Polzunkov (1848)

“Polzunkov” is about a man who’s unable resist the impulse to humiliate himself.  I can’t read this story without a feeling a searing “why?”  The narrator insists that Polzunkov is kind and noble, yet his life is a grotesque parody of Christ’s call to turn the other cheek.  “They strike you on the cheek,” Polzunkov says, “and in your joy you offer them your whole back.”  He is like the one the Apostle Paul describes who delivers up his body to be burned, but has not love.

A normal way to explore such oddity would be to offer possible explanations.  But Dostoevsky doesn’t do this.  Instead, he merely plunges us into the details of Polzunkov’s experience.  In place of a backstory or an analysis, Dostoevsky just gives us Polzunkov’s face:

“Everything was there—shame and an assumption of insolence, and vexation at the sudden flushing of his face, and anger and fear of failure, and entreaty to be forgiven for having dared to pester, and a sense of his own dignity, and a still greater sense of his own abjectness—all this passed over his face like lightening.”

Dostoevsky has a knack for articulating aspects of personality that have previously gone unstudied.  Humanity is a species that needs many subclassifications, and Dostoevsky is a master at delineating them.  

But his art isn’t simply a freak show where I gawk at some bizarre other.  In Dostoevsky’s lab, the subject observed refuses to stay on their side of the glass.  

As I get to know Polzunkov, something strange happens.  I begin to feel his pain, and through his pain, I find him in myself.  I discover that he is the pure strain of a trait that had existed in me all along, only I hadn’t known it until I saw myself in him.

Reading fiction like this, I am amazed by the breadth of my own personality—it seems to encompass all the varieties human experience in deluded form.  Therefore when a great artist like Dostoevsky unearths a new corner of human personality and pulls me close, I learn something new about myself.

But in the case of Polzunkov, this knowledge isn’t benign.  Dostoevsky, with spot-on dramatic intuition, places Polzunkov in the exact situation where his problem can’t be ignored.  His compulsive self-humiliation gets him into more and more urgent trouble.  As his problems escalate, my pain becomes more acute, desperate—I need there to be an answer.  I scour the text for some way for Polzunkov—me!—to escape this pit. 

The story provides scant solutions, but by exposing my desperation, it pushes me toward that open, seeking frame of mind that I’ve found fertile.