Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  In any event, Stavrogin’s symbolic cultural status helps to throw light on the puzzling particularities of his relationship to Kirillov and Shatov, often seen as arbitrary and enigmatic. Dostoevsky could not imagine the Byronic type without also thinking of the two competing ideologies of the Westernizers and Slavophils, who had offered divergent responses to its moral-spiritual dilemmas, and the structure of Stavrogin’s linkage with these figures, as well as their own peculiar mixture of past friendship followed by antipathy, easily becomes comprehensible once seen in these historical-cultural terms. Dostoevsky dramatizes these ideologies strictly in relation to the problem of religious faith, which, as he saw it, lay at the root of the self-torments of the Byronic type. The beliefs of both Kirillov and Shatov, being derived from the tainted source of Stavrogin, are presented as secular substitutes for the genuine and spontaneous religious faith that both, like their mentor, yearn for but cannot attain.

  In Kirillov, who is one of his greatest inspirations, Dostoevsky concentrates all the pathos and sublimity of the atheistic humanism inspired by Feuerbach, with its doctrine that the Man-god—that is, all of humanity—could take the place of the traditional God-man. Shatov represents Dostoevsky’s view that even the Slavophils, despite their declared adherence to the Russian Orthodox faith, were still too Westernized to accept the Russian Christ with a complete inward acquiescence. This opinion of Slavophilism had recently been reinforced by the publication of Danilevsky’s Russia and Europe, in which the ex-Fourierist and ex-Feuerbachian writer had spoken of God as the “synthetic personality” of each people, just as, for Feuerbach, God had been the “synthetic personality” of humankind—a creation of humankind itself, in other words, and not a divine truth surpassing reason. The ideas that Shatov took over from Stavrogin, and which he then repeats to his master, transcribe this Slavophil version of Feuerbachianism straight from the pages of Danilevsky’s book. Dostoevsky, as we know, agreed politically with Danilevsky’s glorification of Slavdom and Russia as the basis of a new world-culture, but he was troubled by the writer’s failure to recognize the universal religious mission of Orthodoxy. Shatov thus embodies Dostoevsky’s criticism of Danilevsky, and Shatov’s elevation of the Russian people into a god fits very neatly into the tragic incapacity of Stavrogin, whose ideas Shatov is repeating, to attain the humility of self-surrender to a redeeming religious faith.

  One further context, provided by the Franco-Prussian War, also helps to enrich the symbolic significance of Stavrogin. Dostoevsky had been filled with horror and rage at the flames engulfing Paris during the last days of the Commune. Of the Communards, whom he held responsible, he said, “to them (and many others) this monstrosity doesn’t seem madness but, on the contrary, beauty. The aesthetic idea of modern humanity has become obscured.”26 These words surely bear on the scene in which Peter Verkhovensky, as he goes into raptures over Stavrogin’s “beauty,” finally reveals himself to be a passionately visionary fanatic and not simply a cold and ruthless tactician of terror. “ ‘Stavrogin, you are beautiful,’ cried Peter Stepanovich, almost ecstatically. ‘I love beauty, I am a Nihilist, but I love beauty. Are Nihilists incapable of loving beauty? It’s only idols they dislike, but I love an idol’ ” (10: 323). True beauty for Dostoevsky had become incarnated in the world by Christ, and to equate it with violent destruction was the height of perversity.

  The calm and impassive figure of Stavrogin is thus surrounded in Dostoevsky’s imagination with the infernal halo of the flames that had recently been crackling in the heart-city of Western civilization. It is he who has brought to Russia all the “beauty” of this idolatrous negation, which, if allowed to go unchallenged by the “authentic beauty” of Christ, would light the same torch of destruction in Holy Russia that was already ravaging the West. For the “beauty” of Stavrogin is that of the demonic, the beauty of Lucifer in Byron’s Cain, who, as Herzen wrote unforgettably, “is the gloomy angel of darkness, on whose brow shines with dim lustre the star of bitter thought, full of inner discords which can never be harmonized.” He lures like “still, moonlit water, that promises nothing but death in its comfortless, cold, glimmering embraces.”27

  1 This letter has been translated in Daughter of a Revolutionary, ed. Michael Confino (La Salle, IL, 1973), 305–309; his translation differs somewhat in wording from my own.

