Although G.K. Chesterton did not mention Dostoevskii in print until a 1912 article in the Illustrated London News, he had probably been familiar with the Russian author’s works since the 1890s. Chesterton read prolifically, and maintained close links with Dostoevskii’s admirers and promoters, including Gissing and Edward Garnett. In 1903 he co-wrote a pamphlet on Tolstoi with Garnett. Dostoevskii was inescapable in 1910, when Irving’s popular stage production of Crime and Punishment at the Garrick Theatre (as The Unwritten Law) inspired Everyman to reprint the Whishaw translation of the novel; this was also the year when Chesterton’s first Father Brown story, ‘The Blue Cross’, appeared. Heinemann’s publication of Constance Garnett’s translations soon ushered in the so-called ‘Dostoevsky cult’ of 1912-21.28 It is therefore entirely feasible, albeit speculative, to posit Crime and Punishment as an influence on Chesterton’s detective stories, including the Father Brown series and other crime mysteries such as The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922), and The Poet and the Lunatics (1929).29 Mark Knight convincingly indentifies major themes in both writers’ fiction—the use of the grotesque and of doubles, a fascination with insanity, and an ‘emphasis on the centrality of human freedom’, that is, on free will.30 One Chesterton biographer has pointed out that Chesterton never created a character infused with the bitter existentialism of a Raskol’nikov or an Ivan Karamazov: ‘Raskolnikov is
27 Gissing, Born in Exile, p. 471.
28 Muchnic, Dostoevsky’s English Reputation, pp. 62-110. See also Olga Ushakova, ‘Russia and Russian Culture in The Criterion (1922-39)’ in this volume.
29 Mark Knight has traced a detailed timeline of Chesterton’s potential encounters with Dostoevskii in his article ‘Chesterton, Dostoevsky, and Freedom’, in English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, XLIII, no. 1 (2000), pp. 37-50 (37-41).
30 Knight, ‘Chesterton, Dostoevsky, and Freedom’, p. 42.
Crime and Publishing 157 not found lurking in Flambeau’.31 Yet, if we cannot find Raskol’nikov in Chesterton’s most famous criminal, we can with greater justification find Porfirii Petrovich, the chief criminal investigator in Crime and Punishment, lurking within the British author’s various detective heroes. I contend that Porfirii Petrovich represents the inauguration, and Chesterton’s detective the continuation, of a particular archetype: the investigator who solves crimes by a combination of incongruity, perspicacity, intuition and surprise, besides more conventional police methods, without resorting to sensational tactics or egoistic posturing. In both Dostoevskii’s novel and the majority of Chesterton’s mysteries, crime is solved through a fixed alternation of pretence and recognition. Initially, the detective and the criminal each misrepresents himself: the criminal pretends innocence, while the detective manifests a chaotic or incompetent persona. The criminal ‘misreads’ the detective’s pretence as genuine, while the detective correctly ‘reads’ the criminal’s attitude as false. When, at the moment of exposure, the criminal finally ‘reads’ or interprets the detective correctly, punishment is suspended while both men experience the temporary equality—and intimacy—of mutual recognition.
Here is how Razumikhin describes Porfirii Petrovich to a suspicious Raskol’nikov:
‘He is a nice fellow, you will see, brother. Rather clumsy, that is to say, he is a man of polished manners, but I mean clumsy in a different sense. He is an intelligent fellow, very much so indeed, but he has his own range of ideas.... He is incredulous, sceptical, cynical... he likes to impose on people, or rather to make fun of them. His is the old, circumstantial method.... But he understands his work... thoroughly... Last year he cleared up a case of murder in which the police had hardly a clue. He is very, very anxious to make your acquaintance!’32
Here Razumikhin has identified the essential traits in the character of the Chief Investigator: Porfirii’s unusual combination of social polish with assumed ‘clumsiness’ (amply evidenced by his rapid changes of tone or apparent loss of the thread of a conversation), his desire to ‘make fun’ of people, and his thorough grasp of circumstantial evidence. At his first meeting with Raskol’nikov, Porfirii is inappropriately garbed in a dressing-gown, and his appearance is deliberately unprepossessing:
31 Gary Wills, Chesterton: Man and Mask (New York, 1961), p. 51.
32 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Constance Garnett (London, 1914, 1979), hereafter Crime and Punishment, p. 226.
