The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky Read online

  2001 Modern Library Paperback Edition

  Notes and Reading Group Guide copyright © 2001 by Random House, Inc. Biographical note copyright © 1992 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  The excerpt from “Dostoeffsky” from Master Builders, An Attempt at the Typology of the Spirit: The Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoeffsky, vol. 1, by Stefan Zweig, was originally published in the German language by Williams Verlag AG, Switzerland, and in the English language by Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to New Directions Publishing Corporation for permission to reprint an excerpt from Dostoevsky, by André Gide, translated by Arnold Bennett. Copyright © 1961 by New Directions. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 1821–1881.

  [Short stories. English. Selections]

  The best short stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky / translated, with a translator’s introduction by David Magarshack.

  p. cm.

  Contents: White nights—The honest thief—The Christmas tree and a wedding—The peasant Marey—Notes from the underground—A gentle creature—The dream of a ridiculous man.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82408-0

  1. Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 1821–1881—Translations into English. 2. Russia—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Magarshack, David. II. Title.

  PG3326.A2 2001 00-048951

  891.73’3—dc21

  Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  WHITE NIGHTS

  THE HONEST THIEF

  THE CHRISTMAS TREE AND A WEDDING

  THE PEASANT MAREY

  NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

  A GENTLE CREATURE

  THE DREAM OF A RIDICULOUS MAN

  Commentary

  Reading Group Guide

  Biographical Note

  INTRODUCTION

  David Magarshack

  With a writer of such great genius and such vast output as Fyodor Dostoevsky it is perhaps natural that criticism should be concerned mainly with his larger works. And yet it is in Dostoevsky’s smaller works that we find the highest expression of his creative power and profundity of thought. In these smaller works we find reflected as in a convex mirror the whole immensity of Dostoevsky’s world, concentrated with gem-like brilliance and startling clarity. Here and there in Dostoevsky’s great novels passages occur which reveal an inability to take a detached view of life and overcome political and racial prejudices, and it is in these works in particular that those “streaks of cruelty” appear that did not escape the notice of the Russian critics of his own day. In his smaller works, however, Dostoevsky was singularly free from partizanship. In the greatest of them, such as in Notes from the Underground and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, Dostoevsky showed that he was capable of withdrawing from the conflict of human passions and of surveying the human scene with complete detachment. It is in these works, therefore, that the reader will obtain a clearer, if not deeper, insight into his genius and will be able to judge him more fairly than those who form their judgments about him mainly from his great novels.

  The stories in this volume are (with one exception) published in their chronological order so as to afford the reader an idea of the growth of Dostoevsky’s genius through the different phases of its development. The exception is the short story, The Peasant Marey, which is placed after the three stories belonging to Dostoevsky’s first period, ending with his arrest and imprisonment in Siberia in 1849. As it deals with Dostoevsky’s life in prison, it forms a convenient connecting link between the young and the mature Dostoevsky.

  Fyodor (Theodor) Dostoevsky was born in Moscow on October 30, 1821. His father was an army doctor, and Fyodor was the second of his six children. His childhood was spent in Moscow and on his father’s small estate in the Tula province. Already, as a child, Dostoevsky was distinguished by his highly excitable, “fiery” temperament, and from his early years he showed a great interest in literature. His father, however, decided that he should be an engineer, and accordingly in 1837, soon after the death of his mother, he and his elder brother Mikhail were sent to Petersburg to be placed in the Army Engineering College. Here Dostoevsky spent over five years, devoting most of his time, however, to reading and writing, having made up his mind to become a writer as soon as he could conveniently give up the career which had been forced upon him. An interesting light on Dostoevsky’s reading as a boy is shed in a letter he wrote to his brother on August 9, 1838. In that year he read through the whole of Shakespeare and Pascal, almost the whole of Balzac, Goethe’s Faust and his shorter poems, most of the works of Victor Hugo, and all the works (both in the original and translation) of the German romantic novelist Hoffmann. Curiously enough, his first literary efforts were two historical dramas, Mary Stuart and Boris Godunov, which he wrote in 1841, the extracts from which he read to his brother in the same year. These two plays have not been preserved. In 1841 Dostoevsky obtained his commission, and in 1842 he became a lieutenant. A year later he finished his course at the Engineering College and was attached to the Army Engineering Corps in Petersburg, in the drawing department. In the same year appeared his first published work, a translation of Balzac’s novel Eugénie Grandet.

