Netochka Nezvanova (1849)
One of the marvels of great fiction is its ability to embrace the complexity of experience and at the same time to shape it into a meaningful unity. Part One of Dostoevsky’s Netochka Nezvanova is a masterpiece of such complex unity. It opens with Efimov, Netochka’s step-father. Efimov is both focused and complex.
He’s focused around his dream of apotheosis. In the Biblical story, the serpent tempts Eve with the forbidden fruit by telling her that “ye shall be as gods.” Few temptations are so alluring as this ambition to be superhuman.
Efimov meets his own serpent, a jaded ex-conductor, who teaches him violin and tells him he’s an under-appreciated genius. This dream intoxicates Efimov, and he becomes obsessed with achieving the highest success.
His extreme ambition hampers him from keeping jobs because he always feels his employer is undervaluing him. He falls into debt, which inhibits his progress up the ladder of the music world, and the more he’s inhibited, the more he fixates on dream rather than his actual situation, and his fantasies begin to displace practical plans.
Soon he’s unwilling to even touch his violin because the reality of his playing gets in the way of his dream that he’s the supreme artist of the world.
The more Efimov flees reality for the comfort of his dreams, the more painful reality becomes. To overcome the money obstacle, he marries a widow with a small inheritance. But the widow also has a small child, Netochka, and Efimov finds himself pulled toward reality by the obligations of family. Efimov can’t bear this pull. He does nothing for his family—he lets Netochka’s mother work to the point of illness and lets them all to fall into miserable poverty.
The pain of what Efimov is doing to little Netochka makes reality even more unbearable. He sometimes gets a glimpse of what he’s become and is overwhelmed with fear—and then quickly seeks vodka and fantasy. Conscience is a powerful agent of reality—one that is hard to drown out. Efimov, in order to not face the pain of the harms he’s doing to those closest to him, must believe in his delusions of grandeur. If he were the world’s great genius, he thinks, all would be excused. The urgency of his need to delude himself, aided with drink, causes him to start to sink into insanity.
The tightness of Efimov’s character around this single theme of the dream of apotheosis is matched by the complexity with which he responds to it. He’s a combination of the most grandiose ambition with the most self-shaming despair, and his relations to others alternate between the extremes of arrogance and servility.
His portrait is compelling because it’s a fuller picture than common conceptions of self-esteem. It’s easy for me to see someone acting arrogantly and think all they need is to be taken down a notch or to see someone struggling with low self-esteem and to think that all they need is a boost. Efimov complicates such tidy fixes. His two distorted senses of self are not opposites; they spring from the same problem. Efimov hates himself because his ambitions are so high that he can’t bear that he hasn’t achieved them; he’s ashamed for not being superhuman. His self-loathing is then so painful that he tries to console himself by imagining himself still more superior.
Efimov’s version of the ambitious artist is more complex than the norm, and it rings more true. I’ve read many stories where an artist is so ambitious that they are willing to sacrifice conscience and all other normal bonds to reality to achieve greatness. But Efimov’s tragedy demonstrates that art is reality beyond one’s self, and to lose reality beyond one’s self is to lose art.
This dream of apotheosis not only unifies Efimov’s complex character, but the other characters as well. Because they all revolve around this central theme, they clash dramatically on their most crucial points.
Netochka’s mother becomes preoccupied with the dream that she can be “the firm guiding hand and support of a genius”—to be the god’s goddess. She’s trying to make him rise, but he uses her as an excuse for a lack of success. He convinces himself that once she dies, then he will achieve his dream. Thus they are at perpetual odds, and his animosity toward her becomes necessary to him. Thus the mother’s dream, on which she’s staked everything, is constantly dashed by Efimov’s behavior. The mother’s despair is so crushing that she grows more and more ill, closer and closer to death. Yet her despair is just as complex as Efimov’s ambition—it manifests itself not in passivity but in more and more angry demands for control.
This constant battle becomes its own stasis, which is disrupted by Netochka. Her relation to the dream is different because she’s nine years old. Her first memory is of her (assumed) father caressing her for standing up for him against her mother. She’d rarely received affection, so this caress becomes a crucial link to her sense of reality. She longs for the reality she found in Efimov’s affection, but this is immediately complicated by Efimov’s delusion—that all will be made right once Netochka’s mother dies. He infects little Netochka with this dream.
