SOURCE: “The Double,” in Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849, Princeton University Press, 1976, pp. 295–312.

To attain a proper perspective on Dostoevsky's minor fiction in the 1840s after Poor Folk is by no means an easy task. It is impossible, of course, to agree with the almost totally negative evaluation of his contemporaries, especially since we can discern, with the benefit of hindsight, so many hints of the later (and much greater) Dostoevsky already visible in these early creations. On the other hand, in rejecting what seems to us the distressing myopia of his own time, we should not fall into an equally flagrant and perhaps less excusable error. We should not blur the line between potentiality and actuality, and read this earlier work as if it already contained all the complexity and profundity of the major masterpieces. Some of the more recent criticism, especially outside of Russia, has fallen into this trap; and these slight early works—The Double is a good case in point—have sometimes been loaded with a burden of significance they are much too fragile to bear.

It should be stated at once that Dostoevsky's production between 1846 and 1848 can boast of no work that matches Poor Folk as a successful and fully rounded creation. Indeed, at the time of his imprisonment he was generally considered a writer who had failed lamentably to live up to his earlier promise. This prevalent opinion was of course unjust and untrue; but it is not as outrageous as it may seem at first sight. Between 1846 and 1848 Turgenev published a good many of the stories included in A Sportsman's Sketches; Herzen produced Who Is To Blame? and a series of brilliant short stories; Goncharov made his impressive début with An Ordinary Story, and followed it with a chapter from his novel in progress, “Oblomov's Dream”—and we have not yet mentioned either Grigorovich's two novels of peasant life, Anton Goremyka and The Village, or A. V. Druzhinin's Polinka Sachs, which raised the banner of female emancipation. Compared to the array of such works, Dostoevsky's publications seemed very small potatoes indeed; and the longer book that he counted on to reestablish his credit with the reading public, Netotchka Nezvanova, was never completed because of his arrest.

Part of Dostoevsky's problem was unquestionably his straitened circumstances, which required him to turn out work too quickly. Part was also his artistic restlessness and ambition, which impelled him to abandon the vein of sentimental Naturalism and, after the triumph of Poor Folk, to shift disconcertingly to what seemed an unhealthy fascination with mental disorder and to lyrical explorations of the theme of mechtatelnost. It is clear to us now that Dostoevsky was experimenting with styles and character-types that he was later to fuse together superbly. But it was difficult at the time not to feel that, compared with the other young writers on the rise, he had simply lost his way.

2

Dostoevsky's next important work, which followed hard on the heels of Poor Folk, was The Double. In May 1845, while putting the finishing touches to his first novel, he tells Mikhail that he already has “many new ideas”¹ for other works; and the initial conception of The Double was probably among them. From other references in letters, we know that he discussed the novel (as he called this long story) during the summer of 1845, and got down to work on it seriously in the fall. In a letter of October 1845, parodying the speech-style of the main character, he informs Mikhail that “Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin … [is] a rascal, a terrible rascal! He will not agree, under any circumstances, to finish his career before the middle of November. He has just cleared things up with Your Excellency, and, if it comes to that (and why not?), is ready to hand in his resignation.”² But, as was to become usual with Dostoevsky, work dragged on longer than expected, and he was still revising at the end of January 1846 just a few days before the magazine version was published.

The origins of the novel, both in Dostoevsky's personal life and in literary tradition, are not difficult to discern. It is interesting to note that, in a letter referring to Netotchka Nezvanova, he remarks that this projected novel “will also be a confession like Golyadkin, but in another tone and style.”³ This observation is made in a context of some personal self-criticism which reminds one of Golyadkin because of Dostoevsky's protest against the view taken of him by others. “I am ridiculous and disgusting, and I always suffer from the unjust conclusions drawn about me.”⁴ Like his character again, Dostoevsky was subject to “hallucinations” which may very well have included delusions similar to Golyadkin's; and he was shy to a degree bordering on the abnormal. From Belinsky's already-quoted remark to Annenkov that, like Rousseau, Dostoevsky was also “firmly convinced that all of mankind envies and persecutes him,” we know that he exhibited more than a trace of Mr. Golyadkin's paranoia.

Such aspects of self-portraiture in The Double, however, furnish only one element of its composition; others were provided both by Dostoevsky's own earlier work and by external literary influences. There is, in the first place, an obvious continuity between the character of Devushkin and that of Golyadkin. During one of the crucial moments of Poor Folk—at the point where Devushkin, in complete despair, is summoned for his interview with the General—his feelings are described as follows: “My heart began shuddering within me, and I don't know myself why I was so frightened; I only know that I was panic-stricken as I had never been before in all my life. I sat rooted to my chair—as though there was nothing the matter, as though it were not I” (1: 92). Here is exactly the reaction of terror that leads to the splitting of Golyadkin's personality and the appearance of the double: the internal process is simply given dramatic reality.

