Response to Nancy Green (HOGTOWN & DOSTOEVSKY)

[Andrei Ostrovskii]

>Date:    Wed, 2 Oct 2002 12:56:13 -0700
>From:    Nancy Green <nancygreenmight at HOTMAIL.COM>
>Subject: Hogtown and Dostoevsky
>
>I have been reading a novel about a Russian scholar named Yuri Marmaladoff
>who makes a discovery in his studies of Dostoevsky. His primary discovery
>is
>Elijah the Prophet as a symbol that occurs again and again throughout
>Dostoevsky’s writings – unnoticed by professors of Russian for most of the
>20th century. I’m not a Russian major, but I’m very interested in Russian
>literature. I have had two courses that dealt with Dostoevsky, and Elijah
>the Prophet was never mentioned by my professors. Can you Russian
>specialists clarify for me whether there really was such a discovery – or
>is
>"Hogtown" pure fiction?
>   Nancy Green
>
Yes, there was such a discovery, but few Slavists have "discovered the
discovery". The book you need is Tainyi kod Dostoevskogo (Leningradskoe
otdelenie Akademii Nauk, 1992). If your Russian is not yet far enough along
for that, look in the afterword to "The Landlady" (The Birchbark Press,
2002). There you'll find a summary as well as a fairly detailed survey of
the Elijah symbolism in "The Landlady" itself. The author argues that in
interpreting old Ilya Murin simply as a demonic figure the experts have
missed the mark. Instead, he is closely associated with the wrathful prophet
Elijah. The theory actually begins with Raskolnikov's confession, which
comes on or near the holiday of Elijah (July 20), when a thunderstorm was
always anticipated. Sure enough, Raskolnikov is browbeaten by a
thunderstorm, a virtual deluge, the night before he confesses to Ilya
(Elijah) Petrovich. Tainyi kod deals with about 15 of Dostoevsky's works,
but the Elijah material, I think,is most significant for interpreting the
early works of the forties. Much of the speculation about atheist tendencies
and certain insurrectionary urges in the young Dostoevsky will have to be
tempered or put aside entirely.
  Andrei Ostrovskii

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