SOURCE: LeBlanc, Ronald D. “An Appetite for Power: Predators, Carnivores, and Cannibals in Dostoevsky's Fiction.” In Food in Russian History and Culture, edited by Musya Glants and Joyce Toomre, pp. 124-45. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, LeBlanc explores Dostoevsky's use of food and eating in his fiction, and suggests that the author uses such imagery as a metaphor for humans' efforts to dominate, or “devour” each other.]

We are what we all abhor, Anthropophagi and Cannibals, devourers not only of men, but of ourselves.

—Thomas Browne, Religio Medici

Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal?

—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another.

—Galatians 5:15

In a rather fanciful American novel set in the late 1960s entitled The Abortion (1970), Richard Brautigan describes a public library in California that accepts books from its patrons rather than lends them out. One of the titles brought to this mythical library is The Culinary Dostoevsky, written by a man named James Fallon, who refers to his literary creation as “a cookbook of recipes” culled from Dostoevsky's novels and who claims to have eaten everything the Russian author ever cooked.¹ “Brautigan's fancy is delightful,” Simon Karlinsky observes in regard to this fictitious Dostoevsky cookbook,

but in actual fact his character would end up very poorly nourished. Gogol, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, among Russian writers, have written lovingly and at length about various foods eaten by their characters. But Dostoevsky, who can be so magnificent in his own realm of irrational passions and spiritual insights, had very little interest in the physical basis of human life or in man's natural surroundings. The only kinds of food that it would occur to him to use for literary purposes are a crust of dry bread someone denies to a starving little boy or a pineapple compote that a neurotic young girl dreams she would eat if she were witnessing the crucifixion of a child.²

Few readers, I think, would dispute the validity of this analysis; nor would they seriously challenge Karlinsky's additional claim that “for the flavor and the feel of actual life as it was lived in Russia, reproduced with all the fidelity and subtlety that literary art is capable of,” we have to turn to other Russian authors than Dostoevsky.³ The “culinary Dostoevsky,” therefore, turns out to be a rather ironic (if not oxymoronic) choice of title for a cookbook, since the novels by this author seem an unlikely site to explore in search of tasty recipes, kitchen expertise, or cooking tips.

It seems to me, however, that we can account for the rarity—not to mention the perversity—of descriptions of food and scenes of eating that we observe in Dostoevsky's fiction by more than merely what Karlinsky calls the Russian author's putative lack of interest in “the physical basis of human life” or in “man's natural surroundings.” Dostoevsky, I would argue, simply utilizes food motifs and eating metaphors for different narrative purposes than do most Russian writers; moreover, the “poet of the underground” proceeds to encode these gastronomic images with a peculiar symbolic significance. Visits to inns, taverns, and restaurants in a Dostoevsky novel serve not as an opportunity for the author to paint a picture—rich in physical detail and pictorial expressiveness—of contemporary culinary practice in Russia; they instead provide him with an opportunity to orchestrate memorable scandal scenes and impassioned dialogic encounters between his characters. As a verbal artist, Dostoevsky seems eminently more interested in appropriating the discourse of gastronomy as a trope for depicting the emotional state or psychological motivation of his characters than in providing readers with the artistic representation of actual meals. Accordingly, he tends to exploit the act of eating not as a mimetic device for representing the details of everyday life in nineteenth-century Russia but rather as a metaphor for illustrating human conflicts in modern life between the sexes, the generations, and the social classes.

Moreover, in Dostoevsky's fictional world, where many of the characters are portrayed as highly volitional creatures who seem obsessed with a desire to dominate and control each other, the act of eating serves less as a paradigm of pleasure than as a paradigm of power. For his characters (especially the pathological ones to whom Karlinsky alluded), the ingestion of food—whether it be as a mimetic or metaphoric act—tends to indicate not taste, enjoyment, and nourishment but rather violence, aggression, and domination. Dostoevskian characters such as these do not merely eat; they seek to devour, digest, and destroy. Indeed, they seem to share the same pathology of desire that Pechorin experiences in Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (1841), when he confesses to satisfying a strange inner need that compels him, vampirelike, to “feed” upon the feelings and emotions of other people. “I have an insatiable craving inside me that consumes everything,” the hero explains, “and that makes me regard the joys and sufferings of others only in their relationships to me, as food to sustain my spiritual powers.”⁴ Food, like sex, comes to serve in Dostoevsky's novels as an object of desire that is coveted not for the libidinal satisfaction it can bring but rather for the sense of autonomy, domination, and control it can bestow. Both eating and fornicating thus come to signify acts of violence rather than of pleasure in Dostoevsky's fictional universe, where carnal desire seems to manifest itself primarily as a rapacious appetite for power.⁵

