"The Double" Dostoevsky

Mochulsky writes of The Double: We are again presented with the problem of the loneliness of the human soul, the solitude of consciousness, the escape underground.
Golyadkin himself in one of his last frenzied outbursts to an imaginary interlocutor says of his double: He’s another person, your Excellency, and I’m another person too; he’s apart and I am really myself by myself too; I’m really myself by myself, your Excellency, really myself by myself.

In The Double,- and indeed in Dostoevsky’s early period in general- it is only in solitude that the self is encountered. However, the notion of the self is very fluid, very uncertain, very fractured. In the long monologues (delivered to the reader) which are one of the most salient structural features of the work, Golyadkin sometimes speaks of himself in the first person What an addlepate I am! sometimes in the second You silly old fool, you silly old Golyadkin, sometimes in a dialogue between first and second No, you and I had better be patient, Yakov Petrovich, let us wait and be patient sometimes in the third This Golyadkin’s a rascal, don’t take any notice of him, and don’t mix him up with the other, but the other one’s honest, virtuous, mild, free from malice, and sometimes even in the plural: Being scared is our special line. Even the practice of talking to oneself, implies an ontological split: Who speaks? Who listens?

With others, in company, on the other hand, a mask is assumed, a role is played, and the self is subsumed, lost, drowned or buried, placed to one side, or put away. This creates an anxiety of being, an anxiety which registers in two ways: the projection onto the world of a double; and in dreams, in which subconscious anxieties are revealed. In the dream of Chapter 10, a terrible multitude of duplicates springs into being and obstructs the whole town. Society itself becomes a fracturing of selves; we are other people. Either way the boundary of the self is uncertain: is the self my own solitude? Or is it the roles we play with others? Is it both of these? Is it none?

The real interpretive problem for the reader is deciding whether the double exists in the world, or only as a figment of Mr Golyadkin’s imagination. Other characters appear to see the double, but there is always the possibility that we are seeing their reactions through Mr Golyadkin’s eyes. Although the narrator is always scrupulous to designate Mr Golydakin senior as the real or geniune Mr Golyadkin, and Mr Golyadkin Junior as the man who called himself Mr Golyadkin, or the other, or Mr Golyadkin’s perfidious friend, the objectivity of the narrative voice nonetheless is imperiled by a sneaky use of free indirect discourse to maintain ambiguity. The narrative voice starts out being quite objective, limiting itself to descriptions of scenes and actions the dirty green smoke begrimed dusty walls of his little room,… from his bed he ran straight to a little round looking glass, but gradually as the story progresses and Mr Golyadkin’s situation becomes more fraught, narrative objectivity and certainty evolves into something both more ironic, with sarcastic references to the timid, rabbit-like Golyadkin as our hero, and less objective. The narrative voice reflects Golyadkin’s ontological doubts and anxieties in an increasing multiplicity of voices (a Bakhtinian diglossia), mirroring (doubling) the character’s fracturing of self.
Let’s look at a scene in detail. Here is the opening of chapter 9:

Everything, apparently, and even nature itself, seemed up in arms against Mr. Golyadkin; but he was still on his legs and unconquered; he felt that he was unconquered. He was ready to struggle. He rubbed his hands with such feeling and such energy when he recovered from his first amazement that it could be deduced from his very air that he would not give in. yet the danger was imminent; it was evident; Mr. Golyadkin felt it; but how to grapple with it, with this danger? - that was the question. The thought even flashed through Mr. Golyadkin's mind for a moment, "After all, why not leave it so, simply give up? Why, what is it? Why, it's nothing. I'll keep apart as though it were not I," thought Mr. Golyadkin. "I'll let it all pass; it's not I, and that's all about it; he's separate too, maybe he'll give it up too; he'll hang about, the rascal, he'll hang about. He'll come back and give it up again. That’s how it will be! I'll take it meekly. And, indeed, where is the danger? Come, what danger is there? I should like any one to tell me where the danger lies in this business. It is a trivial affair. An everyday affair. . . ."