  Already during his student years Dostoevsky revealed the characteristic trait which was to cause him so much trouble during his life, namely, his utter inability to manage his own personal affairs and his uncanny gift for getting into debt. In spite of his more than adequate allowance of five thousand roubles a year, he seemed incapable of living within his means. He spent his money almost as soon as he got it and during the rest of the year he literally starved. An illustration of his unpractical turn of mind is provided by the fact that he rented an expensive flat while still at college. He paid 1,200 roubles a year for it, although he only lived in one small room in which he froze during the winter as he never had enough money to keep even that one room warm. In 1844 Dostoevsky resigned his commission and devoted himself entirely to literary work.

  From October, 1844, when Dostoevsky gave up his army career, to April, 1849, when he was arrested and imprisoned in the Petropavlovsk Fortress in Petersburg, Dostoevsky published ten novels and short stories. His first novel, Poor Folk, written in 1846, brought him fame literally overnight. He was hailed by the poet and editor Nekrassov, to whom he had sent the novel, and the great Russian critic Belinsky, as a successor to Gogol. At the age of twenty-four he became a celebrity, and it is perhaps not surprising that his success went to his head and that some of his subsequent stories did not come up to the expectations of his admirers, two of them, The Landlady and Prokharchin, being sharply criticised by Belinsky.

  In his first appreciation of Dostoevsky, Belinsky at once singled out those characteristic features of his art which were later to make him (in spite of his exasperatingly careless style) one of the giants of Russian and, indeed, of world literature. What were these characteristic features? First of all, his amazing truthfulness in the description of life. Secondly, his masterly delineation of character and the soc
ial conditions of his heroes. Thirdly, his profound understanding and his wonderful artistic re-creation of the tragic side of life. Belinsky, too, from the very outset put his finger on the weakest spot of Dostoevsky’s genius: his diffuseness and his tendency to tire the reader by unnecessary repetitions and digressions.

  As for Gogol’s influence on Dostoevsky, Belinsky was also the first to point out that in the case of so outstandingly original a writer as Dostoevsky this influence was merely superficial. “Dostoevsky as a writer of great talent,” Belinsky wrote, “cannot be called an imitator of Gogol, though he certainly owes a great deal to him. Gogol’s influence can even be seen in the structure of his sentences,* but there is so much originality in Dostoevsky’s talent that this obvious influence of Gogol will most probably disappear with his other shortcomings as a writer, though Gogol will always remain, as it were, the fount from which he drew his inspiration.”

  Dostoevsky himself, in the often quoted phrase, “We have all emerged from under Gogol’s Overcoat,” acknowledged his indebtedness to Gogol, and, specifically, to Gogol’s faith in “the divine spark in man,” however degraded socially or however poor in spirit he might be. It was this deeply humane attitude to the lowly and the downtrodden that made Dostoevsky such a great admirer of Charles Dickens, to whom he had paid what is surely the finest compliment one great writer can pay to another by writing his own version of The Old Curiosity Shop in The Insulted and Injured (published in 1861).

  The Honest Thief, the second story in this volume, written in 1848, is perhaps the best example of this early tendency in Dostoevsky’s works. Yemelyan is the first of Dostoevsky’s characters whose tragedy consists of their helplessness to resist evil in spite of, and perhaps even because of, the fact that they recognise it as evil. He is, as it were, the embryo from which the Yezhevikins, Marmeladovs, and Lebedevs later emerged. As with many another of Dostoevsky’s characters, he is merely the original theme of the different variations which Dostoevsky wrote as his own perception of life and his sensibility deepened and broadened.

