Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  25. A page from Dostoevsky’s notebooks for Demons

  My dear friend, I have just learned that N[echaev]. has called on you and that you hastened to give him the address of your friends (M. and his wife). I conclude that the two letters by which I warned you, and begged you to turn him away, arrived too late; and, without any exaggeration, I consider the result of this delay a veritable misfortune. It may seem strange to you that we advise you to turn away a man to whom we have given letters of recommendation addressed to you. . . . But . . . since then we have been obliged to admit the existence of matters so grave that they have forced us to break all our relations with N. . . .

  It remains perfectly true that N is the man most persecuted by the Russian government, which has covered the continent of Europe with a cloud of spies seeking him in all countries; it has asked for his extradition both from Germany and Switzerland. It is equally true that N. is one of the most active and energetic men I have ever met. When it is a question of serving what he calls the cause, he does not hesitate; nothing stops him, and he is as merciless with himself as with all the others. This is the principal quality which attracted me, and which impelled me to seek an alliance with him for a good while. Some people assert that he is simply a crook—but this is a lie! He is a devoted fanatic; but at the same time a very dangerous fanatic whose alliance cannot but be harmful for everybody. And here is why: at first he was part of a secret committee which really existed in Russia. The Committee no longer exists; all its members have been arrested. N. remains alone, and alone he constitutes what he calls the Committee. His organization in Russia having been decimated, he is trying to create a new one abroad. All this would be perfectly natural, legitimate, very useful—but the methods he uses are detestable. . . . he has gradually succeeded in convincing himself that, to found a serious and indestructible organization, one must take as a foundation the tactics of Machiavelli and totally adopt the system of the Jesuits—violence as the body, falsehood as the soul.

  Truth, mutual confidence, serious and strict solidarity only exist among a dozen individuals who form the sanctum sanctorum of the Society. All the rest must serve as a blind instrument, and as exploitable material. . . . It is allowed—even ordered—to deceive all the others, to compromise them, to rob them and even, if need be, to get rid of them—they are conspiratorial fodder. For example: you have received N. thanks to our letter of recommendation, you have taken him into your confidence, you have recommended him to your friends. . . . Here he is, transplanted into your world—and what will he do first? First he will tell you a pack of lies to increase your sympathy and your confidence; but he will not stop there. The tepid sympathies of men who are devoted to the revolutionary cause only in part, and who, besides this cause, have other human interests such as love, friendship, family, social relations—these sympathies are not, in his eyes, a sufficient foundation, and in the name of the cause he will try to get a hold on you completely without your knowledge. To do this, he will spy on you and try to gain possession of all your secrets; and in your absence, being alone in your room, he will open all your drawers and read all your correspondence. If a letter seems interesting to him, that is, compromising from any point of view either for yourself or one of your friends, he will steal it and preserve it very carefully as a document either against you or your friend. . . . when, at a general meeting, we accused him of this, he had the nerve to say—“Well, yes, that’s our system. We consider as our enemies all those who are not with us completely, and we have the duty to deceive and to compromise them.” This means all those who are not convinced of their system, and have not agreed to apply it to themselves.

  If you have presented him to a friend, his first concern will be to sow discord between both of you by gossip and intrigue—in a word, to cause a quarrel. Your friend has a wife, a daughter; he will try to seduce them, to make them pregnant, in order to tear them away from official morality and to throw them into a forced revolutionary protest against society.

  All personal ties, all friendship, all [gap in text] . . . are considered by them as an evil, which they have the right to destroy—because all this constitutes a force which, being outside the secret organization, diminishes the sole force of this latter. Don’t tell me that I exaggerate: all this has been amply unraveled and proven. Seeing himself exposed, poor N. is still so naïve, so childish, despite his systematic perversity, that he thought it possible to convert me—he went so far as to implore me to develop this theory in a Russian journal that he proposed to establish. He has betrayed the confidence of us all, he has stolen our letters, compromised us terribly, in a word, behaved like a villain. His only excuse is his fanaticism! He is terribly ambitious without knowing it, because he has ended by identifying the cause of the revolution with that of himself—but he is not an egoist in the banal sense of the word because he risks his life terribly, and leads the existence of a martyr full of privations and incredible activity.

