Dostoevsky (70 page)

This brief sketch of the cumbrous intrigue shows Dostoevsky making use of the tritest material—the wrath of a loving but angry and heartbroken father against an erring daughter; a rich, powerful aristocrat, cynical and corrupt to the core, who wreaks his will on the innocent and pure-hearted; a virtuous young man (the narrator) in love with the heroine and ready to sacrifice himself unstintingly on her behalf; and a poor waif exposed to the unspeakable evils of the Petersburg underworld, snatched from perdition by a generous rescuer, and who carries the secret of Valkovsky’s scandalous past. All these motifs are the most threadbare ingredients of the roman-feuilleton, and Dostoevsky exploits them unashamedly for their maximum capacity to pluck at the heartstrings.

Here, for example, is part of a passage about Nellie’s mother, inserted at the conclusion of
Part II
to whet the appetite for what lies ahead: “It is the story of a woman driven to despair, wandering through the cold, filthy streets of St. Petersburg, begging alms with the little girl whom she regarded as a baby. . . . It was a gloomy story, one of those gloomy and distressing dramas which are so often played out unseen, almost mysterious, under the lowering sky of Petersburg, in the dark corners of the vast town, in the midst of the giddy ferment of life, of dull egoism, of clashing interests, of gloomy vice and secret crimes, in the lowest hell of senseless and abnormal life . . .” (3: 299–300). Dostoevsky thickens the atmosphere with as heavy a hand and as murky a palette as Eugène Sue or Frédéric Soulié, and his overwrought sentimentality of tone conveys much of what provoked the contemptuous references of its first critics to the book’s lack of artistic quality.

Even though Dostoevsky had never before used the ingredients and technique of the roman-feuilleton, this type of novel had long been identified with the propagation of “progressive” and Socialist ideas (
Les mystères de Paris
had dramatized a number of Fourierist notions). Dostoevsky’s use of the form was thus considered by the critics as perfectly congruent with his subversive past and, even more, as indicating a reinforcement of the social humanitarian principles for which he had suffered hard labor and exile. This was the opinion of Dobrolyubov, who saw no marked difference between the Dostoevsky of the past and the present, and even attacked the novelist precisely for this reason. Dostoevsky, the critic pointed out, continued to depict “weak” characters unable to assert themselves, and while these are not superfluous men, Dobrolyubov nevertheless chides him, as both he and Chernyshevsky had done in the case of
Turgenev, for failing to realize that Russian life has entered a new phase in which literature is called upon to depict protagonists with more strength of will.
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This impression of continuity with Dostoevsky’s early work was augmented by the repeated evocation of
Poor Folk
throughout the new text. In one scene, Dostoevsky describes the proud young author Ivan Petrovich, his first novel hot off the press, reading it aloud to his admiring foster family, the Ikhmenyevs. Natasha is moved to tears: “all at once she snatched my hand, kissed it, and ran out of the room” (3: 189).
Poor Folk
is used throughout as a touchstone of moral sensibility; all the “good” characters respond to it in an appropriately compassionate fashion, and even the disreputable and hard-drinking Masloboev confesses that “when I read it, I almost became a respectable man again” (3: 265). The scoundrelly Prince Valkovsky reacts with an outburst of scorn at the literary mode of which it was a product and whose inspiration had been revived and intensified in the more recent “accusatory” literature. “Poverty is all the fashion with you now,” he says contemptuously to Ivan Petrovich, and he admonishes the young writer, for the benefit of his career, to move in “higher” circles.

Prince Valkovsky is so stagey and melodramatic an aristocratic villain that it is difficult for us now to take him at all seriously, but our reaction is not that of Dostoevsky’s initial readers, who considered the prince a plausible and familiar social type. Even as severe a judge as the novelist Evgenia Tur, who declared bluntly that
The Insulted and Injured
“could not sustain the slightest criticism as art,”
³
wrote, without blinking an eyelash, that “everyone having some acquaintance with the world has met many such people, but happily, that is, happily for our society, such people as Prince Ivan [Valkovsky] are dying out year by year and are no longer being born.”
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Dostoevsky’s portrayal of the prince was accepted as a searing exposé of the depravity of an entire social class. Moreover, the author’s “sympathy with the weak and the oppressed” was clearly indicated—just as it had been during the 1840s—by the presentation of his humble folk as infinitely superior to the prince from a moral point of view and, indeed, as the living refutation of his witheringly contemptuous view of his fellow humans.

For a Russian reader of the time, accustomed to regard “weak” characters as doomed to inevitable defeat by the very excess of their moral merits, the prince was a thoroughly unmitigated scoundrel, while the battered but unblemished Ikhmenyevs—not to mention the all-suffering Ivan Petrovich—were exemplars of sterling worth and integrity. No power at the prince’s command could shatter the indestructible bonds of their love and devotion to each other, as becomes
clear in Ikhmenyev’s ecstatic but badly overstrained declaration terminating the climactic reconciliation scene:

Without the benefit of hindsight, it was impossible for Dostoevsky’s readers to see the future novelist germinating amid the clichés of
The Insulted and Injured
. One or two critics were uneasily aware of something “new” in the book; but this awareness took the form of negative criticism. One critic objected to the title because it had led him to expect a genuine social novel. In fact, as he rightly points out, the characters behave in such a bizarre fashion that most of their difficulties are caused by their own folly. The intrigues of Prince Valkovsky play only an accessory part in their dilemmas, and Dostoevsky handles his characters so as continually to
undercut
the supposed social humanitarian significance of the book. What determines their fate are the traits of their own personalities, not the external mechanism of the roman-feuilleton plot. Within the social humanitarian thematic of his hackneyed plot, Dostoevsky was perceptibly beginning to grope his way toward his later novel-tragedy of ideas. What we can glimpse in
The Insulted and Injured
, through the interstices of the clichés, is a premature novel about a young writer named Ivan Petrovich (the narrator and Dostoevsky’s alter ego) who represents the “philanthropic” ideology of the 1840s, and whose world and life are shattered because his convictions prove inadequate to cope with the deeper forces of human passion and egoism that overwhelm his well-meaning innocence and Romantic idealism.