What I wish to explore in this chapter is how Dostoevsky conveys the will to power within people in large part through the language and imagery of eating. Like Dickens in England, this nineteenth-century Russian writer repeatedly uses different kinds of animal imagery (birds of prey, insects, reptiles) to help convey how the dynamics of various relationships of power—sociological, sexual, and psychological—operate between human beings.⁶ To help reinforce this imagery, he selects certain masticatory terms (such as “to swallow” and “to devour”) whose literal meanings and etymological origins are designed to compete semantically with what seem to be their more neutral figurative value. I will seek to show, in addition, how the carnivoristic appetite that develops within some people—a metaphorical hunger that Dostoevsky identifies closely with the psychological desire to dominate and control others—can ultimately devolve into anthropophagy (or man-eating), especially when this will to power is fueled by a highly competitive social and economic environment, such as the one that was taking shape in post-Emancipation Russia, a country that was undergoing a process of rapid industrialization and capitalist development. Filtered through his unique artistic imagination, his abiding Christian faith, and his profoundly apocalyptic vision of mankind's future, the bestial carnivorism that Dostoevsky saw at the basis of human relations in the modern secular world threatens to make people degenerate eventually into bloodthirsty cannibals intent upon devouring one another.⁷

EATING AS DEVOURING: DOSTOEVSKY, DARWIN, AND THE DISCOURSE OF PREDATION

The carnivoristic nature of human appetite that Dostoevsky represents in his major novels coincides with the critical reaction within Russian intellectual circles to the appearance of Darwin's theory of evolution, which was enthusiastically received by the young radical activists of the 1860s, members of a burgeoning secular intelligentsia who worshipped the natural sciences. Intellectuals from across the political spectrum in Russia may generally have revered Darwin as a scientist, but they were almost equally unanimous in their condemnation of Darwinism as an ideological movement that they associated primarily with the pessimistic social theories of Malthus.⁸ Darwin himself maintained that his famous metaphor, the “struggle for existence,” was merely the social doctrine of Malthus applied to the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Most Russian thinkers, however, objected strongly to the contention made by Darwinists that the laws of nature were not fundamentally different from the laws of society—that biology, in other words, could join hands with political economy and social theory to help explain the human condition. As Daniel Todes has observed, the Russians' sense of communitarianism, their cooperative social ethos, and their vision of a cohesive society emblematized by the traditional peasant commune (mir) were seriously threatened by Darwin's Malthusianism, which to them exalted individual conflict at the expense of cooperation, brotherhood, and mutual aid.⁹ Indeed, the conservative Slavophiles and the radical socialists in mid-nineteenth-century Russia found themselves in rare agreement over this issue, since both groups shared the belief that the ideological underpinnings of Darwin's theory were inappropriate for Russian historical conditions and cultural values. To their minds, the ideology of Social Darwinism championed what were essentially “alien” values for Russians: mainly, a European respect for bourgeois egoism and individualism in general and a British enthusiasm for competition in particular. Although most Russians thus accepted Darwin while rejecting Darwinism, the debate that ensued immediately following the publication in 1864 of a Russian translation of On the Origin of Species (1859) prompted widespread discussion about the nature of human beings and their social relations. Indeed, the controversy over Darwinism in Russia, one critic notes, “acquired the character not of a scientific, but of a philosophical dispute.”¹⁰

