Dostoevsky and Poe: Conceptions of the Fantastic

Dostoevsky himself writes in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, "In the French nature, yes, in the Western European nature in general, brotherhood is not present. Instead, we find the personal principle, the principle of isolation, a vigorous self-concern, self-assertion, self-determination within the bounds of one's own ego. This ego sets itself in opposition, as a separate, self-justifying principle, against all of nature and all other humans; it claims equality and equal value with whatever exists outside itself" (Encounter 245). Frank comments that, "Dostoevsky's purpose in Winter Notes is to convey the idea that European civilization is based on a soulless, heart-less materialism, and to imply by contrast-in virtue of his own reaction as a Russian-that such a civilization is inimical and anti-pathetic to the Russian spirit" (Encounter 240).

The fact that Notes from Underground is the first major work that Dostoevsky wrote after publishing and writing on Poe in 1861 could very well be, of course, a mere fact of historical coincidence. That so many critics have argued that Poe's work influenced Notes, however, is ample cause for serious reflection. Furthermore, our investigations have revealed that the core concept underlying Notes--human perversity, or underground consciousness--has remarkable similarities to Poe's Imp of the Perverse. While it would be risky to claim any critical role in Dostoevsky's maturation at the same period during which he published and wrote about Poe, nevertheless it is striking that this period of time coincides with Dostoevsky's discovery of romantic realism on the one hand and Dostoevsky's deepening political polemics on the other hand, as we see that Dostoevsky's selection of Poe's three stories and his only novel for publication are representative not only of Poe's fantastic style, but also of his parodic, anti-utopian efforts.

We thus return to the connection of perverseness as a political weapon to be wielded against materialism and socialism. Purdy addresses the theme of perversity, which as we have already mentioned, is discussed in "The Black Cat," which Dostoevsky published. Purdy notes that a similar tendency--the dire satisfaction of working oneself harm" characterizes the Underground Man. The end of Purdy's article contains many insights that, though they have been repeated by several of the critics sighted in this study, nonetheless contain certain highlights that interest us, and merits being quoted at length.

"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' either take up where Poe left off or provide an astonishing coincidence in literary thought. The Underground Man opens with his stating that he is sick but won't go to a physician from spite, and ends with his dismissing the prostitute with money when he has decided to help her: "I opened her hand and put the money in itfrom spite." 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. Poe's mind was too superficial to do more than touch upon it, but "The Black Cat" makes him the pioneer in the field, and perhaps one of Dostoevsky's most important literary sources as well." Purdy, S. B. “Poe and Dostoyevsky.” Studies in Short Fiction, 4 (1967), 171.

The "absurd" nature of this "fantastic element" is something that we will explore in more detail later in this work. Meanwhile we may also raise some objection to the characterization that "Poe's mind was too superficial to do more than touch upon" human perversion. We believe, rather, that his representation of it, while admittedly much less detailed than Dostoevsky's exploration of the theme, was nonetheless dictated by his own artistic principles, principles that were not so much "superficial" as they were characterized by self-imposed limitations of "destructive transcendence," as Harap states. Harap, Louis. “Poe and Dostoevsky: A Case of Affinities.” 1976. P. 284.

"With Poe, too, consciousness of the real world is intolerable. Everyday reality is repulsive to him; science, the most rational mode of consciousness, is dull and robs one of imagination; the actual world is this "damned Earth." His self-analysis, however, does not have the profound insight, nor is it so drastically thorough as that of the Underground Man. He is "tortured" and "destroyed" by his perverse acts in "The Black Cat": but he attempts no self-flagellating analysis to justify such acts beyond the bare statement that he was driven to them by the "primal" impulse to perversity. 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.

It's worth mentioning that this story features a theme common to Poe and Dostoevsky, and one that is probably responsible for the Russian writer having selected from his kindred spirit's tales "The Devil in the Belfry": that is, the theme of a fantastic outsider appearing and disrupting the order of a utopian city. This suggests that Dostoevsky did indeed focus on this recurring theme of Poe's. But there is also a connection between "The Devil in the Belfry" and a tale of Poe's that Dostoevsky refers to in his "Introduction to Three Tales by Edgar Poe"--"The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" (1835). While Dostoevsky's comments pertain to Poe's use of copious and convincing details in order to create such a compelling verisimilitude of a real event that Poe's readers actually initially believed in the hoax that was this story, it nonetheless also contains a parody of a populace that exhibits absurd conformity of behavior and absence of imagination.

