In the first chapter of his seminal Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the multitude of memorable characters in the Russian novelist’s works have led to a certain fragmentation of the author’s persona, giving the impression that “one is dealing not with a single author-artist who wrote novels and stories, but with a number of philosophical statements by several author-thinkers.” Similarly, he remarks that scholarly criticism had largely fallen prey to a comparable reading of Dostoevsky’s works, privileging individual characters’ voices, in the process splintering the author-figure by merging it with each individual character, as if it were “not an object of authorial discourse, but rather a fully valid, autonomous carrier of his own individual word” (5)
