Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Good, or evil, life,

  Powers, passions, all I see in other beings,

  Have been to me as rain unto the sands. . . .

  I have no dread,

  And feel the curse to have no natural fear,

  Nor fluttering throb, that beats with hopes or wishes, Or lurking love of something on the earth.1

  The action in the first four chapters of Part II, which concentrates on Stavrogin as he makes a round of visits to Kirillov, Shatov, and the Lebyadkins, indirectly illuminates both his historical-symbolic significance and the tragedy of his yearning for an unattainable absolution through humility. The first two figures each represent an aspect of himself that he has discarded but that has now become transformed into one or another ideological “devil” permanently obsessing his spiritual disciples. In the case of Kirillov, this devil is the temptation to self-deification logically deriving from the atheistic humanism of Feuerbach. “The necessary turning point of history,” Feuerbach had written in his Essence of Christianity, “will be the moment when man becomes aware of and admits that his consciousness of God is nothing else but the consciousness of man as species. . . . Homo homini Deus est—this is the great practical principle—this is the axis on which revolves the history of the world.”2 There is a transparent echo of these famous words in the scene between Kirillov and the narrator in Part I, when Kirillov remarks that history will be divided into two parts, “from the gorilla to the annihilation of God, and from the annihilation of man [“To the gorilla?” ironically interjects the narrator—J.F.] . . . to the transformation of the earth and of man physically. Man will be God and be transformed physically” (10: 94).3

  Kirillov is one of Dostoevsky’s most remarkable creations, and, like Raskolnikov, displays Dostoevsky’s intimate understanding of the moral passion inspiring many of the radical intelligentsia whose concrete politics he abhorred. Kirillov is a secular saint whose whole being is consumed by a need for self-sacrifice. Determined to take his own life for the greater glory of mankind, whom he wishes to free from the pain and fear of death, Kirillov has agreed to do so at the moment that would most aid “the cause,” and Peter Verkhovensky intends to exploit this demented but great-souled resolution to cover the murder of Shatov. God, Kirillov believes, is nothing but the projected image of this pain and fear, and he wishes to commit suicide solely to express the highest capacity of humankind’s self-will—solely to free humanity from a God who is nothing but such a fear. Kirillov is convinced that such a suicide will initiate the era of the Man-god predicted by Feuerbach, and his death will thus be a martyrdom for humankind, but a martyrdom that reverses the significance of that of Christ. Rather than testifying to the reality and existence of God and a superterrestrial world, it will mark their final elimination from human consciousness.

  With a daring that has given rise to a great deal of confusion, Dostoevsky does not hesitate to endow Kirillov with many of the attributes of Prince Myshkin—his love for children, his ecstatic affirmation of life, his eschatological apprehension of the end of time. The symbolism of the book requires Stavrogin always to inspire a deformed and distorted image of the truth—but one that resembles what it imitates as closely and uncannily as Stavrogin’s “mask” resembles healthy human beauty. Hence Dostoevsky gives Kirillov the “mask” of Myshkin’s apocalyptic intuitions and feelings while revealing the monstrosities that result when such religious emotions, divorced from a faith in Christ, are turned into secular and subjective ideas.

  Kirillov’s deification of man leads to his own self-destruction as well as that of all humankind (“it will be the same to live or not to live”); his conviction that the Kingdom of God already exists, if people will only realize it, deludes him into denying the existence of evil (“everything is good”), and he sees no difference between worshipping “a spider crawling along a wall” and a sacred icon. Stavrogin’s demonism is refracted in Kirillov through a religious sensibility haunted, like Ippolit Terentyev, by the loss of Christ; and Kirillov’s apocalyptic yearning makes him oblivious of, and personally immune to, the horrible consequences of his own doctrines. Stavrogin, though, has lived through other experiences, and he indicates the most important of them in his question: “if anyone insults and outrages [a] little girl, is that good?” Throughout this scene he regards Kirillov “with a disdainful compassion,” though, as Dostoevsky adds carefully, “there [was] no mockery in his eyes” (10: 187–189).

  The dialogue with Kirillov is followed by a parallel scene with Shatov, and here again Dostoevsky uses some of his most cherished convictions to dramatize another of Stavrogin’s “masks.” Just as Stavrogin had inspired Kirillov with an atheistic humanism based on the supremacy of reason and the Man-god, so he has inspired Shatov, at the same time, with a Slavophilism founded on the very opposite principle. “Reason has never had the power to define good and evil,” Shatov declares, repeating Stavrogin’s teaching, “or even to distinguish between good and evil, even approximately; on the contrary, it has always mixed them up in a disgraceful and pitiful way; science has even given the solution by the fist.” The distinction between right and wrong, as the Slavophils had argued, comes only from the irrational, only from religion and faith. “There has never been a nation without a religion, that is, without an idea of good and evil.” And since, for a Russian, religion can only mean Orthodox Christianity, Stavrogin had affirmed that “a man who was not Orthodox could not be a Russian” (10: 197–199). Here, growing directly out of Stavrogin’s preachments, is the metaphysical-religious essence of the two ideologies that succeeded the Russian Byronism of the 1830s.

  The relation between Shatov and Stavrogin is much more complex, and much more difficult to describe accurately, than that between Stavrogin and Kirillov. Kirillov’s attempt literally to incarnate the Man-god can lead only to self-destruction; he thus expresses the demonic and Luciferian side of Stavrogin’s personality (but in a morally elevated form). Shatov, on the other hand, represents the need and the search for faith that is also deeply rooted in Stavrogin, the need that is impelling him to acknowledge and repent his crimes. Moreover, the effect of Stavrogin on Shatov has been the very opposite of what occurred with Kirillov; he helped Shatov to break with his radical past and imbued him with the messianic idea of the Russians as a “god-bearing” people destined to regenerate the world. Stavrogin’s influence has thus led Shatov along the path that Dostoevsky certainly considered that of salvation, but the symbolic pattern of the book requires that his path also be blocked by the fatality of Stavrogin’s doom.

  Dostoevsky wishes to emphasize the need for convictions to be grounded in sincere religious faith. Shatov’s ideas echo those of Danilevsky, who had, in Dostoevsky’s view, reduced Orthodoxy simply to a national faith and thus betrayed the universal religious mission of the Russian Christ. Indeed, Dostoevsky now felt that even the old Slavophilism of Khomiakov and Kireevsky, for all its overt religiosity, was still an artificial, Western-imported substitute for the spontaneity of the people’s faith. “The Slavophil,” Dostoevsky wrote in his notes, identifying such a doctrine with Danilevsky, “thinks that he can manage solely thanks to the natural attributes of the Russian people, but without Orthodoxy one will not manage at all, no attributes will do anything if the world has lost faith.” On the same page, in a speech not included in the text, Shatov calls Slavophilism “an aristocratic whim” and then adds: “They [the Slavophils] will never be able to believe directly” (11: 186). This idea was finally assigned to Stepan Trofimovich, who says much the same thing—and here he certainly speaks for the author—when he declares that “Shatov believes by forcing himself to, like a Moscow Slavophil” (10: 33). Hence Stavrogin and his pupil Shatov, for all their Slavophilism and Russian nationalism, cannot muster the simple and unquestioning faith that would infuse their ideas with the inner fire of true emotional commitment.

  Stavrogin thus here again inspires a mutilated version of the truth that falls short of its grounding in religious faith, even
though he knows abstractly that such faith is the only means of rescue from the chaos of his unlimited freedom. Shatov diagnoses the malady afflicting Stavrogin (and himself) in a key speech that helps to explain how Dostoevsky saw them both:

  You’re an atheist [Shatov says] because you’re a nobleman’s son, the last nobleman’s son. You’ve lost the distinction between good and evil because you’ve ceased to know your people. A new generation is coming, straight from the heart of the people, and you will know nothing of it, neither you nor the Verkhovenskys, father or son, nor I, because I am also a nobleman’s son, I, the son of your serf-lackey Pashka. (10: 202–203)

  On the symbolic level of the book, this can only mean that all the ideologies deriving from Stavrogin—whether liberal or radical Westernism in its political or metaphysical-religious form, or Slavophilism of whatever tint or shading—are equally tainted with the original sin of their birth among a Western-educated “aristocracy” totally divorced from the people. All are doomed to be swept away by an authentically Russian culture springing from the people’s faith.

