Romantic Realism: A Comparative Study of Dostoevsky and JM Coetzee

 

Chinta Praveen Kumar¹, Prof. V. Srinivas²

¹Professor, Vardhaman College of Engineering, Hyderabad

¹Research Scholar, Telangana University, Nizamabad

 

ABSTRACT:

Dostoevsky as a man of twentieth century of his philosophical reflection besides psychological, social realm of literary world has remarkable experimental study of literature considered for ever. Similarly, JM Coetzee’s writings offer a Post-Modern engagement with a classic tragedy of imperialism and cultural subjugation the impact, in Africa and elsewhere, of an expansionist in wide arena of political, ethical, and philosophical followed subsequent discussion. This paper is an attempt to explore socio-psychological analysis of behavioural patterns in the characters through a major literary form-Romantic Realism as a key factor in this research study. Romantic realism combines elements of both romanticism and realism. The terms ‘romanticism’ and ‘realism’ sometimes seen as opposed to one another, however, it is used as romantic elements found in Realistic novels in the present study of two writers who distinguish themselves time and space. This paper is to study characters of two well-known fictional works of JM Coetzee and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A Socio-psychological element is a common feature, even if they might share some features of their behaviour such as tendencies and temperaments. The paper will also try to shed some light in the direction of understanding psychological traits by comparative study on the realistic view of romanticism. The study explores this through the protagonists of major works of these two writers.

 

 

INTRODUCTION

Dostoevsky was much celebrated writer of tragic themes. He was considered one of the greatest innovators in the realm of subjective tragic theme which would fall on objective understanding. He created, in my opinion, a completely new type of philosophical in artistic form of narrative technique, is also called polyphonic writing. Romantic Realists dramatize human struggle, suffering or absurdity, and they choose to explore the vulnerable sections of society and life, the best of them do so with a strong creative and authentic power. It takes much imagination to represent the evils of existence or to mark one’s artistic presence at reality through irony or retreat into anguish and agony of distraction of novelty. It takes many people to read and empathise with more imagination to crystallise and promote such novels. This type of creative thinking found its expression in Dostoevsky’s novels, Initially, Western writers and thinkers have seen in Dostoevsky a champion of social ideals.

But humanity is limited in much of the novels from many social writers who had always taken to heart their challenges to many features of civilization further. But its significance is far beyond the limits of the novel alone and touches upon several basic principles of humanity. John Maxwell Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa on 9th February 1940. His father was a lawyer, and his mother, a schoolteacher. Their ancestry could be traced to the early Dutch settlers who migrated to South Africa in the 17th century. Essentially, Coetzee's fiction voices the quintessential quest for a rather Utopian world. The characters in his novels do not hail from a world where there is happiness and contentment. Their lives mirror an irrepressible desire for well-being. Characterized by an acute lack of certain vital essentials of life, these men and women are symbolic of the larger problematic that is life.

 

COMPARATIVE STUDY:

Socio-psychological profiles in JM Coetzee and Dostoyevsky’s works are among the writers who begin to explore psychological disorders in some of their works. In particular, their works Disgrace (1998), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) approach the topic of psychopathologies from the point of view of their protagonists. Duel characterization presents an inner conflict, more visible in some, that appears at a superficial or at a deeper level [1]. Their cold-blooded attraction for violence, the infliction of pain and cold -blooded death on their victims is evident. Empathy and fear are both feelings that seem to be lacking in their psychological profiles [4]. These personality deviations can sometimes be traced back to their remote childhood. The topic is of particular interest to JM Coetzee and Dostoevsky who in their works present conflict crisis of psychological thirst.