5. The ridiculous uniformity of behavior among the denizens of Rotterdam is striking

"Nevertheless, about noon, a slight but remarkable agitation became apparent in the assembly: the clattering of ten thousand tongues succeeded; and, in an instant afterward, ten thousand faces were upturned toward the heavens, ten thousand pipes descended simultaneously from the corners of ten thousand mouths, and a shout, which could be compared to nothing but the roaring of Niagara, resounded long, loudly, and furiously, through all the environs of Rotterdam.

"What could it be? In the name of all the vrows and devils in Rotterdam, what could it possibly portend? No one knew, no one could imagine; no one- not even the burgomaster Mynheer Superbus Von Underduk- had the slightest clew by which to unravel the mystery; so, as nothing more reasonable could be done, every one to a man replaced his pipe carefully in the corner of his mouth, and cocking up his right eye towards the phenomenon, puffed, paused, waddled about, and grunted significantly--then waddled back, grunted, paused, and finally--puffed again." Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. P. 3.

We note that in both "The Devil in the Belfry" and "Hans Pfall," devils are evoked in order to refer to that which lies beyond the laws of society. The fact that this is seemingly only a rhetorical flourish does not wholly diminish the significance of the symbolism for it is only a stretch of degree to write the devils who disrupt social order as actual characters, as Poe and Dostoevsky both did, imbuing their creations with varying degrees of philosophical and psychological complexity. Furthermore, the Netherlands seems to have been Poe's favorite example of false utopianism in a similar fashion to how Germany was Dostoevsky's favorite target as an example of the absence of humanity in Godless socialist and materialist society. Both "The Devil in the Belfry" and "Hans Pfall" poke fun at the Dutch.

The fact that Hans Phall's hot air balloon is perceived by the citizenry of Rotterdam, viewed from below, as being made out of newspapers, is, of course, not accidental: "But, as I was saying, we soon began to feel the effects of liberty and long speeches, and radicalism, and all that sort of thing. People who were formerly, the very best customers in the world, had now not a moment of time to think of us at all. They had, so they said, as much as they could do to read about the revolutions, and keep up with the march of intellect and the spirit of the age. If a fire wanted fanning, it could readily be fanned with a newspaper"

We will conclude this chapter with a few reflections, not on our two writers' political views and their literary expressions of them, but with elements that are perhaps at the very core of perverseness as perceived by Poe and Dostoevsky: human evil and the drive toward to destruction.

J. D. Grossman writes, "Poe had not gone this final step, he did not see man's perversity as an advantage. Having stumbled on the edge of the abyss, he only stands horrified and fascinated, looking over the brink." We disagree with Grossman's statement to a certain extent, as we do with Purdy's assertion that Poe's intellect was too feeble to grasp this complexity of human nature. Rather, it is informative to consider the general proposition of what Poe considered his magnum opus--his prose poem Eureka. Poe writes, "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" ("Eureka").

Our conclusion, as already proposed, is that this statement has repercussions beyond "Eureka" and is, rather, a metaphysical principle that Poe applied in his other works. The fact that Poe considered it the primary law of the universe gives us reason to believe that this proposal is likely, not to mention its reverberations in his concept of self-destructive perversity and the ubiquitous tendency toward "ironic downfall," as Fusco called it, in his stories. The point is, that we seem to have encountered another of Poe's limits, as Todorov would note: that is, the limit between being and nonbeing.

Thus, that Poe did not go beyond the ineffable tendency toward self-destruction of human beings--or at least a certain kind of human being characterized by pathological perverseness, as so many of his characters are--should hardly surprise us. Humankind's tendency toward ironic downfall, or annihilation due to the germ of destruction that lies within people, was the limit of the human, and thus so much of Poe's work is dedicated to exploring the fringes of human experience and beyond: states between waking and dreaming, life and death, sanity and madness, joy and despair. It is not a question an inadequacy of intellect on Poe's part, per se, as Purdy rather brazenly accuses. J. D. Grossman states the case with more accuracy, Poe really did stand at the brink of a cliff and stare over the edge into the abyss, and this demarcates what was for perhaps for Poe the ultimate limit.

Thus the Underground Man's suffering is not without an aspect of hope. Through his suffering he is exercising his freedom, and in particular, his freedom from a dehumanized socialist utopian society. But, we believe it would be a mistake to simply state that Poe simply was unable or unwilling to delve further into the theme of perversity. In fact, his tendency, as Harap notes, to link perversity to movement toward an indefinite world, follows certain laws that Poe outlines in his "Eureka," a prose poem that the American author considered his finest work.

