Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel

Kitzinger, Chloë

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-w8y3-zx36

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Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel

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What makes some characters seem so real? Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel explores this question through readings of major works by Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Working at the height of the Russian realist tradition, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky each discovered unprecedented techniques for intensifying the aesthetic illusion that Chloë Kitzinger calls mimetic life—the reader’s sense of a character’s autonomous, embodied existence. At the same time, both authors tested the practical limits of that illusion by extending it toward the novel’s formal and generic bounds: philosophy, history, journalism, theology, myth.

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