Dostoevsky and Poe: Conceptions of the Fantastic

We recall that "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, 67. We would argue that here in "The Black Cat" the two categories merge. That is, the external capriciousness of withheld information, which creates a capricious plot, and a capricious character, whose "heightened" consciousness is a product of his perverseness, and who certainly, himself, as a character, a product of Poe's deliberation of an effect--that of terror in this case. Again, we believe this moment demarcates the limits of external and internal in Poe's characters.

In sum, Dostoevsky's comment that Poe was a "capricious" writer was evidently very well chosen, as it seems to apply not only to Poe's structuring of the narratives in his tales but also the internal psychological states of Poe's characters. Furthermore, we believe that there is a general relation between capriciousness and irony, and ironic, counterintentional error more specifically. Finally, behavior that seems capricious on the surface, is often in fact motivated by subconscious factors, and seems to--at least if the examples discussed by Burnett and ourselves are indicative of a larger pattern--be somewhat predictable based on ironic process theory. While we have not been able, given constraints of space, to flesh out these connections in great detail, we hope to have at least demonstrated the plausibility of doing so.

"Perversity is certainly common, but the analysis of its power to attract and to satisfy was not, in Dostoevsky's time, nor the linking of it to absurd actions. The reflections in Notes from Underground on the "fatal fantastic element" in man that leads him `purposely to do something perverse' (Short Novels, p. 149) either take up where Poe left off or provide an astonishing coincidence in literary thought." Purdy, 171.

We intend to focus here specifically on the fantastic nature of perversion and its commonly resulting in absurd actions. Furthermore, we believe this kernel of Poe's thought--the Imp of the Perverse--to be a source of inspiration for Dostoevsky's aesthetic of "travesty" as Victor Terras describes it in his book Reading Dostoevsky. Terras describes his concept of "travesty" as follows: "A peculiar form of ambiguity is due to the presentation of themes and characters, particularly those that are central to the drama, in travesty. By "travesty" I mean an action, sentiment, or thought whose performance or expression falls drastically short of its intended or normal effect, or distorts it so badly that it is in danger of turning into its opposite. Marmeladov's travesty of Judgment Day on the first pages of the novel sets the tone for much of the rest of the text. The story of the Marmeladov family is an exercise in travesty. Theirs is a marriage in travesty, for Katerina Ivanovna married a man twice her age only because she had "no place to go" with her three small children. The St. Petersburg of the slums, where they land, is a travesty." Terras, Victor. Reading Dostoevsky, 1998, 71.

It is also noteworthy that Lacan chooses "Bobok" as the background for Dostoevsky's analysis of one of Dostoevsky's most famous thought experiments: If God doesn't exist, then everything is allowed. Bakhtin considered "Bobok" to be central to Dostoevsky's work as a whole a key to understanding it. (Meanwhile G. Bograd found in this short story the influence of Poe.) Lacan reformulated Dostoevsky's thought experiment in the following way:

"The true formula of atheism is not God is dead - even by basing the origin of the function of the father upon his murder, Freud protects the father - the true formula of atheism is God is unconscious." Ћiћek, Slavoj. How to Read Lacan. London: Granta Books, 2006, 92.

As Ћiћek comments on Lacan: "In order to properly understand this passage, one has to read it together with another thesis of Lacan. These two dispersed statements should be treated as the pieces of a puzzle to be combined into one coherent proposition. It is only their interconnection (plus the reference to the Freudian dream of the father who doesn't know that he is dead) [2] that enables us to deploy Lacan's basic thesis in its entirety:

As you know, the father Karamazov's son Ivan leads the latter into those audacious avenues taken by the thought of the cultivated man, and in particular, he says, if God doesn't exist - If God doesn't exist, the father says, then everything is permitted. Quite evidently, a naпve notion, for we analysts know full well that if God doesn't exist, then nothing at all is permitted any longer. Neurotics prove that to us every day." Ibid.

And thus, perhaps, Dostoevsky and Poe's characters act as though God does not exist and they are freed from moral obligations, but subconsciously, they sabotage their own freedom. Their subconsciousnesses impose punishments on them for their transgressions. It is in this way that both authors are strikingly modern, and, still relevant today. This Imp of the Perverse has precisely this dual, "ambivalent" function, as Purdy points out: it inspires transgression by the exercise of freedom, but it also imposes punishment for such transgression.

The very name of Dostoevsky's novel "Crime and Punishment" --one of his principal works in which the critics cited in this study have located Dostoevsky's borrowing and utilization of Poe's Imp of the Perverse--nicely summarizes the dual function of the Imp. Terras writes of Raskolnikov's self-sabotaging behavior after committing murder, "Only luck keeps him from being caught in the act. He has every chance to escape justice, but manages to compromise himself enough to attract suspicion. The travesty he makes of a clever criminal is compounded by the fact that he actually evokes Porfiry Petrovich's pity." Terras, 71.