  2 Ibid., 323. Extradited to Russia from Switzerland in 1872 as a common-law criminal accused of murder, Nechaev was tried in January of the following year and sentenced to twenty years of hard labor and exile to Siberia for life. His attitude in court was defiant, and he refused to recognize its authority. Alexander II ordered that Nechaev be secretly held for life in the Peter-and-Paul Fortress. There his rebellious attitude in solitary confinement led to further punishments, though he was provided with books he requested and apparently wrote a number of works that have disappeared. Most remarkable of all is that he gradually won over the soldiers assigned as his guard to the revolutionary cause, and they became his willing couriers. In 1879, learning through new prisoners of the existence of the underground revolutionary People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya), he sent a message to the Executive Committee that they could hardly believe. Nechaev was still alive, and not in Siberia but in Petersburg! Plans were made to arrange an escape from prison, but Alexander II’s assassination on March 1, 1880 put an end to a hope of escape with outside aid, though Nechaev attempted to organize one himself with the help of his allies in the prison garrison. But someone informed the authorities of his influence among the soldiers and his guard was replaced. He died of scurvy on November 21, 1882. See Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution (New York, 1966), chap. 15.

  3 Yury Steklov, Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin, 4 vols. (Moscow–Leningrad, 1926–1927), 3: 489.

  4 I cite the translation of Catechism of a Revolutionary given in Confino (see note 1) as the most recent and readily available. See Daughter of a Revolutionary, 226.

  5 Ibid., 228.

  6 Ibid., 227.

  7 Ibid., 228.

  8 Ibid.

  9 Ibid., 229.

  10 Steklov, Bakunin, 3: 455–456.

  11 Ibid., 464–465.

  12 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, 39 vols. (Berlin, 1959–), 18: 426.

  13 See the citation from Tkachev in Venturi, Roots of Revolution, 399; also B. P. Kozmin, P. N. Tkachev i revolutsionnie dvizhenie 1860–kh godov (Moscow, 1922), 119–120.

  14 Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, trans. by Constance Garnett, revised by Humphrey Higgens, 4 vols. (New York, 1968), 2: 586.

  15 N. A. Dobrolyubov, Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. J. Fineberg (Moscow, 1956), 156.

  16 PSS, 29/Bk. 1: 113n.28; May 28/June 9, 1870.

  17 Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 4: 1581, 1579.

  18 Ibid., 1581, 1583.

  19 Cited in Abbott Gleason, Young Russia (New York, 1980), 132–133.

  20 B. P. Kozmin, Iz istorii revolutsionnoi mysli v Rossii (Moscow, 1961), 547.

  21 A. I. Herzen, Sochineniya, 10 vols. (Moscow, 1955–1958), 8: 417.

  22 Ibid., 405, 417.

  23 A. S. Dolinin, “Turgenev v Besakh,” in his Dostoevsky i drugie (Moscow, 1989), 173.

  24 PSSiP, 10: 9.

  25 The letter is published in Proizvedeniya Petrashevtsy, ed. V. I. Evgrafova (Moscow, 1953), 496–497.

  26 PSS, 29/Bk. 1: 214; May 18/30, 1871.

  27 Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 2: 744.

  CHAPTER 45

  The Book of the Impostors

  Demons, as we know, was initially begun as a “pamphlet-novel” in which Dostoevsky would unleash all his satirical fury against the Nihilists. It is thus not surprising that, of all his major works, it contains the greatest proportion of satirical caricature and ideological parody. This becomes immediately apparent in the rhetoric of the narrator’s account of Stepan Trofimovich’s career, which both exalts and deflates him at the same time. Since the narrator feels a genuine sympathy for Stepan Trofimovich, he begins by delineating th
e exalted and ennobling image that the eminent worthy has of himself. But he immediately undermines it by revealing the completely exaggerated, even illusory nature of many of the poses that his subject strikes (as a supposed “political exile,” for instance, who was not an exile at all, or as a noted scholar whose “notoriety” was mainly fictitious). “Yet Stepan Trofimovich was a most intelligent and gifted man,” the narrator affirms, “even, so to say, a man of science . . . well in fact he had not done such great things in science. I believe indeed that he had done nothing at all. But that’s very often the case, of course, with men of science among us in Russia” (10: 8).

