Natasha is very far from being the innocent victim of a typical aristocratic seducer; on the contrary, it is she who forces the issue and decides to live openly with her lover. Indeed, her passion for the weak-willed, frivolous, and inconstant Alyosha has reached such a pitch that she is willing to submit to any degradation so as to cling to him and “to be his slave, his willing slave” (3: 200). But she is fully aware that her infatuation is “abject” and abnormal, springing more from a desire for domination than from a genuine love between equals. It is her pride that has been wounded by Alyosha’s philandering, and her pride impels her not only to humiliate her father but also to plunge herself into an abyss of masochistic abasement and self-torment. Once again her conflict is resolved as the result of a successful inner struggle: Natasha conquers her egoism and regains her self-respect by voluntarily surrendering Alyosha to her far more suitable rival, the young heiress Katya.
In the case of little Nellie, Dostoevsky brings this type of moral-psychological conflict, with its characteristic swing from wounded sensibility to masochistic self-laceration and sadism, into its sharpest focus. Among all the “insulted and injured,” Nellie has the most right to claim such a designation, and she has acquired a savage pride and a mistrust of humanity initially encouraged by her mother’s fierce intransigence. Nellie’s personality thus combines a youthful need for affection and love with suspicion and hatred, and she refuses at first to respond even to generosity or kindness. Dostoevsky’s depiction of her shifting moods, and of the gradual softening and taming of her spirit, are among the best sections of the book. The self-tormenting depths of Nellie’s psychology are brought out in one crucial scene, when all the embittered memories of her past have surged back in a flood and she rushes out of Ivan Petrovich’s sheltering room to beg in the streets as a gesture of defiance. Tears come to Ivan Petrovich’s eyes when he chances upon her:
Yes, tears for poor Nellie . . . she was not begging through need; she was not forsaken, not abandoned by someone to the caprice of destiny. She was not escaping from cruel oppressors, but from friends who loved and cherished her . . . she had been ill-treated; her hurt could not be healed, and she seemed purposely trying to aggravate her wound by this mysterious behavior, this mistrustfulness of us all; as though she enjoyed her own pain, by this egoism of suffering, if I may so express it. This aggravation of suffering and this reveling in it I could understand; it is the enjoyment of many of the insulted and injured, oppressed by destiny and smarting under the sense of injustice. (3: 385–386)
It is Dostoevsky himself who italicizes the phrase “egoism of suffering,” highlighting its importance because it contains the internal thematic link uniting three main centers of action: Natasha–Ikhmenyev, Natasha–Alyosha–Katya, Nellie–Ivan Petrovich. In each case, one or more of the characters respond in this fashion to some indignity or humiliation; in each the conflict is resolved when, in an act of outgoing love, the egoism of suffering is overcome.
Even though Dostoevsky had not yet decisively abandoned his old philanthropic ideals and values in The Insulted and Injured, there are still definite indications that he was continuing that revision of his past already initiated in Petersburg Visions. Such a revision is the explicit purpose of the finest scene in the book, in which Dostoevsky underscores the ineffectuality of Ivan Petrovich when openly challenged by the treacherously villainous Prince Valkovsky. This scene, for the first time, allows us to catch a glimpse of the great Dostoevsky to come. Elevating the theme of egoism to its full metaphysical dimension, Dostoevsky here momentarily lifts his soap opera plot to a new height of dignity by covertly fusing the theme of egoism with that of radical ideology, at last striking the vein that will soon provide him with a new source of inspiration.
Valkovsky’s long and gloating “confession” to Ivan Petrovich amply confirms the earlier suggestions that he is a shameless libertine; not only does he harbor a taste for the usual forms of vice, but he particularly enjoys the self-conscious desecration of the moral norms of society. Valkovsky unmasks himself for the sheer pleasure of shocking his idealistic young interlocutor, and he compares his pleasure in doing so to that of a sexual pervert exhibiting himself in public (manifestly referring to Rousseau’s Confessions). Much of this self-exposure, of course, was calculated to discredit Valkovsky in the eyes of the reader, but it also functions to disclose some of the “irrational” depths of personality equally exhibited in the behavior of the other characters. Nothing gives Valkovsky more delight, he explains, than deliberately to provoke “some ever-young Schiller,” first by pretending to take seriously “all those vulgar and worthless naïvetés and idyllic nonsense,” and then “suddenly distorting my ecstatic countenance into a grimace, putting out my tongue at him when he is least of all expecting such a surprise” (3: 360).