We note that the "travesty" that is Raskolnikov's criminal career can be described as essentially a much more drawn out and sophisticated treatment of a common plot in Poe--that of a criminal who evades justice but whose conscience, or perversion, the relation of these two concepts is vital to understanding the moral function of perversion in both authors, not just in Dostoevsky's--causes him to give himself into the hands of justice. Indeed, this compulsion to confession is present in two of the three tales that Dostoevsky published in Vremya--"The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat." It is also present in the the continuation of Poe's musings on the perversion, "The Imp of the Perverse." Furthermore, it is crucial to the understanding of the moral dimension of Poe's Imp to realize that it is also present in "William Wilson" as well.

One of the key moral concepts that is found throughout Poe's work, from "William Wilson" to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is that of mirror punishment. In Poe's only novel, the crewmember who suggests that the three survivors resort to cannibalism to survive and eat someone to be chosen randomly by drawing lots is "randomly" chosen himself and subsequently eaten. Furthermore, the natives' treachery leads to thousands of them being blown up when they set fire to the ship and its store of gunpowder with it.

Thus we find a kernel of Poe's perversion in the "travesty" of Dostoevsky in this Raskolnikov's murder and confession. We intend to investigate whether there are any other instances of Poe's Imp motivating "travesty" in Dostoevsky. The fact that this apparent Imp of the Perverse, as described in "The Black Cat" as the motivation for committing murder and in "The Imp of the Perverse" as the cause for confession are intimately linked, whose significance can only be fully appreciated by situating it in the context of the entirety of Poe's works, as Harap correctly suggests, leads us to question the assertion, made by many critics, including J. D. Grossman and Harap himself, that Dostoevsky alone was responsible for the intellectual breakthrough of adding a positive dimension to Poe's "Imp of the Perverse."

We have only to mention "William Wilson," a treatment of the phenomenon of doubles, which as J. D. Grossman, Harap, and Burnett note, is more focussed on the ethical dimension than Dostoevsky's psychological portrayal of the same theme in The Double. In "William Wilson" the double is the guardian angel and moral anchor of the wayward narrator, and, who compels the narrator to self-sabotage and confession, thus foiling his dishonest schemes. We would have to consider Poe a very amoral author indeed not to recognize that this treatment of perversion contains a positive and moral aspect. It is true that in Poe the religious dimension is not as accented as in Dostoevsky, and thus we do not, as Harap notes, arrive at the same ideal of absolute freedom attained through suffering, which is something that the Underground Man posits, this suffering being willfully brought about through psychological perversion and rebellion against false utopian laws.

Nevertheless, the end of "William Wilson" should leave us with no doubt about the moral consequences for ignoring one's better moral self: "The fight was short indeed. I was wild with hate and anger; in my arm I felt the strength of a thousand men. In a few moments I had forced him back against the wall, and he was in my power. Quickly, wildly, I put my sword's point again and again into his heart. At that moment I heard that someone was trying to open the door. I hurried to close it firmly, and then turned back to my dying enemy. But what human words can tell the surprise, the horror which filled me at the scene I then saw?! The moment in which I had turned to close the door had been long enough, it seemed, for a great change to come at the far end of the room. A large mirror -- a looking glass -- or so it seemed to me -- now stood where it had not been before. As I walked toward it in terror I saw my own form, all spotted with blood, its face white, advancing to meet me with a weak and uncertain step. So it appeared, I say, but was not. It was my enemy -- it was Wilson, who then stood before me in the pains of death. His mask and coat lay upon the floor. In his dress and in his face there was nothing which was not my own! It was Wilson; but now it was my own voice I heard, as he said: "I have lost. Yet from now on you are also dead -- dead to the World, dead to Heaven, dead to Hope! In me you lived -- and, in my death -- see by this face, which is your own, how wholly, how completely, you have killed -- yourself!" ("William Wilson").

Let us take note of the fantastic occurrence of the mirror suddenly appearing at the moment of the double's--the narrator's guardian angel and moral center, as Harap notes--death.

Indeed, in "The Black Cat" and "The Imp of the Perverse" the Imp serves an ambivalent, but largely positive role, forcing a confessed murderer to justice. Furthermore, while Harap and J. D. Grosman mention the positive role that Dostoevsky supposedly adds to his conception of human perversion (as opposed to Poe's apparently more primitive treatment), we must not forget that Dostoevsky's treatment of perversion is also characterized by moral ambivalence. While we may praise the Underground Man, as Harap does, for exercising his moral freedom, we should not lose sight of his moral crimes against the prostitute, which were also motivated by his perversion, as Purdy pointed out. "He acts in both cases for the pleasure of hurting himself; deliberate self-destruction is the essence of underground life. Developed repeatedly and forcefully in The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov, this theme is one of the most striking parts of Dostoevsky's appallingly effective study of evil." Purdy, 171. (Purdy 171).