We can identify three different voices here:
i) an omniscient objective narrator,
ii) free indirect discourse, in which the narrative voice mimics the character’s voice or reflects the character’s point of view without actually quoting it,
iii) and direct speech, which is presented simply to the reader as the thoughts of the character.
Let’s indulge in some Barthesian analysis here and divide the paragraph up into lexias showing the breaks between the voices. An asterisk * signals the end of a lexia and a switch to another voice:

Everything, * told in voice ii) apparently, * told in voice i) and even nature itself, seemed up in arms * ii) against Mr. Golyadkin; * i) but he was still on his legs and unconquered; * ii) he felt that he was unconquered. * i) He was ready to struggle. * ii) He rubbed his hands with such feeling and such energy when he recovered from his first amazement that it could be deduced from his very air that he would not give in. * i) Yet the danger was imminent; it was evident; * ii) Mr. Golyadkin felt it; * i) but how to grapple with it, with this danger? * ii) - that was the question. the thought even flashed through Mr. Golyadkin's mind for a moment, * i) "After all, why not leave it so, simply give up? Why, what is it? Why, it's nothing. I'll keep apart as though it were not I," * iii) thought Mr. Golyadkin. * i) "I'll let it all pass; it's not I, and that's all about it; he's separate too, maybe he'll give it up too; he'll hang about, the rascal, he'll hang about. He'll come back and give it up again. That's how it will be! I'll take it meekly. And, indeed, where is the danger? Come, what danger is there? I should like any one to tell me where the danger lies in this business. It is a trivial affair. An everyday affair. . . ." * iii)

The first two voices are woven subtly together so that one hardly has time to register their differences in the flow of reading: an illusion of objectivity is thus created. Nonetheless, it does not go far enough to dispel an underlying, ghostly, whispering anxiety: is the double real or not?

Structurally, the novel works like a literary Rorschach blot, with events mirroring or doubling each other: two appearances by the doctor, two gate crashing scenes, two scenes where Mr G is lurking in shadows, behind the cupboard, behind the woodpile, two carriage drives, two interviews between Mr G and his double, two scenes in the office, two encounters with the double in an eatery in which Mr G is left to foot the bill, two shopping scenes, one in the arcade, one when commissioning Petrushka to buy an overcoat…

Andrei Tarkovsky on modern culture

Modern mass culture is crippling people's souls, it is erecting barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.

From the lost papers of Doctor Cornelius Mucus (Vienna), eminent Sinologist, preserved for posterity by the astonishing memory of Murr,

Lecture notes on Buddhism and Christianity

Buddha’s mission, as he saw it (c.f. Majjhimanikaya 26), was to show the way out of dukkha to nibbana. We have thus three elements: dukkha (the unease of existence) nibbana (unbinding) and the way.

In general terms, the way refers to the series of thought and breathing exercises the Buddha gave to us, and which he believes will best help us to unbind the ties of craving which hold us in dukkha. It is of course assumed, but never stated, that Buddha himself achieved nibbana by these methods.

We need to pause here to talk about our first two terms dukkha and nibbana. This is necessary for a number of very important reasons.
1. the terms are Pali. Pali is the language in which the main body of Theravada sutras (the Buddhist Gospel) were originally transcribed. Like Latin and Ancient Greek, this language is dead, and the bulk of it only remains in the Buddhist Suttas themselves.
2. the terms, and a knowledge of the very great difficulties in translating them, are central to a critical and informed understanding of Buddhist thought.

Before we talk about the terms, I want to talk first about the difficulties inherent in translating them. These difficulties are:
1. the terms are difficult to translate into English equivalents
2. the terms describe concepts which in themselves often reside outside the realm and intellectual schematic of the Western mind. A very simple example here to show you what I mean is that in Buddhist thought there are six senses, rather than the Western five, the sixth one being thought. I feel that we must be honest and recognise that the concept of thought as a sense (in the same way that hearing, for example, is a sense), is a concept which is difficult for the Western mind to encompass. The same difficulty exists in understanding the concepts which lie behind our three terms.
3. many of the central Pali terms of Buddhism have been translated carelessly in the past, or translated using English equivalents which come from a Western religious mindset, a mindset which is quite at odds with the real nature of the Pali terms, and of Buddhist thought in general, for reasons I will come to later.
4. these careless or erroneous translations and the false impression they have created, have stuck and become popularised, both by Western practitioners, and their Asian teachers, who in striving, perhaps, to make these concepts clear to their students, reach for English words they think will help their students to understand.

Having described briefly the difficulties inherent in translating the terms, we may now move to a brief examination of the terms themselves.

1. dukkha often this word is translated as ‘reality’ or ‘pain’, but its closer meaning is something more akin to ‘unease’. This unease may encompass different states on a spectrum ranging from a sense of vague unease about life, a Keatsian veiled melancholy seated in the very temple of delight, a Derridian deferral of pleasure, the Freudian pleasure/pain principle or indeed downright straightforward pain and suffering, misfortune, illness and other human problems. At the same time the term dukkah also implies that this state of affairs is delusional and created by the self in response to craving (The Buddhist concept of self is very interesting and requires a separate set of notes in itself).

