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Amnesia and the Externalized Personality in Early Dostoevskii

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

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By tracing a pattern through Fedor Dostoevskii's early stories–especially The Double, “The Landlady,” and Netochka Nezvanova–in which characters are bound to each other as interacting aspects of a larger personality, Yuri Corrigan explores the problem of individual identity. Entering into debate with classical studies of the self in Dostoevskii from Mikhail Bakhtin to Nikolai Berdiaev, Corrigan explores how the active suppression of memory and interiority in Dostoevskii's early characters gives rise to the mechanism of intersecting selves, in which the inner architecture of one personality is extended throughout numerous consciousnesses. Through an analysis of these relationships, Corrigan examines how Dostoevskii synthesizes two traditions of doubling in his early writing–the “cognitive” dualism of self-consciousness and the “psychic” dualism of the unconscious–to form a tripartite model of personality that will be important for his later novels.

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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2014

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References

1. Zander, L. A., Dostoevsky, trans. Duddington, Natalie (London, 1948), 84.Google Scholar See also, for example, Berdiaev, Nikolai, who commented on a “fatal duality” in Dostoevskii between, on the one hand, a “fanatical” belief in the “personal principle,” and, on the other, an attraction to “collectivism, which paralyzes the principle of […] personal spiritual discipline.” Berdiaev, Mirosozertsanie Dostoevskogo (Prague, 1923), 232–33.Google Scholar

2. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Emerson, Caryl (Minneapolis, 1984), 108. Emphasis in the original. “[In Dostoevskii's art] all is simultaneous, everything coexists. That which […] is valid only as past, or as future […] is for him nonessential and is not incorporated into his world. That is why his characters remember nothing, they have no biography in the sense of something past and fully experienced. They remember from their own past only that which has not ceased to be present for them, that which is still experienced by them as the present, an unexpiated sin, a crime, an unforgiven insult.” Ibid., 29. Slavic Review 72, no. 1 (Spring 2013)Google Scholar

3. Berdiaev, Mirosozertsanie Dostoevskogo, 17. For a related view, see Mochul'skii's, reading of Crime and Punishment:The battle between good and evil waged within the murderer's soul, is substantialized in the Opposition of these two Personalities, Sonya and Svidrigailov. […] Raskolnikov is […] the Spiritual center of the novel. […] The tragedy Springs up in his soul and the external action only serves to reveal his moral conflicts.Mochulsky, Konstantin, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans. Minihan, Michael A. (Princeton, 1967), 298–99.Google Scholar

4. Berdiaev, Mirosozertsanie Dostoevskogo, 39: “Some kind of center, a central human personality takes shape and everything turns around this axis. A whirlwind of passionate human relationships takes shape and everyone is drawn into it.” Dmitrii Chizhevksii describes this phenomenon as an illustration of the mikrokosmichnost’ (microcosmic nature) of the Dostoevskian personality: the human being is a center of the universe that incorporates all other personalities into itself. Chizhevskii, , “Dostoevskij—psikholog,” in Bern, A. L., ed., 0 Dostoevskom: Sbornikstatei (Prague, 1929), 1:55.Google Scholar

5. See, for example, Breger, Louis, who describes Dostoevskii's development of the novel as a protracted attempt at psychoanalysis, an attempt to discover balance between the “characters who embody different sides of his conflicts—who represent his different inner selves.Breger, , Dostoevsky: The Author as Psychoanalyst (New York, 1989), 911.Google Scholar Related approaches can be found in Bern, A. L., Dostoevskii: Psikhoanaliticheskie etiudy (Prague, 1938),Google Scholar or in Dalton, Elizabeth, Unconscious Structure in The Idiot: A Study in Literature and Psychoanalysis (Princeton, 1979).Google Scholar

6. Evlampiev, I. I., “Lichnosf kak absoliut: Metafizika F. Dostoevskogo,” Istoriia russkoi metafiziki v XIX-XX vekakh: Russkaia filosofiia v poiskakh absoliuta. Chast’ 1 (St. Petersburg, 2000), 119–20;Google Scholar emphasis in the original: “Dostoevskii is not interested in the psychological nuances of a person's inner [dushevnaia] life that ground his behavior, but in those ‘dynamic’ ones […] in which the volitional energy of personality is expressed. […] Although Dostoevskii's protagonists, at first glance, in no way differ from ordinary 'empirical’ people, in essence, alongside the ordinary empirical dimension, they have yet an ‘additional’ dimension of being, which is the most important. Most important is a metaphysical dimension in which […] the empirical protagonists are connected in some kind of unity, which expresses an integral energy […] in the form ofa metaphysical Personality, ofa Single metaphysical Protagonist.“

