Dostoevsky’s next major work, The Double (Двойник, 1846) is by any standards a most unusual and inventive piece of novel writing. According to Dostoevsky’s own evaluation, it was “ten times better than Poor Folk”. This opinion, however, was not shared by the vast majority of contemporary critics, who had trouble accepting its blend of fantasy and realism. Mr Golyadkin, an ordinary, perfectly unremarkable, naive and helpless nineteenth-century man, is overwhelmed by the pace of progress in a modern metropolis with all the latest waterproof galoshes, open-plan offices, luxury soft-sprung carriages, dazzling gas streetlights and the hectic pace of social life all round, and begins to inhabit another world or, to put it in clinical terms, slowly but surely to lose his mind. The author does not state this in so many words – Mr Golyadkin’s mental disintegration is never explained or accounted for. The reader is plunged into the medias res of a mad world from the word go. As a result Golyadkin’s predicament gains in authenticity because specifics do not stand in the way of the reader identifying himself with the hero; each one of us can supply our own catalogue of examples that threaten our sanity and therefore there is a pervasive atmosphere of “there but for the grace of God go I”.
The Double was hugely controversial, and on the whole was pronounced to be stylistically inadequate, a judgement with which Dostoyevsky himself tended to agree, though with important reservations. In 1846 he wrote to his brother: “absolutely everyone finds [The Double] a desperate and unexciting bore, and so long drawn out it’s positively unreadable. But, funnily enough, though they berate me for bringing on tedium, they all, to a man, read it over and over again to the very end.” This very early novel was already full of innovative, arresting characteristics: agitated, strained dialogue, always disordered, always rambling; madness predominating over method; a perplexed, pathetic soul cruelly disorientated amid confused perspectives of time and place; heart-rending tragedy compounded by a welter of manic Hollywood-type slapstick comedy – this off-the-wall tale of galloping schizophrenia took contemporary readers by storm and left them quite bewildered. Some critics hailed The Double as profound, others found it so permeated with the mentally aberrant spirit of Gogol’s novella Diary of a Madman that it was no longer a question of influence, but of blatant imitation. However, if it was imitation, it was imitation of the highest order.
Like much in Dostoevsky, The Double was too far ahead of its time, and it would only find a reading public ready to appreciate and enjoy it to the full much later. For Vladimir Nabokov, who was no fan of Dostoevsky, The Double was “the best thing he ever wrote… a perfect work of art”. Time and again Dostoevsky expressed, probably under the influence of outside pressures, his intention to “improve” The Double; a partially revised version appeared in 1866.
Netochka Nezvanova (Неточка Незванова, 1849), a novella which was originally conceived as a full-length novel: in its present form it should be considered as an unfinished work. Dostoevsky deals here with what was to become one of his favourite themes – the psychology and behaviour of an unusually precocious child. The plucky child-heroine Netochka has much in common with Nelly from Humiliated and Insulted, particularly in her capacity for boundless love, self-sacrifice and indomitable will-power. They are both fighters who refuse to succumb to life’s vicissitudes whatever the odds.
Although the novella still captures the imagination today thanks to its dramatic intensity – which for example prompted a successful theatre adaptation at the New End Theatre in London in 2008 – it is generally considered to contain tedious and long-winded passages, which one outspoken contemporary critic, A. Druzhinin, characterized in 1849 as reeking of perspiration. These words must have rankled with Dostoevsky, because he recalls them with dramatic irony in the epilogue to Humiliated and Insulted.
In The Village of Stepanchikovo (Село Степанчиково, 1859), Dostoevsky again found himself irresistibly drawn to Gogol, who had by then become an obsession. Set on a remote country estate, the story concerns a household completely dominated by the despotic charlatan and humbug Foma Fomich Opiskin, whose sententious utterance contains a good deal of satire on the reactionary Gogol. The owner of the estate, the retired Colonel Rostanev, is a meek, kind-hearted giant of a man, cruelly dominated by Opiskin. With deftly controlled suspense, the novel builds up to a confrontation between these two.
