Dostoevsky and Poe: Conceptions of the Fantastic

Let us contrast Dostoevsky's technique with what is perhaps the epitome of Poe's style of portraying the natural world and is found in his image of the mansion of the Usher's, which resembles a human head, thus invoking a provocative metaphor for the subconscious. This house is thus entirely an interior space. It exists within the consciousnesses of the characters of the tale--one brother, one sister, and the narrator whose head perhaps the mansion in fact is, as suggested by the scene in which he observes the reflection of the house in a tarn before entering it. There is no "pedestrian" side to the house of Usher because there is no extraneous detail, as Fangar ascribes to Dostoevsky's descriptions of St. Petersburg. Every description carries a heavy metaphorical burden and/or is designed to add to the effect of mystery and gloom.

The comparison of Dostoevsky's St. Petersburg--"the most fantastic city in the world"--and Poe's House of Usher felicitates another useful observation: the vast difference in scale between Dostoevsky and Poe's worlds. The House of Usher houses three people--upon the family doctor's ominous exit as the narrator, an old friend of Roderick Usher's who enters the house maintains the triangle of persons. Moreover, as Benjamin F. Fisher suggests in his article "Poe and the Gothic," Roderick and his twin sister Madeline may be aspects of the narrator's psyche--the male and female components thereof. Thus, it is possible to propose a plausible reading of the tale that reduces the dramatis personae to just one, in yet another example of what Todorov describes as Poe's only true narrative style--a monologue. This obviously contrasts in the extreme to Bakhtin's conception of Dostoevsky's polyphonic style in which each character possesses a fully independent voice that cannot be finalized and exists apart from authorial intent. In any case, Poe's world is typically inhabited by one single and desolately lonely figure, whereas Dostoevsky's fictional worlds are populated by a chorus of characters participating in dialogues with each other.

The commonality between the two authors lies in how the layers of consciousness of the characters are pealed back to reveal the deeper motivations of their actions and their most intimate thoughts and feelings. (However, the discovery of motivations has its limits, as the motives of both the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart," among other of Poe's tales and Raskolnikov ultimately remain a mystery.) Madness is one tool that both authors employ both to dissect their characters consciousnesses by accentuating and exaggerating subconscious impulses that are kept in check by sane people, and in order to create the conditions for the fantastic. This in turn raises the question of madness versus rationality again, this time in a new, metafictional light: Poe and Dostoevsky exploit their mad characters in a rational, methodical way in order to create their superrational worlds in which coincidence and higher meaning intersect--this is the world of the fantastic. However, Poe prefers to abandon the world as such in pursuit of indefiniteness and aesthetic, sensual oblivion. Dostoevsky's talent, and the very point of his fantastic realism, lies in is imbuing even the most sordid details of daily life with higher spiritual meaning.

Dostoevsky called Petersburg the most fantastic and unnatural city in the world. In contrast to Poe's practice, however, Dostoevsky provided detailed and realistic descriptions of Petersburg, as any tourist walking along the path that Raskolnikov took from his abode to the pawnbroker's shop well knows. However, there are certain limits to Dostoevsky's fictional worlds: "Nature, in the romantic sense, had little attraction for Dostoevsky, who invokes it rarely and then always with a special purpose. His themes inhere rather in the man-made world of the city; his landscapes are predominantly urban." Fangar, 145.

There is also a most curious psychological phenomenon that is common to both Poe and Dostoevsky's works; we might call it a "fantastic disease." It occurs when a fantasy life replaces real life. Fangar considers the following passage to be a personal confession on Dostoevsky's part in the guise of Dostoevsky's description of a national characteristic of Russians; it also happens to correspond with the romanticized image of Poe--if only to a lesser extent with the actual poet--that was worshipped by Baudelaire, who actually prayed to Poe's ghost, and which was largely accepted as biographical reality until Quinn's breakthrough biography in 1941.

