Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Belinsky could only have accepted the new departure Dostoevsky’s work was taking as confirmation that the hopes he had once placed in the promising young writer had been illusory. For “The Landlady” was evidently a return to the style of Russian Hoffmannism that Belinsky now loathed with all the fury of his previous adoration. Writing of “The Landlady” in early 1848, Belinsky could not have been more crushing. “Throughout the whole of this story,” he says, “there is not a single simple or living word or expression: everything is far-fetched, exaggerated, stilted, spurious and false.”13 The whole attitude toward art of the two erstwhile friends had now become diametrically opposed.

  Dostoevsky no doubt seemed to Belinsky to be betraying everything that the critic had fought so hard to attain, and the literary ideals they supposedly shared. But Dostoevsky had never been as exclusively committed to the poetics of the Natural School as Belinsky probably believed on the basis of his impression of Poor Folk. At the very moment Dostoevsky was finishing up this work in 1845, he was also writing Mikhail, “Have you read Emelya of Veltman in the last Library for Reading?—what a charming thing!”14 In this new work by Dostoevsky’s old favorite, Veltman shuttles back and forth between the real and the imaginary in a Romantic style rejected in the 1840s as completely out-of-date. Dostoevsky had also chosen the epigraph for Poor Folk from Odoevsky’s volume, Russian Nights (1844), whose stories and dialogues are the literary quintessence of the Romantic Schellingian spirit of the Russian 1830s.

  It is clear to us now that Dostoevsky was experimenting with styles and character types that he was later to fuse together superbly. But it was difficult at the time not to conclude that, compared with the other young writers on the rise, he had simply lost his way. Between 1846 and 1848 Turgenev published a good many of the stories included in A Sportsman’s Sketches; Herzen produced his novel Who Is To Blame? and a series of brilliant short stories; Goncharov made his impressive début with A Common Story and followed it with a chapter from his novel in progress, “Oblomov’s Dream”—not to mention either Grigorovich’s two novels of peasant life, Anton Goremyka and The Village, or A. V. Druzhinin’s Polinka Sachs, which raised the banner of female emancipation. Compared to the array of such works, Dostoevsky’s publications seemed relatively insignificant indeed.

  The Double was attacked on two fronts, one stylistic and the other thematic. Decades later, even the Russian Symbolist Andrey Bely, both a connoisseur of Gogol and an admirer of Dostoevsky, wrote that “The Double recalls a patchwork quilt stitched togther from the subjects, gestures, and verbal procedures of Gogol.”15 Belinsky’s remark about its chief character belonging in a madhouse, taken up by others, saw Dostoevsky as an imitative, sensational depicter of pathological states of mind. There is external evidence that Dostoevsky himself (as well as others) thought of The Double primarily in relation to Dead Souls. “They [Belinsky and the Pléiade] say,” he writes Mikhail jubilantly on the day his new work was published, “that after Dead Souls nothing like it has been seen in Russia. . . . You will like it even better than Dead Souls.”16 In revising the novel nineteen years later, Dostoevsky eliminated most of the traces pointing from one to the other; but the best way to understand The Double is to see it as Dostoevsky’s effort to rework Dead Souls in his own artistic terms, just as he had already done in Poor Folk with Gogol’s “The Overcoat.”

  Both Poor Folk and The Double are part of the same artistic endeavor to penetrate into the psychology of Gogol’s characters and depict them from within. Golyadkin, the protagonist of The Double, may be described as a composite of the timidity and pusillanimity of Poprishchin in Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman” imbued with the “ambition” of Chichikov in Dead Souls, but the closeness of vision, the descent into his inner life, hardly creates any feeling of sympathy. The mock-heroic tonality taken over from Dead Souls, which Gogol used for purposes of broad social satire, is now applied to a world shrunk to the level of slightly off-color vaudeville farce; the picaresque adventure involves the search not even for a large fortune but for a slightly higher office post and acceptance into the charmed circle of a corrupt bureaucratic hierarchy. Dostoevsky thus once again takes his departure from a Gogolian model and intensifies its effect, but this time his aim is not to bring out more unequivocally the “humanitarian” component of the original. Rather, it is to reinforce Gogol’s acute perception of the grotesque effects of moral stagnation and social immobility on character. The result is a new synthesis of Gogolian elements, transformed and recast not by sentimentalism but by a deepening Hoffmannian fantasy into a genuine exploration of encroaching madness. In this way, Dostoevsky accentuates the humanly tragic aspect of Gogol’s still relatively debonair portrayal of social-psychic frustrations.

