Dostoevskii’s correspondence of the 1840s, and in particular the letters sent to his brother Mikhail, to whom he was especially close both emotionally and intellectually, disclose an individual acutely sensitive to his role as a budding author. On the most immediate level the letters reveal Dostoevskii’s keen awareness of the economic realities of the profession he has decided to adopt. References to money, indebtedness and publishers’ advances are everywhere, alongside the occasional and not entirely convincing assertion that he writes primarily for money: ‘What’s the point of fame here, when I’m writing to earn a crust?’ (XXVIII/1, 106; letter of 24 March 1845). He describes the writer’s relationship to the publisher as that of a slave to his master (XXVIII/1, 128; 7 October 1846) and even draws attention to the alarming number of German poets who have died of hunger and cold or have ended up in asylums (XXVIII/1, 108; 24 March 1845). Behind these details we can discern Dostoevskii’s emerging awareness of himself as a figure in an established literary tradition. He constantly refers to and compares himself to other writers, both European and Russian: he relates his financial hardship to that experienced by Pushkin and Gogol before their fame was secure (XXVIII/1, 107; 24 March 1845); in revising for the umpteenth time his drafts of Poor Folk, he justifies himself by reference to the writing and rewriting practices of Chateaubriand, Pushkin, Gogol and Laurence Sterne (XXVIII/1, 108; 4 May 1845); he draws comfort from the fact that the hostility aroused in some quarters by his novel is no worse than that experienced by Pushkin and Gogol; and he is sensitive to the fact that he is in competition with several other new writers such as Goncharov and Herzen (XXVIII/1, 120; 1 April 1846). With the success of Poor Folk he also becomes extravagantly aware of his own fame and pre-eminence in contemporary Russian literature.
A particularly interesting development from this is the fact that Dostoevskii derives from this sense of being in a literary tradition not only his self-image, but also on occasion his voice and verbal persona. We sense in his letters from as early as 1838 the discontinuity between the dry narrative style in which he recounts his school experiences and the assumption of a romantically elevated linguistic register in order to discuss literary matters. For example, in referring to a poem by his brother, he comments that ‘inspiration, like a heavenly mystery, sanctifies the pages over which you have wept and posterity will continue to weep’ (XXVIII/1, 55; 31 October 1838). Elsewhere, he describes the sufferings of his friend Ivan Shidlovskii in terms of those experienced by literary characters such as Pushkin’s Onegin (XXVIII/1, 68; 1 January 1840). These examples are perhaps a mark of the young Dostoevskii’s naivety and a measure of the extent to which he has withdrawn from reality, but they also suggest the degree to which the experience of literature was incorporated into the way he saw his world.
This chapter attempts to explore the related theme of how literature and Dostoevskii’s willingness to appropriate it inform the way he approached the writing of his own fictional texts in the 1840s. By this I do not mean to offer a study of how other writers might have ‘influenced’ Dostoevskii, for this has been attempted many times before, and in any case it is debatable whether so general a concept as ‘influence’ can be reduced to anything genuinely meaningful in attempting to understand how Dostoevskii went about his writing. Instead, what follows takes the form of two case studies of specific ways in which the discussion of literature and writing forms part of the author’s strategies in the creation of his early works. The first of these looks at the ways in which Dostoevskii’s first novel exploits the opportunities offered by the epistolary narrative form for setting up a tension between the contributions made to the text by the letter-writers, on the one hand, and by the author-figure on the other. The second examines the use made of ‘source’ texts by Pushkin and Gogol throughout Dostoevskii’s work of this period.
The figure of the little government clerk, crushed by poverty and his own insignificance in the bureaucratic and social hierarchy in which he worked and lived, had become a cliché of the so-called Natural School of Russian literature by the 1840s. Championed by the great social and literary critic Vissarion Belinskii, the ‘School’ was characterised by works structured upon the naturalistic description of the lower reaches of Russian social life, often combined with a sentimental account of the depredations inflicted by that society on its lowly victims. Today, the reader who adopts Belinskii’s reading of Poor Folk and interprets the figures of Makar Devushkin and Varvara Dobroselova just as social lessons, incarnations of the downtrodden heroes of sentimental naturalism and material for those who would champion social equality, will surely quickly tire of the drab self-righteousness of these characters. That is not to say that we should not acknowledge their origins in the portrait gallery of the Natural School. However, the reader who goes on to recognise both them and their correspondence as products of, and ingredients in, Dostoevskii’s playful engagement with his own reading and his reflection on literary traditions and forms will sense above all the striking modernity (if not ‘post-modernity’) of his first novel. To read Poor Folk simply as a critically engaged, naturalistic work is to consign it to the past as a not particularly inspired example of the European social novel. To read it as a meditation on literature is to set free its rich, sophisticated and enduring irony.
