Dostoevsky (141 page)

Stavrogin’s next visit, to the Lebyadkins, completes the sequence unmasking Stavrogin as an “impostor.” Marya Lebyadkin, Stavrogin’s virginal wife, is one of Dostoevsky’s most poetic and enigmatic creations. Childish and mentally feeble, unable to distinguish between objective reality and her dreams and desires, she yet pierces through the “mask” of Stavrogin with a clairvoyance that recalls Prince Myshkin and foreshadows Father Zosima. Her sense of the sacredness of
the cosmos, her affirmation that “the Mother of God is the great mother, the damp earth,” who brings joy to men when they “water the earth with [their] tears a foot deep” (10: 116), evokes the esoteric, heretical lore of certain sects of the
raskolniki
, who mingled their Christianity with remnants of pre-Christian paganism.

Marya represents Dostoevsky’s vision of the primitive religious sensibility of the Russian people, who continued to feel a mystical union between the Russian soil and “the Mother of God.” The debasement and pathos of her condition, however, reveal Dostoevsky’s ambiguity about the
raskolniki
and their sectarian offshoots; he tended to see them as a precious reservoir of Old Russian values, but kept his distance from their sometimes theologically suspect extremes. At one point, Dostoevsky had thought of using Golubov, an Old Believer returned to Orthodoxy, as a positive source of moral inspiration. In this context, Marya’s poignant longing for a “prince” who would not be ashamed to acknowledge her as his own takes on historical-symbolic meaning. Her false and unconsummated marriage to Stavrogin surely indicates that no true union is possible between the Christian Russian people and the embodied essence of godless Russian Europeanism.

Symbolically again, it is entirely appropriate that Marya should finally unmask Stavrogin and label him unequivocally an “impostor.” Whatever confusion may exist in her mind, her demented second sight, like that traditionally possessed by a “holy fool” (
yurodivy
), has now pierced through to his ultimate incapacity for true selflessness. “As soon as I saw your mean face when I fell and you picked me up—it was as if a worm had crawled into my heart,” she says; “it’s not
he
, I thought to myself, not
he
! My falcon would never have been ashamed of me in front of a young society lady!” (10: 219). Stavrogin starts with rage and terror when she prophetically alludes to his “knife,” that is, his lurking desire to have her murdered (on which Peter Verkhovensky hopes to capitalize). And while she reads his innermost soul, she also speaks for the Russian people in assigning him his true historical-symbolic dimension. He is not the “prince,” not the genuine Lord and Ruler of Russia, but only Grishka Otrepeyev, “cursed in seven cathedrals,” the impious and sacrilegious “impostor” and “false pretender”—Ivan the Tsarevich—that Peter Verkhovensky wishes to use to betray and mislead the hapless Russian people.

How justly Marya has seen into Stavrogin becomes even clearer when he throws his wallet to Fedka the convict in the solitary darkness of the storm-tossed night. By this gesture, Stavrogin silently connives at the murder of the Lebyadkins, giving way once again to the temptation of evil. His inner defeat is dramatized again in his duel with Gaganov, when he strives to achieve self-mastery and to avoid useless bloodshed, but his arrogant and contemptuous
manner only enflames the uncontrollable hatred of his opponent all the more. The truly good Kirillov, ready to give his life for humankind, tries to explain to Stavrogin that moral self-conquest means a total suppression of egoism and the patient acceptance of any humiliation, even the most unjust and insupportable. “Bear your burden,” he says. “Or else there’s no merit” (10: 228). But Stavrogin cannot bear the burden of good, whatever his desire to do so, because his irrepressible egoism continues to stand in the way.