Poor Folk thus constitutes the most obvious literary source for The Double; but there are several others that should be mentioned. Dostoevsky's employment of the device of the Doppelgänger links his new novel with E. T. A. Hoffmann; and the possible relations between The Double and various Hoffmannian prototypes have been thoroughly investigated.⁵ The direct influence of Hoffmann, however, is much less important than his assimilation by the Russian Hoffmannists as it came to Dostoevsky particularly in the writings of Gogol. V. V. Vinogradov has defined the subject of The Double, formally speaking, as consisting of “a naturalistic transformation of the Romantic ‘doubles’ of Russian Hoffmannism,”⁶ presumably on the analogy of the naturalistic transformation of the sentimental epistolary novel in Poor Folk. But The Double is much less original in this respect. Gogol himself—not to mention others—had already begun this process of “naturalistic transformation,” and Dostoevsky simply carries it one step further.

Golyadkin's courtship of the appetizing Klara Olsufyevna recalls the similar infatuation of Gogol's Poprischin, in the Diary of a Madman, with the daughter of his office-chief. The young lady pays no more attention to him than to the furniture in her father's bureau, and the baffled Romeo ends up in a madhouse firmly believing himself to be the King of Spain. In another of Gogol's stories, The Nose, this irreplaceable organ becomes detached from its proper location on the face of collegiate assessor Kovalyov (who prefers the military title of major) and darts about town in the uniform of a much more exalted rank under the bewildered eyes of its former possessor. Both stories use the same technique of the fantastic grotesque combined with themes of social ambition that we find in Dostoevsky, who clearly is working in the same tradition.

These two stories, however, are by no means the only Gogolian sources for The Double.There is external evidence that Dostoevsky himself (as well as others) thought of his new work primarily in relation to Dead Souls. “Golyadkin is ten times better than Poor Folk,” he writes Mikhail jubilantly on the day his new work was published. “They [Belinsky and the pléiade] say that after Dead Souls nothing like it has been seen in Russia. … You will like it even better than Dead Souls, that I know.”⁷ Dostoevsky evokes this linkage quite self-consciously in his original subtitle, The Adventures of Mr. Golyadkin, which recalls Gogol's The Adventures of Chichikov. Just as Gogol had written a mock-heroic account of Chichikov's “adventures” in trying to rise in the world, so Dostoevsky was doing the same for Mr. Golyadkin. The relation between The Double and Dead Souls has been more or less neglected because, in revising the story nineteen years later, Dostoevsky eliminated most of the traces pointing from one to the other. But the best way to understand The Double is to see it as Dostoevsky's effort to rework Dead Souls in his own artistic terms, just as he had already done with The Overcoat.

The effect he obtains, nonetheless, is quite different in the two cases, even though both are part of the same artistic endeavor to penetrate into the psychology of Gogol's characters and depict them from within. Golyadkin may be described as a composite of the timidity and pusillanimity of Poprischin imbued with the “ambition” of Chichikov; but the closeness of vision, the descent into his inner life, hardly creates any feeling of sympathy. The mock-heroic tonality taken over from Dead Souls, which Gogol used for purposes of broad social satire, is now applied to a world shrunk to the level of slightly off-color vaudeville farce; the picaresque adventure involves the search, not even for a large fortune, but for a slightly higher office post and acceptance into the charmed circle of a corrupt bureaucratic hierarchy. Dostoevsky thus once again takes his departure from a Gogolian model and intensifies its effect; but this time his aim is not to bring out more unequivocally the “humanitarian” component of the original. Rather, it is to reinforce Gogol's acute perception of the grotesque effects on character of moral stagnation and social immobility. The result is a new synthesis of Gogolian elements, transformed and recast not by sentimentalism but by a deepening of Hoffmannian fantasy into a genuine exploration of encroaching madness. In this way, Dostoevsky accentuates the humanly tragic aspect of Gogol's still relatively debonair portrayal of social-psychic frustrations.

3

In The Double, we are once more in the same chinovnik atmosphere, and confront the same world of the St. Petersburg bureaucracy, as in The Overcoat or Poor Folk. But Golyadkin is by no means an Akaky Akakievich or a Devushkin, living at the very edge of poverty and destitution. On the contrary, he is not impoverished at all, lives in his own flat with his own servant (rather than in a “corner” somewhere behind a screen), and has piled up a tidy sum in savings which he keeps at hand to gloat over for reassurance. Golyadkin's position in the bureaucratic hierarchy is by no means exalted, but he is nonetheless the assistant to the chief clerk of his office. As the story opens, he has just hired a carriage, outfitted his servant Petrushka with a livery, and is nervously making preparations to crash the birthday party of Klara Olsufyevna to which he has carefully not been invited.

