Dostoevsky and Poe: Conceptions of the Fantastic

According to Frank, the narrator, in discovering or at least more clearly articulating than he had before, this new aesthetic and way of seeing and describing the world, also "ironically points up the paradox of making such a tenuous, subjective experience the basis of an apprehension of the real What new orientation did this "vision of the Neva" supposedly inspire? Before it occurred, the writer of the feuilleton pictures himself as having lived exclusively in the Romantic, imaginary and exotic world of Schiller and Hoffmann, that is, the spiritual world of the Dostoevsky who had not yet written Poor Folk. But suddenly, after this "vision," the real world became as "fantastic" and memorable to him as the most extravagant literary daydreams." Frank, Joseph. “Dostoevsky's Discovery of `Fantastic Realism.'" 289.

This transition from living in an ideal world populated by romantic writers such as Schiller and Hoffmann to a fantastic world in which fantasy and reality is intermingled is of obvious interest to us within the framework of this study. It even seems to touch upon a preoccupation that is evident in Dostoevsky's "Introduction to Three Stories by Edgar Poe," in which, Dostoevsky discusses the superior poetic quality of Hoffmann and his ideals and descriptions of other worlds and then juxtaposes this with Poe's "materialistic," psychological, and detail-oriented treatment of the fantastic. As we have noted, Frank and Astrov position Dostoevsky closer to Poe's art than Hoffmann's, and indeed many critics have noted Dostoevsky's use of detail and creation of the fantastic via extreme mental and psychical states, rather than creating marvelous worlds that "objectively" exist in his art.

But Dostoevsky's "St. Petersburg Dreams" also underlines an essential difference between Poe and Dostoevsky's artistic visions. Frank notes that depicting social inequality was a primary motivation for Dostoevsky's interest in realism. Todorov remarks that it is impossible to find any realistic depiction of 19th-century American life in Poe's works. We would argue that Poe is in fact deeply interested in contemporary life and, generally through parody, explores many of the psychological and social implications of developments in modern science and politics. Todorov is correct, however, in stating that Poe's decor is entirely conventional and serves the plot, rather than featuring any realism. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, is acutely interested in social conditions, and aims to depict them through his conception of fantastic realism. He writes in "St. Petersburg Dreams," "How much drama, perhaps, even something tragic, is occurring somewhere in a damp corner on the fifth floor, where a whole family is heaped together in one room." Ibid., 287. Harap, however, as we will see below, characterizes both Dostoevsky and Poe as writers who depict the spiritual crisis and alienation of the individual in a rapidly industrializing world, with its drastic social, scientific, and technological shifts.

Be that as it may, Dostoevsky offers further insight into his vision of fantastic realism, and, specifically, the combination of reality and fantasy that Dostoevsky uses to achieve a higher sense of realism. Frank writes, "we can hardly go wrong in interpreting Dostoevsky's feuilleton [St. Petersburg Dreams in Verse and Prose] as a defense and reaffirmation of his literary vision. This vision was based on a perception of the intimate interconnection between `reality and fantasy,' on an intuition of the real which grasped the psychically unusual and the extraordinary as a clue to the social forces operating beneath the surface of the everyday. Dostoevsky's `psychopathic' characters had been the general butt of criticism in the 1840s; but it is clear from the feuilleton that Dostoevsky has no intention of kowtowing to his erstwhile detractors. `"I, you see, simply cannot renounce my fantastic frame of mind,' he writes. `Back in the forties I was called a fantasist and laughed at. Then I was still totally wet behind the ears. Now, naturally, --gray hairs, experience of life, etc., etc., and yet, for all that, I have remained a fantasist.' In this way Dostoevsky makes his first defense of the `fantastic realism' that he explicitly claimed later as the distinguishing feature of his literary talent." Ibid., 290.

It is certainly true that in Poe that it is much more difficult to locate the social forces portrayed in his psychologically deranged characters, particularly as the settings of his stories are often throwbacks to gothic tradition--old manor houses, dark castles, faraway places--than it is in Dostoevsky's works. Furthermore, Poe's characters tend to be erudite, but physically and emotionally sensitive geniuses, possessing, or seeking after arcane knowledge. His women characters, as Alexander Kaun noted in his article "Poe and Gogol: A Comparison," are completely unrealistic, and are not flesh-and-blood characters, but rather idealized figures. However, we also have to reconcile this apparent separation from contemporary reality with the fact that Poe is hailed as the inventor of several literary genres, and was thus, as it were, at the cutting edge of many literary developments. However, Todorov claims that literature is the real subject in Poe's stories. As Todorov puts it, "Poe is an adventurer, but not in the ordinary sense of the term; he explores the possibilities of the mind, the mysteries of artistic creation, the secrets of the blank page." Todorov, Tzvetan. Genres in Discourse, translated by Catherine Porter, 98.

