Dostoevsky (19 page)

⁴⁰
Honoré de Balzac, “Eugénie Grandet,”
La comédie humaine
, ed. Marcel Bouteron (Paris, 1947), 3: 599.

No début in Russian literature has been described more vividly than that of Dostoevsky, and few, in truth, created so widespread and sensational a stir. Dostoevsky’s account is well-known, though he considerably exaggerated and sentimentalized his own innocence and naïveté. “Early in the winter [of 1845], suddenly, I began to write
Poor Folk
[
Bednye lyudi
], my first novel; before that I had never written anything. Having finished the novel, I did not know what to do with it, and to whom it should be submitted.”
¹
Dostoevsky knew very well what he wished to do with his novel, and there is also evidence that Grigorovich was pushing him to give his work to
Notes of the Fatherland
.
²

There can be no doubt, however, about what occurred when the novel was ready. Grigorovich was profoundly moved by the work; he took it to Nekrasov; and both young literati shed tears over the sad plight of Dostoevsky’s characters. Acting on impulse, they rushed to Dostoevsky’s apartment at four o’clock in the morning—it was a St. Petersburg “white night,” bright and luminous as day—to convey their emotion. The next day Nekrasov brought it to Belinsky, who greeted it with equal warmth and appreciation. Annenkov visited Belinsky while the critic was plunged in Dostoevsky’s manuscript, and he has left a graphic account of Belinsky’s enthusiasm at his discovery. “You see this manuscript? . . . I haven’t been able to tear myself away from it for almost two days now. It’s a novel by a beginner, a new talent . . . his novel reveals such secrets of life and characters in Russia as no one before him even dreamed of. Just think of it—it’s the first attempt at a social novel we’ve had. . . . The matter in it is simple: it concerns some good-hearted simpletons who assume that to love the whole world is an extraordinary pleasure and duty for every one. They cannot comprehend a thing when the wheel of life with all its rules and regulations runs over them and fractures their limbs and bones without a word. That’s all there is—but what drama, what types! I forgot to tell you, the artist’s name is Dostoevsky.”
³

Belinsky’s response, aside from the proclivity of his excitable temperament to extreme reactions, is only explicable in terms of his struggle against the Russian epigones of Romanticism and his single-minded attempt to create a new movement of social Realism in Russian literature. While urban, lower-class Russian life had now begun to be depicted in all its forms and diversities in the physiological sketch, the emphasis was on description of externals rather than on narration, on photographic accuracy (the sketches were called “daguerrotypes” and were accompanied by illustrations) rather than on imaginative penetration and inner identification. Dostoevsky was the first writer who, having chosen this material within the thematic range of the Natural School, had managed to produce more than a series of physiological sketches. “I am very often at Belinsky’s,” he writes Mikhail in the fall of 1845. “He is as well-disposed to me as one possibly could be, and seriously sees in me
a public proof
and justification of his opinions.”
⁴
Dostoevsky
had
succeeded in producing the work that Belinsky had been waiting for; and the immense stir created by
Poor Folk
among contemporaries is to a large degree attributable to the controversy over the new orientation that Belinaky had given to Russian literature.

Poor Folk
is cast in the form of an epistolary novel between two correspondents—the lowly titular councillor Makar Devushkin, a middle-aged copying clerk employed in one of the vast offices of the St. Petersburg bureaucracy, and a young girl just barely out of her teens, Varvara Dobroselova.
⁵
Both are tender, lonely, fragile souls whose solicitation for each other brings a ray of warmth into their otherwise bleak lives. But the innocent idyll is soon ended by the pressure of the sordid forces against which they struggle. The hopelessness of Varvara’s position and the chance to reestablish her social situation compel her to accept an offer of marriage, and the book ends on Devushkin’s wail of anguish as Varvara vanishes forever into the steppes with her callous bridegroom Bykov (whose name evokes the Russian word for bull).

Nothing is more impressive in
Poor Folk
than the deftness with which Dostoevsky uses the epistolary form to reveal the hidden, unspoken thoughts of his characters; what one reads between the lines of their letters is more important than what appears on the surface—or rather, it is the tension between the spoken and unspoken that gives us the true access to their consciousness. Devushkin, so simple and uncomplicated at first glance, is a character constantly
struggling with himself. He reduces himself to abject poverty for the sake of Varvara, showering her with little gifts of candy and fruit that he can ill afford, and he suffers agonies of humiliation, which he tries to conceal, because of the difficulties caused by his destitution. Above all, there is his “ideological” struggle—the wrestle with the rebellious thoughts that surge up in him unexpectedly under the pressure of his emotional involvement with Varvara and that are so much at variance with the unquestioned credo of obedience he has always accepted up to that time.

Dostoevsky surrounds this simple tale of his characters’ brief encounter with a number of accessories that enlarge the story to the dimensions of a true social novel. Varvara’s inset diary takes us back into her innocent rustic girlhood, and it also contains the portrait of the tubercular student Pokrovsky—Dostoevsky’s first brief description of the new
raznochinets
intellectual who would later evolve into Raskolnikov. His nominal father—a hopeless drunkard, married off to a girl made pregnant by Bykov—is depicted by Dostoevsky with a tragicomic pathos worthy of Dickens, particularly in the scenes in which the broken old man follows the hearse of his adored educated son to his final resting place. “The old man seemed not to feel the cold and wet and ran wailing from one side of the cart to the other, the skirts of his old coat fluttering in the wind like wings. Books were sticking out from all his pockets; in his hands was a huge volume which he held tightly. . . . The books kept falling out of his pockets into the mud. People stopped him and pointed to what he had lost, he picked them up and fell to racing after the coffin again” (1: 45).

