The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Dostoevsky was devoted to the printed word, and so are his fictional characters. Several strategies exist for “replaying the words of a book.” Dostoevsky was adept at them all. The author can take an earlier literary character and re-run his plot, but only after endowing the character with more consciousness and thus with more intricate conflicts. Such is Dostoevsky’s technique in The Double (1846), which portrays a madman not according to the usual author–reader contract – that is, with the madness present as a written trace – but in a far less stable form. The model for Dostoevsky’s tale, Gogol’s Diary [or Notes] of a Madman (1835), had chosen for its strategy the externalized written trace, accessible as a document from the outside, which establishes a reassuring distance between reader and madman. Dostoevsky replays the slide into insanity from the inside, before any transcript of it could be made. With schizophrenia, this is not an easy task. We watch, or hear, the consciousness of Golyadkin break in two, as one side of his humiliated persona tries to assure the other side that everything he does is “normal, quite all right” (visiting his doctor, forcing his way into a party uninvited, or simply waiting on the trash-filled landing for the right moment to enter, knowing it will cause a scandal and in denial about that knowledge). Finally, one side of this persona actually materializes, breaks off into a body, and evolves from Golyadkin’s companion into his rival and betrayer.

Hoveringoverthesesplit,frightened,defensivevoicesis anarratorwithaccess to all three perspectives – but only erratically. That access might be an illusion

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as well. The reader cannot know, just as Golyadkin’s mind cannot know, the reliability of any source. Although the beginning and end of the story remain Gogol’s, the madman’s experience in between is thicker and scarier. The reader no longer merely observes a single disintegrating consciousness but participates in it, and must work hard to ascertain who is speaking, and from where. This technique, which grew out of an apprenticeship to Gogol, became Dostoevsky’s signature narrative style.

Another strategy for replaying a book occurs in Dostoevsky’s maiden work, Poor Folk. The poor clerk of this epistolary novel, Makar Devushkin, receives from Varenka, his female correspondent and platonic love interest, two stories to read: Pushkin’s “Stationmaster” (one of the Belkin Tales) and Gogol’s “Overcoat.” He misreads both – which is Dostoevsky’s device for deepening our understanding of the hero. Devushkin, an aspiring writer in the Age of Realism, has no concept of fiction. He loves the Pushkin story because he identifies with (and sympathizes with) Dunya’s father, the embittered old man who takes to drink after losing his daughter to the dashing Minsky. But Devushkin is scandalized by “The Overcoat.” Clearly it had been written by someone who had spied on him, in all his poverty and misery. “I can no longer live in peace in my little corner,” Devushkin complains. Who knows what other people will “worm their way into my nest, to spy out how I’m living . . . whether I have boots and how they’ve been soled, what I eat, what I drink, what I copy out.”26 As their exchange of letters proceeds, however, this untalented reader Devushkin, who eventually loses his Varenka to her earlier seducer, actually learns how to see and to write. His literary tastes, initially appalling (trashy steamy potboilers and parodies of Gogol’s Ukrainian tales), improve dramatically. His final letters to Varenka describe the lives and deaths in his tenement house with discreet compassion. Then she departs. His real life lost out to their epistolary novel.

The darkness of this theme expands as Dostoevsky’s talent matures. Both White Nights and Notes from Underground feature a hero – or anti-hero – of contemporary consciousness cobbled together out of literary bits and pieces. In the longer novels, this “underground” tension between “writing down an event in order to be honest to it” and “writing down an event so that others can read it as a piece of literature” produces the false confession. These documents are intended by their confessing authors to lend dignity to their lives, over which they have lost control. Most of them fail. Midway through The Idiot, at Prince Myshkin’s birthday party at Pavlovsk, the eighteen-year-old Ippolit, in and out of hysteria and dying of consumption, reads out loud to a reluctant gathering his just-authored “Essential Explanation” that is to preface his suicide at dawn (Part III, chs. 4–7). The document crams into one breathless sequence all his convictions, experiences, personal outrage, dreams – the final testament by

148 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature