Dostoevsky (26 page)

“The Landlady” is the first of Dostoevsky’s fictional works in which the figure of the dreamer makes his appearance. One expects Ordynov to come into contact or conflict with the “real,” but instead, his first, faltering emergence from isolation leads into a realm far more fantastic than anything he had ever imagined. To be sure, the world that Ordynov encounters is intended to represent the
psychic
“reality” of the Russian past impinging on the present. But Dostoevsky was not yet master of the artistic means that could have made this “reality” seem anything more than what Belinsky called it—an attempt “to reconcile Marlinsky
and Hoffmann,” in which everything was “far-fetched, exaggerated, stilted, spurious, and false.” Dostoevsky’s next effort in the same direction, however, happily corrects these two defects of “The Landlady.” Romantic folklore is dropped entirely and the psychology of the dreamer is now placed squarely at the center of the artistic perspective.

The result is that charming little story, “White Nights” (
Belye nochi
), one of the two minor masterpieces (the other is
The Double
) that Dostoevsky wrote after
Poor Folk
. Charm is not a literary attribute that one ordinarily associates with Dostoevsky, but he was versatile enough to capture this elusive quality on the one or two occasions when he tried for it. “White Nights” stands out from the tragicomic and satirical universe of his early creations by the beautiful lightness and delicacy of its tone, its atmosphere of springtime adolescent emotionality, and the grace and wit of its good-natured parodies.

Both Ordynov and this new dreamer are similar in their sense of isolation and loneliness, but the dreamer in “White Nights” looks with friendly curiosity and benevolent interest on the rest of humanity. Just as in “The Landlady,” the dreamer in “White Nights” makes his contact with reality by meeting a young girl—not, however, a pain-racked beauty like Katerina but a pert little miss of seventeen named Nastenka, betrothed to a young man who had gone to Moscow to establish himself. For one dazzling moment, encouraged by Nastenka, the dreamer obtains a glimpse of “real” happiness, but she flies to the arms of her intended when he returns from Moscow, and the dreamer is left to mull over this last of his dreams. The wistfully humorous lyrical extrapolations of the dreamer are, in part, taken over word for word from the portrait of this type in the fourth Petersburg feuilleton, and Dostoevsky conjures up once again, with even more detail, all the enchantments and fascinations of the extraordinary world in which he lives.

The most famous passage in his lengthy tirade is one that Dostoevsky added in 1860, when he revised the story and decided to give the dreamer a specific cultural genealogy. “You ask, perhaps, what is he dreaming of? . . . of friendship with Hoffmann, St. Bartholomew’s Night, of Diana Vernon, of playing the hero at the taking of Kazan by Ivan Vasilevich, of Clara Mowbray, of Effie Deans, of the council of the prelates and Huss before them, of the rising of the dead in
Robert the Devil
(do you remember the music, it smells of the churchyard!), of Minna and Brenda, of the battle of Berezina, of the reading of a poem at Countess V. D.’s, of Danton, of
Cleopatra ei suoi amanti
, of a little house in Kolomna . . .” (1: 115–116). The passage contains allusions, so far as they can be identified, to Hoffmann, Merimée, Scott, Karamzin, George Sand (perhaps!), Meyerbeer, Zhukovsky, and Pushkin.

Dostoevsky inserted this kaleidoscope of Romantic influences into “White Nights,” and its sparkle now tends to conceal what probably stood out more in
the original text—the parody of Romantic novels depicting desperate and undying love in high society and exotic climes. Hitherto, the narrator’s inflamed imagination has battened on such enticing fare, and while his declamation for the benefit of the open-mouthed Nastenka is too extended to quote in full, one extract is indispensable to give the flavor of Dostoevsky’s witty deflation:

By the time he meets Nastenka, the bloom of such imaginary romances has long since begun to fade, and the dreamer has become aware of the insubstantiality of their deceptive delights. The meetings with Nastenka finally provide him with that one day (or rather, several “white nights”) of real life, and he knows that as a result his own existence will be changed forever. The dreamer’s love for Nastenka is untainted by selfishness, and he even tries to help her make contact with her elusive fiancé. When the latter appears at last, there is not a trace of jealousy or resentment in his response, even though he knows he is condemned once again to the gloom of his lonely chamber. “May your sky be clear, may your sweet smile be bright and untroubled, and may you be blessed for that moment of blissful happiness which you gave to another, lonely and grateful heart! My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of a man’s life?” (1: 141).

“White Nights” thus terminates on a note of benediction for the one moment of “real” happiness that the dreamer has been vouchsafed. The splendors of the ideal and the imaginary fade into insignificance before the reality of love for a sprightly snip of a girl of glowing flesh and blood. This is Dostoevsky’s vibrantly poetic contribution to the attack on Romantic
mechtatelnost
’ so common in Russian literature of the late 1840s; and though his little story cannot compete
with the novels of Herzen and Goncharov on the same theme, nowhere in Russian literature is it expressed with more sensitivity and lyrical grace. “White Nights” was the only one of Dostoevsky’s minor stories to be greeted favorably by the critics, but it also provided the occasion for a friendly polemic with Aleksey Pleshcheev, who in response wrote his own “Friendly Advice,” dedicated to Dostoevsky.

