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.

The Double (1846)

The Double has a distinct resemblance to Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman (1835).  Both chronicle a man’s descent into delusion, both are energized by curiosity about the experience of psychosis. Yet the readerly experiences they offer are about as similar as watching a bullfight on TV to being eye to eye with the bull in the arena.

The difference lies in the narrator.  Gogol tells his story through an unreliable narrator.  This narrator, the madman himself, makes claims that Gogol meanwhile contradicts through the reactions of others, the narrator’s slips of tongue, and clashing circumstances.  Thus Gogol trains me to have a sense of the reality of the novel apart from what the narrator tells me, and I enjoy my superior knowledge.  By the time hallucination swallows the narrator whole, I can marvel at his craziness from a safe distance.  

Dostoevsky’s narrator is much more bizarre.  The story is written in the third person, so apparently the narrator is not Goliadkin. Yet the narrator is at times so close to Goliadkin that the narrator’s words clearly belong to Goliadkin.  When the hero is hiding in a backroom trying to decide whether or not to crash a party, the narrator says, “Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, waiting now for this quiet, and he has been waiting exactly two and a half hours for it.  Why should he not wait?”  That last question clearly comes from Goliadkin—no objective person would think his behavior a good idea.  Again, when the Double jumps in a cab, the narrator tells us that the driver “was obviously in full complicity with him.”  There is no indication that the driver would be complicit with the Double—such a reality would be an absurdity.  The assumption only makes sense in light of Goliadkin’s paranoia.  The narrator is not expressing reality here, but Goliadkin’s take on it.

The narrator at times seems like he only has access to Goliadkin’s perspective and nothing else.  When Goliadkin is on a bridge looking down at the Fontanka, the narrator says, 

It is not known precisely how much time he spent in this occupation.  It is known only that at that moment Mr. Goliadkin reached such despair, was so broken, so tormented, so exhausted and sagging in what remained of his spirit, which was weak to begin with, that he forgot everything. . .

The narrator does not know even such simple external details as the passage of time—the narrator only knows Goliadkin’s internal state.  

If the narrator always remained this close to Goliadkin, The Double would have a much similar effect to Diary of a Madman.  I would get used to the idea that I am only given the information in Goliadkin’s head and learn to grasp clues for the reality beyond it.  But Dostoevsky does not afford me this luxury.  He complicates matters by giving the narrator a much more fluid perspective.

At times, the narrator indulges in sharing knowledge entirely outside of Goliadkin’s view.  Check this out: “Our hero failed to notice that he was at the present moment the object of the exclusive attention of all those in the room.”  And again: “He rushed to the window and, with great concern, began searching with his eyes for something in the courtyard on which the windows of his apartment gave.  Apparently whatever he was searching for in the yard also satisfied him completely; his face lit up with a self-satisfied smile.”  In both instances, there is a marked separation between narrator and protagonist.  

Okay, so the narrator is capable of dipping into Goliadkin’s head and coming out again.  I’d call that fluid but not bizarre.  That is, until I read the description of the Klara’s birthday party.  Here the narrator details a scene at which Goliadkin is absent.  This is the first time I get to experience the narrator without Goliadkin, so I am curious to see what the narrator’s like.  But I soon find that the portrait is oddly contradictory.  The narrator at first seems overawed by the party’s splendor.  He repeatedly says that only a genius could chronicle the party justly.  Yet he goes so overboard with this verbal worship that it falls into sarcasm.  His tone becomes decidedly satirical in passages like these: 

How can I portray this extraordinary and decorous mixture of beauty, brilliance, decency, gaiety, amiable solidity and solid amiability, friskiness, joy, all the games and laughter of all these official ladies, more like fairies than ladies—speaking in a sense advantageous to them—with their lily-and-rose shoulders and faces, their airy waists, and their friskily playful, homeopathic (speaking in high style) little feet?

But what kind of satire is this?  The absurdity lies more on the chronicler than on the ladies.  The tone is too sincere to be entirely absurd and too absurd to be entirely sincere.  It’s both.  It’s simultaneously fawning and defiant.  Yet this paradoxical tone is not unfamiliar to the reader.  It is the exact stance of Goliadkin on such occasions.  

In other words, at the precise moment when the narrator shows himself to be a distinct personality from Goliadkin, he nonetheless channels Goliadkin’s attitude.  It’s as if the narrator both is and isn’t Goliadkin—as if he were another double.

Dostoevsky’s decision to create such a paradoxical narrator is significant because the action of the story revolves around the fantastic escapades of Goliadkin’s doppelgänger.  When I start the novel, I chug along the first few pages thinking, “This book has a realistic style—I’m expecting a realistic storyline,” and then in walks a doppelgänger.  This presents me with a question: is the doppelgänger real or is Goliadkin going crazy?  But I am barred from an answer due to the paradoxical nature of the narrator.  He describes the Double as if he were real.  But when the narrator gives these descriptions, are they from Goliadkin’s perspective, thus indicating they are Goliadkin’s hallucination?  Or are they descriptions given from a perspective outside of Goliadkin, thus indicating that I am reading a fantasy novel?  The narrator is too slippery to give me a clear answer.  