In other words, Mr. Golyadkin has climbed high enough on the social ladder, at least in his own estimation, to aspire to climb a bit higher; he is suffering not from grinding poverty but from “ambition.” Dostoevsky thus breaks the connection maintained in Poor Folk between Devushkin's poverty and his struggle for self-respect, and now emphasizes this latter motif. His focus, becoming internal and psychological, concentrates on the effort of Golyadkin to assert himself; but this inevitably brings him into opposition with the existing rigidities of the social order. And Dostoevsky's theme now becomes the crippling inner effects of this system on the individual—the fact that, to quote his feuilleton, Golyadkin “goes mad out of ambition, while at the same time fully despising ambition and even suffering from the fact that he happens to suffer from such nonsense as ambition.”

The first several chapters of The Double give a brilliant picture of Golyadkin's split personality before it has disintegrated entirely into two independent entities. On the one hand, there is Golyadkin's evident desire to pretend to a higher social station and a more flattering image of himself—hence the carriage, the livery, the simulated shopping spree for elegant furniture as if he were a new bridegroom, even the marvelous detail of changing his banknotes into smaller denominations to have a fatter pocketbook. His pretension to the favors of Klara Olsufyevna is only an expression of this urge for upward mobility and ego-gratification, not its cause. Indeed, the novel originally contained a passage that explicitly motivates Golyadkin as indulging in ego-enhancing daydreams. Mr. Golyadkin, Dostoevsky wrote, “very much loved occasionally to make certain romantic assumptions touching his person; he liked to promote himself now and then into the hero of the most ingenious novel, to imagine himself entangled in various intrigues and difficulties, and, at last, to emerge with honor from all the unpleasantnesses, triumphing over all obstacles, vanquishing difficulties and magnanimously forgiving his enemies” (1: 335). Mr. Golyadkin as first conceived thus had a streak of Don Quixote in him, or, if one prefers, Walter Mitty.

This motivation was part of the original mock-heroic framework of the novel, which was eliminated in the revised version we are familiar with. Each chapter, for example, was introduced by a series of parodistic descriptive sentences outlining, in a format that began with Don Quixote, the action to come. “Of the awakening of the titular councilor Golyadkin,” we read in the first chapter. “Of how he outfitted himself, and set forth on the path that lay before him. Of how he justified himself in his own eyes, and then correctly concluded that it was best of all to act boldly and openly, though not without nobility. Of where, finally, Mr. Golyadkin arrived to pay a call” (1: 334). This parody of the heroic convention is supplemented, in the unaltered last chapter, by another parody of the romantic intrigue of the sentimental adventure novel, with its eloping lovers escaping the vigilance of recalcitrant parents and Golyadkin cast in the role of reluctant seducer.

With one part of his character, then, Mr. Golyadkin likes to imagine himself as an all-conquering hero; but with another he knows that he is quite incapable of sustaining such a role, and is, in fact, as timid as a mouse. He shrinks from the sight of two young colleagues in the street as he is rolling along impressively in his carriage, and is positively petrified when overtaken by the smart droshky of his office superior, Andrey Filippovich. His reaction to this event releases the psychic mechanism—the same one we have already seen in Devushkin—that will soon lead to the appearance of the double. “‘Bow or not? Call back or not? Recognize him or not,’ our hero wondered in indescribable anguish. ‘Or pretend that I am not myself, but somebody else strikingly like me, and look as though nothing were the matter. Simply not I, not I—and that's all’” (1: 113). Golyadkin is pathetically unable to live up to the part he is trying to play, and can only escape from it by this evasion of responsibility; but the moment Andrey Filippovich disappears, the all-conquering hero comes to the surface again. “Then, suddenly recalling how taken aback he had been, our hero flushed as hot as fire, frowned, and cast a terrible defiant glance at the front corner of the carriage, a glance calculated to reduce all his foes to ashes” (ibid.).

It is clear from the very start that Mr. Golyadkin, for all his assumed heroism, is not setting out on the road to adventure with a light heart. And his visit to his German doctor, Krestyan Ivanovich Rutenspitz, reveals some of the reasons for his discomfiture. A young competitor, the nephew of Andrey Filippovich, has received the office promotion to which Mr. Golyadkin aspired, and is now the leading (and far more suitable) aspirant for the hand of the beauteous Klara. Mr. Golyadkin, unable to control his displeasure at these frustrating events, had created a scandal only a day or so before by overtly displaying his hostility to his rival and the latter's powerful uncle. Moreover, Golyadkin is also aware that word has gotten round of some disreputable behavior in his own past involving the German landlady of a lodging house where he had once lived. At the beginning of the novel, he is desperately trying to suppress his awareness of both these disturbing events, and has already transferred them, with paranoiac logic, into the idea that he is being hounded and persecuted, and that only he is acting openly, straightforwardly and honestly. The scene with the doctor thus serves to fill in the background of the action, to indicate that Mr. Golyadkin's behavior is distinctly abnormal, and to reveal the pathos of his plight when he suddenly breaks down and starts to weep.

