Dostoevsky (20 page)

Belinsky was deeply struck by this scene, and Dostoevsky reports him exclaiming over it at their first meeting. “And that torn-off button! That moment of kissing the General’s hand!—why, this is no longer compassion for that
unhappy man, but horror, horror! In that very gratitude is horror!”
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The delicacy of feeling displayed in the handshake, the implicit recognition of a human equality with the lowly Devushkin, is a symbolic point made twice over. Devushkin resents that, before being given charity, the affairs of his destitute drinking companion Emelyan Ilyich are investigated, which he takes as an affront to Emelyan’s dignity (“nowadays, my dear soul, benevolence is practiced in a very queer way”). Similarly, when Gorshkov, after winning his lawsuit, goes around muttering that his “honor” has been restored, the cynical hack writer Ratazyaev says that, with nothing to eat, money is more important than honor. “It seemed to me,” Devushkin observes, “that Gorshkov was offended” (1: 69, 98).

Dostoevsky was acutely aware that the spiritual is of equal importance with the material in alleviating the lot of the unfortunate—even, perhaps, of greater importance, since poverty only heightens the need for self-esteem and self-respect to the point of morbidity. Indeed, the prominence of this motif in
Poor Folk
already reveals a tension in Dostoevsky’s work that will have important consequences later. In
Poor Folk
, this tension between the spiritual and the material is still latent and in a state of equilibrium; the emphasis accorded the spiritual (or, if one prefers, the moral-psychological) dimension of human experience only heightens the pathos of the material injustices that Dostoevsky’s characters have to suffer. But when, beginning in the early 1860s, an aggressive and blinkered materialism became the ideology of Russian radicalism, Dostoevsky broke with the radicals in defense of the “spiritual” in a broad sense. This opposition between the satisfaction of man’s material needs and his innate moral-psychic needs will one day, of course, culminate in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.

It turns out that the assistance of the General, though it allows Devushkin to cope with his most pressing necessities, does not solve his human problem. The beginning of the end for Devushkin occurs when the book shifts from the theme of poverty to that of the impossibility of retaining Varvara. That the General’s charitable gesture did not solve
all
of Devushkin’s problems for good indicates that Dostoevsky was projecting his theme in a wider context, where the social is only one component of a still more complex human imbroglio. And the fate of Gorshkov, who dies on the very day he is fully vindicated and restored to honor and security, again illustrates Dostoevsky’s awareness of human problems for which, properly speaking, there is no social solution at all.

One other motif also suggests that Dostoevsky intended a widening of the thematic horizon at this point. For while earlier Devushkin revolts explicitly only against the injustices of the social hierarchy, at the very end of the book there is the timid beginning of a revolt against the wisdom of God himself.
When Varvara announces her acceptance of the marriage proposal and places her fate in God’s “holy, inscrutable power,” Devushkin replies, “Of course, everything is according to God’s will; that is so, that certainly must be so, that is, it certainly must be God’s will in this; and the Providence of the Heavenly Creator is blessed, of course, and inscrutable, and it is fate too and they are the same. . . . Only Varinka, how can it be so soon? . . . I . . . I will be left alone” (1: 101–102). One catches here a glimpse of the future metaphysical Dostoevsky moving out beyond the confines of the question of social justice, or rather taking it only as his point of departure.

Poor Folk
, as well as being at its core a moving plea for social commiseration, is also a highly self-conscious and complex little creation. All through the eighteenth century, the sentimental epistolary novel had been the form in which models of virtue and sensibility, such as Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe and Rousseau’s Julie, or poetic and exalted souls, such as Goethe’s Werther, had poured forth their lofty feelings and noble thoughts. The epistolary novel had thus become a vehicle for high-flown romantic sentiment, and its central characters were always exemplary figures from the point of view of education and breeding. Indeed, the underlying social thrust of the form was to demonstrate the moral and spiritual superiority of its largely bourgeois protagonists to the corrupt world of aristocratic class privilege in which they lived. Dostoevsky uses the form for much the same purpose in relation to a much lower social class. But, since the sentimental epistolary novel had traditionally become identified with highly cultivated and emotionally exalted characters, he took a considerable artistic risk in doing so.

To portray the abortive romance of an elderly copy clerk and a dishonored maiden in this sentimental pattern was to violate the hitherto accepted conventions of narrative, but we can see that Dostoevsky did so very self-consciously. In the slum boardinghouse where Devushkin has rented a corner of the kitchen, the two servants are called Teresa and Faldoni (not their real names, of course, but presumably an invention of the caustic littérateur Ratazyaev). Not only had Karamzin’s
Letters
made the names of these two heroic lovers famous in Russia, their story had also furnished the subject for a French epistolary novel translated into Russian at the beginning of the century. Devushkin himself is dubbed a “Lovelace” by Ratazyaev, that is, identified with the aristocratic libertine who rapes Clarissa Harlowe. The incongruity of all these appellations illustrates the effect that Dostoevsky wishes to obtain. By elevating his Devushkin and Varvara to the stature of epistolary protagonists while demoting Teresa and Faldoni to the level of comic caricatures (Teresa is “a plucked, dried-up chicken,” Faldoni “a red-haired, foul-tongued Finn, with only one eye and a snub nose”) (1: 23),
Dostoevsky implicitly claims for his lowly characters the respect and attention hitherto accorded the much more highly placed sentimental heroes and heroines. And by inviting the reader mentally to compare Devushkin and Lovelace, Dostoevsky exhibits the moral preeminence of the humble clerk over the brilliant but selfish and destructive aristocrat.

