Mr. Prohartchin (1846)

Part of my awe of reading comes from the experience of discovering that differing characters, events, places, and objects all have a unifying element that creates a grand pattern.  When fiction is too clearly unified, it’s boring.  Why would I want to read about something that is exactly as it appears?  There’s nothing new for me there.  But if a story is all wild occurrence with no pattern, then it’s equally boring.  There’s no art to it.  It’s just randomness with no significance.

Dostoevsky’s pen has a talent for stretching a thread across contradictions, and his short story “Mr. Prohartchin” is no exception.  It bridges opposites in character, genre, and structure.

On the surface, the titular character is just a miser so miserly that he’d rather die in poverty than spend anything.  Most of Prohartchin’s angst begins when Zinovy suspects him of hiding money.  At first, I think, oh, he’s just worried someone will find out and try to steal it.  But as I read on, I discover that as much as Prohartchin is driven by avarice, he is equally driven by a repressed sense of charity.  I get my first hint of this when he dreams that a man suggests that he doesn’t have enough to eat and that he has seven children and then stares angrily at Prohartchin “as though it were Mr. Prohartchin’s fault that he was the father of seven.”  The narrator tells us that though Prohartchin “was fully convinced of his own innocence in regard to the unpleasant accumulation of seven under one roof, yet it seemed to appear that in fact no one else was to blame” but himself.  This suggests that Prohartchin feels guilty that he has all this money and isn’t helping anyone.  His anger at himself is coming out in this dream character.  He then dreams about seeing someone’s house on fire (which he had really seen earlier that day) and a cabby riles up the crowd to believe that Prohartchin is responsible for the fire.  The cabby is someone he had ripped off before.  Prohartchin wakes up in delirium, believing that his own lodging, his own head is on fire, too.  His sense of responsibility has risen so high that he can’t separate others’ tragedies from his own.  This clamoring sense of responsibility seems connected to the illness that takes his life.  That last thing anyone says to him before his final fit is “Are you a Napoleon?”  And the narrator draws an association between being a Napoleon and assuming enormous responsibility.  

But Dostoevsky doesn’t leave Prohartchin as a mere contradiction—he threads the two halves together by probing to their root.  What is this need to stockpile?  What is this need to share?  On the one hand, Prohartchin craves isolation and on the other community.  Though these are opposite goals, they arise from a similar impulse.  We learn early that Prohartchin has no talent for making friends.  Yet in his illness, he becomes preoccupied with faces.  One can feel his longing for people, especially as he repeatedly dreams about the woman who lost both her family and her coppers and gets them mixed up.  This dream reflects his own state—he longs for a family circle and confuses it with his hoard.  His nesting instinct manifests itself in the only way he knows by combining the responsibility of being a “Napoleon” with having a napoléon d’or coin hidden in his mattress.  

Prohartchin’s impulse to unify his fragmented impulses can be most clearly seen in his last act.  When the others first find his dead body, he “was lying under the bed; he must, while completely unconscious, have dragged the quilt and pillow after him so that there was nothing left on the bedstead but the bare mattress.”  He spends his final strength exposing to the waiting thieves the trove he spent so long guarding.

Paradoxes abound not only within Prohartchin but in the story’s genre.  When Prohartchin’s housemate Okeanov witnesses the final catastrophe, he says he is “between sleeping and waking.”  This liminal space captures the reportage style of the story as a whole.  The narrator relates the incident of the burning house not as it happened, but afterward, in Prohartchin’s dream.  Reality is told through dream, and the dream resembles reality, and so the two are blurred.  When Prohartchin wakes, he is still in a state of delirium, aware of what’s going on around him, but hallucinating fire.  We experience the hallucination with him.  When Prohartchin dies, the narrator constantly personifies his corpse as if it were still living—even the final paragraph is a quotation from the corpse.  

Dostoevsky intentionally straddles fantasy and realism.  This allows him room to investigate Prohartchin with greater versatility than one could achieve in either genre.  Dostoevsky is able to dramatize Prohartchin’s internal struggle within the dream, thus moving the character’s interior from the limited abstractions of psychology into the living images of mythology.  Yet had Dostoevsky been working purely in the fantastic mode, he would not have been able to craft such a complex and extreme character.  In fantasy, the imaginative energy of the reader is syphoned off into the world itself—fantastic soil simply isn’t solid enough to hold someone like Prohartchin.  By operating in a liminal space between, Dostoevsky bypasses both the material trap of realism and the character-shrinking effect of fantasy.  

Dostoevsky’s use of paradox in character and genre fascinated me, but perhaps what I found most compelling this reading was the story’s structural paradox.  Prohartchin occupies a certain place in the story, and his onlookers another, but upon his death, they swap.  Before his death, he is constantly suspicious that someone will find his stash.  After, the others are suspicious about all the places he may have hidden it.  Before, he is considered antisocial for his eccentric behavior at work; after, his corpse is civil as the others disrespect it.  Before, he rarely washed his clothes or wore socks; after, he’s in his best suit with a cravat while the others are “unbrushed, unshaven, unwashed.”  Before, he is feverish; after, they are feverish.  Before, they are telling him to calm down; after, he is the only one calm.  Before, he is racked with guilt of having that money, projecting it onto them.  After, they are racked with guilt for frisking his corpse, projecting condemning speech onto it.  The transfer of money seems to also transfer Prohartchin’s disease.  

Yet this switching of roles seems to create a new sort of community.  Now that Prohartchin’s mattress ripped, a new understanding emerges that what could happen to him could happen to anyone, and in death, he is freed from his isolation, as if

Some . . . organ-grinder puts away in his traveling box the Punch who has been making an upset, drubbing all the other puppets, selling his soul to the devil and who at last ends his existence, till the next performance, in the same box with the [other puppets].

Stories at their best are acts of reconciliation.  They hunt this vast world for the elements most at odds, and parley.