I still want to know what’s going on, so I look to the circumstances to see if they confirm whether the Double is real or a delusion.  Yet the circumstances themselves seem contradictory.  Almost all of Goliadkin’s conversations with other people are framed in such a way that the Double could be a hallucination.  The others seem confused and never answer directly when Goliadkin brings him up.  But there is one maddening exception.  When Goliadkin speaks to Anton Antonovich, Anton acknowledges that someone also named Goliadkin just started working at the office, and that the man has a striking resemblance to Goliadkin Sr.  This makes me think that the Double is real.  Yet the conversation is still so enigmatic that I remain uncertain.  

There are also strange circumstances that make me distrust the story as a whole, yet I have no reference point for the reality of the situation.  Krestyan Ivanovich, for example, has a thick German accent at the end of the novel, which he does not have at the beginning.  Is this an indication of Goliadkin’s descent into delusion?  He does seem to have paranoia about Germans.  Also, Anton Antonovich tells Goliadkin that the Double took the job of someone named Semyon Ivanovich.  Later on in the book, the porter tells him that someone named Ivan Semyonovich took Goliadkin’s job.  The weird symmetry of these names feels absurd—like they are the creations of a disturbed mind.  Yet again, I have no access to a saner reality.

But how does Dostoevsky pull it off?  Normally such blatant contradictions in a novel would push me out of the story rather than pull me deeper in.  Yet I found myself loving this book.

First, Dostoevsky assures us of his reliability as an author through the structure of the novel.  The events are set up in a pleasant chiasma.  Here is a rough sequence of Goliadkin’s interactions:

1.  His doctor

2.  His boss’s boss and daughter

3.  His double

4.  His boss’s boss and daughter

5.  His doctor

The ordered mirror of the plot centering around the Double gives me a sense that the author knows what he’s doing, that what feels like chaos is actually intentional.

Second, Dostoevsky woos me into such a paradoxical world through his use of gothicism.  Gothic storytelling has long been the home of the uncanny—that feeling when I’m not sure if something is real or not.  

Staples of gothicism are large, grotesque houses and stormy weather.  Goliadkin lives in such a house, and he first encounters the Double during a snowstorm.  Because so many stories of the uncanny take place in such environments, the setting trains me to expect a blurring of reality, which is much how the end of the novel feels with Goliadkin’s long, delirious monologues.  If I had to pick an adjective for this book it would be “uncanny,” which is most vividly shown when Goliadkin encounters the shoes of his boss’s boss:

Here, in his perplexity, he lowered his eyes to the ground and, to his extreme amazement, saw considerable white spots on his excellency’s boots.  ‘Can they have split open?’ thought Mr. Goliadkin.  Soon, however, Mr. Goliadkin discovered that his excellency’s boots were not split open at all, but only had bright reflections—a phenomenon explained completely by the fact that the boots were of patent leather and shone brightly.  “That’s called a highlight,” thought our hero.  “The term is used especially in artists’ studios; elsewhere this reflection is called a bright gleam.”

When I read The Double, I long for reality but am unable to find it, unlike in Diary of a Madman.  Gogol gives me a spectator seat for psychosis—Dostoevsky gives me a direct experience.

Letters between Poor Folk and The Double (1846)

Shortly before publishing his second novel, Dostoevsky wrote the following to his brother:

Some [critics] find a new and original streak in me in the fact that I proceed by Analysis rather than by Synthesis, i.e., that I go deep down and, digging it up, atom by atom, I uncover the whole; whereas Gogol takes the whole directly, and that’s why he’s not as profound as I am.

Looking past Dostoevsky’s youthful arrogance, one can catch an interesting glimpse of his process.  He works by analysis—digging, uncovering, as opposed to synthesis—taking the whole directly.  What does this mean?

Perhaps it means that he writes on the thrust of questions rather than answers, that he uses the process of novelistic treatment itself to make discoveries about people rather than bringing insights ready-made.  I think of how his later novel, Crime and Punishment, will drive forward on an analytical question—why did Raskolnikov commit murder?

Or perhaps it means that Dostoevsky doesn’t disclose everything about his characters, but reveals aspects of them piecemeal.  What is often so remarkable about his characters is how he leaves space around their motives.  Why did Raskolnikov murder?  Many explanations are proffered, yet the explanations themselves just seem to glance off the surface of his motives, creating a general outline of something unsaid.  Dostoevsky’s characters are not fully explained, which leaves room for the inexplicable.  This gives his characters an autonomous quality rather than snapping their behaviors into a deterministic grid.

Or perhaps it means that Dostoevsky’s focus is more on psychological rather than societal aspects of character.  His metaphor of digging implies getting beneath the surface.  His first novel, Poor Folk, is often seen as a riff on Gogol’s story “The Overcoat.”  Both narratives have the same theme: poverty.  But their definitions vary.  Gogol’s sense of poverty focuses on the social and material—to be poor is to be without a coat.  While these aspects are present in Poor Folk, they are not the work’s central theme.  Dostoevsky’s tale is much more focused on poverty as a mindset, that is, the mental inability to conceive of abundance.  

