And, for the sake of doing something original, they do something base. Occasionally, our author tells us, there are clever commonplace people (in contrast to the simple variety), who harbor a worm of despair that gnaws at their heart. Unhappily, these people are deceiving themselves, and are moved not by what they imagine (for they have no imagination), but by an emotional fraud - one which penetrates the entire social spectrum. Men, he says, can be deluded by faint stirrings of sympathy into believing that they are possessed by great humanitarianism.
He cites girls who don the garb of the nihilists to convince others (and themselves most of all) that they have convictions. No amount of money, social position, or good looks can entirely compensate for lacking ideas of one's own. Dostoevsky's thought is that a writer must seek out and study commonplace persons they are not quite as dull, he feels, as they seem in the abstract, for very many of them desire to be independent and "original." Obviously none of them manage to be original, yet the dreams of these people flesh out their surface commonness and often account for their motivations and for their commonplace actions.Īlmost everyone desires to be individual, Dostoevsky says, and notes that this wish is not limited to the poorer classes, even the wealthy are tormented by this drive. But, Dostoevsky says, fiction must contain ordinary people, for if it does not, it cannot have a semblance of truth.
More often than not, ordinary people are likely to be uninteresting, but if only extraordinary types are used, it gives an author's fiction a certain dullness. The vast majority of mankind, the author, is made up of just such people as Varya, and one of the problems confronting a novelist is the re-creation of such fictional personages. Dostoevsky begins this section by speaking of the ordinariness of Varvara (Varya) Ptitsyn.
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