But, as John Tresch points out in his article "`Matter No More': Edgar Allan Poe and the Paradoxes of Materialism," Poe also closely followed the scientific developments of his day and reacted to them in his writing. "The momentum given to Poe's work by the scientific and technological maelstrom of the early nineteenth century has yet to be fully reckoned." Tresch, John. “`Matter No More': Edgar Allan Poe and the Paradoxes of Materialism.” Critical Inquiry, 42 (Summer 2016), 867. Tresch's article is of particular interest to us due to Dostoevsky's characterization of Poe as a "materialist" and thus as a typical American, and his observation that Poe's fantastic has a material basis. Commenting on Poe's involvement in journalism and mass media and his belief that the printed word had similar properties to scientific instruments, Tresch writes, "In constant movement among poetic, philosophical, technical, and scientific registers, Poe's experiments push past current inquiries into the material basis of meaning and the demiurgic powers of media to probe the depths of matter itself At stake in Poe's work, like that of many of his contemporaries, was the cosmological order of modernity." Ibid., 868. Thus, although Poe's work is certainly less obviously socially oriented than Dostoevsky's fantastic realism, his materialism, which is precisely what Dostoevsky focused upon in contrasting him to Hoffmann, is also key to Poe's literary engagement with contemporary society, which was precisely the aim of Dostoevsky's development of fantastic realism and the exploration of the dire social and psychological consequences of social inequality through his focus on often-mentally unstable petty clerks, the poor intelligentsia, and the lower classes of St. Petersburg.

Poe maintained the need to study the entire universe in order to understand man, and we use this as justification for our application of his metaphysical principles--namely his central proposition in "Eureka" about everything containing within it the seed of its own destruction--to our study of Poe's understanding of the psychology of perverseness as well to the "ironic downfall" that permeates his work (see below). "An infinity of error," he wrote, "makes its way into our Philosophy, through Man's habit of considering himself a citizen of a world solely--of an individual planet--instead of at least occasionally contemplating his position as a cosmopolite proper--as a denizen of the universe." Ibid., 869-870.

But what are some of the specific implications of Poe's fascination with materialism for his use of the fantastic? As it turns out, phenomena that we might loosely consider fantastic are central to Poe's conception of the universe and to scientific law. He had a "consistently inconsistent" natural philosophy and was fascinated by fringe scientific and pseudoscientific studies. Indeed it has even been claimed repeatedly, if controversially, that Poe's Eureka predicted the Big Bang Theory and bears certain resemblances to modern String Theory.

One concrete manifestation of Poe's fascination with modern science intermingling with the fantastic is visible in his "tale of ratiocination" "The Gold Bug," in which Poe's fascination with codes and riddles provides the natural, material cause that disproves the supernatural cause of the mystery in this tale--the curse of the gold bug and ensuing madness of the narrator. We could also mention as similar cases the uses of galvanism, mesmerism etc. in such tales as "A Few Words with a Mummy" and "The Facts of the Case of M. Valdemar," in which scientific, or pseudo-scientific means are utilized to explore the mysteries of death.

Tresch provides another example of Poe's melding of contemporary science with his own metaphysical preoccupations in a fantastic tale: "Such upendings of the rudimentary dispositifs of scientific knowledge structure Poe's fiction, all the way back to his 1833 "MS. Found in a Bottle." The title itself hints at containment and an improbable scene of decipherment: found by whom, where, how? Setting sail from Jakarta, the narrator is a skeptic whose hyperbolic denial of the supernatural is toppled when he is shipwrecked and then saved by a ghost ship named Discovery. Among its outdated maps and instruments he finds the pen and paper to write his tale before the ship, approaching Antarctica, descends into a whirlpool and the narrative breaks. Ancient knowledge overwhelms faithless empiricism; defunct devices provide tools for writing oneself off the map; a current theory in geoscience, the hollow earth of John Symmes, heightens both the factuality and the mystery of the conclusion. Fantasy brought concrete results: the tale won him fifty dollars and helped him land the editorship for Richmond's Southern Literary Messenger." Ibid., 880.

We now turn to the question of Dostoevsky's comparison of with Poe with Hoffmann, in which he grants poetic supremacy to the latter. This comparison centers on the German and American fantasists' respective conceptions of the fantastic. Dostoevsky writes of Hoffmann that, "Этот олицетворяет силы природы в образах: вводит в свои рассказы волшебниц, духов и даже иногда ищет свой идеал вне земного, в каком-то необыкновенном мире, принимая этот мир за высший, как будто сам верит в непременное существование этого таинственного волшебного мира." «Время», 1861, том I, № 1, с. 230.  According to Todorov's conception of the fantastic, sorcerers, spirits, and otherworldly ideals of a supernatural world that the author apparently believes is real are elements that lie beyond the borders of the fantastic:

"In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without devils, sylphides, or vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event must opt for one of the two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination--and laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality--but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us. Either the devil is an illusion, an imaginary being; or else he really exists, precisely like other living beings--with this reservation, that we encounter him infrequently. The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event. The concept of the fantastic is therefore to be defined in relation to those of the real and the imaginary" Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 25.

We mention in passing that Todorov's definition of the fantastic contains strong connections to the psychological, and specifically, to extreme psychological states, as they are one of the means of maintaining the tension between the natural and supernatural. Such extreme psychological states include fevers, mental illness, hallucinations, exhausted nerves, etc. But as Todorov mentions devils, let us briefly examine a few devils in Dostoevsky, Poe, and Hoffmann's works. We have a single point at stake here, and that is a consideration of the dividing line between the fantastic and the marvelous.