That Dostoevsky, in distinction to Poe, attributed to human man's perversity a positive role should not surprise us, because it is in keeping with his interpretation of evil more generally. We might even say that Dostoevsky found his way to a productive relationship with evil, while maintaining, or trying to, his belief in ultimate redemption. Berdyaev writes, "With Dostoevsky to the very depths there was an antinomic attitude towards evil. He wants always to acknowledge the mystery of evil, and in this he was a gnostic, he did not push out evil into the sphere of the unknowable, nor did he discard it altogether. Evil was for him evil, evil blazed for him in the hellish fire, and he passionately strove for the victory over evil. But he wanted to do something with evil, to transform it into a handsome metal, onto a higher Divine being and by this to save evil, i.e. to genuinely conquer it, and not relegate it to the outer darkness." Berdyaev, Nikolai. “Otkrovenie  O  Cheloveke  V  Tvorchestve  Dostoevskogo.” Russkaya Mysl, March-April 1918, p. 54.

We hope that this chapter has made some contributions to the understanding of what is one of the most fascinating moments of affinity between Poe and Dostoevsky: their rejection of the modern world and their seeking of refuge in religion, metaphysics and art. At the center of this struggle against modernity is, of course, an overarching sense of pessimism. Poe's prose is only occasionally graced with moments of optimistic relief, such as when Eleonora's ghost forgives the narrator for marrying after her death, citing heavenly laws about love, or in "The Premature Burial" in which the narrator realizes that his catalepsy was a result, not a cause, of his morbid obsessions and decides to live a better life. These two moments may well have autobiographical resonances for Poe, whose wife Virginia died young, after which he had a series of mostly unhappy love affairs, and who suffered from both macabre moods and depression as well as various physical ailments.

Poe's art is also a form of escapism from what the American author viewed as the evils of modern life. "His frustrations with the real world led 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." Harap, 284.

Dostoevsky, on the other hand, located, at least in theory, salvation and regeneration for mankind in Orthodox Christianity, and his works frequently feature conversions, forgiveness, and redemption, even if only at the end of the dark labyrinths of his novels. There is thus a much more prominent note of optimism in Dostoevsky's art than in Poe's. This, in turn, probably caused Dostoevsky to employ such a dark and destructive element of human psychology--perversity--in a positive and productive fashion in humanity's battle for freedom and individuality. Thus Dostoevsky's religious convictions, although only cursorily mentioned in this study, are in fact of paramount importance not only to his use of the fantastic, but also specifically to his polemic against rational socialist utopia and for an Orthodox Christian utopia based on universal suffering and brotherhood.

6. Doubles in Poe and Dostoevsky

Having explored some of the consequences of Poe and Dostoevsky's worldviews, which were in both cases characterized by a profound sense of alienation and ambivalence, we are now prepared to explore one of the most extreme manifestations of that alienation and ambivalence--the phenomenon of doubles. The theme of doubles commonly occurs in both writers. "William Wilson" is the most obvious example in Poe's works, while The Double is the most obvious treatment of this theme in Dostoevsky. Incidentally, Thomas Mann said of Dostoevsky's The Double that it "by no means improved on Edgar Allan Poe's 'William Wilson,' a tale that deals with the same old romantic motif in a way far more profound on the moral side and more successfully resolving the critical [theme] in the poetic." Meyers, Jeffrey, Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy (New York: Cooper Square Press, 1992), 287. Be that as it may, Mann does highlight a difference between these two works: Poe is more interested in the moral implications of the double while Dostoevsky gives the theme its most profound psychological treatment in literature, according to Otto Rank. Doubling is pervasive throughout Dostoevsky's works and also is featured in many of Poe's tales including "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains," "The Black Cat," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Morella,""Ligeia," and "Metzengerstein."

But how is the theme of doubles related to Dostoevsky and Poe's ambivalent and negative feelings toward modern society? "Rank explains the modern negative attitude toward the Double as due to modern man's over-rationalistic alienation from life and death and from his own fundamentally irrational will." Kohlberg, Lawrence, “Psychological Analysis and Literary Form: A Study of the Doubles in Dostoevsky,” Daedalus, 92, no. 2, Perspectives on the Novel (Spring, 1963), 359. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20026782359). This connection between the modern suspicion of doubles as a symptom of an alienation from humankind's irrational nature prompts us to reflect on Poe and Dostoevsky's mutual interest both in irrationality and in doubles, begging the question of what the possible connection between these two interests may be.

