Category: Russian Literature

Crime and Punishment Revisited

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is among the most accessible “classics” of world literature because its tale of murder and its consequences is immediately exciting. All the same, it took me about three attempts before I first finished it. I am now reading it a third time, and each time I feel I understand the book a little better. So far, I have read the first two parts of the book’s six, and I am already overflowing with impressions and observations that I would like to share. The book is so thought-provoking, that simply writing a post at its completion would be to do it an injustice.

World of Decay

I think the thing that has struck me the most this time round is just how grim and depressing the world of Crime and Punishment really is. Within the first two parts we have Marmeladov’s death, an attempted suicide, and plenty of other suggestions of abuse and suffering, not to mention the murder of the pawnbroker which forms the heart of the work.

Colour

Part of this grimness is delivered through Dostoevsky’s use of colour, especially the colour yellow, the traditional colour of sickness and decay. When we find it throughout the entire world of Crime and Punishment’s Saint Petersburg we are left with the feeling that the world itself is falling to pieces. We have Raskolnikov’s wallpaper, the “yellow glass filled with yellow water” that he is given at the police station, the yellow face of the woman who attempts suicide, Sonya’s yellow ticket legalising her work as a prostitute, and most memorably, the “ominous yellowish-black spot” that marks Marmeladov’s fatal wound from the horse’s hoof. There is also the red of blood. When Raskolnikov awakes in the beginning of part II he worries that his clothes are covered in it. Then, when he meets a member of the police later on, he is drenched in it – but in this case it’s Marmeladov’s.

A yellow and decaying wall
While I would like to say that the Saint Petersburg of today could not play host to a similar tragedy to that of Crime and Punishment, I feel like I’d be lying. Just last year a professor here killed and dismembered his student and tried to throw the pieces of her body and himself into the Neva river. Anyway, this is a view onto the inside of my courtyard. When I first moved in, my girlfriend said it looked like it had come from a Dostoevsky novel. Luckily the inside of my flat is nicer.

Clothes and Money

But colour is not the only thing that gives this world its feeling of decline. Money is constantly in focus in these early chapters, whether it be the landlady’s demands for rent, or else Marmeladov’s suffering family watching him drink his salary away, or else of course the pawnbroker herself with her miserliness. Like the characters themselves, who are always on the brink of destitution, we are unable to avoid reading about money in these chapters. Clothing in Crime and Punishment has a similar role, making us aware of the essential poverty of most of its characters. Razumikhin’s joke when he shows Raskolnikov the new clothes he has bought him, that “we have to make a human being out of you”, nonetheless expresses a fundamental truth about poverty’s ability to dehumanise its sufferers. These people can barely even dress themselves with dignity.

Women

But I think the final sign of decay that I’ve found hardest to avoid is Dostoevsky’s representation of women. In Crime and Punishment the women we come across are exclusively downtrodden and suffering. The differences between them concern simply whether they try to maintain some kind of dignity, like Raskolnikov’s mother and Marmeladov’s wife, or fail to, like the woman on the bridge who attempts suicide. Once, we meet a group of them: “some were over forty, but there were some younger than seventeen; almost every one of them had a black eye”. Dunya, Raskolnikov’s sister, suffers for him in a horrible job in their hometown. Sonya, likewise, suffers for her own family. Only by taking economic responsibility onto themselves to try to save others can the women have a chance of saving themselves. Even Nastasya, Raskolnikov’s comparatively not-falling-apart maid, has a “morbidly nervous laughter”. Everyone’s on edge here.

Crime and Punishment as a Horror Movie

Connected with the feverish yellow world of Crime and Punishment is the feeling I have had with this reading that Dostoevsky’s novel has a particularly intense portrayal of reality and bodies not far from their portrayal in works of horror, especially movies. Of course, there is the dinginess of the world, but there is also the murder itself. When Raskolnikov stands outside the pawnbroker’s door, he feels that “someone was standing silently just at the latch, hiding inside and listening, in the same way as he was outside, and also, it seemed, with an ear to the door…” Perhaps I am not explaining it well, but what I mean is this image of fear and closeness to mortal peril is just the sort of thing that we see in Alien when the xenomorph is right next to Ripley, but not yet aware of her.

