Poor Folk, as well as being at its core a moving plea for social commiseration, is also a highly self-conscious and complex little creation. All through the eighteenth century, the sentimental epistolary novel had been the form in which models of virtue and sensibility, such as Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe and Rousseau’s Julie, or poetic and exalted souls, such as Goethe’s Werther, had poured forth their lofty feelings and noble thoughts. The epistolary novel had thus become a vehicle for high-flown romantic sentiment, and its central characters were always exemplary figures from the point of view of education and breeding. Indeed, the underlying social thrust of the form was to demonstrate the moral and spiritual superiority of its largely bourgeois protagonists to the corrupt world of aristocratic class privilege in which they lived. Dostoevsky uses the form for much the same purpose in relation to a much lower social class. But, since the sentimental epistolary novel had traditionally become identified with highly cultivated and emotionally exalted characters, he took a considerable artistic risk in doing so.
To portray the abortive romance of an elderly copy clerk and a dishonored maiden in this sentimental pattern was to violate the hitherto accepted conventions of narrative, but we can see that Dostoevsky did so very self-consciously. In the slum boardinghouse where Devushkin has rented a corner of the kitchen, the two servants are called Teresa and Faldoni (not their real names, of course, but presumably an invention of the caustic littérateur Ratazyaev). Not only had Karamzin’s Letters made the names of these two heroic lovers famous in Russia, their story had also furnished the subject for a French epistolary novel translated into Russian at the beginning of the century. Devushkin himself is dubbed a “Lovelace” by Ratazyaev, that is, identified with the aristocratic libertine who rapes Clarissa Harlowe. The incongruity of all these appellations illustrates the effect that Dostoevsky wishes to obtain. By elevating his Devushkin and Varvara to the stature of epistolary protagonists while demoting Teresa and Faldoni to the level of comic caricatures (Teresa is “a plucked, dried-up chicken,” Faldoni “a red-haired, foul-tongued Finn, with only one eye and a snub nose”) (1: 23), Dostoevsky implicitly claims for his lowly characters the respect and attention hitherto accorded the much more highly placed sentimental heroes and heroines. And by inviting the reader mentally to compare Devushkin and Lovelace, Dostoevsky exhibits the moral preeminence of the humble clerk over the brilliant but selfish and destructive aristocrat.
The originality of Dostoevsky’s use of the sentimental epistolary form, as V. V. Vinogradov has remarked, stands out against the background of the considerable literary tradition already existing for the portrayal of the St. Petersburg bureaucratic scribe (or chinovnik, as he is known in Russian). This tradition, which goes back to the 1830s, treated such a character only as material for the burlesque anecdote and satirical sketch; and one finds protests as early as 1842 against the unfair caricatures of the chinovnik that had become so popular a literary fashion.7 Gogol’s “The Overcoat” derives from this tradition, and keeps much of its jeering, jocular, clubroom-anecdotal tone. Even though Gogol interjects a sentimental plea for pity in the midst of the burlesque anecdote, this plea is still made from a point of view outside of and superior to the character. The unexpected passage thus clashes with the contemptuous tone and treatment accorded Akaky Akakievich8 in the rest of the story and produces rather the effect of a tacked-on moral. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, by casting the theme of the shabby and ridiculous chinovnik—hitherto only a comic butt—in the form of the sentimental epistolary novel, breaks the satirical pattern and integrates his “philanthropic” theme with his form.
