Pushkin's 'Evgenij Onegin,' Dostoevsky's 'Besy,' Capek's 'Hordubal,' and Kundera's 'Zert': The first-person novel in Czech and Russian literature

The dissertation explores the portrayal of consciousness in the first-person novel as it relates to the potentials available to language. It is my contention that a study of character brings us closer to the heart of the novel--to the values, beliefs, and vision it espouses--than any other approach. Structuralist and Formalist criticism notwithstanding, the notion of the existential autonomy and psychological fullness of characters in the novel is not an illusion but is inextricably bound up with the formal evolution of the genre since the eighteenth century.;The decision to compare works from two different literary traditions was guided, first of all, by the abundance in Czech and Russian literature of imaginative prose that makes the presentation of a character's mind, thoughts, or consciousness a main theme of the work. Bluntly stated--these are works with a greater proportion of attitude to action. I will argue that one of the reasons for this can be found in the Czech and Russian languages themselves. Due to certain grammatical peculiarities, these languages present extremely favorable conditions for the interpenetration of different voices to create more subtle and flexible registers of discourse between narrator and character than many other Western European literatures, allowing authors of genius to exploit these options and negotiate between the two realms much more easily and precisely. Moreover, Russian literature entered and helped form the very foundation of the revived Czech literature throughout the nineteenth century. Hence, the study is not only a typological comparison of a certain phenomenon in two different literatures, but also an examination of the influence of one literature upon another and how certain themes, techniques, and authors were received and understood by another culture. This throws new light, I suggest, on the larger historical contours of both Russian and Czech literature.;The first-person novels selected for examination are from two different national traditions, Russian and Czech, and four different literary schools, from Pushkin's Neoclassical/Romantic Evgenij Onegin to Milan Kundera's Modernist/post-Modernist Zert (The Joke), with Dostoevsky and Karel Capek holding the center with their Realist/Modernist works Besy (Demons) and Hordubal. It is my thesis that certain types of first-person novels involve the reader psychologically and morally to a greater extent than other kinds of novels. They invite and often compel the reader to enter into a complex dynamic of sympathy with and judgment of the fictional characters. I do not intend a survey of first-person narration in all its forms, but rather an examination of a specific kind of literary consciousness created in these four very different works. These consciousnesses have at their base essentially the same elements as (in my use of the term) the lyric--not in their use of rhyme, rhythm, and meter, but in the way experience and the empirical world are conceptualized and presented. The authors here under consideration were all interested in psychological mimesis, in creating characters whose cognitive functioning and apprehension of the world resembles such functioning in real life.