A scene from the movie Alien 3 where Ripley, a human, is very close to an alien, but so far undetected
A scene in Alien 3 where Ripley has a close encounter with the xenomorph. In Crime and Punishment there are a lot of moments where characters seem to be unnaturally close to each other, both physically and sometimes spiritually, with the same horrific effect.

The incomprehensibility of violence is also an example of this. Raskolnikov’s terrifying dream, when he witnesses the brutal murder of a horse for very little reason, corresponds to that lurking question always present in horror movies with a vaguely humanoid villain – why? Why is this happening, why does this have to happen? When Raskolnikov is forced to kill the pawnbroker’s sister we are faced with another such moment, when the “why” we previously had – to give the crone’s money away to those who need it – is suddenly rendered inadequate, now that it seems to require a wholly innocent victim as well.

Dostoevsky’s language in Crime and Punishment has its own violent intensity too, such as when Raskolnikov feels “as if a nail were being driven into his skull”, or when he looks like he “had just been released from torture”. Our murderer’s mental tension is the same tensed suspense of a good horror movie, where danger is just around the corner.

Ideas and Responsibility

And then there are the ideas. I would not like to go into too much detail before I have finished the book, but I’d at least like to make some observations on the chessboard as it sits before me, as it were.

An illustration to Crime and Punishment by Nikolay Karazin, showing the moment Raskolnikov is forced to kill the pawnbroker's sister to defend himself from capture.
An illustration to Crime and Punishment by Nikolay Karazin, showing the moment Raskolnikov is forced to kill the pawnbroker’s sister to defend himself from capture.

For in Dostoevsky, there is always a war between ideas. We have by this point been introduced to one of Raskolnikov’s motivations in killing – that he could do some good with it by giving away the old woman’s money. But this theoretical approach has already come up against the unpredictability of the world – firstly in that he didn’t succeed in escaping with the money, secondly in that he was forced to kill the sister. Meanwhile, Razumikhin and Luzhin have already began arguing about the new ideas of progress, economic and otherwise. Extreme and self-centred rationality, we have already heard, will lead people to think it’s okay to put a knife into people. Obedience to much to a system is dangerous, as the wonderful image of Raskolnikov being dragged forwards, “as if a piece of his clothing had been caught in the cogs of a machine”, illustrates.

Glimpses of Redemption

Even as these two initial parts show some of the depths of the human soul, they also begin laying the foundations for later redemption. Raskolnikov’s isolation at the police station, “a dark sensation of tormenting, infinite solitude and estrangement suddenly rose to consciousness in his soul”, which is “more a sensation than an awareness, an idea”, is important for giving us understanding of the way that life is feeling just as much as it is idea. Marmeladov, in some way a double of Raskolnikov – they both have close encounters with horsemen and their whips – in his dying moments comes to understand the sacrifice that his family have made for him, and in doing so finds an implicit redemption, when he sees Sonya, “humiliated, crushed, bedizened, and ashamed”, for the first time in her prostitute’s garb. It is too late to change for life, but not too late for death.

Raskolnikov, meanwhile, through giving his money to Marmeladov’s family, has also found “a new, boundless sensation of a sudden influx of full and powerful life”. He has not found redemption yet, but he has taken his first step on the path to goodness, a journey that for me at least makes this novel so great.

Conclusion

For all this seriousness, I almost forgot to mention the humour in Crime and Punishment. Because this time round I’ve really started to find the whole thing quite funny. From this lovely exchange between Nastasya and Raskolnikov (one familiar, no doubt, to my fellow students) –

"Why don’t you do anything now?”
“I do something…” Raskolnikov said, reluctantly and sternly. 
“What do you do?” 
“Work…” 
“Which work?”
"I think.”

