Dostoevsky and Poe: Conceptions of the Fantastic

Bograd notes in particular that Dostoevsky in this comment associates Poe with the "fragility" of the boundary between reality and the unreal and the ease of transition between the two. Bograd then goes on to remind us that the Russian novelist, in his introduction to Poe's three tales in Vremya mentioned rather the external nature of Poe's treatment of the fantastic and his realistic manner after allowing. While that may be true, we feel that it is important to note that two of the three tales of Poe that Dostoevsky published in 1861--"The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat" feature just this fragile boundary between the fantastic and the real, primary centered in the confused and extremely irritated mental state of the narrator. This is a characteristic that Dostoevsky could not have failed to notice and indeed is an important theme in Crime and Punishment, as many critics have pointed out.

In relation to these two stories, Bograd points out, as others have before him, that they are both monologues written in first-person narrative and told by monomaniacs, who, before their inevitable punishment recount their murderous crimes. He also claims, again in agreement with pre-existing critical literature on this topic, that many details in Dostoevsky's two works written after the publication of Poe's three tales in Vremya in 1861 bear similarities to passages from Poe's tales. Notes from Underground--told in first-person narrative by a sick narrator just as in "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat"--and Crime and Punishment--which was originally conceived by Dostoevsky in first-person narration. More specifically, Bograd juxtaposes the strikingly similar opening passages of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and Notes from Underground, in which both narrators claim to be ill.

The translation of Poe that Dostoevsky published in Vremya reads, "Ну, да! Я нервен, нервен Ужасно--дальше уж некуда. Всегда был и остаюсь таким". And Dostoevsky writes, "Я человек больной. Я злой человек. Непривлекательный я человек. Я думаю, что у меня болит печень". Bograd also mentions in passing that Dostoevsky's "A Gentle Creature" is also an extended monologue. Indeed, we will return to this short story in the third chapter of this study as there is a particular passage in Dostoevsky's short story that resembles a passage from "The Black Cat." To L. P. Grossman's observation in his Dostoevsky's Library that there are intriguing parallels in passages of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and The Eternal Husband, which we have already recounted in this study, Bograd adds that in Crime and Punishment as well there is a similar description of a dream. After Raskolnikov commits murder, he dreams of his heart beating in silence, which is symbolic of his burgeoning conscience.

"Можно вспомнить, что и в "Преступлении и наказании" в подробно описанном сне Раскольникова после совершенного им убийства старухи и встречи с мещанином стук его сердца в тишине заставляет проснуться совесть. В тишине особенно громким кажется стук сердца убийцы Ведь именно оно является обличителем В романе Достоевского это описание предшествует многократному повторному стремлению Раскольникова убить старуху, но уже во сне В рассказах Э По "Сердце-обличитель", "Бес противоречия" герои сами сознаются убийствах." Ibid., 95.

Bograd, like many previous critics, also comments on the similar psychologies of "the spirit perverseness" а la Poe and the underground man а la Dostoevsky, in both of which people, whose action is dictated by immutable laws of nature, partake in behavior that they know is against their better interests, apparently out of spite. Thus Bograd juxtaposes the following passages from "The Black Cat" and Notes from Underground. We leave Poe's text in the translation that Dostoevsky published in Vremya.

In "The Black Cat" we read, "Кто ж не ловил себя сотни раз на подлости или глупости, на которые нас подбило только сознание, что так поступать не положено? Разве не тянет нас то и дело, рассудку вопреки, поглумиться над законом единственно потому, что мы сознаем его непреложность?" And in Notes from Underground we read, "Скажите мне вот что отчего так бывало, что, как нарочно ( ) в те самые минуты, в которые я наиболее способен был сознавать все тонкости "всего прекрасного и высокого" , мне случалось уже не сознавать, а делать такие неприглядные деянья, такие, которые ( ) как нарочно, приходились у меня именно тогда, когда я наиболее сознавал, что их совсем бы не надо делать? () Человеку надо - одного только саностоятельного хотенья, чего бы эта самостоятельность ни стоила и к чему бы ни привела." Ibid.

Interestingly, Bograd unlike many other critics who have examined Dostoevsky's relation to Poe, comments on the third short story that Dostoevsky published in 1861--"The Devil in the Belfry." Noting that Poe's story is a parody that describes the disruption of the peace of a well-ordered town by the arrival of a Devil, who shatters the town's law and order, Bograd claims that Stavrogin from The Devils, as the chief devil in the novel, acts in a similar fashion to Poe's devil. He systematically and shockingly breaks rules of social behavior, while also serving as the philosophical and spiritual leader of the group of anarchists and revolutionaries that destroy the peace and quiet of the town in which the events of the novel unfold. Namely, Stavrogin pulls Pavel Pavlovich Gaganov around by the nose in the presence of some of the town's most respected members and kisses Liputin's wife in public. Bograd writes, "Герой Достоевского, который сродни черту с колокольни провинциального голландского городка из рассказа Э. По, выбивает свою "сатанинскую дробь" не на башне ратуши, а в провинциальном русском городе." Ibid., 96.

