The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Realisms 147

as well. The reader cannot know, just as Golyadkin’s mind cannot know, the reliability of any source. Although the beginning and end of the story remain Gogol’s, the madman’s experience in between is thicker and scarier. The reader no longer merely observes a single disintegrating consciousness but participates in it, and must work hard to ascertain who is speaking, and from where. This technique, which grew out of an apprenticeship to Gogol, became Dostoevsky’s signature narrative style.

Another strategy for replaying a book occurs in Dostoevsky’s maiden work, Poor Folk. The poor clerk of this epistolary novel, Makar Devushkin, receives from Varenka, his female correspondent and platonic love interest, two stories to read: Pushkin’s “Stationmaster” (one of the Belkin Tales) and Gogol’s “Overcoat.” He misreads both – which is Dostoevsky’s device for deepening our understanding of the hero. Devushkin, an aspiring writer in the Age of Realism, has no concept of fiction. He loves the Pushkin story because he identifies with (and sympathizes with) Dunya’s father, the embittered old man who takes to drink after losing his daughter to the dashing Minsky. But Devushkin is scandalized by “The Overcoat.” Clearly it had been written by someone who had spied on him, in all his poverty and misery. “I can no longer live in peace in my little corner,” Devushkin complains. Who knows what other people will “worm their way into my nest, to spy out how I’m living . . . whether I have boots and how they’ve been soled, what I eat, what I drink, what I copy out.”26 As their exchange of letters proceeds, however, this untalented reader Devushkin, who eventually loses his Varenka to her earlier seducer, actually learns how to see and to write. His literary tastes, initially appalling (trashy steamy potboilers and parodies of Gogol’s Ukrainian tales), improve dramatically. His final letters to Varenka describe the lives and deaths in his tenement house with discreet compassion. Then she departs. His real life lost out to their epistolary novel.

The darkness of this theme expands as Dostoevsky’s talent matures. Both White Nights and Notes from Underground feature a hero – or anti-hero – of contemporary consciousness cobbled together out of literary bits and pieces. In the longer novels, this “underground” tension between “writing down an event in order to be honest to it” and “writing down an event so that others can read it as a piece of literature” produces the false confession. These documents are intended by their confessing authors to lend dignity to their lives, over which they have lost control. Most of them fail. Midway through The Idiot, at Prince Myshkin’s birthday party at Pavlovsk, the eighteen-year-old Ippolit, in and out of hysteria and dying of consumption, reads out loud to a reluctant gathering his just-authored “Essential Explanation” that is to preface his suicide at dawn (Part III, chs. 4–7). The document crams into one breathless sequence all his convictions, experiences, personal outrage, dreams – the final testament by