– to her comments when Raskolnikov awakes “And, what’s more, you were extremely interested in your own sock, extremely!”, with its equal measure for readers of humour and horror, Crime and Punishment is a hilarious book.

But the questions of guilt and redemption that lie at the heart of it are, and have always been, the ones that most appealed to me. I guess it was my Catholic upbringing that made me particularly aware of my own moral failures and need to atone for them, but I’ve always found these topics in literature, and elsewhere, the most compelling. Whether it be the Amnesia video games, to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, I’ve always enjoyed art that has challenged my ideas of personal responsibility, and shown how we can, and sometimes can’t, change. Perhaps it was thanks to Crime and Punishment that the first seeds towards my eventual time spent volunteering in prison were sowed. Who knows?

What do you think of Crime and Punishment and its themes?

Death and Dignity: Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat

Introduction and Background

Hadji Murat was one of the last works of literature that the aging Leo Tolstoy wrote, but you wouldn’t get that impression reading it. Absent is that preaching tone that marks much of Tolstoy’s work from around the time he finished Anna Karenina until his death. Instead we have a tale that is almost Classical in its grandeur, stakes, and larger-than-life characters. It takes place in the Caucasus in the years 1851-1852, at a point where the Russian subjugation of the native peoples – Chechens, Avars, and many others – was in full swing. The natives, under the Imam Shamil, are waging a brutal guerrilla war against Tsar Nicholas I’s Russian forces. Chief among the guerrilla leaders was one Hadji Murat, but when the story begins, he has decided to switch sides and join his hated Russian enemies. Shamil no longer trusts him and has imprisoned his family. He had little choice.

A painting of Hadji Murat, showing him against a mountain backdrop and with many daggers at his waist.
Hadji Murat, an Avar warlord, was given the nickname the “Red Devil” by the Russians he fought against. But Tolstoy’s novel aims to reveal that in spite of that, he was not so different from his enemies after all.

Against the backdrop of war, it is the personal that stands out. Hadji Murat, like War and Peace before it, shows the messy truth that lies behind maps and military manoeuvres. It shows the suffering, the heroism, and the dignity of ordinary people. Harold Bloom once called it “the best story in the world”. I’m not sure I would go that far, but it’s certainly among the best I’ve ever read.

Translations from the Russian are my own.

Characters over Plot – the Structure of Hadji Murat

One of the first things you notice reading Hadji Murat is that for a story with its hero in its title, the man himself isn’t the only prominent person here. Instead, Tolstoy makes sure to give us so many names and faces, and indeed places, that we’d be forgiven for thinking we’re reading something as long as War and Peace or Anna Karenina. Hadji Murat is a short book, but one of its unique strengths is that it acts like a long one. Even though most of the characters are only involved for a few pages, they are treated as though they could be there for longer. Whether this is a local officer, a cook, or somebody’s wife, we never know what role they’ll have to play.

And this makes us pay attention. Tolstoy’s strategy, it seems to me, has two important effects. The uncertainty surrounding the later involvement of characters means we have to consider carefully all of them in turn, instead of skipping hastily over those who other writers might mark (unintentionally) as having no further role to play. It all reflects an attitude that sees human dignity as more important than anything else, even concision and consistency. And that’s nothing to complain about, both because Tolstoy’s characters are drawn so well, and because the message of respect and human dignity is so important, especially in our times, when the statistical value of people seems more important than the idea that behind every number is a living, breathing person with their own hopes and dreams.

Violence and Death

The second important effect, very much related to the first, is that Tolstoy’s care for characters makes the underlying anti-war message in Hadji-Murat all the more powerful. In stories the main characters sometimes die, usually at the end, and any decent author can make such a death have weight for their readers. But Tolstoy’s careful portrayal of his minor characters means that even their deaths leave a mark.

One death that particularly affected me was the death of a simple soldier, Avdeev. He is introduced as one soldier among a small group, heading out for a quick smoke beyond the walls of their outpost. He doesn’t take a major part in their conversation, and we would likely forget him without a second thought. Tolstoy does not let us. When the soldiers fight a battle with the natives later on, one of them is wounded. “It was none other than that Avdeev who had been out smoking earlier”.

