The second form dreaming takes in Dostoevsky is that of an unexpected and intense vision, which comes to the dreamer in sleep as a gift or a final revelation, a living image that awakens him to a truth he had not suspected or had not understood before. Such are Alyoshas dream of the messianic banquet and Mityas dream of the wee one in The Brothers Karamazov . These are confirming, saving dreams. They have a negative counterpart, ultimately serving the same purpose, in the nightmares of Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment , of Stavrogin in Demons , and finally in Ivan Karamazovs hallucination of the devil.
With his second book, The Double (1846), another key motif of Dostoevskys work appears. The story tells about the emergence of a Mr. Golyadkin Jr. in the government office where the petty clerk Golyadkin serves, a parody and rival of himself who eventually drives him mad. Mr. Golyadkin Sr. is a proud man and keeps aloof from his fellow clerks; his double is the reverse. Golyadkin Sr. says of him: He has such a playful, nasty character Hes such a scoundrel, such a fidget, a licker, a lickspittle, but then adds, such a Golyadkin. Here Dostoevsky first came upon the surprising truth that pride, far from unifying and fortifying the person, as we might think, is the source of all inner divisions. In The Double it literally splits Mr. Golyadkin in two. Dostoevsky did not repeat this bold artistic experiment, which in fact never satisfied him, but the motif of the double occurs in subtler forms throughout his work. It raises by implication the question of human unity, the oneness of the person and of mankind, which Dostoevsky explored all his lifepolitically in his involvement with revolutionary groups in the 1840s, spiritually in his subsequent religious meditations.
The phenomenon of the double in Dostoevskys work is not subject to purely psychological explanation. There is always a social nexus, an outer and collective world that is reflected in or impinges upon the inner, personal world. In The Double this nexus is the administrative bureaucracy introduced by the emperor Nicholas I, in which, as the critic Konstantin Mochulsky wrote, the schema of human values was replaced by the table of ranks. Administrative unity is external
and imposed; behind it there is a growing disintegration of human life. To dramatize this disunity, Dostoevsky often resorts to the device of the scandalous feast or inappropriate gathering (as one book of The Brothers Karamazov is entitled). So he does with the farewell party in Notes from Underground , the funeral dinner for Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment , and, more scandalous still, the gathering of all the main characters of Demons in Varvara Petrovnas drawing room. Here, says Bakhtin, everything is unexpected, out of place, incompatible and impermissible if judged by lifes ordinary normal course. Things usually hidden are brought to light, unspeakable words are spoken, people are exposed, denounced, humiliated; in tone and effect these scenes are somewhere between wild farce and hysteria. They are marked by a particular shamelessness.
Scandal scenes are loud and chaotic, but the true scandal, the scandalous victim, is silent or inarticulate in Dostoevsky. Separation from what is living leads to violence against what is living, to a violation of the living, to violated innocence. Most often the victim is a child; in both Crime and Punishment and Demons it is a sexually abused little girl. Among all the thinkers, talkers, and writers who populate Dostoevskys works, the child stands mute, unable to comprehend or protest. Certain women play a similar roleSonya Marmeladov, for instance, and the half-mad Marya Lebyadkin. Through them the theme deepens until it touches, in Mochulskys words, on the eternal feminine principle of the world, the mystical soul of the earth.
Dostoevsky composed with these motifs and figures like a musician, playing variations on them, combining them in new ways, working them out in different keys and with different harmonies and tempos. In his novels they are formed into extremely complex structures. In his shorter works they appear in an uncombined state. That may be why some of the most penetrating commentaries on DostoevskyI am thinking particularly of Bakhtins Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics and two books by René Girard: Deceit, Desire, and the Novel and Dostoïevski, du double à lunité give so much attention to the stories we have collected here.
Along with the consistency of its themes, Dostoevskys work exhibits a constant formal inventiveness. This, too, can be seen in a pure state in his shorter pieces. Hailed by earlier critics (Vyacheslav Ivanov in his 1916 study Freedom and the Tragic Life , and Konstantin Mochulsky in his critical biography, among others) as the creator of the novel-tragedya concept fitting the high seriousness and dramatic form of his artDostoevsky has been called by Bakhtin the innovator of a completely new type of artistic thinking, which we have provisionally called polyphonic It could even be said that Dostoevsky created something like a new artistic model of the world, one in which many basic aspects of old artistic form were subjected to a radical restructuring. The stories in this collection support Bakhtins findings in his discussion of the characteristics of genre in Dostoevskythe presence in his work of elements of Menippean satire (the most well-known ancient examples are The Golden Ass of Apuleius and Petroniuss Satyricon), of the allegorical mystery plays of the Middle Ages, of the Voltairean philosophical taleall genres with a marked popular and comic spirit. This is not to say that Dostoevsky imitated old forms or combined them in some peculiar hybrid; his work is artistically of a piece and unmistakably his own; but the formal demands imposed on him by his vision forced him to expand the limits of nineteenth-century realism. (Commenting on the scandalous drawing-room scene in Demons , Bakhtin notes: It is absolutely impossible to imagine such a scene in, say, a novel by Leo Tolstoy or Turgenev. This is no grand drawing room, it is the public square with all the specific logic of carnivalized public-square life.) Dostoevskys formal inventiveness came in part, then, from a listening to tradition. It was this that gave his work its historical depth and resonance. Behind these tales of the most ordinary, obscure lives, there are the broader features of the menippeathe free use of the fantastic, the polemicizing with conflicting ideas, and, above all, the testing of truths in extreme situations.