As Kijko stated that Poe's tale "The Angel of the Odd," which contains a devil figure, bears certain resemblances to Ivan's conversation with his devil in The Brothers Karamazov, as as Bograd draws parallels between Ivan's devil and Bon-Bon's devilish visitor in "Bon Bon," we will commence with these devils. Poe's narrators in both "The Angel of the Odd" and "Bon Bon" are drunk when they are visited by devils. The endings of both tales strongly suggest the possibility that all of the adventures that ensued after the devils appeared was nothing more than the mad imaginings of a drunkard during his debauchery the night before. Meanwhile, Ivan Karamazov is suffering from fever and mental illness when his devil visits him. Moreover, he makes a great point of trying to convince himself (and his devil, ironically) that the latter doesn't exist, but is only a figment of his own troubled imagination. As we have noted, madness and alcohol are two common means of keeping the tension between the natural and supernatural, according to Todorov.

In Hoffmann's "Die Geschichte vom verlorenen Spiegelbild" ("The Story of the Lost Reflection"), the devilish characters--Dapertutto, an evil magician, and Giulietta, a Venetian courtesan--appear out of the blue frequently, and, moreover, independently of the protagonist Erasmus Spikher's being sober or drunk. There is also no suggestion that Erasmus is mad, apart from being madly in love with Giulietta. Furthermore, Erasmus's own wife, noticing that he casts no reflection in the mirror after returning from Italy, is convinced that he has sold his reflection to the devil. There is thus no real hesitation between supernatural and natural explanations for the extraordinary events of Hoffmann's story. The supernatural explanation--that is, that Erasmus was seduced by some sort of succubus who possesses, or is in league with, supernatural powers--is the only "reasonable" explanation for the strange events that transpire in the tale, apart from allegory, which Todorov suggests.

In analyzing these devils, we have explored just one aspect of Poe, Dostoevsky, and Hoffmann's art, and only in four works. Nevertheless, we believe that these episodes are largely representative of how each of these three authors relate to the generic question of the fantastic versus the supernatural. While Hoffmann is certainly a writer of the fantastic, and many of his works clearly fall within this category, he nevertheless has a tendency to cross over into the marvelous more frequently than Poe. Of all Poe's tales only a select few, such as "The Fall of the House of Usher" bely the plausibility of a natural cause to explain the events of the story, and this only because of the collapse of the ancestral mansion of the Ushers at the end of the story, as told by the apparently sane narrator. The rest of the mysterious events of the tale are easily attributable to the mental and psychological derangement of Roderick Usher as well as that of his sister.

For that matter, Benjamin F. Fisher, in his article "Poe and the Gothic," casts the narrator's sanity in doubt as well, along with his objectivity as a narrator: "the narrator has wholly succumbed to the effects of the house of Usher, both in its tangible features and appointments and in its emotional effects, which have been rendered symbolically in the crumbling mansion. What this narrator probably witnesses, as is borne out by the symbolic techniques in the tale, is a spectacle of his own life and being. What more artistic way to depict this narrator than to have him enter a house that looks like a human head, there to behold in Roderick and Madeline male and female components in what surely is his own self?" Fisher, B. F. “Poe and the Gothic.” The Annotated Poe, edited by Kevin J. Hayes. Cambridge, MA and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015, xxviii.

It is important to note that Dostoevsky never crosses the line entirely into the realm of supernatural tales. Even "Bobok" and "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" are fantastic tales, and not supernatural ones. The narrator of "Bobok" is an alcoholic who acknowledges that others might think him mad, and therefore there is the plausible possibly that he hallucinated or imagined the conversation between the dead that he witnessed. "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man," for all the otherworldly creatures and places that the narrator describes, is, after all, framed as being a dream, and all the action within it thus falls within the realm of the fantastic. Both alcoholism and dreaming are mechanisms that Todorov identifies for maintaining the prolonged hesitation between natural and supernatural causes for extraordinary events. Therefore we concur with Frank and Astrov that Dostoevsky's artistic style is closer to Poe's, and this is certainly true in the respective treatment of the fantastic by the three authors.

Now that we have determined the limits of the fantastic and the essential difference between a fantastic work and a marvelous one, we return to our underlying premise in this study--that certain seeds of Poe's creative art found fertile soil in Dostoevsky's mind, to borrow L.P. Grossman's metaphor, and as J.D. Grossman also believe did indeed occur. As this chapter is dedicated to questions of genre, it seems suitable to continue to attempt to continue to with our generic interrogation of Poe's work in order to these kernels of Poe's art that lived on and found new life in Dosteovsky's art. This investigation of genre seems to be a particularly appropriate approach as the Russian novelist's "Introduction to Three Stories by Edgar Poe" does essentially the same thing--interrogating the nature of Poe's treatment of the fantastic genre.

