Dostoevsky (24 page)

It is in this latter part of the work that Dostoevsky’s social-psychological thrusts become the sharpest. Golyadkin struggles against becoming confused with his double, who behaves in a fashion that the initial Golyadkin would dearly like to emulate but that he has been taught to believe is morally inadmissible. The double is of course “a rascal,” but the
real
Golyadkin is “honest, virtuous, mild, free from malice, always to be relied on in the service, and worthy of promotion . . . but what if . . . what if they get us mixed up” (1: 172)! The possibility of substitution leads Golyadkin to accuse his double of being “Grishka Otrepeev”—the famous false pretender to the throne of the true tsars in the seventeenth century—and introduces the theme of impostorship, so important for Dostoevsky later and (with its evocation of
Boris Godunov
) so incongruous in this context.

The more threatened Golyadkin feels because of the machinations of his double, the more he is ready to surrender, give way, step aside, throw himself on the mercy of the authorities and look to them for aid and protection. He is ready to admit that he may even truly be “a nasty, filthy rag”—though, to be sure, “a rag possessed of ambition . . . a rag possessed of feelings and sentiments” (1: 168–169). The inchoate phrases that tumble off his tongue are filled with the mottoes of the official morality of unquestioning and absolute obedience encouraged by the paternal autocracy. “I as much as to say look upon my benevolent superior as a father and blindly trust my fate to him,” he tells his superior Andrey Filippovich, in his desperate efforts to “unmask the impostor and scoundrel”
who is taking his place. “At this point,” says the narrator, “Mr. Golyadkin’s voice trembled and two tears ran down his eyelashes” (1: 196). As the double, “with an unseemly little smile,” had told Golyadkin in the important dream sequence of the preceding
Chapter 10
: “What’s the use of strength of character! How could you and I, Yakov Petrovich, have strength of character?” (1: 185).

Some of the most genuinely amusing moments in the novel occur as Golyadkin, believing that he has received a letter from his beloved Klara setting a rendezvous for an elopement, sits waiting in the courtyard of Klara’s house (taking shelter from the pouring rain under a pile of logs) for her to keep their supposed assignation—and at the same time, inwardly protests against such an unforgivable breach of the proprieties. “Good behavior, madame”—these are his ruminations—“means staying at home, honoring your father and not thinking about suitors prematurely. Suitors will come in good time, madame, that’s so. . . . But, to begin with, allow me to tell you, as a friend, that things are not done like that, and in the second place I would have given you and your parents, too, a good thrashing for letting you read French books; for French books teach you no good,” and so on (1: 221). The original version of
The Double
concludes shortly thereafter as Golyadkin is driven off in a carriage by his doctor, who suddenly becomes a demonic figure, and—but we are left hanging in the air! The work is abruptly cut short at this point on a note of Gogolian flippancy and irresolution: “But here, gentlemen, ends the history of the adventures of Mr. Golyadkin” (1: 431).

The haunting brilliance of Dostoevsky’s portrayal of a consciousness pursued by obsessions of guilt and ultimately foundering in madness has never been disputed, yet it is genuinely difficult to pinpoint Dostoevsky’s moral focus. One way of doing so is to see that for all his taunts at Golyadkin, Dostoevsky is even more sarcastic about the exalted eminences of the bureaucratic realm that glimmer before Golyadkin as his unattainable ideal.
They
are clearly corrupt to the core, and lack even that minimum of moral self-awareness responsible for Golyadkin’s plight.
¹⁷
Golyadkin at least
believes
in the pious official morality to which everybody else gives lip service, and his struggle with the double is an effort to defend that morality from being betrayed. In fighting off the double, Golyadkin is really fighting off his own impulses to subvert the values presumably shared by his official superiors. This is probably what Valerian Maikov meant when he said that Golyadkin perishes “from the consciousness of the disparity of particular interests in a well-ordered society,” that is, from his realization of the impossibility of asserting himself as an individual without violating the morality that has been bred into his bones and that keeps him in submission.

Yet Dostoevsky’s genuine indignation at the crippling conditions of Russian life, which offered no outlet for the ego to assert itself normally, did not turn him into a moral determinist willing to absolve the victims of all responsibility for their conduct. His very portrayal of a figure like Devushkin implied that debasing social conditions were far from being able entirely to shape character. As a result, Dostoevsky’s work of this period often contains a puzzling ambiguity of tone because a character is shown
simultaneously
both as socially oppressed and yet as reprehensible and morally unsavory precisely because he has surrendered too abjectly to the pressure of his environment.