  Stavrogin’s personal behavior in these scenes also makes it clear that he will never be able to achieve the total abandonment of self necessary for a religious conversion. Even with Shatov, whom he comes to warn about the impending danger of his possible murder and to whom he is closer than anyone in the book except Darya Shatova, he cannot confess the truth about Matryosha. He denies that he has “outraged children,” just as he had lied earlier about his marriage to Marya Lebyadkina. And he refuses to answer when Shatov poses the question that was to be clarified in his visit to Tikhon: “Is it true that you saw no distinction between some brutal obscene action and any great exploit, even the sacrifice of life for the good of humanity? Is it true that you have found identical beauty, equal enjoyment, in both extremes?” (10: 201). Shatov displays the same insight into Stavrogin that Tikhon would later exhibit when he diagnoses the motives for his marriage to Marya: “You married through a passion for martyrdom, from a craving for remorse, through moral sensuality” (10: 202). The first two impulses in Stavrogin, genuinely moral, are always crippled and distorted by the third, which stems from his enjoyment of the outrageously perverse, shocking, and sheerly gratuitous manifestations of his absolute self-will.

  Stavrogin’s next visit, to the Lebyadkins, completes the sequence unmasking Stavrogin as an “impostor.” Marya Lebyadkin, Stavrogin’s virginal wife, is one of Dostoevsky’s most poetic and enigmatic creations. Childish and mentally feeble, unable to distinguish between objective reality and her dreams and desires, she yet pierces through the “mask” of Stavrogin with a clairvoyance that recalls Prince Myshkin and foreshadows Father Zosima. Her sense of the sacredness of the cosmos, her affirmation that “the Mother of God is the great mother, the damp earth,” who brings joy to men when they “water the earth with [their] tears a foot deep” (10: 116), evokes the esoteric, heretical lore of certain sects of the raskolniki, who mingled their Christianity with remnants of pre-Christian paganism.

  Marya represents Dostoevsky’s vision of the primitive religious sensibility of the Russian people, who continued to feel a mystical union between the Russian soil and “the Mother of God.” The debasement and pathos of her condition, however, reveal Dostoevsky’s ambiguity about the raskolniki and their sectarian offshoots; he tended to see them as a precious reservoir of Old Russian values, but kept his distance from their sometimes theologically suspect extremes. At one point, Dostoevsky had thought of using Golubov, an Old Believer returned to Orthodoxy, as a positive source of moral inspiration. In this context, Marya’s poignant longing for a “prince” who would not be ashamed to acknowledge her as his own takes on historical-symbolic meaning. Her false and unconsummated marriage to Stavrogin surely indicates that no true union is possible between the Christian Russian people and the embodied essence of godless Russian Europeanism.

  Symbolically again, it is entirely appropriate that Marya should finally unmask Stavrogin and label him unequivocally an “impostor.” Whatever confusion may exist in her mind, her demented second sight, like that traditionally possessed by a “holy fool” (yurodivy), has now pierced through to his ultimate incapacity for true selflessness. “As soon as I saw your mean face when I fell and you picked me up—it was as if a worm had crawled into my heart,” she says; “it’s not he, I thought to myself, not he! My falcon would never have been ashamed of me in front of a young society lady!” (10: 219). Stavrogin starts with rage and terror when she prophetically alludes to his “knife,” that is, his lurking desire to have her murdered (on which Peter Verkhovensky hopes to capitalize). And while she reads his innermost soul, she also speaks for the Russian people in assigning him his true historical-symbolic dimension. He is not the “prince,” not the genuine Lord and Ruler of Russia, but only Grishka Otrepeyev, “cursed in seven cathedrals,” the impious and sacrilegious “impostor” and “false pretender”—Ivan the Tsarevich—that Peter Verkhovensky wishes to use to betray and mislead the hapless Russian people.

  How justly Marya has seen into Stavrogin becomes even clearer when he throws his wallet to Fedka the convict in the solitary darkness of the storm-tossed night. By this gesture, Stavrogin silently connives at the murder of the Lebyadkins, giving way once again to the temptation of evil. His inner defeat is dramatized again in his duel with Gaganov, when he strives to achieve self-mastery and to avoid useless bloodshed, but his arrogant and contemptuous manner only enflames the uncontrollable hatred of his opponent all the more. The truly good Kirillov, ready to give his life for humankind, tries to explain to Stavrogin that moral self-conquest means a total suppression of egoism and the patient acceptance of any humiliation, even the most unjust and insupportable. “Bear your burden,” he says. “Or else there’s no merit” (10: 228). But Stavrogin cannot bear the burden of good, whatever his desire to do so, because his irrepressible egoism continues to stand in the way.

