Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Decimonónica

Volume

5

Issue

2

Publisher

Decimonónica

Publication Date

2008

First Page

49

Last Page

66

Abstract

In the first chapter of his seminal Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the multitude of memorable characters in the Russian novelist’s works have led to a certain fragmentation of the author’s persona, giving the impression that “one is dealing not with a single author-artist who wrote novels and stories, but with a number of philosophical statements by several author-thinkers.” Similarly, he remarks that scholarly criticism had largely fallen prey to a comparable reading of Dostoevsky’s works, privileging individual characters’ voices, in the process splintering the author-figure by merging it with each individual character, as if it were “not an object of authorial discourse, but rather a fully valid, autonomous carrier of his own individual word” (5).

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