Both explicitly and implicitly, the discussion of literature is everywhere in Poor Folk. On the one hand, and despite Dostoevskii’s protestation in a letter of 1 February 1846 that he does not allow his own ‘mug’ to show in the novel (XXVIII/1, 117), we sense the presence of the young author knocking at the door of literary fame and affirming his credentials for admission through a display of his own reading. Literary allusions are scattered like calling cards as Dostoevskii seeks to locate his novel against a background of literary tradition and history. Thus the very form chosen for the novel invites us to consider its relationship to the traditional practice of the epistolary novel. Is Dostoevskii betraying his inexperience by the adoption of an outmoded form, or is he seeking to renegotiate the terms of its practice? There are many other references to individual authors and works of literature. The servants in the house are referred to as Teresa and Faldoni, after the heroes of a sentimental epistolary novel by the French writer N. G. Léonard, translated into Russian in 1804. The inserted narrative of Varenka’s early life owes much to the plot of Katenka, or the Child of Misfortune, the translation of a novel by F. G. Ducray-Duminil which appeared in Russia in 1820. (In the original the heroine’s name is Emma.) The works of Ducray-Duminil were very popular in Russia, and Makar Devushkin makes reference to another of them, The Little Bell-Ringer (I, 59; 1 July). Devushkin is ironically referred to by his fellow-lodger Rataziaev as Lovelace, the hero of Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa (I, 79; 11 August). Rataziaev himself is a littérateur, much admired by Devushkin but recognisable to the reader, through the texts that Devushkin quotes verbatim and at length, as a parody of the over-blown Romanticism of A. A. Bestuzhev-Marlinskii and other writers of the time (I, 52–3; 26 June). At one point, oblique reference is made to the current Russian taste for the literary ‘physiological sketch’: ‘books with little pictures and various descriptions’ (I, 60; 1 July), and Devushkin’s letter of 5 September contains an implied engagement with Grigorovich’s work in that mode, The Organ-Grinders of St Petersburg (I, 86). Most evident of all, of course, among the metafictional elements of Poor Folk is the polemic it sustains with Pushkin and Gogol, as Devushkin confronts in their works what he sees as conflicting images of himself. Other literary allusions to which we could refer have already been treated at length in the existing critical literature.1
Of course, the epistolary form of Poor Folk means that such references to Dostoevskii’s reading emerge initially as evidence of Devushkin’s. This alerts us to the fact that this is a text in which, as Vinogradov has pointed out,2 the hero himself becomes a man of letters and sometimes wittingly, but more often than not unwittingly, defines and refines his self-image through the medium of literature. By making Devushkin a writer and allowing direct access to his correspondence with Varvara, Dostoevskii enriches Poor Folk with the ambiguities offered by an apparently unmediated narrative form. For example, from the outset he exploits the epistolary novel’s pretence at the condition of ‘framelessness’, i.e. the apparent absence of an overall organising authorial presence. We are almost, but not quite, plunged directly into the correspondence, and the novel ends with us reading Devushkin’s final despairing letter. The words on the page are those of the participants in the fiction: no conclusions are drawn, nor any comments made, in the absence of an authoritative narrative voice. As Dostoevskii wrote to his brother Mikhail in February 1846, ‘people don’t understand how it is possible to write in such a style. They are accustomed to seeing the author’s mug in everything, and I have not shown mine. It never occurred to them that it is Devushkin speaking, not me, and that Devushkin cannot speak in any other way’ (XXVIII/1, 117).
But, as John Jones has pointed out,3 this is a tease on Dostoevskii’s part, and the pretence at framelessness is a device used by the author to enlarge the concerns of his novel beyond those accessible to its protagonists. The clearest evidence of the fallacy of authorlessness is the presence of an epigraph. Who put it there? And for what purpose? Given its content and its impatient dismissal of storytellers who write about unsavoury matters, we can be certain that it does not come from either Devushkin or Varvara, unless in their metaliterary guise they have assumed a hitherto unsuspected sense of irony. Moreover, the epigraph is not a neutral quotation from Prince V. F. Odoevskii’s tale A Living Corpse (1838): it has been altered. The infinitive form zapretit’ (to forbid), which in Odoevskii’s original yields the impersonal final sentence: ‘They should be forbidden from writing; they should simply be forbidden altogether’, is replaced in the text of Poor Folk by a masculine past tense, which changes the emphasis to the much more personal: ‘I would forbid them from writing; I would simply forbid them altogether.’ Is this an insignificant and unintentional event, a mere mistranscription on Dostoevskii’s part, one more likely in the old Russian orthography of the time? Or is it a conscious attempt to conjure up a narrative persona out of a deliberate misquotation? If so, who is this ‘I’? Is it Dostoevskii ‘showing his mug’ after all? Or, more intriguingly, is it the malevolent Rataziaev, the author who not only threatens to put Devushkin and Varvara in a novel, but who is also in a position to lay hands on their correspondence? Devushkin’s final letter implies that he is ill and that his days are numbered, and we can be certain that he has kept all Varvara’s letters to him for his nosy neighbour to find after his death. Moreover, before her departure Varvara writes that she has left all Devushkin’s letters to her in the top drawer of a chest of drawers in Fedora’s room, a clear trail that Rataziaev might have followed!
Definitive answers to the questions identified above are elusive, but in any case they are less important than the fact that such questions are raised in a way that invites us to focus on the nature of the text of Poor Folk. The same is true of the gaps in the correspondence that have been noted by John Jones. He supplies convincing textual evidence that some letters are missing from the correspondence as it is presented.4 Compare this with Varvara’s insistence, cited above, that she has returned all Devushkin’s letters! Such missing letters also eat away at the illusion of framelessness, for someone has decided to omit them from the exchange while simultaneously leaving evidence pointing to the fact that they once existed. Through such tactics Poor Folk is transformed from straightforward naturalistic novel into one that invites meditation on its own status and condition.
The narrative of Poor Folk creates gaps not only in the sequence of the correspondence, but also in the perceptions supported by that correspondence. The fact that we witness events as the protagonists see and understand them means that we are party to their perceptual failures and to their emotional and intellectual limitations. Varvara’s account of her friendship with the student Pokrovskii, for example, contains (but does not actively present) evidence suggesting that he is the illegitimate son of Bykov. We draw this conclusion easily from facts that Varvara reports without appearing to understand their import:
But fate smiled upon the young Pokrovskii. The landowner Bykov, who knew the clerk Pokrovskii and had once been his benefactor, took the boy under his wing and placed him in some school or other. He took an interest in him because he had known his late mother, who while still a girl had received the good favours of Anna Fedorovna and had been married off by her to the clerk Pokrovskii [. . .] They say that his mother was very good looking, and it seems strange to me that she should have made such an unsuccessful match to such an insignificant man . . .
