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Today Vadim Shneyder sat down with Melissa Frazier to discuss her book, Signs of the Material World: Dostoevsky, Science, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel which came out with University of Toronto Press earlier this year.
VS: Congratulations on your new book! Tell us a bit about the history of your project. What kinds of questions motivated the book? Which fields, ideas, and traditions are you in dialogue with?
MF: I didn’t start the project with any “motivating questions,” or really with any plan at all; it was more a matter of my reading and re-reading a shifting and expanding set of texts. I am very fortunate to teach at an institution that affords faculty near-total autonomy in designing our courses, and it was in a class on “Dostoevsky and the West” in 2008 that I first found myself thinking about something that I now recognize as “(S)cience.” That story emerged only very slowly, however, and only by way of many often serendipitous intellectual encounters. In 2012, for example, I discovered the rich vein of scholarship on George Eliot and science by way of a piece that I just happened to hear on NPR, “Your Brain on Jane Austen.” Or: I first heard the name Bruno Latour at a series of panels devoted to Melville and Thoreau at the 2016 MLA conference. Which is to say, I’m a reader above all, and a writer only by dint of an approach that is neither inductive nor deductive but abductive, exactly as I define it in Chapter Four: “Abduction is the movement of the mind as, often in a flash of insight, it connects and also shapes our empirical observations.”
VS: Most of your readers are probably used to seeing “art” and “science” framed in opposing terms. And as you note at the beginning of your book, “Dostoevsky is not particularly known for his fondness for science of any sort.” Yet, your book invites us to think of nineteenth-century science in a more expansive way. The “science” and “nineteenth-century novel” of the book’s subtitle are not in any kind of simple opposition. Could you say a few words about the relationship between the realist novel and this expanded concept of science as it emerges in your work?
MF: While I think that readers often underestimate the complexity of nineteenth-century realism, the larger problem is a widespread belief that science offers simple and unambiguous truths. Science doesn’t always work that way, however, not in the nineteenth century, and not now. To give my favorite quote from George Henry Lewes: “… the external world exists, and among the modes of its existence is the one we perceive.” That multiplicity is fundamentally novelistic, I think.
VS: The concept of “fellowship” that you discern in the work of novelists like George Eliot and Fyodor Dostoevsky seems particularly crucial to your broader argument. It also seems germane to contemporary ecological concerns. Could you elaborate on the meaning of fellowship in the works of these writers?
MF: While I present the idea of “fellowship” as indeed germane to ecological concerns, I take the term from Nina Auerbach’s reading of Middlemarch in “Dorothea’s Lost Dog” (2006). Like Raskolnikov, Dorothea starts the novel with a sense of superiority; what she needs to learn, in Eliot’s words, is “the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.” In more strictly literary terms, I would also emphasize the relationship that Eliot and Dostoevsky established with their respective reading publics. Both were remarkable for the degree of personal engagement that their writing elicited from real, flesh-and-blood readers, and here I think of Gillian Beer’s claim in George Eliot (1986) that what Eliot took from Feuerbach was an understanding of novel-writing as a “joint enterprise of production” that “’furnishes space’ for the activity of reader and writer together” (75).
VS: One of the key figures in your book is George Henry Lewes, a pioneering figure in the discipline of physiological psychology. He was also a novelist (and George Eliot’s common-law husband). You mention that he was a wide-ranging researcher and writer in an age that was already beginning to professionalize. For her part, George Eliot was, in addition to her work as a novelist, a wide-ranging essayist and translator of important works in philosophy like Spinoza’s Ethics and Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity. Dostoevsky was a famously omnivorous reader. Does your book have something broader to say about the value of intellectual generalism?
MF: Short answer: yes, although I think that the catchphrase in 2025 is “interdisciplinarity” and, I would add, “collaboration.” Longer answer: I am interested less in intellectual generalism than I am in an on-going de-stabilization of received categories. As Cary Wolfe writes in Ecological Poetics: “the term ‘environment’ reminds us that what counts as ‘nature’ is always a product of the contingent and selective practices deployed in the embodied actions of a living system.” The same holds true for fields of expertise: there is nothing “natural” about the walls that demarcate the disciplines as our current academy would have them, not that those walls are the invention of our scholarly minds, either. Like Lewes as Rick Rylance describes him in Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850-1880 (2002), I aspire to a particularly rigorous form of disciplinarity, one that is “both creatively adequate and radically provisional” (259).
VS: You make the case that the fairly neglected German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach was an important influence on the development of Dostoevsky’s understanding of the relationship between mind and world. What did Dostoevsky take from Feuerbach?
MF: Above all, Feuerbach’s emphasis on what he called “sensuality” (Sinnlichkeit). As Feuerbach writes in Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843), his new philosophy is “certainly based on reason as well, but on a reason whose being is the same as the being of man; that is, it is based not on an empty, colorless, nameless reason, but on a reason that is of the very blood of man.” In Dostoevskyan terms, we might consider Ivan’s sticky little leaves in spring, for example, not to mention all those bodies, including our own as we respond to the twists and turns of his “sensational” plots. Note also the Underground Man in a rare moment of truth: “where there is no love, there is no reason,” he tells Liza.
VS: I was fascinated by the connection you bring out between an alternative nineteenth-century conception of science, which emphasizes the mutual interaction of embodied minds and the world, and novelists, like Dostoevsky, who use the intensity of their plots as a way of involving the reader’s nervous system in the activity of reading. Do you think that the history of these kinds of embodied intellectual activity gains new significance in the age of large language models (LLMs), with their unembodied manipulation of language?
Relatedly, your book is, in many ways, about the importance of the activity of reading, and particularly a kind of reading that is not just distanced and contemplative but is a mode of active involvement of the reading self in the world. It seems to many people that reading itself is undergoing a profound transformation today. Has your work on this project shaped how you talk to your students about reading, or how you approach the pedagogy of reading?
MF: In a world where some would respond to what they see as the limitations of materiality not just by promoting the unembodied manipulation of language, but by preserving their consciousness in digital form, for example, or by finding a new planet to exploit, yes, the history of these kinds of embodied intellectual activity gains new significance. I am looking forward later this fall to teaching Jeanette Winterson’s Frankisstein (2017) together with Frankenstein (1818) in a revamped version of my Romanticism class, and I hope that I will have more fully formed thoughts by then. In the meantime, I don’t think that we are going to solve the climate crisis by practicing new, computer-assisted forms of disembodiment; in broader political terms, I also stand with Mustafa Nayyem and the Revolution of Dignity: “Likes don’t count.” And, yes, I have thoughts on changing ways of reading, not that I’m operating off anything other than my own anecdotal experience. But: what strikes me is that my students’ experience of reading is often more distanced and more fragmented than the immersive sort of reading that I grew up with and still practice. As scholars of literature, we have something desperately important to teach our students: what and how we read matters.
Melissa Frazier is Professor of Russian language and Russian and comparative literature at Sarah Lawrence College; she is currently engaged in teaching her way to a new focus on contemporary Belarusian, Polish and Ukrainian literature.
Vadim Shneyder is an associate professor in the Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. He is the author of Russia’s Capitalist Realism: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov (Northwestern University Press, 2020) as well as articles on Russian and Belarusian literature, economic criticism, and literary theory. He is secretary-treasurer of the North American Dostoevsky Society.