  He is a fanatic, and fanaticism carries him away to the point of becoming an accomplished Jesuit—at moments, he simply becomes stupid. The majority of his lies are woven out of whole cloth. He plays at Jesuitism as others play at revolution. In spite of his relative naïveté, he is very dangerous because each day there are acts, abuses of confidence, treacheries, against which it is all the more difficult to guard oneself because one hardly suspects their possibility. With all this, N. is a force because of his immense energy. . . . His last project was nothing less than to set up a band of brigands and thieves in Switzerland, naturally with the aim of acquiring some revolutionary capital. I saved him by persuading him to leave Switzerland because he would certainly have been discovered, he and his gang, in a few weeks; he would have been lost, and all of us lost with him. . . .

  Persuade M. that the safety of his family demands that he break with them completely. He must keep N. away from his family. Their system, their joy, is to seduce and corrupt young girls; in this way they control the whole family. I am very sorry that they learned the address of M. because they would be capable of denouncing him. Didn’t they dare to admit to me openly, in the presence of a witness, that the denunciation of a member—devoted or only partly devoted—is one of the means whose usage they considered quite legitimate and sometimes useful? . . . I am so frightened at their knowledge of M.’s address that I beg him to change his lodgings secretly, so that they won’t discover him.1

  Ironically, the “methods” that Bakunin now castigates so severely, and from which he so fastidiously dissociates himself, are merely the application of doctrines set down in the notorious Catechism of a Revolutionary, written either by Nechaev and Bakunin in collaboration or by one of them alone (scholars still dispute this issue). There is no doubt that Bakunin had full knowledge of this most sinister of handbooks of revolutionary strategy and had approved of its precepts. What horrified him was only that the recommended methods were now being used against himself and his friends. Dostoevsky of course had no knowledge of this letter, but Bakunin’s bewilderment and outrage at becoming the victim of doctrines he had originally sponsored remind one irresistibly of Stepan Trofimovich’s reaction to the ideas and activities of his son Peter, whom he sees as distorting and vulgarizing the exalted ideals of his youth. Bakunin’s letter illustrates the uncanny accuracy, mutatis mutandis, with which Dostoevsky had captured the essence of the historically symbolic relation between the generations.

  Bakunin’s infatuation with Nechaev survived the parting of the ways recorded in this letter, and he wrote sorrowfully to Ogarev on learning of the arrest of his erstwhile protégé by the Swiss police, who would extradite him to Russia. “I feel very sorry for him. . . . He was a man of rare energy; and when you and I first met him, there burned in him a clear flame of love for our poor and downtrodden people, he had a genuine ache for the people’s age-long suffering.”2 Dostoevsky did not deprive Peter Verkhovensky of this one redeeming feature, though it is not displayed prominently. “Listen,” Peter says to Stavrogin, �
��I’ve seen a child six years old leading home his drunken mother, while she swore at him with foul words. . . . When it’s in our hands, maybe we’ll mend things” (10: 324–325). Just as Dostoevsky remained true to Nechaev by including this one flicker of compassion, so there is not a single action of Peter Verkhovensky that Nechaev did not perform, or would not have performed if given the opportunity.

