Dostoevsky (58 page)

Marya Alexandrovna’s manifest superiority emerges when she is faced with the task of persuading the proud and high-principled Zina, who has only contempt
for her mother’s ambitions and machinations, to agree to marry the decrepit prince. Zina, it should be explained, is in love with an impoverished young schoolmaster dying of tuberculosis, and her mother knows that she has pledged not to marry while he is in the throes of his death-agony. To accomplish her aim, Marya Alexandrovna realizes that she must offer some truly tempting prospect, and after some forceful but ineffectual preliminary maneuvers, she is forced to unlimber weapons of a heavier caliber. A marriage with the prince, she tells her daugher, would not be a true marriage at all (“he is not capable of requiring such a love”), and in any case “the Prince will live for a year or two at the utmost.” The young schoolmaster could not possibly be jealous of the prince, and hence Zina is told to “reflect that you will give him fresh courage and relieve his mind by marrying the Prince!” But Zina sees through her mother’s sophistries and pinpoints her strategy with exasperated precision: “I understand you, Mamma, I quite understand you! You can never resist a display of noble sentiments even in the nastiest action” (2: 325). These “noble sentiments” are Marya Alexandrovna’s “ideology,” and she draws them from the storehouse of commonplaces piled up by the Romantic literature of the 1820s and 1830s both in Russia and in Europe.

Realizing that any appeal to enlightened self-interest is doomed to failure, Marya Alexandrovna strikes a higher note—self-sacrifice. Why not think of marriage with the prince as an act of devotion? “Where is the egoism, where is the baseness?” Dostoevsky, as he will so often do in the future, is not afraid to mock ideas and ideals in which he believes himself when, as in this instance, they are only being used as a screen for selfishness and egoism. Marya Alexandrovna concludes by telling Zina that, if the prince’s wealth bothers her, she can renounce it, give away to the poor all but the barest necessity, and “help him, for instance, that luckless boy lying now on his death-bed” (2:326).

There is no need to detail here all of Marya Alexandrovna’s sophistries, but finally she strikes a vein of pure gold. As the narrator comments, “An inspiration, a genuine inspiration, dawned on her,” and she realizes that she has found a way of appealing to Zina’s authentic idealism: let Zina sacrifice herself by a degrading marriage so as to help her dying beloved. At this point, Marya Alexandrovna pulls out all the stops: “He [the local doctor] told me, in fact, that under different circumstances, especially with a change of climate and surroundings, the patient might recover. He told me that . . . in Spain there is some extraordinary island, I believe it is called Malaga—like some wine, in fact—where not only persons with weak lungs, but consumptives recover simply from the climate, and that people go there on purpose to be treated.” Once cured—and the prince conveniently deceased—the lovers could be properly united, or, if not, the schoolmaster will die happily, “trusting in your love, forgiven by you, in the shade of the myrtles and lemons, under the azure exotic sky!” (2: 327). This
lengthy tirade, of which only a few samples have been given, is more than Zina can resist; she breaks down and gives her reluctant consent.

Much the same tactic is used with the gullible Mozglyakov, who is persuaded that, although ready to marry the prince, Zina is actually madly in love with
him
and only testing his character by her decision. If he behaves nobly, thinking only of
her
happiness, and the great advantages of such a marriage, his rewards in the future will surpass his most fervid dreams: “For the Prince’s health Zina will go abroad, to Italy, to Spain. . . . You will follow her there . . . there your love will begin with irresistible force; love, youth! Spain—my God. Your love of course is untainted, holy. . . . You understand me,
mon ami
!” (2: 354). And then, the prince dead, the wealthy widow Zina will of course marry the man who has proven worthy of her love. Mozglyakov, however, sobers up quickly; and it is he who finally ruins the grand design and engineers Marya Alexandrovna’s defeat. But even his momentary acceptance of her intoxicating harangue shows the power of her personality and the power of ideology (in this case literary Romanticism) to impose its cloud-capped visions as a substitute for the awful truth.

