The Politics of Polyphony: Dangerous Modernity and the Structure of the Novel in Dostoevsky and Bakhtin

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article offers the hypothesis that, from the standpoint of the “sociological poetics” of the 1920s and contemporary literary epistemology, the structure of the polyphonic novel that Dostoevsky created and Bakhtin conceptualized (firstly in his 1929 book Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art [Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo]) enables a reconstruing of the principles governing the writer’s social imagination along with the political thinking and priorities associated with them. From this standpoint, polyphony can be seen as one of the most fruitful and wholistic artistic interpretations of modern sociality experienced in an era of catastrophe, a sociality requiring a rejection of political action aimed at social change.