Harap writes, "The heightened self-consciousness of the age brought with it a tendency to recoil from what it revealed about the self. Although the ambivalence of consciousness pervaded the work of both writers, the problem is specifically explored in Dostoevsky's "The Double" and Poe's "William Wilson." Harap, Louis, “Poe and Dostoevsky: A Case of Affinities.” Weapons of Criticism: Marxism in America and the Literary Tradition, ed. Norman Rudich (Palo Alto, CA: Ramparts Press, 1976), 280. The social basis, or more specifically, the basis in social alienation, for the occurrence of doubling is readily apparent in Dostoevsky's The Double. Golyadkin is one in a series of unfortunate and pitiful petty officials, who lead impoverished lives in dreary corners of St. Petersburg, and whose inner worlds Dostoevsky brings to life through parody and fantastic realism. The cause of his hallucinating his double and his ultimate collapse can be convincingly located in his frustrated social and erotic ambitions, areas in which his evil double excels. Meanwhile, William Wilson is a perpetually displaced vagabond and petty criminal who travels around Europe in an effort to escape his ethically superior double. He drifts in and out of prestigious schools and Oxford University, mingles with high society, and sinks into dissipation and disgrace. He is a close kin of "The Man of The Crowd," who aimlessly wanders the streets of London in search of something unknown, and who Harap describes as the epitome of alienation in Poe's work. We have attempted to situate the theme of doubles in the context of the modernizing world of the 19th century. In doing so we have necessarily limited the rich history of doubles as they appear in literature to a specific treatment of it.

But doubling, within the context of the fantastic, requires a hesitation between a natural and supernatural explanation for the phenomenon. Does an objective double physically exists who is visible by third parties? Is he merely a hallucination of the doubled character? Is the double an angel, a demon, or merely a projection of a repressed part of the self? Is the whole episode in which the double appears merely a dream? Returning to the intersection of dreams with reality and their apparent intermixing, Widnдs discusses "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" (1844) and its similarities to Dostoevsky's The Double. She cites these as both demonstrating the effects of reality being less "real" than the fantastic, which can lead to a doubling of the consciousness. Although Widnдs does not point this out in her analysis, it is worth noting that Golyadkin Senior, upon awaking from confused dreams on the morning of that fatal day when his double first appeared, is unsure of whether he has really woken up or if he is experiencing a continuation of his dreams. This effect is reinforced by his jumping out of bed and running to a mirror (that typical Romantic trope often associated with doubles) immediately after deciding that the gloomy St. Petersburg morning must be real and that he would rather still be asleep and dreaming.

For his part, Mr. Augustus Bedloe, increasingly under the effects of the "magnetic remedies" frequently administered by the sinister Doctor Templeton, his double, experiences an eerie connection with an apparent past life. One of treatments undergone by Bedloe sleep induced "at the mere volition of the operator, even when the invalid was unaware of his presence." Here was find the material, pseudo-scientific explanation for the subsequent fantastic events of the story that is typical of Poe's work. Frequently raising the question of whether he dreamed the vision of his death during an insurrection in India, it becomes apparent from Doctor Templeton's response that Bedloe's life was somehow caught up with an old friend of Templeton who was killed in the same manner as Bedloe experienced. Bedloe subsequently dies in a manner strikingly reminiscent of the death he had a vision of.

Widnдs makes another important point about doubles and their similar treatments in Poe and Dostoevsky. Acknowledging that the trope of doubles is a very common one in Romantic literature, she states that Poe and Dostoevsky understand it in a way that is unique and differs from the Romantic tradition in key ways. In E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Die Doppelgдnger" (1815) the doubles are friends who look completely alike but are in fact two distinct persons. Similarly in Gogol's "The Nose" (1936), "где исчезновение носа коллежского советника Ковалева, хотя его нос и является ему как двойник, все же для личности героя не имеет никаких последствий, а остается чисто внешним происшествием." Виднес М. Достоевский и Эдгар Аллан По // (Copenhagen:Scando-Slavica. 1968), T. 14, 26 (Widnдs).

Poe (William Wilson) and Dostoevsky's doubles (Golyadkin), on the other hand, are one and the same person. Furthermore, the conflict between these doubles turns inward and becomes a psychological conflict taking the form of apparent hallucinations, which features extreme fear on the part of the doubled characters--for example Golyadkin Senior and Bedloe--when they first witness their doubles. Thus, Widnдs considers the splitting of personality (раздвоение личности) to be a trait whose presence in their respective treatments of doubles groups Poe and Dostoevsky on the one side, and whose absence puts Hoffmann with Gogol on the other. This is, of course, an important observation from the standpoint of our current investigation, as Hoffmann and Gogol undoubtedly exerted substantial influence on Dostoevsky, a fact that makes the peculiar similarity between Poe and Dostoevsky's portrayals of doubles, as opposed to Hoffmann or Gogol's, all the more relevant.

