The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky

by Dostoevsky, Fyodor

  This is the glimpse of London in the early sixties of the last century that Dostoevsky gives in the same issue of Vremya:

  “In London you can see crowds so vast, and in such an environment, as you will not see anywhere else in the world. For instance, I was told that every Saturday night half a million workers, men and women, with their children, spill into the streets like a flood, flocking to certain parts of the town, and all through the night, till five o’clock in the morning, they are taking part in a bacchanalian revel, eating and drinking like beasts, to last, one would think, the whole week. All this, of course, means going short for the rest of the week, saving up their meagre earnings gained with toil, sweat, and curses. In the butchers’ and grocers’ shops flaring gas jets are burning, lighting up the streets brightly. It is as though a ball had been prepared for these white negroes. The people swarm round the open taverns and in the streets, eating and drinking everywhere. The public houses are as gay as palaces. All are drunk, but not cheerfully; everything is sombre, dull, and somehow ominously quiet. Only from time to time is this brooding silence, which weighs so heavily upon everything, broken by loud curses and bloody fights. All seem to be set on getting dead drunk as quickly as possible. Wives are no better than their men and get drunk with them; the children run about and crawl among them.

  “On such a night, at two o’clock in the morning, I lost my way and wandered about for hours in the streets among the countless multitudes of this gloomy city, driven to ask the way almost by signs as I don’t know a word of English. I found my way at last, but the impression of what I had seen weighed on my mind for three days and would not let me rest. The common people are the same everywhere, but here everything is so overwhelming and so startling that what existed before only in my imagination, now confronts me as a solid reality. Here you are no longer aware even of people, but of an insensible human mass, a general loss of consciousness, systematic, resigned, encouraged. When you look on these outcasts of society, you feel that for a long time to come the prophecy will not be fulfilled for them; that for a long time there will be no palm branches for them, nor white robes; that for a long time they will call in vain to the throne of the Almighty, ‘How long, O Lord!’

  “But they know this themselves, and so far they have been protesting against the wrongs society has inflicted on them by forming all kinds of dark religious sects. We are surprised at the folly of people embracing such superstitions, but we fail to realise that what we see here is a rejection of our social formula, an obstinate, unconscious, instinctive separation, a separation at all costs, for the sake of salvation, a separation accompanied by a feeling of disgust with us, and fear, too. These millions, abandoned and driven away from the rich man’s table, jostling and crushing each other in the outer darkness in which they have been flung by their more fortunate brothers, are groping blindly to knock at the gates—any gates, looking desperately for a way of escape from the suffocating dark cellar. Here we are witnessing a last desperate attempt to hold together in a community among themselves, prepared to abandon even the semblance of human beings, so long as they can have a life of their own, so long as they can keep out of our way.

  “Anyone who has ever visited London has probably been to the Haymarket, if only once. This is the quarter which is at night crowded with women of the street. In the Haymarket I saw mothers who had brought their young daughters, girls who were still in their teens, to be sold to men. Little girls of about twelve seize you by the hand and ask you to go with them. Once I remember seeing among the crowd of people in the street a little girl who could not have been more than six years old. Her clothes were in tatters. She was dirty, barefoot, and beaten black and blue. Her body, which could be seen through the holes in her clothes, was all bruised. She was walking along aimlessly, hardly knowing where she was, and without apparently being in any hurry to get anywhere. Goodness knows why she was roaming about in the crowd; perhaps she was hungry. No one paid any attention to her. But what struck me most about her was that she looked so wretched and unhappy. Such hopeless despair was written all over her face that to see that little creature already experiencing so much damnation and despair was to the highest degree unnatural and terribly painful. She kept shaking her dishevelled head from side to side, as though debating some highly important question with herself, waving her little hands about and gesticulating wildly, and then, suddenly, clapping them together and pressing them to her bosom. I went back and gave her sixpence. She seized the small silver coin, gave me a wild look of startled surprise, and suddenly began running in the opposite direction as fast as her little legs would carry her, as though terrified that I should take the money away from her …”

  Dostoevsky never forgot the little girl in the Haymarket. Fourteen years later he was to use her as a symbol of the pitiful and as an object of mercy in one of the most imaginative of his “philosophic tales,” The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.

  Dostoevsky returned to Petersburg from his first trip abroad in August, 1862. His periodical Vremya was still flourishing, but its success was beginning to worry the authorities who finally suppressed it in May, 1863.* In August of the same year Dostoevsky went abroad again (he was beginning to be drawn there by the gaming tables, his passion for gambling becoming more and more irresistible). On his return in January, 1864, he and his elder brother Mikhail embarked on their second journalistic venture which was to end in disaster. They were planning to publish another monthly, but met with disappointment at the very start. Dostoevsky wanted it to be called Pravda (“Truth”), but the authorities thought the title too provocative. After a few more suggestions, it was at last agreed to call it Epokha (“Epoch”), and the first number appeared on March 21, 1864. It lasted only one year. One disaster after another overwhelmed Dostoevsky. His wife died in Moscow on April 15, 1864, and, worst blow of all, his brother Mikhail, the business manager of the paper, died in July of the same year. The death of his brother brought about the closing of the journal, involving Dostoevsky in a debt of over 15,000 roubles, which he was repaying almost to the end of his life. This was the beginning of the financial disasters which drove Dostoevsky to seek refuge from his creditors abroad, where the fascination of the roulette table only involved him more deeply.*

  It was in the first and the second issues of Epokha that Dostoevsky published the most concentrated and profound of his reflections on the destiny of man—Notes from the Underground. Dostoevsky himself used to say that as a philosopher he was “weak.”† And, no doubt, it was only as a creative artist, that is, through the mind and heart of the characters he created, that he could reach out beyond the borderlines of conscious thought into the darkest recesses of the human personality and, at the same time, provide the deepest analysis of human nature and human destiny that any creative writer before or after him was ever able to achieve. In these Notes Dostoevsky discusses the workings of the intellect and inevitably meets the challenge of the scientific determinism of his day. No one saw more clearly and from the very outset the limitations of the scientific approach to the ethical problems of mankind. He understood the lure of material prosperity which the developing powers of science were beginning to present to mankind, and the unlimited resources open to exploitation. The whole of this splendid vision he sums up under the symbol of a Crystal Palace, which recurs again and again in his writings. The use of this symbol by Dostoevsky is interesting as showing his immediate recognition of the significance of the Exhibition of 1851 in London, housed in Paxton’s Palace, the fame of which had spread to the farthest corners of Europe. He saw in this the sign of an advent of a new epoch which threatened by a new temptation to undermine all the cultural values of European life, and which he later expounded so explicitly in the story of “The Grand Inquisitor” in The Brothers Karamazov. Within the compass of a few short chapters, the bewilderment of the self-conscious intellect grappling with the ultimate problems is portrayed with brutal frankness in the first part of the Notes from the Underground. No regard
for self-respect, charity, or pride is allowed to impede the deliberate dissection until the inescapable truth has been stated. Dostoevsky rejects one after another the palliatives so dear to the romantic humanitarian and forces on him the acknowledgment of his own guilt and ineffectiveness. This, indeed, appears very clearly from the way Dostoevsky dismisses Nekrassov’s poem with which he introduces the second part of the Notes; for his two etceteras are in themselves sufficient to dispose of Nekrassov’s plea for the “fallen woman” with utter contempt; he then proceeds to elucidate his thesis by an appeal to uncompromising realism.

  The parallelism between White Nights and Notes from the Underground has been noted earlier. In both the hero is a dreamer of dreams; but while the story in White Nights moves along smoothly and pleasantly on the surface of human thought and emotion, in the Notes from the Underground it penetrates deep into the human heart and mind, so deep indeed that the main subject of the story transcends the personal fortunes of the anonymous hero and assumes a universal significance; it is all mankind and not individual man that is the real subject of the discourse.

  The two last stories in this volume belong to Dostoevsky’s last years. He died on February 9, 1881, from a burst artery in his lungs, aggravated by an attack of epilepsy, an illness from which he had suffered all his life. A Gentle Creature was published in 1876, in the November number of A Writer’s Diary, and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man in the April number of the next year.

