Poor Folk , livre ebook

Copyright
This edition first published in the United States in 2003 by
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ISBN: 978-1-59020-970-7
Contents
Copyright
Introduction
Begin Reading
Notes
INTRODUCTION
Poor Folk occupies a position of particular interest and importance in both the history of Russian literature and Dostoevsky’s work as a whole. Several lines of development in Russian prose intersect: sentimentalism with its roots in Karamzin’s “Poor Liza” (1792), naturalism and the so-called physiological sketch which was popularized in the press of the early 1840s, and of course, the phenomenon of Gogol, with whom Dostoevsky maintains a dialogue throughout the novel. These are not the only intersecting strands in the web of literary motifs and tendencies which make up Poor Folk , but they are perhaps the most historically significant, and coincidentally find a living emblem in one man of the period: Vissarion Belinsky.
In the mid-forties Belinsky was the leading radical literary critic in Russia. Despite the fact that he was largely uninterested in the specifically literary aspects to a writer’s work which were eventually to distinguish it as great, Belinsky was able to identify instinctively, as it would seem, those writers such as Gogol and Dostoevsky who were to become the great masters of Russian prose. The reason appears to have been connected with his ability to perceive what made a work “typical” of its age (in the sense of standing at the very nexus of various dominant social and literary tendencies of the day). This is what happened in the case of Poor Folk . Since the late thirties Belinsky had undergone his own metamorphosis from a position of right-wing Hegelian acceptance of “reality” to a left-wing position of the need for a radical socialist transformation of society and the concurrent need for a literature which reflected all that was wrong with contemporary society—literature in the naturalist mold. When Gogol’s Dead Souls was published in 1842 Belinsky had contributed to turning the mid-forties into a Gogolian period in which the literary scene was dominated by discussions of Gogol’s art as a truthful representation of social reality. Belinsky, like so many other Russian critics, used Gogol as a springboard to trumpet abroad his own preoccupations with the duty of Russian writers to take progressive standpoints in their depiction of contemporary society, its appalling injustices, and the conditions in which the downtrodden in both the city and the countryside were living. It was not surprising, therefore, that when they read the manuscript of Poor Folk in the summer of 1845, his pleiade was swept off its feet by a work which seemed to represent the very distillation of what was to be hoped for in a progressive piece of Russian prose. It was “typical” in the purest sense. Nekrasov (editor of The Petersburg Almanac in which Poor Folk first appeared in January 1846) hailed Dostoevsky as “the new Gogol,” while the editor and critic Panaev and the novelist Grigorovich joined Belinsky in whetting the public’s appetite with enthusiastic reports of the new luminary about to arise on the literary horizon. Belinsky wrote to Annenkov that “the novel reveals secrets about life and character-types in Russia of a kind never dreamt of by anyone else before him.”
In Poor Folk Belinsky found the naturalism, the authenticity, the humanitarianism, the hint of social protest, and the move away from romanticism which he believed the age demanded. Yet while moving forward in these areas of naturalism and social concern, the novel remained rooted in specifically Russian literary tradition, synthesizing as it did various aspects of Pushkin’s and Gogol’s art. In some ways—although Belinsky would not have described it in these terms— Poor Folk may be read as a dialogue between the Belinsky/Gogol period of the mid-forties and other periods of Russian literature, beginning with Karamzin, and a number of foreign, and more particularly French, literary modes.
At one level the whole novel is a dialogue between Pushkin and Gogol as seen from the perspective of the mid-forties. The dialogue stands out most clearly in Devushkin’s acceptance of Pushkin’s story “The Stationmaster” as a realistic yet compassionate account of the vicissitudes of a poor government official on the one hand and his rejection of Gogol’s “Overcoat” as “unrealistic” on the other, presumably because the narrative with its grotesque comic elements did not appear to be as sympathetic to the protagonist as Devushkin was educated to expect. The Pushkinian motif is, of course, reinforced by its attachment to the Pokrovsky father and son when Varvara and old Pokrovsky buy the young raznochinets the complete works of Pushkin for his birthday. (Old Pokrovsky may in fact be seen as a refraction of the image of Vyrin, the stationmaster, in Pushkin’s story—both Vyrin and Pokrovsky suffer humiliation and rejection at the hands of their children and give themselves up to drink.) The Gogolian strand is brought out more in the ironic parallels between Devushkin and Akaky Akakievich from “The Overcoat.” Both lead empty, meaningless lives as copyists in government departments in Petersburg, focusing all their emotional energy on one object—in Akaky Akakievich’s case, his new overcoat, in Devushkin’s, Varvara—and both are ultimately and quite unjustly robbed of the object of their obsessive love.
Dostoevsky reworked elements he took from both authors. While referring back to Pushkinian themes and motifs from “The Stationmaster” and The Bronze Horseman , he expanded the psychological analysis from within and introduced new notes of sentimentalism, playing more overtly than Pushkin did on the reader’s sensibilities. But what really transformed Poor Folk for all its sentimentalism and humanitarianism, into “the first social novel in this country,” as Belinsky called it, was the appearance of Gogol’s Dead Souls and “The Overcoat” on the Russian literary scene. Although Dostoevsky had, of course, read Gogol’s earlier works, it was not until 1843 that we have evidence of intense interest in Gogol on Dostoevsky’s part. His interest was newly aroused by Belinsky’s changed interpretation of Gogol as a humanitarian writer. Although he relied on devices of the grotesque and tragicomedy to make this point, Gogol was considered by Belinsky to be a “social” writer. Dostoevsky modified the grotesque side of Gogol’s work and transformed Gogol’s naturalistic details into an aspect of social observation. He also aligned the narrative point of view more closely with the characters’ own.
The result of the literary dialogue in Poor Folk is a sentimental naturalism which was to be reflected in many later works by Russian naturalist writers.
The background to the writing of Poor Folk in 1845 throws considerable light on these different dialogues. Naturally, there are many biographical elements in the text from Dostoevsky’s own experience: the bucolic idylls in Varvara’s notes refer back to Dostoevsky’s enjoyment of the countryside as a child at Darovoe during the summer months; similarly, Varvara’s alienation from her boarding school reflects his own; Varvara’s father, harassed and made wretched by his desperate situation, yet not by nature cruel or heartless, was doubtless suggested by the character of Dostoevsky’s own father, and Varvara’s attitude of fear mixed with a desire to please is almost certainly patterned on Dostoevsky’s attitude to his father; and the deathbed scene of Varvara’s mother almost certainly echoes the death of Dostoevsky’s own mother in 1836. However, despite these motifs with their origins in Dostoevsky’s own experience, it is the literary elements in the novel’s background which are the most significant.
During the years 1837 to 1839, while he was a student at the Engineering Academy of St. Petersburg, Dostoevsky formed a close friendship with a civil servant from the Ministry of Finance called Ivan Shidlovsky. Under Shidlovsky’s tutelage, Dostoevsky immersed himself in the Romantic literature of the 1830s which abounded in the sufferings of exalted beings, stormy passions, desires unassuaged and melancholy musings. Shidlovsky himself, with his sunken cheeks and burning eyes, seemed cast in the role of Romantic hero par excellence —steeped in Byron, Schiller, and Shakespeare, he appeared to Dostoevsky as a lofty soul, suffering from a touching combination of unrequited love and modest circumstances. It was in Dostoevsky’s appreciation of this combination that the germ of the idea of Poor Folk in fact lay.
Romantic motifs, with their origin in either the literature of the time or Shidlovsky, play an important part in Poor Folk . The influence of foreign models, such as the works of Walter Scott, Schiller, and Byron, with whom Dostoevsky had been acquainted since an early age, should also not be underestimated. These motifs were, however, transformed by the novel’s naturalist framework. Suffering which ennobles, circumstances which isolate and humiliate, noble idealism, crossed love, purity of soul, innocent hearts cruelly wronged—all these motifs are present, although in their new form they are unexpectedly present