With Russia’s long and complicated history regarding social conflict, triumph, and failure, it was the deep intellect of select Russian writers that helped articulate and even combat by pen and satire, the issues of the day. It is with this conviction and criticism of the state for the greater good that captivates readers, ensuring the relevance of these works, especially in today’s world.
Fyodor Dostoevsky is perhaps one of the most infamous writers to come out of the Golden Age of Russian literature and has since transformed the literary world. His name has somehow been echoed in everything from smarmy, elitist cocktail parties to a third of Woody Allen’s films, and yet, his name is synonymous with Russian symbolism, existentialism, expressionism, and psychoanalysis.
As a literary titan, his works, which are still very much wildly influential today, have been adapted into films, plays, and television, while transcending generations throughout the world.
James Joyce praised Dostoevsky’s prose, stating:
“He is the man more than any other who has created modern prose, and intensified it to its present day pitch. It was his explosive power which shattered the Victorian novel with its simpering maidens and ordered commonplaces; books which were without imagination or violence.”
Dostoevsky's most acclaimed works include Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Notes from the Underground, among others. Although, Dostoevsky wasn’t always viewed in such a favorable light. Some of his critics, including Vladimir Nabokov, viewed his writing as excessively psychological and philosophical, rather than artistic. Others found his plots chaotic and disorganized. Tolstoy criticized him for his puppet-like characters, which he compared to E.T.A. Hoffman, an author who Dostoevsky admired.
This brings us to our titular story, The Crocodile. A lesser-known of Dostoevsky's works, The Crocodile is a satirical short story depicting a fictional scenario in 1864 where a man was swallowed by a crocodile, and miraculously unharmed, he was tempted to launch a social movement right within the belly of the crocodile.
The narrator, who some readers may view as a thinly veiled stand-in for Dostoevsky himself, or at least a character who shares his sentiments, visits The Arcade, a mall of sorts, along with his friend, Ivan Matveich, a Russian bureaucrat, along with his wife, Elena Matveich.
As the narrator, along with the couple, visits the Arcade, Ivan is in an especially good mood. However, when they visit the crocodile exhibit, in fact, it’s said the first crocodile to be exhibited in Russia, owned by an especially capitalistic German entrepreneur, that’s when things take a disastrous turn for Ivan, as he is swallowed whole by the crocodile. Though not all is lost as it is discovered Ivan is not only alive, but he is also quite comfortable in the crocodile. And not only does he seem unaware of his horrible circumstances, but he even celebrates them, going as far as to reimagine his place in society as a social leader from within the belly of the croc.
Ivan’s wife, at first upset with the German, orders for the crocodile to have its belly cut open, however, the German refuses, valuing the crocodile much higher than the life of Ivan. When the narrator offers to buy the crocodile, the German seizes his moment and requests an extraordinary amount. That which the narrator, let alone a wealthy member of the aristocracy, could hardly afford. This plays as a humorous moment in the story, however, it is also a damning criticism of how human life is diminished as property.
The narrator returns to Ivan, each time forced to pay the German entrepreneur to see the crocodile, but even more curiously, Ivan, too, values the crocodile’s value over his rescue, much to the narrator’s displeasure, agreeing with the German. Ivan begins to have great dreams for him and his wife, where he is to be led, while still within the belly of the crocodile, to his wife’s boutique where he is to make grand proclamations for the greater public from his unique position.
Admittedly, this is where the narrator begins to lose patience with Ivan and even goes to see their colleague, another Russian bureaucrat, the respectable Timofey Semyonitch. Although, Timofey is quickly noted as a buffoon who pontificates on foreign investment in Russia. He rules the “principles of economics” must rule the day, but he quickly follows this assertion by suggesting he will make sure to visit Ivan’s wife, who has gained suitors by the day, to the point where even the narrator can’t help but become captivated by her beauty.
When Ivan visits Elena she has already become jaded by Ivan and his predicament and all but eludes to an affair she is having with another man. She is flattered by her husband’s grand ideas for himself but quickly dismisses them, going on with her life, and considering the proper time to seek a divorce. By the end of the story, Dostoevsky includes parodies from newspapers regarding the surreal event. Their various exaggerations add to the uneasiness the reader feels at the end of the story.
The Crocodile appeared in the journal Epoch in February of 1865. Epoch was owned by Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail. Mikhail was the stand-in owner and financial manager of the publication due to Dostoevsky's past political history, where he was exiled to Siberia for reading Belinsky and circulating his banned Letter to Gogol, and other works. However, shortly after Mikhail’s death, the journal would soon go under.
More notable, however, are the comparisons critics of the time drew between The Crocodile and one of the leaders of Russian radicalism, Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, whom some scholars consider as a forerunner to Vladimir Lenin. At the time, many saw The Crocodile as a vicious and cowardly lampoon on Chernyshevsky. Chernyshevsky was regarded as one of the most influential critics and positivist thinkers in the late 1850s and early 1860s. His doctoral thesis, The Aesthetic Relations of Art and Reality became a standard work for radicals. Its basic tenant being literature’s main function was to promote social change. Chernyshevsky was arrested on vague charges, just as Dostoevsky himself was earlier in 1849, and while confined he wrote his most famous work, the social Utopian novel, What Is To Be Done? Which had enormous appeal to young radicals.
If the critics were correct, then it would have seemed especially horrible to the public, given that The Crocodile was published a year after Chernyshevsky had been sent to penal servitude in Siberia. Dostoevsky claimed such accusations were unfounded, and in his diaries, writes of his distaste for such a comparison, even going as far to state that he never had a personal problem with Chernyshevsky, and any similarities were mere coincidence. Being as Dostoevsky and Chernyshevsky experienced similar experiences of fate, it’s difficult to argue with Dostoevsky's case from our future perspective.
The Crocodile is an important literary work, not just for the work itself, but for the criticism Dostoevsky faced due to a misguided public opinion. Just as today, we, too, face the same problem of a greater public opinion that is not always privy to the facts, where emotions can muddle our own logic.
