Dostoevsky’s early genius

“Well, let me tell you, I don’t believe that my fame will ever surpass the height it has now attained,” wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky to his brother, Mikhail, in November 1845. “Poor People,” his first novel, was not to be published until the following January, but St. Petersburg society was already abuzz with talk of this new literary talent. The first people to whom he showed his manuscript did not stop reading until they finished it at 4 in the morning, then rushed to find the author. Tears pouring down their cheeks, they embraced and congratulated him as “the new Gogol.” The 24-year-old author was speechless and embarrassed. It was not long before Vissarion Belinsky, the most influential literary critic of the day, had added his own commendation. Could Dostoevsky himself -- Belinsky demanded -- understand the tremendous significance of what he had written? No, he could not, he was too young and inexperienced. It was, Dostoevsky said, the most enchanting moment of his life, and it went straight to his head. “Everyone considers me a phenomenon!” he boasted joyfully to his brother.

Belinsky’s excitement was not simply pleasure at the discovery of a new voice. The liberal Russians of the 1840s, frustrated by their reactionary tsar and longing for reform, placed all their hopes in literature. Belinsky insisted that the role of the author was to be a mouthpiece for a silenced population. “Honour and glory to the young poet whose Muse loves those who live in garrets and basements, and speaks of them to the dwellers in gilded halls, saying, ‘See, these too are men and your brothers,’ ” he declaimed in his review of “Poor People.” Dostoevsky was to be the new protector of the “Little Man,” a conscience for the nation. This interpretation of the novel proved durable, providing the official line for Soviet critics, at least. But Dostoevsky himself almost certainly found it too simplistic. Only a few months after publication, Dostoevsky fell out with Belinsky, announcing that the latter understood nothing about literature.

“We all crawled out from under Gogol’s ‘Greatcoat,’ ” Dostoevsky is supposed to have remarked. Whether apocryphal or not, it is a comment that applies particularly to “Poor People,” a grotesque version of the epistolary novel that was so popular in the early 19th century.

The protagonists are Makar Devushkin, a wretched, middle-aged copying clerk in the civil service, and Varenka, a poor orphan in her late teens whose honor has been compromised in some unspecified but wicked way by the wealthy Mr. Bykov. Much of the humor and poignancy arises from Devushkin’s prose, which, with its folksy, colloquial and unintentionally revealing language, certainly owes a debt to Gogol. After a first, perfunctory reading, in fact, I was inclined to agree with the reviewers who claimed it was little more than an imitation of the great man.

Yet I was soon returning to pore over the text again, trying to make sense of its contradictions and ellipses. Even in this earliest work, Dostoevsky’s approach to the irrational is quite different from Gogol’s. Where Gogol slides into the fantastic world of dreams and nightmares, Dostoevsky has already identified the area that he will spend his life investigating, and that, by the following century, will make him the most widely read Russian author in the world. “Poor People” soon emerges as a typically Dostoevskian study: an acute psychological portrait of a man driven to his limits.

And it is here, to my mind, that the excitement of Dostoevsky’s first novel lies. He may not have formulated his extreme conservatism until much later in life, yet in “Poor People” the conflict between his liberal views and his acute awareness of human irrationality is already fierce. As in later books, he focuses above all on the irrationality of those who are struggling to survive. The very fact that a single illogical decision could push them over the edge into despair, that they have no safety net to allow them a little wavering, an eccentric action now and again, seems to draw people toward the brink. Devushkin and Varenka suffer from ill health and the vulnerability of their position before rich and predatory men. But these conventional threats -- the threats that a more didactic social commentator might be expected to dwell on -- are made dramatically worse by their own, irresistible self-destructive urges. As Devushkin remarks, in what could be seen as the guiding principle of the tale: “Poor men are capricious ... that’s the way nature arranges it.”

There is no doubt that Devushkin is a good man, self-sacrificing and generous. Yet, as we become adept at interpreting the contradictions and gaps in the letters, his selflessness starts to look more like fatal self-delusion. His longing to treat Varenka as a lady, to shower her with gifts and take her to the theater almost drives both of them to starvation. His kindness is full of contradictions, and his flights of optimistic fancy are tainted by the admission the following evening that his “head ached all day” -- a hangover, we deduce. The man’s slide into drunkenness is subtly developed, as the tone of the letters lurches from wild enthusiasm, to abject apology, to fatalism. Even his sympathy for those who are more desperate than himself is spoiled by the remark that “to tell the truth, my dear, I began describing all this to you in part to get it off my chest, but more to show you an example of the good style of my writing....” His great ambition is to become a writer, someone whom passersby point out on Nevsky Prospekt: “Here comes the composer of literature and poet, Devushkin!”

In short, far from being simply an anodyne hero, Devushkin is also moody, unreliable, deceitful and vain, and the shame of his poverty occasionally seems about to drive him mad. In certain respects, he can even be seen as the first in Dostoevsky’s long line of autobiographical figures. There are, of course, important differences in their age and position, yet many of the young author’s comments in letters of the time bear a comical resemblance to those of Devushkin. Dostoevsky is just as obsessively worried about money and just as extravagant, just as anxious about status and quick to sense humiliation -- qualities that were to be greatly magnified and elaborated in Golyadkin, protagonist of his next novel, “The Double.”

Dostoevsky had worked hard at “Poor People,” writing and rewriting several times; at one point he complained to his brother, “[It] has given me so much trouble that, if I had realized beforehand, I would never have got started on it at all.” His hard work shows in the sophisticated structure of the novel: an incomplete bundle of letters -- hastily scribbled or long and discursive, some written in a flurry, two to a day, others after a gap of two or three weeks. In the gap between the two contrasting voices, each with its own anxieties and secrets, through the mass of detail and apparently random digressions, the reader senses his way toward the truth. “They find my novel drawn out, when it doesn’t contain one unnecessary word

“The whole” in this case is a passionate, painfully detailed account of poverty and its effects on the human character. The poor that Dostoevsky describes are not particularly worthy or noble; they are as vain, silly and moody as the rest of us. Yet his ability to make us feel their humiliations and the knife-edge of survival that they tread is his great, humanizing genius. It is no surprise, but a joy all the same, to find that this gift was present even in his earliest fiction. *