First, the separate edition, which appeared immediately after the serialization was completed and which serves as the basis for modern editions, preserves many aspects of the novel's serial form: titles, subtitles, segmentation, and format, even when the format was a typesetter's mistake, as was the case with the single uninterrupted paragraph of "The Grand Inquisitor." (6) In preserving his serial form, Dostoevsky differed from such Western writers as Dickens, Thackeray, or Trollope, who would dissolve and regroup the parts of their serials into new wholes as they prepared separate editions.(7) Second, the separate edition of Vidual elements (such as Alesha) to the whole and which promise the reader that the project underway is itself only part of a larger one.(5)Įven scholars who devote their energies to intrinsic analyses of the separate, one-volume edition of the text might find reason to examine the serial publication of Taktika is Dostoevsky's),(4) in the reactions of his contemporaries to the parts as they appeared, and in the opening lines of the novel, which thematize the relationship of indi. Compelling invitations to such a study may be found in Dostoevsky's "tactical" correspondence with his editor (the word The questions of part and whole, text and context, which these two types of research have raised make it all the more interesting to return to a consideration of the novel's serial publication, in connection with which these questions arose. Other important studies, for the most part more recent ones, have read the novel as an integral text, an artistic whole comprised of various structures. Many fine studies of the novel have already examined its beginnings in Dostoevsky's plans from the late 1860's, in Dostoevsky's creative interaction with works (such as Schiller's) which he had read and reread since childhood, or in Dostoevsky's life history. Since, as he admitted, it was also the novel that he had least drafted as he began serialization, it was in many ways the most demanding for him, and his need for ongoing research into such topics as the investigative process as well as his personal problems forced him no less than eleven times to miss the month's installment of a "book" ( kniga) and several times to change his plans for the novel as it unfolded.(3) The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky's longest serialized novel (and thus his most demanding for his readers).
The Brothers Karamazov, which appeared in sixteen installments in The Russian Herald over a period of almost two years, January 1879 to November 1880. In this paper, which will be programmatic and somewhat hortatory, I would like to address certain issues involved in the publication and reception of Such would be the case, to give one example, with histories of a text's publication, which can indicate the ways in which the changing shape of the text has refracted and influenced its changing interpretations.(2) These histories can show us, among other things, how radically different is our habitual awareness of the text and its contexts from the awareness of the writer and of the first readers who encountered text and contexts. Although it was criticized already in the 1920's for alleged ahistoricity and psychologism, the project which Shklovsky proposed can, in fact, involve not only a revision of the text in modern terms, but also a rediscovery of structural aspects which were conditioned by its initial production and reception. Sixty years ago Viktor Shklovsky challenged literary scholarship to provide new perceptions of the text by impeding accepted ones.(1) This project of scholarly defamiliarization echoed, of course, his famous conception of the effect of art The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Serial Publication William Mills Todd III, Stanford University Dostoevsky Studies :: The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Serial Publication
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