Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  One can well imagine Dostoevsky’s satisfaction at reading Herzen’s condemnatory words, which to him could well have sounded almost as a self-denunciation and recantation. And while Dostoevsky did not need Herzen to teach him the value of art and culture (he had defended them against Belinsky in 1849 and Dobrolyubov in 1861), he would surely have been gratified to find Herzen aligning himself so fervently against the Pisarevian iconoclasm (in the literal sense of the word) that had become endemic among the generation of the 1860s. “Woe to the revolution poor in spirit and weak in a sense of art,” Herzen exclaims, “which will make of all that has been acquired by time a depressing workshop, and whose sole interest would be subsistence and nothing but subsistence!” One recalls here the notorious slogan of Peter Verkhovensky: “Only the necessary is necessary, that’s the motto of the whole world henceforward” (10: 323). “The force of unleashed destruction,” Herzen continues, “will wipe out, along with the limits of property, the peaks of human endeavor that men have attained in every direction since the beginning of civilization. . . . I have often felt this keenly when, overcome by a gloomy sadness and almost shame, I have stood before some guide who showed me a bare wall, a broken sculpture, a coffin torn from its tomb, and who repeated: ‘All this was destroyed during the Revolution.’ ”22

  Only against this background can one fully appreciate Stepan Trofimovich’s defiant “last word” in Demons—a last word shouted at a hooting, jeering younger generation that hounded him as unmercifully as it had hounded Herzen in his last years, and to which he replied with the voice of Herzen and that of Dostoevsky as well. “ ‘But I maintain,’ Stepan Trofimovich shrilled at the utmost pitch of excitement, ‘I maintain that Shakespeare and Raphael are higher than the emancipation of the serfs, higher than Nationalism, higher than Socialism, higher than the young generation, higher than chemistry, higher than almost all humanity because they are the fruit, the real fruit of all humanity, and perhaps the highest possible fruit! A form of beauty already attained, without whose attainment I, perhaps, would not consent to live. . . . Oh, God’ he cried—he clasped his hands—‘ten years ago I cried exactly the same thing in Petersburg in exactly the same words, and they understood nothing in exactly the same way, they laughed and hissed as now; you pygmies, what do you need to make you understand?’ ” (10: 372–373). Ten years before, in The Superfluous and the Bilious, Herzen had anticipated these very words, and Dostoevsky’s boisterously uproarious fête, which also includes other incidents and allusions taken from the stormy events of the early 1860s, is the artistic enshrinement of this momentous historical-cultural clash.

  Stepan Trofimovich, to be sure, is not the only figure in the book who represents an eminent member of the generation of the 1840s. No account of Demons would be complete without some discussion of the malicious but masterly caricature of Turgenev in the portrait of Karmazinov (Karmazin, from the French cramoisi, means crimson in Russian and ridicules the presumed social-political sympathies of the Great Writer). Personal caricature was commonplace in Russian fiction, and Turgenev himself had not spared Bakunin in Rudin or a host of well-known personalities (particularly Ogarev) in Smoke. But to find an equally extended lampoon of a prominent literary personage one would probably have to look to Dickens’s attack on Leigh Hunt in Bleak House through the character of Harold Skimpole.

  Karmazinov bears no physical resemblance to the handsome figure of the stately Turgenev, but otherwise Dostoevsky’s target is unmistakable, and he ridicules all those aspects of his fellow novelist that had long aroused his antipathy. Turgenev’s aristocratic airs and manner, his preference for residence in Europe, his demolition of Russian culture in Smoke, the philosophical pessimism revealed most overtly in his prose poems, the squeamish, self-protective egoism that Dostoevsky saw most blatantly manifested in the article about the execution of Troppman—nothing is spared! The first encounter between the narrator and the Great Writer is accompanied by a derisory parody of the Troppman article, transposed into an account of the wreck of a steamer off the English coast. As a young man, Turgenev had been involved in such a wreck off Lübeck (he later wrote about it in 1883, after Dostoevsky’s death), and widespread rumor in literary circles attributed to him a behavior that was far from heroic.

  Just as when Troppman was guillotined, Karmazinov-Turgenev is much more concerned with his own reactions than with the victims of the disaster. “All this rather long and verbose article was written solely with the object of self-display. One seemed to read between the lines: . . . ‘Why look at that drowned woman with the dead child in her dead arms? Look rather at me, see how I was unable to bear the sight and turned away from it. Here I stood with my back to it, here I was horrified and could not bring myself to look; I blinked my eyes—isn’t that interesting?’ ” “When I told Stepan Trofimovich my opinion of Karmazinov’s article,” the narrator adds, “he quite agreed with me” (10: 70).

  Although Karmazinov’s vanity and narcissism are thus displayed from the start, his role is defined more broadly by the attempts of Turgenev to worm his way back into the good graces of the generation of the 1860s. In contrast to Herzen’s forthright and staunch defense of his own values, which then became embodied in Stepan Trofimovich, Turgenev had ignominiously truckled to Nihilist browbeating, implicitly giving his stamp of approval to Bazarovism and, by extension, to its latest avatar, Sergey Nechaev. Of course, the presumed approval of Nechaev was not literally true, but in the symbolic myth of Dostoevsky’s creation it is perfectly defensible. Karmazinov is responsible for Peter Verkhovensky’s prestige in society, just as Turgenev had been responsible for the prestige of Bazarov and his later offshoots in real life, and he acts as the young man’s mentor and advocate. “When I came, I assured everyone,” he tells Peter, “that you were a very intelligent man, and now I believe everyone is wild over you” (10: 286). As A. S. Dolinin has shrewdly noted, even though Stepan Trofimovich is the physical father of Peter Verkhovensky, the latter is much more the “spiritual son” of Karmazinov.23

  The climax of Dostoevsky’s ridicule of Turgenev occurs during the fête scene, when Karmazinov condescendingly agrees to read his farewell work to the hungry and fractious assemblage, having decided—or so he pretends—to put down his pen forever after his last appearance in public. Turgenev, upon receiving a letter of sympathy from a friend after the publication of this chapter, replied in a hurt tone of restrained dignity: “It is surely curious that he chose for his parody the sole work [Phantoms] that I placed in the journal he once edited, a work for which he showered me with grateful and flattering letters. I still have the letters. It would be amusing to publish them! But he knows that I will not do such a thing. I am only left with the regret that he employs his undoubted talent to satisfy such unsavory feelings.”24

  Phantoms is by no means the main basis for Dostoevsky’s parody, which in fact takes off from another prose poem, Enough (Dovol’no). Turgenev’s temperament is given free rein in these prose poems, whose dominant mood, often expressed by dreamlike events unrestrained by the limits of time and space, is a sense of world-weariness and metaphysical despair. Dostoevsky takes well-directed aim against these extremely vulnerable aspects of Turgenev’s prose poems, which are easy enough to ridicule simply by introducing a note of sober prosaicism into their lugubrious fantasy. Time and again, as he does so, Dostoevsky also mocks the self-importance impelling the great genius to reduce every event and incident to a reflection of his own existential anguish. In one scene, the poet is presumably drowning after falling through the ice of the Volga in a thaw, but then “he caught sight of a tiny little ice floe, the size of a pea . . . and . . . its iridescent glitter recalled to his mind the very same tear, which you remember rolled down from your eyes when we sat beneath the emerald tree and you cried joyfully, ‘There is no crime.’ ‘No,’ I said, through my tears, ‘but if that is so, there are no saints either.’ We burst into sobs and parted forever” (10: 366–367). This is a hit at Turgenev’s newly proclaimed
adhesion to Nihilism, whose moral-metaphysical negation is here portrayed in a ridiculously burlesque register rather than, as with Stavrogin, in a tragic one.

  In a similar passage, the sublime poet has dug beneath the Sukharev Tower in Moscow for three years, finds a hermit in a cave with a lamp burning before an icon, and suddenly hears a sigh. “You think it was the hermit that sighed? What does he care about your hermit? No, this sigh simply reminds him of her first sigh, thirty-seven years ago, when do you remember how we sat beneath the agate tree in Germany, and you said to me, ‘Why love? Look, furze is growing all around, and I am in love, but when the furze ceases to grow, I shall fall out of love’ ” (10: 367). Dostoevsky then travesties Turgenev’s fondness for bestrewing his pages with learned references. “Here a mist rises again, Hoffmann appears, the water nymph whistles a tune from Chopin, and suddenly out of the mist Ancius Marcus appears over the roofs of Rome, wearing a laurel wreath. A shiver of rapture ran down our backs and we parted forever, and so on and so forth” (10: 367).

