Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  Following Verkhovensky’s “confession” to the false god Stavrogin, Dostoevsky had planned to portray Stavrogin’s confession to the true God in the person of his servitor, Tikhon. This would have dramatized all the horror and abomination of the “idol” that Peter Verkhovensky was worshiping. After a sleepless night spent in warding off his hallucinations, Stavrogin would visit Tikhon, and then the secret of his past, repeatedly hinted at up to this point, was to be finally disclosed. Like Onegin and Pechorin, Stavrogin is a victim of the famous mal de siècle, the all-engulfing ennui that haunts the literature of the first half of the nineteenth century and is invariably depicted as resulting from the loss of religious faith. Baudelaire, its greatest poet, called ennui the deadliest of the vices:

  Quoiqu’il ne pousse ni grands gestes ni grands cris,

  Il ferait volontiers de la terre un débris

  Et dans un baillement avalerait le monde.4

  Ennui is a prominent symptom of that “romantic agony” whose dossier has been so industriously compiled by Mario Praz and whose usual result is some form of moral perversion.5 Dostoevsky had depicted it as such in Prince Valkovsky (The Insulted and Injured), in the sudden appearance of Cleopatra in Notes from Underground, and in Svidrigailov (Crime and Punishment). With Stavrogin, it has led to the abominable violation of little Matryosha and his unspeakably vile passivity as she takes her life.

  Such is the result of Stavrogin’s attempt to pass beyond the limits of morality, to put into practice, with the maniacal determination of Dostoevsky’s negative heroes, the conviction that there are no moral boundaries of any kind. “I formulated for the first time in my life what appeared to be the rule of my life,” Stavrogin tells himself, “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” (12: 113). For Stavrogin, these were “old familiar thoughts” that he was at last putting clearly to himself for the first time. Like Raskolnikov’s crime, Stavrogin’s revolting escapades had been a great moral-philosophical experiment. This is why Dostoevsky had taken such pains from the start to dissociate his conduct from any kind of banal and self-indulgent debauchery.

  Yet Stavrogin’s ambition to transcend the human, to arrogate for himself supreme power over life and death, nonetheless runs aground on the hidden reef of conscience. No matter what he may think, Stavrogin cannot entirely eliminate his feeling for the difference between good and evil. This irrepressible sentiment breaks forth from his subconscious—usually, though not invariably, the guardian of morality for Dostoevsky—in Stavrogin’s famous dream of “the Golden Age,” inspired by Claude Lorrain’s painting Acis and Galatea. Stavrogin saw in his mind’s eye:

  A corner of the Greek archipelago; blue, caressing waves, islands, . . . a magic vista in the distance, a spellbinding sunset. . . . Here was the cradle of European civilization, here were the first scenes from mythology, man’s paradise on earth. Here a beautiful race of men had lived. They rose and went to sleep happy and innocent. . . . The most incredible dream that has ever been dreamed, but to which all mankind has devoted all its powers during the whole of its existence, for which it has died on the cross and for which its prophets have been killed, without which nations will not live and cannot even die. (11: 21)

  This vision of a primeval earthly paradise of happiness and innocence fills Stavrogin’s heart with overflowing joy. “I woke and opened my eyes, for the first time in my life literally wet with tears. . . . A feeling of happiness, hitherto unknown to me, pierced my heart till it ached.” But then a tiny red spider, associated in Stavrogin’s subconscious with Matryosha’s death, replaced this blissful vision of Eden. He sees the little girl, in his mind’s eye, standing on the threshold of his room and threatening him with her tiny fist. “Pity for her stabbed me,” he writes, “a maddening pity, and I would have given my body to be torn to pieces if that would have erased what happened” (12: 127–128). Stavrogin finds this lacerating reminder of his own evil unbearable, but he willfully refuses to suppress the recollection, and this insupportable need to expiate his crime, which nothing he knows or believes in can help to absolve, is gradually driving him mad.

  Stavrogin’s confession thus reveals the source of his inner torment, but this torment has never been sufficient to overcome the supreme egoism and self-will that originally motivated his actions. Even his confession, as Tikhon senses, is only another and more extreme form of the “moral sensuality” that has marked all his previous attempts at self-mastery. “This document,” says Tikhon of his manuscript, “is born of a heart wounded unto death. . . . But it is as though you were already hating and despising in advance all those who read what you have written, and challenging them to an encounter” (11: 24). Tikhon discerns that Stavrogin by himself can never achieve the true humility of genuine repentance; his need for suffering and martyrdom can thus lead only to more and more disastrous provocations. Hence Tikhon argues that Stavrogin submit his will completely to the secret control of a saintly starets and thus discipline himself, by a total surrender to another, as the first step along the path to the acceptance of Christ and the hope of forgiveness. But Stavrogin, irritably breaking an ivory crucifix he has been fingering during the interview, rejects this final admonition and goes to his self-destruction.

