Dostoevsky (57 page)

Although Dostoevsky put aside his plans for a major novel, he did write his two shorter works—the Siberian novellas
Uncle’s Dream
(
Dyadyushkin son
) and
The Village of Stepanchikovo
(
Selo Stepanchikovo
). Dostoevsky had hoped to send
Uncle’s Dream
to
The Russian Word
by September 1858, and he apologizes to his brother, who had negotiated the advance, with the explanation that his illness had kept him from his desk. “Last month I had four attacks, which had never happened before—and I almost did not work at all. After my attacks I . . . feel completely crushed.”
⁴
Also, work on
Uncle’s Dream
was difficult because Dostoevsky wrote it with inner distaste. “I don’t like it, and it saddens me that I am forced to appear in public again so miserably. . . . You can’t write what you want
to write, and you write something that you wouldn’t even want to think about if you didn’t need money. . . . Being a needy writer is a filthy trade.”
⁵
Uncle’s Dream
had probably been part of the “comic novel” that he had worked on with so much pleasure, but which now had become a burden. “I would be happy to do better,” he writes Mikhail, “but all the ideas in my head are for large works.”
⁶
Nevertheless, it was sent off in mid-December and published in the spring (March 1859) in
The Russian Word
.

At first, Dostoevsky’s attitude toward
The Village of Stepanchikovo
was as resentful as toward
Uncle’s Dream
. “The story that I am writing for Katkov,” he tells Mikhail, “displeases me very much and goes against the grain. But I have . . . to pay back a debt.”
⁷
By the time he had sent off three-quarters of the manuscript, though, his opinion had swung round full circle. “Listen, Misha!” he admonishes his brother, “the novel, of course, has very great defects, . . . but what I am as sure of as an axiom is that, at the same time, it has the greatest qualities and is
my best work
. . . . I base all my hopes on it, and, even more, the consolidation of my literary reputation.”
⁸
To his dismay, Katkov flatly rejected the work and asked the author to return his advance payment; but Dostoevsky did not lose faith in his creation. “There are,” he tells his brother, “scenes of high comedy that Gogol would have signed without hesitation.”
⁹

The two brothers offered the work to Nekrasov, who had earlier offered through Mikhail to send Dostoevsky an advance if he were in financial straits. Even though Dostoevsky was still smarting from the wounds inflicted by
The Contemporary
, Katkov’s rejection left him no recourse but to seize on what seemed the most likely chance to obtain funds immediately. Nekrasov was handed the manuscript in the first days of September 1859 and hesitated over a month before coming to a decision—a month during which Dostoevsky, on tenterhooks in Semipalatinsk, kept urging his brother to prod the editor. “Note all the particulars and all his words, and, I implore you for God’s sake, write me about it in as much detail as you can.”
¹⁰

Dostoevsky’s novella contained parodistic thrusts against the Natural School of the 1840s—and thus implicitly against Belinsky—which Nekrasov (not to mention Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov) would have found offensive. No wonder he waited on tenterhooks! To make matters worse, these thrusts included a reference to one of Nekrasov’s own poems, “When from dark error’s subjugation,” which Dostoevsky will use at greater length in the epigraph to
Notes from Underground
. In
The Village of Stepanchikovo
, he cites the poem ironically, using it to criticize the humanitarianism of the Natural School as containing a latent self-complacency, an implicit posture of superiority to and patronage of the “fallen,” who must be “sought out and raised up.”

