TY - JOUR
AU - Frazier,, Melissa
AB - Abstract Midway through Middlemarch (1871), one of the locals offers an entirely Dostoevskiian description of Will Ladislaw: ‘I know the sort … some emissary. He’ll begin with flourishing about the Rights of Man and end with murdering a wench.’ It is the plot of Crime and Punishment (1866) in brief, not because Eliot knew Dostoevskii, but because Eliot together with her common-law husband George Henry Lewes shared Dostoevskii’s complicated response to the same constellation of ideas, both scientific and political. Eliot’s novel highlights the reliance on Lewesian physiological psychology that also underlies Dostoevskii’s work, as both novels represent and embody the relationship of subject or mind to material world that Lewesian post- or anti-Positivist science entails. Dostoevskii, on the other hand, makes especially clear the political stakes of this shared scientific project, illuminating the response to radical politics that is as fundamental to Middlemarch as it is to Crime and Punishment. Midway throughMiddlemarch (1871), George Eliot offers an entirely Dostoevskiian description of Will Ladislaw. Will has now embarked on the newspaper business in Middlemarch and also taken up the cause of Reform. On being told that his name is Ladislaw and that he is ‘said to be of foreign extraction’, Mr Hawley says: ‘ “I know the sort … some emissary. He’ll begin with flourishing about the Rights of Man and end with murdering a wench.” ’1 Even in the more genteel surroundings of Middlemarch, it is the plot of Crime and Punishment (Преступление и наказание, 1866) in brief, not that Mr Hawley, nor even his far more well-read author, intends the allusion. Mr Hawley’s startling comment reminds us instead that Fëdor Dostoevskii and George Eliot shared the same response to the same constellation of ideas, the combination of radical politics and equally radical science that readers of Russian literature know as Nihilism. This response is first a complicated and even ambivalent political stance. While Dostoevskii’s early dip in the waters of revolutionary thought is evident in his arrest in 1848, Eliot’s decision to make her way as a writer first on her own and then, starting in 1854, together with an already-married man, George Henry Lewes, makes her an earlier and English incarnation of the ‘Nihilist girl’, an emancipated woman straight from the pages of Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s What Is To Be Done? (Что делать?, 1863).2 As the English translator of Strauss’s The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, 1835) and Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (Das Wesen des Christentums, 1841), Eliot also played a significant part in the mid-nineteenth century turn to atheism. Although both writers then ended as pillars of their respective literary establishments, it was without ever entirely renouncing their more radical beginnings. Instead, most overtly in Crime and Punishment and Middlemarch (M, p. 3), both warned of the dangers of a ‘binding theory’ that fails to take into account the existence of real others, while still paying tribute to the ‘ardour’ of young people with utopian plans for re-making the world. This political commitment was also the embrace of a particular strain of nineteenth-century science. The Western European science that Nihilism made its own skewed sharply left in an often contradictory set of -isms aimed not just at knowing, but at transforming our physical environment: materialism, determinism, empiricism, rationalism, scientism, atheism.3 Just as Dostoevskii and Eliot were wary of social utopia, however, so both sought a science that would move beyond the limitations of a more narrowly Nihilist sort to better respect the interrelationship of subjects and objects in the conditions of the material world itself. This scientific intersubjectivity prefigures the ‘associations of humans and nonhumans’ that for Bruno Latour in Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (1999) offer our only means of achieving what he calls a ‘more “realistic realism” ’.4 This other sort of science is also exemplified by the work of one of the most influential nineteenth-century scientists and science-writers: Eliot’s common-law husband and closest intellectual collaborator, George Henry Lewes. Lewes was known across Europe for his early advocacy of Auguste Comte and for his contributions to the burgeoning sciences of physiology and physiological psychology. In his experimental work, he was an active and vocal vivisectionist who devoted many years to exactly the kind of galvanic experiments on frogs that readers of Russian literature associate with the most famous of fictional ‘Nihilists’, Bazarov in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (Отцы и дети, 1862), as well as Chernyshevskii’s Lopukhov and Kirsanov. Where the Nihilists were sharp in their dismissal of the ‘softer’ sciences, however – ‘A good chemist’s twenty times more useful than a poet’ [‘Порядочный химик в двадцать раз полезнее всякого поэта’], as Bazarov says5 – Lewes combined his scientific pursuits with a career as a noted critic and author of a number of books across a wide range of genres, including a biography of Goethe, histories of philosophy and theatre, and even a few early novels. This multifaceted career together with his lack of any formal training have long opened Lewes’s scientific work to the charge of dilettantism. For more recent scholars like Rick Rylance, however, it is exactly Lewes’s ‘versatile, polymathic, innovative’ approach that accounts for his scientific sophistication.6 As Rylance argues, Lewes is strikingly modern in his insistence that science offers no final word. For Lewes, science as an area of inquiry is defined instead by its ‘provisionality, openness, revisability, and collective endeavor’, formal principles reflected in Lewes’s own scientific practice.7 In the newly emerging field of psychology, Lewes’s great contribution was his belief, as Richard Menke writes, that ‘physiology and psychology, nerves and neuroses, are best understood as, respectively, the objective and subjective presentations of what are in fact the same phenomena’;8 turned outwards, Lewes’s claim was the again very modern view that perception and what we might call the material world mutually inflect one another. Eliot, for her part, is well known for her reliance on and contribution to Lewes’s dual-aspect monism (the belief that physical and mental processes are two parts of the same whole) as it developed from his early novel Ranthorpe (1847) through The Physiology of Common Life (1859–60) and the partly posthumously published Problems of Life and Mind (1876). What is less appreciated is the extent to which Lewesian science also undergirds Dostoevskii’s view of the interrelationship of mind and body and mind and world. Both Dostoevskii and Eliot point to the limitations of a more familiar nineteenth-century science through scientist-heroes like Lydgate, as well as direct references to the workings of contemporary science, including the Underground Man’s ‘laws of nature’ and Ivan Karamazov’s rejection of non-Euclidean geometry.9 The provisional, open and collective Lewesian science that both advocate, however, operates most importantly in formal terms. In Crime and Punishment, the cluttered physical space of St. Petersburg is insistently real and yet also a representation of Raskol’nikov’s narrow mental confines; in Middlemarch, while it is above all Dorothea who merges with her blue-green boudoir, mental and physical space also overlap in Lydgate’s failed marriage. In both cases the persistent conflation of mental and physical spaces demonstrates the interaction of subjective perceptions and objective reality that was for Lewes a matter of the biological functioning of minds and bodies in the world. In ‘Sensual Mind: The Pain and Pleasure of Thinking’ (2004), Marina Kostalevsky vividly evokes the materialization of mental processes so characteristic of Dostoevskii’s writing. In Notes from Underground (Записки из подполья, 1864), the unnamed narrator gives thought a physical existence when he writes: A sullen thought was born in my brain and passed through my whole body like some vile sensation, similar to what one feels on entering an underground cellar, damp and musty.