“Mr. Schedrin” & “The Crocodile” (1865)

In Dostoevsky’s story, “The Crocodile,” Ivan is swallowed alive by a crocodile, but everyone is having a hard time caring about getting him out.  The narrator is running around trying to get people to care, but as he continues, it becomes clear that even he may not care all that much. 

Part of the reason many of the characters can’t care is that the novelty of the situation threatens the tidy way they have imagined reality.  For example, when the narrator tells Timofey that his friend has been swallowed by a crocodile, Timofey responds, “I always believed that this would be sure to happen to him.”  Timofey has long disliked Ivan’s progressivism, so now that something bad has happened to Ivan, Timofey is convinced it is because of Ivan’s progressivism.  Timofey is unable to comprehend the newness of the event—he can only twist the facts to confirm the closed loop of what he has believed all along.

Similarly, when newspapers report on the event, they too distort the facts so that their own pet agendas are confirmed.  In each case, heads are full of general principles built on a hope that these principles will contribute to a vague, generalized humanity, at the expense of the suffering of this specific human.  In result, everyone is swallowed by their own metaphoric crocodile.  Each is so insulated that they have lost the ability to have any meaningful interaction with anyone else.  If hell is to not love, as Dostoevsky’s character Zossima will later say in The Brothers Karamazov, than this state very much resembles hell.

In “Mr. Schedrin,” a satire Dostoevsky wrote the same year as “The Crocodile,” he accuses his opponents of lopping off life to fit their ideas, rather than studying life to gain ideas.  

This is very difficult to not do.  In fact, I shudder to think how many times I have done it in the above paragraphs.  But if I want to move away from the hell of not loving, I must try.

Dostoevsky’s fictional process may serve as a guide.  It’s telling that he does not aim all of his satire in “The Crocodile” at one political side.  Capitalists, socialists, conservatives, progressives all come out with bitemarks.  Indeed, in “Mr. Schedrin,” he mocks those who seek to shield any piece of writing that’s a representation of their own side, no matter how poorly written.  To satirize one side of an issue and not the other is to give the reader a twisted picture, and this lopping off of life leads to the self-enclosed loop, not to an affirmation of life as it actually exists.

Dostoevsky’s process also reveals his commitment to people over ideas.  In “Mr. Schedrin” and “The Crocodile,” I can feel that Dostoevsky is starting with an idea. “Mr. Schedrin” is a counterpunch to Schedrin’s attack on Notes from Underground, and “The Crocodile” is a satire against some of Dostoevsky’s other ideological opponents.  But as both pieces advance, the bottom seems to drop out.  I get the sense that after the big D has been writing for a while, his imagination gets whirring, and the characters take on a life of their own in a way that may not have all that much to do with his original idea.  In “Mr. Schedrin,” Schedrin the character becomes oddly sympathetic and starts taking on complexities that makes me feel as if the satire is breaking down, yet the story is becoming more interesting.  Similarly, when the narrator of “The Crocodile” is trying to convince Elena to stay true to her husband while his attraction to her mounts, the complexity of the character dynamics seems to have little to do with the original political satire, but has become something more—something living.  

Dostoevsky seems willing to let his parodies fail (at least, in a superficial reading) to let his characters live.  His artistic instinct is to follow that alive quality in his characters because he knows that if life is getting in the way of the idea, the idea may need some revising.