2. nibbana. This term is fraught with the difficulties I mentioned above. In many English translations of this word, we find ‘bliss’, ‘salvation’, ‘heaven’, ‘perfection’, ‘peace’, ‘enlightenment’ and so on. Most Pali philologists reckon, however, that a closer and more accurate rendering of this term is ‘unbinding’, a freeing, or a loosening, an unwrapping. This is seen as an unfolding process, not a state of being, or a locative goal. Thus the goal of the way is not a static, achieved, place at which we arrive, but an unfolding process, the kind of paradox in which Eastern thought delights. It is quite incorrect to equate the Pali term nibbana (and hence the concept it describes) with a state of salvation. It is not a state, and it is not a salvation in the sense of being saved by someone or something from some thing or some state. It is an unbinding from the ties which bind us to the dukkha, namely, those cravings I mentioned earlier. Of course, one hopes and assumes that having reached the condition of nibbana, one would experience peace, bliss, joy and so on simply as the result of having loosened the ties. But we must not confuse this hope and assumption of bliss with the actual condition itself. We might experience nibbana as a cessation of everything except the experience of cessation itself. Only someone who has achieved this condition is able to describe it, and the only one who has left any record of having reached it, is Gautama Buddha himself.

Now that we have an understanding of these essential terms and the difficulties inherent in them, both linguistic and conceptual, we may return to our original assertion:

Buddha’s mission, as he saw it (c.f. Majjhimanikaya 26), was to show the way out of dukkha to nibbana. We have thus three elements: dukkha, nibbana and the way.

We come now to the crux of the matter: Why is Buddhism incompatible with Christianity and other wussy sky-god religions?

We can identify two preliminary reasons:

1. Buddha was quite clear that the way out of dukkha did not lie in a search for the unknowable, the unknowable meaning questions like: Why am I here? What happens to me after I die? Does God exist? These kind of speculations lie in a foreign domain, outside the realms of our senses: Do not wander out of your natural domain into a foreign habitat. (Samyuttanikaya 5.47.6) Buddha is quite clear about this: the way out of dukkha lies in a greater understanding and development of our perception of the here-and-now (ayatana) (Majjhimanikaya. 63) and not in speculations about the unknowable. In his words:

The claim of the religious authorities to know the path to union with God is just not viable. It is just as if there were a river that was so full of water that cows and crows could drink out of it, and a man would come to it desiring to cross to the other side. Standing on the near bank, he calls out to the farther bank: “Come, farther bank, come:” (Dighanikaya 13)

It’s not that Buddha says religion is wrong, but just that it is irrelevant to a cessation of dukkha because the religious questions are unanswerable by means of our current apparatus of understanding and in our current state of being. (Surprising similarities with Protagoras here). On the contrary, the way out of dukkha is findable by means of our current apparatus of understanding and in our current state of being if we focus on ayatana and follow the way.

2. The way consists of a series of exercises (thought and breathing exercises designed to help clear thinking) designed to increase our understanding and perception of the here-and-now (ayatana) through the development and sound use of the six senses. Straying out of the realm of the senses only increases our dukkha as we are plagued by doubts and unanswerable questions, increasing our delusions and engaging in petty arguments about whose God is stronger, who has the biggest army and the longest…

This is profoundly incompatible with religious thought –in particular Christian thought-, which has as its basic assumptions: there is a God, there is a part of us which is immortal, we can be saved: all speculative ideas. (Not to mention the way that post St-Augustinian Christianity totally denigrates the body.) There are a number of superficial similarities between Buddhism and Christianity: doing good works, being kind to others (when you’re not killing them for not being Christians) etc, which make it easy for the latter to attempt to assimilate the former, but the basic premise of Buddhism- a position on the here-and-now- is incompatible with Christianity –a position on the hereafter.

"Dead Souls" Nikolai Gogol

And for a long time to come am I destined by the mysterious powers to walk hand in hand with my strange heroes, viewing life in all its immensity as it rushes past me, viewing it through laughter seen by the world, and tears unseen and unknown by it…

Chichikov, a portly, middle-aged former civil servant, travels around the Russian countryside with his driver and footman buying up the names of dead peasants so that he can mortgage them later and thus improve his position, fraudulently, in society. This basic premise is less a plot than an excuse to present to the reader the real matter of the story: encounters with humorous and eccentric landowners. The novel is a picaresque, a ludic compendium of irrelevant but highly rewarding and entertaining detail and digression.

