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Varen'ka Dobroselova: An Experiment in the Desentimentalization of the Sentimental Heroine in Dostoevskii's Poor Folk

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Gary Rosenshield
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Extract

Ever since its publication the success of Fedor Dostoevskii's first novel Poor Folk has been ascribed primarily to the characterization of its “naturalistic” hero, Makar Devushkin, not to its sentimental heroine, Varen'ka Dobroselova. Although critics have continued to discover new merits in Poor Folk, in the end it is Devushkin who dominates the novel and on whom, in one way or another, most of its virtues depend. Not only is Devushkin the protagonist, he is also at the center of the novel's important innovations in style, theme, and characterization. Dostoevskii took the poor copying clerk, a type that for a decade had been used as a stock device—and most often the butt—of Russian comic fiction, and transformed him into the hero of a tragi-comic sentimental novel. This transformation was much abetted by Dostoevskii's use of the epistolary form— a form common to the sentimental novel of the eighteenth century, but long outdated in Russia by the 1840s—for it permitted the hero to tell his own story and, by so doing, to reveal the sensitive human being behind the comic mask.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , Fall 1986 , pp. 525 - 533
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1986

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References

1. For the earliest reaction to Poor Folk, see Vissarion Belinskii's reviews in E M. Dostoevskii v russkoi kritike, ed. A. Belkin (Moscow: GIKhL), pp. 3–26; and the summaries of, and referencesto, contemporary reviews in Vinogradov, V. V., “Shkola sentimental'nogo realizma: roman DostoevskogoBednye liudi na fone literaturnoi evoliutsii 40-kh godov,” Izbrannye trudy (Moscow: Nauka, 1976, pp. 163–176 Google Scholar; Dostoevskii, F. M., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. Bazanov, V G. et al., 30 vols.(Leningrad: Nauka, 1972) 1: 470–480 Google Scholar (hereafter cited as PSS); Grishin, D. V., Rannii Dostoevskii (Parkville, Melbourne: Mel'burnskii universitet, 1977), pp. 76–78 Google Scholar.

2. Vinogradov, “Shkola “; Bakhtin, M. M., Problemy tvorehestva Dostoevskogo (Leningrad: Priboi, 1929, pp. 136–146 Google Scholar; Shklovskii, V. B., Za i protiv: Zametki o Dostoevskom (Moscow: Sovetskiipisatel', 1957), pp. 5–49 Google Scholar; Trubetzkoy, N. S., Dostoevski] als Kiinstler (The Hague: Mouton, 1964, pp. 30–51 Google Scholar; Mossman, Eliot D., “Dostoevski's Early Works: The More than Rational Distortion,” Slavic and East European Journal 10 (1966): 268–278 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Terras, Victor, The Young Dostoevski] (1846–1849): A Critical Study (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), pp. 55–62, 160–171, 241–251Google Scholar; Fasting, Sigurd, “ Bednye liudi als Briefroman,” Scando-Slavica 18 (1972): 37–43 Google Scholar; Leatherbarrow, W. J., “The Ragwith Ambition: The Problem of Self-will in Dostoevsky's ‘Bednyye lyudi’ and‘Dvoynik, '” Modern Language Review 68 (1973): 607–618 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Neuhäuser, Rudolf, Das Frühwerk Dostoevskijs (Heidelberg: Winter, 1977, pp. 51–56 Google Scholar.

3. For an excellent discussion of the natural school, see Vinogradov's “Shkola” and also idem, Gogol’ i natural'naia shkola (Leningrad: Obrazovanie, 1925. See also Tseitlin, A. G., Povesti o bednom chinovnike Dostoevskogo: K istorii odnogo siuzheta (Moscow, 1923)Google Scholar; Hodgson, Peter, From Gogol to Dostoevsky: Jakov Butkov, A Reluctant Naturalist in the 1840's (Munich: Fink, 1976).Google Scholar

4. See, for example, Simmons, Ernest J., Dostoevsky: The Making of a Novelist (1940; reprint, London: Lehmann, 1950), p. 14 Google Scholar.

