents this deficiency of feeling in the guards as a product of a way of seeing, which he

describes as follows:

One encounters many similar characters among the colleagues in the detachment. And it
can be no other way. For most of their life, these gentlemen have been escorting prisoners
and they have already seen their fill (nasmotrelis’) of such unfortunate people, already
grown tired of seeing (prigliadelis’) their suffering, their illness, and they’ve grown
accustomed to seeing (privikli videt’) amongst themselves such people who are for the
most part wicked. The nature of their public service blunts the officers’ sensitivity
(chuvstvitel’nost’) to others, and they occasionally beat the prisoners as coolly as they
pack their pipes. (PSS 19:152)

Dostoevsky uses three different verbs of seeing in his analysis of the characters: nasmotret’,

prigliadet’ and videt’. The first, "nasmotret’," combines the reflexive form of the root verb

“smotret’,” meaning “to look at/watch,” with the prefix “na,” which expresses a sense of excess.

Dostoevsky thus conveys a sense of mind-numbing habitude. The second verb, combines the

reflexive the reflexive form of the root verb “gliadet’,” also meaning “to look at,” with the prefix

pri, which conveys the sense of “thoroughly.” There is an additional connotation of visuality in

this verb, similar to the English infinitive, “to eye,” since the Russian verb gliadet’ stems from

the word for “eye,” or glaz. This reflexive form of the verb is also used in the expression “to

grow accustomed to/used to the dark” (prigliadet’sia k temnote) when the eyes adapt to see more

clearly in darkness. The third verb that Dostoevsky uses is videt’, which means "to see" in both

the literal and metaphorical sense, as in English. In the painting, the eyes of the members of the

detachment are so “used to seeing” (privykli videt’) suffering, illness and misfortune—that they

have adapted to such darkness as normal. Their eyes are desensitized to the suffering of others.

The three verbs that Dostoevsky uses for the kind of vision that prevails in the painting pertain to

27
passive looking and contrast strongly to the verbs of active and imaginative seeing that

characterize the vision of the feuilleton writer in “Petersburg Visions.”

Fig. 2. Detail of prisoner in Yakobi’s Prival arestantov

In the review, Dostoevsky describes a second prisoner who is so desensitized that he does

not feel his own pain. Once again, Dostoevsky perceives a lifeless gaze on the withdrawn

prisoner who is in shackles in the painting’s lower right-hand corner (See fig. 2, above).

Dostoevsky takes issue with the unfeeling way in which the prisoner examines the sores in his

legs caused by wearing shackles during the transport:

[There is] a prisoner in rags, not paying attention to a thing that is happening around him,
busy with his own affairs: he’s looking over his wound, gnawed into his leg by his
shackles. The hardened face of this person—who has probably sat out many years in
different prisons, and has been sent several times from one to the next, for thousands of
miles—has taken on the marker that is quite common to people of this sort, the marker of
indifference to everything in the world: whether it be to the elements, the seasons, the
torture of his mates or to his very own suffering. With exactly this dull indifference, he
looks at his wound, and for that reason, one cannot detect any expression on his rigid
face, half-covered by his disheveled hair. (PSS 19:153)

Dostoevsky describes the prisoner as occupying a world that is utterly removed from the chaos

and suffering on all sides. The prisoner has not only retreated from the disorder surrounding the

wrecked cart, but he has also retreated from the living world around him. Dostoevsky portrays

him as oblivious to his natural surroundings and the changing rhythms of the weather and the

28
seasons. The prisoner’s detachment from the world begins with his own detachment from his

body, which manifests in how he neglects to express his own pain outwardly. Just as the dead

eye of the supine prisoner gazes out onto the world, and just as the captain gazes at that same

dead eye, so the prisoner gazes at his own suffering with indifference. The prisoner looks at his

own body from the perspective of a disembodied gaze that once more echoes the removed

perspective of the artist who paints him. The prisoner looks at his own pain without feeling,

which prevents him from acknowledging the pain. In the next paragraph, Dostoevsky elaborates

the difference between a photograph or a mirror image and real art. The characters within the

painting reflect the artist’s unfeeling gaze like so many mirrors.

Dostoevsky acknowledges the verisimilitude of the painting, but for him this effect

pertains not to “reality,” but rather to external appearances. He writes, “Everything that is

portrayed in the painting by the artist is exactly as it is in nature (tak byvaet v prirode), that is, if

you are looking at nature only on the surface” (PSS 19:153).39 Dostoevsky compares the fidelity

with which Yakobi paints the characters in the painting to that of the camera and the mirror, both

instruments that reflect the world passively. “The viewer does in fact (deistvitel’no) see actual

prisoners (nastoiashchikh arestantov) in Mr. Yakobi’s painting, just as he would see them, for

example, in a mirror or in a photograph, then painted over with great skill in the matter” (PSS

19:153). Neither the camera nor the mirror, nor the painter who objectifies himself in the act of

mimicking the function of either instrument can produce art in Dostoevsky’s opinion because

they are lifeless. Consequently, they can only reflect the surface of things.

39
Dmitri Minaev concurs with the superficiality of the Academy painters’ aesthetic. He refers to Yakobi’s
painting as one of several “painting-photographs” (kartiny-fotografiia), in which the artists “pursue not
the general truth of the whole painting, but rather its particular details” (my translation, Minaev, 20).
Dmitri Minaev, “Neskol’ko slov o khudozhestvennoi Akademicheskoi vystavke 1861 goda” in Russkoe
Slovo 3.9-10 (1861), 1-22.

29
 Dostoevsky contrasts the physical experience of the human eye and that of mechanical or

technical visual instruments. He argues that Yakobi’s finished product, like a mirror or

photograph represents an “absence of art” (otsutstvie khudozhestva). For Dostoevsky,

photographs or mirror images lack the human personality required for art. Dostoevsky claims,

“The true artist (istinnyi khudozhnik) cannot do this. Whether in a painting, a story, a musical

composition, without fail he will be seen (viden); he is unwillingly reflected, even against his

will” (PSS 19:153). The word istinnyi pertains not to factual truth, but rather to the realm of

spiritual or metaphysical truth. Dostoevsky ascribes Yakobi’s gaze to that of nearly every

character within the painting, but Yakobi is not a true artist because his gaze is directed at

surfaces. For Dostoevsky, the realist painter of this type mimics a superficial surface in order to

achieve his brand of realism. The realist painter, like a good reflective surface, can create the

illusion of visual depth, but he lacks the sagacity, personality and depth of feeling that

characterize Dostoevsky’s true artist. On a formal level, the painting is no longer of human

characters, but a reproduction of the artist’s mechanical modes of seeing. It is not an unfolding

human drama, but a collection of unmanned cameras and fallen mirrors.

Dostoevsky also critiques the limited scope of the technical precision in Yakobi’s

painting. He argues that the visual precision and technical accuracy achieved by Yakobi ought to

be distinguished from art:

No, this is not what is required of the artist, neither photographic fidelity, nor mechanical
(mekhanicheskaia) precision, but rather something else, something greater, broader,
deeper. Precision and fidelity are needed, fundamentally indispensible, yet they are not
enough. Precision and fidelity are as yet only the material out of which a work of art is
eventually created. They are the instruments of the creative work. (PSS 19:153)

The fidelity to reality in Yakobi’s painting corresponds to the relative degree of mastery of

technique that produces the illusion of real people occupying real spaces, but Yakobi’s characters

30
do not appear truly real to Dostoevsky because of their status as superficial objects. Dostoevsky

views verisimilitude as the starting point that grounds the artist in empirical reality. Dostoevsky’s

istinnyi (metaphysically true) art aims at “something else, something greater, broader, deeper.”

The true artist integrates the visible components of man into a skillful depiction of human

experience, one whose form and content reflect the human subject not simply as an onlooker, but

as a complex cognizing, imagining and feeling individual.

Dostoevsky’s true artist depicts characters with feeling as a result of perceiving them

feelingly. As a novelist, Dostoevsky reminds his readers that every set of eyes looks from within

a personal context. As a viewer, Dostoevsky demands that Yakobi reintegrate the detached

camera lens of the eye into the body so as to depict the convicts not impassively as visual

objects, but sympathetically as human subjects. He writes:

The viewer has the right to demand that the artist should see nature not as a photographic
lens would, but as a person would. In the old days they would have said that he should
look with the body’s eyes and, above all, with the soul’s eyes, or the spiritual eye. Let
him see the human beings in these “unfortunate” convicts and let him show them to us.40
(PSS 19:154)

The prisoner doesn’t feel his own pain because, like his artist creator, he does not look at it with

his “body’s eyes”; he does not feel what he sees. Dostoevsky demands from the artist a fuller

accounting of the prisoner and of the calloused officers, one that indicates a sense of

responsiveness to the world and to those occupying it. The camera, by contrast, produces

mechanical representations. Like creates like: the artist as camera depicts others as cameras, as a

mirror reflects others as mirrors. Dostoevsky demands an artist’s eye that the viewer can sense

belongs to a particular human body and dusha (human soul). He wants to see the complexity of

40
The term in quotation marks here referring to the “neschastnye” (unfortunate) is the same designation
that Dostoevsky uses for the convicts in Dead House. Fridlender points to this usage as evidence of
Dostoevsky’s hand in the composition of “The Exhibition at the Academy of the Arts 1860-61” (See PSS
19:315-16).

31
personality in the artist behind the camera or holding up the mirror, and he wants this complexity

to be imparted to the characters within the representation both in form and content. These artistic

demands articulate Dostoevsky’s poetics, which produce developed characters as inwardly

complex and vividly sentient because they are conceived from within a vital place of sensing,

feeling and seeing.

Dostoevsky argues that Yakobi even fails at his misguided artistic attempt to model his

painting after a photograph because the faces of Yakobi’s characters lack individuality. For

Dostoevsky, Yakobi is not only a ne-istinnyi (un-metaphysically true) artist, he is also a poor

photographer: “[Yakobi] photographed each of his subjects and did not paint a painting, and he

also committed an investigative error. Everyone of his subjects is а scoundrel, and they are all

the same” (PSS 19:155). Dostoevsky identifies this same look of a scoundrel in the horse near

the center of the painting. Instead of depicting diverse personalities, Yakobi has merely projected

his own apathetic gaze onto several faces.

Dostoevsky identifies a second “photographic infidelity” (fotograficheskaia nevernost’)

in the painting (PSS 19:155). Yakobi fails to show the linings for the prisoners’ shackles.

According to Dostoevsky, this error is as egregious as a photographer failing to capture the tail

on a horse: “Rest assured that one could never walk a single verst, let alone a few thousand,

without leather linings for the shackles to prevent them from cutting into one’s leg.” He adds:

“And at this stage of the journey, without [the linings] the flesh would possibly tear all the way

to the bone” (PSS 19:155).41 Dostoevsky speculates that this “photographic infidelity” is due

either to forgetfulness or to the fact that Yakobi did not “inquire into the reality” (ne spravilsia s

deistvitel’nost’iu). At the very least, it signals that Yakobi made an insufficient effort to imagine

41
A verst is a Russian unit of measurement that is 1.0668 kilometers or .6629 miles (3,500 feet).

32
the embodied experience of the prisoners. This absence of empathy and insufficient imagination

yield an inaccuracy in the “reality” depicted. For the prisoner—as was certainly the case for the

former convict Dostoevsky—perhaps the most memorable impression of this experience would

have pertained to the shackles.42 Even with linings, the pain at this stage of travel would be

excruciating, and yet Yakobi depicts only cold indifference on their faces.

Dostoevsky finishes his critique of Yakobi’s painting by taking aim at his narrow

technical training as an art student. He claims that while the young Yakobi is well on his way to

“reaching actual truth” (on dobiraetsia do pravdy deistvitel’noi), yet he still has a way to go to

reach the “remaining, higher truth” (do ostal’noi, vysshei pravdy) in his art (PSS 19:156).43 For

Dostoevsky, this will not come via more academic or technical training, but rather from “general

development” (obshchеe razvitie) and “general education” (obshchее obrazovanie).44 Lived

experience and general edification, Dostoevsky remarks, are rare commodities in contemporary

Russian artists, who seek to capture the life of a people with whom they have little to no personal

42
In Dead House, Gorianchikov refers to shackles at several points, including the difficulties presented by
bathing with them, as in the bathhouse scene with Petrov. See Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky, The House of the
Dead and, Poor Folk, trans. Constance Garnett, (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004), 125-26.
43
Twenty years after writing “The Exhibition” article, Dostoevsky would revisit this distinction between
“actual” and “higher” truth. In a diary entry from 1881 (undated), he writes, “They call me a psychologist;
not true: I am a realist in the higher sense, i.e., I depict all the depths of the human soul” (PSS 27:65).
Scholars such as Robert Louis Jackson and Malcolm Jones have written at length about this “realism in a
higher sense.” See Robert Louis Jackson, Dialogues with Dostoevsky: The Overwhelming Questions.
(Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993). See also Malcolm V. Jones, Dostoevsky after Bakhtin: Reading in
Dostoyevsky’s Fantastatic Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990).
44
Dostoevsky concurs with Minaev on the systemic problem of the education offered by the Academy.
Minaev writes that young artists have no time to “sit in front of а book” because they are too busy
studying those skills that support their trade. He points out that photography has “killed portrait painting”
(ubila portretnuiu zhivopis’) and forced artists to look for alternative sources of income that pay far less.
As a result of having to piece together odd jobs (such as drawing advertisements for tobacco shops), the
artists have no time for their general edification and the Academy does not require it, resulting in
paintings that are technically proficient, but philosophically naïve and lacking in substance. See Minaev,
“Neskol’ko slov o khudozhestvennoi akademicheskoi vystavke 1861 goda,” 5.

33
means to empathize. Dostoevsky portrays Yakobi as a product of the educational style of The

Academy of Arts, which is vocational rather than humanizing and artistic. This vocational bias

within the academy limits each student to the practical demands of his focused field of study.

Dostoevsky claims that “history is studied there from the perspective of…suits,” that is, in order

for the tailor to know how to make suits, he studies history from the perspective of suit-making.

He continues:

Architecture and perspective are studied there without descriptive geometry (that is, just
the rules of perspective [pravila perspectivy] — gropingly), or a theory of fine arts;
anatomy is studied from the perspective of bones, muscles and their coverings, without
the actual history of the human being, without general philosophical preparation, and so
on. This kind of utilitarian tendency, of course, doesn’t provide that general edification
that is utterly essential for the artist, and the arts in our country will never progress
without serious preparation for them in the universities. Otherwise, we’ll never break
away, either from daguerreotyping and its varying degrees of success, or from complete
pseudo-classicism. (PSS 19:156)

Dostoevsky perceives a lack of understanding of the human condition in the painting, which

prevents Yakobi from attaining Dostoevsky’s approval as a “true artist.”45 Dostoevsky

encourages Yakobi’s general education in order to develop a way of seeing that allows him to

employ his technical skills artistically. Until then, Yakobi’s skill is limited to the mechanical

means that he employs to reproduce what he sees. The strict imitation of the daguerreotype leads

to the artist “daguerreotyping” reality, rather than portraying it artistically.46

Dostoevsky’s personality, by contrast, appears vividly in his interpretation of Yakobi’s

painting. He refuses to accept the artistic representation of appearances as “realism” and makes

45
In the same letter to his friend Alexander Vrangel that contains his proposal to write “Letters about
Art,” Dostoevsky adds that he would dedicate the work to the Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna
(daughter of Tsar Nicholas I), who was the acting President of the Academy of the Arts. She was involved
in the Academy of Arts initially through her first husband, Maximillian, Duke of Leuchtenberg, who was
president from 1843 until his death in 1852, at which point Maria Nikolaevna took over his post.
Dostoevsky had taken interest in the Academy well before his exile, dating back to the 1840s. Letter to A.
Y. Vrangel 13 Apr. 1856 (28, 1:228-229).
46
I discuss the specific effect of the daguerreotype on realism in the following section of this chapter.

34
clear his skepticism of the alleged objectivity of such realism. His critique of Yakobi addresses

the objectifying tendency of any so-called “realism” that dehumanizes its human subjects by its

empirical imperatives. He emphasizes the dangers of conforming artistic representation to the

demands of the eyes exclusively, as if the eyes were somehow self-sufficient instruments

detached from the fuller context of the human body, the imagination and the exponentially more

complex act of seeing. For Dostoevsky seeing is a compassionate art; looking at human suffering

without feeling is pathological, and any art that pretends to see without feeling falls short of his

understanding of “true art.” Eyes that look without empathy grow dim and are consequently

inferior instruments for the task of both considering the whole of the human subject and

rendering the subject whole in art.

The Daguerreotype Captured the Attention of Writers, Critics and Painters Who Modeled

Realism After Photographic Depictions of “Real” Life

Valery Yakobi was one of the founding members of the Russian art movement that is

now synonymous with Russian Realism, namely, the Peredvizhniki (lit. “travelers” or “movers,”

commonly misleadingly translated as “The Wanderers” or “The Itinerants”).47 His painting won

him a gold medal from the Russian Academy of Arts and gave Dostoevsky the chance to develop

the nuances of his own aesthetic and visual theories. Dostoevsky contrasts the physically

embodied, visual experience with that of mechanical or technological perception. For

Dostoevsky, the contrasting visual experiences represent a larger divide between the spiritual and

47
Yakobi was a provincial nobleman and an ill fit with the majority of the Peredvizhniki who came from
lower classes and with whom he maintained very loose associations. He had attended, but did not
graduate from Kazan University due to his enlistment to fight for the Imperial Russian Army in the
Crimean War (1853-56). When he returned, he elected to study art at the Russian Academy of the Arts
where he studied from 1856-61 rather than resume his studies at Kazan. For more on the history of the
Peredvizhniki and its inextricable ties to Russian Realism, see Elizabeth Valkenier, Russian Realist Art:
The State and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1977).

35
the materialistic plaguing Russian realist visual culture. Prisoners’ Halt is typical of the social-

minded Peredvizhniki artists who sought to redirect the public eye away from the mythological

content of state-sanctioned art of the time towards the more mundane yet more personally

relevant content of daily, contemporary life with all of its social ailments.48 The Peredvizhniki

corroborated the literary motives of the Natural School that emerged in the 1840s and continued

to the end of Nikolai I’s reign in 1955. This “school” was more of a literary trend that was united

by its focus on the same small-scale content of ordinary life and social inequalities. Indeed,

Dostoevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk (1945), was christened as a model for the socially conscious

literature that the famous literary critic, Vissarion Belinsky, championed at the time.49

By the time he wrote his article, “Exhibition at the Academy of the Arts: 1860-1861,” the

“realism” that Dostoevsky saw in Yakobi’s art was diverging strongly from his own. The

daguerreotype was especially influential on the literary realism of the 1840s and 1850s.

Following its debut in Russia in 1839, the daguerreotype captured the imagination of writers,

critics and artists alike. Russia’s first daily newspaper, Sankt-Peterburgskie vedemosti, at the

48
Nikolai I (1825-55) lorded over the aesthetic aims of the Academy in the three decades prior to the
Peredvizhniki movement. For Nikolai I, the perfectly smooth surfaces, detailed modeling, well-delineated
forms and ancient mythology of Neoclassicism created the perfect artistic medium for his reactionary
ideology. As Elizabeth Valkenier writes, “Like other Academies, the Russian Akademiia regarded
mythological subjects and neo-classical style as the only ones fit to convey genuine beauty and other
aesthetic principles of High Art, a valuation it begrudged to realistic scenes of everyday life” (Valkenier,
Russian Realist Art, 16). Historically, neo-classical painters saw their art as bound to ethics. The
movement favored the idea that strong drawings were decidedly rational and consequently morally
superior to the frivolous sensuality of the Rococo tradition, against which it established itself. Nikolai I
saw a similarly moralizing function for neo-classically inspired art, only directed the clarity and
rationality of the painting style towards subject matters that would enflame the heart of the Russian
viewer with patriotic feeling. Yakobi emerged as a star pupil of the Academy’s modern aesthetic by
accomplishing the opposite of this patriotic feeling. He kills the pathos in his depiction and keeps it from
having the political charge.
49
Belinsky’s article is reprinted in F. M. Dostoevskii v russkoi kritike (Moscow, 1997). Dostoevsky
recalls specifically that Belinsky praised him for capturing “in an image” what other writers and critics
had been attempting “in words” (PSS 28.1:169).

36
time а state sponsored publication of the Russian Academy of Sciences, lauded the

daguerreotype in an article entitled “Novogo roda zhivopis’,” or “A New Type of Painting,”

calling this new art form superior to painting in its detailed visual-mimetic capacity. The article

described the end product of the daguerreotype as “the most delicate, most precise, most perfect

representation that God’s creation and the works of human hands could hope for.”50 When

Dostoevsky accuses Yakobi of daguerreotyping, he disassociates himself from those critics who

have sensationalized its ability to capture reality as it is. The Russian pioneer of photography,

Aleksei Grekov, engineered his own version of the daguerreotype and in 1841 published a

document entitled The Painter Without Brush or Paint that explained how to create the perfect

likeness of reality within minutes by reproducing images of physical phenomena onto a metal

plate with a daguerreotype.51 Despite the cumbersome and bulky build of the original camera,

early daguerreotypists such as Sergei Levitskii not only took to the streets to document Moscow

city life but traveled across the Russian empire to catalogue its vast wilderness and various

ethnicities. Eventually, Levitskii committed his daguerreotypes to the documenting of the

Crimean War, and the images placed side by side resulted in the pioneering art form of

photographic journalism.

A similarly photographic attempt at storytelling took hold of the literary scene in Russia

during the 1840s. Nekrasov’s Physiology of Petersburg (Fiziоlogiia Peterburga, 1845) was a

collection of “physiological sketches” made by various authors arranged consecutively, the

sketches held together not by a written narrative, but rather by their physical proximity in a

single album and the very loosely defined content of realia. The physiological sketch prevailed

50
“Novogo roda zhivopis’” in Sankt-Peterburgskie vedemosti (January 25, 1839), 181.
51
Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power (New
Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2005) 372.

37
in the literature of the 1840s and 50s, in the wake of the daguerreotype sensation. Joseph Frank

explains:

Lower-class Russian life had now begun to be depicted in all its varieties […] But
emphasis was placed on the description of externals, on photographic accuracy (the
sketches were also called ‘daguerreotypes,’ and were accompanied by illustrations),
rather than on imaginative penetration and inner identification with the people involved.52

The collection of images captured by the daguerreotype offered a model for a kind of storytelling

that derived its effect from a series of compelling images and the visual narratives constructed

from them. Collections of sketches were structured rather like photo albums, with each sketch

standing on its own as a glimpse into isolated moments of the so called “real life” of lower-class

Russians. The sketches taken collectively, however, lacked narrative continuity. The writers of

the “physiological sketch” in the Natural School were trying to achieve a similar effect in

literature to what the daguerreotype was accomplishing in the visual arts. These writers began to

look at life as it is, so to speak, with an objectivity and impartiality that was analogous to that of

the daguerreotype. The Natural School was considered “natural” not because the writers limited

themselves to the natural world nor to the empirical descriptions visible to the daguerreotype, but

because they sought to depict life in a natural way, that is, without what they perceived to be the

un-natural idealization and beautification characteristic of the Russian Romantics in the early and

mid-nineteenth century, beginning with Pushkin and continuing with authors such as Lermontov,

Baratynsky, and Tiutchev. Belinsky thought that the fantastic filter of the Romantics obscured

the clear-eyed focus of the aesthetic that he desired for the Sovremennik, which sought to portray

the plight of the lower classes in unflinchingly vivid, photographic detail.

Yet Belinsky did not believe that the daguerreotype was a sufficient model for literature

on its own. As early as 1846, Belinsky critiqued the model of reality afforded by the
52
Joseph Frank, Introduction to The House of the Dead, trans. Garnett, (New York: Barnes & Noble
Classics, 2004), xvii.

38
daguerreotype. His general criticism of the second volume of Butkov’s Peterburgskie vershiny

(Summits of Petersburg) is that it is a “mere daguerreotype” that fails to tell a story.53 Belinsky

wanted to retain the focus of the sketches on the daily lives of ordinary, lower-class characters,

but he wanted to complement the expository, photographic aspects of the sketches with a larger

ideological narrative that attempted to raise awareness of the social ills. Belinsky announced that

the Sovremennik would publish stories about “Russian life,” adding, “And this is not a whim, not

a fashion, but a rational need having deep meaning and deep foundation: it is a need that

expresses the strivings of Russian society towards self awareness, and consequently, awakening

to moral interests and intellectual life.”54 His exemplary model of a physiological sketch that

achieved narrative success through the just use of realistic imagery was Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk.

Dostoevsky’s and Belinsky’s aesthetics had enough in common to coexist for a short while, and

both agreed that the daguerreotype was insufficient as a self-standing model for literary realism,

but their overlap was superficial. They soon realized that they diverged on the issues of both how

realia should be incorporated into fiction as well as what ends their conflicting aesthetics should

serve. Dostoevsky tied fantastical aspects of the Romantic tradition to the real operations of the

imagination in shaping empirical observation. He used the fantastical to depict reality from the

imagined world-views of others, but was always quick to remind his reader of the artifice behind

the imagined world-view.

53
Belinsky’s critique of Butkov comes from the article “Vzgliad na russkuiu literaturu 1846 goda,” in
Sovremennik, I, No.1, 1847. Read in Gippius’s Gogol (especially pp. 162-65) for more on Belinsky’s
understanding of the governing aesthetic of the physiological sketches in The Physiology of Petersburg
(1845) as a “faithful mirror of the real life of St. Petersburg.” Vasilii Vasilʹevich Gippius’s Gogol (Ann
Arbor: Ardis, 1981), 162.
54
Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub.
House, 1956), 380.

39
Visual Monologism and What Dostoevsky Doesn’t See in Photographic Realism

Dostoevsky’s interpretation of Yakobi’s homogenization of his characters results in what

I will call visual monologism. I am borrowing the term “monologism” from Bakhtin, who writes

the following:

The dialogic means of seeking truth is counterposed to official monologism, which

pretends to possess a ready-made truth, and it is also counterposed to the naïve self-
confidence of those people who think that they know something, that is, who think that
they possess certain truths. Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an
individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the
process of their dialogic interaction. (PDP 110)

Visual monology is the visual analogue to Bakhtin’s literary-philosophical notion of

monologism. In visual monologism, subjects are reduced to objects that reflect the unified

perspective of the artist. As Dostoevsky’s interpretation of Prisoners’ Halt shows, Yakobi’s

prisoners are simply reifed objects—mirrors and cameras—that reflect Yakobi’s superficial

worldview. Yakobi’s visual bias in the painting neglects each character’s unique interiority.

Instead of conveying reality dialogically, as a dynamic interplay of unique and conflicting

perspectives, Yakobi projects his monologic perspective onto his characters.

As a consequence of Yakobi’s visual monologism, his “realism” lacks the capacity to

convey truth because, for Dostoevsky, truth arises from the clash of opposing views. In

Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form, Robert Louis Jackson writes that “Philosophical truth for

Dostoevsky is contradiction, and life the interaction of contradictory elements” (Quest for Form

70). Similarly, Jefferson Gatrall defines the reality within Dostoevsky’s novels as “never simply

an object to be represented, not an effect, nor even an affect, but a problem…”55 I would add to

55
Jefferson J. A. Gatrall, “The Icon in the Picture: Reframing the Question of Dostoevsky’s Modernist
Iconography” in Slavic and East European Journal 48.1 (2004), 1-25.

40
Jackson’s description that a Dostoevskian problem is dialogic in both form and content: it can

only be represented when characters disagree about what they see from fully-valued, unique

perspectives. Neither the narrator, nor the characters’ nor the implied author’s perspective can be

valued over the other in order for the Dostoevskian problem to be fully expressed. Because

Dostoevsky works in a verbal medium, the imagined perspectives of his characters manifest as

what Bakhtin terms “voices,” which express what each character sees. Bakhtin uses the metaphor

of “unmerged voices” to describe how Dostoevsky resists the urge to merge his authorial voice

with those of his depicted characters, but this resistance also extends into the visual realm:

Dostoevsky must resist the urge to project his authorial perspective onto his characters (PDP 6).

Bakhtin emphasizes voices because Dostoevsky’s characters exist in a verbal format and each

character expresses their difference of opinion verbally, but the verbal metaphor needs visual

supplementation that calls attention to unique perspectives. Dotoevsky’s characters are unmerged

voices as well as unmerged perspectives.56

Ironically, Dostoevsky dismisses Yakobi’s perspective even though Yakobi’s painting is

more dialogic than Dostoevsky’s interpretation would lead one to believe. For Bakhtin, a work of

art, a word, a language, or a discourse, becomes “dialogized” when it calls itself into question.