(I, 33; 1 June)
The narrative irony is thick here. Is Varvara so stupid that she does not see the implications of what she writes? Or is she fully aware and unwilling to say more to Devushkin because of the similarity of the mother’s fate to her own seduction by Bykov? In either case we will recall this episode later when Devushkin recounts how he has been on the receiving end of the good favours of his superior:
It is not only me he has been good to: he is known to everyone for the goodness of his heart. From many quarters people sing his praises and shed tears of gratitude. He brought up an orphan girl in his house. He made all the arrangements for her: he married her off to a certain man, a clerk who lived in His Excellency’s home in order to carry out special commissions for him. He set up the son of a certain widow in a government office, and has done many other good deeds like that.
(I, 95; 11 September)
Critics of Dostoevskii’s novel have on the whole taken this episode at face value, seeing in His Excellency’s generosity a humane reversal of Akakii Akakievich’s treatment by his superior in Gogol’s The Overcoat. Devushkin’s outrage at the lack of humanity in Gogol’s story, of course, encourages such a reading. But the spectre of Bykov’s similar ‘good deeds’ hangs over and ironises His Excellency’s behaviour here, poisoning any admiration we may be tempted to feel, and leading us to believe that Devushkin in his naivety has entirely missed the point, both about his superior and about The Overcoat.
We also see Varvara through Devushkin’s eyes, as well as through her own words. Is she what she seems – a downtrodden and sexually abused innocent – or is this a misreading conjured out of a combination of Devushkin’s naive and slavish devotion, Varvara’s desire to present herself in the best possible light, and our own expectations as readers of what we take, initially at least, to be a sentimental epistolary novel? Varvara’s wholesome image becomes increasingly threadbare as the novel progresses and our expectations are revised. Her surname, which like most names in Dostoevskii is significant, initially suggests dobro (‘good’). However, in view of her enthusiasm for the good things in life shortly before her marriage to Bykov, and her gross insensitivity in urging the spurned Devushkin to do her pre-nuptial shopping for her, there may be an ironic reference here to the other meaning of dobro – ‘property’ – and to the verb selit’sia (‘to take up residence’). We have already seen how her ‘love’ for Devushkin does not extend to keeping his letters, which she discards before leaving (I, 106; 30 September), and when Devushkin visits her room after her departure, he finds that she has used one of his ‘miserable little letters’ to wind her wool (I, 105; 29 September). On other occasions she incites him to borrow money at exorbitant interest so she can move to a new flat (I, 73; 4 August). She deflates his delight at the thought that her raised curtain might be a lover’s signal – ‘I never gave it a thought; it must have got caught up when I moved the flower pot’ (I, 18; 8 April) – and discourages any view he might have of himself as a romantic suitor by telling him not to worry about what the neighbours might think: ‘You’re a friend, and that’s all there is to it!’ (I, 22; 9 April).
We also wonder about her status as an innocent victim of sexual abuse who is otherwise pure. The words in which she describes her early life with Anna Fedorovna are evasive and softened by the conceits of the sentimental tale in which they are embedded (for Varvara writes more than letters!), but their meaning emerges – for us, if not for Devushkin:
Anna Fedorovna lived very well, much better than one might have supposed; but the source of her wealth was unclear, as were her affairs [. . .] She had a large and varied circle of acquaintances. She had a constant stream of visitors, and Lord knows what kind of people they were, always dropping in on some kind of business and never staying very long. Mother always took me off to our room as soon as the front door-bell rang. Anna Fedorovna was terribly angry at mother for this and constantly insisted that we were too proud [. . .] To this day it’s a mystery to me precisely why she [Anna] invited us to stay with her.
(I, 30; June 1)
Despite the coy final protestation of ignorance, it is clear that Anna’s business is prostitution; she is a procuress and Varvara is one of her victims. The latter implicitly acknowledges the sexual nature of her past relationship with Bykov in terms hesitant enough to pass over Devushkin’s head, but clear enough to the reader: ‘She [Anna] says that Mr Bykov is completely in the right and that a man does not simply go and marry every girl who . . . but why write about that!’ (I, 25; 25 April). What is not clear is her present moral status: officers still importune her, and she lets slip the intriguing detail that, before finally offering to marry her, Bykov has made extensive and detailed enquiries about her ‘present behaviour’ (I, 100; 23 September – my italics)! Such details, allowed to float free and unmediated in the epistolary novel’s convention of authorlessness, invest with great irony the moment when Devushkin reports what he takes to be the outrage of the neighbours over his pursuit of the much younger Varvara: ‘The landlady told me people are saying that the devil has taken up with the infant, and then she called you by an indecent name’ (I, 70; 1 August). We wonder who is the devil and who is the infant, particularly given the virginal implications of Devushkin’s name (devushka – ‘maiden’).
Such inversions of the conventions of the sentimental epistolary novel are the essence of Poor Folk. Joseph Frank has pointed out that the very fact of handing the correspondence over to a middle-aged copying clerk and a dishonoured girl violates the conventions of a form used traditionally to express the ‘lofty feelings and noble thoughts’ of ‘models of virtue and sensibility’, ‘exemplary figures from the point of view of education and breeding’.5 Not that such conventions had always been slavishly followed in the past: Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons (1782) had offered a correspondence about seduction and the corruption of virtue that avoided sentiment in favour of a sophisticated amoralism. There is no direct evidence that Dostoevskii ever read Laclos’s novel: there is no reference to it in his writings and we have no indication that it was in his library. The reader of Poor Folk may nonetheless feel that the work nods in the direction of Dangerous Liaisons by offering an account of seduction and manipulation, written on this occasion from the point of view of the victims.