7. See, for example, Cunningham's, David S. reading of the Karamazov brothers as illustrative of the intersecting and interpenetrating life of one more complete personality, and ultimately as an icon of the divine trinity. Cunningham, “'The Brothers Karamazov' as Trinitarian Theology,” in Pattison, George and Thompson, Diane O., eds., Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition (Cambridge, Eng., 2001), 144–50.Google Scholar

8. “The more spirit and inner content there is in us, the more beautiful our corner and life. Of course, the dissonance is frightening. […] The outer must be in balance with the inner. Otherwise, in the absence of external phenomena, the internal will take too dangerous an upper hand.” Letter to M. M. Dostoevskii, January-February 1847, in Dostoevskii, F. M., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad, 1972-84; hereafter PSS), 28:137–38.Google Scholar

9. Ralph Tymms described the double in Romantic literature, especially in the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann, as a “secondary, non-conscious seif,” a “part of the mind inaccessible to the conscious personality,” which, “freed from its hiding-place,” becomes “projected into the outside world in the visible form of a physical double.” Tymms, , Doubles in Literary Psychology (Cambridge, Eng., 1949), 119.Google Scholar Many of Dostoevskii's readers apply this theory of doubling, including Mochulsky, Dostoevsky, 50; Frank, Joseph, Dostoevsky: The Seeds ofRevolt, 1821-1849 (Princeton, 1976), 304;Google Scholar and Leonard J. Kent, The Subconscious in Gogol andDostoevskij, and Its Antecedents (The Hague, 1969), 90: “[Goliadkin's] double is a manifestation of the repressed unconscious.” Tymms's reading of Dostoevskii reduces his work to an intensification of this theme; the doppelgänger does not “lose this romantic character when it reappears in Dostoevskii's works […] for his use of the theme only corroborates Hoffmann's half-intuitive understanding of the obscurest processes of the mind” (121). See also Charles, E. Passage for a reading of Goliadkin as a reformulation of Hoffmann's Medardus: Passage, “The Double,” Dostoevski the Adapter: A Study in Dostoevski's Use ofthe Tales of Hoffmann (Chapel Hill, 1954).Google Scholar

10. On Dostoevskii and Neoplatonism, Carus, and Mesmer, see C hizhevskii, , “Dostoevskii— psikholog.” For an appraisal of Dostoevskii's reading of Carus during his exile, and the many similarities they shared in their treatment of the unconscious, see Gibbian, George, “ C. G. Carus’ Psyche and Dostoevsky,” American Slavic and East European Review 14, no. 3 (October 1955): 371–82.Google Scholar For an account of German literature's development of the unconscious in the context of Russian literature, see Leonard J. Kent, “Towards the Literary ‘Discovery’ ofthe Subconscious,” Subconscious in Gogol’ and Dostoevskij, 15-52.

11. On Sonia as Raskol'nikov's soul, see, for example, Zander, who argues that “the fate ofthe ‘Sonias,’ of Maria Lebyadkina, symbolizes the life of a feminine soul and even of the world-soul.” Zander, Dostoevsky, 100. On Rogozhin as Myshkin's id, see Dalton, Unconscious Structure in The Idiot, 83.

12. The field was pioneered in the 1940s by Melanie Klein who influentially described the “projective identification” exhibited by “schizoid personalities” who externalize the seif, a normal process in childhood development, but which underlies deeper mental illness when “a weakened ego feels incapable of taking back into itself the parts which it projected into the external world.” Klein, , “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946-1963 (New York, 1975), 12.Google Scholar On projective mechanisms and The Double, see Rosenthal, Richard J., “Dostoevsky's Experiment with Projective Mechanisms and the Theft of Identity in The Double ,” in Rancour-Laferriere, Daniel, ed., Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis (Amsterdam, 1989), 5988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Rosenthal describes how Goliadkin's projection of himself onto others ultimately points to a lack of subjectivity, an inner emptiness: “Something which should come from within, which should be part of the seif, is missing and feit to come from the outside world” (67). See also Breger: “What is portrayed here is a failure of projection as it would be experienced by such a person. Golyadkin tries to get rid of his undesirable qualities by putting them in a split-off ‘other,’ but this only makes them more undesirable and they follow him around and ruin his life; he cannot get rid of them. Nor does the disassociation ease his pain.” Breger, Dostoevsky, 123.