If any broad conclusions can be drawn from this chapter, it is that, once again, there are considerable similarities between Poe and Dostoevsky's interests in, and approaches to, psychology. Dostoevsky was beyond a doubt the more profound psychologist, but the general territory of his investigations into the human condition overlap to a remarkable degree that of Poe's somewhat less ambitious efforts. On the other hand, we recall that Dostoevsky was much enamored with Poe's psychological perspicacity as well as his ability to convincingly transfer internal states to the written page: "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!" «Время», 1861, том I, № 1, с. 231. . The scope of Poe's psychological explorations was certainly more limited than Dostoevsky's. Poe's idiom is exploring the extremes of such emotions terror, sorrow, regret, confusion, and anger. In doing so he often crosses back and forth over the line that separates sanity from madness. Dostoevsky will do the same, but his characters are less imprisoned by a sort of hellish solipsism and are more tormented by the dangerous and inadequate--to Dostoevsky's mind--intellectual currents of Dostoevsky's time, as well as the general conditions of social inequality and the psychological abnormalities that they engender.

If Dostoevsky's characters psychologies are coaxed into fuller existence through dialogue with other characters--many of them doubles of themselves--Poe's characters exist in a monologue, as Todorov observed. Cut off from the world and from humanity, they have nowhere to go but deeper into themselves and into the prisons of their own hearts and into the mysteries of their own souls, where they inevitably discover the seeds of their own ironic downfall, for "In the Original Unity of the First Thing lies the Secondary Cause of All Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation." Poe, E. A. Eureka. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/poe/eureka.html

Having plumbed the depths of problems of psychology in Poe and Dostoevsky to the best of our ability and as space allowed, we are prepared to analyze what is perhaps the most fascinating and strongest moment of correspondence between Poe and Dostoevsky, and one in which their psychological insights into the human condition lead them to the same conclusion: their deep-rooted suspicion of projects for constructing a utopia for humankind.

4. Alienation, the Perverse, and Utopia

One of the most important moments of kinship between Dostoevsky and Poe involves their respective worldviews, and in particular, their political beliefs and views of human nature. Taken all together, Poe and Dostoevsky's mutual belief in the irrational nature of humankind coupled with a conservative, fundamental suspicion of contemporaneous political developments, particularly with regards to European politics, mark another important moment of affinity between our two authors.

Interestingly, both authors political thought was at least partially derived from their metaphysical beliefs. As Harap puts it, "They both were artists who had `lost touch with life' and were tormented by mental strife. They were separated from their fellow-men. Dostoevsky sought salvation in fervent faith in the Russian Orthodox God and in a mystical union with the Russian people; Poe turned his back on reality and looked for solace to a subjectively created world of supernal beauty." Harap, 282.. Fusco's statement that Poe "would rather ignore society and instead analyze the relationship between man and universe" is not entirely true as Poe did stay abreast of social and political happenings and wrote about them, often in parody, in his capacity as literary journal editor, critic, poet, and writer of fiction. Nonetheless, Poe's generally dismal view of modern society is evident in stories such as "Some Words With A Mummy," "The Devil in the Belfry," "The System of Professor Tarr and Doctor Fether," and, despite its being set in a distant land long ago, "The Mask of the Red Death."

Dostoevsky's political views are based less, as Poe's were, on aesthetics and (pseudo)scientific ponderings about the universe as a physical space with natural laws, than on religious faith. As David Walsh writes in Dostoevsky's Political Thought, "In an age of unquestioned acceptance of autonomous secular reason as the starting point for all discussion of man, society and history, Dostoevsky had the audacity to reject the reigning assumption out of hand. In its place he maintained that the point of departure for any study of human nature must be Christ, for no personal or political order can be sustained unless it is rooted in a universal, self-sacrificing love. He insisted that the moral regeneration of society could never be achieved without a rediscovery of the transcendent spiritual order from which all reality is ultimately derived. As a consequence, he elaborated the essential elements of a Christian philosophy of politics, and did it outside the context of any confessional apologetics." Walsh, David. “Dostoevsky's Discovery of the Christian Foundation of Politics.” Dostoevsky's Political Thought. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2013, 9.

It is informative to take note of the fact that Dostoevsky did possess a positive, forward looking, and indeed utopian vision for the future of humanity, in which all people would be brought together in brotherly love according to Christian principles. This differs radically to what we consider to be Poe's most cherished and fundamental view of the universe--the general proposition in "Eureka," which Poe considered his masterpiece, whatever critics may have said about it. "My general proposition, then, is this: --In the Original Unity of the First Thing lies the Secondary Cause of All Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation." Poe, E.A. “Eureka.” http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/poe/eureka.html We recall that Poe claimed that Poe expressed the view that investigations about the nature of man should do well to consider the universe as a whole, and man's place in it. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that humans are subject to the same laws expressed in the general proposition. Indeed, Poe's fascination with the Imp of the Perverse and with ironic downfall, in which individuals and communities are ironically destroyed from within by some internal flaw are traits that are omnipresent in his works and that are examples of Poe's central metaphysical law in action.

We are already very close to understanding why it is, then, that critics such as J.D. Grossman, Purdy, and Harap claimed that Dostoevsky's version of human perversity contained a positive side that Poe's lacked, and that it led on a path, albeit one full of suffering, to ultimate freedom, while Poe's lacked such a positive element. Richard A. Fusco writes in "Poe and the Perfectablility of Man" (1982) about Poe that, "Because of his psychic drive toward self-alienation, he mistrusted on an instinctual level all forms of society." Fusco, 38. Both Poe and Dostoevsky rebelled against 19th-century Western society, but they found different solutions to their alienation, as we will read below.

Louis Harap, in his 1976 article "Poe and Dostoevsky: A Case of Affinities" offers one of the most penetrating analyses on our theme that we have encountered. His opening paragraph, which sets the tone for the rest of the article, merits being quoted at length: "The prevailing mood of Poe's work is one of intense suffering of the sensitive individual who cannot reconcile himself with society or the world as it is. Poe's alienation is well-nigh total: a chasm separates him from other people, from the vital love of women, from a hostile society as a whole and from a physical world that is inadequate to his dreams of perfect beauty. He rejects in toto this world he never made, denies its reality, strives to destroy it and reconstruct in imagination a supernal realm of beauty and exquisite sensation. The dehumanized world where people and ideas are counters in a market place of commodities he replaces with an equally dehumanized world of dreams whose inhabitants are not human but angelic or demonic." Harap, 271.

After this introduction, Harap notes that, despite their divergent backgrounds--with Poe coming from the slave-owning south, which was undergoing swift industrialization, while Dostoevsky hailed from a society in which serfs worked the land and an inefficient economy prevailed, with the intelligentsia living in urbanized environments--Poe and Dostoevsky and were reacting to new socio-economic and ideological movements in western society. Furthermore, they were both working within "the complex of ideas that originated in Western Europe, ideas born under the impact of the most radical economic and social revolutions mankind had known up to that time." Ibid., 271-272. (This is a particularly important point as critics often erroneously claim that Poe's work contains no links to the contemporary world around him.)

Both writers rejected the alienated consciousness that stemmed from the changes capitalism was causing, that is, industrial, technological, and scientific developments that were revolutionizing society. Harap, following Robert Louis Jackson, notes that in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground the depiction of this alienated consciousness of modern man ("one of the most drastic ever conceived") and the rejection of drastic societal changes are readily evident. Ibid., 272.. Harap, like most of the researchers cited in this study, finds many connections between the underground man and Poe. Furthermore, "Both writers, quite independently of one another, were suffering from the wounded consciousness that is the hallmark of the alienated man and were fighting, as they thought, the last-ditch battle for the integrity and freedom of the individual."

Harap cites as the primary link between Poe and Dostoevsky two of the former's short stories: "The Black Cat" and "The Imp of the Perverse," in which Poe's idea of the Imp of the Perverse is most explicitly fleshed out. Interestingly, Harap traces the source material for Poe's notion and finds it to be an original one. While Edith Smith Krappe Krappe, Edith Smith, “A Possible Source for Poe's `The Tell-Tale Heart' and `The Black Cat,'” American Literature (1940), XII, pp. 84-88. convincingly demonstrated that "The Clock-Case" incident in Dicken's Master Humphrey's Clock may have served as inspiration for Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat," Dicken's work contains no mention of the specific notion of perversity. This Imp of the Perverse being, according to Poe, an immutable and irrational instinct of man to commit self-destructive acts. In "The Black Cat" it is exemplified by the narrator's killing the cat, which he knew loved him, fully aware that the crime would bring about his eternal damnation.

Harap claims that Poe "was fascinated by the concept," noting that he again examined the concept in "The Imp of the Perverse" (1845), two-thirds of which are essentially an essay explicating Poe's conception of perversity. Ibid., 274. Significantly, Poe claimed that The Imp of the Perverse had gone unnoticed by science due to "the pure arrogance of reason," and the rationalistic assumption that God's design for man is devoid of perversity and irrationality. Indeed, Poe claimed that although reason dictates that a person should not carry out a self-destructive act, he does it anyway. This is exemplified by the narrator's unprovoked confession in "The Imp of the Perverse."

Returning to Dostoevsky, Harap notes that, like Poe's narrators from his two tales that theorize about the Imp of the Perverse, the underground man "is actuated by malice or spite" and claims, just as Poe's narrators, that he acts because he knows that he should not. Indeed the opening line of Notes from Underground is "Я человек больной Я злой человек." Indeed, Harap cites several of the underground man's actions, such as inviting himself to dinner with his ex-schoolmates and mistreating the prostitute Liza, as examples of committing acts out of spite that he knows he should not. Furthermore, Harap claims that the Underground Man's self-analysis in the beginning of Chapter VII of Part I is remarkably similar to Poe's notion of the perverse. Both explications begin "by polemicizing with those who believe that men do not act contrary to their own interests." Ibid., 276.

In the opening passage from Poe's "Imp of the Perverse" we read: "In the consideration of the faculties and impulses- of the prima mobilia of the human soul, the phrenologists have failed to make room for a propensity which, although obviously existing as a radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment, has been equally overlooked by all the moralists who have preceded them. In the pure arrogance of the reason, we have all overlooked it. We have suffered its existence to escape our senses, solely through want of belief- of faith;- whether it be faith in Revelation, or faith in the Kabbala. The idea of it has never occurred to us, simply because of its supererogation." Mabbott, 1217.

Dostoevsky writes: "Что же делать с миллионами фактов, свидетельствующих о том, как люди зазнамо, то есть вполне понимая свои настоящие выгоды, отставляли их на второй план и бросались на другую дорогу, на риск, на авось, никем и ничем не принуждаемые к тому, а как будто именно только не желая указанной дороги, и упрямо, своевольно пробивали другую, трудную, нелепую, отыскивая ее чуть не в потемках. Ведь, значит, им действительно это упрямство и своеволие было приятнее всякой выгоды." Ф.М. Достоевский. Собр. соч. в 15 тт.  Т. 4. C. 466.

Both authors cite an abundance of evidence proving their theories of irrational human behavior. Yet Harap claims that Dostoevsky in his Notes from Underground--perhaps following up on J.D. Grossman's similar observation three years earlier--improves upon Poe's notion of perversity and indeed succeeds in explaining a human psychological drive that Poe had depicted as being inexplicable. Harap cites Poe's statement that "We perpetrate them [perverse acts] merely because we feel that we should not. Beyond or behind this, there is no intelligible principle." Harap, 276. Dostoevsky meanwhile, Harap claims, went beyond Poe here. While Harap acknowledges that it's possible to "discover the meaning of the Imp in its full context" if we examine related material in Poe's opus, Dostoevsky provided an explanation for the phenomenon of irrational human perversity within Notes from Underground. This explanation involves the intellectual and artistic alienation of the epoque in question.

Harap states that both Poe and Dostoevsky resisted the directions that their contemporary societies were moving in. In Notes Dostoevsky cites the 1840's as the time at which this intellectual malaise began, which is precisely when Poe was theorizing about the Imp of the Perverse. Indeed we will return to Poe's rejection of contemporary society in the third part of this present study. [See Sverdlov on Poe's genres, both rationation and fantasy as rejecting the modern world--also we should attempt to contextualize Poe's Imp, to see if he ever arrived at the idea of a higher freedom--or what that may have looked like--see destructive transcendence.] Indeed, Harap cites Dostoevsky's assertion, made in a footnote to the novella, that the social influences are responsible for the condition of the Underground Man.

But for Dostoevsky, the perversity of the Underground Man was a "deliberate revolt against reason and science which would rob man of his freedom and individuality and reduce him `from a human being to an organ stop.'" Ibid., 277. As Harap notes, Dostoevsky was commenting on rationalism and scientism in particular, and as Jackson also argues, on the utopian visions and Crystal Palace of Chernyshevsky, who saw in this revolutionary steel and glass building, which had been built for the London Exposition in 1851 a symbol for his socialist utopian vision of satisfying the needs of all people. Harap adds that Dostoevsky visited this building when he was in London, and was disgusted by the "rationalized, dehumanized effects of the mechanical civilization" that he saw in it. Ibid.

In addition, Dostoevsky rejected mechanized life in modern industrial society as well as rationalization and mathematics, stating: "And as all choice and reasoning can really be calculated--because there will some day be discovered the laws of our so-called freewill--so, joking apart, there may one day be something like a table constructed of them, so that we really shall choose in accordance with it." Ibid. . As Harap claims, this would turn man into an "insect," which is exactly what the Underground Man finds himself unable to become, due to his perverse nature. Poe similarly wrote about the dehumanizing effects of science in his poem "Sonnet to Science."

Another essential point that Harap makes is that for Dostoevsky suffering was paramount to spiritual life. Thus Chernyshevsky's Crystal Palace, which would eliminate suffering from the human experience, would dehumanize mankind. Furthermore, Chernyshevsky's idea about enlightened self-interest benefits the common good. As we have noted, Poe's narrators who are afflicted by the Imp of the Perverse act against their own self-interest, as does the Underground Man, apparently. But Harap goes on to claim that Dostoevsky developed further Poe's Imp of the Perverse, so that the Underground Mas actually acts positively to defend his freedom, as the assertion of individual freedom is the highest good of all, and it supersedes all other nineteenth-century preoccupations.

Harap writes, "What Poe was groping toward in his concept of the perverse, Dostoevsky realized in all its implications." Ibid., 278. These implications were, that mankind was losing its humanity because of the influences of mechanization and rationalization and that hope lay only in the individual's exercise of free, which implied a certain rejection of reason and science as the foundations of modern society. According to Harrap, while the Underground Man succinctly articulates this rejection, Poe's concept of the Imp of the Perverse was "an almost unconscious manifestation of the same frustration," and one that the American author expressed this frustration more commonly in the "destructive motifs" that appear throughout his writings. Ibid. We will explore some of those motifs in the third section of this study. Generally speaking, Poe was disturbed by the mechanization that when hand-in-hand with science and Harap mentions Poe's "Sonnet to Science" as being one poignant example of this tendency. Meanwhile "Eureka" features merely the use of the laws of science in order to create a cosmic myth of an aesthetic universe.

Harap further discusses how the Underground Man, whom he considers representative of Dostoevsky's own beliefs, suffers from a tortured subjectivity that rejects false values. This mirrors Poe, for whom "consciousness of the real world is intolerable." Poe's analysis of these symptoms, however, lacks the profundity and perspicacity that Dostoevsky brings to bear in Notes, according to Harap. "The Black Cat" for instance, lack the self-analysis about the narrator's motivations for his crime, apart from the claim that the Imp of the Perverse, "one of the indivisible primary faculties" spurred him on. "Instead, he flees to the borders of consciousness where truth and morality are irrelevant. While the Underground Man analyzes his condition without mercy, Poe seeks consolation in resort to the intermediate state between sleep and waking, between life and death, in which state he may enjoy sensation and pleasure free of any human responsibility whatsoever." Ibid., 280.

Harap claims that the Underground Man diagnosed also Poe in saying that everyone has lost touch with life and become crippled by the modern condition. Furthermore, they both reacted to their condition through recourse to irrationality: "The Underground Man was speaking for Poe as well when he says, `we've all lost touch with life and we're all cripples to some degree. We've lost touch to such an extent that we feel a disgust for life as it is really lived and cannot bear to be reminded of it.' The one suffered--and enjoyed--an ambivalent and intensely acute flagellation of his mental state. The other, too, was riven by conflict but created--and enjoyed--a subjective world perceived at the borders of consciousness through destructive transcendence." Poe in fact identified perversity with the movement toward the world of the `indefinite,' as he suggests in "The Imp of the Perverse." Ibid.

Both Poe and Dostoevsky "were horrified by the truth about themselves," that is, that they rejected the modern world and suffered from ambivalent, alienated consciousness. Ibid. But, where Poe shrank away from this truth, Dostoevsky elaborated it to its extremity in Notes as well as in his subsequent great novels. Thus we have encountered another of the limits of Poe, as Todorov would say. As we have discussed, Poe's metaphysics led him to simply see self-destruction as a natural consequence of existence. His engagement with the politics of his day, though often underestimated by critics, was insufficient for him to elaborate an alternative political philosophy as Dostoevsky did, whose Orthodox Christian solution was based on an idealized model of the Russian peasant commune.

Harap connects the pain of these self-revelations about the malaise of the modern condition to the romantic theme of doubles, in which the awareness inner-conflict is dramatized. "The heightened self-consciousness of the age brought with it a tendency to recoil from what it revealed about the self." This is the case in Poe's "William Wilson" and Dostoevsky's The Double. We will discuss the theme of doubles in the following chapter. Harap discusses the romantic theme of doubles and compares Poe's "William Wilson" with Dostoevsky's The Double. "The heightened self-consciousness of the age brought with it a tendency to recoil from what it revealed about the self." This "ambivalence"of consciousness, while being present throughout the two writers work, is treated specifically in the these two works. Harap notes that Thomas Mann preferred Poe's story about doubles to Dostoevsky's, saying that in Poe's work the "arch-romantic motif is treated in a morally more profound manner." Indeed, the moral law of mirror punishment, which features heavily in "William Wilson" appears in many of Poe's works, and indeed seems to be a sort of metaphysical universal law that informs his conceptions of justice and of even, to a large extent, of cause and effect. For example, in "The Black Cat" the narrator kills his cat Pluto. An uncanny double of the murdered cat appears and effectively kills the narrator by inducing him to murder his wife and then revealing her body hidden in a wall of the narrator's basement to the police.

Meanwhile Harap suggests that both Poe and Dostoevsky portray the internal conflict within their protagonists in terms of socially acceptable versus unacceptable behavior, thus tying the theme of doubling into his general focus on the two authors' responses to the social influences of their day. Harap, like Burnett after him, states that Poe's story emphasizes morality, while Dostoevsky's is a psychological portrayal of the theme of doubling. But Harap uses the two stories as a means to read into the lives of authors who penned them. "They both were artists who had `lost touch with life' and were tormented by mental strife. They were separated from their fellow-men. Dostoevsky sought salvation in fervent faith in the Russian Orthodox God and in a mystical union with the Russian people; Poe turned his back on reality and looked for solace to a subjectively created world of supernal beauty." Ibid., 282.

As an example of this sense of alienation, Harap examines "The Man of the Crowd," whose eponymous character wanders the street in apparent deep loneliness and restlessness, in much the same way as the similarly alienated characters the Underground Man and Golyadkin from The Double do, according to Harap. Indeed, citing a passage from the opening paragraph of the tale--"Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burthen so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave," Harap suggests that the Man of the Crowd is a "man of ambivalent consciousness, who is akin to the Underground Man with his "profound malice." Ibid., 283. Harap also argues that his interpretation of Poe's short story is supported by the quotation from La Bruyere at the beginning of the story: "Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir кtre seul." Furthermore the old man is a stand-in for Poe, who has also lost touch with humanity, and constantly tries to reach out to others, especially to women, but in vain. "His frustrations with the real world lead him to create a more congenial world in his alienated condition by a destructive transcendence of a real world that will not allow him an integrated life. He projects an unreal realm of beauty that justifies the destruction of the real world. This is Poe's ultimate rendering of the Gothic escape from a hostile, commodity-dominated society."

