Dostoevsky (23 page)

The Double
was published in
Notes of the Fatherland
early in February 1846, and Belinsky’s article on Dostoevsky discusses both of his works. The general view of
The Double
, like his view of
Poor Folk
, is highly favorable. “For everyone initiated into the secrets of art, it is clear at a glance that, in
The Double
, there is even more creative talent and depth of thought than in
Poor Folk
.”
⁵
But the negative criticism is equally unequivocal. “It is obvious that the author of
The Double
has not yet acquired the tact of measure and harmony, and, as a result, many criticize even
Poor Folk
not without reason for prolixity, though this criticism is less applicable here than to
The Double
.”
⁶
Such remarks were instantly snapped up by the Pléiade and gleefully repeated. This was the moment that Dostoevsky suffered the severe nervous illness referred to earlier, and the shock of his disappointment obviously contributed to his malady. “All this,” he tells Mikhail, “was hell for me for a time, and I fell sick from chagrin.”
⁷
Dostoevsky managed to survive this blow, however, and his friendship with Belinsky apparently remained unimpaired.

Then, during the early fall of 1846, Dostoevsky unwittingly became involved in a rivalry that rocked all of Petersburg literary life and placed an additional strain on his relations with Belinsky. For the critic had broken with Kraevsky, the powerful proprietor of
Notes of the Fatherland
, and joined his friends Nekrasov and Panaev, who had obtained editorial control of
The Contemporary
(
Sovremennik
)—the famous periodical founded by Pushkin. All of Kraevsky’s contributors were now summoned to choose between their old affiliation and their loyalty to Belinsky’s literary and moral ideals.

Dostoevsky had already begun his customary system of taking advances for unwritten work and was heavily in debt to Kraevsky. Moreover, despite his reverence for Belinsky, his personal feud with the Pléiade had been getting worse, and he had now become friendly with another coterie of lively intellectuals, one of whose members, the talented young Valerian Maikov, had replaced Belinsky at the key post of chief critic of
Notes of the Fatherland
. Dostoevsky refused to align himself entirely on the side of
The Contemporary
, and the consequences of his effort to stay above the battle soon made themselves felt. “I have had the unpleasantness of quarreling definitively with
The Contemporary
in the person of Nekrasov,” he writes Mikhail in November 1846. “He became annoyed because I continue to give stories to Kraevsky, to whom I am in debt, and because I would not declare publicly that I do not belong to
Notes of the Fatherland
.”
⁸

The very next month, Belinsky spoke of Dostoevsky again in a survey of Russian literature for 1846, and the terms in which he criticizes him are now much sharper and much less apologetic. Reading between the lines, we can glimpse Belinsky’s suspicion that Dostoevsky’s work was moving in a direction opposed to the one he would have wished him to follow. Though he does not renounce his protégé, the effect of his soaring compliments is considerably modified by a more serious objection.
The Double
, he says, also “suffers from another important defect: its fantastic setting. In our days the fantastic can have a place only in madhouses, but not in literature, being the business of doctors, not poets.”
⁹
Such remarks, from the erstwhile ecstatic admirer of Hoffmann, are enough to justify Dostoevsky’s charge that Belinsky “is such a weak person that even in literary matters he keeps continually changing his mind.”
¹⁰

As for Dostoevsky’s next story, “Mr. Prokharchin,” published in the October 1846 issue of
Notes of the Fatherland
, Belinsky shows no mercy. He finds it “affected,
maniéré
, and incomprehensible.” As if accepting the personal accusations of the Pléiade against Dostoevsky, he writes that “this strange story” seems to have been “begotten” by “something in the nature of—how shall we say?—ostentation and pretension.”
¹¹
Nothing could have been more wounding to Dostoevsky, under the circumstances, than such a thrust from the man whose moral authority still remained for him unimpaired.

The final break between the two occurred sometime in the months immediately following the publication of this article. Belinsky’s letters contain allusions to Dostoevsky that repeat the gossip making the rounds and express dissatisfaction with his work. Dostoevsky’s stock, quite evidently, was rapidly falling to a new low, and the reports that he may have given Belinsky about his work in progress would hardly have restored him to the critic’s esteem. For Dostoevsky abandoned the two stories he had intended to write for Belinsky’s proposed almanac, which would have remained within the accustomed range of the Natural School, and had now surrendered to a new source of inspiration. “All that is nothing but a stale repetition of what I have long since said,” he writes Mikhail at the end of October 1846. “Now more original, living, and luminous ideas are begging to be put on paper. . . . I am writing another story, and the work goes, as it once did for
Poor Folk
, freshly, easily, and successfully.”
¹²
This work was “The Landlady” (
Khozyaika
), of which he speaks again enthusiastically three months later.

Belinsky could only have accepted the new departure Dostoevsky’s work was taking as confirmation that the hopes he had once placed in the promising young
writer had been illusory. For “The Landlady” was evidently a return to the style of Russian Hoffmannism that Belinsky now loathed with all the fury of his previous adoration. Writing of “The Landlady” in early 1848, Belinsky could not have been more crushing. “Throughout the whole of this story,” he says, “there is not a single simple or living word or expression: everything is far-fetched, exaggerated, stilted, spurious and false.”
¹³
The whole attitude toward art of the two erstwhile friends had now become diametrically opposed.

