17 Panaev, SS, 6: 273.
18 V. G. Belinsky, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow, 1948), 159.
19 Ibid., 164–165.
20 P. V. Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade, ed. Arthur P. Mendel, trans. Irwin R. Titunik (Ann Arbor, MI, 1968), 112.
21 The best-known names of the Pléiade were Panaev himself and K. D. Kavelin. Between 1843 and 1848, it blossomed to include Nekrasov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Goncharov, and Saltykov-Shchedrin. Herzen and Ogarev were also occasional participants when they came to Petersburg.
22 See N. V. Gogol v Russkoi kritike (Moscow, 1953), 122.
23 Annenkov, Decade, 112.
24 Belinsky, IFS, 1: 432.
25 A citation from Dead Souls. Belinsky, Works, 192–193.
26 DVS, 1: 129.
27 D. V. Grigorovich, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 12 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1896), 12: 266.
28 DVS, 1: 114.
29 Belinsky, Works, 323.
30 Harold March, Frédéric Soulié (New Haven, 1931), 177.
31 George Sand, The Last of the Aldinis, trans. George Burnham Ives (Philadelphia, 1900), 359–360.
32 DW (June 1876), 346.
33 Cited in M. Polyakov, Vissarion Belinsky (Moscow, 1960), 325.
34 Dostoevsky read L’Uscoque, which was published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1838. Spiridion began to appear in the same publication the same year, and the eminently respectable journal was available in the French library to which Dostoevsky was a subscriber.
35 DVS, 1: 112–113.
36 DW (June 1876), 349.
37 Pis’ma, 1: 73; September 30, 1844.
38 Ibid., 76; March (February) 24, 1845.
39 This view has been advanced by K. K. Istomin and A. I. Bem. For further discussion, see Bem’s suggestive article, “Pervye shagi Dostoevskogo,” Slavia 12 (1933–1934), 134–161.
40 Honoré de Balzac, “Eugénie Grandet,” La comédie humaine, ed. Marcel Bouteron (Paris, 1947), 3: 599.
CHAPTER 7
Poor Folk
No début in Russian literature has been described more vividly than that of Dostoevsky, and few, in truth, created so widespread and sensational a stir. Dostoevsky’s account is well-known, though he considerably exaggerated and sentimentalized his own innocence and naïveté. “Early in the winter [of 1845], suddenly, I began to write Poor Folk [Bednye lyudi], my first novel; before that I had never written anything. Having finished the novel, I did not know what to do with it, and to whom it should be submitted.”1 Dostoevsky knew very well what he wished to do with his novel, and there is also evidence that Grigorovich was pushing him to give his work to Notes of the Fatherland.2
There can be no doubt, however, about what occurred when the novel was ready. Grigorovich was profoundly moved by the work; he took it to Nekrasov; and both young literati shed tears over the sad plight of Dostoevsky’s characters. Acting on impulse, they rushed to Dostoevsky’s apartment at four o’clock in the morning—it was a St. Petersburg “white night,” bright and luminous as day—to convey their emotion. The next day Nekrasov brought it to Belinsky, who greeted it with equal warmth and appreciation. Annenkov visited Belinsky while the critic was plunged in Dostoevsky’s manuscript, and he has left a graphic account of Belinsky’s enthusiasm at his discovery. “You see this manuscript? . . . I haven’t been able to tear myself away from it for almost two days now. It’s a novel by a beginner, a new talent . . . his novel reveals such secrets of life and characters in Russia as no one before him even dreamed of. Just think of it—it’s the first attempt at a social novel we’ve had. . . . The matter in it is simple: it concerns some good-hearted simpletons who assume that to love the whole world is an extraordinary pleasure and duty for every one. They cannot comprehend a thing when the wheel of life with all its rules and regulations runs over them and fractures their limbs and bones without a word. That’s all there is—but what drama, what types! I forgot to tell you, the artist’s name is Dostoevsky.”3
Belinsky’s response, aside from the proclivity of his excitable temperament to extreme reactions, is only explicable in terms of his struggle against the Russian epigones of Romanticism and his single-minded attempt to create a new movement of social Realism in Russian literature. While urban, lower-class Russian life had now begun to be depicted in all its forms and diversities in the physiological sketch, the emphasis was on description of externals rather than on narration, on photographic accuracy (the sketches were called “daguerrotypes” and were accompanied by illustrations) rather than on imaginative penetration and inner identification. Dostoevsky was the first writer who, having chosen this material within the thematic range of the Natural School, had managed to produce more than a series of physiological sketches. “I am very often at Belinsky’s,” he writes Mikhail in the fall of 1845. “He is as well-disposed to me as one possibly could be, and seriously sees in me a public proof and justification of his opinions.”4 Dostoevsky had succeeded in producing the work that Belinsky had been waiting for; and the immense stir created by Poor Folk among contemporaries is to a large degree attributable to the controversy over the new orientation that Belinaky had given to Russian literature.
