Discussion
When Dostoevsky remarked, humorously, that “a person doesn’t always resemble himself,” was this casual yet programmatic statement an anticipation of what Bakhtin would later call a person’s fundamental “non-coincidence” with himself? If so, it could be seen as a token of our cherished existential unfinalizibility in a world of often limited and limiting practical choices, but the original aphorism is one of the many intriguing reflections on the value of difference in Dostoevsky that cannot be exhaustively explained by a Bakhtinian reading. In what way does our (admirable?) failure to coincide with ourselves within the structures of the same “I” relate to our distinct status vis-à-vis other selves? Is emphasizing difference always productive in defining ourselves against others or against our own past or future selves?
This presentation will reflect on the significance of strangeness and uniqueness, expressed through the notion of
chudachestvo (eccentricity) in Dostoevsky in the context of personhood, agency, and the characters’ often frustrated struggle for individual freedom. I will discuss the (paradoxical) value of Dostoevsky’s oddball heroes in
The Brothers Karamazov and
The Idiot, linking “chudachestvo” to the notion of “Seltsamkeit,” similarly endorsed by Dostoevsky’s romantic predecessor and an underacknowledged influence on his thought, the latently philosophical E.T.A. Hoffmann. Locating the roots of Dostoevsky’s interest in eccentricity in the philosophical program of European Romanticism, I will examine what lies behind Dostoevsky’s, and Hoffmann’s, consistent privileging of the eccentric. Through drawing important parallels between the two writers and analyzing Dostoevsky’s documented responses to Hoffmann, I will demonstrate that Dostoevsky’s enthusiasm for the German author stems from Hoffmann’s firm grasp of “the ideal,” which Hoffmann, according to Dostoevsky, includes in the realm of the ultimately real (
deistvitelnost’). Celebrated as capturing a higher reality, Hoffmann’s eccentrics are fruitfully transplanted by Dostoevsky onto the Russian soil. Dostoevsky’s innovation in crafting the late nineteenth-century image of the eccentric consists in expanding the
ethical significance of non-conformity, merely hinted at in Hoffmann. In the final analysis, Dostoevsky sees Hoffmann as a proto-realist and further develops the Hoffmannian character type as he enters, and creatively expands, the European Realist tradition.