Additionally, Bograd claims that Dostoevsky's burlesque short story "Bobok" (1873) reflects the images of Poe's heroes in his tales "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842) and "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" (1850). Also the Russian critic believes that Poe's "The Man That Was Used Up" (1850), and, in particular, the description of the eponymous Brigadier General John A.B.C. Smith, served to inspire Dostoevsky's description of a similarly decrepit to the extreme character--the senile Prince K--who likewise uses an array of mechanical devices to disguise his infirmities in Uncle's Dream. Furthermore, Bograd continues, "В "Дядюшкином сне" старый князь имеет не только пробковую ногу, подобную ноге героя Э. По, сохраняет цвет волос (черный), но и многозначительно растягивает слова, как это делает один из персонажей того же рассказа По." Ibid., 97.

It is worth noting that Poe's definitive biographer Quinn's judgment of "The Man that Was Used Up" is that, "There may be some profound meaning in this satire upon a general who is made up of cork legs, false teeth, and other artificial limbs, but it escapes the present writer." Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe, 1941, 283. So why might Dostoevsky have been interested in this grotesque? An interpretation of Poe's short story as a biting social criticism would presumably have been of interest to Dostoevsky, and indeed is in keeping with our overall thesis that Dostoevsky appropriated certain elements of Poe's works to forward his own polemics about contemporary society, as Harap's investigations seem to confirm. In any case, Quinn notes that the fact that Poe selected "The Man that was Used Up" for printing along with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in 1843 in Gentleman's Magazine, where he served as editor, suggests that he had a high opinion of the Grotesque. At any rate, the material nature of Poe's style--the crippled general is composed of carefully assembled machinery--which Dostoevsky remarked up, is on full display in this story.

Bograd continues his analysis by adding another category of Poe's influence on Dosteovsky: "Иногда некоторые детали в произведениях Достоевского, связанные типологическим сходством с деталями из произведений Э. По, приобретают значение символа, выходя за рамки частного явления." Боград Г. Оказал ли влияние Эдгар По на творчество Достоевский: Материалы и исследования. СПБ., 2010, T. 19, 97. Additionally, Bograd claims that Dostoevsky's short story "Babok" reflects the heroes of Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" and "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether," although he does not elaborate on his point. The Russian critic also, and perhaps more convincingly, notes that echoes of Poe's "The Man that Was Used Up" (1850) can be readily found in Dostoevksy's Uncle's Dream (1859). Both Poe's short story and Dostoevsky's novella feature protagonists who dissemble their physical decrepitude through the use of elaborate mechanical devices and prostheses. Moreover, as Bograd notes, Dostoevsky adds several details to his character, Prince K, that seem to correspond with Poe's description of Brigadier General John A.B.C. Smith including the fact that both have cork legs, black hair, and Prince K extends the syllables of his words as one of the characters in "The Man that was Used Up" does.

Finally, Bograd makes the following point: "Иногда некоторые детали в произведениях Достоевского, связан ные типологическим сходством с деталями из произведений Э. По, приобретают значение символа, выходя за рамки частного явления." Ibid., 97. . As examples of this phenomenon he cites Ippolit's dream from The Idiot and its relation to Poe's tale "The Sphinx" in which insects serve symbolically as omens of impending death from disease.

In conclusion, the critics cited above have noted a plethora of instances in which characters, plot devices, and thematic content in Dostoevsky's works seem to reflect Poe's influence and that are related to Dostoevsky's conception of fantastic realism. We believe that humor, and specifically parody, in Poe and Dostoevsky is a direction that is worthy of additional investigation. Beyond that, we deem it likely that Dostoevsky saw in Poe's material fantastic a path to the future: a modern and relevant treatment of the fantastic that, despite being often staged in faraway lands and steeped in ancient, esoteric lore (not to mention rather shameless demonstrations of scholarship that Poe in fact did not possess), was rooted in modern social and scientific developments.