For many of Dostoevsky's contemporaries, it is true, the drive to obtain food that Darwin posited as underlying the struggle for existence among animals in the natural world seemed a not entirely appropriate metaphor for human behavior within a civilized society, even a society that found itself increasingly being affected by the free economic competition that characterized the era of growth capitalism. Nonetheless, the debate over Darwinism in Russia often prompted mention of the open warfare that is perpetually being waged between predators and their prey in the animal kingdom. As a result, it was not uncommon in Russia during the 1860s and 1870s to encounter naturalistic metaphors about people behaving like “wolves” and “sheep” (or “pikes” and “carps”)¹¹ as well as animal idioms such as “homo homini lupus est.” Indeed, the public discourse during this period of sudden and rapid capitalist development on Russian soil fairly resonates with predatory imagery and carnivoristic language of this sort.¹² Aleksandr Ostrovsky, for instance, explicitly foregrounds predation as a trope in his play Volki i ovtsy [Wolves and sheep] (1875), where the dynamics of human relations are shown to be dominated almost exclusively by socioeconomic coercion and sexual duress. In the opening act of Ostrovsky's rather bleak comedy about marriages arranged through economic blackmail and extortion, the landowner Lynyaev observes that it is not human beings who live all around them but rather wolves and sheep. “The wolves devour the sheep,” Lynyaev notes, “and the sheep peacefully let themselves be devoured.”¹³ Likewise, Aleksei Pisemsky's drama Khishchniki [The predators] (1873), makes it clear that the new wave of capitalist entrepreneurs living in Russia during the 1860s and 1870s constitute little more than predatory beasts possessed of an almost insatiable appetite for material comfort, economic power, and worldly success.¹⁴ In Nikolai Leskov's antinihilist novel, Na nozhakh [At daggers drawn] (1870-71), the opportunistic swindler Gordanov, who at one point in the narrative is characterized as “a wolf in sheep's clothing,” openly admits that he is merely seeking to put into practice in his own life Darwin's famous theory about the struggle for existence, which to his mind is accurately summed up by the adage: “Swallow up the others or they will swallow you up.”¹⁵ Even in Lev Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1878) we find that one of the dark thoughts that enters the heroine's troubled mind just prior to her suicide is Yashvin's cynical view that “the struggle for existence and mutual hatred are the only things that unite people” (pt. 7, chap. 30).

Since Dostoevsky was acutely attuned to the dominance hierarchies that operated in his society, he clearly saw in the Russian life around him a world dominated by the ruthless struggle for survival and inhabited by human beings whose bestial nature and carnivoristic appetite for power predisposed them toward devouring each other. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that in his novels he too makes extensive use of imagery derived from the animal kingdom, frequently portraying the dynamics of human relationships in terms of animal predation. In Dostoevsky's fictional world the pyramidal food chain from zoology seems to have invaded human society and made it into a wild kingdom where one must either eat or be eaten. Indeed, Dostoevsky once noted sardonically that in Russia Darwin's theory about the fierce nature of the struggle for existence was not merely considered an ingenious hypothesis but had already long ago become axiomatic.¹⁶ As we know from some of his letters and notebook entries, Dostoevsky firmly believed that in a godless universe—in a secular world that believes in Darwin and science rather than in Christ and religion—there can be neither love nor compassion. “There is only egoism,” he writes, “that is, the struggle for existence.”¹⁷ As a verbal artist, Dostoevsky adds a compelling psychological and religious dimension to this public discourse in Russia during the 1860s and 1870s that centered upon the issue of predation of a social and economic nature. In the famous essay in which the populist critic Nikolai Mikhailovsky attacks Dostoevsky's so-called “cruel talent,” he acknowledges the author's keen insight into human psychology, noting that “no one in Russian literature has analyzed the sensations of a wolf devouring a sheep with such thoroughness, such depth, one might say with such love, as Dostoevsky.”¹⁸ This writer's specialty, Mikhailovsky notes, is his ability to dig “into the very heart of the wolf's soul, seeking there subtle, complex things—not the simple satisfaction of appetite, but precisely the sensuality of spite and cruelty.”¹⁹

Dostoevsky's notebooks for A Raw Youth bear witness to this abiding concern with what the author calls the “predatory” (khishchnyi) character, a personality type that we encounter in many of his novels.²⁰ Thus in The Devils, for instance, the strong-willed Countess Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina is described as pouncing upon Shatov's sister Darya “like a hawk” (pt. 1, chap. 2), and later she grabs the arm of the Bible-selling Sophie Ulitkina (another of Stepan Trofimovich's female friends) much “as a kite seizes a chick” (pt. 3, chap. 7). “Well, here she is, I haven't eaten her up,” Varvara Petrovna reassures Stepan afterward. “You thought I had eaten her, didn't you?” (pt. 3, chap. 7). Likewise, Marya Lebyadkina notes that her tyrannical mother-in-law “would have been glad to devour me” (pt. 2, chap. 3). In The Brothers Karamazov, meanwhile, the voluptuous Grushenka is characterized as a “hyena” and “tigress” who promises to “devour” (s”est') (bk. 3, chap. 4) and “swallow up” (proglotit') (bk. 7, chap. 3) the docile Alyosha by taking away from him his monkish virginity. Lise Khokhlakova, another predatory female who has sexual designs upon Alyosha, cannot understand how it is that she has scared off the youngest of the Karamazov brothers, wondering aloud at one point, “Surely I will not eat him up?” (bk. 2, chap. 4).²¹