  When it proved impossible to include the confession chapter in its proper place, Dostoevsky was forced to mutilate the original symmetry of his plan. Part II was to have exposed the origins of the chaos sown by Stavrogin and his “worshiper” Peter Verkhovensky; Part III would then have shown the practical results of their handiwork. Instead, Dostoevsky was forced to allow the present Chapter 9 of Part II (“Stepan Verkhovensky Is Raided”) to replace the confession. From this point on, a continuous sequence unrolls the disastrous moral-social consequences of Peter Verkhovensky’s intrigues, including von Lembke’s madness and the weird fête for the underprivileged governesses of the province, one of the greatest comic mass scenes in the history of the novel and also containing the hilarious parody of Turgenev. These events reach dizzy heights of farce, intermingled with the shocking news of Liza Tushina’s flight to Stavrogin (arranged by Peter), the destruction caused by the fires, and the discovery of the murders of Captain Lebyadkin and his sister.

  Both the killing of Shatov and the suicide of Kirillov exhibit the same pattern of reversion and regression to the inhuman. The hapless conspirators are far from sharing Peter’s insouciance about human life, and as the murder takes place, Lyamshin and Virginsky are overtaken by a panic return to animality. “Lyamshin gave vent to a scream more animal than human, he went on shrieking without a pause, his mouth wide open and his eyes staring out of his head. . . . Virginsky was so scared that he too screamed out like a madman, and with a ferocity, a vindictiveness that one could not have expected of Virginsky” (10: 461). Nor is Kirillov’s eerie death the triumphant assertion of a total self-will; it is, rather, the demented act of a crazed and terrified subhuman creature. The annihilation of God, far from leading to a mastery over the pain and fear of death, brings on the animal frenzy with which Kirillov sinks his teeth into Peter’s hand. Like Raskolnikov’s crime, Kirillov’s suicide is the self-negation and self-refutation of his own grandiose ideas.

  If some characters may be said to sink below themselves by reverting to the level of animality, Stepan Trofimovich surprises the narrator by rising above himself and finally overcoming his eternal hesitations. His touchingly aimless peregrinations, which Dostoevsky had so much looked forward to composing, plunge him into entirely new circumstances. Nothing is finer, in this book so filled with remarkable pages, than the bewildered contact between the sheltered, pampered “liberal,” who has spent his life uttering fine phrases and depreciatory remarks about the Russian people, and the dumbfounded peasants whom he finally encounters. There is mutual incomprehension on both sides, as each observes the strange ways of the other with astonishment. Above all, th
e inspired meeting with the ex-nurse distributing copies of the New Testament allows Dostoevsky to introduce his religious thematic in the midst of Stepan Trofimovich’s perplexities.

  The startled lady immediately becomes the object of his affectionate attention, and he dependently adapts himself to her as he had done for most of his life with Mme Stavrogin. “Vous voyez, désormais nous le prêcherons [the New Testament] ensemble. . . . the common people are religious, c’est admis, but they don’t yet know the Gospel. . . . By expounding it to them verbally it is possible to correct the errors of that remarkable book, which, of course, I shall treat with the utmost respect” (10: 497). Running a high fever and near death, he attempts to persuade her of his unacknowledged genius, leaving her totally confused as she arranges for the administration of the sacraments.

  From the very first pages, Stepan Trofimovich has been presented not as an atheist, to be sure, but as a species of Hegelian deist. “I believe in God,” he declares importantly, “mais distinguons, I believe in him as a Being who is conscious of himself in me only” (10: 33). Nothing that Stepan Trofimovich says in these last pages contradicts his aversion to the naïve anthropomorphism of the popular faith, and the narrator maintains a well-justified skepticism over “whether he was really converted, or whether the stately ceremony of the administration of the sacraments impressed him and stirred the artistic responsiveness of his temperament” (10: 505). Nor does he lose his taste for risqué jests about religion even on his deathbed. It is after an imperious outburst of Mme Stavrogin, who has finally arrived to take charge, that he smiles faintly and says, “God is necessary to me if only because He is the only being whom I can love eternally” (10: 505).

  Stepan Trofimovich, then, does not die a Christian in any strict meaning of the word, but a reading of the Sermon on the Mount stirs him to acknowledge: “My friend, all my life I’ve been lying.” And after listening to the passage from Luke about “the devils” who had entered the herd of swine, he declares: “They are we, we and those . . . and Petrusha and les autres avec lui . . . and I perhaps at the head of them” (10: 499). Such words, though consistent with the plot structure, scarcely accord sufficient importance to Stavrogin. More convincing, and entirely in character, is Stepan Trofimovich’s final statement of his credo: “The whole law of human existence is merely this, that man should always bow down before the infinitely great. If people are deprived of the infinitely great, they will not continue to live and will die in despair. The infinite and immeasurable are as necessary to man as the little planet on which he dwells. My friends, all, all: Long live the Great Idea!” (10: 506). This is not Christian in any literal sense and could hardly have been meant to be taken as such; but it contains enough of a feeling for the transcendent to constitute an answer to the hubris of the purely human.

