Virginia Woolf and Dostoevsky’s «Great Dialogue»

Reading “An Unwritten Novel” as Cross-Cultural Conversation

Abstract

This paper presents a reading of Unwritten Novel by Virginia Woolf as an experimental narrative answer to her encounter with what Mikhail Bakhtin has called Dostoevsky’s dialogism. It thus contributes to a better understanding of cross-cultural influence, interaction and communication between geographically and temporally distant worlds. Building on recent studies on the cultural contacts between British Modernism and Russian literature such as Rebecca Beasley’s Russomania (2020), this paper analyses Woolf’s narrative as a dialogic incorporation of Russian elements into her modernist poetics, achieved through the act of critical reading and translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s works. Drawing on the Bakhtinian idea that dialogue is the essential nature of the Russian writer’s narrative, I will show how in An Unwritten Novel Woolf takes on Dostoevsky’s dialogism exactly by initiating a dialogue between her narrative creative process and Dostoevsky’s writing. I will show how she incorporates and answers to the dialogical nature of Dostoevsky’s work through a narration based entirely on the imaginary dialogue between the narrator and the other characters, between the narrator and the readers and finally between Woolf herself and her critical reading of Dostoevsky. In this way, I will argue, the narrative mediation constructed in the short story becomes Woolf’s testing ground for her dialogic rewriting of Russian literature.