Dostoevsky, Rousseau and Others

Malcolm V. Jones, University of Nottingham

Traditional studies of literary influence frequently run into methodological difficulties which we all too frequently discern in works on Dostoevsky. Cases of plagiarism, parody or travesty can sometimes be established and evaluated to general satisfaction, but produce an array of parallels, echoes and similarities of dubious pedigree and significance accompanied by grand statements about the looming and pervasive influence of the parent author.

This is, of course, much to be regretted. The influence of one author upon another is not very noteworthy if it is a matter of occasional ad hoc borrowing or quotation. And it is very frustrating if all we can say, as George Steiner says of the influence of Dostoevsky on Balzac and Dickens, is that it is too obvious and far-reaching to require detailed proof. (1) It is much more interesting if it can be shown how a writer assimilates the text of another and makes it his own, especially where the parent text—or that part of it which matters—plays a crucial structuring role in the successor text or texts.

In this post-structuralist and neo-Bakhtinian world we may prefer to abandon the search for influence and concentrate on forms of intertextuality or evidence of the 'voice of the other' (chuzhoj golos) in dialogue with our author. Those of us who see much of value in contemporary literary theory while stopping short of commitment may find that discussion of influence is clarified and made more rigorous by reference to such theory, and that is the approach I propose to adopt here.

The experience of writing and reading suggests that there are two principal modes in which literary influence may operate, which we may if we wish liken to vertical and horizontal dimensions. A writer may consciously respond to or work on a precursor text (as, for example, in parody or travesty), or he may be unconsciously influenced as a result of long-term assimilation whose origins 81

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are long forgotten. I do not wish to pursue theoretical discussions here. Instead I should like to present two concrete examples on which to build my argument for saying that in a limited number of definable cases it is possible to trace the process of assimilation of the precursor text through a number of Dostoevsky's works and in doing so to show that some of those 'family resemblances' which so tantalize influence-hunters and dismay their critics do have a definable place in the process of assimilation of what Genette calls the hypotexte into the hypertexte (2) (the parent text and its successor).

I have one more preliminary remark: I think we can say that we have Dostoevsky's authority for claiming that on occasion particularly striking literary scenes (i. e., scenes to be found in other people's fiction) may play a crucial role in his work.

Everybody recalls the passage from Dostoevsky's Notebooks where he says: 'To write a novel the author must start with one or more strong impressions which his heart has actually experienced (... ) on the basis of which he develops a theme, a plan, a harmonious whole. ' (3)

Such impressions may sometimes be 'actually experienced' it would seem in reading the works of others. Versilov, in A Raw Youth, remarks that in the works of great artists there are scenes which are so painful that you remember them all your life: for example, Othello's last monologue, Evgenij Onegin at Tatjana's feet, or the meeting at the well on a cold night between the fugitive convict and the little girl in Hugo's Les Misérables. Such scenes cut into the heart and leave a permanent wound. (4)

I should like to give a name to the motif which I shall discuss here: the best I can do is 'gratuitous victimization.’

My first example predates the period in which we are interested (the first half of the 1870's) by two years. I hope you will excuse this liberty in the light of further discussion. It is a well-known case where the influence of the precursor cannot reasonably be doubted and which has been considered recently by Robin Feuer Miller. (5) The precursor text is the Marion episode in Book II of Rousseau's Confessions, (6) It has already been the subject of comparison with an episode in The

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Idiot, to which we shall return.

The story which Rousseau tells concerns a period when he was in service. He steals a pink ribbon, but does not hide it and it is soon found. On being asked where he got it, he accuses a maidservant, Marion, of having given it to him, thereby by implication accusing her of the theft. The girl is of irreproachable character and the accusation improbable, but she is summoned and Rousseau accuses her publicly. She quietly denies the accusation, appeals to Rousseau not to ruin an innocent girl and reproaches him tearfully. The moderation of her replies compared with Rousseau's firmness damages her case. Both are dismissed, though Rousseau is ignorant of her subsequent fate.

