“White Nights” (1848)

I often think of desire as a fundamental element of fiction.  In most stories, a character wants something, but an obstacle hinders fulfillment.  The vast majority of stories operate this way.

But there’s a snag to this sort of storytelling.  It just doesn’t square with my experience.  To want something wholly, with no reservations whatsoever, seems to be the sole privilege of a rare maniac.  The rest of us find even our strongest desires riddled with doubts.  Thus, after reading a book, I can feel like I’m missing out if I’m not experiencing a supernatural romance, or I can attribute to passing passions something more fundamental than they actually possess.

Not so when I read Dostoevsky.  Perhaps the reason I find the two main characters in “White Nights” so compelling is that their desires are just as fragmented as mine.  The Dreamer seems to prefer his fantasies to real life.  He sees the world as dull, cold, sullen, and hostile compared to his magical, opulent dreams.  Yet at the same time, he sees his life whiled away in daydreaming as pathetic, poisonous, cursed.  Sometimes he feels like he would trade all his fantasy-filled years for one day of reality, no matter how gloomy.

When he tells Nastenka of this, she relates, but in a different way.  She has spent her life hovered over by her Granny, who pushes her toward romance while simultaneously forbidding it.  Their two backstories run parallel—The Dreamer’s fantasies and Nastenka’s Granny are slowly destroying each of them by splitting their desires.

But this is only the beginning.  Nastenka is waiting for the return of a man she wishes to marry.  While waiting, she meets the Dreamer, who quickly develops feelings for Nastenka.  The crucial question then becomes: who is Nastenka going to pick?

But the further the story presses into this question, the more unclear I feel about which man Nastenka prefers.  She herself doesn’t seem to know.  Trying to get to the bottom of her desires is like trying to get to the bottom of a staircase designed by M.C. Escher.

But how can such a story be told?  Desire is the thrust of fiction.  These characters’ desires are so contradictory that the narrative should grow inert and die.  Contradictory desires cancel each other out, so in terms of moving the plot forward, contradictory desires should function the same as no desires.  Without the wind of desire, a story can’t sail.

Yet “White Nights” does.  Why?  Dostoevsky is able to cultivate in me a sense of hope that the instability in these characters isn’t too stable itself—that there’s something solid beneath the ambiguities that’s worth investigating.  

First, the tone of the story is one of contagious curiosity.  The writing feels energized with a sort of dogged determination to get to the bottom of the matter.  Nothing about the tone seems to suggest that sort of despairing throwing up of the hands that says, “Well, I guess we’ll never know.”  Dostoevsky is determined to get closer to a why.  The Dreamer spends two evenings racking his brains trying to discover why his room made him so uneasy.  He examines his walls and furniture in detail.  And when he tells his story to Nastenka, he tells much of it using only “why” questions.  Again and again, Dostoevsky invites me to interrogate his characters’ motives.  I can’t but help but hope that all this interrogation won’t be in vain.

Second, Dostoevsky lays out tantalizing patterns of theme.  There are two major themes in this story—that of dreams versus reality, and that of lingering moments versus the quick passage of time.  He returns to both of these themes in almost every paragraph, so I can’t help but wonder how these themes are related.  Once again, he gives me a fragmentation and a longing to fuse together the pieces.  And he offers me abundant opportunities to do so.  He often mentions how time passes differently in dreams versus reality.  

The Dreamer finds spring in Petersburg so ephemeral that he hasn’t time to fall in love with it.  He dislikes how reality consists of moments that pass by.  He finds it morbid and associates it with death.  For a dreamer, a moment isn’t enough.  But a moment is all reality has to offer—it can only be experienced that way.  In his fantasies, on the other hand, he can prolong moments; he can rehash them and squeeze out all their sweetness.  But because of this, there are no real moments in his dreams.  They are a blur of noncommittal superficiality.  The Dreamer can’t commit to the dying moment, thus he can’t truly know grief or sacrificial love.

By presenting us with these two separate but cross-talking themes, Dostoevsky gives us another layer of patterns by which we can come to a deeper understanding of his characters.  

As usual, Dostoevsky doesn’t come out and say what desire lies at the bottom of these equivocal characters.  But he does give us enough material to make progress with what seems to be the crucial question of the piece: what does it mean to love?