  Breaking the connection maintained in Poor Folk between Devushkin’s poverty and his struggle for self-respect, Dostoevsky now emphasizes the latter motif. His focus, becoming internal and psychological, concentrates on the effort of Golyadkin to assert himself, but this inevitably brings Golyadkin into opposition with the existing rigidities of the social order. And Dostoevsky’s theme now becomes the crippling inner effects of this system on the individual—the fact that Golyadkin “goes mad out of ambition, while at the same time fully despising ambition and even suffering from the fact that he happens to suffer from such nonsense as ambition” (13: 31).

  The first several chapters of The Double give a brilliant picture of Golyadkin’s split personality before it has disintegrated entirely into two independent entities. There is Golyadkin’s evident desire to pretend to a higher social station and a more flattering image of himself—hence the carriage, the livery, the simulated shopping spree for elegant furniture as if he were a new bridegroom, even the marvelous detail of changing his banknotes into smaller denominations to have a fatter pocketbook. His pretensions to the favors of his imaginary beloved Klara Olsufyevna is only an expression of this urge for upward mobility and ego gratification, not its cause. During the first part, Golyadkin’s “ambition” dominates his feelings of inferiority and guilt and manages to keep them in check. The movement of the action shows him, however unsuccessfully, still trying to impose himself on the world despite its rebuffs. Once the double appears, however, the process is reversed, and we find Golyadkin striving by every means possible to prove himself a docile and obedient subordinate who accepts the dictates of the authorities ruling over his life as, literally, the word of God.

  It is in this latter part of the work that Dostoevsky’s social-psychological thrusts become the sharpest. Golyadkin struggles against becoming confused with his double, who behaves in a fashion that the initial Golyadkin would dearly like to emulate but that he has been taught to believe is morally inadmissible. The double is of course “a rascal,” but the real Golyadkin is “honest, virtuous, mild, free from malice, always to be relied on in the service, and worthy of promotion . . . but what if . . . what if they get us mixed up” (1: 172)! The possibility of substitution leads Golyadkin to accuse his double of being “Grishka Otrepeev”—the famous false pretender to the throne of the true tsars in the seventeenth century—and introduces the theme of impostorship, so important for Dostoevsky later and (with its evocation of Boris Godunov) so incongruous in this context.

  The more threatened Golyadkin feels because of the machinations of his double, the more he is ready to surrender, give way, step aside, throw himself on the mercy of the authorities and look to them for aid and protection. He is ready to admit that he may even truly be “a nasty, filthy rag”—though, to be sure, “a rag possessed of ambition . . . a rag possessed of feelings and sentiments” (1: 168–169). The inchoate phrases that tumble off his tongue are filled with the mottoes of the official morality of unquestioning and absolute obedience encouraged by the paternal autocracy. “I as much as to say look upon my benevolent superior as a father and blindly trust my fate to him,” he tells his superior Andrey Filippovich, in his desperate efforts to “unmask the impostor and scoundrel” who is taking h
is place. “At this point,” says the narrator, “Mr. Golyadkin’s voice trembled and two tears ran down his eyelashes” (1: 196). As the double, “with an unseemly little smile,” had told Golyadkin in the important dream sequence of the preceding Chapter 10: “What’s the use of strength of character! How could you and I, Yakov Petrovich, have strength of character?” (1: 185).

  Some of the most genuinely amusing moments in the novel occur as Golyadkin, believing that he has received a letter from his beloved Klara setting a rendezvous for an elopement, sits waiting in the courtyard of Klara’s house (taking shelter from the pouring rain under a pile of logs) for her to keep their supposed assignation—and at the same time, inwardly protests against such an unforgivable breach of the proprieties. “Good behavior, madame”—these are his ruminations—“means staying at home, honoring your father and not thinking about suitors prematurely. Suitors will come in good time, madame, that’s so. . . . But, to begin with, allow me to tell you, as a friend, that things are not done like that, and in the second place I would have given you and your parents, too, a good thrashing for letting you read French books; for French books teach you no good,” and so on (1: 221). The original version of The Double concludes shortly thereafter as Golyadkin is driven off in a carriage by his doctor, who suddenly becomes a demonic figure, and—but we are left hanging in the air! The work is abruptly cut short at this point on a note of Gogolian flippancy and irresolution: “But here, gentlemen, ends the history of the adventures of Mr. Golyadkin” (1: 431).