The narrative may be divided roughly into the following units:

1.    a) An object of little value is stolen by the (male) author of the confession.

    b) He falsely accuses another (young, female) person who is highly vulnerable and entirely innocent.

    c) The victim denies the charge and reproaches him, but accepts her fate meekly.

    d) The author allows her to be punished (dismissed) and consigned to probable destitution.

    e) The author also is dismissed.

In his commentary on the episode the narrator makes, among others, the following points:

2.   a) There was an element of perversity in his act.

      b) There was an element of the acte gratuit in it (he describes her as 'le premier object qui s'offrit')

      c) He was actually quite fond of the girl and in a sense this was the cause of his accusation; he accused her of giving him the ribbon  because he had himself intended giving it to her.

      d) He did not fear punishment so much as shame.

      e) Had the right words been uttered he would have confessed there and then.

      f) What worried him most about her fate was not her probable destitution but the thought of what a young girl might be driven to by the humiliation of dishonoured innocence ('le découragement de l'innocence avilie').

Paul de Man, in his article on the purloined ribbon (7), claims that the confession is not really a confessional text because to confess is to overcome guilt and shame

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in the name of truth. Rousseau not only confesses, he also excuses himself. On another level the function of the confession is to afford Rousseau a public scene of exposure, a stage on which to parade his disgrace, or, what amounts to the same thing, a good ending for Book Two of his Confessions.

Here, then, in addition to the narrative units we distinguished, we have a number of factors in the narrator's motivation, firstly on the plane of motivation for the narrated acts and secondly on the plane of motivation for the published confession.

I shall not devote much time to the parallel story in The Idiot, that of Ferdyshchenko in the game at Nastasja Filippovna's name-day party (8). This is also presented as a confession. Ferdyshchenko, in his story, is at a party and, for no reason he understands, steals a three- rouble note. The theft is discovered and the maids are questioned. Suspicion falls on a maid called Darja. Ferdyshchenko tries to persuade her to confess. He feels an extraordinary sense of pleasure, preaching to her while the note is actually in his pocket. Later the girl is dismissed. It never occurs to him at the time to confess his crimes (either the theft or the false accusation). He does not say, probably does not know or care, what happened to the girl afterwards. When his story does not go down well he is very displeased.

There cannot be any doubt of the literary provenance of Ferdyshchenko's story. Indeed, taking into account the fictional context, the reader may wonder whether Ferdyshchenko simply made the story up on the basis of Rousseau's, as General Ivolgin makes up a story on the basis of a report in L'Indépendance Belge. (9)

The first four of the five narrative units we noted in the Marion story are present, with some slight modification, in Ferdyshchenko's story as well. What has significantly changed is the motivation for the crimes described. He feels no sense of guilt or shame either at the time of the theft, slander and dismissal or later. On the contrary he feels an extraordinary sense of pleasure in combining high-sounding moralizing with a consciousness of his own villainy and her innocence. He shares only one apparent motive with Rousseau: that of wanting to create an impression by his self-exposure, his 'khvastovstvo osobogo roda'.

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To use Genette's terminology, we have here a significant transmotivation with regard to the narrated acts, a partial transmotivation with respect to the confession. There is a significant though slight transformation in the narrative mode:  it is the confession of a character rather than of the author or fictional narrator. That means it is set within a context where the voices of other characters are to be heard, thus enhancing the degree of 'polyphony'. Nevertheless it lacks the semiotic complexity of Rousseau's story. But the voice is the same: that of the male victimizer; the focus is the same, though the victimizer is no longer a fellow-servant but a guest.

Now I want to look at a quite different and much more problematic case by way of experiment. There is an episode in A Raw Youth of which, at first sight at any rate, the most that can be said is that it bears a distant family resemblance (10) to the Marion story. It might perhaps be claimed (and such claims are not hard to find in other places) that it is the sort of thing that Rousseau might have written. That sounds very vague but it is surprising how powerful such impressions can be in the mind of the reader and critic. Let us look briefly at the episode and ask ourselves how we might proceed if we wanted to make a case for Rousseau's influence.