Despite Dostoevsky's childhood adulation for Hoffmann, and the German Romanticist's lasting influence on his work and thought, Dostoevsky's own brand of the fantastic is rooted in a combination of material social conditions and the spiritual and psychological effects of modernity, and thus a combination of the Hoffmann and Poe's idioms, but closer to the latter. But there are essential differences between Poe and Dostoevsky as well, of course. As Frank noted, "the true genius of Dostoevsky only blossoms when he begins to derive the obsessions of such characters from one or another ideology of the Russian intelligentsia rather than from some indistinctly social situation." Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky's Discovery of "Fantastic Realism," 297. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/127257 Poe's work lacks this ideological level, and, consequently, much of the richness and lasting relevance that Dostoevsky achieved. Instead, as Todorov noted, Poe's true subject was literature as such, and he constantly experimented with forms and genres, often parodying them in the process. Even Poe's fantastic stories and his tales of horror should likely be interpreted with some circumspection as to their seriousness. And thus, it is necessary to study parody in humor in both Poe and Dostoevsky in order to try to determine how much of Poe's genius Dostoevsky appreciated and borrowed as well as how much of Poe's "fudge" Dostoevsky may have adopted for his own parodic and polemic ends.

3. The Problem of Psychological Analysis in Dostoevsky and Poe

The topic of psychology in Poe and especially in Dostoevsky is a truly gargantuan one. Countless studies, both psychoanalytic and psychological, have been conducted about these authors' works, as well as on the psychologies of the authors themselves. Due to constraints of space, we propose to approach the problem of psychology in Poe and Dostoevsky by limiting the scope of our enquiry primarily to Dostoevsky's comments about psychology and Poe and their importance to Dostoevsky's own portrayal of various psychological states in his works. Limiting our enquiry within this framework also enables us to focus on the primary theme of this study--the fantastic--as in both Poe and Dostoevsky, psychology, is as a rule depicted in its most extreme states, and is intricately connected with both author's treatment of the fantastic genre.

We are immediately presented with an interesting conundrum. Dostoevsky is, of course, widely acclaimed as a master of psychology. Nietzsche famously wrote in Twilight of the Idols that Dostoevsky was the only psychologist that taught him anything. However, Todorov claims that there is no psychology as such in Poe (this is contrary to Dostoevsky's statements): "Thus traditional narrative is absent, and so too is ordinary psychology as a means of construction of the story. The determinism of facts takes the place of psychological motivation, as has often been noted, and Poe's characters, victims of a causality that surpasses them, always lack depth. Poe is incapable of constructing a true alterity: the monologue is his preferred style, and even his dialogues ("Colloquy," "Conversation") are disguised monologues. Psychology arouses his interest only as a problem among others, a mystery to unravel; as an object, not a method of construction. The proof is found in a tale like "The Purloined Letter," in which Dupin, a puppet-character lacking in all "psychology" in the novelistic sense, offers lucid formulations of the laws of human psychic life." Todorov, Tzvetan. Genres in Discourse, translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 100.

The cause of this apparent lack of psychological depth in Poe's work is his extreme formalism: "But the principle of limits determines the work more basically, through a fundamental aesthetic choice which every writer confronts and in the face of which Poe opts once again for an extreme solution. A classical work of fiction is at one and the same time, and necessarily, an imitation--that is, a relation with the world and with memory--a game, which entails rules; and an organization of its own elements. Some element of the work--a scene, a decor, a character--is always the result of a dual determination, one stemming from the other elements that are copresent in the text, the other imposed by "verisimilitude," "realism," our knowledge of the world. The equilibrium that is established between these two types of factors may vary greatly, depending on whether one moves from the "formalists" to the "naturalists." But the disproportion between the factors rarely reaches so high a degree as in Poe. Here, nothing is imitation, everything is construction and game." Ibid., 97

Todorov's comments certainly give us reason to pause in our search for Poe's influence on Dostoevsky's discovery of fantastic realism; according to Todorov there is no realism in Poe whatsoever. However, we must bear in mind Poe's stated artistic method as elucidated in "The Theory of Composition," in which he begins with one particular sensation upon whose efficient communication he carefully composes his works. Therefore, presumably, whatever psychology is present in Poe, is concentrated upon this one effect in in his extreme formalist approach to recreating it. This manifests as the psychological effect on the reader as well as in Poe's narrator's hyperbolic descriptions of their own psychological states.

Todorov makes one more key point that is relevant to our study of psychology in Poe, and one that bears direct connection to Dostoevsky. "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.

Interestingly, this question of irrationality versus rationality/superrationality on the one hand, and freedom and sort of slavery on the other hand is common to both Poe and Dostoevsky. Moreover, somehow psychology is caught up in the question. As Todorov noted, Poe's characters are "victims of a causality that surpasses them." Ibid., 100.. This causality is the result of Poe's superrational formalist writing method, that eschews coincidences and random occurrences in the pursuit of his literary games and the creation of emotional effects.

As for Dostoevsky, Mikhail Sverdlov argues that in Crime and Punishment the Devil possesses Raskolnikov, as soon as he conceives of the idea of a moral murder, through seemingly random occurrences that facilitate the execution of his murderous intent. Raskolnikov then becomes a slave and lives in a state of "living death." Thus the Devil also operates at a superrational level--there is no true coincidence--there is God's plan and the Devil's plan.

"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." Sverdlov, Mikhail. Свердлов М. В чем преступление и в чем наказание Раскольникова? // Литература. 1998. №21, 5.

Interestingly enough, the very psychological trait that was, according to several critics cited in this survey, including J. D. Grossman and Harap, a means of freedom for Dostoevsky--that is, perversity--is, according to Todorov, in Poe a symptom of slavery to "a causality that surpasses" Poe's characters. To reiterate--the Underground Man's perversity, he claimed, enables man to reject totalitarian socialist "utopias," in which everything, including human will, is subject to calculation. On the other hand, Poe's Imp-bitten characters are plagued by a human compulsion toward self-destruction that they neither understand nor resist.

We would do well to remember Sverdlov's words about devils lying in the details, or rather manipulating hapless people through seeming coincidence. Indeed, in his article "Polina and Lady Luck in The Gambler," Robert Louis Jackson argues that gambling has a demonic quality in The Gambler because it is based on chance. Pure chance is hell--that is, the death of the will. It is a form of living death that seems very similar to the state of living death that Raskolnikov finds himself in after resolving to commit murder, as Sverdlov argued, and as he becomes more enmeshed within the devil's treacherous web of seemingly chance events.

Related to these questions of free will versus determinism, freedom versus slavery, and the irrational versus the superrational is the problem of madness. As we have seen, there is a certain method to the madness of many of Poe and Dostoevsky's characters, and thus there is a problem of irrationality versus a strange, if sinister, form of rationality, or even genius. Moreover madness is intricately linked to the fantastic genre. Todorov lists madness as one of the techniques by which authors of the fantastic maintain the hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations for events.Thus one consequence of Poe and Dostoevsky's explorations of the extreme limits of consciousness is a radical ambiguity of the understandings of reason and madness. Indeed Dostoevsky's Underground Man takes things one step farther, postulating that all thought is a disease: "Но все-таки я крепко убежден, что не только очень много сознания, но даже и всякое сознание болезнь (Достоевский: собр. соч. т.2 404) / "But yet I am firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in fact, is a disease" (Notes 7).

Tellingly, Poe and Dostoevsky not only both employ madness ubiquitously to create the fantastic, but they also suggest that madness and dreaming constitute a higher form of reason. Poe writes, "Science has not yet told us whether madness may not be the sublime form of intelligence" (quoted from Fantastic 39). In Crime and Punishment, Svidrigaпlov--Raskolnikov's evil double--speculates that, "People will tell you, `You are ill: hence, what appears to you is nothing but a vision, the results of delirium.' But this is not logical reasoning. I admit that apparitions only happen to the sick; but that proves that, in order to see them, one must be sick, and not that they are not in existence. A healthy manis, above all, a material man But let him get ill, let his normal physical organization get out of order, then, forthwith becomes manifest the possibility of another world." Crime and Punishment, quoted from Astrov, Vladimir. “Dostoievsky on Edgar Allan Poe.” American Literature, 14 (1942), 72.

This quote is remarkably similar to a passage in Poe's "Eleonora": "Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence--whether much that is glorious--whether all that is profound--does not spring from disease of thought." Poe, E. A., Complete Tales & Poems, 649. Todorov observes that the question of whether or not madness is a higher form of reason, which is frequently postulated in fantastic literature, is another way of maintaining the hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations for narrative events. We know that Svidrigaпlov and Poe's narrator in "Eleonora" are considered mad, or ill. But the questions that still troubles the reader are as follows: Is madness a higher form of reason? And does madness/physical illness allow humans to observe supernatural phenomena that actually do exist?

Moreover, while Poe's characters frequently experience hallucinations brought about (possibly) by madness, alcoholism, and so forth, Poe the critic formulates, in a book review, a principle of his understanding of human consciousness: "The mind of man can imagine nothing that has not already existed." The Gentleman's Magazine, Volume 6, Issue 1840, page 53 Naturally, if man is incapable of imagining anything that has not previously existed, then this must include the apparently supernatural phenomena experienced in dreams and diseased states, including the mysteries and phantoms that haunt fantastic literature. This in turn begs the question of where such visions come from. But providing an answer to this question does not lie within the purview of fantastic literature, but is rather the territory of the supernatural and marvelous stories, such as fairy tales. Meanwhile Dostoevsky's conception of "fantastic realism" is also characterized by a blending of psychology with the fantastic, as we have discussed.

We have discussed Burnett's analysis of capriciousness in relation to the fantastic. 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 psychologcy of the characters. It is this second type of capriciousness that we will discuss in this chapter.

Citing Sven Linner's Dostoevskij on Realism. Burnett writes that, "Imagination partakes of deliberation, in the sense of a studied or carefully considered reflection on the given subject, and deliberation is essential to caprice both in the `external' and in the `psychological' senses of the word A capricious plot is dependent upon the `deliberate withholding ofinformation' and the capricious character upon a deliberation of effect, consequent upon that character's `heightened consciousness'." Burnett, Leon. “Dostoevsky, Poe and the Discovery of Fantastic Realism.” F.M. Dostoevsky (1821-1881), 1981, 67. Here we return to the general territory of Poe's supposed deliberate artistic method as outlined in "The Philosophy of Composition," wherein Poe emphasizes both his intentional and methodical creation of emotional effect and, if Burnett's definition of capriciousness is not clearly in evidence in Poe's explanations of his artistic method, the fact that Baudelaire was suspicious of Poe's genuineness in writing this essay, there is some reason to suspect that the whole thing is an elaboration of a "process whereby the reader is initially misled by the deliberate withholding, or concealment, of information" Ibid., 64. --that information being that Poe's whole project is quite possibly "a caricature" of functionalism, as Wayne C. Booth put it). Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Theory and History of Literature, 1984 / 2011, xviii. Such a possibility suggests that there is also a link between capriciousness and parody.

We now return to Burnett's discussion of capriciousness. As we noted, Burnett identified two kinds of capriciousness at play in Poe and Dostoevsky. The first is an external, formal capriciousness that operates at the level of plot and entails the author concealing the material cause for seemingly supernatural events, or some other critical piece of information, for the reader in order to create a sense of suspense. The second is an internal, psychological form of capriciousness that often serves as a sort of index of identity for characters.

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").

For both the rational and mad characters in Poe, capriciousness is an index of identity. "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. We could even generalize with some accuracy and say that if the caprice in Poe's story exists as an external plot-related literary device, then the characters are sane. Such cases often the revelation of rational behavior on the part protagonist and/or a natural, external cause for seemingly impossible events (Dupin, Legrand, the narrator of "Thou Art The Man," etc.). On the other hand, if the caprice exists internally, that is, within the minds or souls of Poe's characters, their doom is generally guaranteed (see "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat," "Berenice," etc.)

Be that as it may, Burnett cites an example of capricious behavior that leads us to examine an important psychological question that pervades both Poe and Dostoevsky's works: why is it that people often seem to do the exact thing that they wish to avoid doing? Burnett examines the episode from The Idiot in which Myshkin breaks a vase after deliberately trying not to. Social psychologist Daniel M. Wegner's article, "How to Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for Any Occasion" offers some informative clues. His article is dedicated to a psychological explanation for "ironic" or "counterintentional errors," that is, doing exactly what we intend not to do, seemingly by accident: "the precisely counterintentional erroris when we manage to do the worst possible thing, the blunder so outrageous that we think about it in advance and resolve not to let that happen." Wegner, Daniel M. “How to Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for Any Occasion.” Science, (2009), 325(5936), 48-50. This is precisely the sort of error that Myshkin commits in The Idiot when he breaks the vase. And this seems to be exactly what Poe's narrator describes in "The Black Cat": "Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a stupid action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not?" ("The Black Cat").

Wegner mentions starts off his historical survey of the problem with Edgar Allan Poe and his Imp of the Perverse and proceeds to note that Sigmund Freud, Willliam James, Charles Baudouin, and Charles Darwin, have all weighed in on this puzzle of human psychology. Wegner does note, however, that we rarely commit counterintentional errors, but when people do, it is generally when their minds are under stress. This point is obviously highly significant for the present study, given the psychological states of most of Poe and Dostoevsky's characters. Wegner continues,

"Do we do the worst thing more often than other things? Fortunately for the proprietors of china shops, we do not. However, accumulating evidence on ironic processes of mental control reveals conditions under which people commit precisely counterintentional errors. The prototypical error of this kind occurs when people are asked to keep a thought out of their mind (e.g., "don't think about a white bear"). The thought often comes backWhy would thought suppression be so hard? It does seem paradoxical: We try to put out of the mind what we are thinking now, while still remembering at some level not to think of it later. The ironic process theory suggests that we achieve this trick through two mental processes: The first is a conscious, effortful process aimed at creating the desired mental state. The person engaged in suppressing white bear thoughts, for example, might peruse the room or otherwise cast about for something, anything, that is not a white bear. Filling the mind with other things, after all, achieves "not thinking of a white bear." Ibid., 48.

There are then, two mental processes at work in the act of repressing certain thoughts, with the first being purposefully distracting oneself with other thoughts. Both Myshkin and the narrator of "The Black Cat" engage in this search for distraction. Myshkin makes a conscious effort to stay away from the vase and even offers not to come to the party at the Epanchins' for fear he'd make a fool out of himself. When he does decide to come to the party, he continues to try to consciously avoid breaking the vase:

"At the beginning of the evening, when the prince first came into the room, he had sat down as far as possible from the Chinese vase which Aglaya had spoken of the day before" (The Idiot, 807).

The narrator of "The Black Cat" tries to avoid the presence of the second black cat, and it is precisely the fact that the cat follows him everywhere and that he is unable to separate himself from it that makes the experience so haunting and horrible:

"With my aversion to this cat, however, its partiality for myself seemed to increase. It followed my footsteps with a pertinacity which it would be difficult to make the reader comprehend. Whenever I sat, it would crouch beneath my chair, or spring upon my knees, covering me with its loathsome caresses. If I arose to walk it would get between my feet and thus nearly throw me down, or, fastening its long and sharp claws in my dress, clamber, in this manner, to my breast. At such times, although I longed to destroy it with a blow, I was yet withheld from so doing, partly by a memory of my former crime, but chiefly--let me confess it at once--by absolute dread of the beast" ("The Black Cat").

Thus, Poe ratchets up the emotional level of the tale and creates a concentrated effect of terror by depriving his narrator of the opportunity to partake in "a conscious, effortless process aimed at creating the desired mental state" of suppressing unwanted thoughts--in this case, about having tortured and hung Pluto the cat. Ibid. The fact that the narrator is an alcoholic further escalates the emotional strain and confusion in the tale and furthermore provides one of the material causes, combined with madness, for the fantastic events of the tale.

We now return to Wegner's study of counterintentional error. We recall that the first mental process at work in consciously repressing a certain thought is achieving the desired mental state by distracting oneself and in that way avoiding the forbidden thought. "As these distractors enter consciousness, though, a small part of the mind remains strangely alert to the white bear [i.e. the suppressed thought], searching for indications of this thought in service of ushering it away with more distractions. Ironic process theory proposes that this second component of suppression is an ironic monitoring process, an unconscious search for the very mental state that is unwanted. The conscious search for distractions and the unconscious search for the unwanted thought work together to achieve suppression--the conscious search doing the work and the unconscious search checking for errors. The control system underlying conscious mental control is unique, however, in that its monitoring process can also produce errors. When distractions, stressors, or other mental loads interfere with conscious attempts at self-distraction, they leave unchecked the ironic monitor to sensitize us to exactly what we do not want." Ibid.

We note in passing that he very terminology "ironic process theory" is reminiscent of Poe and Dostoevsky. In a further elaboration of the present study, we plan to examine the character of Stavrogin and his strange and apparently psychotic behavior, who, as his mother said, was possessed by "the demon of irony." Meanwhile Richard A. Fusco, in his "Poe and the Perfectibility of Man," stated that "ironic downfall" is a prevalent feature in Poe's works, particularly those in which he polemicized against the feasibility of utopia. Fusco, 40.

Be that as it may, one of the important takeaways from the above quote is that when the mind is under stress, it is more likely to commit ironic errors. The point is that "heightened consciousness," as Burnett calls it, is in some way a requisite of capricious behavior because it is when the brain is under heavy load--that is, distraction or emotional stress--that ironic errors most frequently occur. Thus, if Dostoevsky and Poe's characters were not, as a rule, perpetually in a state of nervous exhaustion, they would be much less likely, as Wegner`s findings suggest, to experience ironic errors, which Poe ascribed to the Imp of the Perverse, and Dostoevsky expounded upon throughout his opus, and particularly in Notes from Underground. Prince Myshkin's counterintentional error of breaking the vase was more likely to occur due to the fact that he a.) suffered from a mental deficiency and b.) was in a confused erotic relation with Aglaya, who, offended by his lack of initiative toward her, mercilessly mocked him. His brain was thus under load in two significant ways.

