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Today Fiona Bell sat down with Lindsay Ceballos to discuss her book, Reading Faithfully: Russian Modernist Criticism and the Making of Dostoevsky, 1881–1917, which came out with Northern Illinois University Press this month.
FB: Faithful reading, in your book, is both a descriptor of Silver Age criticism and a methodological invitation to scholars today. Can you tell us what it means to read faithfully?
LC: Faithful reading is an affective approach to reading and interpreting, which moves away from the negative mode of critique that has predominated for many decades. I think my favorite way to think about faithful reading came from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s piece on paranoid reading, particularly her mobilization of Melanie Klein, which I quote at length in the book because I found it so generative. Klein writes of traumatic past events that the subject must somehow relate to in order to live again. She refers to that process as the subject psychically reassembling “murderous part-objects” into a new whole so that their reckoning with history and the present can be healing rather than destructive, or deconstructive. Transported to critique, the impulse of the critic might be to avoid, or negate to oblivion certain harmful or difficult authors or texts, which produces a suspicious attitude that turns reading into an act of detection or paranoia. It is how many of us teach close reading even today and it’s not wrong, but recent scholarly interest in postcritique—which inspired my term faithful reading—asks the critic to attend to their emotional responses to reading rather than their tendency to tap into ideological frameworks and theoretical structures. Faithful reading is not making excuses for authors who wrote harmful things, but it reorients the critic toward the critical object by letting affective response mediate the intimate relationship between critic and author/text. Such an approach permits us to read Dostoevsky outside of frameworks that divide him into two different people, which tends to foster predictable readings of his texts.
FB: By the end of your book, I’d come to see twentieth-century literary criticism as a continuum that included Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Vasily Rozanov, Sergei Bulgakov, and other Russian modernists alongside critics like Barthes, Foucault, and Sedgwick. Do you see these approaches as continuous, that is, historically related, or as coincidental affinity? How do you think about connecting Russian modernist critics with anglophone critical traditions?
LC: I guess some of what I was after was restoring Symbolist critics to the legacy of Formalist poetics. Symbolist critics were seen by Formalists as “unscientific”—either they relied too heavily on biographical details about the author to inform their interpretative work, or they were too subjective, letting their own projects influence their conclusions about an author/text. Genealogically, many are aware of the role of some Symbolists, namely Briusov, Ivanov, and Belyi, in fostering innovative post-Symbolist experiment in poetic form and critical work explaining its function. But when I looked at Symbolist criticism and religious-philosophical writing on Dostoevsky, I saw them reading the text in ways that complicated the traditional view of them as ineffectual or “unscientific,” whatever that means. They seemed to be trying to read the text separate from the author in order to reconstruct who they wished the author to be. This kind of selective reading relied heavily on their reception of certain characters whose voices challenge the author—a dialogue that Bakhtin would later turn into a whole theory of reading Dostoevsky’s novels. In short, I think Silver Age criticism is innovative and has produced compelling readings of many nineteenth-century authors’ methods of characterization (as Chloë Kitzinger has pointed out in her work) and in the metaphysical dimensions of literature more broadly. We hope to bring this to the attention of new readers in our volume of translated works from this period of Russian criticism, which is nearing completion.
FB: It strikes me that Dostoevsky scholarship has been, within Slavic Studies, a particularly fruitful site for theorizing reading. Why do you think this is?
LC: Totally. It’s the critic-author-narrator-hero-hero interplay, I think. Each of those layers is a whole lifeworld; you get lost in a good way and find “secrets,” as Carol Apollonio would say. It’s inexhaustible and feels real in a way that won’t destroy your life (if we compare it to endless scrolling). Reading Dostoevsky is like the endless scroll many of us get sucked into. And sometimes I wonder if it’s also his poetics that facilitate it. There’s that famous accusation by contemporaries that he wrote ungrammatically. I’m realizing that there is so much more interpretive potential for gnarly writing compared to clear and precise prose (or AI-generated prose, which is technically correct but vapid).
FB: Dostoevsky is often imagined as easy to love for conservative readers, a “problematic fave” for liberal readers, and anathema to radical readers. Your book troubles this narrative: we see how conservative thinkers, particularly in the wake of 1905, were uneasy with Dostoevsky’s pro-autocracy stance. In his 1914 adaptation of Devils for the Moscow Art Theater, as you show in your fascinating final chapter, Nemirovich-Danchenko attempts to excise the religio-nationalism from the Shatov/Stavrogin scene. Meanwhile, writers in socialist and anarchist circles were interested in remaking Dostoevsky for their own purposes. How does the history of Dostoevsky criticism in this period help us see Russian intellectual history differently?