" then in characters eager for activity, eager for spontaneous life, eager for reality--but weak, effeminate, gentle--there arises little by little what is called reverie, and a man becomes at length not a man but some strange creature of an intermediate sort--a dreamer. Do you know what a dreamer is, gentlemen? It is a Petersburg nightmare, it is sin personified, it is a tragedy, mute, mysterious, gloomy, savage, with all the furious horrors, with all the catastrophes, peripeties, plots, and denouements--and we say this by no means in jest. Sometimes you meet a man, distracted, with a vague, lackluster look, a pale, rumpled face, who seems always to be occupied with something terribly distressing, some most puzzling business, sometimes exhausted as if from heavy labors, but as a matter of fact producing absolutely nothing: such is the dreamer, seen from the outside. The dreamer is always difficult because he is uneven to the extreme: now he is too gay, now he is too gloomy, now a boor, now attentive and tender, now an egoist, now capable of the noblest feelings. At work these gentlemen are good for absolutely nothing, and though they workthey only drag out their jobsThey settle for the most part in profound isolation, in inaccessible corners, as if hiding in them from people and from the world [of "from the light": the Russian svet means both], and in general there is even something melodramatic that strikes you at first sight of them. They are morose and taciturn with those at home and absorbed in themselves, but they are very fond of everything lazy, light, contemplative, everything that acts tenderly on the emotions or stimulates their sensations. They like to read, and to read all sorts of books--even serious, specialized ones--but usually drop their reading after the second or third page, for they have satisfied themselves fully. Their fantasy, mobile, volatile, light, is already aroused, their impression is already attuned, and a whole world of dreams, with joys, with griefs, with hell and heaven, with captivating women, with heroic feats, with noble activity, always with some titanic struggle, with crimes and all sorts of horrors, suddenly takes possession of the dreamer's whole being. The room vanishes, as does space; time stops or flies so fast that an hour seems a minute. Sometimes whole nights pass in indescribable delights; often in a few hours one lives through a paradise of love or a whole enormous life, gigantic, unheard-of, marvelous as a dream, grandly beautiful. By some unknown whim the pulse speeds up, tears spurt, the pale moist flashes in the window of the dreamer, he is pale, sick, tormented, and happy. He throws himself onto the bed almost unconscious, and, falling asleep, still feels for a long time a sickly sweet, physical sensation in his heartThe minutes of sobering-up are terrible: the unfortunate cannot bear them, and immediately takes his poison in new, increased doses. Again a book, a musical motif, some ancient recollection, an old one, from real life--in a word, one of a thousand of the most trivial reasons--and the poison is ready, and his fantasy unfolds brightly and luxuriously anewOn the street he walks with his head hung low, paying little attention to those around him, sometimes even here forgetting reality; but if he notices anything, then even the most ordinary everyday trifle, the most empty routine matter, immediately assumes for him a fantastic coloring. His glance is already attuned so as to see the fantastic in everything. Closed shutters amid broad daylight, a twisted old woman, the gentleman coming toward him waving his arms and talking to himself (the sort, incidentally, of which you meet so many), a family picture in the window of a poor little wooden house--all these are already almost adventures." Quoted from Fangar, 147, Fangar's emphasis.

How many of Poe's characters could we identify that match Dostoevsky's description to a remarkable degree? Roderick Usher is one, whose actual physical malady seems to be a sort of nervous condition, an effect of overwrought nerves and aesthetic sensibilities heightened to a morbid extremity. In fact, every single narrator of Poe's fantastic tales corresponds to Dostoevsky's description, all the way up to the confusing of fantasy with reality. Does the narrator of Morella really see his deceased wife returning in his daughter's body? Or is it merely a warped fantasy, which Freud would have a ball with and which may have served as a means for his superego to punish the narrator for wishing his wife's death?

Dostoevsky's diagnosis of the "Petersburg nightmare" also has implications for the fantastic space of Dostoevsky's stories, and, due to the extraordinary similarity between this "nightmare" and the nightmares that consume the minds of so many of Poe's heroes, it illuminates Poe's gloomy worlds as well. This is because it is Dostoevsky's dreamers who experience Petersburg and through whose eyes we often view the city. On the other hand, as we have discussed, Poe's descriptions of the world are not subjective, but rather it is the external world that is part of the system of causalities that "victimize" and determine the characters, as Todorov puts it. In other words, one of Dostoevsky's descriptive techniques is to start from within his characters' psyches and works outwards into their physical environments, which are tinted with their subjective impressions; Poe starts from somewhere even exterior to the story--with a planned effect that he then carefully constructs as he crafts his tales, adhering to an extreme formalist method--and then explores the depths of the human psyche, but only in such of its capacities, thoughts, and feelings that are relevant to the desired effect. The end result, if not the relative profundity, of these two seemingly opposed techniques, is, oddly enough, largely the same--a profound disconnect, and, at the same time, merging of character and environment.

But how does this strange dual interaction between character and environment occur? In Dickens' characters often take on the traits of their environments, while Gogol's works feature absurd anthropomorphisms. Dostoevsky's above description of dreamers contains some useful clues. First, "the most empty routine matter, immediately assumes for him a fantastic coloring. His glance is already attuned so as to see the fantastic in everything." Fangar 147. For the dreamer the first two or three pages of a book, a snippet of a melody, a trivial domestic scene, a random ever day encounter--these are enough to send the dreamer's imagination

Once again it is worth revisiting the narrator of "The Black Cat" and his interrogation about the possibility of seeing mundane coincidences where he found a horrible supernatural sequence of events that led him toward murder, damnation, and execution. If we consider the possibility that Poe's narrator is simply one of Dostoevsky's dreamers, who has lost himself in his fantasy world, which "always with some titanic struggle, with crimes and all sorts of horrors, suddenly takes possession of the dreamer's whole being." Ibid. Similarly, Mabbott mentions that, "At least one of my students suggested that everything was the diseased imagining of the speaker, who had really killed nobody, and mistook for policemen the guards from an asylum." Thomas Ollive Mabbott (E. A. Poe), “The Tell-Tale Heart,” The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe -- Vol. III: Tales and Sketches (1978), p. 789. He also states the fact that most readers believe that the murderous narrator hears his own heart beating at the end of the tale.