One thing that’s amazing about these characters is that they aren’t rational, but this irrationality isn’t a mere flaw but a sign of something deeper.  There’s more to their desires than their own logic and understanding of their well-being.  They both have a need for love to be stable, but the romance where they are trying to find it isn’t—it’s breaking apart beneath the weight of their need.  Romantic attraction comes and goes, but the need behind it is something pure, something profound.  

“You can’t help believing,” The Dreamer says, “that there is something alive and palpable in his vain and empty dreams!”  Who hasn’t felt that need, that need for a moment, yes, but a lasting moment, a moment that doesn’t die?  Who hasn’t felt that need to love like they do in the stories, to love purely, with no contrary strains, no adulterations?  When romances fail and dreams go sour, that need remains.

A Christmas Tree and a Wedding (1848)

The basic outline of “A Christmas Tree and a Wedding” is quite conventional.  The affinity between a boy and girl is threatened by the girl’s grotesque suitor, whose social position enamors the girl’s parents.  I’ve heard variations on this theme many times.  But Dostoevsky’s version has some odd tweaks.  Here are three:

1.  In a typical version of this plot, the boy and girl are adults.  In Dostoevsky’s take, they are children, yet the powerful suitor is middle-aged.  

2.  Conventionally, the narrator reports and comments on the situation but has no power to get involved.  ‘A Christmas Tree’s narrator, however, is on the scene.  He has the ability to engage, but he doesn’t.  Instead, he only laughs.

3.  This type of plot normally ends emphatically.  Either the boy and the girl get together or they don’t.  ‘A Christmas Tree,’ however, ends ambiguously.  An end may be implied, but the central tension remains unresolved.

Why did Dostoevsky make these alterations?  The answer may have to do with Dostoevsky’s commitment to a certain kind of honesty.  French philosopher Simone Weil claims that literature shines brightest when the author is laboring under the sort of honesty that admits that any of us, at any moment, could lose everything.  This is the honesty of Job, of Oedipus, of Lear.  It’s this honesty that allows one to stand stripped naked of all of one’s illusions of control.  

Whenever I read a story about evil, I naturally want to distance myself from it.  My mind crowds with rationalizations to soothe me.  That couldn’t happen to me, I tell myself.  I want to be somehow immune to such pain.  Like Oedipus, I can’t give ear to a prophet who says “You are the murderer of the king whose murderer you seek.”  The question then becomes how can I move from King Oedipus to King David, who, when the prophet says, “You are the man!” David listens.  

Each of Dostoevsky’s three tweaks bring me closer to David by confronting three of my biggest rationalizations:

1.  “The problem isn’t that bad.”  

Dostoevsky’s decision to make the protagonists children ups the stakes; their vulnerability is too stark for cloudy justification; to be profit-oriented with them is to be sinister.  I like to tell myself that acting on my own interest while ignoring the interests of others isn’t a big deal, but Dostoevsky forces me to take my actions more seriously by showing how they can effect children.  What I thought was reasonable indulgence, when brought into the light of childhood innocence, looks more like cruelty.

2.  “The problem belongs to someone else.”  

That the narrator could watch this scene unfold and do nothing but laugh implicates the narrator.  This brings to mind the fact that I too, am watching, and that I too, do nothing.  Without the narrator’s callous laugh, I could too easily read this story blaming no one but the monstrous suitor.  But the story is told in a way that implicates me in it—I have no way of separating myself from the suitor’s stink. 

3.  “I can fix the problem.”  

The first line of the story presents me with a contradiction: “The other day I saw a wedding . . . but no, I had better tell you about the Christmas tree.”  Here Dostoevsky employs metanoia (one of his favorite rhetorical devices), where he has the narrator correct himself.  The narrator says he’s going to tell us about a wedding, but then he changes his mind.  The wedding is even promised in the title.  But this is the last I overtly hear of the wedding.  This creates a tension in the story.  I’m waiting to see who gets married.  I assume that the girl either must marry the suitor or the boy; the text seems to imply that the girl marries the suitor, but it never says explicitly.  I begin with the tension of the wedding, and I am left with it, which is unsettling.  I want to hear that justice triumphed, but I don’t even find out what happened.  I am left with urgent questions but with no answers.  In short, I am left in an impossible situation.