The wounded man is suddenly given a history not because Tolstoy has delved into his dying thoughts, but because he has connected a dying man with the life he had innocently led earlier, a life we ourselves had scarcely noticed. Avdeev’s life is banal, but it is life all the same, and that life has been robbed from him, and Tolstoy, rightly, wants us to be outraged. In dying he has achieved nothing. No grandeur nor glory surrounds him. He hadn’t even managed to load his rifle before he was hit. And as his comrades gather round him, the overwhelming impression is one of the pointlessness of his end, of the stupidity of it. “What, mate, does it feel bad?” One of them asks him. And then Avdeev dies.

But still Tolstoy does not leave him alone. The eighth chapter of Hadji Murat takes us to his home, where his family are hard at work. Avdeev, the virtuous youth, had volunteered to be conscripted in place of his brother, who had children of his own to look after, while Avdeev had only his wife. The family go around doing their simple tasks like threshing oats and bantering, and it’s painful to watch. They do not know that Avdeev is dead. The brother he has left behind is no good at the work and the family scold him for it. And though they all try to forget about Avdeev, to save themselves the worry, they think of him all the time – he was a good worker and they want to send him a letter and money.

The whole chapter is pointless. A modern editor, probably, would cut it. It does not advance the plot an inch. But its pointlessness is its very strength. The stupidity of the chapter within Hadji Murat reflects the stupidity of war and death itself, suddenly removing human joy and life. When at the end of the chapter the family finally hears that Avdeev has died, “protecting the Tsar, the motherland, and the Orthodox faith”, we feel disgusted. It’s a lie that provides no consolation for these lives. And it’s easy to understand, at this point, why his mother wails.

A photo of the mountains and forests of the Caucasus
The landscapes of the Caucasus are breathtaking, but for the Russians they also held a dangerous enemy. Photo from Peretz Partensky of San Francisco CC BY-SA

Authority

The message to Avdeev’s family connects the theme of pointless war-time death with its – in Tolstoy’s view – main cause: misguided authority. People are moved around, killed, and suffer, all because of people who are not affected by their decisions. And so they fail to appreciate them. If they did, Tolstoy would no doubt say, then there would be no more war. Hadji Murat, having lost Shamil’s trust and joined the Russians, finds himself trapped between two tyrants. Both Shamil and Nicholas I receive a chapter’s inspection by Tolstoy’s pen, and neither comes out particularly well. Shamil knows he is fighting a losing battle but refuses to surrender or find a compromise that would result in reduced bloodshed. Instead, he allows his men to believe they are winning against the Russians after all. But Shamil’s treatment is nothing next to Nicholas’s.

Hadji Murat is not a funny book, but the chapter detailing a moment in the life of Nicholas I’s is simultaneously tragic and hilarious. We find him receiving a report on the “capture” of Hadji Murat by the Russians. Tolstoy emphasises the contingency of Hadji Murat’s fate here. If Nicholas hadn’t been in a “bad mood” when he received the report, perhaps history might have been completely different. Nicholas, however, was. He is a petty womaniser, chasing after a married woman at a party, refusing to acknowledge any moral authority except his own, looking at the world through “lifeless eyes” (Tolstoy repeats the description three or four times in just as many pages). He is cruel and stupid. When worried, he begins “to think about what always calmed him: how great he was.” If he had no power, he would be funny, but he does, and the implications are terrifying.

Culture and Blood

Avdeev’s death is not the only one that is sprung on us. The first chapter of Hadji Murat details its eponymous hero’s arrival into a mountain village, where he is offered shelter by a friend. Once again, we are introduced to characters who we would otherwise forget. But Tolstoy, as the book draws towards its closing chapters, returns our attention to them. The Russians, chasing Shamil’s army, torch the village to the ground, kill the animals, and destroy the land. We see them come back from their shelter in the mountains to find their world in ruins.

