Psychology in Dostoevsky is often linked to that special quality the Russians call Dostoevshchina. It involves gloom, suffering, self-will, self-pity, hysteria, and other exaggerated and sometimes pathological emotions that often appear in Dostoevsky’s fiction. Curiously, these elements are among the least unique in Dostoevsky’s work. They are the stock in trade for the most popular prose writers of the nineteenth century: Hoffmann, Dickens, Hugo, and all the Gothic and Sensationalist novelists of that period, particularly Poe, who is often called the inventor of the detective story and whom Dostoevsky, as a publisher and editor, introduced to Russian readers.
Certain patterns, however, are genuinely peculiar to Dostoevsky and deserve more psychological and literary study than they have received. Let us consider violence, for example. There is no shortage of it. In Crime and Punishment alone, Aliona and Lizaveta have their skulls bashed in; a landlady is seriously beaten in one dream and a horse beaten to death in another; Marmeladov’s wife hauls him about by his hair and slams his forehead against the floor; an angry coachman catches Raskolnikov with his whip; Razumikhin knocks a watchman off his feet; a tradeswoman, an abused child, and Svidrigailov all attempt suicide, the last two successfully; and in Raskolnikov’s final dream, the entire world is engulfed in lucidly self-righteous violence. Curiously, however, all this violence does not include a single good fight. With the exception of the completely abstract slaughter in the final dream, every one of these attacks is one-sided. The nearest thing to a fair fight in Crime and Punishment is the scrap between the two painters after a day’s work together: “I grabbed Mitka by the hair and knocked him down and started tearing at him, and Mitya grabbed me by the hair, from under me, and started tearing at me, and we did this not in anger, but in all affection, in play” (pt. 2, chap. 4). Lizaveta does not even raise her hand to deflect the axe, and Marmeladov, who assisted his wife’s efforts, looks up from the floor and tells Raskolnikov that this beating brings him satisfaction, naslazhdeniie (pt. 1, chap. 2).
Plainly, however, this one-sidedness in violence does not come from any inherent inability of Dostoevskian characters to resist aggression, or any universal masochism. As his journalistic career shows, Dostoevsky himself was good at reciprocating hostility. In his works, the number of two-sided contests at the verbal level is at least equal to the number of beatings on the physical level. Raskolnikov insults Razumikhin, Porfiry, and the explosive lieutenant at the police station, and all of them give as good as they get. Luzhin and Svidrigailov respond to Raskolnikov’s insults with greater restraint or irony, but they certainly could never be called submissive like Lizaveta or compliant like Marmeladov. In this novel, and in general in Dostoevsky, if violence is reciprocal, it is not physical; if it is physical, it is not reciprocal. The reverse of these statements does not hold true. If an assault is not physical, it may or may not be reciprocated: Razumikhin does not always answer Raskolnikov’s verbal assaults, and Sonya never does. If an assault is not reciprocated, it may or may not be physical: Marmeladov welcomes verbal as well as physical assaults.
Readers often remark how few happily married husbands and wives there are in Dostoevsky, although he himself was a devoted and loving family man. In her Columbia doctoral dissertation, Rima Shore points out that in Crime and Punishment the two unhappy couples, the Marmeladovs and the Svidrigailovs, are all dead by the end of the novel, and that Raskolnikov confesses to the only surviving father, the explosive lieutenant, rather than to the emphatically unmarried Porfiry, as one might otherwise expect. This absence of happy marriages might be ascribed to a novelistic tradition that marries characters off only at the end of the book, after a series of impediments and travails that constitute the plot of the novel. In Dostoevsky, however, there is virtually no good clean sex outside of marriage either, and the novelistic tradition of his day certainly accepted that. The absence of happy marriages and healthy extramarital sex might be ascribed to prudery, but that explanation will not work either because in many of Dostoevsky’s novels there is no shortage of depraved sex, which is subject to stricter taboos. In Crime and Punishment, Svidrigailov rapes a little girl and someone like him misuses the girl Raskolnikov tries to rescue on the street; Sonya and the prostitutes near Raskolnikov’s apartment earn their living through the loveless and eventually fatal selling of their bodies to satisfy desire.