Valkovsky, as we see, thus criticizes Ivan Petrovich in much the same terms as the young author himself uses for Ikhmenyev and Nellie’s mother. The actual creator of Poor Folk is now placing his previous artistic self, and the values inspiring his early work, among the manifestations of that “naïve Romanticism” whose shortcomings his new novel sets out to expose. And this debunking of Ivan Petrovich becomes even more pointed when Prince Valkovsky displays his familiarity with the idea-feelings of his interlocutor. For it turns out that the Prince is not simply an inveterate blackguard but is himself a disillusioned idealist who “ages ago, in the golden days of my youth,” as he sardonically explains, once too had had “a fancy to become a metaphysician and philanthropist, and came round almost to the same idea as you.” He too had “wanted to be a benefactor of humanity, to found a philanthropic society,” and had even constructed a model hospital on his estate. But boredom had finally got the better of him—boredom, and a sense of the ultimate futility of existence. “We shall die—and what comes then!” he exclaims; and “well, so I took to dangling after the girls.” Alas, the protesting husband of “one little shepherdess” was flogged so badly that he died in the model hospital (3: 361).
Face-to-face with metaphysical ennui and the ineluctability of extinction, Prince Valkovsky discovers that the “pleasures” of philanthropy are hardly powerful enough to compensate for the vacuity of existence, and, like Cleopatra, he begins to search for stronger stimulants. Besides, the ideology of social humanitarianism was now terribly out of date, and what had replaced it, Valkovsky appreciatively informs Ivan Petrovich, comes very pat to the prince’s purposes. On being reproached for his “beastliness” by the indignant narrator, the Prince retorts that all such estimable remonstrances are “nonsense.” Moral obligations are a sham because, “What isn’t nonsense is personality—myself.” For his own part, he proclaims, “I . . . have long since freed myself from all shackles, and even moral obligations. I only recognize obligations when I see I have something to gain by them. . . . You long for the ideal, for virtue. Well, my dear fellow, I am ready to admit anything you tell me to, but what can I do if I know for a fact that at the root of all human virtue lies the completest egoism. And the more virtuous anything is, the more egoism there is in it. Love yourself, that’s the one rule I recognize” (3: 365).
By asserting a doctrine of absolute egoism against Ivan Petrovich’s “philanthropic” self-abnegation, Valkovsky thus objectifies and justifies, as a sinister philosophy of evil, the very same drives and impulses against which the “good” characters have been carrying on a moral struggle. Dostoevsky is parodying Chernyshevsky’s “rational egoism,” and Valkovsky is Dostoevsky’s first artistic reaction to the radical doctrines of the 1860s. For Dostoevsky uses Valkovsky to follow out the logic of Chernyshevsky’s position to the end—without accepting the proviso that reason and self-interest would ultimately coincide, and that egoism would miraculously convert itself into beneficence through rational calculation. Dostoevsky remembered the irrational frenzies of frustrated egoism that he had witnessed in the prison camp, and he had read Choderlos de Laclos and the Marquis de Sade. Like them, he was persuaded that to b
ase morality on egoism was to risk unleashing forces in the human personality over which Utilitarian reason had little control. Indeed, Dostoevsky’s allusions to these two writers indicates his awareness of an indebtedness to the libertine tradition of the French eighteenth-century novel, in which characters similar to Prince Valkovsky also dramatize, whether with approval or dismay, the possible consequences of putting into practice the logic of an egoism unrestrained by moral inhibitions.
