Dostoevsky’s hero in Poor Folk is a poor, abused copy clerk in the vast Xerox-less Russian bureaucracy, as is the hero of Gogol’s most famous short story, “The Overcoat” (1842). The hero of Poor Folk reads this story, as he does “The Station Agent,” and reacts with the same unsophisticated sorrow. This sorrow carries Dostoevsky into direct competition with Gogol. The plot of all of Gogol’s greatest works is very simple: paradise lost. Usually, it is fairy-gifts, a nonexistent paradise: the estate of the hero of Dead Souls, or the greatness of the Inspector General. In “The Overcoat,” the paradise is, for a moment, really there. The poor clerk shivers and starves himself until he can buy an overcoat, and rejoices in it; when it is stolen, he dies. We have learned about his psyche primarily from what happens to him and what he does. Dostoevsky’s poor clerk also loses the object of his longing, that for which he has starved and sacrificed, but this is a human being, not a piece of cloth. And his hero has poured out a soul in his letters. Dostoevsky has challenged the two greatest writers of the previous generation by taking the plots of two of their greatest stories and giving their heroes psyches.
By the time he wrote Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky had long since turned, as the European novel had two generations earlier, from the letter novel to the mature psychological novel. After a decade in prison camp and exile, Dostoevsky returned to a St. Petersburg where Dead Souls and Eugene Onegin were about to relinquish center stage to a new, radical, idealistic, and, in fact, ideological novel, Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (1863). True to form, Dostoevsky challenges this new literary leader. Dostoevsky’s first world-famous work, Notes from Underground (1864), undermines this Chernyshevsky’s novel without the admiration that characterizes his emulation of Pushkin and Gogol.
We have touched on the rich past of the psychological novel in the eighteenth and later centuries, but it goes on being disinvented by ideologues and goes on having to be reinvented by their opponents because the subtleties of psychology defy most ideologies. As is frequently asserted, Dostoevsky reacted against the sensationalist sexual and social doctrines and the utopian and utilitarian politics of What Is to Be Done?, but he also reacted against it novelistically in the realm of causality. For Chernyshevsky, events are linked to one another by a clear sense that certain human beings are in control of their destinies, that possession of a strong will and correct ideas would enable human beings to reshape their lives or the whole world for the better. Much has been written about the influence of Nietzsche on the Nazis, but scholars have only begun to realize the impact of Nietzsche’s thinking upon the Communists, partly because Bazarov, Rakhmetov, Sanin, and other characters from nineteenth-century Russian novels had already brought essentially Nietzschean values into the literary world the old Bolsheviks were brought up in.
Chernyshevsky saw little need to explain his characters psychologically because he viewed them as social types. Let us consider the scene where Chernyshevsky’s narrator asks what sort of a person the hero, Lopakhin, is. The narrator answers that Lopakhin is the kind of person who, impoverished and dressed in rags, refuses to give way to a domineering and self-satisfied officer he meets striding down the street. Instead, Lopakhin picks the man up, casts him into a muddy ditch and threatens to drag him through it, then pulls him up, behaves as if the man has had an accident, and sends him on his way. Novelistically, Dostoevsky reacts angrily against the fact that Lopakhin fulfills the needs of Chernyshevsky’s egalitarian politics and theories of universal human dignity, but has no psyche or inner motivation. Chernyshevsky invented a literary character in modern times that would bother to defend his right of way on the sidewalk and be greatly concerned with his costume while doing so. Robin Hood in merry England or Tybalt in fair Verona might care, of course, but a nineteenth-century Russian who worried about his dignity that much in that way would have to be very strange. Dostoevsky in response invented a man so insignificant that he tended to be ignored, and so insecure about existing at all that he constantly—offensively—demanded attention. The Underground Man challenges Chernyshevsky’s doctrines in many ways, but the childishness of his psychology challenges the whole idea of writing a novel made up of exemplary characters and exemplary actions but lacking anything Dostoevsky would consider an inward life. For the Underground Man, giving way on the street acquires an enormity whose very morbidity draws attention to Lopakhin’s lack of any psychology at all.
