The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review

Review: [untitled]
Author(s): Robin Feuer Miller
Reviewed work(s):
Tyrant and Victim in Dostoevsky by Gary Cox
Source: Russian Review, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Oct., 1986), pp. 431-432
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the
Russian Review
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/130476
Accessed: 26/12/2009 08:29

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review and Blackwell Publishing are collaborating with
JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Russian Review.

http://www.jstor.org
 Reviews 431

Cox, Gary. Tyrantand Victim in Dostoevsky. Columbus,OH: Slavica Publishers, 1984.

119pp. $9.95.

In Tyrantand Victimin Dostoevsky Gary Cox attemptsto impose an ethnological,

ethological grid on Dostoevsky's oeuvre. Like any pre-definedapproachinspired by a
theory to which the literarymaterialat hand is supposed to adapt, such a method is both
illuminating and limiting. Cox's highlighting of the tyrant-victim paradigm in
Dostoevsky's work yields interesting discussions, particularlyof The Double and of A
Raw Youth. Yet as I read, I kept reflecting that Dostoevsky might look askance at this
effort to interprethis fiction according to definable laws-laws which, moreover, apply
even to "non-humanprimatesocieties" (p. 20). For so much of Dostoevsky's work may
be read as an effort to understandman as man-distinguished from all other living
creaturesby virtue of his free will. Cox ought perhapsto have dealt at the outset with the
paradox arising from this collision of focus between writer and critic. Furthermore,his
emphasis on the tyrant-victimparadigmtends to minimize the countervailingforces in
much of Dostoevsky's fiction expressive of optimism and faith.
In the first section of the book Cox stresses that it was in prison that Dostoevsky
learned that "the inversion of the dominance hierarchy is often the mainspring of its
operation,that the aggressorbecomes a victim and the victim an object of veneration" (p.
11). Indeed, the victim, in Cox's scheme, convincingly takes on "totemic force." Cox
goes on to maintainthat Dostoevsky produceda "set of stock types or stereotypicalchar-
acters" in orderto create a language for describingthe humanpersonality(p. 12). Cox's
subsequentanalysis abounds with generalizationsabout Dostoevsky's characters,yet all
the charactersCox treats at length (often provocatively) seem exceptions to his assertion
that Dostoevsky has createda gallery of stereotypes. Where is one who fits the rule?
At times Cox's psychological approachseems reductive, as when he writes of the
undergroundman's "low self-esteem" (p. 35). Nevertheless, Cox writes well, and his
analysis of the Notes is insightful;his underscoringof the fish imagery found there could
have fit neatly into his delineation of dominancehierarchies. Cox creatively gives a new
implicationto Vyacheslav Ivanov's idea that Dostoevsky's charactersencounterothers as
subjects rather than as objects: "characters like the undergroundman identify so
thoroughly with the non-self as subject that the self becomes object for them" (p. 45).
This is both an efficient and an elegant descriptionof self-alienation.
With his uncoveringof structuresand patterns,Cox has establishedhis basic prem-
ise that the tyrant-victim paradigm is sprinkled nearly everywhere throughout
Dostoevsky's work. But certain conclusions Cox reaches along the way seem skewed.
Can one really label Myshkin as an "emotionally isolated Dostoevskian psychopathwho
deals with the world passively" (p. 52)? Are Myshkin and Rogozhin best described as
two "failures" who revert to behavioral extremes they had representedat the outset (p.
58)? Nor, in A Gentle Creaturedoes the title character"have an affair with an old army
pal" of her husband(p. 67). He is not her "paramour";instead, she proudly spurnshis
advances. (Cox could have profitedfrom Robert Jackson's analysis of this story in The
Art of Dostoevsky.) The conception of PorfiryPetrovich (Crime and Punishment)as one
of Dostoevsky's "womanish men" who assume a "characteristicof vulnerability" also
needs much explication (p. 76). Finally, althoughit is a possible working hypothesis for
describingDostoevsky's fictional output, it seems ultimatelyto misrepresenthis fictional
world to assertthat "the importanceof crime as a prerequisite(italics added)to salvation
distinguishes Dostoevsky's system from a strictly Christian concept of salvation" (p.
109). This assertion could well have been made near the beginning and investigated
 432 The Russian Review

throughout,along with the tyrant-victimparadigm. But it is difficult to accept this con-

troversialand difficult notion on faith. Has genuine crime been a prerequisitefor the sal-
vation of Sonya or Alyosha? Whatever position one ultimately takes on this matter,
Dostoevsky's attitudetowards the necessity of suffering and crime in the process of the
acquisitionof grace is a subjectthat has long been open to interpretationand debate.

Robin Feuer Miller

Brandeis University

Vroon, Ronald. VelimirXlebnikov's Shorter Poems: A Key to the Coinages (Michigan

Slavic Materials, no. 22). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1983. 251 pp.
$15.00.

Vroon's monograph deals with the most difficult aspect of Xlebnikov's art, the
nature of his poetic coinages. The book opens with an apt and succinct review of
Xlebnikov's unique philosophy of language. The main work of the book, the linguistic
analysis of the coinages proper, follows. The corpus of Xlebnikov's neology is neatly
divided into three main categories-"the grammatical coinages," "the non-
grammatical,"and "the agrammatical,"each group having its subtlersubdivisions. The
result is a thoroughand meticulous analysis of many groups of Xlebnikov's coinages and
an effort to explain their meaning as far as it is possible to do so. In fact, Vroon's mono-
graph is the first and very successful effort to deal with Xlebnikov's neology on such a
wide scale.
Vroon's linguistic expertise and his great caution in interpretationallow him to
avoid many pitfalls inherentin such a complex topic, especially in view of the highly eso-
teric character of Xlebnikov's language. He disarms a critically minded reader with
detailed rebuttals-practically every time one wants to question this or that coinage, the
validity of either its source, classification or interpretation,in the next passage one dis-
covers either the author'sreservations,or a furtherdiscussion of the problem,or at least a
recognitionof its complexity.
Vroon's extreme caution, however, has resulted in one featurethat might be taken
as a major drawback-his reluctance to supply a direct translationfor the coinages. In
the same mannerno translationis given when he quotes Xlebnikov's poems. Thus the
readeris providedwith a clue only to the coinage in isolation, while the surroundingcon-
text is left to guess-work.
When it comes to the grammaticalanalysis of the coinages, Vroon is at his best.
Undoubtedly,it helps the readerto understandXlebnikov's neology better,and suggests a
numberof insightful interpretations.Yet the expert readerof Xlebnikov, the readerwho
knows and likes his poetry or who takes on the task of decoding it, will in the majorityof
cases come to the "correct" answer without sophisticated linguistic analysis. Vroon's
grammatical analysis in fact makes explicit the implicit analogizing processes of the
reader's mind. Thus, Vroon does not so much decode the word as explain the rationale
for its decoding by a native speaker. One does not need to have the perceptiveness of
Vladimir Markov (p. 125) to decipher "liubno, bratno, rovno" in the context of
"Voina-smert'," as "liberte, egalit6, fraternit," nor to understandsuch coinages as
"nebich," "khokhotarstvui," "glazhdane" and even "seleben," provided one is
acquaintedwith Xlebnikov's poetic world, and is given the words in their contexts.