Letters between Poor Folk and The Double (1846)

Shortly before publishing his second novel, Dostoevsky wrote the following to his brother:

Some [critics] find a new and original streak in me in the fact that I proceed by Analysis rather than by Synthesis, i.e., that I go deep down and, digging it up, atom by atom, I uncover the whole; whereas Gogol takes the whole directly, and that’s why he’s not as profound as I am.

Looking past Dostoevsky’s youthful arrogance, one can catch an interesting glimpse of his process.  He works by analysis—digging, uncovering, as opposed to synthesis—taking the whole directly.  What does this mean?

Perhaps it means that he writes on the thrust of questions rather than answers, that he uses the process of novelistic treatment itself to make discoveries about people rather than bringing insights ready-made.  I think of how his later novel, Crime and Punishment, will drive forward on an analytical question—why did Raskolnikov commit murder?

Or perhaps it means that Dostoevsky doesn’t disclose everything about his characters, but reveals aspects of them piecemeal.  What is often so remarkable about his characters is how he leaves space around their motives.  Why did Raskolnikov murder?  Many explanations are proffered, yet the explanations themselves just seem to glance off the surface of his motives, creating a general outline of something unsaid.  Dostoevsky’s characters are not fully explained, which leaves room for the inexplicable.  This gives his characters an autonomous quality rather than snapping their behaviors into a deterministic grid.

Or perhaps it means that Dostoevsky’s focus is more on psychological rather than societal aspects of character.  His metaphor of digging implies getting beneath the surface.  His first novel, Poor Folk, is often seen as a riff on Gogol’s story “The Overcoat.”  Both narratives have the same theme: poverty.  But their definitions vary.  Gogol’s sense of poverty focuses on the social and material—to be poor is to be without a coat.  While these aspects are present in Poor Folk, they are not the work’s central theme.  Dostoevsky’s tale is much more focused on poverty as a mindset, that is, the mental inability to conceive of abundance.  

Whatever Dostoevsky meant, what strikes me is that Dostoevsky sees literary profundity not arising from a faculty of wisdom one brings to the writing desk, but from one’s method.  He claims his piece is more profound than Gogol’s not because he is smarter, but because he has gone about writing in a different way.

But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this letter is that Dostoevsky seems to be observing, with great interest, what critics thought of his process.  In other words, he is looking to people wholly unconnected with his writing process for insights about how it works.  This seems to suggest that Dostoevsky doesn’t quite know himself how he wrote that book.  There’s something baffling about the creation of a great novel—even to the author.