Ideas and the Novel (9 page)

At this moment it is obvious that his goose is cooked. His article, taken together with his generally suspicious behavior, has done for him. Though the magistrate, rather frighteningly, seems to be in no hurry to confront him, Raskolnikov knows that it is just a question of time before he is caught in a net mainly of his own fabrication. The memory of his ineptitude fills him with self-hatred. Taking stock a few hours later, alone in his garret room, he whispers to himself in despair, appalled at his past temerity. “And how dared I, knowing myself, knowing how I should be, take up an axe and shed blood!” A thought brings him to a standstill. “No, those men are not made so. The real
Master
to whom all is permitted storms Toulon, makes a massacre in Paris,
forgets
an army in Egypt,
wastes
half a million men in the Moscow expedition and gets off with a jest at Vilna. And altars are set up for him after his death, and so
all
is permitted. No, such people...are not of flesh but of bronze!” And he gives a wild laugh, picturing Napoleon creeping under an old pawnbroker’s bed.

What has happened is that the distance between himself and “the extraordinary men” has been swiftly widening. Now it has become a terrifying gap, across which he stares back, horror-struck, at Napoleon. And by a stroke of irony this has occurred at the very point when he has been called upon, in a room full of curious listeners, to explain the theory he had stated in his article—an article which, so far as he had known until that instant, had never been published. Yet there it is, and Porfiry Porfirovich has read it, two months before.

Confronted with his theory, like a flesh-and-blood witness, and comparing it with his own behavior during and after the crime, he measures the immense space yawning between. His reaction, perhaps not strange, is pure hatred of Napoleon. The scorn boiling up in his wild, insensate laugh at the picture of the Emperor creeping under an old woman’s bed, though aimed at himself, at the absurdity of any comparison, spills over on Napoleon with blistering effect. By imagining the great man under a bed, on all fours, he reduces him to a creeping thing, a louse (his own word later) like himself and the rest of the race. Disconnected thoughts of Egypt, the pyramids (i.e., the monumental), add venom to his merriment. His hatred is double-edged, half for himself and half for the “genius” who encouraged him. With the mocking stress he lays on certain key words (“Master,” “forgets,” “wastes,” “all”), he is taunting Napoleon for his crimes—the very crimes that a few hours before were the slide-rule or gauge of his now loathsome greatness.

In that tirade, a little more than halfway through the novel, an idea is murdered, shockingly, before our eyes. From this point on, Raskolnikov’s theory (“no barriers”) is dead for him. He has strangled it and tossed it aside, contemptuously, and he has stuck pins into the waxen figure of Napoleon, which bleeds wax blood. Raskolnikov is not yet ready to subject himself to the moral law, but he has no compunction now in subjecting Napoleon to it.

This is not the final word we hear here of Napoleon and the all-is-permitted theory, inseparable companions, but, when next mentioned, they are spoken of historically, as relegated to the past. When Raskolnikov confesses the murders to Sonia, he tries to explain his reasons to her. But he has difficulty reconstructing them. He has to think back and query himself. Finally he decides. “I wanted to become a Napoleon, that is why I killed her. ...Do you understand now?” “N-no,” answers Sonia. He tries again, mentions Toulon, Egypt, becomes incoherent. “Well, I...murdered her, following his example. ...Perhaps that’s just how it was.” “You had better tell me straight out...without examples,” she says. Then he suggests that he did it from need, for his career, to make himself independent. Sonia is still not satisfied. At last he thinks he has it: “...for the first time an idea took shape in my mind which no one had ever thought of before me, no one!...I saw clear as daylight that not a single person living...has had the daring to go straight for it all and send it flying to the devil! I...I wanted to
have the daring
...and I killed her. ...That was the whole cause of it!”

In other words, Napoleon has taken a back seat. He is of no importance. Raskolnikov himself is the sole cause. And that, as far as I know, is the last appearance in fiction of Napoleon as ruling idea. After this, if we meet his avatars, immersed in the
Mémorial
or joying in his crimes, it will be in a madhouse.

