‘A Nasty Business’ was published in the Dostoyevsky brothers’ journal Time (Vremya) in 1862, a year after the emancipation of the serfs, and is clearly written in response to discussions about the Great Reforms being instituted in Russia at the time. The youngest of the three generals assembled as the story opens, Ivan Ilyich Pralinsky, advocates, after several glasses of champagne, extending the ideas behind the government reforms to everyday life, all under the banner of ‘humaneness’. Nikiforov, his cynical host, cryptically observes that ‘we won’t bear it’. The remainder of the story gives Pralinsky an opportunity to put his philosophy into practice, which needless to say turns out to be a miserable failure.
Through a chain of unforeseen circumstances, Pralinsky happens upon the wedding celebration of Pseldonimov, a petty clerk from his office. (Many of the surnames are in keeping with the satirical thrust of the story: Pralinsky conjures up confectionery visions of sticky pralines; the bride is the daughter of Mlekopitayev, that is, ‘mammal’; Pseldonimov is only a letter away from psevdonim, the Russian word for ‘pseudonym’.) The tipsy Pralinsky, who has visions of becoming a famous statesman one day, an event that he thinks might even be commemorated by the raising of a monument, ventures to grace the proceedings with his presence. During the rehearsal of his entrance we see that he means to be on equal footing with the wedding guests, but it is to be an equality of the patronizing, patriarchal sort. In any event, he enters the gathering, but not before he has literally put his foot into the galantine set to cool on the porch. Ignoring this bad omen, he walks into the house, the dancing stops and there’s general embarrassment all round. This continues for hours, as Pralinsky drinks two bottles of champagne that his poor clerk can ill afford. The evening ends with him sick, nursed all night long by Pseldonimov’s mother, and then he scurries away in the early morning, deeply ashamed of his behaviour. The story ends with his signing a transfer request for Pseldonimov and admitting to himself, in the story’s final line, that he ‘couldn’t bear it!’
THREE STORIES FROM A WRITER’S DIARY
In 1873, Dostoyevsky was made editor of Citizen (Grazhdanin), a weekly journal owned by the conservative Prince Meshchersky. Finding himself in frequent disagreement over politics with Meshchersky, who advocated, for example, rolling back the Great Reforms initiated by Tsar Alexander II, the day-to-day grind of running a journal took an even greater toll. But it was here that Dostoyevsky began publishing his A Writer’s Diary, not the independent publication that he had originally envisioned, but a monthly column that would comment on social and cultural problems of the day. As he wrote in the introductory column: ‘My position is highly uncertain. But I shall talk to myself and for my own amusement, in the form of this diary, and we’ll see what comes of it. What will I talk about? About everything that strikes me or gives me pause for thought.’ Indeed, the contents range from articles on literature and sketches of literary acquaintances to essays on national and international politics. And there was even one genuine short story published in the sixth instalment – ‘Bobok’.
The genesis of these ‘Notes of a Certain Person’, as ‘Bobok’ is subtitled, can be traced to an item that appeared on 14 January 1873 in the newspaper the Voice:
A Writer’s Diary reminds one of the famous notes which end with the following exclamation: ‘Nevertheless, the Bey of Algiers has a bump on his nose!’ It’s enough to look at the portrait of the author of A Writer’s Diary, currently on exhibit in the Academy of Arts, to feel that same compassion for Mr Dostoyevsky that he so inappropriately mocks in his journal. This is the portrait of a man exhausted by a grave illness.