Dostoevsky, we know, did not think much of
Uncle’s Dream
; fifteen years later, replying to a correspondent who wished to turn it into a play, Dostoevsky explains that he wrote it “solely with the aim of commencing my literary career and in terrible fear of the censorship (as an ex-convict). And hence I wrote a little thing of sky-blue mildness and remarkable innocence.”
¹⁸
It hardly, he surmises, contains enough substance even to make it a “comedy,” although it does include the prince, who is “the single serious figure in the entire story.” Dostoevsky’s remark indicates the importance that he continues to attach to the ideological connotations that he gave to the figure of old Prince K., who tries to conceal his true age with the aid of false hair, false teeth, a false mustache, a glass eye, and other such creations of the cosmetician’s art. Indeed, writes Dostoevsky, it was “only on closer inspection that you discerned . . . he was a sort of corpse worked by mechanisms,” and “was entirely made up of different little bits” (2: 310, 300).

What gives Prince K. his special stamp is the consistent satire of a certain kind of Russian Westernizer that Dostoevsky works into his depiction. One of the earliest touches of this kind, which sets the tone, occurs in a few sentences that describe the prince taking a little fresh air. “He was sometimes seen also on foot, wearing an overcoat and wide-brimmed straw hat, with a lady’s pink neckerchief round his neck, with an eyeglass in his eye and a wicker-basket for mushrooms, cornflowers and other wild flowers. . . . When he was met by a peasant,
who stepped aside, took off his hat, bowed low and said: ‘Good-day, Prince, your Excellency, our sunshine,’ the Prince promptly turned his lorgnette upon him, nodded graciously and said to him affably: ‘
Bonjour, mon ami, bonjour!
’ ” (2: 302). The prince’s pastoral get-up and French salutation reveal just how distant he was from the realities of Russian peasant life, but for all his giddiness, he is not unaware of what is going on in the world. He arrives in Mordasov originally because of an accident to his coach, and he assures everyone that the peasant coachman “was trying to take my life. . . . Only fancy, he has got hold of some new ideas, you know! There is a sort of skepticism in him . . . in short, he is a communist in the fullest sense of the word!” (2: 312).

The prince’s rambling reminiscences are filled with allusions to the Congress of Vienna and Lord Byron, as well as references to his romance with an enchanting French
vicomtesse
whom he lost to a German baron “when I was abroad in the Twenties” (2: 315). The prince is thus a product of the same period of literary Romanticism whose productions supply Marya Alexandrovna with her rhetorical arsenal. And even though the addlepated prince is a figure of comedy, Dostoevsky could not resist evoking, if only for an instant, the grim background against which the cultured Russian of that time was pursuing his carefree European existence. For the prince recalls “a very poetical [Moscow] lady” he had once met while taking the waters abroad, who had a daughter of fifty, and “she, too, almost talked in verse. Afterwards she had a very unfortunate mishap: she killed one of her serf-girls in a fit of rage and was tried for it” (ibid.).

Apropos of this attack on “naïve Romanticism,” a word must be devoted to the epilogue of the novella, which, as Russian criticism has long been aware, contains a parody of the famous ball scene in the last book of
Evgeny Onegin
. It is the scene in which Evgeny and Tatyana meet again after many years, she no longer the simple country lass but the queen of Petersburg society, he now hopelessly in love with the girl he had once scorned. Marya Alexandrovna had used this scene earlier to bewitch the bewildered Mozglyakov, holding up before him the vision of a similar encounter with Zina, the wealthy widow of Prince K., who falls into his arms in gratitude for his nobility of soul. Three years later, sent to a remote part of the Russian Empire, Mozglyakov meets the Governor-General (“an old military man”) and is invited to his wife’s name-day ball that very evening. Of course, his wife turns out to be the beautiful and imperious Zina, who snubs the bewildered Mozglyakov entirely. Mozglyakov stands around “with a biting Mephistophelean smile” and in a picturesque attitude, leaning against a column for several hours; but “his disillusioned air and all the rest of it were thrown away. Zina completely failed to observe him” (2: 397). At last, hungry and tired, he beats a retreat and leaves town the next morning.