It is also worth noting that L. P. Grossman noticed a marked tendency toward "titanic and sick" thoughts in Poe's typical heroes. L.P. Grossman, 116. He saw this trait as making them akin to Raskolnikov and his theory of the superman. Furthermore, can we really say that Poe's heroes, at least in his fantastic and horror tales, accomplish anything apart from murder and self-destruction? Like with Dostoevsky's dreamers, their "titanic struggles" occur only in their minds and dreams; they produce nothing. Some strive for arcane knowledge, like Ligeia, which is arguably both a titanic and productive pastime; others, like Roderick Usher, become accomplished artists and musicians of the most eccentric sort. But this knowledge and skill typically lies too close to the limits of human striving that one cannot return from once crossed, and the quest inevitably brings destruction, madness, and death in its wake.

It is also worth mentioning the psychological ailment that plagues the narrator of "Berenice," for the sake of its similarities with Dostoevsky's diagnosis of dreamers' overactive imaginations latching onto small details of daily life and turning them into prolific sequences of fantasies: "I living within my own heart, and addicted body and soul to the most intense and painful meditationThis monomania, if I must so term it, consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive. It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe. To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device on the margin, or in the topography of a book; to become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day, in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the door; to lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire; to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower; to repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind; to lose all sense of motion or physical existence, by means of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in; --such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to anything like analysis or explanation." Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, p. 643. The correspondence between Poe and Dostoevsky's studies on daydreaming is remarkable, to say the least. But one major consequence of this perspective on reality that is abstracted to the highest degree is a profound destabilization of reality as such, that is, objectivity and the individual's connection to a world that others can relate to. As Dostoevsky notes, dreamers tend to prefer isolation, even extreme isolation. All of Poe's characters from his fantastic tales are loners. They might have extremely intimate, but ultimately destructive and tragic relationships with a female character, or perhaps with their cat, or with an old man with a "vulture eye," but they always end the stories utterly alone. Poe, even goes so far as to take this trait to the most extreme extent possible within the context of a written story, and, as Todorov claims, always constructs monologues. Todorov tells us that, "Poe is incapable of constructing a true alterity." Todorov. Genres, 100.

In Poe's works, even as in Dosotoevsky's description of dreamers, the merest detail can have extraordinary and seemingly irrational consequences. Todorov notes that the old man that the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" murders is nothing more than an eye and a beating heart. This fact has a perverse sense to it. The narrator fixates on the old man's eye and kills him because the eye somehow fascinates and horrifies him, then he hears the beating of the old man's heart as remorse and guilt overcome him--it is a universal law in Poe that evil is punished, and typically in a mirror fashion, and it is understood from the narrator's confession to the police that his own heart will likely soon be stopped by judicial decree, just as the narrator of "The Black Cat" will be hung on the following day, just as he hung his once beloved cat Pluto.

We have already discussed how Sverdlov makes the case that the Devil possesses Raskolnikov through seemingly random or coincidental events. This is a problem that is inherent to the fantastic, and we have examined it through the lens of the problem of naturalism versus supernaturalism that is intrinsic to the fantastic genre. Given Dostoevsky's deeply religious worldview, we agree with Sverdlov's interpretation of the Devil's influence in Crime and Punishment, and indeed we readily admit that the religious dimension of Dostoevsky's work and its relevance to the fantastic in general is a vast topic that we have woefully neglected in this study and we plan to remedy this in a future version of this work. However, it is also possible to propose a reading of Crime and Punishment wherein the "coincidences" that occur after Raskolnikov conceives of the idea of a murder with conscience--Raskolnikov's accidental visit to the pawn broker followed by his accidental overhearing of a conversation about whether a person could conscionably kill the very same pawnbroker, etc.--wherein such coincidences are accounted for by Raskolnikov's mental illness. This ambivalence as to possible interpretations of the fantastic phenomena in Crime and Punishment, in this case split along the line separating an external, supernatural cause--the Devil's pernicious influence in events--and an internal, psychological cause--Raskolnikov's madness--is typical of the fantastic.

The following quote from Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter provides a succinct explanation for the connection between self and landscape in the fantastic genre: "it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature" Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. London: Knight and Son, 1851, p. 189. We note that the conditions of man's seeing signs indicative of his own moral well-being in nature around him, which is the context in The Scarlet Letter from which this quote is taken, presupposes a prolonged morbid and obsessive state of contemplation, or dreaming, as Dostoevsky would have it. As we have seen, the connection between moral sensibilities and the external landscape are more obvious in Poe than in Dostoevsky. In Dostoevsky this connection is sublimated into his conception of fantastic realism, and is infinitely more subtle. Perhaps one of the more obvious examples of nature possessing both atmospheric effect and moral "consequences" for characters can be found in Dostoevsky's use of snow. Such is the case in the first climactic scene in The Double which Golyadkin meets his double while walking home after having disgraced himself at a party in a blizzard, and with the snow that inspires the title of Part II of Notes From Underground in which the narrator recounts the shameful events of his life that led to his forlorn situation described in Part I: "Нынче идет снег, почти мокрый, желтый, мутный. Вчера шел тоже, на днях тоже шел. Мне кажется, я по поводу мокрого снега и припомнил тот анекдот, который не хочет теперь от меня отвязаться. Итак, пусть это будет повесть по поводу мокрого снега." Достоевский, Ф.М. Собр. соч. В 15 тт. Т. 4. С. 481

