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Of Crime, Utopia, and Repressive Complements: The Further Adventures of the Ridiculous Man

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Eric Naiman
Eric Naiman*
Affiliation:
Department of Slavic Languages, University of Colorado, Boulder
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Extract

"Therefore," I said, somewhat bewildered, "we would have to eat again from the Tree of Knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence?"

"Quite right," he answered. "And that's the last chapter in the history of the world."

Heinrich von Kleist, "On the Marionette Theatre"

On the morning of 11 May 1876, a young seamstress pushed her stepdaughter out the window of their Petersburg apartment. The apparent reason for this attempted infanticide (miraculously, the child survived her four-story plunge) was Ekaterina Kornilova's anger at her husband and jealousy of his deceased first wife. The case would seem undistinguished in its sordidness were it not for Fedor Dostoevskii's adoption of the affair as a cause celebre. Although he originally attacked Kornilova's defenders, Dostoevskii later defended her as well when he learned that Kornilova had been pregnant at the time of the attempted murder.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , Fall 1991 , pp. 512 - 520
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1991

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References

The author would like to express his gratitude to Anne Nesbet, whose substantial contributions include several of this article's fundamental arguments. The author would also like to thank Hugh McLean for his comments and suggestions.

1. The epigram is from German Romantic Criticism, ed. A. Leslie Willson (New York: Continuum, 1982), 244. William Woodin Rowe appears to be the only scholar to treat the Kornilova case in the context of Dostoevskii's literary work. He devotes a few paragraphs to the matter in the chapter “The Child as Victim” in his Dostoevsky: Child and Man in his Works (New York: New York University Press, 1968), 13-14.

2. For an excellent discussion of framing in Utopian narratives, which does not, however, consider the device's apotropaic function, see Morson, Gary Saul, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevky's Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 138-142, 162–175 Google Scholar.

3. See, for example Tommaso Campanula's The City of the Sun, where a condemned man may appeal to the Metaphysician for mercy. Trans. Daniel J. Donno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 97.

4. All citations to Dostoevskii's works are to F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972-1990).

5. Jacques Catteau, “De la metaphorique des utopies dans la literature russe et de son traitement chez Andrej Platonov,” Revue des etudes slaves 56, no. 1 (1984): 41.

6. To summarize, Dostoevskii discussed the Kornilova case in the following issues of Dnevnik pisatelia: May 1876 (23: 19); October 1876 (23: 136-141); December 1876 (24: 36-43); April 1877 (25: 119-121); December 1877(26: 92-110). “Sonsmeshnogocheloveka” was published in the April 1877 issue (25: 104-118).

7. There are obvious thematic links between the Komilova case and “Krotkaia,” many of which are due to the similarities between Kornilova's crime and the actual suicide upon which Dostoevskii based his other “fantastic story.” Consideration of these similarities go beyond the scope of this analysis.

8. See Catteau, “De la metaphorique,” 32-33, and Michel Foucault's discussion of the birth of the modern prison in Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 195-257.

9. Indeed, Fedor Mikhailovich seemed to have forgotten his dictum pronounced on an earlier criminal case: “Kto uzh slishkom zhaleet obidchika, pozhalui, ne zhaleet obizhennogo” (23: 16).

10. At least one other commentator has focused on the specific date of the dream's date and hour. Nathan Rosen's observations, while interesting, are not exhaustive: “The date and time are suggestive. November is the eleventh month of the year, the time is 11: 00 P.M. Three is a traditional symbol for completeness (mother-father-child, beginning-middle-end, thesis-antithesis-synthesis). [The Ridiculous Man's] experience with the star and the little girl and his dream occurs, so to speak, at the eleventh hour of his life, saving him from death,” “The Defective Memory of the Ridiculous Man,” Canadian American Slavic Studies 12, no. 3 (1978): 327.

11. Igor Volgin, “Pis'ma chitatelei k F. M. Dostoevskomu,” Voprosy literatury 9 (September 1971): 193-194.

12. “Zapisnaia tetrad’ 1876-77 gg,” Literaturnoe nasledstvo (Neizdannyi Dostoevskii) (Moscow) 83 (1971): 588.

13. Before the birth of Komilova's daughter, Dostoevskii assumed that the child would be a boy.

14. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Adventures of Don Quixote, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), 86.

15. On Quixote in the Dnevnik, see Morson, Boundaries of Genre, 178-179. Also see the commentary to the “Son” in Dostoevskii, PSS 25: 404.

16. Cervantes, Don Quixote, 25. Emphasis added.

17. In preparatory notes, Dostoevskii described this term of waiting as lasting “posle sroka 8 s lishkom mesiatsev” and “9 mes(iatsev)” (26: 189).

18. Dostoevskii's claim becomes more intelligible if we posit an implicit (and traditional) relation in it between the concepts of uterus and soul. Pregnancy is the time when “v dushe beremennoi zhenshchiny proiskhodiat strannye perelomy” (24: 36). If Kornilova is acquitted, Dostoevskii writes, this “strashnyi urok, uzhe vynesennyi eiu, uberezhet ee, mozhet byt', na vsiu zhizn’ ot khudogo dela; a glavnoe, mozhet byt', sil'no pomozhet razvernut'sia i sozret’ tem semenam i zachatkam khoroshego, kotorye vidimo i nesom nenno zakliucheny v etoi iunoi dushe” (24: 43). Is it only Kornilova's soul that the writer hopes has been “podavlena” (26: 10) or the soul's physical counterpart as well, its metaphorical partner in a “sumasshestviia bez sumasshestviia” (24: 36) that etiologically has much in common with hysteria?

19. Volgin, “Pis'ma chitatelei,” 196.