Dostoevsky (59 page)

That
The Village of Stepanchikovo
explicitly involves a critical revision by Dostoevsky of his own past is also clearly indicated by the narrative perspective. For the story is told by a young man, a nephew of the Colonel, brought up by him and a recent graduate of the University of St. Petersburg. What happens in Stepanchikovo is recounted through his startled and disbelieving eyes, and the change he undergoes is of first-rate thematic importance. Before meeting Foma Fomich in the flesh, the narrator responds to all the rumors about him in accordance with the humanitarian principles inculcated by his progressive university education. And these principles turn out to be, in a simplified and parodistic form, precisely those that had inspired Dostoevsky’s own works in the 1840s.
Perhaps, says the young narrator fumblingly, Foma is “a gifted nature” who “has been wounded, crushed by sufferings,” and so is avenging himself on humanity (“and perhaps if he could be reconciled to humanity . . . he would turn out to be a rare nature, perhaps even a very remarkable one”) (3: 29). This point of view is abandoned instantly by the narrator once he sees Foma in action; and his change of heart reveals to what extent Dostoevsky was conscious of having broken with the ideology of his earlier work. From this time on, the social-psychological perspective he had largely maintained throughout the 1840s will be replaced by one in which the moral responsibility of the person takes precedence over all other considerations.

As the narrator rightly observes, Foma Fomich could not have achieved the “insolent domination” he exercises at Stepanchikovo if not for the equally remarkable character of the owner of that estate, Colonel Rostanev. No single Dostoevskian character anticipates Colonel Rostanev as clearly as Yefimov does Foma Fomich, but the Colonel may nonetheless be linked to a thematic tendency already observable in
Netotchka Nezvanova
. Just as in the case of Yefimov, that is, without overtly clashing with the social-psychological framework, Dostoevsky stressed the need to overcome the instinctive impulse of the humiliated ego to hit back; each important episode illustrates in some way the nefarious moral consequences of a failure to conquer resentment and the ravages of an egoism so self-absorbed as to be incapable of forgiveness or even of mercy. Now, in
The Village of Stepanchikovo
, Dostoevsky essays his first positive embodiment of this thematic motif in a single character, his first attempt to create that ideal of a “perfectly good man” to which he will return repeatedly throughout the remainder of his life. And the juxtaposition and pairing of Foma and the Colonel—the face-to-face opposition of an egomaniacal member of the Russian intelligentsia with a simple Russian soul, overflowing with charity and love—anticipates a similar pattern in many later works.

Dostoevsky presents his first ideal figure in the unlikely guise of an officer, now retired to run his estate. While appearing the very image of presumably self-assertive masculine health and strength, Colonel Rostanev possesses a moral disposition seraphic in its mildness, amiability, and lack of self-regard. “He was a perfect child at forty, open-hearted in the extreme, always good-humored, imagining everybody an angel. . . . He was one of those very generous and pure-hearted men who are positively ashamed to assume any harm of another . . . and in that way always live in an ideal world, and when anything goes wrong always blame themselves first. To sacrifice themselves in the interests of others is their natural vocation” (3: 13–14). Colonel Rostanev is thus a “weak” character in the best sense of that word; and one has the distinct impression that in dealing with
his qualities, Dostoevsky is doing so with a side-glance at the Chernyshevsky-Annenkov controversy. Why otherwise should the narrator have felt called on to meet the following objection: “Some people would have called him cowardly, weak-willed and feeble. Of course he was weak, and indeed he was of too soft a disposition; but it was not from lack of will, but from fear of wounding, of behaving cruelly, from excess of respect for others. . . . He was, however, weak-willed and cowardly only when nothing was at stake but his own interests, which he completely disregarded, and for this he was continually an object of derision, and often with the very people for whom he was sacrificing his own advantage” (3: 14).

Foma Fomich obtains his initial hold over the Colonel when he arrives in the retinue of the Colonel’s mother, the widow of the general who had used (and abused) Foma as his buffoon. Foma has succeeded in gaining control over this credulous and superstitious woman, who rivals him in selfishness and self-indulgence while lacking his cunning and intelligence. “He (Foma) read aloud to them [
Madame le générale
and her repulsive hangers-on] works of spiritual edification; held forth with eloquent tears on the Christian virtues; told stories of his life and heroic doings; went to mass and even to matins; at times foretold the future; had a peculiar faculty for interpreting dreams, and was a great hand at throwing blame on his neighbors” (3: 8). As the narrator bitingly remarks: “And this idiot woman my uncle thought it his duty to revere, simply because she was his mother” (3: 14). As a result, the Colonel’s reverence for his mother is transferred to Foma, and Foma exploits this filial devotion to turn the Colonel into a plaything at the mercy of the whims of a malicious underling. It is the consummate moral imposter Foma who displays all the sins he imputes to the Colonel, but the latter, incapable of finding fault with others and only too ready to accuse himself, is tremendously impressed by Foma’s high-minded regurgitations of snippets from Gogol’s
Selected Passages
(and his earlier
Testament
).