Our investigations have seemingly led us far afield of the supposed question at hand--the fantastic landscape. But to describe the fantastic landscape requires more than merely listing its typical features--such as crypts, ancient manors, and macabre castles, in the case of Poe; and dirty, humid streets, frozen landscapes, tiny claustrophobic rooms, a climate that is inimical to life, and impoverished districts, as in Dostoevsky--it necessitates also an exploration of self and other, coincidence and fate, choice and consequence. In short, the fantastic landscape is a moral landscape. The fundamental ambivalence of the fantastic genre--its perpetual oscillation between the natural and supernatural--means that the fictional worlds and their events and characters are not only subject to multiple "plausible" interpretations, but also that the apparent boundaries between the internal and external begin to erode. The ending of "The Fall of the House of Usher" in which the ancient ancestral mansion collapses upon the death of the last members of the Usher family symbolizes this merging of self and environment.

Dostoevsky too, at a much more sophisticated level, also explored the mutually informing relationship of environment and man. "He presented for the first time the life of the city in all its sordidness--not simply to show what these conditions automatically did to people, as the naturalists would show, but to raise the problem of how, within them, sentient human beings might pursue the quest for dignity. And on a less literal level, he raised the chaotic city to the position of a symbol of the chaotic moral world of man, so that the contradictions of the second find their counterpart in the contrasts of the first." Fangar, 211. Our emphasis.

Returning to our suggestion of the possibility of explaining Raskolnikov's actions not by demonic influence but through his own troubled mind, just such a psychological reading of Crime and Punishment was offered by A. D. Nuttall in his brilliant article "Crime and Punishment: The Psychological Problem." Nuttall begins his essay, which is in fact a chapter of his book Crime and Punishment: Murder as Philosophic Experiment, Nuttall, A.D. Crime and Punishment: Murder as Philosophic Experiment. Sussex University Press, 1978. Begins with a question that J.D. Grossman cited as being inexplicable--why did Raskolnikov kill the old woman? Nuttall rejects the seemingly obvious explanation that Raskolnikov became a murderer because of malnutrition, poverty, and his abject living conditions, as proposed by Dmitry Pisarev, among other critics. Similarly Nuttall dismisses as insufficient the suggestion that the pressure of watching his mother and sister sacrifice so much for his education, which he squandered, drove Raskolnikov to crime. And thus, Nuttall cites the necessity of investigating Raskolnikov's psychology for clues.

Nuttall finds evidence of schizophrenia initially in Raskolnikov's "mechanical stupor" or hypnotic state when committing his double murder and notes the irony of his idea about achieving ultimate freedom through murdering the old pawnbroker and in fact ending up enslaved by the act instead. Ibid., 157. The next symptoms of schizophrenia are noticeable in the manner in which Raskolnikov converses with his mother and sister Dounia after the murder. "Raskolnikov speaks with a ponderous care which suggests a mind focusing upon a distant object. Dounia is terribly disturbed. She wonders, `Is he being reconciled and asking forgivingness as though he were performing a rite or repeating a lesson?'" Ibid., 158.

Nuttall claims that Raskolnikov "is, so to speak, his own hypnotist. First we have the inducing of the `trance.' This is accomplished over a period of months, by solitude, poor food, and the monotonous, obsessive reiteration of certain sentences and words: `Everything is permitted,' `Exceptional Man,' `destruction of the present for the sake of the better,' "Napoleon." And together with all this comes the self-addressed imperative: `Dare.' Of course the proximity of Raskolnikov's condition to one of trance varies considerably from day to day, and from hour to hour, but that does not matter; the groundwork has been laid. The suggestion introduced during trance will produce effects when the trance has passed off. But for that, of course, you need some sort of signal, a `trigger.'" Ibid., 160.

Before we discuss the trigger that Nuttall believes invoked Raskolnikov's hypnotic state, it is worth noting the frequency of cases of hypnosis in Poe's fantastic tales. "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains," "Mesmeric Revelations," and "The Facts of the Case of M. Valdemar" are some examples of Poe's repeated exploration of the possibilities of hypnosis for inducing psychological states that achieve the fantastic genre's aims: to leave the world of the purely rational and explainable and enter into communion with forces beyond our immediate comprehension--forces that may, or may not, exist.

Raskolnikov's "trigger" comes in the form of a randomly overheard conversation about the idea of murdering a woman whom he happened to know, for a reason--to rid the world of a parasite--that he happened to sympathize with due to his own parallel theories. Sverdlov sees in this string of coincidences, as we have discussed, the workings of the Devil. Given the religious foundation of Crime and Punishment, this is a plausible explanation. (And incidentally the fact that Sverdlov argues for the immediacy with which the Devil enters the scene after Raskolnikov's conceiving of murder has resonances in Poe, for whom mirror punishment is generally swift and "logical," according to his moral laws--just as the Devil's influence imbues a supernatural logic to what would otherwise be a series of random events in Raskolnikov's mundane existence.)