Another moment of similarity that Widnдs has uncovered is the fact that both Dostoevsky and Poe's characters exhibit a tendency to physically try to run away from their terrible thoughts, including their doubles. For example, Golyadkin Senior flees from Golyadkin Junior, and the narrator from "The Imp of the Perverse," gripped by terror and guilt, flees aimlessly in the streets until he collapses and confesses to murder to the crowd gathering around him. We could add to Widnдs's examples, that of William Wilson who flees from school and travels to various countries to flee from his double, also without success. This is because, "Конфликт у Э. А. По, так же как у Достоевского, весь внутри, в душе и уме самого героя." Ibid., 28.

Widnдs, in comparing The Double, written in 1846, to Poe's treatment of doubles, also raises the crucial question of whether or not Dostoevsky could been familiar with Poe's work when he was writing his novella. Dostoevsky did not mention Poe in his correspondence. However, "Если Э. А. По был знаком Достоевскому уже в ранние 40-е годы, то Достоевский в Э. А. По несомненно видел нечто другое, описание душевного мира человека скорее, чем романтических ужасов, каковые у Э. А. По до того видели романтики. Достоевский видел в Э. А. По "реалиста" (мы бы сказали "психолога") и в необычайных происшествиях, описываемых Э. А. По, мог найти психологическую правду и мог следовать за ним в стиле повествования, соответствующего именно этой психологической реальности. Во всяком случае, если по поводу ранних новелл Достоевского нельзя утверждать "влияния" Э. А. По, то можно утверждать большое сходство в трактовке сюжетов, которым Достоевский, так как и Э. А. По, порывает, как с романтикой ужасов, так и с реализмом, ограничиваюшимся объективной непосредственной регистрацией внешнего мира, порывает с Бальзаком, даже иронизируя на "фотографичностью" в литературе. Ibid., 29.

But for Dostoevsky, doubling is more than merely a theme to be explored within the framework of his novels and short stories--that is, content--it has been interpreted as in fact being an essential element to the structure of his works--or, form. Lawrence Kohlberg in his article "Psychological Analysis and Literary Form: A Study of the Doubles in Dostoevsky" points out that there exists a tradition in literary criticism on Dostoevsky to interpret his use of doubles as critical to understanding of the structure of his novels. Kohlberg, “Psychological Analysis and Literary Form,” 348. For example, Beebe writes about doubles in Dostoevsky that, "According to most interpretations of Crime and Punishment, the struggle within Raskolnikov becomes physical external action as he wavers between Svidrigailov, epitome of self-willed evil, and Sonia, epitome of self-sacrifice and spiritual goodness." J. M. Beebe, “The Three Motives of Raskolnikov,” in E. Wasiolek, ed., Crime and Punishment and the Critics (San Francisco: Wadeworth, 1961). This is reminiscent of "William Wilson" in which the narrator, who has become dissipated and dishonest, is haunted by a double who represents his better moral self.

Kohlberg demonstrated how Dostoevsky's "split" characters' condition is attributable to obsessive compulsive neurosis, can be broken down into two sets of simultaneously or near-simultaneously occurring factors: impulse/counter-impulse and belief/disbelief.

"Our discussion suggests a close connection between Double or autoscopic experiences and epilepsy on the one hand, and concern about death and immortality on the other. Dostoevsky's extreme concern with death and immortality was expressed both in ideological and in symptomatic behavior. On the ideological level, he wrote: "Without a superior idea, there cannot exist either the individual or the nation. But here on earth we have only one superior idea--the immortality of the soul because all other superior ideas have their source in this idea." Kohlberg, “Psychological Analysis and Literary Form,” 360. Kohlberg notes that both Dostoevsky and Poe likely suffered from autoscopic syndrome, in which they saw hallucinations of their own doubles. He even posits the possibility of explaining Dostoevsky's ideology of vicarious guilt and suffering through an psychoanalytic explanation. Ibid., 326.

Lawrence Kohlberg describes the factor of compulsion featured in the Imp of the Perverse and the tendency toward crime in Poe and Dostoevsky: "tragedy requires a crime to be committed which is both willed and unwilled; both free and foreordained, a fated act for which the actor is yet responsible. As tragic crime is foreordained but willed, so tragic punishment is both doom and self-discovery of evil. In Athenian tragedy, the fated aspects of crime and punishment were the result of cruel but moral external forces. In the modern "psychoanalytic" form of tragedy, the fated aspects of crime and punishment are the products of uncontrolled and unconscious internal forces. The crime is the fated result of immutable instinctual impulses; the inevitable doom which follows the crime is the result of unconscious and inescapable needs for punishment." Ibid., 346.