This theme of innocence and its self-deceptions is struck early by some semi-ironic remarks about Ikhmenyev, whose relation to Valkovsky derives from a warm-hearted self-delusion analogous to that of the unselfish Colonel Rostanev toward the malevolent Foma Fomich in
The Village of Stepanchikovo
. Ikhmenyev refuses to believe any of the discreditable rumors circulating about the prince and declares that “he was incapable of a mean action” (3: 182). Ikhmenyev prefers to live in a world where moral imperfection does not exist, and he takes much the same attitude toward his daughter Natasha, whom he steadfastly continues to regard as an angelic child even though she has reached marriageable
age. Another example of such “naïve Romanticism,” less instinctive and more literary in character, is found in Nellie’s mother, who ran off with Valkovsky because “from the very beginning she dreamed of something like a heaven upon earth, of angels; her love was boundless, her faith limitless, and, I am convinced, she went mad not because he ceased to love her and threw her over, but because she had been deceived by him,
he was capable of deceiving
and had thrown her over, because her angel had turned into dirt, had spat on and humiliated her” (3: 437).

When, as invariably occurs, Romantics of this type are betrayed by life, their response is to fall back on outraged pride, regardless of the suffering this may cause to those they presumably love the most. Just as Ikhmenyev execrates his beloved daughter when she publicly dishonors his name by becoming the mistress of Valkovsky’s son, so Nellie’s mother condemns her daughter to a life of terrible misery and torment because “in her horror and, above all, her pride, she drew back from him [Valkovsky] with infinite contempt” (3: 438) and refused to use the documents in her possession proving their marriage. The proud and hence egoistic reaction of such frustrated Romantics leads to a masochistic intensification of their own misery and a certain sadism with regard to others (Natasha, Nellie). In the case of Ikhmenyev, this inner conflict is finally overcome by a movement of love that vanquishes pride and conquers the rankling resentment created by betrayal. It also involves the acceptance of a world where good and evil are inextricably intermingled, and where “the shattering of idealism” (to use K. Mochulsky’s apt phrase)
⁵
is an unavoidable and even salutary precondition for forgiveness and reconciliation.

Much the same conflict occurs in the Natasha-Alyosha relationship, even though Natasha is not specifically a Romantic. She is described as having “that characteristic of good-natured people, perhaps inherited from her father—the habit of thinking highly of people, of persistently thinking them better than they really are, warmly exaggerating everything good in them” (3: 270). What she feels for Alyosha, however, destroys her “innocence” and reveals aspects of her character that bewilder and frighten her by their unexpected complexity.

Natasha is very far from being the innocent victim of a typical aristocratic seducer; on the contrary, it is she who forces the issue and decides to live openly with her lover. Indeed, her passion for the weak-willed, frivolous, and inconstant Alyosha has reached such a pitch that she is willing to submit to any degradation so as to cling to him and “to be his slave, his willing slave” (3: 200). But she is fully aware that her infatuation is “abject” and abnormal, springing more from a desire for domination than from a genuine love between equals. It is her pride that has been wounded by Alyosha’s philandering, and her pride impels
her not only to humiliate her father but also to plunge herself into an abyss of masochistic abasement and self-torment. Once again her conflict is resolved as the result of a successful inner struggle: Natasha conquers her egoism and regains her self-respect by voluntarily surrendering Alyosha to her far more suitable rival, the young heiress Katya.

In the case of little Nellie, Dostoevsky brings this type of moral-psychological conflict, with its characteristic swing from wounded sensibility to masochistic self-laceration and sadism, into its sharpest focus. Among all the “insulted and injured,” Nellie has the most right to claim such a designation, and she has acquired a savage pride and a mistrust of humanity initially encouraged by her mother’s fierce intransigence. Nellie’s personality thus combines a youthful need for affection and love with suspicion and hatred, and she refuses at first to respond even to generosity or kindness. Dostoevsky’s depiction of her shifting moods, and of the gradual softening and taming of her spirit, are among the best sections of the book. The self-tormenting depths of Nellie’s psychology are brought out in one crucial scene, when all the embittered memories of her past have surged back in a flood and she rushes out of Ivan Petrovich’s sheltering room to beg in the streets as a gesture of defiance. Tears come to Ivan Petrovich’s eyes when he chances upon her:

It is Dostoevsky himself who italicizes the phrase “egoism of suffering,” highlighting its importance because it contains the internal thematic link uniting three main centers of action: Natasha–Ikhmenyev, Natasha–Alyosha–Katya, Nellie–Ivan Petrovich. In each case, one or more of the characters respond in this fashion to some indignity or humiliation; in each the conflict is resolved when, in an act of outgoing love, the egoism of suffering is overcome.