On the level of the theme, Dostoevsky’s parody of Pushkin supplies a suitable conclusion to the attack on literary Romanticism that runs through the work as
a subtext. By revealing so glaringly the triumph of “real life,” with its necessary limitations and compromises, over an inflated and unworldly idealism nourished on literary stereotypes, Dostoevsky is making a point that he will return to again and again in the future—of course, in relation to other ideologies with far graver consequences when put into practice.

The Village of Stepanchikovo
is more ambitious than
Uncle’s Dream
, although pitched at the same level and written in the same key of farcical comedy. Considering it his best work up to that time, Dostoevsky spoke of it as an authentic personal expression of his own point of view. “I have put into it my soul, my flesh and blood,” he tells his brother. “I do not wish to say that I have expressed myself completely in it; that would be nonsense! . . . but it contains two immensely typical characters, created and noted down over a five-year-period, worked out flawlessly (in my opinion)—characters entirely Russian and only badly presented up to now in Russian literature.”
¹⁹
Dostoevsky is obviously referring to his two main figures, Foma Fomich Opiskin and Colonel Rostanev, whose strange relationship constitutes the heart of his story.

For at least the first of these characters, Foma Fomich (his last name, Opiskin, means a mistake in writing or a slip of the pen), the passage of time has verified Dostoevsky’s conviction that he had produced an “immensely typical” figure; no less a judge than Thomas Mann has called him “a comic creation of the first rank, irresistible, rivaling Shakespeare and Molière.”
²⁰
Indeed, the name Foma Fomich has since become a byword in Russian for any kind of insolent and impertinent hypocrite, toady, and sponger and is used much as the names of Uriah Heep and Pecksniff are used in English. As Mann’s mention of Molière suggests, the role Foma Fomich plays in the household of Colonel Rostanev reminds one strongly of Tartuffe in Molière’s famous play, unquestionably one of Dostoevsky’s sources. Others of lesser importance have been unearthed; and important as they may be, it is more illuminating to view Foma as a new version of a type that Dostoevsky had often depicted in the 1840s. Like most of the protagonists of these early works, Foma is (or had been) one of the downtrodden, with just enough education to make him feel his obscure social status as a wounding humiliation. In the past, we learn, Foma had tried his hand at everything, at last finding employment as a reader and paid companion to a vicious general,
an invalid who enjoys degrading his flunky for amusement: “there was no ignominy which he had not to endure in return for eating the General’s bread” (3: 8).

Previously, Dostoevsky had treated such characters with sympathy, if occasionally also, as in
The Double
, mixed with ironic condescension; but in his very last work before Siberia,
Netotchka Nezvanova
, where he emphasizes the lack of any
social
cause for the failed musician Yefimov’s resentment against the world, he was moving toward the placement of moral responsibility squarely on the person himself for the consequences of his actions. Now, with Foma Fomich, Dostoevsky firmly and finally confronts the philanthropic moral assumptions of the Natural School—within whose ranks he had begun his own career and whose values he had once accepted—and rejects them out-of-hand. There is no mistaking the indictment that Dostoevsky levels against Foma’s conduct when his fortunes are reversed and
he
achieves a position of power: “He paid us out for his past! A base soul escaping from oppression becomes an oppressor” (3: 13). Not even the most extreme humiliations that Foma endured because of his social inferiority can absolve him from the onus of being “a base soul,” whose definition is precisely the inability to overcome a need to dominate and humiliate others as revenge for one’s own humiliation and sufferings.

Foma Fomich is framed in the story by two other characters, who serve as “quasi-doubles” to highlight this authorial judgment of his baseness. The personal history of the wealthy heiress Tatyana Ivanovna, a guest in the hospitable home of Colonel Rostanev, is an exact parallel to that of Foma’s. All the same, the native sweetness and kindness of her nature remain unaltered when her position changes overnight. Closer in character to Foma is the clerk Yezhevikin, the impoverished father of the young governess Nastenka with whom Colonel Rostanev is in love. Like Foma, Yezhevikin has a rankling envy of his betters and, while pretending to be “the most abject, groveling flatterer” (3: 166), clearly is mocking and sneering at those before whom he is verbally subservient. At the same time, though, he is genuinely honest, possessing a sense of dignity that does not allow him to exploit others in his own interest or even to accept any but the most essential financial aid offered out of kindness by the Colonel.