Poor People (Бедные люди, 1846), Dostoevsky’s debut epistolary novel, with which he conquered Belinsky’s heart and entered upon the St Petersburg literary stage, is in choice of subject firmly rooted in Gogol. However, in emotional substance and character delineation it goes way beyond anything that the author of The Greatcoat ever attempted. “People (Belinsky and others) have detected in me a radically new approach, of analysis rather than synthesis, that is, I dig deep and, delving to the level of the atoms, I reach further down to the heart of the matter, whereas Gogol’s point of departure is the heart of the matter itself; consequently he is less profound.” Although Dostoevsky’s self-analysis may not be altogether convincing, the novel itself – an exchange of heart-rending letters between two lost souls – is artistically persuasive. It is set wholly in the stifling bureaucratic, class-ridden Russia of the early-nineteenth century, but in spite of the passage of time has lost none of its universal appeal. The events could easily have been taking place in any epoch, in any society – a lowly official exchanging messages with an unfortunate, repressed female living in the house across the way.
Dostoevsky’s next major work, The Double (Двойник, 1846) is by any standards a most unusual and inventive piece of novel writing. According to Dostoevsky’s own evaluation, it was “ten times better than Poor People”. This opinion, however, was not shared by the vast majority of contemporary critics, who had trouble accepting its blend of fantasy and realism. Mr Golyadkin, an ordinary, perfectly unremarkable, naive and helpless nineteenth-century man, is overwhelmed by the pace of progress in a modern metropolis with all the latest waterproof galoshes, open-plan offices, luxury soft-sprung carriages, dazzling gas streetlights and the hectic pace of social life all round, and begins to inhabit another world or, to put it in clinical terms, slowly but surely to lose his mind. The author does not state this in so many words – Mr Golyadkin’s mental disintegration is never explained or accounted for. The reader is plunged in medias res into a mad world from the word go. As a result Golyadkin’s predicament gains in authenticity because specifics do not stand in the way of the reader identifying himself with the hero; each one of us can supply our own catalogue of examples that threaten our sanity and therefore there is a pervasive atmosphere of “there but for the grace of God go I”.
The Double was hugely controversial, and on the whole was pronounced to be stylistically inadequate, a judgement with which Dostoyevsky himself tended to agree, though with important reservations. In 1846 he wrote to his brother: “absolutely everyone finds [The Double] a desperate and unexciting bore, and so long-drawn-out it’s positively unreadable. But, funnily enough, though they berate me for bringing on tedium, they all, to a man, read it over and over again to the very end.” This very early novel was already full of innovative, arresting characteristics: agitated, strained dialogue, always disordered, always rambling; madness predominating over method; a perplexed, pathetic soul cruelly disorientated amid confused perspectives of time and place; heart-rending tragedy compounded by a welter of manic Hollywood-type slapstick comedy – this off-the-wall tale of galloping schizophrenia took contemporary readers by storm and left them quite bewildered. Some critics hailed The Double as profound, others found it so permeated with the mentally aberrant spirit of Gogol’s story ‘Diary of a Madman’ that it was no longer a question of influence, but of blatant imitation. However, if it was imitation, it was imitation of the highest order.
Like much in Dostoevsky, The Double was too far ahead of its time, and it would only find a reading public ready to appreciate and enjoy it to the full much later. For Vladimir Nabokov, who was no fan of Dostoevsky, The Double was “the best thing he ever wrote… a perfect work of art”. Time and again Dostoevsky expressed, probably under the influence of outside pressures, his intention to “improve” The Double; a partially revised version appeared in 1866.
Netochka Nezvanova (Неточка Незванова, 1849), a novella which was originally conceived as a full-length novel: in its present form it should be considered as an unfinished work. Dostoevsky deals here with what was to become one of his favourite themes – the psychology and behaviour of an unusually precocious child. The plucky child-heroine Netochka has much in common with Nelly from Humiliated and Insulted, particularly in her capacity for boundless love, self-sacrifice and indomitable will-power. They are both fighters who refuse to succumb to life’s vicissitudes whatever the odds.
Although the novella still captures the imagination today thanks to its dramatic intensity – which, for example, prompted a successful theatre adaptation at the New End Theatre in London in 2008 – it is generally considered to contain tedious and long-winded passages, which one outspoken contemporary critic, A. Druzhinin, characterized in 1849 as reeking of perspiration. These words must have rankled with Dostoevsky, because he recalls them with dramatic irony in the epilogue to Humiliated and Insulted.