The episode I have in mind is the story of little Olja. Olja, again a young, innocent and vulnerable girl, has just had a humiliating experience at a brothel which she visits owing to a naive mistake; shortly before that she has had a no less humiliating experience with a merchant. Soon afterwards Versilov, out of genuine good- will, visits her and leaves her some money to tide her over while he finds her some work. She trustfully accepts the gesture. Later she comes to the conclusion that he too wished to insult her and humiliate her and seeks him out to fling the money back. Later in despair she hangs herself. We may distinguish three narrative units here.

1.   a) The little girl displays naive trust towards the narrator's father.

      b) This is followed by an outburst of humiliated rejection.

      c) She hangs herself in despair.

None of these narrative units parallel those of the

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Marion episode, so what basis have we for a comparison? Let us invoke Genette's terminology again (though he himself would not be so incautious), and try to assemble an argument.

Firstly we may argue that the most crucial transformation here is a transfocalization. The focus of interest has shifted from the victimizer to the victim and elaborates precisely that element of motivation in the Marion story which was left hanging in the air... the thought of what a young girl might be driven to by the humiliation of dishonoured innocence. The girl thinks she is the victim of an act of gratuitous victimization—never mind whether in Versilov's case she is right—and she suffers the humiliation of dishonoured innocence—never mind whether she has just cause—and as a consequence takes her own life. The change in focus is accompanied by a change in voice. The story is told not by the victimizer but by the son of the man who performs this role and, through him, by the mother of the victim. So there is an element of transvocalisation here too. Undoubtedly there is also a very substantial transmotivation. The victimizer, if, in deference to Olja we may still call him that, far from wishing to victimize, is actually trying to help. The motivation for Olja's action is, of course, suggested in the Marion story, but there is no corresponding recorded action.

What we have here then, it might be argued, is what Genette calls a continuation paraleptique (a paraleptic sequel) of Rousseau's story in which the psychological focus is shifted to the victim to such an extent that it is a matter of indifference what were the intentions and indeed the actions of the 'victimizer' provided that they were sufficient, in context, to produce the recorded effect.

So, by the application of a few simple principles of transformation, the formal links between the two texts can be convincingly shown. What we may momentarily overlook—and the traditional hunter after influences typically overlooks—is that we are talking precisely of formal links between two texts and not of creative links between a hypotexte and a reader/author.

What is lacking is either an explicit avowal—which here does not seem to exist—or a missing textual link or links which might serve as evidence that we are dealing with a progressive assimilation of Rousseau's text over

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a number of Dostoevsky's texts, as manifested in a chain of related episodes in the hypertexte. Such evidence would not be absolutely conclusive, but would be very interesting.

The reason I have chosen the Rousseau text and the theme of gratuitous victimization is that I believe there to be such a chain in this case. The missing textual link is to be found, I shall argue, in the Matresha story in Stavrogin's confession in The Devils. (11)

Stavrogin dwells on a particular episode in his confession which, like Rousseau's, is presented (though in the mouth of a character) as a written confession. He recounts how he permits an innocent young girl to be beaten for stealing his missing penknife, although he had never intended this to happen and has no reason to think that she has taken it. Later it turns up on his bed where he had presumably mislaid it.

If we compare this story with the Marion story and the Darja story we shall see that all three contain a number of narrative units in common, but, if we are to describe the units in the Matresha story with any degree of precision, we shall note that in each case there has been a significant attenuation.

