Syntax and temporality in the photographic thinking of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Bruno Schulz

Abstract

This article examines stylistic and linguistic aspects of photographic thinking in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Bruno Schulz. The analysis is framed by the insights of Western and Ukrainian theorists of the image. The development of photo technologies anticipates photographic thinking as an aesthetic phenomenon. Photographic thinking is embodied in the specific artistic and imaginative reflection of reality and the human world, embedded on the linguistic—syntactic—level of the artistic text. In Dostoyevsky’s tract, the text can be seen as a photo album with consecutive snapshots, each frame containing a certain dominant. On the syntactic level, the phrases “suddenly” and “for a moment” introduce the photographic frame or a change of frame. The phrase “for a moment” grounds a new poetic technique, a way of capturing the psychological states of a character when the soul is revealed, that is, when he or she is reacting unconsciously. The capturing of life from the point of view of a camera distinguishes the surrealist fiction of Bruno Schulz. This photographic perspective is connected with a new conceptualization of temporality: the past and the present are on the same plane and neither is the time of representation, which means the subject of representation is always dead. The conception of time as ‘frozen’ in the moment is also part of Dostoevsky’s poetics.