Demons Read online

  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 'appears with 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 people who have surmounted temptation and have resolved to begin a new regenerated 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, believes furiously. 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 cr
isis 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, reasonable and 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.

  Even though Dostoevsky's writing went smoothly from this time on, his problems with the novel were by no means over. A good part of Demons was published in installments during 1871, despite the disturbance caused by the Dostoevskys' return to Russia in July (the manuscripts of The Idiot, The Eternal Husband and the early drafts of Demons were all burned for fear of running into trouble at the border). But publication stopped after the November issue, when Part One and eight chapters of Part Two had already appeared, and did not resume until almost a year later. The reason was that, in what was intended as chapter 9 of Part Two, Dostoevsky describes a visit by Stavrogin, assailed by hallucinations of various mocking 'devils', to a nearby monastery to seek for spiritual aid from the monk Tikhon. This name and character come from an eighteenth-century saint whom Dostoevsky admired, St Tikhon Zadonsky, who plays an important role in The Life of a Great Sinner and has been taken over from there (he later also provided inspiration for Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov). Stavrogin asks Tikhon to read a confession in which he describes his seduction of a twelve-year-old girl, whose suicide he then does nothing to prevent. Dostoevsky was told that Katkov would not print this chapter, but no final decision was taken on its exclusion until just before the November issue of 1872.

  Meanwhile, Dostoevsky made attempts at revision which left the question of an actual rape uncertain, hoping this would be enough to satisfy 'the modesty' of his editors; he also read this chapter to his literary friends to obtain their advice (which later led to ugly and totally unfounded rumors, handed down to posterity, that he was actually confessing a misdeed of his own). Continuing to forge ahead with the remainder of the book, he wrote on the assumption that his contested chapter would be accepted in its revised form; but publication continued to be delayed. It was only a year later, just before publication resumed, that he received a definitive refusal, and he then worked frantically on the galleys to give his remaining text whatever coherence he could.

  One addition, made at the last moment to the original manuscript of Part Three, is of some importance - the scene in which the dying Stepan Trofimovich listens to the reading of a passage from St Luke (Dostoevsky also uses this passage as epigraph), about the devils entering into a herd of swine and drowning in the sea. It is under the inspiration of this passage from the Gospels that the repentant Westernizer declares himself to be one of the devils, and perhaps their progenitor. It is possible that, if Dostoevsky's initial chapter 9 had been accepted, he would have assigned more responsibility to Stavrogin, whose social-cultural coloration makes him the far more plausible (and historically accurate) source of Dostoevsky's ideological devils. The original plot assignment of Stepan Trofimovich as Stavrogin's tutor, who is thus presumably the cause of all the moral-ideological maladies of his pupil, is obviously a structural hangover from the earlier plan before the Prince had been transformed into Stavrogin and taken over the book.

  However that may be, chapter 9 vanished among Dostoevsky's papers and was only unearthed in 1922, although parts of it (the dream of a Golden Age of innocence, mirrored by a classical Greek landscape taken from Claude Lorrain's painting, Acis and Galatea) were used in A Raw Youth. There has been a continual dispute over whether it still belongs to the book, but the consensus is that it should certainly be read if we are to grasp the moral-philosophical inspiration underlying Dostoevsky's remarkable character. For here we see, as one variant of the chapter tells us, that Stavrogin was not simply a perverse moral monster; he was, rather, carrying out a sacrilegious moral-philosophical experiment on himself to ascertain
whether it were true 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.' Dostoevsky wrote in a letter that 'I took him [Stavrogin] from my heart', and in my view he meant a heart that was aching because the glamorous radiance of this 'product of the Russian century', the finest flower of the Russian absorption of European culture, should have been doomed to such a tragic destiny.

  Demons is thus a totally original amalgam, one part of which contains a brilliantly ironic depiction of the conflict of generations in Russian culture and displays all of Dostoevsky's still insufficiently recognized talents as a satirist and a parodist. The portrait of Stepan Trofimovich is unsurpassed in the Russian novel, and the more one knows about the Russian culture of the period the more one marvels at Dostoevsky's intellectual sophistication, skill and sureness of touch. The foibles, the weaknesses, the impotence, the self-pampering pretensions of the personage are all there, and the jibes of Pyotr Verkhovensky against his father hit home time and again. One also laughs at the tempestuous vagaries of his beautifully Platonic relationship with his strong-willed patroness; but we are also shown the genuine sweetness of spirit, the occasional pangs of conscience, and the sincere devotion to the ideal.

  For all his detestation of his own generation, Dostoevsky much preferred it to the cold, Utilitarian, Nihilist rationalists of the 1860s; and the final chapter of Stepan Trofimovich's last wanderings is a wonderful mélange of tender mockery and slyly humorous reverence. It is also, incidentally, a totally unintended but prescient foreshadowing of what would actually occur a year later, when a new generation of young radicals decided 'to go to the people,' and were met by them with the same bewilderment that greeted the itinerant scholar. Dostoevsky is more pitiless with the figure of Karmazinov, a caricature of Turgenev, with whom he had a personal bone to pick; but there were also ample social-cultural reasons in the mid-1870s to motivate Dostoevsky's lampoon. The parody of Turgenev's prose-poems perfectly catches their mannerisms and is hilariously funny; so is the entire boisterous helter-skelter of the fête scene, with its wicked takeoff on Karmazinov's world-weary farewell to literature that nobody takes seriously. Such a large-scale assault on a fellow writer has no rival, except perhaps Dickens's attack on Leigh Hunt in the Harold Skimpole of Bleak House, with which Dostoevsky, a great reader of Dickens, was certainly familiar.