Fedor Dostoevskij

The first-person narrator is a young man living in Petersburg > with nothing to do, (...) convinced that in short order (he would) accomplish truly remarkable, even grandiose things. He is supported by an uncle, a wealthy landowner in distant Stepanchikovo. Their correspondence is sparse, but of late the young man has been urged to join his uncle through rambling, incoherent letters, beneath which lies an entreaty to marry the young governess—an unhappy, beautiful, and educated girl. Our young man decides to comply with these requests, out of a blend of curiosity and affection. He finds himself amidst a > bizarre collection of characters, a tight-knit community revolving around a shrewd, charismatic manipulator—what we would call today a "guru"; hence the modern resonance of the tale. Foma Fomich > was short, fair-haired and grizzled, with a hook on his nose and fine wrinkles all over his face. (...) He would read aloud books on the salvation of the soul, speak with eloquent tears of the various Christian virtues, (...) recount his life and his exploits, (...) and was a master at passing judgment on his neighbor. Having lived in squalor, all his life he had been forced to wander from one landowner’s estate to another, playing "the buffoon." In Stepanchikovo, at long last, he was able to practice his arts as a fabulist, indulge his vanity, and redeem himself from the humiliations suffered for so long. His technique consists in exploiting the weaknesses of others, shifting from an aggrieved, haughty victimhood to sermons extolling his own virtues while decrying the depravities of others. Suffice it to say, he finds fertile ground. The uncle, a former hussar colonel, is good-natured, honest, and trusting, yet he is carrying on an affair with the young, destitute governess: he wishes to marry her off to his nephew in order to continue the liaison. The girl’s father displays a dignified indifference, but in truth aims to marry his daughter to the aging, wealthy landowner. Then there is Tatiana, a wealthy, somewhat nymphomaniacal spinster; the household hopes she will marry the uncle to unite their fortunes, but a few dandies are scheming to abduct her to get their hands on her money. Then there is the general's widow, with her entourage of devout and venomous young ladies: hysterical fits, fainting spells, and seizures occur whenever Foma’s position is called into question, whereupon, deeply offended, he declares he is leaving, going into exile. Naturally, he never will. > Foma occupies two large, splendid rooms. (...) Absolute comfort surrounded the great man. The fresh, colorful wallpapers, the shimmering silk curtains at the windows, the rugs, the pier glass, (...) everything bore witness to the tender solicitude of the master and mistress of the house toward Foma Fomich. And what of our young man? He postures as a "scientist," "philosopher," "know-it-all": he observes the dynamics of these human beings, growing indignant only in fits and starts when he sees his uncle trampled by this rogue. The narrative moves swiftly, paced like a theatrical play: brisk dialogue, sharp humor, caricatures, stereotypical "masks" of human pettiness. One senses a disdain for the provinces and for the peasant world in particular—exemplified by that poor serf, constantly abused by Foma because he keeps dreaming of "a white bull" rather than "refined ladies and gentlemen taking tea." In a crescendo worthy of a comedy of errors, Foma seems on the verge of losing his grip, yet with a dramatic reversal the sly, adept manipulator reasserts his dominion over the inhabitants of Stepanchikovo. It is the fate of great authors that their broader oeuvre is overshadowed by their undisputed masterpieces. When Dostoevsky is mentioned, one immediately turns to works such as *Crime and Punishment*, *The Idiot*, and *The Brothers Karamazov* (see the review of *The Idiot* on this site). Across the Russian writer’s vast output there is much else of enduring worth. Consider *The Adolescent*, so strikingly contemporary in its scrutiny of the protagonist's relationship with his father (see the review on this site). *The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants* is unanimously labeled a comic work, thereby missing the novel's distinctive qualities. It is a study of Power, and of the profound motivations that underpin it: it is not money (Foma rejects a handsome offer to quit the estate), nor is it even the taste for raw dominion or the authority to make critical decisions (on the contrary, Power evades decision-making). What drives Foma is sheer vanity—a narcissistic hunger to occupy center stage, to revel in his own rhetoric, to be revered and flattered. Its contemporary relevance is glaring in an age of Power that seeks only to generate talk about itself in a media frenzy. The inhabitants of Stepanchikovo may be an isolated community in the Russian countryside, but they speak volumes about sycophancy and the vacuity of the human soul. The writing and plot are effervescent, departing stylistically from the major novels: there is no psychological introspection, nor are the relationships between characters probed in depth. It is without question a coming-of-age novel, in which the great writer hones his craft in dialogue construction, paying scant attention to setting, and above all neglecting the narrator, behind whom Dostoevsky himself lurks. Why read it? It is entertaining and profound.