Dostoevsky’s contemporaries saw him primarily as a follower of Gogol; recent critics have focused on his “parodistic” transformation of Gogolian characters and motifs, which he converts from the tonality of grotesque, fantastic comedy into that of sentimental tragicomedy. These points of view, however, are not mutually exclusive. Dostoevsky does reverse those stylistic features of “The Overcoat” that tend to ridicule Akaky Akakievich. The effect of this reversal, though, is not to undermine the significance of Gogol but rather to strengthen his overt “humanitarian” theme. Gogol’s narrative technique works to create a comic distance between character and reader that defeats emotional identification; Dostoevsky counteracts the purely satirical features of the model by taking over its elements and, through his use of the sentimental epistolary form, reshaping them to accentuate Devushkin’s humanity and sensibility. There is no term known to me that quite fits this process of formal parody placed in the service of thematic reinforcement. Far from being the antagonistic relation of a parodist to his model, it more resembles that of a sympathetic critic endowed with the creative ability to reshape a work so as to bring its form into harmony with its content. Both Poor Folk and “The Overcoat” contain the same Gogolian mixture of “laughter through tears,” but in different proportions; laughter is uppermost for Gogol, while for Dostoevsky it is tears that predominate.9
Dostoevsky’s novel also incorporates hints as to the more immediate literary ancestry of the new treatment he now accords the chinovnik. Indeed, one of the most striking features of Poor Folk, as A. Beletsky remarked long ago, is precisely its “literariness,” the numerous references and reflections on the current literary scene that Dostoevsky manages to work into its pages.10 Devushkin and Varvara send each other books to read and comment on their impressions—Devushkin even dreams at one point of publishing a volume of his own poetry and becomes self-conscious about his “style.” Their remarks add up to nothing less than a self-commentary on the work provided by the author—a commentary that climaxes in Devushkin’s reaction to two stories, Pushkin’s “The Station Master” and Gogol’s “The Overcoat.”
Varvara lends Devushkin a copy of Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin, and the story “The Station Master” particularly stirs him. “You know I feel exactly the same as in the book,” he informs her, “and I have been at times in exactly the same position as, for instance, Samson Vyrin, poor fellow” (1: 59). Vyrin is the stationmaster who, out of his good nature and his respectful docility to his betters, allows a young nobleman to run off with his beautiful daughter. The old man drowns his despair in drink and dies of a broken heart, and the story is delineated by Pushkin with genuine sympathy for his suffering. Devushkin weeps profusely over this sentimental tale, which prefigures what he foresees for Varvara and himself, and he says prophetically: “Yes, it’s natural. . . . It’s living! I’ve seen it myself; it’s all about me.”
“The Overcoat,” however, arouses Devushkin to a violently antagonistic outburst. What particularly incenses him is Gogol’s supercilious depiction of Akaky Akakievich’s life and character traits in a fashion that Devushkin finds personally insulting and profoundly untrue. By what right, he asks indignantly, “here under your very nose . . . [does] someone make a caricature of you?” (1: 62). Nor is he impressed by the one passage containing the plea to treat Akaky as a brother. What the author should have added, he asserts, is that he was “kindhearted, a good citizen, that he did not deserve such treatment from his fellow clerks, obeyed his superiors . . . believed in God and died (if one insists that he absolutely has to die), mourned by all” (1: 62–63). Devushkin also thinks the story would be improved if it had a happy ending.
While Dostoevsky does not conform to this demand of Devushkin’s uncultivated taste for a sentimental tale with an edifying moral at the end, he does move in that direction. For he depicts the sad story of Devushkin’s life in the tenderhearted fashion of Pushkin’s sentimentalism in “The Station Master.” Retaining the “naturalism” of detail and décor associated with the comic tradition of the portrayal of the chinovnik, Dostoevsky unites it with the tearful strain of Russian sentimentalism that goes back to Karamzin; and this fusion created an original artistic current within the Natural School—the current of sentimental naturalism—which quickly found imitators and became an independent, if minor, literary movement.11
Dostoev
sky also carried on a running polemic with the Romantic enemies of the Natural School and with those literary jobbers who exploited the latest fashions solely out of pecuniary motives. Ratazyaev is the first of Dostoevsky’s many unflattering portraits of the literary tribe, and it is interesting to see how early this deep-seated antipathy to his fellow writers set in. Ratazyaev is a versatile hack who knocks out works in various genres, and Devushkin, terribly impressed, transcribes sample passages for Varvara’s edification from such masterpieces as Italian Passions or Yermak and Zuleika. These give Dostoevsky the opportunity to parody Romantic novels in the high-society style of Marlinsky, and to poke fun at the dime-a-dozen imitators of Scott: “What is the poor maiden [Zuleika], nurtured amid the snows of Siberia in her father’s yurta to do in your cold, icy, soulless, selfish world?” (1: 52–53). Ratazyaev, naturally, does not think much of “The Station Master” because now, he tells Devushkin, all that is “old-fashioned,” and physiological sketches are all the rage (1: 60).
