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It is easy, then, for Bakhtin to find the carnivalesque all over Dostoevsky, as any scandal scene, any mass scene is considered "carnivalesque." Let us grant the carnival tone of the scene in "Uncle's Dream" of the exposure of the decrepit old Prince. We may agree that Dmitrij's orgy at Mokroe has elements of the carnival and so has the feast in "The Possessed." But the term seems to lose all definite meaning applied to the general tone and attitude of Dostoevsky. Bakhtin himself says that "Carnival belongs to the whole people; it liberates from fear, brings the world close to man and man to his fellow man" (214). Almost nothing in Dostoevsky implies a collective rapture or resembles the "joyous relativity" (166) Bakhtin finds in the "carnivalesque." He ignores the deep seriousness, the somber colors of a Dostoevsky novel, even if we grant that there is a bright Utopian hope at the end of the rainbow. But there is nothing in Dostoevsky of Rabelais' corporality, of the lust for life in the ancient saturnalia or the commedia dell'arte.In every way Dostoevsky seems to me to represent the opposite of the carnivalesque spirit. He was a man of deep commitment, profound seriousness, spirituality, and strict ethics whatever his lapses were in his own life.
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We are treated to a long list of themes and tones supposedly belonging to the Menippean satire: comic elements, fantasy, symbolism, adventures, philosophical
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debate, moral experimentation, scandalous scenes, oxymoric combinations, topical references, etc. (152-8) buttressed by an almost as inclusive roster of authors. At the same time the Menippean satire is supposed to combine with the carnivalesque which Bakhtin uses again so loosely that he speaks of the Socratic dialogue (which had no connection with a folk festivity) (176) or even the scene in the Gospels of the crowning of Jesus Christ as King of Jews as "carnivalesque" (181). The carnivalesque is found in almost any author: in Cervantes' "Don Quixote," called "one of the most carnivalesque novels of world literature" (171), in Rabelais, Scarron, Le Sage, Voltaire, Diderot, Sterne, Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, E. A. Poe and others. Bakhtin finally claims that Balzac, George Sand and Hugo "had a profounder carnivalesque attitude toward the world" (213). He seems not to remember that Dostoevsky called "Don Quixote" "the saddest of all books" which can bring man to despair and excites not laughter but tears. 11
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The true observation made by Bakhtin and others that Dostoevsky allows "each of the contending viewpoints to develop to its maximum strength and depth, to the maximum of plausibility" (93) does not refute the fact that Dostoevsky makes a clear judgment about the values of the points of view presented by the speakers. He is "objective" in the sense that he knows how to expound ideas of which he disapproves (as every dramatist must) but there cannot be any doubt that, for instance, in "Crime and Punishment" we know what Dostoevsky considers good and what evil, that he agrees with the Biblical command: "Thou shalt not kill" even a "louse," even an old useless and even harmful usurer. Dostoevsky would not be an artist if he merely stated his ideas; he enacts, embodies them in characters and situations. We should acknowledge that novelists before and after him did exactly the same, maybe less well and with ideas of less pertinence today.
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