We are now ready to offer our analysis of the third short story of Poe's that Dostoevsky published in Vremya. In a footnote to his article "Dostoevsky, Poe, and the Discovery of Fantastic Realism," Leon Burnett wrote, "No commentator has satisfactorily explained the presence of The Devil in the Belfry in the trilogy of Poe's stories translated in Vremya. It may hardly be admitted on an appeal to Russian humour, since, as Grossman points out, its humour `rests mainly on wordplays involving English phrases pronounced with a German accent.' I would suggest that it was included as a contrast to the two `heavier' tales of murder or else, more inconclusively, that it had come easily to hand as copy. Certainly, in a discussion of literary influence The Devil in the Belfry puts the cat among the pigeons." Burnett, 83.

We believe that we can offer a convincing explanation for the inclusion of "The Devil in the Belfry" in the three tales of Poe published in Vremya. Our interpretation begins with Frank's statement that it is "an allegory of the intrusion of the irrational into an orderly world that has always run in accordance with its immutable laws." Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, 2009, 303. At any rate Mabbott's comment that "It obviously makes fun of the weighty German scholarship of the time" supports, if only indirectly, our contention that "The Devil in the Belfry" fit nicely into Dostoevsky's polemic against socialist utopianism, a prime example of which Dostoevsky found in Germany.

Fusco analyzes "The Devil in the Belfry," "The Mask of the Red Death," and "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" to support his argument that Poe rejected utopianism in his writing. According to Fusco, "Poe attacks utopia's delicate balance" in "The Devil in the Belfry." Fusco goes on to describe the town of Vondervotteimittiss ("Wonder-what-time-it-is) and the various "social infrastructures that make it appear ideal," such as the mathematical regularity of the landscape, city plan, demography, etc. The physical layout of the houses--60 homes are evenly placed in a circumference around the center of the city, with each home being placed sixty yards from the center--symbolizes sixty 60 and 60 minutes, with time thus being the overarching metaphor. Moreover, the denizens of the town are obsessed with keeping track of time. Thus the symbolic effect of the disturbance of the devilish-looking trespasser ringing 13 times on the village clock at noon is heightened to the uttermost extreme. Indeed the existential crisis that ensues is foreshadowed by the interrogative name of the town "Wonder-what-time-it-is." "Wondering" by definition implies not knowing, of course. The Dutsch town is thus destroyed by its own internal flaws--this is the ironic downfall that Fusco also finds in "The Mask of the Red Death" and "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether."

But does the Imp of the Perverse have a role in Poe's anti-utopian polemic? It seems that devilish figure from "The Devil in the Belfry" may plausibly be interpreted as akin to the Imp of the Perverse. Indeed his actions seem to be prime examples that demonstrate the very definition of perversity. He certainly plays a similar destructive--and if we accept that the seeds of Vondervotteimittiss's anhiliation were contained in its social structures and the mentality of its citizenry--then the devil provokes the self-destruction of the town. Poe makes it clear that the town never recovered from the devil's visit. Thus Poe's perverse devil, seems to be playing a similar anti-utopian role as Dostoevsky's Underground Man, albeit with much less philosophy, political theory, psychology, and, we must admit, profundity in evidence. Nonetheless, the key to Poe's tale is the allegory. If we successfully unwrap the allegorical meaning of "The Devil in the Belfry," and, if we presume a distaste in Poe's readership for the petty totalitarian ways of the denizens of Vondervotteimittiss, then our sympathy is very much with the devil here. Moreover, while Poe does not explicitly connect perversity to freedom as the Underground Man does, we believe a reading in which the devil's ringing of 13 at noon actually liberates the rotund, time-obsessed citizens Vondervotteimittiss from stifling laws and customs, is certainly possible.

We recall that Harap declared, "What Poe was groping toward in his concept of the perverse, Dostoevsky realized in all its implications. The impersonal rationalization and mechanization of life that industry and social relations enforced were draining man of his humanity and making of him a fragmented, disintegrated personality. Neither writer saw any possibility that man's condition could be meliorated by social change." Harap, 274. Given the conclusions we have just drawn about Poe's treatment of perversity we have some reservations about Harap's claim. Nevertheless it is certainly true that Dostoevsky elucidated to a much greater degree the possibilities of perversity becoming a means of achieving freedom from an apparently totalitarian rationally constructed form of government.

Perversity is an act of resistance, an attempt on the part of the individual to defy the totalitarian social calculations upon which human lives are designed in Dostoevsky and Poe's anti-utopian nightmares. Robert Louis Jackson writes in Dostoevsky's Underground Man in Russian Literature [Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoevsky's Underground Man in Russian Literature. The Hague: Greenwood Press, 1958.] "In the figure of the Underground Man, alienated consciousness becomes aware of its alienation and adopts a consciously belligerent posture. The revolt of the Underground Man's entire life is a repulsion from impotence, from an overpowering and humiliating reality. The Underground Man's entire life is one continuous attempt to make contact with the world and with himself; isolated, unable to act, he is a social zero." Ibid., 272.

For the purposes of this study it is worth recalling that Notes from Underground is one of those works of Dostoevsky's on which Poe exerted the most influence. Frank writes in "Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time" that "The stories of Poe that Dostoevsky printed can all be related to the two great works he will write in just a few years--Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment. Even the least of Poe's stories in Time--"The Devil in the Belfry," hardly more than a broad comic anecdote--is an allegory of the intrusion of the irrational into an orderly world that has always run in accordance with its immutable laws." We will investigate the theme of the irrationality of human nature of as represented by Poe and Dostoevsky within the context of their overall worldview and political beliefs, which are in accordance in relation to a deep distrust of utopian ideas.