Pleshcheev’s main character, also a dreamer, sounds very much like Dostoevsky’s and even echoes some of his phrases. But he attains the object of his heart’s desire, marries a wealthy and ordinary young lady—and then settles down to lead the most Philistine existence imaginable! For Pleshcheev, the dreamer’s passion for Nastenka is itself only a less grandiose, more commonplace form of Romantic self-delusion. The Soviet critic who makes this point also remarks that the enticements of
mechtatelnost
’, even though thematically condemned, are nonetheless painted by Dostoevsky in the most glowing colors.
⁶
The power of imagination is glorified in the very act of seeming to censure its effects, and a good deal of the story’s appeal certainly derives from this ambiguity. Indeed, Dostoevsky pronounces his negative judgment with such elegiac tenderness that one cannot help suspecting a greater sentimental attachment to the richness of Romantic culture than he would perhaps have been willing to acknowledge.

Indeed, Dostoevsky was tied to Romanticism by too many emotional fibers of his being to detach himself from it entirely. If he was always ready to satirize and parody the fatuity of Romantic attitudes, or their use as a screen for egoistic impulses (“in the foreground is of course himself, our dreamer, in his precious person”), he would nonetheless always continue to believe in the importance of maintaining the capacity to be stirred by the imaginative and the ideal. During the 1860s, the theme of Dostoevsky’s early story would become one of the main issues at stake in the battle between the generations. And no matter how much Dostoevsky later belabored the pretensions and the moral vacuity of the Romantic generation of the “fathers,” he would always prefer the latter to their offspring, who fanatically insisted on reducing “real life” exclusively to the matter-of-fact, prosaic, and even grossly material.

Discouraged with turning out copy for Kraevsky, and longing to write in peace and at leisure, Dostoevsky complains to Mikhail in 1846 that what he yearns for is “at last [to] work for Holy Art, a holy work carried out in purity and simplicity of heart—a heart which has never yet so trembled and been stirred as now by
all the new images being created in my soul.”
⁷
Dostoevsky has thus by no means abandoned the Romantic Idealist conception of art as only distinguishable in form, but not in substance, from religion, nor would he ever do so in the future.

At about the same time, though, Belinsky was expressing a preference for a socially didactic art as the only kind he could now endure. In December 1847 he writes to Botkin, “I no longer require any more poetry and artistry than necessary to keep the story true; . . . the chief thing is that it should . . . have a moral effect upon society. If it achieves that goal even entirely without poetry and artistry, for me it is
nonetheless
interesting, and I do not read it, I devour it. . . . I know that I take a one-sided position, but I do not wish to change it and I feel sorrow and pity for those who do not share my opinion.”
⁸

Dostoevsky and Belinsky had broken off relations sometime between January and April of 1847, and Belinsky’s final judgment on his erstwhile disciple was a totally negative one. “I don’t know if I’ve informed you,” the critic wrote to Annenkov early in 1848, “that Dostoevsky has written a story,
The Landlady
—what terrible rubbish! . . . each work of his is a new decline. . . . I really puffed him up, my friend, in considering Dostoevsky—a genius! . . . I, the leading critic, behaved like an ass to the nth degree.”
⁹
Nor, as we know, did the usually generous and warm-hearted Belinsky find any more favorable words to say about Dostoevsky as a person. “Of Rousseau, I have only read
The Confessions
and, judging by it . . . I have conceived a powerful dislike of that gentleman. He is so much like Dostoevsky, who is profoundly convinced that all of mankind envies and persecutes him.”
¹⁰

Even during his darkest days of despair over the poor reception of his works, Dostoevsky still clung to the hope that he could reverse the process of his downfall. He had begun to block out a new major novel probably as early as October 1846, and in December he writes Mikhail that he has agreed to give Kraevsky “the first part of my novel
Netotchka Nezvanova
.”
¹¹
Dostoevsky, we know, was repeatedly forced to break off work on both this novel and “The Landlady” in 1847 for journalistic assignments that brought in much-needed extra cash, though doing so with great reluctance. He knew that only a substantial literary success could halt his precipitous decline in public favor, and he was well aware that a new group of literary competitors was looming on the horizon. “A whole host of new writers have begun to appear,” he had remarked uneasily to Mikhail in April 1846. “Some are my rivals. Herzen (Iskander) and Goncharov stand out
the most among them.”
¹²
In the December letter, he confesses to Mikhail, “I can’t help feeling that I’ve begun a campaign against all our literature, journals, and critics, and that with the three parts of my novel in
Notes of the Fatherland
this year I will again affirm my superiority in the teeth of all who wish me bad luck.”
¹³
It would take over a year, however, before the first installments of
Netotchka Nezvanova
began to appear at the beginning of 1849.