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.

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.