4

Y
OU COULD SAY THAT
Crime and Punishment
was a novel about the difference between theory and practice. Well, if you were a philistine, you could.
The Possessed,
too, deals with advanced ideas and the effects of applying them to life. It does so on a wider scale, and without any reassuring suggestion that to try to implement them is to see them refuted. In the earlier book there was just one theory, Raskolnikov’s, which he fails to prove, owing to his own half-heartedness in applying it—an indication of a possible weakness in the theory itself. In
The Possessed,
there is a whole band of theorists, each possessed by a doctrinaire idea, and a whole innocent Russian town to practice on. But in the outcome there is no divergence between idea and reality; in most cases theory and practice have fused, which is what makes the novel so frightening. The exception is the superannuated old liberal, Stepan Trofimovich, an idealist in his writings and something more abject in his daily conduct; such a man can hold no terrors for his fellow-citizens.

It is possible to see
Crime and Punishment
as a prophecy of
The Possessed.
There is the seed of a terrorist in Raskolnikov, which cannot come to fruit since he lacks a prime essential: organization. He is isolated, and his having a devoted mother and sister who bring out the “good” in him makes him feel all the more cut off. He appears to believe in socialism, yet his only friend, the former student Razumihin, is a conservative and disquietingly thick with functionaries of the law. A minor figure, Lebezniatikov, is lumped together with Raskolnikov by a spiteful person as one of a pair of “notorious infidels, agitators, and atheists.” Lebezniatikov, who keeps talking about a commune and regards Sonia’s being forced into prostitution as “a vigorous protest against the organization of society,” is certainly a socialist, but Raskolnikov, who has no time for idiots, consistently gives him a very wide berth. He is reserved, proud, and unsociable and, despite his boldness in theory, never had any plan to commit more than a single murder (the second was unplanned and regretted), obviously not a chain of crimes. A final liability is the difficulty he has in making up his mind.

In
The Possessed,
all these deficiencies are made up. There is determination in Pyotr Verhovensky, an organizing gift, complete absence of scruple. He thinks large, in sweeping arcs, not one faltering step at a time. He is highly sociable, almost convivial, has no pride; when we first meet him, he is described as “an ordinary young man, very lively and free in his manners but nothing special in him.” He is constantly paying visits in the town’s highest circles but he has other calls to make too. At the direction of a mysterious “Committee” somewhere abroad, he has set up a “quintet” of inconspicuous citizens, each and all inhabited by ideas. These obscure men are chords he knows how to strike at the right moment in a revolutionary overture of his own authorship. The ideas that possess them can be turned to his purposes regardless of intellectual sympathy or of pooling for a common aim. Making up the “quintet” are five one-track minds bent on separate versions of revolutionary doctrine, but for the purpose divergences do not matter, any more than between the first violin and the kettle-drum. The important thing is that each instrument know its cue. And they can function as instruments in Pyotr Verhovensky’s diabolical concert because each has merged with an idea; they
are
ideas, so to speak, without ties to anything material, which might serve as a deterrent. Self-persuaded, they need no persuasion. As incarnate ideas, they have lost the power of thought, which may seem paradoxical till you reflect on it. These ordinary men, including fathers of families, have turned into syllogisms, and a syllogism cannot think but merely goes from A to B to C by a rigid track of inference.

The devils of the Russian title are not the quintet, nor Kirillov, nor the young ensign, Erkel. The devils are the ideas in possession of them that have made them into automata. The only demon is Verhovensky, who believes in nothing, has no ideas or principles. If he is an Idea, which I wonder about, it is an idea without specific content, a principle devoted (but not dedicated) to destruction. Dedication is not his style.

He is aware of a lack in himself, which is why he turns to Stavrogin. The nucleus needs a center, and he himself cannot be that, for he is not within but without—a manipulator and strategist. The Byronic figure of the young nobleman appeals to him. His remarkable mask-like beauty, as of Death-in-Life, almost casts him for the central role in Pyotr Stepanovich’s Apocalypse. Or, to put it in more practical terms, from what Pyotr has heard of his exploits in the town, he perceives that he can find a use for him: Stavrogin may be able to supply the charisma that is wanting, the seductive spark of the inhuman. Pyotr himself is inhuman enough, but on a lower level of being, as he knows. He is infernal but cold, sharp, precise, business-like. The very fact that he is greedy to make use of Stavrogin, once the possibility has occurred to him, is typical of the economics of his mind. “You will be the leader, I will be your secretary,” he tells him at one point, showing as concise a grasp as Stalin’s of where the levers of power in revolutionary politics lie. And later, in great excitement: “You are the leader, you are the sun and I am your worm.” It is no shock to see him fawning, but his excited state would be quite out of character if he were not carried away by the vision of what he can
do
with Stavrogin.

