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The phenomenon of the double in Dostoevsky’s 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 i
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 i
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 Dostoevsky—I am thinking particularly of Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics and two books by René Girard: Deceit, Desire, and the Novel and Dostoïevski, du double à l’unité—give so much attention to the stories we have collected here.
Along with the consistency of its themes, Dostoevsky’s 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-tragedy”—a concept fitting the high seriousness and dramatic form of his art—Dostoevsky has been called by Bakhtin the i
The development of Dostoevsky’s work was by no means the smooth, orderly unfolding of a successful writer’s career. Here the biographical factor, to which I have already alluded, comes to the fore again. The turbulence of Dostoevsky’s life is well known: his involvement in revolutionary politics during the late 1840s, his arrest together with other members of the Petrashevsky circle in 1849, his mock execution, stayed at the last minute on orders from the emperor, his four years at hard labor in the prison of Omsk, followed by six years of service “in the ranks” in Semipalatinsk, his return to Petersburg and literary activity in 1859, the painful difficulties that ensued (deaths in the family, the failures of two magazines he edited with his brother, the accumulation of debts, the begi
The emergence of the underground is the turning point in Dostoevsky’s work. What he wrote before Notes from Underground was talented, certainly. What he wrote after was far more than talented. The shift in tone that signals the emergence of the underground indicates a deeper shift, an i