Угрюмая мысль зародилась в моем мозгу и прошла по всему телу каким-то скверным ощущением, похожим на то, когда входишь в подполье, сырое и затхлое.10 In The Brothers Karamazov (Братья Карамазовы, 1881), chapter titles like ‘The Sensualists’ [‘Сладострастники’] and ‘An Adulterer of Thought’ [‘Прелюбодей мысли’] suggest not just a physicality, but even an ‘eroticism of intellectual desires’.11 As spirit is repeatedly made manifest, Kostalevsky argues, not just mind and body but also what we might take to be their respective products, reason and emotion, merge. The same is true in Middlemarch. In Middlemarch, thoughts take on a striking degree of materiality, for example when Raffles arrives in the novel as the embodiment of Bulstrode’s ‘incorporate past’, a ‘loud red figure … risen before him in unmanageable solidity’ (M, p. 523), much as Svidrigailov first appears to Raskol’nikov as if from his dreams. As Karen Chase notes, in Middlemarch, too, thoughts and emotions are one, for example when Lydgate sees Rosamond’s tears and ‘an idea … thrilled through the recesses within him … raising the power of passionate love’ (M, p. 301).12 For Kostalevsky, Dostoevskii’s ‘sensualization of the mind’ derives from ‘the concept of unity between mind and body as developed by the Orthodox tradition, with its attention to the sacredness of matter.’13 With regard to the very English and nearly atheist George Eliot, however, Kate Flint argues that ‘The substantiality of ideas may itself be read as an extended metaphor for the physiological and psychological fact not only that body and mind are inseparable but that the properties of the mind itself depend on the materiality of the body.’14 In the case of Bulstrode, it is the impact of the mind on the material world that seems most evident, not just in his apparent manifestation of his shameful past in the actual person of Raffles, but also in the effect of the subsequent mental strain on his physical being. Without understanding the reasons for Bulstrode’s decline, Lydgate reflects that ‘ “One sees how any mental strain, however slight, may affect a delicate frame” ’ (M, p. 680). When Bulstrode’s past misdeeds are finally known to all, his wife, too, is marked by ‘the sorrow that was every day streaking her hair with whiteness’ as by a face ‘aged to keep sad company with his own withered features’ (M, pp. 824, 825). Eliot consistently lays emphasis on the workings of the body, however, when the narrator describes Bulstrode’s ‘diseased motive’ as operating ‘like an irritating agent in his blood’, or when she compares his ‘misdeeds’ to ‘the subtle muscular movements which are not taken account of in the consciousness’ (M, pp. 707–08, 687). The centrality of the body is still more evident in the case of Will. Will, the narrator tells us, ‘was made of very impressible stuff’, and his body and mind are one, for example in his habit of ‘shaking his head backward’ in conversation, or in an emotional moment with Dorothea when ‘the blood had mounted to his face and neck’, or especially in the reaction of his nerves that Eliot repeatedly describes as ‘electric shock’ (M, pp. 388, 545, 621). When Dorothea enters the room, for instance, Will ‘started up as from an electric shock and felt a tingling at his finger-ends’. ‘Any one observing him,’ the narrator adds, ‘would have seen a change in his complexion, in the adjustment of his facial muscles, in the vividness of his glance, which might have made them imagine that every molecule in his body had passed the message of a magic touch’ (M, p. 388). When much later in the novel Rosamond lays the tips of her fingers on Will’s coat sleeve, an infuriated Will recoils from her touch, ‘darting from her, and changing from pink to white and back again, as if his whole frame were tingling with the pain of the sting’ (M, p. 777). As Flint argues, ‘[W]hether sensationalism occurs in the shocks that a plot may deliver, or in the metaphors through which wordless mental agony is conveyed to the reader, the body, as the locus of sensation, remains a constant and necessary given.’15 The body plays the same role in Crime and Punishment, although a little less evidently. In contrast to Eliot’s openly omniscient narrator, the narrator of Crime and Punishment confines himself almost entirely to Raskol’nikov’s point of view; so much so, in fact, that when Raskol’nikov faints at the police station, the narrative stops: Raskolnikov picked up his hat and made for the door, but he did not reach it … When he came to his senses he saw that he was sitting in a chair. Раскольников поднял свою шляпу и пошел к дверям, но до дверей он не дошел … Когда он очнулся, то увидал, что сидит на стуле.16 We are perhaps most immediately struck by the psychological dimensions of that perspective: before the abrupt shift in style that begins with the confession in the final lines of Part Six, what we see pours out in a dense and hectic flow of words that corresponds to Raskol’nikov’s dense and hectic mind. As Dostoevskii’s many descriptions of Raskol’nikov’s physical state would remind us, however, that perspective is also bounded by a body. The text in fact devotes significant space to accounts of Raskol’nikov’s sleeping, and especially to his often ‘greedy’ consumption of soup, bread, tea and beer; it also dwells on the corporeal effects of an illness that is as physical as it is mental. As Zosimov sees it, Raskol’nikov’s illness is the ‘product of many complex moral and material influences’ [‘продукт многих сложных нравственных и материальных влияний’] (Crime, p. 207 / v, p. 214). Raskol’nikov himself distinguishes body from mind while nonetheless suggesting their interaction when he reflects on conditions at the police station: ‘… too bad it’s so airless here,’ he added, ‘stifling … My head is spinning even more … my mind, too …’ (Crime, p. 95) ‘… жаль, что здесь воздуху нет, – прибавил он, – духота … Голова еще больше кружится … и ум тоже …’ (v, p. 101) Porfirii Petrovich also emphasizes Raskol’nikov’s corporeal self, for example when he recalls the physical effects of an earlier meeting: ‘[Y]our nerves were humming and your knees trembling, and my nerves were humming and my knees trembling.’ (Crime, p. 449) ‘у вас нервы поют и подколенки дрожат, и у меня нервы поют и подколенки дрожат.’ (v, p. 468) or when he explains Raskol’nikov’s return to the scene of the crime as a desire to again experience ‘that spinal chill’ [‘холод-то этот в спинном мозгу’] (Crime, p. 456 / v, p. 473). The body is also at issue in Raskol’nikov’s repeated experience of ‘sensations’ [‘ощущения’]. When Raskol’nikov realizes that the police have called him in to question him not about the murder but about the money he owes, he is at first filled with ‘complete, spontaneous, purely animal joy’ [‘полной, непосредственной, чисто животной радости’] (Crime, p. 98 / v, p. 104). This unthinking emotion quickly gives way, however, to something much more troubling: A dark sensation of tormenting, infinite solitude and estrangement suddenly rose to consciousness in his soul. […] What was taking place in him was totally unfamiliar, new, sudden, never before experienced. Not that he understood it, but he sensed clearly, with all the power of sensation, that it was no longer possible for him to address these people in the police station, not only with heartfelt effusions, as he had just done, but in any way at all […]. Never until that minute had he experienced such a strange and terrible sensation. And most tormenting of all was that it was more a sensation than an awareness, an idea; a spontaneous sensation, the most tormenting of any he had yet experienced in his life. (Crime, pp. 103–04) Мрачное ощущение мучительного, бесконечного уединения и отчуждения вдруг сознательно сказалось душе его. […] С ним совершалось что-то совершенно ему незнакомое, новое, внезапное и никогда не бывалое. Не то чтоб он понимал, но он ясно ощущал, всею силою ощущения, что не только с чувствительными экспансивностями, как давеча, но даже с чем бы то ни было ему уже нельзя более обращаться к этим людям, в квартальной конторе […]. он никогда еще до сей минуты не испытывал подобного странного и ужасного ощущения. И что всего мучительнее — это было более ощущение, чем сознание, чем понятие; непосредственное ощущение, мучительнейшее ощущение из всех до сих пор жизнию пережитых им ощущений. (v, p. 109) Once he hides his ill-gotten gains, this ‘new, insurmountable sensation’ [‘новое, непреодолимое ощущение’] becomes ‘a certain boundless, almost physical loathing for everything he met or saw around him’ [‘какое-то бесконечное, почти физическое отвращение ко всему встречавшемуся и окружающему’], a physical response that is entirely sorted out only at the very end of the novel when a different ‘sensation’ [‘ощущение’] ‘seized him all at once, took hold of him entirely – body and mind’ [‘овладело им сразу, захватило его всего – с телом и мыслию’], and he bows down at the crossroads to kiss the earth (Crime, pp. 103–04, p. 525 / v, pp. 116–17, p. 550). As P. S. Shkurinov argues, for all the centrality of Dostoevskii’s faith in an intangible God, Raskol’nikov’s finally uncontrollable urge to confess suggests also a physical reaction, the response of ‘living life’ to the deed that Raskol’nikov’s rational mind has led him to perform; indeed, terms like ‘spinal cord’ [‘спинной мозг’] and ‘sensation’ [‘ощущение’] point straight to a physiological context that was fascinated with the possibilities of a central nervous system and bodily responses that bypass cognition.17 This sense of the interaction of body and spirit is exactly Eliot’s, even to the extent that biology alone serves a similar moral function in the almost entirely secular Middlemarch. Just as Raskol’nikov’s body drives him to confess, for example, as Sally Shuttleworth notes, ‘The physiological coherence’ of Bulstrode’s body ‘appears to offer a guarantee of cumulative social order.’18 Both Eliot’s and Dostoevskii’s emphasis on the body derives from a literary context marked by a new form, the novel of sensation, and critics in their own day were quick to make the connection. Despite Eliot’s rejection of sensationalism in ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ (1856) as elsewhere, Eliot was criticized for her own reliance on ‘startling situations’, while P. N. Tkachev was withering in his attack on what he claimed was Dostoevskii’s address to readers’ bodies alone: Give us more and more gossip, scandal, irritate all the more strongly the reader’s spinal cord, make his hair stand on end, entertain him, amuse or frighten him, but just don’t make him think or look up from the page. Давайте больше и больше сплетен, скандалов, раздражайте сильнее спинной мозг читателя, заставляйте его волосы подыматься дыбом, потешайте его, смешите его или пугайте, но только не заставляйте его думать и оглядываться.19 Their understanding of the body as both cause and effect also finds a scientific basis in Lewes. Readers of Dostoevskii may remember that Lewes makes a fleeting appearance in Crime and Punishment when Lebeziatnikov recommends that Sonia read his Physiology of Common Life. This passing reference to Lewes’s compendium of bodily functions, from ‘Hunger and Thirst’ to ‘Life and Death’, is a marker of the Nihilist inclinations that Lebeziatnikov fully expresses only much later in the novel when he expounds on his philosophy to his one-time mentor and now houseguest Luzhin (Crime, pp. 361–71 / v, pp. 374–86). While Dostoevskii was evidently well aware of Lewes’s reputation in Nihilist circles, an unsigned review of The Physiology of Common Life that appeared in his journal Time (Время) in 1861 suggests that Dostoevskii himself read Lewes in a different light. This highly positive review begins by praising Lewes’s genuine difficulty. Homegrown physiologists of the cruder Chernyshevskiian sort would do best to steer clear of the English, the anonymous author warns: ‘All these Leweses, Buckles, Millses, Darwins are a most dangerous people’ [‘Все эти Льюисы, Бокли, Милли, Дарвины – преопасный народ’], he writes. Where the Russians apparently prefer to rush ahead without waiting for hard evidence, he explains, the English are ‘so cold-blooded, cautious and mistrustful, such skeptics and people so little likely to be carried away, that you won’t go very far with them’ [‘так хладнокровны, осторожны, недоверчивы, такие скептики и малоувлекающие люди, что с ними далеко уйти нельзя’].20 Indeed, Lewes’s actual practice as a scientist provided a level of complexity that eluded the more ‘vulgar’ materialists in Russia as elsewhere.21 Even before Lewes became an expert dissector and skilled microscopist, however, a more sophisticated approach to the problems of life and mind was already on view in his early novel Ranthorpe (1847), published in Russian as A Poet’s Life (Жизнь поэта) in 1859. While Lewes was never the novelist that he helped George Eliot to become, still the hodgepodge of theme and plot that makes up Ranthorpe serves well to convey the pan-European literary context that was also Dostoevskii’s. The Russian title, Жизнь поэта, emphasizes the extent to which Percy Ranthorpe’s story offers a re-telling of Balzac’s Lost Illusions (Illusions perdues, 1837–43) with Percy a Lucien de Rubempré who ends on a happier note. Ranthorpe also includes a proto-Chernyshevskiian medical student, a ‘mixture of the gentleman and the Mohock’ whose ‘dark eye was full of fire and intelligence; his open laughing face was indicative of malicious mirth and frankness; and the resolution about his brow, and sensibility about his mouth, redeemed his slang appearance, and showed the superior being, beneath the unprepossessing exterior.’22 Harry Cavendish’s first act in the novel is to knock to the ground a peddler who ‘was