In The Village of Stepanchikovo (Село Степанчиково, 1859), Dostoevsky again found himself irresistibly drawn to Gogol, who had by then become an obsession. Set on a remote country estate, the story concerns a household completely dominated by the despotic charlatan and humbug Foma Fomich Opiskin, whose sententious utterance contains a good deal of satire on the reactionary Gogol. The owner of the estate, the retired Colonel Rostanev, is a meek, kind-hearted giant of a man, cruelly dominated by Opiskin. With deftly controlled suspense, the novel builds up to a confrontation between these two.
The chief asset of the work is its rich, dramatic dialogue – The Village of Stepanchikovo was in fact first conceived as a drama. It is through their words that Dostoevsky gives flesh and blood not only to the protagonists but also a host of unforgettable minor characters – the perspiringly loquacious and hypochondriac landowner Bakhcheyev, the literary valet Vidoplyasov, the dancing peasant household pet Falaley, the scheming poseur Mizinchikov and the unfortunate heiress Tatyana Ivanovna, touchingly confined in her fantasy world.
Dostoevsky was thirty-nine when in January 1861 Humiliated and Insulted (Униженные и оскорблённые) began to be serialized in the first issue of Time (Время), the literary periodical which he founded jointly with his brother Mikhail. A much revised version came out in book form in autumn of the same year. It was his fourth novel to date after Poor People and The Double (1846), and The Village of Stepanchikovo (1859), neither of the last two being originally designated as novels, but given the stylized titles of “poem” and “tale” (повесть) respectively. However, The Village of Stepanchikovo and Humiliated and Insulted have this in common: that they were written in close succession, straight after his return from the ten-year period of penal servitude and exile in Siberia, and were meant to serve as passports for re-entry to the literary scene from which he was debarred for so long.
Notes from the House of the Dead, literally and more accurately Notes from the Dead House (Записки из мертвого дома, 1862), is Dostoevsky’s fictionalized record of four years of unremitting hardship and privation suffered as a convict in one of Tsar Nicholas I’s Siberian penal institutions. In 1854 he wrote to his brother: “The different folk I met in the settlement! I lived amongst them and got to know them well. The stories I heard from the vagabonds and felons – about their nefarious deeds and gruelling way of life – would be enough to fill several tomes. What an amazing set of people!” Dostoevsky looked upon penal servitude with the eyes of an artist, making imaginative generalizations and giving the narrative a deliberately fictional intensity and tone. And yet its genre category is unclear. Without a coherent plot or storyline, it is hardly a novel. Attempts to call the work a memoir are fundamentally wrong. Dostoevsky had a particular penchant for “notes”, which is perhaps the most appropriate term.
Tolstoy had read it three times, and in a letter to the critic Nikolai Strakhov, he wrote: “I was a bit under the weather the other day and reread The Dead House. I’d forgotten a lot… I know of no better work in the whole of modern literature, including Pushkin… If you see Dostoevsky, tell him I love him.” In his response, Strakhov informed Tolstoy that Dostoevsky was very pleased to hear the words of praise and asked to be allowed to keep Tolstoy’s letter, only he was taken a little aback at the implied note of disrespect for Pushkin.
Notes from Underground (Записки из подполья, 1864) is a work which holds an enduring fascination for critics and readers. It opens, rather famously, with a burst of angry, personal observations: “I am a sick man… a spiteful man… an unattractive man, that’s what I am.” Having introduced himself in this manner, the narrator describes his current situation, having retired early from a low-ranking civil-service job thanks to an inheritance that enables him to survive in misery and seclusion. He explains that, due to a heightened consciousness of his own motives and emotions, he has retreated to a life of inertia and boredom. He also expounds his theory that man, out of a desire to exercise his free will, intentionally acts against his own interest and the dictates of logic – contrary to the claims of conventional rationalist doctrine. While he exposes his arguments, the narrator frequently interpolates his imaginary audience’s potential objections, and often backtracks and revises his opinions.
In the second part of the Notes, the narrator relates anecdotes from his past, ostensibly to illustrate the points he has made in the first part. The first story deals with his obsessive plans to get revenge against an officer who offended him by pushing him out of his way in the street. After weeks of fantasizing he finally acts by intentionally bumping into the officer, only to find, to his annoyance, that his victim is not in the least bothered by this assault.