  The Honest Thief as well as White Nights is also remarkable for the fact that in them we find the first statement of the central idea of one of Dostoevsky’s greatest novels, Crime and Punishment, published in 1866. In White Nights the sentence expressing this idea, which Dostoevsky eliminated from subsequent editions of the story, ran: “I am told that the proximity of punishment arouses real repentance in the criminal and sometimes awakens a feeling of genuine remorse in the most hardened heart; I am told this is due to fear.” A more elaborate statement of the same idea (also omitted in the subsequent editions of the story) is found in The Honest Thief.

  White Nights (i.e., the twilight summer nights in Petersburg), also published in 1848, is perhaps one of the most characteristic works of the young Dostoevsky. It is to a large extent autobiographical, the sentimental theme being developed against the background of his own personal impressions during his nocturnal wanderings in Petersburg. The story is remarkable for the way Dostoevsky avoids the more obvious pitfalls of such a romantic theme, for its gentle humour, and for its delicate touches of genuine feeling. Dostoevsky was to re-write this story in his true manner of creative artist and thinker seventeen years later under the title Notes from the Underground.

  The Christmas Tree and a Wedding is perhaps the most artistically perfect short story Dostoevsky wrote during his first period as a fiction writer. Satiric in character, it drives home its main point in the last sentence with shattering force: the contrast between the young helpless victim of a stupid social order and the ruthless pursuit of wealth by a middle-aged careerist who calculates the amount of money he is to get by marrying the young girl with almost inspired correctness five years before the actual event. It is one of Dostoevsky’s most savage judgments on “success” under the acquisitive system of society.

  In 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested and sent to prison in Siberia. His imprisonment at Omsk marks a break with the rather mild liberalism of his youth, a break that was much more complete than it would have been if he had not been involved in the so-called Petrashevsky case. Petrashevsky was a young and very rich political dilettante who dabbled in the utopian socialism of the French school. He was an enthusiastic admirer of Fourier, and his Friday at homes were frequented by the liberal-minded intellectuals of the day, of whom Dostoevsky was one. Politics was only one of the topics discussed at those social gatherings, and on one occasion Dostoevsky read Belinsky’s famous letter to Gogol, in which the Russian liberal critic attacked the reactionary opinions expressed by Gogol in his Correspondence with Friends.

  Dostoevsky was arrested with the other members of the Petrashevsky “group” on April 23, 1849, imprisoned for eight months in the Petropavlovsk Fortress in Petersburg, and then sentenced to death, a sentence which was immediately commuted to eight years of imprisonment in Siberia. But this commuted sentence was only read out to Dostoevsky and his associates after the gruesome ceremony on Semyonovsky Square where they had been brought to face a firing squad. In a letter to his elder brother, Dostoevsky gives this description of his mock execution:

  “Today, December 22nd, we were all taken to Semyonovsky Square. There the sentence of death was read out to us, we were all made to kiss the cross, a sword was broken over our heads, and we were told to put on our white execution shirts. Then three of us were tied to the posts to be executed. I was the sixth, and therefore in the second group of those to be executed. I had only one more minute to live. I thought of you, dear brother, and all of yours; during the last minute it was only you I was thinking of, my dear, dear brother. I had time to embrace Plescheyev and Durov who were standing beside me and to take leave of them. Then the retreat was sounded on the drums, those tied to the posts were taken back, and an order from His Imperial Majesty was read to us granting us our lives. Afterwards our sentences were read out to us.”

  The sentence against Dostoevsky ran: “For taking part in criminal plots, for circulating the letter of the writer Belinsky, full of insolent attacks against the Orthodox Church and the Government, and for attempting, with others, to circulate articles directed against the Government by means of a home-printing press, to be sentenced to eight years penal servitude.”