Dostoevsky often ends his stories this way.  He leaves me between the horns of a dilemma that is so urgent that it doesn’t even leave room for a despairing cop-out.  What is my responsibility to those suffering around me?  Well, what is it?  To ignore the question is cruel.  To do nothing is oppressive.  But what can I do?  Positive actions often feel more symbolic than satisfactory, and the proffered answers often seem to just point the cruelty in another direction.  I feel as though I have been brought to the point that I must act, but I am paralyzed.  

And this is where Dostoevsky leaves me.  Why?  I can’t answer for him, but one reason I keep coming back to these stories is because I find this impossible state one of spiritual fertility.  When I come to the end of my answers, I finally become willing to cry out for help.

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.

Another Man’s Wife, or the Husband Under the Bed (1848)

In Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, the narrator claims that the best readers look for “more reality, than real life itself can show.”  An actor’s body is more expressive than a candid person’s because the actor must reveal what a person experiences but cannot express.  Fiction does the same.  It is, as Melville puts it, “nature unfettered.”

I have at least three tendencies that hinder real life from showing me reality:

1.  Blurry thinking.  My tendency toward imprecise thinking, which causes me to skate over complexity.  The current of my brain naturally drifts this way because it’s easier than struggling upstream through life’s paradoxes.

2.  Self-deceit.  My tendency to rationalize my unsavory side and to distract myself from pain.  My field of vision is limited when I refuse to face my shadow.

3.  Familiarity.  My tendency to miss what’s right in front of me simply because I’ve seen it so many times before.  This slips me into the habit of overlooking much of reality.

Fiction can show me more reality than these real-life handicaps because it offers a work-around for each:  

1. Fiction can cut through my sloppy convictions though a careful imagining of details.  The written word has a way of laying bare contradictions.  Thoughts are like butterflies—they are harder to tell apart in flight than when pinned.  Ink pins down thoughts, which makes their variations harder to ignore.

2.  Fiction can cut through self-deceit through the process of empathy.  It’s hard to scrutinize myself, but it’s easy to scrutinize a stranger.  Fiction merges the two—I can scrutinize characters as I would strangers, but as I inhabit their experiences, I find myself within them.

3.  Fiction can cut through familiarity by the very fact of its being fiction.  Fiction is strangeness.  If it weren’t strange at all, that is, if it were completely identical to real life, it wouldn’t be fiction.  The “real life” that I bring with me to a book is isn’t really real life, it’s only my expectations of real life.  True reality is unexpected and strange.  I just don’t tend to think so for the reasons listed above.  Fiction reawakens in me the strangeness of reality.

I say reawaken because I knew reality was strange when I was young.  I can see this in the sort of stories that used to excite me.  G. K. Chesterton says that “a child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon.  But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door.”  Great fiction reawakens in me the strangeness of opening a door. 

Strangeness is surprising.  Therefore a lot of the best fiction surprises me with its strangeness, and then surprises me again by rendering the strangeness familiar, or as Charles Baxter puts it, “We meet ourselves coming in the other direction.”

“Another Man’s Wife, or the Husband Under the Bed” is full of the unexpected.  It opens with a man in an expensive coat acting servilely to a man in a poor one.  The strangeness increases when we realize that the man in the expensive coat, Ivan Andreyitch, suspects the other man of cuckolding him.  Still more when Ivan Andreyitch finds he can’t confront his wife without asking the suspected lover to help him.

The normal roles are reversed, as the title implies.  Normally, the lover hides behind the furniture, but here the husband does.  Normally, the lover feels guilty and the husband gets angry, but here the husband feels guilty and the lover gets angry.  Normally, the unfaithful spouse runs from the faithful one, fearful of being caught, but here, the faithful spouse runs. 

If everything went as expected, I, the reader, would feel snug in my present understanding of reality, but the unexpected destabilizes me and opens me to something new.  The strange makes me wonder.

But that isn’t quite true.  The merely strange doesn’t make me wonder.  It makes me shrug and say, “Well, that was weird.”  What makes me ask why is the strangeness that rings true.  “Fiction,” says Melville, “should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.”

As usual, Dostoevsky doesn’t spell out why Ivan Andreyitch feels guilty for his wife’s infidelities or why, when something falls on his head at the opera, he continues to scan and scan the crowd until he finds someone laughing at him.  Dostoevsky leaves it to me to sleuth out causes.  

