The Insulted and Injured (1861)

Prince Valkovsky, the villain in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Insulted and Injured, is a strange man.  He is at times so strange that he often pushes the limits of what a reader can believe.  He comes dangerously close to violating one of the best diagnostics of fiction, which is simply asking, “Would someone actually do that?”

But this isn’t unusual for Dostoevsky.  He seems to delight in strange characters.  In his later novel, The Idiot, he writes:

“Authors, as a rule, attempt to select and portray types rarely met with in their entirety, but these types are nevertheless more real than real life itself [ . . . ] In real life typical characters are “watered down,” so to speak; and all these [extreme characters] actually exist among us every day, but in a diluted form.”

Dostoevsky likes to distill personality traits to their purest strain so that we can study them undiluted.  This is a way of putting a magnifying glass on human nature so we can examine it with greater precision.  For example, I can learn much about my own tendency toward jealousy by encountering Othello.  

Extreme characters can make for good fiction, but they are also much harder to write.  A novelist must render the characters credible for the novel to work (though there are, of course, exceptions).  How does Dostoevsky render Prince Valkovsky creditably?

First of all, he wades us in.  He doesn’t reveal all of the Prince’s quirks on page one.  The first Prince we meet is understandable at a glance.  He’s simply someone who desires wealth and success.  That’s easy enough to accept.  But then cracks start appearing in this simple picture of him.  Vanya keeps getting an impression of insincerity, as if the Prince were putting on a show.  Then, when Vanya unexpectedly sees the Prince in a stairwell, the Prince is cursing violently with a look of anger and hatred.  When the Prince sees Vanya, his face immediately relaxes into “an affable, merry expression.”  At this point it becomes clear that the Prince is wearing a mask for them, that his real feelings are much darker.  The Prince then behaves with unexpected magnanimity.  Everyone is surprised.  People had gotten used to him acting out of self-interest, and then he is suddenly generous.  Natasha suspects he’s up to something.  I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Dostoevsky has now primed me to be acquainted with the true Prince.  When I learn what a sadist he is, while the degree is shocking, this quality about him now feels plausible because of Dostoevsky’s gradual unveiling.  Dostoevsky has trained me in my expectations to such a degree that I would probably find the Prince implausable if he didn’t turn out to be evil.

Second, Dostoevsky renders the Prince’s hidden motivations vivid through use of analogy.  For example, when Prince Valkovsky reveals to Vanya how depraved he is, Vanya says that the Prince “found a certain pleasure—and perhaps even a certain sensual gratification—in the shamelessness, in the insolence, in the cynicism with which at last he ripped off his mask before me.  He wanted to enjoy my astonishment, my horror.”  While this motivation is perhaps not wholly unknown to me, it isn’t one that I experience every day.  Dostoevsky is aware of this and knows he will have to do more work render credible such an extreme motivation.  He does this by having the Prince tell the story of a grotesque old man who took delight in flashing people on the street.  Valkovsky claims that his delight in exposing his soul to Vanya is similar.  Valkovsky renders this anecdote so vividly that it comes alive in the reader’s imagination, thus by way of analogy making his own motivations more vivid, thus more credible.  It’s easier to believe something if I can clearly picture it.

Third, Dostoevsky has the Prince articulate his philosophy for living.  Some actions seem unbelievable until you become acquainted with the actor’s beliefs.  For example, that someone would bomb innocent civilians in a town square may only baffle, but if I were to learn about the bomber’s goals for revolution, while I might not sympathize, I could still see that someone who believed so-and-so could do such-and-such.  The same works with the Prince.  When I learn the cynicism he harbors toward the possibility of idealistic morality, his ruthlessly hedonistic approach to life becomes more believable.

Fourth, the energy and coherent personality that comes out when he speaks has such life that I can’t help but accept him as a character.  Everything he says, I can’t help but find myself saying, “Oh, he would say that.”  It’s easy to believe in the Prince’s existance because I can hear his voice so clearly.  

Fifth, much of what is going on with the Prince is unstated.  Dostoevsky gives me clues, and I must make inferences.  The Prince lives in the shadows of subtlety and subtext.  This aspect of him makes him much easier to accept.  By, in a way, giving me space to participate in the creation of the Prince in my imagination, I then find it harder to reject the Prince as incredible.  The Prince is a liar.  It’s hard to believe anything he says.  Because of this, I am always having to construct the truth behind the Prince’s lies on my own—and I find it hard to reject the truth that I myself have constructed.  For example, I know that the Prince threatens to have Natasha thrown into jail.  How do I know this?  He never comes out and says it.  I know it by reading into hints he makes, and the tone in which he makes them.  He alludes to “a certain kind of unpleasantness I can arrange for her.”  This is how the Prince works.  He almost exists more in my imagination than in the exact words on the page.  By leaving so much off the page, he becomes so much more in my imagination.

Dostoevsky does this in smaller ways as well.  Some of his most vivid descriptions of the Prince contain almost no sense details at all.  For example, Vanya tells us that the Prince 

“looked at me sarcastically as I was finishing my sentence, as if enjoying my cowardice and challenging me with his eyes, as if saying, ‘I see you backed off: No guts, huh, my friend?’  This must have been so, because when I finished, he burst out laughing, and with patronizing friendliness slapped me on the knee.  ‘You amuse me, my friend!’ was what I read in his eyes.”

Here we get zero descriptions beyond the laugh, the slap, and a vague mention of the eyes, but instead Dostoevsky relies on my experience of seeing sarcasm to supply the face.  When I read this, the Prince’s face is remarkably vivid in my mind’s eye.  More than vivid—I see not only his physical face, but beyond it to something more essential.  Appearances can lie, yet descriptions like these push past appearances.

Sixth, I more readily believe the Prince’s eccentricities because I, in a way, want them to be true.  In a way, I don’t.  The Prince is evil and causes much misery for the characters I care most about.  But the Prince’s wickedness makes the novel more satisfying—it would feel lopsided without it.  All the other characters are so sincere that when the Prince’s irony bursts onto the scene, it’s almost refreshing.  Without the Prince laughing at them, all the main characters’ noble intentions could sink into melodrama.  When a novel is all earnestness, a voice inside me cries, “Yes, but it’s not that simple!”  Earnestness makes no room for doubt—it’s a sort of juggernaut that crushes nuance with its seriousness.  If the Prince doesn’t laugh at the main characters, I will.  I need the Prince to laugh at them so that I’m free to care about them.  The Prince’s personal actions may strain plausibility, but the presence of his cynicism in a world of such earnestness makes the novel more plausible.  The Prince is so well counterpointed to the other characters that his existence is necessary to the world of this story.

Seventh, Dostoevsky makes me believe in the Prince because he goes out of the way to help me find the Prince in myself.  

“I’m certain,” the Prince says, “you’re calling me a sinner, perhaps even a scoundrel, a monster of vice and corruption.  But I can tell you this: If it were only possible [. . . ] for every one of us to describe all his secret thoughts, without hesitating to disclose not only what he’s afraid to tell his best friends, but even what he’s sometimes afraid to confess to himself, the world would be filled with such a stench that we’d all suffocate.”  

The Prince claims that he’s not much different than me, that I too might find secret pleasure in sticking out my tongue at naive idealism.  By working to make this villain vivid in my imagination, Dostoevsky presses me to ask the question—can I see Prince Valkovsky in me?

In their book Understanding Fiction, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren claim that “it is the glory of fiction to render coherent many strange, apparently self-contradictory examples of human nature.”  Fiction allows me to find myself in more and more surprising places, thus finding more and more surprising traits within myself.  Fiction expands my ability to identify with others.