Bakhtin’s Radiant Polyphonic Novel, Raskolnikov’s Perverse Dialogic World

When queried at the end of his life, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) identified himself not as a literary scholar but as a philosopher—or more precisely, as a “thinker” (myslitel’). Bakhtin’s book on Dostoevsky (1929, rev. 1963) introduced the potent concepts of dialogism versus monologism, the “fully-weighted idea-hero,” double-voiced discourse, and novelistic polyphony. But even as these concepts began to leak into and then dominate our critical vocabulary, reservations were raised. Bakhtin’s philosophy of dialogue seemed to omit a great deal of Dostoevsky’s texture and wisdom. This essay discusses the virtues and drawbacks of a Bakhtinian reading of Crime and Punishment. It incorporates recent scholarship on Bakhtin’s notion of author–hero relations, and on the possibility of our real and fictive “outsideness” to one another, and on the corruptions to which word and image are prone. It ends with a hypothesis about polyphony, most relevant to Dostoevsky’s first and last great murder novels, which attaches the concept not to literature but to medieval philosophies of music. In so doing it reconciles the linear thrust of dialogue (melody) with two other virtues Bakhtin saw equally present in Dostoevsky’s art: simultaneity and coexistence.