‘What a fine thing literature is!’ Devushkin’s words after his induction into Rataziaev’s literary evenings remind us that, thanks to the epistolary form of Poor Folk, it is not just Dostoevskii who is in a position to exploit the potential of the written word for making things seem what they are not. Devushkin may well possess execrable literary taste, admiring Rataziaev’s prose and mentioning in the same breath Homer and the popular writer Baron Brambeus (I, 16; 8 April), but he understands instinctively the creative power of writing. In his position of social inferiority, helplessness and total dependence on the will of those above him, literature is something that allows him to assume a measure of control over his life. He uses words to re-present things as he would like them to be and to impose order and meaning on the contingency around him. This is evident from the very start of his correspondence with Varvara, where he uses words like sheepdogs to round up and close off the unpleasantness of his new surroundings:
I live in the kitchen, or rather it would be much more accurate to put it this way: right next to the kitchen there’s a room (and I must point out to you that our kitchen is clean, light, and a very nice one), a small room, a modest sort of corner [. . .] that is, or to put it even better, the kitchen has three windows, and I have a partition running along the side wall, so that you end up with what is practically another room, a supernumerary one; everything is spacious, convenient, and there’s a window and everything – in a word, it is all most convenient.
(I, 16; 8 April)
These apparent verbal tics (what does that final ‘and everything’ mean?) are not fortuitous: they are the considered choices of a careful writer who, as we later learn almost by chance, writes drafts of his letters (I, 79; 11 August)! They are a part of Devushkin’s constant preoccupation with style, something that is not a natural extension of his normal being, but a mode that he assumes, no doubt in recognition of the fact that the only control he possesses over his life is over how he writes it (see, for example, I, 88, 91; 5–9 September). This explains his desire to be a poet and to publish The Poems of Makar Devushkin. It explains also his verbal flights of fancy on the winged horse Pegasus in order to escape the smell of rotting rubbish under his window (I, 19; 8 April). But, above all, it explains the nature of his engagement with Pushkin’s The Stationmaster and Gogol’s The Overcoat, for he sees these works primarily as the attempts of others to write his life for him.
Devushkin’s enthusiasm for The Stationmaster is based on his conviction that ‘it is real! It is life!’ (I, 59; 1 July). But, of course, it is not life: it is literature, a work of the imagination that has managed to write the life of the little man as Devushkin himself would like. ‘I am dim-witted and stupid by nature,’ he writes, ‘and I cannot read works that are too weighty. But you read this one and it is as though I had written it myself; as though, so to speak, I had taken my own heart, just as it is, and turned it inside out for people to see and described it all in detail. And it’s so simple, by God!’ Devushkin’s confusion of life with literature, and his belief that Pushkin’s work is ‘simple’, betray his own lack of sophistication as a reader and his lack of alertness to the possibility of ambiguity. For The Stationmaster is part of a larger work, The Tales of Belkin, so that, like Devushkin’s, the life of Samson Vyrin is framed by a narrative structure that exploits to the full the potential for irony. Similarly his outrage at Gogol’s unsympathetic ‘lampoon’ of the little clerk in The Overcoat culminates in Devushkin setting out how he would rewrite the work: ‘It would have been best of all not to leave him to die, poor devil, but to have his overcoat be found and have that general find out more about his virtues, transfer him to his own office, give him a promotion and a decent increase in salary, so that then, you see, evil would be punished and virtue rewarded [. . .] That’s how I, for example, would have done it’ (I, 63; 8 July). Devushkin would like Gogol to have created a work and a hero in the tradition of sentimental naturalism; he cannot see the purpose of The Overcoat as it stands: ‘What is the point of writing such things? What use does it serve?’ His own narrow view of literature as ‘a picture and a mirror’ that ‘fortifies people’s hearts and instructs them’ (I, 51; 26 June) – a view matching that of Belinskii and the Natural School – prevents him from seeing that the figure of Akakii Akakievich is a convention, an ingredient in a complex and grotesque literary game being played by his creator. The real irony, of course, arises from the way this mirrors the conflict emerging between Devushkin’s literary aspirations and those of his creator. For while Devushkin’s letters allow him to ‘turn his heart inside out’ and write himself and his relationship with Varvara as he would like them to be seen, the implicit frame that encloses these letters, one that derives from and exploits the ambiguities of the epistolary form, transforms these characters, like Akakii, into ingredients in a literary game being played above their heads. To put it another way: while Devushkin attempts to write himself and Varvara into the portrait gallery of the Natural School, Dostoevskii is busy writing them out.
The final achievement of this game is to rob Devushkin of his role as unrequited lover and Poor Folk of the primary thematic ingredient of any pretensions it might have to being a novel of sentimental naturalism: its love story. The hero’s final letter certainly reveals despair at the prospect of Varvara’s departure, but it also makes clear that this despair derives largely from the loss of her as correspondent. In pleading with her to continue writing after her marriage, he says: ‘Otherwise, my heavenly angel, this will be my last letter and, you see, there’s no way this letter can be the last. I mean, how could it so suddenly be the last! No, I will write and you will write [. . .] Otherwise, the style I am now developing . . .’ (I, 108). It is writing to Varvara, rather than Varvara herself, that has been the love of Devushkin’s life for, as John Jones says, Poor Folk is not that sort of love story.6 In fact, the writing ends and Devushkin disappears. We could read this naturalistically, take note of Devushkin’s earlier references to his illness, and assume that he has died the touching death of a downtrodden hero of sentimental fiction. Or we could recognise that, just as Poor Folk is not that sort of love story, so Devushkin is not that sort of hero. What has come to an end is not his life, but his words: he has disappeared because he no longer writes himself.
