Dostoevskii Versus Pisarev: 'Struggle for Existence' Inside a Crocodile

• In Event: Exhibiting Evolution

Abstract

This paper reads Dostoevskii’s 1865 unfinished short story “The Crocodile” as a polemic against Dmitrii Pisarev’s 1864 “Progress in the World of Animals and Plants,” a lengthy essay endorsing the key ideas of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” (1859). I argue that the central premise of “The Crocodile”—in which the clerk Ivan Matveich is swallowed alive by a crocodile on display at a menagerie and proceeds to miraculously survive inside the crocodile’s stomach—is a rejection of Darwin’s famous concept of “struggle for existence.” Instead, I argue, Dostoevskii uses literary strategies to challenge scientism, imagining an alternative model for interspecies interaction through the symbiotic relationship that forms between Ivan Matveich and the crocodile.

Author

• Emily Ziffer, Yale U