Текст книги "Demons"

Dostoevsky was living in Dresden, plagued by financial worries and undecided about what to undertake next. He had recently finished The Idiot,in which he had tried to depict 'an absolutely beautiful man' (Prince Myshkin), who wished to live in the real world and, at the same time, to incorporate the highest Christian virtue of totally selfless love; but this novel had not met with the same success as Crime and Punishment,nor was he by any means satisfied with it himself. In a letter to the critic N. N. Strakhov, defending what he called his 'fantastic realism' ('what the majority calls almost fantastic and exceptional for me sometimes constitutes the very essence of the real'), he nevertheless admitted that 'much in the novel [The Idiot]was written hastily, much is dragged out and does not come off, but something still does come off. I do not stand by my novel but by my idea.’

This 'idea', in its broadest sense, was to create a positive artistic image to counter the influence of the ideology of Russian radicalism in the 1860s. The intellectual leaders of this movement – N. G. Chernyshevsky, N. Dobrolyubov, D. Pisarev – are little known except to students of Russian culture, but they exercised an enormous influence and determined the literary-cultural ambiance in which Dostoevsky was writing. These critics and publicists (though Chernyshevsky also wrote a famous and influential novel, What Is To Be Done?)were not only atheists who rejected God and the divinity of Christ, but they also attempted to substitute for the Christian morality of love and self-sacrifice one based on a purely homebrewed Russian amalgam of Benthamite Utilitarianism and Utopian Socialist idealism (labelled 'rational egoism'). Dostoevsky's great aim was not only to reveal the disastrous human consequences to which such an ideology might lead (as he had done with both the underground man and, more explicitly, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment),but also to rehabilitate the Christian ideal against all its gainsayers. It is thus not surprising that, even before completing the fourth and last part of The Idiot,he should have thought of another embodiment of the same thematic ambition.

In December 1868, writing to his oldest friend, the poet Apollon Maikov, Dostoevsky confides his plan for 'a huge novel whose title would be Atheism',asking his friend to keep the idea secret ('for God's sake, let this remain between us'). The passage is too lengthy to quote entire, but it involves a main character who loses his religious faith, and then embarks on a quest to find a substitute ideal. He goes off in search of this alternate faith among a large variety of competing groups: 'the atheists, the Slavs and Europeans [i.e., the Slavophils and Westernizers], the Russian fanatics, anchorites, the priests'; he even flirts with Polish Jesuits, but 'slips away from them to the depths of the flagellants [Russian sectarians] – and in the end finds Christ and the Russian God'. The importance of this project for Dostoevsky could not be more forcefully expressed: 'Let me write this final novel,' he declares, 'and even if I die – I will have spoken out about everything.'

It was to take another year, however, before Dostoevsky could get around even to making notes for this project. Instead, to obtain some much needed funds (his wife had just given birth to a daughter), he wrote The Eternal Husbandwith great reluctance, although his expressed aversion to doing so did not prevent him from turning out a small masterpiece, the most classically perfect of all his shorter works. But it was only in December 1869 that he could think of his Atheismnovel again, which by this time had turned into a much larger idea for a work in several volumes to be called The Life of a Great Sinner.Never written as such, this projected series furnished material for Demons,as well as for Dostoevsky's two last novels, A Raw Youthand The Brothers Karamazov.

His ideas for The Life of a Great Sinnerwere sketched in his notebooks between December 1869 and January 1870, and Dostoevsky told Apollon Maikov in the first week of December that he would be sitting down to begin writing 'in three days'. But just a month later, he excitedly reported to Maikov that he had been inspired by a new theme. 'I have tackled a rich idea,' he tells him enthusiastically. 'I am not speaking of the execution but of the idea. One of the ideas that has an undoubted resonance among the public. Like Crime and Punishmentbut even closer to reality, more vital, and having direct relevance for the most important contemporary issue.' Dostoevsky was certain that he would be able to finish thisnovel by the fall of 1870, and that, since its topicality might have the same financial success as Crime and Punishment,'there is hope of putting all my affairs in order and of returning to Russia ... Never have I worked with such enjoyment and such ease.'