Like his eighteenth-century prototypes, when Prince Valkovsky yields to the temptations of sensuality and the sadistic pleasures of desecration and domination, he finds it convenient to have a doctrine of egoistic self-interest at hand providing a philosophical rationale for his worst instincts. Since everyone possesses such instincts, even the “good” characters, who believe in a morality of love and self-sacrifice, can easily become prey to the passions of “egoism,” and Valkovsky illustrates what might happen if “egoism” were to be taken seriously as the prevailing norm of behavior. Valkovsky, as has long been accepted, is the prefiguration of such later characters as Svidrigailov and Stavrogin; he is also Dostoevsky’s first attempt, inspired by the radical ideology of the 1860s, to portray the futility of “reason” to control the entire gamut of possibilities contained in the human psyche.
Other aspects of the novel also suggest that Dostoevsky had now come to regard his past moral-political attitudes as lamentably and unforgivably naïve. There is talk of a “circle,” again linked with the Poor Folk world, that meets once a week and to which the hare-brained Alyosha has been attracted. “They all know you, Ivan Petrovich,” he burbles. “That is, they have read your works and expect great things of you in the future” (3: 308–309). What Alyosha reports of their discussions brings the group within the orbit of the “progressive” ideas of the 1840s (with a little updating). They converse, he confides, “of everything in general that leads to progress, to humanity, to love, it’s all in relation to contemporary questions. We talk of the need of a free press, of the reforms that are beginning, of the love of humanity, of the leaders of today, we read and discuss them” (3: 310). It is generally accepted that Dostoevsky is here drawing, more or less amiably, on his own experiences in the Petrashevsky Circle, handling all this as part of the same universe of illusory innocence represented by Ivan Petrovich and, at a further extreme, by Alyosha.
Since the report of the circle is conveyed by the giddy and flighty Alyosha, his words immediately characterize it as just another of his evanescent enthusiasms, engagingly youthful and refreshing and filled with the exuberance of adolescent inexperience. “We all talked of our present,” he says, “of our future, of science and literature, and talked as well, so frankly and simply. . . . There’s a high-school boy that comes too” (3: 309). The implications of this last bit of information are not lost on Prince Valkovsky, who listens to his son “with a malignant sneer; there was malice in his face,” and the prince breaks into convulsive laughter “simply to wound and to humiliate his son as deeply as possible.” But Alyosha, for the only time in the book, manages to stand up to his father and to answer him “with extreme sincerity and a sort of severe dignity.” “Yes,” he replies, “I am enthusiastic over lofty ideas. They may be mistaken, but what they rest upon is holy” (3: 311).
Such words, we may surmise, indicate the complex ambiguity that Dostoevsky himself felt about the ideals of his radical past—the ideals he had just brought back to life again in the pages of The Insulted and Injured. There was no question that they had been “mistaken,” or at least lamentably shortsighted in their view of the human condition; but he still continued to believe that what they had rested upon—the values of compassion and love—were sacred. What now prevented such values from being realized, however, was no longer primarily the deformations of character caused by an oppressive and unjust social system and a crushing political tyranny. It was, rather, the hidden forces of egoism and pride slumbering in every human breast.6
All through The Insulted and Injured, then, we can see Dostoevsky poised on the brink of a new phase of creation. Time and again in this novel we can catch suggestions of character types and motifs that serve as unmistakable harbingers of the masterpieces to come. Dostoevsky’s characters often bear a family resemblance in their psychology, and it is not too far-fetched to point out a connection between the ragged little waif Nellie in The Insulted and Injured and the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna in The Idiot. Both are consumed by the “egoism of suffering.” Both exhibit a fierce pride, a drive toward masochistic self-abasement, and an undying hatred of their persecutors and oppressors. Nellie finally overcomes her egoism at the cost of her life; so does Nastasya by offering herself as a victim to Rogozhin’s knife. What is only tearful in the early novel becomes tragic in the later one.