Another such inset story is that of the starving clerk Gorshkov and his family, come from the provinces to clear his name of a charge of embezzlement while in government service. This is the archetypal family in the lowest depths of poverty that will appear again and again in Dostoevsky—and here characterized by a terrible and unnatural silence, as of a suffering too deep for lamentation. There is no sound even of the children, Devushkin tells Varvara: “One evening I happened to pass their door; it was unusually quiet in the house at the time; I heard a sobbing again as though they were crying so quietly, so pitifully, that it was heartrending, and the thought of those poor creatures haunted me all night so that I could not get to sleep properly” (1: 24).

All these narrative lines interweave to build up an image of the same unavailing struggle to keep afloat humanly in the face of crushing circumstances, the same treasures of sensibility, sensitivity, and moral refinement appearing in the most unlikely places—unlikely, at least, from the point of view of previous Russian literature. Everywhere poverty and humiliation, the exploitation of the weak and the helpless by the rich, powerful, and unscrupulous—all this in the midst of crowded St. Petersburg slum life, with its nauseating odors and debris-littered dwellings.
Poor Folk
combined these picturesque merits of the best of the
physiological sketches with a new and unerring insight into the tortures of the humiliated sensibility. The world as seen from below rather than above constitutes the major innovation of Dostoevsky vis-à-vis Gogol, whose sympathy with his humble protagonists is never strong enough to overcome the condescension implicit in his narrative stance. The situations and psychology of
Poor Folk
speak for themselves against class pride and class prejudice, and against the presumed superiority of the upper over the lower. But the book also contains a much more outspoken protest that, although not mentioned by Belinsky, could certainly not have left him indifferent.

Devushkin undergoes a distinct evolution in the course of the book. The early letters reveal him accepting his lowly place in life without a murmur of protest, and even taking pride in performing his unassuming tasks conscientiously. At the very lowest point of Devushkin’s misery, though, he loses heart and takes to drink. Never had he felt so degraded and worthless; and this is the moment when a faint spark of rebellion flares even in his docile and submissive breast. Emerging onto one of the fashionable Petersburg streets, filled with luxurious shops and smartly dressed people, he is struck by the difference from the sullen and unhappy crowds of his own slum district, and he suddenly begins to wonder why he and Varvara should be condemned to poverty while others are born into the lap of luxury.

“I know, I know, my dear that it is wrong to think that, that it is free-thinking; but to speak honestly, to speak the whole truth, why is it fate, like a raven, croaks good fortune for one still unborn, while another begins life in the orphan asylum?” (1: 86). Fortune seems to have no relation to personal merit; nor is this revolutionary idea the full extent of Devushkin’s “freethinking.” As he continues, we find him emitting the distinctively Saint-Simonian idea that the humblest worker is more entitled to respect, because more useful to society, than the wealthiest and most aristocratic social parasite. All this leads Devushkin to a piercing vision of the contrasted lives of the rich and the poor—a vision that, as in one of the feuilleton-novels of Sue or Soulié, strips away the façade beyond which both classes live concealed so that one sees them simultaneously:

The indifference of the rich and mighty to the misery all around them fills Devushkin with indignation—to such an extent, indeed, that he even feels for a moment that his own sense of inferiority is misplaced. “Get to the bottom of that,” he says, “and then judge whether one was right to abuse oneself for no reason and to be reduced to undignified mortification” (1: 89).

This passage contains the central social theme of the book, which is Dostoevsky’s variant of the same plea one finds in the French social novel of the 1830s and in Dickens—the plea addressed to the wealthy and powerful to assume some moral responsibility for their less fortunate brothers. This theme comes to a climax in the famous scene with Devushkin’s Civil Service superior, when the poor clerk, who has been careless in copying some urgently needed document, is called in for a reprimand. His feelings are described as follows: “My heart began shuddering within me, and I don’t know myself why I was so frightened; I only know that I was panic-stricken as I had never been before in all my life. I sat rooted to my chair—as though there was nothing the matter, as though it were not I” (1: 92). By this time his appearance is little better than that of a scarecrow, and his last remaining button falls off and noisily bounces along the floor as he is trying to mumble some excuse. Moved by his obvious misery, the kindhearted General privately gives Devushkin a hundred-ruble note. When the latter tries to kiss his hand in gratitude, he flushes, avoids the self-debasing gesture, and gives Devushkin an equalitarian handshake instead. “I swear that however cast down I was and afflicted in the bitterest days of our misfortune,” he tells Varvara, “looking at you, at your poverty, and at myself, my degradation and my uselessness, in spite of all that, I swear that the hundred rubles is not as much to me as that His Excellency deigned to shake hands with me, a straw, a worthless drunkard” (1: 93). The General could feel not only with Devushkin’s pitiful economic distress but also with his longing to preserve his self-respect: this is what saves the charitable impulse from being still another humiliation.