The discussion in Poor Folk of the relative merits of Gogol and Pushkin, at least as far as their depiction of the lowly individual is concerned, has attracted much critical attention from commentators who have seen it variously as evidence of Dostoevskii’s indebtedness to Gogol, of his willingness to engage that writer polemically, or of his humanisation of Gogol’s ‘masks’ using Pushkin’s ‘compassion’ as a model. Most of this attention has focussed on Dostoevskii’s literary relationship to Gogol, although Konstantin Mochulsky has argued that Poor Folk demonstrates how ‘Dostoevskii was to learn the art of words from Gogol’, but that he ‘mastered the art of the psychological short story through the mentorship of Pushkin’.7 Such views may well be correct in general terms, but in the particular instance of Poor Folk they overlook the fact that the preferences expressed in that novel’s overt discussion of Gogol and Pushkin are Devushkin’s, and there is no immediate reason to suppose that they necessarily coincide with those of Dostoevskii. Notwithstanding such reservations, there is indeed evidence that the engagement with Gogol and Pushkin is not confined solely to Devushkin’s discourse, but that it also inhabits the ‘frame’ of the novel and derives from the voice of an organising authorial presence. Such evidence might include our earlier argument that Devushkin and his creator are ‘writing against each other’, and that whereas Devushkin concentrates on characterisation in The Overcoat and The Stationmaster, the implicit authorial presence directs attention to the narrative frames of these works. A further example of the authorial presence operating in this way behind Devushkin’s back is to be found in the latter’s letter of 26 June. Devushkin’s enthusiasm for Rataziaev’s ‘humorous’ extract about Ivan Prokofevich Zheltopuz (‘Yellowbelly’) is not informed by awareness of that piece’s parodistic relationship to the account of Anton Prokofevich Pupopuz (‘Navel-Belly’) in Gogol’s Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich. The piece might well be Rataziaev’s, but the use of Gogol to keep Devushkin in the dark, and to reveal his lack of literary awareness, is the responsibility of the framing authorial figure.
The implicit and explicit discussion of Gogol and Pushkin is extended into several of Dostoevskii’s other works of the 1840s, and in these subsequent works there is further evidence of the responsibility for such discussion being assumed by the organising authorial voice. It would still be rash to talk uncritically in terms of such works disclosing ‘Dostoevskii’s views’ on his two great precursors, and we must remain alert to the presence of narrative irony. But the continuing juxtaposition of the two writers is clearly suggestive of a metafictional purpose ascribable ultimately to Dostoevskii. For example, when at the start of The Double Goliadkin approaches his small round mirror in order to see whether a pimple or something similarly unpleasant has sprouted on his nose (I, 110; Ch. 1), it is not he who is steering the reader to recall the almost identical scene at the start of Gogol’s The Nose. But somebody is. When the novel’s narrator abandons imitation of Goliadkin’s verbal characteristics in favour of a long, hyperbolically Gogolesque digression on the wonders of Klara Olsufevna’s birthday party, bemoaning the fact that ‘I am not a poet’, we can be sure that this ‘I’ is not Goliadkin’s but that of some organising parodistic presence (I, 128–31; Ch. 4). Similarly, when Goliadkin first confronts his double on a foul Petersburg night in November and is prompted by the sound of a cannon to wonder whether the Neva is about to flood (I, 140; Ch. 5), it is not he but the reader who recalls a similarly foul November night in Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, when the hero Evgenii meets his nemesis – a statue of Peter the Great that chases him to madness through a flooded Petersburg landscape. Both The Nose and The Bronze Horseman are structured upon the presence of the uncanny, and their juxtaposition in the text of The Double serves to remind us that, whereas in The Nose the uncanny is rooted in the presence of the genuinely fantastic, in Dostoevskii’s work, as in Pushkin’s poem, it derives from the incipient madness of the hero. The juxtaposition thus serves the metaliterary function of suggesting to the reader how to read the uncanny experiences of Goliadkin. As in Poor Folk, this understanding between reader and authorial presence is struck behind the back of the character concerned, for Goliadkin is denied any such insight into the nature of what he is going through.
When The Landlady appeared in 1847 it provoked a confused and largely hostile response from Dostoevskii’s contemporaries, and critical opinion has subsequently, with only a few exceptions, continued to dismiss it as a failure. The sticking point for many is the confusion produced by a point of view that never really secures itself, either in narrative objectivity or in the dramatisation of the hero’s delirium as he falls beneath the spell of the beautiful Katerina and her forbidding companion Ilia Murin. As a result the work combines down-to-earth depiction of daily Petersburg life with soaringly exotic passages drawn from folk tradition. Belinskii saw it as a strange hybrid, an attempt ‘to reconcile Marlinskii and Hoffmann, having stirred in a little humour of the latest kind and covering the whole thing in a lacquer of Russian folksiness’, before dismissing it as ‘terrible rubbish’. The first part of this judgement is not that far from the mark, for the key to The Landlady lies in the way source literary texts are reworked both on the fictional level, by the hero Ordynov, and on the metafictional level by the organising narrative voice. Malcolm Jones’s comment about The Double, to the effect that collusion between reader and author generates the ghosts of other texts which serve to shed light on the text under consideration, is even more appropriate to The Landlady.8 Such ‘ghosts’ help us to steer a course through the confusion of Ordynov’s dream, when he falls ill shortly after moving in with Murin and Katerina. The apparently chaotic fantasy is domesticated and brought within the reader’s experience by the gradual revelation that the dream is constructed from fragments of Ordynov’s own reading. The attentive reader will discern images drawn from Lermontov’s lyrics ‘1st January’, ‘Cossack Cradle Song’ and ‘The Angel’, from Gogol’s Ukrainian tales, especially A Terrible Vengeance, from Pushkin’s The Miserly Knight, and from Russian folk literature – all of which we might reasonably expect to form part of the cultural ‘baggage’ of an educated Russian of the 1840s such as Ordynov. His almost complete estrangement from the mundane world means that for him literature comes to take the place of life, and the figures of Katerina and Murin are absorbed into an imaginative displacement of his experiences that is fed by source texts. The proximity of the narrative voice to Ordynov’s subjective experience, and the absence of a clearly authoritative narrative voice to steer the reader, mean that the latter is drawn into the confusion of this displacement with only his ability to recognise those source texts as a means of self-orientation. The identification of such source texts has been widely treated in the critical literature on The Landlady, particular attention having been drawn to Ordynov’s indebtedness to Gogol’s A Terrible Vengeance in constructing the figures of Katerina and Murin for his delirium. Both Ordynov’s tale and Gogol’s story centre on a beautiful girl called Katerina and a malignant and possibly supernatural father-figure with whom, it is intimated, she conducts an incestuous relationship. In contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to the presence of works by Pushkin amongst the source texts of The Landlady, or to the fact that such source texts are not only used unwittingly by Ordynov to fuel his delirium, but are also manipulated quite consciously at authorial level for metafictional purposes, in particular to focus attention upon the status of the fantastic in this work.