Dostoevsky no doubt seemed to Belinsky to be betraying everything that the critic had fought so hard to attain, and the literary ideals they supposedly shared. But Dostoevsky had never been as exclusively committed to the poetics of the Natural School as Belinsky probably believed on the basis of his impression of
Poor Folk
. At the very moment Dostoevsky was finishing up this work in 1845, he was also writing Mikhail, “Have you read
Emelya
of Veltman in the last
Library for Reading
?—what a charming thing!”
¹⁴
In this new work by Dostoevsky’s old favorite, Veltman shuttles back and forth between the real and the imaginary in a Romantic style rejected in the 1840s as completely out-of-date. Dostoevsky had also chosen the epigraph for
Poor Folk
from Odoevsky’s volume,
Russian Nights
(1844), whose stories and dialogues are the literary quintessence of the Romantic Schellingian spirit of the Russian 1830s.

It is clear to us now that Dostoevsky was experimenting with styles and character types that he was later to fuse together superbly. But it was difficult at the time not to conclude that, compared with the other young writers on the rise, he had simply lost his way. Between 1846 and 1848 Turgenev published a good many of the stories included in
A Sportsman’s Sketches
; Herzen produced his novel
Who Is To Blame?
and a series of brilliant short stories; Goncharov made his impressive début with
A Common Story
and followed it with a chapter from his novel in progress, “Oblomov’s Dream”—not to mention either Grigorovich’s two novels of peasant life,
Anton Goremyka
and
The Village
, or A. V. Druzhinin’s
Polinka Sachs
, which raised the banner of female emancipation. Compared to the array of such works, Dostoevsky’s publications seemed relatively insignificant indeed.

The Double
was attacked on two fronts, one stylistic and the other thematic. Decades later, even the Russian Symbolist Andrey Bely, both a connoisseur of Gogol and an admirer of Dostoevsky, wrote that “The
Double
recalls a patchwork quilt stitched togther from the subjects, gestures, and verbal procedures of Gogol.”
¹⁵
Belinsky’s remark about its chief character belonging in a madhouse,
taken up by others, saw Dostoevsky as an imitative, sensational depicter of pathological states of mind. There is external evidence that Dostoevsky himself (as well as others) thought of
The Double
primarily in relation to
Dead Souls
. “They [Belinsky and the Pléiade] say,” he writes Mikhail jubilantly on the day his new work was published, “that after
Dead Souls
nothing like it has been seen in Russia. . . . You will like it even better than
Dead Souls
.”
¹⁶
In revising the novel nineteen years later, Dostoevsky eliminated most of the traces pointing from one to the other; but the best way to understand
The Double
is to see it as Dostoevsky’s effort to rework
Dead Souls
in his own artistic terms, just as he had already done in
Poor Folk
with Gogol’s “The Overcoat.”

Both
Poor Folk
and
The Double
are part of the same artistic endeavor to penetrate into the psychology of Gogol’s characters and depict them from within. Golyadkin, the protagonist of
The Double
, may be described as a composite of the timidity and pusillanimity of Poprishchin in Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman” imbued with the “ambition” of Chichikov in
Dead Souls
, but the closeness of vision, the descent into his inner life, hardly creates any feeling of sympathy. The mock-heroic tonality taken over from
Dead Souls
, which Gogol used for purposes of broad social satire, is now applied to a world shrunk to the level of slightly off-color vaudeville farce; the picaresque adventure involves the search not even for a large fortune but for a slightly higher office post and acceptance into the charmed circle of a corrupt bureaucratic hierarchy. Dostoevsky thus once again takes his departure from a Gogolian model and intensifies its effect, but this time his aim is not to bring out more unequivocally the “humanitarian” component of the original. Rather, it is to reinforce Gogol’s acute perception of the grotesque effects of moral stagnation and social immobility on character. The result is a new synthesis of Gogolian elements, transformed and recast not by sentimentalism but by a deepening Hoffmannian fantasy into a genuine exploration of encroaching madness. In this way, Dostoevsky accentuates the humanly tragic aspect of Gogol’s still relatively debonair portrayal of social-psychic frustrations.

Breaking the connection maintained in
Poor Folk
between Devushkin’s poverty and his struggle for self-respect, Dostoevsky now emphasizes the latter motif. His focus, becoming internal and psychological, concentrates on the effort of Golyadkin to assert himself, but this inevitably brings Golyadkin into opposition with the existing rigidities of the social order. And Dostoevsky’s theme now becomes the crippling inner effects of this system on the individual—the fact that Golyadkin “goes mad out of
ambition
, while at the same time
fully despising ambition and even suffering from the fact that he happens to suffer from such nonsense as ambition” (13: 31).

The first several chapters of
The Double
give a brilliant picture of Golyadkin’s split personality before it has disintegrated entirely into two independent entities. There is Golyadkin’s evident desire to pretend to a higher social station and a more flattering image of himself—hence the carriage, the livery, the simulated shopping spree for elegant furniture as if he were a new bridegroom, even the marvelous detail of changing his banknotes into smaller denominations to have a fatter pocketbook. His pretensions to the favors of his imaginary beloved Klara Olsufyevna is only an expression of this urge for upward mobility and ego gratification, not its cause. During the first part, Golyadkin’s “ambition” dominates his feelings of inferiority and guilt and manages to keep them in check. The movement of the action shows him, however unsuccessfully, still trying to impose himself on the world despite its rebuffs. Once the double appears, however, the process is reversed, and we find Golyadkin striving by every means possible to prove himself a docile and obedient subordinate who accepts the dictates of the authorities ruling over his life as, literally, the word of God.