Dostoevsky (139 page)

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.

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 the 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:

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).