beating his donkey in so brutal a manner that several people were crying “Shame! shame!” ’ (R, p. 7); in a chapter prefaced by an epigraph from Georges Sand’s Jacques (1833) (R, p. 307), Harry ends by breaking his engagement with Isola when he realizes that she loves Percy instead. In between, Harry solves a violent murder wrongly attributed to Percy, and it is in this ‘sensational’ subplot that Lewes’s science of mind and body comes into play. Not unlike Porfirii Petrovich in Crime and Punishment, Harry’s strategy in the absence of any hard evidence is simply to confront the real murderer, Oliver Thornton, who, despite a plan that ‘seems to succeed even in its smallest details’ (R, p. 208), is overwhelmed with guilt: ‘He had thought of flying to America, but was afraid, lest it should look suspicious. […] Such was his suffering, that he was often on the point of blowing his brains out, and so ending his misery’ (R, p. 222); ‘Every knock at the door went to his heart, as if it announced his arrest. Every noise in the street sounded like the mob coming to seize him. He read the morning and evening paper with horrible eagerness. Every line respecting the murder made him thrill’ (R, p. 221). The ‘thrill’ of Oliver’s response is as physical as it is mental, as is the initial motivation for his crime. The narrator explains: His uncle’s death soon became a fixed idea with him. […] He must either become a murderer or a monomaniac! The tyrannous influence of fixed ideas – of thoughts which haunt the soul, and goad the unhappy wretch to his perdition – is capable, I think, of a physiological no less than of a psychological explanation. […] In proportion to the horror or interest inspired by that thought, will be the strength of the tendency to recurrence. The brain may be then said to be in a state of partial inflammation, owing to the great affluence of blood in one direction. And precisely as the abnormal affluence of blood towards any part of the body will produce chronic inflammation, if it be not diverted, so will the current of thought in excess in any one direction produce monomania. Fixed ideas may thus be physiologically regarded as chronic inflammations of the brain. (R, pp. 202–03) Although a recent strain of scholarship, as Rylance notes, tries to enlist Lewes for the Kantian side, Lewes’s stance in Ranthorpe as in his later scientific writings is not the idealism that ‘the tyrannous influence of fixed ideas’ taken by itself might suggest.23 Nor, despite the emphasis on the material body with its ‘chronic inflammations’ and ‘affluence of blood’, was Lewes an advocate of the more radical Nihilist approach that would elevate body over mind. In the novel as in the later scientific work, body and mind instead operate in tandem, as simultaneously both cause and effect. In his 1876 article ‘What is Sensation?’, for example, Lewes addresses the ambiguity of a term that was used by physiologists and psychologists alike with different meanings. The physiologist, he explains, takes the word in its ‘objective aspect’ to refer to ‘the reaction of a sensory organ’ alone, as separate from our conscious recognition of that reaction.24 The psychologist, on the other hand, ‘has only direct knowledge of a change of feeling following some other change’, a very different kind of ‘sensation’ that is ‘wholly a fact of Consciousness’.25 While Lewes suggests that scientists might do better to use ‘sensation’ for what he calls ‘neural processes’ and ‘feeling’ for ‘psychical’ ones, his clarification comes only with the caveat that the two are ultimately interdependent. As Lewes puts it in the first volume of his Problems of Life and Mind published in the same year, every mental phenomenon has its corresponding neural phenomenon (the two being as the convex and concave surfaces of the same sphere, distinguishable yet identical), and […] every neural phenomenon involves the whole Organism. (Problems, I, pp. 103–04) Lewes’s stance is not a straightforward empiricism; indeed, as Rylance argues, for Lewes ‘it is reductive and misleading to claim that all our knowledge is generated from sense experience (though it is ultimately referable to it).’26 Still, the body matters for Lewes, above all in the shape that it gives to sensory experience. For Lewes, bodies (and not just brains) generate thought. In The Physiology of Common Life he supports the claim ‘that the Brain is only one organ of the Mind, and not by any means the exclusive centre of Consciousness’ with a focus on the functioning of the spinal cord and somatic nerves – exactly the ‘spinal chill’ that Raskol’nikov seeks.27 More broadly for Lewes, the body shapes all perception first to the extent that bodies in different states perceive very differently. As Rylance points out, among his contemporaries ‘Lewes was unusually aware of psychological dysfunction and abnormality’, and he had a clear sense of the possible physiological bases of any mental disturbance.28 Lewes suggests in Problems of Life and Mind that we ‘take an example from Insanity’: A visceral disturbance, especially in the digestive or the generative organs, will cause a perversion of Sensibility from which will arise abnormal sensation, hallucination, moods, melancholy, depression, etc. These prompt the intellect to explanation. External causes are imagined; and the wildest hypotheses of persecution, divine or diabolic communication, are invented. As the disturbance spreads and the organism becomes more and more abnormal, the ideas become more and more incoherent, till Dementia supervenes. (Problems, I, p. 113) Despite her own preoccupation with different kinds of perception, Eliot confines herself for the most part to the limitations of what we might call a ‘normal’ psychological state. Dostoevskii, on the other hand, famously shares Lewes’s fascination with ‘psychological dysfunction and abnormality’, and he, too, persistently raises the possibility of a physiological basis. Psychological states altered to the point of insanity abound in Crime and Punishment, typically with an ambivalent reference to a physical state. Just as Raskol’nikov’s own illness partakes of mind and body alike, for example, so Katerina Ivanovna’s eventually full-blown insanity is linked to her consumption. Marmeladov implies that her poor grip on reality precedes her actual illness when he attributes a kind of innocence to the lies that his wife would tell on his behalf: ‘ “[S]he believed it all, she delights in her own fancies, by God, sir!” ’ [‘[…] сама всему верит, собственными воображениями сама себя тешит, ей-богу-с!’] (Crime, p. 21 / v, p. 24). Katerina Ivanovna’s nervous energy may also have produced the consumption, as the description given when Raskol’nikov first sees her would suggest: Her eyes glittered as with fever, but her gaze was sharp and fixed, and […] this consumptive and agitated face produced a painful impression. (Crime, p. 25) Глаза ее блестели как в лихорадке, но взгляд был резок и неподвижен, и болезненное впечатление производило это чахоточное и взволнованное лицо […]. (v, pp. 28–29) Physical and mental are finally inextricably connected in Lebeziatnikov’s attempt to explain Katerina Ivanovna’s deranged behaviour in the wake of her husband’s funeral. While Lebeziatnikov himself acknowledges that he knows nothing about medicine, he is quick to make a diagnosis. He first tells Raskol’nikov, ‘She’s certainly gone mad!