Happily, Poe's artistic style has certain characteristics that may make his influence easier to detect in Dostoevsky. In Todorov's book Genres in Discourse, he dedicates a chapter to Poe, entitled "The Limits of Edgar Poe," to analyzing Poe's craft. Todorov, remarking on Poe's unique position in the history of literature, writes, "Poe has benefited--and continues to benefit--from the attention of critics who have seen in his work the most perfect illustration of a certain ideal--which however turns out to be a different ideal in every case." Todorov, Tzvetan. Genres in Discourse, 93. Thus, while the end of this quote sounds a note of caution for the unwary critic, nevertheless, we can reasonably hope that Poe's extreme generic, thematic, stylistic, and/or narrative characteristics may make their possible appropriation by Dostoevsky more readily evident than they might otherwise be.

Todorov continues to try to parse out what makes Poe's art unique, making it the privileged example for a wide range of critical traditions from psychoanalysis to materialism: "As with any author, then, but in a particularly striking way here, Poe's work poses a challenge for the commentator. Is there a single generative principle common to such diverse writings?Just such a generative principle was identified by Poe's first great admirers (and if the value of a poet were to be measured by that of his admirers, Poe would be one of the greatest): Baudelaire and Dostoevsky. But they both failed to appreciate its full importance, or so it seems, for they perceived it in one of its concrete realizations and not as a fundamental movement. Baudelaire had the right word, "exception," but when he spoke of "the exceptional case" he hastened to add "in the moral order"; he assterted that "no onehas told about the exceptions in human life and nature with more magic" but he was content to continue by listing a few thematic elements. Similarly, Dostoevsky asserted that Poe "almost always chooses the rarest reality and places his hero in the most unaccustomed circumstance of psychological situation."

Now rather than possessing a thematic common denominator, these tales all stem from an abstract principle that engenders what is called "technique," "style," or "narrative" as well as "idea." Poe is the author of the extreme, the excessive, the superlative; he pushes everything to its limits--and beyond, where possible. He is interested only in the greatest or the smallest: the point where a quality becomes achieves its highest degree, or else (but this often amounts to the same thing) where it threatens to turn itself into its opposite. This single principle determines the most varied aspects of his work." Ibid., 94.

Todorov has thus posited what he believes to be the definitive characteristic of Poe's art: its perpetual tendency toward the extreme. There are several implications in Todorov's quote that are of interest for the present study, beginning with the observation that extremes transform into their opposite. Todorov informs us that extremes characterize Poe's technique, style, narrative, and ideas. This tendency indeed touches upon the theme of perversity. We have already noted how Poe's perverse characters tend to transform in negative ways: the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" goes from loving the old man to becoming transfixed by and obsessed with his eye and murdering him, the narrator of "The Black Cat" goes from adoring his cat Pluto to brutally murdering it, the narrator of "The Imp of the Perverse" commits murder and receives an inheritance with impunity, but his very bravado transforms into a compulsion to confess, etc.

Proceeding with an analysis of Poe's themes, Todorov discusses the limits of the fantastic genre. We will repeat Todorov's succinct definition of the fantastic, and examine his assessment as to how Poe's work fits within its parameters: "the fantastic is nothing but a prolonged hesitation between a natural explanation of events and a supernatural one. It amounts to playing with the boundary between the natural and the supernatural. Poe says so quite explicitly in the first lines of his fantastic stories, by stating the alternative: the explanation is either madness (or dreaming) --and therefore natural--or else supernatural intervention." Ibid., 95.

Thus Poe's work explores the limit of genre, and in doing so, of our perception of reality. The limits of madness and reason are similarly explored in "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether." But Todorov claims that the limit that obsessed Poe the most and that saturates his work is the ultimate limit--death. "Death haunts nearly every page of Poe's work." Ibid. Todorov mentions some of the ways Dostoevsky's explores this limit, including by revivifying a mummy by way of galvanism ("Some Words with a Mummy"), survival via magnetism ("The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar'), resurrection through love ("Morella," "Ligeia," "Eleonora").

One of these manifestations of Poe's exploration of the limits of life and death, according to Todorov, is his repeated use of the trope of being buried alive, for example, in "The Cask of Armadillo," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and in burying corpses in "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat," etc. In Poe's fictional story "The Premature Burial" we read, "To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality" ("Premature Burial"). Poe, always fond of categorical statements and superlatives, thus us grants us insight into a probable reason why being buried alive is an often recurring theme in his prose--its efficaciousness at inducing terror.

We also read, "The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague." Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? ("Premature Burial"). These musings bring us back to Todorov's statement of exploring and pushing limits as a general principle of his creative art, with death being the ultimate limit, especially as Poe's narrator wonders where the soul goes during deathlike states. The narrator then discusses various historical cases of premature burial and then reveals his own "catalepsy," in which he would like motionless as if dead for extended periods. This medical condition contributed, in turn, to a torturous phobia of being buried alive that it gave rise to: "In all that I endured there was no physical suffering but of moral distress an infinitude. My fancy grew charnel, I talked "of worms, of tombs, and epitaphs." I was lost in reveries of death, and the idea of premature burial held continual possession of my brain. The ghastly Danger to which I was subjected haunted me day and night. In the former, the torture of meditation was excessive- in the latter, supreme" ("Premature Burial"). We can well see the connection of this severe paranoia with the morbid events in such stories as "Ligeia," "Morella," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "Berenice."