Mr. Golyadkin's crisis is precipitated by his efforts to gain admittance to Klara's birthday party. The wonders of this occasion are described by the narrator in a splendid outburst of Gogolian mockery underlining the ludicrous mediocrity of the sphere to which Mr. Golyadkin aspires. “Oh, if I were a poet! Such as Homer and Pushkin, I mean, of course; with any lesser talent one would not venture—I should certainly have painted all that glorious day for you, O my readers, with a free brush and brilliant colors,” etc. (1: 128). This passage is worth dwelling on for a moment because, aside from its interest as an example of Dostoevsky's rhetorical skill, it is also of some thematic importance. For the narrator makes clear, amidst all his flowery, self-negating phrases, that the group being celebrated is really a hotbed of bribetaking and corruption. The worthy Olsufy Ivanovich, Klara's father and Golyadkin's patron, “is a hale old man and a privy councilor, who had lost the use of his legs in his long years of service and been rewarded by destiny for his devotion with investments, a house, some small estates, and a beautiful daughter,” etc. (1: 129). Mr. Golyadkin's rival Vladimir Semyonovich, who has been promoted because of nepotism, inspires the remark that “everything in that young man … from his blooming cheeks to his assessorial rank, seemed almost to proclaim aloud the lofty pinnacle a man can attain through morality and good principles” (1: 130). Compared to such hardened reprobates, Golyadkin himself is the soul of innocence and virtue.

It is after Mr. Golyadkin has been ignominiously evicted from this worthy gathering that his double finally materializes. The arrival is preceded by another rhetorical set-piece, a parody of the style of the historical novel. “It was striking midnight from all the clock towers in Petersburg when Mr. Golyadkin, beside himself, ran out on the Fontanka Quay,” etc. (1: 138). And the double comes on the scene when, as we are told explicitly, “Mr. Golyadkin was killed—killed entirely, in the full sense of the word” (ibid.). When he first looms out of the darkness of the stormy night, the double of Mr. Golyadkin unquestionably seems a purely psychic phenomenon. But there are certain scenes (such as those in the office) where the presence of an actually existing double is affirmed by other characters; and Dostoevsky deliberately keeps the reader in a state of uncertainty about how much of what occurs is the result of Golyadkin's hallucinations and growing loss of objective awareness. Whether the double is psychic or material, however, his function is never left in doubt: he is used to confront Mr. Golyadkin with everything the latter cannot endure to contemplate about himself and his own situation. This situation has been caused by his social temerity, the suspicions about his tawdry peccadillo in the past, and his fear of the consequences of having offended his superiors. Golyadkin's relation with his double mimics one or another of these three facets of his position vis-à-vis himself and his world, and sometimes several of them blended together in a superbly subtle admixture.

4

The first five chapters of The Double describe the “adventures” of Mr. Golyadkin trying to assert himself in the real world. The remainder, which begin a new sequence, depict his unsuccessful struggle to keep from being replaced by his double everywhere and finally sinking into madness. At first, the double is deferential, ingratiating, obsequious, and begs Mr. Golyadkin for protection. Such comportment is probably meant to recapitulate the start of Mr. Golyadkin's own career, when he must have behaved in the same fashion; the sad tale told by the double of early poverty and humiliation may be taken as a flashback to Golyadkin's own life. The subordinate status of the double expresses the position of relative self-confidence that Mr. Golyadkin has just managed to attain and which has nourished his “ambition.” But then, after the double worms his way into Mr. Golyadkin's confidence and learns all his secrets, the double “betrays” him (as Mr. Golyadkin is “betraying” his superiors by his insubordination) and begins to act out Mr. Golyadkin's mingled hopes and fears.

The double obtains all the success in the office that Mr. Golyadkin would like to have had, constantly humiliates him by allusions to his amorous dalliance with the German landlady (“‘he's our Russian Faublas, gentlemen; allow me to introduce the youthful Faublas,’ piped Mr. Golyadkin junior, with his characteristic insolence”), is on the best of terms with Klara Olsufyevna, and baffles and frustrates the real Mr. Golyadkin in every possible way (1: 195). Some of the episodes are purely slapstick—such as the consumption of ten pies by the double on the sly, which requires Golyadkin, who has eaten only one, to pay for eleven and to suffer the embarrassment of a reprimand. But, for the most part, the double's behavior both mirrors the suppressed wishes of Mr. Golyadkin's subconscious and objectifies the guilt feelings which accompany them.