  Dostoevsky’s narrator finally admits that he finds it hard to make head or tail out of what Karmazinov had read, and he ends with a string of antitheses reproducing the moral-spiritual confusion engendered in such Russian geniuses after they have absorbed the sublime conquests of European thought: “There is crime, there is no crime; there is no truth, there are no truth-seekers; atheism, Darwinism, Moscow church bells. . . . But, alas, he no longer believes in the Moscow church bells; Rome, laurels. . . . But he doesn’t believe in laurels. . . . Here you get a conventional attack of Byronic spleen, a grimace from Heine, something of Pechorin—and off he goes full steam ahead, with his engine emitting a shrill whistle.” Behind all this, the narrator finds only the author’s egoism, and he does not believe for a moment that, as Karmazinov-Turgenev promises, he will now lay down his pen forever in weariness and sorrow (10: 367). The takeoff on Turgenev’s literary mannerisms and personal foibles could not have been deadlier, and it enriches Demons with a dazzling display of Dostoevsky’s satiric virtuosity.

  The capstone of Dostoevsky’s intricate thematic construction in Demons is the figure of Stavrogin. No clues to any prototype for his character can be found in Dostoevsky’s notes, and a debate has raged for years over whether he may not have been inspired by Bakunin. But if we are to link Stavrogin with any actual person, the likeliest candidate would be the enigmatic figure of Nikolay Speshnev, whom Dostoevsky called his Mephistopheles during the days of his involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle. This committed communist was the center of a secret revolutionary group whose seven members included Dostoevsky. This group operated within the larger Petrashevsky society and attempted to manipulate it for its own ends, just as Peter Verkhovensky manipulates his own little group, and society at large, for his ends. Speshnev was well read in the philosophy then current in progressive left-wing circles, and his moral-philosophical views are similar to those later attributed to Stavrogin. These views are expressed by Speshnev in private letters; and it is highly possible that he uttered the very same thoughts in the course of conversations with intimates such as Dostoevsky.

  Speshnev closely followed the controversies that had arisen among the Left Hegelians following the publication of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (1841), and on these issues he sided with Max Stirner’s totally subjective egoism. “Anthropotheism [the position of Feuerbach] is also a religion,” he wrote perceptively, “only a different one. It divinizes a new and different object [man, humanity—J.F.], but there is nothing new about the fact of divinization. . . . Is the difference between a God-man and a Man-god really so great?” Speshnev refused to accept any authority over the individual ego and concluded, as a result, that no objective criteria exist for anything. “Such categories as beauty and ugliness, good and bad, noble and base, always were and always will remain a matter of taste.”25

  These words should be set against Stavrogin’s confession in the suppressed chapter “At Tikhon’s,” where he explains that “I formulated for the first time in my life what appeared to be the rule of my life, namely, that I neither know nor feel good and evil and that I have not only lost any sense of it, but that there is neither good nor evil (which pleased me), and that it is just a prejudice: that I can be free from any prejudice, but that once I attain that degree of freedom I am done for” (12: 113). That such a doctrine will lead to self-destruction is Dostoevsky’s own conclusion; otherwise, Stavrogin’s denial of any difference between good and evil remarkably coincides with Speshnev’s. Indeed, the abominable violation of little Matryosha is really a terrible experiment designed to test such ideas in practice. There is thus every reason to believe that Dostoevsky recalled some of the features of Speshnev, his initiator into underground revolution and moral-metaphysical Nihilism, when the amorphous “Prince” of the early drafts began to evolve into Stavrogin.

