The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Dostoevsky favors built-up, congested environments: a prison barracks, a tenement building, houses strung out along a street. Spatial thresholds – windows, door-jams, corridors, fences, stairways, and landings – are prominent in this architecture. The plot leaps forward at moments of tense eye-to-eye contact over a threshold, as when Raskolnikov, in a panic, commits two murders just inside the door, or when the jealous Rogozhin pulls a knife on Prince Myshkin,

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the Idiot, at the top of the stairs. For Dostoevsky, truths are released in crisis time. In the calmer, more coherent and linear time-space of the criminal trial, such as the lengthy legal procedure during which Dmitry Karamazov is found guilty of parricide, truths are bungled or lost. At the end of The Double, Golyad-kin is committed to a madhouse by the very double he has himself conjured up as his successful fantasy self. Before this ghastly final stop, Golyadkin’s look-alike toady delivers him to his doctor’s house, where suddenly a high-ranking dignitary appears in an armchair at the top of the landing. “The front door opened with a crash . . . Sick with horror, he looked back. The whole of the brightly-lit staircase was thick with people. Inquisitive eyes were watching him from all sides. . . . Our hero gave a scream, and clutched his head. Alas! He had felt this coming for a long time!”12 The passage of time merely reveals what was always true.

Around the edges of a Dostoevskian townscape, nature can be oppressive. Petersburg is a city of dirty slush, rain, unbearable heat, but its weather is always symbolically marked. Nature can also seem magical, as it does to the Dreamer wanderingthe streetsduring WhiteNights,orin theimageof “sticky greenleaves in the spring” that intoxicate Ivan Karamazov. Dostoevsky can mesmerize with glimpses of the natural or non-urban world. The placid Siberian steppe as seen from Raskolnikov’s hard-labor camp in the Epilogue of Crime and Punishment is one such moment, preparing us for the hero’s rebirth; other moments are nostalgic, such as the utopian vision of a Garden in the “Dream of a Ridiculous Man” (1876). But these spaces are always only glimpsed. The hero or heroine cannot enter them in a practical way or work in them. They are either transitory or hopelessly lost in time, either past or future. Nature does not exist on its own, under the open sky.

In Dostoevsky’s typically explosive, “built” environment, natural and biological cycles are muted. Over time, families tend to break down. Except for the occasional unsatisfying snack in a pub, discussion over cognac, or scandal at a funeral feast, Dostoevsky’s characters do not sit down to regular meals, nor do they sleep normal hours, go out to work, or observe fixed schedules. If a child is born, it dies within hours or weeks. Men and women often rush, but to nowhere in particular, simply beyond the boundaries of the story. This abruptness and disorder is only partly explained by poverty. Energy is not spent on maintenance or on routine material things. (In The Idiot, the robust lunches of cheese, honey, and cutlets enjoyed by the three “tall, blooming, sturdy” daughters of General Epanchin, who “took no pains to conceal their appetites” and were in no hurry to get married (Part I, ch. 4), are comically presented – a tribute to Gogol in Dostoevsky’s world.) Crisis events give rise to a huge amount of talk, but never small talk; all parties are well read, intellectually curious,

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articulate even when drunk, and keen to debate topics in ethical philosophy. The pace can be frenetic – these huge novels are short on clock time, lasting from a few days to a few months – but there is always time to tell one more story.