During the first part, Mr. Golyadkin's “ambition” dominates his feelings of inferiority and guilt and manages to keep them in check. The movement of the action shows him, however unsuccessfully, still trying to impose himself on the world despite its rebuffs. Once the double appears, however, the process is reversed, and we find Golyadkin striving by every means possible to prove himself a docile and obedient subordinate, who accepts the dictates of the authorities ruling over his life as, literally, the word of God. It is in this latter part of the work that Dostoevsky's social-psychological thrusts become the sharpest. Golyadkin struggles against becoming confused with his double, who behaves in a fashion that the real Golyadkin would dearly like to emulate but which he has been taught to believe is morally inadmissible. The double is of course “a rascal,” but the real Golyadkin is “honest, virtuous, mild, free from malice, always to be relied on in the service, and worthy of promotion … but what if … what if they get us mixed up” (1: 172)! The possibility of substitution leads Mr. Golyadkin to accuse his double of being “Grishka Otrepeev”—the famous false pretender to the throne of the true Tsars in the seventeenth century—and introduces the theme of impostorship, so important for Dostoevsky later and (with its evocation of Boris Godunov) so incongruous in this context.

The more threatened Mr. Golyadkin feels because of the machinations of his double, the more he is ready to surrender, give way, step aside, throw himself on the mercy of the authorities and look to them for aid and protection. He is ready to admit that he may even truly be “a nasty, filthy rag”—though, to be sure, “a rag possessed of ambition … a rag possessed of feelings and sentiments” (1: 168–169). The inchoate phrases that tumble off his tongue are filled with the mottoes of the official morality of unquestioning and absolute obedience encouraged by the paternal autocracy. “‘I as much as to say look upon my benevolent superior as a father and blindly trust my fate to him,’” he tells Andrey Filippovich, in his desperate efforts to “unmask the impostor and scoundrel” who is taking his place. “At this point Mr. Golyadkin's voice trembled and two tears ran down his eyelashes” (1: 196). As the double, “with an unseemly little smile,” tells Golyadkin in the important dream-sequence of Chapter 10: “What's the use of strength of character! How could you and I, Yakov Petrovich, have strength of character? …” (1: 185.)

This depressing process of Mr. Golyadkin's capitulation is lightened somewhat, in the final chapters, by his belief that he has received a letter from his beloved Klara setting a rendezvous for an elopement. Since Poprishchin was able to read the delightfully chatty correspondence of the two dogs Madgie and Fido in the Diary of a Madman, there is no need to speculate, as so many commentators have done, about the ontological status of the epistle that represents Mr. Golyadkin's heart's desire. Or does it really? Some of the most genuinely amusing moments in the novel occur as Mr. Golyadkin, taking shelter from the pouring rain under a pile of logs, sits waiting in the courtyard of Klara's house for her to keep their supposed assignation—and, at the same time, inwardly protests against such an unforgivable breach of the proprieties.

“‘Good behavior, madame’—these are his ruminations—‘means staying at home, honoring your father and not thinking about suitors prematurely. Suitors will come in good time, madame, that's so. … But, to begin with, allow me to tell you, as a friend, that things are not done like that, and in the second place I would have given you and your parents, too, a good thrashing for letting you read French books; for French books teach you no good,’” etc. (1: 221). The original version of The Double concludes shortly thereafter as Mr. Golyadkin is driven off in a carriage by his doctor, Krestyan Ivanovich, who suddenly becomes a demonic figure and—but we are left hanging in the air! The work is abruptly cut short at this point on a note of Gogolian flippancy and irresolution: “But here, gentlemen, ends the history of the adventures of Mr. Golyadkin” (1: 431).

5

The haunting brilliance of Dostoevsky's portrayal of a consciousness pursued by obsessions of guilt and ultimately foundering in madness has been recognized from the very first moment that The Double was published. What occurs in the novella is clear enough in its general outline; but there has been continual controversy over just how to interpret its significance. Does Mr. Golyadkin's double represent, as one Soviet critic has put it, “the meanest and most degrading qualities of [Golyadkin's] soul”?⁸ Or does the double, as another has argued, represent only a hallucinatory image of the external social forces that threaten Golyadkin's existence as an individual?⁹ It seems to me impossible to choose between such alternatives because, if Golyadkin's existence is threatened socially, it is precisely because he has dared to assert himself in a manner that does reveal something about his soul (or his subconscious).