These parodies serve by contrast to deepen the characterization of Devushkin; and they serve also as a background to heighten the moral elevation of his own life. For Devushkin is in fact living the life of love and is really engaged in the struggle against “a cold, icy, soulless, selfish world” that these bombastic exaggerations merely counterfeit. Dostoevsky thus uses the implicit relation of his form to the literary tradition, the direct comment of his characters, and satirical parody to endow his pathetic-sentimental story with an “ideological” dimension that defines his strikingly independent position among the social-literary currents of the 1840s.
1 DW (January 1877), 584.
2 Pis’ma, 1: 75; March (February) 24, 1845.
3 P. V. Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade, ed. Arthur P. Mendel, trans. Irwin R. Titunik (Ann Arbor, MI, 1968), 150.
4 Pis’ma, 1: 82; October 8, 1845.
5 Both names have allegorical echoes. Devushkin evokes devushka, the word for a young girl or maiden. The incongruity of this appellation is touchingly humorous, and yet indicates some of the quality of Devushkin’s character. Dobroselova is a combination of the Russian word for “good” and for “country village.”
6 Belinsky’s article is reprinted in DRK, 24.
7 V. V. Vinogradov, Evolutsiya Russkogo naturalizma (Leningrad, 1929), 311–338. This is part 2 of Vinogradov’s classic study of Poor Folk.
8 His very name is derived from the Russian word for “doo-doo” (shit), kaki.
9 Victor Terras, The Young Dostoevsky, 1846–1849 (The Hague, 1969), 14–15; for discussions of parody, see Wido Hempel, “Parodie, travestie und pastiche,” Germanische-Romanische Monatsschrift 46 (April 1965), 150–175, and Yu. Tynyanov, “Dostoevsky i Gogol (K teorii parodii),” in Texte der Russischen Formalisten, ed. Jurij Striedter (Munich, 1969): 1: 301–371.
10 Cited in V. I. Kuleshov, Naturalnaya shkola v literature XIX veka (Moscow, 1965), 256.
11 Vinogradov, Evolutsiya, 390.
CHAPTER 8
Dostoevsky and the Pléiade
Belinsky’s excitement over the manuscript of Poor Folk quickly made Dostoevsky’s name a byword among his circle, and the fame of the new young author spread throughout the literary community even before the publication of the novel in January 1846. Panaev, who paid Dostoevsky the compliment of immediately beginning to imitate his manner, wrote several years later: “We carried him in our arms through the streets of the city, and, exhibiting him to the public, cried: ‘Here is a little genius just born, and whose works in time will kill off all the rest of the literature past and present. Bow down! Bow down!’ We trumpeted his name everywhere, in the streets and in the salons.”1 The ironic tone of this passage reflects the later attitude of the Belinsky Pléiade to Dostoevsky, but it also confirms the enormous acclaim that he received even before his first novel appeared in the Petersburg Almanac, a collection of writing of the Natural School edited by Nekrasov.
With his usual impetuosity and wholeheartedness, Belinsky immediately adopted the young author as an intimate and spoke of him to others with unconstrained affection. “ ‘Yes,’ [Belinsky] used to say proudly,” recalls Turgenev, “as though he had himself been responsible for some terrific achievement, ‘yes, my dear fellow, let me tell you it may be a tiny bird,’ and he would put his hand about a foot from the floor to show how tiny it was, ‘but it’s got sharp claws.’ . . . in his access of paternal tenderness to a newly discovered talent, Belinsky treated him like a son, just as if he were his own ‘little boy.’ ”2
Dostoevsky thus became—for an all-too-brief season—the literary lion of cultivated Petersburg society, and the newfound glory of his position, the flattering adulation he received on all sides, would have turned the head even of a more balanced personality. In Dostoevsky’s case, it opened the floodgates of a boundless vanity that, up to this point, he had kept tightly closed. His letters are now filled with a manic exuberance and self-glorification quite comprehensible under the circumstances. “Everywhere,” he tells Mikhail, “an unbelievable esteem, a passionate curiosity about me. . . . Everybody considers me some sort of prodigy. I can’t even open my mouth without it being repeated in all quarters that Dostoevsky said this or Dostoevsky thinks of doing that. . . . Really, brother, if I began to recount all my successes, there would not be enough paper for them. . . . I tell you quite frankly that I am now almost drunk with my own glory.”3
He reports to Mikhail that two aristocratic littérateurs, Count Odoevsky and Count Sollogub, have been asking about him, and that A. A. Kraevsky, the powerful proprietor of Notes of the Fatherland, had bluntly told Sollogub, “Dostoevsky will not honor you with the pleasure of his company.” “This is really so; and now this petty little aristocrat has mounted his high horse and thinks he will crush me with the magnificence of his condescension.”4 Face-to-face with Sollogub, though, who called on him unexpectedly one day, Dostoevsky was nervous, confused, and frightened.
