How Bednye ljudi smell(s)
In his letter to Varvara Alekseevna on April 12, Makar Devushkin performs for her a vivisection of his living quarters and writes a detailed physiological sketch of his surroundings (Dostoevskij 22). The house’s walls are suffused with poverty, bitter tears, and even disease, in a word, the house is not very nice and life there is not overly pleasant.
“Начну сначала <…> больше порядку будет,” Devushkin writes. And so, he gives Varvara a good look at the house’s arrangement, beginning in the reception-room, which is yet bright, clean, and spacious. Things start to soil with the greasy and odoriferous galley and the stairs, “винтовая, сырая, грязная, ступеньки поломаны.” This initial description of the physical space — a rapid series of adjectives linked paratactically rather than logically, resembling spoken speech more than a carefully composed sentence — is such that it immediately creates an acute representation of decay. Devushkin also forces the body into his description: “стены такие жирные, что рука прилипает, когда на нихопираешься” (22). That is, his boarding house is not merely to be seen by the reader but physically experienced. As Devushkin’s hand sticks to the grease of the wall, our fingers begin to stick to the grease of the page. Such details, indeed, exemplify realism’s insistence on embedding characters within concrete material circumstances; human existence becomes inseparable from the texture of its surroundings. Apart from sight, Varvara is also given a good listen to the stir of the house in the morning as its inhabitants rise, stamp their feet, and head to work; and in the evening as they play cards and host parties. She even hears the subdued sobs that escape through the door of the house’s isolated corner room.
But Devushkin’s rather brisk tour through the house’s floorplan is followed by an elaborate description of its atmosphere: above all, Varvara is given a good sniff of dirt, litter, eggshells, and fish-bladders. “Запах дурной… одним словом, нехорошо,” he admits.
Я уже описывал вам расположение комнат; оно, нечего сказать, удобно, это правда, но как-то в них душно, то есть не то чтобы оно пахло дурно, а так, если можно выразиться, немного гнилой, остро-услащенный запах какой-то. На первый раз впечатление невыгодное, но это всё ничего; стоит только минуты две побыть у нас, так и пройдет, и не почувствуешь, как всё пройдет, потому что и сам как-то дурно пропахнешь, и платье пропахнет, и руки пропахнут, и всё пропахнет, — ну, и привыкнешь. У нас чижики так и мрут. Мичман уж пятого покупает, — не живут в нашем воздухе, да и только. Кухня у нас большая, обширная, светлая. Правда, по утрам чадно немного, когда рыбу или говядину жарят, да и нальют и намочат везде, зато уж вечером рай. В кухне у нас на веревках всегда белье висит старое; а так как моя комната недалеко, то есть почти примыкает к кухне, то запах от белья меня беспокоит немного; но ничего: поживешь и попривыкнешь (22).
Although Devushkin attempts to present his life methodically to Varvara (moving rationally from the outer shell to the internal workings), it is evident that what he endeavors to explain actually resists orderly representation — and his poverty appears not as a neat system but as an overwhelming sensory environment. This tension between methodical narration and chaotic reality exemplifies a central feature of Devushkin’s struggle throughout the novel to organize an experience that exceeds his ability to interpret and transcribe it. Furthermore, the smells of the boarding house intensify the gulf between Devushkin’s social and moral aspirations and his social reality: his spirit longs for the cultivated literary world, he fantasizes about writing a book; yet his body remains embedded in rankness and rotting sweetness.[1]
How, then, does the olfactory discourse here structure the larger social world of both Bednye ljudi (1845), and Russian literary and social culture in the second half of the nineteenth century? Given olfaction’s strong affective nature, the smells that Devushkin invokes in his letter signify his status in such a direct way that bypasses any conscious reflection — that is, odor affects the body before it can be abnalyzed intellectually, evidenced by the ambiguities in his description. Smell is an immediate sensation, notoriously resistant to precise language and articulation: see, for example, Devushkin’s use of phrases such as kakoj-to and esli mozhno vyrazit’sja, which reveal the limitations of representation. One also wonders how it is that an odor could be just nemnogo gniloj, as if a letter sent on April 11 would have smelled more pleasant, and on April 13, utterly unbearable; nor is it entirely clear where the ostro-uslashchennyj lies on this olfactory spectrum. Despite being the second step in his “systematic explanation,” then, olfactory descriptions betray his living conditions faster than the preceding visual representations to produce an impression of his moral atmosphere. The smell of the house becomes a material sign of Devushkin’s humiliation and vulnerability, and odors soon acquire a psychological dimension.
