UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines how the narratives of Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy grapple with the consequences of their omniscience. Their narrators do not simply read minds and tell stories; they also become wrapped-up in the ethical implications of telling stories that require the reading of minds. In effect, they ask: what happens when narrators become godlike? Does the privilege of omniscience define—or disrupt—the novel’s ethical value? I argue that the phrase “God only knows” [Bog znaet] becomes the constant refrain of realist narrative, a performance of authority in the moment of divesting from it.

In a series of close readings—from Turgenev’s early Sketches of a Hunter to his novel Fathers and Sons, from Dostoevsky’s first work Poor Folk to his late story “The Meek One,” and from Tolstoy’s earliest semi-autobiographical narrative experiments to the trilogy of novels Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth—I argue that the newly omniscient Russian narrator draws attention to the consequences of his gaze, highlighting the existence of a boundary in the moment he makes a display of crossing it, making sacrosanct the interior of the other in the process of laying it bare. These narratives of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy become deeply concerned with the troubling effects of their increasingly privileged intrusion into the minds of others and, in making us ever aware of the ethical consequences of reading the face to access the mind, cast a spotlight back onto our reading of them.

Recent works of literary criticism—from rhetorical humanists championing the value of literature to deconstructive examinations of the ethics of reading—investigate the intersection of narrative and ethics in the novel. This dissertation brings Russian narratives of the mid nineteenth-century into this conversation, which has not yet been done by Slavic scholars. Building on recent theories of narrative ethics and omniscience, this dissertation argues that an awareness of the transgressive nature of privileged knowledge becomes clearly manifest in realist prose, even when hidden feelings and unspoken thoughts are rendered legible. These works reckon with—and invite us to attend to—the troubling effects of their increasingly privileged intrusion into the minds of others. Turgenev’s, Dostoevsky’s, and Tolstoy’s narratives rely on strategies of representation that mark themselves as instances of self-aware transgression, defining their own devices of omniscience as an ethically fraught process, caught up in the problem of making knowable what “God only knows.”