LC: I think the Silver Age era is a time when the creative intelligentsia finally had historical distance from the central debates of the 19th century: what is the role of the intelligentsia in an autocratic space, the appeal of the populist movement, and finally the role of literary criticism as “art for art’s sake” movements began to rival critical realist traditions. Their literary heroes were all dead or were dying: Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Silver Age critics were attempting to move beyond what they perceived as the narrow critical field of the previous generation, which was interested almost exclusively in the social value of art. Chekhov is an intriguing exception, as always, both in his generational “betweenness” and his fusion of realist and Symbolist modes. Dostoevsky was just as invested in the social relevance of art, but he came at it from a conservative perspective that sought to depict his notion of Russian reality, spiritually. I think that insight spoke to Silver Age critics and gave them license to break away from their own youthful associations with populist or Marxist circles and devote themselves to what Dostoevsky called “higher realism,” which they understood as a religious concept. Like him, too, they searched for a Russian spirituality that had been fostered by Orthodoxy but that was not defined by its institutional guise. Their criticism was cast as “decadent” and apolitical by their contemporary opponents and later by Soviet critics, but I hope my book shows how much the political ideas and events of their time shaped their writings and fueled their positions on the role of religion and spirituality in society. We can see their political investments emerging in their encounters with Dostoevsky’s work, which is why I think it is so productive to consider as a whole, even if they all had very different readings of him. Finally, it’s important to remember that the explosion of creativity across the arts in the Silver Age, the vibrant fusion of poetic and political impulses at this time—these emerged during the decline of the Russian empire. There is a reason why apocalyptic imagery abounds in Symbolist poetry and drama. They seem to have sensed the end and perhaps reckoned with it as historians taking stock of a subsection of time officially confined to the past. It’s my opinion, but this period was one of the most honest reckonings among the liberal intelligentsia about the traumas of Russia’s past and how to heal them by centering humanistic inquiry and nurturing the diversifying potentiality of democratic structures available in artistic creation and community. Contemporary Russia is in dire need of this kind of difficult reflection.
FB: The book’s scope is 1881, year of Dostoevsky’s death, to 1917, year of revolution. Can you sketch out the state of Dostoevsky criticism on the edges of this period? Were there theatrical adaptations of Dostoevsky during his lifetime? And how did Soviet theater and criticism in the 1920s depart from where you leave us in the conclusion of your book?
LC: During his lifetime there were only dramatic readings of his work and even then not that many, it seems. In the Soviet period there was a huge revolution in the theater and the repertoire benefitted from tons of new plays and innovative productions—the aim was to create a theater culture for proletarian audiences and so I don’t think there was as much interest in staging Dostoevsky during that time.
FB: Your book is an attentive and loving introduction to the Symbolist critics. These writers aren’t just the loopy, or bigoted, forebears of contemporary Dostoevsky criticism. In fact, they remind us of the ruse of critical objectivity, how we inevitably bring ourselves to our scholarship. How has spending time with these critics shaped you as a reader and critic?
LC: Thanks. This question is the hardest one to answer for some reason. There’s nothing dry about the Silver Age. The critics I write about in my book were reading so many different kinds of things at the time and attempting to synthesize majorly disparate notions–like the young Berdiaev who dreamed of bringing metaphysics to Marxism. Or Merezhkovsky’s weird synthesis of flesh and spirit, which truly was a reformist religious project but it was also just wild. And don’t get me started on Rozanov and his Egyptomania period. Their utopianism disturbs and fascinates me. As a critic I’m nothing like them—if anything I feel like I’m a foil to them and that’s where I seem to have developed a critical distance.
FB: How do we teach faithful reading?
LC: At the moment I’m just trying to teach them reading full stop, lol. But it could be that teaching a style of reading that is not merely about detection or “calling out” certain characters or writers’ worldviews could help motivate students to engage with the practice of reading. I have written about this topic for a Cornell blogpost on the occasion of my book’s publication. I already teach a form of faithful reading in my Dostoevsky seminar—inspired by the Hundreds project and the book by Katie Stewart and Lauren Berlant, The Hundreds. I wrote about that on Bloggers Karamazov, if anyone wants to learn more. Since many students don’t have the frameworks that burden us as scholars, they have a lot of potential to approach texts in ways that resonate with their ordinary experience and ways of being, which is a good start. But it can be challenging to encourage them towards an intimate relationship with the text, which is necessary to move beyond frameworks and to exercise faithful reading. And perhaps most importantly, this is the kind of reading that only human beings can do. AI cannot read with feeling; it does not feel pain and can only simulate longing after we prompt it, and so it cannot be a reader.
FB: Merezhkovsky identifies himself not as a follower of Dostoevsky, but as his “accomplice.” Rozanov argues, on the contrary, that “we must go further than Dostoevsky.” How would you frame your readerly/critical relationship to Dostoevsky?
LC: It’s an evolving thing, an iterative process. Even after this book I still prefer to have scholars and critics mediate him for me. My book is devoted to his readers, after all. The hardest thing is teaching him because then it’s just the two of us and I feel the intense ambivalence about his work that I have had since I was a teenager. But then I can share those thoughts with students and watch them form a more complex picture of his work and their role in shaping the culture of reading him.
Lindsay Ceballos is Associate Professor and Chair of the Program in Russian and European Studies at Lafayette College in Easton, PA.
Fiona Bell is an Assistant Professor of Russian at the University of Utah and a member of the North American Dostoevsky Society’s Readers Advisory Board. Learn more about her work here.