The Double
suffered from being too imitative of Gogol, but it was also too original to be fully appreciated. For the complexities of Dostoevsky’s narrative technique also posed a special problem for his readers.
The Double
is narrated by an outside observer who gradually identifies himself with Golyadkin’s consciousness and carries on the narrative in the speech-style of the character. Its verbal texture thus contains a large admixture of stock phrases, clichés, mottoes, polite social formulas, and meaningless exclamations, which are obsessively repeated as a means of portraying the agitations and insecurities of Golyadkin’s bewildered psyche. This is a remarkable anticipation, unprecedented in its time, of Joyce’s experiments with cliché in the Gerty McDowell chapter of
Ulysses
, and of what Sartre so much admired in John Dos Passos—the portrayal of a consciousness totally saturated with the formulas and slogans of its society. The effect in
The Double
, however, was a tediousness and monotony that Dostoevsky’s critics, and readers, were not yet prepared to put up with either for the sake of social-psychological verisimilitude or artistic experimentation.

And even though Dostoevsky’s narrative technique per se no longer creates any barrier for the modern reader, the complexity of Dostoevsky’s attitude still creates problems of comprehension. In isolating Golyadkin’s imbroglio from any overt social pressure, and by treating both Golyadkin
and
the world he lives in with devastating irony, Dostoevsky tends to give the impression that Golyadkin is simply a pathological personality who has only himself to blame for his troubles. Even Belinsky, who might have been expected to grasp the social implications of Golyadkin’s psychology, remarked that his life would not really have been unbearable except “for the unhealthy susceptibility and suspiciousness of his character” which was “the black demon” of his life.
¹⁸
In other words, Dostoevsky was simply portraying a case of paranoia and mental breakdown with no larger significance than that of a case history. And from Belinsky’s remark to Annenkov that, like Rousseau, Dostoevsky was “firmly convinced that all of mankind envies and persecutes him,”
¹⁹
we can surmise how closely Belinsky associates the protagonist of
The Double
with his erstwhile protégé.

This judgment set the pattern for a view of Dostoevsky’s work that dominated Russian criticism until the end of the nineteenth century. In 1849 Annenkov, echoing Belinsky, accused Dostoevsky of being the leader of a new literary school (that included his brother Mikhail and Yakov Butkov, Dostoevsky’s competitor as a portrayer of Petersburg slum life) specializing in the portrayal of “madness for the sake of madness.”
²⁰
Annenkov severely criticized this unhealthy taste for rather sensational and grotesque tragicomedy, in which he could not discern any more serious or elevated artistic aim. Such an accusation was of course unfair to Dostoevsky, whose “abnormal” and “pathological” characters can all be seen, on closer examination, to make a social-cultural point. But Dostoevsky perhaps relied too much on the reader to grasp the ideological implications of his psychology and to understand that the “abnormalities” of his characters derived from the pressure of the Russian social situation on personality. The result was an artistic lack of balance that led to a good deal of misunderstanding and has caused unceasing critical disagreement.

The “idea” embodied in
The Double
—the internal split between self-image and truth, between what a person wishes to believe about himself and what he really is—constitutes Dostoevsky’s first grasp of a character type that became his hallmark as a writer. Golyadkin is the ancestor of all of Dostoevsky’s great split personalities, who are always confronted with their quasi-doubles or doubles (whether in the form of other “real” characters or as hallucinations) in the memorable scenes of the great novels—such as the underground man, Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, and Ivan Karamazov—although the frame of reference in
The Double
is still purely social-psychological. In this early phase of Dostoevsky’s work, Golyadkin’s intolerable guilt feelings at his own modest aspirations primarily disclose the stifling and maiming of personality under a despotic tyranny.

Several short stories that Dostoevsky produced at this time are written from the same perspective as
The Double
and raise much the same critical issues. In each, Dostoevsky continued to explore the pathological effects on personality of the Petersburg world of giant chancelleries and terrified
chinovniki
, but without portraying this environment as in any way
specifically
responsible for the abnormalities he depicts. The result was a continuation of the confusion that had been caused by
The Double
, and an increasing dissatisfaction with Dostoevsky’s works by the critics and, presumably, by most of the reading public as well.

¹
DW
(January 1877), 587–588.

²
Pis’ma
, 1: 86–87; October 8, 1845.

³
P. V. Annenkov,
The Extraordinary Decade
, ed. Arthur P. Mendel, trans. Irwin R. Titunik (Ann Arbor, MI, 1968), 151.

⁴
Ibid.

⁵
DRK
, 27.

⁶
Ibid., 28.

⁷
Pis’ma
, 1: 89; April 1, 1846.

⁸
Ibid., 102; November 26, 1846.

⁹
V. G. Belinsky,
Selected Philosophical Works
(Moscow, 1948), 385.

¹⁰
Pis’ma
, 1: 103; November 26, 1846.

¹¹
Belinsky,
Works
, 385.

¹²
Pis’ma
, 1: 100; end of October, 1846.

¹³
Belinsky,
Works
, 478.

¹⁴
Pis’ma
, 1: 78; May 4, 1845.

¹⁵
Cited in A. L. Bem,
U istokov tvorchestva Dostoevskogo
(Prague, 1936), 143.

¹⁶
Pis’ma
, 1: 81; February 1, 1846. Dostoevsky evokes this linkage in his original subtitle,
The Adventures of Mr. Golyadkin
, which recalls Gogol’s subtitle,
The Adventures of Chichikov
. Just as Gogol had written a mock-heroic account of Chichikov’s “adventures” in trying to rise in the world, so Dostoevsky was doing the same for Mr. Golyadkin.

¹⁷
This point is well brought out in F. Evnin, “Ob odnoi istoriko-literaturnoi legendy,”
Russkaya Literatura
2 (1965), 3–26.

¹⁸
V. G. Belinsky, “Petersburgsky sbornik,” in
DRK
, 27.

¹⁹
V. G. Belinsky,
Izbrannye pis’ma
, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1955), 2: 388.

²⁰
P. V. Annenkov,
Vospominaniya i kriticheskie ocherki
, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1879), 2: 23.

Despite the wounding criticism from Belinsky and others, the besieged and struggling Dostoevsky nonetheless continued along his own path. Weary with the narrow stylistic range of the Natural School, he felt his shift to a new style and subject matter as an inner release. “I am writing my
Landlady
,” he tells Mikhail at the end of January 1847. “My pen is guided by a source of inspiration rising directly from the soul. Not like
Prokharchin
, over which I agonized all summer.”
¹
Even as inspiration coursed through him, however, and even as he had already begun to block out another major novel (
Netotchka Nezvanova
), Dostoevsky’s chronic indebtedness forced him to keep a sharp eye on the literary marketplace and to snap up any assignments that could bring in a little extra cash. While rushing the completion of “The Landlady,” he picked up an assignment from the
St. Petersburg Gazette
. The writer who supplied the feuilletons for this newspaper died unexpectedly, and the editor hastily filled the gap by appealing to some of the young St. Petersburg literati to furnish him with copy. Four feuilletons, signed F. D., were written by Dostoevsky.

All the up-and-coming young talents of the Natural School—Grigorovich, Panaev, Turgenev, Goncharov, Sollogub, Pleshcheev—wrote feuilletons, and Dostoevsky was simply joining a general literary trend that had originated in France. Starting out as a medium of publicity, this type of newspaper column branched out to describe urban types and social life, giving birth to the physiological sketch. Once the taste for such sketches had caught on, it occurred to Frédéric Soulié to unite them week by week with a loose narrative line, and this was the origin of the feuilleton-novel. The feuilleton allows the writer to roam wherever his fancy pleases and to display his personality. Indeed, as we learn from Belinsky, he is essentially “a chatterer, apparently good-natured and sincere, but in truth often malicious and evil-tongued, someone who knows everything, sees everything, keeps quiet about a good deal but definitely manages to express everything, stings with epigrams and insinuations, and amuses with a lively and clever word as well as a childish joke.”
²
These words fit the personality
assumed by the young Dostoevsky to the life.
³
With all their sly evasions, the feuilletons do express a good deal of what was preoccupying Dostoevsky—and many others like him—in the spring of 1847.