13. Kathryn Szczepanska's examination of Dostoevskii's doubles tends toward this avenue, especially in her emphasis on the significance of G. W. F. Hegel's dialectic of self-consciousness as an explanatory paradigm: “characters become the physical representa-tion of thesis and antithesis; the protagonist himself represents at the same time the con-flicts and its possible synthesis.” Szczepanska, , “The Double and Double Consciousness in Dostoevskii” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1978), 22.Google Scholar This aspect of the doppelgänger tradition is the focus of Dmitris Vardoulakis's recent book in his contention that the “doppelgänger makes possible an ontology of the subject” without entailing “a lapse into meta-physics.” Vardoulakis, , The Doppelgänger: Literature's Philosophy (New York, 2010), 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. Dostoevskii, PSS, 1:125. All translations are mine. Jones, Malcolm describes this gaze as “the disconnrming glance of the other,” which “constantly throws [Goliadkin] into a State of inarticulate panic.” Jones, , Dostoyevsky after Bakhtin: Readings in Dostoyevsky's Fantastic Realism (Cambridge. Eng., 1990), 42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. A third voice, Bakhtin says, is the voice of the narrator, yet another aspect of Goliadkin's self-consciousness. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 217.

16. Ibid. Compare this with the widely held contrasting view, for example, in Leonard J. Kent's analysis: “the subconscious is the Single most important factor governing Goljadkin's life, Controlling him not only from within, but flowing over to infect the total context of his life.” Kent, Subconscious in Gogol’ and Dostoevskij, 94. Others have read Goliadkin's dualism as a comic parody of the Romantic tradition. See, for example, Shklovskii, Viktor: “Dostoevskii's double is the simplest, saddest and most hopeless version of the double. The two heroes are not different from each other in any way. A clerk-failure invented himself just the same as he was, with the same goals, but a success. This absence of an ideal, the refusal to move further denotes the limitedness of the given hero.” Shklovskii, Za i protiv: Zametki o Dostoevskom (Moscow, 1957), 57.Google Scholar See also Terras, Victor who emphasizes the parodic element, or travesty of the doubling: “we witness a struggle not between Heaven and Hell for a man's soul, but between two ridicu-lous underlings—for a snug little job. […] These grotesque antics can well be viewed as a travesty of the frenzied sciamachies of Hoffmanesque Doppelgangers.Terras, , The Young Dostoevsky (1846-1849): A Critical Study (The Hague, 1969), 14.Google Scholar

17. Dostoevskii, PSS, 1:142.

18. Ibid., 3:170-71.

19. Apparently, Goethe approved of the reading of Faust in which Mephisto is interpreted as a projected aspect of Faust's personality. See Tymms, Doubles in Literary Psychology, 34-35.