The chief asset of the work is its rich, dramatic dialogue – The Village of Stepanchikovo was in fact first conceived as a drama. It is through their words that Dostoevsky gives flesh and blood not only to the protagonists but also a host of unforgettable minor characters – the perspiringly loquacious and hypochondriac landowner Bakhcheyev, the literary valet Vidoplyasov, the dancing peasant household pet Falaley, the scheming poseur Mizinchikov and the unfortunate heiress Tatyana Ivanovna, touchingly confined in her fantasy world.
Dostoevsky was thirty-nine when in January 1861 Humiliated and Insulted (Униженные и оскорблённые) began to be serialized in the first issue of Vremya (Time), the literary periodical which he founded jointly with his brother Mikhail. A much revised version came out in book form in autumn of the same year. It was his fourth novel to date after Poor Folk and The Double (1846), and The Village of Stepanchikovo (1859), neither of the last two being originally designated as novels, but given the stylized titles of “poem” and “tale” (повесть) respectively. However, The Village of Stepanchikovo and Humiliated and Insulted have this in common: that they were written in close succession, straight after his return from the ten-year period of penal servitude and exile in Siberia, and were meant to serve as passports for re-entry to the literary scene from which he was debarred for so long. On his return to St Petersburg from Moscow, he wrote in a letter of 3rd May 1860:
I’m back here and in a terrible emotional upheaval. The reason for it is my novel. I want it to turn out well, I feel there is a lot of lyricism in it, and I know my whole literary career is in the balance. The next three months I’ll have to work tirelessly round the clock. On the other hand when I’m finished, what a reward I’ll be able to reap! Inner peace, contentment, awareness that one has done what was required, has got one’s own way.
By the time of the Humiliated and Insulted, Dostoevsky appears largely to have broken free of the influence of his former idol Gogol, and perfected a compositional style all his own with a lightness of touch and a degree of sophistication that he never surpassed even in his later novels. A salient feature of Humiliated and Insulted is the complex, racy plot with its multiplicity of interweaving and overlapping themes, all under tight control in an atmosphere of suspense and expectation. It is clear that Dostoevsky strives to hold the reader’s attention as a stage performer might that of a live audience, never allowing the tension to slacken even for a moment lest someone might get up and leave, lest some reader might shut the book and not reopen it.
In 1861 A. Khitrov, reviewing the newly published Humiliated and Insulted, waxed lyrical over Dostoevsky’s storytelling powers:
The story is told in such a way that one cannot accuse the author of fabrication or that such and such could never have happened. On the contrary, the events unfold naturally before the reader’s eyes and he feels himself drawn in as an active participant… besides, the fate of the characters is so fascinating that one cannot help reading to the very end…
One of the chief characteristics of Dostoevsky’s novels has always been the abundance of action and the whirlwind pace with which it unfolds, the multiple events surprising, shocking, amusing, saddening, but never failing to intrigue the reader. In Humiliated and Insulted there are no holds barred as far as engaging the reader’s attention is concerned. It starts like a tale of mystery and suspense. The reader is kept in a state of uncertainty, events are crowded, sometimes revealed in reverse chronological order, as for example in Part Four, chapters 4 and 5, where the impoverished landowner’s distress and psychological humiliation, culminating
in a stark rejection of his desperate attempt to befriend a destitute orphan, are – by being recounted out of sequence – perceived with additional force and poignancy. Above all, contrast is maintained. The St Petersburg setting of the novel is palpably real down to “the dust, the smell of lime, the baking hot stonework and fetid air...” Against this stark, for the most part dreary background, the characters appear to be enveloped in a dreamlike aura of mystery and foreboding, and as the action develops and unfolds, disturbing events emerge from their past to haunt and torment them.
The novel’s narrator is Vanya, an indigent young author, who is hopelessly in love with Natasha Ikhmenev, the daughter of a ruined landowner. They were together in childhood when Vanya, an orphan, was taken into the Ikhmenev family. At seventeen he left for St Petersburg. Natasha was then fifteen. Two years later the Ikhmenevs also move to St Petersburg, ostensibly for Ikmenev Senior to pursue a long-standing lawsuit against his bitter foe, Prince Valkovsky. In the meantime Natasha falls hopelessly in love with his son Alyosha, a handsome, frivolous, happy-go-lucky young man. One evening a girl of about thirteen unexpectedly wanders into Vanya’s lodgings. He comforts and befriends the girl, whose name is Nelly, and she stays on. She turns out to be terminally ill, and an epileptic. Meanwhile Natasha, who has left her parental home to cohabit with Alyosha, has not only been disowned by her father, but finds she is no longer the sole centre of attraction for her lover. Alyosha has in the meantime fallen in love with a rich young heiress, Katya. His father, Prince Valkovsky, does everything to encourage this relationship. Ikhmenev loses his lawsuit and is on the brink of bankruptcy. Prince Valkovsky turns out to be Nelly’s father, who abandoned his wife after appropriating her money to bring about the ruin of her English-born father, the industrialist Jeremiah Smith. Nelly dies. Alyosha goes off with Katya, the Ikhmenevs prepare to leave for another part of the country, and Vanya faces the prospect of being left behind and alone in St Petersburg.
Notes from the House of the Dead, literally and more accurately Notes from the Dead House (Записки из мертвого дома, 1862), is Dostoevsky’s fictionalized record of four years of unremitting hardship and privation suffered as a convict in one of Tsar Nicholas I’s Siberian penal institutions. In 1854 he wrote to his brother: “The different folk I met in the settlement! I lived amongst them and got to know them well. The stories I heard from the vagabonds and felons – about their nefarious deeds and gruelling way of life – would be enough to fill several tomes. What an amazing set of people!” Dostoevsky looked upon penal servitude with the eyes of an artist, making imaginative generalizations and giving the narrative a deliberately fictional intensity and tone. And yet its genre category is unclear. Without a coherent plot or storyline, it is hardly a novel. Attempts to call the work a memoir are fundamentally wrong. Dostoevsky had a particular penchant for “notes”, which is perhaps the most appropriate term.
Tolstoy had read it three times, and in a letter to the critic Nikolai Strakhov, he wrote: “I was a bit under the weather the other day and reread The Dead House. I’d forgotten a lot… I know of no better work in the whole of modern literature, including Pushkin… If you see Dostoevsky, tell him I love him.” In his response, Strakhov informed Tolstoy that Dostoevsky was very pleased to hear the words of praise and asked to be allowed to keep Tolstoy’s letter, only he was taken a little aback at the implied note of disrespect for Pushkin.
Notes from the Underground (Записки из подполья, 1864) is a work which holds an enduring fascination for critics and readers. The opening words are, as in Humiliated and Insulted, a model of simplicity. But, instead of a calm, level-headed statement – “Last year, on the evening of 22nd March, I had a most unusual experience” – we have a burst of paranoid personal observations: “I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased”, with no concern about whether the reader is prepared or interested.
At this stage one must of necessity note a certain lack of equivalence between подпольe as in the original Russian title and “underground” – the nearest possible rendering of it into English. The Russian word is far more applicable to predominantly abstract conditions, from secretive, clandestine – in the political or criminal sense – to repressed, inhibited – in the psychological one. The book and its title were famously parodied in Woody Allen’s Notes from the Overfed (1968): “I am fat. I am disgustingly fat. I am the fattest human I know, etc.” Zany though this spin-off may appear, it is in the spirit of Dostoevsky himself, because Notes from the Underground, like most of his fiction, is itself full of madcap, riotous humour.
In pictorial terms the sinister side of the underground man is essentially Walter Sickert’s figure in the black waistcoat and white shirt sitting with his head bowed beside the naked corpse of a woman. Dostoevsky did not go that far just then. The broody murderer – precisely as depicted in Sickert – came a little later, in The Idiot.
We don’t know what motivated Jack the Ripper, or the Camden Town Murderer – Sickert doesn’t tell us, and neither does Dostoevsky explain why his anonymous underground man harbours such hatred for the attractive young prostitute Liza, whom he ravishes, sermonizes, moves to the limits of self-pity and then rejects cruelly so that she leaves his lodgings in utter desperation. Dostoevsky was already groping his way towards formulating the aesthetics of crime. This would be fully accomplished in the later work, Devils.