> I am a Dreamer... I have so little real life! In reality, I have lived moments such as these so rarely that I hope to make them live again in my dreams. I will dream of you all night, every week, every month, all year round.... This is how the first-person narrator expresses himself when, one night, he meets a weeping girl who also describes herself as a "dreamer." We will never learn his name; hers we discover is Nasten'ka, and she lives with her grandmother, who keeps her pinned to her skirt with a safety pin to prevent her from wandering off. It is a peculiar sort of cloistering, given that Nasten'ka slips out into the night without trouble and has embarked on a relationship with a young neighbor who promised to marry her—an improbable, "tear-jerking" tale that would have seduced no one but our naive Dreamer. On the other hand, he is a young man disillusioned with life, possessing *a fantasy sick with anguish*, waiting for a > spark from which to flare up a fire to warm the frozen heart, from which to revive that which was once so dear, which touched the soul and made the blood boil, which drew tears from the eyes and deceived so majestically. And if for Nasten'ka the encounter is a way to console herself and, if you will, a coquettish, self-victimizing pose to win admiration and toy with feelings, for the Dreamer the young woman is the continuation of the Dream, of a fantasy of Love. > Oh Nasten'ka, Nasten'ka, if only you knew how alone I am. the Dreamer cries out, as though the girl could, or wished to, fill his void. Poor Dreamer! The subtle game of seduction is carried to the point where our Dreamer is ready to marry her, given that Nasten'ka's betrothed has failed to show up to honor his promise of taking her to the altar. Better a Dreamer than an old maid pinned to her grandmother's skirts! > I had looked at her... She had leaned against me more heavily. At that moment a young man passed us by. (...) God, what a cry! What a shudder! How she tore herself from my arms to run toward him. (...) I remained there, for a long time, watching them... In the end, both had vanished from my sight. In her fine introduction, Sarah Tardino evokes the distant love of the Provençal poet Jaufré Rudel; in this light, Nasten'ka would be a Fantasy of Love, a figure both idealized and real who, as Giosuè Carducci sang, "three times the trembling mouth / with love’s kiss did kiss." Far too much grace for the wretched Dreamer! This interpretation focuses attention on the relationship between the two youths, losing sight of the core of the tale: the Dream. Within a narrative structure hinged upon dialogue, the story is actually a long soliloquy, in which the part recounted by Nasten'ka is merely the distorted mirror of the Dreamer's suffering and of his need to construct a narrative wherein he is the protagonist, the savior of the sorrowful maiden. In this dialogue born of the Dreamer's fantasy, Nasten'ka asks herself > why can we not all be like brothers? (...) Why can one not speak plainly what is in one's heart...? Why can the Dream not become real, I would add? Why can one not meet someone to confide in, and fall in love with, with whom to escape from loneliness? Or perhaps, it is better to go on dreaming. Why read it? A fragile tale, difficult to grasp, yet admirably written.

In the preamble, the author himself divides the tale into two parts. In the first, entitled "Underground", > the character presents himself, his views, and seems to wish to elucidate the reasons why he appeared, and was bound to appear, in our midst, that is, how in the era of positivism and dominant reason, it was necessary to acknowledge a primordial force within man—one rising from the underground, driving one to be wicked, to debase oneself in abjection, making one cry out with self-satisfaction: > I am a sick man... I am a wicked man. It is thus a philosophical manifesto, a nihilistic culmination concerning human nature. In the second part, "Apropos of the Wet Snow" (a title one might expect from a Japanese novel), the protagonist narrates an episode from his life meant to explain the ideas and impressions voiced in the first part. It is as if the protagonist, forty years old at the moment he expounds his theories, returns in memory to when he was twenty and to an encounter that altered his life. If we liberate ourselves from the framework cunningly proposed by the author, we realize that Woman lies at the heart of the tale. A clear hint is already present in the verses quoted by Dostoevsky at the opening of the second part: "when, out of the darkness of error, /(...) you told me the story of what had been before me/and suddenly, covering your face with your hands,/overcome with grief and shame,/indignant and appalled,/ you wept..." (Nikolay Nekrasov, 1846). Here it is a young prostitute, Liza, whom the protagonist meets in a brothel and urges to turn her life around, offering his help. He had been captivated by her > fresh, young, rather pale face, with straight, dark eyebrows and a serious, somewhat astonished look. In making her this reckless promise of redemption, our protagonist is not moved by genuine empathy. > A sordid thought was born in my mind and crept through my whole body like an unpleasant sensation, akin to descending into a damp and musty cellar. (...) Now, however, the absurd idea—loathsome as a spider—of depravity became clear to me, which, without love, in a brutal and vulgar way, begins precisely with that: the crowning of true love. There is, as it were, a faint