This crucial sequence of scenes is climaxed by Stavrogin’s unexpected meeting with Darya Shatova, an episode that, in the book text, is about a page and a half shorter than the earlier magazine version. The section that Dostoevsky cut contained Stavrogin’s admission that he was haunted by hallucinations and “devils,” which he knew were only parts of himself; but his self-absorption indicates that he is beginning to believe in their reality. This menace of madness was meant to motivate the visit to Tikhon but became superfluous and incomprehensible without the confession chapter. One passage of the variant, however, helps to reconstruct the original historical-symbolic meaning of Dostoevsky’s conception. Stavrogin tells Darya that he has begun to be obsessed with a new “devil,” very different from those in the past (as represented by Kirillov and Shatov): “Yesterday he was stupid and insolent. He’s a thickheaded seminarian filled with the self-satisfaction of the 1860s, with the . . . background, soul, and mentality of a lackey, fully persuaded of his irresistible beauty. . . . Nothing could be more repulsive! I was furious that my own devil could put on such a debasing mask” (12: 141). It is clear that Dostoevsky intended to make Stavrogin as much responsible for devils of the 1860s as Stepan Trofimovich, if not indeed more so, because of his disdainful collaboration with Peter.

The scene with Darya Shatova, accordingly, serves as a transition between the first and second sections of
Part II
. Immediately following this dialogue, Dostoevsky shifts his focus from Stavrogin to the spread of the moral and social chaos he has brought in his wake in the form of Peter Verkhovensky. Here Dostoevsky gives full play to his immense satiric verve as he sketches all the people whose stupidity and lack of principle turn them into willing dupes of Peter’s intrigues. The ambitious bluestocking Yulia von Lembke, determined to impress the most exalted spheres by her influence on the young generation; her obtuse and incompetent Russo-German automaton of a husband, the governor of the province, literally driven out of his mind by the tumultuous course of events; even the normally hardheaded and domineering Mme Stavrogina—all fall under Peter Verkhovensky’s spell, aided and abetted by the patronage of Karmazinov. Only poor Stepan Trofimovich, more and more lonely, isolated,
and agitated, resists the general disintegration and still plans to vindicate his ideals.

Starting as the personal foible of a few foolish people, the corruption becomes a demoralization in the most literal sense. Dostoevsky introduces a whole series of incidents to illustrate it, ranging from a breakdown of standards of personal conduct and social propriety to disrespect for the dead and the desecration of a sacred icon. Just as with his general influence on society as a whole, the result of his pressure on the quintet is a collapse of their own moral-political standards and the approval of a wanton murder. There is a clear structural parallel between Stavrogin’s round of visits in the first half of this section and Peter’s calls in the second half on all the pawns he is engaged in maneuvering. Dostoevsky intended to bring these parallel sequences together by the two chapters of self-revelation that would conclude
Part II
: Verkhovensky’s mad hymn to universal destruction, inspired by Stavrogin, and then a disclosure of the moral bankruptcy and despair of Verkhovensky’s “idol” as he makes his confession to Tikhon.

From his first appearance in the novel, Peter Verkhovensky is depicted as the genius of duplicity. He is Stavrogin’s demonism incarnated as a political will-to-power. “I invented you abroad,” he cries furiously to Stavrogin. “I invented it all, looking at you. If I hadn’t watched you from my corner, nothing of all this would have entered my head” (10: 326). What Peter has invented, under the spell of Stavrogin, is the plan to consecrate him as Ivan the Tsarevich—to use the very force he wishes to destroy, the faith of the Russian people in a just and righteous God-anointed ruler, as a means for their own destruction. This plan has obvious symbolic affinities with Stavrogin’s effect on Kirillov and Shatov; in each of them he has inspired a “mask” of the truth shorn of its true religious foundations. This mask is “beautiful,” as Peter exclaims ecstatically while gazing at Stavrogin, but, as already noted, it is the beauty of the demonic. “You are my idol!” Peter passionately proclaims to Stavrogin (10: 323). Peter’s plan, however, implicitly contains its own negation, for it reveals the impotence of his godless and amoral principles to establish any basis for human life. Falsehood and idolatry must speak deceptively in the name of truth and God, thus confessing their own bankruptcy.

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:

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:

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.