The characters are so tightly wound around this dream that the action unfolds with precision. Efimov is desperate to maintain the delusion of his musical divinity. But the law of nature is that reality will out. So there inevitably arrives in Petersburg a true genius violinist: S. Efimov must see S. perform to convince himself that he is better than S., but the performance costs twenty-five rubles. He asks Netochka to steal the money from her mother.
This request hits Netochka in her tenderest spot—the tension between her dream and her reality. She knows that her mother is ill and is desperate for that money and that the strain of the loss could kill her. Netochka thus feels that by agreeing to her father’s request, she could kill her mother—which, in light of the dream she’d inherited from her father, she’d secretly both hoped for and felt guilty for hoping. Her conscience—that pure contact with reality—revolts from such an action.
But Efimov knows exactly where she’s most vulnerable. When she refuses, he says, “It means you don’t love me, eh? All right! I’ll leave you now.” Being loved by her father and going on with him to a better place is crucial to all her hopes. She complies, and what follows does lead to the mother’s death. Netochka’s dream comes true, but the reality of it is a nightmare.
Each character clashes around their common obsession with an impossible dream. These clashes inevitably lead to an intrusion of reality into that dream. The nightmarish quality of Part One’s ending is a result of this collision. The dream is a desire to control, but reality cannot be controlled, and so the place where the dream and reality meet is in nightmare—the dream gone out of control.
The way Dostoevsky describes the final scene encapsulates the nightmarish clash between the self’s desire to control and reality’s wildness. It intensifies how we experience reality—not through the cold mechanism of a camera, but through emotional personality.
As Netochka faces that night under such duress that the world around her takes on heights of significance beyond mere sense-input, yet at the same time, she experiences uncanniness through a heightened awareness of her senses. When Efimov takes the dead mother’s money, Netochka remembers it this way:
“At first he put the money in my hand, then took it back and thrust it in the top of my dress. I remember shuddering when I felt the silver against my body, and I think it was then that I first understood the meaning of money.”
The cold metal against her body has a heightened vividness compared to the novel’s normal level of description, yet it is coupled with the enigmatic phrase “I first understood the meaning of money.” She doesn’t say what the meaning is, yet the intensity of how it feels takes on mysterious significance.
Similarly, when they discover the mother dead, Efimov gets out his violin and starts playing. Netochka remembers it this way:
“[I]t was not music [. . . ] they were not notes of the violin, but the sound of a terrible voice that was resounding through our room for the first time. Either my impressions were incorrect or delirious, or else my senses were so thrown by all that I had witnessed that they were prepared for frightful, agonizing impressions—but I am firmly convinced that I heard groans, the cries of a human voice.”
The weird humanity the violin in Netochka’s ears feels as if Netochka’s experience is withdrawing from reality and at the same time as if the wildness of reality is breaking in on Netochka’s dream of control. She’s sensing the strain of living too long in delusion. Both Netochka and Efimov hoped that their own constructed fantasies would always obey their creators. But the dreams themselves seem to have their own laws, their own reality outside of the conscious self.
Of course, as a child, Netochka’s not responsible for the monstrousness of her inherited dream, but as the novel shifts focus from Efimov to her, she takes on the consequences of his mistakes. Yet she doesn’t succumb to the dream like Efimov did. Perhaps the horror she experiences is the adventure of health. The night seems to be more nightmarish for her than for Efimov, and she also displays more agency—he seems as if he has already been lost to his delusions and is beyond the reach of the healing pain of reality.
Netochka, on the other hand, emerges as a heroine. Her devotion to such an unlovely step-father causes her childlike purity to shine all the more in its ghoulish surroundings.
It’s a shame Dostoevsky never finished Netochka Nezvanova. It has that great-novel quality about it—that diamond of clashing characters around a complex but focused value. As an exploration of the allure of playing God and the backlash of nature—even the nature of our own minds—Netochka Nezvanova makes a valuable offering.