Perhaps the strangest thing about this strange book is its structure, and the huge disparity between parts one and the incomplete part two. From the beginning we are immediately plunged into the story with Chichikov’s arrival in the town of N. We see how he prepares the ground for his business, we see his encounters with local landowners, we even see how he occupies himself alone in his room, but we have no idea who he is or what motivates him. His backstory is only presented in the last chapter of part 1, and it’s only then that we learn about his scheme, his past life and his ambitions. This structure creates an interpretative question for the reader all through the first half: who is Chichikov? This question in the mind of the reader is cleverly mirrored in the same question asked by the dignitaries of the town of N, once they realise that Chichikov’s business is not so honest as it seems: they realise that this man, whom they have made much of, is an unknown quantity. Who is Chichikov: is he a high government official travelling incognito, as in The Government Inspector? Is he Captain Kopeikin? Is he a forger of government notes? Is he the devil, as James Wood bizarrely suggests? Gogol himself seems to be laughing at this kind of metaphysical interpretation by having one of the characters assert that Chichikov is really Napoleon, escaped from St Helena, and roaming Russia in disguise. Which is more farfetched, more absurd: the devil or Napoleon?

And who indeed is Gogol? "No one can imagine what Gogol was really like," wrote Akhmatova. "Everything about him is incomprehensible from beginning to end. The individual features refuse to add up to anything." He is a comic genius, a writer whose characters and situations have life of their own, whose prose buzzes and fizzes with uncontrolled detail, a hilarious fabulist who is unable to control his tongue […]because there were so many interesting details bobbing up of their own accord, that it was quite impossible to give them up as the narrator remarks of the inveterate tale-spinner Nozdryov, in a miniature self-portrait of the artist at work. He is a wonder boy genius, whose Ukranian tales made him the toast of Petersburg at the age of 24, and whose Petersburg tales influenced everyone from Dostoevsky, Kafka and Bulgakov to the magic realists, the surrealists and those ur-fabulists: Freudian psychoanalysts. He was a Russian nationalist who spent most of his adult life in European exile; he was a lonely homosexual tormented by self-hatred, a delusional messiah, who convinced himself that his great work would be the answer to all of Russia’s problems. He was the lover and perpetrator of practical jokes, the fraudster who wangled himself a position as Professor of History at St Petersburg University at the age of 25(!). And yet he was also an arch conservative, stern moralist and a sweaty Christian fanatic who disowned his early works, burnt his masterpiece and then starved himself to death at the age of 43. Gogol remains ungraspable, hemmed about by deception, temptation and failed intentions; a would-be seer who was always at the unwilling mercy of his colossal verbal gift, a gift that he relished, and at the same time abhorred.

Many errors have been made in the world which today it seems even a child would not have made, the narrator says in the penultimate chapter of Part 1. These errors he attributes to man’s propensity to avoid the straight and narrow road leading to the magnificent building of the truth even when it lies clear before him, and to voluntarily choose instead the path leading to impassable out-of-the-way places, to run after will-o’-the-wisps, to throw a blinding mist over each other’s eyes. Chichikov says more or less the same thing when he is thrown in prison at the end of part 2: I was dishonest only when I saw that I could not get anywhere by following the straight path, and that the crooked path led more directly to the goal. (Incidentally, this may be a prefiguring of Dostoevsky’s philosophy of the irrational: Dostoevsky learnt much from Gogol.) The source of this temptation to stray from the truth, to choose the interesting digression over the straightforward exposition, lies within language itself. It is in the very nature of language to deceive because language is inseparable from fiction. For Gogol, (in particular the Russian) language is a kind of force of nature, a mystery which he only thinks he controls: there is not a word that is so sweeping, so vivid, none that bursts from the very heart, that bubbles and is tremulous with life, as a neatly uttered Russian word. Language is tremulous with life of its own. Again and again in Part 1 the narrator testifies to the independent life of his linguistic creations: Let us see what Chichikov is doing! …I’m terribly sorry! I believe a rather colloquial expression has escaped from the lips of my hero. But what’s to be done about it?...I’m afraid we are talking too loudly, forgetting that our hero, who was asleep while we have been telling the story of his life, has awakened…the author must not quarrel with his hero under any circumstances. They still have a long way to go….No words can express the author’s gratitude, for say what you like, if this idea had not occurred to Chichikov, this epic poem would never have seen the light of day.