In terms of overt acknowledgement Pushkin is much more evident in The Landlady than Gogol. In particular, Iaroslav Ilich, a police official and Ordynov’s friend (insofar as we can tell through the confusion of the narrative), seems unable to resist mentioning him. When they first renew their acquaintance, Iaroslav remarks to Ordynov apropos of nothing that he has read a great deal since their last encounter: ‘I have read all of Pushkin [. . .] He portrays human passion remarkably, sir’ (I, 284; Pt 1, Sec. 3). Later, when discussing Murin’s gifts as a fortune-teller, he counters Ordynov’s scepticism by claiming: ‘He is not a charlatan. Pushkin himself mentions something similar in his works’ (I, 287; Pt 1, Sec. 3). At their final meeting Iaroslav again makes mention of his beloved Pushkin.
These surface allusions to Pushkin are supported by an undercurrent of covert gestures in the direction of his works. Iaroslav’s comment on Murin’s fortune-telling steers us towards The Queen of Spades; Ordynov’s dream includes a vision of the dead rising from their graves, which brings to mind the lines from the Baron’s monologue in scene 2 of The Miserly Knight: ‘the moon grows dim and graves / Confounded send forth their dead’. Also, it is difficult not to see a resemblance between Katerina’s tale of how the brigand Murin burned her father’s barges on the Volga before running off with her and the following extract from Pushkin’s drafts for the narrative poem The Robber Brothers: ‘Near Astrakhan; they smash up the merchants’ boat; he takes another woman – the other goes out of her mind.’ In The Landlady Murin abandons Katerina’s mother, who has been his mistress, in order to abscond with Katerina. The distraught mother then curses her daughter. The resemblance is striking, but inconclusive in the absence of evidence of Dostoevskii’s familiarity with Pushkin’s draft. More promising is the debt The Landlady seems to owe to Pushkin’s folk tale Ruslan and Liudmila. There are, of course, many folk motifs in Dostoevskii’s tale: Murin as a sorcerer with an apparently supernatural hold over Katerina; the suggestion that Katerina is his illegitimate daughter and that their relationship is incestuous; Ordynov’s assumption of the role of ‘prince’ pledged to her liberation; the exotic speech of the characters, infused with the imagery and inflections of folk literature. While acknowledging that these motifs are most obviously traceable to Gogol’s A Terrible Vengeance, we must not overlook the ghosts of Pushkin’s folk tale in Dostoevskii’s text. Like The Landlady, Ruslan and Liudmila describes the attempts of a young hero to rescue his beloved from the clutches of a sorcerer. Like Murin, Pushkin’s Chernomor is ‘an abductor of beautiful women’ (‘krasavits davnii pokhititel’), who has ensnared the much younger heroine through mysterious means. Their names also resonate: Chernomor implies ‘black’ (chernyi), as does Murin (a negro, a Moor).
Given the unclear relationship of the narrative voice in The Landlady to the consciousness of the hero, we must at least acknowledge the possibility that such ‘ghost’ texts are brought into the overall narrative of the tale, as similar ones are brought into his dream, by Ordynov himself from his own reading. But to leave the matter there would be to overlook evidence of the sort of collusion between author and reader mentioned by Jones, a collusion that excludes the hero and frames his experiences. As in The Double, the juxtaposition of works by Pushkin and Gogol here too serves the more authoritative function of suggesting to the reader how to approach the delirium of the hero and how to understand the part played by the fantastic in the work. This function turns on the different attitudes to the nature and role of the fantastic implicit in the works of Gogol and Pushkin. In his early Ukrainian tales in particular Gogol shows a willingness to accept the fantastic and incorporate it into his work on its own terms. In A Terrible Vengeance, for example, there is no trace of irony in the account of sorcerers, magic and ghosts. Indeed, this tale is one of the most humourless of Gogol’s works, and the incredible is presented without that ironic naivety which gives the later Petersburg tales their peculiarly wry quality. In it the status and nature of the supernatural go unchallenged. Pushkin’s works, however, rarely allow the reader the opportunity to accept the supernatural on its own terms. It would be a particularly obtuse reader who took Ruslan and Liudmila at face value, as a fairy tale pure and simple. As John Bayley has indicated, the poem offers us not so much the fantastic as ‘a sophisticated sport with the fantastic’.9 Its most striking feature, one that sets it apart from A Terrible Vengeance, is the disbelief with which the author professes his belief as he ironically transcends the limits of the genre by combining the expected role of credulous narrator with a wholly unexpected one, that of sceptical, worldly sophisticate. The result is a narrator who invites the reader to suspend his disbelief while at the same time encouraging that disbelief; who invites the reader into the world of the fantastic while simultaneously undermining the status and credibility of that world.
