Aut Caesar, Aut Nihil: A Study of Dostoevsky's Moral Dialectic

Abstract

In the first pages of The Brothers Karamazov the narrator recalls that he knew a young lady of the last romantic generation who, because of insuperable obstacles to union with her lover—all of which she had invented—one stormy night threw herself off a high precipice into a deep, rapid river. By this act she was able to satisfy her desire to be like Shakespeare's Ophelia; but, the narrator adds, had the precipice been less picturesque—a fiat mud bank, for instance—the suicide most probably would not have taken place. The romantic heroine, whose fate Dostoevsky brings up here only as an aside in his attempt to explain why Adelaida Ivanovna had married Fyodor Karamazov, recalls a character type which flourished on the pages of his works in the 1840's. Every reader of Dostoev-sky's early works will remember his bookish heroes, who prefer the beautiful improbabilities of romantic novels and the fantasies of their own minds to the reality they must live in. I am thinking of such obvious examples as the hero of White Nights, who for eight years has been intimately acquainted with characters from works of Hoffman, Scott, Goethe, and Mérimée, but who does not know a single real person in St. Petersburg. I am thinking, also, of the little hero from the story of the same name, who, in the seconds before he leaps on the unridable horse Tankred, sees in his mind's eye pictures of damsels, tournaments, pages, and all the paraphernalia of chivalry. As one who prefers fantasies to reality, Golyadkin of The Double is an obvious example; but even Makar Devushkin of Dostoevsky's first published work, Poor Folk, turns his back on the miserable conditions of his daily life and plays out the role of the generous benefactor to a young girl, even though the added economic burden drives him to drink and penury. There is hardly a work in the forties that does not have its dreamer: Netochka Nezvanova, huddled in a miserable corner looking across the street to the splendid house and dreaming of an improbable life, is a summary image of the hero of the forties.