But he does give me a certain sense of coherence.  Ivan Andreyitch is full of contradictions, yet nonetheless, I sense there is some sort of inner unity beneath the contradictions.  Even the lapdog Ivan Andreyitch imagines seems a reflection of this underlying characteristic: “It is just as though a confectioner made it of sweetmeats.  And it’s such a funny little thing—gets entangled in its own coat and falls over.”

What I find particularly amazing about this type of characterization is that the unity remains off-page.  It’s precise, yet unarticulated.  It’s the art of focus.  The whole story revolves around this single trait, but what is the trait?  Jealousy?  Not exactly.  Othello was jealous, and this little resembles Othello.  Dostoevsky creates a tight circle around his theme and leaves its definition unspoken. The theme has only this name: Ivan Andreyitch.  The great acting teacher Constantin Stanislavsky claims that “the greater the literary work, the greater the pull of its super-objective.”  What’s marvelous about a character like Ivan Andreyitch is that I’m certain he has a super-objective, but I’m sure if you asked ten different readers what it was, you’d get ten different answers.

This is because I sense his coherence not logically but experientially.  Ivan Andreyitch’s behavior is irrational and exaggerated, yet familiar.  Phenomena like induced guilt and pain-shopping are everyday occurrences; I just often don’t notice them until fiction exposes their strangeness.

A Weak Heart (1848)

The narrative style of “A Weak Heart” is full of gaps and misdirection.  Vasya and Arkady are both infatuated with Lizanka, yet at no point do either speak of jealousy.  Who ever heard of a love triangle without jealousy?  After Vasya and Arkady have a long and passionate discussion about Vasya’s workload, the narrator tells us “Neither the one nor the other had made even the briefest allusion to [Lizanka].”  Why would the narrator go out of his way to underline what they hadn’t talked about?  The story has two plots which seem to be at variance at one another.  Is the story really about Vasya getting together with Lizanka or about Vasya getting all his work done?  On almost every page, Dostoevsky has me thinking something like “Why did Vasya do that?” or “Why is this in the story?”  In short, the narrator is a compounder of confusion.

Confusion creates a yearning for order.  As I read “A Weak Heart,” I found myself hunting for a thread that would tie everything together.  I wanted to find form in the chaos.  Few things are as satisfying as when I am presented with a jumble of facts and then have the magic thought: Fact A resembles Fact G, and Fact B resembles Fact E—I’m onto something!

Such a search, when rewarded, is one of the joys of reading.  Spotting links across a vast factual terrain is a thrill that brings me back to fiction again and again.  If a story is a small, closed circuit of connections, it lacks mystery, and thus truth.  If a story is all chaos with no coherence, it lacks beauty, and thus purpose.  Dostoevsky provides shape to the chaos of “A Weak Heart” in two ways.  

First, through the word “gratitude.”  The very frequency of its appearance creates a pattern, which is the first step toward order.  The word is often used as explanation for the gaps surrounding Vasya, whose motivations are the story’s primary enigma.  This happens most memorably when Vasya’s boss asks Arkady why Vasya lost his mind, Arkady can only stammer, “From gra-gra-titude!”  The statement almost functions as the story’s thesis.  

Vasya, to put it mildly, is not facing life successfully.  He’s unable to marry the woman he loves, unable to maintain the job he loves, unable to retain his sanity.  He seems to be suffering from a illness which Arkady names “gratitude.”  This, of course, differs from all conventional uses of the word—gratitude is normally considered healthy.  “A Weak Heart” becomes a bizarre new definition, a new concept on Dostoevsky’s map of the soul.  “I was never good to anyone,” Vasya says, “because I couldn’t be [. . .] Yet everyone was always being good to me!”  This obsessive need to repay one’s debts of kindness drives Vasya to psychosis.

Second, the confusion is ordered by the ending.  From a bridge on the Neva River, Arkady gazes at Petersburg.  His vision of the city is full of echoes from the rest of the story, which gives me the impression that its various threads are tying together.  When I try articulate this interconnection in a statement of meaning, I fail.  But the fact that the pattern of experience can’t be reduced to a conceptual statement makes its truth larger.  