The Landlady is constructed on a similarly ironic manipulation of the fantastic, as the reader is invited to question its status in the light of Ordynov’s psychological condition. Here too Dostoevskii’s indebtedness to Pushkin, rather than Gogol, is clear, for Pushkin also had used fantasy as a key to his hero’s psychological state in The Queen of Spades. The apparently supernatural events that befall Hermann may be seen merely as the subjective product of an imagination fed by guilt and irritated by drink, although to do so would be to rob the tale of the delicious ambiguity which Dostoevskii himself so admired:
There is a limit and a rule for the fantastic in art. The fantastic must be so close to the real that you almost have to believe it. Pushkin, who has given us almost all forms of art, wrote The Queen of Spades – a masterpiece of fantastic art. And you believe that Hermann really had a vision, and one in precise agreement with his philosophy. However, at the end of the story, i.e. when you have read it through, you cannot make up your mind. Did this vision come out of Hermann’s nature, or was he really one of those who are in contact with another world, one of the evil spirits hostile to mankind? [. . .] Now, that is art!
(XXX/1, 192; letter of 15 June 1880)
It is therefore fitting that, in a stroke of authorial mischief towards the end of the tale, The Landlady should acknowledge its debt to Pushkin’s treatment of the fantastic. The reader familiar with The Queen of Spades should have no difficulty recognising the resemblance between the scene where Hermann approaches the coffin of the dead Countess and the passage where Ordynov contemplates murdering the sleeping Murin:
He looked at the old man . . .
At that moment it seemed to him [emu pokazalos’ – Pushkin expresses Hermann’s uncertainty in the same words] that one of the old man’s eyes slowly opened and looked at him laughingly. Their eyes met. For a few moments Ordynov looked at him without stirring [. . .] Suddenly it seemed to him that the old man’s whole face broke into a laugh and that a diabolic, murderous and chilling burst of laughter at last resounded throughout the room.
(I, 310; Pt 2, Sec. 2)
Dostoevskii’s tale of 1846, Mister Prokharchin, also discusses themes to be found in works by Gogol and Pushkin – those of miserliness and insecurity – and like other works of the period it seeks to do so through a collusion between author and reader which emerges from the acknowledgement of ghost texts embedded in the narrative. In this work, however, unlike in Poor Folk and The Landlady, there is no possibility of confusion over whether these texts derive from the hero’s reading or the author’s. Responsibility for the generation of these source texts has now been assumed entirely by the author, in that the hero, a figure ‘more like the shadow of a rational creature than the rational creature itself’ (I, 245), is completely lacking in literary consciousness and unable to express himself either directly, through articulate speech, or indirectly through his reading. Indeed, there is no evidence that Prokharchin does any reading. His characteristics are drawn on the one hand from the figure of the Baron in Pushkin’s dramatic sketch The Miserly Knight and, on the other, from a medley of Gogolian grotesques including Pliushkin (Dead Souls) and Akakii Akakievich (The Overcoat). He is another of Dostoevskii’s lowly civil servants, typical of the works of the 1840s, but he has a novel trait, his pathological miserliness. He lives in the most squalid poverty, denying himself food and company, but on his death he is found to be in possession of a considerable amount of money, concealed in his mattress.
The wordy narrative manner of the work is entirely after Gogol. The characters possess eccentric names suggesting they could once have inhabited Gogol’s imagination. There are at least two indirect references to The Nose: one where Prokharchin scolds a fellow lodger with the words ‘You, you, you’re stupid! They could bite off your nose and you would eat it up with your bread without noticing’ (I, 255), and the other where Prokharchin’s landlady is described as ‘a most respectable and portly woman, who was particularly partial to meat dishes and coffee’ (I, 240), which echoes in detail the comment on the barber’s wife in Gogol’s tale: ‘quite a respectable woman, who was very fond of drinking coffee’. But such superficial and tangential allusions and narrative mannerisms would appear to be as far as the text of Mister Prokharchin is prepared to go in Gogol’s direction. The latter’s stylistic and comic virtuosity is thematically corrosive, often consuming all sense and potential social relevance in a cauldron of semantic nonsense. It would appear that Dostoevskii was not prepared to lose the implications of Prokharchin in such a way, for he saw his miser as a figure of enormous significance in the context of contemporary Russian society: ‘Suddenly it seemed to me that my Solovev [the name of Prokharchin’s real-life prototype] was a colossal figure. He had retreated from the world and withdrawn from all its temptations into a world of his own behind a screen. What did all this hollow splendour, all this magnificence of ours mean to him?’ (XIX, 73). Dostoevskii recognised that the miserliness of Prokharchin and his kind represented a quest for security: money could offer the certainty, power and sense of individual identity which the low-grade clerk could not otherwise hope to attain. In investing his hero with such significance Dostoevskii draws his source text not from Gogol, but from Pushkin, from the Baron’s monologue in The Miserly Knight. Like Prokharchin, the Baron sees his fortune as representing a sort of abstract existential possibility, rather than any reality of immediate wealth:
I am above all desires; I am content,I know my power, and such consciousnessIs enough for me . . . (He looks at his gold)
As for both Prokharchin and the Baron the whole meaning of life is concentrated in consciousness of their unrealised wealth, it follows that their lives too are mere abstractions. They both live meagrely, for the awareness of their potential wealth and power facilitates withdrawal and isolationism, but their contentment is that of physical stagnation and emotional atrophy. Pushkin contrasts the spectre-like Baron with the vivid physicality of his son, Albert, whose appetite for a life of jousting, socialising and drinking is limited only by his own poverty. He wants to lay hands on his father’s money in order to spend it and thus release its possibilities.