Poor Folk is cast in the form of an epistolary novel between two correspondents—the lowly titular councillor Makar Devushkin, a middle-aged copying clerk employed in one of the vast offices of the St. Petersburg bureaucracy, and a young girl just barely out of her teens, Varvara Dobroselova.5 Both are tender, lonely, fragile souls whose solicitation for each other brings a ray of warmth into their otherwise bleak lives. But the innocent idyll is soon ended by the pressure of the sordid forces against which they struggle. The hopelessness of Varvara’s position and the chance to reestablish her social situation compel her to accept an offer of marriage, and the book ends on Devushkin’s wail of anguish as Varvara vanishes forever into the steppes with her callous bridegroom Bykov (whose name evokes the Russian word for bull).
Nothing is more impressive in Poor Folk than the deftness with which Dostoevsky uses the epistolary form to reveal the hidden, unspoken thoughts of his characters; what one reads between the lines of their letters is more important than what appears on the surface—or rather, it is the tension between the spoken and unspoken that gives us the true access to their consciousness. Devushkin, so simple and uncomplicated at first glance, is a character constantly struggling with himself. He reduces himself to abject poverty for the sake of Varvara, showering her with little gifts of candy and fruit that he can ill afford, and he suffers agonies of humiliation, which he tries to conceal, because of the difficulties caused by his destitution. Above all, there is his “ideological” struggle—the wrestle with the rebellious thoughts that surge up in him unexpectedly under the pressure of his emotional involvement with Varvara and that are so much at variance with the unquestioned credo of obedience he has always accepted up to that time.
Dostoevsky surrounds this simple tale of his characters’ brief encounter with a number of accessories that enlarge the story to the dimensions of a true social novel. Varvara’s inset diary takes us back into her innocent rustic girlhood, and it also contains the portrait of the tubercular student Pokrovsky—Dostoevsky’s first brief description of the new raznochinets intellectual who would later evolve into Raskolnikov. His nominal father—a hopeless drunkard, married off to a girl made pregnant by Bykov—is depicted by Dostoevsky with a tragicomic pathos worthy of Dickens, particularly in the scenes in which the broken old man follows the hearse of his adored educated son to his final resting place. “The old man seemed not to feel the cold and wet and ran wailing from one side of the cart to the other, the skirts of his old coat fluttering in the wind like wings. Books were sticking out from all his pockets; in his hands was a huge volume which he held tightly. . . . The books kept falling out of his pockets into the mud. People stopped him and pointed to what he had lost, he picked them up and fell to racing after the coffin again” (1: 45).
Another such inset story is that of the
starving clerk Gorshkov and his family, come from the provinces to clear his name of a charge of embezzlement while in government service. This is the archetypal family in the lowest depths of poverty that will appear again and again in Dostoevsky—and here characterized by a terrible and unnatural silence, as of a suffering too deep for lamentation. There is no sound even of the children, Devushkin tells Varvara: “One evening I happened to pass their door; it was unusually quiet in the house at the time; I heard a sobbing again as though they were crying so quietly, so pitifully, that it was heartrending, and the thought of those poor creatures haunted me all night so that I could not get to sleep properly” (1: 24).