The Imp of the Perverse and the Split Personality

Versilov in A Raw Youth (1875) says, "I am really split in two mentally, and I am horribly afraid of it. It is just as though one's second self were standing beside one; one is sensible and rational oneself, but the other self is compelled to do something perfectly senseless and sometimes very funny; and suddenly you notice you are longing to do that amusing thing, goodness knows why. I once knew a doctor who suddenly began whistling in church, at his father's funeral." A Raw Youth, quoted from Ibid., 352.

The perverse impulses that Versilov ascribes to himself are very reminiscent of the those that persecute Poe's victims of the Imp of the Perverse. First, there is the apparent splitting of the personality, as Dostoevsky himself characterizes it. Although this is not explicit in many of Poe's works (with the glaring exception of, for example "William Wilson"), it is nonetheless a common feature. In "The Tell-Tale Heart" the narrator's repeated denial of his madness, often put in the form of a rhetorical question apparently addressed to the reader, which occurs six times in the short story seem to suggest a certain splitting of the personality. Meanwhile the narrator of "The Black Cat" is transformed by alcoholism and general dissolution from a highly sensitive animal lover into a cat killer.

However, Kohlberg will give us a more precise definition of this psychological phenomenon according to the psychoanalytic tradition. After supplying the above quote from A Raw Youth, Kohlberg comments: "These divided selves of Dostoevsky do not, however, correspond to psychiatric notions of the "split personality." The most common psychiatric conception of the "split personality" refers to the hysterical phenomenon of multiple personalities, the Three Faces of Eve; each living a Jekyll and Hyde existence in independence of one another. Unlike such multiple personalities, the "selves" within any of Dostoevsky's figures are simultaneously aware of one another. These "split selves" have equally little to do with schizophrenia, in the sense in which this has been misleadingly mistranslated as "split personality." Dostoevsky's consciously "split" characters do present classical symptoms of the obsessive-compulsive character, however. The "split" is not a separation of selves, it is an obsessive balancing or undoing of one idea or force with its opposite. Most characteristically, a sacred idea compulsively arouses a degrading idea; the sacredness of the father's funeral compels the impulse to whistle.The hero of Notes from Underground says, "At the very moment when I am most capable of feeling every refinement of all that is good and beautiful it would, as though by design, happen to me not only to feel, but to do, such ugly things." Ibid., 352.

We have not only discovered a psychoanalytic definition that pertains to the phenomenon of doubling in Dostoevsky's works, but, recalling that the perversity of the Underground Man was crucial to his comparison with Poe's victims of the Imp of the Perverse (according to Purdy, J. D. Grossman, Harap, Bograd, and Frank), we have arrived at an important means of interpreting Poe's perverse characters as well. We recall that the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" loved the old man that he brutally murdered, while the narrator of "The Black Cat" loved and cherished Pluto, the cat whose eye he gouged out before finally hanging him. This perplexing juxtaposition of love with the travestying acts of murdering the love object, in both cases without any apparent motive, bears a certain resemblance to the inner states of Versilov and the Underground Man, as they themselves describe them. Does this then suggest that Poe's narrators are obsessive-compulsive?

Kohlberg continues, "Not only the impulse and counter-impulse, but belief and disbelief are opposed and simultaneously felt in a compulsion neurosis. According to Ivan's devil, "Some can contemplate such depths of belief and disbelief at the same moment that sometimes it really seems as if they are within a hairsbreadth of being turned upside down." Ibid., 352. If we continue to explore the parallels of Kohlberg's diagnosis of Dostoevsky's "split" characters as suffering from obsessive-compulsive neurosis, it seems clear that the victims of the Imp of the Perverse experience the impulse/counter-impulse phenomenon. Indeed examples of such behavior in Poe are abundant.

But what about the juxtaposition of belief and disbelief? The very opening sentences of "The Black Cat" supply a ready answer: "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" (Poe). Meanwhile the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" also experiences a state of profound mental confusion, which exists simultaneously with his inexplicable impulse to murder the old man whom he loved:

"It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture --a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees --very gradually --I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever." Mabbott, T. O., ed. Collected Works of Edgar Allen Poe:Tales and Sketches, 1843-1849. Cambridge, MA and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978, 792. https://www.eapoe.org/works/mabbott/tom3t002

Finally, in "The Imp of the Perverse" the narrator proclaims the impossibility of understanding the propulsion of perversity that philosophers had never even identified. We recall that Purdy, J.D. Grossman, and Harap criticized Poe for not penetrating human perversity more deeply in his study, with Purdy even going so far as to attribute to Poe a "superficial" mind. Purdy, S. B., “Poe and Dostoyevsky.” Studies in Short Fiction, 4 (1967), 171. But what if mental confusion is one of the very symptoms of those afflicted by The Imp of the Perverse that Poe was attempting to describe? The fact that no less an authority than Dostoevsky himself, who has so often been labeled one of the most brilliant psychologists in literary history, commented on Poe's immense talent, psychological perspicacity, and cunning, in of itself gives us reason to approach these slights of Poe's talent with some circumspection.