In Dead Souls part of the way language shows its own tremulous life lies in the way signifiers become freed from the signified and take on an existence of their own: the word ‘millionaire’ was to blame, not the millionaire himself, but just the word alone… Signifiers create a signified, which no longer exist. When Chichikov reads the lists containing the names of the deceased peasants he has purchased he was seized by a strange feeling…it seemed as if the peasants had been alive only yesterday. The names of the peasants stand in metonymic relation to the lives of the peasants, the names create the imaginary lives of the peasants: Stephan Probka, here is the tall man of great strength who might have made a fine guardsman... It’s significant in this scene, that even here, Gogol/Chichikov cannot resist the fantastic digression as he tells the story of the peasant who belonged to the name Maxim Telyatinkov, who started a cobbler’s business and cheated his customers; or the story of the peasant who belonged to the name Popov, who is interrogated by a policeman and who gives bald lies as his answers and ends up in prison: these digressions are fictions about fictions (the cheat, the lies) taking place within a fiction whose origin stems from marks on a page: the words in Dead Souls, the names on the list… Chichikov has never met these peasants, these imaginings of his are not acts of memory, they are acts of fiction, of tale spinning, of falsehood, spun by the too-potent power of the signifier, and which always get the teller in trouble: Popov ends up in jail, Chichikov flees from N, Gogol starves himself to death in a supreme act of disavowal.

Part 1, 8 years in the writing, was published in 1842, whereupon Gogol left for Europe, and began writing the second part, of a projected three part work. However, his confidence in himself began to wane, and his relationship to his gift changed. At every step I stopped myself with questions: Why? What is it all for? What should such a scene and such a character express? I saw clearly that I could no longer write without a clearly defined plan he wrote in his Author’s Confession. Everywhere in part 2 is evidence of this doubt in his ability and forcing of content to fit a predetermined theme. Instead of the tremulous life, the living characters who astonish and delight us by the truthfulness of conception and description; instead of the luminous prose and organic unity of structure of the first part, the second part is lame in way which has nothing to do with its incompleteness. The landowners Chichikov meets in Part 2 have no clearly defined characteristics to set them apart from each other; they become mere mouthpieces for authorial rants against the corruption of the Russian soul by European influences. Even the characters themselves seem to be aware of this. Kostanjoglo remarks on his neighbour Koshkaryov: He is necessary because the stupidities of all our clever fellows are caricatured and reflected in him, and therefore become more transparent to us….: In place of the real steppe landscape and endless roads of the first part, we have an idealised pastoral view which all too obviously and nostalgically represents itself as a mythical landscape of an agrarian paradise. The hilarious digressions and details which characterise part 1 are absent here; and passing secondary figures appear because they represent something other than themselves: the clerk in the final chapter, for example, is one of the few officials who did their work con amore; without being anxious to make a profit out of his job appears as a symbol of the ‘good official’, rather than as a character with individuality.

Only one thing sticks out in Part 2, and that is the prescience with which Gogol describes a future Soviet bureaucracy in the description of Koshkaryov’s method of managing his estate: your request will go to the Office of Reports and Petitions. Having entered it into a book, the Office will send it over to me. I will send it to the Committee of Rural Affairs and from there, after all the necessary inquiries have been made, it will be sent on to…

Musorgsky on history

History is my nocturnal friend. It brings me pleasure and intoxication.

Fragment 1912

In 1717 Peter the Great, Autocrat of all the Russias, published a manual of etiquette in European manners, in an attempt to drag his countrymen out of the medieval past into modernity. Among the instructions was the admonishment not to blow your nose like a trumpet. He shaved the beards of the Boyars himself. In 1722 he promulgated the Table of Ranks in the new civil service, laying the grounds for his new state.

In 1836 Gogol published his short story The Nose, in which a lowly clerk in Peter’s civil service wakes up to find his nose missing. After many adventures, the nose, who has assumed a rank in the service much higher than the clerk's, uniform and all, is arrested by the police and returned to its owner. At the end of the tale, the narrator comments: what is most incomprehensible of all is how authors can choose such subjects… I confess, that is utterly inconceivable, it is simply… no no, I utterly fail to understand. In the first place, there is decidedly no benefit to the fatherland, in the second place… but in the second place there is also no benefit. I simply do not know what it… This dissolving haze of ellipses masks a sleight of hand on Gogol's part: the real question is not so much how authors can choose such subjects, but why they choose them.

In 1842, in Part 1 of Gogol’s novel, Dead Souls, the protagonist Chichikov is described like this: there was something solid in the gentleman’s manners, and he blew his nose extremely loudly. It was a mystery how he did it, but his nose sounded like a trumpet. This apparently quite innocent accomplishment, however, inspired so great a respect in the waiter, that every time he heard the sound… he asked the gentleman whether he required anything. In Part 2, Chichikov does the same action, and the narrator comments: sometimes in an orchestra you will find such a cunning rogue of a trumpet that when it lets out a blast it seems to be coming not from the orchestra but from somewhere inside your ear….
This apparently quite innocent accomplishment is not so innocent after all, but the action of a cunning rogue.

For Gogol the nose has a number of significations: a veiled revolt against autocracy, against the past, against what Orlando Figes calls a revolt against the service ethic of the eighteenth century, an assertion of the individual’s right to do with his own body what he pleases, a waving of the flag of Slavophile Russianness under the noses of the Westernizers...

