Dostoevsky (138 page)

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 backward 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.

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.