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About Notes from Underground
How to Write a Russian Novel
From 1866 until his death in 1881, Dostoevsky wrote some of the greatest novels in the Western canon: Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), The Possessed (1871–72), and The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80). Though his genius has been praised and his words have been declared mini revolutions in style, form, and content, he didn’t write in a vacuum. Among his literary peers were the founding fathers of Russian literature: Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, Ivan Turgenev, and Leo Tolstoy. Through their novels and short stories, they created a catalogue of stock characters, plots, and themes. And if you've always dreamed of joining their ranks and writing your own novel in nineteeth-century fashion, here are the tools to inspire your inner Dostoevsky.
To begin with the setting: St. Petersburg is the capital of Russian literature. Peter the Great envisioned his city, planned it, and built it in the model of great European capitals. Despite mapping out its every corner in detail, there was a major flaw in his design: St. Petersburg itself floats on top of a swamp, and the city often finds itself cloaked in a thick fog. During the winters, a slushy, wet snow, almost like sleet, adds to the perpetual humidity. During the summers, endless sunshine, called "white nights" inspires both beauty and madness.
The largest demographic of the fictional St. Petersburg is comprised of whores and clerks. Sure, landlords and beggars, officers and criminals, young virgins and old hags, may wander in and out of stories, but Peter's city teems with struggling government clerks and the prostitutes they can’t afford to patronize. The city once boasted its own red-light district, named the Haymarket, where prostitution was legal, and whores were licensed.
If government service can't pay the bills—and one isn't lucky enough to receive an inheritance—what revenue streams are possible in this imagined St. Petersburg? Apart from running a thriving brothel, a profitable occupation might be to open a gambling ring. These same clerks, scrimping and saving to buy their winter overcoats, bet everything they have trying to draw that perfect hand of cards. Losing only propels them further into debt, which in turn provides material for lamentation; and if an addiction to gambling develops, those poor secretaries might fall victim to insanity.
But in the fictional Petersburg of Russian novels, most roads lead to poverty. So the nights of carousing might lead to more encounters with whores, plunging the petty officials deeper into debt. And a potent cocktail of lust, desperation, and vodka could stir up rivalries, providing ample opportunity to imagine duels. These duels tend to be sparked by humiliation, small or large, not battles over love. On the other hand, if a clerk manages to avoid a duel and scrape up enough kopecks for a night with a prostitute, his paroxysms of joy might inspire him to save the lady from a life of servitude. No matter which course of action he takes, he’ll likely suffer a hangover of conscience the next morning.
All strung together, these components form a juicy if formulaic melodrama, but in the hands of the masters, they form the palette of a nation's literature.
—AMY BORATKO, PRODUCTION DRAMATURG