All these narrative lines interweave to build up an image of the same unavailing struggle to keep afloat humanly in the face of crushing circumstances, the same treasures of sensibility, sensitivity, and moral refinement appearing in the most unlikely places—unlikely, at least, from the point of view of previous Russian literature. Everywhere poverty and humiliation, the exploitation of the weak and the helpless by the rich, powerful, and unscrupulous—all this in the midst of crowded St. Petersburg slum life, with its nauseating odors and debris-littered dwellings. Poor Folk combined these picturesque merits of the best of the physiological sketches with a new and unerring insight into the tortures of the humiliated sensibility. The world as seen from below rather than above constitutes the major innovation of Dostoevsky vis-à-vis Gogol, whose sympathy with his humble protagonists is never strong enough to overcome the condescension implicit in his narrative stance. The situations and psychology of Poor Folk speak for themselves against class pride and class prejudice, and against the presumed superiority of the upper over the lower. But the book also contains a much more outspoken protest that, although not mentioned by Belinsky, could certainly not have left him indifferent.
Devushkin undergoes a distinct evolution in the course of the book. The early letters reveal him accepting his lowly place in life without a murmur of protest, and even taking pride in performing his unassuming tasks conscientiously. At the very lowest point of Devushkin’s misery, though, he loses heart and takes to drink. Never had he felt so degraded and worthless; and this is the moment when a faint spark of rebellion flares even in his docile and submissive breast. Emerging onto one of the fashionable Petersburg streets, filled with luxurious shops and smartly dressed people, he is struck by the difference from the sullen and unhappy crowds of his own slum district, and he suddenly begins to wonder why he and Varvara should be condemned to poverty while others are born into the lap of luxury.
“I know, I know, my dear that it is wrong to think that, that it is free-thinking; but to speak honestly, to speak the whole truth, why is it fate, like a raven, croaks good fortune for one still unborn, while another begins life in the orphan asylum?” (1: 86). Fortune seems to have no relation to personal merit; nor is this revolutionary idea the full extent of Devushkin’s “freethinking.” As he continues, we find him emitting the distinctively Saint-Simonian idea that the humblest worker is more entitled to respect, because more useful to society, than the wealthiest and most aristocratic social parasite. All this leads Devushkin to a piercing vision of the contrasted lives of the rich and the poor—a vision that, as in one of the feuilleton-novels of Sue or Soulié, strips away the façade beyond which both classes live concealed so that one sees them simultaneously:
There, in some smoky corner, in some damp hole, which, through poverty, passes as a lodging, some workman wakes up from his sleep; and all night he has been dreaming of boots, for instance, which he had accidentally slit the day before, as though a man ought to dream of such nonsense! . . . His children are crying and his wife is hungry; and it’s not only shoemakers who get up in the morning like that . . . but this is the point, Varinka, close by in the same house . . . a wealthy man in his gilded apartments dreams at night, it may be, of those same boots . . . in a different sense, but still boots, for in the sense I am using the word, Varinka, every one of us is a bit of a shoemaker, my darling; . . . it’s a pity there is no one at that wealthy person’s side, no man who would whisper in his ear: “Come, give over thinking of such things, thinking of nothing but yourself, living for nothing but yourself; your children are healthy, your wife is not begging for food. Look about you, can’t you see some object more noble to worry about than your boots?” (1: 88–89)
The indifference of the rich and mighty to the misery all around them fills Devushkin with indignation—to such an extent, indeed, that he even feels for a moment that his own sense of inferiority is misplaced. “Get to the bottom of that,” he says, “and then judge whether one was right to abuse oneself for no reason and to be reduced to undignified mortification” (1: 89).