Fragment 1412

Notes on Dickens 10

Dickens and Gogol shared the same metonymic use of language. When they stuck to their guns and remained true to their gift, their writing was its most powerful. For Gogol, the temptation, to which he finally succumbed, was the metaphorical. In Part 2 of Dead Souls, he tries to make his details, his language symbolize something, and his writing suffers as a result. For Dickens, the temptation was allegory. In parts of The Old Curiosity Shop, in Hard Times he tries to make his language exemplify something, and his writing suffers. Gogol, in his view of himself as a messianic saviour, was undone by metaphor, Dickens, in his view of himself as a teacher and social reformer, was almost undone by allegory. However, Dickens's gift was strong enough to survive this temptation.

Hoffmann on the irrational

Perhaps there does exist a dark power which fastens on to us and leads us off along a dangerous and ruinous path which we would otherwise not have trodden; but if so, this power must have assumed within us the form of ourself, indeed have become ourself, for otherwise we would not listen to it, otherwise there would be no space within us in which it could perform its secret work.

Inadvertent Obscenity #9

Chichikov for his part was very glad to settle down for a time in the house of so peaceful and quiet a man. He was tired of his gypsy life. To have a rest even for only a month in a beautiful country place in view of the fields and at the time of approaching spring was beneficial even from the point of view of his haemorrhoids. It would have been hard to find a better spot for a rest.

Nikolai Gogol Dead Souls

Fragment 812

Barthes writes: the binary classification of concepts seems frequent in structural thought, as if the metalanguage of the linguist reproduced, like a mirror, the binary structure of the system it is describing. However, on the level of the discourse, it is usually a tripartite classification of concepts which operates. Here are some examples from historiography:

The sources of England’s wealth must be sought in i) her extensive domestic circulation of goods, ii) in her advanced division of labour, and iii) in the superiority of her machines.
Louis Simond 1812

So far the history of Europe has been dominated by the three great forces of i) Hellenic civilisation, ii) the Roman empire, iii) the Christian religion, the first two clearly interlinked, but the last deriving from the east and challenging at many crucial points the i) conduct, ii) beliefs and iii) interests of the ancient world.
H.A.L. Fisher 1935

Industrialization prospers when it is introduced to low income areas – as can be seen today by looking at i) South Korea, ii) Hong Kong and iii) Singapore.
Braudel 1979

This tripartite ordering of concepts has a certain kind of natural symmetry about it (Father Son, Holy Ghost; Centre, Left and Right). However, it risks at the same time imposing an artificial structure on the world, risks oversimplifying it, tidying it up. Were there really only three sources of English wealth in the 19th century? Were there really only three forces which dominated European history up until the Germanic invasions of the 3rd Century? Are there really only three examples of areas with rapid industrialisation? Or have these trinities been selected by the discourse in its drive for explicatory convenience, in its search for rhetorical order? What criteria influence their selection? What does this structural imperative of the discourse leave out, and (how) does it effect the way we see the world?
We see what we bring. Henry Adams.

Fragment 712

Notes on Dickens 9

Sinyavsky writes of Gogol: his language shifts from the object of speech to speech itself… that is why we perceive Gogol’s prose so distinctly as prose, and not even as a form of putting thoughts into words… it has its content and even if you wish, its subject in itself - this prose which steps forth in the free image of speech about facts worth mentioning, speech in a pure sense about nothing. Substitute Dickens for Gogol, and you have the most accurate description of Dickens’s language as any I have read.

Bayley writes comparing the two: Unlike Dickens’s, Gogol’s words are never interested in exploiting emotion or in their own luxuriant freedom and sentiment; they are much too absorbed in themselves. The Dickensian interest in exploiting the emotion of words (a contentious issue in itself) aside, Bayley puts up a false dichotomy between words' own luxuriant freedom and sentiment and their self-absorption: but to me these two qualities of words define each other, and they are the qualities that both writers share. What else is the self-absorption of Gogol’s words but a luxuriating in their freedom and sentiment/what else is the self-absorption of Dickens's words but a luxuriating in their freedom and sentiment?

