“A couple of words about Akim Petrovitch”
Russian literature is obsessed with characters. An inordinate number of references to any person includes their full name and it is not at all unusual for the narrator of Russian story to introduce some character exposition using a line similar to that quoted above. Following that introduction, the narrator proceeds to give some vital information - keeping in mind by this point in the narrative, the reader has already been familiar with Akim Petrovitch for about twenty pages.
“He was a man of the old school, as meek as a hen, reared from infancy to obsequious servility, and at the same time a good-natured and even honourable man.”
The Persistence of an Ant
Elsewhere, Dostoevsky builds a character out of metaphor through layering image on top of each other. While the above example shows how a metaphor immediately linked to a simile works, the author does something a bit more complex with figurative language here. Notice the subtlety of what he does here with the sentence layered in between the two simple direct metaphors. It is quite clear that the “ant” and “animal” references are observations of the narrator, but the sentence which links those two metaphors is constructed less directly. It is still the voice of the narrator or has the narrative briefly entered into the character’s mind to tell us how he thinks? It makes a difference.
“He had the persistence of an ant. Destroy an ants' nest, and they will begin at once re-erecting it; destroy it again, and they will begin again without wearying. He was a constructive house-building animal.”
"The Crocodile"
In the story “The Crocodile,” Dostoevsky goes all in on the use of metaphor. Rather than being satisfied with populating examples of metaphorical comparisons isolated throughout the text, the entire story is a constructed metaphor. This is a story about a worker in the notoriously inefficient Russian bureaucracy who is literally swallowed by a crocodile, but remains alive throughout the entire. The bureaucrat forced to live in the belly of the beast is just one aspect of the metaphorical dimensions to this story. Pursuing the form of allegory, each of the main characters in the story is also representative of a different aspect associated with the contemporary bureaucratic system of the author’s day. Whether by intention or accident, Dostoevsky never got around to finishing the story and so even its ending without resolution seems to become a metaphor at play in the allegory.
The Funny Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky has a reputation for being one of the most singularly morose and relentlessly depressing writers in all of literature, but one should not take that to mean he is completely without humor. It may not be his greatest virtue, but he proves on more than few occasions that he can create an image out of metaphor that does prove he was not completely without a sense of humor:
“Her neck was thin, and she had a figure like a chicken's with the bones all sticking out.”
Men Are All Animals
On the other hand, if one wants to see Dostoevsky’s sense of humor in full bloom being displayed in what is seemingly a most atypical fashion for the serious Russian writer, one need only look to the title of his story “Another Man’s Wife or The Husband under the Bed: An Extraordinary Adventure” and proceed from there to this pivotal moment when the writer unleashes an uncommonly light touch with his mastery of making the metaphor fit the mood:
“Ivan Andreyitch, transformed from a ferocious tiger to a lamb, timid and meek as a mouse before a cat, scarcely dared to breathe for terror, though he might have known from his own experience that not all injured husbands bite.”