This state of mental confusion expressed by Poe's narrators about the reasons why the commit perverse acts seems at least to be consistent with Kohlberg's statement that belief and disbelief occur simultaneously in the obsessive-compulsive character, which he claims to be an appropriate psychological diagnosis for many of Dostoevsky's "split" characters, and who, as we argue, share many of the same features with Poe's perverse characters. Furthermore, we should do well to keep in mind that many of Dostoevsky's most brilliantly drawn characters, who are themselves (i.e., as characters) gifted, if not brilliant, intellectuals--e.g. Ivan Karamazov, Stavrogin, and Raskolnikov--frequently experience profound ambivalence.

Indeed, we would do well to remember Andrй Gide's comment about Dostoevsky's recurring theme of the evil of the intellect: "In Dostoevsky we find the mysterious inversion of values already noticed in William Blake, the great mystic amongst English poets. Hell, according to Dostoevsky, is the first region, the realm of mind and reason. Throughout his works, if our attention be at all alert, we shall become conscious of a depreciation of mental powers which is not so much systematic as involuntary and inspired by the spirit of the Gospel. Dostoevsky never deliberately states, although he often insinuates, that the antithesis of love is less hate than the steady activity of the mind. In his eyes it is intellect which individualizes, which is the enemy of the Kingdom of Heaven, life eternal, and that bliss where time is not, reached only by renouncing the individual self and sinking deep in a solidarity that knows no distinctions." Gide, Andrй. Dostoevsky. New York: New Directions, 1961 (1927), 127. Perhaps mental (and moral) ambivalence, possibly somehow related to the concurrent existence of belief and disbelief in the obsessive compulsive subject, contributed to Dostoevsky's deep suspicion of the human intellect.

In conclusion, the question of doubles is, in a way, a logical continuation of Todorov's definition of the fantastic--that it is a prolonged hesitation between a natural and supernatural explanation for events--to the level of the psychology of an individual character. A doubled character no longer is sure what is his being--that is, the natural explanation for his subjective thoughts and emotions--and what is other--which, in the case of doubling functions, for all intensive purposes, as a supernatural explanation. This confusion, or prolonged hesitation on the part of the character as well as the reader, provides much of the narrative tension in The Double, for example. Moreover, the ambivalence does not end there: it is plausible to interpret the opening scene of the novella, in which Golyadkin wakes up, but is initially not sure that he is not still asleep and dreaming, as merely, in fact, Golyadkin's dream. Moreover, as we have seen, "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" also plays with this line between sleeping and waking, with one double making the other double fall asleep by mere silent exercise of will.

Moreover, the limit between sanity and madness is also commonly at stake in doubling, as the psychological climax of The Double demonstrates, with Golyadkin being carried off to an insane asylum at the end of the story. Poe's "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" also explores this boundary, when the lunatics, disguised as asylum personnel, mimic themselves as they behaved when they were actually living as patients in the asylum. Another obvious limit intrinsic to doubling, and perhaps the primary one, is self and other. Therefore doubling is a sort of concentration of many of the themes that constitute the fantastic. It also inherently contains many of the limitations that Poe was so obsessed with exploring, as Todorov observed. And it is in precisely these limits, or extremes rather, that Dostoevsky took from Poe and expanded into new forms and combinations.

7. Final Considerations: The Fantastic Landscape, Rational Madness, and Parody

In the final chapter of this study, we propose examining a few problems related to Dostoevsky and Poe's conception of the fantastic that merit closer study than they have thus far received in the critical literature. First, we will explore the problem of "fantastic space" in the two authors' works--that is, how fantastic phenomena appear within the fictional worlds that are created by some combination of realism and formalism. Second, we will analyze a related problem--that of rationality versus superrationality in Poe and Dostoevsky's works, again largely within the context of narrative technique. At stake here is the problem of random occurrences versus the design of some supernatural influence. Finally, we will briefly investigate the problem of parody and humor in Poe and Dostoevsky and how it relates to the question of utopia as treated by our authors.

Addressing first the question of fantastic landscapes, it is useful to return to Todorov in order to determine how Poe crafts his worlds. Todorov writes, "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--and a game, which entails rules; and an organization of its own elements. Some element of the work--a scene, a dйcor, 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 whetherone 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." Todorov, Genres, 97.

