-
Chapter 2. The Bronze Horseman and The Double: Reevaluating the Madness of the Common Man
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
In The Double, completed soon after Poor Folk, Dostoevsky continues his response to both Gogol and Pushkin. Like Gogol’s “Notes of a Madman ” and Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman,1 The Double portrays a man who goes increasingly insane. In “Notes of a Madman,” the hero ends up in an insane asylum; in The Bronze Horseman, after years of wandering , he dies mad and impoverished on an island in the Neva, the river running through Petersburg. In The Double, the hero is on his way to an insane asylum.We learn nothing more of his fate,but given the Pushkinian and Gogolian subtexts, we assume there will be no recovery. Dostoevsky does not include as specific a reference to Pushkin and Gogol in The Double as he does in Poor Folk, where the hero explicitly discusses “The Stationmaster” and “The Overcoat”; however, the implicit references are unmistakable, not to mention the portrayal of madness itself. Embedded in the plot of “Notes of a Madman” is a petty clerk’s hopes of marrying his superior’s daughter. Aksentii Ivanovich Poprishchin , Gogol’s hero, is a titular councillor—like Devushkin and Akaky Akakievich—who does copying for his boss.Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, Dostoevsky’s hero, also a titular councillor who does copying, has hopes of marrying a young lady, whose father is of much higher rank than he. That the heroes are serious about their courting possibilities shows to what extent they are out of touch with reality—actually mad.Letters play an important role in revealing the extent of each hero’s insanity. Gogol’s hero imagines intercepting and reading the letter of the dog of his superior ’s daughter, in which the dog makes fun of the hero’s looks. In The Double the hero imagines reading letters from, and writing letters to, his enemies, even his own double. The Double includes references to other works of Gogol, in particular,“The Nose”() and Dead Souls ().2 chapter The Bronze Horseman and The Double Reevaluating the Madness of the Common Man But in The Double Dostoevsky clearly engages Pushkin’s work far more than Gogol’s, and not only because Dostoevsky gives us a more realistic representation of madness than Gogol (talking and reading dogs give a decidedly comic cast to Gogol’s work), but also because he directly takes on Pushkin’s portrayal of Petersburg in The Bronze Horseman.Whereas in Poor Folk Dostoevsky provides a realistic corrective to what might be seen as fairy-tale elements of Pushkin’s“The Stationmaster”by setting his love story in the modern city, in The Double he confronts the idea of the city much more directly.Though The Bronze Horseman is a narrative poem (poema in Russian), Pushkin gives it the subtitle “A Petersburg Story” (Peterburgskaia povest’)—povest’ in Russian usually denoting a prose novella.Dostoevsky provides a contrasting echo by giving his prose novella the subtitle,“A Petersburg Poem” (poema). Gogol, too, provided his own vision of Petersburg, an entirely negative one, but it could be argued that his view of Petersburg was one of the modern city in general and that had he written about London or Paris he might have depicted them in a similar manner. For Gogol, Petersburg, as a metropolis, embodied the threat of modern civilization.3 In responding to Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, Dostoevsky is doing something different; he is writing about the meaning of Petersburg not just as a modern city, but as a city with a special symbolic and ideological significance for understanding Russia’s history and its mission among the nations. In the next sections I shall examine some of the most important correspondences between The Bronze Horseman and The Double, showing Dostoevsky using Pushkin’s work as a subtext for his own, and summarizing Dostoevsky’s reaction to Pushkin’s monumental view of Petersburg and Peter the Great, the city’s founder. But I shall be focusing on the heroes of these works because each writer tells the story of the city, and by extension, the nation, by implicating the city in the madness of his middling heroes. Context also figures prominently here. I would suggest that both authors revise their previous image of the little or middling man in Russian society to accommodate their new theme, especially in terms of narrative technique and point of view. Correspondences The implicit references in The Double to The Bronze Horseman indicate the importance of The Bronze Horseman as a...