The story can quite literally be regarded as Dostoyevsky’s reply to this attack. ‘Bobok’ begins in medias res, with Semyon Ardalyonovich accusing Ivan Ivanych (a name so common as to imply Everyman) of never being sober. After abruptly dropping Semyon Ardalyonovich altogether, the narrator immediately turns to the subject of his own portrait. The Voice columnist had commented on the now famous likeness of Dostoyevsky, painted in 1872 by Vasily Perov (1834–82), which portrays the writer, deep in contemplation, with hands clasping his knees; the portrait is mentioned again at the end of the story.12
More importantly, the ‘notes’ that the Voice article refers to, by quoting the exclamation about the Bey of Algiers, are ‘The Notes of a Madman’ (more commonly translated into English as ‘The Diary of a Madman’, 1835) by Russia’s comic genius, Nikolay Gogol. The allusion elicits from Dostoyevsky a Gogolian response in genre, narrator and style.13 Both ‘Bobok’ and ‘The Notes of a Madman’ share the same genre identification – notes (zapiski). Furthermore, both Ivan Ivanych and Gogol’s diarist, Poprishchin, from the very beginning are mad or teetering on the brink of madness. Dostoyevsky’s Certain Person, even before he goes to the cemetery for ‘diversion’, observes that something strange is happening to him and that he is ‘beginning to see and hear certain strange things. Not exactly voices, but it’s as if someone were right beside me, saying: “Bobok, bobok, bobok!” ’ This clearly echoes Gogol’s Poprishchin: ‘To be frank, quite recently I’ve started hearing and seeing things that I’d never heard or seen before.’14 Finally, there’s the matter of style. A friend of the Certain Person remarks: ‘Your style is changing … it’s choppy.’ Indeed, he clearly holds up Poprishchin’s ‘jerky’ style as a model for his own. The Certain Person is a failed writer. His feuilletons15 go unpublished and he seems to make a living on hack work, translations, advertisement copy, obituaries and risqué compendiums. (Note that none of these genres is what would be called ‘high’ literature.)
The Certain Person ‘end[s] up’ at the funeral of a distant relative, but in keeping with the preamble to the story, he shows no reverence for the deceased, but instead gloats that the surviving family with its many daughters will not be able to make ends meet. In other words, his behaviour continues to be inappropriate. He performs a naturalistic survey of the graveyard (for example, the smiling corpses, open graves filled with green water, the stench) as befits the same sort of realism that captured the warts in his portrait. Although he is one of the pallbearers, he does not attend the service, but instead stretches out on a gravestone and begins to listen to the voices coming from the graves.
At first, what is most striking about the conversation of these corpses is the utter banality of their preoccupations, for example, cards, money, social status. As the Certain Person observed during his survey of the graveyard, the plots are assigned by ability to pay; most of the corpses speaking here belong to the upper levels of society, the exception being a ‘man of the common people’, contemptuously dismissed as a ‘shopkeeper’. And it is only he who seems to recognize the importance of the hereafter – he asks whether he’s in the torments (in the Russian Orthodox Church the trials the soul must undergo for the first forty days after death) and refers to the prayers that his widow and children will say for him. The other members of this graveyard community continue to be concerned with the petty details of everyday ‘life’. When Baron Klinevich, the self-described ‘scoundrel from pseudo-high society’, chimes in, the conversation takes a decided turn for the worse: counterfeit money, swindling, brides not yet sixteen, brothels and robbing funds for widows and orphans. Klinevich’s major contribution, however, is his suggestion to spend these last two or three months as pleasantly as possible, and to that end proposes that they should cast off all shame, that they should be naked and, finally, that they should cease lying; the latter is seen as a particularly indispensable part of their previous life. They will tell their life stories to entertain themselves. Since they have vowed to be without shame, the stories will indeed represent the ‘most shameless truth!’
The Certain Person sneezes and all becomes as quiet as the grave. The narrator is incensed by the depravity he has witnessed ‘in such a place’, that is, the corpses are not respecting the sacredness of the environs. But this merely complements the beginning of the story, where Ivan Ivanych, making himself comfortable on a g
ravestone, sees a half-eaten sandwich on the adjacent grave. Or is the narrator incensed that he will miss the salacious stories that the corpses will be telling each other? In any event, Ivan Ivanych says he will write this up and take it to the Citizen, to Dostoyevsky’s journal.
