be the first appearance in literature of the “stream of consciousness”—a point the writer himself comments on in his opening note. Most of Dostoevsky’s writings contain direct or hidden comments on their own “poetics.” There are no outpourings of psychic magma here, but the explorations of a highly conscious artist. Like each of his novels, each of these stories is formally unique, each is a fresh response to the expressive challenge posed by the thematic materials of his art.
The development of Dostoevsky’s work was by no means the smooth, orderly unfolding of a successful writer’s career. Here the biographical factor, to which I have already alluded, comes to the fore again. The turbulence of Dostoevsky’s life is well known: his involvement in revolutionary politics during the late 1840s, his arrest together with other members of the Petrashevsky circle in 1849, his mock execution, stayed at the last minute on orders from the emperor, his four years at hard labor in the prison of Omsk, followed by six years of service “in the ranks” in Semipalatinsk, his return to Petersburg and literary activity in 1859, the painful difficulties that ensued (deaths in the family, the failures of two magazines he edited with his brother, the accumulation of debts, the beginning of his addiction to gambling), his flight abroad in 1866 to escape his creditors, the precarious and nomadic existence he led there with his second wife, gambling away everything including her wedding ring and writing all the while (The Idiot, The Eternal Husband, the first drafts of Demons), his return to Russia in 1871, to find relative peace and eventual fame, which was at its height when he died in 1881 at the age of sixty. Yet the decisive break in this much-disrupted life is not to be found in any of these external events, not even the break in his career caused by ten years of prison and exile. Dostoevsky went on writing in more or less the same way after those ten years as before. The decisive break occurred in his “spiritual biography” some five years after his return, with the sudden discovery of what he called the “underground.”
The emergence of the underground is the turning point in Dostoevsky’s work. What he wrote before Notes from Underground was talented, certainly. What he wrote after was far more than talented. The shift in tone that signals the emergence of the underground indicates a deeper shift, an inner displacement, a peripeteia. As Rene Girard explains it, the love triangles and dreamers of Dostoevsky’s early work reflect a certain state of affairs (not peculiar to Dostoevsky); with the underground, the reality behind that state of affairs is revealed for the first time. Error gives form to the truth that corrects it. The underground appears doubly in Notes, through the nameless hero as he tells his story, and through the author as he portrays this “man from underground.” Despite the markedly personal tone of the writing, the two are not the same. The narrator is in the underground, Dostoevsky is some way out of it.
The underground brings out the rivalry hidden behind romantic sentiments and ideals, the exchanges of pride and humiliation that govern the relations between people and even within the singular person, who turns out to be multiple. Spiritual pride, the separation from one’s fellow creatures, the will to autonomy, produces the rival, and thus brings about its own humiliation. The scale of this imitative rivalry is a richly chromatic one, running through all degrees of envy, jealousy, and duplicity, conscious and unconscious. But the question, finally, is of the place of imitation in human life. Here matters of art and education come together with the highest spiritual endeavor, because the ideal offered to the Christian is also a way of imitation—the imitatio Christi, the “imitation of Christ.” The sheer original does not exist; we cannot escape imitation. Rene Girard observes: “In the universe structured by the Gospel revelation, individual existence remains essentially imitative, even, and perhaps above all, when it rejects with horror any thought of imitation. The Fathers of the Church held as evident a truth that later became obscured and that the novelist wins back step by step through the terrible consequences of that obscuring” (Dostoievski, du double a l’unite). The way of imitation revealed by the Gospels may be denied, rejected, but the structure remains, only turned another way. The original model is exchanged for another. Girard’s term for this exchange is “deviated transcendence.” The most extreme example in Dostoevsky is furnished by Kirillov in Demons, whose suicide for the salvation of mankind is a parody rather than an imitation of Christ, betraying the demonic wrenching of the deviation. Dostoevsky did not expound this as a whole and ready-made truth in his work; he came to it precisely step by step on his way through the underground.
The present collection represents, in miniature, the inner development of Dostoevsky’s later work. The stories here, with one exception, were written after Notes from Underground. And even that one exception, A Nasty Anecdote, written in 1862, may be described as verging on the underground. It is one of the broadest satires in Dostoevsky, and the most farcical of his scandalous feasts. The target of the satire is the spirit of reform that spread through Russia in the early years of the reign of the “tsar- liberator” Alexander II, who came to the throne in 1855. More specifically, the target is the “festival of reconciliation” that Dostoevsky himself had looked forward to even quite recently in his journalism. Here, when the wealthy liberal official Pralinsky, whose name in English as in Russian suggests the sweetness of praline, appears uninvited at the wedding party of his subordinate Pseldonymov, the “festival” actually takes place, with disastrous consequences. What erupts into Pralinsky-Dostoevsky’s dream of all people “embracing morally” is a world that Pralinsky has never known but that Dostoevsky knew quite well—the world of wretchedly poor clerks and young nihilists, the underside of the bureaucracy of which Pralinsky and his fellow generals are the top, and along with that the world of carnival humor. Pralinsky wants to “embrace morally” while keeping his distance (“I’ll delicately give a reminder that they and I are—different, sirs. Earth and sky”). He finds himself, however, in a very physical predicament: his first act is to step into a cooling galantine, and he ends with his face in the blancmange. No distances are respected; all distinctions break down. This is not the sort of union Pralinsky dreamed of. He gets drunk, and his great word, meant to bring all people together, the word “humaneness,” comes out as “hu- humaneness.” Instead of proving himself a statesman, he makes himself the subject of a “nasty anecdote.” The structure of the story is particularly effective: by postponing his account of Pseldonymov’s life until the end, Dostoevsky leaves us with two monumental portraits, absolutely irreconcilable, standing side by side.
These portraits are still single, anecdotal figures. Their opposition is mainly social and external. In the underground, the divisions become internal and rivalry acquires a metaphysical dimension. This is shown clearly in The Eternal Husband, written in 1870. Dostoevsky said at the time, in a letter to his friend and editor N. Strakhov: “I thought of writing this story four years ago, the year of my brother’s death, in response to the words of Apollon Grigoriev, who praised my Notes from Underground and said to me then: ‘That is how you should write.’ But this is not Notes from Underground, it is quite different in form, though the essence is the same, my usual essence, if only you, Nikolai Nikolaevich, will acknowledge that, as a writer, I have some particular essence of my own.” The more spectacular ideological elements of Dostoevsky’s work, such as the polemical monologue of the man from underground or the “poem” of the Grand Inquisitor, which have drawn so much commentary from critics and philosophers, are entirely absent from The Eternal Husband. They are not of the essence, then. What is of the essence, of his “usual essence,” is the mechanism of metaphysical rivalry and deviated transcendence, which is portrayed here in its purest form, as a kind of duel, almost a prizefight, its rounds signaled by the ringing of bells.
There is a certain way in which the double makes his appearance in Dostoevsky’s work. Raskolnikov, in acute anguish at the end of the third part of Crime and Punishment, dreams that he is murdering the old woman again, but this time she does not die but instead laughs wildly at him. Terrified, he attempts to cry out and wakes up:
He drew a deep breath—yet, strangely, it was as if the dream were still going on: his door was wide open, and a man completely unknown to him was standing on the threshold, studying him intently.
Raskolnikov had not yet managed to open his eyes fully, and he instantly closed them again. He lay on his back without stirring. “Is this the dream still going on, or not?” he thought, and again imperceptibly parted his eyelashes a little: the stranger was standing in the same place and was still peering at him!… Finally it became unbearable: Raskolnikov raised himself all at once and sat up on the sofa.