Verhovensky can find a use for everything, not just the enigmatic vagaries of Stavrogin, but every failing, every tic in the community. These are handles he can coolly pull to initiate action, and the ideas of the quintet, which resemble tics, are among the handles he has practiced with. There is the theory of Shigalov, a man with long ears like a donkey’s and a philosophy of despair to match: his final gloomy solution of the social question is “the division of mankind into two unequal parts. One-tenth enjoys absolute liberty and unbounded power over the other nine-tenths.” There is the thought of the miserly Liputin, a domestic despot and Fourierist who believes in the “social harmony” and gloats at night over visions of a future phalanstery: he has come to the conclusion that, as the necessary massacre of 100 million persons would take no less than thirty to fifty years to achieve, maybe emigration is the answer.

Those two are adherents of Verhovensky’s quintet, but he has many other instruments in the town, sometimes unknown to themselves, for example, the provincial governor’s wife, Yulia Mihailovna, who has become so enamored of the new ideas she imbibes from him that she has virtually converted her salon into a revolutionary cell, arousing jealousy in the other ladies. There is Kirillov, a disciple of Feuerbach and believer in a new man-god, who has resolved to commit suicide in order to free other men from the superstitious fear of death. This could not suit Pyotr’s hand better, since Kirillov gladly agrees to donate his suicide to the cause, leaving the time of it to Pyotr to fix. It will be timed just right to cover the murder of the brooding Slavophil Shatov, who has broken with the “Society” and whose execution as a spy has been voted by the quintet.

Fedka, the convict, no social idealist, is another of Pyotr’s agents. His need of a passport enrolls him initially, and a gift of money assures his following through. With Stavrogin’s tacit consent, he will murder a drunkard posing as an army captain, who has got tired of distributing leaflets for the cause, and the fellow’s demented crippled sister, whom Stavrogin has secretly married. Even before this, Fedka will undertake another commission, to rob and desecrate an especially venerated icon, along with a confederate—no ordinary criminal but a quintet member—who will commit the ultimate blasphemy of placing a live mouse in it. Coming on top of other indignities, this outrage leads to the district governor’s having a nervous breakdown and leaving town for Switzerland. But before his nervous illness is recognized and he is deprived of his functions, this mild bureaucrat has had some striking factory-workers flogged—an error the town will pay dear for.

The fever of organization is such that there is no act that does not lead to something else. Sometimes the hand of Verhovensky is discernible; sometimes not. The vanity of the writer Karmazinov leads him to pronounce an absurd farewell to his public entitled
“Merci”
at the benefit fête for the governesses of the province, and this oration is a contributing cause of the general disorderly uproar that evening, which leads to fires being set. We know that Pyotr did not suggest the topic of the oration—indeed, having been shown the text, he remembers the title as
“Bonjour.”
Yet we feel that he was somehow behind the governesses’ fête—did he slyly urge the charitable idea on Yulia Mihailovna?—behind the invitation to Karmazinov, who has already demonstrated what a fool he will be on the platform by his excited, approving interest in the manifestoes that are circulating through the town. And who was the guiding spirit in the benefit committee’s decision—catastrophic—not to serve a buffet lunch and champagne to ticket-holders?

There is a terrible sequentiality in all this as in “The house that Jack built.” Events pile up, and every slender straw thrown on the heap is arsonous. The town is tinder, ready to ignite at a touch. Of course this is mainly the work of Pyotr Stepanovich, who has prepared the ground. Yet there are times when the alarming incidents seem to have their source in some indefinable larger causality. Moreover such implacable sequiturs are not usual in Dostoievsky, where normally there is room for the arbitrary, the
non
-sequitur. Here the only non-sequitur is the unexpected arrival of Shatov’s wife, and this is also the only episode that has
no
effect on things to come. It is as though the reasoning process going on in the characters’ heads had been copied by outward events, which seem to be obeying Aristotelian logic with never an undistributed middle term. The implacable sequiturs may be comical, too, since the chain of logic, inevitably, is made up of both large beads and small beads, so that if an end-result is a very small bead—the governor in a Swiss rest-home—it is grotesquely out of proportion with the horrors that had led up to it.