Uncle’s Dream (1859)

Nothing is as it appears in Dostoevsky’s novella, Uncle’s Dream.  Marya hides her Machiavellian viciousness under the guise of a gracious hostess.  She and her arch-nemesis act like besties.  Her husband looks imposing in his white cravat—until he opens his mouth and reveals he’s an adorably absurd man-child.  The Prince looks young but is really old, and he prefers his coachman, who grows a magnificent beard, to wear a false one because, as Mozglyakov (Zina’s false suitor) says, “Art is superior to nature.”  Even the snow covers the desolate steppe “like a dazzling shroud.”  

The town’s appearance is so unreliable because none of its inhabitants live in reality; each person is preoccupied with a daydream.  Marya is possessed with the idea of becoming rich and powerful, Zina with sacrificing herself for her dying lover, and so on.  As I read, I craved to find someone awake so that I could get a sense of truth beyond all these delusions.

Dostoevsky knows that he’s creating this craving, yet he postpones satisfying it until the end.  In the meantime, he shows that while everyone is dreaming, not everyone is having the same dream.  Marya’s dream is material and practical—she wants tangible prosperity.  Zina’s dream is romantic—that is to say, she implicitly trusts the impulses within herself that she deems noble and finds them infinitely more important than any practical or material considerations.  Marya’s and Zina’s dreams demonstrate opposite views of reality that are equally extreme and distorted.  This difference of delusion, while it doesn’t articulate reality, at least gives us a sense of the reality beyond their exaggerations.

I say that the two views are equally distorted, but in truth, the novella seems inclined to favor Zina’s view.  Zina is a more sympathetic character—of all the liars, she’s perhaps the most honest, and so she, as imperfect as her view is, becomes a sort of moral center, even though Marya is the main character.  In this story brimming with irony, all of the earnestness hovers around Zina.  

Because of this, I sense that Zina’s romantic view is dearer to Dostoevsky than the material one.  A lesser writer would simply have made Zina’s view correct and stacked the reality to reinforce this.  The fact that Dostoevsky doesn’t do this is one of the things that makes him great.

A remarkable trait of Dostoevsky is how much wiser his fiction is than his letters or his journalism.  His own voice and thoughts are less profound than what emerges from his characters.  As an artist, he cultivated a technique that allowed him to transcend his own prejudices.  It is simply this: when I find myself writing about something dear to me, I must get in touch with the shadow-part of me that doubts that dear idea and give it voice so that it can mercilessly attack the worldview I find sacred.  “Dostoevsky,” Rowan Williams writes, “could expose his own most passionate feeling to the acidity of his own irony.”

Dostoevsky does this by populating the scenes with a mocking crowd.  At the key scene, Marya’s parlor is bustling with people eager to laugh at anything sincere.  He also shows the absurdity of Zina’s view through her lover, Vasya, who kills himself out of an excess of romance.  Romance may be a pleasanter dream than pragmatism, but it’s still a dream.

Attacking my own better judgement is, of course, a dangerous thing to do.  To give free vent to the discordant voices in my head can easily lead to courting seductive delusions and moving even further from the truth.  It also involves the risk of harming readers.  If I present all sides of an issue too well, won’t readers be in greater peril of choosing incorrectly?

These dangers are serious, but I must pass through them if I want to write something that approaches honesty.  Dostoevsky had enough respect for his readers to let them choose what to believe without trying to force their hand.

Does this mean that great writing must be a cacophony of differing views in which none gets the upper hand, that is to say—where the author leads the reader only into greater confusion rather than greater truth?  No.  It only means that fiction must operate by the principle that what can be shaken must be shaken so that only that which is unshakable remains.  When worldviews are subjected to a fair fight, truth will out.  Rowan Williams puts it this way:

“What would make the words more than a cliché would be not that they command such veneration or carry such manifest authority that they are incapable of being ironized.  It would be that when subjected to this disrespectful treatment they do not disappear, they do not become contemptable or ineffectual.  And Dostoevsky can only find out whether this is so by subjecting them to the harsh light of irony.  Truthfulness . . . has to show that it can sustain itself against assault . . . But we shall discover this in narrative form only by letting [it] be assailed as relentlessly as can be.”

In this world of clashing daydreams, truth outs through the clash.  In the novella’s final catastrophe, the differences between the daydreams are brought to a head, so that characters are ripping off each other’s masks.  Dostoevsky sets his characters at odds, and puts them onto a course where they will most clash, and in the clash, each can’t help but have their own blindsides exposed.

Writing this way is painful.  That which I hold most precious I must barrage more persistently than any other elements in the story.  But this seems to be happening in Uncle’s Dream.  The narrator regularly takes Marya’s side even though Marya’s perspective is often morally repugnant.  This gives the story a moral coldness that fosters in me a deeper thirst for goodness.  But Dostoevsky never makes the story so ambiguous that I lose all sense of right and wrong.  “There is no abiguity at all,” Rowan Williams says, “about the destructive character of evildoing.”  Through the narrator’s contradictions or through the protestations of Zina, we always have some idea of how things really are.

It’s interesting to note that of all the characters, none seem to change, except one: Zina’s imposter-suitor, Mozglyakov.  That the story ends with him is surprising because he’s its most despicable character.  He isn’t a towering evil, just paltry and petty, which makes him even more annoying.  But in the final paragraph, he seems to pass from dreams to reality, which is what I had been longing to see the whole book.  This happens after the dream of his vanity—that he would be leaning, forlorn, on a column at a ball with Zina—comes true, yet Zina pays him no notice.  He comes face to face with his own foolishness.  That Dostoevsky chose the unlikeable Mozglyakov for the longed-for awakening is interesting.  Reality favors neither extreme of the idealogical dialectic of the story; instead it shines its dawn on the one most humiliated.  It’s exactly the sort of upside down triumph one finds beyond the confines of a daydream.