1.   a) An object of little value is supposed to have been stolen (in the Marion and Darja stories it really has). Here it has actually been lost by the male narrator.

      b) A young girl who is highly vulnerable and entirely innocent is accused (but not by the male victimizer who stands passively by).

      c) The victim apparently accepts her fate uncomplainingly (there is not even a protest).

      d) The narrator allows her to be punished (but plays no active role and makes no accusation himself). He morally colludes in the injustice by not subsequently revealing that he has found the lost object.

If there is attenuation in the substance of the narrative units, there is, by way of contrast, an elaboration of the motivation. A study of the motivation of Stavrogin requires a much more detailed treatment than there is time for here, but none would deny that there would be room in such a study for discussion of an element of perversity in Stavrogin's behavior, an element of the

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acte gratuit, the thesis that he did not fear punishment so much as shame (Tikhon's view), and the idea that Matresha was the victim of the humiliation of dishonoured innocence. The third important shift is the inherent subversion of the mode of the confession itself. Paul de Man has shown that this is there in embryo in Rousseau's confession. In the preamble to Stavrogin's confession the narrator explicitly casts doubt on the reliability of Stavrogin's document, without being prepared to give a verdict. Thomas Barran, in a comparative study of Rousseau's and Stavrogin's confessions, says that Dostoevsky attacks Rousseau's confessional genre with three main arguments: 1) indiscriminate candour alone does not expiate sins or establish the moral worth of an individual, but. rather dulls the ability to distinguish good from evil; 2) written confession, no matter how avowedly sincere, cannot avoid presenting the confessor as he wishes to see himself, and not as he actually is; 3) the very motives which impel men to confess on paper are all too often rooted in pride and contempt of others, rather than in desire to expiate guilt or express remorse. (12)

But unlike Rousseau or Ferdyshchenko, Stavrogin does record what happened afterwards and he is deeply implicated in it. After the events briefly described above there is a sequel in which, in a sudden neurotic display of passion, previously suppressed, the young girl throws herself at Stavrogin. This is followed by a period of shame and withdrawal and finally by suicide. What seem to be the major narrative units here are not identical with those in the Olja story, but the. underlying psychological sequence is in one respect very similar. In each case the child's ideal of innocence is subverted, she is covered in shame and finally kills herself.

The two parts of the Stavrogin-Matresha story knit together Dostoevsky's transformation or Rousseau in The Idiot and the Olja story in A Raw Youth and demonstrate the reality of the family likeness which, taken in isolation, it cost us such pains and methodological contortions to bring to light.

But in my résumé I made a more substantial claim, that here we have not simply a series of episodes which display a progressive assimilation, but also one which metonymically 'stands for' the thematic movement of Dostoevsky's oeuvre as a whole. The essence of this claim can be seen in the transformations which, by way

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of experiment, we noted in our discussion of the Olja episode. In the course of progressive assimilation into Dostoevsky's texts the Marion episode has undergone weakening in some respects and strengthening in others. Let us mention the most important.

1)   There is a change in narrative mode: the confessional genre has been subverted and has almost disappeared as direct dialogue with the reader.

2)   Transvocalization. Consequently, the voice is not that of the victimizer, but of both victim and victimizer mediated by other voices.

3)   Transfocalization. The emphasis has shifted relatively from victimizer to victim, but not entirely. Alongside this shift there is a shift in

4)   Motivation. Insofar as it concerns the victim, it concentrates on what a young girl might be driven to by the humiliation of dishonoured innocence. But insofar as it concerns the victimizer, it represents a shift from wilful, gratuitous victimization, accompanied by various emotions, to unintended, accidental victimization, existing in the mind of the victim rather than that of the victimizer. At the same time responsibility for the girl's misapprehension is distributed in some measure among a number of characters including the narrator, who has blackened Versilov's character in her presence.