This is the first reference to Demons in Dostoevsky's correspondence, and we can see the novel beginning to take shape in his notebooks while, at the same time, he continued to add material to his 'great sinner' corpus (some notes are dated from as late as March 1870). But what was the idea that had so gripped Dostoevsky, and which had 'direct relevance to the most important contemporary issue'? It was the murder, committed during November 1869, of a young student at the Petrovsky Agricultural Academy in Moscow by a revolutionary group headed by Sergei Nechaev; and one can see why Dostoevsky thought that his proposed idea was 'even closer to reality' than Crime and Punishment. In that novel, he had invented a crime inspired by the supposedly humanitarian aims of radical ideology, but now 'reality' had finally caught up with what he had foreseen would be the results of 'rational egoism' in practice.

News about the crime began to appear in the Russian and foreign press about a month after it was committed, and while it certainly would have attracted Dostoevsky's notice in any case, the name and activities of Nechaev had come to his attention even earlier. It so happened that Dostoevsky's young brother-in-law, Ivan Snitkin, was a student in this very Academy and had been visiting with the Dostoevskys in the fall of 1869. Dostoevsky's wife, Anna Grigoryevna, thus attributed the origin of the novel to Dostoevsky's conversations with her young brother; but this exhibition of pardonable family pride is highly exaggerated. At most, Ivan Snitkin may have spoken to Dostoevsky about Nechaev's organizing activites at his school before the murder actually took place, but he could have known nothing else; nor is there any evidence in Dostoevsky's notes that he thought of a novel involving a political murder before the story broke in the newspapers. Indeed, Dostoevsky himself affirmed, in a letter to his editor Mikhail Katkov a year later, that 'I know nothing at all about Nechaev, nor Ivanov [the victim], nor the circumstances of the murder, except from the newspapers.'

What Dostoevsky learned from these newspapers confirmed some of his worst fears, which had become particularly exacerbated during his self-imposed European exile, about the disintegrating effect that the Western-imported ideas of the Russian Nihilism of the 1860s was exercising on the moral fibre of Russian society. Sergei Nechaev, whose extraordinary force of personality seemed to exercise a hypnotic effect on all those who knew him, had carried the Utilitarian component of 'rational egoism' to its farthest extreme by advocating a total Machiavellianism – one which included, not only deception and falsity against one's enemies, but also against friends and allies if this became necessary for the cause. In his own case, Nechaev created a completely false myth about himself as having been arrested, and then accomplishing the unprecedented feat of escaping from the Peter-and-Paul fortress (where Dostoevsky himself had once been imprisoned). When Nechaev contacted the veteran revolutionaries Mikhail Bakunin and Nikolai Ogarev in Geneva, enveloped in the aureole of his supposed exploits, he represented himself as the delegate of a powerful and perfectly fictitious underground organization; and Pyotr Verkhovensky presents himself in the same fashion to the awed members of his revolutionary cell, as well as to all those assembled in the superb scene in which 'the progressives' of the town gather for a meeting. Dostoevsky read Nechaev's blood-curdling Catechism of a Revolutionary(probably written in collaboration with Bakunin), only after the first part of Demonshad already appeared. But he was convinced that he had nonetheless created a character, Pyotr Verkhovensky, who embodied all the unscrupulousness and ruthlessness of its precepts, and the Catechismitself, though perhaps adding a few extra details, only helped to confirm his creation. Pyotr Verkhovensky, he told Katkov, does not resemble the real-life Nechaev in any way, but 'my aroused mind has created by imagination the person, the type, that really corresponds to the crime'. The image of this type, however, did not emerge all at once, but underwent a crucial metamorphosis as the writing of the book proceeded.