  The haunting brilliance of Dostoevsky’s portrayal of a consciousness pursued by obsessions of guilt and ultimately foundering in madness has never been disputed, yet it is genuinely difficult to pinpoint Dostoevsky’s moral focus. One way of doing so is to see that for all his taunts at Golyadkin, Dostoevsky is even more sarcastic about the exalted eminences of the bureaucratic realm that glimmer before Golyadkin as his unattainable ideal. They are clearly corrupt to the core, and lack even that minimum of moral self-awareness responsible for Golyadkin’s plight.17 Golyadkin at least believes in the pious official morality to which everybody else gives lip service, and his struggle with the double is an effort to defend that morality from being betrayed. In fighting off the double, Golyadkin is really fighting off his own impulses to subvert the values presumably shared by his official superiors. This is probably what Valerian Maikov meant when he said that Golyadkin perishes “from the consciousness of the disparity of particular interests in a well-ordered society,” that is, from his realization of the impossibility of asserting himself as an individual without violating the morality that has been bred into his bones and that keeps him in submission.

  Yet Dostoevsky’s genuine indignation at the crippling conditions of Russian life, which offered no outlet for the ego to assert itself normally, did not turn him into a moral determinist willing to absolve the victims of all responsibility for their conduct. His very portrayal of a figure like Devushkin implied that debasing social conditions were far from being able entirely to shape character. As a result, Dostoevsky’s work of this period often contains a puzzling ambiguity of tone because a character is shown simultaneously both as socially oppressed and yet as reprehensible and morally unsavory precisely because he has surrendered too abjectly to the pressure of his environment.

  The Double suffered from being too imitative of Gogol, but it was also too original to be fully appreciated. For the complexities of Dostoevsky’s narrative technique also posed a special problem for his readers. The Double is narrated by an outside observer who gradually identifies himself with Golyadkin’s consciousness and carries on the narrative in the speech-style of the character. Its verbal texture thus contains a large admixture of stock phrases, clichés, mottoes, polite social formulas, and meaningless exclamations, which are obsessively repeated as a means of portraying the agitations and insecurities of Golyadkin’s bewildered psyche. This is a remarkable anticipation, unprecedented in its time, of Joyce’s experiments with cliché in the Gerty McDowell chapter of Ulysses, and of what Sartre so much admired in John Dos Passos—the portrayal of a consciousness totally saturated with the formulas and slogans of its society. The effect in The Double, however, was a tediousness and monotony that Dostoevsky’s critics, and readers, were not yet prepared to put up with either for the sake of social-psychological verisimilitude or artistic experimentation.

  And even though Dostoevsky’s narrative technique per se no longer creates any barrier for the modern reader, the complexity of Dostoevsky’s attitude still creates problems of comprehension. In isolating Golyadkin’s imbroglio from any overt social pressure, and by treating both Golyadkin and the world he lives in with devastating irony, Dostoevsky tends to give the impression that Golyadkin is simply a pathological personality who has only himself to blame for his troubles. Even Belinsky, who might have been expected to grasp the social implications of Golyadkin’s psychology, remarked that his life would not really have been unbearable except “for the unhealthy susceptibility and suspiciousness of his character” which was “the black demon” of his life.18 In other words, Dostoevsky was simply portraying a case of paranoia and mental breakdown with no larger significance than that of a case history. And from Belinsky’s remark to Annenkov that, like Rousseau, Dostoevsky was “firmly convinced that all of mankind envies and persecutes him,”19 we can surmise how closely Belinsky associates the protagonist of The Double with his erstwhile protégé.

  This judgment set the pattern for a view of Dostoevsky’s work that dominated Russian criticism until the end of the nineteenth century. In 1849 Annenkov, echoing Belinsky, accused Dostoevsky of being the leader of a new literary school (that included his brother Mikhail and Yakov Butkov, Dostoevsky’s competitor as a portrayer of Petersburg slum life) specializing in the portrayal of “madness for the sake of madness.”20 Annenkov severely criticized this unhealthy taste for rather sensational and grotesque tragicomedy, in which he could not discern any more serious or elevated artistic aim. Such an accusation was of course unfair to Dostoevsky, whose “abnormal” and “pathological” characters can all be seen, on closer examination, to make a social-cultural point. But Dostoevsky perhaps relied too much on the reader to grasp the ideological implications of his psychology and to understand that the “abnormalities” of his characters derived from the pressure of the Russian social situation on personality. The result was an artistic lack of balance that led to a good deal of misunderstanding and has caused unceasing critical disagreement.

