The Village at Stepanchikovo (1859)

A quick glance out my window will tell me that the leaves beyond it are green.  But if I take the time to study those leaves, I will notice all sorts of shades within that green.  The same is true of any field.  What are just teeth to a layman are to my dentist and hygienist distinct varieties of incisors, canines, and molars.  They have them all numbered, and they have cryptic discussions over my bibbed, spotlit mouth about my “number twenty-four.”

To make progress in any field, I must have a way to move from the general to the specific and to apply the peculiarities of the specific to the general.  I must learn to see not just teeth, but number twenty-four, and yet to see number-twenty four not as a wholly unique entity, but as a tooth.

The same is true the field of the novelist—human nature.  So if Dostoevsky is to study his subject in depth, he must find ways to delineate differences.  In The Village of Stepanchikovo, the chracter of Foma is a good example of how Dostoevsky does this.  

Foma is gushing with vanity.  If the boy Falaley didn’t dream one night about the subjects Foma demanded, Foma felt affronted.  

Now, I go into this novel with assumptions about what vanity should look like.  The category of “vanity” is in my mind like a solid block much like the category of “teeth” to a non-dentist.  My understanding of this block of human experience can be summed up in words like spoiled, privileged, sheltered.  

Foma is none of these.  Foma spent his formative period as a downtrodden outcast.  For years he was forced to humiliate himself by impersonating different animals for his tyrannous employer.  And he’s vain not in spite of his background but because of it.  This means I can’t use my generality-block to understand Foma.  Dostoevsky forces me to cut a slice off of my “vanity” block and label it “Foma.”  I must take Foma as a highly specific individual, yet one who nonetheless falls into this larger category.

But specificity is meaningless in isolation.  I have no sense of gradations of green without comparison.  But it’s not enough to have some flashy blue come swaggering in.  I won’t see kelly green unless I compare it with lime green and seafoam green.

The same, of course, is true of human nature. My vanity-block is still a solid block if its only resident is Foma.

This is where Rostanev comes in.  Rostanev is the other main character of Stepanchikovo.  Rostanev’s vanity is the inverse of Foma’s.  Foma’s vanity is nurtured by a sense of victimhood.  He constantly imagines that everyone is insulting him, and his dignity rises with his martyrdom.  Rostanev, on the other hand, suffers from a displaced vanity.  He can’t bear for anyone one else to be insulted except for himself, and so he tries to assume blame for everything.  Foma’s mantra could be “everyone is against me,” while Rostanev’s is “it’s all my fault.”  

Once could hardly imagine two more drastically different men, yet they both seem primarily motivated by a similar characteristic, a block I’m calling “vanity.”  By the end of the novel, my understanding of the vanity-block of human nature has become more complex, containing as it does such a variety of slices as Foma and Rostanev.

But Dostoevsky doesn’t stop there.  To become a thorough student of a subject requires not only an in-depth examination, but a commitment to continued examining.  

My dentist has an expertise about my number twenty-four not only because he fiddled his little hook around it specifically, but because he continues to do so every six months for many years.  And not only has his little hook come back to my number twenty-four, but also to who knows how many others.  I can only imagine that it’s through this process that a dentist acquires rigorous teeth-knowledge.

Dostoevsky has a similar commitment across his novels.  He continues to rehash many of the same types.  One could draw a family tree of his characters across his novels because of how each generation of characters passes on traits to the next.  The examples are too many to write without risking tedium, but here’s one: Rostanev, an extreme parody of Sermon-on-the-Mount docility, has clear ancestors in the title character of “Polzunkov” and in Vasya from “A Weak Heart.”  He also is himself an ancestor of Prince Myshkin from The Idiot.  Each new generation of this personality is more complex, more profound, more lifelike than the last.  Dostoevsky spent decades rehashing many of the same characters, determined to render them truer with each pass.

Dostoevsky not only fixates on a similar cluster of characters, but also on nearly identical situations.  Seeking to marry someone with severe mental disabilities is a prominent situation in Uncle’s Dream, The Village to Stepanchikovo, The Idiot, and Demons.  Foma theatrically rejects a wad of cash, just like Nastasya Filipovna in The Idiot and Captain Snegiryov in The Brothers Karamazov.  The open-eyed abuse of an innocent child occurs in more of his works than it doesn’t.  Again, the examples are too numerous to list.  But what’s interesting is how certain situations won’t leave Dostoevsky alone.  He keeps wondering why someone would do certain actions, and he provides deeper explorations of motives in each subsequent book.