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In his 1963 monograph Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics,1 Mikhail Bakhtin famously categorizes Lev Tolstoy as a "monologic" author. In his discussion of Tolstoy's story Three Deaths (1859), he writes:
The words and consciousness of the author, Lev Tolstoy, are nowhere addressed to the hero, do not question him, and expect no response from him. The author neither argues with his hero nor agrees with him. He speaks not with him, but about him. The final word belongs to the author, and that word-based on something the hero does not see and does not understand, on something located outside the hero's consciousness-can never encounter the hero's words on a single dialogic plane. A similar disjuncture separates his heroes from one another. (71)
According to Bakhtin, in Tolstoy's world the creator's judgment is final, unquestionable, and indeed unknowable, since all of his creatures are trapped within the capsule of their monologic imaginations. For Bakhtin, the blinkered, at times solipsistic existence of Tolstoy's characters presents a stark contrast to the expansive and interpenetrative universe modeled in the fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky, an author whose work Bakhtin describes as uniquely "polyphonic":
What unfolds in his novels is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with his own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event. (6, emphasis in original)
According to Bakhtin's well-known theory, Tolstoy's detached objectivity and refusal to speak with his characters violates their right to selfdefinition since, in Bakhtin's view, the individual's innermost identity cannot be fixed by an external, monologic voice: "The truth about a man in the mouths of others, not directed to him dialogically and therefore a secondhand truth, becomes a lie degrading and deadening him, if it touches upon his 'holy of holies,' that is, 'the man in man'" (59). In Bakhtin's polyphonic novel, characters can respond to what anyone else, including the author, says about them.
It is no accident that Bakhtin uses a biblical image, the Holy of Holies, to characterize the individual's innermost "word." The most sacred place in the Hebrew Temple of Jerusalem, the Holy of Holies housed the Ark of the Covenant,...