Dostoevsky and Poe: Conceptions of the Fantastic

Yet they meet for a moment only to diverge again along different trajectories to what they each considered the Ultima Thule of human experience--Dostoevsky to his Orthodox God, and Poe to his strangely concomitant aesthetic and material oblivion. In a sense, they could not have gone in more opposite directions: Dostoevsky returns to the soil with the teachings of Christ and dreams of a worldly paradise of brotherly love through universal suffering; Poe drifts off into the universe escaping from his own suffering and carrying with him the seeds of his own annihilation into infinite self-diffusion, according to the metaphysical laws of his self-proclaimed magnum opus "Eureka."

And yet, perhaps the uneven results of our comparative study are not wholly untoward, for in a sense we proceeded along the lines of inquiry that Dostoevsky detailed in his "Introduction to Three Stories by Edgar Poe." We started with those features of Poe's style that Dostoevsky took note of--which were essentially all part of Dostoevsky's elucidation of Poe's conception of the fantastic--and this at a time when Dostoevsky was in the process of conceiving his own mature vision of the fantastic--fantastic realism. Thus proceeding, we attempted to plumb the depths of Poe's art, while listening intently for echoes of Dostoevsky's own therein. As a result, an interesting conundrum presented itself: Dostoevsky's work subsequent to his having written about and published Poe bears striking stylistic and thematic similarities to Poe's; so too, however, if to a lesser extent, do many of those works Dostoevsky had written before he was likely to have read Poe.

Nonetheless, we believe that we have detected a shift in Dostoevsky's thematic interests that occurs at around 1861, when he published Poe. There seems to be a honing of his talent for painting scenes of horror and an acceleration of his dialectical exploration of the human soul, which at least formally speaking, resembles Poe's eternal oscillations between opposites along the borders of some extremity or another--often thematically comparable in both authors--madness vs. rationality, love vs. hate, the natural vs. the supernatural, life vs. death, and beyond

Doubles are a common result for both authors--the unintended consequences of the moral vicissitudes and ideological undercurrents of modern life, as are mentally deranged and morally crippled titans of human striving: Dostoevsky's febrile denizens of Petersburg--insulted and injured--and Poe's aloof geniuses, removed to vaguely caricatured gothic environs. Both writers are hailed as prophets, to a greater or lesser extent, and universal suffering, whether as a moral necessity for the regeneration of mankind or an aesthetic proclivity that penetrates into the unconscious mind, characterizes both of their oeuvres.

How much of this is coincidence, how much is due to Dostoevsky's studying of Poe's craft, or how much is due to a kinship of spirit that transcended time, culture, language, and continent is a question worthy of the fantastic genre. As such, we have attempted to locate the material evidence indicating influence in our authors' texts while maintaining due appreciation for the spiritual connection--however elusive--between two alienated men of modernity, possessed of tremendous, if unequal, talent and vision--out of place in the mechanized, industrializing world, physically ill, mentally troubled, and spiritually restless.

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