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Chapter 3. The Miser Redone: The Transformation of Pushkin’s The Covetous Knight in Dostoevsky’s Mr. Prokharchin
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Mr. Prokharchin is the first of Dostoevsky’s works to take on Pushkin’s little tragedy, The Covetous Knight (). Although Dostoevsky incorporated aspects of The Covetous Knight, more than any other work of Pushkin, into his later fiction (Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, The Idiot, A Raw Youth, “The Gentle Creature ” (“Krotkaia”), and The Brothers Karamazov), it is in Mr. Prokharchin (), the first major work he completed after The Double, that he makes his most radical revision of a Pushkin text,1 again with the aim of continuing his dialogue with Pushkin about the legacy of Peter the Great. We have seen that in The Double Dostoevsky employed an unusual vehicle—a mad titular councillor—to conduct his critique of Peter’s legacy, but in Mr. Prokharchin Dostoevsky goes even further in his portrayal of the little man, the chinovnik, and his exploration of the shaky foundations of the Russian state. In Poor Folk it was partly bad luck that led to misfortune. As Devushkin argues, the fortunate seem to be born with silver spoons in their mouths. In The Double, the hero fears that everyone is replaceable and therefore no one’s position is really secure.In Mr. Prokharchin, the focus is less on the fear of being replaced by others (one’s rivals or competitors) than on the fear of the inviability of the institution itself and the feeling of powerlessness that arises from this fear. For whatever reason,Dostoevsky chose a miser to be the vehicle of his next experiment. He again had ready models of avarice in the works of both Pushkin and Gogol. One of the most brilliant chapters of Dead Souls is devoted to the miser Plyushchin, a skinflint and a compulsive collector of junk. However, since Dostoevsky wanted to continue to explore the relationship between fear, power, and powerlessness along the chapter The Miser Redone The Transformation of Pushkin’s The Covetous Knight in Dostoevsky’s Mr. Prokharchin lines he had already developed in The Double, Pushkin’s miser-baron from The Covetous Knight presented a far more appropriate model for critical engagement than Gogol’s.2 Pushkin’s and Dostoevsky’s misers make an unlikely pair. It seems as though Dostoevsky purposely emphasizes, often through the most grotesque parody, the differences between Pushkin’s hero and his own. For many critics, especially in the nineteenth century, Pushkin’s Baron was a larger-than-life, romantically conceived, almost Shakespearian figure. Prokharchin, on the other hand, is the lowliest by far of Dostoevsky’s clerk-heroes.3 If we were to look at Pushkin’s works in the order in which Dostoevsky chose to respond to them: “The Stationmaster,” The Bronze Horseman,and The Covetous Knight (and not the order in which Pushkin wrote them) and compare them to Dostoevsky’s order, we would see a progressive elevation of the Pushkinian hero and a progressive diminution of the Dostoevskian hero. The hero of the “The Stationmaster,” Samson Vyrin, is a government official of the lowest rank, even considerably lower than Devushkin and Golyadkin; Evgeny in The Bronze Horseman is a government official but with a noble and ancient lineage; and the Baron in The Covetous Knight, who belongs to the French aristocracy , may be one of the wealthiest noblemen in the kingdom. By contrast, Devushkin in Dostoevsky’s first work, Poor Folk, is much more positively portrayed than Golyadkin in The Double,and Mr.Prokharchin seems to be a much reduced version of Golyadkin.Yet,despite the status of Mr. Prokharchin, Dostoevsky still gives him an important role in revealing the truth about the legacy of Peter the Great. Dostoevsky is engaging here in a daring—and also quite risky—strategy, attempting to discover new uses for literary parody, to test whether it is possible to employ an extremely diminished and comically presented “hero” to reveal existential social and political truths of no less moment than those of The Bronze Horseman.4 In the following sections, I briefly examine Dostoevsky’s diminution of his hero-clerk, in both kind and degree, through the parody of The Covetous Knight. Nowhere does Dostoevsky’s talent as a comic artist emerge so clearly as in his parody of Pushkin’s little tragedy. Although Dostoevsky emphasizes many differences between his protagonist and Pushkin’s, in character and situation, he also develops in detail some of the traits and situations that these figures, unexpectedly, have in common . The Baron...