5. Neuhäuser, Das Friihwerk Dostoevskijs, pp. 51–55, has even argued that Devushkin is moreinterested in his development as a writer than in Varen'ka herself.

6. For the earliest critical reactions to Varen'ka, see the references in note 1.

7. Belkin, ed., Dostoevskii v russkoi kritike, p. 17.

8. Vinogradov, “Shkola,” pp. 168–169.

9. Ibid., pp. 163–171.

10. See, for example, Shklovskii, Za i protiv, p. 35; Trubetzkoy, Dostoevski] als Künstler, p. 34.

11. Terras, The Young Dostoevskij, pp. 76–88. Terras, who sees an unresolved tension betweenVaren'ka's practical and sentimental sides, maintains that “Varen'ka is, like Devushkin, half humanindividual and half literary travesty” (ibid., p. 85).

12. Bakhtin, Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo, pp. 136–148.

13. Critics have not been precise in defining Varen'ka's style. It has been characterized asschoolgirlish, neutral, down-to-earth, affected, and sentimental. Trubetzkoy in Dostoevskij als Künstler, for example, states that Varen'ka's neutral style contrasts with Devushkin's (p. 34), but a fewpages later characterizes her style as traditionally sentimental (p. 38).

14. In the first book publication of Poor Folk, Dostoevskii eliminated perhaps the most stylisticallysentimental passage from the diary. See PSS, p. 443.

15. Nechaeva, V. S., Rannii Dostoevskii: 1821–1849 (Moscow: Nauka, 1979, pp. 144–148 Google Scholar.

16. See Shklovskii, Za i protiv, p. 35; Trubetzkoy, Dostoevskij als Künstier, p. 34.

17. Vinogradov's attempts to show Varen'ka's “naturalistic” style are unconvincing to me.Varen'ka's description of the older Pokrovskii seems rather objective in comparison not only with Devushkin's description of Gorshkov, another desperate unfortunate, but also with the descriptionof Samson Vyrin by the narrator of Pushkin's “Stantsionnyi smotritel'.” That the older Pokrovskiiis badly dressed and has strange mannerisms certainly types him, but it is the point of view of thenarrator and author and the linguistic play of the narration that are the essential characteristics ofthe naturalistic style.

18. See Terras, The Young Dostoevski], p. 78, for other improbabilities in Varen'ka's situationin Poor Folk. Soviet critics, not unexpectedly, assert the validity of Varen'ka as a symbol of theoppression of the reign of Nicholas I. See, for example, V. I. Etov, Dostoevskii: Ocherk tvorchestva (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1968), pp. 61–62. The more interesting question of Varen'ka as a victim—and of women in general as victims—is beyond the scope of this paper. The prominent role of thefemale “predator” Anna Fedorovna and the unhappy fates of most of the male characters makegeneralizations about male predatoriness and female victimization, at best, problematical. For anattempt to deal with the problem of victim and tyrant in Dostoevskii's later fiction see Cox, Gary, Victim and Tyrant in Dostoevsky (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1983)Google Scholar.

19. Dostoyevskii, , Three Short Novels, trans. Garnett, Constance (New York: Dell, 1960, p. 263 Google Scholar. All translations are from this edition; they have been checked against the original in PSS 1: 13–128and revised when necessary. Future references to this Garnett edition will appear in parentheses inthe text.

20. Most critics have taken Varen'ka at her word with regard to her health. Simmons, Dostoevsky, p. 13; Mochulsky, Konstantin, Dostoevsky: His Life and Works, trans. Minahan, Michael A. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 37 Google Scholar.

21. Terras, The Young Dostoevski], pp. 79–80.

22. Shklovskii, Za i protiv, pp. 46–47, holds that one of the reasons that Varen'ka accepts Bykov's proposal is that she does not want to destroy Devushkin. That, it seems to me, is going alittle too far, but perhaps Shklovskii saw in Varen'ka's relationship with Devushkin the seeds of therelationship between Myshkin and Nastas'ia Filippovna in The Idiot.