Here is Dickens in 1836 describing the morning streets in Sketches by Boz:
Rough sleepy-looking animals of strange appearance, something between ostlers and hackney coachmen begin to take down the shutters of early public houses, and little deal tables, with the ordinary preparations for a street breakfast make their appearance at their customary stations. Numbers of men and women, (principally the latter), carrying on their heads heavy baskets of fruit, toil down the park side of Piccadilly, on their way to Covent Garden, and, following each other in rapid succession, form a long straggling line from thence to the turn of the road at Knightsbridge…

And here is Gogol in 1835, describing the morning streets in Nevsky Prospect:
At that time Nevsky Prospect is empty: the stout shop owners and their sales clerks are still asleep in their Holland nightshirts or are soaping their noble cheeks and drinking coffee; beggars gather near the pastry shops, where a sleepy Ganymede, who yesterday was flying about with chocolate like a fly, crawls out, tieless, broom in hand and tosses them stale cakes and leftovers. Down the streets trudge useful folk: Russian muzhaks pass by occasionally, hurrying to work, their boots crusted with lime that even the Ekaterininsky Canal, famous for its cleanliness, would be unable to wash off…

There is the same accumulation of very specific and digressive detail, the same energy in the telling and bustle in the seeing, the same metonymic use of a single swift gesture to delineate a character or an object, the same caricatured sharpness of vision, the same acute awareness of food and drink and their economic ramifications, the same urbanity and wit, the same ironic observations spoken to the side; those noble cheeks and the pastry boy flying about, are very Dickensian, very Gogolian…

Fragment 512

Notes on Dostoevsky 1

Dostoevsky is supposed to have said "We all came out from under Gogol's Overcoat", and Gogol himself wrote in that story: Everything in holy Russia is infected with imitation. In his works of the 1840s Dostevsky engages in a dialogue with Gogol.

The hero of Poor Folk (1846), Makar Devushkin, is a reworking of Akaky Akakievich, the hero of The Overcoat. Akaky Akakievich is described as a creature who is so marginal, that he was born looking like the titular counsellor he eventually becomes. Like Devushkin a copyist, his speech consists of prepositions, adverbs, and finally such particles as have decidedly no meaning and the narrator remarks of him -it's really impossible to get inside a man's soul and learn all he thinks. Dosteovsky gives this utterly empty and contentless character a voice and a soul by transforming him into the inveterate letter writer and would-be poet Devushkin. In a nice touch of irony, Devushkin reads Gogol's tale and remarks: A nasty little book. It’s not even possible there could be such a civil servant. I will make a complaint, a formal complaint. Devushkin is unable to recognize himself in Akakievich, and his outburst has the same hopeless despair about it as Isabella in Measure for Measure: To whom shall I complain? Did I tell this, who would believe me?

Mr Golyadkin, the hero of The Double (1846) is a reworking of Gogol’s Kovalov, the clerk who loses his nose in The Nose. Todorov describes two reactions to the presence of the inexplicable in literature: the marvelous, in which supernatural external forces provide the explanation; and the uncanny, in which the explanation is sought within the character's mind, creating an ontological uncertainty for the character which is mirrored by an epistemological uncertainty for the reader. In Gogol, there is always the presence of magic, but it is masked by the comedy. How did the nose get inside the bread? How exactly does a nose don a uniform, attend church, and book a carriage place to Riga? In Gogol the presence of the marvelous is drowned out by laughter; it never becomes unsettling, and we never question it because we are laughing at the absurdity, (even if we sometimes still rub our noses while reading just to reassure ourselves….). Kovalov is furious about his disfigurement, vexed, inconvenienced, but nonetheless it doesn’t threaten his sense of being. Mr Golyadkin, on the other hand, loses not his nose, but his mind. The presence of the double causes him and the reader to question his sanity. In Dostoevsky’s early period, Gogolian magical laughter becomes Hoffmanesque uncanniness. In his maturity, after his terrible experiences in Siberia, Hoffmanesque uncanniness is transmuted into a much more profound and urgent quest for the metaphysical, the spiritual.

The Landlady (1847) has structural and thematic echoes of Gogol's Nevsky Prospect. A lonely flaneur chances upon a mysterious woman and follows her through the streets. Like the woman in Gogol’s tale (a dream or a real woman, a high society debutante or common prostitute?) the landlady is a source of interpretative uncertainty both for the protagonist and for the reader (sane or crazy? manipulater or manipulated?) She begins to speak like a heroine out of a traditional Russian fairy tale, and her back story of life by the Volga is reminiscent of one of the Ukranian Tales by Gogol.