… It’s those little knobs they say come out on the brain in consumption’ [‘– Непременно помешалась! … Это, говорят, такие бугорки, в чахотке, на мозгу вскакивают’] (Crime, p. 423 / v, p. 442), only to apparently dismiss his first theory for another: ‘But what I say is this: if one convinces a person logically that he essentially has nothing to cry about, he’ll stop crying’ [‘Но я про то говорю: если убедить человека логически, что, в сущности, ему не о чем плакать, то он и перестанет плакать’] (Crime, p. 424 / v, p. 442). If a Nihilist might seem an unlikely proponent of a talking cure, still more striking is the commitment to the physiological underpinnings of mental states evident in Raskol’nikov’s response. ‘Life would be too easy that way’ [‘Слишком легко тогда было бы жить’] (Crime, p. 424 / v, p. 442), Raskol’nikov replies, prompting Lebeziatnikov to give a somewhat confused account of a Parisian professor’s success in curing mad people by ‘logical conviction’ alone. Lebeziatnikov explains: ‘His basic idea is that there’s no specific disorder in a mad person’s organism, but that madness is, so to speak, a logical error, an error of judgment, a mistaken view of things. He would gradually prove his patient wrong, and imagine, they say he achieved results! But since he used showers at the same time, the results of the treatment are, of course, subject to doubt… Or so it seems.’ (Crime, p. 424) ‘основная идея его, что особенного расстройства в организме у сумасшедших нет, а что сумасшествие есть, так сказать, логическая ошибка, ошибка в суждении, неправильный взгляд на вещи. Он постепенно опровергал больного и, представьте себе, достигал, говорят, результатов! Но так как при этом он употреблял и души, то результаты этого лечения подвергаются, конечно, сомнению… По крайней мере, так кажется.’ (v, pp. 442–43) Both the ambivalence and the constant return to the possible physiological bases of mental derangement also mark the many ‘perversions of sensibility’ in Crime and Punishment that stop just short of insanity. Svidrigailov, for example, claims to see ghosts, and significant again is Raskol’nikov’s response: ‘You should see a doctor’ [‘Сходите к доктору’] (Crime, p. 288 / v, p. 298).29 Wrong or at least ‘unreal’ perceptions are also offered by the dreams that again apparently stem from particular physical conditions. Raskol’nikov’s dream of the mare, for example, derives from the ‘morbid condition’ that, as the narrator explains, tends to give dreams a ‘remarkably graphic, vivid, and extremely lifelike quality’ [‘необыкновенною выпуклостию, яркостью и чрезвычайным сходством с действительностью’] (Crime, p. 54 / i, v, p. 59). In the same way, according to Nastas’ia, Raskol’nikov’s still more lifelike dream that the police lieutenant was beating his landlady can be explained by ‘the blood’. No one was here, she says: ‘It’s the blood clamoring in you. When it can’t get out and starts clotting up into these little clots, that’s when you start imagining things.’ (Crime, p. 117) ‘А это кровь в тебе кричит. Это когда ей выходу нет и уж печенками запекаться начнет, тут и начнет мерещиться.’ (v, p. 123) We might consider, finally, how often Raskol’nikov is taken to be drunk. As Tat’iana Kasatkina argues, this misinterpretation offers a ‘real’ reading of what is actually a spiritual condition, that he has ‘regaled’ his spirit ‘with the drunkenness of sin’.30 This persistent mistake also, however, reflects a clear understanding that chemical imbalances in the brain can be artificially induced. In Middlemarch Mr Farebrother makes the same mistake when he sees a visibly agitated Lydgate: ‘ “He may have been taking an opiate,” was a thought that crossed Mr Farebrother’s mind’ (M, p. 640). There is always the possibility in Dostoevskii that apparently ‘abnormal’ perceptions are not mad at all, but instead windows onto alternative realities. As William James would later put it with evident knowledge of Lewes’s work and a clear affinity for Dostoevskii’s: [F]or aught we know to the contrary, 103° or 104° Fahrenheit might be a much more favourable temperature for truths to germinate and sprout in, then the more ordinary blood-heat of 97 or 98 degrees.31 Despite Raskol’nikov’s questioning of her sanity, for example, Sonia is not mad but rather sees a Christian meaning to her life that Raskol’nikov eventually comes to share, and we might note also Svidrigailov’s answer to Raskol’nikov: ‘I agree that ghosts come only to sick people; but that only proves that ghosts cannot appear to anyone but sick people, not that they themselves do not exist.’ (Crime, p. 289) ‘Я согласен, что привидения являются только больным; но ведь это только доказывает, что привидения могут являться не иначе как больным, а не то, что их нет, самих по себе.’ (v, p. 299) Alternative realities, however, are another consequence of the grounding of perception in the material realities of the body. As a scientist Lewes is very aware that bodies even in a ‘normal’ state bring a certain perceptual apparatus to bear; for what Lewes calls ‘other forms of Sentience (if there are such) than our own’ (Problems, I, p. 168), reality takes on a very different shape that is no less real. As again James would write, ‘The knower is an actor, and co-efficient of the truth on one side, whilst on the other he registers the truth which he helps to create.’32 Similarly, Michael Davis argues, for Lewes ‘neither the mind nor the external world on their own can be the sole arbiters of knowledge: instead, we can only know the world through a combination of the world and the mind.’33 The senses ‘don’t directly apprehend – or mirror external things,’ Lewes explains; instead ‘[e]ach excitation has to be assimilated ’ (Problems, I, p. 113), just as the body assimilates food: Out of the general web of Existence certain threads may be detached and rewoven into a special group, – the Subject, – and this sentient group will in so far be different from the larger group, – the Object; but whatever different arrangement the threads may take on, they are always threads of the original web, they are not different threads. (Problems, I, pp. 173–74) Other ‘Sentiences’ are not more or less correct in their perceptions, only limited in different ways, as Lewes insists: ‘[T]he external world exists, and among the modes of its existence is the one we perceive’ (Problems, I, p. 168). In the contemporary terms of the Santiago school of cognition, this nervous system functions neither to represent an ‘objective’ reality nor to invent a reality of its own. Instead, as Francisco Varela writes, ‘[A]nimal and environment are two sides of the same coin, knower and known are mutually specified.’34 In Crime and Punishment as in Middlemarch, this Lewesian scientific truth finds its most striking literary embodiment not in the description of bodies that are also minds, but in a conflation of physical and mental space that operates in terms of a particular kind of metaphor. Crime and Punishment is remarkable for its representation of a St. Petersburg that is insistently, materially present and yet entirely symbolic on multiple levels. The novel famously represents the real city with such exactness that we can trace the characters’ movements on a map; the real, material city is also emphasized in the many references to the heat, the smell and the lack of air. At the