Four Essays from The Petersburg News (1847)

Toward the end of Dostoevsky’s essays for The Petersburg News, he a sketches a personality type he calls The Dreamer.  The Dreamer’s defect is his “uncontrolled imagination,” which intoxicates him.  The Dreamer thinks he is being inspired with great art, but in actuality “the talent of real life becomes blunted in him.”  He withdraws from reality and grows useless.

Toward the beginning of the essays, Dostoevsky reviews Ivan Goncharov’s novel An Ordinary Story.  Dostoevsky takes issue with “the author’s special desire to preserve his idea, to explain it at great length,” which “gives the novel a sort of peculiar air of dogmatism and aridity.”  Dostoevsky’s problem with An Ordinary Story is the opposite of his problem with The Dreamer.  The Dreamer’s imagination is too uncontrolled; Goncharov’s, too controlled.  Goncharov makes such an effort to preserve his ideas that he chokes his imagination.

On the surface, these two errors look like opposites, but they are actually two sides of the same canker: disconnection from reality.  Almost all of Dostoevsky’s criticism in these essays is leveled at people losing touch with real life.  He makes fun of the philanthropic landowner who would treat his faithful peasants well, but who never has any faithful peasants—the ones he does have he considers scoundrels, so he gives them “lessons in morals every Saturday.”  Dostoevsky dislikes the gap between the man’s philosophy and his life.  

He also praises Goncharov because he “believes in reality.”  Dostoevsky links belief in reality to great writing. 

He grounds his own commitment to reality into his essays through embodiment.  Whenever he wishes to evaluate a concept, he embodies it into a person and watches how this person interacts with other people.  Dostoevsky longs to understand Petersburg, and so he personifies Petersburg no less than nine times.  He seems to think that you can’t properly analyze something until you give it a face.  

He largely uses two techniques to study these embodiments:

1.  By having them interact with other characters.

2.  By contrasting them with other characters.

In both cases, he confirms that life happens not in isolation, but in society.

But what is his goal in studying Petersburg this way?  What does reality signify to Dostoevsky?  It’s interesting what reality doesn’t signify.  He isn’t primarily interested in investigating something purely naturalistic, say, Petersburg’s socio-political climate.  If he wanted to do this, he would deluge us with facts and figures about current events.  But in the second essay, he declares the news unimportant and proceeds to summarize a fictional short story he recently read.  

Why?  Doesn’t this fly in the face of everything he had just been advocating?  Isn’t this the very flight from reality at which he has been wagging his finger?  

He is still pursuing reality, but of a different sort than relaying information about “new omnibuses.”  His short story recap ends with a treasured mirror getting smashed, and he tells us that “when I read it, I felt as though I had smashed that mirror myself, as though it was my fault.”  The story brought him back to self-awareness.  His own characterizations have a similar trend.  His portrait of The Dreamer, for instance, ends with this: “And are we not all more or less dreamers?”  Personification can lead to identification.

If one dissects reality from the outside, detached from it, the dissection becomes abstract and unreal.  Life happens in society.  Dostoevsky knew that he could not diagnose the ills of Petersburg without finding its symptoms within himself.  This is the most honest way to approach reality.  One can’t make the most truthful judgements about the human condition without acknowledging one’s own humanity.  Such efforts normally fall into projection—a desire to find the problem elsewhere so that I don’t have to face it in myself.  

One amazing feature of these essays is how doggedly interested Dostoevsky is in Petersburg.  His interest propels him to focus his studies with remarkable perseverance.  He’s interested about Petersburg because he cares.  He cares because he identifies.  He continues to find Petersburg in himself, and so Petersburg remains personally important.  Shared personhood is where imagination and reality meet.