boundary between subjugation, the pleasure of humiliating, and sincere, pure affection for a Woman; between love as lust and Love without ifs or buts. And when Liza arrives at the protagonist's home, he pursues a cruel game of insults and spite, almost as if it were the poor girl's fault for having caught him in a shabby dressing gown— > filthy, wretched, disgusting, (...) a scoundrel, a rogue, a loafer, no longer the hero of their encounter at the brothel. And then *a strange thing happened*. Humiliated, insulted, in the face of abasement, Liza > had understood, above all, what a woman always senses before anything else, if she is truly in love: namely, that I was unhappy. (...) I had not even imagined that she had not come to hear pitiful words, but to love me, because for a woman all resurrection, all salvation from whatever ruin, and all rebirth lie in love alone, which cannot manifest itself except in love. Unfortunately, > we are stillborn, and for a long time now we have not been fathered by living fathers, and we like it more and more. We do not know how to recognize and accept Love. The tale is an existential, introspective, and philosophical analysis of an antihero, or rather of a split within the Self, between our self-representation in fantasy and literature and concrete life, in which we are no longer great men, but petty and wicked beings. I do not know whether D'Annunzio ever read *Notes from Underground*, but without doubt the novella's protagonist seems to foreshadow the characters of our writer's novels and plays: supermen in art and abject in life. It is not the protagonist-narrator who remains etched in our imagination; on the contrary, we ultimately grow weary of the redundant flood of words behind which he takes refuge. It is Liza who gradually emerges—from a wretched prostitute into a woman wounded in her betrayed love, in her proud refusal of a payment brutally thrust upon her. She is a dynamic, non-stereotypical figure, the only one to evolve within a static narrative where situations and characters seem pinned down in their functions, beginning with the protagonist. It is no accident that *Notes from Underground* did not achieve critical or popular success, precisely because it lacks plot and the development of human figures in their psychological and spiritual dimensions. Why read it? It is of great interest for understanding Dostoevsky's "philosophy".

Arkady Dolgoruky, the first-person narrator, is the natural son of Versilov, > a cold and proud man, haughty and negligent toward me, who..., having fathered me and abandoned me among strangers, not only did not know me at all, but never even repented of it . Arkady suffers deeply from his father’s indifference, not least because the latter has taken his mother with him and reduced the young man to a state of acute social distress, as his status as an illegitimate son is known to all. > I was like an outcast... and I had decided to renounce them all and withdraw once and for all into my own life . What draws the young man, who has now completed his secondary studies, out of his isolation is a letter from Versilov inviting him to Petersburg. The first part of the novel recounts Arkady’s encounter with the complex and elusive figure of his father: a fraught relationship, also because > that man was nothing but my dream, the dream of my childhood years. Thus I had invented him myself, whereas in reality he proved to be different, fallen so far below my fantasy . Yet Versilov is not the sole center of Arkady’s life. The young man finds himself caught within a veritable “enigma,” woven of characters, relationships, and events, amid which he feels ill at ease with his rigid, solitary, and proud disposition. Much to his regret, he must acknowledge that people have multiple faces, that interpersonal relationships are often ambiguous, and that there is a “sacrosanct axiom” in Pushkin’s famous verse: “dearer to me than base truth / is the deception that transfigures us.” In the second part of the novel, Arkady appears to have accepted this reality. He leads a dissipated life, devoted to gambling, drinking, and women, while neglecting his mother and sister, whom he has only just met. This might be an ordinary phase in an adolescent’s life, were it not for the fact that Arkady carries a terrible secret: sewn into his coat is a document in which Katerina Nikolaevna, Versilov’s former lover, formulated a plan to have her father declared legally incompetent—a wealthy, elderly prince to whom, moreover, Arkady is deeply attached. The discovery of this document would prompt the prince to disinherit his daughter and would favor the aspirations of Arkady’s half-sister, who wishes to marry the old aristocrat. To complicate matters, Arkady is in love with Katerina and cannot bear to betray her. Furthermore, he is fond of his half-sister, fascinated by her intellect and strong character. Everyone suspects that the young man possesses the document, and so they cajole him with words and gestures that the naive Arkady misinterprets as genuine acts of friendship and even love. It is difficult to navigate this web of intrigue, especially when one lacks a clear perception of good and evil and when people are neither clearly wicked nor purely virtuous. What reigns is “the soul of a spider”—namely, that man > can cherish in his soul the loftiest ideal alongside the greatest baseness, and all in perfectly good faith . Yet Arkady too is seized by “ignominious thoughts”—for instance, using the document in his