Nekrasov did not like the novella at all. “Dostoevsky is finished,” he is reported to have said. “He will no longer write anything important.”
¹¹
But Nekrasov was not one of the most successful editors of his time for nothing, and, rather than reject the story outright, he accepted it—but offered to pay so little that no self-respecting author could accept his terms. Dostoevsky thought at first that he was bargaining. “If Nekrasov bargains and becomes more
reasonable
, the priority is his whatever happens,” he instructs Mikhail. “You see, it is very important that the novel be published in
The Contemporary
. This journal once sent me packing, and now maneuvers to have my text. This is very important for my literary situation.”
¹²

Dostoevsky, however, was woefully deceiving himself, and Mikhail soon became aware of the true state of affairs. He offered the work next to Kraevsky for
Notes of the Fatherland
, where it was finally accepted after some negotiations and at a higher price per sheet. “That’s what it means not to derogate one’s dignity,” Mikhail writes triumphantly. He also conveys some literary comments of Kraevsky, whose rather negative remark is valuable all the same in helping to define the new tonality observable in Dostoevsky’s Siberian novellas. “You surrender yourself sometimes to the influence of humor and wish to arouse laughter. The strength of F. M. . . . lies in feeling, in pathos, here perhaps he has no equals, and so it’s a pity that he neglects this gift.”
¹³
Kraevsky was right in detecting a new and much sharper satirical edge replacing Dostoevsky’s earlier pathos.

From his exile in Semipalatinsk, Dostoevsky asked his brother to send him any press comments that might appear after
Uncle’s Dream
and
The Village of Stepanchikovo
were published, but Mikhail, probably to spare Feodor’s sensibilities, remarked that literary journals were no longer reporting on each other to the same extent as in the 1840s. The truth was that
no
reference of any kind appeared in the literary press about either of Dostoevsky’s works; they were passed over in complete silence.

This is hardly suprising because, in these very same years, Turgenev was producing much of his best work and turning out a novel almost annually; Tolstoy had just burst on the scene with his
Childhood, Boyhood, Youth
and
Sevastopol
Stories
; Pisemsky’s
A Thousand Souls
was the literary sensation of 1858 and was followed by the drama
A Bitter Fate
; and Saltykov-Shchedrin had stirred up a furor with his caustic
Provincial Sketches
, which created a new genre of literary muckraking in Russian writing. Moreover, the whole country was in a fever of anticipation over the forthcoming liberation of the serfs, and the mood of the moment demanded literature with solid social-cultural substance. The only glimpse of social reality in
Uncle’s Dream
was, as the prince recalls, a lady whose daughter “killed one of her serf girls in a rage and was tried for it” (2: 315), and this snip of reality was easily overlooked in the comic context. The time-worn plots of Dostoevsky’s novellas appeared to involve nothing more momentous than a marriage decision. Even worse,
The Village of Stepanchikovo
depicted life on a country estate in which idyllic relations prevailed between the peasants and their landlowner. The only conflicts were caused by the excessive good nature of this exemplary proprietor and gave rise to comic situations that Dostoevsky’s socially conscious readers, preoccupied as never before with the abuses and injustice of serfdom, could hardly take as anything worthy of serious attention.
¹⁴

Even someone as well disposed toward Dostoevsky as Pleshcheev spoke of
Uncle’s Dream
as “too farcical,” and his concluding estimate of
The Village of Stepanchikovo
, which he asked Alexander Milyukov not to convey to Dostoevsky, was that “all this is fabricated, contrived; terribly stilted.”
¹⁵
These criticisms are of literary form and they occurred, in my view, because the technique Dostoevsky used clashed radically with the norms then prevailing in Russian prose, which, growing from the physiological sketch, continued to emphasize character description and the portrayal of milieu rather than narrative movement. Most important Russian novelists of the mid-nineteenth century began with such sketches; later, their own novels would continue to have the simplest of plot lines and to retain the emphasis on the portrayal of character through incidents linked together by the commonplace events of ordinary social existence.

Dostoevsky’s readers could hardly have realized that his technique, derived from the elaborate plots of 1830s’ dramatic farce, marks a new departure in his work. For all of Dostoevsky’s major novels (with the exception of
House of the Dead
) will display the essential features deriving from such a form: a rapid and condensed plot action, unexpected turns of events that pile up fast and furiously, characters who are presented in terms of dialogue and dramatic movement rather than through analytic portraiture or lengthy depiction of consciousness, and climaxes usually taking place amid the tumultuous group scenes that
have been labeled “conclaves” and compared with the celebrated finale of Gogol’s
The Inspector-General
.
¹⁶

