Having received an advance of 4,500 rubles, Dostoevsky found himself with twenty-three days to finish five chapters. Financial pressures and tight deadlines, of course, were not new to Dostoevsky. Only a year earlier, for example, he had famously dictated The Gambler under an extraordinary deadline in order to escape a punitive publishing contract.

But the tight deadline in December 1867 was due, in part, to a larger, artistic problem that Dostoevsky was struggling to solve: how to capture “a perfectly beautiful human”2, a task he considered one of the most difficult in literature. The character who emerged from those frantic twenty-three days was Prince Lev Myshkin, the protagonist of The Idiot.

While Dostoevsky had been thinking about the novel for months, and perhaps about its central moral problem for much longer, the character of Prince Myshkin was not the center of the first draft of The Idiot. Indeed, the iteration of Prince Myshkin that readers of The Idiot know so well did not appear until Dostoevsky’s seventh plan for the novel. In Dostoevsky’s early drafts and sketches, the character was a figure closer to Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment, marked by “immeasurable pride” and a “burning need for love,” and capable of extreme manifestations of both good and evil.3

When he made the decision to discard his draft and rewrite what he called “another novel”, he did so in order to capture the “perfectly beautiful human”. Amazingly, he was able to construct the scaffolding of Prince Myshkin in just twenty-three days. Myshkin himself, however, was still far from fully developed; the character who would become one of the nineteenth century’s great literary figures was, at this stage, still taking shape.

Though Dostoevsky’s correspondence from this period reveals that he feared his efforts were “decidedly lacking in effect,” the novel’s first installments were met with considerable enthusiasm, with early readers responding in particular to the originality of Prince Myshkin. As the serialization continued, however, the response became more divided.

Years later, when reflecting on The Idiot in an 1877 letter to Arkady Kovner, Dostoevsky would observe, “All those who have spoken to me of The Idiot as my best work have something particular in the cast of their mind that has always greatly astonished me and pleased me… And if you have the same cast of mind, so much the better for me.”4

The Early Concepts

Dostoevsky produced detailed and complicated notes for The Idiot, producing no fewer than eight plans in all for the novel, plus many variations of each plan. The surviving drafts reveal just how unsettled The Idiot remained during its early development. Characters repeatedly change their identities and relationships to one another, while proposed events appear in one plan only to disappear in the next. Dostoevsky seems to have been working without a fixed conception of the novel as a whole and instead focused on experimenting with characters and situations until a plot began to cohere.5

The Idiot in Dostoevsky’s first six plans is a “double” character, a device that the author first employed in his 1846 novella The Double, and would continue to revisit, albeit in more subtle form, throughout his career. It is in the fifth plan, in particular, that Dostoevsky explicitly refers to “the dualism of deep nature”: his Idiot feels both love and hatred and wishes suffering upon both himself and others. These early versions have the Idiot emerging from this dualism and turning toward the good, in a trajectory similar to Raskolnikov’s in Crime and Punishment.

His fourth plan, for example, outlines these stages:

“In the beginning:

1. Revenge and self-love (a causeless revenge, he himself sees this, and that it is characteristic of him).

Then:

2. Frenzied and merciless passion.

3. Lofty love and regeneration.”6

The Idiot in the first six plans is cruel, vengeful, and proud. All seem to follow Dostoevsky’s initial rendering of the character: “The Idiot’s passions are violent, he has a burning need of love, a boundless pride, and out of pride he means to dominate himself, conquer himself. He takes delight in humiliation. Those who do not know him make fun of him; those who do know him begin to fear him.”7

On December 4^th, 1867, less than a month before his first installment was due, Dostoevsky “threw everything to the devil”. Writing to Apollon Maikov, Dostoevsky explained that he had been working on the novel all through the summer and autumn, “but a certain experience always enabled me to sense beforehand either falsity, or difficulty, or the insufficiently matured quality of some idea…. I assure you that the novel could have been mediocre; but it became repugnant to me beyond belief precisely because it was mediocre, and not positively good. I did not need that. Well what was I to do?”8

It was with his seventh plan, as the deadline loomed, that Dostoevsky abandoned the idea of a cruel and vengeful idiot, and began moving toward a radically different protagonist: the attempt to portray “a perfectly beautiful human.”

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“A Perfectly Beautiful Human”

With less than a month left to deliver his first installment, Dostoevsky “tormented” himself “with inventing a new novel.”

“Nothing in the world could have made me continue with the first one,” Dostoevsky wrote to Maikov. “My head was in a whirl. It’s a wonder I didn’t go out of my mind. At last, on December 18, I sat down and started writing a new novel.”9 Over the next twenty-three days, he wrote the first five chapters of The Idiot, and completed two more five days later, finishing the first installment in time to send it to The Russian Messenger.

In his new idea, Dostoevsky had reconceived both the plot and the kind of protagonist he wanted at the center of the novel. Writing to his niece Sofia, he described the idea as “an old and beloved one of mine, but so difficult that for a long time I did not dare undertake it, and if I have undertaken it now, it is decidedly because I was in an almost desperate position.”10 The idea was to portray “a perfectly beautiful human” in the figure of Prince Myshkin.

“There is nothing more difficult than this in the world, especially now”, he wrote to Sofia. “All writers, not only ours, but even all European writers, whoever has attempted to portray the positively beautiful,—has always given up. Because the task is immeasurable. The beautiful is an ideal, but the ideal—neither ours nor that of civilized Europe—is as yet very far from having been worked out.”11

The difficulty, as Dostoevsky understood it, was both moral and artistic, as a perfectly good character still had to command the reader’s attention. To explain how this might be accomplished, he described the attempts of several European authors to approach the ideal.

Only Christ, Dostoevsky argued, could be considered perfectly beautiful. Among fictional characters, Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote “stands as the most complete”, but “he is beautiful solely because at the same time he is ridiculous.” For Dostoevsky, then, goodness in and of itself is not enough. Don Quixote becomes lovable because his nobility is bound up with vulnerability and absurdity.

Dostoevsky saw a similar mechanism at work in Charles Dickens’ Mr. Pickwick, whom he called “an infinitely weaker conception than Don Quixote; but immense nevertheless.” Here too, the good man is made ridiculous. Dostoevsky then explains why that matters: “Compassion appears for the beautiful man who is ridiculed and does not know his own worth—and consequently sympathy appears in the reader as well. This awakening of compassion is the secret of humor.”

For Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean offered a different model, one that was a powerful attempt at the ideal, but one who “awakens sympathy through his terrible misfortune and society’s injustice toward him.”12 It is Jean Valjean’s suffering that gives the reader an immediate reason to care for him.

The problem for Dostoevsky was that he still had to solve how Myshkin would earn that same sympathy without relying on either comic absurdity or overwhelming misfortune: “But there is nothing of this sort in my novel, absolutely nothing, and that is why I am terribly afraid it will be a positive failure.”

The First Installment

Dostoevsky himself had tempered expectations for the success of the novel’s first installment. “On essence,” he wrote to Maikov, “I myself have absolutely no idea what it is that I sent. But insofar as I can have an opinion—the thing is not very handsome and by no means effective.”13

He was somewhat less harsh in his letter to Sofia, saying instead that his attempts were “lacking in effect”, but also rationalizing that “it is only an introduction, and the good thing is that nothing has yet been compromised; but almost nothing has been explained either, nothing has been established. My sole desire—is that it should awaken at least some curiosity in the reader, so that he will take up the second part.”14

The seven chapters of the first installment are, indeed, largely preparatory. They take Myshkin from the train journey to St. Petersburg and onto the imperial capital’s society, introducing Rogozhin, Lebedev, General Epanchin, Ganya, and the Epanchin women. Though the reader does not yet meet Nastasya Filippovna, the Prince learns of her and Dostoevsky foreshadows her role in the story. None of the novel’s major dramatic scenes had yet occurred, but Dostoevsky did produce some extremely powerful passages in this initial section.

Among the most striking are Myshkin’s reflections on capital punishment and the experience of a condemned man awaiting death. There are several occasions in the first seven chapters in which Myshkin discusses the experience of condemned individuals in the moments leading up to their executions, one of which is the protagonist telling the Epanchin women about a man sentenced to death by firing squad who was unexpectedly reprieved shortly before the execution.

“Consequently,” Myshkin says, “he had about five minutes left to live, not more. He said those five minutes seemed like an endless time to him, an enormous wealth. It seemed to him that in those five minutes he would live so many lives that there was no point yet in thinking about his last moment… he said that nothing was more oppressive for him at that moment than the constant thought: ‘What if I were not to die! What if life were given back to me—what infinity! And it would all be mine! Then I’d turn each minute into a whole age, I’d lose nothing, I’d reckon up every minute separately, I’d let nothing be wasted!’ He said that in the end this thought turned into such anger in him that he wished they would hurry up and shoot him.”15

When Alexandra Ephanchin asks him if the prisoner, after his commutation, did, indeed, end up living his “infinite life”, Myshkin responds, “Oh, no, he told me himself—I asked him about it—he didn’t live that way at all and lost many, many minutes.”

The episode is, of course, deeply rooted in Dostoevsky’s own experience in 1849, when he and the other members of the Petrashevsky Circle were prepared for execution and only then informed that their sentences had been commuted. Through the character of Myshkin, Dostoevsky retells one of the most formative moments of his life giving, his “perfectly beautiful human” a profound capacity for compassion and identification with suffering.

To quote the great Dostoevsky scholar Joseph Frank, “The Idiot is the most uneven of Dostoevsky’s four best novels, it is the one in which his personal vision of life, in all its tragic complexity, is expressed with the greatest intimacy, with the most poignancy, and with a lyrical pathos that touches on sublimity.”16

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Conclusion

The Idiot was written during one of the most tumultuous periods of Dostoevsky’s life. Throughout the roughly sixteen months in which he worked on the novel, deadlines constantly loomed, and the plot and its characters remained in flux almost until the very end. To add to the pressure, he and Anna moved a total of five times during this period, and his work was interrupted by the birth of their first child, Sofia. The joyous occasion was followed only months later by her tragic death from pneumonia, which brought an unimaginable period of anguish for Fyodor and his wife, Anna.

The Idiot has rightfully been remembered as one of Dostoevsky’s most powerful novels. What makes it even more remarkable is that, while it bears the marks of haste and instability, Dostoevsky was able to produce in Prince Lev Myshkin one of the greatest characters in the nineteenth-century literary canon by writing under repeated deadline pressure. “My whole fate depends upon my work,” he wrote to his niece Sofia after submitting the first installment, and he viewed The Idiot as “the repayment of my debt, my daily bread, and my entire future.”17

Myshkin, perhaps, never became the “perfectly beautiful human” Dostoevsky at first envisioned, but the struggle to imagine such a person on the page became the novel’s deepest source of power.

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So ends Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1848 novella White Nights, a story that, nearly 180 years after its publication, has become a social media sensation. The book’s resurgence in the age of social media is, to be sure, fitting; Dostoevsky’s character is a dreamer, an individual who has transformed his own isolation into an elaborate story of his own existence, inventing relationships with strangers and substituting imagined experience for life itself. His thoughts and perceptions of the world can undoubtedly resonate with those engaging in a similar type of behavior in the year 2026, though now, instead of wandering the streets of St. Petersburg in June, the dreamer curates and romanticizes his life from behind a screen.

But Dostoevsky’s charming novella was written at a specific polemical moment, when Russian writers and critics were fiercely debating the moral value of Romantic “dreaminess” (mechtatelnost), about whether the imagination offered a necessary refuge from an impoverished reality or merely justified withdrawal from the demands of actual life. Led by Vissarion Belinsky, the preeminent liberal literary critic of the 1840s, mechtatelnost was condemned as a distinctly intelligentsia malady that encouraged the withdrawal from ordinary life in indulgent Romantic contemplation.

Dostoevsky, who had recently fallen out of favor with the Belinsky circle, complicated the campaign’s criticism of the dreamer, first by writing The Landlady, and then several months later, White Nights. Both tell variations of the same story: an isolated Petersburg dreamer encounters a young woman and imagines that love will release him into real life. The two stories, however, are written in very different styles and arrive at very different understandings of what it means to awaken. In The Landlady, the dreamer’s encounter with reality end in humiliation and a deeper retreat into isolation; in White Nights, disappointment produces a fleeting moral clarity, as the dreamer becomes capable of accepting a happiness in which he has no place.

Though The Landlady was initially poorly received and would eventually be eclipsed by the more enduring White Nights, it remains a remarkably powerful work, anticipating in compressed form the moral and psychological conflicts that Dostoevsky would explore more fully in his later novels, particularly freedom and submission, domination and dependence, self-deception, and the attraction of suffering. White Nights, meanwhile, was the only of Dostoevsky’s early short works after Poor Folk (1845) to have been positively received by the St. Petersburg critics, and has endured in part because its lyrical tenderness and recognizable psychological themes of loneliness and self-invention have obscured Dostoevsky’s deliberate parody of the Romantic literature of the 1830s and 1840s.

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Dreamers in the 1840s

In the spring of 1847, Sovremennik published Ivan Goncharov’s novel An Ordinary Story about a young, idealistic Russian nobleman who arrives in St. Petersburg from the provinces, where he quickly becomes disillusioned and begins to question his youthful, romantic idealism. Examining the contrast between youthful dreams and the pragmatic demands of adult life, the novel demonstrates the incompatibility of exalted, Romantic ideas with reality.

Vissarion Belinsky, who two years earlier had ushered the young Fyodor Dostoevsky into the St. Petersburg literary scene, praised Goncharov’s new novel as a devastating blow against the Romanticism that “even Russian writers of genius have failed, and still fail, to shake off.” Writing to V.P. Botkin in March 1847, Belinsky exclaimed “what a benefit it will bring to society! What a devastating blow it deals to romanticism, daydreaming, sentimentality, and provincialism!”2

For the influential Belinsky, Romantic and sentimental literature had become morally dangerous, a current that elevated subjective feeling above experience and judgement. For example, in his 1845 review of Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris, Belinsky explained that such novels were especially dangerous for female readers, writing, “Girls among us are always destined for a more or less advantageous match, while they dream of the bliss of pure and disinterested love. Sentimental novels sustain and inflame this dangerous dreaminess. From this comes the lifelong unhappiness of many female dreamers.”3

Dostoevsky himself entered the debate in June 1847 in the final installment of his newspaper feuilleton The Petersburg Chronicle, written several months before The Landlady. In this article, he neither accepted Belinsky’s dismissal of the dreamer nor the Romantic celebration of him. Dostoevsky saw the problem less an excess of imagination than the absence of meaningful activity. “In our country, the thirst for life moves to such an unrestrained passion,” he wrote. “Everyone wants a serious activity.”4

For Dostoevsky, for those “who yearn for action, for immediate life, and for reality, but who are also feminine, tender, and weak, there gradually comes to the fore what people call dreaminess, so much so that in the end, people become not people but strange entities of an average type—dreamers.”5 For Dostoevsky, then, dreaminess was not as much a moral defect as a social and psychological condition, in which a frustrated longing for genuine life substituted imagined experience for lived experience.

Whereas Belinsky held dreaminess as a dangerous Romantic indulgence, Dostoevsky took a more nuanced view, acknowledging its consequences while treating it as a symptom of modern St. Petersburg society. It was this figure, someone whose imagination had expanded to fill the void left by a life without meaningful work or human connection, that Dostoevsky would explore in The Landlady later that year and in White Nights the following year.

“Is not such a life a tragedy! Is it not a horror and a sin? Is it not a caricature? And are we all not more or less dreamers!”6

The Landlady (1847)

Warning: This section contains spoilers.

In a letter to his brother, Mikhail, in early 1847, fresh off the negative reception he received for The Double, Dostoevsky wrote “Wish me success. I am writing my The Landlady. It is turning out even better than Poor Folk. It is in the same vein. My pen is guided by a spring of inspiration welling up straight from the soul. Not like in “Prokharchin”, over which I suffered all summer.”7

In The Landlady, one can see a clear attempt by Dostoevsky to revisit the Romantic folklore tradition, with a style and plot-motif that can be found in some of Nikolai Gogol’s work from the previous decade, specifically “A Terrible Vengeance” (1831-1832) and “Nevsky Prospekt” (1835).8 Indeed, the name of Dostoevsky’s heroine in The Landlady, Katerina, is the same as Gogol’s in “A Terrible Vengeance”, and the plot, atmosphere, and mystical elements are very similar in both works.

Dostoevsky’s dreamer, in this case, is Vasily Ordynov, the quintessential Romantic dreamer who believes that art and philosophy are complementary paths toward the discovery of higher truth. He is the last survivor of an aristocratic family whose inheritance allows him to live a secluded life devoted to study. “He was devoured by the deepest and most insatiable passion, which absorbs a man’s whole life and does not, for beings like Ordynov, provide any niche in the domain of practical daily activity. This passion was science.”9

One day, he takes to wandering the streets of St. Petersburg “like a recluse, like a hermit who has suddenly come from his dumb wilderness into the noisy, roaring city.”10 He watches the inhabitants of the city and feels an intense sense of dejection and misery due to his own yearning for love and sympathy. His wandering eventually brings him to a church, where he notices a beautiful young woman who “walked with her eyes cast down, and a sort of melancholy dignity pervaded her whole figure and was vividly and mournfully reflected in the sweet contours of the childishly soft, mild lines of her face.”11 She’s accompanied by a mysterious older man, “tall, still upright and hale-looking, but thin and of a sickly pallor.”12 These individuals, he would come to learn, are Katerina and Murin.

