Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  All the up-and-coming young talents of the Natural School—Grigorovich, Panaev, Turgenev, Goncharov, Sollogub, Pleshcheev—wrote feuilletons, and Dostoevsky was simply joining a general literary trend that had originated in France. Starting out as a medium of publicity, this type of newspaper column branched out to describe urban types and social life, giving birth to the physiological sketch. Once the taste for such sketches had caught on, it occurred to Frédéric Soulié to unite them week by week with a loose narrative line, and this was the origin of the feuilleton-novel. The feuilleton allows the writer to roam wherever his fancy pleases and to display his personality. Indeed, as we learn from Belinsky, he is essentially “a chatterer, apparently good-natured and sincere, but in truth often malicious and evil-tongued, someone who knows everything, sees everything, keeps quiet about a good deal but definitely manages to express everything, stings with epigrams and insinuations, and amuses with a lively and clever word as well as a childish joke.”2 These words fit the personality assumed by the young Dostoevsky to the life.3 With all their sly evasions, the feuilletons do express a good deal of what was preoccupying Dostoevsky—and many others like him—in the spring of 1847.

  The first three of these articles display Dostoevsky’s skill at slipping past the censorship and depicting educated society chafing at the tight reins by which they were being held by Nicholas I. His fourth feuilleton furnishes insight into a new vein of his production that begins in 1847 with “The Landlady”—a vein that no longer focuses on a chinovnik of limited mental capacities but rather on a character type of the intelligentsia, “the dreamer.” Dostoevsky’s dreamer emerges exactly at the moment when a general campaign was being carried on against the dangers of mechtatelnost’ (dreaming, reverie) as a congenital malady of the Russian intelligentsia. Everywhere one turns in Russian culture of the mid-1840s, one finds evidence of this campaign. High-flown Romantic ideals and attitudes are denounced as leading to a debilitating withdrawal from the world and the cultivation of a self-satisfied attitude of exalted contemplation. Belinsky inveighed against those who, modeling themselves on Schiller’s ideal of “the beautiful soul,” believed they could transcend the conflicts of ordinary life.4

  Belinsky was in effect denouncing Russian fiction of the 1830s, which, influenced by Hoffmann and German Romanticism, is filled with the dissonance between the ideal and the real. In those days, this lack of adjustment was felt to be a crushing indictment of the narrowness and limitations of the quotidian. And since it was only artists (and philosophers) who, according to the metaphysics of Romantic Idealism, were in inspired contact with the realm of transcendental truth, artists invariably turned up as the heroes of such creations. The classic expression of this theme in Russian literature is Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect” (1835).

  However, Gogol’s story stands at the borderline between the purely Romantic delineations of this clash between the ideal and the real and its later development in the 1840s. For Gogol does not weigh the values of the story heavily in favor of the young artist Piskarev; there is something pathetic, rather than sublimely tragic, about his ignorance of the ways of the world. Only a short step separates Gogol’s portrayal of the artist-dreamer from Dostoevsky’s own portrait of the type in his Petersburg feuilletons of this period. In the interval between the two portrayals, though, came Belinsky’s attack on Romanticism, which led to a complete reversal of the original Romantic relation between the ideal and the real. Now the dreamer (an abortive or inauthentic artist) becomes a symbol of the failure to grapple with and master the demands of life. This is the context in which, along with Goncharov, Herzen, the early Turgenev, and many others, Dostoevsky offers his own unique version of the dreamer character type and his conflicts.

  In Dostoevsky’s feuilleton, everything serves to nourish the dreamer’s capacity for living in an artificial universe of his own creation. “Sometimes entire nights pass imperceptibly in indescribable pleasures; often in a few hours he experiences the heavenly joys of love or of a whole life, gigantic, unheard of, wonderful as a dream, grandiosely beautiful” (13: 30). The Petersburg chronicler, throughout his seemingly casual causerie, skillfully conveys all the smoldering frustration undoubtedly felt by the progressive intelligentsia. But nowhere else is the tempting siren song of mechtatelnost’ rejected with more inner awareness of its delights and dangers! Although the cultivation of such delights brings with it an increasing incapacity to tolerate reality, and the chronicler ends by labeling such a life a tragedy, a sin, a caricature, he nevertheless asks, “are we not all more or less dreamers?” (13: 31).