Such disagreements arise, however, because it is genuinely difficult to pinpoint Dostoevsky's moral focus in The Double. It is, for example, clearly impossible to identify with Golyadkin sympathetically to the same degree as with the kindhearted and self-sacrificing Devushkin. If nothing else, the nature of his “ambition” as revealed through his double is hardly one of which Dostoevsky wishes us to approve unconditionally—as he makes amply clear by the unflagging mockery of his narrative tone. At the same time, the radical critic of the 1860s, N. A. Dobrolyubov, is undoubtedly right in characterizing Golyadkin as one of the early Dostoevsky's “downtrodden people,” struggling desperately to assert their dignity and individuality in a social hierarchy that refuses to acknowledge their right to the luxury of such sentiments.¹⁰ But how can we reconcile Dostoevsky's irony with his compassion?

One way of dealing with this problem has already been indicated in passing. For all his taunts at Golyadkin, Dostoevsky is even more sarcastic about the exalted eminences of the bureaucratic realm that glimmer before Golyadkin as his unattainable ideal. They are clearly corrupt to the core, and lack even that minimum of moral self-awareness responsible for Golyadkin's plight.¹¹ Golyadkin at least believes in the pious official morality to which everybody else gives lip service; and his struggle with the double is an effort to defend that morality from being betrayed. In fighting off the double, Golyadkin is really fighting off his own impulses to subvert the values presumably shared by his official superiors. This is probably what Valerian Maikov meant when he said that Golyadkin perishes “from the consciousness of the disparity of particular interests in a well-ordered society,” i.e., his realization of the impossibility of asserting himself as an individual without violating the morality that has been bred into his bones and which keeps him in submission.

Such an answer, however, is only partially satisfactory, and still leaves in the dark the question of why Dostoevsky should have treated Golyadkin satirically at all. Here, it seems to me, we must have recourse to a document that has been neglected in this connection—Dostoevsky's remarks on “necessary egoism” in his feuilleton. Russian life, he said there, offered no outlet for the ego to assert itself normally, and the Russian character as a result tended not to exhibit a sufficient sense of its own “personal dignity.” Such an analysis contains exactly the same mixture of sympathy and critical reserve that he incorporates in The Double: there is commiseration for Golyadkin's desire to rise, but also a certain disdain for his inability to sustain the combat and for the paltriness of his aims. Dostoevsky's genuine indignation at the crippling conditions of Russian life, in other words, did not turn him into a moral determinist willing to absolve the victims of all responsibility for their conduct. Indeed, his very portrayal of a figure like Devushkin implied that debasing social conditions were far from being able entirely to shape character. As a result, Dostoevsky's work of this period often contains a puzzling ambiguity of tone because a character is shown simultaneously both as socially oppressed and yet as reprehensible and morally unsavory because he has surrendered too abjectly to the pressure of his environment.

The same ambiguity of attitude is also reflected in the narrative technique of the story, which has attracted a good deal of attention in Soviet criticism. Both Bakhtin and Vinogradov have rightly noted that, while the narrator begins as an outside observer, he becomes more and more identified with Golyadkin's consciousness as the story progresses.¹² More recently, it has been stressed with equal justice that this identification is never total: the narrator keeps his distance by parodying Golyadkin, even when he uses the character's own speech-style and seems to limit himself to Golyadkin's horizon.¹³ This mixture of identification and raillery creates the peculiar blend of tragicomedy in The Double that most readers find so difficult to accept (if we are to judge from the inclination of critics to read the work exclusively in one or the other perspective), and yet which exactly translates Dostoevsky's own point of view.

6

As we know, Dostoevsky's high hopes for the success of The Double were quickly dashed. The work met with a withering fire of criticism for two main reasons. One was simply because—to quote the Russian Symbolist Andrey Bely, both a connoisseur of Gogol and an admirer of Dostoevsky—“The Double recalls a patchwork quilt stitched together from the subjects, gestures, and verbal procedures of Gogol.”¹⁴ In this respect The Double suffered from being too imitative; but in another it was too original to be fully appreciated. For the complexities of Dostoevsky's narrative technique did pose a special problem for the readers of his time.

The Double is narrated by an outside observer who gradually identifies himself with Golyadkin's consciousness and carries on the narrative in the speech-style of the character. Its verbal texture thus contains a large admixture of stock phrases, clichés, mottoes, polite social formulas, and meaningless exclamations, which are obsessively (and excessively) repeated as a means of portraying the agitations and insecurities of Mr. Golyadkin's bewildered psyche. This is a remarkable anticipation, unprecedented in its time, of Joyce's experiments with cliché in the Gerty McDowell chapter of Ulysses, and of what Sartre so much admired in John Dos Passos—the portrayal of a consciousness totally saturated with the formulas and slogans of its society. The effect in The Double, however, was a tediousness and monotony that Dostoevsky's readers were not yet prepared to put up with either for the sake of social-psychological verisimilitude or artistic experimentation.