Mabbott, offers some insight into the possible motivations for "The Premature Burial," found in Poe's boyhood terror of the dark and his burying himself beneath bedding at night: "Poe was himself troubled by fear of the dark. A Richmond friend of his last few years, Susan Archer Talley Weiss, in her Home Life of Poe, 1907, p. 29, says: Mr. John Mackenzie, in speaking of Edgar, bore witness to his high spirit and pluckiness in occasional schoolboy encounters, and also to his timidity in regard to being alone at night, and his belief in and fear of the supernatural. He had heard Poe say, when grown, that the most horrible thing he could imagine as a boy was to feel an ice-cold hand laid upon his face in a pitch-dark room when alone at night; or to awaken in semi-darkness and see an evil face gazing close into his own; and that these fancies had so haunted him that he would often keep his head under the bed-covering until nearly suffocated." Mabbott, 953.

Be this as it may, "The Premature Burial" concludes in a most unusual way for Poe. The narrator, who, after waking up from a long cataleptic sleep, believes his worst fears of being buried alive have been realized when he finds himself tightly confined in darkness. However, as it turns out he merely fell asleep in a tight berth aboard a ship during a hunting trip and suffered his usual amnesia upon waking. This episode fills him with the necessary resolve to abandon his morbid obsessions and even realizes that all of his fantastic visions of realms beyond death, devils, and the like were simply the result of his macabre fixations, as was, indeed, his catalepsy. This psychological--or natural, as Todorov would say--explanation for the events of the story designates this tale as fantastic.

Interestingly, Freud, analyzing Dostoevsky's epilepsy, writes, "His brother Andrey tells us that even when he was quite young Fyodor used to leave little notes about before he went to sleep, saying that he was afraid he might fall into the death-like sleep during the night and therefore begged that his burial should be postponed for five days. Quoted in Royle, Nicholas, The Uncanny, 151-152. Thus, at least according to Freud, Dostoevsky actually suffered from a medical condition similar to the one described in Poe's "The Premature Burial," as well as the concomitant paranoia.

Nicholas Royle, in his book The Uncanny, notes that the seemingly obvious explanation for these notes, if the story is to be believed at all, is Dostoevsky's fear of being buried alive. Within the context of the current investigation, this instantly recalls to mind Poe's "The Premature Burial," along with other stories that feature someone being buried alive, whether accidentally or otherwise, such as "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Cask of Amontillado." But Freud has a different explanation for Dostoevsky's fits of death-like spells, or episodes of "catalepsy" as Royle notes that Poe would call such an attack. Poe writes, "We know the meaning and intention of such death-like attacks. They signify an identification with a dead person, either with someone who is really dead or with someone who is still alive and whom the subject wishes dead. The latter case is the more significant. The attack then has the value of a punishment. One has wished another person dead, and now one is the other person who is dead oneself. Ibid., 152.

The narrator of Poe's "Morella" expresses just such a wish for the death of the eponymous character who then arises from the dead in her daughter's body: "Shall I then say that I longed with an earnest and consuming desire for the moment of Morella's decease? I did; but the fragile spirit clung to its tenement of clay for many days, for many weeks and irksome months, until my tortured nerves obtained the mastery over my mind, and I grew furious through delay, and, with the heart of a fiend, cursed the days and the hours and the bitter moments, which seemed to lengthen and lengthen as her gentle life declined, like shadows in the dying of the day." Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, 668

We will leave aside the details of Freud's assertion that this is an example of Oedipal Complex. While it would be doubtless highly informative to conduct a comparative psychoanalytic analysis of Poe and Dostoevsky seizures, as well as of their artistic productions, for the time being we shall simply observe that Freud's observation about Dostoevsky's identification with a dead person bears a general resemblance to a theme that Poe returned to incessantly: a young woman returning from the grave. Indeed, as Poe states in "The Philosophy of Composition," "The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover." Poe, E. A. “Philosophy of Composition.” xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/poe/composition.html Alexander Kaun, in his article "Poe and Gogol: A Comparison," highlights the significance of Poe's mother's early death (she was a famously beautiful actress, according to Quinn) and the fact that his "mother-worship" caused him to obsessively return to idealizing women in his works. Kaun, Alexander. “Poe and Gogal: A Comparison.” The Slavonic and East European Review, 15, No. 44 (Jan., 1937), 389-399.

Without essaying a thorough analysis of the psychological implications of the theme of premature burial as it possibly relates to Poe and Dostoevsky, we content ourselves with having simply identified another moment of correspondence between our two authors, and one that may have implications for the fantastic scenes of life continuing in the grave in some form, in Poe's tales "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Premature Burial," "Eleonora," "Morella" etc. as well as Dostoevsky's "Bobok." There is also the case of The Underground Man who laments with masochistic pride that he never really lived during the 40 years he spent living in his self-imposed hole along with all the subterranean imagery and symbolism present in the novel, including the narrator's reference to a "mouse hole" and "underground home." While not fantastic, per se, critics cited in this study have proved rather convincingly that Notes bears the mark of Poe's influence, in certain respects. It is possible that this influence extends to the subterranean imagery that is associated with emotional misery and overwrought nerves in both authors.

