Humiliated and Insulted, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Staff review by Chris Saliba


Dostoyevsky’s early novel Humiliated and Insulted is a brilliant achievement.

Humiliated and Insulted was Dostoyevsky’s second novel after his Siberian exile (he was charged with political subversion). Published in 1861, it was written with an eye on re-entry into the Russian literary world. Many of Dostoyevsky’s major literary works such as Notes from the Underground and Crime and Punishment would soon follow.

The plot is so wildly intricate and dramatic, no summary could do the novel justice. It’s perhaps best to say there’s an odious villain, Prince Valkovsky, a poor waif, Nelly, and two young women in love with the Prince’s son, Alyosha.  One of the women, Katya, is a rich heiress. The other love interest, Natasha, is the daughter of middle-class parents and a childhood friend of the narrator, Vanya. The drama ostensibly centres around Alyosha and who he will choose for his wife. His father, the evil Prince, has been manoeuvring his son to marry the rich Katya, so he can get his grubby hands on her money. Another plot involves the waif Nelly and connects her to Prince Valkovsky.

It’s amazing to think that Humiliated and Insulted isn’t better known amongst English readers. The novel is a superbly baked souffle. Dostoyevsky reveals his story at a swift pace, astonishing the reader with a dizzying amount of detail. Every character’s smallest gesture and reaction is captured with absolute precision. While the style is almost naturalistic, there are also many uncanny effects. The descriptions of the wicked Prince are unforgettable, especially his Chinese slippers and bejewelled evening wear. Many scenes read as comic, similar in spirit to the black comedy of Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. Prince Valkovsky also has much in common with the wicked Robert Lovelace out of Samuel Richardson’s proto-feminist novel Clarissa (1748). He laughs as he commits his vices.

The only criticism that could be levelled at the book is the title. Humiliated and Insulted makes the novel sound like a dark, turgid tome, whereas its style is light and full of playful irony. Dostoyevsky fans should definitely pick this gem up. For new readers of Dostoyevsky, Humiliated and Insulted is a great place to start. Every page will thrill you.

Humiliated and Insulted, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Published by Alma Classics. ISBN: 9781847492692  RRP: $19.99

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The Double, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

Dostoyevsky’s short early novel about a paranoid, mid-level office worker is a minor classic. It’s comic, surreal and psychologically spot on.

The Double was Dostoyevsky’s second novel, published in 1846. He later revised it in 1866.

The style of the novel is very much in the vein of fellow Russian Nikolai Gogol’s black comedies, although the writing certainly does anticipate the later novels, such as Crime and Punishment and The Devils.

The plot is fairly simple. A government clerk, Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, meets a younger man who looks exactly like him. Not only do the two men look like twins, they also have the exact same full name. To make matters worse, the younger Golyadkin (named junior throughout the text) has taken a job, exactly the same position at Golyadkin senior’s place of work. Throughout the story Golyadkin junior taunts and humiliates Golyadkin senior, who to add to his problems suffers all sorts of paranoia and hypochondria. Indeed, it often seems just possible that Golyadkin senior has dreamt up this terrible foe and the dreadful fate that he leads him to.

Dostoyevsky brilliantly mixes a hallucinatory style (visually the surrealist paintings of Magritte came to mind as I read) with a witty and sophisticated black humour. The laughs aren’t explicit, but rather implied in the farcical situations that Golyadkin senior keeps winding up in. Anyone who has felt themselves to be excessively sensitive, paranoid or simply unable to cope with social situations will find much relief in Golyadkin’s feverish stream-of-consciousness ravings. It’s good to know you’re not alone! Dostoyevsky clearly lived at the edge of his nerves, if The Double is anything to go by.

It’s a bit sad to read that Dostoyevsky didn’t think much of his second novel. He was only in his mid twenties when he wrote it. At only 130 pages, it’s quite a short and entertaining read. It carries its brief off very well, describing a man with a persecution complex who may be creating most of his problems in his own mind. The Double is a great place to start for those looking to read Dostoyevsky.

The Double, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Translated by Constance Garnett. Published by Dover Classics. ISBN: 9780486295725. $10.95

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Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

Dostoyevsky’s classic gets treated to a highly enjoyable new translation by Oliver Ready.

Penguin books has published a new translation by Oliver Ready of the seminal Russian classic by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The basic plot, while rather unappealing, is one of the world’s most famous. A 23-year-old former student, Raskolnikov, decides to kill an old pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna, with whom he’s had substantial dealings. Things don’t go to plan, however, and the pawnbroker’s younger sister, Lizaveta, accidently intrudes on the murder. She is killed too, brutally, with an axe. Raskolnikov has murdered the pawnbroker because he is impoverished and feels the money will get him off to a good start.

To help him psychologically deal with the murder, it later emerges that he has developed his own philosophy, outlined in a published essay, that essentially divides the population off into two categories. There are the ordinary people who follow the laws and are submissive. Then there is a breed of superior people who can ignore the common laws and be a law unto themselves. Napoleon is cited as a prime example: killing innocents in order to achieve his military goals never caused his conscience a pang. Raskolnikov believes he should be able to follow this philosophy. Napoleon, he surmises, wouldn’t even stop to think about killing an old pawnbroker. It wouldn’t even enter his head as a question.

That’s Raskolnikov’s theory on paper. However, once the murder is done, he spirals into a near total nervous collapse. Much like Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, his former confidence quickly unravels into madness. He becomes physically sick. Ironically, he becomes so ill after the murder that his friends and family must look after him. None really know why he is so sick, but it’s clear to the reader why, which creates a sense of suspense and tension. You fear that this illness will soon give him away.