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The house’s unpleasant smell, Devushkin hastens to explain, disappears quickly, though certainly not because the air improves. The dweller becomes utterly saturated with it, and we as readers also dissipate in it and grow accustomed to the novel’s filth: “и сам как-то дурно пропахнешь, и платье пропахнет, и руки пропахнут” (23). It is important to note that the repetition of the verb propachnut’ is not only emphatic but structures the sentence rhythmically and structurally in a way that dramatizes the gradual engulfment of the human subject by his environment.[2] This repetition functions as a demonstration of the realist conviction that social reality permeates the individual — as previously mentioned, smell bypasses intellectual mediation and affects the body immediately. And, never forgoing the importance of threes in the tradition of Russian literature and philosophical thought, it also stands to be highlighted that the clause itself unfolds in three parallel segments: first the self stinks, then the clothing, and finally the hands. Each repetition advances the sense of permeation further into the body’s immediate sphere, as though the olfactory were spreading from the air into the person and then throughout every surface that mediates between body and world, human identity and the material atmosphere that surrounds it. In a word, the boundary between subject and environment collapses.[3] The structure of this repeititon also suggests a sort of narrative progression: the first clause refers to Devushkin’s own body. The second shifts outward to his clothing, the most visible sign of one’s social identity. The third returns to the body again, though this time with a focus on the hands, the part most associated with work, labor, and everyday activities such as cooking meat; washing and scrubbing; and hanging linen out to dry. In this way Devushkin traces a circle between body and socio-economic appearance — odor permeates both the private self and the public lens through which that self is perceived. The downtrodden dweller’s clothes and hands carry the odor of his dwelling and, consequently, smell becomes an involuntary signal of his class.[4]
After describing the wretched smell of the house, Devushkin turns at once to its inhabitants: there is the warrant officer who promises his patronage; the literary tschinovnik who gives parties that are nonetheless delicate and innocent; the impoverished Gorshkov family in the corner room; the landlady, “сущая ведьма <….> Худая, как общипанный, чахлый цыпленок”; and her servant Fal’doni, “рыжий, чухна какая-то, кривой, курносый, грубиян” (23). In moving directly from the characterization of the atmosphere to the individuals who inhabit that space, the material environment becomes a key to understanding the personalities within it. Indications of the environment posessing unpleasant olfactory properties generate a sense of expected moral degradation and prepare the reader to encounter lives shaped by similarly stuffy conditions of constraint. Indeed, within the boarding house each tenant represents a different variation of poverty and aspiration within the bureaucratic world of Petersburg. The warrant officer embodies a faint hope of economic support; the literary clerk, a perhaps fragile cultivation of middle-class culture. Gorshkov has fallen out of official service entirely and his family represents the extreme vulnerability of this kind of poverty. It is in this way that Devushkin’s house, therefore, becomes a microcosm of the social reality that penetrates the bodies and minds of all its persons.