same time, the novel very evidently takes place also in Raskol’nikov’s own mind, as the crowded physical spaces are equally strikingly a representation of Raskol’nikov’s cramped mental confines. As Flint argues, in Middlemarch the same conflation of physical and mental space is most often associated with Dorothea, for example when she moves to Lowick only to find that ‘the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by ante-rooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither’ (M, p. 195). It is also notable in the case of Lydgate. Lydgate, we learn, discovered medicine as a boy when a wet day sent him to the encyclopedia for entertainment and the entry on Anatomy introduced him to the valves of the heart. As the narrator explains: ‘He was not much acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valvae were folding doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light startling him with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism in the human frame;’ at that moment, ‘the world was made new to him by a presentiment of endless processes filling the vast spaces planked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed to be knowledge’ (M, p. 144). It is Lydgate’s tragedy that he eventually succeeds in stepping into these ‘vast spaces’ only to find them transformed. As the narrator already warns with recourse again to spatial metaphor: [I]n the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. (M, pp. 144–45) Indeed, ghastly new furniture is exactly Lydgate’s fate. The proximate cause for the collapse of Lydgate’s marriage with Rosamond is the furniture she wants that they can’t afford. The furniture is also mental, however, as the narrator explains that Lydgate: was beginning now to imagine how two creatures who loved each other, and had a stock of thoughts in common, might laugh over their shabby furniture, and their calculations how far they could afford butter and eggs. But the glimpse of that poetry seemed as far off from him as the carelessness of the golden age; in poor Rosamond’s mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in. (M, p. 701) The stakes are higher in Crime and Punishment and the spaces more cramped on every level, but Rosamond is trapped within and without just like Raskol’nikov in his ‘cupboard’ of a room. ‘What an awful apartment you have, Rodya; like a coffin’ [‘Какая у тебя дурная квартира, Родя, точно гроб’] (Crime, p. 231 / v, p. 240) his mother says, and later: ‘his room is awfully stuffy … but where can one get any air here? It’s the same outside as in a closed room. Lord, what a city!’ (Crime, p. 241) ‘ужас у него душно… а где тут воздухом-то дышать? Здесь и на улицах, как в комнатах без форточек. Господи, что за город!’ (p. 250) For Dostoevskii’s characters as for Eliot’s, inside and outside are one, in Lewesian terms, ‘the two being as the convex and concave surfaces of the same sphere’ (Problems, I, pp. 103–04). Where their literary rendering exceeds Lewes’s science, however, is on the level of form. As novelists, both Dostoevskii and Eliot convey dual-aspect monism not just on the level of content, but in the very workings of their metaphors. Metaphors in literature as in cognition more generally would seem premised on a notion of two halves, tenor and vehicle, or ground and figure, or target and source, the first an item at hand, as it were, and the second present only by analogy. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue, we tend to understand the movement between those two halves as one-way; in their words, ‘there is directionality in metaphor, that is, that we understand one concept in terms of another.’35 In Dostoevskii as in Eliot, however, the ‘directionality’ goes both ways. Especially as it is often the substance of the analogy that is emphasized – valves that become more real only as the doors opening on to a new world view, for example, or an imaginary room that partakes of more reality or at least more materiality than Rosamond’s real mind – metaphor in Dostoevskii and Eliot works not to elevate concrete instance over abstract referent or the other way around, but to show substance and idea as always interdependent: just as mind and body shape and imply one another, so Casaubon and his house, or Raskol’nikov and his city, point to one another. Where Dostoevskii scholars tend to talk in terms of ‘dialogism’, for scholars of Eliot, the word is ‘fellowship’. Either way, as we oscillate between two halves of a metaphor that are both equally real and equally symbolic, Crime and Punishment and Middlemarch represent and embody (the two actions being in some respects the same) the relationship of subject or mind to material world that Lewesian science entails. This literary ideal of intersubjectivity as a kind of science is finally also a political statement, and here we finish where we began. In Pandora’s Hope Bruno Latour describes an ideal science that begins with the premise of a mind which is not separate from the world that it would consider, but is instead, as he puts it, itself ‘a wriggling and squiggling part of nature’.36 Like Lewes, Latour casts our scientific commitment to theory and our empirical experience of the material world not as opposites, but as two parts of the same whole. He also makes clear the politics that such a science implies, although with one small difference: as we move from Lewes to Latour, left and right swap places. In our own day, the ‘[i]nhuman, reductionist, causal, law-like, certain, objective, cold, unanimous, absolute’ science that Latour calls ‘Science with a capital S’ largely aligns with corporate interests and the political right.37 The Lewesian ‘collective’ science that Latour himself articulates, on the other hand, supports and is supported by what we most often call ‘progressive’ politics. In the 1860s and ’70s, those political valences were roughly flipped, at least to the extent that Big Science was a tool of the radical left. In the real world, the proposition that we transform hearts and minds by transforming the physical environment served as the foundation of the entire Soviet project. In fictional terms, Chernyshevskii’s What Is To Be Done? famously argues that we harness the power of science and technology for socialist utopian ends, and ‘Big Science’ of a left-wing sort accordingly also underpins Raskol’nikov’s crime in Crime and Punishment ; as Raskol’nikov’s friend Razumikhin protests: ‘You can’t overleap nature with logic alone!’ [‘С одной логикой нельзя через натуру перескочить!’] (Crime, p. 256 / v, p. 266). Eliot didn’t have a Bolshevik revolution to anticipate, and Middlemarch, while published in 1871, is set in the late 1820s and early 1830s, a little too early for a science and hence politics of an explicitly Nihilist kind. Even in Middlemarch, though, radical politics hover just off-stage. As Eliot was well aware, the people and events of the 1820s and ’30s when the novel is set resonated very differently in the 1860s and ’70s when the novel was written and published. Gillian Beer notes the effect of the second Reform Bill in 1867 on readers’ perceptions of the first in 1832, and with Dostoevskii in mind we recognize in Lydgate a precursor to the Nihilist doctor along the later lines of the real Claude Bernard or Chernyshevskii’s fictional Kirsanov.38 Lydgate, when we meet him, has just set up his medical practice in Middlemarch having recently returned from France where he engaged in ‘galvanic experiments’ with rabbits and frogs. Now back in England, his ultimate goal is to pursue not patients, but research, as he is ‘ambitious above all to contribute towards enlarging the scientific, rational basis of his profession’ (M, p. 147). Eliot makes explicit the political implications that for now are only a possible consequence of Lydgate’s sort of science. If Lydgate, we are told, ‘[i]n warming himself at French social theories […] had brought away no smell of scorching’ (M, p. 348), it is because Eliot has made her point – and because with Lydgate she is careful to keep within the confines of her historical setting. As Hawley’s extraordinary statement would indicate, however, with Will Eliot doesn’t always maintain the veneer of historicity. Despite Will’s liberal notions and even his partly Polish background, the claim that Will is a murdering spy is not just utterly misplaced but even, as Thomas McLean argues, an obvious anachronism, as is Mrs Cadwallader’s concern that Dorothea’s marrying Will would be like marrying ‘an Italian with white mice’ (M, p. 490).39 An Italian with white mice can only be Count Fosco, the villain of Wilkie Collins’s 1859 The Woman in White, and Eliot’s strikingly deliberate comparison (it is repeated two pages later) (M, pp. 490, 492), like Hawley’s later reference to ‘Any cursed alien blood, Jew, Corsican, or Gypsy’, points instead to an association of revolution, crime and Napoleon that was much more keenly felt by the date of Eliot’s actual writing (M, p. 719). Just as Fosco combines his career as both secret agent and amateur chemist with a striking resemblance to the former Emperor of France, so Hawley’s ‘Corsican’ refers to one Corsican in particular, the one Raskol’nikov compares himself to when he offers his most concise explanation of his crime: ‘I wanted to become a Napoleon’ [‘я хотел Наполеоном сделаться’] (Crime, p. 415 / v, p. 433). Razumikhin’s belated notion that Raskol’nikov might be engaged in political conspiracy echoes Hawley’s suspicions of Will, but only as based in facts more firmly on the ground by the 1860s: Raskol’nikov is a Will Ladislaw pushed further East but still set in revolutionary opposition to the same imperial power, and also made more real by the radicalization not just of Russia, but of Eliot’s own day. Last but not least, the double time-frame gives even the gentle Dorothea a radical edge. Like Raskol’nikov with his hazy philanthropic aims, Dorothea promotes utopian schemes that in her case tend to revolve first around the design of ideal living spaces and then the creation of what she calls a ‘Pythagorean community’. As she explains late in the novel, ‘I should like to take a great deal of land, and drain it, and make a little colony, where everybody should work, and all the work should be done well. I should know every one of the people and be their friend’ (M, p. 550). By the 1870s there were a number of models for Dorothea’s project, including Robert Owen’s New Lanark and New Harmony, Margaret Fuller and Brook Farm, and, not that Eliot knew it, Chernyshevskii’s vision in ‘Vera Pavlovna’s Fourth Dream’; in Eliot’s fictional 1830s, Dorothea’s inspiration is the French pastor and philanthropist J. F. Oberlin (1740–1826).40 That her plans come to naught is only in part because Dorothea is prevented by her circumstances as a latter-day St Theresa, a woman and not a man ‘struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state’ (M, p. 838). The problem is also that Dorothea starts a little too ‘theoretic’, and her giving, like Raskol’nikov’s, is much too one-way, above all in the failed project that is her marriage to Casaubon (M, p. 28). In Middlemarch we only dance around the possibility of murder, not just in Hawley’s insinuations regarding Will, but more importantly in Lydgate’s implication in the death of Raffles, and Dorothea herself would seem impossibly far from Raskol’nikov’s axe-murdering excess. Still, Casaubon’s encounter with the determinedly well-intentioned Miss Brooke proves equally fatal. Eliot is quite clear that Dorothea thinks far more about her own imagined role than about the real Casaubon, and that there is accordingly something quite oppressive about Dorothea’s repeated offers to help.41 Dorothea, we are told, ‘had thought that she could have been patient with John Milton, but she had never imagined him behaving in this way’ (M, p. 282). In her frustration Dorothea lashes out; half-an-hour later Casaubon suffers his first heart attack, and soon he is dead. Dorothea’s own awareness that she had pushed her husband too far is evident in her anguished cry to Lydgate: ‘I beseech you to speak quite plainly […]. I cannot bear to think that there might be something which I did not know, and which, if I had known it, would have made me act differently’ (M, p. 288). As the narrator explains, there was indeed something that she could have done differently: We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, and yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling – an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects – that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference. (M, p. 211) In Porfirii Petrovich’s words, ‘[I]t’s a dangerous thing in young people, this suppressed, proud enthusiasm!’ [‘[O]пасен этот подавленный, гордый энтузиазм в молодежи’] (Crime. p. 452 / v, p. 471), and Eliot’s narrator gives the moral of both novels in summing up the fundamental failing of the intensely evangelical Bulstrode: ‘There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men’ (M, p. 619). Where in Middlemarch we tend to understand the ideal of ‘direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men’ in the secular terms of conventional English marriage, readers of Crime and Punishment usually focus instead on the religious dimensions of what is otherwise the same message. It is the genius of these two writers, however, that the ideal relationship of self to other operates on multiple levels. On a political level, the protagonists of both novels learn to temper their utopian aspirations with the real and even material experience of another’s ‘equivalent centre of self’. In literary terms, ‘dialogism’ is enacted in a particular kind of metaphor as in the intimate relationship that both texts work to construct with their readers, from their shared appeal to the ‘sensational’ responses of readers’ actual bodies, to Eliot’s reliance on readers’ recognition of her double time-frame, and Dostoevskii’s detective-novel trick of withholding information. The fellowship with non-humans as well as humans that is the embrace of minds and bodies in the world is finally a science of intersubjectivity, in Eliot’s and Dostoevskii’s day as in our own. Footnotes 1 George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 358. Further references will be given in the text as M followed by the page number. 2 The Russians saw Eliot as one of their own, so Sofiia Kovalevskaia, mathematician and author of The Nihilist Girl (Nigilistka, 1890), made a pilgrimage to meet Eliot; see her ‘Vospominaniia o Dzhorzhe Elliote’ (‘Reminiscences of George Eliot’), in S. V. Kovalevskaia, Vospominaniia. Povesti (Moscow: Pravda, 1986), pp. 311–31. 