Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Nekrasov did not like the novella at all. “Dostoevsky is finished,” he is reported to have said. “He will no longer write anything important.”11 But Nekrasov was not one of the most successful editors of his time for nothing, and, rather than reject the story outright, he accepted it—but offered to pay so little that no self-respecting author could accept his terms. Dostoevsky thought at first that he was bargaining. “If Nekrasov bargains and becomes more reasonable, the priority is his whatever happens,” he instructs Mikhail. “You see, it is very important that the novel be published in The Contemporary. This journal once sent me packing, and now maneuvers to have my text. This is very important for my literary situation.”12

  Dostoevsky, however, was woefully deceiving himself, and Mikhail soon became aware of the true state of affairs. He offered the work next to Kraevsky for Notes of the Fatherland, where it was finally accepted after some negotiations and at a higher price per sheet. “That’s what it means not to derogate one’s dignity,” Mikhail writes triumphantly. He also conveys some literary comments of Kraevsky, whose rather negative remark is valuable all the same in helping to define the new tonality observable in Dostoevsky’s Siberian novellas. “You surrender yourself sometimes to the influence of humor and wish to arouse laughter. The strength of F. M. . . . lies in feeling, in pathos, here perhaps he has no equals, and so it’s a pity that he neglects this gift.”13 Kraevsky was right in detecting a new and much sharper satirical edge replacing Dostoevsky’s earlier pathos.

  From his exile in Semipalatinsk, Dostoevsky asked his brother to send him any press comments that might appear after Uncle’s Dream and The Village of Stepanchikovo were published, but Mikhail, probably to spare Feodor’s sensibilities, remarked that literary journals were no longer reporting on each other to the same extent as in the 1840s. The truth was that no reference of any kind appeared in the literary press about either of Dostoevsky’s works; they were passed over in complete silence.

  This is hardly suprising because, in these very same years, Turgenev was producing much of his best work and turning out a novel almost annually; Tolstoy had just burst on the scene with his Childhood, Boyhood, Youth and Sevastopol Stories; Pisemsky’s A Thousand Souls was the literary sensation of 1858 and was followed by the drama A Bitter Fate; and Saltykov-Shchedrin had stirred up a furor with his caustic Provincial Sketches, which created a new genre of literary muckraking in Russian writing. Moreover, the whole country was in a fever of anticipation over the forthcoming liberation of the serfs, and the mood of the moment demanded literature with solid social-cultural substance. The only glimpse of social reality in Uncle’s Dream was, as the prince recalls, a lady whose daughter “killed one of her serf girls in a rage and was tried for it” (2: 315), and this snip of reality was easily overlooked in the comic context. The time-worn plots of Dostoevsky’s novellas appeared to involve nothing more momentous than a marriage decision. Even worse, The Village of Stepanchikovo depicted life on a country estate in which idyllic relations prevailed between the peasants and their landlowner. The only conflicts were caused by the excessive good nature of this exemplary proprietor and gave rise to comic situations that Dostoevsky’s socially conscious readers, preoccupied as never before with the abuses and injustice of serfdom, could hardly take as anything worthy of serious attention.14

  Even someone as well disposed toward Dostoevsky as Pleshcheev spoke of Uncle’s Dream as “too farcical,” and his concluding estimate of The Village of Stepanchikovo, which he asked Alexander Milyukov not to convey to Dostoevsky, was that “all this is fabricated, contrived; terribly stilted.”15 These criticisms are of literary form and they occurred, in my view, because the technique Dostoevsky used clashed radically with the norms then prevailing in Russian prose, which, growing from the physiological sketch, continued to emphasize character description and the portrayal of milieu rather than narrative movement. Most important Russian novelists of the mid-nineteenth century began with such sketches; later, their own novels would continue to have the simplest of plot lines and to retain the emphasis on the portrayal of character through incidents linked together by the commonplace events of ordinary social existence.

  Dostoevsky’s readers could hardly have realized that his technique, derived from the elaborate plots of 1830s’ dramatic farce, marks a new departure in his work. For all of Dostoevsky’s major novels (with the exception of House of the Dead) will display the essential features deriving from such a form: a rapid and condensed plot action, unexpected turns of events that pile up fast and furiously, characters who are presented in terms of dialogue and dramatic movement rather than through analytic portraiture or lengthy depiction of consciousness, and climaxes usually taking place amid the tumultuous group scenes that have been labeled “conclaves” and compared with the celebrated finale of Gogol’s The Inspector-General.16

  Even though Dostoevsky’s two novellas have a distinctly comic surface, this should not be taken to mean that they are entirely devoid of serious substance. A close reading—one focusing on the allusions embedded in the prose and on the parodistic subtext—discloses as much satire in Dostoevsky’s pages as lighthearted tomfoolery. We see as well a notable increase in the range and variety of Dostoevsky’s character types compared with his protagonists of the 1840s, and they are projected with a boldness of contour and a loquacity of self-expression that somehow make them seem to have grown almost physically in size and stature. It is difficult to imagine the Dostoevsky of the early stories writing the later novels, but the author of these Siberian novellas already gives indications of being able to do so. Finally, whatever the strained high jinks made necessary by his “comic” plots, Dostoevsky has nonetheless already begun to adumbrate the great new theme—it may be called “the critique of ideology,” or the conflict defined in his letters as that between “ideas” and “the heart”—that will dominate all his post-Siberian writings.

  Uncle’s Dream

  The plot intrigue of Uncle’s Dream may be set down in a few words. “Uncle” is a decrepit but wealthy Russian prince, almost in his dotage, who accidentally arrives in the town of Mordasov one fine day and is immediately taken in tow by the powerful “leading lady” of the environs, Marya Alexandrovna Moskaleva. She conceives the scheme of marrying him to her still unwed twenty-three-year-old daughter, Zina, a proud beauty, and expends treasures of ingenuity in carrying out her plan. But it is finally defeated, to the immense joy of her numerous rivals for social supremacy, by the jealousy of the rejected suitor for Zina’s hand, a young Petersburg bureaucrat named Mozglyakov, who persuades his distant relative the prince, quite unable to distinguish between his waking and sleeping states, that the marriage proposal he had made to Zina in a drunken stupor had only been “a dream.”

  Dostoevsky dresses up this anecdote in a faintly mock-heroic style and presents it, in an obvious parody of the title of Balzac’s César Birotteau, as “the full and remarkable history of the exaltation, glory and solemn downfall of Marya Alexandrovna and all her family” (2: 516). The story is also subtitled “From the Annals of Mordasov” (2: 296)—and such epic accents, of course, only underline the insignificance of the events (just a year or two earlier Saltykov-Shchedrin had used the same device in his Provincial Sketches, also recounted by a local busybody serving as narrator). This new type of Dostoevskian narrator is a gossip chronicler, as much (if not more) interested in rumor and slander as in what he is able to verify with his own eyes and ears; nor is he ever really certain how to interpret even what he witnesses firsthand. A narrator of this kind is later used by Dostoevsky for other works also set in the Russian provinces, such as Demons and The Brothers Karamazov, and he develops this device into a subtle instrument for controlling his narrative perspective. It is particularly valuable in allowing him to portray his main figures against a background of rumor, opinion, and scandal-mongering that serves somewhat the function of a Greek chorus in relation to the central action.17

  The image given here of provincia
l life, with its eternal gossip, backbiting, and ruthless struggles for power over trifles, provides the background against which the major figures of the story stand out in sharp relief. And no figure in Mordasov is more major than Marya Alexandrovna—who is even compared to Napoleon and is said to be actually superior to the all-conquering emperor. Marya Alexandrovna openly exhibits a will to domination that she is hardly entitled to exercise by rank or fortune, and she is the first Dostoevsky character of this type to appear in a work in which the conventions of realism are scrupulously observed. The only previous character of this kind had been the fantastic and mesmeric Murin, who rules over all the others in the highly symbolic “The Landlady.” Dostoevsky had earlier been able to conceive the psychology of such a figure only in terms of Romantic hyperbole. Now, however, he places such a “strong” personality within the most humdrum of Russian provincial settings, thereby taking his first step toward that reassimilation of the scope and grandeur of Romantic thematics, and its fusion with Russian social reality, that will distinguish his later work. Indeed, no matter how petty the form taken by such “grandeur” in this instance, the name of Napoleon is enough to alert us to what Dostoevsky will make of such an urge for domination in the future.

  Marya Alexandrovna’s manifest superiority emerges when she is faced with the task of persuading the proud and high-principled Zina, who has only contempt for her mother’s ambitions and machinations, to agree to marry the decrepit prince. Zina, it should be explained, is in love with an impoverished young schoolmaster dying of tuberculosis, and her mother knows that she has pledged not to marry while he is in the throes of his death-agony. To accomplish her aim, Marya Alexandrovna realizes that she must offer some truly tempting prospect, and after some forceful but ineffectual preliminary maneuvers, she is forced to unlimber weapons of a heavier caliber. A marriage with the prince, she tells her daugher, would not be a true marriage at all (“he is not capable of requiring such a love”), and in any case “the Prince will live for a year or two at the utmost.” The young schoolmaster could not possibly be jealous of the prince, and hence Zina is told to “reflect that you will give him fresh courage and relieve his mind by marrying the Prince!” But Zina sees through her mother’s sophistries and pinpoints her strategy with exasperated precision: “I understand you, Mamma, I quite understand you! You can never resist a display of noble sentiments even in the nastiest action” (2: 325). These “noble sentiments” are Marya Alexandrovna’s “ideology,” and she draws them from the storehouse of commonplaces piled up by the Romantic literature of the 1820s and 1830s both in Russia and in Europe.

  Realizing that any appeal to enlightened self-interest is doomed to failure, Marya Alexandrovna strikes a higher note—self-sacrifice. Why not think of marriage with the prince as an act of devotion? “Where is the egoism, where is the baseness?” Dostoevsky, as he will so often do in the future, is not afraid to mock ideas and ideals in which he believes himself when, as in this instance, they are only being used as a screen for selfishness and egoism. Marya Alexandrovna concludes by telling Zina that, if the prince’s wealth bothers her, she can renounce it, give away to the poor all but the barest necessity, and “help him, for instance, that luckless boy lying now on his death-bed” (2:326).

  There is no need to detail here all of Marya Alexandrovna’s sophistries, but finally she strikes a vein of pure gold. As the narrator comments, “An inspiration, a genuine inspiration, dawned on her,” and she realizes that she has found a way of appealing to Zina’s authentic idealism: let Zina sacrifice herself by a degrading marriage so as to help her dying beloved. At this point, Marya Alexandrovna pulls out all the stops: “He [the local doctor] told me, in fact, that under different circumstances, especially with a change of climate and surroundings, the patient might recover. He told me that . . . in Spain there is some extraordinary island, I believe it is called Malaga—like some wine, in fact—where not only persons with weak lungs, but consumptives recover simply from the climate, and that people go there on purpose to be treated.” Once cured—and the prince conveniently deceased—the lovers could be properly united, or, if not, the schoolmaster will die happily, “trusting in your love, forgiven by you, in the shade of the myrtles and lemons, under the azure exotic sky!” (2: 327). This lengthy tirade, of which only a few samples have been given, is more than Zina can resist; she breaks down and gives her reluctant consent.

  Much the same tactic is used with the gullible Mozglyakov, who is persuaded that, although ready to marry the prince, Zina is actually madly in love with him and only testing his character by her decision. If he behaves nobly, thinking only of her happiness, and the great advantages of such a marriage, his rewards in the future will surpass his most fervid dreams: “For the Prince’s health Zina will go abroad, to Italy, to Spain. . . . You will follow her there . . . there your love will begin with irresistible force; love, youth! Spain—my God. Your love of course is untainted, holy. . . . You understand me, mon ami!” (2: 354). And then, the prince dead, the wealthy widow Zina will of course marry the man who has proven worthy of her love. Mozglyakov, however, sobers up quickly; and it is he who finally ruins the grand design and engineers Marya Alexandrovna’s defeat. But even his momentary acceptance of her intoxicating harangue shows the power of her personality and the power of ideology (in this case literary Romanticism) to impose its cloud-capped visions as a substitute for the awful truth.

  Dostoevsky, we know, did not think much of Uncle’s Dream; fifteen years later, replying to a correspondent who wished to turn it into a play, Dostoevsky explains that he wrote it “solely with the aim of commencing my literary career and in terrible fear of the censorship (as an ex-convict). And hence I wrote a little thing of sky-blue mildness and remarkable innocence.”18 It hardly, he surmises, contains enough substance even to make it a “comedy,” although it does include the prince, who is “the single serious figure in the entire story.” Dostoevsky’s remark indicates the importance that he continues to attach to the ideological connotations that he gave to the figure of old Prince K., who tries to conceal his true age with the aid of false hair, false teeth, a false mustache, a glass eye, and other such creations of the cosmetician’s art. Indeed, writes Dostoevsky, it was “only on closer inspection that you discerned . . . he was a sort of corpse worked by mechanisms,” and “was entirely made up of different little bits” (2: 310, 300).

  What gives Prince K. his special stamp is the consistent satire of a certain kind of Russian Westernizer that Dostoevsky works into his depiction. One of the earliest touches of this kind, which sets the tone, occurs in a few sentences that describe the prince taking a little fresh air. “He was sometimes seen also on foot, wearing an overcoat and wide-brimmed straw hat, with a lady’s pink neckerchief round his neck, with an eyeglass in his eye and a wicker-basket for mushrooms, cornflowers and other wild flowers. . . . When he was met by a peasant, who stepped aside, took off his hat, bowed low and said: ‘Good-day, Prince, your Excellency, our sunshine,’ the Prince promptly turned his lorgnette upon him, nodded graciously and said to him affably: ‘Bonjour, mon ami, bonjour! ’ ” (2: 302). The prince’s pastoral get-up and French salutation reveal just how distant he was from the realities of Russian peasant life, but for all his giddiness, he is not unaware of what is going on in the world. He arrives in Mordasov originally because of an accident to his coach, and he assures everyone that the peasant coachman “was trying to take my life. . . . Only fancy, he has got hold of some new ideas, you know! There is a sort of skepticism in him . . . in short, he is a communist in the fullest sense of the word!” (2: 312).

  The prince’s rambling reminiscences are filled with allusions to the Congress of Vienna and Lord Byron, as well as references to his romance with an enchanting French vicomtesse whom he lost to a German baron “when I was abroad in the Twenties” (2: 315). The prince is thus a product of the same period of literary Romanticism whose productions supply Marya Alexandrovna with her rhetorical arsenal. And even
though the addlepated prince is a figure of comedy, Dostoevsky could not resist evoking, if only for an instant, the grim background against which the cultured Russian of that time was pursuing his carefree European existence. For the prince recalls “a very poetical [Moscow] lady” he had once met while taking the waters abroad, who had a daughter of fifty, and “she, too, almost talked in verse. Afterwards she had a very unfortunate mishap: she killed one of her serf-girls in a fit of rage and was tried for it” (ibid.).

  Apropos of this attack on “naïve Romanticism,” a word must be devoted to the epilogue of the novella, which, as Russian criticism has long been aware, contains a parody of the famous ball scene in the last book of Evgeny Onegin. It is the scene in which Evgeny and Tatyana meet again after many years, she no longer the simple country lass but the queen of Petersburg society, he now hopelessly in love with the girl he had once scorned. Marya Alexandrovna had used this scene earlier to bewitch the bewildered Mozglyakov, holding up before him the vision of a similar encounter with Zina, the wealthy widow of Prince K., who falls into his arms in gratitude for his nobility of soul. Three years later, sent to a remote part of the Russian Empire, Mozglyakov meets the Governor-General (“an old military man”) and is invited to his wife’s name-day ball that very evening. Of course, his wife turns out to be the beautiful and imperious Zina, who snubs the bewildered Mozglyakov entirely. Mozglyakov stands around “with a biting Mephistophelean smile” and in a picturesque attitude, leaning against a column for several hours; but “his disillusioned air and all the rest of it were thrown away. Zina completely failed to observe him” (2: 397). At last, hungry and tired, he beats a retreat and leaves town the next morning.

  On the level of the theme, Dostoevsky’s parody of Pushkin supplies a suitable conclusion to the attack on literary Romanticism that runs through the work as a subtext. By revealing so glaringly the triumph of “real life,” with its necessary limitations and compromises, over an inflated and unworldly idealism nourished on literary stereotypes, Dostoevsky is making a point that he will return to again and again in the future—of course, in relation to other ideologies with far graver consequences when put into practice.