He was a man of about five and thirty, short, stout even to corpulence, and clean shaven. He wore his hair cut short and had a large round head, particularly prominent at the back. His soft, round, rather snub-nosed face was of a sickly yellowish colour, but had a vigorous and rather ironical expression. It would have been good-natured except for a look in the eyes, which shone with a watery, mawkish light under almost white, blinking eyelashes. The expression of those eyes was strangely out of keeping with his somewhat womanish figure, and gave it something far more serious than could be guessed at first sight.33
While Porfirii is ‘womanish’ (‘bab’e’),34 Father Brown is repeatedly characterized as ‘childlike’. He is also short, round and stout, and he enlarges on Porfirii’s clumsiness to the point of helplessness: ‘The little priest […] had a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling; he had eyes as empty as the North Sea; he had several brown paper parcels, which he was quite incapable of collecting’.35 Like Porfirii, Father Brown’s deceptively harmless appearance is belied by his eyes. A murderer opens his confession to the priest: ‘damn your eyes, which are very penetrating ones’;36 elsewhere, Father Brown stares at a murder suspect ‘so long and steadily as to prove that his large grey, ox-like eyes were not quite so insignificant as the rest of his face’.37 Porfirii Petrovich and Father Brown (and, indeed, all of Chesterton’s detectives) unerringly identify their suspects by a combination of observation and intuition, supported by painstakingly accumulated evidence. Porfirii, for example, has Raskol’nikov’s room searched, interviews everyone with whom the student has had contact, and retains, as he claims, ‘a little fact’ of solid evidence (never disclosed).38 Yet it is intuition, rather than evidence, which allows Porfirii to accuse Raskol’nikov unequivocally after only three informal meetings. The casual laughter Raskol’nikov artfully produces at their first encounter does not deceive Porfirii for an instant: forewarned by intuition, he correctly interprets it as a disguise. Similarly, the unworldliness, vulnerability, and distraction manifested by Chesterton’s detectives are disguises designed
33 Crime and Punishment, p. 230.
34 Dostoevskii, Prestuplenie i nakazanie, in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v XVIII tomakh, VII (Moscow, 2004), p. 174.
35 G.K. Chesterton, ‘The Blue Cross’, in Chesterton, The Annotated Innocence of Father Brown, ed. Martin Gardner (Oxford, 1988), pp. 15-41 (p. 18).
36 Chesterton, ‘The Wrong Shape’, in The Annotated Innocence of Father Brown, pp. 138-59 (p.
156).
37 Chesterton, ‘The Hammer of God’, in The Annotated Innocence of Father Brown, pp. 179-96 (pp. 189-90).
38 Crime and Punishment, p. 412.
Crime and Publishing 159 to unbalance and disarm the criminal. Porfirii ingenuously calls his plan to startle Raskol’nikov into confessing by confronting him with a witness his ‘little surprise’;39 in ‘The Face in the Target’, Horne Fisher unexpectedly confronts his suspect with a caricature of the victim to confirm his guilt;
in ‘The Blue Cross’, Father Brown bamboozles Flambeau by behaving outrageously in public.
Dostoevskii’s and Chesterton’s detectives understand their suspects’
motives and urge them to redemption by ‘taking their suffering’ (the Old Believer penance that Porfirii encourages Raskol’nikov to emulate).40 Porfirii allows Raskol’nikov time to confess, because moral regeneration is pendant on confession; Father Brown prevents a repentant murderer from committing suicide because ‘that door leads to hell’;41 Horne Fisher refrains from exposing certain criminals to avoid harming innocent people. It is not quite true, as one critic writes, that ‘Porfiry Petrovitch goes beyond understanding Raskolnikov to identifying with him in some respects’;42 Porfirii recognizes and admires, but does not necessarily share, the ideas raised in Raskol’nikov’s article. The Man Who Was Thursday’s Gabriel Syme, an undercover detective posing as an anarchist to win a seat on the Anarchist Council, exemplifies the extreme of deliberate identification with one’s moral opposite. Yet, ironically, the plot reveals that there are no real anarchists on the Council: each member is an undercover detective.
While one must not over-emphasize Chesterton’s debt to Dostoevskii, it is worth stressing that each deploys the same distinct type of detective.
Dostoevskii, possibly inspired by Gaboriau, made Porfirii an ordinary police official at a time when professional investigators (as opposed to amateur or accidental sleuths) were highly unglamorous ancillary figures.43 There is doubt whether Dostoevskii had yet encountered Dickens’s charismatic Inspector Bucket in Bleak House (1852-3), although he certainly acquired a copy after 1871.44 Chesterton’s detectives are all marginal, superficially insignificant individuals, pursuing undistinguished professions, with the
39 Crime and Punishment, p. 317.
40 Ibid., p. 415.
41 Chesterton, ‘The Hammer of God’, p. 195.
42 Michael Cohen, Murder Most Fair: The Appeal of Mystery Fiction (London, 2000), p. 73.
43 See Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (London, 1972), pp. 40-55.
44 See N.M. Lary, Dostoevsky and Dickens: A Study in Literary Influence (London and Boston, 1973), p. 10. For an argument that Dostoevskii did read Bleak House while still in exile, see Veronica Shapalov, ‘They Came From Bleak House’, Dostoevsky Studies, IX (1988), http://
www.utoronto.ca/tsq/DS/09/201.shtml [accessed 15.10.2012].
single exception of Gabriel Syme, who is a kind of professional amateur, a detective dilettante rather than a dilettante detective. Father Brown is a Catholic priest; Horne Fisher is a private secretary; and Gabriel Gale is a minor poet on the brink of being committed to the lunatic asylum. Despite their marginality, all four emerge, like Porfirii Petrovich, as dedicated defenders of humane behaviour. As Chesterton wrote in 1901, the detective story reminds us ‘that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions’, and that ‘the agent of social justice…
[is]… the original and poetic figure…[…] The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man’. This was a view with which Porfirii Petrovich, as the forerunner of Chesterton’s ‘successful knight-errantry’ of
‘noiseless and unnoticeable police management’,45 would certainly have concurred.