Much has already been written about the “insectology” at work in Dostoevsky's novels and about how the Russian author—in order to foreground the bestial nature of human beings—consistently links his characters with lower forms of animal life, especially with those from the insect realm: spiders, ants, flies, cockroaches, lice. Readers of Dostoevsky are apt long to remember Svidrigailov's haunting vision of hell as a bathhouse filled with spiders in the corners (pt. 4, chap. 1) as well as the Hamlet question that Raskolnikov poses to himself when he asks whether he is “a man or a louse” (pt. 5, chap. 4).²² Ralph Matlaw correctly notes how Dostoevsky associates the image of the spider with evil, in particular with morally dissolute behavior on the part of his more demonic characters, some of whom are rumored to have committed such heinous acts as the sexual violation of children. “The spider,” Matlaw writes, “is inevitably connected with evil, not only in a sensual but also in a broader, ethical and moral sense.”²³ What has not been emphasized sufficiently enough about Dostoevsky's use of insect imagery, however, is the highly predatory nature of many of the crawly creatures he does mention, especially spiders and tarantulas, who trap and then devour the other (invariably weaker) insects that have been caught in their sticky webs. Insect imagery of this kind helps to reinforce the dynamics of power relationships between human beings in Dostoevsky's fictional universe, which—according to Gary Cox—can be seen as being polarized between “tyrants” and “victims,” between masters and slaves.²⁴

In The Devils, for example, the political conspirators who make up Petr Verkhovensky's local group of five are correct to feel trapped—in a legal as well as a moral and psychological sense—“like flies in the web of a huge spider” (pt. 3, chap. 4). In Crime and Punishment, when Raskolnikov speculates as to what he might have done with the pawnbroker's money after murdering her, the alternatives he poses are either to have become a generous benefactor to mankind or to have spent the rest of his life “like a spider catching everybody in my web and sucking the lifeblood out of them” (pt. 5, chap. 4). Predatoriness of a socioeconomic nature is likewise the target of the mad speaker's harangue at the fête in The Devils. The speaker accuses Western-style capitalism of preying upon his homeland; the modern railways, he asserts, have “eaten up” all of the country's economic resources and now cover Russia “like a spider's web” (pt. 3, chap. 1).²⁵ In The Idiot Ippolit feels that, in a broader metaphysical sense, we are all trapped in the clutches of a dark and evil nature, which he envisions as an enormous tarantula that devours Christ and thus destroys all that is good in life. Ippolit protests plaintively, “Can't I simply be devoured without being expected to praise what has devoured me?” (pt. 3, chap. 7). Quite frequently in Dostoevsky's novels images of predatory insects are used to characterize the dynamics of personal relations between individual human beings, especially their sexual relationships.²⁶ Thus Dmitry Karamazov, that self-proclaimed “noxious bug” who senses that his own heart has been bitten by a phalange spider, feels inclined to take advantage of Katerina Ivanovna, who is completely at his mercy when she comes to him for the money she needs to cover her father's alleged embezzlement of government funds. Stung by a “venomous” thought whose voluptuous appeal he can hardly resist (“My first thought was a Karamazov one” [bk. 3, chap. 4]), Dmitry is strongly tempted to exploit the young lady's position of acute economic and sexual vulnerability, to act toward her, in his words, “like a bug, like a venomous tarantula, without a spark of pity” (bk. 3, chap. 4).²⁷