20. Dostoevskii, PSS, 3:171.

21. Ibid., 3:411.

22. For a basic reading of Ordynov as a Romantic dreamer who projeets fairy-tale qualities onto his interlocutors, see Leatherbarrow, W. J., “Dostoevsky's Treatment of the Theme of Romantic Dreaming in ‘Khozyayka’ and ‘Belyye nochi,'” Modern Language Review 69, no. 3 (July 1974): 584–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. Reactions have been divided over whether Ordynov's experience is real, a subjeetive fantasy, or whether the entire story should be read allegorically. A. L. Bern argued that Ordynov's experiences are entirely imaginary. Ordynov, in his feverish State, projeets fairy-tale qualities onto the normal lives of Katerina and Murin. Bern, “Dramatizatsiia breda, (Khoziaika Dostoevskogo),” Dostoevskii: Psikhoanaliticheskie etiudy, 77-141, a conclusion that Leatherbarrow Supports in “Dostoevsky's Treatment of the Theme of Romantic Dreaming,” 584-85. Terras describes two plots, “objeetive” and “subjeetive,” suggesting that the story calls attention to the dissonance between reality and the fantastic subjeetivity of the Romantic dreamer. Terras, Young Dostoevsky, 195-96. In a more recent article Leatherbarrow examines the tyranny of Ordynov's authorial imagination; he imposes narratives upon Murin and Katerina: “The displacement of God's creation with an individualized universe leads to the absorption, loss of otherness and ‘spoiling’ not only of third parties, but also of Ordynov himself.” Leatherbarrow, W. J., “The Sorcerer's Ap-prentice: Authorship and the Devil in Dostoevsky's Poor Folk and ‘The Landlady,'Slavic and East European Review 83, no. 4 (October 2005): 613.Google Scholar Another tendency in criticism puts the emphasis upon the relationship that Ordynov observes, not upon Ordynov himself. Joseph Frank, for example, dismissed Bem's reading as unlikely: “the story itself does not center thematically on this type [the dreamer] at all. As the title indicates, the focus is on Katerina and her relation both to Murin and Ordynov; the psychology of the latter is sketched in briefly but not really developed.” Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds ofRevolt, 342. Other readings of the relationship between the three characters have been symbolic and allegorical. For example, in Rudolf Neuhauser's argument: “the landlady is meant to represent the Russian people“ “we can define [Murin] as the personification of […] national traditions reaching back to pre-Petrine times,” while Ordynov is the new-fangled idealist/utopian socialist who wants to rescue the Russian soul from repressive autoeraey. Neuhauser, , “The Landlady: ‘A New Interpretation,'Canadian Slavonic Papers 10, no. 1 (Spring 1968): 4267.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Dostoevskii, PSS, 1:311.

25. Ibid., 1:319. Emphasis in the original.

26. Ibid., 1:278-79.

27. Ibid., 1:265, 278.

28. Ibid., 1:269. Rudolf Neuhauser presents a psychoanalytic reading, associating Ordynov with the life of the spirit trying to gain mastery over the soul: “the main characters of the tale form one composite figure: man, particularly adolescent man, on his uncertain path to maturity. The prince symbolizes human spirituality, the intellectual component of man; the princess or bewitched beauty embodies the principle of the soul, the emotional component of man; the wizard represents evil drives, the psychological substratum in man, which rises against him in adolescence and has to be overcome before the intellect can be united to the soul, that is, gain power over the emotional, animalistic seif. Only then has adolescent man, the composite hero of the tale, reached maturity.” Neuhauser, “The Landlady,” 45.

29. Many readings of “The Landlady” have emphasized its derivative qualities. See, for example, Charles E. Passage, “The Landlady,” Dostoevski the Adapter, 40-62. See Terras's overview of “The Landlady” and Romantic antecedents in Young Dostoevsky, 27-30.

30. Dostoevskii, PSS, 1:273-74.

31. Ibid., 1:276.

32. Ibid., 1:267, 270.

33. Ibid., 1:278-79.

34. Ibid., 1:279-80.

35. In the words of Leonard J. Kent, “whatever merit The Landlady has results primarily from Dostoevskij's use of the subconscious. Dostoevskij was very early convinced that the delineation of the pathological and the psychological could not only serve the ends of literature but could encompass and express the philosophical and ethical, and even the least successful pieces he wrote are therefore necessarily of some profundity.” Kent, Subconscious in Gogol’ and Dostoevskij, 105.

36. Dostoevskii, PSS, 1:302.

37. Ibid., 1:294.

38. Ibid., 1:306.

39. Ibid., 1:272.

40. Ibid., 1:304.

41. Ibid., 1:277.

42. Ibid., 1:225.

43. Ibid., 8:507.

44. Ibid., 1:278.

45. Ibid., 1:277, 278, 292.

46. Ibid., 1:272.

47. Ibid., 1:281.

48. Ibid., 1:306.

49. Ibid., 1:307-8.

50. Ibid., 1:268.

51. Ibid., 1:301 and 308,305.

52. Ibid., 1:269,281,297, and 299, respectively.

53. For more than a hundred and fifty years now, “The Landlady” has been panned by critics. Vissarion Belinskii set the tone for the story's reeeption shortly after its appearance, describing it as “far-fetched, exaggerated, stilted, spurious and false.” For more on this, see Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds ofRevolt, 342.