“Nobody spoke about hatred towards the Russians. What they all felt, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hatred. It was not hatred, but an unwillingness even to acknowledge these Russian dogs as people.”

Tolstoy fought in Chechnya as a young man. We have several short stories and the novel The Cossacks to show for it. But in Hadji Murat his attention goes beyond the Russians to their enemies. I cannot say if Tolstoy accurately portrays the Chechens, but I can say without a doubt that he portrays them with respect. By contrast, he has little love for the Russian army, with the pettiness of its commanders and brutality among much of its rank and file. Their tactics, of destroying the native forests and burning all they can, puts Hadji Murat next to Heart of Darkness as being a powerful Western critique of our own imperialism. Unfortunately, even now, I find most Russians expressing opinions about their southernly neighbours (now successfully “pacified” and “integrated”) that show they still haven’t learned the lessons Tolstoy was trying to teach them a hundred years ago.

We may have our differences, but we aren’t so different.

An Epic Figure – who was Hadji Murat?

No review of Hadji Murat could be complete without the man himself. But like Nostromo in Conrad’s novel of the same name, the figure of Hadji Murat is hard to pin down. While in Conrad’s work we rarely get a glimpse within Nostromo’s mind, Tolstoy freely tells us what Hadji Murat is thinking. But all the same, there is a tension in the story between rumour and official reports, and what Hadji Murat is actually like as a person. Legendary warlord Hadji Murat, we discover early on, is a human being. His main motivation in life is not some epic hatred of the Russians but simply protecting his own family – a universal concern.

The Russians he meets cannot believe that. They are always trying to work out how he’s planning to betray them. The Russians have a kind of mythic view of Hadji Murat that scarcely corresponds to reality. He’s never been scared, so one rumour goes. But when, in Tbilisi (then Tiflis), he recounts his life’s story to a Russian scribe, we find he has been scared like any other person, if only once. He has one leg short than the other – he’s no monstrous figure. But the Russians almost don’t want to see him like that. When they meet him they aren’t concerned with his personality. At public events in Tbilisi they only ask him one and the same question – “how do you find it here?”. It’s as if they only want to go home and say they’ve met the legendary warlord, rather than actually get to know him.

A painting illustrating Hadji Murat's time in the high society world of Tbilisi. He stands off to one side while various women fawn over him.
An illustration from an early edition of Hadji Murat. The man himself is on the right. Speaking little Russian and unwilling to conform to the arbitrary rules and customs of Russian high society, his first appearance draws plenty of attention.

And what is he really like? A heroic figure, yes, but not only. He scarcely fights during the book. Instead, he’s full of life, with a “child-like” smile – exactly the sort of person who shouldn’t need to die. When he is given a Breguet pocket watch with a minute repeater function he spends hours listening to its chimes. He is also devout, constantly making time to pray and perform his ablutions. In short, he is a good man. If he is once described as like a caged beast, it is not because he’s an animal in Tolstoy’s eyes but rather because he is a victim of the Russian bureaucratic machine, which gradually dehumanises everyone. For Tolstoy the answer to the question “who is to blame” is obvious: the leaders, surrounded by sycophants and insulated from the pain their actions cause. Alas, not much has changed.

Conclusion

I had read ­Hadji Murat once before now, but then I barely understood a thing. My Russian wasn’t good enough, and I wasn’t willing to read slowly enough to compensate for it. This time I was better prepared. Tolstoy’s story demands slow and careful reading, though it is short, because otherwise we run the risk of denying the characters their own dignity. And there are so many exciting people here that I was spoiled for choice when it came to writing this review. Alongside Avdeev and Nicholas I, another one I was particularly struck by was the character of Butler, a young man who loses everything (and then some) at cards after striking up a friendship with Hadji Murat. Even though his role in the overall book is not great, his short story is so perfectly written that I would gladly have read an entire book that carried on his tale.

That, perhaps, is Tolstoy’s ultimate gift. He not only creates characters who are so real that the best of them live inside us, but he also creates characters who are so interesting that they make us realise that everyone around us has their own personal dignity, and everyone deserves attention and respect. Whether man or woman, Chechen or Russian, everyone has their own story, and the world would be better if only we stopped to listen.