This passage contains the central social theme of the book, which is Dostoevsky’s variant of the same plea one finds in the French social novel of the 1830s and in Dickens—the plea addressed to the wealthy and powerful to assume some moral responsibility for their less fortunate brothers. This theme comes to a climax in the famous scene with Devushkin’s Civil Service superior, when the poor clerk, who has been careless in copying some urgently needed document, is called in for a reprimand. His feelings are described as follows: “My heart began shuddering within me, and I don’t know myself why I was so frightened; I only know that I was panic-stricken as I had never been before in all my life. I sat rooted to my chair—as though there was nothing the matter, as though it were not I” (1: 92). By this time his appearance is little better than that of a scarecrow, and his last remaining button falls off and noisily bounces along the floor as he is trying to mumble some excuse. Moved by his obvious misery, the kindhearted General privately gives Devushkin a hundred-ruble note. When the latter tries to kiss his hand in gratitude, he flushes, avoids the self-debasing gesture, and gives Devushkin an equalitarian handshake instead. “I swear that however cast down I was and afflicted in the bitterest days of our misfortune,” he tells Varvara, “looking at you, at your poverty, and at myself, my degradation and my uselessness, in spite of all that, I swear that the hundred rubles is not as much to me as that His Excellency deigned to shake hands with me, a straw, a worthless drunkard” (1: 93). The General could feel not only with Devushkin’s pitiful economic distress but also with his longing to preserve his self-respect: this is what saves the charitable impulse from being still another humiliation.
Belinsky was deeply struck by this scene, and Dostoevsky reports him exclaiming over it at their first meeting. “And that torn-off button! That moment of kissing the General’s hand!—why, this is no longer compassion for that unhappy man, but horror, horror! In that very gratitude is horror!”6 The delicacy of feeling displayed in the handshake, the implicit recognition of a human equality with the lowly Devushkin, is a symbolic point made twice over. Devushkin resents that, before being given charity, the affairs of his destitute drinking companion Emelyan Ilyich are investigated, which he takes as an affront to Emelyan’s dignity (“nowadays, my dear soul, benevolence is practiced in a very queer way”). Similarly, when Gorshkov, after winning his lawsuit, goes around muttering that his “honor” has been restored, the cynical hack writer Ratazyaev says that, with nothing to eat, money is more important than honor. “It seemed to me,” Devushkin observes, “that Gorshkov was offended” (1: 69, 98).
Dostoevsky was acutely aware that the spiritual is of equal importance with the material in alleviating the lot of the unfortunate—even, perhaps, of greater importance, since poverty only heightens the need for self-esteem and self-respect to the point of morbidity. Indeed, the prominence of this motif in Poor Folk already reveals a tension in Dostoevsky’s work that will have important consequences later. In Poor Folk, this tension between the spiritual and the material is still latent and in a state of equilibrium; the emphasis accorded the spiritual (or, if one prefers, the moral-psychological) dimension of human experience only heightens the pathos of the material injustices that Dostoevsky’s characters have to suffer. But when, beginning i
n the early 1860s, an aggressive and blinkered materialism became the ideology of Russian radicalism, Dostoevsky broke with the radicals in defense of the “spiritual” in a broad sense. This opposition between the satisfaction of man’s material needs and his innate moral-psychic needs will one day, of course, culminate in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.
It turns out that the assistance of the General, though it allows Devushkin to cope with his most pressing necessities, does not solve his human problem. The beginning of the end for Devushkin occurs when the book shifts from the theme of poverty to that of the impossibility of retaining Varvara. That the General’s charitable gesture did not solve all of Devushkin’s problems for good indicates that Dostoevsky was projecting his theme in a wider context, where the social is only one component of a still more complex human imbroglio. And the fate of Gorshkov, who dies on the very day he is fully vindicated and restored to honor and security, again illustrates Dostoevsky’s awareness of human problems for which, properly speaking, there is no social solution at all.
One other motif also suggests that Dostoevsky intended a widening of the thematic horizon at this point. For while earlier Devushkin revolts explicitly only against the injustices of the social hierarchy, at the very end of the book there is the timid beginning of a revolt against the wisdom of God himself. When Varvara announces her acceptance of the marriage proposal and places her fate in God’s “holy, inscrutable power,” Devushkin replies, “Of course, everything is according to God’s will; that is so, that certainly must be so, that is, it certainly must be God’s will in this; and the Providence of the Heavenly Creator is blessed, of course, and inscrutable, and it is fate too and they are the same. . . . Only Varinka, how can it be so soon? . . . I . . . I will be left alone” (1: 101–102). One catches here a glimpse of the future metaphysical Dostoevsky moving out beyond the confines of the question of social justice, or rather taking it only as his point of departure.
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