Virginia Woolf wrote of Dostoyevsky’s writing, “Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading.” It’s hard to pin an exact theme to Crime and Punishment, the novel swirls around in such mad directions, seemingly losing control of itself in its many digressions. The dialogue is extraordinarily long, with single responses going on for pages. One thing is sure, it’s an incredibly detailed and complex psychological study of one man’s moral collapse. For this alone it’s unparalleled in literature, except arguably for Shakespeare, as Virginia Woolf noted. You could say that Crime and Punishment is Dostoyevsky’s Macbeth.

Dostoyevsky sustains his suspenseful story with a wonderfully claustrophobic atmosphere. The Haymarket precinct of St Petersberg is where much of the action takes place and Dostoyevsky describes every nook and cranny of this urban environment - the narrow, twisting streets, grimy stairwells and connecting courtyards - in exhaustive details. One house’s architecture is characterised as almost an offence against all morality - a roof that slants at a weird angle, doors askew and asymmetric walls that bring on a sense of nausea. This atmosphere is brought to a climax in the descriptions of Raskolnikov’s poky apartment - it’s likened to a coffin at one stage. At every turn there is a terrible feeling of entrapment, of people being too close to each other, of festering antagonisms and extremely frayed nerves.

Dostoyevsky is probably not for everyone. I could understand readers finding his dialogue and the feeling of endlessness that permeates his writing too much. His style and outlook is hallucinatory and ironic. It’s like Jane Austen, but on LSD. If you’re like me, you’ll find Crime and Punishment an awe inspiring achievement, it’s nothing less than a comprehensive map of the human heart. 

Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Translated by Oliver Ready. Published by Penguin. ISBN: 9780141192802. RRP: 16.99

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The House of the Dead, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dostoyevsky’s 1860 novel The House of the Dead is a loose memoir based on his prison experiences in Siberia between 1849 and 1854. It’s one of his minor works, but is fascinating nonetheless as a study of humanity’s extremes of character, presented in a humane and sympathetic manner. The novel can also be read as a precursor to Dostoyevsky's classics Crime and Punishment (1865-6) and The Devils (1871).

One of the most rivetting aspects of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s ( 1821-1881) biography is his narrow, last minute escape in 1849 from the death penalty after his involvement in the ‘Petrashevsky Circle’. His involvement in this political conspiracy included printing incendiary matter and the call for the violent overthrow of the monarchy. Dostoyevsky escaped death, and was given a reprieve at the very last moment. What it was like to come so close to execution he described in his famous Crime and Punishment. Instead, the young Russian novelist was sent to Siberia for five years, until 1854.

The House of the Dead (1860) describes those years of drudgery and misery. It’s an odd piece of literature, as it describes itself as a novel, but is really a first person memoir. The ‘novel’ is introduced by a man who met one Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, a former convict who had spent ten years in prison for the murder of his wife. When Goryanchikov dies, the man goes to his landlady to find out some more information. The landlady has a basket of the ex-convict’s papers, which she sells for a twenty-copeck piece. The man takes the papers away and sorts out the trivial from the more substantial. As happens in these types of novels, the reader is then presented with the text of the original found diary. The rest of the novel is then merely all of Goryanchikov’s first hand experiences of life in a Serbian prison.

Of course, once you start reading you pretty much straight away take it for granted that you’re reading a first person memoir of Dostoyevsky’s personal experiences in prison. The flimsy device that supposedly turns it into a work of fiction immediately evaporates into thin air. If The House of the Dead resembles anything in the Dostoyevsky canon, it’s Notes From the Underground (1864), another novel written in the first person that mixes stream of consciousness and an existential philosophy. The House of the Dead the reader presumes to be Dostoyevsky’s accurate recollections of prison life, but we allow him the literary licence to immerse some of his memories in a bit of philosophical brooding. Perhaps we should take for granted that the sentiments and feelings in The House of the Dead are one hundred percent accurate, whereas the details described may not achieve that exactitude.

The whole notion of Serbian prisons immediately evoke feelings of dread and horror, but I was surprised to find that the novel is not particularly violent or ghoulish. Dostoyevsky avoids self pity and concentrates on presenting the psychological mood of men reduced to this level of bad food, foul smells, uncomfortably close living, appalling hygiene and a litany of other domestic evils. As a novelist, Dostoyevsky has a keen interest in character, and the novel is replete with a fascinating gallery of murderers, thieves and other criminals. Paradoxes come aplenty, as the reader learns about the gentle natures of certain murderers, and the nice manners of outlaws in general. You get to the end of the novel and its hard not to draw the conclusion that the extremes of personality Dostoyevsky met in prison deeply influenced his later writings. The kind of unfathomable eccentrics that turn up in The Devils can be found here in embryo.

The House of the Dead is not one of Dostoyevsky’s greater works. In fact, its safe to say its one of his minor novels. There are a few irritating repetitions in it, like the constant refrain ‘needless to say’, but its absolutely fascinating and highly readable nonetheless. It’s almost a bridging work to the great works that would soon come, as though Dostoyevsky were working out the extremes of humanity (of men, really) in his mind, sorting out how to present such paradoxical characters in fiction and make them real and coherent, with an essential human truth.

While The House of the Dead is not perfect, it should be mandatory reading for all students of Dostoyevsky. For the non-student of the great Russian master, it will provide a fascinating window onto the life of Siberian prisons in the late nineteenth century.

The House of the Dead, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Published by Penguin Classics. ISBN: 978-0-14-044456-8