possession to win Katerina’s love. > Where, then, had all of this come from, already so prepared? And this, because I had the soul of a spider! It means that everything had sprouted long ago and lay in my corrupt heart, lay in my desire . And it is precisely Arkady’s weakness, his yielding to the pull of evil, that precipitates the crisis in the third part of the novel. The young man is himself duped by criminals who secretly steal the document from him and attempt to blackmail Katerina. To his horror, the youth later discovers that they are in league with Versilov.. Versilov’s split personality confronts the young man as a “broken image,” all the more so after an intense, long-awaited conversation in which Versilov had professed to his son his love for Arkady’s mother, only to subsequently send Katerina a formal marriage proposal. Who, then, is his father really? Perhaps merely a man driven by whim, by unchecked vanity, Arkady thinks. The disillusionment with the father figure is complete. Arkady is no longer an adolescent. *The Adolescent* is the author’s most contemporary novel. Several elements contribute to this: the modernity of the father-son relationship, the Pirandellian theme of duplicity, the detective-story elements of the plot, which is full of twists and turns and frequently leaves the reader in suspense as to what will follow. The book’s greatest merit lies precisely in its tight pacing, which leaves little room for philosophical disquisitions, as is so often the case in the author’s other novels. Beyond Dostoevsky’s well-known skill in constructing dialogue, what is striking is the author’s ability to mirror duplicity in the very structure of the sentence: for example, chapters unfailingly close with the image of a contradiction, of an ‘other,’ delineated in just a few sparse strokes. Why read it? It is one of Dostoevsky’s finest novels, insufficiently appreciated perhaps because it does not foreground philosophical and religious themes.

Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin is a respected civil servant. Dostoevsky introduces him in his tidy and modest dwelling on a morning brimming with expectations for our "hero": > the dingy, smoke-grimed greenish walls of his little room, the mahogany chest of drawers, the Turkish-style divan of red oilcloth with greenish little flowers, looked upon him with familiarity. In front of the mirror, on this exceptional day for him, > it would really be a fine thing," Golyadkin said under his breath, "it would really be a fine thing if I weren't in proper order today, if, let's say, some novelty had cropped up, a nice, completely untimely pimple, for instance. Our hero must be flawless; he is invited—or believes himself to be—to the birthday of the only daughter of State Councillor Berendeyev. Yet amidst this prevailing euphoria, Dostoevsky immediately gives us several signs that something is amiss: as he steps into *a light-blue carriage for hire*, his servant exchanges > knowing glances with the coachman and several loafers, (...) barely suppressing the coarsest laughter; having climbed into the carriage, our hero > shuddered (...) and hastily, almost terror-stricken, shrank into the darkest corner of the carriage; finally, we discover that Golyadkin, the staid civil servant, is in the care of a doctor who urges him not to shun a carefree life, not to be an *enemy of the bottle*. We are therefore hardly surprised when our hero is turned away by the doorman and denied entry to the birthday of the powerful councillor's daughter. He is not a welcome guest! Through a subterfuge, Golyadkin manages to slip into the reception, where, in a state of delirium, he behaves so unseemly that he is shown the door. But is it reality or a hallucination born of an already diseased mind? This serves as the prelude to the entrance of a new character: the double, the slimy, disgusting, cunning Golyadkin number two. At first, the double displays a humble attitude toward "number one," *hanging on his every glance*, but soon grows increasingly arrogant, currying favor with our hero's superiors. What is more, he mocks him in front of their younger colleagues. > After tickling him a little, (...) causing great amusement among the young people surrounding them, Mr. Golyadkin number two, with disgusting brazenness, decisively gave a tap to the protruding belly of Mr. Golyadkin number one, accompanying the gesture with the most venomous and suggestive of smiles, saying: "having fun, little brother?" What is the double referring to? As Dostoevsky will make explicit in *Notes from Underground* (see the review on this site), there is within us, deep in our soul, a malice that leads us to commit wicked acts, and which can also drive us to madness. Only in a dream does our hero manage to glimpse a petty act, > a piece of cowardice seen, heard, or committed by himself not long before, an unbecoming behavior: > a well-known young lady, (...) a little German girl, to whom the double can freely allude, > wheedling around Golyadkin, smiling at him affably, and displaying, in that way, false cordiality toward him. For our hero, it comes as a relief when he sees the doctor arrive: > tears streamed from Mr. Golyadkin's eyes. "in that case I am ready... I submit entirely and entrust my fate (to the doctor)," (...) a tremendous and deafening cry of joy burst from the chests of all those surrounding him and, with the cruellest resonance, rippled through the waiting crowd. (...) The slimy twin of Mr. Golyadkin (...) blew little