Authors: Joseph Frank
Dostoevsky (136 page)
The views of the radically oriented Zaitsev derived from his Social Darwinism, and this doctrine is alluded to when Shigalev asserts that all previous social thinkers “have been dreamers, tellers of fairy tales, fools who contradicted themselves, who understood nothing of natural science and the strong animal called man” (10: 311). Shigalev’s own theory for attaining “the earthly Paradise” is unmistakably biological, even though it is given only in an abbreviated version. (He solemnly asks for ten meetings to expound it properly, but, alas, the revolution cannot wait!) A “lame teacher” who has read his manuscript explains the chief idea: “Shigalev suggests . . . the division of mankind into two equal parts. One-tenth enjoys absolute liberty and unbounded power over nine-tenths. The others have to give up all individuality and become, so to speak, a herd, and, through boundless submission, will by a series of regenerations attain primeval innocence, something like the original paradise. They will have to work, however. The measures the author proposes for depriving nine-tenths of humanity of their true will, and their transformation into a herd by means of the re-education of whole generations, are . . . based on the facts of nature and very logical” (10: 312).
One might imagine that Dostoevsky here has simply let his satirical fantasy run wild à la Swift, and that there could be no textual source for Shigalev’s plan to create “the earthly Paradise” by selective Socialist breeding. In fact, however, such a source exists in the radical journalism of the 1860s, and Dostoevsky’s familiarity with all varieties of such journalism makes it more than likely that he drew on it for his purposes. It can be found in the writings of P. N. Tkachev, one of whose first articles was published by Dostoevsky in
Time
, and who had been associated with Nechaev in agitating among Petersburg students in 1869. Together they had written a
Programme of Revolutionary Activities
, which led to
Tkachev’s arrest in the roundup of Nechaev’s followers after Ivanov’s murder. Both Tkachev and Zaitsev developed the implications of Social Darwinism within the Russian radical context, but Tkachev drew conclusions even more extreme, and more shockingly inhumane, than the iconoclastic defender of Negro slavery.
Tkachev accepted the biological foundations of Darwinism but deplored the social-political conclusions that could be drawn from its tenets. If unchecked and uncontrolled, he argued, the struggle for existence could lead only to the eternal perpetuation of inequality and injustice. Justice could not be achieved except in a world of total equality, but this aim “must by no means be confused with political or legal or even economic equality”; rather, it meant “an organic, physiological equality conditioned by the same education and common living conditions.” Such equality, Tkachev wrote, was “the final and only possible aim of human life . . . the supreme criterion of historical and social progress”; it was thus “the absolute goal and highest ideal of the coming Socialist revolution.”
13
If Dostoevsky was not parodying Tkachev, it is surely a remarkable coincidence when Peter Verkhovensky exclaims that “Shigalev is a man of genius” because “he’s discovered ‘equality.’ ” “Great intellects cannot help being despots and they’ve always done more harm than good. . . . Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned—that’s Shigalevism! Slaves must be equal: there has never been either freedom or equality without despotism, but in the herd there’s bound to be equality, and that’s Shigalevism!” (10: 322).
The ultimate aim of Peter Verkhovensky is to seize power by turning Stavrogin into Ivan the Tsarevich, the false pretender to the throne, and in this way to enlist the peasantry behind his revolutionary banner. Even here Dostoevsky does not depart from a verisimilar transmutation of Russian historical reality into the “myth” of his creation. Deeply rooted in the Russian folk imagination was the idea of a “tsar in hiding” who would someday appear to remedy the world’s injustices. Time and again in Russian history a revolt has been justified by the claim that the reigning tsar was “false.” The renegade monk Gregory Otrepeyev, who led the uprising against Boris Godunov in the early seventeenth century, claimed to be the “true” tsar and the murdered son of Ivan the Terrible. Exactly the same legend arose at the end of the eighteenth century, when the rebellious Cossack leader Pugachev claimed to be Peter III, who had been killed in a court conspiracy. Peter Verkhovensky intends to exploit the deepest historical recesses of the Russian folk imagination and use the quasi-religious status of the tsar to achieve his overthrow in the interests of social revolution.
This is a part of the solid historical foundation on which Dostoevsky constructed what seems to be his most extravagant fictional edifice. One of the commonest charges made against
Demons
in the mostly hostile early reviews was that the book was purely a product of Dostoevsky’s “psychiatric talent”—his penchant, long ago noted and harshly criticized by Belinsky, for preoccupying himself with what could only be considered abnormal and psychopathological characters. But Dostoevsky was convinced, and time has proven him right, that his “fantastic realism” cut more deeply into the problems of Russian life than the more superficially verisimilar and equably average presentation favored by his literary contemporaries. While giving free rein to his “fantasy,” however, he knew that the charges of his critics might be justified unless he took great pains to anchor its flights in the “realism” we have tried to document; and we shall next show that he took the same care with Russian culture as he had done with the “myth” of Nechaev and his group.
The Nechaev affair and its ramifications is only one of the interweaving historical-ideological strands in
Demons
. Another is the satirical confrontation between Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky and his Nihilist son Peter. Even though this encounter became subordinate in the final text, Dostoevsky succeeded, all the same, in making
Demons
one of the two classic portrayals in Russian literature of this momentous battle between the generations.
Turgenev had depicted its opening salvos in
Fathers and Children
(1862), but Stepan Trofimovich is much closer to the central figure of an earlier Turgenev novel,
Rudin
(1856), than he is to any of the characters who speak for the past face-to-face with Bazarov. Like Stepan Trofimovich, Rudin is also a Romantic Idealist of the 1840s—a genuinely pure and noble spirit, but one too weak to live up to his lofty phrases and glowing ideals.
Demons
may thus seem as a disputation between two of Turgenev’s characters at a later stage of their lives, when Rudin had sunk into a whimsically charming self-pampering
poseur
and Bazarov had stiffened into a ruthless fanatic. Dostoevsky, we know, enthusiastically agreed with Maikov’s remark that Dostoevsky’s characters reminded him of “Turgenev’s heroes grown old.”
Demons
thus has an extremely important literary-cultural dimension, which includes its relation both to Turgenev’s novels and to Turgenev himself (malevolently but irresistibly caricatured in the figure of Karmazinov). In addition, it also encompasses a whole range of other literary, moral-philosophical, and cultural phenomena whose richness can only be rivaled, in the nineteenth-century novel, by Balzac’s
Les illusions perdues
and Flaubert’s
L’Éducation sentimentale
. The book is almost a compressed encyclopedia of the Russian culture of the period it covers, filtered through a witheringly derisive and often grotesquely funny
perspective, and it creates a remarkable “myth” of the main conflicts of this culture reconstructed on a firm basis of historical personages and events.
The figure of Stepan Trofimovich, as we have seen, is primarily derived from that of T. N. Granovsky, a historian from the 1840s who was already half-forgotten by 1869. Dostoevsky had cherished his image particularly because of the portrait given in Herzen’s
My Past and Thoughts
. In a famous chapter, Herzen describes the end of his friendship with Granovsky in the summer of 1846. This was the fateful moment when Belinsky and Herzen had become militant atheists, but Granovsky refused to follow Herzen along this emotionally lacerating path. “I will never accept your desiccated, cold idea of the identity of the body and spirit,” Herzen cites him as saying; “with that, the immortality of the soul disappears. Perhaps you don’t need this, but I have had to bury far too much to give up this belief. For me personal immortality is a necessity.”
14
Dostoevsky, who himself clung tenaciously to the hope of personal immortality, saw Granovsky as a kindred soul: here was a liberal Westernizer who refused to surrender the ultimate sanctuary of religious faith. It was precisely such a figure, with all its inner contradictions, oscillations, and uncertainties, that Dostoevsky wished to highlight as the precursor, as well as the shocked opponent, of the amoral Nihilism exhibited by the new breed of Bazarovs.
The sources for Stepan Trofimovich-Granovsky can be found not only in the personality and biography of the Moscow historian, who died in 1855, but also and more extensively in the controversies that began in the middle of 1858, when the tension between the generations exploded in public. The spokesmen for the newly vociferous
raznochintsy
intellectuals, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, unleashed a flood of derogatory articles against the generation of the 1840s, which was dismissed as weak and indecisive; its members were slaves to high-flown principles that only served to bolster their egoism and vanity:
People of
that
generation were possessed by lofty but somewhat abstract strivings. They strove toward truth, longed for the good, they were captivated by everything beautiful; but highest of all for them was
principle
. . . . Withdrawing in this way from real life, and condemning themselves to the service of principle, they were not able truly to estimate their strength and took on much more than they were capable of performing. Hence their eternally false position, their eternal dissatisfaction with themselves, their eternal grandiose phrases of self-approval and self-encouragement, and their eternal failure in any practical activity. Little by little they sank into their passive role, and, of all that had gone before, they preserved only a youthful inflammability, yes, and the habit of conversing with well-bred
people about good manners and dreaming of a little bridge over the stream [that is, local, insignificant reforms and improvements—J.F.]
15
No better outline of Stepan Trofimovich’s character profile could be sketched; all that remained was for Dostoevsky to fill in the traits.
Such attacks could hardly fail to elicit a reply; and one was soon forthcoming from Herzen, who had been the original inspirer and propagator of whatever radical and Socialist currents of thought existed in Russia in the 1860s. Granovsky may have furnished an external schema for Stepan Trofimovich, but the pattern of his opposition to Peter, as the horrified “father” of a Nihilist “son,” is historically based on Herzen’s intransigent refusal to knuckle under to the generation of the 1860s. Herzen, as we know, was much on Dostoevsky’s mind exactly at the moment when he was working on the early drafts of
Demons
. His death in January 1870 immediately called forth an important series of articles by Strakhov summing up his career, and they were published almost simultaneously with Dostoevsky’s decision to write a “pamphlet-novel.”
Dostoevsky’s reaction to these articles has already been cited; here we need only recall his remark that “the main essence of all Herzen’s activity [was] that he has been, always and everywhere,
primarily a poet
.” It is this aspect of his nature, Dostoevsky believed, that explains “even his flippancy and inclination to pun about the loftiest moral and philosophical questions (which, by the way, is very revolting in him).”
16
Such a comment indicates to what extent Stepan Trofimovich and Herzen blended together in Dostoevsky’s imagination. For the quality that offended Dostoevsky in Herzen also offends the narrator in Stepan Trofimovich. “Why could not this week be without a Sunday—
si le miracle existe
?” exclaims the latter despairingly, anticipating a meeting with the formidable Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina on that fateful day. “What could it be to Providence to blot out one Sunday from the calendar? If only to prove His power to atheists
et que tout soit dit
!” “He wouldn’t have been himself,” the narrator comments acidly, “if he could have dispensed with the cheap gibing free-thought which was in vogue in his day” (10: 100).
Herzen’s
The Superfluous and the Bilious
(1860) was the first reply of the generation of the 1840s to the onslaught of their detractors, and, like Stepan Trofimovich, Herzen spoke for the fathers, or at least those among them who refused to abdicate their right to paternal respect. Voicing the attitude of the “bilious” sons, their unnamed spokesman (Chernyshevsky) sarcastically remarks that the “superfluous men” of the 1840s “were educated differently, the world surrounding them was too dirty, not sufficiently wax-polished, besmirched by hands and feet. It was far pleasanter for them to moan over their unhappy lot, and meanwhile to eat
and drink in peace.”
17
These were exactly the words, and this is unmistakably the condescendingly contemptuous tone, of Peter about his father.