  In fact, recalls the narrator, a famous article written by Stepan Trofimovich contained “the beginning of a very profound investigation into the causes, I believe, of the extraordinary moral nobility of certain knights at a certain epoch or something of that nature” (10: 9). This choice of subject defines the sublime elevation of Stepan Trofimovich’s own ideals, which are also illustrated by the chronicler’s account of Stepan Trofimovich’s prose poem, written sometime in the 1830s. Described as “some sort of allegory in lyrical-dramatic form” (10:9), the poem parodies Vladimir Pecherin’s The Triumph of Death and is the first announcement of the book’s dominating symbolism:

  Then a youth of indescribable beauty rides in on a black steed, and an immense multitude of all nations follow him. The youth represents death for whom all the peoples are yearning. And finally, in the last scene we are suddenly shown the Tower of Babel, and certain athletes at last finish building it with a song of new hope, and when at length they complete the topmost pinnacle, the lord (of Olympus, let us say) takes flight in acomic fashion, and man, grasping the situation and seizing his place, at once begins a new life with a new insight into things. (10: 10)

  This parody contains the major theme of the book and foreshadows the appearance of Stavrogin. He too is of an “indescribable beauty”; he too is death and not life; he too is followed, if not by multitudes of all nations, then by the multitude of all those who look to him for inspiration. He too believes that man can take the place not of the lord of Olympus, who has nothing to do with the Tower of Babel, but of the God of the Old Testament and his Son of the New. Stavrogin is the pretender and the impostor aspiring to the throne of God, just as in the poem the youth representing death aspires to be the source of life. Everything that stems from Stavrogin is thus marked with the seal of supreme falsity and deception and leads to death. He is a counterfeit and fraudulent facsimile of truth; and this symbolism of the usurper, the pretender, the impostor runs through every aspect of the book, underlying and linking all its actions.

  No one, to be sure, is more of an impostor—more of an endearing and charming old fake—than Stepan Trofimovich. Dostoevsky paints him with such an overflowing abundance of traits that it is difficult to do justice to them all, but each reinforces the comic discrepancy between his rhetorical postures and his egocentric practical performances. Nor does Dostoevsky neglect, despite his personal detestation of Nihilism, to allow Peter Verkhovensky to puncture his father’s poses with deadly accuracy. But this only serves to make the fickle old Idealist even more sympathetic and appealing. Whatever the material basis of his existence, he has never exploited it basely; in yielding to his weaknesses, he always remains aware that he is unworthy of the great ideals that he proclaims and reveres. Stepan Trofimovich, in other words, has never allowed his conscience to become dulled—and this, for Dostoevsky, always leaves the path open for salvation.

  Up to the age of sixteen, Stavrogin was the pupil of Stepan Trofimovich, and this plot structure makes a Liberal Idealist of the 1840s the spiritual progenitor of a Byronic type associated with the 1820s and 1830s. Stavrogin’s Byronism loses much of its symbolic meaning when he is linked to Stepan Trofimovich as pupil to teacher, but Dostoevsky nonetheless succeeds in making their relationship humanly convincing. He underlines the tradition of metaphysical-religious Idealism that constitutes a bond between teacher and pupil, but the heritage is conveyed in a form reflecting all the velleities of Stepan Trofimovich’s highly volatile character, which exercises a morbid influence on his impressionable charge. “More than once he awakened his ten- or eleven-year-old friend at night, simply to pour out his wounded feelings and weep before him, or to tell him some family secret, without noticing that this was totally impermissible” (10: 35). The tutor communicated all his own moral uncertainty and instability to his unfortunate pupil without providing anything positive to counteract their unsettling effects, and the result was to leave an aching emptiness at the center of Stavrogin’s being.

  “Stepan Trofimovich succeeded in reaching the deepest chords in his pupil’s heart, and had aroused in him a first vague sensation of that eternal, sacred longing which some elect souls, once having tasted and discovered it, will then never exchange for a cheap gratification. (There are some connoisseurs who prize this longing more than the most complete satisfaction of it, if such were possible)” (10: 35). This passage defines Stavrogin as a personality emotionally engaged in the quest for an indeterminate absolute and also suggests the perversity springing from his lack of any positive goal. His quest is a spiritual experimentation totally preoccupied with itself, totally enclosed within the ego, and hence incapable of self-surrender to the absolute presumably being sought.