He then tells of a farewell dinner for his former classmate Zverkov, a pompous and boastful high achiever, along with other former school friends. Even though he dislikes them all, especially Zverkov, and is destitute and shabbily dressed, he decides to attend out of spite. He is infuriated when he arrives at the agreed time but has to wait for an hour because they have neglected to tell him that they had delayed their arrival. Civilities are quickly cast aside, and he launches into a diatribe against them and mankind in general. The others leave to go to a brothel without him, and he eventually follows them, but they are gone by the time he arrives. There he meets the prostitute Liza.
The scene continues later on, in the same setting, with the narrator delivering an impassioned moralistic lecture about Liza’s lifestyle and bleak prospects. She is moved by his apparent concern for her plight, and he gives her his address and leaves. The narrator begins to regret having left his details and is haunted by the possibility of her coming to see him. When she finally does arrive, she catches him at an undignified moment, which prompts a cruel outburst from him, before he breaks down and owns up to his own sense of humiliation. She embraces him out of pity, but he cannot help taking advantage of her, and she leaves, never to be seen or heard from again.The narrator’s truthful confessions end on this regretful note.
Unlike those of Rousseau and Heine, these alleged confessions are unsparing in their detail and self-criticism. The narrator parades convictions, sentiments and soul-searching observations which would normally be subconscious, or at least not consciously acknowledged by normal people.
These amount to negative attributes such as envy, jealousy, the inability to empathize, insecurity. The only positive attribute is frankness, but frankness leads the narrator to own up to and to illustrate his own self-centredness, cowardice and moral cruelty – characteristics which he suggests are the inevitable concomitants of being hyper-sensitive and over-educated. “Here,” as the underground man concludes in his Notes, “are deliberately gathered together all the characteristics of an anti-hero.”
Crime and Punishment (Преступление и наказание, 1866) is one of the four of Dostoevsky’s major novels, which Nabokov referred to as “the so-called major novels” (my italics). The arguably much greater, but less well-known Nobel-Prize-winning author Ivan Bunin had a similarly low opinion of Dostoevsky’s great novels, or novels of ideas, as they are also not infrequently referred to. Valentin Kataev recalls that Bunin raged over the hero, Raskolnikov: “Dostoevsky obliges you to witness impossible and inconceivable abominations and spiritual squalor. From here have come all Russia’s ills – Decadence, Modernism, Revolution, young people who are infected to the marrow of their bones with Dostoevshchina – who are without direction in their lives, confused, spiritually and physically crippled by war, not knowing what to do with their strengths and their talents…”
At the heart of Crime and Punishment is the student Raskolnikov’s premeditated murder of a miserable old woman moneylender with the manic idea that this act would somehow make him into a superman, raise him above the law and enable him to identify himself with Napoleon. Around this idea, Dostoevsky, armed with a marvellous title, manages to spin a truly fascinating tale. Issues of crime and punishment are always calculated to arouse interest, and he manages to score some significant firsts, such as his creation of the detective Porfiry. “Wilkie Collins and Dickens portrayed Victorian detectives, but no one had yet shown the ‘master’ detective, capable of deducing facts from psychological observation: in the twentieth century the super-detective was a close rival of the criminal for the status of hero,” writes Professor Richard Peace.
As mentioned above, Dostoevsky was addicted to gambling, and he channelled this personal experience into his next novel, The Gambler (Игрок, 1866). The action takes place in the spoof town Roulettenburg, where a bunch of Russian prize idlers have fetched up to feed their habit and indulge in conspiracies and sterile romantic pursuits. As was to be expected, no one gets any richer, just the opposite, and all personal relationships end in frustration and heartache.
In a letter to his favourite niece Sofia Alexandrovna Ivanova, to whom he dedicated The Idiot (Идиот, 1868), Dostoevsky wrote: “I have been nurturing the idea of this novel a long time now. It is a particular favourite of mine, but is so difficult that I have not dared to tackle it… The main aim is to portray a positively good man. There’s nothing more difficult than this in the world, especially nowadays. All writers, not only ours, but even the European ones too, who tried, had to give up, for the simple reason that the task is measureless.”