kisses to Mr. Golyadkin; but then he began to show signs of flagging and appeared less and less frequently, until he disappeared completely. A psychiatrist might say that we are confronted with a schizophrenic personality in a state of mounting impairment, with a splitting of the self. A psychoanalyst, long before Freud, might discern the ego's fear of meeting its double, of uncovering the evil harbored within, behind the veneer of bourgeois respectability—a rejection of the cogs of the Russian Empire's oppressive bureaucracy. And so Golyadkin's madness, the conjuring of his disgusting, slimy double, is nothing less than a desperate act of revolt, one that can only lead to the asylum, deviant as it is from the reigning norms. And Dostoevsky is the bard of Petersburg society. > Oh, if only I were a poet! A poet, naturally, equal to Homer and Pushkin, for with a less sublime talent it is impossible to step forward. Could it be that for us contemporaries, too, nothing remains but madness in the face of such a suffocating world—yet where is a Dostoevsky? The pace is brisk and lively, calling to mind for the reader the splendid *The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants* (see the review on this site). Already a great writer, Dostoevsky leads us by the hand through the tale of the protagonist's madness—at first incredulous, with gentle, ironic touches, then in an increasingly overt manner. To be sure, the narration of madness coils in upon itself, and how could it be otherwise, given that only through the repetition of events and emotional states can one dig deep beneath the surface? The concept of the double is brilliant because it establishes another point of view, a perspective both external and internal at once—a truly innovative narrative device found in few novels, such as Natsume Soseki's *I Am a Cat* (see the review on this site), though undeniably with a vastly different rhythm. Why read it? Intense and disquieting at once.

The novel pivots on the figure of Prince Myshkin, who returns to Russia after an extended stay in Switzerland, where he was treated for "idiocy"—that is, mental illness. The protagonist’s trajectory unfolds within a setting crowded with characters, from the somber Rogozhin (virtually the personification of evil) to a succession of opportunists and nihilists, through to two female characters (Nastasya and Aglaya) who, albeit in different ways, vie for Myshkin’s love. The clash between the two women, Nastasya’s flight from Myshkin (who intended to marry her out of pity rather than love), and Rogozhin’s murder of Nastasya ultimately drive Myshkin back into madness. The novel’s central theme is Myshkin’s innocence within a false, devious, and ambiguous world that the protagonist does not comprehend, and whose conventions and rules he tends rather to disrupt through spontaneous and sincere behavior. Myshkin constitutes a disruptive element to which society fails to respond, bewildered and taken aback as it is. The dilemma is the one voiced by Aglaya’s parents: > There was something strange about the matter, and just how strange, exactly? Or was there, rather, nothing strange at all? . Naturally, the parents seek an answer in the opinion of society and its most prominent figures, arranging a reception at which Myshkin will astonish (and partly mesmerize) everyone with his disconcerting behavior. In some ways, Myshkin recalls the figure of Christ in the famous encounter with the Grand Inquisitor in *The Brothers Karamazov*: sincerity, simplicity, a sense of pity, and the will to bestow love are all elements alien to our society, and somehow misunderstood or rejected. Madness is thus not a negative condition, but a different—and truer—vantage point on reality and human relations. The characters seem somehow to grasp Myshkin’s power; they are drawn to it, yet dread it. Nastasya understands him better than the others, yet shrinks from him for fear of hurting him; Aglaya loves him, yet wishes he were different, more compliant with the rules of society; and Rogozhin hates him precisely because he perceives that Nastasya is irreversibly drawn to Myshkin’s nature. The other characters too—and they are countless—act out of the same ambivalent sentiment, wavering between contempt and admiration. Alongside this central theme run innumerable other lines of inquiry, some characteristic of contemporary society (such as the nihilism already explored in *Demons*), others more universal: among the most compelling are the anticipation of death and the anguish that grips humankind, the face as a mirror of the soul and of the observer, and the theme of evil and hatred, embodied by Rogozhin and evoked within the gloomy atmosphere of his house. *The Idiot* is a singular novel. It is highly traditional in its narrative style, which is so overburdened with dialogue as to almost resemble a play, yet it is profoundly innovative in terms of the themes it addresses. The near-total absence of the religious theme (dominant in *The Brothers Karamazov*) allows for the explosion of other concerns closer to an existential dimension, in which the individual must seek selfhood autonomously rather than relying on divinity or metaphysics. Even more than his other novels, *The Idiot* gives expression to the "new man" and thereby opens the door to postmodernism. The narrative pacing is not consistently compelling (closer to *Demons* than to *Crime and Punishment* or *The Brothers Karamazov*), and in strictly literary terms, it is not particularly successful.