If Dostoevsky had provided no conclusion, the story would’ve been mere delirium.  If the conclusion had been conceptual, the story would’ve been mere platitude.  Instead, Dostoevsky concludes with a unifying visual, which illuminates meaningful mystery.

Polzunkov (1848)

“Polzunkov” is about a man who’s unable resist the impulse to humiliate himself.  I can’t read this story without a feeling a searing “why?”  The narrator insists that Polzunkov is kind and noble, yet his life is a grotesque parody of Christ’s call to turn the other cheek.  “They strike you on the cheek,” Polzunkov says, “and in your joy you offer them your whole back.”  He is like the one the Apostle Paul describes who delivers up his body to be burned, but has not love.

A normal way to explore such oddity would be to offer possible explanations.  But Dostoevsky doesn’t do this.  Instead, he merely plunges us into the details of Polzunkov’s experience.  In place of a backstory or an analysis, Dostoevsky just gives us Polzunkov’s face:

“Everything was there—shame and an assumption of insolence, and vexation at the sudden flushing of his face, and anger and fear of failure, and entreaty to be forgiven for having dared to pester, and a sense of his own dignity, and a still greater sense of his own abjectness—all this passed over his face like lightening.”

Dostoevsky has a knack for articulating aspects of personality that have previously gone unstudied.  Humanity is a species that needs many subclassifications, and Dostoevsky is a master at delineating them.  

But his art isn’t simply a freak show where I gawk at some bizarre other.  In Dostoevsky’s lab, the subject observed refuses to stay on their side of the glass.  

As I get to know Polzunkov, something strange happens.  I begin to feel his pain, and through his pain, I find him in myself.  I discover that he is the pure strain of a trait that had existed in me all along, only I hadn’t known it until I saw myself in him.

Reading fiction like this, I am amazed by the breadth of my own personality—it seems to encompass all the varieties human experience in deluded form.  Therefore when a great artist like Dostoevsky unearths a new corner of human personality and pulls me close, I learn something new about myself.

But in the case of Polzunkov, this knowledge isn’t benign.  Dostoevsky, with spot-on dramatic intuition, places Polzunkov in the exact situation where his problem can’t be ignored.  His compulsive self-humiliation gets him into more and more urgent trouble.  As his problems escalate, my pain becomes more acute, desperate—I need there to be an answer.  I scour the text for some way for Polzunkov—me!—to escape this pit. 

The story provides scant solutions, but by exposing my desperation, it pushes me toward that open, seeking frame of mind that I’ve found fertile.

The Landlady (1847)

One of the most difficult decisions one makes when composing fiction is how to frame the point of view.  In The Landlady, Dostoevsky tackles this issue in interesting ways.  He largely relies on the perspective of his protagonist, Ordynov.  In the early pages, the narrator describes Ordynov’s childhood:

“Every one was always somewhat ill at ease in his presence, that even in his childhood every one had avoided him . . . he was utterly unlike other children of his own age.  Now he remembered and reflected that always, at all times, he had been left out and passed over by every one.” 

This statement feels subjective—it depicts Ordynov’s emotional experience, not objective reality.  While Ordynov may have been a social misfit, that his otherness would be so universal smacks of morbid self-centeredness—reality doesn’t single people out with such Truman Show exactness.  So at this point, the story is submerged in Ordynov’s perspective—I don’t yet see how Dostoevsky is going to reveal to me a more reliable sense of reality.

For a few pages, I worry that he won’t.  The narrator starts indulging in overblown depictions of emotion.  From the inside, emotions can feel omnipotent and eternal, and phrases like “a rush of infinite passion” or “life lost its color forever” may indeed capture what Ordynov is feeling, but these phrases lack wider perspective.  Their subjectivity is too airtight.  They are akin to demanding that all birds be shot because once one made droppings on my head.

Yet capturing subjective experience is crucial for the reader to get emotionally involved with the character.  As a reader, I don’t want to just clinically observe a case study; I want to empathize with a personal experience.  But as we’ve seen, subjectivity taken too far leads to dishonesty. I crave a tension between consciousness and reality.

By the end, The Landlady creates just such a tension.  Dostoevsky stuffs me into Ordynov’s head, yet he leaves me clues to show me where Ordynov’s perspective is at odds with reality.  This is the sort of fiction I like most.  A sense of truth gathers between Dostoevsky and me through mutually acknowledged gaps in the speech, thought, and actions of Ordynov.  

