Friday, March 4, 2016

Did Tolstoy (post 5) and Nabokov (post 9) intentionally put multiple personality in their novels, having borrowed the idea from Dostoevsky (post 7)?

In my posts on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, when I argue that Anna, judging from signs and symptoms in the text, had multiple personality, do I mean that Tolstoy intentionally created Anna with that in mind?

After all, Dostoevsky had started a tradition of multiple personality in Russian literature, beginning with The Double (1846). And this tradition continued in the 20th century with Vladimir Nabokov, whose novels Lolita and Despair were discussed in past posts.

Indeed, Nabokov is an amusing case. He derided Dostoevsky, saying he was an inferior literary talent, but said that Dostoevsky had one good idea, that of The Double. And then Nabokov went on to use that idea in Despair, and to manifest his own multiple personality with the contradictory narrative perspectives of Lolita.

But what about Tolstoy? I doubt that he intentionally constructed Anna to depict multiple personality, because most novelists do not mechanically, intentionally, “create” their major characters, according to Mark Twain and other novelists I have quoted. This is true even in the carefully planned detective and mystery genres, as seen in a number of past posts.

I have not finished Anna Karenina yet, but if it turns out that neither the narrator nor any character explicitly invokes the idea of multiple personality, per se, then my inference will probably be that Tolstoy did not have multiple personality in mind, even if Anna has symptoms.

So how could a character get multiple personality if the author did not intend it? Was Tolstoy influenced by Dostoevsky? Where did Dostoevsky get the idea? Edgar Allan Poe? But both Dostoevsky and Poe, themselves, had multiple personality.

Indeed, most novelists (and perhaps 30% of the general public) have a normal version of multiple personality, and their characters reflect it.

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