The phenomenon of the double in Dostoevsky’s work is not subject to purely psychological explanation. There is always a social nexus, an outer and collective world that is reflected in or impinges upon the inner, personal world. In The Double this nexus is the administrative bureaucracy introduced by the emperor Nicholas I, in which, as the critic Konstantin Mochulsky wrote, “the schema of human values was replaced by the table of ranks.” Administrative unity is external and imposed; behind it there is a growing disintegration of human life. To dramatize this disunity, Dostoevsky often resorts to the device of the “scandalous feast” or “inappropriate gathering” (as one book of The Brothers Karamazov is entitled). So he does with the farewell party in Notes from Underground, the funeral dinner for Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment, and, more scandalous still, the gathering of all the main characters of Demons in Varvara Petrovna’s drawing room. “Here,” says Bakhtin, “everything is unexpected, out of place, incompatible and impermissible if judged by life’s ordinary ‘normal’ course.” Things usually hidden are brought to light, unspeakable words are spoken, people are exposed, denounced, humiliated; in tone and effect these scenes are somewhere between wild farce and hysteria. They are marked by a particular shamelessness.
Scandal scenes are loud and chaotic, but the true scandal, the “scandalous victim,” is silent or inarticulate in Dostoevsky. Separation from “what is living” leads to violence against what is living, to a violation of the living, to violated innocence. Most often the victim is a child; in both Crime and Punishment and Demons it is a sexually abused little girl. Among all the thinkers, talkers, and writers who populate Dostoevsky’s works, the child stands mute, unable to comprehend or protest. Certain women play a similar role—Sonya Marmeladov, for instance, and the half-mad Marya Lebyadkin. Through them the theme deepens until it touches, in Mochulsky’s words, on “the eternal feminine principle of the world, the mystical soul of the earth.”
Dostoevsky composed with these motifs and figures like a musician, playing variations on them, combining them in new ways, working them out in different keys and with different harmonies and tempos. In his novels they are formed into extremely complex structures. In his shorter works they appear in an uncombined state. That may be why some of the most penetrating commentaries on Dostoevsky—I am thinking particularly of Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics and two books by René Girard: Deceit, Desire, and the Novel and Dostoïevski, du double à l’unité—give so much attention to the stories we have collected here.
Along with the consistency of its themes, Dostoevsky’s work exhibits a constant formal inventiveness. This, too, can be seen in a pure state in his shorter pieces. Hailed by earlier critics (Vyacheslav Ivanov in his 1916 study Freedom and the Tragic Life, and Konstantin Mochulsky in his critical biography, among others) as the creator of the “novel-tragedy”—a concept fitting the high seriousness and dramatic form of his art—Dostoevsky has been called by Bakhtin the innovator of “a completely new type of artistic thinking, which we have provisionally called polyphonic… It could even be said that Dostoevsky created something like a new artistic model of the world, one in which many basic aspects of old artistic form were subjected to a radical restructuring.” The stories in this collection support Bakhtin’s findings in his discussion of the “characteristics of genre” in Dostoevsky—the presence in his work of elements of Menippean satire (the most well-known ancient examples are The Golden Ass of Apuleius and Petronius’s Satyricon), of the allegorical mystery plays of the Middle Ages, of the Voltairean philosophical tale—all genres with a marked popular and comic spirit. This is not to say that Dostoevsky imitated old forms or combined them in some peculiar hybrid; his work is artistically of a piece and unmistakably his own; but the formal demands imposed on him by his vision forced him to expand the limits of nineteenth-century realism. (Commenting on the scandalous drawing-room scene in Demons, Bakhtin notes: “It is absolutely impossible to imagine such a scene in, say, a novel by Leo Tolstoy or Turgenev. This is no grand drawing room, it is the public square with all the specific logic of carnivalized public-square life.”) Dostoevsky’s formal inventiveness came in part, then, from a listening to tradition. It was this that gave his work its historical depth and resonance. Behind these tales of the most ordinary, obscure lives, there are the broader features of the menippea—the free use of the fantastic, the polemicizing with conflicting ideas, and, above all, the testing of truths in extreme situations. Yet we also hear, suddenly, the tones of high tragedy. The Meek One reaches, in the end, the harrowing grief of Lear’s last scene with the dead Cordelia (the story has, in fact, not a little in common with King Lear). At the same time, precisely in this story we also have one of Dostoevsky’s boldest experiments in fictional form, what may be the first appearance in literature of the “stream of consciousness”—a point the writer himself comments on in his opening note. Most of Dostoevsky’s writings contain direct or hidden comments on their own “poetics.” There are no outpourings of psychic magma here, but the explorations of a highly conscious artist. Like each of his novels, each of these stories is formally unique, each is a fresh response to the expressive challenge posed by the thematic materials of his art.
The development of Dostoevsky’s work was by no means the smooth, orderly unfolding of a successful writer’s career. Here the biographical factor, to which I have already alluded, comes to the fore again. The turbulence of Dostoevsky’s life is well known: his involvement in revolutionary politics during the late 1840s, his arrest together with other members of the Petrashevsky circle in 1849, his mock execution, stayed at the last minute on orders from the emperor, his four years at hard labor in the prison of Omsk, followed by six years of service “in the ranks” in Semipalatinsk, his return to Petersburg and literary activity in 1859, the painful difficulties that ensued (deaths in the family, the failures of two magazines he edited with his brother, the accumulation of debts, the beginning of his addiction to gambling), his flight abroad in 1866 to escape his creditors, the precarious and nomadic existence he led there with his second wife, gambling away everything including her wedding ring and writing all the while (The Idiot, The Eternal Husband, the first drafts of Demons), his return to Russia in 1871, to find relative peace and eventual fame, which was at its height when he died in 1881 at the age of sixty. Yet the decisive break in this much-disrupted life is not to be found in any of these external events, not even the break in his career caused by ten years of prison and exile. Dostoevsky went on writing in more or less the same way after those ten years as before. The decisive break occurred in his “spiritual biography” some five years after his return, with the sudden discovery of what he called the “underground.”