I get this sense when Ordynov goes for a walk.  After a while, he discovers that he is soaked to the skin and then notices for the first time that it is raining.  I experience this as Ordynov does—I was just as ignorant as he of the rain, yet the evidence of his soaked clothes hints to me the reality beyond Ordynov’s awareness of it.

Dostoevsky slips me these hints by poking holes in Ordynov’s reliability.  Ordynov’s regular delirium helps with this.  When Katerina behaves unexpectedly, Ordynov wonders if he is still dreaming.  This shade of doubt on Ordynov’s perception strengthens the notion that there is a reality beyond his consciousness.  Dostoevsky often doesn’t give data about the world outside Ordynov, but he destabilizes Ordynov’s ego-centric view enough for me to know that world is there.

One of the strongest images of the novella is when Ordynov peeks through a hole to spy on Katerina.  The limitation of the view focuses it—I have both a subjective perspective and an awareness of a hidden beyond.

A Novel in Nine Letters (1847)

What I find fun about this story is the sort of relationship Dostoevsky develops with me as the reader.  The story, like Poor Folk, is written as an exchange of letters between two people.  Early on, I discover that one or both of the narrators is willfully lying.  This puts me in an interesting place.  Dostoevsky gives me two different takes on the world of this story, and he leaves it up to me to decipher the truth.

The story he lays before me almost reads like a detective mystery, except that instead of trying to ferret out a murderer, I’m just trying to ferret out what on earth’s going on with these people.  I collect data from each of the narrators on the different characters and events.  And just when I start to feel like I’ve got the story figured out, the next letter blasts apart my theory.  

The dueling narrators create a chaos from which I try to make patterns.  The further into the story I wander, the more intricate my pattern has to become so that by the time I emerge from the final sentence, I achieve something like order.  Almost.  I’ve read the story several times, and I’m still not one hundred percent clear on what happened.

But that’s the thing.  What makes this story so juicy is its sense of subtext.  The whole time I’m reading, I get this tip-of-the-iceberg feeling: I know this narrator’s saying xyz, but what is he really saying?  I just can’t get enough of this sort of thing as a reader.  I think it’s because of the sense of reality this style of writing creates between writer and reader.  If Dostoevsky were just to invent this world and then explain it to me, it wouldn’t be nearly as exciting or profound.  Instead, Dostoevsky maps out for me a typography of the characters and convinces me that something more important is beneath their surface.  I want to know what’s beneath, and so I start to read more actively, hunting for signs of the subterranean secrets.  

And here is where the importance of the ambiguous ending comes in.  If Dostoevsky were then to make it perfectly clear what lies beneath, the unspoken reality that seemed to hover between him and me would evaporate.  On the other hand, if he betrays my trust, and I start to suspect that there’s nothing underneath, that he just created a tidy, meaningless puzzle, then I would feel cheated.  Why had I spent all that energy to find out what was beneath these characters only to have Dostoevsky mystically wiggle his fingers at me and say “I guess we’ll never know?”

But he doesn’t do this.  He gives me enough to sense that there’s something there, yet he doesn’t reduce it to explanations.  He lets it hover between us.

Four Essays from The Petersburg News (1847)

Toward the end of Dostoevsky’s essays for The Petersburg News, he a sketches a personality type he calls The Dreamer.  The Dreamer’s defect is his “uncontrolled imagination,” which intoxicates him.  The Dreamer thinks he is being inspired with great art, but in actuality “the talent of real life becomes blunted in him.”  He withdraws from reality and grows useless.

Toward the beginning of the essays, Dostoevsky reviews Ivan Goncharov’s novel An Ordinary Story.  Dostoevsky takes issue with “the author’s special desire to preserve his idea, to explain it at great length,” which “gives the novel a sort of peculiar air of dogmatism and aridity.”  Dostoevsky’s problem with An Ordinary Story is the opposite of his problem with The Dreamer.  The Dreamer’s imagination is too uncontrolled; Goncharov’s, too controlled.  Goncharov makes such an effort to preserve his ideas that he chokes his imagination.

On the surface, these two errors look like opposites, but they are actually two sides of the same canker: disconnection from reality.  Almost all of Dostoevsky’s criticism in these essays is leveled at people losing touch with real life.  He makes fun of the philanthropic landowner who would treat his faithful peasants well, but who never has any faithful peasants—the ones he does have he considers scoundrels, so he gives them “lessons in morals every Saturday.”  Dostoevsky dislikes the gap between the man’s philosophy and his life.  

He also praises Goncharov because he “believes in reality.”  Dostoevsky links belief in reality to great writing. 

He grounds his own commitment to reality into his essays through embodiment.  Whenever he wishes to evaluate a concept, he embodies it into a person and watches how this person interacts with other people.  Dostoevsky longs to understand Petersburg, and so he personifies Petersburg no less than nine times.  He seems to think that you can’t properly analyze something until you give it a face.  

He largely uses two techniques to study these embodiments:

1.  By having them interact with other characters.

2.  By contrasting them with other characters.

In both cases, he confirms that life happens not in isolation, but in society.

But what is his goal in studying Petersburg this way?  What does reality signify to Dostoevsky?  It’s interesting what reality doesn’t signify.  He isn’t primarily interested in investigating something purely naturalistic, say, Petersburg’s socio-political climate.  If he wanted to do this, he would deluge us with facts and figures about current events.  But in the second essay, he declares the news unimportant and proceeds to summarize a fictional short story he recently read.  

Why?  Doesn’t this fly in the face of everything he had just been advocating?  Isn’t this the very flight from reality at which he has been wagging his finger?  

He is still pursuing reality, but of a different sort than relaying information about “new omnibuses.”  His short story recap ends with a treasured mirror getting smashed, and he tells us that “when I read it, I felt as though I had smashed that mirror myself, as though it was my fault.”  The story brought him back to self-awareness.  His own characterizations have a similar trend.  His portrait of The Dreamer, for instance, ends with this: “And are we not all more or less dreamers?”  Personification can lead to identification.

If one dissects reality from the outside, detached from it, the dissection becomes abstract and unreal.  Life happens in society.  Dostoevsky knew that he could not diagnose the ills of Petersburg without finding its symptoms within himself.  This is the most honest way to approach reality.  One can’t make the most truthful judgements about the human condition without acknowledging one’s own humanity.  Such efforts normally fall into projection—a desire to find the problem elsewhere so that I don’t have to face it in myself.  

One amazing feature of these essays is how doggedly interested Dostoevsky is in Petersburg.  His interest propels him to focus his studies with remarkable perseverance.  He’s interested about Petersburg because he cares.  He cares because he identifies.  He continues to find Petersburg in himself, and so Petersburg remains personally important.  Shared personhood is where imagination and reality meet.

Mr. Prohartchin (1846)

Part of my awe of reading comes from the experience of discovering that differing characters, events, places, and objects all have a unifying element that creates a grand pattern.  When fiction is too clearly unified, it’s boring.  Why would I want to read about something that is exactly as it appears?  There’s nothing new for me there.  But if a story is all wild occurrence with no pattern, then it’s equally boring.  There’s no art to it.  It’s just randomness with no significance.

Dostoevsky’s pen has a talent for stretching a thread across contradictions, and his short story “Mr. Prohartchin” is no exception.  It bridges opposites in character, genre, and structure.

On the surface, the titular character is just a miser so miserly that he’d rather die in poverty than spend anything.  Most of Prohartchin’s angst begins when Zinovy suspects him of hiding money.  At first, I think, oh, he’s just worried someone will find out and try to steal it.  But as I read on, I discover that as much as Prohartchin is driven by avarice, he is equally driven by a repressed sense of charity.  I get my first hint of this when he dreams that a man suggests that he doesn’t have enough to eat and that he has seven children and then stares angrily at Prohartchin “as though it were Mr. Prohartchin’s fault that he was the father of seven.”  The narrator tells us that though Prohartchin “was fully convinced of his own innocence in regard to the unpleasant accumulation of seven under one roof, yet it seemed to appear that in fact no one else was to blame” but himself.  This suggests that Prohartchin feels guilty that he has all this money and isn’t helping anyone.  His anger at himself is coming out in this dream character.  He then dreams about seeing someone’s house on fire (which he had really seen earlier that day) and a cabby riles up the crowd to believe that Prohartchin is responsible for the fire.  The cabby is someone he had ripped off before.  Prohartchin wakes up in delirium, believing that his own lodging, his own head is on fire, too.  His sense of responsibility has risen so high that he can’t separate others’ tragedies from his own.  This clamoring sense of responsibility seems connected to the illness that takes his life.  That last thing anyone says to him before his final fit is “Are you a Napoleon?”  And the narrator draws an association between being a Napoleon and assuming enormous responsibility.  

But Dostoevsky doesn’t leave Prohartchin as a mere contradiction—he threads the two halves together by probing to their root.  What is this need to stockpile?  What is this need to share?  On the one hand, Prohartchin craves isolation and on the other community.  Though these are opposite goals, they arise from a similar impulse.  We learn early that Prohartchin has no talent for making friends.  Yet in his illness, he becomes preoccupied with faces.  One can feel his longing for people, especially as he repeatedly dreams about the woman who lost both her family and her coppers and gets them mixed up.  This dream reflects his own state—he longs for a family circle and confuses it with his hoard.  His nesting instinct manifests itself in the only way he knows by combining the responsibility of being a “Napoleon” with having a napoléon d’or coin hidden in his mattress.  

Prohartchin’s impulse to unify his fragmented impulses can be most clearly seen in his last act.  When the others first find his dead body, he “was lying under the bed; he must, while completely unconscious, have dragged the quilt and pillow after him so that there was nothing left on the bedstead but the bare mattress.”  He spends his final strength exposing to the waiting thieves the trove he spent so long guarding.

Paradoxes abound not only within Prohartchin but in the story’s genre.  When Prohartchin’s housemate Okeanov witnesses the final catastrophe, he says he is “between sleeping and waking.”  This liminal space captures the reportage style of the story as a whole.  The narrator relates the incident of the burning house not as it happened, but afterward, in Prohartchin’s dream.  Reality is told through dream, and the dream resembles reality, and so the two are blurred.  When Prohartchin wakes, he is still in a state of delirium, aware of what’s going on around him, but hallucinating fire.  We experience the hallucination with him.  When Prohartchin dies, the narrator constantly personifies his corpse as if it were still living—even the final paragraph is a quotation from the corpse.  

Dostoevsky intentionally straddles fantasy and realism.  This allows him room to investigate Prohartchin with greater versatility than one could achieve in either genre.  Dostoevsky is able to dramatize Prohartchin’s internal struggle within the dream, thus moving the character’s interior from the limited abstractions of psychology into the living images of mythology.  Yet had Dostoevsky been working purely in the fantastic mode, he would not have been able to craft such a complex and extreme character.  In fantasy, the imaginative energy of the reader is syphoned off into the world itself—fantastic soil simply isn’t solid enough to hold someone like Prohartchin.  By operating in a liminal space between, Dostoevsky bypasses both the material trap of realism and the character-shrinking effect of fantasy.  

Dostoevsky’s use of paradox in character and genre fascinated me, but perhaps what I found most compelling this reading was the story’s structural paradox.  Prohartchin occupies a certain place in the story, and his onlookers another, but upon his death, they swap.  Before his death, he is constantly suspicious that someone will find his stash.  After, the others are suspicious about all the places he may have hidden it.  Before, he is considered antisocial for his eccentric behavior at work; after, his corpse is civil as the others disrespect it.  Before, he rarely washed his clothes or wore socks; after, he’s in his best suit with a cravat while the others are “unbrushed, unshaven, unwashed.”  Before, he is feverish; after, they are feverish.  Before, they are telling him to calm down; after, he is the only one calm.  Before, he is racked with guilt of having that money, projecting it onto them.  After, they are racked with guilt for frisking his corpse, projecting condemning speech onto it.  The transfer of money seems to also transfer Prohartchin’s disease.  

Yet this switching of roles seems to create a new sort of community.  Now that Prohartchin’s mattress ripped, a new understanding emerges that what could happen to him could happen to anyone, and in death, he is freed from his isolation, as if

Some . . . organ-grinder puts away in his traveling box the Punch who has been making an upset, drubbing all the other puppets, selling his soul to the devil and who at last ends his existence, till the next performance, in the same box with the [other puppets].

Stories at their best are acts of reconciliation.  They hunt this vast world for the elements most at odds, and parley.