On an impulse, Ordynov rents a room in their flat. Overwhelmed by his own sense of loneliness, Orydynov’s alienation is compounded in the attraction he feels toward Katerina. At the same time, his antipathy for her companion and guardian, Murin, leads him to believe, in his imagination, that the old man is standing between him and Katerina. From this point, the story’s folk qualities unfold alongside the plot, with Katerina becoming a sad princess type figure held in mysterious captivity by Murin.13

Ordynov falls ill and enters a near constant state of delirium, with the veil between reality and his imagination blurred. Ordynov, himself, realizes that he cannot decipher reality from delirium. Katerina moves between loving tenderness toward Ordynov and attention toward the mystical Murin:

“At times, in moments of clouded consciousness, the thought flashed through his mind that he was condemned to live in some long, interminable dream, filled with strange, fruitless anxieties, struggles, and sufferings. In terror he tried to rise up against the oppressive sense of fatal inevitability, but at the very moment of his most intense and desperate resistance, some unknown force struck him down again, and he heard and felt with perfect clarity that he was once more losing consciousness, that an impenetrable, bottomless darkness was again opening before him, and that he was plunging into it with a cry of anguish and despair.”14

As Ordynov learns more of Katerina’s past, his understanding of her relationship with Murin and the latter’s power over her become clearer, though never fully grasped. Here, Dostoevsky develops a number of themes that would be developed masterfully later in his career, one being the psychology of masochism and the enjoyment of self-laceration. Dostoevsky, through the character of Murin, ties this concept to that of fear of freedom. According to Murin, people fear freedom more than servitude. Katerina repeatedly reaches for her liberation, but when real freedom appears, she retreats into the familiar structure of fear and guilt:

“Let me tell you, sir, a weak man cannot stand alone. Give him everything, he will come of himself and give it all back; give him half the kingdoms of the world to possess, try it and what do you think? He will hide himself in your slipper at once—he will make himself so small. Give a weak man his freedom—he will bind it himself and give it back to you. To a foolish heart freedom is no use!”15

This idea would reach its culmination in Ivan’s poem in The Brothers Karamazov, “The Grand Inquisitor”, when Dostoevsky demonstrates that true human dignity depends on freedom, even if that freedom leads to suffering and doubt.

After a series of increasingly dramatic confrontations, The Landlady ends without fully resolving the nature of Murin’s power over Katerina or the boundary between reality and Ordynov’s delirium. Defeated and humiliated, Ordynov retreats even further from ordinary life, sinking even deeper into his isolation:

“Often for hours together, forgetting himself and his daily life, forgetting everything in the world, he would sit in the same place, solitary, disconsolate; would shake his head hopelessly and, dropping silent tears…”16

Rather than being merely a Romantic hero, Ordynov, thus, is the very type of dreamer Dostoevsky had described months earlier in The Petersburg Chronicle: a man yearning for “immediate life and reality” who instead retreats ever deeper into imagination, until he loses the capacity for genuine human relationships.

The St. Petersburg literary critics, headed by Belinsky, responded with open hostility when The Landlady was published. “Had this work been signed by some unknown name we would not have said a word about it”, Belinsky wrote. “Not only the basic idea, but even the meaning of this no doubt extremely interesting tale remains a mystery to my understanding and will remain so until such a time as the author gives us the necessary explanations and interpretations of this wonderful riddle of his whimsical fantasy”.17

Writing in private to Annenkov, Belinsky took on an even harsher tone, calling the story “extremely vulgar, stupid, and talentless. It starts off with absolutely nothing (and no matter how hard he tried) goes nowhere.”18

Dostoevsky, himself, would acknowledge some of the novella’s downfalls. According to him, financial pressure forced him to accept and meet deadlines that led his creativity to suffer. In a February 1849 letter to Andrei Kraevsky, the editor and publisher of the journal in which The Landlady was published, journal Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland), Dostoevsky explained that “in order to keep my word and deliver by the deadline, I did violence to myself and wrote, among other things, such bad works, or rather, in the singular, such a bad work as The Landlady. As a result, I fell into bewilderment and self-abasement, and for a long time afterward could not pull myself together to write anything serious and worthwhile.”19

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White Nights (1848)

Warning: This section contains spoilers.

In Dostoevsky’s next novella, White Nights, he continues to refine his conception of the Petersburg dreamer, dropping the Romantic folklore so apparent in The Landlady and focusing more directly on the psychology of the dreamer. As we shall see, however, Dostoevsky would add to the story in 1860, inserting Romantic cultural references into the text.

The unnamed narrator in White Nights is another isolated Petersburg dreamer but, unlike Ordynov, he has no intellectual vocation. He has lived in the imperial capital for eight years without having a meaningful relationship. Instead, he retreats into an imagined intimacy with the city and its inhabitants, inventing lives for the strangers he regularly observes, and experiences the departure of the city’s residents for their summer homes as a personal abandonment.

“I was ready to go away with every wagon,” the narrator laments, “to drive off with every gentleman of respectable appearance who took a cab; but no one—absolutely no one—invited me; it seemed they had forgotten me, as though really I were a stranger to them!”20

One evening, while wandering along the embankment, he sees a young woman crying beside the canal. Noticing that a drunken man begins to approach her, the narrator takes a stick and stands between the girl and her pursuer. It is this action that provides him with an opportunity to speak to the girl: “Give me your arm… And he won’t dare to annoy us further.”

As he accompanies the young woman, Nastenka, home, he reveals that he is completely inexperienced with women and spends his life imagining encounters that never occur.

“And I do nothing but dream every day that at last I shall meet someone,” he says to her. “Oh, if only you knew how often I have been in love in that way....”

“How? With whom?” she responds.

“Why, with no one, with an ideal, with the one I dream of in my sleep. I make up regular romances in my dreams. Ah, you don’t know me!”21

As their exchange draws to a close, the two agree to meet the following night. Over the next three days, the two exchange their histories, and the narrator describes the strange existence of the dreamer, who withdraws from reality and creates an imaginary world in which he can experience the love, adventure, and recognition absent from his actual life.

“Why is it,” he tells her, “that whole sleepless nights pass like a flash in inexhaustible gladness and happiness, and when the dawn gleams rosy at the window and daybreak floods the gloomy room with uncertain, fantastic light, as in Petersburg, our dreamer, worn out and exhausted, flings himself on his bed and drops asleep with thrills of delight in his morbidly overwrought spirit, and with a weary sweet ache in his heart?”22

At one point, Dostoevsky directly ties White Nights to The Landlady. On the second night, the narrator recounts a dream about his love for a young woman, which is a near exact duplication of Ordynov’s dream in The Landlady:

“Yes, Nastenka, one deceives oneself and unconsciously believes that real true passion is stirring one’s soul… And that queer ancestral house where she spent so many years lonely and sad with her morose old husband, always silent and splenetic, who frightened them, while timid as children they hid their love from each other? What torments they suffered, what agonies of terror, how innocent, how pure was their love, and how (I need hardly say, Nastenka) malicious people were!^”23

Nastenka then tells the narrator about her own life. She lives under the close supervision of her blind grandmother. A year earlier, a young lodger had moved into the upper room of their home. After lending Nastenka books and taking her and her grandmother to the theater, the lodger told Nastenka that his business in St. Petersburg was concluded and that he had to return to Moscow. “When I heard that, I sank into a chair half dead,” Nastenka tells the narrator.24

When he prepared to leave Petersburg for Moscow, she went to his room and asked to accompany him. He explained that he was too poor to marry but promised to return for her in one year if his circumstances improved. The year has now passed, and although the lodger has returned to the imperial capital, he has not contacted her.

Hearing that the lodger is in the city, the narrator exuberantly offers his assistance. “Good God, can I do nothing to help you in your sorrow?”25 he exclaims. He agrees to deliver a letter to him and waits beside Nastenka for a response.

As the nights pass without word from the lodger, the narrator’s sympathy develops into love. “Oh, Nastenka, Nastenka! If only you knew how lonely I am now!” he thinks after their parting on the third night.26

When Nastenka finally concludes that the lodger has abandoned her, the dreamer confesses his feelings. “It’s impossible, but I love you, Nastenka! There it is! Now everything is told.”27

For a brief moment, the narrator believes that the life he has experienced only in fantasy may finally become real. The possibility is quickly dispelled when the lodger reappears at the end of the story. Unlike Ordynov, however, the narrator becomes capable of accepting a happiness in which he has no place. Indeed, when the lodger appears, even though his fleeting moment of happiness is about to disappear, the dreamer displays no hint of jealousy or resentment.

White Nights was received by the St. Petersburg literary scene far more positively than The Landlady, though Belinsky himself died in June 1848, several months before the novella appeared in the December issue of Otechestvennye zapiski. Writing in Sovremennik, however, A. V. Druzhinin praised White Nights as being superior to The Double, A Weak Heart, and The Landlady, noting that the story “is both remarkable and true.”28

S. S. Dudyshkin, meanwhile, considered both A Weak Heart and White Nights to have been among the best Russian literary works of the year, though he considered the latter to have been superior: “The author was repeatedly reproached for a special love for often repeating the same words, deducing characters that often breathe inappropriate exaltation, to dissect too much the poor human heart… in White Nights the author is almost irreproachable in this respect. The story is light, playful, and if the hero of the story himself were not a little original, this work would be artistically beautiful.”29

Interestingly, Dostoevsky revisited White Nights in 1860 in part, perhaps, in response to these criticisms, especially the idea that character and his inner impulses were not clearly enough defined. In his 1860 revision, Dostoevsky gave the story, in the words of Joseph Frank, “a specific cultural genealogy” by inserting a “kaleidoscope of Romantic influences” into the story.30 In an inserted portion that references Hoffmann, Merimée, Scott, Karamzin, George Sand, Meyerbeer, Zhukovsky, and Pushkin, the narrator notes:

“You ask, perhaps, what is he dreaming of?... of friendship with Hoffmann, St. Bartholomew’s Night, of Diana Vernon, of playing the hero at the taking of Kazan by Ivan Vasilevich, of Clara Mowbray, of Effie Deans, of the council of the prelates and Huss before them, of the rising of the dead in Robert the Devil (do you remember the music, it smells of the churchyard!), of Minna and Brenda, of the battle of Berezina, of the reading of a poem at Countess V. D.’s, of Danton, of Cleopatra ei suoi amanti, of a little house in Kolomna.”31

Interest in White Nights had already begun to revive before Dostoevsky revised the story in 1860. In 1859, Apollon Grigoriev called it one of the finest products of “sentimental naturalism,” while also regarding its “morbid poetry” as evidence of that school’s limitations. The revised story’s republication brought additional comments by critics, with Nikolai Dobrolyubov attacking the dreamer’s self-sacrifice as weakness and empty romanticism. Evgenia Tur, by contrast, called the revised White Nights one of the most poetic works in Russian literature.32

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Conclusion

Read together, The Landlady and White Nights contain the seeds of ideas that Dostoevsky would later masterfully explore with greater depth: freedom and submission, self-deception, the attraction of suffering, and the relationship between imagination and lived experience. The two novellas, however, already reveal the complexity of his treatment of the dreamer. In The Landlady, Ordynov’s encounter with reality ends in humiliation and a deeper retreat into isolation, while in White Nights, the dreamer becomes capable of recognizing a happiness in which he has no place. This contrast anticipates Dostoevsky’s greatest dreamer, also an unnamed narrator, in Notes from Underground (1864), though this dreamer follows a far darker trajectory.

Through all these works, Dostoevsky therefore neither simply condemns nor celebrates dreaminess. While he exposes its vanity and its power to substitute imagination for real life, he also preserves the dreamer’s responsiveness to beauty, sympathy, the ideal, and another person’s happiness.

For all the deserved attention now given to White Nights, The Landlady remains a powerful and unjustly neglected work that deserves to be rediscovered alongside it.

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This concern belonged to the broader 19^th century debate between Russia’s Westernizers and Slavophiles, with the former holding European civilization as the model Russia should follow and the latter emphasizing Russia’s distinct historical and spiritual character. Though Dostoevsky once moved in Westernizing circles, by the 1860s, he had helped develop the “return to the soil” movement (pochvennichestvo), the aim of which was to reconcile Russia’s European-educated classes with the traditions and Orthodox faith of the Russian people. By 1873, his sympathies lay much closer to the Slavophile camp, though his view remained far more nuanced than a simple binary split. In short, he believed Russia could remain culturally open and absorb Europe’s achievements without surrendering its own national character.

For Dostoevsky, the concern that European audiences did not possess the point of view to fully appreciate Russian art extended beyond visual art to include literature. He recalled, specifically, the efforts of Louis Viardot, a Frenchman, to translate Gogol with Ivan Turgenev’s assistance. Despite his complex relationship with Turgenev, he praised him as understanding Gogol “with the utmost subtlety; like everyone else at the time, he admired him with rapture.”1

Despite Turgenev’s assistance, in Viardot’s translation, according to Dostoevsky, “Gogol literally disappeared. All the humor, all the comic, all the individual details and the main moments of the denouements… all this has disappeared, as if it had not happened at all.”

Even Turgenev’s novel Rudin, which Dostoevsky considered the most German-like or European-compatible of Turgenev’s works, would not be properly understood in translation; its “main essence” would remain unsuspected.

“In a word,” Dostoevsky wrote, “everything characteristic, all our national par excellence (and consequently everything truly artistic), in my opinion, is unrecognizable to Europe… And even so that the greater and more original the talent, the more unrecognizable it will be.”

At the same time, Dostoevsky insisted that Russians possessed a reciprocal capacity that Europeans lacked. According to him, Russians could understand Dickens almost as fully as the English and could enter into a German scene “almost with their own German feelings,” even when Europeans failed to recognize the Russian equivalent.

Dostoevsky’s visit to the exhibition became an occasion to ask what, exactly, made a work of art Russian. Rather than asking only whether these pictures were technically accomplished, he asked what made them recognizably Russian.

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Vasily Perov: Hunters at Rest/Охотники на привале (1871)

Dostoevsky chose to highlight this painting as one of the most accessible examples of Russian genre painting, but he still doubted that a European audience could fully understand it. Dostoevsky acknowledges that the scene is simple enough: “One man is lying away heatedly and boastfully; another listens and believes him with all his might; while the third believes none of it, lies there laughing beside them.”

For Dostoevsky, the painting’s appeal is found in the specificity of its characters. “What a delight!” he writes, before insisting that the central figure is specifically “a Russian teller of tall tales,” lying “in a distinctly Russian way.”

According to him, the painting’s meaning resided in details that a Russian viewer could almost hear: “the whole turn of his story, his manner of speaking, his feelings.” A German spectator, Dostoevsky suggests, may understand the basic situation once it had been explained, but would still miss the distinctly Russian character of the scene.

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Vladimir Makovsky: Lovers of Nightingale Singing/Любители соловьиного пения (1872–1873)

Dostoevsky presents Makovsky’s painting as a scene whose humor depends on intimate knowledge of Russian social life. The setting is a small room belonging to “a townsman, or perhaps some retired soldier who sells songbirds,” where two aging merchants sit listening to a caged nightingale. The two are “already advanced in years, and perhaps even domestic tyrants… And yet both have visibly melted with pleasure, the most innocent, almost touching pleasure. Something is taking place here that is touching almost to the point of absurdity.”

According to Dostoevsky, the man who is standing addresses the two others with “a certain insolence and severity”, and that this is exactly how it should be, because the nightingale that he is showing is “extraordinarily good!”

“It will remain a kind of abstract knowledge, and it will be very difficult for a German to understand why the scene is so amusing,” Dostoevsky writes. “We, however, look at the picture and smile. Later we remember it, and once again, for some reason, we find it both funny and pleasing… there is, in my opinion, even a love of humanity.”

Dostoevsky then reiterated that if a similar picture were painted by a German, Russians would understand it just as well as Germans. “We would even admire it as they do, almost with their own German feelings, whereas they will understand absolutely nothing of ours. Though perhaps, in a certain sense, that is all to our advantage.”

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Ilya Repin: Barge Haulers on the Volga/Бурлаки на Волге (1870-1873)

Dostoevsky admired Barge Haulers on the Volga because Repin avoided turning the men into symbols of oppression or making the painting preach an obvious political message. When he first read about the painting, he prepared himself to find the haulers dressed in uniforms “with the usual labels pasted across their foreheads”.

“And what did I find?” Dostoevsky wrote. “To my delight, all my fears proved groundless: they were barge haulers, real barge haulers, and nothing more. Not one of them cries out from the canvas to the viewer: “Look how miserable I am, and see how deeply indebted you are to the people!” That alone may be counted among the artist’s greatest achievements.”

Dostoevsky went on to explain that the figures portrayed by Repin are “Gogolian”: “That is a great word, though I do not claim that Mr. Repin is a Gogol in his own art. Our genre painting has not yet reached the level of Gogol or Dickens.”