Yakobi accomplishes this by hinting at the visual artifice of the painting. For example, the

painting prominently highlights three eyes that belong to three of the most clearly visible

characters. The first is the previously discussed eye of the dead prisoner, the second is the right-

eye of the officer examining the prisoner and the final is the left eye of the horse, which stands at

the painting’s geometric center.

56
The appearance of Holbein’s Dead Christ in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot elicits conflicting worldviews
especially well because the artist portrays its subject dialogically, as I discuss in Chapter 3 of this
dissertation.

41
 Figure 3. Detail of three eyes in Yakobi’s Prisoners’ Halt.

The dead man’s right eye is shielded from the viewer, while his left eye remains unnaturally

opened by the hand of the officer who shuts one eye and leans in to peer with his right in order to

examine the prisoner’s eye more clearly, or perhaps more objectively. His vision is monocular,

just like that of the realist painter, who depicts the painted world from the perspective of a single

eye so as to maintain a constant and fixed distance from his depicted subjects.57 The horse’s right

eye is not only turned away from the viewer but is also squinting, while its left eye is wide open

and appears to be gazing directly at the viewer, who stands at eye level with the painter. The

horse brings attention to the painted world as an artifice by looking at the painter. The horse is

also looking at the viewer, reminding us that we cannot look into a painting without it somehow

looking back at us and that every viewing is dialogic.

Another gesture hints at the perspectival construction of the painting: a flock of birds fly

in single file directly along an orthogonal that is tucked away in the clouds overhead (Fig. 4

57
The artist often uses his brush at the end of his fully extended arm to compare the size of the objects
that he is depicting against the tip of his brush, for example. Even though Prisoners’ Halt is an imagined
scenario, visual realism relies on maintaining a fixed perspective relative to the depicted objects, and this
cannot be from two eyes, which would change the relative position of the depicted object in the artist’s
vision, consequently distorting the perspectival unity of the representation. For more on the history of and
strategy for perspectival representation, see the section in the following chapter on Florensky’s “Reverse
Perspective.” See also the Appendix to this dissertation for an explanation of the perspectival method.

42
below). The flock is simultaneously emerging from and headed towards the vanishing point,

which is wide-left, beyond the painting’s frame.

Fig. 4. Detail of flock of birds in single file in Prisoners’ Halt.

Yakobi thus points to the artifice used to construct the painting. The orthogonal can be

determined by the mile-marker (left side of Fig. 4), which is slanted in the painting relative to the

horizon, yet if one imagines the mile-marker standing upright, then the parallel lines depicted on

the darkened side of the signpost indicate the orthogonal lines perfectly. The line of birds, which

is uncommonly long, travels along one of these orthogonals. It is difficult to make out just how

many birds there are (my count ends around 30). On the one hand, the painter calls attention to

the means of the artist’s chosen artifice for representing reality. On the other hand, the vanishing

flock serves as a reminder of that moment at which the visible world becomes not less real, but

simply less visible.

Perhaps realism’s late arrival to Russia is responsible for Yakobi’s conscious or

subconscious fascination with perspectival method, which visibly permeates his painting, or

perhaps it stems from Yakobi’s recent studies of the artistic style prevalent at the Russian

43
Academy of the Arts. Perhaps Yakobi, in the painting, is coming to terms with his own newly

acquired gaze. Regardless of the specific cause, Yakobi effectively exposes the governing force

of the unfeeling eye behind his artistic medium. He pulls back the eye of the dead (or dying)

prisoner to lay bare the instrument behind the artifice. The painting represents the eye as an

instrument of great persuasive power, but adds a layer of scrutiny by showing how the objective

intention of such representation threatens to overlook the human subject. Yakobi conveys a

consciousness of his own medium, just as Dostoevsky makes his feuilleton writer convey a

consciousness of his. Yakobi sees the elements that shape his visual narrative, the eye, the

perspectival construction, the orthogonal, just as the feuilleton writer sees the elements that

shape his narrative picture of St. Petersburg. Yet Dostoevsky, along with the other critics of the

time such as Minaev, Petrov and Kovalevskii, still considers Yakobi’s painting to be artistically

naïve.58

Dostoevsky critiques Yakobi’s painting for being like a mirror of its creator, yet

Dostoevsky’s interpretation of the painting reflects certain aspects of his own creative

personality. His interpretation reflects the vehement emotion of his gaze. The absence of pain on

the chained prisoner’s face contrasts with the empathetic pain that Dostoevsky experiences as he

draws from his personal memories of shackles. In his ekphrasis, Dostoevsky incorporates the

painter’s visual reality into a more complex interiority that includes a sensorial space with pain

and empathy. For Dostoevsky, Yakobi’s misrepresented shackled prisoner exemplifies the

consequences of considering empirically observable, visual, information at the expense of the

58
The articles reflect a broad interest among the journals at the time to discover a homegrown Russian
painting tradition, which lagged behind Russian literature. Fridlender notes that critics were in mutual
agreement about the poor quality of the Academy’s general education of the artists and about their poor
selection of program content. For example, he writes, “All who wrote about the exhibition of 1861
unanimously criticized the programmatic themes that were proposed to the pupils by the Academy” (PSS
19:320). For further information on these articles, see PSS 19:319-24.

44
remaining senses and faculties for processing our experiences. The shackled prisoner’s eyes are

open and capable of looking out onto the surroundings, but they only look in a metaphorical

sense. They reflect the world without sensing it. The prisoner negates his pain by detaching his

gaze from his body, that is, by detaching his visual from his sensual reality. For Dostoevsky, the

strength of the realist, perspectival representation, proves to be its limitation. Yakobi attains the

visual precision of the logically ordered system by first objectifying himself and then the

characters in turn. The artist flattens his embodied experience in an attempt to become more

objective, that is, more mirror-like. As a result, he depicts more mirror-like characters.

Prisoners’ Halt does indeed function like a mirror, albeit not the mirror that Dostoevsky

had in mind. The officer mechanically opens the dead eye of the prisoner “with one hand” in an

act that mimics Yakobi’s own revelatory act of coldly opening the viewer’s eye onto his painted

world. The painter reveals each viewer’s gaze to himself. Yakobi’s style allows viewers like

Dostoevsky to fill in the compassion lacking in this art form by projecting their own feeling onto

the depicted characters. Unfortunately for Yakobi, Dostoevsky does not reserve any such

compassion for the artist. Yakobi depicts the scene neither with malice nor with particular

generosity towards the personae, but rather creates the conditions for a range of responses to

emerge from the viewer. Just as the officer coldly lifts the eyelid of the prisoner to check whether

he is dead or alive, so Yakobi lifts the eyelid of the viewer onto the painted world to check the

viewer for a pulse. The glass eye at the center of the painting, the blank eyes of the remaining

prisoners, and the painting as a whole function as mirrors insofar as they reflect the worldview

implicit in the viewer who gazes into them. This is theoretically true of any reading or viewing,

but the depiction of the eyes makes Yakobi’s awareness of this fact an important component in

his representation.

45
 For Dostoevsky, Yakobi’s brand of realism illustrates a way of looking at the world with

an objectivity that is inadequate to represent the multidimensionality of human experience. The

end goal of the visual-empirical realism that Dostoevsky identifies with Prisoners’ Halt is the

starting point for the author’s own depiction of the human subject in his fiction. Dostoevsky

would have the artist outwardly indicate the prisoners’ interiority and individuality. The heap of

cameras and mirrors would be transformed into a tragic tale of human suffering.

The mock-feuilleton “Petersburg Visions” and “The Exhibition” article can be seen as

Dostoevsky’s unrealized treatise on art. In the mock-feuilleton, Dostoevsky announces to critics

and followers alike that he has returned from Siberia to write fiction according to his

fantastically inclined artistic vision. This vision compounds the notions of dream, vision, and

daydream into a way of not only seeing the world, but feeling it as a sensation. His fiction

emerges out of this complex cognitive-sensorial experience wherein the city of St. Petersburg

and the city of smoke simultaneously model and inform one another. Moreover, each city is

filtered through the existing poetry and prose that claim St. Petersburg as theirs. The two cities in

the feuilleton combine with the existing composite of fictional St. Petersburgs (of various genres)

in the mind of the feuilleton writer who incorporates them into the plasticity of the multi-genre

feuilleton. The feuilleton writer depicts reality with a conscious transparency about his personal,

imaginative and embodied way of seeing. Dostoevsky’s vision pertains to the realm of prozrenie,

that is, “seeing through,” “insight,” and “discernment.” “Petersburg Visions” models an

imaginative, meaning-making process that sets the tone for Dostoevsky’s realism for the

remainder of his career.

46
 “The Exhibition” article defines Dostoevsky’s aesthetic vision primarily by way of

opposition. He focuses his criticism on the visual orientation both in the painting and the

literature of his time. He speaks about the passive forms of vision that characterize this mode of

seeing conveyed by verbs for vision such as “to see one’s fill” (nasmotret’sia) and “to grow tired

of seeing” (prigliadet’sia), both of which carry the sense of seeing something either so much or

so often as to lose the capacity to see actually see it. The vacant, disembodied gaze of the artist

renders the painted subjects as appearances unfeelingly. Yakobi’s overreliance on vision as a

purely empirical process that treats the eye as a mechanical instrument causes him to de-animate

his characters. Like a camera, he renders his subjects as visually accurate surfaces, but unlike a

camera, he neglects to differentiate between the individuals that he captures in his painting. And

while Yakobi questions his own artifice, his subjects remain flat, and his painting only

monologizes the characters that he depicts in his painting, further distancing his viewers from the

peasants. The form of Yakobi’s painting contains dialogic elements, but its characters utterly

lack in individuality, precluding the possibility of the multiplicity of worldviews that

characterizes Dostoevsky’s fiction at its best.

Dostoevsky represents the act of seeing as an artist both in the mock-feuilleton and in his

art criticism in such a way that articulates the aesthetic outlook that informs his own realist

fiction. This is especially apparent in Dead House, the novel that Dostoevsky wrote from 1860-

62, the period during which the two works analyzed in this chapter were written. Dostoevsky

represents reality as an admixture of empirical observation and vividly imaginative processing.

He sees through appearances by turning his gaze both outward to the empirical world and inward

to the inseparable processes of seeing and co-feeling.

47
 CHAPTER 2

Gorianchikov’s Depiction of Peasant Convicts in Notes From the Dead House Is Visually

Oriented, But Does Not Objectify

In the Early 1860s, Dostoevsky Was Searching for a Literary Form that Could Humanize

the Peasantry

Dostoevsky wrote the mock-feuilleton “Petersburg Visions” (1860) and the critical article

“The Exhibition at the Academy of Arts: 1860-1861” (1861) as he was writing Notes from the

Dead House (1860-61).59 These works were written during what Symbolist poet Grigorii

Chulkov has sarcastically referred to as “the so-called years of peasant emancipation (1860-

62).”60 Yakobi’s painting and Dostoevsky’s Dead House were each part of the movement to

59
The timing of the publication for Notes from the Dead House relative to the publication of the works
covered in Chapter 1 is as follows. The first four chapters of Dead House were published in the periodical
Russkii mir (Russian World) beginning on September 1, 1860 and ending in January 25, 1861. The novel
was then published serially in its entirety in the journal Vremia from April 19, 1861 to December 7, 1862.
Dostoevsky submitted “Petersburg Visions,” a mock-feuilleton, to the censors in December of 1860, just
three months after Dead House started to appear in print. The final version did not appear until March of
1861, in the first issue of Vremia. “The Exhibition at the Academy of the Arts” was published in the
October 27, 1861 issue of Vremia (PSS 19:1-22). See commentary to “Peterburgskie snovidenie v
stikhakh i proze” in Stat’i i zametki (PSS 19:262-263). See commentary to “Vystavka v akademii
khudozhestv za 1860-61 god” in Stat’i i zametki, (PSS 19:314).
60
Chulkov points out that the peasant question—as evidenced in but not limited to both the Exhibition
Article and Dead House—was a central focus of Vremia from the time of the journal’s inception. Grigorii
Chulkov, Kak rabotal Dostoevskii (Moskva: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1939), 76. Ellen Chances notes that the
Dostoevsky brothers’ journal Vremia (1861-63), in which the three works discussed in this and the
previous chapter (the art criticism, the mock-feuilleton and Dead House) appeared, served as a podium
for rethinking the intelligentsia’s relationship to the peasantry through the philosophy of pochvenichistvo.
She writes, “It was on the pages of Vremia and Epokha (Epoch), which superseded Vremia after the
censors closed Vremia in 1863, that the Dostoevskys, with Nikolai Strakhov and Apollon Grigor’ev, set
forth the ideology of pochvennichestvo, or ‘concept of the soil.’ According to the ‘pochvenniki,’ Russia’s
problems stemmed from the isolation of the intelligentsia from the simple people, their isolation from the
Russian soil.” See Ellen Chances, “Literary Criticism and the Ideology of Pochvennichestvo in
Dostoevsky’s Thick Journals Vremia and Epokha” in Russian Review 34.2 (1975), 151-64. For an
introduction to the general political and economic background of Vremia, see Vera Nechaeva’s Zhurnal

48
develop modes of representing aspects of reality, such as peasants and convicts, that had

previously been neither literary nor artistic subjects.61 Both works materialized during a time in

which the recognition of peasants as free men required a radical reimagining of their personhood.

One of the conclusions Dostoevsky–or at least Gorianchikov–draws in Dead House is that he is

not one of them and can’t really be their friend.62 The best he can hope for is to gain their

respect. In his review of Yakobi’s painting, Dostoevsky disapproves of its reductive

representation of the peasantry.63 He argues that the painting not only fails to inspire empathy in

the viewer, but it also reinforces upper-class stereotypes of the moral bankruptcy of peasant-

convicts and thus further isolates the viewer from the peasantry. Yakobi shows the peasant-

convicts as “scoundrels” nothing more, whereas Gorianchikov without attempting to penetrate

M. M. i F. M. Dostoevskikh “Vremia” 1861-1863, (Moscow: Nauka, 1972). Vremia was founded by

Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail and began publication in January of 1861. For more on the history of
the journal and its reception, see Sarah Hudspith, “Dostoevsky’s Journalism in the 1860s” in Dostoevsky
in Context, eds. Deborah Martinsen and Olga Maiorova (Cambridge UP, 2015), 280-87.
61
Dostoevsky had plenty of opportunity to empathize with the peasantry. He had returned in 1858 from a
nine-year exile in Siberia three years prior to viewing Yakobi’s painting and writing the critique.
62
Gorianchikov the narrator ought not to be confused with Dostoevsky the writer. Dostoevsky creates a
true artist in the narrator Gorianchikov who reports empirical observations empathetically.
63
The vast majority of the prisoners depicted in the novel are peasants. Dostoevsky is not irked by
Yakobi’s depiction of prisoners at large, but of his unfavorable depiction of Russian peasant-convicts.
The question of Dostoevsky’s attitude to the peasantry is vexed. Dostoevsky scholars are fond of quoting
his letters to his brother in which he disparaged the peasants. Some suggest that only later, in the 1870s,
did he come to the more sympathetic views expressed, for example, in “Muzhik Marey.” For more on
Dostoevsky’s biases in his depiction of prisoners in Dead House, including his paternalism towards the
main Muslim character Alei and his emphasis on “the alterity of non-Russians” in Dead House, see
Elizabeth Blake’s article “Portraits of the Siberian Dostoevsky by Poles in the House of the Dead” in
Dostoevsky Studies, New Series, Vol. X (2006), 56-71. Alternatively, Gary Rosenshield argues that while
the Jewish Isai Fomich Bumshtein is portrayed farcically when compared to the psychological seriousness
with which the Russian peasants are treated, the Muslim Alei is depicted as Dostoevsky’s Christian ideal.
See Gary Rosenshield, “Religious Portraiture in Dostoevsky’s ‘Notes from the House of the Dead’:
Representing the Abrahamic Faiths” in The Slavic and East European Journal 50.4 (2006), 581-606.

49
their psyches, presents them as scoundrels, but distinguishes them from each other and shows

them to be complex, sentient and suffering individuals.64

Dostoevsky adapts the literary genre of “notes” as his artistic medium for humanizing the

peasantry. The chronological progression of the final novel does not reflect Gorianchikov’s

original, jumbled notes. Instead, the original manuscript, like the physiological sketches of the

Natural School, are not strictly bound by an overarching narrative, but are rather a collection of

juxtaposed verbal images. The editor, in his introduction to the novel, points out the lack of

narrative continuity in the notes, commenting that, “It was a disconnected (bessviaznoe)

description of the ten years spent by Alexandr Petrovich in penal servitude”65 (Garnett 11; PSS

4:7). The editor borrows the title The Notes from the Dead House from Gorianchikov, but with

one important difference. He keeps the second half of Gorianchikov’s title, “From the Dead

House,” but inserts the word “Notes” in place of Gorianchikov’s descriptor, “Scenes.”

Gorianchikov calls the content of his writing “Stseny iz mertvogo doma,” or “Scenes from the

Dead House”66 (Garnett 11; PSS 4:7). The precise nature of these “scenes” is elusive because

64
Dostoevsky sees “the face of a scoundrel (negodiai)” in each of Yakobi’s peasant-convicts who “are all
the same (odinakie)” (PSS 19:155).
65
Throughout the Chapter I quote Garnett’s translation, providing page numbers from her translation,
followed by those from Dostoevsky’s PSS. Occasionally, I translate phrases or the passage in whole to
bring it closer to the Russian. Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead and Poor Folk, trans. by
Constance Garnett, (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004). John Jones calls the arrangement of the
notes as “the art of the remiss, of provisional assessment, gossip, idle conjecture, contradiction,
uncertainty above all.” John Jones, Dostoevsky, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 158. Dale Peterson argues
that this loose arrangement of the notes contributes to Dostoevsky’s “aesthetics of disorder” in the novel.
Dale E. Peterson, Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul (Durham:
Duke UP, 2000), 8.
66
Gorianchikov’s aesthetics align with Dostoevsky’s and, in this sense, he is a rather transparent mask for
Dostoevsky. Joseph Frank argues that Dostoevsky was at least partially motivated to create the persona of
Gorianchikov in order to deter censors. See Joseph Frank, The Years of Ordeal: 1850-1859, (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton UP, 1983), 218-219. There are, however, many important differences between the
character of Gorianchikov and Dostoevsky’s biography, such as the salient fact that Dostoevsky was not
imprisoned for the murder of his wife; nor, obviously did he die immediately after his release from prison.

50
there are no visual images in the notes themselves; this is simply how Gorianchikov defines his

writing, which describes various visual art forms, including pictures, staged plays, photographs,

impressionistic and realist paintings.67 The notes, then, are intended to induce a decidedly visual

experience in the reader’s imagination. Robin Feuer Miller has written that Dead House “affects

us in a way approximating a work of visual art.”68

The “notes” are impressionistic as opposed to strictly documentary or photographic in

nature. For ten years, Gorianchikov was not able to process his visual impressions verbally. He

was forbidden to write or to own books in prison until the end of his sentence, at which point he

had earned certain privileges, including access to books and writing materials.69 Thus, he writes

the notes primarily after he is released. The “scenes” are not real-time, verbal snapshots of

unfolding events during or even close to the time of their occurrence, but recollections of his

lived prison experience. They are the product of years of visual data that are finally verbalized,

with the paradoxical clarity and distortion that hindsight brings to past experiences.

Gorianchikov’s initial impressions of the first month stand out in greater detail than the later

67
The precise nature of the genre of this novel has received much critical attention. Joseph Frank, in his
chapter on Dead House, initially defines it as a hybrid of “unadorned memoir” and “fictional construct,”
and later in as a tripartite of “sketch form,” “personal memoir,” and “a documentary novel about
collectivity” (The Years of Ordeal 222). Chirkov defines the novel as “an artistic memoir,” which he
considers an important phase in the development of Dostoevsky’s realism. See N. M. Chirkov, O stile
Dostoevskogo; problematika, idei, obrazy (Moskva: Nauka, 1967), 16. Viktor Shklovskii calls the work
“a documentary novel” in Za i protiv and “a new, original, artistic union of the novel” in Povesti o proze.
Viktor Shkovskii, Za i protiv: Zametki o Dostoevskom (Moskva: Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1957), 64-84; Viktor
Shklovskii, Povesti o proze. (Moskva: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1966), 2:214.
68
Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky’s Unfinished Journey (New Haven: Yale UP, 2007) 22. Robert Jackson
describes the visual impact of the notes as “a series of gigantic frescoes of human experience and destiny”
(Quest for Form, 217).
69
Gorianchikov writes that in the last year, he was “able to have more money, to write home and could
even have books” (my translation; PSS 4:232). He explains that books and outside supplies were
considered a threat to prison security because it meant that one had acquaintances in town who could
arrange for special treatment and or help prisoners to escape.

51
memories, which blend into general impressions. He writes about this blending of the later

images as follows: “The first month and the beginning of my prison life in general appear vividly

to my imagination now. My subsequent prison years flicker much more dimly in my

imagination. Some seem to have faded (stushevalis’) and flowed into each other, leaving one

whole impression: oppressive, homogenous, suffocating” (My translation; PSS 4:9).

Gorianchikov’s observation corresponds to the truth of cognition, specifically the function of

human memory, which dictates that we remember what comes last best, then what came first,

and finally everything in the middle is murkiest.70 The word that I have translated as

“homogenous” here is odnoobraznoe, literally, “single-imaged,” which is to say that the

collection of images have melted into a “single-imaged” impression, a kind of imaginary

painting of images that are organized by various overarching, yet changing, subjective moods.

Gorianchikov Retains the External Perspective of a Visual Realist Relative to His

Characters While Retaining Empathy for Them

Gorianchikov retains the externality of a photo-journalist’s perspective in his depictions

of the prisoners, yet this externality differs from that of a photographer or a realist painter such as

Yakobi. Both Gorianchikov and Yakobi remain outside of the psyches of their characters, but

Gorianchikov differs from Yakobi insofar as he hints at the depth of the prisoners’ inner-worlds

from the outside. He suggests that they have complex thoughts, but he neither explicates them

nor pretends to know what those thoughts are.

Gorianchikov displays an empathetic objectivity in his depictions of the convicts, as

when he describes an old man who was being released after serving a near life-sentence. He

writes that the old man’s face was “sad and somber” and contrasts it to the stories that he hears

70
This phenomenon is known in modern psychology as the serial position effect, which includes the
primacy effect and recency effect that refer to the enhanced memory of the first and last elements of a
series. See Andrew M. Colman, A Dictionary of Psychology. 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015).

52
from other elderly prisoners about the departing prisoner’s youthful and enthusiastic countenance

when he arrived. Gorianchikov gestures at the inner transformation as written on the face of this

prisoner, but he does not explain how this transformation happened, neither does he provide the

reader with the elderly prisoner’s thoughts. Instead, the reader is left to imagine the years that

have transpired in prison to cause this profound change. The vast amount of time elapsed

between these two faces, young and old, offers potential for the reader to empathize with the

released criminal not only by recreating his prison years in thought, but by drawing on personal

memories in order to do so. He feels sadness when he imagines the prisoner’s sadness.

Gorianchikov describes the face of a second prisoner in a way that motions to the man’s

interiority while retaining his external perspective. He recalls the incident as follows:

I remember how a prisoner who had been a well-to-do peasant (muzhik) in Siberia was
one evening summoned to the gate. Six months before, he had heard that his former wife
had married again, and he was terribly downcast about it. Now she herself had come to
the prison, asked for him, and given him alms. They talked for a couple of minutes, both
shed tears and parted for ever. I saw his face when he returned to the barracks…. Yes, in
that place one might learn to be patient. (Garnett 13; PSS 4:10)

In this instance, Gorianchikov reports the general appearance of the prisoner’s face within the

context of a few pertinent historical details regarding his encounter with his former wife.

Gorianchikov neither disregards the prisoner as unthinking nor does he offer an account of the

man’s inner monologue, but instead he leaves an ellipsis followed by the hyperbolic suggestion

that it was “possible” to learn patience as a prisoner. By commenting on the elderly prisoner’s

appearance while omitting the specific content of the prisoner’s inner monologue or even the

prisoner’s dialogue with his wife, Gorianchikov allows readers to access their own personal

memories in order to lend content to the prisoner’s experience. The ellipsis cues the reader to co-

create the prisoner’s interiority in the imaginative act of reading. Gorianchikov remains external

to the prisoner’s thoughts, but unlike Yakobi, he manages to create an awareness of his

53
interiority. The reader’s experience of the prisoner’s subjectivity contrasts with the indifference

that Dostoevsky sees when looking at the faces of Yakobi’s prisoners. Gorianchikov’s use of

external perspective combines the clarity of a removed perspective with empathy.

Contrary to the photographic realism that Dostoevsky disdains in Prisoners’ Halt,

Gorianchikov’s realism does not reduce the prisoners to their external appearances.

Gorianchikov reports what he sees as well as what he does not see and rounds out empirical facts

with humanizing guesswork about the invisible interiority of the hearts and minds of the

prisoners. For example, he recalls that he never witnessed an outward display of repentance

during his time in prison, but he does not conclude from this that the prisoners were inwardly

unrepentant:

I have said that in the course of several years I never saw one sign of repentance among
these people, not a trace of despondent brooding over their crime, and that the majority of
them inwardly considered themselves absolutely in the right. This is a fact. No doubt
vanity, bad example, boasting, false shame are responsible for a great deal of this. On the
other side, who can say that he has sounded the depths of these lost hearts, and has read
what is hidden from all the world in them? (Garnett 19; PSS 4:15)

Gorianchikov renders the prisoners as layered personalities viewed from a place of introspection.

He does not jump to conclusions from the absence of outward repentance in the other convicts,

but once more draws attention to their unsounded depths and the portions of their hearts that are

permanently hidden not only from Gorianchikov and his readers, but from “all the world.”

The interiority of most of the characters in the novel, including Gorianchikov’s, remains

hidden from view. We know from the fictional editor of The Dead House that Gorianchikov

committed a crime of passion, for example. While the reader is never told explicitly that

Gorianchikov feels repentant for his past crime, the editor informs us that Gorianchikov

commissions a memorial service on St. Katherine’s Day once he is released. Dostoevsky

reinforces the connection to St. Katherine by having Gorianchikov befriend and admire his

54
landlady’s young granddaughter, Katya. And although there is no overt mention of

Gorianchikov’s wife being called Ekaterina, the reader is left to put two and two together. True

to the poetics that govern Dostoevsky’s depiction of peasant-characters in the novel, here, with

the condemned wife-murderer Gorianchikov, we are left to guess.71 The reader can conclude

from this information that the memorial gesture is for his wife, but neither the editor nor

Gorianchikov in his notes speaks to his feelings of repentance. Instead, Gorianchikov leaves

room for the reader to judge for himself while simultaneously cautioning against judgment.

Gorianchikov lives out his sentence with the knowledge of this sin weighing on his conscience,

yet Gorianchikov knows that he too appears unrepentant to the other prisoners.72 He, along with

every other prisoner, follows the unwritten rule that no prisoner must speak of his former life as a

free person, especially on the topic of his purported crime. Perhaps Gorianchikov allows for this

disparity between the inner life and the outward behavior in the other prisoners because he is

acutely aware of the disparity between what he holds in his heart and what he reveals to others

on the subject of his crime. Regardless of Gorianchikov’s personal repentance, he does not

presume to know what is in the prisoners’ hearts.

71
Liza Knapp suggests one compassionate way of piecing together the related facts of Gorianchikov’s
past, his memorial on St. Katherine’s Day and his relationship to the young Katya as follows, “Also
possibly relevant in Gorianchikov’s case is the pure love that develops between him and Katya, the young
granddaughter of the landlady: the circumstances suggest that whereas he once loved his wife Ekaterina
with a murderous jealous passion, the love he now feels for her namesake is pure” (Footnote 20, p. 329).
Taken from Liza Knapp’s article on Dostoevsky’s elliptical realism, “Dostoevsky’s Ellipses and
Dostoevsky’s Realism in The Dead House,” in “A Convenient Territory”: Russian Literature at the Edge
of Modernity. Essays in Honor of Barry Scherr, ed. Michael Wachtel and John M. Kopper, (Bloomington:
Slavica, 2015), 319-36.
72
Gorianchikov may not disclose his past in the edited notes, but there is the possibility that the excised
sections that the editor refers to as the product of “madness,” might have had to do with his guilt over his
wife. See Ruttenburg’s book Dostoevsky’s Democracy (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008), 70–90. For more
on the significance of Gorianchikov’s murder of his wife to the work as a whole, see “The Narrator in
House of the Dead” and “The Nethermost Pit and the Outer Darkness: ‘Akulka’s Husband: A Story’” in
Jackson’s The Art of Dostoevsky, 33–114. See also Karla Oeler’s “The Dead Wives in the Dead House:
Narrative Inconsistency and Genre Confusion in Dostoevskii’s Autobiographical Prison Novel” in Slavic
Review 61.3 (2002), 519-34.

