In Bhabha's words, which were evoked by his readings of Fanon rather than Dostoevsky, in the colonial situation, "in place of the symbolic unconsciousness that gives the sign of identity its integrity and unity, its depth, we are faced with the dimension of doubling" (1994: 71). But Dostoevsky's fantasy goes further than Bhabha's theories. Goliadkin's multiplication does not terminate with his doubling; as his delirium develops, he sees more and more copies of himself: St. Petersburgis full of them; flocking together like geese, they chase Goliadkin; a policeman brings them all in to jail, but in vain. "A horrible abyss of perfect simulacra," wrote Dostoevsky about Goliadkin's experience (1993: 1/242).
The intensity of the competition between Goliadkin and his double always surprised Dostoevsky's readers. As Mikhail Bakhtin (2000: 118) put it in his brilliant reading of The Double, "the foreign word settled in Goliadkin's consciousness and took power there." The "foreign word" is one of Bakhtin's most frequent and favorite concepts, but here it acquires a political, colonial connotation, that of a foreign settler who is also an invader, an occupant. According to Bakhtin, three voices interact in Goliadkin's internal conversations: the voice which affirms Goliadkin's independence from the foreign word of those in power; the voice which simulates Goliadkin's indifference to this foreign word; and the voice which imitates the foreign word as if it is his - Goliadkin's - own. These three voices model the dynamics of internal colonization, which results not in dialogue and integrity but in doubling and madness. The story of Goliadkin is told by someone else, a conventional observer who, as happens in novels, holds narratorial and also disciplinary power over the character, someone like a doctor or a detective who reconstructs the internal life of another person. But Bakhtin shows that this framing, objectifying narrative of The Double is often mixed with words that could be attributed only to Goliadkin. The circle closes here: the voice of power is also infected with the madness of the subject. Simultaneously with Bakhtin's discovery of dialogism in Dostoevsky, Walter Benjamin (1999: 13) wrote about the Russian peasants' incapability of "following two simultaneous narrative strands" as a problem that was recognized by the early Soviet filmmakers. Essentially, Bakhtin's "dia- logism" is the subject's ability to follow and develop "two simultaneous narrative strands" without collapsing into doubling. If Goliadkin's obsessive dialogue with his double illustrates the problem which was noticed by Benjamin, Bakhtin's focus on the open, creative dialogue - a process that always resists the monologic interference that comes from power - may be understood as his solution.
Dostoevsky's reader feels that there is no exit from Goliadkin's suffering precisely because he is possessed by a double, his exact and strangely modern clone, rather than an old-fashioned monster of the kind that Gogol and other Gothic predecessors of Dostoevsky loved to portray. Monsters are playful and picturesque; they are humans hybridized with animals and spirits; they come from afar and they might return there, like Transylvanian vampires or Haitian zombies. Monsters can be explored and tamed; doubles cannot be colonized because they are failed products of colonization. As the experience of horror movies teaches us, "To transform the double back into a monster is to retain a residual sense of oneself as one self" (Coates 1991: 87; see also Webber 1996). This is exactly what Goliadkin fails to accomplish. While external colonization finds its symbolic representation in hybrids, internal colonization finds it in doubles. The circular character of this imaginary matches the reflective character of self-colonization, which is striving to define its Other and ends up with doubles of the Self. Jean-Paul Sartre (1963: 22) wrote that "the European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters." His undoing has been through creating serfs and doubles.
Internal colonization led to the unlimited sophistication of cultural differentiations which had as its limit the replication of subjects' vicious doubles. In the mid-nineteenth century, this process targeted the middle men of the imperial system who found themselves split by the unstable but razor-sharp colonial frontier that cut through their selves, leaving them alone with their doubles. Goliadkin's despair produces a community of his own simulacra: a parody of the socialism of Fourier and his Russian followers with whom Dostoevsky, at the moment of writing, was increasingly disenchanted. When the self collapses, its split produces a double and then a multitude, a society of equals. Readers of Bakhtin and Dostoevsky use the notion of the dialogical as a paradigm for the postcolonial utopia, a proof of the human ability to relate to the other as other. The Double is also a blueprint for the post-totalitarian anti-utopia, a document of human collapse when the other is purged.
The geography and history of internal colonization compressed nineteenth-century Russian culture into folds, which connected different levels that in other western cultures were separated either by oceans or by millennia. On the level of high professional culture - among Russian authors and their cultured heroes such as Grinev, Myshkin, and Darialsky - there developed rationality, individualism, writing, and discipline. On the level of folk culture - among millions of Russian peasants - life was "eastern," "native," "communal," "oral," and "mystical." This is the level of Pugachev, Rogozhin, and Kudeiarov. There was also the middle-ground level of the imperial officials, managers, and executors of colonization, people like Maksim Maksimovich, Kovalev, or Goliadkin. The heart of darkness was there; their terrible conflicts developed in an imperial solitude, in the conspicuous absence of women and worldliness that triggers the dynamics of a novel. Representing the short circuits of sacrifice and doubling that punctured the folds of history, the Russian novel portended the modern condition, in which internal colonization gradually takes over from external colonization. As Iurii Tynianov put it in 1924: "Russian literature was subjected to many demands, but all were futile. It was ordered to discover India, but instead it discovered America" (Tynianov 2001: 458).
Conclusion
Things move fast in the postcolonial world. Just a few decades ago, the idea that Ukraine or even Central Asia were colonies of the Soviet Empire evoked furious resistance on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In the 1990s, postcolonial experts still debated the reasons for not applying their concepts to the emerging countries of the post-Soviet space. The current literature resolves these problems but reveals new ones. Focusing on ethnicity, nationalism, and sovereignty in this part of the world, many scholars have turned their backs on the peculiar institutions of the Russian Empire that defined the life of northern Eurasia for several centuries and brought it to its twentieth-century turmoil. Russian serfdom provides a good example. A central subject for nineteenth-Russian politics and historiography, it is reduced to a footnote in the twenty-first-century textbooks of Russian history. Abolished at the same time as American slavery and involving much greater numbers, serfdom must have had at least as deep and lasting an impact. However, nothing similar to the North American attention to the legacy of slavery has emerged. This reveals a double standard, in academia and elsewhere.