It is hardly necessary, I think, for me to dwell on the parallel developments in Dostoevsky's major works of this period in the direction of what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia (raznorechie) and the many-layered reporting of the other's speech. Equally important is the progressive thematic development from intentional act (e.g. Raskol'nikov's murder of the old woman) to unintended or ambiguously intended effect (e. g. Ivan's responsibility for his father's death) and from specific responsibility (e. g. Raskol'nikov) to generalized responsibility (as exemplified in The Brothers Karamazov), Moreover there is a movement in focus away from the point of view of both victim and victimizer toward that of the implicated bystander. Compare The Brothers Karamazov again where the murder is not a problem for the victim or the murderer so much as for the three brothers who did not commit it.

In conclusion I should like to suggest the following methodological observations:

1)   'Family resemblances' in texts may be misleading or

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impossible to substantiate, but can be accounted for more plausibly when there is a genealogy. That is, the idea that the Olja story is 'the kind of thing that Rousseau might have written' does hot take us very far even where we can establish formal links between the two texts. But if we can show that it is a link in an evolutionary chain in which Rousseau's model does play a part, the claim is more weight. It also tells us something more interesting about Dostoevsky's work itself.

2) The study of chains of episodes like the one we have examined enables us to see 'influence' not primarily as the exploitation of a parent text in a successor text (usually in a one-to-one relationship) but in terms of gradual assimilation and development which may, as in the present case, present parallels which precede the point where comparison with the parent text is most obvious. The incident involving Luzhin and Sonja in Crime and Punishment immediately suggests itself as a link in the chain although in the chronology of Dostoevsky's work it precedes the Ferdyshchenko story. Tockij's story may likewise be seen as a stage for branching off.

3) Not all chains may display a distinct, consistent development. That is something that has to be looked into in each individual case. There may be chains of episodes, deriving in part from a parent text, whose genealogy escapes. If Dostoevsky's manuscripts for U Tikhona had not survived that would have been the case here. Tracing them is a very chancy business and we have to be philosophical about our failures.

4) A chain may intersect at various points with other chains (or at any rate recurrent motifs), e. g., the confrontation of rival women (adumbrated in Stavrogin's Confession), an explosion of suppressed passion (Stavrogin's Confession), flinging back a gift of money (the Olja story).

5) There may be more than one precursor text. In some cases rival claims to parentage may be easy to adjudicate. For example Lermontov's Pechorin is a perpetrator of gratuitous victimization on innocent girls, but his example seems textually less significant in the chain we have examined than Rousseau's. In other cases it may be more difficult to decide.

6) Different parts of the chain may relate to different precursor texts. Here, for example, we may be tempted to

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look for an ancestor of the Matresha/Olja episodes in Dostoevsky's reading. I know of none in English or German or Russian literature. Of works of French literature known to Dostoevsky, Eugène Sue's Mathilde springs to mind. (13) Here, the aristocrat Contran de Lancry seduces a girl of humble origin and then abandons her, after which she commits suicide. No details are given and the episode, reported in retrospect but not described, is insufficiently developed to make a definite connection. (14) It is important however to bear in mind Dostoevsky's almost obsessive interest in suicide in his Diary of a Writer, often of girls or young women, and this reminds us that the lines between incidents experienced in real life, in reading or in fantasy may be fine ones for the creative writer.

The final question we shall want to ask is: granted that we have a chain of episodes here which exemplify a progressive development to be seen in Dostoevsky's work as a whole, and granted that at some point the influence of Rousseau is to be discerned, are we dealing here with a unique case or is this really a paradigm case for a pervasive phenomenon in Dostoevsky's work? Since this series of episodes deals with Dostoevsky's central concern, shown so effectively in Robert Jackson's recent book The Art of Dostoevsky, (15) with the disfigurement of the image of humanity in an individual and also with Dostoevsky's well-known preoccupation with innocent suffering, perhaps it is after all unique.

I have to admit that I have not discovered any other example so inherently interesting and so convenient for demonstration, which is after all why I chose it for my paper. But it is not the only one, either in the mature work or earlier, and further studies would undoubtedly repay the effort.