We discussed above the way in which Poe reinforces the fantastic nature of "The Premature Burial" by giving a psychosomatic solution to the visions of the afterlife and the conversations with demons that the narrator experienced. Slavoj Ћiћek, in his article "Lacan Plays with Bobok" suggests a similar psychological solution to one of Dostoevsky's most fantastic tales, in which an alcoholic narrator--haunted by unconscious prohibitions according to Lacan and Ћiћek--overhears the grotesque banter of interred corpses in a graveyard. "What if, in "Bobok" also, the entire spectacle of the corpses promising to spill out their dirtiest secrets is staged only to attract and impress poor Ivan Ivanovich? In other words, what if the spectacle of the "shameless truthfulness" of the living corpses is only a fantasy of the listener--and of a religious listener, at that?" Ћiћek, Slavoj. “Lacan Plays with Bobok.” How to Read Lacan, by Lavoij Ћiћek. Granta Publications, 2011, 95.

Todorov writes, "It must be understood, however, that this fascination with death is not the direct result of some morbid impulse; it is the product of an overall tendency which is the systematic exploration of limits to which Poe devotes himself (an exploration that might be called his `superlativism')." Todorov, Tzvetan. Genres in Discourse, translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 96.

Another important observation that Todorov makes concerning Poe's artistic style relates to the Imp of the Perverse. Todorov states that Poe's artistic style is characterized by extreme formalism. "The rigor of causality leads to tales that are constructed in the spirit of the deductive method Poe cherished, such as "The Gold-Bug," "The Purloined Letter," or "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." But it also has less immediate consequences; and one may wonder whether Poe's discovery of the "imp of the perverse" does not have something to do with this. This particular state of mind consists in acting "for the reason that we ought not to do it"; but rather than stopping at such a negative observation, Poe constructs a faculty of the human spirit whose property is to determine such acts. Thus the gesture that is the most absurd in appearance is not left unexplained, it too participates in the general determinism (along the way, Poe discovers the role of certain unconscious motivations). In a more general way, we might be inclined to think that the fantastic genre attracts Poe precisely because of his rationalism (and not in spite of it). If one limits oneself to natural explanations, one must accept chance coincidences in the organization of life; if one wants everything to be determined, one must also recognize supernatural causes. Dostoevsky declared the same thing about Poe--after his own fashion: "If he is fantastic, it is only superficially." Poe is fantastic because he is superrational, not because he is irrational, and there is no contradiction between the fantastic tales and the tales of ratiocination." Ibid., 99.

This tension between determinism and naturalism, rationalism and superrationalism also exists in Dostoevsky. Sverdlov claims that the Devil possesses Raskolnikov by means of "coincidences." According to Sverdlov, as soon as Raskolnikov conceived of the possibility of a moral murder apparently chance events conspired to set him down the path toward real murder. Behind these coincidences lies the Devil's plan to cause Raskolnikov to lose his soul and exist in a state of living hell.

"Каков же дьявольский план, какова последовательность продиктованных им событий? Сам Раскольников "во всем этом деле [то есть, в обстоятельствах, предшествующих и сопутствующих убийству] <> всегда наклонен был видеть некоторую как бы странность, таинственность, как будто присутствие каких-то влияний и совпадений". Чье же это "влияние"? Черта. "Совпадения" же вот какие: как только Раскольникова захватила идея, пока еще только в самом общем виде, о возможности убийства "по совести", тут же и приключился его "случайный" визит к старухе-процентщице; как только к о н к р е т н а я мысль о ее убийстве стала "наклевываться в его голове", тут же был "случайно" услышан спор студента с молодым офицером - о том, дозволено ли "по совести" убить эту самую старуху; стоило ему восстать против ее - дьявольской идеи - "чар, колдовства, наваждения", тут же некая сила властно повернула его к роковой встрече ("точно тут нарочно поджидала его") - с Лизаветой" Свердлов М. В чем преступление и в чем наказание Раскольникова? // Литература. 1998. No. 21. С 5.

Having briefly addressed Dostoevsky's comment that Poe's fantastic is materialistic, we now turn our attention to Dostoevsky's claim that Poe was a "capricious" writer. Leon Burnett, in his article "Dostoevsky, Poe, and the Discovery of Fantastic Realism," conducted an extensive analysis of what he identified as capriciousness in Poe and Dostoevsky's works.