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Arkhip Kuindzhi: On the Island of Valaam/На острове Валааме (1873)

Dostoevsky acknowledged that Europeans could enjoy Russian landscapes that are visually dramatic or exotic, specifically those of the Crimea and Caucasus. But the plain and “meager” landscape of north and central Russia, “our most distinctly national Russian landscape… whose entire character consists, so to speak, in its lack of character, is nevertheless dear and precious to us. But what do the Germans care about our feelings?”

Dostoevsky provides the example of Arkhip Kuindzhi: On a Valaam Island, which is a landscape showing two birch trees in a marsh with a forest in the background. “From it comes something that is not quite a cloud but a haze, a dampness,” Dostoevsky explains. “The damp seems to penetrate your whole body; you can almost feel it.”

“What is so special about it?” he then asks. “What is distinctive about it? And yet how beautiful it is! Perhaps I am mistaken, but a German could not like it in quite the same way.”

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Conclusion

Though Dostoevsky’s essay undoubtedly celebrated some of the great Russian masterpieces of the era, they were not celebrated merely because of their Russianness. His criticism of Nikolai Ge’s Last Supper (1863), for example, shows that “the essence of a historical event cannot be represented by an artist exactly as it may have occurred in reality.”

Writing specifically of Ge’s painting, Dostoevsky argued that the artist wanted to depict a raw historical event, but in stripping away the sacred, he reduced Christ’s final meal to “an ordinary quarrel among thoroughly ordinary people.” For Dostoevsky, thus, realism involved discovering and representing the event’s essential human, national, or historical truth.

Interestingly, as Dostoevsky's philosophy evolved over the next seven years, he would come to reframe this "untranslatability" into Russia's ultimate spiritual mission. Speaking at the three-day jubilee honoring Alexander Pushkin in Moscow in 1880, Dostoevsky passionately explained that Pushkin was both a great poet and a prophet, one with the unique ability to “infuse his spirit into the spirit of other nations”. For Dostoevsky, this “universal responsiveness” was the definitive proof of Russia’s messianic mission which, in his mind, was to serve as the great reconciler of the fallen West, unifying the fractured genius of Europe within the compassionate embrace of Russia. According to Dostoevsky, only the Russian people possessed the universal empathy required for such a mission.

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Unfortunately, Dostoevsky’s letter, and therefore the specifics of his opinion on Turgenev’s seminal work, did not survive. However, by looking at Dostoevsky’s later comments on Bazarov, the response to the novel in his journal Vremya, and his own unrealized plans for a novel about contemporary Russian fathers and children, we can at least recover the outline of what Dostoevsky seems to have seen in Turgenev’s nihilist.

Despite the complex relationship between Dostoevsky and Turgenev, the two authors maintained a degree of mutual artistic admiration, and based on the surviving documents, it is clear that Dostoevsky enjoyed Fathers & Children, and especially the character of Evgenii Bazarov. Indeed, the character of Bazarov had created a storm of controversy among Russian intellectuals; the majority of Russian radicals felt insulted, believing Turgenev had written a crude, mocking parody of their generation. Meanwhile, the conservative right was horrified that Turgenev had seemingly glorified Nihilism and made a radical look so powerful.

Dostoevsky, instead, read the character of Bazarov not as a villain or a caricature, but as a tragic figure who was torn by the conflict between his rationalist-materialist worldview and the irrepressible impulses of his “great heart.”2 This reading, which was conveyed in Dostoevsky’s journal Vremya in an article written by Nikolai Strakhov, confirmed in Turgenev’s letter, and briefly mentioned in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions a year later, seems to be precisely what Turgenev wished to show in his great character. “It was exactly as if you had entered into my soul and felt even what I did not consider it necessary to say aloud,” Turgenev wrote.

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Fathers & Children

First published in March 1862, barely a year after Tsar Alexander II issued the Edict of Emancipation, Fathers & Children was published in Mikhail Katkov’s Russki Vestnik. Almost immediately, the novel became the heart of the social-cultural controversy that had been raging in Russia between the idealistic, Westernizing liberals of the 1840s and a new generation of intelligentsia who adhered to a new world view that rejected traditional authority in favor of rationalism and utilitarian science. This younger generation, galvanized by the writing of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, along with critics like Dmitry Pisarev and Nikolai Dobrolyubov, rejected tradition, art, and religion in favor of materialist science and social engineering that sought to dismantle old Russia from the ground up.

Many of the adherents of this new ideology were the educated sons of priests, low-level civil servants, and merchants, a rising class of non-noble intellectuals known as raznochintsy. The split thus took on a class element in addition to the generational split.

Turgenev’s characters captured this dimension brilliantly. The novel begins with the homecoming of Arkady Kirsanov, a young university student from the landed gentry, who is accompanied by his friend Evgenii Bazarov, the son of a humble retired army doctor. While Arkady represents the idealistic gentry youth who merely flirted with radical ideals without fully adopting them, Bazarov represents the self-made man of science who relies entirely on his own intellect rather than inherited privilege.

Staying on the Kirsanov estate with Arkady’s father, Nikolai, and uncle, Pavel, Bazarov is quickly introduced as a Nihilist, a word popularized by Turgenev. “Well, what is Mr. Bazarov himself?” Pavel asks. “He’s a nihilist”, Arkady responds. “That’s from the Latin, nihil, nothing, as far as I can judge; the word must mean a man who... who accepts nothing?” Nikolai then adds.

“No, it’s not the same thing,” Arkady explains. “A nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence that principle may be enshrined in.”3

This definition almost immediately pits Bazarov against Arkady’s father and uncle. With his romantic ideals, appreciation of art and literature, chivalric honor, and English tailoring, Pavel was the embodiment of the refined Westernized aristocrat and in many ways was based on Turgenev himself. Nikolai, meanwhile, is a gentle, well-meaning liberal of the 1840s who genuinely believes he has kept pace with historical progress. He has spent his life modernizing his estate and managing the fallout of the recent emancipation, later lamenting: “I was doing everything to keep up with the times: I have done well by the peasants, set up a model farm, so that all over the province I am known as a radical.”4

Bazarov, on the other hand, rejected any notion of artistic contemplation, seeing nature as a workshop for human utility. He dismisses Pavel’s beloved poetry as mere nonsense, arguing that “a good chemist is twenty times as useful as any poet.”5

At one point, Bazarov tells Arkady, “The day before yesterday I saw him [Pavel] reading Pushkin… Explain to him, please, that that’s no earthly use. He’s not a boy, you know; it’s time to throw up that rubbish. And what an idea to be a romantic at this time of day! Give him something sensible read.”6

When Arkady asks what he should give his uncle to read, Bazarov responds, “Oh, I think Buchner’s Stoff und Kraft to begin with.”7

Shortly thereafter, while Nikolai is reading Pushkin, Bazarov, without saying a word, took the book from his hands and replaced it with Buchner’s book, a work of extreme, uncompromising scientific materialism. When Nikolai asked his brother what he thought of the German book, Pavel responded, “Either I’m stupid, or it’s all nonsense. I must be stupid, I suppose.”8

Later on, Bazarov further illuminates his thoughts on art, at one point exclaiming, “To my mind, Raphael’s not worth a brass farthing; and they are no better than he.”9

Bazarov’s attack against art in general and poetry in particular is a clear reference to Chernyshevsky, though whereas Chernyshevsky argued that art should be subordinate to life, Bazarov takes his idea further and argues for a total negation of the value of art. Bazarov, similarly, appears to exemplify Chernyshevsky’s views on the value of the physical sciences and material determinism, believing that they hold the key to decoding every aspect of human life, including social and ethical dilemmas.10

At one point, Bazarov goes around the estate collecting frogs. When asked by a farm boy what he wants to do with the frogs, Bazarov responds, “I shall cut the frog open, and see what’s going on in his inside, and then, as you and I are much the same as frogs, only that we walk on legs, I shall know what’s going on inside us, too.” When Pavel sees Bazarov’s sack of frogs, he exclaims, “So he’s going to cut them up… He has no faith in principles, but he has faith in frogs.”11

As Bazarov’s conversations with the Kirsanovs progress, it becomes increasingly apparent that Bazarov doesn’t simply lack faith in principles, but rejects principles as a matter of ideology. In perhaps the most famous passage of the book, Arkady’s father, Nikolai, asks Bazarov: “You deny everything, or, speaking more precisely, you destroy everything… But one must construct too, you know?” To which Bazarov responds, “That’s not our business now… The ground has to be cleared first.”12

As the book progresses, it becomes apparent that Bazarov is, in reality, a man deeply divided against himself. The façade of his orderly and mechanical universe begins to unravel the moment he meets the wealthy, independent widow Anna Odintsova. Prior to meeting Anna, Bazarov explains to Arkady that looking at a beautiful woman is purely a matter of assessing her physiology:

“And what stuff it all is, about these mysterious relations between a man and woman? We physiologists know what these relations are. You study the anatomy of the eye; where does the enigmatical glance you talk about come in there? That’s all romantic, nonsensical.”13

Falling desperately in love, Bazarov is forced to confront his own romantic and existential longing while grappling with an emotion that his materialist philosophy dismisses as biological delusion.

“And besides, love… you know, is a purely imaginary feeling,” Bazarov tells Odintsova at one point.14

Finally, Bazarov, clearly in love with Odintsova, breaks through his façade and loses his renowned self-control. “I love you like a fool, like a madman… There, you’ve forced it out of me,” he tells her.15 Odintsova’s rejection fundamentally alters Bazarov. His pride is shattered, and his certainly in his perceived order of the world evaporates.

This existential unraveling follows Bazarov back to his childhood home, when he and Arkady visit his parents’ modest estate. Upon arrival, Bazarov is met by his father, Vasily, a doting retired army doctor who hero-worships his son, and his mother, Arina, a deeply superstitious, traditional woman of the old world. Both parents fear annoying their brilliant, educated son, but can’t help but shower him with affection. Bazarov, however, finds himself suffocated by their devotion, and quickly becomes bored with the provincial life of his parents. This boredom devolves into despair.

Lying under a haystack on the estate, Bazarov remarks to Arkady that the tiny space he occupies is “so infinitely small in comparison with the rest of space, in which I am not... and the period of time in which it is my lot to live is so petty beside the eternity in which I have not been, and shall not be… And in this atom this mathematical point, the blood is circulating, the brain is working and wanting something… Isn’t it loathsome? Isn’t it petty?”16

With his rigid materialism failing to comfort him, Bazarov falls into a profound existential crisis. He becomes aware of his internal contradiction: a man who claims to believe in nothing, but is utterly consumed by the tragic depth of his own human soul. It was precisely in this internal fracture that Dostoevsky recognized the greatness of Bazarov.

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The Reception of Fathers & Children

Upon finishing Fathers & Children, Turgenev himself was prepared for the controversy that would come with its publication. “Read it and tell me your opinion with complete sincerity,” Turgenev wrote to Dostoevsky a month before the novel’s publication. “I expect failure, not to say more — and this is not “running ahead of myself,” but a fairly clear awareness based on positive data. I know what I wanted — and I am beginning to feel that I have taken on a task beyond my powers; but it never occurred to me to instruct anyone at all. There was no room for that.”17

Even before its publication, sectors of Petersburg literary circles were already gossiping that Bazarov was a malicious caricature of Nikolai Dobrolyubov, one of the great radical critics of the late 1850s and early 1860s, associated with Chernyshevsky’s journal, Sovremennik. Dobrolyubov died very young in 1861, only months before Fathers and Children was published, so the idea that Bazarov was based on Dobrolyubov was seen as tasteless and vindictive.

Chernyshevsky entrusted the review of Turgenev’s novel in Sovremennik to Dobrolyubov’s protégé, M.A. Antonovich. In his essay, “Asmodeus of Our Time”, Antonovich dedicated much of the essay to impugning Turgenev himself, accusing him of “personal hatred and animosity” toward his heroes. “This vindictiveness,” Antonovich wrote, “reaches the point of absurdity; it has the character of schoolboy pinches, showing itself in trifles and petty details.”18 Through Antonovich’s essay, Sovremennik’s argument was that Turgenev’s portrayal of the new generation was a malicious caricature, showing Bazarov as a demonic distortion of contemporary youth while giving moral superiority to the “fathers.”

Meanwhile, Mikhail Katkov, then an increasingly anti-radical editor and publicist and editor of Russki Vestnik, saw in Bazarov a completely recognizable figure. “Here is obvious proof that the artist hit the mark,” Katkov wrote. “In his work, that which he depicted recognized itself, recognized itself not only without distortion, but even in the most flattering form, and at the same time felt itself wounded.”19

At the same time, Katkov and other conservatives read the text as an elevation of Bazarov. In a letter to Afanasy Fet, Turgenev himself wrote that he was “scolded” by Katkov because “Bazarov emerged in my work as an apotheosis.”20

Turgenev then exclaimed to Fet that he was unsure of how he meant to portray Bazarov: “Did I want to revile Bazarov or to exalt him? I do not know that myself, for I do not know whether I love him or hate him!”21

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Dostoevsky on Fathers & Children

Dostoevsky first read Fathers & Children soon after the novel’s publication in March 1862. As mentioned earlier, a letter he wrote to Turgenev outlining his thoughts on the novel in general and on the character of Bazarov in particular has not survived. However, Turgenev’s response to Dostoevsky’s letter is revealing.

“I need hardly tell you to what degree your opinion of Fathers and Children delighted me,” Turgenev wrote. He then explained the criticism he had received both from his friends and early readers concerning the character of Bazarov. “How, then, can one not begin to doubt and lose one’s bearings?” he wrote.

Turgenev believed Dostoevsky had understood Bazarov as the human and artistic center of the novel, a living contradiction that was neither a caricature nor an elevation of a political position:

“You grasped so fully and so subtly what I wanted to express through Bazarov that I could only spread out my hands in amazement — and pleasure. It was exactly as if you had entered into my soul and felt even what I did not consider it necessary to say aloud. God grant that this reflected not only the sensitive penetration of a master, but also the simple understanding of a reader — that is, God grant that everyone may see at least part of what you saw! Now I am calm about the fate of my story: it has done its work — and I have nothing to repent of.”22

Shortly after penning this letter to Dostoevsky, Turgenev wrote to V.P. Botkin, excitedly explaining “Dostoevsky assures me that this single work is worth everything I have written, compares it with Dead Souls (!)”23

Dostoevsky’s thoughts on Fathers & Children undoubtedly influenced the review written by Nikolai Strakhov in the Dostoevsky brothers’ journal Vremya. In this review, Strakhov rejected the idea that Bazarov was a crude lampoon and instead treated him as a serious artistic type:

“A living, whole man is grasped by the author in every action, in every movement of Bazarov. This is the great merit of the novel, which contains its chief meaning, and which our hasty moralizers failed to notice. Bazarov is a theoretician; he is a strange man, one-sidedly sharp; he preaches extraordinary things; he acts eccentrically; he is a schoolboy, in whom the crudest affectation is joined with deep sincerity; as we have said, he is a man alien to life, that is, he himself holds himself aloof from life. But beneath all these external forms there flows a warm current of life; for all the harshness and artificiality of his manifestations, Bazarov is a fully living man, not a phantom, not an invention, but real flesh and blood. He renounces life, and yet he lives deeply and powerfully.”24

Dostoevsky himself returned to this idea in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, where he mocked the radicals who had criticized Turgenev for the character of Bazarov. Dostoevsky suggests that what the critics failed to see is precisely what made Bazarov more than a mere ideological type.

“And what a beating he got for Bazarov, for the restless and yearning Bazarov (the sign of a great heart) despite all his nihilism,” Dostoevsky wrote.25

Shortly after Strakhov’s article appeared, Turgenev arrived in St. Petersburg from Paris and visited the office of Vremya. Strakhov recalled that Turgenev invited him and the Dostoevsky brothers to dine with him. “The storm that had blown up against him obviously upset him,” Strakhov wrote.26

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Conclusion

More than a decade later, Dostoevsky, writing in Diary of a Writer, expressed his own long-standing wish to write a novel that explored the generation divide of Russia:

“I have long set myself the ideal of writing a novel about present-day Russian children, and of course about their present-day fathers, in their present mutual relationship.”27

Dostoevsky explained that The Adolescent was “the first trial of my thought” but, as we know, he would explore this theme with great depth and force in the Brothers Karamazov.

It is, of course, interesting to see Dostoevsky’s thoughts on Fathers & Children through the lens of the totality of their relationship that spanned nearly 40 years. Despite the mockery and scathing satire, from Turgenev’s 1847 poem calling Dostoevsky “a pimple on literature's nose” to Dostoevsky’s satire of Turgenev through the character of Karmazinov in Demons, the two great authors maintained mutual artistic admiration, culminating in the public display of affection during the 1880 jubilee honoring Alexander Pushkin. That episode, however, is a story for another day.

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In 1877, eleven years after The Double had been revised, Dostoevsky again wrote about the power of his idea in his second book. Admitting that the story, itself, was not successful, he wrote that he had “never contributed anything to literature more serious than this idea. But I was completely unsuccessful with the form of the story.”2

The “idea” to which Dostoevsky referred was the divided self under social and psychological pressure: the way personality can fracture under humiliation, envy, shame, ambition, and the unbearable need to be recognized. The novella itself explores the suppressed personality aspects that the main character, Yakov Golyadkin, is unwilling or unable to face, and the resulting internal split between self-image and truth.

