The Meek One grew out of Dostoevskys meditations on the suicide of a young woman, mentioned briefly in the October 1876 installment of his Diary of a Writer , the issue before the one in which the story itself was published. About a month ago, he wrote, there appeared in all the Petersburg newspapers a few short lines in small type about a certain Petersburg suicide: a poor young girl, a seamstress, threw herself out of a fourth-story windowbecause she simply could not find work to feed herself. It was added that she threw herself out and fell to the ground holding an icon in her hands . This holding of an icon is a strange and unheard-of feature in suicides! So then this was some sort of meek , humble suicide. In shaping a story around this incident, Dostoevsky went back to the love story in the second part of Notes from Underground , where the hero, in indirect 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 Ive been incapable even of picturing any other love, and Ive 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! Butwhy? Wont I hate her, maybe tomorrow even, precisely for kissing her feet today? Wont 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 Dostoevskys 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 Dostoevskys work. One of these is the theme of ridiculousness. The fear of being or looking ridiculous marks most of Dostoevskys 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 Dostoevskys 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 onefirst, 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, whats more, youve 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 Dostoevskys 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 Dostoevskys last artistic work before The Brothers Karamazov and points to that novels 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