4 PSS, 18: 280–281.
5 Pis’ma, 1: 183–184; April 13, 1856.
6 N. G. Chernyshevsky, Selected Philosophical Essays (Moscow, 1953), 376.
7 N. A. Dobrolyubov, Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. J. Fineberg (Moscow, 1956), 542.
8 Chernyshevsky, Essays, 317–318.
9 Dostoevsky’s imaginative reading of this poem receives some indirect confirmation from the remarks of Roman Jakobson about the symbolic meaning attributed to sculpture in the Russian tradition. “It is important to see,” he writes, “that in his poems [those of Pushkin] the statue is most often called idol, something which had greatly surprised Tsar Nicholas I in The Bronze Horseman. Whether it is Pushkin the atheist, Blok the heretic, or the antireligious poetry of Mayakovsky, Russian poets had been raised in the world of Orthodox customs, and their work, whether intentionally or not, is steeped in the symbolism of the Eastern Church. It is the Orthodox tradition, which vehemently forbade sculpture, did not allow it inside churches, and considered it a pagan or diabolic sin (the two notions were the same for the Church), which suggested to Pushkin the close link uniting statues and idolatry, diabolism and magic.”
Jakobson then quotes Gogol to prove that, “from the Russian point of view, sculpture and the image of paganism” are inseparable. “It [sculpture] was born at the same time as the finite pagan world,” Gogol had written, “it expressed [that world] and died at the same time. . . . It was, in the same degree as pagan belief, separated from Christianity by a frontier.” Jakobson’s article, originally published in Czech, is here quoted from the French translation of his selected criticism. Roman Jakobson, “La statue dans la symbolique de Pouchkine,” in Questions de poétique, ed. Tzvetan Todorov, trans. by several hands (Paris, 1973), 186–187.
10 Dostoevsky is here paraphrasing a famous poem of Pushkin, “The Poet and the Crowd,” in which the poet scornfully tells the benighted mob, “The Apollo Belvedere is for you an idol. / In him no usefulness—usefulness—do you discern.” PSS, 18: 289.
11 Pis’ma, 1: 142; February 20, 1854.
12 For more information on these matters, see V. S. Nechaeva, Zhurnal M. M. i F. M. Dostoevskikh, Vremya, 1861–1863 (Moscow, 1973), 155–210, esp. 183, 188.
13 Matthew Arnold, Poems (London, 1888), 214.
14 In her preface to an edition of The Insulted and Injured, L. M. Rosenblyum remarks: “Although, in the uncovering of Valkovsky’s views, no direct association is visible with the materialism of [the generation of] the 1860s, one may, all the same, assume that they contain, of course in a covert form, an onslaught against Chernyshevsky’s The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy—the work in which the ethical principles of the radical democrats are set forth. The Anthropological Principle was published a year before The Insulted and Injured.” See F. M. Dostoevsky, Unizhennye i oskorblennye, ed. L. M. Rosenblyum (Moscow, 1955), 25; PSS, 3: 527–528.
15 Nikolay Strakhov, Iz istorii literaturnago nigilizma (St. Petersburg, 1890; rpt. The Hague, 1967), 34.
CHAPTER 23
The Insulted and Injured
Dostoevsky’s novel The Insulted and Injured (Unizhennye i oskorblennye), began to appear as a serial in the first issue of Time and ran through seven numbers of the journal. The work encountered a mixed critical reception, but it was read with avid attention and achieved its purpose of making readers impatient for the next installment. Dobrolyubov devoted his very last essay, “Downtrodden People” (Zabitye lyudi), a classic of Russian criticism, to a penetrating survey of the entire corpus of Dostoevsky’s writings up to and including this latest product of his pen. In an obvious reply to Dostoevsky’s attack some months earlier, he remarked that the book was “beneath aesthetic criticism,” but, he acknowledged, everyone had been reading what stood out as the most interesting Russian novel published in 1861.1
Our contemporary view of Dostoevsky can hardly be that of Dobrolyubov, but there is no reason to disagree with his verdict: The Insulted and Injured is by far the weakest of Dostoevsky’s six major post-Siberian novels. Nor did Dostoevsky himself have any illusions about the quality of his own creation. “I recognize fully,” he publicly admitted several years later, “that in my novel there are many characters who are puppets and not human beings, perambulating books and not characters who have taken on artistic form (this really requires time and a gestation of ideas in the mind and the soul)” (20: 134). Whatever its manifest flaws, however, The Insulted and Injured allows us to catch the author in a stage of transition, trying his hand for the first time at mastering the technique of the roman-feuilleton and also giving new character-types, themes, and motifs their initial, inchoate expression.