Traces of this idea, specifically in regards to the personality structure of Golyadkin, can be seen in some of Dostoevsky’s later great characters, especially the underground man, Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, and Ivan Karamazov. However, unlike Dostoevsky’s later characters, Golyadkin experiences the torment of ruthless self-consciousness as a result of psychological pressure and social humiliation, resulting in the fantastic creation of a mirror image “double” of himself.

Dostoevsky’s characters of the 1860s and 1870s, meanwhile, demonstrate the effects of what Dostoevsky regarded as the radical ideologies imported from the West on the moral and religious Russian character. Their “doubles” would be found in obvious hallucinations or in the introduction of separate characters who embodied certain internal aspects in a concentrated form, like Ivan Karamazov’s devil, or Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov.

In short, Dostoevsky wrote The Double in the 1840s as a passionate young radical embedded in Saint Petersburg’s progressive intelligentsia in a milieu receptive to French utopian socialism. At that early stage, he viewed the “divided self” as a tragic byproduct of an oppressive, unequal social hierarchy under a despotic government. Decades later, however, having survived a Siberian labor camp and witnessed the rise of what he viewed as a ruthless and materialistic Russian nihilism, Dostoevsky’s characters undergo fractures that occur as they attempt to sever themselves from their innate moral conscience and their people.

It is with these nuances in mind that reading The Double becomes so uniquely rewarding. Despite its structural flaws, understanding its place in Dostoevsky’s evolution and his lifelong desire to return to the “idea” makes the book an exceptionally rewarding and enjoyable read.

The Double was my second stop in my endeavor to read all of Dostoevsky’s works in the original Russian in chronological order. Like I mentioned in my article on Poor Folk, I hope to, at some point, provide a more detailed “read-along” for this Substack, complete with a full plot analysis. For now, however, I will content myself with these general impressions of Dostoevsky’s The Double.

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The Shape of the Novel

The Double follows Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, a deeply insecure, low-ranking government clerk in Saint Petersburg who is desperately seeking social advancement and professional validation. Unlike Poor Folk, in which the characters attempt to maintain a semblance of dignity in the face of abject poverty, Golyadkin, with his position as the assistant to the chief clerk of his office, his own apartment complete with his own servant (Petrushka) and his modest savings, suffers from his ambition and his inability to assert himself. Indeed, he has the means to project the higher social standing that he does not possess, wearing the finest clothes, riding throughout St. Petersburg in a carriage, and changing his banknotes into smaller bills so that his wallet would appear larger.

At the same time, Golyadkin is acutely aware of his inability to maintain such a role, and frequently shrinks with timidity in everyday social situations. One encounter, early in the novella, provides an exceptional character sketch of the hero. When paying an unannounced visit to his doctor, Krestyan Ivanovich, who, at the sight of his patient, gave a “displeased mien”, Golyadkin:

“murmured something—however, it seems to have been an apology—and, not knowing what to do next, took a chair and sat down. But, recollecting that he had sat down without being invited, he at once felt his impropriety and hastened to correct his error in ignorance of society and good tone by immediately getting up from the seat he had occupied without being invited. Then, thinking better of it and dimly noting that he had done two stupid things at once, he ventured, without the least delay, upon a third, that is, he tried to excuse himself, murmured something, smiled, blushed, became embarrassed, fell into an expressive silence, and finally sat down definitively and did not get up anymore, but only provided himself, just in case, with that same defiant gaze, which possessed the extraordinary power of mentally incinerating and grinding to dust all of Mr. Golyadkin’s enemies.”3

His fragile psychological equilibrium completely shatters when he encounters a man who looks exactly like him, shares his name, and has secured a position in his very same government office:

“He himself, however, was burning in a slow fire… The figure now seated opposite Mr. Golyadkin was Mr. Golyadkin’s horror; he was Mr. Golyadkin’s shame… completely different, yet at the same time completely identical to the first: of the same height, the same build, dressed in the same manner, with the same bald spot… no one—absolutely no one—would have dared to determine which of them was the real Golyadkin and which the counterfeit; who was the old one and who the new; who the original and who the copy.”4

The lookalike, Golyadkin Junior, possesses all the qualities that Golyadkin Senior lacks and is aware that he lacks, namely charm, cunning, ruthlessness, and social savvy. Golyadkin Junior ultimately usurps the hero’s career, relationships, and sanity.

The Double is narrated by an outside observer who gradually identifies himself with Golyadkin’s consciousness and adopts the speech of the novella’s hero, a brilliant technique that results in a choppy, somewhat clumsy narration, full of redundancies and meaningless exclamations that increase as Golyadkin becomes more and more paranoid and agitated. The complex narrative technique, as we shall see later, was problematic for readers at the time, and served to fuel the fire of the novella’s criticism.

Despite the heavy theme of the book, The Double is filled with comical episodes. Without providing spoilers, one of the more amusing moments that, at the same time, is utterly tragic, is when Golyadkin, believing that he was meeting Klara for their elopement, waited for her outside a party, behind a pile of logs:

“Thus reassured, he once again ensconced himself beneath the peaceful canopy of his comforting and protective woodpile… Suddenly, in every window at once, a strange commotion broke out; figures flitted to and fro, curtains were flung open, and whole groups of people crowded into the windows… all of them searching and peering out into the courtyard for something. Secure within the sanctuary of his saving woodpile, our hero, too, began to watch this general commotion with curiosity, craning his head to the right and to the left with keen interest—or at least as far as the short shadow cast by the woodpile, which served as his cover, would allow. Suddenly, he froze in bewilderment, gave a start, and nearly sank to the ground in sheer terror… It was not just ‘something’ or ‘someone’ they were searching for: they were searching, quite simply, for ‘him’—for Mr. Golyadkin… Everyone is looking in his direction; indeed, everyone is pointing right at him. Fleeing was impossible: they would see him... Dumbfounded, Mr. Golyadkin pressed himself as tightly as he could against the woodpile, and only then did he notice that the treacherous darkness was failing him—that it no longer concealed him entirely.”5

The Origins of the Novel

Dostoevsky started writing what would become The Double in the middle of 1845, just as he was completing the final edits of Poor Folk. In a letter to his brother in September, Dostoevsky wrote, “Ah, brother, what a sad thing loneliness is, and I am beginning now to envy you… What will happen, what lies ahead? I am now a real Golyadkin, whom, by the way, I will begin working on tomorrow… Golyadkin has actually benefited from my melancholy. Two new ideas have been born, along with a fresh narrative situation.”6

It is not a stretch to find evidence of Dostoevsky’s temperament and personality in the character of Golyadkin, a current that the author himself effectively acknowledged. Dostoevsky was prone to nervous intensity, social awkwardness, and suspicious self-consciousness, and, according to Belinsky, was “firmly convinced that all of mankind envies and persecutes him.”7

Golyadkin was also clearly influenced by Makar Devushkin, the hero of Poor Folk. The great Dostoevsky historian Joseph Frank points out the scene in Poor Folk where we catch an obvious glimpse of Goldyadkin, as Devushkin is preparing to meet the general: “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 thought there was nothing the matter, as though it were not I.”

This scene shows how the self under pressure begins to withdraw from itself, a very Dostoevskian concept that would later be encompassed in the phrase, coined by Dostoevsky himself in The Double, of Stushevatsya meaning to fade away, shrink back, efface oneself, lose presence, or become embarrassed and withdraw.8 This concept, first explored in Poor Folk, would become one of the dominant themes of The Double.

As the character of Golyadkin began to take shape, Dostoevsky shared a character sketch with his brother, written in the speech style of Goldyadkin himself:

“Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin is sustaining his character perfectly. A terrible scoundrel, impossible to get at; he absolutely refuses to move forward, claiming that, after all, he is not ready yet, and that for the time being he is just on his own, that he is nothing, nothing at all, but that, perhaps, if it comes to that, then he too can do something, why not, why shouldn’t he? After all, he is like everyone else; he is only so-so, but otherwise he is like everyone else. What of it!”9

As would become a common occurrence for Dostoevsky, progress on the novella lagged behind schedule, and he found himself racing against the deadline. “Golyadkin is still not finished,” he wrote in November, “and I absolutely must finish him by the 25th.”10

Nevertheless, Dostoevsky had high hopes for the novel. “Well, brother, if I were to start listing all my successes to you, there would not be enough paper,” he wrote to Mikhail. “I think I shall have money. Golyadkin is turning out splendidly; it will be my chef-d’œuvre.”11

Once in print, however, the critics would think The Double anything but.

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Gogol & Pushkin

Like all of Dostoevsky’s early works, the influence of Nikolai Gogol and Alexander Pushkin are clear in The Double. It was in Pushkin’s 1833 masterpiece, The Bronze Horseman, that Dostoevsky inherited the preoccupation with a vulnerable, low-ranking clerk who was driven to madness by the hostile, crushing reality of the imperial capital. Dostoevsky appears to have deliberately echoed the atmosphere of The Bronze Horseman: just as the catastrophic November weather in the imperial capital ultimately led to Evgeny’s psychological rupture, it was during a blinding, midnight November snowstorm along the Fontanka canal that Golyadkin’s world dissolves, culminating in the first appearance of his double.12

It was, however, Gogol who had the larger influence on The Double and, having been heralded as the “New Gogol”, Dostoevsky himself did not shy away from the obvious parallels. Golyadkin’s infatuation with Klara Olsufyevna, the daughter of Civil Councillor Olsufy Ivanovich Berendyev, is reminiscent of Poprischin’s infatuation with the daughter of his office chief in Gogol’s Diary of a Madman. Poprischin ultimately ends up in a madhouse, believing himself to be the King of Spain.

In another Gogol story, the Nose, the story’s namesake becomes detached from the collegiate assessor Kovalyov, and goes around St. Petersburg wearing the uniform of a higher rank official. As Joseph Frank suggests, Dostoevsky employs the same theme of social ambition in The Double, though perhaps with a slightly lower degree of “fantastic grotesque.”13

It was, however, Gogol’s Dead Souls that became Dostoevsky’s lodestar. Writing to his brother on the day The Double was published, Dostoevsky exclaimed, “Golyadkin is ten times higher than Poor Folk. Our people say that since Dead Souls there has been nothing like it in Russia, that it is a work of genius, and what don’t they say! With what hopes they all look upon me! Indeed, Golyadkin has succeeded for me beyond all measure. You will like it more than I can say! You will like it even better than Dead Souls, I know it.”14

The Double, however, undoubtedly takes a distinctly Dostoevskian approach to some of the broad social satire employed by Gogol. Whereas Gogol turned bureaucratic ambition and social vanity outward into grotesque satire, Dostoevsky turned them inward, exploring how the absurdities of rank and social embarrassment could lead to a psychological fracture.

“In many parts of both novels of Mr. Dostoevsky,” Belinsky wrote in March 1846, “one sees the powerful influence of Gogol, even in his turns of phrase. But in Mr. Dostoevsky there is so much independence that the obvious influence of Gogol will probably not continue and will disappear with other personally characteristic shortcomings. Nonetheless, Gogol will remain with Mr. Dostoevsky forever as, so to speak, a father figure in creativity.”15

Nevertheless, for the St. Petersburg literary scene, the novella would come to be viewed as an excessive and tedious mimicry of Gogol’s mannerisms.

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The Double on the Literary Scene

Unlike Dostoevsky’s debut Poor Folk, which was heralded in the St. Petersburg literary press and launched the young Dostoevsky into the spotlight, The Double was almost unanimously rejected both by critics and his contemporaries. I have outlined elsewhere Dostoevsky’s falling out with the Belinsky Circle, but suffice it to say that the young author’s personal fall from grace with the St. Petersburg literary establishment coincided with the publication of The Double, though how closely the two were related is the subject of a separate article.

Belinsky himself, as the center of the liberal literary establishment, initially praised the creative talent shown by Dostoevsky in The Double, but he quickly focused on the negatives of the novella, writing “It is evident that the author of The Double still has not mastered the techniques of measure and harmony. This is why, not completely without foundation, many readers reproach the writer for long-windedness even in Poor Folk, although such reprimands are less with this work than in The Double.”16

This criticism was almost immediately echoed by other members of the Circle, with Dostoevsky writing to his brother that, “here is what is vile and agonizing: my own people, our people, Belinsky and the rest, are all displeased with me over Golyadkin… Everyone… found Golyadkin to be so tedious and sluggish, so drawn-out, that reading it was simply impossible.”17

Another critic, Shevyryov, noted, “We do not understand how the author of Poor Folk, a work that is so remarkable, could write The Double… This work is a sin against artistic consciousness… one must appeal constantly to familiar characters from Gogol… But the work, assuming one gets to the end, is like a most unpleasant and boring nightmare after a rich dinner.”18

Another critic, Bilyarsky, wrote much the same: “Regarding The Double by Mr. Dostoevsky… never again will we like to see similar abuses of talent and effort.. The conversation of the characters in this story transcends all borders of decency… a meld of curses and oaths… intolerable for educated readers.”19

There were, of course, exceptions to the negative reception given to The Double, the most notable being the review given by Valerian Maikov. Comparing Dostoevsky to Gogol, Maikov argued that “Gogol is a poet preeminently social, while Mr. Dostoevsky is preeminently psychological,” explaining that for Gogol “the individual is important as the representative of a certain society or circle,” while for Dostoevsky “society itself is interesting through its influence on the personality of the individual.”

Turning directly to The Double, Maikov wrote that Dostoevsky had “penetrated so deeply into the human soul” and “gazed so fearlessly and passionately into the hidden machinery of human feelings, thoughts, and actions” that the effect of reading the novella could be compared to that of “an inquisitive person penetrating into the chemical composition of matter.” In short, Maikov recognized the psychological depth that would later come to define Dostoevsky.20

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Conclusion: Dostoevsky’s Idea

The hostile reception of The Double prompted Dostoevsky to consider revising it almost immediately after its publication, but this did not prove possible due to his arrest. His notebooks from after his release from Siberia outline an entire recasting of the story, with Golyadkin becoming a radical and attending a meeting of the Petrashevsky Circle.

Ultimately, the complete rewrite did not happen, but in 1866, he did revise The Double. The revisions consisted, primarily, in removing many of the verbal repetitions that had been highlighted by the literary critics after the novella’s initial publication.21 To distance himself from accusations that he was simply mimicking Gogol, he changed the subtitle from The Adventures of Mr. Golyadkin to A Petersburg Poem (the subtitle of Dead Souls was The Adventures of Chichikov). He also removed one entire chapter and shortened others.

As Dostoevsky lamented in those later letters to his brother and in his Diary of a Writer, he had failed the form, but not the idea. His idea, first formulated in The Double, showing the self confronted by another version of itself, would return in some of Dostoevsky’s great characters, in Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov, in Stavrogin and his various moral reflections, and most explicitly in Ivan Karamazov’s encounter with the devil:

“In reviling you, I revile myself!... You are me—my very self—only with a different face. You say precisely what I am already thinking... and you are powerless to tell me anything new!... You are me, you are I and nothing more! You are trash, you are my fantasy!”22

In The Double, Dostoevsky had not yet mastered the form, as he later admitted, but he had discovered one of his central imaginative structures: the human soul divided against itself, forced to meet its own shame, pride, resentment, and unbelief in the form of another.

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During his famous speech, Dostoevsky noted to the crowd: “Pushkin is an extraordinary phenomenon and, perhaps, the unique phenomenon of the Russian spirit,” said Gogol. I will add for myself: and a prophetic one... And never before has any Russian writer, neither before nor after him, joined so soulfully and kindredly with his people as Pushkin... Pushkin died in the full development of his powers and indisputably carried a certain great secret with him to the grave. And so now, without him, we are discerning this secret.”

Addressing the crowd, Dostoevsky passionately explained that Pushkin was both a great poet and a prophet, one with the unique ability to “infuse his spirit into the spirit of other nations”. For Dostoevsky, this “universal responsiveness” was the definitive proof of Russia’s messianic mission which, in his mind, was to serve as the great reconciler of the fallen West, unifying the fractured genius of Europe within the vast, compassionate embrace of Russia. According to Dostoevsky, only the Russian people possessed the universal empathy required for such a mission.

The conclusion of Dostoevsky’s speech unleashed nearly hysterical emotions among the crowd, with D. A. Lyubimov later remembering “a storm of applause, some sort of rumbling, stamping, feminine screeches… the Hall of the Moscow Nobility either before or since had ever resounded with such a tempest of ecstasy.”2

The speech cemented Dostoevsky’s place in Russian literary history as a secular prophet, a man who had finally decoded the “Pushkinian secret” to prove that Russia’s ultimate destiny was one of spiritual leadership and global healing. In doing so, he succeeded, ever so briefly, in uniting a fractured Russian intelligentsia under the banner of a single, divine national purpose.

Dostoevsky’s admiration for and devotion to Pushkin is so remarkable because it is one of the few elements that remained consistent through Dostoevsky’s otherwise turbulent intellectual life. Dostoevsky was, in many ways, defined by his radical ideological split when he moved from the utopian socialism of his youth to the Orthodox conservatism of his maturity. During this shift, nearly all the writers and thinkers who had influenced his youth were condemned. His admiration for Pushkin, however, as well as his view of the poet as the central figure of the Russian spirit, remained steadfast throughout his life, and if anything, grew stronger.