The hero of the novel, Prince Myshkin, is a Christ-like figure. He is mentally distinctly unstable, indeed he brands himself an idiot. The question arises, can saintliness survive in the real world? Russia being the real world, the novel’s answer is no, because it is synonymous with some kind of mental deficiency, which is bound to lead to disaster. At the beginning of the novel Myshkin returns from a Swiss sanatorium after a lengthy treatment, hopefully on the way to complete recovery. Abroad he had witnessed public executions by guillotine, and the memories continue to haunt him, especially the gruesome ordinariness of the preparatory ritual. What goes through the condemned man’s head as he hears the swish of the descending blade? In St Petersburg he finds no solace. On the day of his arrival, without a respite, he is thrown into a vortex of events that would have unsettled a much stronger man. Representing the darker side of humanity is the volatile, passionate, reckless merchant Rogozhin, whom Myshkin gets to know on the journey. It is a fateful meeting. As the action unravels both come to grief in their rivalry and quest for happiness, Rogozhin’s fate being, if anything, the more heart-rending, because he ends up with blood on his hands beside the lifeless corpse of the woman they both loved to distraction. As for Myshkin, he returns to the sanatorium, we fear permanently.
The novel is conceived on a large scale with numerous sub-plots and a host of secondary characters. True to form they are all colourfully depicted, invariably with customary Dostoevskian humour and wit. However, some critics have found the structure of the novel problematic, and it is not the most popular choice among a wider readership.
In the work Devils (Бесы, 1871–72, also known as The Possessed and Demons), one of Dostoevsky’s main concerns is nihilism: this is embodied in the novel to devastating effect through its memorable characters. The great Russian critic and novelist Dmitry Merezhkovsky argues in Gogol and the Devil that the suave, smooth-talking, clownish con man Chichikov in Gogol’s Dead Souls is the devil par excellence, because he is one of us who goes about deceiving people left, right and centre with impunity, hiding under his mask of normality and ordinariness – a point worth noting in relation to Devils.
The novel boasts some of the most blood-curdling episodes imaginable, but at the same time the translator Michael
R. Katz writes: “Devils is without doubt Dostoevsky’s most humorous work. It has more irony, more elements of burlesque and parody, more physical comedy and buffoonery, more exaggerated characterizations and ambiguous use of language than any of his other works.” We are indeed not miles away from the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera. Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, with whom the novel opens and who continues to play a significant role to the very end, can, improbably enough, be seen as a Groucho Marx figure with a touch of Don Quixote thrown in. The picture is completed with the former’s inimitable screen foil Margaret Dupont, who is represented in the novel by the grand and unapproachable Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina.
Dostoevsky based his story on a Russian press report of a brutal murder by a follower of the revolutionary anarchist Ivan Bakunin. He uses that as a paradigm for depicting a ruthless nationwide conspiracy, incidentally directed from abroad, to bring down the existing order in Russia. Acts of terrorism and extreme violence are used as political tools. But the events, despite being narrated by an apparently non-committal chronicler, are by no means a factual record of reality. The highly mysterious chronicler’s very protestations of veracity are a novelist’s ploy to draw the reader into a fantasy world that is blatantly of his own creation. At the centre of it are the demonically beguiling figures of Nicolas Stavrogin, a self-confessed paedophiliac and sadist, and his utterly unprincipled sidekick Peter Stepanovich Verkhovensky. Besides the motif of rampant terrorism, there is the theme of suicide, not as a desperate solution out of a psychological impasse, but as a supreme manifestation of one’s will.
Dostoevsky had always been keenly interested in all aspects of publishing. Even his fictional characters are bitten by the bug. Vanya in Humiliated and Insulted talks to a publisher or entrepreneur, as he facetiously styles him, and appears to know his role and what motivates him; Liza Drozdova in Devils comes up with a serious proposal to bring out a digest, “an illuminating overview” of current affairs, and she waxes lyrical over the benefits and commercial viability of the prospective undertaking. Dostoevsky himself was a prolific journalist and the founder and editor of several periodicals. Liza’s idea in fact goes back to Dostoevsky’s plans of 1864–65 to found Notebook – a fortnightly periodical which failed to materialize – and looks forward to Diary of a Writer (Дневник писателя, 1873–81), which did materialize in 1873. In both cases Dostoevsky was to be the sole contributor. It is for this reason that Diary of a Writer can, indeed should, be regarded as a free-standing literary work. In essence it is a ground-breaking, wide-ranging pot-pourri of all types of literary genres, “an illuminating overview” of all that continued to preoccupy the writer till the end of his days, and some of the issues touched upon were further reflected in his Pushkin speech and in The Karamazov Brothers.