And even though Dostoevsky's narrative technique per se no longer creates any barrier for the modern reader, the complexity of Dostoevsky's attitude still creates problems of comprehension. In isolating Golyadkin's imbroglio from any overt social pressure, and by treating both Golyadkin and the world he lives in with devastating irony, Dostoevsky tends to give the impression that Golyadkin is simply a pathological personality who has only himself to blame for his troubles. Even Belinsky, who might have been expected to grasp the social implications of Golyadkin's psychology as Dostoevsky had explained them in his feuilleton, remarked that his life would not really have been unbearable except “for the unhealthy susceptibility and suspiciousness of his character” which was “the black demon” of his life.¹⁵ In other words, Dostoevsky was simply portraying a case of paranoia and mental breakdown with no larger significance than that of a case history.

This judgment set the pattern for a view of Dostoevsky's early work (and for much of his later work as well) that dominated a good deal of Russian criticism until the end of the nineteenth century. In 1849 P. V. Annenkov, echoing Belinsky, accused Dostoevsky of being the leader of a new literary school (which included his brother Mikhail Dostoevsky and Butkov) specializing in the portrayal of “madness for the sake of madness.”¹⁶ Annenkov severely criticized this unhealthy taste (as he saw it) for rather sensational and grotesque tragicomedy, in which he could discern no more serious or elevated artistic aim. Such an accusation was of course unfair to Dostoevsky, whose “abnormal” and “pathological” characters can all be seen, on closer examination, to make a social-cultural point. But Dostoevsky perhaps relied too much on the reader to grasp the ideological implications of his psychology, and to understand that the “abnormalities” of his characters derived from the pressure of the Russian social situation on personality. The result was an artistic lack of balance that led to a good deal of misunderstanding, and has caused unceasing critical disagreement.

7

The overwhelmingly hostile reaction to The Double spurred Dostoevsky to think of revising it almost from the moment of its publication. This did not prove possible before his arrest, however, and he could only return to the project in the 1860s. His notebooks contain a series of jottings, not so much for a revision as for an entire recasting of The Double, with the same characters and sentimental intrigue but with new ideological motifs deriving from this later period. Golyadkin would become a radical, attend a meeting of the Petrashevsky circle, “dream of being a Napoleon, a Pericles, the leader of the Russian revolt,” learn about science and atheism—and his double would denounce the radicals to the authorities.¹⁷ These notes show how the double-technique had begun to expand in Dostoevsky's imagination, and to incorporate the major ideological motifs that would characterize his post-Siberian creations. But he never got around to rewriting The Double as he had intended, perhaps because the same artistic impulse was already being channeled into new productions. It was only while finishing Crime and Punishment in 1866 that he revised The Double, and gave it the form it has retained ever since.

For the most part, Dostoevsky's revisions consist in little more than cutting out many of the verbal repetitions that were the butt of so much criticism.¹⁸ More important, however, is that he also eliminated the entire mock-heroic framework. He struck out all the chapter headings, and for the original subtitle—The Adventures of Mr. Golyadkin—substituted A Petersburg Poem. This concealed the stylistic relation to Dead Souls, and was perhaps meant to dissociate The Double from the elements of radical social critique and the memories of Belinsky still connected with Gogol's novel. The new subtitle did not betray the work (Golyadkin was a Petersburg type), and was vague and noncommital enough not to be compromising; it had the further advantage of correctly assigning The Double its place in the Russian literary tradition initiated by The Bronze Horseman.

In addition, Dostoevsky shortened the work by a full chapter and simplified the intrigue, excising almost entirely the motif of the double as “Grishka Otrepeev” (this was given much more space in the original), and truncating Golyadkin's xenophobic fear of being poisoned in a plot woven by his German ex-landlady in cahoots with the equally German Krestyan Ivanovich. Some passages connected with this poison-motif are much more obscure in the final version. By contrast, the central social-psychological emphasis was strengthened by a change in the ending, which now provides chilling confirmation of Golyadkin's madness and ultimate destination, along with a last thrust of his sense of guilt: “You get free quarters, wood, with light and service, which you deserve not” (1: 229).

Despite his dissatisfaction with The Double, Dostoevsky always continued to maintain his belief in its great significance. Writing to Mikhail in 1859 about his plans to improve it, and to publish it with a new preface, he says: “They [his critics] will see at last what The Double really is! Why should I abandon a first-rate idea, a really magnificent type in terms of its social importance, which I was the first to discover and of which I was the herald?”¹⁹ Twenty years later, in the Diary of a Writer, he confessed that “my story was not successful”; but he continued to claim that “its idea was clear enough, and I have never contributed anything to literature more serious than this idea. But I was completely unsuccessful with the form of the story.”²⁰ Just what Dostoevsky means by “form” here is unclear; but one suspects that he was referring to the “fantastic” aspect of The Double, the uncertain oscillation between the psychic and the supernatural. The double as an emanation of Golyadkin's delirium is perfectly explicable; the double as an actually existing mirror-image of Golyadkin, with the identical name, is troubling and mysterious. Dostoevsky never leaves any doubt in the future about this alternative: his doubles will either be clear-cut hallucinations, or they are what may be called “quasi-doubles”—characters who exist in their own right, but reflect some internal aspect of another character in a strengthened form.