Pyotr Verkhovensky is a product of the ideology of the 1860s, and the members of this generation, almost from the very start, had defined themselves in opposition to the generation of the 1840s (to which Dostoevsky himself belonged). This conflict of generations had been brilliantly depicted in Turgenev's Fathers and Children,a novel that Dostoevsky greatly admired, and in which the main younger character, a medical student named Bazarov, treated members of the older generation with a pitying and condescending contempt. He had no tolerance at all for their high-minded Romantic and idealistic velleities, even though these had played a part in helping to abolish serfdom and had led to a more humanitarian attitude toward the peasantry. But Bazarov had no patience with exalted sentiment of any kind, including that expressed in art, and proclaimed himself a Nihilist who believed nothing except what could be established through science and materialism (he spends a good part of his time dissecting frogs).

This opposition between the generations, so indelibly portrayed by Turgenev, also gave rise to a whole series of polemical exchanges throughout the mid-1860s to which Dostoevsky paid the closest attention, and on which he drew for his own novel. In 1867, he quarrelled personally with Turgenev, at least in part because of an anti-Russian tirade in Turgenev's novel, Smoke;and in the course of their heated exchange of unpleasantries, he advised his fellow novelist to acquire a telescope so that he could see Russia more clearly from the latter's European residence. In reporting on this incident to Maikov, Dostoevsky already anticipates the clash of generations as he would later present it. 'The difference [between the generations]' he wrote, 'is that Chernyshevsky's followers simply criticize Russia openly and wish for its collapse,' while the older radicals of the 1840s like Turgenev, who are 'Belinsky's offspring, [Belinsky was the greatest literary critic of the 1840s, a political radical and Westernizer] add that they loveRussia.' (italics in text) The tragi-comic quarrel between Pyotr and his father, the marvellously delineated Stepan Trofimovich, whom Dostoevsky both pillories and glorifies at the same time, is already implicit in these words.

Once having decided to write a topical novel, Dostoevsky started by reworking some of his old notes in which embryonic images of his later characters already appear. There is a Romantic poet who calls himself 'a pagan' and 'deifies nature' (Stepan Trofimovich); there is a lame girl, whose father is a drunken lieutenant, and 'who goes begging in a noble fashion' (Captain Lebyadkin and his lame sister Marya); there is also the beginning of a political plot. 'Nechaev, Kulishov had denounced Nechaev ... The police enter and capture [presumably Nechaev].' Dostoevsky also sketches a romantic rivalry between a Prince, 'a pathetic figure', and a Schoolteacher, obviously a moral exemplar; both are competing for the affections of a young girl called the Ward (Darya Shatov), who has been raised by the Prince's mother (Mme Stavrogin).When the Prince seduces the Ward, the mother wants to marry her off to the Schoolteacher with a dowry; but he refuses the dowry and becomes her friend instead. This plot intrigue, provisonally entitled Envy,ends with the Prince marrying the Ward because he wishes to emulate the superior moral qualities of the Teacher.

There are also some other features of these early notes that foreshadow the final text. The locale of the action is set in a populous provincial society ('a large group gathered in the rural countryside'), and this somnolent and lethargic world has become infiltrated and undermined by Nihilist ideas. Nihilist ideas are being spread by 'a neighbor ... very wealthy, and with students'; even the morally positive Teacher is 'a Nihilist up to a point, does not believe'. One may see him as a protoype of the later Shatov, also a figure of sterling moral purity and wrestling with the problem of religious faith. Just how these two themes – the romantic and the political – will be interwoven is by no means clear; but the way forward is indicated by another note: 'Proclamations. Fugitive appearance of Nechaev, to kill the Teacher(?).' Dostoevsky's question mark indicates his uncertainty as yet, but he has introduced a political murder that intersects with the sentimental intrigue of Envy,and this is the path that he will continue to follow, interweaving the private and the political ever more closely as he goes along. His next task is to integrate this plot structure with the ideological conflict-of-generations theme that will provide his novel with so much of its satirical bite.

An important aid in this task was a review article that N. N. Strakhov had written the year before about a recent biography of T. N. Granovsky, a liberal historian who had enjoyed a brief moment of fame in the 1840s. Strakhov had defined him as 'a pure Westernizer', who had sympathized with everything that was 'sublime and beautiful' in European culture, but who, like all the others of the same stripe, had nonetheless been one of the forefathers of the Russian Nihilism that the surviving members of this generation had since been denouncing. Indeed, the detestation was reciprocal, 'and the Nihilist children themselves have now taken to renouncing their fathers'. Whether Dostoevsky recalled this article, or had it at hand, it certainly inspired a note labelled ' T. M Granovsky... a pure and idealistic Westernizer,' whose 'aimlessness and lack of firmness in his views ... which ... used to cause him suffering before ... have now become his second nature(his son makes fun of this tendency).' (italics in text) Dostoevsky wrote to Strakhov asking him to dispatch a copy of the book about Granovsky as quickly as possible, and in a later letter explains: 'I wish to speak out about several matters even though my artistry goes smash. What attracts me is what has piled up in my mind and heart; let it give only a pamphlet, but I shall speak out.'

Once Granovsky had become the prototype of the character representing the 1840s, Dostoevsky could imagine him very clearly and concretely. 'Places himself unconsciously on a pedestal, in the style of relics to be worshipped by pilgrims, and loves it ... Shuns Nihilism and does not understand it ... "Leave me God and art, and I will let you have Christ" ... Christ did not understand women ... Literary recollections, Belinsky, Granovsky, Herzen ... Turgenev and others.' Stepan Trofimovich does not merely 'recollect' all these figures of his generation but also represents them because they become part of his own character as well. Dostoevsky's artistic practice, even if he started as here with an identifiable prototype, was never simply to delineate an individual; he allowed himself the greatest freedom to create by amalgamation a 'type' that would portray his conception. Hence Stepan Trofimovich fuses Granovsky with Alexander Herzen, who had taken on Chernyshevsky himself in his slashing article, The Superfluous and the Bilious,and who defended the importance and dignity of art – just as Stepan Trofimovich does in the unsurpassed fête scene of the novel – against what Herzen called 'the Daniels of the Neva'.

If Dostoevsky could immediately grasp the character of Stepan Trofimovich in all the pathetic splendor of his faded glory, it took him a considerable amount of time to arrive at his definitive portrait of Pyotr Verkhovensky. At first, he saw him as another, though much more sinister, incarnation of Bazarov. Now called 'the Student,' he 'appearswith the aim of counterfeit money, proclamations and groups of three ... Troubles his father (Granovsky) by his Nihilism, his sarcasms, contradictions. Simple, straightforward ... Rebuild the world ... Bazarov.'(italics in text) This is very far from being the Pyotr of the novel, who is anything but 'simple, straightforward', though his relation to his father will remain unchanged. Even less like the final Pyotr is another note, in capital letters: 'THE STUDENT AS A HERO OF OUR TIME'. The Student will thus be endowed with some of the Romantic, Byronic traits of Lermontov's Pechorin, the protagonist of his famous novel, A Hero of Our Time.The Prince is still in love with the Ward, and a group of three kill a character called Shaposhnikov (the later Shatov) for fear of being denounced. They attempt to throw the blame on the Prince, between whom and Shaposhnikov there is a supposed mutual hatred because the Prince has dishonored Shaposhnikov's sister (the Ward), etc., etc. (there are a plethora of plot variations that Dostoevsky tries out to motivate the accusation against the Prince). What originated as the idea of an innocent person being accused of the murder eventually becomes that of an innocent person, Kirillov, voluntarily assuming the guilt.

Once such an accusation against the Prince is made, however, this hitherto colorless and conventional Romantic prop 'immediately unravels everything ... obliges Uspensky [a member of the group of three, whose name is that of one of Nechaev's actual accomplices] to confess and firmly denounces to the Governor.' The Prince then marries the Ward, as in Envy,and Dostoevsky notes: 'The principal idea (that is, the pathos of the novel) is the Prince and the Ward – new peoplewho have surmounted temptation and have resolved to begin a newregenerated life.' (italics in text) The problem, though, is that Dostoevsky had not given much thought earlier to the Prince, and now finds himself called upon to provide some adequate motivation for his heroic behavior. 'In general,' he writes, 'at the end of the novel nobody suspects such a strong and ardent character in the Prince'; but this implies that he would be portrayed as a mediocrity in the eyes of society throughout most of the text. To avoid such an unpromising prospect, Dostoevsky then conceives of him as a haughty aristocrat, contemptuous of all those around him, but then also endows him with a passionate religiosity. 'Despises the atheists to the point of fury, believesfuriously. Wishes to be a muzhik;Old Believer.' (italics in text) With this, the political 'pamphlet' begins to move into the realm of the religious thematic to which it had been intended as an alternative.

Dostoevsky had expected that he would be able to write his 'pamphlet-novel' very quickly, but almost a year after beginning he wrote to Strakhov: 'All year I only tore up and made alterations, I blackened so many mounds of paper that I even lost my system of references for what I had written. I have modified the plan not less than ten times, and completely written the first part each time.' What was causing him so much difficulty? Part of the answer is that, once having begun to provide the Prince with a religious motivation, the character began to deepen in a way that Dostoevsky had not foreseen. Until March 1870, he had clung to his initial plan of the Prince and the Ward as 'new people', who would emerge triumphant from the the machinations of Nechaev and the ordeal of the murder; but suddenly all this is changed. After the Prince unravels the murder plot as before, and declares that 'it is necessary to believe ... [that] Russia and Russian thought will save humanity ... he [the Prince] prays before icons ... And then suddenly, he blows his brains out. -(Enigmatic personage, said to be mad).' This note turns the Prince into a genuinely tragic character, beset by a crisis of faith like 'the great sinner', and his two projects thus begin to merge in Dostoevsky's imagination.

Dostoevsky then immediately develops this new image of the Prince, who would become Stavrogin by the end of March ('stavros' in Greek means cross). In a transitional note, Dostoevsky writes: 'The Prince – a man who has become bored. Product of Russian century.'(italics added) Previously, the Prince had turned for ideological guidance to Shatov and Golubov (the real name of a writer on religious issues, a former Old Believer who had returned to Orthodoxy, and whose articles had impressed Dostoevsky); but now Golubov is dropped, and it is the Prince 'who inflames him [Shatov] with enthusiasm, but does not believe himself. A page later, there is a reference to the Prince as having 'violated a child of thirteen years of age, which created some stir'; and he is described as 'gentle, modest, quiet, infinitely proud and bestially cruel ... all the pathos of the novel in the Prince; he is the hero'. What had begun as a satirical depiction of the clash of generations, with Stepan Trofimovich and his son as the central characters, has now become one revolving around Stavrogin, who inspires others with beliefs that he does not share, and is himself 'a product of the Russian century'.

This last phrase is of considerable importance because it helps to clarify the particular social-historical coloring that Dostoevsky will give to his character. The remark about Stavrogin's 'boredom', the famous mal de siècle,links him with the Russian Byronic type first created by Pushkin in Evgeny Onegin;and like Baudelaire and many others, Dostoevsky attributed this sense of ennui to a loss of that religious faith which had previously provided a meaning to the universe and to human life. In an essay dating from 1861, in which he had defended Pushkin's creation against the charge of being merely an upper-class wastrel, Dostoevsky had seen him as the first artistic expression of a crisis of the Russian spirit – a crisis caused both by the assimilation into the Russian moral-social psyche of all the attainments of European civilization, and the realization of the European-educated upper class that this assimilation had deprived them of contact with their own native roots (which for Dostoevsky always meant the religious roots still deeply embedded in the soil of Russian peasant life). 'The skepticism of Onegin,' he had written, 'contained something tragic in its very principle, and sometimes expressed itself with malicious irony.'