In 1876 Dostoevsky wrote: “When, about a year and a half ago, Nikolai Alexeyevich Nekrasov asked me to write a novel for The Notes of the Fatherland, I was on the point of starting my version of Fathers and Sons, but held back, and thank God for that. I was not ready. All I’ve been able to come up with so far is my Adolescent.”
Just as in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, the theme of the generation gap is at the heart of The Adolescent (Подросток, 1875). Incidentally the narrator-hero rejoices in the name of Arkady (Dolgoruky), the same as one of the principal characters, Arkady (Kirsanov), in Turgenev’s story; the other – the more important of the two – being Yevgeny Bazarov. The similarity does not end there. Both Arkady Dolgoruky and Yevgeny Bazarov are kindred spirits, rebels at heart and ardent champions of liberalism and truth. This ideological confluence is quite remarkable because on most points the two authors could not see eye to eye at all.
Also, the theme of relationships with serf women is tackled head on by both authors, especially Dostoevsky, who of course extracts every ounce of drama from the controversy associated with such liaisons. Arkady is illegitimate: he is the son of the serf Sofia, wife of the bonded serf Makar Dolgoruky, and the gallivanting nobleman, Andrey Versilov. Dostoevsky is immediately on home ground – the trials and tribulations of a thoroughly dysfunctional family. After his wife has been taken away from him, Makar Dolgoruky leaves his village to wander off and walk the land as a penitent, surfacing only at the end of the story. Young Arkady, at nineteen – having been knocked all his life from pillar to post – is back with his biological father, whom he has hardly met since birth, eager to get to know him closely. It’s a love-hate relationship from the start: Arkady is fascinated by Versilov, and is drawn to him inexorably. Versilov shares a good few characteristics with the devil of Ivan’s nightmare in The Karamazov Brothers, who, in line with Dostoevsky’s intertwining of good and evil, is of quite an affable, genial sort. Arkady wants to live up to his father, and in his young heart he nurtures a grand, but in his view eminently attainable and realistic idea. He lusts after money, and above all, power. As he says in the novel, he wants to become a Rothschild. Father and son also lust after the same woman almost to the point of committing murder. In the background there is the ever-present mother figure of the saintly, long-suffering Sofia, and what with Makar Dolgoruky bearing a strong resemblance to Father Zosima, the similarity between Dostoevsky’s last two novels is striking. Yet the atmosphere is altogether different. Perhaps the chaotic, topsy-turvy, structurally unbalanced Karamazov Brothers is more action packed and stimulating, intellectually intriguing and humorous too, which is what counts with readers in the end, even the more sophisticated ones. The Adolescent is, in that case, arguably too sophisticated and refined for its own good. One way or another The Adolescent has been overshadowed by his other great novels both in Russia and the Anglophone West.
Sigmund Freud wrote that The Karamazov Brothers (Братья Карамазовы, 1879–80) was “the most magnificent novel ever written”. Indeed, the novel played right into his hands, above all as regards the Oedipal connection. The work blends together literature, philosophy and entertainment in a way that has held a strong appeal for many intellectual readers.
At the heart of the novel is a dysfunctional family, four sons – one illegitimate – and the father, a dissolute, cunning, mistrustful old man, who is in a running feud with the eldest over money and the favours of the local siren. The conflict gets out of hand and Dmitry Karamazov is accused of patricide. Bound up with this intense family drama is Dostoevsky’s exploration of many of his most deeply cherished ideas. The novel is also richly comic and philosophically challenging. One chapter, entitled The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, in which the churchman, in a confrontational dialogue with Christ, argues that freedom and happiness are incompatible, is styled a poem, and for its content and form occupies a unique place in literature.
This account of Dostoevsky’s works is by no means exhaustive, but has had to be limited to some of the most famous and pivotal novels and novellas. During his career Dostoevsky wrote many other shorter works of fiction, not to mention articles, essays and travel writing, and among his short stories one could mention the following, among many others: White Nights (Белые ночи, 1848), a story of isolation and heartbreak spanning four nights, during which the protagonist realizes his love for a young girl called Nastenka must always remain unfulfilled; The Eternal Husband (Вечный mуж, 1870), which compellingly describes a recently widowed man’s encounter with his dead wife’s former lover; A Gentle Creature (Кроткая, 1876), the tale of a widowed pawnbroker’s turbulent relationship with a young customer who eventually becomes his wife; The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (Сон смешного человека, 1877), which recounts the spiritual journey of its suicidal protagonist, who finds salvation in an encounter with a young girl and a subsequent dream.
– Ignat Avsey