The originality of Dostoevsky’s use of the sentimental epistolary form, as V. V. Vinogradov has remarked, stands out against the background of the considerable literary tradition already existing for the portrayal of the St. Petersburg bureaucratic scribe (or
chinovnik
, as he is known in Russian). This tradition, which goes back to the 1830s, treated such a character only as material for the burlesque anecdote and satirical sketch; and one finds protests as early as 1842 against the unfair caricatures of the
chinovnik
that had become so popular a literary fashion.
⁷
Gogol’s “The Overcoat” derives from this tradition, and keeps much of its jeering, jocular, clubroom-anecdotal tone. Even though Gogol interjects a sentimental plea for pity in the midst of the burlesque anecdote, this plea is still made from a point of view outside of and superior to the character. The unexpected passage thus clashes with the contemptuous tone and treatment accorded Akaky Akakievich
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in the rest of the story and produces rather the effect of a tacked-on moral. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, by casting the theme of the shabby and ridiculous
chinovnik
—hitherto only a comic butt—in the form of the sentimental epistolary novel, breaks the satirical pattern and integrates his “philanthropic” theme with his form.

Dostoevsky’s contemporaries saw him primarily as a follower of Gogol; recent critics have focused on his “parodistic” transformation of Gogolian characters and motifs, which he converts from the tonality of grotesque, fantastic comedy into that of sentimental tragicomedy. These points of view, however, are not mutually exclusive. Dostoevsky does reverse those
stylistic
features of “The Overcoat” that tend to ridicule Akaky Akakievich. The effect of this reversal, though, is not to
undermine
the significance of Gogol but rather to
strengthen
his overt “humanitarian” theme. Gogol’s narrative technique works to create a comic distance between character and reader that defeats emotional identification; Dostoevsky counteracts the purely satirical features of the model by taking over its elements and, through his use of the sentimental epistolary form, reshaping them to accentuate Devushkin’s humanity and sensibility. There is no term known to me that quite fits this process of formal parody placed in the service of thematic reinforcement. Far from being the antagonistic relation of a parodist to his model, it more resembles that of a sympathetic critic endowed with the creative ability to reshape a work so as to bring its form into harmony with its
content. Both
Poor Folk
and “The Overcoat” contain the same Gogolian mixture of “laughter through tears,” but in different proportions; laughter is uppermost for Gogol, while for Dostoevsky it is tears that predominate.
⁹

Dostoevsky’s novel also incorporates hints as to the more immediate literary ancestry of the new treatment he now accords the
chinovnik
. Indeed, one of the most striking features of
Poor Folk
, as A. Beletsky remarked long ago, is precisely its “literariness,” the numerous references and reflections on the current literary scene that Dostoevsky manages to work into its pages.
¹⁰
Devushkin and Varvara send each other books to read and comment on their impressions—Devushkin even dreams at one point of publishing a volume of his own poetry and becomes self-conscious about his “style.” Their remarks add up to nothing less than a self-commentary on the work provided by the author—a commentary that climaxes in Devushkin’s reaction to two stories, Pushkin’s “The Station Master” and Gogol’s “The Overcoat.”

Varvara lends Devushkin a copy of Pushkin’s
Tales of Belkin
, and the story “The Station Master” particularly stirs him. “You know I feel exactly the same as in the book,” he informs her, “and I have been at times in exactly the same position as, for instance, Samson Vyrin, poor fellow” (1: 59). Vyrin is the stationmaster who, out of his good nature and his respectful docility to his betters, allows a young nobleman to run off with his beautiful daughter. The old man drowns his despair in drink and dies of a broken heart, and the story is delineated by Pushkin with genuine sympathy for his suffering. Devushkin weeps profusely over this sentimental tale, which prefigures what he foresees for Varvara and himself, and he says prophetically: “Yes, it’s natural. . . . It’s living! I’ve seen it myself; it’s all about me.”

“The Overcoat,” however, arouses Devushkin to a violently antagonistic outburst. What particularly incenses him is Gogol’s supercilious depiction of Akaky Akakievich’s life and character traits in a fashion that Devushkin finds personally insulting and profoundly untrue. By what right, he asks indignantly, “here under your very nose . . . [does] someone make a caricature of you?” (1: 62). Nor is he impressed by the one passage containing the plea to treat Akaky as a brother. What the author
should
have added, he asserts, is that he was “kindhearted, a good citizen, that he did not deserve such treatment from his fellow clerks, obeyed his superiors . . . believed in God and died (if one insists that he absolutely
has to die), mourned by all” (1: 62–63). Devushkin also thinks the story would be improved if it had a happy ending.

While Dostoevsky does not conform to this demand of Devushkin’s uncultivated taste for a sentimental tale with an edifying moral at the end, he does move in that direction. For he depicts the sad story of Devushkin’s life in the tenderhearted fashion of Pushkin’s sentimentalism in “The Station Master.” Retaining the “naturalism” of detail and décor associated with the comic tradition of the portrayal of the
chinovnik
, Dostoevsky unites it with the tearful strain of Russian sentimentalism that goes back to Karamzin; and this fusion created an original artistic current within the Natural School—the current of sentimental naturalism—which quickly found imitators and became an independent, if minor, literary movement.
¹¹