revenge for an earlier humiliation, first “rescues” and then rejects a young prostitute. He is such an underground reasoner that he never imagines the girl may have her own mind and will. “For me to love meant to tyrannize and to preponderize morally,” he explains. “All my life I’ve been incapable even of picturing any other love, and I’ve reached the point now of sometimes thinking that love consists precisely in the right, voluntarily granted by the beloved object, to be tyrannized over.” The girl leaves, the man rushes after her a moment later, but then stops: “Why am I running after her? Why? To fall down before her, to weep in repentance, to kiss her feet, to beg forgiveness!… But—why?… Won’t I hate her, maybe tomorrow even, precisely for kissing her feet today?… Won’t I torment her to death?” In The Meek One, the hero marries the girl, and proceeds to do just that. But there are significant differences.
These appear clearly in the form of the two works. The Meek One has none of the discursive and polemical character of Notes. It is the most intimate of Dostoevsky’s stories; reading it seems almost like a profanation. The man from underground is a writer, though a careless and defiant one; the narrator here is a desperately speaking voice. But despite his rambling efforts to “collect his thoughts to a point,” the story is highly unified, concentrated into the few hours following the catastrophe, during which he tries to understand what has happened. As in The Eternal Husband, Dostoevsky shows himself a master at revealing events through the incomprehension of the person who experiences them. But here the double story of the marriage and the “attempt to understand” unfolds simultaneously. There is a difference, too, in the consciousness of the hero, who is in the process of exchanging defiance for grief. All this gives his voice a piercing urgency.
Like Bobok, the brief Dream of a Ridiculous Man is a compendium of themes central to Dostoevsky’s work. One of these is the theme of “ridiculousness.” The fear of being or looking ridiculous marks most of Dostoevsky’s underground heroes, including the suave Velchaninov and even the proud Nikolai Stavrogin. Ridiculousness is the shameful other face of pride. The narrator of The Meek One refuses to challenge a fellow officer, not from fear of a duel but from fear of looking ridiculous in the theater buffet, and for that he pays the most terrible price. In this last story, the label of “ridiculous” is fastened on the narrator from the start. The second paragraph is a succinct description of the doubled personality of all of Dostoevsky’s ridiculous men. The metaphysical malady it leads to is the same that afflicts Kirillov in Demons: “The conviction was overtaking me,” says the ridiculous man, “that everywhere in the world it made no difference.” It is an ethical solipsism the implications of which the narrator ponders for a long time while sitting in his Voltaire armchair. And he resolves on the Kirillovian solution of suicide, though without the messianic ambition that pushes Kirillov into demonic parody. At this extremity he is granted two things which are really one—first, a moment of “irrational” pity, which he repulses, and then a saving dream. In the end, which is the beginning, he not only loses his shame at being ridiculous, but even embraces his ridiculousness. He has gone through the underground and come out on the other side.
These ridiculous narrators are all extreme cases. Dostoevsky was obviously drawn to such cases, perhaps for the reason suggested by the man from underground at the end of his story: “As far as I myself am concerned, I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared to carry even halfway, and, what’s more, you’ve taken your cowardice for good sense, and found comfort in thus deceiving yourselves. So that I, perhaps, come out even more ‘living’ than you. Take a closer look!” The extreme and eccentric have a heroic and representative quality, despite their social isolation. Bakhtin goes so far as to say that “Dostoevsky’s mode of artistic thinking could not imagine anything in the slightest way humanly significant that did not have certain elements of eccentricity (in all its diverse manifestations).” The Dream of a Ridiculous Man was Dostoevsky’s last artistic work before The Brothers Karamazov and points to that novel’s hero, Alyosha Karamazov, who is beyond the fear of being ridiculous, that is, beyond the doubled consciousness of the underground. The author says of Alyosha in his opening note: “… not only is an odd man ‘not always’ a particular and isolated case, but, on the contrary, it sometimes happens that it is precisely he, perhaps, who bears within himself the heart of the whole, while the other people of his epoch have all for some reason been torn away from it for a time by some kind of flooding wind.”
The dream that saves the ridiculous man is a vision of the earthly paradise—a “second earth” that has not known the Fall into sin and evil. Similar dreams come to Stavrogin in Demons and to Versilov in The Adolescent, but the theme is treated most fully here. Stavrogin discovers the “tiny red spider” of his own terrible sin in the center of his vision, and it is suddenly dispelled. The Fall is not absent from the ridiculous man’s dream either: he brings it about himself. What comes then is a condensed and somewhat polemicized history of humanity, which so fills the dreamer’s heart with guilt, pity, grief, and love that he wakes up—and for him it is a true awakening, to life, “life—and preaching!” In the terms of the epigraph I have placed at the head of this preface, he moves from “eternal defection” to “ever increasing participation.” He will preach because he has seen the “living image” of the truth, beyond conceptual understanding. It has shown him “that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the ability to live on earth.” And he goes and finds the little girl he offended. The Dream of a Ridiculous Man thus resolves a whole series of interlocking motifs in Dostoevsky’s work.
This book begins and ends with attempts to speak the saving word that will unite mankind. But Pralinsky’s absurd “hu-humaneness” had to pass through the underground of duplicity and silence—the failure of Velchaninov to tear “the very last word” either from Pavel Pavlovich or from himself in The Eternal Husband; the putrefaction of souls leading to the senselessly repeated “bobok, bobok” that haunts the writer of Bobok; and finally the hell of “silent speaking” in The Meek One—before it could emerge in the ridiculous man’s preaching, the same yet quite transformed.
—Richard Pevear
A NASTY ANECDOTE
A STORY
THIS NASTY anecdote occurred precisely at the time when, with such irrepressible force and such touchingly naive enthusiasm, the regeneration of our dear fatherland began, and its valiant sons were all striving toward new destinies and hopes. Then, one winter, on a clear and frosty evening, though it was already past eleven, three extremely respectable gentlemen were sitting in a comfortably and even luxuriously furnished room, in a fine two- storied house on the Petersburg side,1 and were taken up with a solid and excellent conversation on a quite curious subject. These three gentlemen were all three of general’s rank.2 They were sitting around a small table, each in a fine, soft armchair, and as they conversed they were quietly and comfortably sipping champagne. The bottle was right there on the table in a silver bucket with ice. The thing was that the host, privy councillor Stepan Nikiforovich Nikiforov, an old bachelor of about sixty-five, was celebrating the housewarming of his newly purchased house, and, incidentally, his birthday, which happened to come along and which he had never celebrated before. However, the celebration was none too grand; as we have already seen, there were only two guests, both former colleagues of Mr. Nikiforov and his former subordinates, namely: actual state councillor Semyon Ivanovich Shipulenko and the other, also an actual state councillor, Ivan Ilyich Pralinsky. They came at around nine o’clock, had tea, then switched to wine, and knew that at exactly eleven-thirty they should go home. The host had liked regularity all his life. A couple of words about him: he began his career as a fortuneless petty clerk, quietly endured the drag for forty-five years on end, knew very well how far he would be promoted, could not bear having