This limitation of sexual encounters to depraved characters persists in all of Dostoevsky’s stories and novels. It is hard to find happy marriages or mutually fulfilling sex in any of Dostoevsky’s works. But this limitation does not come from any Dostoevskian hostility to marriage or love. Razumikhin and Dunya are two of the liveliest and loveliest lovers in all of literature, and Raskolnikov and Sonya save each other through their love, but these loves go unconsummated until the epilogue, as tends to happen with the happy love in all Dostoevsky’s other works.
There are many definitions of depravity, but for the purposes of this chapter, I should like to define it as consummated but unreciprocated desire. This definition leads to a puzzle that demands attention. In Dostoevsky’s novels, desire, like aggression, if physically consummated is not reciprocated, and if reciprocated is not consummated. As with violence, this pattern does not work backwards; unreciprocated desire may be either unconsummated, like Luzhin’s, or physical, like that of Sonya’s customers; while unconsummated desire may be reciprocated, like Razumikhin’s for Dunya, or unreciprocated, like Luzhin’s. In short, in two apparently unrelated regions of Dostoevsky’s oeuvre—desire and violence—if it is physical, it is not reciprocal, and if it is reciprocal, it is not physical.
This pattern has at least four possible explanations. Socially, in a society like Russia’s, where some people owned others, the consummation of unreciprocated desire becomes a part of interclass rather than interpersonal relations and may radiate from that center throughout the society. And in a society where the gentry dreaded the corporal powers of the tsarist bureaucracy, as Irina Reyfman has pointed out, single combat became a defining prerogative of the gentry, who go practically unrepresented in Crime and Punishment and is underrepresented in most of Dostoevsky’s works. This pair of explanations might play a small part in explaining the number of beatings and depraved sexual encounters, but it is of little use in explaining the absence of fights or sexual mutuality, both of which transcend all social limitations.
Psychologically, Dostoevsky may well have believed that in sex one partner was always stronger, more sophisticated, and in a position to exploit the more innocent and weaker. Evgeny Opochinin records him as saying this, and his sense that his sister Varvara was victimized by her older, richer husband fused with much of his reading of Sand, Thomas De Quincey, the Gothic novelists, and all the heirs of Richardson to generate a pervasive picture of exploitative physical love, sometimes reciprocated at a comparable level, as Samsonov’s practical affection for Grushenka seems to be in The Brothers Karamazov, but often depraved, like Bykov’s for Varvara in Poor Folk. Dostoevsky’s psychological vision certainly paid due attention to the phenomenon of dominance by the strong and submissiveness by those who must submit. His psychology of desire may have simply amplified this awareness into a universal pattern. With violence, however, this pattern does not work at all. In fact, the weaker often assault the stronger, who do not reciprocate. Neither Marmeladov nor Fedor Karamazov and Maksimov in The Brothers Karamazov are weaklings, but they are physically beaten by their wives. Here we are dealing with some sort of moral dominance that does not fall within the traditional range of psychological inquiry.
If both a psychological and a social explanation seem inadequate for this mutual exclusion of the physical and the reciprocal, a literary explanation remains worth exploring. The novelistic tradition emerges from earlier traditions of unrequited or unfulfilled love. Greek romance left its heroes physically victimized and their love unconsummated until an epilogic moment. Medieval romance tended to do the same, as did later novels which Bakhtin characterizes as ordeal novels. The Dunya/Razumikhin subplot in Crime and Punishment follows this Bakhtinian formula. The strikingly beautiful woman undergoes dangers and indignities in her economic and social life before an epilogic union with a brave, enduring man who has been infatuated with her from the beginning. Long before Bakhtin, in the first lines of book 1, canto 3, of The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser describes the power of such plots to stimulate one of the two emotions Aristotle expected of dramatic plots:
Nought is there under heav’ns wide hollownesse,
That moves more deare compassion of mind,
Then beautie brought t’ unworthie wretchednesse
Through envies Snares, or fortunes freakes unkind.
(1.3.1–4)
But pity is only one of Dostoyevsky’s novelistic goals. A beating or a one-sided assault can produce a moral sense of wrong being done, while a fair fight stimulates very different emotions. The assaults in Dostoevsky and the consummation of depraved desire can both appeal to our moral indignation in ways that a fair fight or happy love cannot. This is the spirit not of the ordeal but of melodrama, in which the goodness of the victim, more than the beauty and worthiness, involves the readership in the story. At every step of a literary plot, it is helpful to have a wrong that needs to be righted. The reader desires justice, and whether the siuzhet satisfies that desire or not, the reader continues to turn the pages. This explanation works for much of the violence and the depraved love in Dostoevsky, but not all of it. Raskolnikov’s encounters with the abused girl or the prostitutes on the street have marks of closure which make them too episodic to produce any reader expectations at all. The majority of the assaults on Fedor Karamazov seem eminently satisfying, and Marmeladov certainly deserves the treatment his wife gives him, although it may not work as negative reinforcement.
To seek a solution to this puzzle about the parallel structures of desire and violence in Dostoevsky, let us turn to one of the many moments when these two elements share the stage: Dunya’s visit to Svidrigailov in his apartment. In the past Svidrigailov has been both the victim and the beneficiary of Marfa Petrovna’s unreciprocated desire, selling himself much as Sonya does professionally and as Dunya has tried to do as the victim and beneficiary of Luzhin’s unreciprocated desire. Svidrigailov has tried to exploit his lordly provincial power over Dunya, but her Sandean spiritedness has, as he puts it, “done more harm to me than I to you, even in the country” (pt. 6, chap. 5). Now he has the new power of blackmail over her, threatening to denounce her brother as a murderer; in addition, as he himself points out, he is twice as strong as she is, in a completely isolated apartment, a standard location for melodramatic victimization. Svidrigailov is not Luzhin; for him, power is an instrument of lust, not an object of it, but he is prepared to use it ruthlessly until Dunya pulls a revolver on him, to which he responds, “Well, that altogether changes the course of events.” Certainly, as Mao Zedong and Davy Crockett knew, a revolver does alter the power relationship. Rape might at first seem to be the place where desire and violence meet most clearly, but rape seems to be motivated by power more often than by desire. The assault on Dunya that Svidrigailov contemplated may be exceptional in using violence for the sake of desire and not of power. He continues, however, “You are simplifying the matter extraordinarily, Avdotya Romanovna.” “The matter” is probably not Svidrigailov’s anticipated suicide; the decision on that is not final until after Dunya rejects him definitively.
Rather, he is stating that his newly acquired weakness gives him some power over Dunya, just as her powerlessness in the provinces coupled with a little bit of luck gave her the power to reject him. Indeed, with a little bit of luck and the power of helplessness, he turns her unreciprocated assault with a gun into a complete defeat when she casts the revolver aside, returning herself to helplessness. At this point, she regains that same power she had possessed in the provinces. He puts his arm around her waist and she beseechingly says, “Let me go!” He trembles and asks, “So you don’t love me?” She shakes her head, and he whispers, in despair, “And…you can’t, ever?” When she answers, “Never,” he lets her go. Here, we have desire which may at some point have been reciprocated; the text offers no hard evidence to support either Dunya’s angry denial or Svidrigailov’s insinuating assertion. Since his wife’s death, in any case, his desire has been entirely unreciprocated, and only power can lead to its physical consummation. But power in this scene works backwards, as it tends to work in Svidrigailov’s life. He kills the wife who holds power over him and the people he kills all haunt him, much as Lizaveta and the old pawnbroker haunt Raskolnikov, from the total powerlessness of death. If power forms the link that explains the parallel mechanisms of violence and desire in Dostoevsky, it is more often than not paradoxical power. The beaten and the sexually exploited inherit the earth. In both these cases the power of weakness becomes central. I would suggest that the unifying element that explains the incompatibility of the reciprocal and the physical may well be this paradox of power in these two areas, desire and aggression. For Dostoevsky, victims become victors. If tragedy is about the weakness of the strong, novels—or at least this kind of novel—are about the power of the weak.
This insight was not original with Dostoevsky; Jesus, for example, came to it earlier, and Dostoevsky was deeply Christian. But Dostoevsky’s contribution to the history of psychology does not lie in the originality of his discoveries. It lies in the way he brought the insights of his time (and of Jesus’s, and Sophocles’s too) before the kind of reader who passionately intellectualizes a fictional world. He made the psychological novel a philosophical instrument by using parallel plots to explore the ways characters’ ideas about the world were related to their personalities and their relationships to power. His ideas feel original because he carries us through the process of discovering them.
And because his novelistic, religious, social, and psychological imperatives each reinforced all the others, he could control all of the elements in his fiction to achieve the integrity of impact that made his vision of humanity particularly contagious. He made us feel that psychology is part of the novelistic whole.