  Dostoevsky’s attention to factual accuracy is displayed in the entire social-political intrigue of the book. The power of Peter Verkhovensky in Demons is based on his claim to be the representative of a worldwide revolutionary organization, vaguely located somewhere in Europe and with which he has made contact in Switzerland. Nechaev carried credentials attesting him to be representative No. 2771 of the “Russian section of the World Revolutionary Alliance,” and these credentials, signed by Bakunin, were also stamped with the seal of the “Central Committee” of the “European Revolutionary Alliance.”3 None of these bodies existed anywhere except in the vast reaches of Bakunin’s conspiratorial imagination, and it is doubtful whether Nechaev placed too much faith in their power. After all, he had presented himself to Bakunin as the delegate of an equally fictitious organization of Russian students, but he was perfectly content to use the aura of Bakunin’s prestige, and the looming shadow of these all-powerful organizations, to impress his dupes in Moscow. To reinforce his authority, he once arrived at a meeting of his group with a stranger (an inoffensive visiting student from Petersburg), whom he introduced as a member of the “Central Committee” in Geneva come to check on their activities. Quite appropriately, Peter Verkhovensky instructs the glamorous Stavrogin to appear at a meeting as “one of the founding members from abroad, who knows the most important secrets—that’s your role” (10: 299).

  Nechaev’s career was marked by a systematic use of falsehood and deceit, even toward his allies and followers. Such a policy was explicitly affirmed as a principle in the Catechism: “the degree of friendship, of devotion, and of other obligations toward . . . a comrade is measured only by his degree of utility in the practical world of revolutionary pan-destruction.”4 Peter Verkhovensky reveals that he is acting alone only to Stavrogin, who is the key to his revolutionary plans. All the rest of his group he considers “raw material,” to be used and manipulated as he sees fit for the good of the cause. Such manipulation was foreseen in the paragraph of the Catechism devoted to “revolutionary chatterers” (a perfect description of the group at Virginsky’s), who were to be “pushed and involved without ceasing into political and dangerous manifestations, whose result will be to make the majority disappear while some among them will become revolutionaries.”5 It was in accordance with this ruthless application of the principle of utility that Nechaev disposed of Ivanov, and Dostoevsky was convinced that he wished to gain an indissoluble hold on his followers by involving them in a common crime against a troublesome dissident.

  Peter Verkhovensky arrives in the provincial town where the novel is set as the bosom companion of the gentry scion Stavrogin and also as an intimate of the equally wealthy Drozhdov family. Having learned the secret of Stavrogin’s perverse marriage to Marya Lebyadkina, and aware of Liza Tushina’s infatuation with Stavrogin, he manifestly hopes, whether by intimidation or by catering to Stavrogin’s lusts, to gain a hold over Stavrogin and exploit him for his revolutionary purposes. Such maneuvers are completely in conformity with the doctrines of the Catechism: “with the aim of implacable destruction a revolutionary may, and often must, live in the midst of society, pretending to be quite different from what he really is.”6 The aim of this disguise, as with Peter, is to gain power over “the great number of highly placed animals who, by their position, are rich and have relations.” Such dupes “must be exploited in every possible way, circumvented, confused, and, by acquiring their dirty secrets, be turned into our slaves. In this manner their power, their relations, their influence, and their riches will become an inexhaustible treasure and an invaluable aid in our various enterprises.”7

  The same tactics are used by Peter Verkhovensky to gain control over the von Lembkes—the governor of the province and his wife—whom he also exploits for his revolutionary aims. Revolutionaries, the Catechism declares, should conspire with liberals “on the basis of their own program, pretending to follow them blindly” but actually compromising them so that they can be “used to provoke disturbances in the State.”8 Peter subverts Yulia Mikhailovna’s innocent liberal fête for the benefit of the governesses of the province in exact accordance with these instructions, turning it into a riotous manifestation of protest against the authorities.

