On the Dangers of Intimacy (The Vasia Shumkov Paradigm)

And it happened [...] that Jonathan's very self became bound up with David's, and Jonathan loved him as himself. [...] And Jonathan, and David with him, sealed a pact because he loved him like himself. And Jonathan took off the cloak that was on him and gave it to David, and his battle garb, and even his sword and his bow and his belt.

— 1 Samuel 18:1–4

People receive nourishment from one another [...] through the soul, through sensing and imagining one another; otherwise, what can they think about, where can they spend the tender, trusting strength of life, where can they scatter their sorrow and find comfort, where can they die an unnoted death? With only the imagination of his own self to nourish him, a man soon consumes his soul, exhausting himself in the worst of poverties and dying in mindless gloom.

— Platonov, Soul

We like subsisting on someone's else mind ... that's what we like!

— Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Indwelling Self / Relational Self

Among studies of Dostoevsky's conception of personality, two largely incompatible and equally influential schools of thought can be discerned. On the one hand, Dostoevsky has been read as a neoromantic "expressivist" who situated the roots of the personality, and of the world itself, in the inexhaustible depths of the "human soul." The elder Zosima's teaching in The Brothers Karamazov on the organic nature of the personality whose roots "touch other worlds" provides an illustration of this view: Zosima describes our "secret innermost sensation" of a "connection with [...] a celestial and higher world," and the sense that "the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here, but in those other worlds" (14:291). It was in this mystical romantic vein that Vladimir Solovyov spoke of Dostoevsky's belief in "the divine power in the soul" and in its "divine origin." The personality, understood in this way, becomes not only a repository for divinity but also an "all-encompassing," "microcosmic" universe within itself. Various traditions of selfhood stand behind this notion of personality, among them, the Neoplatonic Augustinian self that turns inward to discover the presence of the divine in its depths, and the German romantic self that reaches, in its dark inscrutable basis, into the very sources of nature and of the universe.

In observing the radically social, relational nature of Dostoevsky's characters, however, readers have questioned whether this apparent belief in the infinite inward capaciousness of the self extends to his active psychological portraits. Thus, a second school of thought finds its center in what can be described as Bakhtin's Dostoevsky: a remarkably contemporary, potentially postmodern, writer who reconceived traditional notions of self in intersubjective space. This is the Dostoevsky who, according to Tzvetan Todorov, "rejects an essentialist conception of man," and for whom "the human being has no existence prior to the other or independent of him." Bakhtin called attention to the absence of a psychologized and naturalized sense of self in Dostoevsky's characters, who lack the detailed interiority or personal biography of realist literature, and whose radical inner formlessness abates only in the activity of interpersonal dialogue. These characters, Bakhtin observed, are always on the "threshold," looking outward, existing fully in the "living present," never determined or limited by unconscious lives or biographical pasts. Bakhtin's perspective helps to illuminate the relational nature of personhood in Dostoevsky whose characters apprehend their depths outside of themselves, "in the souls of others." From this perspective, if the self is rooted in other worlds, as Zosima espouses, then those other worlds are not transcendent essences but rather the worlds of other consciousnesses.

Thus, the personality in Dostoevsky is thought of, on the one hand, as an essence, a bottomless depth, encompassing and expressing the entire universe, and on the other, as an activity,event, or point of view that constitutes itself outwardly through relationships. The present chapter engages this duality in commentary by examining the tension between interiority and intersubjectivity already distinctly evident in one of Dostoevsky's early stories, "A Weak Heart" ("Slaboe serdtse"), published in 1848. Both the indwelling and relational models of selfhood are evoked in the story's depiction of how two personalities of significant interior complexity become merged into one extended self.

Intimate Friendship and the Collective Self

"A Weak Heart" depicts the anxious travails and gradual descent into madness of one Vasia Shumkov, a humble, ardent, slightly disfigured clerk who has been entrusted with a large amount of copying work by his superior and benefactor, Yulian Mastakovich. Because of a newly formed engagement with his beloved Liza, whom he has fervently pursued for weeks, Vasia has egregiously neglected his work. His roommate and best friend, Arkady Nefedevich, tries to help him finish the copying, attempting at all costs to shore up his friend's sanity, but Vasia is ultimately beyond saving, overwhelmed as he is by the emotions of his newfound happiness, and tormented by his own professional negligence and apparent "ingratitude" before his benefactor. Vasia undergoes a pitiful public collapse, is removed to an asylum, and Arkady is left alone without his friend in the cold and ghostlike city of St. Petersburg.

The work has been consistently read, for good reason, as "a story of social protest" in its illustration of how a lowly civil servant is crushed by the hierarchical rank and file nature of imperial Russia. According to this traditional reading, the meek Vasia Shumkov, in his wrenching psychological collapse, is a representative of Dostoevsky's "downtrodden" (the focus of his early, socially oriented writing), and the hero's breakdown is the result of his having utterly internalized his subordinate social status. Vasia, it follows, is so terrified of his superiors that he loses his mind as he suffers convulsive and devastating bouts of gratitude and anxiety before them.

When read in the context of Dostoevsky's extended inquiry into the notion of relational personhood, however, the passionate, intimate attachment between Vasia and his roommate, Arkady, seems less a facet of Dostoevsky's social commentary and more the emerging kernel of a larger philosophical and psychological project. The destructive consequences of the pair's loving friendship vividly express the dangers of intimacy in Dostoevsky's world, as the friends' closeness leads directly to the replacement of aspects of the...