Whatever Dostoevsky meant, what strikes me is that Dostoevsky sees literary profundity not arising from a faculty of wisdom one brings to the writing desk, but from one’s method.  He claims his piece is more profound than Gogol’s not because he is smarter, but because he has gone about writing in a different way.

But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this letter is that Dostoevsky seems to be observing, with great interest, what critics thought of his process.  In other words, he is looking to people wholly unconnected with his writing process for insights about how it works.  This seems to suggest that Dostoevsky doesn’t quite know himself how he wrote that book.  There’s something baffling about the creation of a great novel—even to the author.

Poor Folk (1846)

Fascination—the reader’s holy bliss, thus the writer’s holy grail.  Fascination often starts when I find myself wanting something on behalf of a character.  When this character’s desire meets resistance, my urge to see the character fulfilled increases.  This could be part of why the two narrators of Poor Folk can fascinate me simply by speaking.  The words of Devushkin and Varvara have their own drag of resistance even before they collide with external barriers.  Their simplest statements are rife with tension.

When, for example, Varvara calls Devushkin a good man, he replies, “All that is true, little mother, all that is completely true; I really am as you say, I know it myself.”  The way he repeats himself betrays a strain in his voice.  We get the impression that a part of Devushkin does not believe himself a good man, and his repetition is an effort to talk down that part.  This impression deepens as he continues: “When a man reads the kind of thing you write, his heart is moved, and then various painful thoughts come into his mind.”  These unspoken painful thoughts must be Devushkin’s inner objections to Varvara’s compliment.

Vavara’s speech is full of similar fractures.  When Devushkin invites her to the theatre, she responds, “Won’t that be very expensive?” and then she worries about the money he spends and laments that he spends it on her.  She closes the letter, and then tacks on a post script: “You know, if we go to the theatre I shall wear my new hat and my black mantilla.”  This betrays the excitement that her letter was laboring to suppress.  

Devushkin and Varvara are stuck in a similar dilemma—they both have a desperate need for money but fatally coupled with a deeper need, which thwarts their ability to receive money.  When Varvara comes upon some rubles, she sends them to Devushkin, but he uses the money to go on a drunken binge.  He describes his spree starting this way: 

You would soon be going hungry yourself, yet you told me to buy tobacco. Well, what was I to do in such a position?  Was I, like some bandit, to start plundering you, a little orphan?  It was at that point that my spirits sank, little mother; that’s to say, at first, being overwhelmed by the feeling that I was no good for anything and was little better than the sole of one of my own boots, I thought it improper for me to believe myself of any consequence, and started to view myself as something improper and, to a certain degree, indecent.  Well, once I had lost all respect for myself, once I had abandoned myself to the denial of all my good qualities and of my own sense of self-worth, then I was done for, my downfall was assured!  

Devushkin needs money, but he can’t accept Varvara’s gift because he has a deeper need that thwarts the gift.  This is evident when he relates how, as a younger man, he became obsessed with an actress.  He bankrupted himself “hiring smart cabs and trying to make myself noticed as I drove past her window.”  His deeper need is to be admired by a woman, and to take money from Varvara would spoil his efforts.

When Devushkin comes into some cash, he mails it to Varvara, who immediately returns it even though she is on the verge of dying from the work she is doing to support herself.  She can receive his money no more easily than he can receive hers.  She has a hidden desire that runs deeper than her instinct to save her own life, or even his.  This becomes evident in another one of her fractured speeches.  “Poor and unhappy people ought to steer clear of one another,” she tells him, “I have brought you unhappiness such as you never experienced earlier in the modest and isolated existence you have led.  All this is tormenting me and making me waste away with grief.”  In effect, she says, we’re bad for each other—let’s leave each other alone.  And yet, she immediately follows this with, “Please write me a frank account of what happened to you and how you could have come to behave like that.”  In this sentence, we get a glimpse of the desire that has a deeper grip on her than self-preservation.  She needs to save him.  It isn’t enough that he be saved—she needs to be informed of and controlling the process.  If this is her driving need, it makes perfect sense that she always sends his money back.  She needs to be the one giving in order to fulfill her mission.

The novel’s plot escalates around this contest to out-give each other while neither is capable of receiving.  They push each other into deeper and deeper need.  Scarcity lurks not only in their wallets, but also in their mindsets.  Or, put another way, the effect of poverty on them has not merely been circumstantial, but also psychological.  This adds greater poignance to the title Poor Folk.

That their poverty is not merely circumstantial is key to my fascination as a reader.  Inner conflict is easier to relate to than external conflict.  If the story were merely about characters bumping up against hard times, I could not be as greatly moved because I wouldn’t be able to see myself in those characters unless I had been in similar situations.  But the inner conflict of being unable to receive is near-universal.