It is not difficult to understand, though, why Dostoevsky thought the “idea” embodied in The Double to have been of such importance. Golyadkin's double represents the suppressed aspects of his personality that he is unwilling to face; and this internal split between self-image and truth—between what a person wishes to believe about himself, and what he really is—is Dostoevsky's first grasp of a character-type that became his hallmark as a writer. Golyadkin is the ancestor of all of Dostoevsky's great split personalities, who are always confronted with their quasi-doubles or doubles (whether in the form of other “real” characters, or as hallucinations) in the memorable scenes of the great novels. The similarity of personality-structure between Golyadkin and his successors—such as the underground man, Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, and Ivan Karamazov—has led some critics to interpret The Double as if all the philosophical and religious themes of the mature Dostoevsky were already present in its pages;²¹ but this is an untenable anachronism. The Dostoevsky of the 1840s is not that of the 1860s and 1870s, and his frame of reference in The Double is still purely social-psychological.

The mature Dostoevsky later felt that the discovery of this “underground” type, whose first version is Golyadkin, constituted his greatest contribution to Russian literature. For such a type represented, in his view, the true state of the Russian cultural psyche of his time, hopelessly split between competing and irreconcilable ideas and values. In this early phase of Dostoevsky's work, Golyadkin's intolerable guilt feelings at his own modest aspirations disclose the stifling and maiming of personality under a despotic tyranny. Later, the same character-type will be employed to exhibit the disintegrating effect of the atheistic radical ideology imported from the West on what Dostoevsky believed to be the innately moral-religious Russian national character, with its instinctive need to believe in Christ and God.

Notes

1. Pisma, 1: 78; May 8, 1845.

2. Ibid., 81; October 8, 1845.

3. Ibid., 108; January-February 1847.

4. Ibid.

5. The most recent study is Natalie Reber, Studien zum Motiv des Doppelgängers bei Dostoevskij und E. T. A. Hoffmann (Geissen, 1964); also Charles Passage, Dostoevski the Adapter (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1954). Passage's book is vitiated by the idea indicated in the title—that Dostoevsky did nothing else but “adapt” Hoffmann.

6. Vinogradov, Evolutsiia, 214.

7. Pisma, 1: 81; February 1, 1846.

8. G. M. Fridlender, Realizm Dostoevskogo (Moscow-Leningrad, 1964), 70.

9. F. Evnin, “Ob Odnoi Istoriko-Literaturnoi Legenda,” Russkaya Literatura 2 (1965), 3–26.

10. See his influential article “Zabitie Liudi” in DRK, 58–94.

11. This is a point well brought out in Evnin's article (note 9 above), though he reads the work much too exclusively in the Dobrolyubov tradition for me to accept his view as a whole.

12. Bakhtin, Problemy Poetiki Dostoevskogo, 291–292; Vinogradov, 261–267.

13. See Terras, The Young Dostoevsky, 206–212; M. F. Lomagin, “K Voprosu o Positsii Avtora v ‘Dvoinike’ Dostoevskogo,” Filologicheskie Nauki 14 (1971), 3–13; most recently, Wolf Schmid, Der Textaufbau in den Erzählungen Dostoevskijs (Munich, 1973), 85–146.

14. Cited in A. L. Bem, U Istokov, 143.

15. V. G. Belinsky, “Petersburgskii Sbornik,” in DRK, 27.

16. P. V. Annenkov, Vospominania i Kriticheskie Ocherki, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1879), 2: 23.

17. These notes are now in 1: 432–435; they have been translated in The Unpublished Dostoevsky, ed. Carl R. Proffer (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1973), 1: 15.

18. A detailed study of these revisions can be found in the article by P. I. Avanesov, “Dostoevskii v rabote nad ‘Dvoinikom,’” in Tvorcheskaya Istoria, ed. N. K. Piksanov (Moscow, 1927), 154–191.

19. Pisma, 1: 257; October 1, 1859.

20. DW (November 1877), 882–883.

21. This tendency is regrettably manifest in the otherwise classic study of Dimitri Chizhevsky, “The Theme of The Double in Dostoevsky,” in Dostoevsky, ed. René Wellek (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962), 112–129.