This is the first installment of a three-part article exploring Pushkin’s influence on Dostoevsky as both a talented writer and a moral compass. While there were, to be sure, stylistic echoes of Pushkin in Dostoevsky’s works and shared themes, the deeper story lies in the profound, unwavering personal devotion Dostoevsky felt for a man he never actually met.

This first part addresses the profound impact Pushkin’s work had on Dostoevsky as a young man through his experiences as a budding novelist in the 1840s. Part two will focus on Dostoevsky’s time in a Siberian prison camp, the consequent ideological shift, and his emergence as a prolific writer and thinker. Part three will focus on the Westernizer/Slavophile intellectual debate of the 1870s and Dostoevsky’s 1880 speech.

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Pushkin & the Young Dostoevsky

From a young age, Fyodor Dostoevsky and his siblings often gathered with their parents in the drawing room of the family’s apartment attached to the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor on Bozhedomka Street in Moscow and had family readings, where historical and literary works were read aloud. Nikolai Karamzin’s History of the Russian State was a favorite, as was Pushkin’s prose.3

Fyodor’s younger brother, Andrei, later recalled that the Dostoevsky parents preferred the poetry of Vasily Zhukovsky, the refined, romantic, and proper court poet, to that of Pushkin, the bolder and linguistically daring modern poet. This led to a friendly generational dispute between the children and their parents.

Fyodor and the eldest Dostoevsky child, Mikhail, “were united in Alexander Pushkin, and both of them, it seems, already knew almost all of him by heart… Little was yet said about him from the lectern as a modern poet; his works were not yet memorized at the insistence of teachers.”4

In one episode, Fyodor memorized and recited Pushkin’s The Death of Oleg, and Mikhail recited Zhukovsky’s Count Hapsburg. After hearing the two poems, the parents unanimously declared Zhukovsky’s to be the better work, but were unable to convince the children.

Andrei recalled, “Our mother became very fond of both of these works and often asked the brothers to recite them; I remember that even during her illness, already lying in bed (she died of tuberculosis), she listened to them with pleasure.”5

Some of Pushkin’s greatest works were published during Dostoevsky’s adolescence, including Eugene Onegin, The Bronze Horseman, and The Queen of Spades. Though critics at the time gave mixed reviews to these later works, the young Dostoevsky eagerly devoured them.

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A Death in the Family & the Death of Pushkin

Dostoevsky’s mother, Marya Fyodorovna, fell ill with tuberculosis in the autumn of 1836, when Fyodor was 15-years-old. For the next several months, the condition of the family’s matriarch would slowly deteriorate. “At the beginning of 1837,” Andrei wrote, “Mother’s condition worsened greatly; she hardly got out of bed, and from February she became completely bedridden. At that time, our apartment seemed to turn into an open house: visitors were constantly coming.”6

By the end of February, the family was told that Marya Fyodorovna’s death was imminent, and on the 27^th, she briefly “regained full consciousness, asked for the icon of the Savior, and first blessed all of us, giving faint blessings and instructions.”7 Several hours later, she passed away at the age of 37.

The death of Marya Fyodorovna had a profound impact on the Dostoevsky family and on the lives of Fyodor and his brother, Mikhail. While Dostoevsky’s father had long intended for his sons to have stable, professional careers, the decision to send the two brothers to St. Petersburg to attend the Academy of Engineers in 1837 was a direct response to the family’s collapse following Marya’s death. Her passing shattered the household; the father decided to retire from his medical practice at the Mariinsky Hospital and move permanently to the family’s small country estate at Darovoe.

During Marya’s illness, on January 27^th, Alexander Pushkin was gravely injured in a duel with Georges d’Anthès, whom Pushkin believed had compromised or pursued his wife. Two days later, Pushkin died of his injuries. Occupied with the great toll Marya’s illness took, the Dostoevsky family did not find out about Pushkin’s death until Marya, herself, had passed away.

Andrei recalled his brothers’ reactions to Pushkin’s death: “I remember that my brothers were nearly beside themselves when they heard of this death and all its details. My brother Fyodor, in conversations with our elder brother, repeated several times that if we had not been in family mourning, he would have asked our father’s permission to wear mourning for Pushkin.”8

In the wake of hearing of Pushkin’s death, Fyodor and Mikhail often recited A. Kersnovsky’s poem “On the Death of Pushkin”:

There is no poet—the fate is fulfilled,
Our native Parnassus lies empty!
Pushkin is dead, Pushkin has vanished,
And has left us forever.

North, O North, where is your genius?
Where is the singer of your wonders?
Where is the source of delight?
Where is our Pushkin?—He is gone!

Yes, he is gone, that mighty spirit,
He has forsaken the earth!
He has risen above the clouds,
He has flown to where he once dwelt!

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Dostoevsky as a Student in St. Petersburg

In May 1837, a mere two months after the death of their mother, Fyodor and Mikhail embarked on a long carriage ride to St. Petersburg to start the next chapter of their lives at the capital’s Academy of Military Engineers, though ultimately, Mikhail was refused admission on health grounds and was sent to Reval/Tallinn instead. Almost forty years later, Dostoevsky wrote an account of this journey in Diary of a Writer that provides insight into his state of mind at the time, brought on by the collective grief of losing his mother and learning of the death of his beloved Pushkin.

“My brother and I were then striving toward a new life,” Dostoevsky wrote. “We dreamed intensely of something, of everything “beautiful and lofty”, at that time this phrase was still fresh and spoken without irony. And how many such beautiful words there were then… we dreamed only of poetry and poets. My brother wrote verses, three poems a day, even on the road, and I was constantly composing in my mind a novel about Venetian life.”9

During the carriage ride, during which they “traveled slowly, almost at a walking pace, and stayed at stations for two or three hours at a time”, the brothers agreed that immediately upon arriving in the capital, they “would go to the site of the duel and try to get into Pushkin’s former apartment, to see the room in which he breathed his last.”10 Whether the brothers ultimately succeeded in entering Pushkin’s apartment is unknown.

The decision to send the brothers to the Academy of Military Engineers was, for Dostoevsky, a mistake, one that he later wrote “spoiled” his future. One reason was, undoubtedly, due to the academy’s rigorous schedule that did not allow Fyodor time to pursue his literary interests.

This was confirmed in the memoirs of Alexander Rizenkampf, one of Dostoevsky’s classmates, who recalled Fyodor telling him of his admiration for Pushkin. “Having told me of his own literary attempts” Rizenkampf wrote, “he confessed that the only thing he regretted at the school was that the strict regimen of the place did not permit his absence from classes and drills.”11

Dostoevsky said as much to his father in a February 1838 letter, writing, “Imagine that from early morning until evening we are in classes, scarcely managing to follow the lectures. In the evening we not only have no free time, but not even a moment to properly review at leisure what we heard during the day. We are sent to drill; we are given lessons in fencing, dancing, singing, in which no one dares not participate. Finally, we are assigned to guard duty, and thus all our time passes.”12

“I cannot say anything good about my comrades”, Dostoevsky wrote in the same letter, though this would change when he met Dmitry Grigorovich, the future novelist who would have a lifelong acquaintance and off-and-on friendship with Dostoevsky until the latter’s death in 1881.

Grigorovich would later recall being impressed that Dostoevsky had already read all of Pushkin’s work and he recalled being struck that Pushkin’s death was “keenly felt among us by only one person, Fyodor Dostoevsky”.13 Grigorovich credits Dostoevsky with introducing him to Russian literature in general.

“Dostoevsky’s literary influence did not stop with me,” Grigorovich wrote. “Three other companions—Beketov, Vitkovsky, and Berezhetsky—were also drawn in. Thus a small circle was formed, which kept somewhat apart and gathered whenever a free moment appeared.”14

Berezhetsky, in particular, seems to have shared Dostoevsky’s love for poetry in general and Pushkin in particular. Alexander Saveliev, a fellow cadet at the Academy, recalled in his memoirs, that the two students “were together constantly reading items from The Northern Bee, or works by Zhukovsky, Pushkin, and Vyazemsky… While their classmates were taking dance lessons, playing games, or marching on the parade ground... the two, under the pretext of illness, either read in a room or walked together through the halls.”15

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Dostoevsky Enters the Literary Scene

Dostoevsky’s studies at the Engineering Academy continued, and in August 1841, he was promoted to the rank of ensign, which enabled him to live outside of the student barracks. Though still enrolled in classes, Dostoevsky’s newfound freedom allowed him to frequent the theater and the ballet, immersing himself in the imperial capital’s artistic life. For the first time, he was introduced to the vibrant social circles where the intellectual and cultural currents of the day were most palpable.16

His new life, taking full advantage of all that St. Petersburg had to offer to a 20-year-old man, was an expensive one, and the young Dostoevsky found himself perpetually short of funds, a state that he would find himself in throughout his career. This was, of course, less a case of abject poverty than one of careless and profligate spending.

The details of Dostoevsky’s writing during this time period have, unfortunately, been lost. During a farewell party in January 1841 for Mikhail, Fyodor allegedly read from two of his works in progress to a gathering of friends, but the contents and quality of these works are unknown.17 It is known that by this time Dostoevsky had begun sketching what would eventually become his debut novel, Poor Folk.

Despite the mounting pressure of his debts, Dostoevsky refused to take what he viewed as the easy path and become a literary artisan, producing copy to order. By early 1845, he was adamant that he would not solve his financial problems by writing commissioned work, viewing such labor as a threat to his creative soul. In a letter to Mikhail, he held up Pushkin and Gogol as moral justifications for his refusal to trade his talent for a pittance.

“Commissioned work will crush and ruin everything,” he wrote. “I want each of my works to be distinctly good. Look at Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol. They wrote little, yet both await monuments. And now Gogol takes 1,000 rubles in silver per printed sheet, and Pushkin, as you yourself know, sold a single verse for a gold piece. But their fame, especially Gogol’s, was bought at the cost of years of poverty and hunger.”18

Dostoevsky similarly made comparisons to Gogol and Pushkin while revising Poor Folk. “Such is always the fate of first works, you revise them endlessly,” he wrote Mikhail. “I do not know whether Atala by François-René de Chateaubriand was his first work, but, if I remember correctly, he revised it seventeen times. Alexander Pushkin made such revisions even to his minor poems. Nikolai Gogol polishes his marvelous creations for two years.”19

Dostoevsky, at least at this point, viewed his writing as a labor of love, and held Gogol and Pushkin as his lofty idols to this end. In his memoirs, Nikolai Stakhov would write about Dostoevsky’s sentiment. Quoting a letter written by Dostoevsky, Strakhov recalled “Believe that Pushkin’s light, elegant poem, consisting of only a few lines, seems to have been written at once precisely because it was composed and reworked for a very long time. These are facts. Nikolai Gogol spent eight years writing Dead Souls. Everything written at once is immature.”20

Others who knew Dostoevsky at this time repeatedly mention his idolization of Pushkin in their memoirs. It was common for Dostoevsky to provide passionate recitations of Pushkin’s stanzas. “When Fyodor Mikhailovich was in high spirits, he loved to recite poetry, especially Pushkin,” one contemporary recalled.21 Another wrote “when speaking of one or the other, would quote entire scenes or chapters from their works from memory.”22

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Pushkin and Dostoevsky’s Early Works

Much has been written on the clear influence that Nikolai Gogol had on Dostoevsky’s early works, with some contemporary critics, most notably Vissarion Belinsky, going so far as to label Dostoevsky the “New Gogol”. Rather less has been written about Pushkin’s influence on Dostoevsky’s style in the 1840s, but the influence was undoubtedly there, and it was undoubtedly strong.

What set the Dostoevsky who wrote Poor Folk and The Double apart from Gogol was the former’s ability, through the use of psychology and a sympathetic understanding of their struggles, to bring characters to life. In fact, in Poor Folk, the character Devushkin, himself a government clerk, reads Gogol’s The Overcoat and feels that it exposes and humiliates poor clerks like himself by portraying them as pitiful and ridiculous.23 Reading Pushkin’s The Stationmaster, however, elicits a far different response from Devushkin:

“And how simply it’s all written! My eyes nearly filled with tears… No, it’s natural! It lives! I’ve seen it myself, it all lives around me… There are many such Samsons Vyrins among us, just such poor, warm-hearted souls.”24

At first glance, Poor Folk is a novel that focuses on poverty and social humiliation, in many ways rooted in Gogol’s Petersburg world of clerks and bureaucracy, but beneath the surface lies the fragility of the individual in a vast, indifferent world, a subject that was widely explored throughout Pushkin’s work.

Konstantin Mochulsky, in his seminal single-volume biography, articulated it well when he wrote, “Dostoevsky was to learn the art of words from Gogol, but he… mastered the art of the psychological short story through the mentorship of Pushkin.”25

More recently, other scholars, namely V.A. Viktorovich, have pointed to the influence that Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, in particular, had on Dostoevsky’s early works. In Pushkin’s poem, the humble clerk Evgenii is destroyed by forces beyond his control: the flood, the city, and ultimately the Bronze Horseman itself, which seems to come alive and pursue him. The conflict for Evgenii is external, as outside forces are against him.

Dostoevsky adopted a similar structure in his second novel, The Double, though in this case, the struggle is internal. In this book, instead of being confronted by a statue, like in The Bronze Horseman, the timid clerk Golyadkin finds himself confronted by his own double. For Dostoevsky’s character, the overwhelming force that crushes the individual was internalized.26

Further traces of Pushkin can be found in Dostoevsky’s lesser-known works on the 1840s, namely A Weak Heart and The Landlady (1848). The former refines themes Dostoevsky explored in The Double that were influenced by The Bronze Horseman, but in this case, catastrophe arises simply from the fear of a concrete disaster.27 The Landlady, meanwhile, seems to have been influenced, in part, by Pushkin’s Ruslan & Lyudmila (1820), with Dostoevsky apparently drawing heavily from both Pushkin’s character and plot.28

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Conclusion

Many of the themes explored in his early works—the fragility of the individual, the importance of personal dignity, the psychological toll of social isolation, and the agonizing tension between a character’s inner nobility and their outward poverty—were undoubtedly influenced by Pushkin’s works. These concerns would remain the moral center of his fiction, persisting as constants throughout his entire literary career, despite his ideological shift. While his later masterpieces would eventually grapple with grander metaphysical questions of faith and nihilism, they remained anchored in this early Pushkinian preoccupation with the sanctity of the downtrodden soul.

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A knight of mournful cast,

Dostoevsky, dear, grand, and tall

Like a new pimple on literature’s nose

Redly do you glow to all.

Perhaps the most scathing and well-known satirical onslaught in the Russian literary canon is Dostoevsky’s portrait of Ivan Turgenev in his 1872 novel Demons (Бесы). Through the character of Karmazinov, a vain, self-important, and aging literary celebrity, Dostoevsky channels years of bitterness into a relentless inventory of Turgenev’s most grating personal and artistic habits.

Referring to Turgenev, through the character of Karmazinov, as a “talent of the average sort”, Dostoevsky wrote via his narrator that such a writer, “in the end displays such thinness and puniness in his basic little idea that no one is even sorry that he has managed to write himself out so quickly… Their vanity, precisely towards the end of their career, sometimes takes on proportions worthy of wonder. God knows who they begin to think they are—gods, at the least.”1

Dostoevsky’s ridicule of Turgenev in Demons transcended mere personal grievance. He used the character of Karmazinov to satirize what he viewed as the broader moral and intellectual decay of the liberal intelligentsia, a class for which Turgenev served as the quintessential archetype. Dostoevsky suggests that this “old guard”, through vanity and stupidity rather than conviction, had become unwitting sympathizers of nihilists and anarchists. Consequently, this feud reflected a deeper ideological split between Westernizers and Dostoevsky’s worldview.

Dostoevsky’s scathing parody of Turgenev was but one in a series of exchanges between the two authors that had started more than 25 years before Demons was published. The enmity between the two began in the wake of the publication of Dostoevsky’s debut, Poor Folk (1845)—the novel that thrust him into the Russian literary spotlight—when the young writer achieved sudden celebrity and was quickly brought into the fold of the Belinsky Circle. This loose association, headed by the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, was comprised of the leading liberal St. Petersburg writers and intellectuals of the day, including the influential critic Vasily Botkin, the revolutionary thinker Alexander Herzen, and the novelist Dmitry Grigorovich.

Dostoevsky’s welcome in the group, however, was short-lived; Turgenev, along with Nikolai Nekrasov and Ivan Panaev, soon penned a satirical poem about the young rising star, jeering at his inflated opinion of his literary ability and ridiculing him for allegedly having fainted at the sight of a beautiful aristocratic lady.

This poem, called “A Greeting from Belinsky to Dostoevsky”, would serve as the impetus for the personal enmity that Dostoevsky would hold toward both Turgenev and, to a lesser extent, Nekrasov, for the remainder of his literary career.

While not shying away from the personal component of this satire, it would be amiss to suggest that Dostoevsky’s satirization was driven primarily by this slight that he had received as a young man. Instead, there were ample ideological reasons that Dostoevsky had later in his career to parody these two. But the extent to which his experience with the Belinsky Circle led to his later profound disdain for the “generation of the 1840s” is impossible to know. In any case, he would never tire of satirizing the discrepancy between the moral posturing of this “generation” and the trivial hypocrisies that defined their private behavior.

