An Honest Thief (1848)

If I’m going to write fiction, I must be curious about people.  That’s vital.  But if one of these people, say a roofer come to fix my leaking chimney, actually knocks on my door, two inner voices can drown out my ears of curiosity.

The first voice calls curiosity unnecessary.  “Your current understanding of people is pretty much exhaustive,” it says.  “What’s left to notice about this roofer isn’t important enough to bother about.”

The second voice finds curiosity unproductive.  “What’s the point?” it says. “There won’t be the right opportunities to learn anything new about this roofer, and anyway, people are so baffling that investigation won’t lead to any real discoveries.”

Dostoevsky, on the other hand, inspires me with his ability to stay curious.  He unearths new questions and doggedly believes in the possibility of answers.  He’s able to do so because, as a skilled miner of the soul, he knows where to dig: in contradictions.

The title of his short story “The Honest Thief” is itself a contradiction.  These words first appear within the text after Astafy calls thieves nasty vermin.  But when the narrator agrees with him, Astafy changes his tune.  He says there’s such thing as an honest thief.  The contradictoriness of the term reflects Astafy’s own contradictory belief about thieves.  One moment he passionately hates them, but the next he isn’t ready for anyone to speak ill of them.

This is the first contradiction of many that Astafy has toward Emelyan, the man he labels an honest thief.  When Astafy moves, he’s happy that Emelyan won’t be able to stay with him anymore, and crestfallen when Emelyan finds him again.  Astafy’s afraid that Emelyan will ruin him with his drinking.  Yet a moment later, Astafy feels that if Emelyan went away he’d have nothing to live for.  Astafy is then suddenly determined that Emelyan stay so that Astafy can reform him.  When Emelyan disappears and then returns, Astafy is simultaneously delighted and upset.  

Astafy recognizes the destructiveness of Emelyan’s drinking, and he also recognizes that if he keeps Emelyan around, Emelyan’s drinking could pull them both down into poverty.  Yet on the other hand, Emelyan’s drinking has put him in a childish state where he needs someone to depend on, and Astafy craves this benefactor status.  

In other words, Astafy needs to be Emelyan’s guardian, but he also needs to not be Emelyan’s guardian.  These contradictory needs are so painful that Astafy is unable to admit his demand for Emelyan’s dependency.  In order to keep himself from fragmenting, Astafy maintains an exterior attitude of trying to help Emelyan to quit, though he must see by now that nothing he does makes any difference.

This becomes clear when Astafy tells Emelyan that decency demands that he mend his ragged coat:

“He took off his coat and began threading the needle.  I watched him; as you may well guess, his eyes were all red and bleary, and his hands were all of a shake.  He kept shoving and shoving the thread and could not get it through the eye of the needle; he kept screwing his eyes up and wetting the thread and twisting it in his fingers—it was no good!  He gave it up and looked at me.”

Emelyan is plainly too far gone to follow Astafy’s rehabilitation plan, but Astafy refuses to admit this.  And Astafy’s self-dishonesty pushes the situation to its catastrophe.

From the beginning of Astafy’s story about Emelyan, he labels him a thief.  The title “thief” hangs over his story, giving it tension.  I’m waiting for Emelyan to steal something.  Astafy’s waiting for it too.  In order for Astafy to maintain his identity as a good guy, he needs Emelyan to be the bad one in this painful relationship—he needs him to steal.

Astafy preludes the theft with a stack of coincidences.  He happens to come into a pair of expensive pants.  It happens to strike him that someone could pawn them for a lot of money.  “And it happened just then,” he tells the narrator, that Emelyan seemed unable to afford a drink.  “And just then came a holiday,” Astafy continues.  He goes to church for the holiday and leaves Emelyan at home.  As soon as Astafy gets back, he immediately goes to the chest where he keeps the pants and discovers they are gone.

That so many coincidences are converging for Emelyan’s theft makes me hunt for a cause.  There is an artful neatness about this setup that makes me suspect a guiding hand.  I know that Astafy needs Emelyan’s dependency but can’t admit it.  This makes me wonder if some part of Astafy left the pants for Emelyan to steal, but that he would do such a strange thing he can’t admit.  My notion is affirmed when Astafy says that as he looks for the pants “something seemed to stab me to the heart.”  He uses almost the same phrase only the page before when he sees Emelyan’s weeping over his helplessness.  The repeated phrase draws an association between the missing pants and Astafy’s pity for Emelyan. 

Now that Emelyan has stolen, the “honest” part of the title hangs over me, filling the scenes with tension.  I’m waiting for him to confess.  Yet when he finally does on his deathbed, his confession does not seem to clear the air.  He wants to tell Astafy something else before he dies.  He expires before we can find out what it is, and so unfinished business lingers between Astafy and Emelyan.  Could it be Astafy’s own confession?  If Emelyan is an honest thief, then Astafy is a dishonest victim.  

That Astafy is hounded by this unfinished business is clear when I consider the story’s frame narrative with which it begins.  At first the frame feels superfluous.  Why not just have Astafy as the only narrator?  Why this added layer of him telling the story to the primary narrator?

Showing Astafy after Emelyan’s death demonstrates that Astafy is scapegoating onto Emelyan a problem that is essentially Astafy’s.  In the frame narrative, a thief steals the narrator’s coat.  Astafy is only a few inches away and makes a show of chasing the thief, yet he doesn’t catch him.  He then goes on to upbraid everyone in the house for letting it happen.  This situation is parallel to when Emelyan stole Astafy’s pants.  Astafy scolds everyone in the house.  By creating this association, Dostoevsky highlights that the two thefts have a similar effect on Astafy.  He’s blaming everyone because a part of him believes that he himself is to blame.  The thief was right there—it’s only plausible that the thief got away because Astafy let him go.  Astafy can’t face his need to be a victim and so remains a victim.

My supplying the motives of Astafy’s actions are approximate.  Dostoevsky simply gives us Astafy’s behavior in all its strangeness, and explanations never totally hit the mark.  The soul of a Dostoevskian character, like wind, is invisible—we only know it by its interplay with its surroundings.  This allows us to study it minutely but indirectly.  This soul is like Grimm’s Elfin Grove—adults can observe it from behind a tree, but once one sets foot in it, it vanishes.  And studying from behind a tree is ever productive, never exhaustive.