However, Nuttall is interested in pursuing a different track: "After months spent in a sort of private dream, Raskolnikov, indeed no free man but rather a solidly programmed being, hears quite objectively from another's lips the imperative which has before existed only within the dream. Hardly knowing why, he finds himself moving into action. Our analogy with hypnotism thus provides us with an admissible word for the function in the novel of this episode. We call it "the Trigger."

This concept of a "trigger" that causes a hypnotic reaction if the right conditions are present in the subject--generally a state of prolonged nervous agitation, morbid and obsessive thoughts, general emotional sensitivity etc.--is highly applicable to Poe. How else do we explain the obsession with the old man's "vulture eye" on the part of the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart?" Another explanation that has been forwarded, as Mabbott did, was that Poe was playing with the traditional folk superstition of the Evil Eye. That is another valid interpretation but in no way discredits or supersedes the psychological reading according to which Poe's narrator has become hypnotized by the old man's eye--indeed these interpretations should exist concurrently in order to maintain the fantastic. Similar episodes in Poe are ubiquitous: Ligeia's eyes, Morella's eyes, Berenice's teeth, Pluto in "The Black Cat," caskets in "The Premature Burial"--the list goes on. All of these physical objects are obsessed over by Poe's pathological narrators, and they tend to be the catelysts through which fantastic phenomena occur. For example, in "Ligeia," the main character believes his beloved has returned from the grave when he sees her eyes peering out of the face of his second wife. Or in "The Black Cat" the narrator's hitherto innocent infatuation with his cat Pluto turns into a murderous obsession and a series of fantastic mishaps partly facilitated by Pluto's uncanny double culminating in his "accidental" murdering of his wife and subsequent execution.

Nuttall discusses the definition of "schizophrenia" and its applicability to Raskolnikov. "The etymology of the word gives us "split mind" but the term has come to be used [to describe] those persons in whom certain consecutive lines of thought are grotesquely disjoined from the normal humane context. Thus schizophrenic utterance is not always irrational; on the contrary it can exhibit formal rationality of a high order, together with a crass incapacity to notice the material context." Nuttall 160.

We are thus beginning to see cracks form in our intuitively sensible opposition between reason and madness. Take, for example, the case of the narrator of Berenice, who is fascinated by his wife's teeth, a fascination that continues even after her death. Therefore, he disinters who corpse, breaks into her coffin, and plies her teeth out of her skull. And why not? She was certainly not using them and he would evidently derive more pleasure from possessing them Berenice was. To a disturbed mind suffering from a separation of a certain logical train of thought from the material and emotional contexts associated with them, Poe's character's actions are "logical."

But there is another aspect of the schizophrenic character that drives the wedge even deeper into the opposition of rationality and madness: "This lack of contextual awareness, though not yet disabling, is, identifiably, schizophrenic in character. It is interesting that the insanity of such language lies not in its content but in its form and presentation. This has some bearing on recent attempts, such as R. D. Laing's, to argue that the schizophrenic is really sane. The argument goes something like this: The advanced schizophrenic (far more advanced than Raskolnikov) says, `My mother sticks pins in my head'; the ordinary world dismisses this as mere nonsense, but an investigation of the family situation reveals that the mother's importunate treatment of her son is admirably described by the metaphor of `sticks pins in my head.' The argument turns; it will be noticed; on rescuing the content of the schizophrenic's words. But the whole point about schizophrenia is that the subject often gets the content right and the form wrong. In the present example, the subject is insane not because he says his mother maltreats him, but because he says it metaphorically without knowing that he has employed metaphor." Nuttall, 164-165. Nuttall's emphasis.

One consequence of this is that it becomes possible to dismantle Sverdlov's argument about the Devil's influence on Raskolnikov by suggesting that the (mildly) schizophrenic Raskolnikov, in stating in his confession to Sonia that, "I want to prove one thing only, that the devil led me on then and he has shown me since that I had not the right to take that path, because I am just a louse as all the rest." was speaking metaphorically, without knowing it. That is, he believed that the Devil took possession of him in the same way in which the hypothetical schizophrenic in the above example says, "My mother sticks pins in my head." Objectively speaking, this is not true. But metaphorically speaking, it efficiently communicates the schizophrenic's familial relations. Similarly, metaphorically it is true that Raskolnikov was persecuted by devils after committing murder, as miserable and ironically anticlimactic existence after the crime. Whether or not Raskolnikov literally means what he says will depend, according to Nuttall's argument, on his degree of schizophrenia. Whether or not the devil he describes actually exists is a question that the fantastic cannot, and must not, answer.

In proposing this psychological explanation, we reiterate that we do not believe that it explains away Sverdlov's argument. It merely offers the "natural" explanation" to accompany Sverdlov's supernatural one, thus maintaining the necessary hesitation that characterizes the fantastic genre. The theological answer of course, is, yes, the Devil possessed Raskolnikov as soon as he invited the Devil to do so by deciding to commit murder, and moreover, having the hubris to concoct a philosophy that justified the murder. But just as religion provides a supernatural solution to what would otherwise be random occurrences in life, the psychological solution gives a sense of order to what would otherwise be interpreted as disordered and chaotic mental events. As Nuttall succinctly puts the case, "`Schizophrenia' alone accommodates the notion of an essentially rational insanity." Ibid., 169. It is thus no accident that symptoms of schizophrenia are ubiquitous in Poe and Dostoevsky's works, up to and including the actual splitting of the mind that the etymology of the world suggests, in the cases of Golyadkin, William Wilson, and an assortment of other unfortunates.

Nuttall makes one more point that is essential for contextualizing Raskolnikov both within Dostoevsky's political and religious philosophy and within one of the more pressing concerns of this current study. It has to do with Poe and especially Dostoevsky's overarching battles against the philosophical and political calculation of the human will, its feelings, capacities, and desires. "The second reason for calling Raskolnikov deranged implies that the theory [of the superman] is itself wrong, not because the reasoning is incorrect, but because the premise itself is unsound: the quantification of human happiness and misery, and the use of this as a sufficient basis for all moral decisions is itself grotesque because it is inadequate to the real richness and complexity of moral experience." Nuttall, 169. We believe it no coincidence that Poe and Dostoevsky found the means to fight against this quantification (and exploitation they would say) of the human experience through the medium of the fantastic genre. The fantastic essentially facilitates a constant intermingling of normal existence and the moral plane.

A final element featured in both Poe and Dostoevsky's art that we will now analyze that can is parody. Parody is more prevalent in Poe's art, than Dostoevsky's, but it is not uncommon in Dostoevsky as well. Whatever modern critics might make of Bakthin's claims about menippean satire, or even the very existence of the genre as such, not to mention its supposed influence on modern authors--we believe Bakhtin was on to something when he called Dostoevsky's work deeply menippean and then stated that all menippean satire is parodic. We do not intend to either interrogate or to defend these claims here, and indeed these two statements contradict one of Bakhtin's central propositions in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics about Dostoevsky's works being free of authorial voice (we disagree), since Bakhtin's conception of parody implies an authorial voice, according to Bakhtin's own definition of parody. However, Bakhtin was sensitive to an aspect of Dostoevsky's art that is relevant to the current study and that he had in common with Poe.

Thus any and all passing references we make to menippean satire in relation to Dostoevsky and Poe, given the growing theoretical indefensibility of Bakhtin's category, are used in this study merely as an efficient means of isolating certain common features of our two authors' works that fall under the category of Bakhtin's menippea. Be that as it may, Bakthin claimed Poe was "close in essence to the menippea" and that Dostoevsky took from him Poe's talent for putting his characters in extraordinary situations. Incidentally, in addition, according to Bakhtin, mennipean satire also commonly deals with the theme of utopia, which is of great importance to this study. We thus wish to narrow our analysis down to three general features, whether menippean or not: parody, extraordinary psychological and external positions, and utopia.

The last work in that Dostoevsky published of Poe is The Narative of Arthur Gordon Pym. As we have already mentioned, of all the critics cited in this study, only L.P. Grossman conducted any analysis of this novel's relevance to Dostoevsky's art. The most obvious classification of Arthur Gordon Pym is that it is an adventure tale, as it recounts the history of Pym's ill-fated and fantastic voyages from Nantucket to Antarctica, facing mutiny, starvation, treacherous natives, and mystical creatures along the way. However, Frederick S. Frank, in Polarized Gothic: An Annotated Bibliography of Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym, called Poe's only novel a "Bermuda Triangle" for literary critics, which suggests that even our simple process of classification may not be entirely straightforward. Meanwhile Douglas Robinson says of it that, "If any novel ever was, Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is the interpreter's dream-text," suggesting a plethora of possible interpretations of the novel. Douglas Robinson, “Reading Poe's Novel: A Speculative Review of Pym Criticism, 1950-1980,” Poe Studies, December 1982, Vol. XV, No. 2, 15:47-54.

Lisa Gitelman, in her article "Arthur Gordon Pym and the Narrative of Edgar Allan Poe" argues that Poe's novel is a parody of contemporaneous exploration literature. Not only that, but Poe employed meticulous detail of the voyage in order to create a sense of realism. "Poe's novel mocks the exuberance for exploration voyages and voyage accounts that gripped America in the 1830s." Arthur Gordon Pym and the Novel Narrative of Edgar Allan Poe Lisa Gitelman. Nineteenth-Century Literature. Vol. 47, No. 3 (Dec., 1992), pp. 354. Evelyn's Hinz's 1970 study identifies "The Adventures of Aurthur Gordon Pym" as Menippian satire. Hinz, Evelyn J. ” `Tekeli-li': The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as Satire,” Genre, 3 (1970), 379-399. Gitelman also notes that the realism of the novel is sustained by Poe's pervasive use minute details describing the voyage and the geography and wildlife discovered along the way. Indeed Poe even went so far as closely paraphrase (and sometimes mock) lengthy passages from actual travel accounts, in a technique "that advances the novel's mimicry of exploration literature." Arthur Gordon Pym and the Novel Narrative of Edgar Allan Poe Lisa Gitelman. Nineteenth-Century Literature. Vol. 47, No. 3 (Dec., 1992), pp. 354. Surely Dostoevsky, who had commented on Poe's power of detail in his introduction to Poe's three tales printed in first ever tome of Vremya in 1861, could not have failed to notice its prolific use in the the novel that he published in his second tome of Vremya in the same year. Certainly Pym found himself in one extraordinary situation after another, both psychological and external, which matches Dostoevsky's description of Poe's fantastic technique that he had written in the volume of Vremya proceeding the one in which he published Arthur Gordon Pym.

Another feature that is present in Poe's novel and that is part and parcel with Poe's moral universe as a whole, is the concept of mirror punishment, which Poe most explicitly elaborated in "William Wilson." This theme plays out in two notable occasions. In the first, the last four survivors of an ill-fated sea voyage about the ship Grampus are reduced to utter desperation due to inclement weather and a lack of food and water. One of them, Parker, insists that they draw straws in order to determine which of them should be eaten in order to ensure the preservation, at least for a time, of the remaining three. After a harrowing first-person narrative description of each member of the crew one by one, it is--unsurprisingly for those readers familiar with Poe's stories--precisely Parker who draws the short straw and is summarily eaten. In the second case, the natives of an obscure island not far from Antarctica, after feigning friendship with the crew of the Jane Guy and entering into trade with them in an elaborate ruse, brutally betray and butcher the crew. However, after setting fire to the ship, thousands of the natives are

killed and maimed when the gunpowder supply aboard the ship explodes. Thus, while The Narrative of Gordon Pym is certainly classifiable as an adventure story, it is also, according to many interpretations, a parody of an adventure story, with a touch of the fantastic--with the appearance of the white giants at the very conclusion of the story--and a dab of horror--with the appearance of the ghost ship "manned"

by inert, rotting corpses and the above-mentioned scene of cannibalism.

Compellingly, of all the works Dostoevsky published works listed--if counted in the number of pages they occupied collectively in Vremya tomes I and II--111 pages in total--95 pages are comedic or parodic, while only 16 pages are written in a "serious" style (and given G. Bograd and other critics' reservations about the seriousness of even these tales, we place this adjective in quotation marks). Thus approximately 86 percent of Poe's prose that Dostoevsky published is humorous and parodic ("The Devil in the Belfry") or simply parodic (The Narrative of Gordon Arthur Pym). Remarkably, apart from one sentence in Widnдs's study about Poe and Dostoevsky's "pathological humor," and a similar passing remark in L.P. Grossman's study, there exist no other investigations that we are aware of regarding the humor and parody in Poe and Dostoevsky. Widnдs, 32. We thus believe that, given the relative percent of parodic writing that Dostoevsky published out of all of Poe that did versus the relative attention this element of Poe's art has received in relation to Dostoevsky, there is room in the critical literature to explore this area further.

After all, Dostoevsky wrote and published "A Nasty Story" (Скверный анекдот) in Vremya in 1862, a year after publishing Poe. A biting social satire, Dostoevsky's short story features another variation of, and precursor to, his underground man. Ivan Ilyitch Pralinsky, a recently minted general in the civil service who professes to lofty and liberal social ideas as a means of aggrandizing himself socially and flattering his ego, certainly suffers from a psychological affliction very akin to Poe's Imp of the Perverse. After getting drunk at a party with two senior colleagues and making unwelcome speeches on social justice and suffering wounded vanity, Ivan Ilyitch drops in uninvited on a humble subordinate's wedding. He is irresistibly drawn toward the wedding, despite, or because of, the great breach of social etiquette, fantasizing about making a moral point and winning the love and adoration of the revelers and even entering the annals of their family histories. His dreams are thwarted by the utter awkwardness of the situation and the growing hostility of the other guests toward him. An agonizing night of drunkenness, shame, and chaos ensues.

Ivan Ilyitch's Imp of the Perverse-like qualities are detectable in his confusion as to his actual motives as well as in his unfailing compulsion to make a buffoon of himself and to vex his soul, as Poe would say. Moreover, we can already see Dostoevsky's appropriation of these qualities and his exploitation of them in favor of his political attacks. The object of his parody is

In short, it is possible to see in Ivan Ilyitch a sort of prototype for the Underground Man. Ivan Ilyitch is confused and much less self-conscious than the latter character, but nonetheless his irrational and perverse qualities are put to the service of disturbing a social order--and this regardless of his success or eloquence--that is apparently unsatisfactory in Dostoevsky's eyes.

There are also strong elements of menippea in "A Nasty Story," including a carnival king who is decrowned in Ivan Ilyitch. Bakhtin claims that the crowning and subsequent uncrowning of the figure of the carnival king is a primary carnival act. While the hapless protagonist of this tale bears no immediate resemblance to a character in one of Poe's tales. Indeed Poe never offers anything close to the depth of psychological characterization that Ivan Ilyitch, along with several other characters in Dostoevsky's short story, receive. However, the overarching plot of the story is reminiscent of "The Devil in the Belfry," which Dostoevsky had, of course, printed just one year prior. In both stories an unwelcome intruder commits social transgressions and shatters the peace of a community. In both stories it is the stringency of the social taboos, heavily parodied in both cases, that cause the uproar when they are shattered.

Furthermore, the general malice of the communities in which the events occur are channeled onto the transgressor. The wedding revelers want nothing more than Ivan Ilyitch's departure--except perhaps his humiliation--while Poe's grotesque ends with the following lines: "Affairs being thus miserably situated, I left the place in disgust, and now appeal for aid to all lovers of correct time and fine kraut. Let us proceed in a body to the borough, and restore the ancient order of things in Vondervotteimittiss by ejecting that little fellow from the steeple." Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, 742.

To belabor this point of the two tales' similarities would put us on rather shaky ground, and is, moreover, not necessary for our argument. Nonetheless, the spirit and general theme of these two stories demonstrate a kinship that goes far deeper than these surface similarities in plot: and that is, a tendency toward parody as a means of criticizing contemporaneous social and political trends that the two authors saw as generally destructive and corrosive to the human soul.

Another strong menippean element in "A Nasty Story" is ubiquitous scandal; scandal and the transgressions of social norms and the resultant shame and humiliation are the very fabric with which this tale is spun. Bakhtin writes, "Very characteristic for the menippea are scandal scenes, eccentric behavior, inappropriate speeches and performances, that is, all sorts of violations of the generally accepted and customary course of events and established norms of behavior and etiquette, including manners of speech." Bakhtin, 117. This description could very well serve as a program note for "A Nasty Story," all the way down to Ivan Ilyich's drunken slurred speech, which is summarily made fun of.

A final striking element of menippean satire, present in both "Some Words" and "A Nasty Story," as well as being a theme that we have had cause to return to again and again in this study as it is central to Dostoevsky's interest in Poe, is the theme of utopia. Bakhtin writes, "The menippea often includes elements of social utopia which are incorporated in the form of dreams or journeys to unknown lands." Bakhtin, 118, Bakhtin's emphasis. Utopia, or rather, parodied anti-utopia is a frequent fixture in Poe's prose. In "Some Words" the mummy destroys the characters' illusions that they are living in the most advanced human civilization that has existed in history, revealing to them that their civilization's accomplishments are paltry in comparison to those of ancient Egypt (according to the mummy). Similarly many of Dostoevsky's characters dream of a utopian society, including Ivan Ilyich, who envisions himself as a sort of shepherd ushering the lower classes of Imperial Russia into a progressive future characterized by mutual understanding and love, and, of course, who will, of course, paradoxically worship him and be beholden to him for his efforts. In this way he is, as we have already mentioned, connected to the Underground Man, who bitterly inveighs against misguided utopian projects in Part I of Notes from Underground.

We hope that this brief analysis of parody in Poe and Dostoevsky at the very least demonstrates how it is yet another point of affinity between these two authors. Moreover, they both employed this technique in their polemics against rational socialist utopian projects. At any rate a comparative study of Poe and Dostoevsky's use of parody and humor more generally is lacking in the current literature and we have touched upon at least some of the many possible angles for attacking this problem, suggesting a possible directions for future study.

Conclusions

We hope to have outlined some of the essential problems that are at stake--literary, social, religious, and psychological--in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky; and in particular, the areas in which these problems overlap, or else where similar aesthetic, philosophical, or moral solutions are presented. As the foremost area of overlap is related to genre--and namely, the fantastic--this research has largely taken the form of a genre study. As such, we utilized several theories of the fantastic, and in particular that of Tzvetan Todorov, to coax out the moments of affinity between our two authors. Such a strategy was perhaps more successful in our examination of Poe, whose work Todorov characterizes as both pushing the bounds of, and being bound up in, and circumscribed by, formal limits--while at the same time exploring the most extreme aesthetic states and events of human existence. As the lesser of the two writers, his work was more easily encompassed by the application of Todorov's theory of the fantastic, as well as Todorov's structural approach to questions of genre in general. The epic stature of Dostoevsky's creative efforts in contrast to the humble proportions of this present study, made it impossible to do justice to any but a few of the specifics of Dostoevsky's treatment of the fantastic, let alone other dimensions of his work.

Nevertheless, we necessarily touched upon elements of Dostoevsky's realism, his religious convictions, and his political beliefs and how they informed his use of the fantastic, and how he actually employed the fantastic to pursue his realist, religious, and political programs. Indeed, it is precisely here, in this question of the utility of the fantastic genre, that Poe and Dostoevsky converge in agreement about, and wage a literary war against, the pitfalls of a mechanizing world, its quantification of the human spirit, and the resultant sullying of the mysteries of life, God, and the universe. Here we see definite indications of Poe's influence on Dostoevsky.