On Dostoevsky's Crocodile—Or Beginnings and Ends

Even if you are a fan of Fyodor Dostoevsky, you might not have read The Crocodile. It is not a work that is often discussed in literary criticism or elsewhere. This is understandable, given all of the great and much longer books by Dostoevsky that appear to require commentary first. It is not a ‘major’ work, but I think it is worth discussing.

My copy of The Crocodile.

The Crocodile is a relatively long short story that was first published in the final issue of Epoch—the literary magazine that Fyodor published together with his brother Mikhail between 1864 to 1865. The most significant writing to appear in that magazine was Notes from Underground (1864), which was published across the first four issues. Of course, publishing Notes from Underground is sufficient to vindicate the existence of any magazine. Be that as it may, The Crocodile seems to occupy only a very small spot within the Dostoevskian oeuvre. This is demonstrated by the fact that Joseph Frank, in his authoritative biography of Dostoevsky, refers to The Crocodile only once. In passing, he calls it the "unfinished satirical story"¹ that the writer produced while he was under the immense stress of trying to keep his and his brother’s financially failing magazine afloat.

Frank's comment is the only reference that I have found to the story being uncompleted. In the edition that I have (see picture above), there is no mention of the story's unfinished status. However, if I wasn't already inclined to take Joseph Frank's word on it, the ending to the story itself bespeaks its unfinished nature. It certainly has a makeshift-ending-awaiting-another-installment feel to it. In any case, Dostoevsky never added to the story, so what we have is all that we will get.

“Truly, our beginnings never know our ends.”²

In The Crocodile, a civil servant named Ivan Matveich and his wife Yelena Ivanovna visit a shopping arcade—on the latter's insistence—because a crocodile is being displayed in one of the exhibitions. The married couple, along with an unnamed friend, who is the narrator of the story, spend some time with the crocodile. The crocodile’s name is Karlchen—he is owned by a fussy and acquisitive German fellow. At one point, Ivan Matveich, in an attempt to show off, tickles the crocodile's nose with his glove, at which point the crocodile proceeds to swallow him up. Miraculously, he doesn't die. He is simply stuck inside the crocodile, which turns out to be hollow and surprisingly roomy. Since the owner refuses to harm the crocodile (his livelihood) in order to free Ivan Matveich, the civil servant soon comes to appreciate his new surroundings. He settles in to the point where he even begins to form grand plans for his life from within the crocodile. His coquettish wife, in turn, quickly moves on from her captive husband…

The Crocodile is at times hilarious. Readers familiar with the later works of Dostoevsky might marvel that it was written by the same author. Yet Dostoevsky could be playful and lighthearted, as this story shows. The surreal, satirical nature of the story owes much to Nikolai Gogol. Especially in Dostoevsky's early work, the influence of Gogol is palpable. Dostoevsky used his shorter pieces in particular to experiment with the ridiculous and the eerie, which mark many of Gogol's tales—from The Nose to the stories that make up Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka. This makes sense, because Gogol's style lends itself more to the form of the short story than to that of the novel. It is telling that Gogol’s only novel, Dead Souls, remained unfinished (some consider Taras Bulba a novel, although I think that it is better characterized as a novella).

We can detect Gogol's influence not just in The Crocodile, but also in other stories by Dostoevsky. We find it, for instance, in Bobok (1873)—an underrated but significant story in which a frustrated writer attends an acquaintance's funeral one day and begins to hear the voices and conversations of the dead (which turn out to be terribly mundane—lots of talk about political scandals). We find it also in A Nasty Anecdote (1862), in which a civil servant becomes very drunk and, in an attempt to enact his philosophy of being kind and understanding to his social inferiors, ends up ruining the wedding celebrations of a subordinate. Finally, we find Gogol’s hand in The Double (1846), an early novella in which a government clerk begins to see a much more successful doppelgänger of himself and ultimately goes mad. These works all contain elements of the fantastic and the uncanny or Das Unheimliche—Freud’s term to refer to the psychological experience of the 'strangely familiar' in his study of, among other things, E. T. A. Hoffmann's work.

Interestingly, in Dostoevsky's longer early works, the clearest influence (or at least so it seems to me) is Charles Dickens. Poor Folks (1846), and especially The Humiliated and Insulted (1861), are tragic and romantic tales that center on the struggles of impoverished and downtrodden characters. Here you find Dostoevsky experimenting with another writer that he admired—now in a longer form, to which Dickensian tales are clearly more amenable. In the manner of a true artist, however, these obvious early stylistic and thematic influences soon dissolve, or at least take on a much more subtle shape, as Dostoevsky grows into himself as a writer and leaves (one might argue) everyone behind.