Until this point in the 1840s, Russian literature had been dominated by romanticism, which favored extraordinary heroes and exalted emotions. But many a young writer had begun to feel that such abstractions no longer corresponded to the lived experience of Russian society. Out of this dissatisfaction emerged realism, which sought to depict not idealizations of beauty and grace, as their fathers and grandfathers had done, but the sweaty underbelly of ordinary reality. Furthermore, in the second half of the nineteenth century a newfound emphasis on the body — as well as new formulations of household and sanitary standards in urban culture — led to a change in the social meaning of smells. The overcoming of aesthetic taboos in this transition from romanticism to realism made it possible to use odors associated with humans not only as an aesthetic detail, but an assessment of one’s physiognomy. Smell, being both a biological trait and a cultural-historical phenomenon, plays a significant role in the sign systems that determine one’s group identity: this is because the act of smelling, no less than seeing, hearing, and tasting, defines evaluative categories of what is good and bad; what is one’s own and a stranger’s; and, most obviously, what is clean and unclean. Certain scents are associated with refinement, tidiness, and noble gentility, while others signify poverty, overcrowding, and moral disorder. An author may also use the semiotics of smell to construct his characters and their social, geographical, and historical milieu; for odors can signify one’s economic status, hygiene, and personality, all crucial elements in the creation of a type. Devushkin’s boarding house, for example, belongs clearly to the negative metaphorical category mentioned above: olfactory rankness defines his space as socially and morally degraded. His repetition of the verb propachnut’, it is worth re-mentioning, only dramatizes the impossibility of escaping this sensory class typification. Because odors saturate the body itself, the characters of Bednye ljudi carry their social environment with them whever they go — even before they speak or act, the smell already announces their position in the social hierarchy. Devushkin, however, seems to have already arrived at a curious mixture of resignation and embarrassment. “Но, ничего: поживешь и попривыкнешь,” he remarks (23). Adaptation to foul smells is adaptation to poverty itself.
In the end, the function of the olfactory encapsulates the entire logic of Dostoevskij’s realism: the environment invades the individual; social conditions imprint themselves upon the body; and the poor copying clerk’s language, more than mere caricature or cliché, becomes actually valuable in its ability to express the interplay between sensory experience and everyday life.[5] Dostoevskij arrived at a serious treatment of Russian reality through the meticulous representation of ordinary experience, odors including — for, as we have seen, everyday smells inherent in a particular milieu may also be extrapolated from the physical to the metaphysical. In a word, Dostoevskij got close enough to reality to give it a good sniff.
[1] Erich Auerbach defines modern realism as “the serious treatment of everyday reality, the rise of more extensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of subject matter for problematic-existential representation, on the one hand; on the other, the embedding of random persons and events in the general course of contemporary history, the fluid historical background” in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton University Press, 2013), 491.
[2] In relation to the theme of writing in Bednye lyudi, Devushkin’s repetitive utterances produce a rhythm that resembles oral speech rather than literary prose. He does not construct a periodic sentence, instead piling up clauses connected by the elementary conjunction “and.” The logic of the sentence depends wholly on accumulation, a trait that corresponds closely to his social position. As a minor clerk writing an intimate letter, Devushkin not infrequently expresses himself in the natural cadence of spoken language, even when he has begun developing his style more attentively. But, as I should like to argue, this apparently simple style proves capable of conveying an even more complex experiential reality, or the impression of one’s surroundings invading one’s own body.
[3] Cf. Auerbach’s similar analysis of Balzac’s description of the pension-mistress at the beginning of Le Père Goriot. He explains that “the description is controlled by a leading motif, which is several times repeated — the motif of the harmony between Madame Vauquer’s person on the one hand and the room in which she is present, the pension which she directs, and the life which she leads, on the other; in short, the harmony between her person and <…> her milieu” in Mimesis, 470. Because of the triple repetition in his letter, however, the motif of harmony in Devushkin’s description appears to me more striking.
[4] To be sure, throughout the novel and his correspondence with Varvara Devushkin increasingly wishes to present himself as dignified and even refined — especially in his discussions of literature. Yet just as the house’s odor clings to his clothes, the social reality of his condition clings to his identity despite his efforts to transcend it.
[5] This is another way Dostoevskij, to borrow Gary Rosenshield’s formulation, transforms the “ridiculous, almost subhuman, clerks of the comic fiction of the 1830s” into the hero of a tragi-comic sentimental novel. Cf. Rosenshield, “Varen’ka Dobroselova: An Experiment in the Desentimentalization of the Sentimental Heroine in Dostoevskii’s Poor Folk,” in Slavic Review 45, no. 3 (1986), 532.