‘I felt that I was not going to the point of stealing from Pushkin,’ wrote Dostoevskii in his article of 1861, ‘Petersburg Dreams in Verse and Prose’ (XIX, 74), and this alerts us to the fact that although The Miserly Knight is used as a ghost text in Mister Prokharchin, Dostoevskii’s miser is a distinct variation on the figure of Pushkin’s Baron. True, Pushkin’s character had provided an insight into the complex psychology of acquisitiveness which Gogol’s Pliushkin had not, but Prokharchin in turn possesses a specific cultural and chronological identity lacking in the Baron. In Mister Prokharchin Dostoevskii achieves what Pushkin, with his eye for the universal implications of particular situations, had not attempted: he locates Prokharchin’s miserliness not as a generic feature of the human condition, but as a specific product of the age and society in which he lives. Pushkin’s Baron is as universal a figure as Shylock, Lear or Hamlet. He is as loosely bound to sixteenth-century France (the apparent setting of the sketch) as Hamlet is to the Denmark of the dark ages. In order to promote the permanent features of his sketch at the expense of the particular, Pushkin withholds those specific historical or topographical details that would allow the reader to locate the action in a particular time or place. Mister Prokharchin is an altogether different proposition: it is inextricably linked into Russian social and literary realities of the 1840s, those of the Natural School. Its hero, with his inarticulateness, his pathological yet indefinite unease, his defiant individualism, and his lack of all social and spiritual foundations apart from those afforded by his money, exemplifies the acuity of Dostoevskii’s insight into the alienation and anxiety experienced by the individual in an age characterised by increasing complexity, specialisation, division of labour and fragmentation of life. It is Prokharchin’s anxiety that most clearly separates him from Pushkin’s Baron, whose status in the end is dependent not on his wealth but on his class. Prokharchin’s miserliness is not an amusing eccentricity, but grows from a basic animal terror at the fact that his very identity, unsupported by the privileges of rank and class, is indefinite and insecure. A tiny cog in a vast bureaucratic machine whose function he cannot begin to divine, Prokharchin senses in a primitive and inarticulate way that his position offers him no control over his life. His fears are fed by rumours that certain chancery offices are to be closed and that his own job might be under threat. Like Devushkin and Goliadkin before him, Prokharchin is vaguely aware that, unenviable as the lowly situation of government clerk might be, it does at least offer the security of self-definition through one’s social identity.
Without this security the individual is isolated and left to his inner resources. He must ask himself again what he is. This is what happens to Prokharchin. He retreats into individualism, both physical and spiritual, by hiding in his little corner and shunning the company of his fellow lodgers. But in turning to his own resources he finds himself wanting. After all, what sort of self does he possess? He is a dislocated cipher lacking the class and confident self-sufficiency of Pushkin’s Baron. Faced with the possibility of an existence without meaning or purpose, Prokharchin seeks self-identification through property. Lacking both social and spiritual bases, he becomes merely what he owns. Unlike the Baron, he contemplates his property not with pleasure, but with a fear that shows his consciousness of the fragility of his existence:
He put his feet on his sacred trunk, cried out at the top of his voice, squatted back almost on his heels and, trembling and shaking all over, cleared as much space as he could with his arms and body on the bed, while gazing with a trembling yet strangely resolute look at those present, as if protesting that he would sooner die than yield to anyone even a hundredth part of his meagre belongings.
(I, 248–9)
On 24 March 1845 Dostoevskii wrote to his brother: ‘You perhaps would like to know how I occupy myself when I am not writing? I read. I read an awful lot, and reading has a strange effect on me. I will read through something I read a long time ago and it is as though I am wound up with new powers. I pay attention to everything, understand everything clearly, and draw from it the ability to create for myself’ (XXVIII/1, 108). This comment would appear substantially to confirm the argument we have pursued in this essay: that the relationship of Dostoevskii’s writing to his own reading was a complex one, rendering suspect any recourse critics might make to over-simple explanations of that relationship, such as that of ‘influence’. It might seem trite to draw from Dostoevskii’s comment above the conclusion that he brought to his reading as much as he took from it, but that very dialogical relationship permitted him to use his reading in a creative way, as an ingredient in the composition of his works that allowed him to mediate his own presence as author alongside that of his fictional characters. The presence of ghost texts and familiar, historically redundant narrative genres in Dostoevskii’s texts of the 1840s was a measure not of his slavish indebtedness to what he had read, but of his willingness to strike out in wholly new directions.
1 See, for example, Victor Terras, The Young Dostoevskij, 1846–1849: A Critical Study (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), and Viktor Vinogradov, ‘The School of Sentimental Naturalism’ in Priscilla Meyer and Stephen Rudy (eds.), Dostoevsky and Gogol (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), pp. 161–228.
2 Vinogradov, ‘School’, p. 192.
3 John Jones, Dostoevsky (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 10.
4 Ibid., p. 10.
5 Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky. The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849 (Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 149.
6 Jones, Dostoevsky, p. 46.
7 Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky. His Life and Work, trans. Michael Minihan (Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 29, 31.
8 Malcolm V. Jones, Dostoyevsky after Bakhtin: Readings in Dostoyevsky’s Fantastic Realism (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 56–7.
9 John Bayley, Pushkin. A Comparative Commentary (Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 41.