Authors

Discussion

Building on Paperno’s studies of suicide as a cultural institution in nineteenth-century Russia, I approach Dostoevsky’s texts about unhappy marriages (or marriages-to-be) as actual or intended suicides on the part of his heroines. As I read Dostoevsky’s “The Meek One” (1876) in the light of Goethe’s Faust, I offer an interpretation highlighting the good intentions of the pawnbroker as the cause of the Meek One’s suicide and her choice to marry him (as opposed to the wife-beating merchant) as a form of suicide. This choice of the worse fate in “The Meek One” can be linked back to “The Idiot,” whose Nastasya Filippovna makes a calculated decision to wed into the merchant family of the Rogozhins. She comments on how many passions Parfen Rogozhin has and dangerously mocks his passion for her, tormenting him with what seems an intention to provoke him into murdering her, in which she succeeds. 

Dostoevsky’s first novel “Poor Folk” (1846), famously praised by Belinsky as a masterpiece of social justice, if read through a Mamardashvilian, or Goethean lens, presents Devushkin’s good intentions as leading to Varenka’s decision to marry Bykov, a pre-meditated suicide on her part. I argue that echoes of marriage as suicide from “Poor Folk” in “The Idiot” and “The Meek One” are connected via Mephistophelian good intentions bringing evil, which Mamardashvili explores when focussing on Dostoevsky. 

The pawnbroker in “The Meek One” prides himself on educating his wife, ‘forming’ her into his image; his misguided attempts fail to the extent that she forgets he is in the same room and starts singing, which shocks him and takes the veil of confusion away from him (“pelena vdrug upala”). Curiously, a similar detail occurs in “The Idiot” when Marie in Prince Myshkin’s story about the Swiss village forgets about other people’s presence and starts singing, but stops suddenly, as everyone is surprised. This detail may tell us more about The Meek One than Marie, and the persecution to which she is subjected by her husband who aims to “mould” her. Nastasya Filippovna, in contrast, offers her list of books to Rogozhin and suggests that he educates himself (“obrazil sebia”) as he is completely uneducated (“ty sovsem neobrazovannyi chelovek”). “Poor Folk”’s Varen’ka sends better books to the offended Devushkin, guiding his literary choices and hoping to improve his literary tastes, as he is offering his love to her. In my previous work on Dostoevsky I wrote on “obraz” in the religious context of “blagoobraziie” and its antithesis “bezobrazie” in Dostoevsky’s works. As I now investigate the early and late Dostoevsky, I argue that he addresses the institution of marriage and its prospects in the context of education (“obrazovanie”) and that his female protagonists aim to have their lives taken from them when they marry violent men, or commit suicide themselves when their husband’s attempts at educating them are put into action.