  The “idea” embodied in The Double—the internal split between self-image and truth, between what a person wishes to believe about himself and what he really is—constitutes Dostoevsky’s first grasp of a character type that became his hallmark as a writer. Golyadkin is the ancestor of all of Dostoevsky’s great split personalities, who are always confronted with their quasi-doubles or doubles (whether in the form of other “real” characters or as hallucinations) in the memorable scenes of the great novels—such as the underground man, Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, and Ivan Karamazov—although the frame of reference in The Double is still purely social-psychological. In this early phase of Dostoevsky’s work, Golyadkin’s intolerable guilt feelings at his own modest aspirations primarily disclose the stifling and maiming of personality under a despotic tyranny.

  Several short stories that Dostoevsky produced at this time are written from the same perspective as The Double and raise much the same critical issues. In each, Dostoevsky continued to explore the pathological effects on personality of the Petersburg world of giant chancelleries and terrified chinovniki, but without portraying this environment as in any way specifically responsible for the abnormalities he depicts. The result was a continuation of the confusion that had been caused by The Double, and an increasing dissatisfaction with Dostoevsky’s works by the critics and, presumably, by most of the reading public as well.

  1 DW (January 1877), 587–588.

  2 Pis’ma, 1: 86–87; October 8, 1845.

  3
P. V. Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade, ed. Arthur P. Mendel, trans. Irwin R. Titunik (Ann Arbor, MI, 1968), 151.

  4 Ibid.

  5 DRK, 27.

  6 Ibid., 28.

  7 Pis’ma, 1: 89; April 1, 1846.

  8 Ibid., 102; November 26, 1846.

  9 V. G. Belinsky, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow, 1948), 385.

  10 Pis’ma, 1: 103; November 26, 1846.

  11 Belinsky, Works, 385.

  12 Pis’ma, 1: 100; end of October, 1846.

  13 Belinsky, Works, 478.

  14 Pis’ma, 1: 78; May 4, 1845.

  15 Cited in A. L. Bem, U istokov tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (Prague, 1936), 143.

  16 Pis’ma, 1: 81; February 1, 1846. Dostoevsky evokes this linkage in his original subtitle, The Adventures of Mr. Golyadkin, which recalls Gogol’s subtitle, The Adventures of Chichikov. Just as Gogol had written a mock-heroic account of Chichikov’s “adventures” in trying to rise in the world, so Dostoevsky was doing the same for Mr. Golyadkin.

  17 This point is well brought out in F. Evnin, “Ob odnoi istoriko-literaturnoi legendy,” Russkaya Literatura 2 (1965), 3–26.

  18 V. G. Belinsky, “Petersburgsky sbornik,” in DRK, 27.

  19 V. G. Belinsky, Izbrannye pis’ma, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1955), 2: 388.

  20 P. V. Annenkov, Vospominaniya i kriticheskie ocherki, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1879), 2: 23.

  CHAPTER 10

  Feuilletons and Experiments

  Despite the wounding criticism from Belinsky and others, the besieged and struggling Dostoevsky nonetheless continued along his own path. Weary with the narrow stylistic range of the Natural School, he felt his shift to a new style and subject matter as an inner release. “I am writing my Landlady,” he tells Mikhail at the end of January 1847. “My pen is guided by a source of inspiration rising directly from the soul. Not like Prokharchin, over which I agonized all summer.”1 Even as inspiration coursed through him, however, and even as he had already begun to block out another major novel (Netotchka Nezvanova), Dostoevsky’s chronic indebtedness forced him to keep a sharp eye on the literary marketplace and to snap up any assignments that could bring in a little extra cash. While rushing the completion of “The Landlady,” he picked up an assignment from the St. Petersburg Gazette. The writer who supplied the feuilletons for this newspaper died unexpectedly, and the editor hastily filled the gap by appealing to some of the young St. Petersburg literati to furnish him with copy. Four feuilletons, signed F. D., were written by Dostoevsky.