In fact Dostoevsky makes explicit the role that Myshkin's frayed nerves played in his breaking of the vase. Myshkin begins the following dialogue with Aglaya:

"Well, you've put me into such a fright that I shall certainly make a fool of myself, and very likely break something too. I wasn't a bit alarmed before, but now I'm as nervous as can be."

"Then don't speak at all. Sit still and don't talk."

"Oh, I can't do that, you know! I shall say something foolish out of pure `funk,' and break something for the same excellent reason; I know I shall. Perhaps I shall slip and fall on the slippery floor; I've done that before now, you know. I shall dream of it all night now. Why did you say anything about it?" (Idiot, 775).

Significantly, Myshkin's daytime neurosis, apparently spills over into his dream life. The same exact thing occurs in "The Black Cat." After killing his formerly beloved cat Pluto due to the malign influence of the spirit of perverseness, as he claims, the narrator of the tale is haunted by day by Pluto's mysterious double and by night by feverish dreams from which the narrator wakes to find the cat lying on his heart. Thus the merging of the narrator's waking state and dream state is explicitly portrayed with Poe's signature economy and devastating effect:

"And now was I indeed wretched beyond the wretchedness of mere Humanity. And a brute beast--whose fellow I had contemptuously destroyed--a brute beast to work out for me--for me, a man fashioned in the image of the High God--so much of insufferable woe! Alas! neither by day nor by night knew I the blessing of rest any more! During the former the creature left me no moment alone, and in the latter I started hourly from dreams of unutterable fear to find the hot breath of the thing upon my face, and its vast weight--an incarnate nightmare that I had no power to shake off--incumbent eternally upon my heart!" ("The Black Cat").

Moreover, tormenting memories haunt many of Poe and Dostoevsky's heroes. From Dostoevsky's side, the Underground Man, Stavrogin, Raskolnikov, Svidrigailov, the narrator from "A Gentle Creature," among other characters exemplify this trend. Poe's narrators in his fantastic tales are typically grief-stricken and/or tortured by feelings of guilt and bad memories. Such is the case in, for example, "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat," "Morella," "Ligeia," and "Berenice." "Eleonora," a tale in which the narrator is forgiven by his beloved's ghost for marrying after the death of his first love is an exception that proves the rule, as Eleonora's forgiveness is the diametric opposite of Ligeia and Morell's vengeance from beyond the grave, but one that nevertheless falls within the same themes of death, immortality and painful memories. Furthermore, all of the above characters--with the exception of The Underground Man and the narrator of "A Gentle Creature" --experience their painful memories in a fantastic fashion. Raskolnikov is racked by dreams of guilt that merge with waking hallucinations, Svidrigailov has feverish dreams of a dead little girl, Stavrogin hallucinates a devil, etc.

We would have to dig much deeper into studies on psychopathology to begin to explain why torturous memories might manifest themselves through hallucinations and other psychosomatic symptoms. However, Wegner's study can perhaps offer some illumination about the psychology of repressed memory, which is such a common theme in Poe and Dostoevsky. Wegner writes, "The ironic monitoring process also influences memory. Memories we try to forget can be more easily remembered because of the ironic results of our efforts, but they do this mainly when mental loads undermine conscious attempts to avoid the memories." Wegner, 49. Thus, just as Poe's perverse narrators and the Underground Man all describe compulsion to commit an act precisely because one knows one should not, there is an ironically self-sabotaging mechanism at work with regards to repressed memories.

One more conclusion from Wegner that bears relevance to the current study is as follows: "Ironic lapses of mental control often appear when we attempt to be socially desirable." Ibid. If we consider the extraordinarily clumsy social behavior of, for example, Golydkin from The Double or of Ivan Ilyich from "A Nasty Story" in this light, it seems that Dostoevsky was well aware that social pressure leads to more frequent ironic errors. And indeed, as Bakhtin any many other critics have noted, social scandal is a central and omnipresent motif in Dostoevsky's work.

Moreover, as Burnett suggests, Aglaya's mocking suggestion that Myshkin break the invaluable china vase played a fatal role in its eventuation: "Will it be believed that, after Aglaya's alarming words, an ineradicable conviction had taken possession of his mind that, however he might try to avoid this vase next day, he must certainly break it? But so it was" (Idiot, 807).

As we have noted, Burnett's characterization of caprice is intimately connected with Dostoevsky's studies of psychological perversity, is indicated by his citing The Underground Man's mention of caprice [kapriz] in the context of his argument about human freedom. Burnett also notes that The Underground considers the degree of a character's capriciousness to be "an index of identity." Burnett, Leon. “Dostoevsky, Poe and the Discovery of Fantastic Realism.” F.M. Dostoevsky (1821-1881), 1981, 65. This demarcates an important difference between between Poe and Dostoevsky's respective concepts of perversity, as Purdy and J. D. Grossman discussed: for Poe, perversity is simply evil and always brings with it suffering and tragedy. For Dostoevsky's The Underground Man, it also brings freedom and individuality.