  With von Lembke, Peter also plays the agent provocateur: he spurs this dimwitted, bewildered official to suppress signs of unrest among the Shpigulin workers and taxes him with being “too soft” and “liberal” in the performance of his gubernatorial duties. “But this has to be handled in the good old way,” Peter jovially tells the hesitant von Lembke. “They ought to be flogged, every one of them; that would be the end of it” (10: 272). Peter’s metamorphosis into an advocate of “the good old ways” is justified by a passage in the Catechism requiring the revolutionary to “aid the growth of calamity and every evil, which must, at last, exhaust the patience of the people and force them into a general uprising.”9 Two Bakunin-Nechaev pamphlets, supposedly issued by the “Descendants of Rurik and the Noble’s Revolutionary Committee,”10 preached the most outrageously reactionary sentiments and were intended to stir up right-wing opposition among the old nobility to the reforming tsar. They probably inspired Peter’s friendship with the retired Colonel Gaganov, who resigned from the army partly because he “suddenly felt himself personally insulted by the proclamation” of the liberation of the serfs. Gaganov “belonged to that strange section of the nobility, still surviving in Russia, who set an extreme value on their pure and ancient lineage” (that is, “the descendants of Rurik”) (10: 224).

  Sources or parallels for almost every other political-ideological feature of Demons can be found either in the Bakunin-Nechaev propaganda or in other easily identifiable historical events. Nothing about the Bakunin-Nechaev propaganda is more striking than its total negativism, the complete absence of any specific aim or goal that would justify the horrors it wishes to bring about. It contains blood-curdling exhortations and apocalyptic images of total annihilation: “We must dedicate ourselves to wholehearted destruction, continuous, unflagging, unslackening, until none of the existing social forms remains to be destroyed.” Such a positive purpose is outlawed on principle as a historical impossibility and must remain wrapped in the messianic obscurity of the future. “Since the existing generation is itself exposed to the influence of those loathsome social conditions against which it is revolting, to this generation cannot belong the work of construction. This belongs to those pure forces that will be formed in the day of renovation.”11 This negativism helps to explain why Peter Verkhovensky sets himself off so sharply from “Socialists” like Shigalev, who do worry about the form of the future social order: “to my mind all these books, Fourier, Cabet, all this talk about the ‘right to work’ and Shigalev’s theories—all are like novels of which one can write a hundred thousand—an aesthetic entertainment” (10: 313). As a true Bakuninist revolutionary, Peter dedicates himself only to the work of uprooting the existing moral-social norms, “but one or two generations of vice are essential now,” he tells Stavrogin, “monstrous, abject vice by which a man is transformed into a loathsome, cruel, egoistic reptile. . . . I am not contradicting myself, I am only contradicting the philanthropists and Shigalevism, not myself! I am a scoundrel, not a Socialist!” (10: 325).

  Marx and Engels make the same distinction, and thoroughly agreed with Dostoevsky’s separation of Nechaev’s tactics from Socialism as they understood it. Indeed, they used the Bakunin-Nechaev propaganda as one of their weapons in evicting Bakunin and his followers from the First International. “These all-destroying anarchists,” they wrote sententiously, “who wish to reduce everything to
amorphousness in order to replace morality by anarchy, carry bourgeois immorality to its final extreme.”12

  Nechaev’s systematic Machiavellianism was alien to other radical groupings then in existence, and Peter Verkhovensky’s relation to the members and sympathizers of his underground organization is one of continual struggle to overcome their opposition and mistrust. No one at the meeting really agrees with Peter, but he browbeats them into submission by playing on their vanity and curiosity: all agree to go “full speed ahead” in order to hear his mysterious “communication” from the all-powerful organization he claims to represent. Just before Shatov’s murder, even the members of Peter’s inner circle are panic-stricken at what has occurred—the fire, the various murders already committed, the riots and disorders—and decide that unless Peter gives them a “categorical explanation” they will “dissolve the quintet and . . . found instead a new secret society ‘for the propaganda of ideas of their own and on the basis of democracy and equality’ ” (10: 415–416). Shigalev, at the last moment, refuses to have anything to do with the murder as a matter of principle; Virginsky never stops protesting even while it is taking place. However unappealing or pathetically ridiculous Dostoevsky makes them out to be, the members of the quintet do not believe in systematic amorality and universal destruction as panaceas for the ills of the social order.