Elira Ospivoa, in "The History of Poe Translations in Russia" discusses the following sentence in "The Black Cat": "Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow." Osipova, Elira. “The History of Poe Translations in Russia.” Translated Poe, ed. Emron Esplin et al. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2014. P. 67. Osipova notes that this phrase sounds just as if it could have been written by the author of The Double. Of course, this novella was published in 1846, 15 years before Dostoevsky published Poe's works in Vremya. Moreover, there exists no evidence that Dostoevsky was familiar with Poe's works at such an early date. Therefore, in this case it seems that Osipova's comment suggests a kinship between the Dostoevsky and Poe that goes beyond any question of influence. On the other hand, Ospiova states that similar phrases can easily be found in Notes from Underground (1864) and "A Gentle Creature" (1876): "Their irrational narrators, possessed by an instinct of self-destruction, belie the optimistic view of human nature. For both Poe and Dostoevsky, these stories were arguments in their literary battles with writers and philosophers who constructed moral utopias" Ibid. Of course, this goes beyond the question of a single phrase. Many critics cited in this study have commented on the remarkable coincidence between early, and presumably "pre-Poe" Dostoevsky, and The Double in particular, and Poe's works such as "William Wilson."

Osipova's comments beg the following question: Is there a significant difference between the perversity of Golyadkin and that of The Underground Man or the narrator from "A Gentle Creature" that could suggest a new development in Dostoevsky's treatment of the subject, which, in turn, could possibly suggest the influence of Poe? We believe there is. If Notes From Underground is in part a clever satire about petty St. Petersburg officials and a parody of Gogolian absurdity, as Fanger suggests in his book Dostoevsky's Fantastic Realism, it is primarily a psychological study of the motif of doubles, as Otto Rank, Harap, Burnett, and many other critics have interpreted it. Nonetheless in "post-Poe" Dostoevsky, we find much more poignant and explicit social critique. Such is certainly the case in Notes from Underground and Dostoevsky's criticism of Chernyshevsky found therein. As Harap's article suggested, both Poe and Dostoevsky wrote about, and felt, alienation in regards to the modern world and its social, political, and technological developments. There is thus reason to believe that Poe's studies of perversion may have encouraged Dostoevsky to see the political and social implications of such a human characteristic.

Dostoevsky's relevant political convictions are stated explicitly in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, published in the February issue of Vremya in 1863. Joseph Frank writes in his article "Dostoevsky: The Encounter with Europe" that, "it would hardly be an exaggeration to regard Winter Notes as a first draft of the more famous work Notes from Underground, which immediately follows it in time." Frank, Joseph. “Dostoevsky: The Encounter with Europe.” The Russian Review 22, No. 3 (July 1963), 237-252. https://www.jstor.org/stable/126268. Accessed: 09-27-2016 00:20 UTC. P. 237-238. Kiril FitzLyon, in his forward to Winter Notes that the mature period of Dostoevsky's work begins with Winter Notes, and not with Notes from Underground. Discussing the former work, FitzLyon writes, "Never again did he write anything which contained so many of his thoughts on so many subjects in so few pages." Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, translated by Kiril FitzLyon. Richmond, Surrey, England: Alma Classics Ltd., 2013 (this ed. first published 2008). First published in 1863 (Russian); English translation first published in 1955 John Calder Ltd. P. vii. Furthermore, FitzLyon states that Dostoevsky's thoughts that he expresses in Winter Notes can be found in his later works. Andrй Gide, however, wrote "I believe that with Notes from the Underground we reach the peak of Dostoevsky's career. I consider this book (and I am not alone) the capstone of his entire work." (Gide, Andrй. Dostoevsky. New York: New Directions, 1961. (New Introduction by Arnold J. Guerard.) First published in 1923 by Plon-Nourit et Cie. P. 43.

Be that as it may, Frank discusses the way in which the persona that Dostoevsky creates as a writer and journalist in Winter Notes transformed into the figure of the narrator from Notes from Underground. A central element here is Dostoevsky's irrational rebellion against the European monuments that he visited in 1862.

FitzLyon notes, discussing a central concept to Dostoevsky's political as well as religious philosophy--the idea of brotherhood--that Dostoesky believed that European socialism, just like Catholicism, were "ultimately emanations of the Roman Imperial idea, which insisted on a purely mechanical, external unification of men." FitzLeon, viii. This differed radically from the spontaneous unification of people that occured in Orthodoxy, and more specifically Dostoevsky's conception of the Orthodox peasant commune. FitzLeon writes, In [Dostoevsky's] interpretation, the Orthodox Church expected unity to come of itself, spontaneously and with no assistance from external human agencies; and when it came, true brotherhood would be established with no need for any rules or constitutions. And it is just because the West is regarded by him as the true abode of "individualist isolation" in contrast to Russia's strivings after a spiritual synthesis of the community, that the theme of Europe and her civilization recurs so frequently in Dostoevsky's writings after his return to Russia" (Winter Notes iv).