Even though Dostoevsky’s two novellas have a distinctly comic surface, this should not be taken to mean that they are entirely devoid of serious substance. A close reading—one focusing on the allusions embedded in the prose and on the parodistic subtext—discloses as much satire in Dostoevsky’s pages as lighthearted tomfoolery. We see as well a notable increase in the range and variety of Dostoevsky’s character types compared with his protagonists of the 1840s, and they are projected with a boldness of contour and a loquacity of self-expression that somehow make them seem to have grown almost physically in size and stature. It is difficult to imagine the Dostoevsky of the early stories writing the later novels, but the author of these Siberian novellas already gives indications of being able to do so. Finally, whatever the strained high jinks made necessary by his “comic” plots, Dostoevsky has nonetheless already begun to adumbrate the great new theme—it may be called “the critique of ideology,” or the conflict defined in his letters as that between “ideas” and “the heart”—that will dominate all his post-Siberian writings.

The plot intrigue of
Uncle’s Dream
may be set down in a few words. “Uncle” is a decrepit but wealthy Russian prince, almost in his dotage, who accidentally arrives in the town of Mordasov one fine day and is immediately taken in tow by the powerful “leading lady” of the environs, Marya Alexandrovna Moskaleva. She conceives the scheme of marrying him to her still unwed twenty-three-year-old daughter, Zina, a proud beauty, and expends treasures of ingenuity in carrying out her plan. But it is finally defeated, to the immense joy of her numerous rivals for social supremacy, by the jealousy of the rejected suitor for Zina’s hand, a young Petersburg bureaucrat named Mozglyakov, who persuades his distant relative the prince, quite unable to distinguish between his waking and sleeping states, that the marriage proposal he had made to Zina in a drunken stupor had only been “a dream.”

Dostoevsky dresses up this anecdote in a faintly mock-heroic style and presents it, in an obvious parody of the title of Balzac’s
César Birotteau
, as “the full and remarkable history of the exaltation, glory and solemn downfall of Marya Alexandrovna and all her family” (2: 516). The story is also subtitled “From the Annals of Mordasov” (2: 296)—and such epic accents, of course, only underline
the insignificance of the events (just a year or two earlier Saltykov-Shchedrin had used the same device in his
Provincial Sketches
, also recounted by a local busybody serving as narrator). This new type of Dostoevskian narrator is a gossip chronicler, as much (if not more) interested in rumor and slander as in what he is able to verify with his own eyes and ears; nor is he ever really certain how to interpret even what he witnesses firsthand. A narrator of this kind is later used by Dostoevsky for other works also set in the Russian provinces, such as
Demons
and
The Brothers Karamazov
, and he develops this device into a subtle instrument for controlling his narrative perspective. It is particularly valuable in allowing him to portray his main figures against a background of rumor, opinion, and scandal-mongering that serves somewhat the function of a Greek chorus in relation to the central action.
¹⁷

The image given here of provincial life, with its eternal gossip, backbiting, and ruthless struggles for power over trifles, provides the background against which the major figures of the story stand out in sharp relief. And no figure in Mordasov is more major than Marya Alexandrovna—who is even compared to Napoleon and is said to be actually superior to the all-conquering emperor. Marya Alexandrovna openly exhibits a will to domination that she is hardly entitled to exercise by rank or fortune, and she is the first Dostoevsky character of this type to appear in a work in which the conventions of realism are scrupulously observed. The only previous character of this kind had been the fantastic and mesmeric Murin, who rules over all the others in the highly symbolic “The Landlady.” Dostoevsky had earlier been able to conceive the psychology of such a figure only in terms of Romantic hyperbole. Now, however, he places such a “strong” personality within the most humdrum of Russian provincial settings, thereby taking his first step toward that reassimilation of the scope and grandeur of Romantic thematics, and its fusion with Russian social reality, that will distinguish his later work. Indeed, no matter how petty the form taken by such “grandeur” in this instance, the name of Napoleon is enough to alert us to what Dostoevsky will make of such an urge for domination in the future.