Can a novelist let the characters argue back and win?

Yes, said the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, and Dostoevsky did it. In literature, polyphony is a feature of narrative that includes a diversity of simultaneous points of view and voices. Bakhtin borrowed the word from music. He found in Dostoevsky's novels "a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses".

In an ordinary, monological novel, the author's ideology dominates and the author keeps ultimate semantic authority at all times. Characters carry the author's plan. In Dostoevsky, Bakhtin argued, the major characters are not only objects of the author's discourse but subjects of their own. Each one is what Bakhtin calls a voice-idea, an idea that lives in a personality. The author does not hide, but places his own position among voices that disagree with it and provokes their confrontation. Since his voice has no more existential weight than any other, he does not know in advance how it will come out.

That sounds like a technique, but for Bakhtin it was a view of truth. A monologic truth is true or false independently of whoever utters it. Bakhtin thought truth needs many consciousnesses and comes into existence where they meet.

His book on Dostoevsky came out in 1929, but just as it was being introduced, in December 1928, he and a number of others were apprehended by the Soviet secret police. His sentence of up to ten years in the Solovki camps was commuted to exile in Kazakhstan, where he and his wife spent six years. The book was republished with significant additions in 1963.