  A Gentle Creature filled the whole of the November issue of Dostoevsky’s monthly. It is clear from his short preface that he was busy on this story for the better part of a month. The first page of the original draft of the story bears the date of November 19, 1876. In the previous number of A Writer’s Diary Dostoevsky tells of the incident which led him to write the story. “About a month ago,” he writes, “all the Petersburg papers carried a small news item in a few lines of small print about a suicide in Petersburg. A poor girl, a sempstress, threw herself out of a fourth floor window ‘because she could find no work to keep herself alive.’ It was added that she had thrown herself out of the window clasping an icon in her hands. This icon in the hands of the young girl is a strange and unheard-of feature in a suicide case! This indeed is a gentle, meek sort of suicide.”

  In this story, one of the most powerful he ever wrote, Dostoevsky analyses one more reason leading to disaster in human relationships. It is the insensibility of one human being towards another, the failure to realise what is passing in another human being’s heart, the lack of sympathy which is the cause of so much cruelty of man towards man.

  Dostoevsky was very fond of sub-titles to his stories, and one cannot help feeling that the sub-title A Fantastic Story to A Gentle Creature is due to this fondness rather than to the reasons he adduces for it in his preface. But the same sub-title to The Dream of a Ridiculous Man is fully justified, since it is essentially a tale of the imagination. The subject of the Golden Age occupied Dostoevsky for many years. He refers to it in Notes from the Underground, and he again refers to it in 1865 in his first draft of Crime and Punishment, where he puts the following stray reflections into the mouth of Raskolnikov: “Oh, why isn’t everything a matter of happiness? The picture of the Golden Age. It is implanted in men’s hearts and minds. How is it that it doesn’t come?” Among Raskolnikov’s other reflections are these anticipatory echoes of The Dream: “I never saw Venice or the Golden Horn, but I expect life must be long extinct there.… Flew to another planet.” But Dostoevsky made no use of any of these fragmentary notes in the final draft of the novel. The picture of the Golden Age was first outlined by him in a finished form in the so-called “Stavrogin’s Confession,” a chapter of The Possessed not included in the novel, where the episode of the Golden Age was connected with Claude Lorrain’s picture Acis and Galatea which Dostoevsky had seen in the Dresden Museum. The whole episode was later incorporated by Dostoevsky in his novel The Adolescent, where it is given as part of Versilov’s speech. For the last time Dostoevsky dealt with this theme in The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.

  Taken together with the first part of the Notes from the Underground, The Dream gives us Dostoevsky’s final judgment on man. And negative though this judgment is on the whole, Dostoevsky never despaired of man. The vision of the Golden Age may be a dream, but it is a dream that makes life worth while even if it can never be realised; indeed, it makes life worth while just because it can never be realised. In this paradox Dostoevsky the creative artist seemed to glimpse some meaning in man’s tragic story. But he did not stop there. He was appalled by the arrogance of the intellect, and in The Dream he again stresses the fact that reason without feeling, mind without heart, is evil, is a dark cellar; for reason bears within itself the seeds of destruction. Only through pity, love and mercy can man be saved. This message, as Dostoevsky himself put it in The Dream, is “an old truth”; but, like the hero in The Dream, he went on preaching it all his life.

  —–

  DAVID MAGARSHACK’S translations include works by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Gorky, and Pushkin. He has also written biographies of Dostoevsky and Gogol.

  *Belinsky was writing about Dostoevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk.

  *The special reason for the banning of the journal was an article on the Polish uprising by Strakhov, a regular contributor.

  *Dostoevsky went abroad in July, 1865, while writing Crime and Punishment, which was published in 1866. In the same year he met his second wife, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, whom he engaged as a stenographer for his novel The Gambler, and whom he married in 1867. She was nineteen at the time. On April 14 of the same year he went abroad again, where he started work on The Idiot, which was published in 1868. This time he spent four years abroad, during which he wrote The Eternal Husband and The Possessed. He returned to Russia in July, 1871, leaving for his next trip abroad in June, 1874, when he began to work on The Adolescent. He went abroad again in May, 1875, July, 1876, and finally, in July, 1879, when he was working on The Brothers Karamazov, published in 1879 and 1880.

