The Resistance of Memory in Stavorgin’s “Confession”

Abstract

The article investigates the resistance of memory as a typical narration technique in Dostoevsky’s works, especially in confessional texts. The attention is focused on a fragment of the unpublished chapter “At Tikhon’s” from an unrealized version of the novel The Possessed: Stavrogin bought a photograph of “one girl”, which he perceives as a photograph of Matryosha herself. The article attempts to explain how Stavrogin organizes memories in his “confession” and why the cases of memory aberrations become both the constructive elements of the genre of literary confession and an original “tool” for the protagonist’s self-knowledge. The illustrative memory aberration is considered here in connection with the problems of narration, the psychology of the protagonist, and the visual forms of representation.

Keywords

• dostoevsky
• poetics
• “at tikhon’s”
• confession
• memory
• vision