For more Tolstoy, I made a translation of a late and fragmentary short story of his here. If you want to know about the spiritual changes that came over Tolstoy after Anna Karenina was finished, and why they spoil his writing, check out this essay of mine.

Sympathy, Sadness, and Disappointment in Dostoevsky’s The Double

It was through Dostoevsky that I first came to Russian literature, after a winter reading The Brothers Karamazov that changed my world and the course of my life. And for a while he was my favourite writer and the only person I could say I’d read nearly everything of. But once my own Russian skills were good enough to read him in the original, the disappointment was crushing. In English, with the kind help of a translator or, in some cases, two, Dostoevsky’s Russian can be hammered into a vaguely readable shape. But in the original, there is no such help, and the truth of it is that Dostoevsky is among the worst stylists ever to be elevated to the Canon. Random words, commas, ellipses – Dostoevsky’s writing in The Double is as mad as his subject matter, the mysterious (apparent) duplication of a civil servant.

A drawing of Fyodor Dostoevsky while he was younger.
A young Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Double was written and published in 1846 – before Dostoevsky suffered the imprisonment and exile that changed his life and made him the author we know today

The Double is not Dostoevsky’s best book, by any stretch, unless you’re Vladimir Nabokov (and he’s not the best judge anyway). It was also written before his mock-execution and years of imprisonment which led to the spiritual conversation that we have to thank for his mature work. Still, it’s on my Cambridge reading list because it’s shamelessly derivative of Gogol’s Petersburg Tales, which I’ve looked at here (“The Nose”) and here (“Notes of a Madman” and “Nevsky Prospekt”). Though Dostoevsky is very much influenced by Gogol – “We all come out from Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’” is a famous quote attributed to him – The Double is also Dostoevsky’s own work, and bears his own stamps too. In this case it doesn’t make for a good book, but it does at least make for an interesting one.

Translations from the Russian are my own.

A Brief and Rough Summary of the Plot

The Double tells the story of a few days in the life of one Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, a poor civil servant in early 19th century Saint Petersburg. On the day the story begins he decides to spend most of his savings on hiring a fancy carriage and a serious livery for his servant Petrushka, all so that he might look better off than he actually is. He then visits his new doctor, who he had already visited earlier that week for an unspecified illness. This doctor suggests that Golyadkin, who is introverted and has paranoia – even within the first chapter he feels he’s being watched – go out and socialize and thus prevent himself having a breakdown. Golyadkin, however, doesn’t leave until he has gone on an unprovoked rant about the “enemies” who conspire against him.

The extravagant spending is because Golyadkin is going, that evening, to the birthday party of Klara, the daughter of a more senior civil servant. But when he arrives, he is unable to enter the main hall – he’s too scared, and ends up just watching from a hiding spot until someone approaches and his cover is blown. He goes up to Klara, but finds himself tongue-tied, and she is led away from him – it is not the first time he’s bothered her. Ashamed, Golyadkin heads home in a snowstorm, and it is only then – a third of the way through The Double – that we actually meet the double himself, also called Golyadkin, first glimpsed as a figure in the night. Both of them are heading to Golyadkin’s house, and the hero offers to let the other Golyadkin stay over.

The next day at work Golyadkin begins to feel a great deal of confusion, because he is the only person who recognises the double as being his double, in name and figure. Every other worker doesn’t notice the complete copying of him. That evening Golyadkin and the double, who appears meek and embarrassed, have a long and heartfelt chat over tea – though only Golyadkin senior appears to actually speak at length – and then they go to bed, having sworn eternal brotherhood. But by the next day things are going terribly wrong for the kind-hearted Golyadkin. At work he finds the double is finding all sorts of official favour, and all of his old colleagues are turning against him. And what is worst of all, the double himself scarcely acknowledges the kindness that Golyadkin had rendered him the night before. Isolated, Golyadkin leaves in shame.