55
 Dostoevsky keeps portions of Gorianchikov’s heart as well as his past hidden from the

reader. Despite having his private notes, we are not given Gorianchikov’s inner world to read

like an open book,. Whereas Yakobi, according to Dostoevsky, tried to hide his personality by

imitating a camera lens, Dostoevsky consistently makes the reader conscious of the perspective

of the artist-persona, Gorianchikov, behind the notes. Like Yakobi, Gorianchikov is a nobleman

who sought to depict a largely unexplored segment of the population with whom he had little to

no interaction. In the words of the novel’s fictional editor, the former prisoner Aleksandr

Petrovich Gorianchikov was “a man who had been a gentleman and landowner born in Russia,

had afterwards become a convict in the second division for the murder of his wife, and on the

expiration of his ten years’ sentence was spending the rest of his life humbly and quietly as a

settler in the town” (Garnett 8; PSS 4:6). From the outset, we learn that Gorianchikov is a

murderer, and one of Dostoevsky’s greatest artistic feats in the novel is his humanization of

Gorianchikov. The reader experiences Gorianchikov as such a kind presence that we often forget

he has committed an awful crime. Gorianchikov extends the favor bestowed on him to the

prisoners by endeavoring to humanize them in turn.

Gorianchikov distrusts the prisoners’ learned behaviors and considers their external

appearances deceptive even though he limits his factual account to empirical observation. He

writes, “One has but to take off the outer superimposed husk and to look at the kernel more

closely, more attentively and without prejudice, and some of us will see things in the people that

we should never have expected. There is not much our wise men could teach them. On the

contrary, I think it is the wise men who ought to learn from the people” (Garnett 156; PSS 4:121-

22). Gorianchikov sees the prisoner’s husk as a construct and his outward behavior as a

performance. He does not assume to know what lies beneath, but looks closer. His husk-kernel

56
metaphor recalls the metaphor in the biblical book of Proverbs: “A word fitly spoken is like

apples of gold in pictures of silver” (Proverbs 25:11). As Maimonides interprets this proverb in

his Guide to the Perplexed, the parables are like apples of gold that are overlaid with silver

filigree work having very small holes. At a distance, one sees a silver apple, the outward image

of the gold apple beneath, but a closer look allows one to glimpse gold beneath the fine mesh

silver exterior. Similarly, Gorianchikov does not vulgarize the peasants by equating them with

their appearances at a distance, as a realist painter would.73 His description renders the peasant-

convicts not with a camera lens, but rather with the “fitly spoken” words that create an image of

them as layered subjects with deceptively simple exteriors. In his notes, Gorianchikov bears the

marks of Dostoevsky’s “true artist,” one who renders his subjects not simply with vision, but

also with insight.

Gorianchikov is a Dreamer

Like the self-declared “dreamer” who narrates Petersburg Visions, Gorianchikov is prone

to fantasy and counts himself among the less sociable of the prisoners. He writes about a

relatively private space where the dreamers take walks. It is where the more brooding prisoners,

Gorianchikov among them, go to think in private: “Here, behind the buildings, those of more

unsociable and gloomy disposition like to pace in their recreational time, hidden from all eyes,

and fall to thinking” (my translation; PSS 4:9). The other prisoners walk in plain sight of the

main courtyard as they engage in conversation. The introverted prisoners, however, go to a place

where they cannot be seen and walk as they converse with themselves. Robert Russell writes that

Dostoevsky’s depictions of space “are all on the one hand ‘real’ in that their representation is

73
This is true even in the case of the more overtly unrepentant criminals such as Petrov, whom
Gorianchikov describes as exceptionally violent and yet Gorianchikov was convinced that at some level,
Petrov “loved [him]” (my translation; PSS 4:86; 97).

57
mimetic, and on the other hand they are psychological constructs, spatial analogues of the

characters’ minds.”74 The place for dreamers is uncommon for being both spacious and hidden

from public view, a fitting spatial analogue for the relative freedoms available to the dreamer-

prisoners in the realm of their imagination. The editor informs us that Gorianchikov continues to

stroll alone once he is released. He reports from his conversation with Gorianchikov’s landlady

that, “According to her, [Gorianchikov] almost did nothing and for months on end neither

opened a book, nor picked up the pen; but for entire nights would walk back and forth around his

room thinking whatever and sometimes even talking to himself” (my translation; PSS 4:9). The

pacing in his room reenacts his dreamer’s pacing, perhaps by force of habit or perhaps to help

recreate the original conditions in which the notes were conceived. But while the dreamer’s area

in the prison was expansive relative to the claustrophobic norm, his dreamer’s area outside of

prison is confined relative to the open spaces available to him as a free man. Even after his

release, Gorianchikov walks in the tight quarters of his rented room, a spatial analogue of the

extended psychological confinement of prison.75

In prison, Gorianchikov confesses to frequently encountering other prison dreamers and

wondering about what they were thinking: “Meeting them during these little strolls, I liked to

peer into their gloomy, branded faces and to guess what they were thinking about” (my

translation; PSS 4:9). The verb translated here as “to peer into” (vsmatrivat’sia) combines the

74
See Robert Russell, “The Modernist Tradition” in The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian
Novel, ed. Malcolm V. Jones and Robin Feuer Miller, (New York: Cambridge UP, 1998), 214.
75
Robert Jackson points out that the prison occupies Gorianchikov’s mind until his death, which comes
shortly after his release. He writes, “[Gorianchikov] gains freedom only to die a short while later a lonely
and broken man. This tragic denouement is of course the direct consequence of the power of the dead
house” (The Art of Dostoevsky 36). Karla Oeler sees the continuation of Gorianchikov’s imprisonment
after his release as the result of the “patriarchal discourse that he so meticulously records," in her article,
“The Dead Wives in the Dead House: Narrative Inconsistency and Genre Confusion in Dostoevskii’s
Autobiographical Prison Novel” in Slavic Review 61.3 (2002), 519-34.

58
prefix v-, meaning “in” or “into,” with the root -smotr-, or “look.” This verb is especially fitting

for Gorianchikov’s peculiar vision throughout his notes since it contains the reflexive ending sia,

which connotes the reflexive sense of “looking into oneself.”76 During these prison strolls,

Gorianchikov looks into the faces of the other gloomy prisoners and imagines what they are

thinking by delving into his own thoughts. He wonders about other prisoners’ thoughts but he

rarely pretends to know them in his writing: he instead reports on their facial expressions. Unlike

Dostoevsky’s characters of his immediately subsequent fiction whose interiority is often

rendered explicit, in Dead House, Gorianchikov only wonders about his fellow prisoners’

interiority.77 He allows himself to imagine only the fundamentally unknowable minds of the

other dreamers by delving into his own “gloomy disposition” as a dreamer.

While Gorianchikov identifies with the dreamers, he distinguishes himself from the

extreme dreamers who carry their dreaming to the point of madness. For example, there is one

character in the prison hospital whom he calls sumasshedshii or a “madman” (Garnett 209; PSS

4:160). The prisoner initially shows no obvious outward indications of madness. Only when he

76
On the topic of vision in the novel, Jackson describes Gorianchikov’s (and Dostoevsky’s) vision not as
a literal form of vision, but rather as the hard-won knowledge after a Dante-esque journey through the
underworld of the prison that allows him to experience the peasant-convicts as fellow human beings.
Carol Apollonio emphasizes vision in the novel as an operation of grace whereby “Prisoner and reader
alike open themselves to revelation,” especially in communal scenes such as the theater scene discussed
in the second half of this chapter (357). For more on vision in the novel see Jackson’s The Art of
Dostoevsky (especially Chapter 2) and Carol Apollonio’s “Notes From the Dead House: An Exercise in
Spatial Reading, or Three Crowd Scenes,” Rossiiskii Gumanitarnyi Zhurnal 3.5 (2014), 354-68. My
concept of vision in the novel aligns with Jackson’s, but I am also interested in this section in how literal
forms of vision shape the content of the notes. I interpret Gorianchikov’s vision as a product of
Dostoevsky’s hybrid realism that allows for an empathetic experience of the depicted character’s
subjectivity while retaining exteriority. I discuss the overlaps between literal and metaphorical vision in
the preceding Chapter 1. See the section entitled “Dostoevsky Learns to See in ‘Petersburg Visions in
Verse and Prose.”
77
I have in mind here characters such as the underground man in Notes From Underground (1864) and
Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment (1866). However, early in his writing career, Dostoevsky also
writes directly about the thoughts of certain characters such as Devushkin in Poor Folk (1846) and
Goliadkin in The Double (1846).

59
starts telling a story about how he will be rescued from his impending punishment does

Gorianchikov realize that the prisoner is delusional. The story quickly descends into the realm of

unbelievable fantasy, since Gorianchikov discovers that the prisoner bases his entire rescue story

on a single, momentary look that he had exchanged with a woman at the prison hospital entrance.

The madman uses this meeting of eyes as evidence both of her love for him and of her

consequent desire to save him. He then proceeds to tell Gorianchikov that she will use her

connections in town to set him free. This reveals a dreamer of an extreme kind who has become

detached from reality. Even as Gorianchikov calls the madman’s story “the creation of a poor,

sick brain” (Garnett 209; PSS 4:160), he cultivates empathy for the prisoner who has been driven

to the point of madness because of the inhumane horrors of corporal punishment. The madman’s

story is factually untrue, but Gorianchikov retells it in such a way as to reveal both the madman’s

inner state as well as the dark truth of how fear of punishment utterly distorts his mind

Gorianchikov is a dreamer, but he, like the feuilleton writer of Petersburg Visions, can still

distinguish between the empirical world and the fictions that we use to understand them, between

the city of St. Petersburg and the imagined city of smoke above it.

Dostoevsky Models Gorianchikov’s Authority after Benevolent Authorities Who Are

Contrasted with Cruel Authorities in his Fictional Prison

Gorianchikov critiques the cruelty of certain authorities in prison and contrasts them with

benevolent authority figures who care for the prisoners and empathize with them. For example,

he contrasts a cruel prison major with a sensible warden, and a “good doctor” in the prison ward

both with doctors who are “wolves” that take advantage of the peasant patients and with

indifferent doctors who care nothing for them. Even the prison executioners (palachi) have

contrasting ways of meting out punishments: the abused prisoners speak fondly of the

60
sympathetic and respected Smekalov because he does not consider himself above them, but they

despise and fear the “monster” Zherebiatnikov, who revels sadistically in their physical and

psychological tortures. Gorianchikov’s critique of authority sheds light on his own authorship.

When he writes about the prison as a whole, he imitates the sensible warden. When he writes

about the prison hospital, he mimics the merciful doctors. When he writes about the

executioner’s hall, he assumes the relatively sympathetic perspective of Smekalov, who wins the

respect of the prisoners because he never looks down on them despite his obvious authority over

them at the time of punishment.78 Dostoevsky lurks behind Gorianchikov’s critiques of prison

authorities, as if contrasting their authority with that of his own humanizing narrator.

Gorianchikov governs his fictional universe in sharp contrast to how “the major” runs the

prison. The feared major is a parody of the third-person omniscient narrator who watches the

prisoners’ every move. His omnipotence is invasive. Gorianchikov writes:

This major was a fateful being for the prisoners; he had reduced them to trembling before
him. He was insanely severe, “flew at people,” as the convicts said. What they feared
most in him was his penetrating lynx-like eyes, from which nothing could be concealed.
He seemed to see without looking. As soon as he came into the prison he knew what was
being done at the furthest end of it. The prisoners used to call him “eight eyes.” His
system was mistaken. (Garnett 18; PSS 4:14)

Like a third-person narrator with pretensions to omniscience, the major has more eyes than is

humanly possible and, for Gorianchikov, his “system” is flawed. The major lacks respect for the

78
Carol Apollonio makes note of the authorities along similar lines, and while she does not interpret them
as models for Gorianchikov as author, she argues that in Dead House, “As everywhere in Dostoevsky’s
work, these mundane identities are masks for greater, invisible and morally loaded forces beyond. The
convicts are all confined in prison because they are guilty (or judged guilty) of a sin. If our world, too, is a
prison, then we, too are guilty – although in our case we can call our guilt original sin. In Dostoevsky’s
world-view, redemption comes only to those who have sinned. And if in the dead house the major
brutally flogs the prisoners with sadistic pleasure, so, too, do free people suffer helplessly at the hands of
a ruthless God, the deity that Ivan Karamazov, righteous, blind man that he is, accuses of injustice"
(Apollonio, “An Exercise in Spatial Reading,” 358). For Apollonio, such “mundane authorities” also
include those who shape the society into which the peasants are being integrated during the peasant
emancipation (359).

61
prisoners’ privacy, and the prisoners fear the idea that he sees everything more than they fear his

violent punishments and explosive outbursts. The prisoners actively protect what meager privacy

they do have, and yet this major threatens to take this from them. Gorianchikov critiques the

major’s rule as exceedingly cruel because his “system” forcibly exposes their intentionally

hidden thoughts.79 Neither the major, nor anyone for that matter, can “see without looking.” This

is the myth that the major cultivates by instilling irrational fear in the prisoners. But

Gorianchikov (who voices Dostoevsky’s views on prison reform) points out that a system that is

based on repression through either fear or inhumane treatment (such as solitary confinement) is

unsustainable and will lead to rebellion.80

As an author, Dostoevsky governs his fictional prison-world by limiting his observations

of the prisoners to what his narrator Gorianchikov can observe empirically. Dostoevsky gives the

prisoner-subjects in his fiction room to breathe, like the sensible warden who oversees the prison

operations and supervises the major’s activities. In the novel, Gorianchikov argues that if it were

not for the presence of a kinder, more sensible governor above the cruel major in the prison’s

chain of command, then the major’s tyranny would have led to “great trouble” (Garnett 18; PSS

79
The British jurist and philosopher, and inventor of the panopticon, Jeremy Bentham, influenced the
nineteenth-century prison reform movement that advocated for correctional punishment in the West and
eventually in Russia. Anna Schur discusses this issue in connection with Dostoevsky’s beliefs about
punishment in Wages of Evil: Dostoevsky and Punishment (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2012).
Bentham’s proposed system for prison management never materialized, but it aligns with the system of
“eight eyes.” His proposal: “If it were possible to find a master of everything which might happen to a
certain number of men, to dispose of everything around them, so as to produce on them the desired
impression to make certain of their actions, of their connections and of all the circumstances of their lives,
so that nothing could escape nor oppose the desired effect, it cannot be doubted that a method of this kind
would be a very powerful and a very useful instrument which governments might apply to various objects
of the utmost importance.” Quoted from Schur’s Wages of Evil, 117. For more on Bentham’s influence on
Russian prisons and his reception into Russian philosophy, see Ian R. Christie, The Benthams in Russia:
1780-1791 (Oxford: Berg, 1993).
80
See Schur’s Chapter 2, “Squaring the Circle; The Justice of Punishment” for Dostoevsky’s response to
Beccaria and other theorists on prison reform who advocated solitary confinement and opposed
communal living in prison (Schur 1993, 38-61).

62
4:14). This is the same governor who both allows the prisoners to put on the annual prison play

and understands the importance of permitting the prisoners the limited freedoms that they do

have. “Eight-eyes” aspires to omniscience, but Dostoevsky does not. Instead, he retains

consciousness of the limits of vision and writes The Dead House in the character of the first-

person narrator Gorianchkov. Like the sensible governor, Gorianchikov does not overstep his

authority by lording over the characters in his notes with any pretense to special knowledge

about their inner worlds. Instead, he allows his fictional prison-subjects their autonomous

privacy. Gorianchikov’s “system” for ruling his fictional prison is sensibly grounded in respect

for the prisoners as individuals and not as lesser beings under a tyrannical rule.

In the prison hospital, the doctors are the authorities. One has the sense that Gorianchikov

questions not simply how the doctors ought to treat prisoners in the prison-hospital, but also

subconsciously questions what he might glean from them in order to treat his prisoners more

compassionately as an author.81 The doctor-peasant relationship is especially relevant to the

nobleman Gorianchikov because peasants are inherently skeptical of doctors insofar as “they will

be treated by ‘the gentry,’ for doctors are after all ‘gentlemen’” (Garnett 185; PSS 4:150). It is no

small feat for the doctors to overcome the peasants’ skepticism and win their trust. The doctors

who are “wolves” withhold the medicine and supplies that the government provides for the

convicts and then turn around to sell them for profit on the sly. The beneficent doctor in the

prison hospital cares for the sick patients not only medically, but also by comforting them and

mercifully allowing them to stay for longer than initially warranted. He has compassion for his

sick patients. Gorianchikov writes about the healing capacity of the good doctor’s humane

81
James Rice calls the prison-hospital “an artistic paradigm of institutional confinement and the clinical
experience.” Gorianchikov, along with the paternal doctor, brings warmth to the otherwise clinical
atmosphere. See James L. Rice, Dostoevsky and the Healing Art: An Essay in Literary and Medical
History (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985), 66.

63
treatment of the prisoners: “Humanity, kindness, brotherly sympathy are sometimes of more use

to patients than any medicine” (Garnett 186; PSS 4:151). The same could be said of

Gorianchikov’s authorship of the patients from within the prison hospital as seen in the case of

the “madman” who fabricates an elaborate escape story.82 Like the good doctor, Gorianchikov

tends neither to coldly report the prisoner-patients’ illnesses, nor to condescendingly judge their

attempts to fool the doctors in order to prolong their stay in the prison hospital. Instead, he finds

a way to treat the sick patients in his writing with a “brotherly sympathy” and sooner justifies

their seemingly questionable or odd behavior than condemns it. His patient-subjects in the novel

benefit from Gorianchikov’s humane treatment insofar as they are rendered as robust,

multifaceted characters. As an artist, Gorianchikov treats the ill patients not as busted carts that

require a good mechanic, but rather as well-rounded, whole and sympathetic persons who need a

human touch.

Gorianchikov’s empathetic authorship differs from a third type of medical treatment in

the prison-hospital, that exhibited by the medical assistant who confirms the death of the prisoner

Mikhailov. The deceased prisoner is completely naked, yet retains his shackles.83 Gorianchikov

notes, “[The medical assistant] (fel’dsher) [...] went up to the dead man with rapid steps that

sounded noisy in the silent ward, and with a particularly unconcerned air, which he seemed to
82
See previous section in this chapter: Gorianchikov is a Dreamer .
83
Dostoevsky spent four and a half years in leg irons, like those of Yakobi’s shackled prisoner, in a
Siberian stockade from 1849-1853. In a letter to his brother, from February 22, 1854, Dostoevsky recalls
vividly the moment that he put on shackles: “At exactly 12 o’clock, i.e., exactly as it became Christmas
Day, I put on shackles for the first time. They weighed about ten pounds and were extremely
uncomfortable to walk in” (my translation; PSS 28.I:173). February 22, 1854. In Notes From the Dead,
the narrator describes the moment of being literally freed from his shackles as the beginning of “new life”
(my translation; PSS 4: 232). The shackles were dehumanizing for Dostoevsky. In Dead House, his semi-
autobiographical narrator, Gorianchikov, argues that the use of shackles can be justified neither as a form
of physical punishment nor as a restraint, but only as a means to demoralize the prisoners. Gorianchikov
defines fetters as “simply a form of degradation, a disgrace, and a physical and moral burden” (Garnett
182; PSS 4:147). The fetters are emblematic of the accepted practice of treating the prisoners as less than
human.

64
have assumed for the occasion, took his wrist, felt his pulse and went away with a wave of his

hand” (Garnett 183; PSS 4:148). In a manner that recalls Yakobi’s indifferent officer who

confirms the political prisoner’s death (see Chapter 1), the medical assistant appears unmoved by

the prisoner’s death and treats him as an object. In his feverish delerium, Mikhailov had removed

all of his clothing in order to cool himself down. Even the small cross around his neck was too

much to bear, and yet he was not permitted to remove his shackles. The medical assistant

remains unmoved by the sight of Mikhailov’s naked, emaciated, shackled corpse. The prisoners

and the sergeant on duty, by contrast, are moved to pity. They close his eyelids and the sergeant

on duty removes his weapons, kneels and crosses himself before Mikhailov. For these characters,

Mikhalov is a person and not an object. Gorianchikov reports his death both with the common

decency of his fellow prisoner-patients and the generosity of the sergeant who forsakes his

authority for a moment and shows his respect by removing his weapons and kneeling before the

deceased.

Gorianchikov Describes a “Strange Picture” From Multiple Perspectives

Gorianchikov’s depiction of the peasant-convicts who gather to see the annual prison

play offers another striking contrast between his and Yakobi’s realist styles. Gorianchikov paints

a picture of the temporary prison theater house scene before the eagerly anticipated Christmas

Eve play: “Until the curtain was raised, the whole room represented a strange and animated

picture (predstavliala strannuiu i ozhivlennuiu kartinku)” (Garnett 157; PSS 4:122).

Gorianchikov describes the picture (kartinka) as “ozhivlennaia,” deriving from the root zhizn’. It

means not just “animated” but even “boisterous” and “lively,” adjectives that denotes motion,

sound and activity. The picture is “strange” for several reasons: it incorporates motion, sound

65
and various time frames, which are considered from all possible perspectives within the theater.

It also contains a realist painting that is painted onto a handmade stage curtain.

An important component of the “strange picture,” the stage curtain is the centerpiece of

the prison theater. The prison artists painted a pastoral lakeside setting with a covered wooden

porch that pertains to one of the upcoming plays involving “country gentlemen.” Prisoners in the

audience, especially Gorianchikov, are impressed with the craftsmanship of the curtain making

as well as with the quality of the art painted onto it. The curtain elevates the impromptu prison

theater to the level of an authentic theater house in their estimation and adds an air of luxury to

the holiday. The painting is not a backdrop; it disappears from view as soon as the curtain is

lifted. It stands rather as an image of the mental escape afforded by the play to come.

Gorianchikov acknowledges the importance of the theater as an escape from prison monotony,

but it is clear that the theater is much more than entertainment both for him and for his fellow

inmates. Beneath the surface level of the painting that represents luxury, escape and

entertainment lies the peculiar curtain itself, which is composed of materials that belong to

various members of the prison community. It includes literal pieces of the clothing and supplies

of the prisoners, officers and townspeople. Where there is not enough cloth to complete the

curtain, there are sheets of paper begged from officers by prisoner-artists. From the prisoner-

spectator’s perspective, the curtain is created for the sake of the painted scene. But for

Gorianchikov, the painting is an afterthought to the curtain itself. The curtain beneath the

painting contains the realia of the gathered community who in this sacred artistic moment is

inwardly united in joyful anticipation of the play itself. It is an emblem of the cathartic power of

art, in this case, the theater, that is especially evident on this occasion.

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 The sense of community in the “strange picture” is reinforced by the fact that the

spectators’ bodies are so crushed into one another as to begin to break down the physical

boundaries between them. They are verging on physical unity, yet contrary to the forced unity

that typifies the overcrowded prison or that characterizes the “hell” that Gorianchikov describes

in his notes on the bath-house scene, this uncommonly crowded ward does not create discord

among the spectators. On the contrary, Gorianchikov writes:

Masses of spectators crowded, squeezed tightly, packed on all sides, waiting with patient
and blissful faces for their performance (predstavlenie) to begin […] A strange light of
childlike joy, of pure, sweet pleasure, was shining on these lined and branded brows and
cheeks, on those faces usually so morose and gloomy, in those eyes which sometimes
gleamed with such terrible fire. (Garnett 157; PSS 4:122)

The crowded atmosphere yields a rare feeling of shared joy among the prisoners. Gorianchikov

develops prisoners’ inner-complexity in the form of contrasting lights. In his “picture,” the

prisoners are not simply depicted as “scoundrels,” à la Yakobi, but each of them houses the

“strange light of childlike joy” alongside “terrible fire.” The tiny prison quarters feel

uncharacteristically boundless, as if stretching to house the entire town—prisoners, officers and

citizens alike—for this communal event. Gorianchikov depicts a rare gathering that spans

contrasting world-views. Each spectator comes to see the play from a uniquely positioned

physical and metaphorical perspective. The typically buried joy of the prisoners now emanates

from each of their faces as they wait for the curtain to part and the play to begin.

Gorianchikov also depicts music played by uniquely talented convict-musicians. Despite

the limited availability and quality of their instruments, the musicians manage to capture the

essence of the Russian songs that they play. Gorianchikov praises them, “Upon my word I had

had no idea till then what could be done with simple peasant instruments: the blending and

harmony of sounds, above all, the spirit, the character of the conception and rendering of the tune

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in its very essence were simply amazing. For the first time I realized fully all the reckless dash

and gaiety of the gay, dashing Russian dance songs” (Garnett 158; PSS 4:123). Despite the

inferiority of their instruments, these musicians manage to capture an essence, in this case, the

spirit of the “Russian dance song.” Gorianchikov also praises their originality, which he argues

characterizes the prisoners’ general way of being: “The tone, the taste, the execution, the handing

of the [balalaika] and the characteristic rendering of the tune, all was individual, original and

typical of the convicts” (Garnett 158; PSS 4:123). The artistry is achieved through originality.

They absorb the original into an idiosyncratic, deeply felt artistic vision, achieving an ideal of

verisimilitude that aligns with the spirit of Dostoevsky’s “true artist.”

Whereas in Dostoevsky’s interpretation of Yakobi’s painting, the artist seems to occupy a

perspective that belongs to a world apart from his subjects, in the prison theater performance, the

dividing line between artist and spectator is indeterminable. In the first place, there is no one

correct angle from which to view the play. Everyone experiences the play from wherever they

manage to be situated in the overly-crowded theater: “And not only were people literally sitting

on others, especially in the back rows, but the beds too were filled up, as well as the spaces to the

right and left of the curtain, and there were even some ardent spectators who always went round

behind the scenes, and looked at the performance from the other ward at the back” (Garnett 155;

PSS 4:120). On the one hand, the variety of perspectives on the play highlights both the different

ways of seeing it as well as the different impressions that result from these individualized

perspectives, none of which is privileged over the other. On the other hand, the prisoners are

united by their joy in the shared experience. The physical proximity of the spectators to the

performers and the viewpoint of some spectators who are back stage, shadowing the actors’

perspective, breaks down the division between actor and spectator. Instead, the theater is filled to

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the brim with actor-spectators. The variety of perspectives hints at both the variety of

perspectives within the community as a whole as well as the variety of individual perspectives.

The lack of division between spectator and actor is also mirrored in Gorianchikov who is both

prisoner and narrator. Unlike Yakobi’s painting, Gorianchikov’s “strange picture” humanizes the

prisoners.

The Play Itself Unfolds Largely in the Prison-Spectators’ and Prison-Artists’ Imaginations

When the curtain rises, the stage design invites the creative participation of the prisoners

to complete the play in their imaginations. Gorianchikov explains that the prisoners have no

shortage of imagination with which to render the set realistic. He calls attention to this special

quality of the prisoners:

I may observe that our scenery was very poor. Both in this play and in the others we
rather supplied the scene from our imagination than saw it in reality. By way of
background there was a rug or a horse cloth of some sort; on one side a wretched sort of
screen. On the left side there was nothing at all, so that we could see the bed, but the
audience was not critical and was ready to supply all deficiencies by their imagination,
and indeed, convicts are very good at doing so. “If you are told it’s a garden, you’ve got
to look on it as a garden, if it’s a room it’s a room, if it’s a cottage it’s a cottage—it
doesn’t matter, and there is no need to make a fuss about it.” (Garnett 164; PSS 4:128)

Gorianchikov overhears this statement about how to look at the play from one of the prison-

spectators in the theater. The prisoners and the reader occupy a similar stance in relation to the

stage insofar as Dostoevsky places a similar demand on the reader’s imagination that the prison

stage places on that of the prisoners. Both the reader and the convicts have to envision the scenes

while being prompted by words. Realism in The Dead House prison-theater does not pertain to

visually realistic images that somehow forcibly impress reality onto the eyes of the observers.

Instead, as Dostoevsky shows through the convict-spectators (in the manner of the feuilleton

writer in “Petersburg Visions”), realism unfolds in the dynamic interaction between the

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empirically available data and the creative cognition of the individual observer who recreates

reality according to the unique “garden,” “room,” or “cottage” in his imagination.