The eminent critic Nikolai Mikhailovsky has pointed out that the novel is not artistically persuasive because of this lack of motive for the hero’s antipathy towards the benighted prostitute Liza. “There is no reason for his spite towards her. The underground man foresees no results from his tormenting her. He abandons himself to his pastime out of love for the art.” But perhaps absence of motive is the whole crux of the matter – supreme evil thrives on absence of motive.
Crime and Punishment (Преступление и наказание, 1866) is one of the four of Dostoevsky’s major novels, which Nabokov referred to as “the so-called major novels” (my italics). The arguably much greater, but less well-known Nobel-Prize-winning author Ivan Bunin, had a similarly low opinion of Dostoevsky’s great novels, or novels of ideas, as they are also not infrequently referred to. Valentin Kataev recalls that Bunin raged over the hero, Raskolnikov: “Dostoevsky obliges you to witness impossible and inconceivable abominations and spiritual squalor. From here have come all Russia’s ills – Decadence, Modernism, Revolution, young people who are infected to the marrow of their bones with Dostoevshchina – who are without direction in their lives, confused, spiritually and physically crippled by war, not knowing what to do with their strengths and their talents…”
At the heart of Crime and Punishment is the student Raskolnikov’s premeditated murder of a miserable old woman moneylender with the manic idea that this act would somehow make him into a superman, raise him above the law and enable him to identify himself with Napoleon. Around this idea, Dostoevsky, armed with a marvellous title, manages to spin a truly fascinating tale. Issues of crime and punishment are always calculated to arouse interest, and he manages to score some significant firsts, to wit his creation of the detective Porfiry. “Wilkie Collins and Dickens portrayed Victorian detectives, but no one had yet shown the ‘master’ detective, capable of deducing facts from psychological observation: in the twentieth century the super-detective was a close rival of the criminal for the status of hero,” writes Professor Richard Peace.
As mentioned above, Dostoevsky was addicted to gambling, and he channelled this personal experience into his next novel, The Gambler (Игрок, 1866). The action takes place in the spoof town Roulettenburg, where a bunch of Russian prize idlers have fetched up to feed their habit and indulge in conspiracies and sterile romantic pursuits. As was to be expected, no one gets any richer, just the opposite, and all personal relationships end in frustration and heartache.
In a letter to
his favourite niece Sofia Alexandrovna Ivanova, to whom he dedicated The Idiot (Идиот, 1868), Dostoevsky wrote: “I have been nurturing the idea of this novel a long time now. It is a particular favourite of mine, but is so difficult that I have not dared to tackle it… The main aim is to portray a positively good man. There’s nothing more difficult than this in the world, especially nowadays. All writers, not only ours, but even the European ones too, who tried, had to give up, for the simple reason that the task is measureless.”
The hero of the novel Prince Myshkin is a Christ-like figure. He is mentally distinctly unstable, indeed he brands himself an idiot. The question arises, can saintliness survive in the real world? Russia being the real world, the novel’s answer is no, because it is synonymous with some kind of mental deficiency, which is bound to lead to disaster. At the beginning of the novel Myshkin returns from a Swiss sanatorium after a lengthy treatment, hopefully on the way to complete recovery. Abroad he had witnessed public executions by guillotine, and the memories continue to haunt him, especially the gruesome ordinariness of the preparatory ritual. What goes through the condemned man’s head as he hears the swish of the descending blade? In St Petersburg he finds no solace. On the day of his arrival, without a respite, he is thrown into a vortex of events that would have unsettled a much stronger man. Representing the darker side of humanity is the volatile, passionate, reckless merchant Rogozhin, whom Myshkin gets to know on the journey. It is a fateful meeting. As the action unravels both come to grief in their rivalry and quest for happiness, Rogozhin’s fate being, if anything, the more heart-rending, because he ends up with blood on his hands beside the lifeless corpse of the woman they both loved to distraction. As for Myshkin, he returns to the sanatorium, we fear permanently.
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