Back to The Crocodile. The press at the time understood the story as a parody of the philosopher and socialist Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who was locked up in St. Peter and Paul Fortress, from where he continued to write and distribute his work. There is something to be said for this. In 1863, Chernyshevsky published the influential novel What Is to Be Done? in response to Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (1862). He was also at the forefront of Russian populism or Narodism (from the Russian narod: 'people' or 'folk'). He furthermore sought to overthrow the reigning autocracy and exchange it for a peasant commune. Dostoevsky hated all of this. He had written Notes from Underground largely in response to Chernyshevsky and those who thought like him (the image of 'The Crystal Palace' was especially meant to drive the point home).

However, Dostoevsky denied that he parodied Chernyshevsky in The Crocodile. I am inclined to believe that he did not do so explicitly. The confinement of Ivan in the crocodile—which is the story’s central scene and image—provides a thin parallel to being in prison, while the circumstances of how and why Ivan got in there do not represent Chernyshevsky's situation very well. Nevertheless, the fact that Ivan Matveich becomes inspired from within the crocodile to "invent an entire social system,"³ which is oh-so-easy because all you have to do is "get off by yourself in some corner—or, for that matter, get into a crocodile—close your eyes, and immediately you invent a complete paradise for all mankind,"⁴ does bring one awfully close to the image of Chernyshevsky writing about socialist utopias from within his prison cell. More than that, these passages from The Crocodile ridicule those who profess to know what is best for mankind from their remote little corners—especially those high-and-mighty social reformers who have never actually lived among the people and who ultimately, through their ignorance and obliviousness, do people more harm than good, like the drunken civil servant in A Nasty Anecdote.

“All one has to do is to be wise and virtuous, and one is certain to be put on a pedestal. If not Socrates, then Diogenes—or perhaps the two of them together. There you have my future role among mankind.”⁵

Interestingly, as in Chekhov's The Death of a Clerk (1883), social anxiety—insecurity about and preoccupation with how you will be perceived by others—is also lampooned in The Crocodile. Immediately after Ivan Matveich affirms that he is alive and well inside the crocodile, he admits: "I’m only worried about one thing, and that is how my superiors will view this episode."⁶ He was supposed to travel abroad, but he instead fell into a crocodile, which is bound to be perceived by his superiors as "not very clever."⁷

One cannot help but think of Kafka's Metamorphosis (1915) while reading The Crocodile. There are important differences between the two tales. In the former, a human being is transformed, metamorphosed, into a creature, while in the latter one is gobbled up by one. There is an ontological difference here, even though it is true that Ivan Matveich appears to remain functioning from within the crocodile, so that it is almost as if he becomes the crocodile. The most striking parallel between the tales, however, is the passive acceptance that marks the psychology of the major characters in the two stories. Something that should be immensely frightening—being transformed into a creature or being swallowed up by one—causes surprisingly little anxiety in itself. Both characters are dehumanized and simply accept the situation as it is. They certainly do not question it or despair over it in the way that we feel that they probably should.  

A final aspect of the story to which I want to draw your attention is the way in which the events of the day are reported in the media. The narrator, toward the end of the story, is handed some newspapers that offer different accounts of what happened at the shopping arcade. (The entire story can, I think, be read as a kind of kaleidoscope of different perspectives.) The reports grossly misrepresent Ivan Matveich's misfortune, in ways that match their ideological outlooks. (Are we surprised?) So we have Hair, a progressive paper, which reminds its readers that "we are progressive and humanitarian and want to catch up with Europe in this respect."⁸ It then proceeds to tell its readers that, after all, a good-natured foreign entrepreneur (the German crocodile owner) came to their capital, which should be a welcome event applauded by all, but then, can-you-believe-it, a corpulent and drunk individual jumped into the crocodile's maw and refused to leave! This all testifying, of course, to the recklessness and backwardness of the Russian temperament. Another newpaper, Leaflet, tells its readers that a certain Mr. X, "a well-known gourmet of high society,"⁹ went into the arcade that day and demanded that the crocodile be prepared for dinner; and when he settled the sum with the owner, he promptly began to eat the animal while it was still alive. The paper continues to express to its readers the hope that this cuisine catches on, for it will bring a profitable new branch of industry to the fatherland.

Dostoevsky’s story, then, is as much a piece of social criticism as it is an indictment of the popular press. The truth is treated loosely and cynically. They cannot even get the details straight of such an extraordinary event! They could, of course; but they would rather not. Has anything changed? 

1. Frank, Joseph. (2010). Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. p. 443.

2. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. (1865/2012). The Crocodile. Translated by Guy Daniel. London: Oneworld Classics. p. 6.

3. Ibid. p. 70.

4. Ibid. p. 71.

5. Ibid. p. 77.

6. Ibid. p. 23.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid. p. 102.

9. Ibid. p. 97.