3 I borrow the list of -isms from Anna Kaladiouk (Schur), ‘On “Sticking to the Fact” and “Understanding Nothing”: Dostoevskii and the Scientific Method’, Russian Review, 65.3 (2006), 417–38. 4 Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 304, 15. 5 Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, trans. by Richard Freeborn (Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 26; I. S. Turgenev, Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1961), iii: Nakanune, Ottsy i deti, p. 142. 6 Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 251. 7 Ibid., p. 301. 8 Richard Menke, ‘Fiction as Vivisection: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot’, ELH, 67.2 (2000), 617–53 (p. 623). 9 Ivan’s tentative reference to non-Euclidean geometry offers a glimpse of exactly the more complicated approach that Lewes offers. See Lewes’s ‘On Imaginary Geometry and the Truth as Axioms’, published as an appendix to George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind: First Series, the Foundations of a Creed, 2 vols (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1875–1880), II, pp. 455–65. Further references to Problems of Life will be given in the text as Problems followed by volume and page numbers. 10 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 88; F. M. Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1956–58), iv (1956): Proizvedeniia 1862–1869, ed. by I. Z. Serman, p. 207. 11 Marina Kostalevsky, ‘Sensual Mind: The Pain and Pleasure of Thinking’, in A New Word on ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, ed. by Robert Jackson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), pp. 200–09 (p. 202). 12 Karen Chase, Eros and Psyche: The Representation of Personality in Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot (New York: Methuen, 1984), p. 141. 13 Ibid., p. 207. 14 Kate Flint, ‘The Materiality of Middlemarch’, in Middlemarch in the Twenty-first Century, ed. by Karen Chase (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 65–86 (p. 79). 15 Ibid., p. 78. 16 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 105; Dostoevskii, v (1957): Prestuplenie i nakazanie, ed. by K. N. Polonskaia, p. 111. Further references will be given in the text as Crime followed by the page number for the English translation, and as volume and page numbers for the original Russian. 17 P. S. Shkurinov, Pozitivizm v Rossii XIX veka (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1980), p. 230. ‘Living life’ [‘живая жизнь’] is the Underground Man’s phrase. See Dostoevsky, Notes, p. 129 / Dostoevskii, iv, p. 240. 18 Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and 19th Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 155; note that Dostoevskii’s God exactly fills what Shuttleworth describes as the ‘logical gap’ in Lewes’s and Eliot’s thought. 19 Eliot’s contemporary critic is quoted in Royce Mahawatte, George Eliot and the Gothic Novel: Genres, Gender, Feeling (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), p. 57; P. N. Tkachev, ‘Bol’nye liudi: “Besy,” roman Fedora Dostoevskogo, v trekh chastiakh’ (‘Sick people: “Demons”, a novel by Fedor Dostoevskii, in three parts’), in Kritika 70-kh godov XIX veka, ed. by S. F. Dmitrenko (Moscow: Olimp, 2002), pp. 67–123 (p. 74). For more on Eliot and sensation, see, for example, Mary Beth Tegan, ‘Strange Sympathies: George Eliot and the Literary Science of Sensation’, Women’s Writing, 20.2 (2013), 168–85. On Dostoevsky and sensation, see Melissa Frazier, ‘The Science of Sensation: Dostoevsky, Wilkie Collins and the Detective Novel’, Dostoevsky Studies, 19 (2015), 7–28. 20 Anon., ‘Fiziologiia obydennoi zhizni. Soch. G. G. L’iusia’, Vremia, 6 (1861), 50–63 (p. 51). 21 The ‘vulgar’ materialists (Engels’s term) include Büchner, Moleschott and Vogt. 22 George Henry Lewes, Ranthorpe (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974), p. 6. Further references will be given in the text as R followed by the page number. 23 See Rylance, Victorian Psychology, pp. 327–330. 24 George Henry Lewes, ‘What is Sensation?’, Mind, 1.2 (1876), 157–61 (p. 159). 25 Ibid. 26 Rylance, Victorian Psychology, p. 296. 27 George Henry Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life, 2 vols (New York: D. Appleton, 1860; repr. 1969), II, p. 11. 28 Rylance, Victorian Psychology, p. 305. 29 On ghosts and other altered states, special thanks to my students Jaime Chu and Jackie Guo for their sharp readings. 30 Tat’iana Kasatkina, ‘Lazarus Resurrected: A Proposed Exegetical Reading of Dostoevskii’sCrime and Punishment ’, Russian Studies in Literature: A Journal of Translations, 40.4 (2004), 6–37 (p. 13). 31 William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 21. Both Rylance (in Victorian Psychology) and Michael Davis (in George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology: Exploring the Unmapped Country (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006)) address James’s debt to Lewes. For a reflection on James’s affinity with Dostoevskii, see Robin Feuer Miller, ‘Adventures in Time and Space: Dostoevskii, William James, and the Perilous Journey to Conversion’, in William James in Russian Culture, ed. by Joan Delaney Grossman and Ruth Rischin (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), pp. 33–58. 32 Quoted in Davis, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology, p. 137. 33 Ibid. 34 Francisco Varela, ‘Afterword’, in Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Boston: Shambhala, 1998), 251–56 (p. 253). 35 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors we Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 112. 36 Latour, Pandora’s Hope, p. 10. 37 Ibid., p. 229. 38 Gillian Beer, ‘What’s Not in Middlemarch’, in Middlemarch in the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Karen Chase (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 15–35 (pp. 17–18). 39 According to McLean, the 1830s were an ‘era of widespread admiration for the Poles’; it was only by mid-century that ‘radical groups were co-opting the Polish cause, producing images of international solidarity that perhaps appealed to working-class and radical readers but frightened everyone else’. See Thomas McLean, The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Imagining Poland and the Russian Empire (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), pp. 164, 160. 40 On Dorothea and Margaret Fuller, see Patricia Deery, ‘Margaret Fuller and Dorothea Brooke’, The Review of English Studies, New Series, 36.143 (1985), 379–85. 41 Nina Auerbach puts her finger on the sore spot when she makes her own scholarly confession: ‘Personal disclosure: I hate people asking dulcetly when my book will be finished, as Dorothea does incessantly.’ See Nina Auerbach, ‘Dorothea’s Lost Dog’, in ‘Middlemarch’ in the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Karen Chase (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 87–105 (p. 92). © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No. SC013532. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Minds and Bodies in the World: Dostoevskii, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes
JO - Forum for Modern Language Studies
DO - 10.1093/fmls/cqy067
DA - 2019-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/minds-and-bodies-in-the-world-dostoevskii-george-eliot-and-george-X1TVS01CZq
SP - 152
VL - 55
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -