Bakhtin says Dostoevsky created the “polyphonic” novel. But wouldn't that require a “polyphonic” (multiple personality) mind?

In Dostoevsky’s writings “one is dealing not with a single author-artist who wrote novels and stories, but with a number of philosophical statements by several author-thinkers—Raskolnikov, Myshkin, Stavrogin, Ivan Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor, and others…The character is treated as ideologically authoritative and independent; he is perceived as the author of a fully weighted ideological conception of his own, and not as the object of Dostoevsky’s finalizing artistic vision…” (1).

“Dostoevsky…creates not voiceless slaves…but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him.

     A plurality of independent…consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels…” (1).

“Dostoevsky is the creator of the polyphonic novel…[which has] a plurality of equally-valid consciousnesses, each with its own world…” (1).

“Dostoevsky’s world is profoundly personalized. He perceives and represents every thought as the position of a personality…” (1).

Bakhtin doesn’t say how Dostoevsky was able to write the “polyphonic” novel.

1. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984.