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PARTISAN REVIEW
Dostoevsky's early work from
I840
to
I849,
when he was arrested
because of his association with the supposedly revolutionary Petra–
shevsky circle, reveals no traces of the preoccupation with violent crime
that would later play so important a role in his works. Rather, he
depicted the minuscule torments and travails of the educated lower class
of St. Petersburg, members of the huge government bureaucracy that
labored to administer the vast reaches of the Russian Empire. All these
were the "poor folk" that he portrayed in his first novel and early sto–
ries, victims rather than evildoers. Their greatest fear was that they
might, in some way, infringe the constricting social-cultural taboos that
marked their place in society; that they might be considered to be "free–
thinkers" by their superiors and thus ground down even more relent–
lessly. All are obsessed with a pathological sense of guilt as a result of
such fears, and in the most extensive portrayal of such a schizophrenic
consciousness in "The Double," the character ends in a madhouse. In
only one story, "The Landlady," do we come across someone possibly
guilty of a serious crime-the elderly merchant Murin, who may once
have been a robber chieftain of Volga bandits. But this story, an imita–
tion of Gogol's Ukrainian folk-tales, is too full of Romantic trappings to
be taken seriously on this level.
There is one work in this period, however, hardly more than a slight
sketch, in which something that might be considered a crime is commit–
ted; but it is really only a pitiful misdeed. The story is called"An Hon–
est Thief," and the oxymoronic title tells it all. A hopelessly destitute and
incurable drunkard, in order to buy more vodka, steals a pair of
breeches from a benefactor who has taken him in out of charity; and the
thief becomes so filled with remorse that he dies of grief.
It
is a textbook
example of the "sentimental Naturalism" for which Dostoevsky became
known at this time, and in itself of minor importance. But there is one
passage in the original text-Dostoevsky suppressed it in revision for
some reason, and it is thus very little known-that is important for my
purposes. The thief's benefactor is trying to explain what occurred to a
third party, and asks his listener not to "despise a man who has fallen;
that's what Christ, who loved all of us more than himself, told us not to
do." And since "he died from grief and a bad conscience ... he showed
the world ... he was a human being all the same." Men can struggle
against vice; "it's not born with you-here today, it can be gone for good
to-morrow; otherwise, if we were destined to stay depraved all through
the ages because of original sin, Christ would never have come to us."
This is of course the utterance of a character in a story, and I am well
aware that it is a flagrant critical error to assume that it speaks for the
