Dostoevsky (140 page)

By this time, Stavrogin has decided to overcome his past, to humiliate himself publicly by acknowledging his marriage to Marya Lebyadkina and confessing his violation of Matryosha. By seeking forgiveness, he hopes to save himself from the madness that he feels to be his impending fate. On the purely moral-personal level, Stavrogin’s character is defined by his despairing struggle to triumph over the egoism of his self-will and to attain a state of genuine humility. The first overt manifestation of this “new idea” is the self-control he exhibits under the provocation of Shatov’s blow; but he lies about his relation to the crippled Marya, which he wishes to reveal only under conditions of his own choosing. And this is the first justification for Tikhon’s later judgment that Stavrogin’s egoism, far from having been conquered by his new resolution, has taken on its subtlest form of all as a carefully staged martyrdom of contempt.

At the end of this scene the narrator attempts to define Stavrogin’s character, and compares him with the well-known figure of a legendary Decembrist, L—n (Lunin). By linking Stavrogin to a member of this group and to this period—that of Russian Byronism,
Evgeny Onegin
, and Lermontov’s Pechorin—Dostoevsky is attempting to compensate for the anachronism inherent in his plot structure. Consequently, Stavrogin turns out to be a
contemporary
development of the same type, its latest avatar in Russian culture, who, unlike his predecessor, is strangely afflicted by inner desiccation and emotional apathy.

In the past, such “predatory” Byronic types, as Grigoryev called them, had at least enjoyed the consciousness of their own superiority and strength. But while Stavrogin would have performed the same daring feats from which they derived pleasure, he would have done so “without the slightest thrill of enjoyment, languidly, listlessly, even with
ennui
and entirely from unpleasant necessity.” Stavrogin had even more “malignancy” than such gentlemen of the past, “but his malignancy was cold, calm, and, if one may say so,
rational
—therefore, the most revolting and terrible possible” (10: 165). All the springs of human feeling have dried up in Stavrogin; his demonism is that of a total rationalism, which, once having emptied life of all significance and value, can no longer make any direct, instinctive response even to its most primitive solicitations. Byron’s Manfred has different reasons for his despair with life (his crime of incest, which resembles Stavrogin’s violation of innocence, is at least a crime of passion), but his self-characterization accurately applies to Stavrogin with equal force:

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:

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.