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.

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.