But we return to Burnett's words, citing Sven Linner in quotations, that "Imagination partakes of deliberation, in the sense of a studied or carefully considered reflection on the given subject, and deliberation is essential to caprice both in the `external' and in the `psychological' senses of that word A capricious plot is dependent upon the `deliberate withholding ofinformation' and the capricious character upon a deliberation of effect, consequent upon that character's `heightened consciousness.'" Ibid., 67. In the context of the brief explication of ironic process theory that we have laid out above, Poe and Dostoevsky's characters themselves often partake in the "capricious" act of deliberately withholding information from themselves by (unsuccessfully) suppressing thoughts and memories. This process is enhanced in cases when the characters in question have (or suffer from) a "heightened consciousness." But again we witness the gulf of difference between Poe and Dostoevsky's conceptions of heightened consciousness. If Dostoevsky's characters sometimes experience ecstatic, sublime moments (Myshkin, The Underground Man) and their perversity can apparently serve to individualize them and guarantee their freedom from material, socialist "utopia," in Poe, heightened consciousness is almost exclusively the hallmark of insanity and moral decay and is often a harbinger of death.

Importantly, parallels of this type of internal, psychological caprice (i.e. the capriciousness that is akin to perversity, rather than external capriciousness at the level of narrative structure) exist in two of the three short stories that Dostoevsky published in Vremya. The narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" kills the old man without knowing why, despite the fact that--and if we develop the above observation about the connection between caprice and ironic error to a perhaps inordinate extreme--quite possibly precisely because--the narrator loved the old man. The same exact thing occurs, but even more explicitly, in "The Black Cat," in which the narrator tortures and murders his beloved cat Pluto. It is this crime that inspires his confessional observations about human perversity.

"Thus traditional narrative is absent, and so too is ordinary psychology as a means of construction of the story. The determinism of facts takes the place of psychological motivation, as has often been noted, and Poe's characters, victims of a causality that surpasses them, always lack depth." Todorov, Tzvetan. Genres in Discourse, translated by Catherine Porter, 1990, 100.. Tellingly, J. D. Grossman noted that the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" is only saved from being a flat character and given psychological depth by his irrational behavior. Incidentally, Todorov makes a claim directly about Poe's craft that is seemingly directly opposite to Bakhtin's characterization of Dostoevsky's poetics in which a polyphony of unfinalized and wholly independent characters exist outside of authorial voice and thus, apparently, of formal intention. In other words, if Poe sacrifices character psychology and often even his narrator to his formal intentions, Dostoevsky, according to Bakhtin, "Dostoevsky's major heroes are, by the very nature of his creative design, not only objects of authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse. In no way, then, can a character's discourse be exhausted by the usual functions of characterization and plot development." Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. 1984/2011, 7.

The point is that sometimes what seems on the surface to be "capricious" behavior is actually governed by psychological laws in which fashion not dissimilar to the way in which Poe's capriciousness as a writer at the level of narrative structure follows his formalist procedures concerning artistic production. We might even say that caprice allows us to explore another "limit of Poe," as Todorov would put it: that of the internal and external, or, in other words, psychological and formal.

Furthermore both instances of caprice--that is, internal and external--happily correspond with Todorov's conception of the fantastic: that it is a prolonged hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations of extraordinary occurrences.

This latter point is also made explicit in the opening lines of "The Black Cat": "For the most wild yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not--and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburden my soul. My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified--have tortured--have destroyed me. Yet I will not attempt to expound them. To me, they have presented little but horror--to many they will seem less terrible than barroques. Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the commonplace--some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects." Mabbott, T. O., ed. Collected Works of Edgar Allen Poe:Tales and Sketches, 1843-1849, 850.

The natural explanation hinges on an objective observer's ability to see coincidence in a seemingly fated and supernatural string of occult occurrences. The supernatural explanation, which the narrator attempts to resist--without great success as he evidently loses his sanity--is that Pluto came back from the dead and avenged himself on his master by instigating the latter's murder of his wife and then intentionally revealing his wife's hidden body to the police. Thus the narrator puts himself of the position of someone from whom information is possibly being withheld, that is, information about the randomness of the unfortunate circumstances that led to his tragic fate, information that only an outside, objective observer can give. In other words, the interpretation of the plot of his narrative is beyond his comprehension.