Nevertheless, the Belinsky Circle’s ostracization of Dostoevsky left a clear and lasting imprint on the young writer, one that undoubtedly contributed to the psychological weight of his later works and illuminates one of the main sources for his later characters. In Netochka Nezvanova (1848), the violinist B., clearly influenced by Dostoevsky’s experience with the Belinksy Circle, tells his friend: “Wait, it will be different when they discover that you have talent. Envy, petty malice, and above all stupidity will press upon you harder than poverty.”2 This is a theme that will later resonate with the great Dostoevsky characters like Rodion Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov.

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The Belinsky Circle

The success of Poor Folk among the St. Petersburg literary world was due in large part to the excitement generated by Vissarion Belinsky, the preeminent literary critic and head of an informal yet highly influential circle of writers and intellectuals in the imperial capital. Known simply as the Belinsky Circle (sometimes Belinsky Pleiade), the group functioned as the supreme arbiter of Russian letters, possessing the collective power to either launch a literary career or condemn it to obscurity.

Belinsky, at the helm of this group, was, in the words of Pavel Annenkov, “concerned with the emerging definitions of the rights and obligations of man, with the new truths proclaimed by economic doctrines that were liquidating all notions of the old, displaced ideas about the moral, good, and the noble on earth, and, in their place, was putting formulas and theses of a purely rational character.”3

While Belinsky’s viewpoints were nuanced and changed over time, what remained steadfast was his unwavering belief in the righteousness of Russia’s Westernizing path, a belief that would eventually become anathema to Dostoevsky’s later convictions.

By the mid-1840s, Ivan Turgenev was the “golden boy” of the St. Petersburg literary scene. Having recently returned from several years of study in Berlin and travel in Paris, he possessed a cosmopolitan polish and an aristocratic ease that stood in stark contrast to Dostoevsky’s social anxiety and impoverished background. At this time, Turgenev was not yet a novelist, but had broken into the literary scene with his poetry. It was his narrative poem Parasha (1843) that had won him the effusive mentorship of Belinsky.

By the time Poor Folk was published and Dostoevsky was propelled into the spotlight, in large part due to Belinsky’s patronage, Turgenev had already entrenched himself as a central pillar of the Belinsky Circle. As a committed Westernizer who shared the critic’s vision for a Europeanized Russia, he was a natural favorite within the “Pleiade”.

Tall, broad-shouldered, and possessing an effortless elegance while wearing the latest European fashions, Turgenev was as charming as he was confident, a man whose aristocratic ease and “brilliant conversationalist” wit made him the natural center of any room he entered.

Dostoevsky, by contrast, was, in the words of Vladimir Sollogub, “a pale and sickly-looking young man. He wore a rather worn house frock coat with unusually short if seemingly unattached sleeves.” When given praise for Poor Folk, “Dostoevsky became embarrassed and confused”.4

Despite the vast artistic, physical, and social differences between the two writers, their initial meetings yielded a genuine rapport. In a letter to his brother, Mikhail, Dostoevsky wrote, “A few days ago Turgenev returned from Paris… and took such a liking to me that Belinsky explains it by saying that Turgenev is in love with me... I too have almost fallen in love with him. A poet, talented, aristocratic, handsome, rich, clever, well-educated, twenty-five years old-nature has denied him nothing. To crown all, a character unswervingly upright, honorable, formed in a kindly school.”5

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Dostoevsky in the Limelight

For a brief period in the 1840s, Dostoevsky became, in the words of Joseph Frank, “the literary lion of cultivated St. Petersburg society.” For the young novelist, the widespread praise and adulation unleashed a level of vanity that would ultimately turn the Belinsky Circle against him.

In a letter to Mikhail, Fyodor wrote, “I think that my fame will never be greater than it is now. Everywhere an unbelievable esteem… about me… Everybody considers me some sort of prodigy. I can’t even open my mouth without it being repeated in all quarters that Dostoevsky said this or Dostoevsky thinks of doing that… Really brother, if I began to recount all my successes, there would not be enough paper for them… I tell you quite frankly that I am now almost drunk with my own glory.”6

While widely hailed in the press, with Belinsky himself going so far as to call Dostoevsky the “New Gogol”, not all critics were taken with Poor Folk. Nikolai Kukolnik, for example, wrote that the book “has no form. It is founded entirely on details that are tiresome and monotonous, and that induce such boredom the likes of which you have never experienced... It is like a dinner in which sugar is served instead of soup, and sauce instead of beef.”7

Leopold Brandt similarly called the novel “artistically simple”, explaining that he “would not have gone on at length about this first unsuccessful attempt of a young writer if it were not for the fact that… several weeks before the appearance [of Poor Folk]... people claimed that it was the work of a new and unusual talent, a piece that was great, even greater than the writings of Gogol and Lermontov. Immediately, a hundred rumors carried the pleasant news throughout the “length and breadth of Petrograd.” Curiosity, expectation, and impatience were everywhere.”8

Nevertheless, the positive reviewers, led by Belinsky himself, elevated Dostoevsky to the upper echelons of Russian literary society. At first, Dostoevsky was welcomed into the circle with open arms. He was quickly invited by Nekrasov to join the staff of a new publication called Zuboskal (the Jester) that ultimately never came to fruition.9

A large part of being within the circle’s orbit involved entering a new social scene to which, being aware of his social inferiority compared to his new comrades, Dostoevsky was not accustomed. Avdotya Panaeva, the wife of Ivan Panaev and the social center of 19^th century Russian literary life, recalled Dostoevsky’s first visit to their house:

“It was evident, from only one glance at Dostoevsky, that he was a terribly nervous and impressionable person… he already knew almost all of our guests, but, clearly, he was disconcerted and did not take part in general conversation.”10

Dostoevsky’s shyness, however, did not last long, and he soon gained notoriety for his vanity and conceit. Once this happened, Avdotya Panaeva wrote, he would “only too clearly express his conceit as an author and his high opinion of his own literary talent.” While interacting with other young authors who had not received the same positive reviews as him, he would “rub them the wrong way by his irritability and his haughty tone, implying that he was immeasurably superior to them in talent.”11

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The Fall from Grace

As quickly as Dostoevsky was welcomed into Belinsky’s Circle, he was pushed out. As Dmitri Grigorovich wrote in his memoirs, “the sudden change from people worshiping and raising the author of Poor Folk almost to the level of genius to their cruel rejection of him crushed such an impressionable and proud individual as Dostoevsky.”12

“Our little genius became unbearable,” Ivan Panev later wrote. “In no way did he want to feel the earth under his feet… Invariably, he demanded that we lift him as high as possible so that everyone could see him. Constantly he raged at us and cried out: “Higher! Higher!” Our arms grew numb as we raised him… but still he raged and cried out, “Higher!”13

Having heard of members of the circle ridiculing him behind his back, he visited the Panaevs, “as if to pour on envious peers all the bile that was suffocating him. But our jests, rather than soothing a sick and nervous individual, irritated him more forcefully.”14

Rather than simply criticizing Dostoevsky, members of the circle, led principally by Turgenev, initiated a campaign of persecution against the writer. “They began to pick him to pieces”, Avdotya Panaeva recalled, “to exasperate his pride by pinpricks in conversation; Turgenev… drew Dostoevsky into argument and drove him to the farthest limits of irritability. Dostoevsky, shed to the wall, sometimes defended with passion the most ridiculous views, which he had blurted out in the heat of argument and which Turgenev pounced on and laughed at.”15

At one point, Belinsky castigated Turgenev for his behavior toward Dostoevsky. “You latch on to a sick man, you egg him on, as if you didn’t know that when he gets worked up, he doesn’t know what he’s saying.”16

Turgenev continued twisting the knife, and in the fall of 1846, he brought matters to a head when, in the presence of the circle, he openly satirized Dostoevsky as a faux-genius. According to Avdotya Panaev, Turgenev “painted the ridiculous side of this individual in a masterly fashion.” Dostoevsky, “white as a sheet and quivering head to foot”, rushed out of the room before Turgenev had finished. From that point on, Dostoevsky no longer visited the group. In November, he wrote to Mikhail that the members “are all scoundrels and eaten up with envy.”17

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The St. Petersburg Rumor Mill

Stories and rumors supporting the ridicule and framing of Dostoevsky’s temperament and conceit spread through St. Petersburg literary society. One story that would follow Dostoevsky throughout his life was that he demanded that Poor Folk be published in the Petersburg Almanac with a special border to distinguish it from other stories.

As Ivan Panaev later wrote, “our idol demanded that without fail, the piece be published at the beginning or end of the book, and that it make a striking visual impression, being set off from the others with a golden border or edge. The editor agreed to everything.”18

No such border or any other type of distinguishing feature was placed in the publication of Dostoevsky’s debut. Other memoirs suggest that a similar demand was made to Belinsky when publishing Dostoevsky’s second novel, The Double. According to Grigorovich, “Dostoevsky demanded constantly that The Double be included in Belinsky’s Anthology, and that the work be surrounded by a border to distinguish it from the other selections in the work.”19

The veracity of this particular rumor is impossible to prove, but it haunted Dostoevsky throughout his life. Shortly before his death, he wrote an entry in his Writer’s Diary, explaining that the substance of this “petty personal attack… never happened and could not have happened”.20 He also felt the need to formally deny the accusation in a letter to A.S. Suvorin in 1880.

Another rumor that circulated at this time involved Dostoevsky’s attendance at a ball given by Count Vielgorsky, Sologub’s father-in-law, at the beginning of 1846. The nervous young author, when being introduced to a young woman, allegedly fainted at the sight of her. As Grigorovich recalled, “when, at the Vielgorskys’ home, Dostoevsky was introduced to the beauty Mrs. Senyavina, he fainted from excitement.”21 Stepan Yanovsky later reported that the only occurrence at the ball was that Belinsky dropped a glass and a tray, which prompted the young woman to blurt out “They are not only barbaric and inept but also dumb.”22

Whatever the truth of the matter, the rumor persisted. Dostoevsky’s daughter, Lyubov, later wrote of the incident in her own memoirs: “Dostoevsky’s friends laughed at his shyness with women and spread the story that allegedly, from agitation, he fainted when he saw the legs of a young woman to whom he had been introduced.”23

Armed with ample ammunition, Turgenev, Nekrasov, and Panaev penned a satirical poem at the end of 1846 called “A Greeting from Belinsky to Dostoevsky”:

The poem spread throughout St. Petersburg literary society both in print and via public readings. Nekrasov, in particular, seemed to relish spreading the poem at public gatherings. Panaeva later wrote of overhearing a fiery interaction between the two, prompting Dostoevsky to storm out of the room and Nekrasov to exclaim, “Dostoevsky has simply lost his mind!”24

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The Aftermath

Belinsky himself gradually lowered his praise of Dostoevsky. Whether due to the general opinion of Dostoevsky’s character or due to genuine criticism of his subsequent work is difficult to say, but, beginning with the publication of The Double, Belinsky’s reviews became increasingly negative.

In early 1847, referring to Dostoevsky’s short story “A Novel in Nine Letters”, Belinsky wrote to Turgenev that, “to my surprise, I simply did not like—I forced myself to finish it. That is my overall impression.”25 Similarly, Belinsky expressed “unpleasant astonishment” at another of Dostoevsky’s stories, “Mr. Prokharchin.”

Belinsky’s final nail, however, would be delivered following the publication of “The Landlady.” “What is this?” exclaimed Belinsky. “Is it abuse or poverty of talent, which wants to rise beyond its strength and therefore fears to follow the ordinary path and seeks some unprecedented road?… In this entire story there is not a single simple, living word or expression: everything is affected, strained, on stilts, artificial and false.”26

“Each of his [Dostoevsky’s] new works is a new fall. In the provinces they cannot stand him; in the capital even Poor Folk is spoken of with hostility; I shudder at the thought of rereading it. We have puffed ourselves up, my friend, with this ‘genius Dostoevsky.’”

With these reviews, Dostoevsky halted work on a story he was writing for The Contemporary (Nekrasov’s journal) called the “Shaved Sideburns”. The literary press soon picked up the signals and began portraying the success and genius of Poor Folk as an aberration. One particular review summed up the prevailing sentiment: “Where is the talent we saw in the first story? Or was there only enough for one?”27

The literary establishment’s turn against Dostoevsky clearly had a tremendous impact on the writer. “I have such a difficult, repellent character”, he wrote to Mikhail. “My nerves do not obey me at such moments. I am ridiculous and repellent, and for that I constantly suffer from unjust judgments about me. They say that I am callous and heartless… I can show that I am a man with a heart and love only when circumstances, by their very force, tear me out of everyday triviality. Until then, I am unpleasant.”28

Dostoevsky was clearly affected by his fall from grace. In an 1858 letter to Mikhail Katkov, Dostoevsky wrote of this time, “I suffered the entire three years of my literary activity in Petersburg.”

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Conclusion

Dostoevsky’s split with the Belinsky Circle would leave a massive imprint on the writer and would contribute greatly to his later worldview. He would continue to be parodied by members of the circle, especially Panaev and Nekrasov. Though the “generation of the 1840s” in general would be a later dominant subject of satire and parody for Dostoevsky, it was Ivan Turgenev, in particular, who would be the climax of Dostoevsky’s ridicule in Demons (though Nekrasov is parodied quite heavily in Notes from Underground).

Dostoevsky and Turgenev’s relationship, to be sure, would evolve over the years, and saw brief periods of cooperation and mutual artistic admiration. Turgenev’s “Phantoms”, for example, was published in a journal run by the Dostoevsky brothers called Epoch in 1864, and both writers provided positive reviews of the others work (specifically Dostoevsky’s Notes from a Dead House and Turgenev’s Fathers & Sons).

As Turgenev’s worldview progressed, however, it came into direct conflict with Dostoevsky’s. The publication of Smoke (1867), in particular, brought the ire of Dostoevsky, who interpreted the work as an “abuse of Russia” and read in it Turgenev’s declaration that he “regarded himself as a German rather than a Russian” and that he was an “out-and-out atheist.” Dostoevsky later wrote that “he [Turgenev] insulted me too much by his opinions.”29

Dostoevsky’s revenge is well known, culminating in the scene in Demons in which Karmazinov (Turgenev) agrees to hold a public reading before retiring:

“An oration commenced! God, what wasn’t in it! I will say positively that even a metropolitan public would have been reduced to stupor, not only ours. Imagine some thirty printed pages of the most mincing and useless babble; what’s more, the gentleman was reading somehow superciliously, ruefully, as if for a favor, so that it even came out offensive to our public. The theme… But, who could make out the theme? It was some sort of account of some sort of impressions, some sort of recollections. But of what? But what about? No matter how furrowed our provincial brows were through the first half of the reading, they could get none of it, so that they listened through the second half only out of courtesy.”30

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Share The Dostoevsky Reading Room

“You see this manuscript?... I haven’t been able to tear myself away from it for almost two days now. It’s a novel by a beginner, a new talent… his novel reveals such secrets of life and characters in Russia as no one before him even dreamed of. Just think of it—it’s the first attempt at a social novel we’ve had… The matter in it is simple: it concerns some good-hearted simpletons who assume that to love the whole world is an extraordinary pleasure and duty for everyone. They cannot comprehend a thing when the wheel of life with all its rules and regulations runs over them and fractures their limbs and bones without a word. That’s all there is—but what drama, what types! I forgot to tell you, the artist’s name is Dostoevsky.”1

The manuscript Belinsky read was an examination of two complex characters, portrayed with a depth and psychology that was rarely present in earlier works of fiction. European and Russian literature up to this point had treated poverty as a static social condition to be described, but with Poor Folk, poverty became a profound internal state.

I first read Poor Folk twelve years ago, as I embarked on a journey to read all of Dostoevsky’s works in chronological order. At the time, I relied on English translations, often poor ones (looking at you, Constance Garnett), to navigate his stifling world and the inner turmoil of his characters. Today, I am embarking on that same journey once more, but this time, I am reading the original Russian.

The first stop on this path is, of course, his 1846 debut: Poor Folk, or Бедные люди (Bednie Lyudi). Returning to this text in its native tongue has been, to say the least, a difficult but rewarding experience. Reading in Russian, naturally, slows the pace, which, in turn, forces deep engagement with the prose. In the original, I have found myself more in tune with the writing styles of the two characters, which is particularly apparent in the original Russian version. On top of that, having now read Dostoevsky’s entire body of work, I am far more sensitive to the recurring themes that appear here, even before his radical ideological shift.

What I’ve noticed more than anything is that the Russian text highlights a uniquely “Dostoevskian” lexicon and themes, words and concepts that would become the psychological basis for his later, more famous masterpieces. While Poor Folk predates his arrest and harrowing years in Siberia, which, in part, prompted his ideological shift, the early formulations of his greatest psychological insights are already visible here.

This article, then, is not purely an endeavor of literary criticism; there are many such works out there written by those far more qualified than I. Rather, it approaches Poor Folk from a historical perspective, examining how a novel written by a twenty-four-year-old shaped the trajectory of Russian literature and introduced themes he would continue to refine until his death in 1881.

At some point, I hope to provide a more detailed “read-along” for this Substack; for now, I will content myself with these general impressions of Dostoevsky’s debut.

