Amnesia and the Externalized Personality in Early Dostoevskii
In: Slavic review: interdisciplinary quarterly of Russian, Eurasian and East European studies, Band 72, Heft 1, S. 79-101
ISSN: 2325-7784
By tracing a pattern through Fedor Dostoevskii's early stories–especially The Double, "The Landlady," andNetochka Nezvanova–in which characters are bound to each other as interacting aspects of a larger personality, Yuri Corrigan explores the problem of individual identity. Entering into debate with classical studies of the self in Dostoevskii from Mikhail Bakhtin to Nikolai Berdiaev, Corrigan explores how the active suppression of memory and interiority in Dostoevskii's early characters gives rise to the mechanism of intersecting selves, in which the inner architecture of one personality is extended throughout numerous consciousnesses. Through an analysis of these relationships, Corrigan examines how Dostoevskii synthesizes two traditions of doubling in his early writing–the "cognitive" dualism of self-consciousness and the "psychic" dualism of the unconscious–to form a tripartite model of personality that will be important for his later novels.