On the Limits of Polyphony: Dostoevsky on English and Russian Wikipedia

• In Event: Dostoevsky in the Digital Age

Abstract

Over the past few years, there has been more conversation about the Russian regime’s appropriation of Dostoevsky’s ideas about religion, nationalism, and Russian identity. The President of Russia has occasionally referenced Dostoevsky in speeches, particularly those written after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. As Wikipedia is the first place many internet users go for information about a given topic, Dostoevsky scholars should consider how such venues (including YouTube) frame the novelist’s political and religious beliefs to the general publics of the Anglophone and Russophone internet and our students, who are often one and the same. This paper is a preliminary investigation into how and to what extent Wikipedia editors on the Russian and English Dostoevsky pages have been discussing the author’s worldview in relation to his art and whether such debates are reflected in the article they author and edit (some of them over many years). I draw on methodologies developed by other scholars who research and monitor Wikipedia talk pages on which ideological disputes have an influence on the content and bias of a given Wikipedia entry (Keeler, 2023). Looking at the “talk page” (or obsuzhdenie page on Russian Wikipedia), I will find patterns of edit disputes and other conversations about Dostoevsky’s work and biography that have a bearing on his reception over the past few years. Wikipedia xtools [https://xtools.wmcloud.org/] supply information about individual users and statistics about article editing, which I will use to supplement my report on the talk/obsuzhdenie pages. In my presentation, I will discuss trends across the English and Russian language Dostoevsky Wikipedia articles since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which will provide a kind of temporal starting point for this investigation. Finally, this paper will consider the “polyphonic” quality of these Wikipedia pages, considering their relationship to evidence and scholarly interpretation.

Author

• Lindsay Marie Ceballos, Lafayette College