The Double (1846)

The Double: A Petersburg Poem

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s second novel was published the same year as his first, Poor Folk, in 1846 when he was 25. The Double was taken, then as now, as being under some influence of Nikolai Gogol (whose The Nose and The Overcoat I think I read many years ago but don’t remember well). At any rate I found The Double crazy impressive and impressively crazy. Wikipedia does not include The Double among Dostoevsky’s “major works,” but Vladimir Nabokov, who was not particularly a fan, called it the best thing Dostoevsky ever wrote. At this early stage of my reading through him somewhat systematically, I’m inclined to agree. No one (not even ISFDB) seems to see much of the fantasy/horror genre in it, but it’s one of the best and most effective doppelganger stories I know. Yes, it works at other levels as well: psychological search for identity, comic lampoon of St. Petersburg society, etc. But the bold absurdity of it is just right. “Our hero,” as Constance Garnett frequently translates, is a low-level bureaucrat in St. Petersburg who is not doing well in his work and entering into a nervous breakdown (that explains it! he's insane! per many). About a quarter or third into this short novel he encounters someone who looks like him and has his same name. This fellow, often designated “Junior” to the original’s “Senior,” is even further down on his luck, and homeless. Senior invites him to stay with him until he’s on his feet again. The next morning Junior is gone when Senior wakes. By the time Senior gets to his job he finds Junior working it for him, as him—and doing very well. It’s soon quite apparent that Junior is stealing Senior’s life. All this is rendered in an early but already accomplished version of Dostoevsky’s raving, raw, canting high-strung voice. You’d be wrecked too if this were happening to you. This little gem is rollicking and entertaining all the way. Like the best horror—I guess I’m going there but Dostoevsky, of course, is much more than mere horror—The Double gives us an impossible situation and little explanation. Where does Junior come from really and what does he want? No word. He’s just there, steadily taking over Senior’s life by way of meritocracy. No one seems fazed that there are two of him, and his employer is pleased with the new guy. The Double is often funny, pitched at this hysterical level. But also unnerving, strange, and very entertaining.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Poor Folk (1846)

Poor People
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s first novel is fairly called “epistolary”—it is a series of letters between two distant cousins in love with one another by all their many declarations. The approach brings some some awkwardness to the narrative related directly to the stop-and-reset nature of a series of letters. Epistolary novels were more common in 19th-century literature, but usually they involved correspondents who are monied people, middle class at least, with leisure time to write. Dostoevsky’s innovation here is to put the emphasis directly on “poor folk.” In terms of classifications, I’m less sure about “novel” because it’s pretty short, less than 150 pages by my count, whereas I see later work of his that appears to be longer characterized as “novella.” As always, go figure. Dostoevsky wrote Poor Folk in his mid-20s but it feels like mature work, perhaps because the epistolary nature of it may cover up to some extent his inexperience as a writer. Critics in the 1840s declared it a social novel—Russia’s first, according to some. The correspondents detail many lives of poverty, including their own, but their anecdotes are fragmented, not the point of their letters even if they are the point of the novel. Some story elements go unfinished or must be surmised. The main subject of these two is their love for one another. Other stories may be broken off but that one never is. There’s a large age gap between them too—he is close to 50 and she’s not even 20. Dostoevsky’s style, his voice, is already in evidence. I’m not sure how to describe it. He enters into passages that are like ranting, full of wild invective, justifications, and self-lacerations. Yet they are also concrete and vivid and serve to propel the stories. Even this early in his career he can sweep you up into them. The best example here is the longest letter by far, written by the woman (in my C.J. Hogarth translation she is Barbara, though more often elsewhere I see her called Varvara). She intends the letter to be the story of her life and it covers a lot of territory. Most of their concerns are otherwise about the daily inconveniences of poverty and how they attempt to overcome them. These persistent, ever-shifting daily problems will be familiar to anyone who has had periods of no money. The crises may seem trivial, especially to people of means, but they are constant and can be imposing. They can take a lot of time and energy to deal with. Despair is never far. The correspondents also make some connections over reading—both are literate. He works as a copyist. The ending is sad because a rich (and cruel) man proposes to Barbara and she accepts, leaving her cousin behind in grief. I don’t particularly like the epistolary mode much, but it’s interesting to encounter Dostoevsky so young and fresh. Call him DJ Dusty F.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

"The Cask of Amontillado" (1846)

Read story by Edgar Allan Poe online.

Edgar Allan Poe's dank tale of revenge, murder, and appalling cruelty is just about the perfect short story—a dark horror play with a twist ending and all elements laid in to support it. I'm about to give it away any minute so go read it if you haven't because of course that's where it is told best. In Italy, during carnival time, the first-person narrator Montresor lures a friend he has come to despise down to the wine cellar of his palazzo, offering to share a very good new wine he says he has acquired at a good price, an amontillado. Montresor's friend, Fortunato (O irony), is already half-drunk from the revels, wearing a jester's costume. The story, though it is dark and cruel, is also funny in many ways. Montresor's rage about Fortunato's unspecified "thousand injuries" and "insult," with his description of the rules for administering revenge, are as comical as they are mad. At one point, Fortunato challenges Montresor's claim to belong to the masons by asking him for the secret sign. Montresor reaches into his cloak and produces a trowel. On first reading, we don't know the significance of this any more than Fortunato and the gesture is more strange than explanatory. Later, when we know better, it is somehow even more funny—something about the mystique of the masons, perhaps, juxtaposed with the homely construction tool, momentarily like a scene from Laurel and Hardy. The setting in the catacombs of a palazzo is perfect—evocative of the 19th-century American view of Europe as a moldering graveyard, decaying and debased. Montresor's crime is impossibly perfect. He plays Fortunato with precision, luring him deeper and deeper into the catacombs. "A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser," Montrosor notes early, later confirming that his crime is still unpunished after 50 years. In fact, it's all a bit too perfect. It might just be an impotent daydream after all. But it's a remarkable feat indeed to lull us as readers enough that we take sympathetic satisfaction from the crime as it goes down, relishing the pleasure of it with Montresor, though we have no idea what Fortunato did to deserve it. We see some ambiguous, potentially dismissive attitude by Fortunato toward Montresor, but not much. Mostly we are caught up in the seething rage and clinical precision of Montresor's monstrous deed. "[The wrong] is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong," Montresor also mentions as preface, and later he sees to that as well. Fortunato knows what is happening to him and, most importantly, by whom. "The Cask of Amontillado" might even be better than some of the revenge fantasies I've played in my own head. Don't miss those jingling bells on Fortunato's carnival cap.

"The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe (Library of America)