  The sentence was reduced to four years by the Emperor Nicholas I. Dostoevsky finally broke with his liberal past during his imprisonment in Siberia, though signs of the coming change can already be discerned in A Little Hero, the “children’s story” Dostoevsky wrote while under arrest in the Petropavlovsk Fortress. In that story Dostoevsky draws a scathingly frank picture of Petrashevsky in the guise of the husband of the story’s heroine, M-me M., as a man with “a lump of fat instead of a heart.”

  The Peasant Marey is a biographical account of Dostoevsky’s life in prison, containing a vivid flash-back to his early childhood on his father’s small country estate. It was published in February, 1876, in A Writer’s Diary, a monthly periodical “without contributors or programme” which Dostoevsky published between 1876 and 1878. The theme of the story was provided by Konstantin Aksakov, son of Sergey Aksakov, the famous author of A Family Chronicle, and leader of the so-called Slavophiles, who, in an article published posthumously, argued that the common people in Russia had always shown a high degree of culture. After discussing this statement at length and acknowledging the close ties that bound the best Russian writers to the common people, Dostoevsky begins his story of the peasant Marey in these words: “But all these professions of faith are, I think, extremely boring to read and, therefore, I will tell you an anecdote, or perhaps not even an anecdote but just an old reminiscence of mine which for some reason I want very much to tell you here at the conclusion of my treatise on the common people. I was only nine years old at the time … but no—perhaps I’d better start with my twenty-ninth year.”

  The episode of the peasant Marey probably took place in 1831, shortly after Dostoevsky’s father had bought the small estate in the Tula province. The prison episode occurred durin
g Easter of 1850 (April 24th), and is described at much greater length in The House of the Dead (published in 1861). Dostoevsky also made use of this childhood incident in The Adolescent, the novel he wrote in 1874.

  Dostoevsky was released from prison in March, 1854. At that time his political views had completely changed and he became a passionate adherent of the most reactionary forces in Russia. Before his release from prison he wrote a number of “Odes” to members of the Czar’s family, couched in the most fulsomely servile language (Dostoevsky’s rather poor poetic efforts were usually connected with some political event, such as the Crimean War). After his release from prison he was forced to join the army as a private, being promoted to non-commissioned rank in January, 1856, and in October of the same year to the commissioned rank of lieutenant. He was still forbidden to return to Russia. In February, 1857, he married a twenty-nine-year-old widow, Maria Dmitriyevna Issayeva. Two years later he resigned from the army. In the same year he was granted permission to return to Russia, but not to Petersburg or Moscow. He spent some months in Tver (Kalinin of today) and only at the end of 1859 was he allowed to return to Petersburg. Between 1859 and 1861 he published three novels, including his comic masterpiece The Village of Stepanchikovo. In March, 1861, Dostoevsky embarked on his journalistic career with the publication of the monthly periodical Vremya (“Time”), under the editorship of his brother Mikhail (being still under police supervision, Dostoevsky himself could not appear as the editor of the journal). Vremya was a great financial success. In June, 1862, Dostoevsky left for his first journey abroad, mainly for reasons of health. In July of that year he was in London, where he visited the famous Russian political exile and writer, Alexander Herzen.

  In London Dostoevsky came face to face for the first time with the industrial society which he regarded as “the triumph of Baal.” The thing that struck him most was the contrast between the “colossal façade” of riches, luxury, and general prosperity of the few and the abject poverty of the many and their “coolie-like” acquiescence in their fate. “In the face of such enormous riches, such immense pride of the spirit of domination, and such triumphant perfection of the creations of the spirit,” Dostoevsky wrote in the April, 1863, issue of Vremya, in which he described his impressions of his first visit abroad, “the starving soul is humbled and driven to submission, seeking salvation in gin and dissipation and beginning to believe that this is the way things ought to be. Facts oppress the spirit, and if scepticism is born, it is a gloomy, accursed sort of scepticism which seeks salvation in religious fanaticism.”