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Speakers): Professor Greta Matzner-Gore, USC

Curious townsfolk scurry around the periphery of Dostoevsky’s Demons. Where there is a rumor to be heard, scandal to be seen, or corpse to be gaped at, they also appear. They attend the governor’s ball, gleefully expecting the mayhem that will unfold there, the “‘denouement’ [razviazka] as some put it, rubbing their hands in anticipation.” This literary term should make readers uneasy, because it suggests a similarity between the townsfolk’s anticipation and our own. If this exciting, suspenseful novel has captured our imagination, then we have also been awaiting this very “denouement,” maybe even “rubbing [our] hands in anticipation.” The parallel raises the question: what emotional impulses underlie our interest in the novel’s violent, scandal-filled plot? The narrator (a curious townsperson himself) declares that “[i]n every misfortune that befalls one’s neighbor there is always something that gladdens the bystander’s eye, it doesn’t make any difference who you may be.” We are not literal bystanders to the many misfortunes that take place in Demons, but we are bystanders-by-proxy: do we derive aesthetic pleasure and excitement from reading about these catastrophes as well? Should we?
As Dostoevsky endeavored to arouse and keep his audience's interest over the course of his dense novels (which were published in serial installments, sometimes over the course of several years), he preached the importance of maintaining readerly “engagement” [zanimatel’nost’]. He experimented with multiple techniques for building suspense, writing narratives filled with cliffhanger chapter endings and ominous foreshadowing, related by gossipy narrators adept at making readers want to know more. Yet Dostoevsky was also interested in what type of interest his suspenseful, scandalous, gossip-filled plots would evoke in readers: compassionate concern for his characters or “greedy curiosity” about what terrible (and thrilling) thing would happen next? In this paper, I argue that Demons not only asks what kind of interest its bloody, suspenseful plot will evoke in readers, it prompts readers to ask this question of themselves as well.

Greta Matzner-Gore is Assistant Professor in the Slavic Department at the University of Southern California, where she specializes in nineteenth-century Russian prose. Her research interests span narrative theory, the ethics of reading, and

intersections between science and literature. Her first book, Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form: Suspense, Closure, Minor Characters, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press.