The same difference of level can be noted in the case of Alyosha Valkovsky, who turns out to be a first draft of Dostoevsky’s most touching effort to portray his moral ideal in the figure of Prince Myshkin. The yawning gap between the impressions produced by the two characters illustrates how Dostoevsky can employ almost identical traits to obtain very different types of significance, for while the lineaments of Myshkin are faintly profiled in Alyosha, there is no trace in him as yet of Myshkin’s supreme saintliness. The most striking attribute of Alyosha, and one that most clearly stamps him as Myshkin’s predecessor, is his capacity for living so totally in each moment of time, or in each experience and encounter, that he lacks any sense of continuity or consequence. It is thus impossible to hold him responsible for anything, or even to take offense at the chaos in other people’s lives that he unwittingly creates; he behaves completely like a child and is characterized as being one: “he was too simple for his age and had no notion of real life” (3: 202).
Alyosha is thus a pure naïf, existing outside the categories of good and evil and of social responsibility. He is genuinely unable to choose between Natasha and Katya, just as Myshkin will be unable to decide between Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya Epanchin, and the two women also meet here to decide the future of the indecisive love object. But the conflict between love as passion and love as compassion, which is one day to tear Prince Myshkin apart, is totally absent in the case of Alyosha, who flits lightly from girl to girl and is in love with them all. Alyosha is a Myshkin, as it were, still lacking a religious aura and motivated solely by ordinary human drives and instincts—a Myshkin whose childlike purity is mixed with so much self-indulgence that Dostoevsky has trouble projecting him as favorably as his role in the plot requires.
The Insulted and Injured also contains the first use of a thematic motif indissolubly connected with Dostoevsky’s major novels. “We shall have to work out our future happiness by suffering,” says Natasha, referring to her relations with her father, “pay for it somehow by fresh miseries. Everything is purified by suffering” (3: 230). Nothing is more important for a proper understanding of Dostoevsky than an accurate grasp of these words. Natasha here is responding to a question put by Ivan Petrovich: Why doesn’t she simply return home to her father and throw herself on his mercy? Her reply is that he will insist on an “impossible atonement,” will require her to renounce her past and her love for Alyosha—and to this she will not submit. Her father is still consumed by his wounded resentment, and only the prolongation of his unhappiness may ultimately soften his heart to genuine forgiveness. Natasha is not referring to material hardship or physical deprivation but rather to the process by which the ramparts of pride, egoism, and wounded self-esteem are battered down and the way left open for forgiveness and love. It is only in this sense that Dostoevsky will ever hold “suffering” to be a good.
Indeed, as if to obviate any misunderstanding, he pointedly makes clear that nothing is more despicable than to exhibit insensibility or indifference to the suffering of others, or worse, callously to impose suffering for the sake of self-advantage. For Dostoevsky, the nadir of human perversity is to justify a base or vicious act on the ground that the suffering it causes
is “good” for the unwilling victim. Prince Valkovsky takes exactly this line in cynically accounting for his behavior toward Nellie’s mother: “I reflected that by giving her back [her] money I should perhaps make her unhappy. I should have deprived her of the enjoyment of being miserable entirely owing to me, and cursing me for it all her life. . . . This ecstasy of suffering can be found in Schilleresque natures, of course; perhaps she will have nothing to eat, but I am convinced that she was happy. I did not want to deprive her of that happiness and did not send her back her money” (3: 367). The underground man, with somewhat less conviction, will use exactly the same reasoning to justify his odious humiliation of the repentant prostitute Liza in the closing scene of Notes from Underground.
These brief considerations should illustrate the anticipatory interest of Dostoevsky’s first major post-Siberian novel. Its deficiencies will only be surmounted when, a few years later, he places the theme of egoism squarely at the center of his action and portrays the radical ideologies of both the 1860s and the 1840s as having encouraged the growth and spread in Russia of this noxious moral plague. Dostoevsky will continue to employ the roman-feuilleton plot, the technique of this kind of melodramatic thriller derived from the Gothic novel by way of Scott, Dickens, and Balzac (the “urban Gothic,” as George Steiner has called it),7 and rely on its effects of suspense and dramatic surprise to rivet the attention of his reader. But he will recast it completely to eliminate its usual motivation, or better, to subordinate such motivation firmly to his own creative explorations of the ultimate moral consequences of radical belief.
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