expansion on “The Diary of a Madman” and “The Nose.” It represents not a plagiarism or imitation, but a “rethinking of Gogol,” as Mochulsky observed. What did this “rethinking” involve?
In the autumn of 1845, Dostoevsky wrote to his brother Mikhail about The Double, not quoting from the novel but describing his work on it in the voice of its hero, the titular councillor Yakov Petrovich Goliadkin:
Yakov Petrovich Goliadkin upholds his character fully. A terrible scoundrel, you can’t get at him. He simply doesn’t want to go ahead, claiming that he’s just not ready yet, and that meanwhile he’s his own man now, that he’s never mind, maybe also, and why not, how come not; why, he’s just like everybody else, only he’s like himself, but then just like everybody else! What is it to him! A scoundrel, a terrible scoundrel! Before the middle of November, there’s no way he can agree to end his career.
Goliadkin, as Mochulsky noted, “emerges and grows out of the verbal element. The writer had first to assimilate his character’s intonations, to speak him through himself, to penetrate the rhythm of his sentences and the peculiarities of his vocabulary, and only then could he see his face. Dostoevsky’s characters are born of speech—such is the general law of his creative work.” In Gogol, with the one exception of “The Diary of a Madman,” the verbal element is the narrator’s voice, not the character’s. Gogol’s characters are entirely objectified, like parts of nature, pure products of the narrator’s words about them; they have no consciousness, and that, in fact, is what makes them so remarkable. For Dostoevsky, on the other hand, consciousness is the central issue: the narrator’s speech in The Double is a projection of and dialogue with Goliadkin’s consciousness; we are given no outside position from which to view him. “Even in the earliest ‘Gogolian period’ of his literary career,” Mikhail Bakhtin observed, Dostoevsky is already depicting not the “poor government clerk” but the self-consciousness of the poor clerk…That which was presented in Gogol’s field of vision as an aggregate of objective features, coalescing in a firm socio-characterological profile of the hero, is introduced by Dostoevsky into the field of vision of the hero himself and there becomes the object of his agonizing self- awareness.
This was the “small-scale Copernican revolution,” in Bakhtin’s phrase, that Dostoevsky carried out “when he took what had been a firm and finalizing authorial definition and turned it into an aspect of the hero’s self- definition.” The failure to grasp the major implications of this shift in artistic visualization probably accounts for the critical incomprehension that greeted The Double.
The disintegration, the inner plurality, of isolated consciousness that Dostoevsky first explored through Mr. Goliadkin remained a constant theme of his work. Many years later, he wrote that he had “never given anything more serious to literature” than the idea of The Double. Mr. Goliadkin is the precursor of the man from underground, of Velchaninov in The Eternal Husband, of Stavrogin in Demons, of Versilov in The Adolescent, and finally, most tellingly, of Ivan Karamazov. The notion that The Double is an exploration of the abnormal and pathological, the description of a man going mad, is mistaken (though Otto Rank, in his Don Juan, A Study of the Double, found in it “an unsurpassed clinical exactitude”). Dostoevsky was concerned here, as everywhere, with penetrating into the depths of the normal human soul, but by means of an extreme case and a bold device—the “literal” splitting of his hero into two Goliadkins. The attempt to determine whether Mr. Goliadkin Jr. is a flesh-and-blood double or a fantasy provoked by the “persecution mania” of Mr. Goliadkin Sr. runs into a host of difficulties as we follow the various turns of the story. Dostoevsky deliberately leaves the boundary between fantasy and reality undetermined. The whole novel thus becomes an embodiment not only of psychological but of ontological instability.
The Double was the first expression of Dostoevsky’s genius, prefiguring his later work in a way not to be found in anything else he wrote in those years or even in the first years after his return from exile in 1860. In a letter to his brother in 1859, he spoke of his plans to rewrite it: “In short, I’m challenging them all to battle, and, finally, if I don’t rewrite The Double now, when will I rewrite it? Why should I lose an excellent idea, a type of the greatest social importance, which I was the first to discover, of which I was the herald?” But nothing came of it. For the three-volume edition of his collected works published in 1865 by the bookseller F. T. Stellovsky, he simply abridged the text (that is the version translated here) and supplied it with a new subtitle, “A Petersburg Poem.” It was only with Notes from Underground, published in 1864, that he returned to the “idea” of The Double, not to rewrite it but to re-create it with incomparably more human experience and artistic skill.
Notes from Underground opened the way for the five great novels on which Dostoevsky’s fame chiefly rests. In their shade, however, lie some smaller works of a rare formal perfection, more concentrated and at times more penetrating than the major novels, works such as The Eternal Husband, “The Meek One,” and “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.” The Gambler belongs to their number.
The chance Dostoevsky took in writing The Gambler was not an artistic one; the risk was all too mundane, but the reward was quite unexpected. The deaths of his first wife and of his beloved brother Mikhail in 1864 had left Dostoevsky heavily in debt. Stellovsky, an unscrupulous “literary speculator,” in Mochulsky’s words, approached him with the offer of a flat fee of two thousand roubles, without royalties, for an edition of his collected works. Dostoevsky refused, but in the end he had no one else to turn to. The terms of Stellovsky’s second offer were stiffer than the first. For three thousand roubles he bought the rights to publish a three-volume edition of Dostoevsky’s complete works, and demanded in addition to that a new novel, ten printer’s sheets in length, to be delivered to him by November 1, 1866. The agreement further stipulated that if the manuscript was not delivered on time, Stellovsky would become the owner not only of Dostoevsky’s existing works but of all he would write for the next nine years.
Meanwhile, Dostoevsky also reached an agreement with the publisher Mikhail Katkov for another work he had in mind. He originally conceived it as a novella, but it eventually grew into Crime and Punishment. Work on it absorbed him completely. The first two parts appeared in 1866, in the January and February issues of Katkov’s journal, The Russian Messenger. The critical response was enthusiastic, encouraging Dostoevsky to continue working on it through the spring and summer. In July, realizing that he was in trouble, he decided to divide his working day in two, writing Crime and Punishment in the mornings and the novel for Stellovsky in the evenings. But by the end of September he had still not written a line of the other book. “Stellovsky upsets me to the point of torture,” he told his old friend Alexander Milyukov, “I even see him in my dreams.” Milyukov suggested that he hire a stenographer and made the arrangements himself. On October 4, 1866, a young woman named Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina came to Dostoevsky’s door. She was the best stenography student in the first secretarial school in Petersburg. He dropped work on Crime and Punishment and began dictating The Gambler to her. On October 29, the novel was finished. Anna Grigoryevna brought him the copied-out manuscript the next day for final corrections, and on November 1, Dostoevsky went to deliver it to Stellovsky. The bookseller was not at home, and his assistant refused to accept responsibility for receiving it. At ten o’clock in the evening, he left the manuscript with the district police officer, who gave him a dated receipt for it. To Stellovsky’s undoubted dismay, Dostoevsky had won. A week later, he proposed to his stenographer and was accepted.
Dostoevsky first conceived of The Gambler as a short story about “Russians abroad.” It is, as Joseph Frank rightly points out, the only work of Dostoevsky’s that is “international” in the sense of that word made familiar by, for example, the fiction of Henry James. It is, in other words, a story in which the psychology and conflicts of the characters not only arise from their individual temperaments and personal qualities but also reflect an interiorization of various national values and ways of life.
The Gambler, Frank concludes, is “a spirited but by no means uncritical meditation on the waywardness of the Russian national temperament.” That waywardness is dramatized in its contrasts with the French, who are all external form and thus perfect deceivers, and the Germans, who are stolid “savers” and “so honest it’s even frightening to go near them.” The one Englishman in the novel, Mr. Astley, is a personally noble and virtuous man, but of limited imagination. He is “in sugar,” as the narrator observes. The Russian is none of these things, and that is so not only of the narrator-hero, Alexei Ivanovich, but of his employer, the retired General Zagoryansky, of the general’s stepdaughter, Polina, and even of the seventy-five-year-old Russian matriarch whom everyone refers to simply as “grandmother”—a superbly comic and contradictory portrait of the old landowning