 

Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. Like the hero of The Idiot, Prince Myshkin, Dostoevsky suffered from epilepsy, experiencing his first fit when he was seven years old [5]. In 1837, after his mother's death, he came to St. Petersburg and entered the School of Military Engineers. In 1845, he finished his first major novel, Poor Folk. Several years later, Dostoevsky joined several socialist societies, the association with which earned him a death sentence. Dostoevsky was one of those few who rose voiced against bourgeois values, that rampant materialism, cultural suppression and individualism that worship of things In “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions” Dostoevsky attacks not merely the poverty and inequities of nineteenth century industrial capitalism and its evil of trade marketing [3].  The Gambler, Dostoevsky's most brilliant and profound work explored the fatal crisis of economics and psychology in social man. Dostoevsky's philosophical review and people, among other things, a classic critique of the money and material discussed bourgeois world. Thus, Marx and Dostoevsky’s understanding matches as In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky seems to have anticipated something profoundly characteristic of middle class life when, through Zosima, it transcends Dostoevsky’s hateful ideology because the Karamazovs sweep past the truths that the novelist continues to talk to us. The strongest impact in Dostoevsky is the control of visionary horror he shares with Blake, an imaginative prophet with whom he has absolutely nothing else in common. No one who has read Crime and Punishment ever can forget Raskolnikov’s murder of poor Lizaveta:

 

There in the middle of the floor, with a big bundle in her arms, stood Lizaveta, as white as a sheet, gazing in frozen horror at her murdered sister and apparently without the strength to cry out. When she saw him run in, she trembled like a leaf and her face twitched spasmodically; she raised her hand as if to cover her mouth, but no scream came and she backed slowly away from him towards the corner, with her eyes on him in a fixed stare, but still without a sound, as though she had no breath left to cry out.

 

Dostoevsky was a great visionary and an excellent storyteller, mystic, prophet, psychologist, irrationalist, a chronicler of the perverse, and as a novelist but there is something paradoxically misanthropist in his narrative visions. The structure is a ramification of protagonist to give up easier pleasures for more difficult pleasures, which is altogether an aesthetic request.

 

Dostoevsky’s first ethical thesis, Askoldov says, “Is something that appears at first glance to be of a highly formal nature? Yet it is, in a certain sense, the most important thing. In all his characters do sympathise”. Personality, according to Askoldov, differs from character, type, and temperament which ordinarily serve as the object of representation in literature because of its extraordinary internal freedom and its utter independence from the external environment. Dostoevsky was a strong novelist who influenced his literary presence which necessitated avenues for creative writings for many. Fanger, in his book on romantic realism provides only one passing mention of The Idiot (1965: 132). His approach, with its focus on the city, offers a different perspective on the interaction between romanticism and realism than the one given here. Dostoevsky’s traditional values, limited by a simplistic account of his moral perspective reflect emotional and intellectual philosophy, not because he regarded such content as impermissible, as Blake and Byron did, but because of a cause and effect policy with such subsequent development [7]. These uniform intersections reveal Dostoevsky and JM Coetzee to be the quintessential modern philosophers of romantic realism. Fanger identifies romantic realism, the transformative fusion of two different literary eras bringing around a two powerful imaginary response to conglomeration of identity; this fusion of two elements reach their aesthetic and metaphysical tragic climax in Dostoevsky, whose vision culminating in Crime and Punishment is seen by Fanger as the final synthesis of romantic realism. It is therefore the similar characterisation in Coetzee’ Disgrace fall upon critique in moral perspective.

 

‘For the first time he has a taste of what it will be like to be an old man, tired to the bone, without hopes, without desires and indifferent to the future’ (p. 107). By the time Dostoevsky wrote The Idiot, twenty years had passed since his early romantic period and he was well established as a psychological writer in the new realist tradition which left a noticeable trace in his creative works as monstrous abundance of a literature era, untouched by the graces of civility and intelligence, potentially lethal combinations of formless art and disrupted social fragmented structure with jarring gaps which is unique in a romantic novel [7].