The Dostoevskyan tropes: the put-upon loner, the hopeless flaneur, the lowly position in society, the people who live in corners, the presence of the uncanny, the redemption of a prostitute, the city itself; all these tropes come from Gogol’s Petersburg Tales. The typical Gogolian attitude in these tales is the skirmish; the narrator dances up to the characters, pulls their hats down over their eyes and dodges back out of reach. Gogol is never still, his comic eye roams everywhere, distracted by detail and digression, continually swerving off: In the department of… but it would be better not to say in which department… After that… but here again the whole incident is shrouded in mist, and what came later is decidedly unknown...though he himself was unable to explain the reason for it. Dostoevsky’s starting point as a writer is to discern an embryonic inner life in the Gogolian character and to give it expression: There is a crack in my soul, and I can hear it trembling, quivering, stirring deep inside me, says Devushkin, but it could just as well apply to Akakievich. Rather than the skirmish, Dostoevsky's tactic is the long engagement, the searching, steady, unblinking gaze. He essays and succeeds in getting inside a man’s soul and learning all he thinks.

"Poor Folk" Dostoevsky

There is a crack in my soul, and I can hear it trembling, quivering, stirring deep inside me.

Prior to the publication of this, Dostoevsky’s first novel, the only other literary work he had completed was a translation of Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet. The shade of Balzac hovers over this tale of love and life in the very lowest rung of the middle classes, especially in its foregrounding of money, the problems of obtaining it, and the effect of grinding poverty on character and behaviour. Another Balzacian influence is the city itself, and we are plunged into the artifice of St Petersburg with its overcast skies, ice clogged canals, mouldy icing and bursting tenements, with their noise, overheated rooms and fetid, soupy air.

The story tells of the love and friendship between two denizens of the lower middle class, and their struggle to stay in this class. Varvara exists on the line between virtue and prostitution by taking in sewing, and her male counterpart, Makar is a clerk on the lowest rung of the civil service. The story is presented as an exchange of letters between the two main characters. The letters are simply presented to the reader, there is no framing device, no editor makes an appearance to comment on the letters and their provenance, and we cannot even be sure if the exchange of letters is complete.

The male protagonist is the first in a long line of Dostoevskeyan anti-heroes, undergound men, figures of such extreme marginality that even they are not sure whether they exist: He’s a man with a reputation what am I? Compared to him, I simply don’t exist…(MD to VD June 26), an ontological uncertainty which Dostoevsky picked up from his reading of Hoffman, and which he was to develop more fully in the later tale The Double. Makar Devushkin lives behind a screen in the kitchen and works as a copyist: he has no space or original contribution of his own. His character comes to life only in and through his letters; he writes himself, creates himself through writing, and exists only in the dialogue with Varvara: when I got to know you, I began for a start to know myself better…before you came along, I was as good as asleep, I wasn’t really living in the world at all… when you came my way, you lit up the whole of my dark life so that my mind and soul were illuminated …(MD to VD August 24) When she leaves Petersburg to marry Bykov, the dialogue stops, Devushkin disappears, and the book ends.
He also displays the irrational behaviour which was Dostoevsky’s contribution to the philosophical picture of man. When he retrieves his button from under the feet of his boss, to his own horror, he acts against his own best interest: had I not been such a fool I would have stood to attention and kept still. But oh, no: I began pressing the button against the torn off threads, as though that would make it stay on and what’s more, I smiled and smiled again. (MD to VD September 9) The drunken episodes, the getting into debt for Varvara’s sake are also forms of irrational behaviour. His Dostoevskyan irascibility, however, is mediated by a tenderness towards Varvara and towards the world, a tenderness which is not present in the later loners of the Dostoevsky canon.

The novel is as much about literature as about the urban poor. Many of the plot incidents revolve around the acquisition of books, there are constant references to other literature: grammars, style manuals, Pushkin, excerpts from the (terrible) writings of Devushkin’s friend and hero, Mr Ratazyayev. The whole tale can be read as Dostoevsky’s dialogue with the overwhelming power of Gogol. The characters lend each other books and comment on them. Devushkin lives in fear of being lampooned in a feuilleton (Dostoevsky himself lampoons another one of his marginal folk in the darkly hilarious tale Mr Prokharchin, where even the narrator calls the eponymous hero a fool). Although Devushkin knows he is a marginal being, he nonetheless has a fully developed sense of amour propre and is quick to take umbrage. The epistolary nature of this novel is a kind of tact on Dostoevsky’s part, in allowing these marginal characters to speak for themselves with their own voices, without the presence of a narrator to describe them, to falsify them or to mock them.

Devushkin is struck by a quote from a style manual which is a kind of manifesto for the group around Ratazyayev: Literature is a picture, or rather in a certain sense both a picture and a mirror: it is an expression of emotion, a subtle form of criticism, a didactic lesson and a document (MD to VD June 26). This may also stand as a manifesto, not only for the method and subject of Poor Folk, but indeed for Dostoevsky’s entire career: the Christian didacticism of his later novels, the expressionism of his confessional stance, his picture of underground and marginal types, his criticisms of society, nihilism and other forms of philosophy, and the mirror he holds up to the modern soul.