“The Crocodile,” Dostoevsky’s Weirdest Short Story

Most writers have at least one bizarre and obscure experiment in their portfolio. Dive into the literary past of Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky and out pops “The Crocodile,” (Russian name: “Krokodil.”) Published in 1865 in Epoch magazine, it’s continents away from Dostoyevsky’s trademark heavy tales of crimes and state tyranny, and it’s arguably his weirdest short story.

The main character of “The Crocodile” is the antithesis of Peter Pan’s Captain Hook, in that the terrifying prospect of being devoured by a crocodile doesn’t upend his life, but improves it. Ivan Matveich is a civil servant and common man. His predictable existence is radically altered one day while visiting St. Petersburg’s Passage department store with his wife, Elena Ivanovna, and a friend, Semyon Semyonitch, who serves as the story’s narrator. There’s a live crocodile, brought to Russia by a German, on display in the store. Ivan, in an effort to display his courage, teases the beast to the point where he faces consequences: he’s swallowed alive.

Inside the belly of the monster (whose owners refer to him as “Our Little Karl”), Ivan actually finds his surroundings comfortable and satisfactory, and he decides to nest. Furious and frantic Elena Ivanovna wants him cut out, but the crocodile’s owner refuses to harm the creature. And Ivan Matveich has no interest in rejoining society as a regular person with a meager income. As a man residing inside a croc, he has a unique new identity and the chance to make a fortune.

A character disappearing into the innards of an animal isn’t an uncommon motif in classic literature. Little Red Riding Hood had to be sliced out of the Big Bad Wolf. Pinocchio and his creator Geppetto had to escape the inside of a sea monster somehow after being gulped up in the ocean. But what makes Dostoyevsky’s story so strange is that there’s no urgency to escape this gruesome fate as part of the hero’s journey. The character actually likes this state of affairs and wants to stay put. But why?

This darkly humorous tale is, according to scholars, meant to be satire. Ivan Matveich and the crocodile were written to be far more than just a man and his adopted shell. They’re meant to poke fun at domestic and international relations from every angle.

The story offers a sharp “satire of the author’s contemporaries and an allegory of Russia’s ambiguous relationship with Europe,” writes novelist Charles Holdefer. A German-owned crocodile of (probable) African origins devouring a Russian man in St. Petersburg sparks a debate not on life and death, but on incursions of foreign capital into Russia, the threat of “progress,” and economic principles.

R. A. Peace, writing for The Slavonic and Eastern European Review, agrees that Ivan Matveich and the crocodile seem to represent some sort of warped trade union. Dostoevsky was writing at a time when Russia was

striving for “new economic relationships”…a loaded phrase which like “ekonomicheskii printsip” [the economic principle] recurs throughout the story. The narrator himself is a defender of the “economic principle,” and it is very much an issue in the press of the day, as becomes clear when [the narrator, Semyon Semyonitch] attempts to enlighten Ivan Matveich’s distraught wife.

There are unexpected benefits to “attracting foreign capital into our fatherland,” Semyon Semyonitch explains, “which I had read about that morning in Peterburgskie izvestiia  and in Volos’ .” (Dostoevsky has thinly disguised the names of actual newspapers, Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti [St. Petersburg News] and Golos’ [The Voice].)

The value of the economic principles governing consumption by outsider animals outweighed the potential harm of said animals’ digestive systems.

“Although a good Russian chinovnik [civil servant] has been swallowed by a foreign crocodile,” Peace writes, there appears to be some mutual advantage, even in the view of the person swallowed, for Ivan Matveich maintains that ‘feeding the crocodile with my own self, I in return receive sustenance from it; consequently we mutually feed one another.’”

And when Semyon Semyonitch reports the event to the authorities, the “subordinate official” Timofey Semyonitch assures him that it’s all in good order. For Russia to “create industry,” Timofey Semyonitch explains,

we must create capital; that means we must create a middle class, the so-called bourgeoisie, and as we have no capital we must attract it from abroad. […] Ivan Matveich, as a true son of the fatherland ought to rejoice and be proud that he himself has doubled the value of a foreign crocodile, and perhaps has even tripled it. This is necessary to attract [others]. If one succeeds, then another will come with a crocodile, a third will bring two and three at a time, and capital will form around them. Then you will have a bourgeoisie. This must be encouraged.

Peace writes that it’s obvious that the crocodile is “a symbol of the rapacious nature of foreign enterprise on Russian soil.” Privatization was in the air, and Dostoevsky smelled danger. Ivan Matveich, on the other hand, was content to remain inside the belly of the beast, delighted to serve as “an example of greatness and resignation to fate!”

The characters from most fairy tales probably don’t share the same sentiments. But then again, they weren’t written by Dostoevsky.

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