  †“I am weak in philosophy, (but not in my love for it;) in my love for it I am strong.” (Letter from Dresden to the Russian journalist Strakhov, June 6, 1870.)

  WHITE NIGHTS

  A SENTIMENTAL LOVE STORY

  From the Memoirs of a Dreamer

  And was it his destined part

  Only one moment in his life

  To be close to your heart?…

  —IVAN TURGENEV

  FIRST NIGHT

  It was a lovely night, one of those nights, dear reader, which can only happen when you are young. The sky was so bright and starry that when you looked at it the first question that came into your mind was whether it was really possible that all sorts of bad-tempered and unstable people could live under such a glorious sky. It is a question, dear reader, that would occur only to a young man, but may the good Lord put it into your head as often as possible!… The mention of bad-tempered and unstable people reminds me that during the whole of this day my behaviour has been above reproach. When I woke up in the morning I felt strangely depressed, a feeling I could not shake off for the better part of the day. All of a sudden it seemed to me as though I, the solitary one, had been forsaken by the whole world, and that the whole world would have nothing to do with me. You may ask who “the whole world” is. For, I am afraid, I have not been lucky in acquiring a single acquaintance in Petersburg during the eight years I have been living there. But what do I want acquaintances for? I know the whole of Petersburg without them, and that, indeed, was the reason why it seemed to me that the whole world had forsaken me when the whole town suddenly arose and left for the country. I was terrified to be left alone, and for three days I wandered about the town plunged into gloom and absolutely at a loss to understand what was the matter with me. Neither on Nevsky Avenue, nor in the park, nor on the embankment did I meet the old familiar faces that I used to meet in the same place and at the same time all through the year. It is true I am a complete stra
nger to these people, but they are not strangers to me. I know them rather intimately, in fact; I have made a very thorough study of their faces; I am happy when they are happy, and I am sad when they are overcast with care. Why, there is an old gentleman I see every day on the Fontanka Embankment with whom I have practically struck up a friendship. He looks so thoughtful and dignified, and he always mutters under his breath, waving his left hand and holding a big knotty walking-stick with a gold top in his right. I have, I believe, attracted his attention, and I should not be surprised if he took a most friendly interest in me. In fact, I am sure that if he did not meet me at a certain hour on the Fontanka Embankment he would be terribly upset. That is why we sometimes almost bow to one another, especially when we are both in a good humour. Recently we had not seen each other for two days, and on the third day, when we met, we were just about to raise our hats in salute, but fortunately we recollected ourselves in time and, dropping our hands, passed one another in complete understanding and amity. The houses, too, are familiar to me. When I walk along the street, each of them seems to run before me, gazing at me out of all its windows, and practically saying to me, “Good morning, sir! How are you? I’m very well, thank you. They’re going to add another storey to me in May”; or, “How do you do, sir? I’m going to be repaired tomorrow”; or, “Dear me, I nearly got burnt down, and, goodness, how I was scared!” and so on and so on. Some of them are great favourites of mine, while others are my good friends. One of them is thinking of undergoing a cure with an architect this summer. I shall certainly make a point of coming to see it every day to make sure that its cure does not prove fatal (which God forbid!). And I shall never forget the incident with a pretty little house of a pale pink hue. It was such a dear little house; it always welcomed me with such a friendly smile, and it looked on its clumsy neighbours with such an air of condescension, that my heart leapt with joy every time I passed it. But when I happened to walk along the street only a week ago and looked up at my friend, I was welcomed with a most plaintive cry, “They are going to paint me yellow!” Fiends! Savages! They spared nothing, neither cornices, nor columns, and my poor friend turned as yellow as a canary. I nearly had an attack of jaundice myself, and even to this day I have not been able to screw up my courage to go and see my mutilated friend, painted in the national colour of the Celestial Empire!