"Il rit, il rit beaucoup": Dostoevsky’s provocateurs
Speaker(s): Lynn Patyk
Lynn Patyk: “Il rit, il rit beaucoup: Dostoevsky’s provocateurs”
“Il rit, il rit beaucoup: Dostoevsky’s provocateurs”
Social movements rely on the mechanism of provocation, according to the German sociologist Rainer Paris, who defines provocation as “an intentionally committed violation/contravention of norms, which is intended to draw the other into an open conflict and elicit a reaction, that in the eyes of a third party, morally discredits and unmasks him.”(“Der Kurze Atem der Provocation,” 58) Even more fundamentally provocation is a means of existentially establishing the identity of self vis-à- vis an adversarial other: “I provoke therefore I am; and vice versa: When I am myself provoked, I know where I stand with the other.” Just as Dostoevsky understood that the self was as likely to be a provocateur as/to the other (in his 1846 The Double), he portrayed both radical provocateurs (Peter Verkhovensky in Demons) and reactionary ones (Fyodor Karamazov), each provoking the other. Yet integral to his critique of both the radicals and the conservatives of his day, Dostoevsky employs a double structure of provocation in which his provocateurs successfully provoke (and unmask) their adversaries, only to be unmasked in their turn. How does he orchestrate this?
Lynn Ellen Patyk received her Ph.D. from èצӰ in 2005 and is currently Assistant Professor of Russian at Dartmouth College. Prior to coming to Dartmouth, she held a joint appointment in History and the Division of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Florida. She is the author of Written in Blood: Revolutionary Terrorism and Russian Literary Culture, 1861-1881 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017), and her articles on revolutionary terrorism and its cultural representations have appeared in Slavic Review, The Russian Review, Kritika, and Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, among others. Her current book project investigates the operation of provocation and provocation narratives in Russian history, politics, and culture, and she has also begun a study of the transnational cultural and media networks that participated in “the grand crusade” of 1876-78 (the Balkans campaign).