Next begins a flurry of letter writing, miscommunications – Golyadkin struggles to say anything in plain language and has various annoying verbal tics – and brief but painful meetings with the double. Nightmares keep Golyadkin from sleeping, but the next day he “discovers” in his pocket a letter from Klara, where she claims that only he can save her from her family, and that he must meet her outside her house at around 2am that day. Buoyant, Golyadkin has another meeting with his double, then eventually winds up outside Klara’s house, where a grand ball is ongoing. Though he tries again to hide, he is discovered, and his double comes and asks him to come inside. There he meets the doctor again, and is whisked away into the night, heading for an asylum.

Dostoevsky’s Touch – Sympathy in The Double

What Gogol manages in forty or so pages Dostoevsky needs almost two hundred in The Double for, and the reason for this, charitably speaking, is that Dostoevsky cares about Golyadkin, and wishes we did too. That is to say, the extra pages are all designed to make him deserve our sympathy, and have absolutely nothing to do with Dostoevsky’s uncontrollable verbiage… In considering Golyadkin as sympathetically portrayed, it’s best to compare him with Gogol’s best known Petersburg hero, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin of “The Overcoat”. In that story, there is a moment where poor Akaky Akakievich is being teased by his coworkers, only for one of them to have a sudden epiphany, in which they recognise for the first time that Akaky Akakievich is their “brother”. But this is just one moment, and for the rest of the story Akaky Akakievich is more the butt of a joke than sympathetic.

Dostoevsky takes us much more into poor Golyadkin’s head. We may not learn about his family, but we learn about the state of his soul. We are taken around endless laps of his repetitive thinking, eavesdrop on conversations he hopes will happen but never do, and hear again and again his various tics, notably the Russian “deskat’”, which means “well,” or “I guess” or nothing really whatsoever. By taking us into his head, we also get a better sense of the challenges he faces in life. When Akaky Akakievich has melon rinds thrown at him we can’t help but laugh, but in The Double we are too close to Golyadkin to idly watch as he suffers. His anxiety becomes, strangely, ours, just as his enemies become our own. And when his madness takes over we feel we’re mad too.

A painting of Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Gogol, whose influence is found throughout The Double. His Petersburg Tales are in my view much more fun to read than Dostoevsky’s novel, but that’s not to say The Double doesn’t have things going for it. Dostoevsky’s sympathy for Golyadkin is one such thing. Gogol didn’t care as much.

Gogol’s Influence – Varieties of Madness

The Double is marked by strangeness right from the very first page, where Golyadkin’s room seems oddly filled with red and green objects. I read green as indicating envy here – for not only does it mark valuable objects, it notably is the colour of the briefcase belonging to Golyadkin’s superior which the double carries around important documents in. Golyadkin’s envy, perhaps, turns the case green. The Double also enjoys focusing on time. Golyadkin is always asking what time it is, but much as with Gogol’s Madman in the story of the same name his grasp of time soon collapses. Once he has received his letter from Klara and is standing outside in the snow, waiting for her, he has a moment of crisis:

“And what was more, maybe it was the case that the letter was written yesterday, and that it just didn’t reach me on time, and it didn’t reach me precisely because Petrushka – and what a rogue he is! – got into a mix. Or perhaps it was written tomorrow, which is to say, that I… that tomorrow I will need to have done everything, that is to say I should be waiting with the carriage then…”

The letter, of course, is also imagined, for it disappears from Golyadkin’s pockets as soon as he’s read it, much as with the “letters” exchanged between the dogs of “Notes of a Madman”. We also have Gogol to thank for the linguistic madness of Golyadkin – the way, that is, that he just keeps talking and talking, yet can never seem to convey anything akin to sense to those who are listening. I suppose it is similar to one whose brain is being destroyed by dementia or cancer and can no longer realise that what they are saying has no meaning.  