  This crucial sequence of scenes is climaxed by Stavrogin’s unexpected meeting with Darya Shatova, an episode that, in the book text, is about a page and a half shorter than the earlier magazine version. The section that Dostoevsky cut contained Stavrogin’s admission that he was haunted by hallucinations and “devils,” which he knew were only parts of himself; but his self-absorption indicates that he is beginning to believe in their reality. This menace of madness was meant to motivate the visit to Tikhon but became superfluous and incomprehensible without the confession chapter. One passage of the variant, however, helps to reconstruct the original historical-symbolic meaning of Dostoevsky’s conception. Stavrogin tells Darya that he has begun to be obsessed with a new “devil,” very different from those in the past (as represented by Kirillov and Shatov): “Yesterday he was stupid and insolent. He’s a thickheaded seminarian filled with the self-satisfaction of the 1860s, with the . . . background, soul, and mentality of a lackey, fully persuaded of his irresistible beauty. . . . Nothing could be more repulsive! I was furious that my own devil could put on such a debasing mask” (12: 141). It is clear that Dostoevsky intended to make Stavrogin as much responsible for devils of the 1860s as Stepan Trofimovich, if not indeed more so, because of his disdainful collaboration with Peter.

  The scene with Darya Shatova, accordingly, serves as a transition between the first and second sections of Part II. Immediately following this dialogue, Dostoevsky shifts his focus from Stavrogin to the spread of the moral and social chaos he has brought in his wake in the form of Peter Verkhovensky. Here Dostoevsky gives full play to his immense satiric verve as he sketches all the people whose stupidity and lack of principle turn them into willing dupes of Peter’s intrigues. The ambitious bluestocking Yulia von Lembke, determined to impress the most exalted spheres by her influence on the young generation; her obtuse and incompetent Russo-German automaton of a husband, the governor of the province, literally driven out of his mind by the tumultuous course of events; even the normally hardheaded and domineering Mme Stavrogina—all fall under Peter Verkhoven
sky’s spell, aided and abetted by the patronage of Karmazinov. Only poor Stepan Trofimovich, more and more lonely, isolated, and agitated, resists the general disintegration and still plans to vindicate his ideals.

  Starting as the personal foible of a few foolish people, the corruption becomes a demoralization in the most literal sense. Dostoevsky introduces a whole series of incidents to illustrate it, ranging from a breakdown of standards of personal conduct and social propriety to disrespect for the dead and the desecration of a sacred icon. Just as with his general influence on society as a whole, the result of his pressure on the quintet is a collapse of their own moral-political standards and the approval of a wanton murder. There is a clear structural parallel between Stavrogin’s round of visits in the first half of this section and Peter’s calls in the second half on all the pawns he is engaged in maneuvering. Dostoevsky intended to bring these parallel sequences together by the two chapters of self-revelation that would conclude Part II: Verkhovensky’s mad hymn to universal destruction, inspired by Stavrogin, and then a disclosure of the moral bankruptcy and despair of Verkhovensky’s “idol” as he makes his confession to Tikhon.

  From his first appearance in the novel, Peter Verkhovensky is depicted as the genius of duplicity. He is Stavrogin’s demonism incarnated as a political will-to-power. “I invented you abroad,” he cries furiously to Stavrogin. “I invented it all, looking at you. If I hadn’t watched you from my corner, nothing of all this would have entered my head” (10: 326). What Peter has invented, under the spell of Stavrogin, is the plan to consecrate him as Ivan the Tsarevich—to use the very force he wishes to destroy, the faith of the Russian people in a just and righteous God-anointed ruler, as a means for their own destruction. This plan has obvious symbolic affinities with Stavrogin’s effect on Kirillov and Shatov; in each of them he has inspired a “mask” of the truth shorn of its true religious foundations. This mask is “beautiful,” as Peter exclaims ecstatically while gazing at Stavrogin, but, as already noted, it is the beauty of the demonic. “You are my idol!” Peter passionately proclaims to Stavrogin (10: 323). Peter’s plan, however, implicitly contains its own negation, for it reveals the impotence of his godless and amoral principles to establish any basis for human life. Falsehood and idolatry must speak deceptively in the name of truth and God, thus confessing their own bankruptcy.