54. Scharff, David E., Object Relations Theory and Practice: An Introduction (Northvale, N.J., 1996), 137.Google Scholar

55. The mutuality of their relationship is compatible with psychiatric theories of projeetive mechanisms. “Projeetive identification,” explains Richard J. Rosenthal, “is a bridging coneept between the intrapsychic and the interpersonal. Simultaneous with the fantasy are often subtle, usually unconscious, affective or cognitive Communications and behaviors which induce complementary or identical states of mind in the reeipient.“ Rosenthal, “Dostoevsky's Experiment with Projeetive Mechanisms,” 63.

56. Dostoevskii, PSS, 1:267. Emphasis added.

57. In a recently completed, as yet unpublished manuscript, Thomas G. Marullo examines the relationships between the novel's characters from the perspective of “morbid codependency,” a State in which the boundaries between seifand other are obscured and dissolved: “Initially, in morbid codependency with others, the child Netochka enjoys untold happiness. To her the advantages are obvious. She can take from others what she believes she lacks. […] Fearing loneliness, abandonment, and eviction, she latches onto her host with gritted teeth and white-knuckled hands.” Marullo, “Heroine Abuse: The Poetics of Codependency in Netochka Nezvanova” (unpublished manuscript, 2012), 69-70.

58. Mochul'skii sees this as a compositional defect in the work: “Netochka is too pale a figure, too much the narrator and not the heroine. With discreet modesty she invariably yields the foreground to other individuals and is incapable of focusing the novel's events on her own personality.” Mochulsky, Dostoevsky, 108.

59. Dostoevskii, PSS, 2:191. Emphasis added. References are to the 1860 revised text.

60. Ibid., 2:185-86.

61. Ibid., 2:194.

62. Dostoevskii, PSS, 2:440. The section with Laria was removed from the unfinished novel in Dostoevskii's later revision. See Terras, Young Dostoevsky, 145-47.

63. Ibid., 2:441.

64. Joseph Frank describes Laria as a “'reflector’ for Netochka [who] helps her, even at this early stage, to understand the significance of her own twisted psychic history.” Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds ofRevolt, 357.

65. Dostoevskii, PSS, 2:445.

66. Ibid., 2:442.

67. Ibid., 2:446.

68. Ibid., 2:445.

69. Ibid., 2:189,197.

70. Ibid., 2:197-99. Emphasis added.

71. Ibid., 2:197.

72. Ibid., 2:207.

73. Ibid., 2:203.

74. Ibid., 2:198,199, 202, 206.

75. Ibid., 2:197,199.

76. Ibid., 2:202.

77. Ibid., 2:200.

78. Ibid., 2:210.

79. Ibid., 2:198.

80. Ibid., 2:210,197.

81. Ibid., 2:204. Netochka does, later, teil Katia of her memories, but, she does not, in Katia's presence, approach those painful, suppressed memories she and Laria share in common.

82. Ibid., 2:210. In Heroine Abuse, Marullo Stresses the infectious nature of “morbid codependency” in Netochka Nezvanova: “morbid codependents bend their hosts into their own image and likeness; or, they transmute to doubles, mirroring with stunning veracity the (often bizarre and unstable) thoughts, actions, and emotions of their partners.” Marullo, “Heroine Abuse,” 23.

83. Dostoevskii, PSS, 2:211.

84. Ibid., 2:215.

85. Ibid., 2:221.

86. Ibid., 2:219.

87. Ibid., 2:206 and 212, 217.

88. Ibid., 2:221.

89. Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, 1996), 8.Google Scholar In her influential discussion of trauma theory and literature, Caruth identifies trauma as “a wound of the mind” that “cries out” not at one specific moment in the past, but in the shaping of one's life and one's relations with others. Caruth argues that literature is particularly capable of examining traumatic experience since it “is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing” (4).

90. Dostoevskii, PSS, 11:9,21.

91. “We will remember how we buried the poor boy. […] We will remember him, gentlemen, for our entire lives. […] Know that there is nothing higher, more powerful, wholesome and more useful later in life, than some good memory, and especially one taken from childhood, from one's parents’ house. […] And even if only one good memory remains in us in our heart, then even that can serve at some point for our salvation.“ Dostoevskii, PSS, 15:195. See Thompson's, Diane Oenning discussion of memories “that affirm the System of Christian memory.Thompson, , The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), 74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

92. Dostoevskii, PSS, 1:272.