  But just as Peter Verkhovensky is not Nechaev, nor Stepan Trofimovich solely Granovsky, neither should Stavrogin be identified with Speshnev. For Dostoevsky “mythifies” this prototype into an image of the doomed and glamorous Russian Byronic dandy who haunted the literature of the 1820s and 1830s. Dostoevsky had long interpreted the immense cultural and moral-religious importance of the Russian Byronic type as a clue to the subterranean changes taking place in the national psyche. This interpretation is found most amply and explicitly in some of the articles he wrote for Time in 1861 arguing that Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin was the embodiment of a momentous crisis in the history of the Russian spirit: “Onegin precisely belongs to that epoch of our historical life marked by the very first beginnings of our agonizing consciousness and . . . our agonizing uncertainty as we look around us. . . . This was the first beginning of that epoch when our leading men sharply separated into two camps [Slavophils and Westernizers] and then violently engaged in a civil war” (19: 10). The crisis is that of the Russian spirit, which, having steeped itself in European culture, realizes that it has lost its native roots and accordingly turns back on itself with destructive skepticism. “The skepticism of Onegin contained something tragic in its very principle, and sometimes expressed itself with malicious irony” (19: 11).

  Onegin, like the later Stavrogin, was a member of the Russian gentry, the group that “had most alienated itself from its native soil, and in which the externalities of civilization had reached their highest development (19: 11). It is proof of Onegin’s moral elevation that he cannot be satisfied with the easy satisfactions of worldly pleasures or social rank; he genuinely suffers from the inner hollowness of his life. And he suffers because he does not know what to occupy himself with, “he does not even know what to respect, though he is firmly convinced that there is something that must be respected and loved. But . . . he does not respect even his own thirst for life and truth. . . . He becomes an egoist, and at the same time ridicules himself because he does not even know how to be that” (19: 11–12).

  This type then enters into the consciousness of Russian society and develops new and more virulent variations with each new generation. “In the personage of [Lermontov’s] Pechorin, it reached a state of insatiable, bilious malice, and of a strange contrast, in the highest degree original and Russian, of a contradiction between two heterogeneous elements: an egoism extending to the limits of self-adoration and a malicious self-contempt. And always this thirst for truth, and always the same eternal ‘nothing to do!’ Out of anger and as if in derision, Pechorin throws himself into outrageous, strange behavior that leads him to a stupid, ridiculous, and useless death” (19: 12). The most extreme and uncompromising development of this type, who coldly experiments with the farthest reaches of moral perversity and self-degradation, is of course Stavrogin himself.

  Once Stavrogin is viewed from this perspective, it is not difficult to understand why he unexpectedly assumed such importance in Dostoevsky’s early drafts. As the outlines of Stavrogin emerged from the character of the colorless Prince, Dostoevsky was seized by the temptation to extend his historical perspective backwa
rd in time and to link up the conflict of the 1840s and the 1860s with the Byronic type of the preceding years—the first manifestation of the disintegrating effects of Western influence on the Russian cultural psyche after such influence had been thoroughly absorbed. Here was the origin of the negation of Russia that had finally culminated in the abhorrent Nechaev, and since for Dostoevsky the idea of Russia was inseparable from that of the Russian Christ and the Orthodox faith, the tragedy of Stavrogin—like that of Onegin and Pechorin, as he saw it—takes the form of a moral-religious crisis. It is the search for an absolute faith that has been surrendered to the blandishments of the European Enlightenment and cannot yet be recaptured despite the torturing need for a “new truth.”

  This social-cultural significance of Stavrogin’s Byronism suggests a more specific and concrete meaning for Dostoevsky’s somewhat vague assertion that “the devils have come out of Russian man and entered into the Nechaevs and the Serno-Solovieviches.” It is Stavrogin—or the type of which he is the greatest incarnation—who is “Russian man” in the fullest meaning of that phrase for Dostoevsky, and it is this type that, historically, gave birth to all the ideological “devils” that have plagued Russian culture ever since. But Stavrogin’s historical role as the original fount of “the devils” became obscured because Dostoevsky retains the plot structure that makes him the pupil of Stepan Trofimovich, in effect reversing the anteriority of the Onegin type to the generation of the 1840s. It is possible that if Dostoevsky had been able to use his chapter “At Tikhon’s,” and thus to reveal the full ideological range of Stavrogin’s supreme attempt to nullify the boundaries of good and evil, he might have allowed him to assume explicit responsibility for “the devils” despite the anachronism involved. Since the Gospel-reading scene in which Stepan Trofimovich declares himself to be responsible for the “devils” was not contained in the original manuscript, such a possibility cannot be excluded.