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The Shape of the Novel

Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote Poor Folk in the form of an epistolary novel between two characters: a destitute middle-aged copying clerk named Makar Devushkin and Varvara Dobroselova, a young woman who came from a well-off family but, through a series of misfortunes, found herself cast into the squalid 19th-century St. Petersburg slums.

The lowly clerk, which had been used as a stock device in Russian literature for a decade before the publication of Poor Folk, was, in the form of Devushkin, used as the main vehicle for Dostoevsky to reveal the human element behind the poverty he was describing.

Dobroselova, on the other hand, has often been dismissed by critics as a predictable and unoriginal character, who was created simply as a literary mechanism, essential only for the characterization of the hero.2

However, my reading found that Dobroselova’s character is far more psychologically complex than a stereotypical sentimental heroine, and is a character facing a distinctly Dostoevskian internal struggle.

Makar is timidly in love with Varvara and, despite Varvara’s tepid protests, reduces himself to abject poverty by showering her with candy and flowers that he can ill afford. “I beg you once again, do not spend so much money on me,” Varvara implores at one point. “I know that you love me, but you yourself are not rich.”3

His generosity is both from love and a way of sustaining his own sense of worth, an attempt to prove, to himself as much as to Varvara, that he is not as insignificant as his circumstances suggest.

“I even daydreamed rather pleasantly today”, Makar wrote in one letter. “And all my thoughts were about you, Varenka. I compared you to a little bird of the heavens, created for people’s delight and for the adornment of nature. Then it occurred to me, Varenka, that we too, people who live in worry and anxiety, ought to envy the carefree and innocent happiness of the birds of heaven.”4

Varvara, due to a number of possible factors, most convincingly their difference in age (though the matter is subject to debate in scholarly circles)5, is unable to reciprocate, but instead displays intense gratitude and affection for Devushkin. Both characters are gentle and isolated figures whose mutual care brings warmth to their otherwise bleak lives.

While neither the theme of the novel nor its epistolary form was new, the young writer’s ability to portray the concepts of poverty and inner turmoil, often through the unspoken thoughts of his characters, was a profound evolution beyond the “physiological sketches” of urban life that had begun to be fashionable within Russian literary circles, specifically those within the Natural School.

Furthermore, where earlier epistolary fiction lingered on cultivated voices and romantic sentiment of the upper classes, Poor Folk descends into the harsh social and inner realities of St. Petersburg’s nineteenth-century slums. In this way, Poor Folk represented a clear break with both European and Russian literary conventions.

That being said, physiological descriptions of poverty, humiliation, and the exploitation of the helpless do permeate the letters exchanged between Makar and Varvara. In one letter, Makar describes the back staircase of his building with the cold accuracy of a “daguerreotype”: “It’s spiral, damp, dirty; the steps are broken, and the walls are so greasy that your hand sticks when you lean on them. On every landing stand trunks, broken chairs and cabinets, rags are hung about, windows smashed; there are basins filled with all sorts of filth, dirt, rubbish, eggshells, and fish bladders — the smell is foul.”6

But what set Poor Folk apart from earlier Russian works is the young Dostoevsky’s ability to go beyond these descriptions to capture the human torture and despair of those living in the St. Petersburg slums. His descriptions and scenes portraying poverty register as lived experiences, shaping how the characters see themselves and their place in the world. Writing about his neighbor, Makar describes him as “Such a pitiful, sickly fellow (we sometimes meet him in the corridor); his knees tremble, his hands tremble, his head trembles—whether from illness or something else, God knows; timid, afraid of everyone, keeps to the side; I myself am shy at times, but he is worse.”7

At one point, “in return for all your trouble and care about me, for all your love for me,” Varvara shares her diary that she kept as a girl, chronicling her relatively affluent childhood, including her move from the provinces to St. Petersburg and the death of her father that drove her and her mother into abject poverty. It is through this diary that Dostoevsky provides some of the most harrowing descriptions of the human suffering experienced by his characters:

“Mother would cry every minute; her health was growing worse day by day, she was clearly wasting away... But mother lost her last strength at work: she grew weaker with every day. The illness, like a worm, seemed to be gnawing away her life and bringing her closer to the grave. I saw everything, felt everything, suffered through everything; it all happened before my very eyes!”8

The novel continues as a slow collision between the characters’ internal dignity and the external demands of a rigid class hierarchy, and Makar’s tone undergoes a distinct shift throughout the book. As his financial situation becomes increasingly desperate, and his humiliation and inner torment reach a fever pitch, the letters become a frantic attempt to stave off the inevitable.

“A poor man is capricious”, Makar writes. “He looks at God’s world differently, and glances sideways at every passerby, casting uneasy looks around him and listening to every word—wondering, ‘Are they talking about me? What is he like? What does he feel? What will he be like on this side, and what will he be like on that side?’ And everyone knows, Varenka, that a poor man is worse than a rag and can get no respect from anyone… everything about a poor man must be turned inside out; he must have nothing kept to himself, no kind of pride—none at all!”9

This struggle highlights one of Dostoevsky’s central themes: a plea, inherited from the French social novels of the 1830s and the works of Dickens, for the wealthy to assume a degree of moral responsibility for the poor.10 However, where his European contemporaries often focused on institutional or legal reform, Dostoevsky’s plea is for the recognition of the “poor man’s” soul.

We see this play out when Makar is summoned before “His Excellency” to answer for a professional error. Standing there in a tattered uniform, Makar is so physically unraveled that a button pops off his coat and rolls toward the high official. But instead of the expected reprimand from the top of the Table of Ranks, “His Excellency” reaches out, shakes Makar’s hand, and gives him money. For a brief moment, Makar is seen as a man, and not simply a poor clerk.

“I swear to you that no matter how I perished from inner sorrow in those bitter days of our misfortune, looking at you, at your troubles, and at myself, at my humiliation and my incapacity, despite all that, I swear to you that those hundred rubles are not as dear to me as the fact that His Excellency himself deigned to shake my unworthy hand, like a straw, like a drunkard!”11

Instead of relying on grand plot twists to drive the narrative, Dostoevsky relies on the cumulative weight of everyday tragedies experienced by his characters.

“I myself was hardly any better than the sole of my own shoe; I considered it improper to think of myself as anything of consequence, and on the contrary, I began to regard myself as something indecent and, to a certain extent, dishonorable. Well, once I lost respect for myself, once I gave myself over to denying my own good qualities and my own dignity, then everything was lost—then came the fall!”12, Makar writes toward the end.

We see the characters’ world narrow until they’re at the point of absolute desperation. The novel’s resolution is born of a soul-crushing desperation just to survive (no spoilers!)

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The Seeds of Dostoevsky

Having come back to Poor Folk after reading Dostoevsky’s entire catalog, I was able to sense the origins of themes that would later be masterfully explored in his great novels. While the setting is the squalid St. Petersburg of the 1840s, the conflicts are already deeply “Dostoevskian.”

Like in his later works, Dostoevsky introduced a number of secondary characters who were used as a vehicles to expand upon his main characters’ internal struggles, the most familiar in Poor Folk being the impoverished student Pokrovsky, who appears in the childhood diary that Varvara gave Makar:

“Pokrovsky was a poor—very poor—young man; his health did not allow him to study continuously, and so, more out of habit than anything else, we called him a student. He lived modestly, quietly, so that he could not be heard at all from our room. In appearance he was rather strange: he walked awkwardly, bowed awkwardly, spoke so oddly that at first I could not look at him without laughing… He sometimes gave lessons elsewhere and earned a little money, and as soon as he had any, he would immediately go and buy books.”13

Pokrovsky’s brief appearance is Dostoevsky’s first depiction of the raznochinets intellectual, the “man of various ranks” who existed outside the traditional nobility. This social type would become a mainstay of Dostoevsky’s career, evolving from the tragic, book-buying Pokrovsky to the ideologically driven Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, and finally to the terminally ill, rebellious Ippolit Terentyev in The Idiot. In Pokrovsky, we see the beginning of the “Dostoevskian Thinker”: a man whose physical poverty is contrasted with an intense intellectual life. And like Raskolnikov, Pokrovsky was a student who did not actually attend classes.

Another familiar archetype to the Dostoevsky reader is the family trapped in unimaginable depths of poverty, in this case, Makar’s neighbor, Gorshkov. Gorshkov’s story represents the total, terrifying collapse of a household.

Through this secondary character, Dostoevsky introduces the “Corner” (Ugol), the tiny, partitioned living space that would become a signature setting in his later novels. Gorshkov is a man broken both by lack of money, and by a years-long legal battle that has stripped him of his dignity. His family’s level of poverty is astounding even to Devushkin:

“Once, toward evening, it happened that I passed by their door; at that time the house had grown unusually quiet; I heard sobbing, then whispering, then sobbing again, just as if they were crying—but so softly, so pitifully, that my heart nearly broke, and afterward the thought of those poor people never left me all night, so that I could not sleep properly.”14

It is not difficult to see the evolution from Gorshkov to Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment or Snegiryov in the Brothers Karamazov, archetypes of the “ruined patriarch” whose greatest agony is witnessing their own degradation through the eyes of their children.

Even though Poor Folk was written prior to Dostoevsky’s major ideological shift, his debut novel contains a running polemic against his literary adversaries that will feel very familiar to readers of his later masterpieces. This is primarily channeled through the character of Ratazyaev, a hack-writer who lives in Devushkin’s boarding house. While not portrayed with the same vitriol Dostoevsky would later use against Chernyshevsky (in Notes from Underground) or Turgenev (in Demons), Ratazyaev serves as a vessel for Dostoevsky to jibe the Romantic remnants and the “Natural School” tropes he was already beginning to outgrow.

Through Ratazyaev’s absurdly florid prose, Dostoevsky mocks the very literary establishment that would soon elevate him to the status of the “New Gogol”. Makar’s defense of the writer reveals his own tragic gullibility and his desperate need for a “refined” escape from his squalor:

“Ah, but you should read him sympathetically... for instance, when you have a bonbon or two in your mouth. Yes, that is the way to read Rataziaev... It is chiefly for his own sake that he writes, and he is to be approved for so doing.”15

Throughout the novel, Dostoevsky shows a keen awareness that material hardship alone does not define the lives of the poor; the need for dignity and self-respect becomes just as urgent under the pressure of deprivation.16 The tension between the spiritual and the material is a central theme that will appear time and time again throughout his works.

This conflict will take on an even more aggressive dimension following Dostoevsky’s later break with Russian radicalism and its celebration of scientific materialism. While the radicals of the 1860s would argue that “bread” is the only solution to the social question, Dostoevsky remains obsessed with the “soul”, the “capricious” and often irrational need for a man to feel he is more than a cog in a machine. This exploration of the opposition between material needs and the character’s demand for dignity will reach a fever pitch in The Brothers Karamazov, but its foundational logic is already visible here in his first novel, specifically in the character of Devushkin.

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Distinct Voices

Reading Poor Folk in the original Russian offers a striking study in emotional and stylistic transformation. The early letters between Devushkin and Varvara appear deceptively simple. As the story unfolds, however, and Devushkin’s mental state begins to fray, his language unravels with him. The clear rhythm of his early prose gives way to agitation and confusion, echoing his descent into despair and drink. Dostoevsky uses this to great effect to show Makar’s isolation and self-destruction.

This was a brilliant use of syntax as characterization by Dostoevsky. Makar, as a product of the lower-class, already uses a language distinct from Varvara’s, and writes with folkish expressions alongside the language of the Russian bureaucracy. As the plot progresses, Makar’s writing begins to, for lack of a better word, stutter. His sentences become loaded with diminutives, nervous interjections, incoherent thoughts, and loops that feel like an early version of the Underground Man.

Heavily influenced by the literature he is reading while writing his letters, he borrows language directly from the books and, unable to adequately express his feelings, intersperses the borrowed language into his increasingly chaotic voice. This creates two distinct voices within Makar’s letters: one a choppy, disorganized run-on of anxiety, and the other a stylized, desperate attempt at the “literary.”17

Varvara, meanwhile, having been raised as a member of the impoverished gentry, writes with a clearer, more educated lexicon and a sentence structure that is far easier to follow. Unlike Makar’s inchoate loops, Varvara’s prose remains largely composed and transparent.

Soviet scholars traced Varvara’s “unsentimental” and neutral writing style to that of Dostoevsky’s own sister, also named Varvara. By grounding Varvara’s voice in the clear and pragmatic language of his own family correspondence, Dostoevsky creates a powerful foil to Makar.18

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Conclusion

While clearly not on the same plane as the massive philosophical edifices of his later novels, Poor Folk is undoubtedly a carefully elaborated work that reveals the essential architecture of themes Dostoevsky would later examine in his seminal masterpieces.

Despite the occasionally restrictive epistolary format, Dostoevsky succeeds in portraying both the physical squalor and the profound psychological anguish of his characters

It is no wonder, then, that Dostoevsky’s early works, beginning with Poor Folk, solidified his reputation as the preeminent chronicler of the destitute, a writer uniquely attuned to those ground down by poverty and an inhuman social order.

For any fan of Dostoevky’s later works, Poor Folk is essential reading, but must be read for what it is: the early scaffolding that would later create the massive works of art.

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Freud saw Dostoevsky as a man of intense emotional life, burdened by guilt and inner conflict, who unconsciously wished death upon his harsh father. He took it for granted that the novelist’s father was murdered and built a sweeping psychological interpretation on that assumption. According to Freud, the supposed murder made those hidden wishes real, leaving Dostoevsky with a lifelong sense of guilt that surfaced in his epilepsy, his streak of self-punishment, his deference to authority, and his repeated return to parricide in his fiction.

The problem, of course, is that the murder itself is far from certain.

What is certain is that on June 6, 1839, on the road from the Dostoevsky family’s estate at Darovoe to nearby Cheremoshnya, Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky suddenly died. The official explanation at the time was an apoplectic stroke, what we would now call a stroke or cerebral hemorrhage.

However, for nearly two centuries his death has hovered between fact and myth. Later generations — biographers, psychoanalysts, family members, and literary critics among them — often accepted a more dramatic version: that Dostoevsky’s father was murdered by his own serfs and that the crime was quietly suppressed by both the family and the authorities.

A close examination of the surviving documents, which include eyewitness accounts, court records, letters, memoirs, and later recollections, makes the story far murkier than Freud’s confident narrative suggests. The case for murder rests largely on secondhand reports, many recorded decades after the event, and they often contradict one another.

The uncertainty itself, however, may be the most important fact. Whether or not the murder occurred, Fyodor Dostoevsky seems to have been deeply haunted by the possibility. The idea of parricide — guilt, rebellion against the father, punishment, and moral reckoning — became one of the central psychological dramas of his fiction, culminating in The Brothers Karamazov, a novel built entirely around the question of a father’s murder.

The theory that Mikhail Andreevich was murdered did not enter the wider literary and biographical discussion until the late nineteenth century, more than a decade after Fyodor Dostoevsky’s death. In 1895 his younger brother Andrei published memoirs recounting family memories of their father’s end, giving the murder story a durable literary form.

The theory gained new momentum in the 1920s, when Fyodor’s daughter, Lyubov Dostoevskaya, published her own memoirs and Soviet scholars, newly attentive to questions of class conflict and peasant grievance, revisited the case with fresh interest. Researchers traveled to Darovoe and nearby Cheremoshnya to interview descendants of the serfs who were said to have killed Dostoevsky’s father.

Their testimony is intriguing but difficult to verify, filtered through decades of retelling and shaped by a revolutionary era in which the killing of a landowner could be framed more as an act of justice than a crime. Whether ideology consciously altered the narrative is impossible to say. But the timing almost certainly influenced how the story was interpreted and retold.

Nevertheless, it remained the dominant version until the 1970s, when scholars in both the Soviet Union and the West began reassessing the documentary record. What they uncovered raises a simple but surprisingly difficult question: was Dostoevsky’s father murdered at all? Answering it means sorting through rumor, memoir, ideology, and archival fact, which is where this story really begins.

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A Portrait of Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in 1821 into a family that stood uneasily between classes. His father, Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky, was the son of a village priest who rose, through education and ambition, to become a military doctor and later a staff physician at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow. The family’s circumstances were modest but respectable.

In 1831, seeking both investment and status, Mikhail purchased a small estate in Tula province: Darovoe, along with the nearby village of Cheremoshnya. The property included roughly one hundred serfs. For a man who had risen from clerical origins, landownership carried symbolic weight. It placed him, however modestly, among the ranks of the provincial gentry.

Accounts of Mikhail’s character vary. Some later memoirs portray him as stern, irritable, and prone to severity, particularly toward his children, but most recognize him as being a conscientious father who personally tutored his sons in Latin and put the education of his seven surviving children at the forefront of his life.2

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s works, full of images of poor, destitute, diseased, and unhappy children, suggest his own childhood contained such experiences, but the writer himself would later recall both his mother and father with fondness. Writing in Diary of a Writer in 1873, he noted, “as far back as I can recall, I remember the love shown me by my parents”.3

Other accounts suggest a more disciplined than cruel temperament, shaped by hardship and professional striving. He was known as a temperamental and irascible man, whose depressive tendencies permeated all aspects of his personal life and medical practice. Fyodor’s daughter, Lyubov, later claimed that her father had based the character of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, the repulsive and buffoonish patriarch in Dostoevsky’s seminal work the Brothers Karamazov, on his own father, a claim that she made as “merely supposition on my part, for which there is no documentary evidence”.4

Scholars and other commentators, chiefly among them Sigmund Freud, have taken Lyubov’s assessment as self-evident, despite the lack of firm evidence. What is clear is that Mikhail Andreevich was a complex figure, a man of deep feeling and high standards, but one whose volatile temper and sullen retreats cast a long shadow over his family.