2.1 Dostoevsky found Poe's use of the fantastic "capricious" because Poe

Dostoevsky found Poe's use of the fantastic "capricious" because Poe,

"если он и фантастичен, то, так сказать, внешним образом Эдгар Поэ только допускает внешнюю возможность неестественного события (доказывая, впрочем, его возможность, и иногда даже чрезвычайно хитро) и, допустив это событие, во всем остальном совершенно верен действительностиСкорее Эдгара Поэ можно назвать писателем не фантастическим, а капризным. И что за странные капризы, какая смелость в этих капризах! Он почти всегда берет самую исключительную действительность, ставит своего героя в самое исключительное внешнее или психологическое положение, и с какою силою проницательности, с какою поражающею верностию рассказывает он о состоянии души этого человека! Кроме того, в Эдгаре Поэ есть именно одна черта, которая отличает его решительно от всех других писателей и составляет резкую его особенность: это сила воображения." «Время», 1861, том I, № 1, с. 230.

Burnett also claims that Dostoevsky's criticism not only takes note of the material nature of Poe's style, but also of its constructed nature. "Later in the foreword a modification of this description occurs, when Dostoevsky shifts his ground, almost imperceptibly, by means of a play on the similarity of sound in two Russian words. [Dostoevsky] writes: "Such power of imagination or, more accurately, of deliberation, is displayed in the tales of the lost letter, of the murder committed in Paris by the orangutan, in the tale of the discovered treasure and so on." Burnett, 63 (Такая же сила воображения, или, точнее, соображения, выказывается в рассказах о потерянном письме, об убийстве, сделанном в Париже орангутангом, в рассказе о найденном кладе и проч.") «Время», 1861, том I, № 1, с. 231.

Burnett comments, "Deliberation (soobrazhenie), not imagination (voobrazhenie). This subtle shiftwould appear to place a greater stress on a structure that does not lose itself in the ideal (as Hoffman does), that remains materialistic, built on a meticulous philosophy of composition, based on method." Burnett, 63. He also cites, of course, as supporting evidence Dostoevsky's comments about Poe's materialism.

Burnett's observation is not without interest to us as it may possibly lend support to E.I. Kyjko (1985) and G. Bograd's (2010) assertions that Dostoevsky seems to have read Poe's "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846). In any case, Burnett argues that Dostoevsky's attention was drawn to the deliberately constructed aspect of Poe's craft.

Dostoevsky's labeling of Poe as a "capricious" writer ("Скорее Эдгара Поэ можно назвать писателем не фантастическим, а капризным") is theme that Burnett focuses a great deal of attention on in his analysis. According to Burnett, Dostoevsky intended this comment to highlight Poe's use of material causes for apparently supernatural events that are left unexplained to the reader until the end of the story. Burnett offers the following definition of caprice, as he believes Dostoyevsky intended it to signify: "the process whereby the reader is initially misled by the deliberate withholding, or concealment, of information, to be supplied subsequently, which explains the motivation of events." Ibid., 64.

A clear example of this device can be found in, for example, Poe's "Thou Art the Man" wherein a corpse is delivered in the same box containing wine that was given to the murderer by the murdered man whose corpse was in the box and was subsequently opened during a party. The murdered man's corpse sits up in the box and says to the murderer, "Thou art the man!" It is only at the end of the story that the narrator reveals that he, having divined the identity of the murderer, organized the whole affair by having the box of wine delivered himself, placing the corpse, whose location he had discovered, in the box with a whalebone stuck in it thus making it sit up when the box was opened. He then used ventriloquism to give the impression that it was the corpse who spoke the damning words.

From the time the apparently supernatural events in the tale occur until the narrator's revelations at the very end of the story, the reader has the impression that he is reading a ghost story. Thus this story adheres perfectly to Todorov's definition of the fantastic, which is that it is a prolonged hesitation between a natural and supernatural explanation for strange events. Moreover, this story contains two of the features that Dostoevsky identifies in Poe: a material, "external" explanation for a supernatural event, and a capricious withholding of information from the reader until the end of the tale.

Another example of caprice in Poe, and one that is found among Poe's stories that Dostoevsky refers to in his "Introduction to Three Stories by Edgar Poe" occurs in "The Gold Bug." After finding an unusual beetle, William Legrand seems to fall under a curse. This impression is created in part by the narrator's mentioning of Legrand's nervous temperament at the outset of the story and his increasing doubts about Legrand's sanity as the story progresses, as well as by his servant Jupiter's superstitious nature, who sees the gold bug as carrying with it a curse. When the rational method by which Legrand proceeded to find the buried treasure is revealed, we are presented with the material causes for the mystery.

Also explored in this short story is the boundary between reason and madness, which, as Todorov stated, is one of the many extreme limits that Poe's work explores: "Here my friend, about whose madness I now saw, or fancied that I saw, certain indications of method, removed the peg which marked the spot where the beetle fell, to a spot about three inches to the westward of its former positionI had become most unaccountably interested--nay, even excited. Perhaps there was something, amid all the extravagant demeanor of Legrand--some air of forethought, or of deliberation, which impressed me. I dug eagerly, and now and then caught myself actually looking, with something that very much resembled expectation, for the fancied treasure, the vision of which had demented my unfortunate companion." Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, 55. ("The Gold Bug").