 

At its heart is Dostoevsky’s great experiment to create a complete man with childlike goodness and naivety, place him in the realist context of St Petersburg society, and see if the dissonance between the ideal and the real could be overcome. This is a quintessentially romantic struggle. What makes The Idiot different from a traditional romantic novel, however, is that Dostoevsky shifts the locus of this struggle to within his main hero. Instead of the author wrestling with bringing together the ideal and the real in his work, it is Myshkin, with his childlike goodness, who struggles to see St Petersburg society in the simple, positive terms he used in his Swiss village, while being bombarded with the cold, harsh realities of greed, lust, and cruelty that become unavoidable from his first day of arrival in Russia [6]. With overly-simplistic childlike logic, he fears that to acknowledge baseness in others would be an admission that darkness had crept into his own soul and therefore he fights against his own knowledge, gradually breaking down by the end of the novel.

 

JM Coetzee similarly conceived the idea of character sketch with the nameless narrator of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground as embodying significance in David Lurie. Dostoevsky's characters feel themselves a completely abnormal among the Russian aristocratic society, who feels deeply alienated from the main values of middle-class Victorian society. Here a strong psychological similarity between these main characters is obvious: both have spent their age in chaos, and, after coming back to their retrospection of guilt, have inherited repentance [2]. Moreover, both characters are self-embracing. However, while in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Prince Myshkin's love for Nastasya Filippovna, based on compassion, prevails over his real love for Aglaya; similarly, Myshkin's proposal to Nastasya Filippovna is a revelation of his essential goodness, kindness, and honesty.

 

He attempts to replace Soraya by having sex to many women: former wives and tourists. He also has “affair with the wives of colleagues, slept with whores” (p. 7) and even make love with a new secretary in his department. The narrator describes David as an aging but still handsome and attractive, so he is easily finds other women.

 

Coetzee’s writings are set to question the basic structures of colonial and post-colonial power of dominance and subjugation. In Foe and The Master of Petersburg, written imaginary grounds of episodes in the lives of Defoe and Dostoevsky like a series of refined examination of the nature of power and authority [7]. Coetzee’s own style is sometimes polyphonic like Dostoevsky, sometimes straightforward. His narrative techniques recreates disintegrated narrative devices of false fiction and has created open-endedness for his story, sudden authorial interventions and abrupt endings may instill readers to go back history. He is preoccupied with narrative voice, structure and form within the fictional illusion which is created and by which it can be discussed.

 

CONCLUSION:

To conclude, this paper has explored socio-psychological behavioural patterns in the characters of two well-known works: Dostoevsky and JM Coetzee on Romantic Realism. I have tried to analyse the characters’ internal struggle from a socio-philosophical, thematic, and structural point of view. Although the period of and space of two writers much vary, their creative power allow an in depth development of the character’s movement in the story, the text provides interesting insights in how perceptual refection on identity is an important psychopathological trait.

 

REFERENCES:

1.        Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics C. Emerson, Ed. and Trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

2.        Kumar, Chinta Praveen. "Notes from the Underground: A Psycho Analytical Criticism with Reflection on Today's Man." Research Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Rese Jour Human. and Soci. Scien. 7.1 (2016): 6. Web. ISSN 2321-5828

3.        Frank, Joseph. “The Genesis of Crime and Punishment.” Belknap, Robert L., ed. Russianness: Studies on a Nation’s Identity. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1990.

4.        Jones, Malcolm V. "Raskol'nikov's Humanitarianism." Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 2003. 37-50.

5.        Nuttall, A. D. "Crime and Punishment: The Psychological Problem." Fyodor Dostoevsky. By Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. 155-70.

6.        Fanger, Donald. The Creation of Nikolai Gogol. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap of Harvard UP, 1979.

7.        Fanger, Donald. Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1965.

 

 

Received on 04.11.2016

Modified on 22.12.2016

Accepted on 21.02.2017

© A&V Publication all right reserved

Research J. Humanities and Social Sciences. 8(2): April- June, 2017, 189-192.

DOI:  10.5958/2321-5828.2017.00027.4