The initial run of A Writer’s Diary came to an end in 1873; Dostoyevsky stepped down as editor of the Citizen the following year. It resumed publication in 1876 as an immensely popular, independent, monthly journal ‘written by a single pen’. The subscription announcement promised the reader a ‘diary in the literal sense … an account of what was seen, heard and read’, which ‘might include stories and novellas, but would primarily be about real events’.16 The October 1876 issue, for example, carried this commentary towards the end of a piece entitled ‘Two Suicides’:
About a month ago, all the Petersburg newspapers ran a few short lines in small print about a Petersburg suicide: a poor, young girl, a seamstress, had thrown herself out of a fourth-floor window – ‘because she was absolutely unable to find enough work to support herself’. It was noted as well that she jumped and fell to the ground, holding an icon in her hands. This holding an icon is a strange and unprecedented detail in suicides! This is some sort of meek, humble suicide. There evidently had been no grumbling or reproaches: it had merely become impossible to live, ‘God didn’t wish it’ – and she died, after saying her prayers. There are some things that you don’t stop thinking about for a long time, no matter how simple they seem, they haunt you and you even feel as if you were to blame. You can’t help but be tormented by the thought of this meek soul who destroyed herself.17
Clearly, Dostoyevsky was haunted by the image of the young seamstress, identified by the newspapers as Marya Borisova. The next issue of A Writer’s Diary was taken up entirely with what many regard as Dostoyevsky’s finest story, ‘The Meek One’, an extended monologue in which the speaker, a pawnbroker, attempts to ‘make sense’ of the suicide of his young wife.
This juxtaposition of report and fictional treatment of the same event was unusual to say the least. Dostoyevsky links the two accounts through the adjective ‘meek’, twice repeated in the short account above, which reappears in the story on several occasions as epithet for the unnamed female protagonist and in the title. Moreover, he incorporates a detail, not mentioned in ‘Two Suicides’, namely that the icon was the Mother of God. ‘The Meek One’, however, is not merely the fictionalization of an event from everyday life – the girl’s history, her marriage and the reasons for her suicide are all Dostoyevsky’s invention: an imagined, plausible chain of events that could lead a young woman, a believer, to say her last prayers and leap to her death.
‘The Meek One’ is subtitled a ‘Fantastic Story’, but as the author’s preface makes plain, the label has nothing to do with the supernatural; in fact, the story is painfully realistic. What the author considers to be ‘fantastic’ is the narrative premise of a stenographic recording of the Pawnbroker’s monologue, which begins a mere six hours after her death. The reconstruction of the narrator’s thoughts, contradictions, self-justifications, questions, accusations and pleading inexorably leads him to the grim realization that he is to blame, that he tormented her to death. But this realization comes only after many false starts, as he constantly gauges the reaction of his imagined listener.
The Meek One, a sixteen-year-old orphan, living on the charity of two hateful aunts, comes to the Pawnbroker’s shop out of desperation. He senses her despair and decides to make use of it – he proposes marriage, knowing that the alternative she faces is even more frightening. From the very beginning, he relishes the inequality of their positions, his domination over her. His byword is ‘strictness’; he subjects her to a regimen of silence; there is never a moment of tenderness. As he tells the story of his marriage, he recounts his personal history: by birth a member of the hereditary nobility, he was formerly an officer in an elite regiment, who had been forced by his fellow officers to resign his commission, because they deemed him to be a coward. He blames the world for all his woes, taking no responsibility himself whatsoever. He falls on truly hard times, until he receives a small inheritance – the figure of 3,000 roubles appears once again!18 – and sets up his pawnshop. As Dostoyevsky knew only too well from his experience in Russia and abroad, pawnshops are a site of misery. Of course, the Pawnbroker defends his right to make a living, but we see as well that he enjoys the power of the situation, he relishes his ‘triumph over her’ even before they are married.
After an incident with his revolver, he declares that she has been defeated, and she falls ill. They spend the winter in vague expectation. He calls himself a ‘dreamer’, but unlike the sublime, Romantic dreams of the narrator in ‘White Nights’ the ‘pictures and material’ for the Pawnbroker’s dreams are based on his wife’s submission. The couple seems to work out a routine where they live together in uneasy silence, when suddenly one April evening the Pawnbroker hears her singing, which causes him to experience ‘bewilderment and terrible surprise’, because the singing seems to indicate that she has forgotten about him for the moment. His entire attitude towards her changes, he falls at her feet and begins making plans to sell the pawnshop, to travel to Boulogne. This sudden turnabout unnerves her and she blurts out that she had thought that ‘you were going to leave me like that’, in other words, that they would remain forever as they had been that winter. As he recounts these events, he points to a number of his mistakes, for example, the sudden gesture of making her a ‘friend’ or looking at her with rapture – not the months of silent torture.