The peasant-actors animate their stage roles imaginatively. For example, the peasant

Netsvetaev wins the role of “the benevolent country gentleman” by supplementing empirical

observations from his past with an ingenious detail that is both off script and his own invention.

He had competed against another peasant Vanka Otpety for the role, but the convict-actors chose

Netsvetaev, not for his superior acting, nor because of his superior looks, but because he

proposed to walk about with a cane and pretend to draw things on the floor. Gorianchikov

reports, “Netsvetaev assured them that he would come on with a cane and would wave it about

and draw patterns on the ground with it like a real (nastoiashchii) gentleman and tiptop swell”

(Garnett 160; PSS 4:125). The “real” gentleman, all convict-actors agreed, would do exactly such

a thing. Vanka Otpety’s performance was unconvincing because it lacked imagination.

Netsvetaev wins the part in this theater not simply by mimicking the appearance of the

benevolent country gentleman, but rather by imaginatively reinterpreting his subjective

childhood experience of the gentlemen, including his fascination with the gentleman’s cane. No

one bothers to ask what exactly Netsvetaev draws on the ground, yet there is something that

rings true to life in his imaginative portrayal, not only for Netsvetaev, but apparently for the

actors who unanimously vote for him, as well as for the audience who heartily applaud his

performance. In contrast to Yakobi’s strict adherence to photographic realism, Netsvetaev, with

the addition of a fantastical gesture, succeeds in making his subject more realistic.

Netsvetaev’s performance is one of many microcosms of the notes’ aesthetic vision. Both

Gorianchikov and Netsvetaev exhibit the vision espoused by Dostoevsky’s mock-feuilleton

narrator in Petersburg Visions. Gorianchikov portrays reality as an empirical observation, in this

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case, Netsvetaev’s childhood memory—the gentleman he observed walking with cane in hand—

and the creative synthesis of that observation with his imagination, i.e., the gentleman drawing

imaginary pictures on the ground with his cane. Netsvetaev’s realism, like that of his author-

reporter Gorianchikov, recreates the truth of observation as shaped by personal cognition.

Netvetaev’s performance faithfully renders his understanding of “a benevolent country

gentlemen.”

Even though certain actors stand out in the performance, the roles of spectator and actor

are interchangeable in this prison theater. The audience participates in the performance and the

actors occasionally break character to indulge in the enjoyment of their own performance as they

act. Gorianchikov recalls that the audience often upstaged the actors. The audience does not

intentionally break the fourth wall, but rather innocently co-creates the spectacle together with

the actors by contributing their own intuitive and spontaneous responses to the play. He writes:

What interested me more than all was the audience; they were all completely carried
away. They gave themselves up to their pleasure without reserve. Shouts of approbation
sounded more and more frequently. One would nudge his neighbor and hurriedly whisper
his impressions, without caring or even noticing who was beside him. Another would
turn ecstatically to the audience at an amusing passage, hurriedly look at everyone, wave
his hand as though calling on everyone to laugh and immediately turn greedily round to
the stage again. (Garnett 159; PSS 4:124)

Like the actors, audience members turn to the rest of the audience. The urge to share their

experience with each other causes them to whisper their impressions to one another. The

audience greets one actor Sirotkin, who plays “the benevolent country lady,” with a roar of

laughter when “she” arrives on stage, and Gorianchikov also notes that “the lady herself could

not refrain from laughing several times” (Garnett 161; PSS 4:125). In other words, the actors also

experience the audience’s joy. In opposition to what Dostoevsky perceived as the isolating

experience of viewing Yakobi’s “realist” painting, Gorianchikov’s depiction of the prisoners in

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this scene is wholly communal, from the narrator to the actors to the audience, and perhaps even

to the reader. In the scene he not only reconnects the prisoners to one another, but he also renders

them whole by supplementing their “terrible fire” with the “strange light of childlike joy.” The

reader senses the warmth with which he depicts the convicts—not from the removed perspective

of an objectifying lens, but rather from the immersed perspective of an empathetic human being

and co-inhabitant of a world that he shares with the subjects that he depicts.

Gorianchikov’s imagination is perhaps liveliest of all during the play and his impressions

bear the characteristic marker of his empathetic perspective. The prisoners offer Gorianchikov

one of the best seats because they perceive him, as a gentlemen, to be an authoritative theater

critic. This is one of the rare displays of actual respect for Gorianchikov, who is typically

disregarded or distrusted by the peasant-convicts for being a nobleman. Gorianchikov returns the

act of kindness by recreating the theater scene with a sense of profound gratitude. Dostoevsky

does not present a depersonalized egalitarian theater, but rather allows for the different strata of

society to coexist. Gorianchikov uses his privileged position not to condescend and objectify the

prisoners, as does Yakobi, but rather to connect personally with their enjoyment of the

experience as a co-participant. At several points during the performance, Gorianchikov notices

that the faces of the prisoners are filled with childlike joy, just as they were in anticipation of the

play. This appears to be both an objective observation and a projection of Gorianchikov’s own

profound joy onto the prisoners’ faces. Gorianchikov even confesses to being distracted by the

unabashedly joyful face of Alei during the performance: “Alei’s charming face beamed with

such pure childlike joy that I must confess I felt very happy in looking at him, and I remember

that at every amusing and clever sally on the part of the actors, when there was a general burst of

laughter, I could not help turning to Alei and glancing at his face” (Garnett 158; PSS 4:123).

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Gorianchikov delights in not being seen by Alei, who is too absorbed to notice that he is being

watched. Gorianchikov notes excitedly, “He did not see me—he had no attention to spare for

me!” (Garnett 157; PSS 4:122). Empathy takes center stage for Gorianchikov. Despite the fact

that they are looking at different objects, Alei and Gorianchikov are united in their sense of

wonder at what is unfolding before their eyes. For Alei, it is the play on stage. For Gorianchikov,

at this moment, it is Alei. Dostoevsky adds to Gorianchikov’s depiction of the prisoners the

element that he found lacking in Yakobi’s painting by depicting the prisoners from a place of

vital feeling through the personality of Gorianchikov. In order to see Alei’s joy, and to render it

as an artist, Gorianchikov must feel joy. Gorianchikov, in turn, creates the conditions for the

reader to experience joy. The reader must supply his or her own imagination and bring his or her

own joyful experiences to bear on the cathartic experience, thereby stitching the pages of the

novel into the communal stage curtain.

At the outset of the novel, Gorianchikov reminds the reader that his notes of prison life

come from the tangential perspective of a single prisoner. It pertains to “a world apart, unlike

everything else,” and as he puts it, “It is this corner apart that I am going to describe” (Garnett

12; PSS 4:10). This “world apart” signifies both the whole prison, which is separate from the life

out in the world, and his own unique perspective. Although this “world apart” is viewed from a

single prisoner’s perspective, it is accessible to the reader. For example, in the opening

paragraph, Gorianchikov sets up the visual parameters of the prison in the opening paragraph and

establishes the fixed perspective from which a prisoner is forced to look at the world. He writes:

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 Our prison stood at the edge of the fortress grounds, close to the fortress wall. One would
sometimes, through a chink in the fence, take a peep into God’s world to try and see
something; but one could see only a strip of the sky and the high earthen wall overgrown
with coarse weeds, and on the wall sentries pacing up and down day and night. And then
one would think that there are long years before one, and that one will go on coming to
peep through the chink in the same way, and will see the same wall, the same sentries and
the same little strip of sky, not the sky that stood over the prison, but a free, faraway sky.
(Garnett 12; PSS 4:10)

The description emphasizes the isolation that stems from having to look at the world from the

fixed perspective of a single body positioned at a fixed point. Gorianchikov establishes the

psychological sense of confinement in visual-spatial terms; the immensity of the free sky is

reduced to a peephole by the prison conditions. He reinforces the chink in the wall with a

description of the parameters of the prison courtyard as “two hundred paces long and a hundred

and fifty wide, in the form of an irregular hexagon” (Garnett 11; PSS 4:9). The shape of the

prison courtyard thus echoes the chink in the wall, reinforcing the visual claustrophobia of the

prisoner who for years must gaze at the blue sky through a chink from within a slightly larger

chink. These two chinks mirror human perspective: we must endeavor to make meaning out of

the immensity of the world from the fixed perspective of our own embodied vision. Once a year,

the prisoners draw especially near to that “faraway sky,” through their imaginative, collaborative

theater experience in which perspectival unity and, therefore isolation, begins to break down.

In the novel, the prisoners adopt an eagle whose wing is wounded. Once the eagle’s wing

heals and he regains his capacity to fly, Gorianchikov describes, not without jealousy, how the

eagle flees from the prison walls in a straight line. Similarly, the play creates the rare opportunity

for the prisoners to escape the prison walls, and like the healed eagle, they flee directly, with all

of their artistic might, to that free space. The wounded eagle leaves the literal confinement of

prison walls to the free space of the world beyond them. But even though the prisoner’s

perspective remains physically fixed, he manages to transcend it by a certain kind of artistic

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vision. Contrary to the reinforced isolation of Yakobi’s perspectival depiction of the prisoners in

the painting, the novel offers a way out of the isolation imposed on our psyche by the body’s

fixed viewpoint. This is a problem that I take up in the following chapter with Florensky’s

critique of the Renaissance humanistic viewpoint in Realist art, which amounts to making point

of view, and consequently individual consciousness, into a prison house.

As we have seen, Gorianchikov gives us flashes of the peasant-convicts’ artistic vision

throughout his notes, a vision that mirrors his own. The theater activates this meaning-making

capacity in the minds of the prisoners, thereby creating the conditions to exit the prison-cave of

fixed perspective. Gorianchikov develops this imaginative capacity in the majority of the

peasant-convicts portrayed in his notes. He predisposes the reader to consider the peasant-

convicts with compassion, leading by example with his own artistic talent, which combines

careful empirical observation with the imagination that makes compassion possible. The reader

can empathize with Gorianchikov’s peasant-convicts to the degree that he or she is willing to co-

create Gorianchikov’s characters in his or her imagination, guided by Gorianchikov’s verbal

prompts, and to the degree that the reader can overcome the limitations of his or her own

perspectival isolation.

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 CHAPTER 3

Chapter 3: Holbein’s Visually Polyphonic Dead Christ Reveals Ippolit’s, Rogozhin’s and

Myshkin’s Contrasting Perspectives in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot

“Architectural combinations of lines, of course, have their own secret.”

-The narrator in The Idiot

Dostoevsky’s writings became increasingly logo-centric after he completed what is his

most poetically iconic, image-based novel, The Dead House. His narrators abandon their exterior

posts relative to their characters’ psyches and turn away from the visual mode of representation.

Whereas Gorianchikov depicts the peasant convicts as a primarily visual phenomenon yet

acknowledges their unknowable interiority, Dostoevsky delves more directly into characters’

thoughts and develops their inner life as a verbal phenomenon. In Dostoevsky’s next work, Notes

from Underground (1864), he creates what is perhaps his most psychologically exposed

character whose first-person narration exposes his private thoughts. Although he switched from

first-person to thrid-person narrator in Crime and Punishment (1866), his narrator remains

extremely close to Raskolnikov and conveys his thoughts both through direct and free indirect

discourse. Before completing Crime and Punishment in December 1866, in October 1866

Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler, which is told from the first-person perspective of the gambling

addict Alexei Ivanovich. Dostoevsky returns to the visual arts in earnest in The Idiot (1868) with

his description of Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb

(1521).84 The painting, or more precisely, a copy of the painting, hangs above a doorframe in

84
Erika Michael refers to it variously as The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, Dead Christ and The
Dead Christ in the Tomb as do the scholars that she cites in her voluminous book Hans Holbein the
Younger: A Guide to Research (New York: Routledge, 2013). The titles used in Russian are: “Khristos,

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Rogozhin’s home. The Dead Christ not only provides a disturbing image of Chirst’s decaying

body within the novel, but it also elicits the highly developed inner worlds of Dostoevsky’s main

characters into dialogue with one another and structures their conversations around the

philosophical problem of resurrection.85 In The Idiot, he balances the predominantly visual

poetics of Dead House with the predominantly logo-centric poetics of his novels written in the

mid-1860s.

Dostoevsky first encountered Holbein’s painting not in its original religious context -- the

original was likely commissioned as either a lid to a sepulcher or a predella to an altarpiece –

and not in an art gallery, but rather via ekphrasis in Karamzin’s Letters of a Traveler. Karamzin

writes about The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb that “nothing divine is visible, but as a

dead person he is depicted quite naturalistically. Tradition has it that Holbein painted it from the

body of a drowned Jew” (my translation).86 These words eventually led Dostoevsky to the

painting itself, which he saw in Basel on August 11/23 in 1867, one month before he began the

sniatyi so kresta” (Christ, taken down from the cross), “Mertvyi Khristos v grobu” (Dead Christ in the
Tomb) and “Khristos v grobu” (Christ in the tomb). The German used by its current holder in the
Kuntsmuseum Basel is “Der tote Christus im Grab” (The Dead Christ in the Tomb), and in scholarship
“Der Leichnam Christi im Grabe” (The Corpse of Christ in the Tomb).
85
The first painting to appear in a Dostoevsky novel is N. N. Ge’s Last Supper (1861) in Notes from
Underground (1864). From then on, he engages at least one major painting in each of his novels.
Raphael’s Madonna (1512) appears in Crime and Punishment (1866). The Idiot (1869) features two
Holbein paintings, The Darmstadt Madonna (1526) and The Body of Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521),
along with Hans Fries’s The Beheading of John the Baptist (1514). Raphael’s Madonna reappears in
Demons (1872) and Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with Acis and Galatea (1657) appears there for the first
time. In Demons, the description of Stepan Trofimovich’s dress, chosen by Varvara Petrovna, derives
from an engraved portrait of Kukol’nik that she admired as a child. The Raphael and Lorrain paintings
resurface in the remaining two novels, The Adolescent (1875) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), along
with the appearance of Ivan Kramskoy’s The Contemplator (Sozertsatel’–1876).
86
See Nikolai M. Karamzin, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh 2 (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura,
1984), 207.

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notebooks for The Idiot in September of 1867.87 Dostoevsky’s personal writing about the

painting has much in common with Karamzin’s, but his ekphrasis of the painting in the novel

attests to a more nuanced and ambiguous interpretation.88

Dostoevsky’s modern reader encounters the painting ekphrastically in The Idiot, which

leads to a desire to see the painting, much as Karamzin’s Letters led Dostoevsky to the original.

The Idiot was Dostoevsky’s attempt to portray a “positively beautiful person” in the character of

Prince Myshkin, and his primary model for Prince Myshkin in world literature was the

collectively portrayed figure of Jesus by the evangelists in the canonical gospels.89 In this

chapter, I examine The Dead Christ outside of the novel’s context before returning to the novel

and to the theories of Pavel Florensky (1882-1937) about realism and reverse perspective, which

I use as models for understanding Ippolit’s, Rogozhin’s, and finally Myshkin’s interpretations of

the painting. I analyze the painting itself in an attempt to trace both the way Dostoevsky

transforms the painting in his novel as well as the way the painting transforms the novel.

Dostoevsky frequented many European museums and was familiar with both Russian Orthodox

depictions of Christ that were rooted in Byzantine iconography as well as Western

representations. Florensky, as a Russian Orthodox theologian, helps us to understand the painting

from within the aesthetic tradition of Russian Orthodox iconography.

87
Miller notes that the “The first two notebooks for The Idiot […] extend from 14 September 1867 to 30
November 1867” (Dostoevsky and the Idiot 48).
88
According to a diary entry of his wife Anna Grigorievna, Dostoevsky also expressed admiration for
Holbein, a response she contrasts with her own distaste for the painting. She writes, “Fedya was so struck
by Holbein’s Dead Christ that he proclaimed Holbein a remarkable artist and poet (on provozglasil
Gol’beina zamechatel’nym khudozhnikom i poetom).” A. G. Dostoevskaia, Basel, Thursday, August 12,
1867 in Dnevnik A. G. Dostoevskoi, 1867 g. (Moscow, 1923), 234. My translation.
89
This declaration comes from a letter Dostoevsky wrote to his niece Sofiia Aleksandrovna Ivanova (PSS
28.2:251; January 1/13, 1868). He also drew inspiration from Cervantes’s portrayal of Don Quixote and
Dickens’s Pickwick (both mentioned in the letter), yet he described Jesus as the model of moral
perfection that surpasses all others.

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Who Does Holbein the Younger Depict in The Dead Christ?

Fig. 5 - Dead Christ in the Tomb.90

Art critics and historians dispute the subject of the painting, which, in English is

commonly referred to as Holbein’s Dead Christ (1521), one of several titles that the painting has

accrued over time. Holbein himself never gave it a title, and he may or may not have included

the inscription in the wooden frame that refers to its subject as “Jesus Nazarenus Rex” (Jesus the

King of Nazareth). The first appearance in print of a title for the painting comes from the 1586

Inventory of Basilius Auerbach who refers to it simply as, “a picture of a dead man by H.

Holbein, oil on wood, with the title, ‘Jesus Nazarenus Rex.’”91 According to James Heffernan,

“A picture title is a kind of verbal representation. It answers precisely the kinds of questions

answered by sepulchral inscriptions—Who is it? What is it? And it begins the work of

interpreting the picture for us.”92 The modern viewer of Holbein’s painting finds answers to

90
Holbein the Younger, Hans. Holbein’s Dead Christ. Digital image. Dailyserving.com.
91
The translated quote is taken from The Paintings of Hans Holbein, which contains transcripts from the
Auerbach’s original inventory. Paul Ganz, The Paintings of Hans Holbein (London: Phaidon, 1950), 57.
The framer of the portrait could very well have been Holbein himself, although there is evidence to
suggest that it was added towards the end of the 16th century, well after Holbein’s death in 1543.
92
James A. W. Heffernan, “Ekphrasis and Representation” in New Literary History, 22.2 (1991), 303.

79
these very questions in the painting’s wooden frame, which contains, between the letters in

“Jesus Nazarenus Rex,” images of the various instruments of torture that are emblematic of the

Passion. Heffernan defines ekphrasis as “a verbal representation of a graphic representation”

(Heffernan, 303). Thus, the inscription on the wooden frame of Holbein’s painting begins the

work of ekprhasis for the viewer. It transforms the visual art into narrative by explaining whose

corpse it is. It is as if the inscription is compensating for the painting’s ambiguous visual cues

that do not clearly identify its subject as Jesus the man, let alone Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

The painting offers mixed signals about the identity of its subject. One set of signals

yields a painting of a dead man. There is no indication of Jesus as “Rex,” literally “king.”

Holbein is rumored to have used an actual corpse as a model for this study and, in many ways,

the painting looks like a naturalistic study of the dead body of a non-descript drowned man with

an additional circular wound on his right hand. The subject’s forehead does not bear the wounds

of a crown of thorns, and there are no indications of scourging across his torso.93

The second set of visual signals yields a portrait of Christ with the stigmata in accordance

with canonical Gospel narratives. Despite the absence of certain signature wounds, the nail holes

of the crucifixion show on the subject’s right hand and foot.94 Holbein includes a wound in the

subject’s side, which appears to be pierced with the so-called “Holy Lance” in accordance with

the Gospel of John (John 19:34). The tomb is lined with the clean linen in which Christ was

93
The flogging of Christ appears in two canonical gospels, John 19:1 and Matthew 20:19, 27:26. All bible
citations are from the Authorized (King James) Version.
94
The term stigmata comes the Greek term for “signs” or “marks” from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians:
"From henceforth let no man trouble me: for I bear in my body the marks [stigmata] of the Lord Jesus"
(Galatians 6:17). The marks have come to refer to the characteristic markers of physical suffering that
Jesus underwent during the crucifixion according to the canonical gospel narratives. The nail holes and
the wound in his side from the holy lance are the stigmata that are represented in the painting, the
evidence of wounding from flogging and from the crown of thorns are missing the stigmata.

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wrapped by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus according to John 19:38-42.95

Each proposed painting title contains the inherent assumption that the person portrayed is

neither a common man nor simply the historical Jesus. They all lay claim to the special title

“Christ,” given to Jesus the man by his followers after his death and resurrection, thereby settling

the debate over Jesus’s divinity. The name “Christ” literally means “the anointed one,” from the

Greek christos, which is a translation of the Hebrew mashiakh. There were certain Jews who

believed that the anointed son of King David would be sent by God to restore Israel to greatness.

Jesus’s followers thought that he was this anointed son. Using the name Christ to refer to Jesus

elevates him to this special status and alters the viewer’s experience of the painting.

Yet while the painting’s titles identify the subject as the Christ, Holbein’s decision to not

entitle the painting and answer the question of his subject’s identity mirrors the equivocal

rhetoric of Jesus himself, as depicted in the gospels. When Jesus stands on trial before the high

priests and scribes in the Gospel according to Luke, they ask him to affirm or deny the

allegations that he is Christ.

And as soon as it was day, the elders of the people and the chief priests and the scribes
came together, and led him into their council, saying, “Art thou the Christ? Tell us.” And
he said unto them, “If I tell you, ye will not believe: And if I also ask you, ye will not
answer me, nor let me go. Hereafter shall the Son of man sit on the right hand of the
power of God.” Then said they all, “Art thou then the Son of God?” And he said unto
them, “Ye say that I am.” (Luke 22:66-70)

Jesus neither affirms nor denies. Holbein’s painting recreates the ambiguity in Luke’s poetics for

Jesus. In both cases, the question of Jesus’s identity is left up to the reader’s interpretation.96

95
Matthew 27:57, Mark 15:43 and Luke 23:53 mention only Joseph of Arimathea.
96
The corresponding scenes in the other three gospels are similarly ambiguous insofar as Jesus never calls
himself “Christ,” but variously defers to his interlocutors or to his works when asked who he is. See Mark
14:53-65, Matthew 11:1-5 and John 10:22-42 and 18:19-24.

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 Both the inscription and the paintings’ various titles point to a problem of interpretation

that is especially pertinent to this painting. The paint and oil create an image on Holbein’s canvas

that is more ambiguous than the inscription suggests. The enigmatic subject polarizes viewers

whose interpretations are as strong and as varied as their beliefs concerning Jesus’s elusive

identity.97 The addition of the inscription on the painting identifies the subject as Jesus, but does

not settle the debate over the subject’s divinity. The subject is unquestionably Christ-like, but the

painting withholds final judgment. It conveys different stories depending on how one frames it,

so to speak. The painting both deepens the faith of believers and corroborates the skepticism of

non-believers. It is simultaneously reverent and blasphemous.

Tatiana Kasatkina has argued that the relative spatial positioning of the painting

determines our interpretations of it. In her article “Seeing the Original,” Kasatkina describes her

visit to Basel to see the original.98 She notes that when the painting is viewed from below, it

appears that Christ’s body is weak and decaying. Viewed head on, it appears to be flexing and

stable. Most of Dostoevsky’s contemporaries would have seen it from below, but not

Dostoevsky, who stood on a chair in order to see it at eye level.99 This, Kasatkina argues, is what

allowed Dostoevsky to see the Holbein differently from Anna Grigorievna and all of the

characters in The Idiot for that matter. These gazers, looking from below, tend to see the dead

97
Anna Grigorievna, Dostoevsky’s second wife, recalls Dostoevsky saying, “One’s faith could be
smashed by such a picture.” But this comment is taken from a context in which Dostoevsky allegedly
expressed admiration for Holbein the Younger based on this painting. Anna Grigorievna adds that it filled
Dostoevsky with “ecstasy” and “so deeply impressed Fedya that he pronounced Holbein a remarkable
artist and poet” (Dnevnik A. G. Dostoevskoi 366).
98
Tatiana Kasatkina, “After Seeing the Original,” in Russian Studies in Literature 47.3 (2011): 73-97.
99
Anna Dostoevskaia wrote that Dostoevsky “was completely carried away by [the Dead Christ] and in
his desire to look at it closer got on to a chair so that I was in a terrible state lest he should have to pay a
fine, like one is always liable to here” (Dnevnik A. G. Dostoevskoi 365).

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corpse. Kasatkina’s experience of the painting reveals its chameleon-like capacity to adapt its

appearance. The painting appears differently not only to different viewers, but even to the same

viewer who sees it from two slightly different perspectives.

The composition of the painting raises further questions. Holbein was in part extracting

Jesus from a religious tradition that painted him with a vertical orientation. This tradition

emphasized his triumph over death through the resurrection. But Holbein does not lead the

viewer directly to this happy ending. Instead, he focuses on the period of time following Jesus’s

death on the cross, which is either the moment before the resurrection or the moment before the

continued decay of his body. The painting is vertically claustrophobic and reads, on the one

hand, as a total submission of the body to the earth, to gravity, to mortality. Decay appears to be

slowly working its way inward from his extremities towards his core. On the other hand, the

corpse appears to be flexing, as if rising from the earth, and the light on his midsection appears to

expel the decay from his body.

Fig. 6. Dead Christ in the Tomb. Hans Holbein the Younger.

The horizon line sits just below the draped surface (See the yellow line in Fig. 7 below). * If we

pause to consider the positioning of Jesus’s body relative to the horizon line, we see that the arc

* Please refer to the Appendix for an analysis of perspectival terms.

83
of Jesus’s body is reminiscent of the sun. The positioning of his body relative to the horizon

raises the question: Is this a rising or a setting sun? Or perhaps somehow both?

The perspectival analysis raises further questions if we extend the only clearly visible

parallel to the vanishing point, where it meets the horizon beyond the painting’s frame, to the

left.100

Fig. 7. Perspectival analysis of Dead Christ.

This tells us that the vanishing point is positioned slightly below and to the left of the subject’s

body. It follows from the laws of one-point perspective that the viewer is also gazing from this

position slightly below and to the left.

The Holbein painting combines elements of two- and one-point perspective. The tomb is

rectangular, yet it is also not centered. Both the front and the inside of the right wall of the tomb

are visible, while the left wall, near his head, is absent from the painting. This places the

viewpoint to the left of the coffin. The front facing sides on the top and bottom of the tomb are

also visible, but the inside of the bottom of the tomb is out of view, while the inside of the top of

100
Holbein’s mastery of the perspectival method is apparent in such masterpieces as his Ambassadors
(1533). The painting includes his famous anamorphic skull. In order to bring the skull into focus, one
must look at the painting from one of two peculiar vantage points, very close to the painting from either
low left or far upper right. For more on Holbein’s manipulation in this painting, see John David North’s
The Ambassadors’ Secret: Holbein and the World of the Renaissance (New York: Hambledon and
London, 2004).

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the tomb can be seen receding towards the back wall. This places our viewpoint just below the

bottom of the coffin. The result is that we are looking at the tomb as if from below and to the left

of the tomb. In a strictly perspectival depiction, then the result of such a viewpoint would render

the tomb in such a shape as in Figure 2:

Fig. 16. Hypothetical perspectival analysis of Holbein’s Dead Christ if it were painted in
strict two-point perspective.

In this strict, two-point perspective rendering of the tomb, there are two planes, in this case those

parallel to the y- and z- axes, which are oblique to the picture plane, while one plane, here

parallel to the x-axis, is parallel to the picture plane. And yet it is clear that this is not the precise

shape generated in the painting because the vertical lines in the painting are depicted as

perpendicular to the horizon as in the Figure 3:

85
 Fig. 17 Perspectival analysis of Holbein’s Dead Christ in one-point perspective.

At last we can see the perspectival oddity of the painting. A view from below and to the

left requires that two axes be oblique to the picture plane, but Holbein’s rendering appears to be

drawn from one-point perspective, since there are clearly two axes (the x- and y- axes), which

are parallel to the picture plane. This point is evident here by the two sets of imaginary lines, one

parallel and one perpendicular to the horizon. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that the

painting is indeed drawn according to strict two-point perspective and that the very short height

of the tomb makes the vertical lines of the tomb appear upright rather than slanted as they would

if the vanishing point were not as far above.

The painting’s viewpoint raises questions about whose perspective is being imitated here.

During Jesus’s time, tombs were actually carved into the side of large rock faces. Bodies were

inserted into the hollowed portion of the rock. The tomb was not sealed by a stone over an

opening in the top, but rather by a large blocking stone, either round or square, in front of the

86
tomb. Here is a diagram of one such tomb, which is called a rolling stone tomb:

6’

1.5’

Fig 8. Diagram of Quadrosolia tomb with rolling blocking stone. The typical recess is

1.5’ tall, 2’ deep and 6’ wide.