A good many of the ideas uttered by Foma Fomich unquestionably contain injunctions and exhortations that speak for Dostoevsky’s own moral ideals. “Be softer, more attentive, more loving to others,” Foma admonishes the Colonel, “forget yourself for the sake of others. . . . Suffer, labor, pray and hope” (3: 89). Dostoevsky does not satirize the literal sense of such perfectly respectable Christian counsels, which he had no intention of undermining
in themselves
, but rather their perversion to obtain and justify domination over others. The target of Dostoevsky’s attack is Foma’s pose of self-glorification and almost self-deification. He repudiates Foma, after all, by juxtaposing him with Colonel Rostanev, who is the authentic embodiment of all the moral values that Foma is eternally proclaiming in words and totally ignoring in deeds. A remark made years later by Dostoevsky reflects his unchanging negative attitude toward the
Selected Passages
. “The ideal of Gogol is strange,” he wrote; “inwardly it is Christianity, but
his Christianity is not Christianity.”
²¹
Dostoevsky created Colonel Rostanev as his first “outward” image of what it meant to be a genuine Christian.

Most of the action is taken up with the various devices invented by Foma, with ingenious nastiness, to harass and mortify the Colonel—all being calculated, at the same time, to exalt the insatiable vanity of the erstwhile flunky. A serious level of intrigue involves the plan, concocted by Foma and the Colonel’s mother, to force the Colonel into marriage with Tatyana Ivanovna. Actually, he is in love with Nastenka, the poor young governess of his two children by his first marriage. Aware of the Colonel’s inclination, Foma and
Madame le générale
persecute Nastenka unmercifully with the aim of driving her away, and the Colonel initially invites his young nephew to Stepanchikovo as a prospective suitor for Nastenka if he can win her consent. Once he is on the scene, however, the situation becomes clear, and the narrator urges his uncle to defy the plotters and marry Nastenka himself.

The dénouement occurs when Foma finally goes too far, accusing the Colonel in public of having seduced and depraved the young woman. This is too much even for the long-suffering Colonel, who, enraged at the slur on Nastenka’s reputation, physically pitches Foma Fomich through a glass door and out of the house. The unbeatable Foma soon returns, bruised and battered, but chastened enough now to realize that he must change his tune. So he blesses the marriage, pretending to have been in favor of it all along, and lives happily ever after in clover with the grateful pair, posing, preaching, and carrying on much as before, but careful not to overstep the line that finally had been drawn: “She (Nastenka) would not see her husband humiliated and insisted on her wishes being respected” (3: 164).

Dostoevsky was speaking truthfully when he declared that
The Village of Stepanchikovo
had been written with “his flesh and blood,” and one can already see reflected in its pages some of the important artistic consequences of his Siberian years. These consequences are most evident in Foma Fomich, who illustrates Dostoevsky’s deepened understanding of the explosive power of resentment and frustration simmering in the irrational depths of the human personality. For what had been suggested in Yefimov only as an aberration of the Romantic ego is now presented as a widespread human potentiality. Foma’s immeasurable vanity, the narrator remarks, may seem a special case, but in fact, “who knows, perhaps in some of these degraded victims of fate, your fools and buffoons, vanity far from being dispelled by humiliation is even aggravated by that very humiliation . . . and being forever forced to submission and self-suppression” (3: 12).
Such a comment springs directly from Dostoevsky’s indelible recollections of the prison camp, where he had seen the need of the personality to assert itself in some way at all costs.

Indeed, it is possible—though probably a trifle premature—to regard Foma Fomich as a first sketch of the underground man. In general, Foma acts in a perfectly rational manner. Even though his behavior as a whole can hardly be compared with the willful self-destructiveness of the underground man, there is one scene in which he does exhibit a willingness to sacrifice immediate self-interest for the sake of an “irrational” ego satisfaction. When the Colonel offers Foma a large sum of money to leave Stepanchikovo and settle in the nearby town, proposing to buy him a house there as well, Foma rejects the inducement with monumental scorn and squeals of outrage that his “honor” is being insulted. Another character comments, on hearing of the incident, “I doubt whether Foma had any mercenary design on it [the refusal]. He is not a practical man; he is a sort of poet, too, in his own way. . . . He would have taken the money, do you see, but he couldn’t resist the temptation to strike an attitude and give himself airs” (3: 93–94). Such a predominance of emotive impulse over economic calculation is only a momentary velleity in Foma’s case, but it does point the way to the future elaboration of his psychology into that of the underground man.
²²

We have already commented on the deflation of the narrator’s philanthropic sentiments once he catches sight of Foma in the flesh, and Dostoevsky reinforces this key motif at the conclusion, where he also adds another important touch to the characterization of the Colonel. For just after Foma has been tamed and placated, the Foma motif is reiterated in relation to another “great man” and “light of learning,” Korovkin, whom the Colonel has met by chance one day and invited to Stepanchikovo. This worthy gentleman turns up at the climax, amid the general rejoicing, attired in greasy rags and dead drunk. The Colonel begins to apologize for him in words almost identical with those earlier used by the narrator about Foma: “You know, he may be an excellent man, but fate. . . . He has had misfortunes. . . .” At which point the affectionate narrator, to comfort his embarrassed uncle, pretends to agree with him: “And I began fervently declaring that even in the creature who has fallen lowest there may still survive the finest human feelings; that the depths of the human soul are unfathomable; that we must not despise the fallen but on the contrary ought to seek them out and raise them up; that the commonly accepted standard of goodness and morality was
not infallible, and so on, and so on; in fact, I warmed up to the subject, and even began talking about the Natural School. In conclusion, I even repeated the verses: ‘When from dark error’s subjugation . . .’ ” (3: 160–161).