The title of the final chapter, ‘Only Five Minutes Too Late’, encapsulates his last attempt to place the blame for her death elsewhere: ‘it’s a pity that it all comes down to chance – simple, barbaric inertia, chance.’ In other words, had he arrived earlier, the whole tragedy could have been avoided forever. When he at last acknowledges his responsibility for her death, he comes to see that people are alone in a world enveloped by death and, significantly, silence. He suddenly remembers Christ’s injunction ‘People, love one another’, but is unable to place it. Of course, it is love that keeps people from being alone. The story ends with a variation on the question that begins his monologue: ‘No, seriously, when they take her away tomorrow, what will become of me?’
When telling the story of how he was asked to resign his commission, the Pawnbroker says that he had always been disliked by his comrades on account of his difficult and ‘ridiculous’ character, and that nobody had ever liked him, not even in school; the same sentiments are expressed by the ridiculous loner in the last work of fiction in A Writer’s Diary, ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ (1877). Like his predecessors in ‘White Nights’ and ‘The Meek One’, the Ridiculous Man, another dreamer, has shut himself off from society and is acutely self-conscious. The first-person narrator conveys his story in his own words, although they may betray a lack of awareness or candour – the reader may come away with a quite different interpretation of events. Furthermore, in all three stories an encounter with a young girl in distress sets the plot in motion – whether he answers her appeal and how he does so will determine his fate.19 Finally, the Ridiculous Man raises once again the problem of the growing incidence of suicide in Russia.
The narrator in ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ professes to be convinced that nothing makes any difference and consequently has resolved to take the dreadful step of suicide, not to prove a point, but simply because it makes no difference. He has bought a revolver in preparation, but two months have passed and it still lies in the drawer. Meanwhile, he visits a friend and gives a detailed account of his disreputable neighbour – a retired captain, whom he accuses of begging on Nevsky Prospekt and who entertains his drunken friends at all hours, frightening the landlady and a lady lodger and her three children. In other words, for someone who has made a philosophy based on apathy, the dreamer seems to take an inordinate interest in the goings-on of complete strangers.
The story
begins one November night in darkness, as he returns home from visiting a friend some time after eleven o’clock. He emphasizes the darkness by commenting on the gaslight, which ‘makes the heart sadder’, and then the ‘terribly dark’ sky in which he could ‘distinguish the ragged clouds, and in their midst bottomless black patches’. Suddenly he espies a little star and begins to watch it. Just as suddenly a little eight-year-old girl appears out of nowhere, tugging at his sleeve. Soaked to the skin in only a dress and kerchief, she calls out to the Ridiculous Man, who continues resolutely on his way, without stopping. She continues pleading, crying out for help. He ends up by stamping his feet and shouting at her to go away, and she rushes across the street to appeal to another passer-by. When he returns to his room he takes out his revolver, but does not shoot himself. The thought of the helpless little girl has saved his life.
Like ‘The Meek One’, ‘Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ bears the subtitle ‘Fantastic Story’, but whereas for the earlier story this was limited to its mode of narration, the Ridiculous Man does indeed experience fantastic events in his dream, for example, resurrection from the dead and flying through space. Significantly, he dreams that he shoots himself in the heart, not in the head as he had originally planned. That is, he had originally intended to kill himself out of rational thought (head), but is saved by his feelings (heart). The story continues in darkness as he imagines himself buried in his grave. Now he is truly alone. He calls out to ‘Whoever you may be’ to be delivered from his fate, and the grave opens and he finds himself with some sort of companion, hurtling through space, still in darkness. After catching sight of the same little star that he saw on his walk home, he is eventually delivered to a duplicate earth, a veritable prelapsarian Garden of Eden, populated by people of the sun. The description here of the Greek archipelago, luxuriant nature and emerald-green sea recalls similar evocations of a Golden Age in Dostoyevsky’s other works, for example, Stavrogin’s confession in Demons. The darkness that has dominated the story from the very beginning gives way to light, but the Ridiculous Man has brought darkness with him into this land of sunlight and corrupts them. We, therefore, witness a second fall of humankind. The children of the sun, who until the dreamer’s arrival had lived in absolute harmony with nature, now exalt science over feeling, having adopted the motto: ‘Knowledge is higher than feeling, consciousness of life is higher than life. Science will give us wisdom.’ In other words, he has corrupted them with the very rationality that had originally set him on the road to suicide.
The Gambler and Other Stories (Penguin ed.) Page 3