This type then entered into the bloodstream of Russian culture, and produced the already-mentioned Pechorin, who combined 'an egoism extending to the limits of self-adoration, and a malicious self-contempt'. The latest avatar of this Russian Byronism is Stavrogin, whose moral-psychological attributes fit these words to perfection, but who combines them with something new – a malignancy, as the narrator of the novel puts it, that was 'cold, calm, and, if one may put it so, reasonableand therefore the most repulsive and terrible that can be'. Moreover, the creation of this Onegin-type by Pushkin, as Dostoevsky saw it, then gave birth to the epoch when 'our leading men sharply separated into two camps ... The Slavophils and the Westernizers were also a historical manifestation and in the highest degree national.' The Slavophils, whose ideas Dostoevsky largely shared, believed that Russian culture should (and would) follow an independent path quite different from that of Europe; the Westernizers believed it was essential for Russia to follow the European model of social-cultural development more and more closely. Stavrogin, as the very latest incorporation of this Onegin-type, is thus flanked by the two disciples whom he had indoctrinated, Shatov and Kirillov, and who unforgettably embody the essence of these two doctrines as Dostoevsky envisaged them (the effort to return to the religious sources of Russian life on the one hand, the triumph of a self-destructive rationalism on the other). The structure of this relationship, which has aroused some perplexity, derives from this view of the whole development of Russian cultural self-consciousness.

Dostoevsky had promised Katkov that he would begin sending chapters of his new novel by June 1870, but found himself unable to meet the deadline even though he had been piling up manuscript and constantly adding new ideas and aperçus to his notes. But he was dissatisfied with what he had written, and felt that there was a problem that he had not yet solved. 'The work went slowly,' he told his niece in mid-August. 'I felt that there was an important error in the whole thing, but what it was – I could not figure out.' By that time he had written fifteen signatures (approximately 240 pages), which unfortunately have not survived in their initial form. During July, his epileptic attacks had been so frequent and so severe that he found it impossible to write at all (they usually incapacitated him for several days, sometimes as long as a week); but perhaps this respite from composition was a blessing in disguise. In any event, when he returned to his desk in August, 'I suddenly saw all at once what the trouble was, and where I had made a mistake ... a new plan appeared in all its proportions ... I struck out everything I had written ... and I began on page 1.' This does not mean, however, that Dostoevsky simply discarded his earlier manuscript; he told Katkov a month later that twelve of the fifteen signatures had been integrated into the new version, though obviously entirely rewritten.

Dostoevsky never explained to any of his correspondents what he discovered his 'mistake' to have been, but some plausible inferences may be drawn from his notes and comments. In mid-August, under the heading 'Something New', we find the following: 'And Nechaev appears on the scene like Khlestakov.' No longer Bazarov or Pechorin, Nechaev is now seen as the ingratiating, fast-talking impostor of Gogol's Réviser,who adapts himself compliantly to whatever role he is cast in by the incomprehension of those around him. Dostoevsky presumably realized that Stavrogin, in becoming an Onegin-type, now embodied the Romantic, Byronic traits formerly attributed to Nechaev-Verkhovensky, and the latter is thus recast in a subordinate and semi-comic role. As Dostoevsky told Katkov: 'To my surprise, this figure [Pyotr Verkhovensky] half turns out to be a comic figure'; and the reason is that 'the whole incident of the murder ... is nonetheless only-accessory and a setting for the actions of another character ... (Nikolai Stavrogin),' who is not only 'a sinister character' but also a tragic one. Once having reconceived his image of Verkhovensky, Dostoevsky solved the problem that had been troubling him subliminally, and he kept his promise to Katkov that he would furnish enough text to begin publishing by January 1871.