The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Consider, as a test case, Gogol’s Petersburg stories of urban poverty and humiliation. His narrators look in on the story from the outside with some glee, moving the sufferer rather quickly to his denouement. Akaky Akakievich falls ill and dies within a page, Poprishchin is committed to a madhouse in half-a-dozen diary entries after which we can assume he dies there – or at least falls silent. Following in Gogol’s footsteps, Dostoevsky takes the same clerk but postpones the end, endows him with more self-awareness and pride, and cuts off the escape. Madness must be lived through at length, and dying people talk right down to the finish line. Since Dostoevsky’s clerks are not just alone but terribly lonely, they seek wherever possible to turn their inner torment into an addressed dialogue. Thus – to take only the pre-exile fiction – DostoevskyfirstreworksPoprishchin’sclerklyconfessions as an epistolary novel (Poor Folk, 1846); then as a transcript of schizophrenia, with several sides of a single personality in erratic, edgy communication with one another (The Double, 1846); finally as a dream-fantasy addressed equally to the reader and to a possibly dreamed-up love object (White Nights, 1848). As these lengthy painful exercises unfold, the hero’s humiliation, embarrassment, and need to hide from himself become so great that his consciousness must “burst out” into some sort of freedom – but not as Gogol’s heroes do, not one-way, disappearing down the street. In Dostoevsky, bursts or explosions are contained within the narrative, as “scandal,” and they tend only to confuse the survivors. They resolve nothing. Bursting out into the freedom to commit murder – Raskolnikov’s route – is an impulse we begin to understand only after the whole length of Crime and

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Punishment. This “will to murder” is refined in the later novels, where rebellion can assume exclusively intellectual forms.

One aspect of Gogol’s storytelling remains constant for Dostoevsky’s art from start to finish, resurfacing in the Symbolist novel. This is the suspicion that authorship itself is the product of demonic pride – and thus a cunning, evasive, unreliable narrator is the most appropriate vehicle for it.2 When “doubles” appear to the tormented heroes in Dostoevsky’s mature work (most famously, Ivan Karamazov’s petty devil), they infuriate and terrorize their interlocutors not by threats of eternal fire and brimstone, but by reminding them of their earlier words, ideas, or creations, which – however wise or clever they seemed at the time – now embarrass them. The devil straps our old stories to our back and won’t let us outgrow them. “I forbid you to speak of ‘The Grand Inquisitor,’ Ivan exclaimed [to his apparition], blushing all over with

shame.”3

What about Tolstoy? Although also a great master at portraying social anguish and public shame, in his deepest concerns Tolstoy starts and ends elsewhere. Of more significance to him than exposure and censure by others (for Tolstoy always rushed to censure himself first) was honor. His definition of the term was not Pushkin’s – Tolstoy respected different codes, and he related “honor” more directly to “honesty” as he understood that quality – but it was well within the Pushkinian tradition. For Tolstoy too there was a violent component to honor, the obligation to face hostile fire and sudden death. But Tolstoy takes honor out of the duel and places it on the battlefield. War remained centrally important to him, even after his crisis and conversion of the early 1880s, when he began to advocate exclusively non-violent modes of resisting evil, including conscientious objection to military service. Near the end of his life, this committed pacifist was still working on his Chechen novel Hadji Murad (1904–07), which ends in an epic orgy of slaughter astonishing in its inevitability and purity. The torso of the besieged Hadji Murad is slowly filling up with bullets, but “his strong body continued the thing that he had commenced.”4 This “thing” was the act of dying, which was beyond pain, feeling, desire, and judgment. When a soldier took his dagger to the head of Hadji Murad, stretched out on the ground, it seemed that “someone was striking him withahammer andhecould not understand who was doingitorwhy. That was his last consciousness of any connexion with his body. He felt nothing more and his enemies kicked and hacked at what had no longer anything in common with him” (p. 667).

In the death of this brave warrior we witness the creation of a Tolstoyan “double,” not by a psyche splitting in two (as in Dostoevsky), but by a body being severed from the spirit. The death of Hadji Murad is a lapidary Tolstoyan

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