The phenomenon of understanding in F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel The Adolescent from the perspective of ‘Working Notes from the 1960s and Early 1970s’ by M. M. Bakhtin

Abstract

This article analyses how the phenomenon of understanding in F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel The Adolescent manifests itself at the level of poetics (specificity of the word, plot, composition and event) and meanings. Our research builds on a lexical analysis of the text. We apply the hermeneutic principle of representing the whole through its part to an aspective analysis of Part 1 of Chapter 5 in Part 2 of the novel. We found out that, firstly, the phrase ‘to understand only too well’ is individual (the contexts in which Dostoevsky uses this combination point to a capacity for special insight, an ability to see the ‘invisible’, the depth of an insight into another person’s soul and the tormenting awareness of a tragedy); secondly, some of its features refer to M. M. Bakhtin’s concept of ‘active dialogical understanding’. This concept is intrinsic to the philosophical oeuvre of this researcher as a whole, but is central to his ‘Working Notes from the 1960s and Early 1970s’. This piece of writing not only develops the topic of understanding in its various aspects but also brings out the process of understanding, so characteristic of its author. We show that the process of ‘active dialogical understanding’, typical of both artistic (Dostoevsky’s) and aesthetic-philosophical (Bakhtin’s) texts, contributes to their integrity. This proves once again that Bakhtin did not focus on Dostoevsky’s texts to materialise any philosophical idea of his own, but because of the attention to the knowledge of the basic laws of consciousness and development of a comprehensive personality which he had discovered in Dostoevsky’s fiction and which was so close to him.