Donald Fangar, in his book Dostoevsky and Fantastic Realism, discusses Dostoevsky's contribution to the fantastic and his indebtedness to, and development of, Gogol's fantastic. Fangar states that in Dostoevsky's fantastic realism, or "realism in a higher sense" as Dostoevsky described it, "the supernatural was rationalized, the essential ambiguity was given a philosophical basis, and the grotesque and absurd--against the background of fantastic Petersburg--took on an existential starkness, a dark beauty, and a new and indisputable tragedy." Fangar, Donald. Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 126.

Fangar's comment about Dostoevsky's rationalizing of the supernatural brings us into similar territory as that which Poe explored in both his fantastic tales and his tales of ratiocination. The narrator of "The Black Cat" struggles with just this question of rational versus supernatural from the opening lines of the story, as we have discussed already. However, it bears citing the most relevant passage of this tale again:

"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 unburthen 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 common-place--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."Poe, Edgar Allan, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, 223.

It is a rather obvious point, but a relevant one nonetheless--if the events that the narrator recounts were "a series of mere household events," or if the narrator perceived them in that way, there would be no horror story and no fantastic elements. Thus mere realism, which by definition must admit coincidences and the general randomness of life, is alien to the fantastic. Another obvious, but important, fact is that the fantastic does not occur in daily life. Widnдs remarked how Dostoevsky found in Poe an alternative to the photographic realism that was becoming popular in his time with the invention of the daguerreotype, exemplified, for example, by Nikolai Uspensky's short stories about peasant life. Dostoevsky deeply disliked and harshly criticized this new technique. Poe's art could not be farther from this style. Even his tales of ratiocination are fantastic, in that, while the solution to the mysteries in them are revealed at the end of the novel to be material, logical, and rational, up until the end a hesitation between rational and supernatural causes is deliberately exploited by Poe.

"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." Todorov, Genres, 99.

Poe's choice of extreme formalism has consequences for his depiction of the natural world in which his tales are set. His stories are so rigorously constructed that details of the natural world are always included to contribute toward the premeditated effect or mood that Poe intends to invoke. He details this method in `The Philosophy of Composition' as well as in a review of Hawthorne's tales, as we have discussed already. It is informative to compare two quotations from L. P. Grossman and Todorov. In Todorov we read, "It would be fruitless to search in Poe's tales for a picture of American life in the first half of the nineteenth century. The action typically takes place in old manor houses, macabre castles, distant and unknown lands. Poe's dйcor is completely conventional: it is whatever the plot requires. There is a pond near the house of Usher so that the house can cave in, not because the region is known for its ponds." Todorov, Genres, 97. In a very different assessment of the physical world described in Dostoevsky's stories, L. P. Grossman writes, "Nineteenth-century Petersburg, in spite of all the fantastic coloring Dostoevsky imparted to its descriptions, has not been depicted by anyone more exactly, more sharply, more palpably, or more truly." L. P. Grossman, quoted in Fangar, 130.

This begs the question of how Dostoevsky managed to combine the fantastic with realism in order to create a "higher realism," and how, in turn, the natural world is depicted in this higher realism. Dostoevsky's St. Petersburg, in addition to the realistic detail provided by the narrator, is often described subjectively from the perspective of his characters. "Throughout his work the city tends to be portrayed through (or in consonance with) the consciousness of his characters. His first protagonists are dreamers; so, differently but no less, are his later ones. This is one reason why his Petersburg, the physical place with all its spectral inhabitants, its buildings, canals, bridges, and streetlamps, seems so perpetually on the point of evanescence. `Perhaps,' the narrator of A Raw Youth reflects, `all this is someone's dream, and there is not one real, true person here, nor one real action. Someone who is dreaming all this will suddenly wake up--and everything will suddenly disappear.'" Fangar, 132.

It seems likely that part of Dostoevsky's lasting relevance to contemporary literature and thought is due to this subjective basis through which the external world is viewed. Indeed, Dostoevsky, in the preceding excerpt from A Raw Youth, even goes so far as to play with the solipsism through which the external world is viewed, which is a common feature in Poe's stories. Poe's descriptions might seem to be subjectively engendered, as they typically correspond with the moods of the narrators; and the narrators of "Ligeia" and "The Domain of Arnheim" construct their environs in a way that pleases their aesthetic proclivities, and Roderick Usher has an especially intense relationship to his ancestral home. However, we recall that Todorov claims that there is no psychology in Poe's works. If there is no psychology, as such, then there can be no subjectivity. Instead there is Poe's formalistic method that determines and delimits his characters.

"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, Genres, 100.