If Jesus were in a modern tomb that opened at the top, it would be physically impossible both for

Jesus’s right hand and for the linen that has been wrapped around his body to be draped over the

bottom of the tomb, as it is in the painting. The fact that he is depicted in a quadrosolia tomb

makes this physically plausible.

87
 Fig. 9 Close up of Jesus’s hand from Holbein’s Dead Christ.

We are gazing at a tomb that would have been visible from the viewpoint of a person who was

standing in front of, slightly below and to the left of the entrance of the tomb when the stone was

rolled away from the tomb. The blocking stone tomb would have allowed for the side-view of

Jesus’s body that Holbein represents in the painting.101

The canonical gospels offer several possible interpretations for this viewpoint from which

the scene is painted. The evangelist Mark (15:47) describes both Mary Magdalene and Mary the

Mother of Jesus as seeing the dead body of Jesus from outside of the tomb.102 The tomb must

have been a small, personal tomb—as opposed to a larger tomb with multiple-chambers—in

101
The tomb is a type of loculi, which is a recess dug into the side of a rock. There are two types of loculi:
an arcosolia if the top of the recess is arched and a quadrosolia when it is rectangular. See Amos Kloner’s
article on Jesus’s tomb for a comparison of historical tombs with Gospel accounts. Amos Kloner, "Did a
Rolling Stone Close Jesus’ Tomb?" Biblical Archaeology Review 25.5 (1999): 22-26. The Gospel of
Mark indicates a rolling stone tomb, “And he bought fine linen, and took him down, and wrapped him in
the linen, and laid him in a sepulchre which was hewn out of a rock, and rolled a stone unto the door of
the sepulchre” (Mark, 15:46). However, rolling stone tombs were allegedly very rare compared to the
square blocking stones; this taken with other information from the gospels leads Kloner to conclude that
the tomb was actually a square blocking stone tomb.
102
The gospel accounts also allow for the perspective to belong to one of an undisclosed number of
guards who were ordered to seal the tomb with the massive stone.

88
order for Jesus’s body to be visible from the entrance in accordance with these gospel accounts.

The window of time in which Jesus’s body would have been visible is the evening

following his crucifixion. Mark (15:34) and Luke (23:44-46) state the time of death at the “ninth

hour,” that is, at 3 pm.103 This is approximately three hours after he was crucified (Mark 15:25).

Mark states that it is not until “evening” that Joseph of Arimathea comes to take Jesus’s body

down from the cross on the eve of the Sabbath, that is, on Friday (Mark 15:34-37). The body

would have been dead for at least three hours, which marks the beginning of rigor mortis, the

stiffening of the muscles consistent with the flexed appearance of the body in the painting.

Although the exposure of his mostly naked body to the air would have hastened the

decomposition process (bacteria thrives under exposure to water and air), three hours of exposure

is not enough time to account for the greenish discoloration visible on the body of the corpse in

the painting. This discoloration can, however, be attributed to the model corpse that Holbein

used, which was found in the Rhine. Decomposing flesh typically emits a green substance

(fodder for flies) within three to eight days after death. The water in which the model was found

may well have hastened this greening process by allowing the bacteria to thrive in the relatively

warm temperatures of the Rhine River.104 Further discoloration appears as a darkening of the

extremities (head, hand and feet, in particular). This can be accounted for by lividity, which

indicates a pooling of blood in the lower portion of the body that, that closest to the earth at the

103
The “ninth hour” refers to the ninth hour of the day. Jesus was crucified around the time of the spring
equinox, which meant that the twenty-four hour day was evenly divided into twelve hours of daylight and
twelve hours of night. Sunrise would have begun at around six or seven am, meaning that the “ninth
hour” would have been at around three or four pm.
104
It is possible that the body may have been floating for three days, but the refloat, the body’s
resurfacing after drowning, would have been hastened by the shallowness of the river and the warm
waters. If the water is less than forty degrees Fahrenheit then the body can remain under water in a semi-
fetal position for as long as two weeks.

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time of and following death. Lividity begins as early as twenty minutes after death and the blood

congeals within four to five hours, at which point it becomes visible on the surface of the skin.

The darkness at Jesus’s feet fits the gospel account of the crucifixion, but the discolored face and

hand (only the right hand shows) do not. It is possible to imagine that Holbein is challenging the

gospel narrative. Perhaps the decay is what might have been seen three days after Jesus’s death,

when the stone had been rolled away and the tomb was not empty, but rather contained the body

of Jesus subject to the natural process of decomposition. All of these interpretive possibilities are

at play at once.

The perspective from which both the tomb and the subject are depicted matches that of

someone gazing into the tomb. By gospel accounts, three characters—Joseph of Arimathea,

Mary Magdalene or Mary the Mother of God—could have seen the body from this perspective.

All three would have seen the body before the tomb was sealed. Joseph of Arimathea took

Jesus’s body down from the cross and put his body into the tomb (see Mark 15:46). This act was

perhaps done out of kindness, but certainly out of reverence. Joseph carried out the burial in

accordance with Halakha, which forbids the hanged body of a condemned criminal to remain

unburied overnight.105 The perspective of the painting also recalls Mary Magdalene’s and Mary

the Mother of God’s as they mourned at Jesus’s tomb.106 The two women model the first church

to form after Christ’s death according to the passage, “For where two or more are gathered in my

name, I shall be in their midst” (Matthew 18:20). The painting raises the question: Is Christ

somehow metaphorically resurrected in those who gather to honor his memory? At the same

105
Halakha is Jewish Law comprised of the five books and the Oral Torah. For the law pertaining to the
burial of those who suffered capital punishment, see Deuteronomy 21:23.

106
The two are mentioned as being present at the tomb before the disappearance of his body in Mark and
Matthew: Mark 15:47, “And Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Jesus beheld where he was laid”;
Matthew 27:61, “And there was Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary, sitting over against the sepulchre.”

90
time, the question of how one could possibly rise from this state asserts itself, challenging any

pretense to faith. Once more, Holbein raises questions without answering them.

If one looks closely at Christ’s face, his eyes appear to be rolling up into his head,

another marker of death overtaking him. Yet there are various ways of reading the eyes. On the

one hand, the rolled eyes appear vacant, just as the prisoners’ eyes in Yakobi’s Prisoners’ Halt.

On the other hand, Jesus’s eyes appear to be actively straining to see something beyond the

confines of his own canvas. The eyes raise the question: is he looking or are his deceased eyes

simply un-shut? Because of the unique lower-left viewpoint of the painting, the left-hand side of

the tomb is shielded from the viewer, once again, posing a question instead of answering it. If he

is looking, at what is he looking? One can assume that he is looking at the tomb, but Holbein

specifically hides the left wall of the tomb from view.107 If we consider the gaze in light of his

posture on the cross, he would have been gazing upwards. This would allude to his resurrection

and in vertical arrangement would encourage the viewer to direct his own gaze heavenward, to

the promised life to come. This message is obscured by the horizontal positioning of the body

which causes the heavenward gaze to lose its upward thrust, but it lingers as a bifurcated

reminder of both his message of the afterlife as well as his being forsaken by that same father on

the cross. Does he look in vain to the empty heavens or is he metaphorically eyeing his own

ascent?

Every aspect of the composition exhibits a duality that corresponds to the “bifurcation”

that Bakhtin finds on the smallest scale in Dostoevsky’s novels. Bakhtin writes about the

appearance of conflicting views at every turn in Dostoevsky:

107
See Appendix for a more detailed analysis of this viewpoint, especially fig. 3.

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 Where others saw a single thought, he was able to find and feel out two thoughts, a
bifurcation; where others saw a single quality, he discovered in it the presence of a
second and contradictory quality. Everything that seemed simple became, in his world,
complex and multi-structured. In every voice he could hear two contending voices, in
every expression a crack, and the readiness to go over immediately to another
contradictory expression; in every gesture he detected confidence and lack of confidence
simultaneously; he perceived the profound ambiguity, even multiple ambiguity, of every
phenomenon. (PDP 30)

This tension of opposites is central to Dostoevsky’s poetics, and it is precisely what makes this

Holbein painting a perfect fit for his novel. Bakhtin argues that Dostoevsky’s novels are so

thoroughly multi-perspectival that contrasting perspectives permeate his writing from the macro-

level of form to the micro-level of detail. Holbein’s painting exhibits a tension that is so

exquisitely balanced as to nearly outshine Bakhtin’s Dostoevsky in his signature craft.

Caryl Emerson writes about the polyphonic novel and carnival as two manifestations of

dialogism: “Each may be considered an extreme—and thus instructive—of dialogism: one of the

word and the other of the body.”108 I propose that the painting is a form of visual polyphony, in

which a dialogism of images unfolds. The details of the image within the painting exhibit the

small-scale permeation of competing perspectives that is characteristic of Dostoevsky’s word in

the polyphonic novel. They recreate visually the “profound ambiguity” of the phenomenon of

Christ’s death in a painting. On the level of visual content, the painting portrays the corpse, the

details of which lead down at least two very different interpretive roads. We can see how the

painting captivated Dostoevsky and we can also see how the painting provides an open structure

that allows its three viewers in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot—Ippolit, Rogozhin and Myshkin— to

find conflicting evidence for their contrasting convictions.

108
Caryl Emerson, “Polyphony and the Carnivalesque: Introducing the Terms” in Studies in Russian and
Slavic Literatures, Cultures, and History: All the Same the Words Don’t Go Away : Essays on Authors,
Heroes, Aesthetics, and Stage Adaptations from the Russian Tradition (Boston: Academic Studies, 2010),
3.

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Florensky is Philosophically Opposed to Calling Linear Perspectival Art “Realism” or

“Naturalism”109

Pavel Florensky first delivered “Reverse Perspective” in 1920 as a lecture for a course on

Byzantine Art at MIKhIM, The Moscow Institute of Historical Art Research and Museum

Management, where Florensky was lecturing at the time in the Byzantine Department.110 The

word “reverse” in the title is a translation of the Russian “obratnyi,” which is also commonly

translated as “reversed” or “inverted.”111 The art theory set forward in this lecture offers a

framework for discussing the philosophical ramifications of linear perspective. The key points of

his theory allow us to compare and contrast Ippolit’s, Rogozhin’s and Myshkin’s different ways

of seeing Holbein’s Dead Christ. I will first explicate Florensky’s criticism of linear perspective

as “Realism” and then show how his criticism illuminates Ippolit’s and Rogozhin’s egocentric

perspective. I will then show how Florensky’s “reverse perspective” resonates with Myshkin’s

more multi-perspectival way of seeing.112

109
What follows assumes a basic understanding of one-, two-, and three-point perspective, which I
explain in the Appendix.
110
Moskovskii institut istoriko-khudozhestvennykh izyskanii i muzeevedeniia.
111
Florensky adopted the term from the Russian-German art historian Oskar Wulff (1864-1946) who
wrote about iconography and the psychology of art in his publication Die umgekehrte Perspektive und die
Niedersicht : Eine Raumanschauungsform Der Altbyzantinischen Kunst und ihre Fortbildung in der
Renaissance. Leipzig: Unidentified, 1907. Florensky also borrows from Erwin Panofsky’s analyses of the
underlying assumptions of linear perspective: the first being that linear perspective ignores the double
effect produced by viewing the world with two eyes instead of one; the second is that the flat plane can
adequately represent a naturally curved visual image. For a discussion of six different definitions of this
term, see Clemena Antonova, “On the Problem of ‘Reverse Perspective’: Definitions East and West.”
Leonardo 43.5 (2010): 464-69. She uses the Christopher Wood’s translation of the term in her title. See
his introduction in Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood. (New York: Zone, 1997).
See especially 6-27. For more on a comparison between the two works, see Clemena Antonova’s Space,
Time, and Presence in the Icon: Seeing the World with the Eyes of God. (Farnham, England: Ashgate,
2010). See especially her chapter “Reverse Perspective -- A Critical Reading” (29-62).
112
It is tempting to draw a comparison between Florensky’s ideal art in “Reverse Perspective” and the
Cubist art of Picasso and Braque, which was making its way onto the art scene during the thirteen years

93
 In Reverse Perspective, Florensky describes the means used to attain verisimilitude in

linear perspectival paintings as a “geometric construct.”113 All objects within the frame conform

to straight lines that converge at either one, two or three vanishing points that are imagined to sit

either on or beyond the canvas. The vanishing points orient the viewer’s relationship to the

painted world in such a way as to create a convincing illusion of depth. According to Florensky,

perspectival painting captivates by fastening the viewer to a single viewing point and forcing him

or her to see the depicted image from a single perspective. But for Florensky, this literal

phenomenon extends into the metaphorical realm. The form of perspectival painting not only

forces the viewer to see an image from a certain perspective, but it also discourages the viewer

from thinking about the content from different perspectives.

Florensky traces the origins of linear perspective to the early theater. The ancient Greek

stage designers, whom Florensky calls the “first theoreticians of perspective,” sought ways to

impress a convincing illusion of reality upon their audience (Florensky 246).114 Florensky

prior to Florensky’s publication of this article in 1920. Picasso and Braque were certainly painting single
objects from multiple perspectives, but they were interested in distorting mass and calling attention to the
acts of depicting and conceiving of the world artistically. Robert Rosenblum puts it as follows: “For the
traditional distinction between solid form and the space around it, Cubism substituted a radically new
fusion of mass and void. In place of earlier perspective systems that determined the precise location of
discrete objects in illusory depth, Cubism offered an unstable structure of dismembered planes in
indeterminate spatial positions. Instead of assuming that the work of art was an illusion of a reality that
lay beyond it, Cubism proposed that the work of art was itself a reality that represented the very process
by which nature is transformed into art.” Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-century Art, (New
York, NY: Abrams, 2001), 13. Florensky, by contrast, was primarily interested in art’s symbolic function
and thought that Byzantine iconography restored objectivity to mass. I discuss both points later in this
chapter.
113
Pavel A. Florensky, Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. Nicoletta Misler, trans.
Wendy R. Salmond (London: Reaktion, 2002). All Florensky quotes in this chapter are taken from this
book; the page numbers are provided in parentheses in the text of the chapter.
114
The Greeks of whom Florensky speaks were far more than stage designers. They were the pre-Socratic
philosophers and polymaths, Anaxagoras (c. 510- 428 BCE) and Democritus (c. 460- c. 370 BCE).

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laments their discovery of linear perspective, which he describes in no uncertain terms as a

cruelly manipulative device that paralyzes the spectator:

Presupposing that the spectator or the stage designer was chained fast, like the prisoner of
Plato’s cave, to a theatre bench and neither could nor should have a direct vital
relationship to reality, these first theoreticians of perspective provided rules for a
deception that ensnared the theatre spectator as if he were separated from the stage by a
glass barrier and there were just one immobile eye, observing without penetrating the
very essence of life and, most important, with his will paralyzed, for the very essence of a
theatre that has become mundane demands a will-less looking at the stage, as at some
‘untruth’, something ‘not really there’: some empty deception. Anaxagoras and
Democritus replace the living man with a spectator […] and so they thereby make clear
the rules for deceiving this spectator. (Florensky 210)

Florensky uses harsh language to articulate how the form of perspectival painting creates the

conditions for a hostile takeover of the mind. He describes the theater in no uncertain terms as a

manipulative space, in which stage-designers transform their audience into will-less prisoners

who are severed from reality by an illusory backdrop, as if by a “glass barrier” (Florensky

210).115 Florensky considers the illusion to be a weak imitation of reality. Illusion transforms the

“essence of life” into “an empty deception” and renders the viewer passive (Florensky 210). Like

the consumptive Ippolit, who is confined to his deathbed and looks out at the world through his

bedroom window, the viewer feels divided from the “essence of life” which remains out of

reach.116

115
The word “theater” derives from the Greek word θεωρία (also the etymological root of “theory”). The
admixture of seeing and contemplation is present in it; θεωρία means both “looking at, viewing,
beholding” and “contemplation, speculation.” The word comes from the noun θεωρός, which is either a
“spectator” or an “ambassador who speaks or makes sacrifices to the gods.” θεωρός, in turn, combines
θεα, “sight,” “view,” or “aspect” with the infinitive ὁρᾶν, which expresses both seeing and knowing: “to
look, see, perceive, behold, observe.” θεωρός results in translations that blur the distinction between
seeing and knowing, such as “one who sees/perceives a sight/view.” The “theater” is both a place of
seeing and a metaphor for the mind’s capacity for both speculation and understanding. All Greek
references come from the Liddell, Scott Lexicon as digitized in Perseus Digital Library. Ed. Gregory R.
Crane. Tufts University. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu.
116
The bed-ridden Ippolit spends his last days staring out of his bedroom window, a point that I discuss
below in the section entitled "Ippolit’s Physical Perspective."

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 Florensky shows how linear perspective was adopted as the defining artistic method of

two related but separate artistic movements called Realism and Naturalism. For Florensky,

nothing could be further from ‘reality’ than the illusion generated by linear perspective and

nothing could be further from ‘natural’ than the highly artificial means employed to achieve the

illusion. The practitioners of nineteenth-century Realism sought to depict reality unadorned,

objectively, with unprecedented precision and fidelity to the prosaic, visible world.117 The

movement grew as a reaction to what its proponents saw as the subjective embellishments and

indulgences of Romanticism. Yet Florensky prefers to define linear perspective as characteristic

of “subjectivism and illusionism” (Florensky 208). He attributes the terms “Naturalism” and

“Realism” to the arrogance of the practitioners and proponents of linear perspective, who claim

that what they see from their privileged point of view is both natural and real. Florensky jabs,

“Who does not find it flattering to consider his own self real and natural, i.e., resulting from

reality itself, without deliberate intervention?” (Florensky 252). The “realist” is, according to

Florensky, someone who substitutes the limited scope of his or her own perspective for reality.

For Florensky, the roots of linear perspective extend beyond visual deception into the

philosophical ignorance of Plato’s cave inhabitants.

Florensky argues that the artificial means of achieving linear perspective undermines the

notion that it is a “natural” way of perceiving things. Florensky speaks of the historical use of

various mechanical devices invented by early perspectival painters to artificially achieve the

desired illusion of perspectival painting: “The purpose of the devices is to make it possible for

117
Naturalism is rooted in the natural sciences and biology, according to nineteenth-century art critic
Jules-Antoine Castagnary, the man who coined the term as applied to the visual arts in 1863. He
contrasted it with Realist artist Gustave Courbet’s appoach, arguing that naturalist artists strove for
passionless, objective depiction and that their “sole aim was to reproduce nature,” adding that
“Naturalism is truth balanced with science.” Jules-Antoine Castagnary, “Salons des Refusés (1863),” in
Salons 1857-1879 Vol. 1 (Paris, 1892).

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the most unskilled draughtsman to reproduce any object in a purely mechanical fashion”

(Florensky 247). The devices constructed by artists allow them to conform their painted objects

to the underlying geometric schema of linear perspective. One such device involves viewing the

objects to be painted through a glass that contains a lightly-etched graph on one side (See Fig. 6

below). Each square on the glass graph corresponds to a square on the canvas, thus ensuring

proportionality in the painting. Florensky includes the following image to illustrate the means

used to achieve verisimilitude in sixteenth-century paintings.

Figure 10. Dürer’s Underweyssung, 1st edn., Nuremberg, 1525.118

The device tricks the eye into believing that the painted objects are real. Yet Florensky argues

that the viewer knows that he is gazing “at some ‘untruth,’ something ‘not really there’”

(Florensky 210). An unsettling disparity arises in the viewer because he senses the artifice

behind the seemingly real objects. The paintings are as if filtered through a graph, just as the

bed-ridden Ippolit’s worldview is filtered through the graph of his windowpanes and through the

graph of Meyer’s wall beyond them.

118
Albrecht Dürer, Dürer’s Underweyssung. Digital image. Vanedwards.co.uk.

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 Florensky holds that the single viewpoint of linear perspective precludes objectivity. He

argues that the modern, perspectival schema distorts objects by equating them with appearances.

Florensky attributes the hierarchical scale of the represented objects in linear perspective to the

egocentric schema of linear perspectival painting, which characterizes the egocentric worldview

of what he terms “modern man” (Florensky 252). Objects that are far away from the viewer are

less well-represented: they are smaller and less vivid. Objects that are closer to the viewer are

better represented: they are larger, more detailed and more vivid. The objects that are further

away are by design less significant. Florensky infers this organizational feature that the size of

the painted objects in linear perspective corresponds directly to their proximity to the artist as the

ultimate value of the painted world. Linear perspective tailors its content to the single viewpoint

of a single viewer who stands at the optic center of the painting and values the objects according

to their proximity to him.

Florensky argues that linear perspective is dehumanizing. Linear perspective forces the

viewer to look at the content of a painting from a coldly removed perspective, “We are not

seeing reality,” he contends, “but we are experiencing a visual phenomenon; and we spy on it as

if through a chink, with cold curiosity, with neither reverence nor pity” (Florensky 211). Linear

perspective transforms the fundamental attitude of the viewer from that of a connected

participant into a detached voyeur.

Perspective is rooted in the theatre not simply because historically and technically
perspective was first used in the theatre, but also by virtue of a deeper motivation: the
theatricality of a perspectival depiction of the world. For in this consists that facile
experience of the world, devoid of a feeling for reality and a sense of responsibility, that
sees life as just a spectacle, and in no sense a challenge. (Florensky 210)

For Florensky, the form of perspectival painting inherently isolates, forcing us to look at its

content passively and without empathy. The painting corrupts from within, morally weakening

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the viewer by detaching him from his surroundings, ridding him of any sense of responsibility

for the world outside of the mind, a world reduced to mere appearances.

Florensky’s skepticism about perspectival art extends to what he describes as the

scientific, systematizing philosophical environment in which linear perspective flourished. He is

wary of scientific models that generalize specifics into broad categories and strip the specific

content of individuality. He identifies this systematizing and homogenizing tendency with linear

perspectival art, wherein objects are no longer “subject to their own laws,” but merely fill in the

blanks that belong to an impersonal graph projected from the eye (Florensky 216). Florensky

defines the space of linear perspectival painting as “Euclidean-Kantian” (216). The Euclidean

half comes from the “geometric construct” of the rectilinear structure used to recreate these

appearances according to Euclid’s systematic book on geometry, The Elements of Geometry. On

a structural level, the objects in the painting conform to a geometric, Euclidean schema. But the

darker half of the schema derives from what Florensky sees as the solipsistic, Kantian,

philosophical world-view that readily accepts fidelity of appearance as Realism. Kant was

especially interested in scientific knowledge of the sort that could be clearly articulated from

within a rigorous and systematic philosophy of the mind. His philosophy emphasized how the

mind processes things. For Kant, the world that is assumed to exist outside of our minds is

inaccessible without the mediation of our way of seeing things. Kant understands space not as

something external to man, but as a subjective condition, an “intuition.”119 In The Critique of

Pure Reason, Kant defines the mental schema—his famous Categories—that he believes

determines all mental perception. Kant’s Categories, however, reduce the subjective experience

to a set of universal preconditions for human perception. Kant writes Euclid’s book of The

119
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub.,
1996), 78.

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Elements for the mind, as it were. The Categories set the parameters for orderly thought, just as

the geometric schema of linear perspective sets the parameters for the production of orderly

images. Kant sought to understand how the mind works, so as to distinguish illusion from reality,

fiction from fact. The result of Kant’s attempt at objectivity yields once more, as with linear

perspective, what Florensky calls “illusionism,” that is, it excludes the possibility of scientific

objectivity.

For Florensky, both Realism and Kant’s theory are the fruits of the ego of “modern man.”

Both replace “living reality” with an artificial schema. Both are limited scientific models that are

merely tools for understanding the world, but neither reflects the complexity of world. Both strip

reality of its special content and reduce the concrete value of individual and singular objects to

appearances. For Florensky, there is danger in sacrificing the irreplaceable, individual values

with an abstract system of thought. For Dostoevsky, the same holds true, as is evident in the

collection of tortured, abstractly minded heroes that populate his pages—the underground man,

Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov to name a few. Ippolit Terentiev also belongs to this

collection, and Florensky’s theory of Realism helps to make sense of how Ippolit sees Holbein’s

painting.

Ippolit’s Physical Perspective Reinforces his Egotistical Worldview

Ippolit Terentiev is a bright adolescent who throughout The Idiot expresses an amateur,

atheistic, scientistic philosophical worldview. He has a penchant for philosophical oration and

keeps company with several main characters of the novel including Kolya, the young, gentle-

hearted admirer of Myshkin, and Rogozhin, the darkly impassioned suitor of Nastasya

Filippovna and friend of Myshkin. Ippolit’s awareness of his consumption makes his

philosophizing cynical. He becomes embittered with the knowledge of his impending, premature

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death and the fact that he must remain in bed for most of his remaining days. This perceived

injustice and resulting indignation consume his thoughts and dictate his narrow scientistic

outlook.

Ippolit’s bed-bound perspective informs his interpretation of the painting. Like the

spectators of ancient Greek plays whom Florensky identifies as the first viewers of the linear

perspectival backdrops, Ippolit is a spectator in his own life, watching it without participating in

it or sensing his connection to it. Instead, he is separated from it as if by a glass wall. He often

literally sees the world through a window and even speaks to his visitors through it, as well. In

fact, another painting, Mikhail Klodt’s Last Spring (see fig. 11 below), bears an uncanny

resemblance to Dostoevsky’s portrayal of Ippolit. Dostoevsky was familiar with the painting, as

it was one of several that he critiqued in his article, “The Exhibition of the Academy of the Arts

1860-1861.” Dostoevsky provides the following ekphrasis of it in the October 27, 1861 issue of

Vremia:

The sick patient, a young woman who is dying, is sitting in a large armchair across from
an open window. She has consumption, won’t survive past spring, and her family
members know it. Her sister stands near the window and is crying; another sister kneels
beside the sick patient. Behind the partition panels, the father and mother of the dying
young woman sit and talk amongst themselves. Their conversation must be melancholy:
the dying young woman’s condition is bad; the mood of her sisters is foul, and it is all
illuminated by the beautiful, clear light of spring. The whole painting is painted
beautifully (prekrasno), impeccably, but in the final analysis, the painting is far from
beautiful (prekrasnaia)” (my translation; PSS 19:167).

I highlight the Russian words prekrasno or “beautifully” and prekasnaia or “beautiful” in

translation because the adjective is the same one that Dostoevsky uses six years later in his letter

to Sofia Ivanovna to describe both Christ and the essential quality that he wants to depict in

Prince Myshkin (28.2:251; January 1/13, 1868). Dostoevsky wants not only to create an image of

a “positively beautiful person” (sovershenno prekrasnyi chelovek), but he also wants to depict

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him “beautifully,” prekrasno. Here, the execution of the painting is beautiful, but the overall

effect of the image according to Dostoevsky is repulsive because it highlights the meaningless

death of a young person.

Figure 11. Mikhail Klodt’s Last Spring (1861).120

The painting shows a sense of division from life beyond the windowpanes, through which the

terminally ill patient gazes. The sick woman, like Ippolit, is artificially cut off from life.

Moreover, she is unmoved by the sense of renewal brought on by spring since it is her “last

spring,” as the painting’s title makes clear. Her windowpane has been temporarily opened in this

moment, though the panes remain visible at the top. The light of spring and the sense of

flourishing life overflow from without into at least a portion of the room. There is a fleeting

connection to life before death, although the patient’s face remains in the shadow cast by her

120
Mikhail Klodt, Last Spring (1861). Digital image. Petroart.ru.

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bedroom walls as if to show that this light of spring does not touch her thoughts, which are

overshadowed by both illness and her impending death.

Dostoevsky incorporates elements from Klodt’s Last Spring into the novel when the

reader first encounters Ippolit in St. Petersburg. Ippolit spends most of his time looking at the

world beyond his bedroom walls through his windows. Evgeny Pavlovich has heard rumors

about Ippolit receiving visitors through this window and asks, “Is it true what I’ve heard, that

you are of the opinion that you need only to talk to the people through the window for a quarter

of an hour, and they will at once agree with you in everything and follow you at once?”

(2.X.293).121 Evgeny Pavlovich’s question reinforces the sense of separation between Ippolit and

others in the novel. Still Ippolit’s rhetoric is convincing as evidenced by those who “follow him,”

hypnotized by Ippolit’s orderly and rational philosophy.122

The small window is deeply connected with Ippolit’s thought process, as when he

confesses that he has “spent so long looking out of that window and thought so much” (2.X.295).

The tiny window metaphorically filters and limits Ippolit’s thoughts. But what Dostoevsky

shows us and what Florensky allows us to see more clearly is that Ippolit’s way of seeing the

world directly influences his way of thinking about it. Recalling Florensky’s description of the

“pane of glass” that exists between the audience and the depicted background on the stage, one

can see that Ippolit sees the world the way Florensky’s modern perspectival painter does.

Interestingly enough, Alberti, the father of modern perspective art theory, described his method

121
Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, NY:
Vintage, 2003). All quotations from The Idiot are taken from this translation and cited in the following
format: (part, chapter, page number). For example, this citation comes from Part 2, Chapter X, page 293.
122
In this same scene, Ippolit confesses to dreaming of talking through the window to the narod (people).
The narod find a way into Ippolit’s life despite his self-inflicted isolation. He shares the pains of his
isolation with those gathered at the dacha (summer home) in Pavlovsk for Myshkin’s birthday, and his
long-winded confession culminates in him weeping on Lizaveta Prokofevna’s bosom.

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for perspectival painting using the window as a model: “I inscribe a quadrangle…which is

considered to be an open window through which I see what I want to paint” (Alberti 56).123 And

Erwin Panofsky, the early twentieth-century art historian from whom Florensky’s “Reverse

Perspective” derives a great deal, describes the perspectival view of space not as foreshortening,

but rather as the phenomenon “when the entire picture has been transformed…into a ‘window,’

and we are meant to believe that we are looking through this window into a space” (Panofsky

27).

Ippolit craves what Florensky calls “living contact” (Florensky 209) with the world that

exists beyond his window. Ippolit poignantly articulates his feeling that he has lost this living

contact in his Necessary Explanation, “The point is in life, in life alone—in discovering it,

constantly and eternally, and not at all in the discovery itself” (3.V.394). He tells Lizaveta

Prokof’evna that he came to the prince’s dacha “in order to see the trees” in accordance with

what appears to be a dying wish (2.X.295). Ippolit has been fastened to the fixed perspective of

his bed and forced to gaze out into a world in which he feels he cannot participate. “Nature,” he

contends, “is very much given to mockery” (2.X.296) He questions the natural order of things

and protests against nature’s alleged wisdom, arguing, “Why does [nature] create the best beings

only so as to mock them afterwards?” (2.X.296). I thus interpret nature as he experiences it. He

feels mocked by nature, which has brought him into being only to kill him at a young age. He

laments nature’s inexorable theft of his own life.

Ippolit’s physical perspective reinforces his philosophical perspective. When Ippolit

wants to know the hard truth about how much time he has left on this, he requests a scientist’s

opinion. The scientist who comes to Ippolit’s aid is actually a medical student who is aptly

123
Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson (New York: Phaidon, 1972).

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named Kislorodov. The Russian word Kislorod means “oxygen,” and Pevear and Volokhonsky

translate his name as “Oxygenov” (3.V.388). Ippolit boasts, “About a week ago the student

Oxygenov was brought to me; in his convictions he is a materialist, an atheist, and a nihilist,

which is precisely why I invited him; I needed somebody who would finally tell me the naked

truth (goluyu pravdu), without mawkishness or ceremony” (3.V.388). Ippolit trusts Oxygenov to

offer a realistic estimate of his numbered days because Oxygenov’s criterion for truth is rooted in

science. Oxygenov gives Ippolit two to four weeks to live. Ironically, “Oxygenov” is a poor

substitute for the life-engendering oxygen that Ippolit wants to continue to breathe, the same air

emanating from the trees that he longs to see. By requesting Oxygenov, however, Ippolit reveals

that he is a “modern man” as Florensky defines it, a man for whom “reality exists only when and

to the extent that science deigns to allow it to exist” (Florensky 217). Ippolit also echoes the

realist urge for objectivity, untainted by sentimentalism. In short, Ippolit reveals his convictions

by asking for a realist who will level with him about his condition. This is the philosophical

perspective from which Ippolit approaches the painting in Part Three of the novel.

Ippolit’s ekphrasis of the Holbein painting is part of the written “Explanation” that he

reads out loud at Myshkin’s birthday celebration.124 He recalls seeing the painting at Rogozhin’s

house. His description of the painting comes within the broader philosophical context of a debate

between Lebedev (the town gossip and alleged interpreter of the Apocalypse) and Ippolit over

the question posed by Hamlet’s famous line, “To be or not to be” (3.IV.368). Lebedev

philosophizes about the Apocalypse, more specifically about the meaning of "Wormwood" as a

symbol in Revelation. He ultimately concludes that the Apocalypse is nigh, and he points as

evidence for his prophesy to the dissolution of society, which lacks a binding moral idea to hold

124
The introduction to the painting comes in Part 2, when Myshkin visits Rogozhin’s house in a scene
that I discuss later in this chapter (PV 217; PSS 8:181).

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it together. This theory sets the stage for Ippolit’s description of the Dead Christ painting, which,

Ippolit sees as a naturalist painting that refutes the possibility of Christ as one such binding idea.

He believes that the painting demonstrates Christ’s failure as a Savior, yet, it also reflects

Ippolit’s own overwhelming sense of powerlessness in the face of death. Ippolit’s "Explanation"

is a long suicide note that he intends to end emphatically by shooting himself, thereby

establishing his stance on the debate over Hamlet’s famous line.

Ippolit calls himself a “dead man” when he apologizes for his audacity at speaking

philosophically in front of polite society (2.X.295). He excuses himself by claiming that he

should not be thought of as an eighteen-year old because, “A dead man has no age” (2.X.295).

He replaces the content of what he sees beyond his tiny window with the content of what he feels

in his bedroom. He sees mockery in nature not only because nature is killing him but also

because he feels mocked by his audience at Myshkin’s—Ippolit accuses them of laughing at him.

Dostoevsky shows us the limits of Ippolit’s materialistic and self-centered way of seeing things.

Like Florensky’s “realist,” Ippolit the scientist can hardly lay claim to scientific objectivity when

he looks into the world and cannot see the limits of his own vision.

When Ippolit turns his attention to the Dead Christ, he sees the cruel force of “nature” as

a mysterious void that is overtaking Christ’s body. He critiques the painting as follows:

Nature looms in the painting in the form of some enormous, inexorable, mute beast, or, to
put it more faithfully, much more faithfully, strange though it is— in the form of some
giant machine of the most modern construction, which has senselessly seized, crushed,
and devoured into itself, dully and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being—such a being
that was by itself worth all of nature and all of her laws, worth the entire world, which
was created, perhaps, solely for the appearance of this being! It is as if exactly this notion
is expressed by this painting, the notion of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal force,
to which everything is subjugated, and it is conveyed to you involuntarily. (My
translation; PSS 8:339)

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Ippolit’s understanding of “nature” seems self-contradictory. Although he first describes it as an

all-consuming “beast,” he proceeds to compare it to a machine. By referring to it as a machine

“of the most modern construction,” as if it were a novel invention, Ippolit reinforces his notion

that nature acts unnaturally. But the contradiction fades when we see that both the “beast” and

the “machine” are images of cruelty, which Ippolit attributes to nature because “nature” is his

executioner. There is neither beast nor machine depicted in the painting. Instead, he uses the

images metaphorically. Both metaphors represent Ippolit’s searching attempts to describe a

disturbing feeling that the painting elicits in him. Ippolit alludes to “a dark, insolent, and

senselessly eternal force” (temnaia, naglaia, i bessmyslenno-vechnaia sila) in the painting, but

does not elaborate on it. Florensky offers a way of fleshing out our understanding of this force

for Ippolit: the machine, the beast and the dark force are found in the manner of perceiving and

depicting Christ.

Florensky’s theory of the non-empathetic core of linear perspectival painting resonates

with Ippolit’s metaphors. In the Dead Christ, Holbein creates a convincing illusion of reality

with the unfeeling and machine-like precision of linear perspective. In order to depict Christ so

precisely, Holbein must subject his image to the schema, which first partitions his image into

proportionate parts and then visually devours him, like a beast, into its own vanishing points.

Ippolit’s description of the dreaded force is at some level an emotional response to the form of

the painting. The perspectival schema is the modern machinery of the truly “dark force” that

devours Ippolit’s priceless Christ. It is the black hole of the ego that lurks in man, maker of

machines, deviser of schemata, and proponent of an ego-centric worldview that renders Christ’s

beauty illusory. As Ippolit says, “there is not a word about beauty” (3.VI.407) in this painting’s

worldview. Like Florensky’s “realist,” Ippolit reduces the heterogeneity of his surroundings to

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the homogeneity of the self. The painting’s true vanishing point rests in his egocentric viewpoint,

which acts as a vacuum that devours objectivity and otherness. Ippolit fails to see beauty because

he does not see Christ in the painting, but himself as a dead man. This is reinforced by the fact

that when Ippolit speaks about the figure in the painting being devoured, he refers to him not as

Christ, as he does elsewhere when he speaks about the historical Jesus, but rather anonymously

as the “great and priceless being.”125 He feels himself being artificially cut off from life by

nature, as if by a machine that is itself devoid of feeling and life. Ippolit’s experience of the

Holbein painting leaves him cold, reduced to the role of Florensky’s spectator, “totally deprived

of the general human feeling common to all men” (Florensky 210).

The way that Ippolit views the painting is symptomatic of the way that he views life. Like

Florensky’s “realist,” Ippolit equates his single perspective with reality. He tries to convince

others of the universal truth of his contingent perspective. He tries to replace all perspectives

with his own. His way of looking at the world, thus informs his monologic way of thinking and

interacting with others.126 Ippolit exhibits “philosophical monologism” in his habit of lecturing

those around him. In Ippolit’s conversation with Evgeny Pavlovich, the narrator remarks,

“Ippolit was barely listening to Evgeny Pavlovich, and even if he said ‘well’ and ‘go on’ to him,

it seemed to be more from an old, adopted habit of conversation, and not out of attention and

curiosity” (2.X.294). Ippolit’s way of speaking is an extension of his way of seeing. Like

Florensky’s “realist,” his perspective does not allow for alternative perspectives. Ippolit’s

125
Robert Louis Jackson’s article alerted me to this fact. Jackson “Once Again About Dostoevsky’s
Response,” 186.
126
Bakhtin defines the context of monologism as follows, “In an environment of philosophical
monologism, the genuine interaction of consciousnesses is impossible, and thus genuine dialogue is
impossible as well. In essence idealism knows only a single mode of cognitive interaction among
consciousnesses: someone who knows and possesses the truth instructs someone who is ignorant of it and
in error” (PDP 80).

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“Necessary Explanation” is a forty-minute, uninterrupted, unsolicited monologue that he forces

onto a room full of Myshkin’s visitors.127

Ippolit is so completely attached to his way of seeing things that he rejects any alternative

view as deceit. In doing so, he makes himself inconsolable. He grows irate when he imagines

others, such as Myshkin, trying to mollify him on his last days on earth with sentimental

Christian teachings. He even questions his own impulse to come to Pavlovsk to see the trees one

last time because both the teachings and the trees offer false hope. He poses the following

rhetorical questions:

And what do they want to do with their ridiculous “Pavlovsk trees”? Sweeten the last
hours of my life? Don’t they understand that the more oblivious I become, the more I
give myself up to that last phantom of life and love with which they want to screen my
Meyer’s wall from me, with all that is written on it so frankly and simple-heartedly, the
more unhappy they will make me? (3.VII.412)

Meyer’s wall is an extension of Ippolit’s window, a continuation of the graph that mirrors his

systematizing, categorizing, and monologic mode of thought. Ippolit tells his audience that he

will not invest in the “phantom” of life because he would rather stick to Meyer’s wall, that is, to

his way of seeing things. Once again, Ippolit’s way of seeing things prematurely severs him from

life. Oxygenov may or may not have been correct about Ippolit’s remaining time on earth, but his

prescriptive prognosis hastens Ippolit’s death. In choosing Meyer’s wall over Pavlovsk, Ippolit

effectively chooses knowledge of life over life itself. His way of seeing slowly isolates him from

life and culminates in his attempted, but embarrassingly unsuccessful, suicide. Consumption

overtakes Ippolit not long after Nastasya Filippovna ‘s murder, but this is not what is tragic in his

case. Ippolit’s tragedy lies in how his way of seeing things steals life from him long before his

consumption does.

127
Lizaveta Prokofevna also accuses Ippolit of “corrupting” Kolya with his atheistic teachings. See
2.X.296.

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 Ippolit’s perspectival way of seeing extends beyond the frames of the Holbein painting

and culminates in his rejection of “the wellspring of force and life,” which he imagines as

embodied in the sun. He refers to the sun as (3.VII.414). He is also waiting for the sun to rise so

that he can “drink to the sun’s health” (3.IV.372) before taking his own life, as if redirecting

nature’s mockery of him back onto the sun that shines favorably on all but him. At the moment

of the rebirth of the sun, the renewal of day, Ippolit wants to end his life. He wants to see the sun

rise only to spite it. In Holbein’s painting, the body of Christ arcs above the horizon like the sun.

As suggested in my analysis, this “sun” can be interpreted visually as rising or setting or

somehow both. Depending on the viewpoint and depending on the way of seeing, it is rising after

setting below the horizon or it is sinking into the earth and leaving it behind. The metaphor is

determined by how one frames Christ’s death. Is he the Savior who trampled down death, or was

he trampled by death? Ippolit sees a dead man; arguably, he does not even see Christ at all, but

his own death. His toast to the sun’s health is an emphatic rejection of its life-giving powers and

by extension, an emphatic rejection of Christ’s resurrection. Ippolit makes sure to let his

audience know that this rejection of life is a conscious and willful decision: “When I get to these

lines, the sun will probably already be risen and resounding in the sky, and a tremendous

incalculable force will pour out on all that is under the sun. So be it! I will die looking straight

into the wellspring of force and life, and I will not want this life!” (3.VII.414).

Ippolit concludes his speech with an explicit rejection of the sun, the life that it sustains,

and its potential beauty, all of which, for him, are things that he cannot have. He writes about the

natural beauty that surrounds him, simultaneously acknowledging and rejecting the fact of its

beauty. It looks beautiful from where he sits, but he does not consider it beautiful because it has

nothing to do with him. It represents a feast to which he is not invited. Ippolit laments his

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inability to participate: “What do I care about all of this beauty, when every minute, every

second, I must and am forced to know that even this tiny fly that is now buzzing near me in a ray

of sunlight, even it participates in this banquet and chorus, knows its place, loves it, and is happy,

while I alone am a castaway, and only in my pusillanimity did not want to understand it till now”

(3.VII. 413).128 Having seen the feast from within his bedroom window, he marvels at its beauty,

but like Florensky’s “realist,” he projects his own inner state onto his surroundings and hastens

to reject the invitation. The self-proclaimed “castaway” quickly casts away the feast as

undesirable once he realizes that everyone—even the buzzing “fly” enveloped in its ray of sun—

has been invited except him.

The only remaining power that Ippolit does have, as he understands it, is the ultimate

rejection of the invitation to the feast through suicide. In a passage that prefigures Ivan

Karamazov’s philosophical returning of his “ticket” to a world that is founded on the suffering of

innocent children in The Brothers Karamazov, Ippolit criticizes the fundamental terms of

existence: “If it had been in my power not to be born, I probably would not have accepted

existence on such derisive conditions. But I still have the power to die, though I’m giving back

what’s already numbered. No great power, no great rebellion either” (3.VII.414). The chapter in

which Ivan returns his ticket is aptly entitled “Rebellion.” Both Ivan and Ippolit reject the logic

behind God’s divine wisdom and both contemplate removing themselves from an existence that

they consider poorly conceived. Whereas Ivan rejects any justification of the suffering of

innocent children, Ippolit rejects any justification either of his own or Christ’s innocent

suffering, as indicated by Ippolit’s analysis of the Holbein painting. Neither follows through with

suicide. Ivan never attempts suicide, but instead clings to life with an irrational, Karamazovian

128
Ippolit takes this image of the buzzing fly from a story that Myshkin had told him. In Myshkin’s
words, “[Ippolit] had borrowed it from his former words and tears” (3.VII.423).

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thirst for “the sticky leaves” that bud in spring. 129 Ippolit of course, rejects even these “sticky

leaves” and attempts the suicide, but fails. Neither Ivan’s nor Ippolit’s rebellion alters either the

divine or the natural order of existence. In the end, Ippolit’s body succumbs to the natural order

and his body is consumed by disease. Nature consumes Ippolit just as it consumes Christ in his

interpretation of the Holbein painting.

Ippolit questions the arbitrariness of a “higher power” that suddenly “annihilates” its

creatures, himself among them. He refuses to accede to this arrangement with humility and

instead asks his audience “Isn’t it possible simply to eat me, without demanding that I praise that

which has eaten me?” (3.VII.413).130 The concept of devouring resurfaces towards the end of

Ippolit’s speech after he mentions the “devouring force” at the core of the painting. Ippolit looks

into the Holbein painting and sees his own fate.

Both Rogozhin and His Home Reflect the Dead Christ Painting

Just as Realism hypnotizes Florensky’s viewer into mistaking its optical illusions for

reality, the Dead Christ mesmerizes Rogozhin. The painting lures Rogozhin effortlessly into its

artificial world, wherein his faith falters. His tragic struggle to recover faith is especially evident

in his futile attempt to conquer his obsession with the painting. He not only takes on the morbid

qualities of the figure within the painting, but the arrangement of the corpse in the painting also

dictates his arrangement of Nastasya Filippovna’s dead body after he murders her. Rogozhin

129
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New
York: Vintage, 1991), 273. Ippolit is not without his own irrational, life-affirming impulses, as the story
of the poor medic’s wallet reveals. Ippolit sees the medic drop his wallet on the street, and despite his
advanced consumption, against the dictates of the law of self-preservation, he impulsively rushes to the
wallet and climbs several flights of stairs (which induces a crippling coughing fit) to return it to the man.
The story comes as part of Ippolit’s “Necessary Explanation” in Part 3 of Chapter 5.
130
He adds, “I agree that it was quite impossible to arrange the world otherwise, that is, without the
ceaseless devouring of each other…” The thought of devouring looms large over Ippolit’s conscience.

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embodies both the murdered and the murderer. Moreover, Rogozhin grows up in a sepulchral

residence that bear resemblance to the painting’s tomb, which is perhaps responsible for his

attraction to the painting: he senses the resemblance of its perspective to that of his domicile. His

preoccupation with the painting can only be partially attributed to his surroundings and to the

perspectival manipulations employed by Holbein to create the convincing appearance of reality.

The rest is Rogozhin’s projection of his own perspective onto the painting. He violently

conforms both Nastasya Filippovna and the painting, to the demands of his egocentric

worldview. He is a Florenskian “realist” in this sense, but rather than painting Nastasya

Filippovna’s corpse, he sculpts it.

The painting overtakes Rogozhin’s life in different ways. In the first place, Rogozhin’s

home resembles the painting’s tomb. A reproduction of The Dead Christ hangs in “a big

reception room” in Rogozhin’s house.131 The narrator writes about the house that, “Both outside

and inside, everything is somehow inhospitable and dry, everything seems to hide and conceal

itself” (2.III.204). The outside of the house reflects its inside, where the Holbein painting

reinforces the general sense of entombment and the absence of life. The paintings that line the

interior walls of Rogozhin’s home are landscapes and portraits, as if highlighting the replacement

of the natural world with the artificial (2.III.217).

Myshkin identifies Rogozhin’s essence in the Rogozhin home. He tells Rogozhin, “Your

house has the physiognomy of your whole family and of your whole Rogozhin life” (2.III.207).

Both Rogozhin’s house and the Holbein painting overlap in Myshkin’s mind with Rogozhin, the

131
There is no ambiguity of the identity of the subject of the painting for the narrator. He begins the work
of ekphrasis for the reader, indicating that, “It portrayed the Savior (Spasitel’) just taken down from the
cross” (2.IV.217). And while he settles the debate over the persona depicted within the painting, he does
not settle the debate over what it means for the Savior to be depicted in this way. This debate is left open
for both the characters and the reader to decide.

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man. When Myshkin visits Rogozhin in his home, he also speaks about the shared qualities of

the art within the house and the architecture as though struggling to conceive of them

independently of Rogozhin. The “Rogozhin life” which his belongings collectively emblemize

can be characterized largely by the negation of life—death, the tomb, and the destruction of the

means to generate life—and also by secrecy, concealment and isolation. Rogozhin’s physical

surroundings reflect and sustain his isolation, as Ippolit’s window and brick wall reinforce his.

The clear sense of division between the private space of Rogozhin’s dwelling and public space

creates a removed vantage point from which to view the world without. And although Rogozhin,

too, looks at the world through his tiny windows, they serve a different function from that of

Ippolit’s window. The narrator mentions that the former’s house is “sturdily built, with thick

walls and extremely few windows,” adding that in such houses, “the ground-floor windows

sometimes have grilles” (2.III.204). For Rogozhin, the windows, reinforced with grilles, are

meant to keep others out and to prevent others from wandering into the privacy of his home, but

they also sever him from his surroundings. For Florensky, Realism stems from a similarly

removed perspective, which reinforces disconnection between the viewer and the falsified reality

in the painting: “We are not seeing reality, but we are experiencing a visual phenomenon; and we

spy on it as if through a chink, with cold curiosity, with neither reverence nor pity, even less with

the pathos that distance lends” (Florensky 229). Rogozhin’s removed physical perspective

reinforces his apathy and his artificial severance from life around him reinforces the functional

equivalence of his home to a tomb.

The narrator frames the home, as it were, with a wooden sign, which bears an inscription

that recalls the wooden frame and label around the Holbein painting. The label for the home

hangs on the gates in front of the home and the inscription reads, “House of the Hereditary

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Honorary Citizen Rogozhin,” thus beginning the work of ekphrasis for the reader (2.III.204). The

title names the former owner and inhabitant of the house, Rogozhin’s recently deceased father,

who was a rich merchant. The home nominally belongs to a dead man, the Rogozhin father, and

establishes the Rogozhin home as a tomb of sorts.132 The inscription thus doubles as an epitaph

and as with the wooden frame on the Dead Christ, the inscription raises as many questions as it

answers for the reader: To which dead Rogozhin does it belong? To the literally dead father? To

the metaphorically dead son? Perhaps both? Rogozhin sleeps on a “wide red morocco couch” in

his father’s former study, which is filled with oil paintings, including a large portrait of

Rogozhin’s father that overlooks the study (2.III.207). The absent father, or rather the prominent

absence of a literal father in Rogozhin’s home is analogous to the perceived absence of God, The

Father, in Holbein’s Dead Christ.133

It is unclear whether his father is a castrate, but Rogozhin tells Myshkin that his father

hosted a sect of eunuchs for three generations. The association with the eunuchs points to this as

a distinct possibility.134 This would make Rogozhin’s father an artificial inversion of the life-

generating Father of the Christian tradition, and Rogozhin, by extension, an inverted, non-

132
As for the ownership of the house after Rogozhin’s father passes away, Rogozhin makes clear that the
house belongs to his mother (2.IV.206). She inherits the home from her deceased husband and lives down
the hall from Rogozhin.
133
Rogozhin’s father is also the original purchaser of the copy of the Holbein painting that Rogozhin the
younger admires.
134
William J. Comer defines the central tenet of the sect, the members of which are called skoptsy
(castrates), as follows: “These sectarians believed that the physical alteration of their sexual organs
(oskoplenie) would release their souls from the temptation to have sexual relations, and therefore
safeguard their spiritual purity.” For more on the historical sect and its significance in the novel, see
William J. Comer, “Rogozhin and the ‘Castrates’: Russian Religious Traditions in Dostoevsky’s The
Idiot” in The Slavic and East European Journal 40.1 (1996): 85. See also Laura Engelstein, Castration
and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003) on the
associations of the Castrates with the merchant class.

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resurrected Christ.135 Rogozhin is an outlier within the family insofar as he is by no means a

Castrate; on the contrary, he suffers a hot-blooded sexual passion for Nastasya Filippovna.136 Yet

Rogozhin does fall in with the Castrates to a degree: he does not mutilate himself, but he

eventually destroys the sole object of his sexual passion, Nastasya Filippovna, effectively

castrating himself in the process. Moreover, outside of the context of his all-consuming desire for

Nastasya Filippovna, he feels more dead than alive. He confesses to Myshkin that upon hearing

her mention the possibility of marrying him, “for the first time [he] breathed like a living person”

(2.III.215). Rogozhin awaits resurrection like the dead man entombed in the painting. But

tragically, for Rogozhin, resurrection can only come through Nastasya Filippovna, whom he kills

(see below).

The narrator describes Rogozhin’s features in terms that apply to Christ’s features in

Holbein’s painting. For example, when Myshkin visits Rogozhin’s home for the first time in Part

Two, the narrator describes Rogozhin’s face as twisted, which anticipates Christ’s distorted face

in the painting. The narrator notes that upon seeing Myshkin in his home, “[Rogozhin] went pale

and froze on the spot, so that for some time he looked like a stone idol, staring with fixed and

frightened eyes and twisting his mouth into a sort of smile perplexed in the highest degree”

(2.III.205). This look remains on Rogozhin’s face during their conversation. The narrator writes,

“The paleness and, as it were, the quick fleeting spasm still had not left Rogozhin’s face”

135
I borrow the coinage “non-resurrected Christ” from Olga Meerson’s article, “Ivolgin and Holbein:
Non-Christ Risen vs. Christ Non-Risen.” The Slavic and East European Journal 39.2 (1995): 200-13.
136
The narrator also leaves open the possibility that Rogozhin’s brother, Semyon Semyonovich, who lives
in the wing of the same house, has also murdered his wife. We know next to nothing about this brother
apart from the fact that in response to Myshkin’s question, “Does he have a family?” Rogozhin replies,
“He’s a widower. Why do you ask?” to which Myshkin has the following ambiguous, yet suggestive
reaction: “The prince looked at him and did not answer; he suddenly became pensive and seemed not to
hear the question. Rogozhin did not insist and waited. Silence fell” (2.III.206). The moment recalls the
elliptical realism identified by Liza Knapp in the Dead House except that the reader is led into imagining
the worst about both Rogozhin and his brother.

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(2.III.205). His “paleness” evokes Christ’s pallor, and the “fleeting spasm” that remains frozen

on Rogozhin’s face prefigures Christ’s mouth in the painting, which is frozen in a perplexingly

open position.137 In his Notebooks to the Idiot, Dostoevsky had proposed that Myshkin would

analyze the painting, and especially the moment in the Gospels when Christ cries out “Eloi, Eloi,

lama sabachthani?” or “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34).138

Christ’s open mouth in the painting invokes this cry and expresses his poignant sense of

abandonment. Rogozhin’s deceased father has abandoned him, too. Not only has Rogozhin taken

on certain features of Jesus in the painting that hangs in his reception room, but he may also

identify with him as a forsaken son.

The placement of the painting within the home – over a doorway, a threshold space,

sitting between two rooms, as if between two worlds – is also significant. The placement of the

painting’s reproduction recreates the original context of Holbein’s painting. The original that was

likely commissioned as either a lid to a sepulcher or a predella to an altarpiece occupied a

threshold space between this world and the next, with equal potential for concealing and

revealing what lies beyond.139 The painting’s placement raises a metaphorical question about

137
This is another bifurcated symbol within the visually polyphonic painting. Jesus appears to be exhaling
or moaning in a gesture that can be interpreted as his last breath or cry on the one hand and his
reawakening breath or cry on the other.
138
In a proposed passage for the novel, Dostoevsky has the Idiot speak of Christ’s “terrible cry.” I owe
this finding in the Notebooks to Jackson in his most recent article, “Once Again about Dostoevsky’s
Response to Hans Holbein the Younger’s Dead Christ in the Tomb,” p. 187. I quote his translation here:
“‘What cry?’ his interlocutor asks. ‘Eloi! Eloi!’ ‘So there was an eclipse.’ ‘I don’t know—but it was a
terrible cry,’ the Idiot answers.” Jackson adds to this passage that “Dostoevsky directly follows this
exchange with the line: ‘The story of Holbein’s “Christ” in Basel’ (PSS 9:184).” This cry is featured in
each of the other three canonical Gospels: Matthew 27:45-46; Luke 23:44-49, John 19:28-30.
139
I thank Tom Roberts for this observation that he made in a conference paper entitled “Ippolit Terent’ev
as Forerunner: Contextualizing Fries’ ‘The Beheading of John the Baptist’ in ‘The Idiot’,” delivered at
AATSEEL in Los Angeles, 2013.

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what, if anything, lies in the “next room.” Its placement challenges the viewer who may dwell on

the painting without walking through, or who might walk through despite or perhaps even

because he sees the painting. This painting marks a critical bifurcation that divides the characters

of the novel roughly into two rooms, as it were, those who believe what they can see with their

own eyes, and those who believe through faith in the renewed life that awaits them in the “next

room.”

Rogozhin claims that he likes looking at the painting,140 but Myshkin thinks that

Rogozhin looks at the painting as a symptom of his desire “to recover his lost faith by force”

(2.V.231). Rogozhin not only looks at the painting in order to win back his faith “by force,” but

he also models his murder of Nastasya Filippovna after the painting, as if to incarnate the

painting and look at it in real life. The narrator writes: “The sleeper was covered from head to

foot with a white sheet, but the limbs were somehow vaguely outlined; one could only see by the

raised form that a person lay stretched out there” (4.XI.606). Her bare toe also juts out from

under the sheet, and the narrator remarks that “it seemed carved of marble and was terribly still”

(4.XI.606). The “raised form” of the dead body of Nastasya Filippovna mirrors the arched dead

body of Christ in the painting. Rogozhin reenacts the murder and burial of Christ by murdering

his personal object of worship and staging her body in the tomb. He then lies in wait, as if

anticipating her resurrection, which would cause him to believe again, effectively winning back

140
The Dead Christ is Rogozhin’s prized possession as he indicates by boasting about his rejection of
three exceedingly generous offers from two different merchants who wanted to purchase it from him.
Rogozhin tells Myshkin, “All these paintings here my deceased father bought at auctions for a ruble or
two. He liked that. One man who’s a connoisseur looked at them all: trash, he said, but that one—the
painting over the door, also bought for two rubles—he said, isn’t trash. In my father’s time somebody
showed up offering three hundred and fifty rubles for it, and Savelyev, Ivan Dimitrich, a merchant, a great
amateur, went up to four hundred, and last week he offered my brother Semyon Semyonych as much as
five hundred. I kept it for myself” (218.2.IV).

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his lost faith “by force.”141 Rogozhin tries to stage and witness Nastasya Filippovna’s literal

resurrection, but his objectifying love yields resurrections opposite: death. In his real-life staging

of the painting, he literalizes the theoretical problem of objectification identified by Dostoevsky

in Yakobi’s depiction of prisoners. Whereas Yakobi metaphorically kills the subjects in his

painting by extinguishing their interiority, Rogozhin literally objectifies the subject of his art by

murdering her. He transforms her from a living subject into a breathless marble statue. His realist

sculpture precludes metaphorical resurrection, either for Nastasya Filippovna or for himself, and

his attempt to recover faith “by force” only yields violence, death and further isolation.

Rogozhin’s artistically arranged post-murder scene interprets The Dead Christ not as the

portrayal of death as a means to eventually renewed life, but instead as an end in itself. He

conforms Nastasya Filippovna’s body to his egocentric demands. Rogozhin’s egotistical,

possessive love is an inversion of Christ’s selfless, resurrecting love. Myshkin points out this

inversion when he tells Rogozhin, “Your love is indistinguishable from enmity” (2.IV.213).

Rogozhin’s egocentric worldview precludes selfless love. The death and the decay of Christ’s

body in the painting are naturalistic depictions, on the one hand, and metaphorical depictions of

self-denial, self-sacrifice, self-abnegation, on the other. Rogozhin interprets the painting literally

and sees the dead body as just that, a corpse. Viewing the body metaphorically contradicts

Rogozhin’s interpretation. The potentially self-sacrificial attributes of Jesus in the painting, for

instance, the wounds that he endured out of love for mankind, undermine the ego that is the

supreme value and source of Rogozhin’s reality. Rogozhin’s love for Nastasya Filippovna turns

to enmity because it is self-centered rather than self-sacrificing. He does not regard Nastasya

141
Andrew Wachtel interprets the scene as a photograph of the same biblical scene in his article
“Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’: The Novel as Photograph” in History of Photography 26, no. 3 (2002). Nina
Pelikan Straus identifies the scene as an objectified Madonna in Dostoevsky and the Woman Question:
Rereadings at the End of a Century (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994).

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Filippovna as an independent entity and complex subject who exists in her own right, beyond the

confines of his ego.

Rogozhin devalues, objectifies and coerces Nastasya Filippovna to fit his solipsistic

interpretation of his most prized possession, The Dead Christ. He violently shapes the physical

body of Nastasya Filippovna into conformity with his artistically egocentric interpretation of the

painting’s non-resurrection. The marble idol made of Nastasya Filippovna’s body devours his

own most beloved being, just as “nature” devoured Ippolit’s “priceless being” in his similarly

solipsistic interpretation of the painting. Nastasya Filippovna is devoured not by an indifferent,

impersonal force of nature, but rather artificially by the artist who sees and renders her in an

objectifying style. Rogozhin is not only a Florenskian “realist,” but also a Naturalist: he literally

imitates nature as he arranges his naturalist tableau.

Rogozhin’s egocentric worldview makes him easily mesmerized by the perspectival

painting. In order to suit his ego, he overlooks certain aspects within the painting that would

challenge his interpretation. The egocentric perspective that orders the painting’s realistic style

mirrors Rogozhin’s egocentric worldview, but he does not see the subtle ways in which Holbein

breaks with perspective, such as his depiction of Christ’s right hand and middle finger. Neither

does he see the ways in which Christ’s protruding hand and flexed body seem to be wrestling his

way out of the inward pull of the perspectival painting and exiting the tomb. Nor does Rogozhin

see ambiguity in the visual cues, such as the decaying/regenerating body, or Christ’s open mouth

that could be exhaling its last breath or breathing its first breath of resurrection. Instead, the form

of the realist painting strokes Rogozhin’s ego, and he self-flatteringly believes that his

interpretation of reality is reality per se. But this illusory reality emerges dynamically out of the

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general form of the painting and Rogozhin’s way of seeing it. Once convinced of the superiority

of this reality, he drags Nastasya Filippovna into conformity with it.142

Rogozhin never leaves this painting, namely, Rogozhin’s Dead Christ, and he makes his

home in it, as it were. He bears the marks of the painting, the tomb, and the inverted Christ, but

he also puts the stamp of his “Rogozhin life” onto these things and personalizes them. He

chooses to remain trapped in the moment of Christ’s death and keeps the painting where his

father left it, hanging overhead in the reception room to the Rogozhin home. Rogozhin eclipses

the life that Christ lived with the shadow of his own ego. Like Father Ferapont in The Brothers

Karamazov, he looks for evidence of the resurrection in the wrong place. The decaying body in

the painting that has the potential to serve as a means to faith instead corroborates both his self-

centered worldview and his consequent lack of faith in the possibility of resurrection through

overcoming his self-imprisonment. Like Ippolit, Rogozhin remains trapped in the theater of the

mind that epitomizes Florensky’s redefinition of so-called “Realism.” He is ensnared in the

philosophical illusoriness of Plato’s cave, into which he drags Nastasya Filippovna violently.

The Empathetic Vision of Reverse Perspective Embraces Many Linear Perspectives

Myshkin does not see the opposite of what Ippolit or Rogozhin see in the painting, rather

he has a more comprehensive way of seeing that embraces Ippolit’s and Rogozhin’s. If Ippolit

and Rogozhin embody Florensky’s “realist,” “monocular” way of seeing, then Myshkin

embodies a panoptic way of seeing that is characteristic of Florensky’s reverse perspective and

its special capacity to restore the viewer to the “living reality” beyond the artistic representation.

142
Myshkin narrowly escapes Rogozhin’s attempt to kill him shortly after they look at the Holbein
painting and discuss it in his home (I cover their discussion later in this chapter). During their
conversation, Myshkin feels painfully uncomfortable in Rogozhin’s house and wants out as soon as he
goes in. This is, on the one hand, an expression of Myshkin’s dislike of the painting in Rogozhin’s house,
as I discuss. But it is, on the other hand, an expression of Myshkin’s fear of being murdered by Rogozhin,
a fate that Nastasia Filippovna ultimately cannot escape. Myshkin is saved in the last moment by an
epileptic fit that overcomes him in the moment Rogozhin is about to murder him.

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Florensky contrasts the egocentric, modernist trend of linear perspective with the non-linear-

perspectival art that prevailed among ancient and medieval artists. The form of this painting style

challenges the value system dictated by the ego in linear perspective. Florensky defines this form

as follows: “the further away something is, the bigger it is; the closer it is, the smaller. This is

reverse perspective […] we are not drawn into this space; on the contrary, it repels us, as a

mercury sea would repel our bodies” (Florensky 239). The term “reverse” in Florensky’s

“Reverse Perspective” refers to the reversal of the artist or viewer’s relationship to the painting.

The word translated as “reverse,” obratnyi in Russian, may also be translated as “inverse.”

Florensky conveys both senses of the term: a reversal in the sense of being repelled by the

painting back into the living world and an inversion in the sense of inverting the hierarchical,

egocentric value system of linear perspective.

Reverse perspective is Florensky’s way out of the Platonic cave of linear perspective. In

reverse perspective, the objects are depicted as if from several perspectives, none of which is

privileged over the next as the definitive “reality.” Reverse perspectival art removes both the

painter and the viewer from the center of the depicted world, which becomes polycentric, in the

sense that there are multiple centers or viewpoints from which a single object is considered. The

monologic form of linear perspectival art is replaced with the more dialogic form of “reverse

perspective.” In contradistinction to the subjectivising form of linear-perspectival artists, the

multi-perspectival art of reverse perspective, Florensky argues, reflects on a formal level the

conviction that objects exist in and of themselves, independently of their momentary appearance

to the viewer. Revers perspective does not attempt to reproduce the object depicted with fidelity

to the eye, but rather engages the viewer in an act of contemplation that turns the viewer’s

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attention away from the painting itself and towards the world in which such objects—including

the viewer’s body—exist, beyond the canvas.

Florensky cites medieval Byzantine icons as an example of art that incorporates multiple

perspectives into its representation of an object. In a Byzantine icon of this style, for example, all

four sides of a table might be depicted instead of just two. To the Western critic, steeped in the

interpretation of linear perspective as “Realism,” such tables appear primitive. Florensky

chastises critics who argue that such art is inferior to linear perspective because it lacks a

coherent spatial schema that would bring all of the represented objects under the orderly rule of

“perspectival unity” (Florensky 246). Multiple perspectives, Florensky argues, are significant not

only as a way of privileging the object, but also as a way of reflecting on a formal level the

viewer’s act of conceiving of and viewing the object depicted from many different

perspectives.143

Florensky critiques images created by the method of linear perspective. He argues that

linear perspective does not accurately reflect of what we see in the world because it involves

reducing the image to what one eye sees. Florensky points out that every image that a person

sees is a synthesis of two images, one from the left and one from the right eye. The mind’s union

of these two separate images is what lends depth to the visible world. The illusion generated by

linear perspective is not even an accurate visual illusion because it reduces the visible world to

its appearance from a single viewpoint, a flat image seen by a single eye. The image alone not

143
Florensky argues that perspectival art misrepresent objects. He asks, “And what resemblance can there
be between, for example, a table and its perspectival depiction, if outlines which we know to be parallel
are depicted by converging lines, right angles by angles that are acute and wide, if the segments and
angles which are equal are represented by unequal sizes, and unequal sizes by equal ones?” (Florensky
253). Also see Boris Uspensky, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon, ed. Stephen Rudy, (Lisse: Peter De
Ridder, 1976), 49. From now on, Uspensky’s work will be cited in the text of the chapter.

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only lacks visual depth for Florensky, but philosophical depth, which according to Florensky

stems from the synthesis of multiple perspectives:

There is not a single person in his right mind who thinks that his point of view is the only
one and who does not accept every place, every point of view as something of value, as
giving a special aspect of the world that doesn’t exclude other aspects, but affirms them.
Some points of view are more full of content and characteristic, others less so, each in its
own respect, but there is no absolute point of view. Consequently, the artist attempts to
examine the object he depicts from various points of view, enriching his observation with
new aspects of reality, and acknowledging them as more or less of equal meaning.
(Florensky 267)

On a formal level, reverse perspective accounts for the range of perspectives that lend depth to

our understanding. To be sure, the images depicted in this style appear flat, that is, lacking in

visual depth, but the decision to paint the object from multiple perspectives adds depth to the

object by leading the viewer into both an acknowledgement and a consideration of multiple

perspectives. The object is fleshed out, so to speak. It is rendered with depth in the viewer’s

imagination, which is prompted by the painting. Long after Florensky, Boris Uspensky redefines

the tradition of multi-perspectival rendering of Byzantine iconography. In his Semiotics of the

Russian Icon (1976), he calls it “summation.” Uspensky describes summation as an act of

“multilateral embrace” that is depicted by the iconographer in such a way as to encourage this

“embrace” of the object depicted in the viewer’s mind (Uspensky 50).144 The viewer’s capacity

to synthesize contrasting perspectives adds depth to the image and restores a sense of connection

not only to the depicted objects and subjects, but to one’s lived, personal experience. I contend

that an image that exhibits visual polyphony reflects this capacity for summation both in content,

as with the dialogic visual cues in The Dead Christ, and in form, as in the case of reverse

144
Miller’s description of the “kaleidoscopic” narration in The Idiot demands the reader’s synthesis of the
narrator’s shifting perspectives (Dostoevsky and The Idiot 230). Both Holbein’s Dead Christ and the form
of the novel initiate a kind of process of summation in the viewer/reader that is analogous to the act of
both creating and understanding an icon.

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perspective that characterizes Byzantine iconography. A visually polyphonic painting animates

the viewer by setting in motion the process of “summation” (Uspensky 50).

Byzantine iconographers rendered the contents of their icons not as viewed from a single

vantage point, but rather as entities that were given to the viewer, who then would contemplate

those entities from several sides and several angles. By contrast, the table in linear perspective

maintains the visual unity of the schema in order to create a singular, realistic visual encounter.

Florensky calls the viewer’s one-eyed perspective both “monocular” and “cycloptic” vision. The

unity of the painting comes at the cost of abandoning contradictory or even slightly alternative

perspectives (Florensky 267). Consequently, the form of the painting reduces the status of the

viewer from that of a contemplator to a gazer, and the status of the object from that of a self-

subsisting whole to a fleeting and incomplete fragment of that whole. The object depicted in

linear perspective gains the illusion of visual depth, but it loses depth in the viewer’s

imagination.

The act of contemplation is not the end goal of reverse perspective for Florensky. The

strictly perspectival painting produces the opposite effect of what Florensky would have a

“Realism” accomplish. For Florensky, any art that lays claim to such an ostentatious title as

“Realism” ought not to draw one into an illusory world either of the painting or of the mind, but

rather ought to catapult the viewer back into the living reality beyond either. He writes, “The task

of perspective, as with other artistic methods, can only be a certain spiritual excitement, a jolt

that rouses one’s attention to reality itself. In other words, perspective too, if it is worth anything,

should be a language, a witness to reality” (Florensky 254). Florensky regards art as symbolic

and declares that it must offer a vivifying sense of connection to the world beyond its own

representation by depicting that world in an artful, but still symbolic, way. A good painting, like

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a good symbol, does not pretend to be the thing that it represents, but rather points to the true

nature of the thing represented. It reintegrates the viewer into his immediate surroundings, as

opposed to severing him from them. Florensky considers art as a road map for reality, not a self-

sufficient replacement of reality. “The map,” Florensky explains, “represents to the extent that

through it and by means of it we turn in spirit to the actual thing depicted [i.e., the land and

bodies of water], and does not represent if it does not carry us beyond its own confines, but

instead detains us in itself as in some pseudo-reality, in a likeness of reality, if the map lays claim

to a self-sufficient significance” (Florensky 260). Real art for Florensky, then, restores a sense of

connection to one’s surroundings by engaging the viewer with life beyond the confines of both

the canvas and the ego.

Myshkin’s Many Ways of Seeing Draw from Different Professions that Reinforce his

Reverse Perspectival Worldview

It is difficult to define Myshkin’s philosophical point of view because he borrows habits

of thought from various vocations, yet it is critical to understand his multi-faceted persona in

order to clarify his interpretation of the painting. Like Ippolit the student, Myshkin does not have

an established profession. The narrator clearly defines Ippolit as a materialist, atheist and nihilist,

but he doesn’t define Myshkin’s identity and concomitant perspective, which he attempts to flesh

out for the length of the novel. Before turning to Myshkin’s experience of the painting, I would

like to examine his way of seeing and how it differs from Ippolit’s.

When Myshkin first arrives in St. Petersburg, his very practically minded and well-

connected relative, General Epanchin, tries to determine which skills Myshkin possesses that will

allow him to provide for himself. The General discovers that Myshkin is a skilled calligrapher,

but he does not call Myshkin a calligrapher, he calls him “an artist” (1.III.34). The term that he

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uses here is artist and not khudozhnik, the term used by Dostoevsky to denote his “true artist”

(see Chapter 1 section on “The Exhibition”). Nonetheless, General Epanchin calls Myshkin an

artist because he exhibits a special mastery of the craft of calligraphy that elevates it to the status

of art in his eyes. He considers Myshkin an artist not only because of his beautiful penmanship,

but also because of the way in which Myshkin describes the signatures of historical people that

he has copied. Within each signature Myshkin sees a personality, or in his words the “whole

military scrivener’s soul is peeking out of it” (1.III.34). Myshkin waxes poetic about these

signatures, confessing that “you can even fall in love” with a script that has exactly the right

proportion of light and dark in the form on the page and the ink in each letter. The general

applauds him, “You’re not simply a calligrapher, my dear fellow, you’re an artist” (1.III.34).

The question remains, what kind of artist is Myshkin? He is not a painter. Not unlike

Dostoevsky, he is an artist who creates with words. The dividing line between the two blurs in

the case of Myshkin’s calligraphy, where the word and the image, logos and icon merge to create

beautiful art.145

Adelaida returns to the idea of Myshkin as an artist during their first conversation. She

asks Myshkin to pick a subject for her to paint. Myshkin expresses confusion at the question and

replies, “It seems to me you just look and paint” (1.III.34). Myshkin reveals that his notion of art

stems not from artifice, but rather from sincerity of expression. In the same way that a child

looks and draws what he sees, artlessly, Myshkin calls for Adelaida to simply paint what she

145
For more on ekphrasis in The Idiot, see Molly Jo Brunson, who discusses the role of vision and the
visual arts in Dostoevsky’s “fantastic Realism” in the novel; Brunson, Russian Realisms: Literature and
Painting, 1840-1890 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois UP, 2016). Jefferson Gatrall argues that “[Dostoevsky’s]
ekphrastic impulse extends to his own word pictures.” He adds, “In Dostoevsky’s fiction, the term
kartina, or ‘picture,’ occurs in a variety of different contexts, including actual paintings, literary
portraiture, mental impressions, and memories.” Jefferson J. A. Gatrall, The Real and the Sacred:
Picturing Jesus in Nineteenth-century Fiction (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2014), 175.

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sees. Adelaida concludes that since art is so simple for Myshkin, he must simply “know how to

look,” something that she claims not to know how to do. Perhaps she has forgotten what she

once knew as a child. Myshkin, however, retains this child-like way of looking. He is referred to

as a “perfect child” by the general and Doctor Schneider and is aware of his special connection

to children, as evident in his ability to convert a community of Swiss children to love the outcast

Marie.146 He converts them with his capacity to render Marie sympathetic in their eyes. The

voices of authority in the Swiss village depict Marie as shameful. Myshkin challenges this

perspective by offering different ways of looking at her. He also exhibits his child-like

connection to art by allowing it to connect him and others to life. He does not tell Adelaida to

paint a simple subject from a detached, voyeuristic perspective, but rather tells her to paint a

story that would allow the viewer to feel empathy for the criminal about to be executed. For

Myshkin, as for a child, art serves as a means to connect rather than isolate.

Florensky describes Byzantine art as natural because of its child-like manner of

representation. According to him, the learned “schema” of linear perspective artificially replaces

the child’s natural manner of representing objects. He argues:

The drawings of children, in their lack of perspective and especially their use of reverse
perspective, vividly recall mediaeval drawings, despite the efforts of educators to instill
in children the laws of linear perspective. It is only when they lose their spontaneous
relationship to the world that children lose reverse perspective and submit to the schema
with which they have been indoctrinated. This is how all children behave, independent of
each other. This means that it is not mere chance, or a willful invention by one of them
putting on Byzantine airs, but a representational method that derives from a characteristic
perceptual synthesis of the world. (Florensky 219)

Myshkin cannot explain to Adelaida how to paint, because for him it is a matter of looking and

painting. There is no division between art and life for Myshkin. There is no pane of glass, no

window between him and his surroundings. Art is an extension of the living world, to which the

146
See The Idiot, 1.IV.51 and 1.VI.74.

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child-like Myshkin bears a “spontaneous relationship.” Myshkin “knows how to look” in the

sense that he knows how to synthesize what he sees imaginatively as a child.147

Myshkin ultimately obliges Adelaida with a subject, but it proves to be an impossible

subject to paint, that is, impossible with paint: Myshkin paints with words. Even when Myshkin

has only described the face of a condemned man before the scaffold, a confused Adelaida asks,

“What sort of picture would it make?” (1.IV.63). What makes the subject difficult to paint is that

Myshkin begins to tell an entire story about his subject. That is, he recounts the tale of a

condemned man’s final days and examines the man’s life from the many different perspectives

of different moments leading up to the execution. Myshkin’s idea for the painting is perhaps best

described in his own words when he instructs Adelaida, saying “You know, here you have to

imagine everything that went before, everything, everything” (1.V.64).

Dostoevsky would revisit this idea in his Writer’s Diary in 1873, in a preface to his own

street sketches, or “Little Pictures”: “When I wander about the streets I enjoy examining certain

total strangers, studying their faces and trying to guess who they are and how they live, what

they work at, and what is in their minds at this moment.”148 Myshkin appears to share this hobby

with his creator, and he wants Adelaida to depict these kinds of facts about the condemned man

in a painting, which seems absurd to her. But Myshkin’s suggestion is only absurd for Adelaida’s

realist painting style. We know from the same conversation with Myshkin that she focuses

primarily on landscapes. It is impossible to imagine a coherent painting in a linear perspectival

147
In a letter to his daughter Olga, sent from Solovki on 13 May 1937, Florensky writes, “The secret of
creativity lies in the preservation of youth. The secret of genius lies in the preservation of something
infantile, an infantile intuition that endures throughout life. It is a question of a certain constitution that
provides genius with an objective perception of the world, one that does not gravitate towards a center: a
kind of reverse perspective, one that is, therefore, integral and real” (Beyond Vision 29).
148
Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, Vol. I, trans. K. A. Lantz, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP,
1993), (216; PSS 21:77).

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style that meets all of Myshkin’s demands; the painting would have to span time and portray

complex tales within tales; it would have to convey on one face several facial expressions

corresponding to the emotional reactions to various experiences.149 Yet this is precisely what

Myshkin would like to see.150 The content of Myshkin’s painting transcends the formal

limitations of Adelaida’s painting style. Myshkin’s suggestion is not absurd on its own. It simply

reveals his reverse perspectival way of seeing things, which clashes with the prevailing artistic

vision of his time. Art is a means to empathy for Myshkin. He wants Adelaida’s painting to

connect the viewer to the personalities (artist and painted subjects alike) that inspire the painting.

The painting should depict a multi-faceted, personal human experience empathetically. His

suggestion challenges the perspectival foundations on which Adelaida’s realism is constructed.

Myshkin’s paintings do not require a literal human subject. In fact, it is Myshkin’s

descriptions of two Swiss landscapes that inspire Adelaida to ask for a subject to paint. He

describes the landscapes according to his humanizing artistic principles. In the first landscape, he

describes looking at a waterfall (not unlike those depicted in François Diday’s Chute inférieure

du Reichenbach, which Dostoevsky reviewed in “The Exhibition” article, discussed below) from

half a mile away; the second is of a view atop a mountain that overlooks his Swiss village. He

describes the landscape in response to Aglaia’s claim that Myshkin “knows how to be happy”

and should therefore teach them how to be happy. Myshkin teaches by juxtaposing his two

descriptions. In the first one, he looks at the waterfall and feels profound sadness. In the second,

149
This desire to depict the face of the condemned man at different times in his life also borrows from the
Byzantine tradition, in which a series of small vignettes frame the central image of a given saint in order
to tell that saint’s story. The vignettes depict various holy deeds over the course of a saint’s life for which
he or she has gained renown.
150
Myshkin’s proposed picture recalls Gorianchikov’s “strange picture” before the play.

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he discovers a way out of his sadness by discovering an “immense life” beyond the horizon. I

quote the passage in full here to allow Myshkin’s verbal paintings to stand on their own:

We had a waterfall there [near the Swiss village], not a big one, it fell from high up the
mountain in a very thin thread, almost perpendicular—white, noisy, foamy; it fell from a
great height, but it seemed low; it was half a mile away, but it seemed only fifty steps. I
liked listening to the noise of it at night; and at those moments I’d sometimes get very
restless. Also at noon sometimes, when I’d wander off somewhere into the mountains,
stand alone halfway up a mountain, with pines all around, old, big, resinous; up on a cliff
there’s an old medieval castle, our little village is far down, barely visible; the sun is
bright, the sky blue, the silence terrible. Then there would come a call to go somewhere,
and it always seemed to me that if I walked straight ahead, and kept on for a long, long
time, and went beyond that line where the sky and the earth meet, the whole answer
would be there, and at once I’d see a new life, a thousand times stronger and noisier than
ours; I kept dreaming of a big city like Naples, where it was all palaces, noise, clatter,
life... I dreamed about all kinds of things! And then it seemed to me that in prison, too,
you could find and immense life. (1.V.58)

Myshkin’s isolation is apparent in his verbal representation of the Swiss landscape. In describing

the waterfall, he seems to be unconsciously trapped in the confines of his own linear perspectival

painting. He senses that in order to be happy, he must break through the landscape’s visual limits

but he does not know how. He longs to transcend the landscape by tearing down the visual

artifice that imprisons him. From the mountain top, he becomes conscious of a way out of the

visible artifice, precisely at the place where vision breaks down at the horizon. The horizon is a

visual ellipsis, a seam in the visual landscape that lures his imaginative thought to dwell on what

lies beyond. He begins to fill in the ellipsis as he becomes conscious of the visual construct that

his physical viewpoint determines. The “immense life” opens to him, or rather, it opens up

within him in the act of imaginatively consummating the visual ellipsis. The sky and the earth do

not end before his eyes, but rather they extend infinitely into his imagination. The physical

beauty of the Swiss landscapes strikes Myshkin, but this beauty induces sadness in him until he

realizes that he has a hand in its co-creation. Just as the feuilleton writer’s existence began upon

discovering the city made of smoke above St. Petersburg, Myshkin’s existence as an artist begins

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at this moment. In both instances, the artists become aware of their creative role in constructing

the visible world, and they begin to consciously recreate it. Here, Myshkin begins to sense his

own creative hand in the act of seeing, and through the visible limits of the Swiss landscape’s

horizon, he finds the “immense life” of the dreamer’s vision. This life exists beyond the confines

of a strictly perspectival worldview.

Myshkin’s landscapes recall Dostoevsky’s ekphrasis of two of his favorite paintings in

“The Exhibition at the Academy of the Arts in 1860” — the works of two Swiss painters:

François Diday (1802-1877) and Alexandre Calame (1810-1864). Both artists meet

Dostoevsky’s demands for the “true artist” by infusing their visually realistic landscapes with

humane feeling, thereby allowing the viewer to connect with the life beyond the painting in the

form of the empathetic artist. The paintings that he admires are Diday’s Chute inférieure du

Reichenbach (1834, see fig. 6 below) and Calame’s Lake of Four Cantons (1852, see fig. 7

below).

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 Figure 12. Chute inférieure du Reichenbach by François Diday.151

151
Diday, François. Chute Inférieure Du Reichenbach. Digital image. Artnet.com.

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 Figure 13. Lake of Four Cantons by Alexandre Calame152

Dostoevsky praises both paintings not only for their verisimilitude, but also for their capacity to

transmit the personality—“mind” and “soul”—of each artist to the viewer. He writes of Diday’s

Chute inférieure du Reichenbach that “It is not a naked photograph of a waterfall. Diday was

searching neither for the supernatural nor for fortuitous enlightenment; he neither fussed over the

152
Alexandre Calame, Lake of Four Cantons (c. 1850). Digital image. Wikimediacommons.

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effect nor painted a portrait of his waterfall, but rather transmitted that impression and that

disposition of mind (dukha), that the Reichenbach [Falls] produced in him with its grand

scenery” (my translation; PSS 19:164). The viewer can sense the living artist, as opposed to the

camera lens, behind the painting. He praises Calame’s Four Cantons for similar reasons:

Apart from the astounding fidelity to nature, apart from how every part, every detail is executed
absolutely painstakingly, the painting impresses by the fact that the magician-artist poured his
soul into it. There is nothing even special in the painting: mountains and peaceful waters in a
gentle mist. But every viewer, without exception, will fall to thinking profoundly and sweetly
about this painting, and each one will see that the artist himself was immersed in a kind of sad
reverie, peering into the faraway mountains, the clear sky and the misty distance. How exactly he
managed to confer all of this to the painting is a secret that belongs to the artist; still it is clear that
he did not photograph nature, but merely used nature as a means to evoke in the viewer (naveiat’
na zritelia) the personal, meek, peaceful, sweet-pensive disposition of his own soul. There would
be nothing easier than to copy (skopirovat’) a similarly simple painting, but it is doubtful that one
could transmit the soul of the original. (My translation; PSS 19:164)

Dostoevsky’s praise of Diday and Calame provides the theoretical context for Myshkin’s artistic

advice for Adelaida. He invites her to use realistic detail as a medium for the revelation of her

soul as she paints.

