Double , livre ebook

Copyright
The edition first published in the United States in 2004 by
Ardis Publishers
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Translation copyright © 1985 by Ardis
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ISBN: 978-1-590-20938-7
To my son, Edgar
CONTENTS
Copyright
Translator’s Introduction
The Double The Adventures of Mr. Golyadkin
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Notes
Rough Drafts for a Proposed Reworking of The Doublet
Translator’s Introduction
I.
Except for a few fragmentary drafts dating from the early 1860s, there are no extant manuscripts of The Double . They were probably destroyed in part by Dostoevsky (along with the manuscripts for other earlier works) before his arrest in late April 1849 as a member of the Petrashevsky circle and in part by the Third Section, which confiscated his papers when arresting him. 1
Dostoevsky began to work on The Double in the summer of 1845, probably in Revel, where he arrived on June 9 to spend the summer with the family of his brother, Mikhail. 2 A letter to Mikhail, written just after Dostoevsky’s return to Petersburg and dated the end of August-beginning of September, shows that during the summer Dostoevsky had made his brother familiar with Mr. Golyadkin. In the letter Dostoevsky calls himself “a real Golyadkin” and promises to begin working again the next day on the tale, which he had abandoned toward the end of his stay in Revel; he justifies his slowness in taking it up again by saying: “Golyadkin has gained because of my spleen. Two ideas and one new situation were born.” 3 His work on it was resumed in September 1845. 4 He wrote another letter to Mikhail on October 8, 1845, humorously using the speech formulas of Mr. Golyadkin Senior and saying that he anticipated finishing it around November 15; he told Mikhail that Belinsky was urging him to finish it and “had already spread the word about it all over the literary world and had practically concluded an advance sale to Kraevsky.” 5 His letter of November 16 to Mikhail showed, however, that Golyadkin was still not finished but absolutely had to be by the 25th. 6 Dostoevsky had high hopes for its success: “Golyadkin is coming out superbly; it’s going to be my masterpiece.” 7
Early in December 1845 Dostoevsky read the beginning chapters of his tale to a gathering at Belinsky’s. Ivan Turgenev left when the reading was only half over. Dostoevsky described the evening many years later, in November 1877, in The Diary of a Writer: “…I think it was in early December—Belinsky insisted that I read two or three chapters of this tale at his house. For this purpose he even arranged an evening gathering (which he almost never did) and invited his closest friends. Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev was there, I remember. He listened to only half of what I read, praised it and left. He was in an awful hurry to get somewhere. Belinsky liked the three or four chapters which I read very much (although they didn’t deserve it). But Belinsky didn’t know the end of the tale and was under the spell of the charm of Poor Folk .” 8
The Double was actually finished on January 28, 1846, four days before the issue of Notes of the Fatherland in which it was to appear came out. 9 On February 1, the day of its appearance, Dostoevsky wrote Mikhail: “Golyadkin is coming out today. Four days ago I was still writing it … Golyadkin is ten times better than Poor Folk . Our bunch says that after Dead Souls there’s never been anything like it in Russia, that it’s a work of genius and how they do go on! What hopes they all place in me! Really, I couldn’t have had greater success with Golyadkin. You will like it better than I don’t know what! You will like it even better than Dead Souls , that I know.” 10
In his review of The Petersburg Collection which had come out in January 1846 and contained Poor Folk , Belinsky had written: “In this issue of Notes of the Fatherland the Russian public will read yet another novel by Mr. Dostoevsky called The Double . It is more than enough to convince them that no person of ordinary talent begins his career with works of this kind.” 11
But the critical response to the tale, some of which is given here, was in general negative. L. V. Brant, writing in The Northern Bee for 28 February 1846, said:
One cannot imagine anything more colorless, monotonous, or boring than the endlessly drawn out, mortally exhausting story of the unentertaining “adventures of Mr. Golyadkin,” who, from the very beginning to the very end of the tale, is deranged, incessantly makes blunders and does foolish things that are not funny and not moving, despite all the author’s efforts to depict them as such in his pretensions to some ‘deep,’ abstruse humor. There is no end to the wordiness—heavyhanded, annoying, irksome, to the repetitions, to the circumlocutions for one and the same thought, for one and the same words which the author has come to like so much. We sincerely pity he young man who so falsely understands art and has obviously been made confused by the literary ‘coterie’ which for reasons of its own claims that he is a genius. 12
S. P. Shevyryov wrote in The Muscovite (No. 2, 1846):
…We do not understand how the author of Poor Folk , a tale that is nevertheless remarkable, could write The Double … It is a sin against artistic conscience, without which there cannot be true talent. At the start one is constantly greeting familiar figures from Gogol: now Chichikov, now the Nose, now Petrushka, now the turkey cock in the shape of a samovar, now Selifan; but the reading of the entire tale, if you really feel like reading it to the end, has the effect on you of a most unpleasant and boring nightmare after a rich supper. Woe to a talent if it binds itself to the rush proofs of a journal and printing presses extract tales from it. Then only nightmares can be born, not poetic creations. Mr. Dostoevsky will understand us if his talent is true.” 13
K. S. Aksakov wrote in The Petersburg Collection in 1847:
In this tale we now see not the influence of Gogol, but an imitation of him … In it Mr. Dostoevsky constantly mimics Gogol and frequently imitates him to such a degree that what comes out is no longer imitation, but borrowing … In speaking of Mr. Dostoevsky’s tale The Double , one can repeat the words which his Mr. Golyadkin often repeats: “Dear, it’s bad, bad! Dear, it’s bad, bad! Dear, my case is pretty bad now! Oh, dear, so that’s the turn my case has taken now!” Yes, indeed, it’s bad and it’s taken a bad turn. If it were not for Mr. Dostoevsky’s first tale, we would have no patience whatsoever to read his second; but we did it out of obligation, wishing to find something in his tale, and we found nothing; it is so boring that we put the book down many times and came back to it again and forced ourselves to read it through. Of course, judging by the first tale we hardly expected that the second would be like this. Where is the talent that we saw in the first tale? Or did it last only for the one? It wasn’t for long that Dostoevsky flattered our hopes; he has quickly shown what he is.” 14
A. A. Grigorev wrote in The Finnish Messenger (No. 9, 1846):
The Double , in our humanly imperfect opinion, is a work that is pathological and therapeutic but by no means literary: it is a story of madness, analyzed, it is true, to the extreme, but, nevertheless, as repulsive as a dead body. Furthermore, after reading The Double we unwittingly thought that if the author goes any further along this path he is fated to play in our literature the role that Hoffmann plays in German literature … Mr. Dostoevsky has immersed himself in the analysis of the life of civil servants to such an extent that boring, naked reality is now beginning to take on for him the form of a delirium close to madness. Alas! one involuntarily recalls the idea of Gogol’s “The Portrait!” … 15
Responding in February 1846 to the attacks on The Double in The Northern Bee , 16 Belinsky said of Dostoevsky’s first two efforts: “Many would consider it a glorious and brilliant thing even to conclude their careers with these works. In the March 1846 issue of Notes of the Fatherland Belinsky included lengthier laudatory remarks about The Double in his extended review of The Petersburg Collection :
Being the person of unusual talent that he is, the author in no way repeated himself in his second work-and it depicts a completely new world. The hero of the novel, Mr. Golyadkin, is one of those touchy people, crazy for self-esteem, who are so frequently to be encountered in the lower and middle strata of our society. It constantly seems to him that he is being insulted by words, looks and gestures, that intrigues are being plotted against him everywhere and attempts being made to undermine him. What makes this all the more funny is that his status, his rank, his job, his brains, his abilities are absolutely incapable of arousing envy towards him in any one. He’s not bright and not stupid, not rich and not poor, is very good and has a character that is soft to the point of being weak; and he could live on this earth not at all badly; but the morbid touchiness and suspiciousness of his character is the dark demon of his