Burnett himself lists "The Philosophy of Composition" and its "extravagant claim" about the method that Poe employed in creating "The Raven," as well as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." The latter, is, of course a tale of ratiocination like the above-mentioned "The Gold Bug." Of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" Burnett has the following to say:

"The story contains a riddle, a formal mystery. Exterior is, as it were, cut off from interior. The focus, in this instance, is on the external event, but, as Dostoevsky correctly observed, Poe has the power to put his here into the most exceptional external or psychological position, and it is the latter, the condition of man's soul, that we would expect to interest Dostoevsky more. Caprice, therefore, may extend from the unfolding of an external plot to the revelation of character, of psychological image. It may extend to the split between external and internal (or psychological) that, in both writers, becomes ultimately the split between reason (or what makes sense to the outside world) and madness (or what makes sense to the damaged soul cut off from social life. The madman, or neurotic personality, is one who is able to "turn his rationalism to the service of his neurosis", as in the examples of the Underground Man, Raskolnikov, or Ivan Karamazov." Ibid.

According to Burnett, caprice has an important function in the philosophical dialogue that the narrator of Notes from Underground has with imaginary interlocutors. Furthermore, Burnett muses that, "It is instructive to observe how Dostoevsky has transferred the notion of caprice from the materialistic fantasy of the Poe foreword in 1861 to the dialogic discussion three years later on free-will (svobodnaya volya) in the work that operates as a sounding-board for the complex, ideological examinations that follow in the great novels." Ibid., 64-65.

Burnett also finds the notion of caprice in the eighth section of Part One of Notes from Underground, which demonstrates its proximity to the perversity of the Underground Man's psychology:

"I repeat for the hundredth time that there is one case, and only one, when a man can consciously and purposely desire for himself what is positively harmful and stupid, even the very height of stupidity, and that is when he claims the right to desire even the height of stupidity, this whim [kapriz], may be for us, gentlemen, the greatest benefit on earthbecause it does at any rate preserve what is dear and extremely important to us, that is our personality and our individuality." Quoted from Ibid., 65.

Indeed, as our research has indicated, the concept of free will, and its morbid expression in the ideas underpinning the Imp of the Perverse, appears to be central to Dostoevsky's interest in Poe, and, moreover, in his borrowings from the American writer and further development of Poe's ideas. It is also informative to note that "The Imp of the Perverse" --Poe's most lengthy elaboration of perversity, and Notes from Underground have the same general structure: a first person narrative in which the the first part is dedicated to a philosophical discussion and the second part provides examples of the narrator's behavior that exemplify his philosophical conclusions.

Burnett also makes another highly important observation: "Although Notes from Underground was to remain Dostoevsky's definitive study of perversity, he had frequent recourse in his subsequent examinations of neurosis to a treatment of capriciousness as an index of identity." Ibid., 65. An example of this can be found in The Idiot, in which, according to Burnett, all of the four main characters owe their social status to their eccentric behavior. "`Heightened consciousness' takes them across the dividing line between the rational and irrational," with Myshkin being defined by his idiocy Nastasya Filipovna by her beauty, Rogozhin by his inevitable homicide, and Aglaya by her capricious personality Ibid., 65.. As an example of Aglaya's capricious behavior, Burnett cites the scene with the hedgehog. In this scene, in which shades of Gogolian absurdity are discernable, a hedgehog--and Burnett traces the etymology of caprice to the Italian capo (head) + riccio (hedgehog)--is confusedly introduced into the midst of the Yepanchin family. Aglaya, who is in love with Prince Myshkin, then gives the hedgehog to Myshkin in a whimsical and enigmatic gesture, and immediately afterward asks him if he intends to ask for her hand in marriage. Thus whimsical behavior is linked with erotic love, and moreover, a confused state of erotic relations, as Myshkin is immobilized between his love for Aglaya and his love for Nastasya Filippovna.

While capricious behavior certainly is exemplified by Poe's various perverse characters, it also has a role in Poe's frequent playing with the line separating genius from madness. What seems like capricious behavior on the part of characters like Dupin and Legrand, turns out to be rational behavior based on method with a concrete objective in mind. However, the capricious obsession on certain physical objects and daydreams of the narrator of "Berenice" is a sure indication of his growing madness:

"To muse for long unwearied hours, with my attention riveted to some frivolous device on the margin, or in the typography of a book; to become absorbed, for the better part of a summer's day, in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry or upon the floor; to lose myself, for an entire night, in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire; to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower; to repeat, monotonously, some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind; to lose all sense of motion or physical existence, by means of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in: such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to anything like analysis or explanation" ("Berenice").

Burnett claimed that there are two kinds of capriciousness in Poe and Dostoevsky's works. First, there is external capriciousness, operating at the level of plot in which the author conceals important details such as the material cause for seemingly supernatural events from the reader until the end of the story. There is also internal capriciousness, which operates at the level of the psychology of the characters. It is this second type of capriciousness that we will discuss in this chapter. For both the rational and mad characters in Poe, capriciousness is an index of identity, as Burnett claims. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter" would be very boring tales, with a very boring hero detective if Monsieur Dupin revealed all of his thinking at the beginning of the stories. Poe's mad characters, most of them characterized by great learning and sensitivity, have lost control of both their capricious natures and, as it were, capriciousness destroys them.