  All through this first presentation of Stavrogin, Dostoevsky accentuates the pure gratuity of his scandalous behavior, the impossibility of explaining it by any commonplace motives. There is something mysterious about Stavrogin’s violence, particularly about his taste for self-degradation, that challenges the norm. The sheer gratuitousness of his defiance of social convention, which so much fascinated André Gide in Dostoevsky, is stressed even more strongly in the episodes that scandalize his birthplace on his return. He suddenly pulls the nose of a harmless old gentleman who has been in the habit of asserting, “No, you can’t lead me by the nose” (10: 38); on the spur of the moment he kisses Liputin’s pretty wife with ardent passion; called in by his distant relative, the governor of the province, for some explanation, he surpasses himself by biting the governor’s ear. All these incidents exemplify Stavrogin’s rejection of any internal or external restraints on the absolute autonomy of his self-will. When he goes mad with an attack of “brain fever,” the chronicler remarks that it was thought by some (and they were right) to be “neither here nor there” so far as an explanation of his actions was concerned (10: 44).

  The first physical description of Stavrogin pinpoints his strange appearance of indefinable artificiality—an appearance that obviously derives from his symbolic function. “His hair was of a peculiarly intense black, his light-colored eyes were peculiarly light and calm, his complexion was peculiarly soft and white, the red in his cheeks was too bright and clear, his teeth were like pearls and his lips like coral—one would have thought the very acme of beauty, yet at the same time somehow repellent. It was said that his face suggested a mask” (10: 37). Stavrogin’s masklike beauty reminds one of the vampires and ghouls of Gothic fictional mythology; like them, he is a living corpse whose unearthly beauty is the deceptive façade behind which festers the horror of evil and corruption. Several years later, however, when the chronicler observes him face-to-face again, a change has occurred. “Now—now, I don’t know why he impressed me at once as absolutely incontestably beautiful, so that no one could have said that his face was like a mask.” Now he seemed “to have the light of some new idea in his eyes” (10: 145).

  By this time, Stavrogin has decided to overcome his past, to humiliate himself publicly by acknowledging his marriage to Marya Lebyadkina and confessing his violation of Matryosha. By seeking forgiveness, he hopes to save himself from the madness that he feels to be his impending fate. On the purely moral-personal level, Stavrogin’s character is defined by his despairing struggle to triumph over the egoism of his self-will and to attain a state of genuine humility. The first overt manifestation of this “new idea” is the self-control h
e exhibits under the provocation of Shatov’s blow; but he lies about his relation to the crippled Marya, which he wishes to reveal only under conditions of his own choosing. And this is the first justification for Tikhon’s later judgment that Stavrogin’s egoism, far from having been conquered by his new resolution, has taken on its subtlest form of all as a carefully staged martyrdom of contempt.

  At the end of this scene the narrator attempts to define Stavrogin’s character, and compares him with the well-known figure of a legendary Decembrist, L—n (Lunin). By linking Stavrogin to a member of this group and to this period—that of Russian Byronism, Evgeny Onegin, and Lermontov’s Pechorin—Dostoevsky is attempting to compensate for the anachronism inherent in his plot structure. Consequently, Stavrogin turns out to be a contemporary development of the same type, its latest avatar in Russian culture, who, unlike his predecessor, is strangely afflicted by inner desiccation and emotional apathy.

  In the past, such “predatory” Byronic types, as Grigoryev called them, had at least enjoyed the consciousness of their own superiority and strength. But while Stavrogin would have performed the same daring feats from which they derived pleasure, he would have done so “without the slightest thrill of enjoyment, languidly, listlessly, even with ennui and entirely from unpleasant necessity.” Stavrogin had even more “malignancy” than such gentlemen of the past, “but his malignancy was cold, calm, and, if one may say so, rational—therefore, the most revolting and terrible possible” (10: 165). All the springs of human feeling have dried up in Stavrogin; his demonism is that of a total rationalism, which, once having emptied life of all significance and value, can no longer make any direct, instinctive response even to its most primitive solicitations. Byron’s Manfred has different reasons for his despair with life (his crime of incest, which resembles Stavrogin’s violation of innocence, is at least a crime of passion), but his self-characterization accurately applies to Stavrogin with equal force: