The story traces the course of the unhappy relationship that led the child-bride to her final, despairing plunge. What attracts the narrator to the girl, when she first comes to pawn her meager belongings, is the combination of her pride and her poverty, her intelligence and her indigence. The death of her parents threw her back on two aunts, who had turned her into a virtual slave. But she is an independent character who has absorbed some of the culture and humanitarian ideals of her generation and has placed advertisements in journals in search of a position (to no avail). By no means is she ready to play a completely subservient role.
The narrator rescues her from being, in effect, sold to a much older suitor. His unexpected proposal of marriage is carefully designed to cast him in the role of a Romantic savior, but his motive is neither genuine magnanimity nor even sexual attraction (though the latter is not entirely absent). Rather, he desperately yearns for someone to recognize his outwardly demeaning life as inspired by an “idea,” someone to acknowledge the inherent righteousness and dignity of the path he has chosen, someone to look beyond his ignominious profession and dishonored past into the torments of his wounded soul. “Admitting her to my house, I desired full respect. I wished that she should look at me worshipfully for all my suffering—and I deserved it! I was always proud, and I always sought either everything or nothing” (24: 14).
This overwhelming pride determines the baneful course he adopts after the marriage. Any sign of tenderness or affection on his part might be interpreted as a humiliating appeal, as an indication of remorse or self-doubt. And so the young girl’s natural warmth of feeling, spontaneously expressed in the first days of their marriage, is stifled by his policy of coldness and seeming indifference. “The main thing was that from the very beginning, much as she tried to restrain herself, she threw herself at me with love. . . . But at once I threw cold water on all this ecstasy. Precisely therein was my idea. I reacted to these transports with silence—benevolent, of course” (12: 13).
This treatment leads to the reverse of what the narrator had anticipated. Rather than her accepting the inner sublimity (as he sees it) of her husband’s way of life, and bowing down before him in worshipful admiration, they become locked in a secret struggle of wills. “At first she argued—how hotly!—but later she left off speaking, and, finally, she grew quite silent; only, when listening, she would open her eyes awfully wide—such big, big eyes, so attentive. . . . And . . . and, besides, suddenly I noticed a smile—a distrustful, silent, wicked, smile. Well, it was with that smile that I brought her into my house” (12: 14).
Ultimately, however, the supposedly “gentle creature” unexpectedly erupts into outright rebellion. At the climax of their secret battle, waking from sleep, he sees her standing over him with a loaded pistol; and he waits in agony for her to pull the trigger, wondering whether she had seen him momentarily open his eyes. Despite her hatred, she is unable to take his life—her final and irreparable defeat. By later revealing his awareness of this incident, he can, at one stroke, remove the cloud hanging over his name because of the imputation of cowardice and also reverse the moral situation. No longer will he be the person surreptitiously seeking pardon; he will now be the kindhearted, great-souled pardoner. But the private joy of this future triumph is so great that he purposely puts off its arrival. He wishes to savor the broken mortification of his wife, who falls ill with “brain fever” and never recovers her health. “Yes, at that time there occurred to me something strange and peculiar. . . . I grew triumphant, and the very knowledge of it proved sufficient to me. This winter passes. Oh, I was content as never before—and this, all winter” (24: 23).
The dénoument occurs in the spring, after a winter spent silently sharing the same apartment but totally estranged from each other. “Of course, it was strange that not once,” says the husband, “did the thought occur to me that while I liked to look stealthily at her, never throughout the whole winter did I catch even a single glance of hers at me! I thought that this was timidity on her part” (24: 25). Far from timidity, it was a deep and unconquerable aversion—as he discovers when, suddenly seized by pity for her and possessed by his own overwhelming need for love, he finally throws himself at her feet. “She shivered and shook herself away from me in great fear, looking into my face. But, suddenly, her eyes expressed stern surprise . . . ‘So you are also after love?’—such was the question in that astonishment of hers, even though she remained silent” (24: 28). The uncontrollable fervor of the narrator, who now pours out pell-mell all the psychic torment he had been suppressing in himself and concealing from others for so many years, simply throws the unhappy girl into hysterical convulsions.
The sudden breakdown and reversal of the situation precipitates the catastrophe. The narrator is now ready to abandon everything, to give up his pawnshop and his revenge on society, if only he can recapture the love that was once within his grasp. But the sweet and gentle spirit of his wife has been irremediably estranged, and she is now consumed by guilt at her own incapacity to respond, except with profound pity, to his entreaties to begin a new life of true-hearted love. All that is left is the leap from the window, clutching to her breast the icon of the Mother of God, the symbol of the promise of eternal love. Nothing that Dostoevsky ever wrote is more poignant than the narrator’s cry of despair at the end, walking up and down beside the bier of “the gentle creature,” at a moment when the entire world has become for him an image of his desolation. “Oh, nature! Man on earth is alone—this is the calamity! . . . Everything is dead, and everywhere—nothing but corpses. Only men, and, around them, silence—such is earth. ‘Love each other’—Who said this? Whose covenant is this?” (24: 35)
Such are among the final words of one of the finest and purest creations that ever came from Dostoevsky’s pen. The subtlety and delicacy of the rendering of the narrator’s consciousness (with its blend of shock, guilt, incredulity, and some last, lingering shreds of self-justification), the brilliant portrayal of the wife through the eyes of the narrator struggling to understand what has occurred easily overcomes the all-too-familiar plot ingredients and the touch of melodrama. “A Gentle Creature” is also Dostoevsky’s best-rounded and most finely modulated portrait of his “underground man” character type. Nowhere else is he presented so fully as a sensitive and suffering human being, whose inhumanity derives from a need for love that has become perverted and distorted by egoism and vanity. What was presented only embryonically in the final episode of Notes from Underground, when the underground man egotistically rejects the offer of love tendered him by the suffering young prostitute Liza, is here developed with a mastery that fully justifies Saltykov-Shchedrin’s enthusiastic accolade.
“The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” also emerges from Dostoevsky’s preoccupation with the theme of suicide. Indeed, the story can best be seen as the second panel of a diptych, whose first is the imaginary suicide letter, “The Sentence.” These two works both echo and answer each other: starting from the same point of no return as the letter, this story ends, not in despair and suicide, but in an ecstatic affirmation of the will to live. This affirmation stems from Dostoevsky’s own belief in the possibility of an apocalyptic transfiguration of mankind, a moral regeneration of humanity as a whole, which first enters his work in the 1860s. The image of a Golden Age of human happiness crops up continuously in his notes for his novels. In “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” he expresses both the moral inspiration provided by the radiant image of the Golden Age, and the loss of the instinctive human harmony that was the source of its felicity. But he also believed—or hoped—that such an instinctive harmony might perhaps be restored, if only partially, through the inspiration of Christian compassion and love for suffering humanity.
This story, which bears the subtitle “fantastic,” relates a dream voyage to another earth, where the ridiculous man encounters a society living in a true Golden Age, before the fall and the existence of sin. The story is a conte philosophique, based on “fantasy” in t
he literal meaning of the word, and has often been compared to Voltaire’s Micromegas. But the fantasy is framed by a setting taken straight from the iconography of urban shoddiness and misery favored by the Natural School of Russian writers in the 1840s. The central figure is one of those isolated and misanthropic characters estranged from everyone; but the horizon of the ridiculous man encompasses a metaphysical-religious dimension. “I suddenly felt that it made no difference to me whether the world existed or whether nothing existed anywhere at all. . . . It was then that I suddenly ceased to be angry with people and almost stopped noticing them” (25: 105).
This conviction induces a total sense of apathy toward the outside world. He is obsessed by the thought of suicide, and on one particularly gloomy and depressing evening, when even the rain seemed “full of obvious animosity toward men” (25: 105)—he decides to put a bullet through his head. On the way home, he is stopped by a little girl appealing to him to aid her dying mother. He stamps and shouts at her to leave him in peace; but sitting in his room later, with the pistol lying ready on the table, he is upset by a new sensation. Theoretically, he should have felt nothing at all shameful about having driven away the little girl; it was totally inconsistent for a man on the brink of suicide, to whom everything in the world had become meaningless, to feel pity. And yet, as with the underground man, his heart and his head refuse to act in unison. “I recall that I felt a great pity for her—to the point of some strange pain, which was quite incredible in my situation” (25: 107).
While pondering this disturbing lapse in the conclusions he has drawn about life, he suddenly falls asleep and dreams. “In a word, that little girl saved me, since, because of the questions, I postponed the shot.” But the little girl also saves the ridiculous man in a deeper sense: the feelings stirred in him by this encounter are then projected into his dream and, on waking, he finds that he has been forever freed from the temptation of suicide. “It would seem,” Dostoevsky surmises, “that dreams are generated not by the intellect but by desires, not by the brain but by the heart” (25: 108). In his dream, the ridiculous man reveals the desires of a heart that conjures up the panorama of the Golden Age; and in Dostoevsky’s story, this opposition between head and heart, between reason and feeling, itself becomes the center of the entire spiritual history of humanity.
Dostoevsky visualizes an island in the Greek archipelago, radiant with sunlit beauty. Never before has he struck this particular note of an all-embracing harmony between man and nature. “The calm, emerald sea gently splashed against the shore embracing it with manifest, apparent, almost conscious love. Tall, beautiful trees stood there in the full luxury of their bloom, and their countless leaves—I am sure of it—welcomed me with their gentle, kind murmur, uttering, as it were, words of love” (25: 112). Love was the natural medium in which the inhabitants of this Paradise existed, or at least the aspect of their lives accessible to the comprehension of an earthling. For he realized that it was impossible for him—“a contemporaneous, progressive, and hideous Petersburg resident”—to understand them because they lived completely on the level of an intuitive feeling that was also a higher form of knowledge. Though having nothing comparable to what on earth is called science—the acme and epitome of reason—“yet their knowledge was deeper and higher than that of our science . . . I was unable to comprehend their knowledge” (25: 113). That higher knowledge is, presumably, their totally selfless and loving communion with each other and with everything.
The lives of these denizens of the Golden Age were thus completely lacking in any sort of self-consciousness, untroubled by any manifestations of egoism or vanity. “They were endowed with love and children were born to them, but never did I observe in them those impulses of cruel voluptuousness which affect virtually everybody on our earth—everybody—and which are the sole source of almost all sin in our human race.” They had no specific religion or religious doctrines about God and eternal life, but they greeted death serenely, and “one could imagine that they continued to communicate with their dead even after death.” They composed songs of praise for each other and lived in “a sort of mutual complete and universal enamoredness” (25: 113–114). To this condition of unalloyed love, which images the world before the fall of humankind into sin, the ridiculous man compares his own twisted love-hate feelings for his fellow human beings, which arose from the clash between his egoism and his longing for communion.
Somehow, the ridiculous man introduces this principle of reflexive self-consciousness and self-awareness—the ultimate psychological root of egoism—into the innocent Paradise of the Golden Age. The catastrophic result is the corruption and fall of its inhabitants. The somber emphasis is on the dialectical movement by which self-awareness engenders egoism and egoism gives rise to a world whose institutions express the loss in reality of what man becomes aware of in thought. The first step is for consciousness no longer to live in a loving harmony with others but to withdraw itself in a manner splitting the unconscious and instinctive acceptance and identification with the other. From this withdrawal arises an awareness of the ego as opposed to the other; and the psychological and sexual struggle begins, as well as “a struggle for self-isolation—for disjunction, for individuality, for ‘mine and thine.’ ” The result was a growing awareness of what had been lost and the attempt to re-create it artificially by self-conscious means. “When they became wicked, they started speaking about brotherhood and humaneness and grasped the meaning of these ideas. When they grew criminal, they invented justice and enacted for themselves codes for its maintenance, and for the enforcement of their codes they used the guillotine” (25: 115–116).
A host of evils arises in this way, which compose a litany of all the ills of civilization. Slavery, the martyrdom of holy men, fratricidal warfare, the cult and doctrine of power—all came from the belief that “science will give . . . wisdom; wisdom will reveal the laws . . . and the knowledge of the laws of happiness is superior to happiness” (25: 116). But things go from bad to worse, and culminate in the growth of a cult of suffering, but the suffering does not arise from any inner conflict or feeling of remorse. Instead, it is the perverse enjoyment of suffering as an aesthetic pleasure or as the indication of intellectual superiority. The glorification of suffering for its own sake, divorced from any relation with pity, compassion, or self-examination, is for Dostoevsky one of the ultimate corruptions of the human personality.
Overwhelmed by guilt, the ridiculous man tries to introduce his perverted innocents to Christianity and its values of self-sacrifice and suffering for others (“I implored them to crucify me; I taught them how to make the cross”). But all to no avail—they simply laughed at what they could not understand. “Finally, they announced to me that I was beginning to be dangerous to them and that they would place me in an asylum if I shouldn’t keep silent” (25: 117). This outcome so afflicts and oppresses the ridiculous man that at this point his sensations become too strong to be endured—and he awakens!
This extraordinary dream is a revelation, and tranforms his life. “Immeasurable ecstasy lifted my whole being”—and he instantly decides, like Nekrasov’s Vlas, to become an itinerant preacher of the truth vouchsafed in his dream. What the ridiculous man will preach is a very old truth, but he has faith in it because he has seen and felt all the beauty of the world in which such truth had once reigned supreme. “The main thing is—love thy neighbors as thyself.” And he has also seen the power of the enemy. “The consciousness of life is higher than life; knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness—this is what we have to fight against!” In the world to which he has returned, everyone sneers at his words and considers him mad, just as in the final phase of his dream; but his faith now can never be shaken because “I saw, saw it (Truth), and its live image filled my soul forever.” His first move on his new path is to search for the little girl: “And—I did find that little girl. . . . And I shall go on! (25: 117–118).
The ridiculous man had reached th
e stage of personal disintegration resulting from individualism and, “being conscious of everything,” had lost faith in God. But the advent of Christ on earth, according to Dostoevsky, provided humans with a new ideal, which consists of “the return to spontaneity, to the masses, but freely . . . in the highest degree willfully and consciously—and this higher willfulness is . . . a higher renunciation of the will” (20: 189–194). The ridiculous man thus devotes himself, on awakening from his dream, to preaching this return to a “higher spontaneity” through the realization on earth of the Christian law of love. He is a tragic, Russian optimist, preaching to a mocking world that he has seen the glories of the Golden Age and that they can be made real once again through Christ. The Dream of a Ridiculous Man contains Dostoevsky’s most vibrant and touching depiction of his positive moral-religious ideal, expressed far more convincingly in this rhapsodic and “fantastic” form than anywhere else in his work.
Dostoevsky Page 110