Chernyshevsky might ignore the psyche and isolate the social motives of his heroes, but Dostoevsky could not ignore the social; he had to realize that most of our actions emerge from the interplay between our social and our psychological identities, but as a novelist he discovered several ways of exploring the psyche in isolation from the social. The Underground Man theorizes about determinism and its implication that our actions were entirely external in origin—that we only react like piano keys, as predictably as logarithms—but he counters this with the assertion that in reality we often act contrary to our external interests, or even ignore them completely. This assertion of the gratuitous opens an area where a novelist can explore the psyche in pure action, undiluted by reaction. In the language of Émile Zola’s later essay “Le roman experimental” (1880), the gratuitous act allows a novelist to conduct this part of his experiment with pure chemicals and reveal the true nature of a given character’s psyche. Dostoevsky uses the probe of the gratuitous to explore the identity of his unreasonable characters, the first of whom is Goliadkin, the hero of his second novel The Double. Goliadkin sometimes responds to the words or actions of his colleagues in the office or of his doctor, but we learn the most about him when he simply surveys his nose, charters a carriage, walks into a store and buys nothing, or ruinously crashes a party, These actions are uncaused, thus outlining the extraordinary concern with his appearance that enables the illusion, the reality, or the practical joke of a double to destroy him. For other characters, gratuitous acts may be rare, but they reveal the psyche with the same clarity.
The Double was attacked for imitating Gogol, but Dostoevsky probably derived its causal system more from the tales and novels of Hoffmann. He once told his wife that the idea of this novel was the best he had ever had, and though he republished all his early works many times, The Double is the only one he bothered to rewrite many years later, reducing such eighteenth-century elements as letters and elaborate chapter titles. We do not know exactly what the word “idea” meant in his remark, but his intellect worked novelistically far better than it did systematically. In the plot of this novel, the disintegrating Goliadkin has a series of experiences whose causes could take many shapes. The arrival of an office colleague with an identical name could be explained as a strange coincidence, a practical joke, a supernatural event, or the delusion of a perception sinking into madness. Dostoevsky provides strong evidence for each of these plots and no basis for selecting among them, so that the cognitive dissonance drives the reader towards a disintegration very like Goliadkin’s.
In Crime and Punishment, the murder is overdetermined; we know of Raskolnikov’s poverty, his reaction to his sister’s engagement to Luzhin, his superstitious reaction to a chance encounter with the idea of a murder like the one he is contemplating, his longing to be one of the elite who are eligible for crime, and so on, but the Raskolnikov who emerges at the end of the novel plans a marriage with a dying girl and runs into a burning building to rescue children he does not know.
These gratuitous acts reveal Raskolnikov more clearly than the caused ones. They also reveal an interesting difference between Dostoevsky and Freud. For Freud, the unconscious lacks the ability to analyze and moralize. In Crime and Punishment, the unconscious is deeply moral; Raskolnikov’s dreams and impulsive actions struggle against his rational mind’s rejection of moral values. There is nothing original in Dostoevsky’s use of the gratuitous for the exploration of unusual psychologies. Poe, Laclos, Honoré de Balzac, and countless others had used it before him. But he made it a major instrument for investigating one of the key elements of psychology, which Poe had called “the perverse” and Dostoevsky called “the paradoxical.”
A second way of exploring a psyche outside the realm of caused actions and reactions is to place characters in a position of total helplessness where nothing they do will make any difference. What one does at such a moment expresses one’s pure identity. Marmeladov places himself in such a position, and asks Raskolnikov, “Have you ever known, Sir, what it is to have nowhere to turn?” (pt. 1, chap. 2). The Gentle Creature marries the horrible pawnbroker when the alternative is the same. The child Stavrogin rapes and the abused children Ivan Karamazov describes all experience this total helplessness, which enables them to express suicidal despair, faith in a child’s God, or whatever else constitutes the center of the identity Dostoevsky has created for them. A major character like Mitya Karamazov reveals his particular pattern of dependency and childlike credulity when he visits Kuzma Samsonov and Madame Khokhlakova at a moment when there is absolutely no chance that they or anybody else would offer him the money to save what is left of his honor. Such situations raise central questions about the Dostoevskian plot, because the driving force of the fabula is normally cause and effect, and in these situations, actions are taken with no cause.
We have observed that motivation differs from other causation because it operates independently of time. The cause of an action may be an anticipated result rather than an action already taken, but in hopeless or gratuitous situations, the cause is explicitly removed, something that can happen in fiction, though not in history. History claims that events occurred, and in some cases it may assert that their causes are unknown, but in fiction, an unknown or assertedly nonexistent cause is not just unknown but simply not there. One can, of course write a book like The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, which is not a work of literary criticism but a work of art about other works of art, but we can never know why Mitya Karamazov’s mother married old Fyodor. The text that calls her action gratuitous is the only arbiter on that issue.
Chernyshevsky did not drive Dostoevsky to reinvent the psychological novel, but Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment are part of an ongoing sequence. Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, and Chernyshevsky, when each was the most celebrated prose experimenter in Russia, described the deeper motives of their characters briefly, if at all. Dostoevsky challenged them all by psychologizing their causal systems.