The Insulted and Injured is composed of two interweaving plot lines, which at first seem to have little to do with each other but then gradually draw together as the story unfolds. The first, typical of the sentimental Romantic novel, concerns an impoverished gentry family, the Ikhmenyevs. Their daughter, Natasha, falls in love with Alyosha, the son of a wealthy neighbor, Prince Valkovsky; and when the prince frowns on their romance because he has destined Alyosha for a wealthy heiress, the two young people run away and live together out of wedlock. As a result, Natasha is renounced by her outraged father, Nikolay Sergeevich Ikhmenyev, not only for having disgraced the family escutcheon but also because Prince Valkovsky, once a friend and supposed benefactor, has now become his deadly enemy. The crux of this plot line is the mutual unhappiness of Natasha and her father, who love each other deeply despite her lethal blow to the family pride and his furious condemnation of her scandalous behavior.
The second plot line introduces the roman-feuilleton Gothic element of mystery, secret intrigue, and venal betrayal. It focuses on the figure of little Nellie, a thirteen-year-old Petersburg waif, whom the narrator, a young novelist named Ivan Petrovich—a foster-son of the Ikhmenyevs, and once engaged to to Natasha—meets by chance. Intrigued by the eccentric appearance of an old man in a coffeehouse, the young observer of life follows him into the street and, when the oldster collapses and dies on the spot, moves into his dingy room. The deceased man was the grandfather of little Nellie, who comes to visit him and finds Ivan Petrovich occupying his quarters. Little Nellie is rescued from the clutches of a procuress by her new acquaintance and his friend Masloboev, an ex-school-teacher leading a shady existence on the edge of the Petersburg underworld but still retaining some traces of the moral idealism of his youth. Ivan Petrovich takes Nellie in to live with him, looks after her welfare, and gradually pieces together the pathetic story of her appalling existence.
By a coincidence typical of the roman-feuilleton, she turns out to be—as we learn at the very end of the book—the prince’s abandoned daughter. Valkovsky had seduced her mother, persuaded his infatuated young wife to rob her wealthy father, Jeremy Smith, and then had discarded her and their child once he had obtained possession of the money. The two plots finally come together when, in order to reconcile Natasha with her father, and at the prompting of Ivan Petrovich, Nellie tells the heart-rending story of her life. Painting in dismal colors the refusal of her grandfather to forgive her mother even as she lay destitute and dying on the floor of a dank Petersburg hovel, Nellie’s piteous tale brings about the forgiveness of Natasha and defeats the plan of the villainous Valkovsky to throw the unprotected girl into the arms of the lecherous old Count Nainsky.
All the events are seen through the eyes of Ivan Petrovich, who is an obvious physical link between the two plots, just as Valkovsky is a more covert one. Ivan Petrovich is writing about a year after the events have taken place, and an additional element of pathos is provided by the situation in which he finds himself as he takes pen in hand to tell his story. “It has all ended in my being here in the hospital,” he explains, “and I believe I am soon going to die. . . . I want to write it all down, and if I had not found this occupation I believe I should have died of misery” (3: 177). The tale recounts the shipwreck of his own life, and he is about to perish with a sense of wa
ste and despair. But he has nonetheless succeeded in rescuing others (the Ikhmenyevs), in surrounding the last days of Nellie with loving tenderness, and in remaining true to himself and the values of kindness and compassion in which he believes.
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.2
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.”4 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:
Oh Lord, I thank Thee for all, for all, for Thy wrath and for Thy mercy! . . . And for Thy sun which is shining upon us again after the storm! . . . Oh, we may be insulted and injured, but we’re together again, and now the proud and haughty who have insulted and injured us may triumph! Let them throw stones at us! Have no fear, Natasha. . . . We will go hand in hand and I will say to them, “This is my darling, this is my beloved daughter, my innocent daughter whom you have insulted and injured, but whom I love and bless for ever and ever.” (3: 422)
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.
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