  Stavrogin’s suicide, which terminates the novel, had been foreseen by Dostoevsky from his very first grasp of this character, but it is difficult to say how it might have been presented if the confession chapter had been included. As we have seen in the excised conversation with Darya Shatova, it is Stavrogin who feels possessed by all the ideological “devils” and ultimately sees himself as their source. As it stands, the book merely contains the somewhat feeble assertion, in Stavrogin’s suicide note, that “from me nothing has come but negation, with no magnanimity and no force. Even negation has not come from me” (10: 514). This last sentence hardly jibes with Stavrogin’s relations with the other characters and may have been included to strengthen the final speech of Stepan Trofimovich. Without the confession chapter, there is no doubt that the book ends somewhat lamely: the reader does not know either that Stavrogin had made a sacrilegious, proto-Nietzchean attempt to transcend the boundaries of good and evil or that his conscience has driven him to the point of madness. His suicide thus loses much of its symbolic-historical meaning as a self-condemnation of all the ideologies he has spawned.

  Nevertheless, the scope of his canvas, the brilliant ferocity of his wit, the prophetic power and insight of his satire, his unrivaled capacity to bring to life and embody in characters the most profound and complex moral-philosophical issues and social ideas—all combine to make this “pamphlet-poem” perhaps Dostoevsky’s most dazzling creation. It is an unprecedented historical-symbolic drama, intended to encompass all the forces of nineteenth-century Russian culture up to its time, and unlike any other work in the period in Russian or European literature. Even with the flood of such novels in the twentieth century, Demons remains unsurpassed as an astonishingly prescient portrayal of the moral quagmires, and the possibilities for self-betrayal of the highest principles, that have continued to dog the revolutionary ideal from Dostoevsky’s day down (even more spectacularly) to our own.

  1 Lord Byron, Complete Poetical Works (Cambridge, MA, 1905).

  2 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York, 1957), 270–271.

  3 Andrzej Walicki cites a passage from the later Lectures on the Essence of Religion in which Feuerbach refers to “the future immortal man, differentiated from man as he exists at present in the body and flesh.” See Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought (Stanford, 1979), 317.

  4 “Without great gestures or loud cries / It would gladly turn earth into a wasteland / And swallow the world in a yawn.” Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec (Paris, 1954), 82.

  5 Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (Oxford, 1970), 419–420.

  PART V

  The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881

  CHAPTER 46

  The Citizen

  The Dostoevskys had been living from hand to mouth on advances from Katkov, and with the conclusion of Demons, this source of income ceased to exist. Anna was determined to help her husband increase the family income, and the opportunity arose when Dostoevsky turned to publishers for the sale of the rights to Demons as an independent volume. He had hoped to net a considerable sum, but the hail of unfavorable criticism lowered the novel’s value in the marketplace, and the offers he received were derisory for an important work by a famous author. He and Anna thus decided to publish the book themselves—at last realizing a dream that Dostoevsky had nourished since the mid-1840s. The project was financially risky and might sink them even further into debt, but the rewards were too enticing to resist.

  With justifiable pride, Anna describes in her Reminiscences how she made presumably innocent inquiries of booksellers and printers about costs, discounts, and so on, carefully concealing her real purpose, and learned the secrets of the trade. The Dostoevskys then published Demons on their own, buying the paper, arranging for the printing and binding, and turning out an edition of thirty-five hundred copies. Anna conducted all the negotiations with the buyers, and the Dostoevskys were thus launched as a publishing firm. This was, as Anna writes with satisfaction, “the cornerstone of our joint publishing activity and, after his death, of my own work, which continued for thirty-eight years.”1 When their first edition was sold out, they had earned a profit of four thousand rubles.

  Long before he even fancied that he could become a publisher, however, Dostoevsky had thought of another means of rescuing himself from his humiliating wage slavery to editors and publishers. Several times in his correspondence from abroad he had mentioned the idea of a new journalistic publication, and he even worked such a notion into the text of Demons. Liza Drozdova, wishing to be “useful” to her country, tells Shatov about her plan for a yearly almanac that would be a selection of facts about Russia, but all chosen in such a way as to convey “an intention, a thought, illuminating all of the whole” (10: 104). As far back as 1864–1865, Dostoevsky had also jotted down notes for a biweekly publication to be called Notebooks (Zapisnye knizhki). This is clearly the origin of what became his Diary of a Writer, and his wife tells us that he was thinking of starting such a publication just at this time. But he was afraid to begin because the economic risks were too great.

  Dostoevsky’s inclusion into the Meshchersky literar
y-political circle, though, had already led him to suggest the publication of a yearly almanac of the type mentioned by Liza Drozdova as a supplement to Meshchersky’s journal, The Citizen, and an announcement of such a supplement appeared in October. In addition, Dostoevsky’s participation in revisions of articles written by Meshchersky during the Wednesday evening gatherings at the prince’s home allowed him to gradually slip into becoming a member of the journal’s editorial board. When an editorial crisis arose in the winter of 1872–1873—Gradovsky, the moderately liberal editor resigned because of the prince’s interference in editorial matters—it was only natural that he, the famous writer now freed from the burden of his novel, should be the person to whom all turned in their hour of need.