CRAIG S

That is the hysterical world of Dostoevsky; somebody commits some atrocity and then begins to beat his breast, and look, the moral order is preserved and the human soul saved. The sinner forgiven, and that's that. But it's all not so simple and sentimental. That's literature and sentimentality, not real life. One must have inside oneself a piece of crystal, something smooth, clean, and hard--something that mixes with nothing and from which everything else slides off.

--Karel Capek

FROM JOSEPH CONRAD to Vladimir Nabokov to Karel Capek, great writers (often too close to the Russian border for comfort) have censured Dostoevsky for the excess, hysteria and sentimentalism of his work. The influence of the Russian novelist upon these later writers, however, is often quite apparent in their works, and it betrays an undeniable fascination with Dostoevsky's own particular genius. This essay examines such a claim on the basis of a psychological and narrative comparison of Dostoevsky's early novel The Double (1846) with the first part of Karel Capek's novel Hordubal, the first work of what is generally considered his masterpiece in the novel genre, the trilogy Hordubal, Meteor, and An Ordinary Life. From a narrative standpoint, the two novels are quite different: Dostoevsky's story is told from a third-person external viewpoint, while Capek's is a first-person internal monologue. On the other hand, both of these works are studies in schizophrenia; in each, the reader witnesses the gradual disintegration of a consciousness at war with itself. In addition, each elicits sympathy for its protagonist in remarkable similar ways.

The aim of this comparative investigation is twofold. First, by comparing the methods of psychological portrayal in these two works with each other and, in an aside, with similarly narrated works in English and other Western European languages, I hope to demonstrate some of the special narrative potentials that the Czech and Russian languages afford the creative writer. Due to what some linguists and grammarians have referred to as an "underdeveloped" system of reporting speech, Czech and Russian offer, I will argue, unusually favorable conditions for the interpenetration of different voices to create more subtle and flexible registers of discourse, or voice zones, between narrators and characters than is possible in most other Western European languages. Second, I hope to draw attention to an unjustly neglected aspect of an author best know in the West for his Newts and Robots.