Isolation in Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and Kafka's Fiction

Introduction: Isolation as a Literary Theme

Isolation has been a frequent topic in literature and fiction, but it developed into a distinct and crucial theme over the latter half of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, as political and technological developments rapidly diminished the status and influence of the individual in the face of overwhelming economic, political, and social forces. Of course, writing is by definition something of a solitary experience, but the dramatic changes that occurred over this period — especially in areas like Eastern Europe and Russia, which did not exhibit the opulent wealth of the West — seemed to precipitate a special consideration of isolation that acknowledged its peculiar connection to boredom, shame, and active oppression.

By considering how Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, Anton Chekhov's "The Man in a Case" and "The Lady with the Lapdog," and Franz Kafka's The Trial deal with the topic of isolation, one is able to see the various ways in which society isolates the individual — whether through disempowering them socially or politically, through the internalization of shame as a means of behavioral control, or through the direct, oppressive application of legal and physical force when internalized methods of isolation will no longer suffice.

Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground and Political Powerlessness

To begin this study, it is worth noting that the first text under discussion, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, has only ever been available to the public in a censored form as a result of the very same political and social pressures that contributed to its representation of isolation in the first place. The book is divided into two parts, with the first being a kind of extended diatribe or monologue, and it is this portion that, according to Dostoyevsky, government censors altered substantially. The changes were so great that Dostoyevsky wrote that "the misprints are horrendous; it would have been better not to print the next-to-last chapter at all (the most important one, where the idea of the work is itself expressed) than print it as it is, that is, with many deleted phrases and self-contradictions" (Dostoyevsky qtd. in Rosenshield 324). When reading the chapter in question, one can see that Dostoyevsky's criticisms are not without merit, because the Underground Man — as the narrator has been dubbed by critics — seems to arrive very near an important point regarding the reason for his dissatisfaction without ever fully broaching it. Nevertheless, considering this chapter, as well as the concluding chapter to Part I, allows one to better understand how the novel represents the narrator's isolation and the reasons for it, even if those reasons are never given full expression.

In the penultimate chapter of Part I, the Underground Man criticizes "a palace of crystal that can never be destroyed," a reference to Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? and other texts that posited idealized, utopian possibilities for political and social organization (Dostoyevsky 30, Rosenshield 333). The Underground Man rejects this idealized image because it is "a palace at which one will not be able to put out one's tongue or make a long nose on the sly" — or, in other words, it cannot be rejected, mocked, or otherwise diminished by the individual, but instead stands firmly above human desire or agency (Dostoyevsky 30–31). While this chapter is of course more difficult to analyze due to its censored message, one can at least observe that the Underground Man is almost terrified of the political possibilities he sees before him because they represent a kind of political organization unassailable by the individual, to the point that, as he remarks later, "the long and short of it is, [...] it is better to do nothing!" (Dostoyevsky 31–32).

This line begins the final chapter of Part I and introduces the Underground Man's overarching philosophy of "conscious inertia," wherein he isolates himself because his action is essentially meaningless. In the face of unassailable, indifferent political and social organizations, the individual might as well exist motionless, in a vacuum, because his or her actions have no bearing on the surrounding world (Dostoyevsky 32). Thus, isolation in Dostoyevsky's novel is simultaneously imposed and self-maintained, because the Underground Man finds himself initially isolated from society, but his attempts to effect any sort of change — such as his "revenge" on the officer or his conversations with Liza — only serve to reinforce his isolation by demonstrating that he is ultimately unable to put his tongue out at society, even without any "crystal palace."

Chekhov's Use of Shame to Depict Isolation

In two of his short stories, Anton Chekhov examines isolation with something of a finer grain, demonstrating how the psychological experience of shame is one of the means by which society imposes isolation on the individual. Shame is a complex emotion, and relates not only to "a fear of ridicule" — which connotes an external application — but also to "a failure to live up to one's ego ideals," which connotes an internal element (Sperber 175). Shame is so effective as a means of isolating the individual precisely because it contains elements of both; that is to say, it represents an internal chastisement at a failure to live up to external standards of behavior. In Chekhov's "The Man in a Case" and "The Lady with the Lapdog," the defining feature of the central characters is their isolation born out of some internal shame: Belikov isolates himself physically as well as figuratively in the former, while Gurov isolates himself through his unhappiness with his life in the latter.

Conclusion: A Shared Vision of Individual Isolation

The four stories discussed above all deal with isolation in slightly different ways, but this does not mean that they necessarily disagree on either the experience of or reasons for isolation — and particularly the isolation felt during the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Instead, each story describes a phenomenon much larger than any single experience, country, or even historical period. The experience of isolation, while multifarious and constantly changing depending on a number of independent variables, nevertheless stems from common factors in society that all four works consider. Thus, this study has attempted to examine these stories' representations of isolation in order to see what they say about isolation as such, rather than what they might say about each other in a purely comparative sense.