"It’s All One Big Fantasy": Memory, Identity, and Modernity in The Idiot

• In Event: The North American Dostoevsky Society: The Idiot Approaching Modernity

Abstract

In “Victorian Photography and the Novel,” Jennifer Green-Lewis persuasively argues that in the mid-nineteenth century Europe, “photography was a symbol of modernity” that allowed its practitioners and consumers to defy “physical and temporal discontinuity.” In addition to its mnemonic properties, photography also possesses the power to transcend social boundaries. This paper will examine how the newly developed practice of photography was theorized and implemented at the time of Dostoevsky’s writing of The Idiot. By considering the implications that it had on social stratification, we can better understand Dostoevsky’s views on universal brotherhood.

Author

• Katya Jordan, Brigham Young U