Dostoevsky (135 page)

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.

To be sure, Dostoevsky’s satire is not much tenderer for Shigalev than it is for Peter Verkhovensky, but he acknowledged the existing spectrum of radical opinion. Shigalev, in Dostoevsky’s notes, is first called Zaitsev—the same radical critic V. A. Zaitsev who had argued in the pages of the liberal journal
The Russian Word
that without the protection of slavery, the black race would be doomed to extinction because of its inherent inferiority. Shigalev too is initially an honest democratic radical who ends up, much to his dismay, favoring the “slavery” of the masses to an omnipotent radical elite. “I am perplexed by my own data,” he confesses, “and my conclusion is in direct contradiction of the original idea from which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism” (10: 311).