Letters Leading up to Poor Folk (1838-1846)

I just reread Poor Folk, published when Dostoevsky was twenty-four.  Twenty-four? How did he have such a deep sense of psychology at twenty-four?  I found a clue in his letters.  He writes this to his brother, Mikhail, in 1839: “I am learning a good deal about ‘what is man and what is life’; I can study human characters from writers with whom I spend the best part of my life.”

Dostoevsky learns about people from his reading.  He mentions many authors in his letters during the years preceding Poor Folk, authors like Shakespeare, Schiller, Balzac, Hoffmann, and every last one of them were poets or dramatists or novelists—that is, fabricators.  Dostoevsky, the guy Nietzsche called “the only psychologist from whom I’ve anything to learn,” taps his insight (at least at the beginning of his career) primarily from imaginary people.  His reliance on fiction is clear even when he studies real people.  When describing his friend Shidlovsky to Mikhail, Dostoevsky calls him “a truly human being like those drawn by Shakespeare and Schiller, although, even then, he was ready to sink into the morose mania of Byronic characters.”  Dostoevsky seems to make sense of the real Shidlovsky by comparing him to invented personas.  

So why did Dostoevsky think fictional sources the most valuable for probing the human enigma?  Wouldn’t genres like biography or psychological case study be more direct?  Dostoevsky gives a hint of his thinking when he tells Mikhail about Corneille’s Cinna.  “Read it,” he says.  “Especially the dialogue between Augustus and Cinna, where he forgives him his betrayal (but the way he forgives him (?)).”  What fascinates Dostoevsky is not Augustus’s forgiveness but the way he forgives.  Forgiveness is the fact; Augustus’s way is the fact’s angle.  Fiction captures such angles better than non-fiction because non-fiction’s focus is inherently tied to the facts.  Facts can go far in plumbing personality’s ocean, but they always have a tether, one that the disciplined imagination of the novelist can outswim.  

But what if some reporter or psychologist is on the scene and witnesses everything, all the nuances of gesture, even for decades?  Wouldn’t that be just as probing as the disciplined imagination?  Maybe.  But imaginary writing has yet another advantage.  Dostoevsky hints at it in a 1838 letter to Mikhail: “The thought that inspiration, like a heavenly sacrament, will illumine the pages . . . I cannot believe that this thought does not infuse the soul of the poet at the very moment of creation.”  Artistic creation calls on resources beyond that of the conscious mind.  At their best, fiction writers collaborate with a mystery.  It is within this mystery that characters can develop something like consciousness independent of the author’s.  When I am writing in this mode, I can make observations about people that stretch beyond my own conceptions.