  Dostoevsky’s apparent empathy for, and even identification with, the figure of the dreamer is what distinguishes his creations from the typical character type of the 1840s. The new turn taken by Dostoevsky’s work in “The Landlady” is thus in the somewhat dated tradition of Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect.” The style and plot-motifs, moreover, have been traced to an even earlier work of Gogol’s, “A Terrible Vengeance.” This story is part of Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1831–1832), where Gogol was still drawing inspiration from Ukrainian folklore and imitating the epic-ballad style of Cossack folk-tales. “A Terrible Vengeance” has a heroine with the same name as the heroine of “The Landlady” (Katerina); she too is loved incestuously by her father—a sorcerer and magician—who murders her mother; he exercises a mysterious and irresistible power over her that drives her to madness; and the story is composed in the highly stylized language of folk poetry.

  There can be no doubt that “The Landlady” attempts to revitalize this Romantic folktale tradition. The dreamer character of the story, Vasily Ordynov, is supplied with all the essential traits of this type. The last survivor of an aristocratic family, he has inherited a small sum of money, allowing him to live a lonely and secluded life devoted to study. He is an old-fashioned Romantic Idealist dreamer, for whom art and philosophy provide equal and eventually converging paths to discovery of the highest truths. Dostoevsky stresses his isolation and sense of estrangement from other people and from the throbbing life of the Petersburg in which he lives, nourishing in proud solitude the flattering belief that he has been singled out for great creative achievement. Like the unhappy Piskarev in “Nevsky Prospect,” a chance encounter has the most fateful consequences for Ordynov. He falls under the spell of the beautiful young Katerina, whom he first sees praying fervently in a church and in whose face he discerns “traces of childlike fear and mysterious horror.” Accompanying her is her father, Murin, the mysteriously enthralling central figure, whose “fiery, feverishly glowing eyes flashed a haughty, prolonged stare” (1: 267–268).

  Moved by an irresistible impulse, Ordynov rents a room in their flat, and from this point on the story becomes a string of incidents, one more incredible and sensational than the last. Ordynov falls ill and lies in a constant state of delirium; when not out of his mind with fever, he is swooning with sensual ecstasy from Katerina’s caresses. She alternates between passionate embraces with Ordynov and enraptured attention to Murin as he reads from the heretical books of the raskolniki or tells wild tales of bandit exploits on the Volga. Murin tries to shoot Ordynov and falls into an epileptic fit. Ordynov, spurred on by Katerina, is on the point of killing the unconscious Murin, but fails when “he fancied that the old man’s whole face began laughing and that a diabolical, soul-freezing chuckle resounded at last through the room” (1: 310). His failure to carry out this deed and free Katerina from Murin’s spell marks the dreamer’s defeat by the malignant power that also holds his beauteous landlady in thrall. Much of what occurs is so extravagant that Ordynov himself wonders repeatedly if he is not living through some sort of hallucination.

  Dostoevsky definitely overdoes the use of Gothic and Romantic accessories in “The Landlady,” and one can understand Belinsky’s violent antipathy to the story. “Murin’s eyes,” he jibes, “hold so much electicity, galvanism, and magnetism that he might have commanded a good price from a physiologist to supply the latter . . . w
ith their lightening-charged crackling glances for scientific . . . experiments.”5 “The Landlady” does not really succeed because Dostoevsky failed to endow his out-of-date Romantic framework with the same new significance that he had managed to give the sentimentalism in Poor Folk and the equally Romantic Doppelgänger motif in The Double. Nonetheless, the story is much more than the overheated Romantic phantasmagoria that Belinsky and all the others took it for. The passage of time has revealed this story to be among the richest of Dostoevsky’s early works in anticipation of the future. For Dostoevsky was struggling here to give the basic theme of his chinovnik stories—the crushing of human personality in the Russian world of despotism and unconditional subordination—a much wider symbolic resonance in terms of Russian history and folklore.

  Katerina’s psyche has become crippled and distorted by her belief in Murin’s occult powers, and these are presented not only as purely magical and pagan but are intertwined with the Christian symbols of Russian Orthodoxy. What ties Katerina to Murin is the fear and horror he has managed to instill in her through these mysterious powers, and which have now become transformed into a strange kind of “enjoyment.” Murin himself is perfectly aware of what he has done to Katerina, and generalizes it, for the benefit of Ordynov, into a universal law. “Let me tell you, sir,” he explains to the thunderstruck Ordynov, “a weak man cannot stand alone. Give him everything, he will come of himself and return it all. . . . Give a weak man his freedom—he will bind it himself and give it back to you. To a foolish heart freedom is no use!” (1: 317).

  It is thus the theme of “freedom” that emerges at the center of “The Landlady” and that links the story firmly, on this level, with Dostoevsky’s other works of the same period. Just as he has dramatized the fashion in which Devushkin and Golyadkin have been psychically crippled by the prevailing conditions of Russian society, so he now explores the same subject in a different style and manner. And to drive the point home even more decisively, he provides Ordynov, at the conclusion of the story, with the following reflections:

  He had constant visions of an immense, overpowering despotism over a poor, defenseless creature, and his heart raged and trembled in impotent indignation. He fancied that before the frightened eyes of her suddenly awakening soul the idea of its degradation had been craftily presented, that the poor weak heart had been craftily tortured, that the truth had been twisted and contorted to her, . . . and by degrees the free soul had been clipped of its wings till it was incapable at last of insurrection or of a free movement toward real life. (1: 319)

  Seen in this light, the folklore aspect of the story and its evocation of the Old Russian past is significant. For it is the dark superstitions of this past—its religion of fear and eternal damnation—that have inculcated in Katerina a crushing sense of guilt and furnished the arms by which Murin has subdued and broken her spirit. What Dostoevsky seems to be suggesting here is the opposition between a religion of light and hope and faith in man and one, more traditional, of mysticism and fatalism—the same contrast, as we shall see, being made by Belinsky at this time. From this point of view, it seems likely that Dostoevsky meant “The Landlady” as a symbolic critique not only of Slavophilism but also of Orthodoxy, so far as he, like Belinsky, then saw the latter as a religion of fear or terror.

  “The Landlady” is thus of considerable interest in Dostoevsky’s laudable (if artistically unsuccessful) attempt to transpose into another key and tonality the major theme of his works written according to the poetics of the Natural School. It is of even greater interest when we become aware that this story marks a decisive moment of transition in Dostoevsky’s artistic maturation. The character of Katerina is the first in which Dostoevsky focuses on the psychology of masochism and begins to explore the unhealthy “enjoyment” that can be derived from self-laceration. Katerina is still a victim of Murin and all the dark forces that he represents, but she is also a victim of her inability to conquer the “pleasure” that she derives from her enslavement and degradation. A new dimension is thus added to Dostoevsky’s portrayal of personality, which now moves in the direction of transferring to the individual some of the moral responsibility for his or her own plight.

  Of crucial importance in the Dostoevsky canon as the first hint of this evolution from a social-psychological to a moral-psychological grasp of character, “The Landlady” also contains more limited anticipations of things to come. Dostoevsky never again tried to write so extensively in an epic-ballad style, but a similar haunting note of folk poetry occasionally appears, most notably in the lyrical accents of the crippled Marya Lebyadkina in Demons. And there is, indeed, a certain similarity in situation between Katerina and Marya that explains the stylistic echo. Katerina hopes that Ordynov has come to rescue her, just as Marya waits for Stavrogin and imagines him to be her “deliverer,” but in neither case is the Russian folk-maiden delivered from the enchantment of evil by her “false” swain from the intelligentsia. In addition, Murin’s contemptuous opinion about mankind’s inability to endure “freedom,” and his symbolic role as the representative of a religion of tyranny, clearly prefigures the awesome majesty of the Grand Inquisitor.

  “The Landlady” is the first of Dostoevsky’s fictional works in which the figure of the dreamer makes his appearance. One expects Ordynov to come into contact or conflict with the “real,” but instead, his first, faltering emergence from isolation leads into a realm far more fantastic than anything he had ever imagined. To be sure, the world that Ordynov encounters is intended to represent the psychic “reality” of the Russian past impinging on the present. But Dostoevsky was not yet master of the artistic means that could have made this “reality” seem anything more than what Belinsky called it—an attempt “to reconcile Marlinsky and Hoffmann,” in which everything was “far-fetched, exaggerated, stilted, spurious, and false.” Dostoevsky’s next effort in the same direction, however, happily corrects these two defects of “The Landlady.” Romantic folklore is dropped entirely and the psychology of the dreamer is now placed squarely at the center of the artistic perspective.

  The result is that charming little story, “White Nights” (Belye nochi), one of the two minor masterpieces (the other is The Double) that Dostoevsky wrote after Poor Folk. Charm is not a literary attribute that one ordinarily associates with Dostoevsky, but he was versatile enough to capture this elusive quality on the one or two occasions when he tried for it. “White Nights” stands out from the tragicomic and satirical universe of his early creations by the beautiful lightness and delicacy of its tone, its atmosphere of springtime adolescent emotionality, and the grace and wit of its good-natured parodies.

  Both Ordynov and this new dreamer are similar in their sense of isolation and loneliness, but the dreamer in “White Nights” looks with friendly curiosity and benevolent interest on the rest of humanity. Just as in “The Landlady,” the dreamer in “White Nights” makes his contact with reality by meeting a young girl—not, however, a pain-racked beauty like Katerina but a pert little miss of seventeen named Nastenka, betrothed to a young man who had gone to Moscow to establish himself. For one dazzling moment, encouraged by Nastenka, the dreamer obtains a glimpse of “real” happiness, but she flies to the arms of her intended when he returns from Moscow, and the dreamer is left to mull over this last of his dreams. The wistfully humorous lyrical extrapolations of the dreamer are, in part, taken over word for word from the portrait of this type in the fourth Petersburg feuilleton, and Dostoevsky conjures up once again, with even more detail, all the enchantments and fascinations of the extraordinary world in which he lives.

  The most famous passage in his lengthy tirade is one that Dostoevsky added in 1860, when he revised the story and decided to give the dreamer a specific cultural genealogy. “You ask, perhaps, what is he dreaming of? . . . of friendship with Hoffmann, St. Bartholomew’s Night, of Diana Vernon, of playing the hero at the taking of Kazan by Ivan Vasilevich, of Clara Mowbray, of Effie Deans, of the council of the prelates
and Huss before them, of the rising of the dead in Robert the Devil (do you remember the music, it smells of the churchyard!), of Minna and Brenda, of the battle of Berezina, of the reading of a poem at Countess V. D.’s, of Danton, of Cleopatra ei suoi amanti, of a little house in Kolomna . . .” (1: 115–116). The passage contains allusions, so far as they can be identified, to Hoffmann, Merimée, Scott, Karamzin, George Sand (perhaps!), Meyerbeer, Zhukovsky, and Pushkin.

  Dostoevsky inserted this kaleidoscope of Romantic influences into “White Nights,” and its sparkle now tends to conceal what probably stood out more in the original text—the parody of Romantic novels depicting desperate and undying love in high society and exotic climes. Hitherto, the narrator’s inflamed imagination has battened on such enticing fare, and while his declamation for the benefit of the open-mouthed Nastenka is too extended to quote in full, one extract is indispensable to give the flavor of Dostoevsky’s witty deflation:

  Surely they must have spent years hand in hand together—alone the two of them, casting off all the world and each uniting his or her life with the other’s? Surely when the hour of parting came she must have lain sobbing and grieving on his bosom, heedless of the tempest raging under the sullen sky, heedless of the wind which snatches and bears away the tears from her black eyelashes? . . . And, good Heavens!, surely he met her afterwards, far from their native shores, under alien skies, in the hot south in the divinely eternal city, in the dazzling splendor of the ball to the crash of music, in a palazzo (it must be in a palazzo), drowned in a sea of lights, on the balcony, wreathed in myrtle and roses, where, recognizing him, she hurriedly removes her mask and whispering “I am free,” flings herself trembling into his arms, and with a cry of rapture, clinging to one another, in one instant they forget their sorrow and their parting and all their agonies, and the gloomy house and the distant garden in that distant land, and the seat on which with a last passionate kiss she tore herself away from his arms numb with anguish and despair . . . (1: 117).