Myshkin encourages the landscape artist, Adelaida, to paint “everything” that pertains to

the execution not only from the embodied perspective of the condemned man, but more

importantly, he encourages her to animate the painting with her personality. He models this

practice by infusing his ekphrastic portrait of the condemned man with the compassion he felt as

he witnessed the criminal’s execution. This personal feeling creates a sense of connection to the

living reality beyond the painting by making the viewer aware of the inner worlds of both the

person to be executed as well as the artist who witnesses and paints his execution. Myshkin

recommends Adelaida to simply “look and paint,” because he does exactly that with words: he

looks and conveys his own subjective, multi-perspectival experience of the scene, as a composite

of images, from a place of profound empathy. Like Dostoevsky’s, Myshkin’s objective details

serve to humanize their subject, whether the realistic details of his Swiss landscape or a the face

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of a condemned criminal moments before his execution. If only Adelaida could paint the

condemned man’s face, or her landscapes, for that matter, in such a way as to transmit her

subjective feeling to the viewer through the medium of the realistic image, then she would never

be at a loss for a subject to paint. Like Myshkin, she would simply “look and paint.” Myshkin’s

unfiltered way of speaking permeates his descriptions with personality. He animates the

descriptions with feeling. Adelaida commits the error that Dostoevsky ascribed to the realist

artist Yakobi: she wants to hide her personality behind the camera lens and paint an objectively

interesting or beautiful painting. She lacks a subject to paint because she does not know how to

infuse her emotions into her paintings. Myshkin gives her a subject that only he is capable of

painting because it is specifically his painting. Adelaida has to find her own painting, but the

subject is only visible to the artist who knows “how to look.” Adelaida’s name means “obscure”

or “unclear,” and it reflects her struggle both to see and to express herself clearly as an artist. She

does not “see” what she needs to paint.153

By contrast, Myshkin, as an artist, sees clearly. In the case of the condemned criminal, he

effortlessly incorporates the details of the execution, not only rendering the criminal’s face with

telling descriptions, but also managing to inspire empathy in his listener-reader both for the

condemned man and for Myshkin as a witness. His verbal imagery does not result in a cold,

voyeuristic depiction of the prisoner as if through Florensky’s “chink in the wall,” but rather a

co-experiencing of the execution. As an empathetic, reverse perspectival artist, he initiates the

act of “summation” in his listener-readers whom he invites to co-create the scene by envisioning

the life of the condemned criminal from the various perspectives leading up to his execution. The

reader summates the criminal in his imagination, metaphorically embracing him in the moment

153
See Knapp’s chapter “Introduction to The Idiot Part 2: The Novel” in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot: A
Critical Companion, ed. Liza Knapp (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1998), 30.

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before his death just as the artist did in his imagination while witnessing him. Myshkin’s realist

style connects the viewer to the living personalities beyond his depictions.

What Myshkin Sees in the Dead Christ Disturbs But Does Not Destroy His Faith

Like Rogozhin and Ippolit, Myshkin views the reproduction of The Dead Christ in

Rogozhin’s house, but he is the only character to actually see the original. The narrator vouches

for the copy’s fidelity of scale to the original, but it is Myshkin who vouches for its fidelity to the

original in style.154 Myshkin identifies the painting at Rogozhin’s, saying “‘Yes, it’s … it’s a

copy from Hans Holbein […] and, though I’m no great expert, it seems an excellent copy. I saw

the painting abroad and cannot forget it’” (2.IV.218). Not only has Myshkin seen the original,

but the memory of the painting also haunts him. He also reminds the reader that the painting

exists outside of the context of the novel.

Myshkin “cannot forget” the painting because it persists against his efforts to banish it

from memory. This point is reinforced by the fact that when he first sees the painting at

Rogozhin’s, he feels suddenly claustrophobic and tries to leave the room. The narrator writes,

“The prince glanced fleetingly at [the painting] as if recalling something, not stopping, however,

wanting to go on through the door. He felt very oppressed and wanted to go out of the house

quickly” (2.IV.218). This urge to leave the room reveals the discomfort inspired by the painting,

but the fact that he wants to leave the house suggests his willingness to move beyond the

painting as if perceiving it as a barrier to faith. Rogozhin, by contrast, does not allow Myshkin to

pass immediately through the doorway, but forces him to pause and talk about the painting.

Rogozhin dwells on the moment of death depicted in the painting not as a passage, but as an

absolute end.

154
The narrator writes, “Over the door to the next room hung a painting in rather strange form,
around six feet wide and no more than ten inches high” (2.IV.217).

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 Rogozhin is the only character in the novel who appears to derive pleasure from looking

at the painting. His reaction differs from both Myshkin’s and Ippolit’s. The painting disturbs

Myshkin, and Ippolit is repulsed by it. Rogozhin’s admission that he “likes looking at the

painting” catches Myshkin off guard, and the ensuing exchange reveals their fundamental

disagreement:

“At that painting!” the prince suddenly cried out, under the impression of an
unexpected thought. “At that painting! A man could even lose his faith from that
painting!”
“Lose it he does,” Rogozhin suddenly agreed unexpectedly. They had already
reached the front door.
“What?” the prince suddenly stopped. “How can you! I was almost joking, and
you’re so serious!” (2.IV.218)

Myshkin does not say that a man must lose his faith over this painting, but rather that a man

“could” (mozhet) lose his faith. Myshkin’s response combines the conflicting perspectives of

seriousness and humor. He communicates that he is neither joking nor perfectly serious about his

comment. He sees what Rogozhin does in the painting, namely, the rotting corpse, which is why

Myshkin is not joking entirely, but he also sees more. He sees a way out of the room, a way

through doubt to faith, which is why he is not completely serious. Myshkin’s half-joke

incorporates two fundamentally different ways of looking at the painting. Rogozhin’s reply is

decidedly one-sided. Rogozhin likes to dwell, not in the “next room,” but in this room, the room

in which there is only despair, captured for him by his most prized painting.

Myshkin’s reaction to the painting further reveals the indissoluble link between art and

life in his mind. Apart from his general observation that the copy is well executed, he does not

dwell at length on an artistic critique of the painting, as does Ippolit, but rather goes straight to

the impact, or the potential impact of the painting on life. For Myshkin, the experience of the

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painting is powerful enough for a person to lose faith under its spell. Myshkin does not say that

the painting robs one of faith, but rather sees the painting as a test of sorts.

Myshkin does not enter the “next room,” but he does leave the house, and it is Rogozhin

who opens the door for him to the world outside. Rogozhin, himself an emblem of the non-

resurrected Christ, opens the door for Myshkin, effectively returning him to the living world

outside of the tomb. This symbolic gesture of Rogozhin opening the door for Myshkin indicates

that Myshkin’s continued belief in Christ comes not despite, but through the dead Christ of

Holbein’s painting. Rogozhin’s opening of the door surprises Myshkin: “The prince was

surprised, but went out. Rogozhin followed him out to the landing and closed the door behind

him. The two men stood facing each other, looking as if they had forgotten where they had come

to and what they were to do next” (2.IV.219). The two men face each other in another threshold

space, between the tomb and life. The absence of life in the tomb implies its opposite outside of

the tomb and vice versa. Myshkin does not succumb to Rogozhin’s one-sided interpretation of

the painting as a tragic death, but restores the tension between the death in the painting and the

life that Christ lived, which is implied in the painting. Myshkin’s belief is shaken by his visit to

the tomb, but it persists. He states his continued belief appropriately in the threshold space

between life and death on the landing to the Rogozhin house.

Myshkin shares four short stories on the nature of belief in a delayed response to a

question that Rogozhin had posed earlier in the house: “Do you believe in God or not?” Initially,

Myshkin does not answer, but instead he takes issue with the strange, unnatural suddenness with

which Rogozhin poses the question. On the landing, Myshkin answers Rogozhin’s question with

four stories regarding belief. The first is about a self-proclaimed atheist and scholar. Myshkin is

not convinced that the self-proclaimed atheist does not believe in God. He claims that the

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atheist’s reasoning was somehow “not about that,” by which he means not related to the question

of religious belief. The second story is about two peasants who are friends. One peasant prays to

God for forgiveness just before murdering the other in order to steal his silver watch. The third is

about a drunken soldier who sells a baptismal cross to Myshkin for twenty kopecks in order to

buy alcohol. The fourth is of a peasant woman who upon witnessing her baby’s first smile,

declares that “a mother rejoices when she notices a her baby’s first smile, the same as God

rejoices each time he looks down from heaven and sees a sinner standing before him and praying

with all his heart” (2.IV.221). Myshkin concludes from this last story that it contains the “whole

essence of Christianity,” which is “that God rejoices over man as a father over his own child—

the main thought of Christ!” (2.IV.221). For Myshkin, the essence of Christian thought is

missing from the Holbein painting, and the “Rogozhin life” (2.III.207). The question of religious

belief for Myshkin is about that, that is, about the joy of a father whose son has been restored to

him. Myshkin is able to look at the painting, to walk into the home resembling it, to see the tomb

and the corpse of Christ and then return to the living world, wherein joy and love are still

possible. One small affirmation of love comes when Rogozhin asks Myshkin to give him the

cross that he bought from the drunken soldier (and still wears around his neck). He offers

Myshkin his own cross in return. The exchange of crosses shows that the act of brotherly love

that contains the seeds of renewal is possible in the face of certain mortality. The exchange

symbolizes spiritual brotherhood and implies the temporary restoration of a common father, the

father absent from Rogozhin’s and Ippolit’s interpretation of Holbein’s painting. Rogozhin

proceeds to take Myshkin to his own mother and asks her to bless him “as [she] would [her] own

son.” His mother obliges without hesitation. Myshkin is a restored son of sorts, but the chapter

ends on a different note for Rogozhin. The narrator comments on Rogozhin’s still twisted lips

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and pale face. After seeing Myshkin receive his mother’s blessing, Rogozhin embraces Myshkin

tightly and then returns to his room, slamming the door behind him. This suggests that

Rogozhin’s experience of the painting culminates in the tomb and in death. Myshkin returns to

the living world outside of the tomb, his escape from the painting culminating in a restoration to

life.

Myshkin’s capacity to speak ends abruptly at the novel’s end. He returns to a state of

idiocy. Upon seeing Rogozhin’s sculpture, the murdered body of Nastasya Filippovna, Myshkin

understands Rogozhin’s interpretation of the painting. Rogozhin’s sculpture leaves little room for

the resurrection narrative: Nastasya Filippovna is unambiguously and irreversibly dead, as is

Christ, for Rogozhin. There is nothing more to say. Rogozhin’s sculptural version of the Holbein

renders Myshkin speechless. Rogozhin, too, has lost his capacity for speech, at least temporarily,

in his insanity. Myshkin and Rogozhin cannot reach a common perspective despite literally

looking at the body from the same viewpoint. They remain inwardly disconnected despite their

physical embrace. Yet even in his idiocy, Myshkin manages to console the mad murderer

Rogozhin. Out of wordless compassion, he strokes Rogozhin’s cheek in front of Nastasya

Filippovna’s corpse.

Myshkin’s Response to Ippolit’s Ekphrasis of The Dead Christ

Myshkin’s idiocy at the novel’s end is a return to an earlier state. In the early morning

just after Ippolit’s “Necessary Explanation” (3.V-VII.387-415), the narrator describes another

Swiss landscape that Myshkin remembers. Myshkin is sitting on a park bench in Pavlovsk,

surrounded by nature while meditating on Ippolit’s speech which included his interpretation of

Holbein’s Dead Christ. Myshkin once more imagines happiness existing at a horizon, but as if

under the lingering influence of Ippolit’s strictly perspectival interpretation of the painting,

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conceives of it as somehow impossible to reach. He also imagines the landscape before drifting

in and out of consciousness and experiencing various snovideniia that pertain to his conflicting

feelings for Aglaia and Nastasya Filippovna. In describing Myshkin’s recollection of wandering

about a mountain in Switzerland after first arriving there, the narrator notes that he was “still

quite like an idiot then, could not even speak properly, and sometimes did not understand what

was required of him” (3.VII.423):

Before him was the shining sky, below him the lake, around him the horizon, bright and
infinite, as if it went on forever. For a long time he looked and suffered. He remembered
now how he had stretched his arms to that bright, infinite blue and wept. What had
tormented him was that he was a total stranger to it all. What was this banquet, what was
this great everlasting feast, to which he had long been drawn, always, ever since
childhood, and which he could never join? Every morning the same bright sun rises;
every morning there is a rainbow over the waterfall; every evening the highest
snowcapped mountain, there, far away, at the edge of the sky, burns with a crimson
flame; every “little fly that buzzes near him in a hot ray of sunlight participates in this
whole chorus; knows its place, loves it, and is happy”; every little blade of grass grows
and is happy! And everything has its path, and everything knows its path, goes with a
song and comes back with a song; only he knows nothing, understands nothing, neither
people nor sounds, a stranger to everything and a castaway. (3.VII.423)

Myshkin’s former sense of isolation resembles that of Ippolit as death approaches. Myshkin sees

the natural beauty and the harmony before him, but he thinks that he occupies a different world.

In this moment, he experiences the isolation of Florensky’s “realist” painter, who describes and

depicts the beauty of the detailed visible world in such a way as to deepen his sense of division

from it. Myshkin, who cannot yet speak properly, feels estranged from his surroundings and

from others. Myshkin’s thoughts return to a fly, which is in quotation marks because he is

quoting Ippolit, who took the original idea of the buzzing fly from Myshkin.155 One consequence

of Myshkin’s idiocy was that he lacked the capacity to speak properly. It is only when he learns

155
The fly reappears buzzing over the bed of the murdered Nastasia Filippovna in a scene that I argue is
Rogozhin’s real life recreation of the painting (606.4.XI).

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“to speak out” that he learns how to “look and paint.”156 Myshkin’s experience of the horizon as

a purely visual phenomenon torments him. His attempt to physically grasp the horizon is at some

level a grasping for a way out of perspectival isolation, and ekphrasis is his way out. He cannot

grasp this outer space because he lacks the capacity for speech that can bridge the gap between

what he sees and what others see. Myshkin looks and suffers because he lacks the capacity to

articulate what he sees and feels. Myshkin eventually learns how “to look” while gazing out into

the Swiss horizon, but he does not know how to look until he masters speech, which enables him

to develop his artistic medium as an ekphrastic artist.

The narrator, through free-indirect discourse, establishes the presence of Myshkin, the

artist who envisions the scene.157 The landscape painting becomes a portrait of Myshkin, the

artist, as a condemned man. Every “blade of grass” that has its place in the landscape reinforces

Myshkin’s loneliness in this moment. The four ekphrastic paintings—Myshkin’s portrait of the

condemned man, his Swiss waterfall, his Swiss horizon and the narrator’s depiction of Myshkin

in his idiocy—are good paintings because they use realistic objective detail to transmit subjective

human feeling as a means to create empathy and escape the all-devouring beast of perspectival

isolation and its tendency to sever the artist from his surroundings. The subject of art for

Myshkin arises naturally when the artist truly attempts to imagine the world from others’

perspectives, when he renders the visual world imaginatively and when he allows the viewer to

sense the interiority of the artist who is the vulnerable agent behind every work of art.

156
The word “ekphrasis” is composed of two parts in Greek: ek- and -φράσις (phrasis), meaning “out”
and “speak,” respectively.
157
Myshkin longs for this specific solitude before the waterfall when he eventually becomes immersed in
the “clatter” and “life” of his native Russia, which overwhelms him. He envisions the Swiss landscape
when he feels most disconnected from and most alone in high society. This ekphrastic landscape painting
occurs to him once more as a symptom of his loneliness. It is emblematic of his isolation. See 3.II.346-47.

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 An analysis of the Dead Christ painting outside of the context of the novel reveals the

visual cues that are ambiguous as to whether Christ triumphs over death or vice versa. Yet the

tone of the painting is decidedly anti-resurrectional. It is tempting to see the painting from the

perspective of Ippolit or Rogozhin, both of whom are drawn into the confines of the painting

itself, without returning to the world wherein the renewed connection to life is possible. The

decision to interpret the painting as they do is a question not of what lies within the painting, but

rather whether to look at the painting as they do. Their worldviews determine their criteria for

interpreting the image. Dostoevsky uses the painting to structure the dialogues that unfold

between these characters and Myshkin, and their contrasting interpretations voice the painting’s

visual polyphony. Rogozhin and Ippolit remain trapped in their own morbid interpretations of the

Dead Christ. For them, the painting is a declarative statement on the impossibility of the

resurrection. Myshkin, however, interprets Holbein’s painting as a paradox, one that

simultaneously expresses the impossibility and possibility of Christ’s resurrection with equal

force.

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Conclusion

If Myshkin, Ippolit, and Rogozhin are three voices in Dostoevsky’s polyphonic choir in

The Idiot, then Holbein’s Dead Christ is both the musical score and the key in which they sing.

The painting is the meeting place within which the voices struggle between collective thought

and individual expression. It also sets a mood for their various conversations. The characters’

different ways of seeing are manifested verbally in the novel, but the painting is both a catalyst

and an occasion for speech. The Holbein painting, as I show, is a visually polyphonic painting

within a verbally polyphonic novel. Using perspective, composition and detail, Holbein conveys

both the resurrected and the non-resurrected Christ simultaneously.

Dostoevsky’s fascination with vision as an imaginative and embodied experience is

central to his poetics. His feuilleton writer’s vision contrasts with the objective vision attempted

by Yakobi in his realist painting and yet the feuilleton writer’s vision does not lack objectivity,

but rather incorporates imagination into the written record of what he sees. The feuilleton writer

models a kind of vigilant and self-aware experience of art, specifically, that of an adolescent. The

“Petersburg vision” named in the feuilleton’s title describes and recreates something like the

vision that he experienced. The writer combines preverbal empirical data with previously

encountered fictional images to form a coherent “vision” of St. Petersburg. The feuilleton writer

includes the layered context of his personal perspective in what he sees, thus reminding us of the

vision’s source. His narrative navigates the middle space between Yakobian objectivity and the

apparent hallucinations of an active imagination. Dostoevsky’s realism unfolds in this middle

space.

Florensky gives us one way to understand the egocentric form of visual realism and the

objectifying tendency of linear perspective. The viewer of a linear perspectival painting is

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subject to a perspective that shuts one out, cuts the spectator off from the object of

contemplation, and enslaves the spectator, but the means of accomplishing it is through the ego.

The form of linear perspective induces a radical subjectivity; the viewer necessarily belittles and

objectifies what s/he sees. The form of linear perspective also impresses an inherently

externalizing perspective upon the viewer, but the viewer does not have to succumb to it.

Myshkin is less susceptible to the externalizing form because he is not in the habit of equating

what he sees from his tangential perspective with reality per se. Instead, as I show, he sees what

both Ippolit and Rogozhin see, but he also sees more, and his final analysis of the painting is a

conditional statement: one “could” lose one’s faith over such a painting. The corollary is that one

could not lose one’s faith. For example, Holbein’s Dead Christ, while painted primarily in one-

point perspective, is not a completely linear perspectival painting. Holbein breaks with the

unified perspective by having Christ’s right hand jut out of the tomb. This break is perhaps the

most dramatic visual moment in the painting, but neither Rogozhin nor Ippolit sees it because

they are not in the habit of seeing things in ways that differ from their own.

Florensky’s and Dostoevsky’s understandings of realism intersect insofar as each

demands the artist and the viewer to be fully present, mind and body, in the act of creating and

viewing art. Both thinkers reject the experience of art as an act of passive viewing because, for

each, art is a fundamentally empathetic experience. For each, to look at the world and to recreate

it unfeelingly defeats the purpose of art. Good art leads to humane feeling, revivifies the viewer’s

connection to life and awakens the viewer to multiple ways of viewing a given object. For

Dostoevsky, art ought to result in the kind of empathetic experience that he illustrates in The

Dead House when the musicians, actors and audience collectively perform in the prison theater.

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Good art allows the viewer to momentarily transcends the solipsism of perspective: it culminates

in shared feeling; and it restores the viewer to community and a sense of shared space.

The reverse perspectival painting urges the viewer to combine several linear perspectival

paintings into a polyphonic whole. It induces a cognitive process that involves imagining what

objects look like from various perspectives. It predisposes the viewer to an artistic attitude that is

inherently open to other perspectives. The form of a perspectival painting reminds the viewer to

question the totalizing tendency of linear perspective that lays claim to the label of Realism.

Reverse perspective enacts a visual form that frees the viewer from the existential fragmentation

imposed on the viewer by the visual demands of strictly linear perspectival art. In short, reverse

perspective is formally analogous to Dostoevsky’s polyphonic poetics.

In subsequent works, Dostoevsky continued to engage the visual by including more cases

of ekphrasis, such as the Sistine Madonna in Demons and the Contemplator in Brothers

Karamazov, and countless explorations of vision—specifically, instances regarding the pain of

others. Dostoevsky’s fiction returns to the drama between those who look at the world with a

removed egocentric objectivity and those who look at it feelingly and with an understanding of

the variety of ways of perceiving. In The Brothers Karamazov, for example, Ivan Karamazov

shows the dangers of daguerreotypic realism and eye-witnessing, whereas Zosima practices a

form of empathetic vision.

Ivan writes for a journal under the pseudonym Ochevidets, “eye-witness” or “spectator.”

His public persona lays claim to an unmediated, non-participatory witnessing of reality. As

Ochevidets, Ivan writes “little ten-line articles about street incidences” (I.3.29) He is also a

collector of bad art, that is, art of a photojournalistic type. He collates a personal album of small

articles that contain the most disturbing images of human nature. Among the images are Turkish

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soldiers tearing babies out of their mother’s wombs and hoisting their dead bodies onto the ends

of their bayonets as trophies; allegedly enlightened parents sleeping soundly as they punish their

daughter for wetting the bed by stuffing excrement in her mouth and forcing her to spend the

night in an outhouse; a Russian general unleashing his wolfhounds on an eight-year-old boy for

accidentally injuring the paw of the general’s dog; a peasant who is urged to accept a Christian

God before he is beheaded for crimes of desperation. Indeed, Ivan Karamazov’s strongest

challenges to God’s world come in the form of images rather than stories. His snapshots

disconnect him from any sense of obligation to others and reinforce his withdrawal from life.

Zosima’s prozorlivost’ (spiritual discernment or clairvoyant power) is a creative art form

that consists of observing the body language of his confessants, listening to them and rendering

their suffering in compassionate speech. He re-authors each confessant’s condemning self-

portrait by showing them an alternative, empathetic perspective. His recasting is neither purely

externalizing nor sermonizing, but rather responsive to their unique torments. He does not

project his interpretation of his confessees’ sins onto them, but instead offers them an alternative

view of their self–objectification. The result: his visitors reorient themselves towards

themselves. Hence, Alyosha’s observation that “nearly everyone who came to visit the elder for

the first time for a private talk, would enter in fear and anxiety and almost always come out

bright and joyful, and the gloomiest face would be transformed into a happy one” (1.I.5). Zosima

assumes a reverse perspectival approach in relation to those who confess to him and he cultivates

this reverse perspectival orientation in others. Zosima, like a good Russian icon, and like a “true

artist” in the Dostoevskian sense, restores a sense of connection to life beyond the confines of the

ego. Zosima’s persepctive is the culmination of Dostoevsky’s lifelong wrestle with ways of

seeing reflecting ways of being.

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Appendix

The basics of linear perspective permit a fuller grasp of the perspectival analysis that

follows. Florensky assumes a working knowledge of basic technical terms and concepts. While I

use modern terminology, there are no concepts in this explanation that are foreign to Florensky.

It simply allows me to use a systemized vocabulary that will clarify my explanation of his art

criticism.

To begin, the horizon line is a straight imaginary line that runs across the painting at eye-

level and establishes the viewer’s position relative to the objects painted. In linear perspectival

painting, once the horizon line has been established, then the vanishing points may be

determined. The three basic types of linear perspective correspond to the number of vanishing

points used to construct a painting: they are called one-point, two-point and three-point

perspective respectively. The vanishing point158 is a point towards which receding parallel lines

diminish. Figure 1 is a diagram of the three basic types of perspective:

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Egnatio Danti is credited with being the first to have verbally identified the ‘vanishing point’ in his Le
due regole della prospettiva practica from 1583. He used the Latin punctum concursus. Punctum,
or“point,” is combined with the genitive concursus, which has various possible translations ranging from
“of union, coincidence, meeting,” none of which actually connote “vanishing.” See Ivins, Rationalization
of Sight, 10.

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 Fig. 14. 1-pt, 2-pt and 3-pt perspective diagram. 159

“PP” in the diagram stands for the picture plane, the plane onto which a scene is projected. In

the case of painting, the picture plane coincides with the canvas. The arrow that passes from the

man in the left of the diagram through the picture plane and onto the painted objects indicates

our viewing point, which does not simply indicate where we are standing relative to the painted

objects, but more specifically, indicates the position of one of the viewer’s eyes relative to the

painted objects. The position of this eye determines the scale of the objects and orients the

viewer. This single eye is also of special importance for Florensky’s philosophical understanding

of perspectival painting. This eye can view an object from different angles. The different angles

can be reflected in the painting by changing the relationship of the single eye to one of three

theoretical planes that are oriented by three Cartesian axes—x-, y- and z- axes—in the picture
159
1-pt, 2-pt and 3-pt perspective diagram. Digital image. Studiomaven.org.

161
plane. The three imaginary axes are perpendicular to each other and correspond to the three

dimensions. For the sake of clarity, let us say the x-axis runs left to right, the y-axis runs up and

down and the z-axis runs front to back. If we imagine passing a plane through each of these axes

then we create the conditions for depicting a three-dimensional object with the proportionality

that is characteristic of linear perspective:

Fig. 15. Cartesian Coordinate System.160

In one-point perspective, two of these axes, typically the x- and y-axes planes (left-right

and up-down) are parallel to the picture plane and the remaining z-axis is perpendicular to the

picture plane. The vanishing point is directly in line with the eye, in the middle of the painting on

the horizon line. This perspective is typically illustrated by how train tracks appear when the

viewer is standing in the middle of the tracks and looking down their length all the way to the

point at which both the two long rails and the railway ties seem to converge in the distance on

160
Cartesian Coordinate System. Digital image. Commons.wikimedia.org.

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the horizon. The long tracks are parallel to the z-axis, which runs from back to front. The short

railway ties are parallel to the x-axis, which runs left to right and is parallel to the viewer. If we

imagine a series of rectangular buildings standing upright on either side of the tracks, then we

would also notice that the long edges of the buildings appear to diminish in length towards the

vanishing point. The sides of these buildings would be parallel to the y-axis, which runs top to

bottom and is also perpendicular to the viewer.

In two-point perspective, the same objects are rotated. The vanishing points can be placed

anywhere along the horizon line. For example, if we look at a single building from one corner,

then we notice (as in the diagram) that the top and bottom of lines on the right-hand wall of the

building appear to be receding towards a vanishing point to the right, while the top and bottom

lines of the left-hand wall appear to be receding towards a vanishing point to the left. In this

instance, the x- and z- axes are oblique to the picture plane. The sides of the wall appear

perfectly vertical because they are parallel to the y-axis (up-down), which is perpendicular to the

picture plane.

In three-point perspective, none of the axes are parallel to the picture plane. Looking at

the diagram, the left- and right-hand walls still recede to their respective vanishing points on the

left and right hand sides of the painting, but a third vanishing point is added above the object to

reflect the fact that we are now looking at the building from below. Therefore, all of the

perpendicular lines seen from the two-point perspectival painting now appear to be receding

away from the viewer towards a vanishing point in the sky.

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