NOTES

1. George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, London, 1960, p. 197.
2. Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes, Paris, 1982.
3. F. M. Dostoevskij, Polnoe sobranie sochinenij v trid cati tomakh (cited henceforth as PSS), Leningrad, 1972, XVI, p. 10.
4. F. M. Dostoevskij, PSS, XIII, p. 382. The reference to Othello is probably to his penultimate monologue, that to Onegin to the end of the 8th chapter, and that to Victor Hugo's Les Misérables to Part II, 1.
   
   

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   Book 3, chapter 5, where Jean Valjean meets little. Cosette (PSS, XVII, p. 390).
5. Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky and The Idiot, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1981, pp. 178-82; also 'Rousseau and Dostoevskys The Morality of Confession Reconsidered' in Anthony M. Mlikotin, ed., Western Philosophical Systems in Russian Literature, Los Angeles, 1979, pp. 89-101.
6. J. -J. Rousseau, Les Confessions, Oeuvres complètes, Paris, 1959, I, pp. 1-656. The Marion episode is to be found on pp. 84-87.
7. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading, New Haven and London, 1979, pp. 278-301. I have left out of account Paul de Man's discussion of 'desire' and how it might apply in Dostoevsky, since it would involve a psychological discussion of some length and complexity. It might, however, prove a rich line of enquiry. (See also footnote 11. )
8. F. M. Dostoevskij, PSS, VIII, pp. 123-34.
9. F. M. Dostoevskij, PSS, VIII, pp. 92-4.
10. I have used the terms 'family resemblance' and 'genealogy' several times in this article. An attempt might be made to apply the metaphor systematically. However, I have not tried to do so.
11. F. M. Dostoevskij, PSS, XI, pp. 13-20; variants, PSS, XII, pp. 109-14 and 123-27. I plead shortage of time in the text of my paper for not pursuing a more detailed analysis of Stavrogin's motivation. But there are other problems too. One is the existence of more than one variant of his confession. In the variant preferred in PSS (based on the proofs of Russkij vestnik), Stavrogin spots his penknife as Matresha's mother is reaching for the besom and keeps silent on purpose, so that the beating will take place. This is not so in the variant recorded in PSS, XII, pp. 108 ff (manuscript of 1872 in Anna Grigorevna's hand), Similarly, his gratuitous theft of a wallet from a civil servant, placed between the two parts of the Matresha story in the early variant but missing in the later one is, to say the least, reminiscent of Rousseau's story. It could be argued that by his action, which ostensibly has nothing to do with the Matresha episode he is confirming our—and perhaps his—intuition of the link between the Matresha and Marion stories. And might we not see Matresha's self-punishment (suicide), for the overt expression of her passion, as confirmation of her previous acceptance of a beating, not for the theft of a pen-
    
    

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    knife which never happened, but for her suppressed wish to attract and seduce Stavrogin? If we feel tempted to follow this line of argument then we may see in Matresha's suicide a reinforcement of narrative unit 1 d) (parallel to Marion's dismissal) and add Stavrogin's later suicide as narrative unit 1 e) (parallel to Rousseau's dismissal). All this is material for another article, but I am grateful to my colleague Dr. Diana Knight for drawing my attention to the relevance of the textual variants for the way the argument is presented and prompting me to think about the two suicides in this context. The changes wrought by Dostoevsky in the second variant confirm the general process of attenuation I have described in my paper.
12. Thomas Barran, 'Dark Uses of Confession: Rousseau and Dostoevsky's Stavrogin', Mid-Hudson Language Studies, 1978, i, pp. 97-112.
13. Malcolm V. Jones, 'An Aspect of Romanticism in Dostoevsky: Netochka Nezvanova and Eugène Sue's Mathilde', Renaissance and Modern Studies, XVII, 1973, pp. 38-61.
14. Eugène Sue, Mathilde, Paris, 1861 (4 vols. ), II, pp. 104-105.
15. R. L. Jackson, The Art of Dostoevsky, Princeton, N. J., 1981.