And somewhere within this all there is a religious madness too. Dostoevsky takes from Gogol a number of small untranslatable signs indicating the presence of the devil through the whole text – for example, in both the Russian word for “black” (chyorniy) and for “four” (“chetyre”) there are most of the letters for the Russian word “Chyort”, meaning a devil. Meanwhile, Golyadkin sees himself a heroic figure, a saviour (like Christ) in contrast to the evil double, who he calls “Judas” and “treacherous” several times. And this ties in with the theme of sympathy too, for we alone pity Golyadkin in his delusion while the rest of society casts him out as a lunatic. Unfortunately for Golyadkin, his own truth and view of things is not one he, linguistically, is capable of sharing, and as language fails him ever more, his delusions only get worse and worse.

Modernity in The Double

But the thing that I’ve found most interesting, reading through The Double this time round, is the way that it predicts a lot of the tensions and difficulties faced by the average office worker (and, I should add, the average student) in this day and age. I do not mean that Golyadkin has to deal with the printer not working so much as the challenges of a hostile bureaucracy, inexplicable social codes and endless humiliating grovelling before his superiors, and so on. His anxiety is in a large part the anxiety of one suffering from imposter syndrome – he’s frightened that people are watching him – and, indeed, one of the things that the double does to further unhinge him is tell Golyadkin that his paperwork is covered with stains (and thus embarrassing). The double himself appears to embody Golyadkin’s fears of his own inadequacy – he is popular, talkative, and successful.

But he is also young. In the narrative he is often referred to as Golyadkin-the-younger, and the way he completely replaces – including in the minds of his former friends – Golyadkin-the-elder I think expresses a frightening (for some) truth of the modern workplace – that loyalty and time count for less than they once used to, and that now all that matters is being talented at sucking-up and appearing to be organised. What Golyadkin-the-elder witnesses is a collapse of his worldview, as the simple values of working hard by which he had lived are proved inadequate for reaching his goal – Klara and positive attention from his superiors. Reality as he had understood it thus collapses, and with it Golyadkin’s sanity does too.

In connection with this I also can’t help but find that Golyadkin’s attachment to his work, as is the case with Gogol’s protagonists, is a major reason for the ease of his collapse. We find a man with “no life”, someone without real friends, who sees love as a miraculous escape, fall into madness the moment he is rejected by that love and his accompanying delusions about the value of his labours shatter. I suppose Golyadkin and these other characters serve as warnings to those of us who invest too much of ourselves into one thing, because the moment those hopes and dreams fail, our entire identity can too. So there’s certainly room for a Marxist critique around here.

A copy of my Russian version of the Double
My Russian copy of The Double. I wanted to enjoy this book as much as I’d enjoyed Gogol’s stories in the original. But, man, Dostoevsky’s style just doesn’t make for fun reading.

Conclusion – Problems and “Problems” in The Double

Some problems within a work can make it interesting for the critics who come afterwards, keen to carve out an interpretation of their own using its ambiguities; other problems make the work unenjoyable and leave people unwilling to pick it up again once they’ve finished. The Double has plenty of the former type, but a disappointing number of the latter sort too. It is far too long, for one thing – Gogol could pack into stories of thirty or forty pages what Dostoevsky has managed here in nearly two hundred. And then there is the language… I’ve read this in English, I’ve read this in Russian, and at neither time have I enjoyed it. Repetitions, confusions, illogic – madness does not make for fun reading.

I can forgive Dostoevsky’s style when it is conveying passionate belief, whether Ivan Karamazov’s or Ippolit’s or Raskolnikov’s – there, it seems to represent a kind of unrestrained self-belief worth admiring. But here Golyadkin is pitiable only. It’s hard to enjoy the way the text makes us aware of that. Still, there’s lots of cool stuff going on, which at the very least mean it shouldn’t be too painful to write an essay on The Double. My feeling now that I’ve been through the whole of the so-called Petersburg Tales is that one of the most interesting things uniting them is their early hostility to industrialisation and bureaucratization in Russia. All of these protagonists, working dead-end jobs under abstruse rules and regulations, eerily prophecy the challenges many of us face in the modern workplace and university. It’s hard not to feel there’s a bit of Golyadkin in all of us.