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Darovoe

By the mid 1830s, Mikhail increasingly divided his time between Moscow and Darovoe. Despite episodes of intense jealousy and distrust toward his wife Maria, at one point questioning the paternity of one of his children, Mikhail was fiercely and limitlessly devoted to his spouse, who managed the daily life of Darovoe while he remained tied to his duties in Moscow.

Correspondence between Dr. Dostoevsky and Maria during this time shows an intimate and affectionate relationship. “Greetings, my priceless treasure, my heartfelt friend, greetings!”5 is how a typical letter began, a testament to a bond that, despite Mikhail’s volatile nature, remained the center of his world. These letters were primarily devoted to the mundane affairs of the estate and the meticulous planning of their children’s education.

What the correspondence does indicate, however, is a streak of rigid severity toward the serfs, which would later be used as foundational evidence for the murder theory. In an 1834 letter, he wrote: ‘I am somewhat reassured about the cattleman, but Kharlashka, I hear, is an idler and lazybones. You need to watch him more strictly, and if necessary, even flog him.”6

The following spring, he again urged corporal punishment: “You write... that a cow calved unsuccessfully... if the cattlewoman is to blame, then you acted very poorly by only mildly scolding her and not punishing her as an example to the others.”7 While such discipline was in no way unique to the era, these letters have been retroactively used to paint a portrait of a man whose cruelty eventually exhausted his peasants’ patience.

Mikhail Andreevich’s intense, almost obsessive bond with his spouse meant that Maria was not simply his wife, but his psychological ballast. Her death in 1837 left him utterly unmoored. Andrei Dostoevsky, writing years later, recalled how the demands of the estate initially occupied his father, but once the harvest ended, Maria’s absence became unbearable for his father: “Father found himself cooped up in two or three rooms of a rural dwelling, without any society... in the early days he even went so far as to talk aloud, imagining he was speaking with his late wife, and responding to himself with her usual words... From such a state, especially in isolation, it was not far to madness… as a result of all this, he began to abuse alcoholic beverages.”8

The poor harvests of the subsequent years exacerbated his declining physical and mental health. The low-snow winter of 1837–1838 was followed by a drought in early summer, and then by heavy rains and hail during the harvest. By the summer of 1839, the situation turned dire; according to a contemporary journal, central Russia experienced ‘the climate of tropical countries,’ resulting in catastrophic thunderstorms, fires, livestock deaths, and widespread peasant misfortune.”9

In May 1839, in a letter responding to Fyodor’s request for money, Dr. Dostoevsky wrote, “Remember that three years ago I wrote to both of you that the grain harvest was bad; last year I wrote the same... This will be followed by a decisive and final ruin of our situation… From the beginning of spring until now there has not been a single drop of rain, not even a trace of dew! The heat and terrible winds have destroyed everything. The winter crops are black, as if they had never been sown... This threatens not only ruin, but complete famine!”10

This was the atmosphere in which Mikhail Andreevich spent his final weeks: a ‘tropical’ heatwave, the literal blackening of his fields, and the mounting pressure of his sons’ financial demands in the city.

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The Death of the Patriarch

On June 6th, 1839, on the road from Darovoe to Cheremoshnya, Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky was struck by a sudden attack while crossing a field of parched, cracked earth in the blistering 100-degree heat. His coachman immediately galloped off to summon a priest and a physician. When Dr. I.K. Shenrok arrived, he declared the cause of death to be an apoplectic stroke. However, as an official of the Ryazan province rather than the Tula province where the body lay, Shenrok lacked the legal authority to issue a final certificate. He ordered that the body remain in the field in its ‘original’ position until Tula authorities could arrive to conduct a formal judicial investigation. According to this official record, there were three primary witnesses to the immediate aftermath: the unnamed coachman, the priest, and Dr. Shenrok.

It is unclear exactly how Fyodor learned of the death of the father he had not seen for two years, but it is known that he was the one to break the news to his older brother, Mikhail. While Fyodor’s original letter has not survived, Mikhail’s response does, and it contains no trace of suspicion regarding the cause of death. Instead, it reveals a son haunted by the lonely, unceremonious nature of the passing: “My God, what a terrible death Papa died! Two days in the field... perhaps rain, dust raged over his mortal remains; perhaps he called us in his last moments, and we did not come to him to close his eyes. What did he do to deserve such an end! May filial tears comfort him in that other life!”11

Indeed, the only surviving record of Fyodor’s reaction to the tragedy is a letter to Mikhail from August 1839, which again makes no mention of anything unusual. “My dear brother! I have shed many tears over the death of father!” was all he wrote.12 Based on the surviving correspondence of the Dostoevsky family, there is absolutely nothing to suggest that they believed Mikhail Andreevich had been murdered. In their private world, the death remained a natural, if lonely, catastrophe.

However, almost immediately, a darker, unofficial narrative began to circulate among the dusty estates of Tula.

Within days, the gears of provincial justice were in motion. Under Russian law, any sudden death occurring outside the home required a formal inquiry. A local police official reported the case to the district land court, triggering a series of depositions. Peasants working in the nearby fields were questioned, and the body was examined by the district staff physician.

The forensic conclusion was straightforward. On June 19, 1839, the district court recorded its final protocol: “On June 6th... Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky... while in the field overseeing the peasants carting manure, died suddenly. Following the investigation... no doubts or suspicions arose... it occurred, as certified by the District Staff Physician, from an apoplectic stroke due to severe hemorrhoidal strains, for which no habitual remedy had been taken.”13 The record was as clinical as it was undignified. No signs of violence were detected, and the case was legally closed. In the eyes of the State, Mikhail Andreevich was victim of the heat, his own failing health, and a lack of medical care.

The investigation took an unexpected turn only when a neighboring landowner, Ivan Leibrecht —who was also Mikhail’s brother-in-law— submitted a written statement claiming that another proprietor, Vladimir Khotyainstev, had voiced doubts about the death. Neither man had been present in the field; their information was pure hearsay, passed from one estate to another. Yet under the rigid procedural codes of the 1830s, even a rumor placed on paper could not be ignored.

The case was recalled, but the focus shifted. Witnesses were re-interrogated and a formal confrontation was arranged between the two landowners. Instead of investigating the death of Mikhail Andreevich, the court was now investigating the origin of the gossip. Over the next year and a half, the inquiry drifted away from the body in the field and into the paper trail of the courts. It became a bureaucratic struggle over jurisdiction and procedure, entangling district officials and the Tula Criminal Chamber in a case where the “crime” being investigated was no longer murder, but the source of the suspicion.

By the autumn of 1840, the Tula Criminal Chamber had reached a stalemate. The investigation had moved through every level of the provincial bureaucracy, and at every turn, the result was the same: silence from the peasants and a lack of physical evidence on the body.

The court’s final resolution, issued in late 1840, was a masterpiece of 19th-century bureaucratic dismissal. It officially upheld the original medical findings, decreeing that the case be “entrusted to the court of God’s will.”14 Since no guilty parties could be found, the legal cause of death remained an apoplectic stroke.

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The Birth of a Myth?

Public discussion of the possible murder of Mikhail Andreevich did not occur until the 1890s, more than a decade after Fyodor Dostoevsky’s death, when the writer’s younger brother, Andrei Mikhailovich, published his memoirs. Andrei, who was only fourteen and away at school in St. Petersburg at the time of the death, was writing nearly fifty years after the event. He admitted that he was initially told his father died of natural causes, but he recalled a slow, youthful obsession with uncovering a “darker” reality. He wrote that he “became convinced” the official reports were untrue and began to press his sister and his aunt to reveal the “whole truth.” The result was the birth of the legend: they finally stopped hiding what Andrei called the “real cause”; that his father had been killed by his peasants.15

Andrei contended that the Dostoevsky family, including Fyodor and his older brother Mikhail, were convinced of the murder from the very start. Yet, he claimed they chose silence over justice. At the heart of this decision were the Kumanins—Fyodor’s wealthy maternal aunt and uncle in Moscow—who had stepped in as guardians of the orphaned children. As prominent members of the merchant class, the Kumanins had no desire to pursue a prosecution that would have seen their family name dragged through a criminal scandal, nor did they wish to risk the state’s confiscation of the Darovoe estate, which was now the children’s only inheritance. On top of that, the Kumanins appeared to have no great love for the elder Dostoevsky, whose volatile temper had long strained family ties.16 According to Andrei, it was a pragmatic of silence: the family and the authorities alike conspired to let the “Official Version” stand rather than highlight the grim reality of the patriarch’s end.

According to Andrei’s memoirs, “a gang of peasants, ten or fifteen men strong” was working in the fields when his father “lost his temper and began shouting very loudly at the peasants. One of them, bolder than the rest, responded to this shouting with gross insolence, and then, fearing the consequences of this rudeness, shouted: ‘Lads, finish him off!” The group of peasants, according to Andrei, then rushed at Dr. Dostoevsky and “made an end of him.”17

Andrei’s account describes a systematic cover-up fueled by bribery. He alleged that local officials from Kashira descended on the estate “like a flock of vultures,” their first order of business being to determine exactly how much the peasants could pay to bury the crime. According to Andrei, the peasants somehow scraped together a “significant sum,” the officials were satisfied, and the autopsy conveniently confirmed the “apoplectic stroke.”18 This explanation, of course, does not address how a group of serfs, in the midst of a drought, could afford to bribe the officials.

The family’s decision to let the matter rest was, in Andrei’s telling, fueled by the grim advice of the neighbors, the Khotyaintsevs. They warned that a formal murder investigation would be a double tragedy: it wouldn’t bring the father back, and it would leave the Dostoevsky children destitute. If the peasants of Cheremoshnya were sent to the gallows or Siberia, there would be no one left to work the land. For the sake of the inheritance, the truth was traded for the estate’s survival. It is worth noting, too, that the Khotyaintsevs were involved in a lawsuit against the Dostoevsky over land demarcation.19 What, if any, motive this played in subsequent events will likely never be known.

Over the following decades, Andrei’s version of the death shifted from family hearsay to accepted historical fact. This wasn’t because new evidence had emerged from the Tula fields, but because of a growing trend in literary circles to read Fyodor’s fiction as a literal confession.

Critics and biographers began to work backward: they looked at the haunting theme of parricide in The Brothers Karamazov and used it as forensic proof that the murder must have occurred. It was a perfect loop of circular reasoning: the life explained the art, and the art was used to verify the life. By the time the next generation of the family took up the pen, the distinction between what had happened in 1839 and what Fyodor had imagined on the page had almost entirely dissolved.

By the 1920s, with the murder theory already widely accepted, Fyodor’s daughter, Lyubov, added some high drama to the account. In her telling, Mikhail Andreevich was not merely “made an end of,” but was found “suffocated with a pillow from the carriage.” By including a vanished coachman, stolen horses, and a group of peasants who fled into the night Lyubov, in effect, rewrote the 1839 archival records.20 It was this version that popularized the murder narrative and would soon become the “official” reality for the rest of the in world in general and Soviet Russia in particular.

The 1920s, prompted in part by Lyubov’s memoirs, brought a resurgence of interest in the death of Dr. Dostoevsky. For researchers in the new Soviet state, the goal was both to investigate the death and to analyze the occurrence through the lens of class warfare. The most prominent of these researchers was V.S. Nechaeva who, for the next 50 years, would be the most prominent proponent of the murder theory. In the 1920s, Nechaeva led expeditions to Darovoe to interview the descendants of the serfs who had lived on the estate in 1839.

For Soviet scholars like Nechaeva, these investigations were conducted through the lens of class warfare, a narrative of peasant resistance that would be continuously honed and codified by state historians in the decades to follow. The elderly villagers she questioned, who were children in 1839, described Mikhail Andreevich as “a strict, ill-tempered master” who “flogged peasants for nothing”. One villager told Nechaeva that if a man failed to remove his cap quickly enough, Dr. Dostoevsky would “give him a good beating of 20–30” lashes and send him back to work. The villagers then described to Nechaeva in great detail how their grandfathers had resolved to “finish him off,” naming the men involved, and how, when the confrontation came, one of them shouted, “Why are you standing there? Didn’t we agree?” before the group rushed their master, silenced him so that “no marks would remain,” and carried his body out to the road between Cheremoshnya and Darovoe.21

In a later 1939 publication, Nechaeva doubled down on this theme, writing “It would be wrong to see in this event only an accidental act of vengeance by the peasants against a hated landlord. The murder of M. A. Dostoevsky must be considered alongside the many peasant uprisings which, increasing year by year, made it eloquently clear that “the serf system is a gunpowder magazine beneath the state,” and that disgust with serfdom was spreading ever more widely among the peasant masses.”22

While Soviet scholars were recasting Mikhail Andreevich as a relic of a collapsing social order, Sigmund Freud was transforming him into a psychic event. In his 1928 essay Dostoevsky and Parricide, Freud accepted the then-dominant narrative that Dostoevsky’s father had been murdered by his own peasants and treated it as biographical fact. For Freud, the violent death of a feared and ambivalently loved father provided the perfect catalyst for unconscious parricidal wishes and the crushing guilt that followed.

As the decades progressed, the rumors surrounding the murder mutated. By the mid-20th century, a new layer of sexual violence and mutilation had been grafted onto the story. Henri Troyat, writing in 1960, claimed that one of the peasants “squeezed his [M.A. Dostoevsky’s] genitals with all his might.”23 By 1971, Marthe Robert was writing of “the castration that accompanied the crime.”24 None of this appeared in the 1839 autopsy, and none of it appeared in the initial family rumors. It was a classic example of “narrative inflation”—the more famous the son became, the more horrific the father’s death had to be to “justify” the genius.

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Revisiting the evidence: 1970s-Present

It was not until the mid-1970s that Soviet and western scholarship took a more critical view towards the murder narrative. The break came with the work of G. A. Fedorov, who located and published archival materials from the original 1839–1840 investigation. These documents, preserved in provincial court records, showed that the Kashira district court had treated the death as a case of sudden apoplexy, found no signs of violence in the medical examination, and forwarded the matter up the bureaucratic chain without recommending criminal prosecution.25

It was Fedorov who discovered that what prolonged the case was a denunciation submitted by a neighboring landowner reporting that “doubts” had been expressed about the cause of death.26 Crucially, those doubts did not originate with the peasants in the field, nor with any member of the Dostoevsky family. They emerged within the small circle of neighboring estate owners and entered the judicial system as hearsay. When the authorities re-opened the file, they interrogated the very men who had circulated the suspicion and found that neither had witnessed the death. The inquiry gradually shifted from investigating a possible homicide to investigating the source of the rumor itself.

Fedorov’s intervention did not dramatically “solve” the mystery; it reframed it. The surviving court records contained no confession, no indictment, and no forensic evidence of violence. The medical verdict of apoplexy remained intact at every level of review. What later generations had treated as a suppressed murder appeared, in the documents, as a routine provincial investigation complicated by gossip and bureaucratic procedure. In returning to the archival record, Fedorov forced scholars to confront an uncomfortable possibility: that the most famous parricide in Russian literary history may have begun not in blood, but in rumor.

Fedorov’s work was published just as the first installment of Joseph Frank’s monumental five-part biography, The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849, was going to press. It gave Frank just enough time to include a lengthy, era-defining footnote. In it, Frank concluded that “in the light of these new facts, the usual depiction of how Dr. Dostoevsky died becomes very dubious indeed.”27

This conclusion has dominated both Russian and Western scholarship for the last fifty years. While there is not enough evidence to dismiss the murder theory with 100% certainty, we are forced to admit a sobering truth: every piece of evidence pointing to a planned attack by the Dostoevsky serfs is circumstantial, hearsay, or removed from the event by decades.

Legacy/Conclusion

Freud constructed an interpretation in which Dostoevsky’s epilepsy became a form of hysterical self-punishment, his gambling an expression of compulsive guilt, and his submission to political and religious authority a search for a substitute father. Whether the death had been medically recorded as an apoplectic stroke scarcely entered the analysis. The historical ambiguity of 1839 dissolved into psychic inevitability: what counted was not how Mikhail Andreevich died in the field, but how his death functioned in the unconscious life of his son.

However, to dismiss the murder as a mere archival error is to overlook a deeper, psychological truth. Whether or not a pillow was involved, or whether a bribe was actually paid in a Tula field, what matters for the history of literature is what Fyodor Dostoevsky believed. If the family “pact of silence” was as pervasive as Andrei claimed, then for the young novelist, the “official” version was always a lie. He may well have lived his life under the shadow of a perceived parricide, regardless of the medical reality. In this sense, the event clearly had a profound impact on his creative development, even if it lacked the clinical, clockwork inevitability that Freud theorized. The tragedy of 1839 remains at the heart of Dostoevsky’s work as a haunting, lifelong “perhaps.”

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