More important for Dostoevsky than such casual acquaintance with celebrity-hunters was his acceptance into the charmed inner circle of the Belinsky Pléiade. At first everything went perfectly with the Pléiade—or so it seemed to the eager young initiate, who had lived a solitary life lacking any true intimacy except with Shidlovsky and with his brother Mikhail. “Recently the poet Turgenev came back from Paris,” he tells Mikhail, “and he attached himself to me at first sight with such devotion that Belinsky explains it by saying he has fallen in love with me! And what a man, brother! I have all but fallen in love with him myself. A poet, an aristocrat, talented, handsome, rich, intelligent, well-educated, and twenty-five years old. And, to conclude, a noble character, infinitely direct and open, formed in a good school. Read his story ‘Andrey Kolosov’ in Notes of the Fatherland. It’s the man himself, though he was not thinking of self-portrayal.”5 There is a good deal of vanity in this passage, but also a touching innocence and an obvious need for genuine friendship—a need that caused him to mistake Turgenev’s well-known but casual affability for a sincere inclination.
The passage was written the day after Dostoevsky had paid his first visit to the salon of the Panaevs, which had become the favorite rendezvous for Belinsky and his group. Weak-willed, good-natured, dissipated, with a knack for writing amusing satirical sketches of fashionable Petersburg life, the amiable Panaev was everybody’s friend. His wife Avdotya was not only a famous beauty but also the most notable bluestocking of her time, who had achieved some notoriety as a novelist. Already, or soon to become, Nekrasov’s mistress (he lived with the Panaevs in a peaceful ménage à trois for ten years), she was at the center of mid-nineteenth-century Russian literary life, and her Memoirs gives one of the best behind-the-scenes portraits of the period. “Dostoevsky visited us for the first time in the evening with Nekrasov and Grigorovich,” she writes, “who had just begun their literary careers. It was evident, from only one glance at Dostoevsky, that he was a terribly nervous and impressionable person. He was slender, short, fair-haired, with a sickly complexion;
his small gray eyes darted somewhat uneasily from object to object, and his colorless lips were nervously contorted. He already knew almost all of our guests, but, clearly, he was disconcerted and did not take part in the general conversation. Everyone tried to involve him, so as to overcome his shyness, and to make him feel that he was a member of the circle.”6
Once Dostoevsky’s original diffidence had worn off his manner changed completely, and he began to display in public the same uncontrollable vanity so noticeable in his letters. “Because of his youth and nervousness,” Mme Panaev observes, “he did not know how to conduct himself, and he would only too clearly express his conceit as an author and his high opinion of his own literary talent. Stunned by the unexpected brilliance of his first step in his literary career, showered with the praises of competent literary judges, he could not, as an impressionable person, conceal his pride vis-à-vis other young writers whose first works had started them modestly on the same career. With the appearance of new young writers in the circle, trouble could be caused if they were rubbed the wrong way by his irritability and his haughty tone, implying that he was immeasurably superior to them in talent.”7
All the evidence agrees that Dostoevsky’s behavior with the Pléiade would have caused difficulties with a group of saints, not to speak of a circle of young and not-so-young writers competing for public attention and each with his own vanity to coddle. The result, only to be expected, was that they turned on Dostoevsky after a certain point and made him the butt of a veritable campaign of persecution. To make matters worse, the leader of the pack, alas, was the same Turgenev whom Dostoevsky had believed to be his devoted friend. “They began to pick him to pieces,” Mme Panaev tells us, “to exasperate his pride by pinpricks in conversation; Turgenev was a past master at this—he purposely drew Dostoevsky into argument and drove him to the farthest limits of irritability. Dostoevsky, pushed to the wall, sometimes defended with passion the most ridiculous views, which he had blurted out in the heat of argument and which Turgenev pounced on and laughed at.”8
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