DOSTOEVSKYISM: FROM CARNIVORES AND PREDATORS TO CANNIBALS

In addition to spiders, tarantulas, and birds of prey, reptiles constitute another species of animal that Dostoevsky at times invokes as a way to convey to readers the highly rapacious nature of some of his fictional characters. The Crocodile, written in 1865 as a satirical and allegorical lampoon against Chernyshevsky and contemporary nihilism, tells the story of how a certain gentleman is swallowed alive by just such an enormous reptile. The notebooks for A Raw Youth reveal the thoughts of a female character (Liza) who looks upon her male lover “like a crocodile wanting to swallow its prey alive.”²⁸ At the famous scandal scene with which part 1 of The Devils comes to a climactic conclusion, Captain Lebyadkin suddenly stops dead in his tracks at the threshold to the drawing room, directly in front of Stavrogin, “like a rabbit in front of a boa constrictor” (pt. 1, chap. 5).²⁹ But perhaps the most memorable instance of Dostoevskian reptile imagery occurs in The Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan is confronted with the very real possibility that the competition being waged between his father and his older brother over Grushenka's affection may well result in the heinous crime of parricide. With regard to this volatile love triangle, Ivan remarks, more with indifference than disgust, “One reptile will devour the other” (bk. 3, chap. 9), an utterance that proceeds to echo, with significant reverberations, throughout the remainder of the novel. For Alyosha, these words are disconcerting mainly because they indicate that Ivan looks upon Dmitry as nothing more than a lowly, disgusting animal.³⁰ For readers of The Brothers Karamazov, however, Ivan's words signal not merely a recognition of man's innate carnivorism and predatory instincts. They also reveal his very real potential for committing the taboo crime of cannibalism, for devouring not simply another species of animal but one of his very own kind. Understood in the terms of insect predation, the spider is no longer just eating flies; he is now eating other spiders as well. Dostoevsky broaches this idea of man's cannibalistic nature with just such an insect metaphor in his Notes from the House of the Dead (1860), where the narrator remarks that without work to keep them busy, prisoners at the Siberian prison camp “would eat each other up like spiders shut up in a bottle” (pt. 1, chap. 1). Likewise in The Devils Captain Lebyadkin depicts artistically, in his playful verse allegory The Cockroach, how when flies crawl into a glass in summer, they turn into “cannibal flies” (pt. 1, chap. 5).³¹

It is human cannibalism—as opposed to cannibalism of the insect or reptile variety—that serves as the topic of Lebedev's memorable anecdote in The Idiot about the sinful (and hungry) monk from the famine-plagued twelfth century who confesses at last to having survived for many years on a largely “clerical” diet: he admits to having killed and consumed by himself some sixty monks and (for the sake of “gastronomic variety”) six lay infants (pt. 3, chap. 4). Human cannibalism also serves as an important component within the narrative structure of The Brothers Karamazov, where the competition between fathers and sons, as Michael Holquist has shown, is built directly upon the Freudian paradigm of the primal horde myth and thus replicates the psychosexual dynamics of the Oedipal complex.³² According to this myth, a despotic father, who for a long time obstructs the sexual desires of his sons as well as their craving for power, is eventually killed and then promptly devoured by his male offspring. August Strindberg provides a compelling modern statement of this myth, explicitly utilizing its concomitant metaphor of cannibalism, in his play The Father (1887), in which a tyrannical patriarch at one point shouts angrily at his child:

I am a cannibal, you see, and I'm going to eat you. Your mother wanted to eat me, but she didn't succeed. I am Saturn who devoured his children because it was foretold that otherwise they would devour him. To eat or to be eaten—that is the question. If I don't eat you, you will eat me—you've shown your teeth already.³³

In Dostoevsky's novel, it is Fyodor Pavlovich who acts out the primal role of the tyrannical tribal despot, “depriving his sons of power, money, and women, better to prosecute his own lusts.”³⁴ Although each of the Karamazov sons has sufficient grounds for hating this despotic father and desiring his death, Dmitry's case seems best to fit the Freudian scheme, for the eldest Karamazov son competes most overtly with his father both for disputed property (the power of money) and for the sexually enticing Grushenka (carnal desire). It is his brother Ivan who recognizes that the struggle between a tyrannical father and his rebellious sons is an archetypal one, universal in scope and cannibalistic in nature, that all men are fated to share. “Who does not desire his father's death?” Ivan asks rhetorically at his brother's trial. “My father has been murdered and they pretend they are horrified … they keep up the sham with one another. Liars! They all desire the death of their fathers. One reptile devours the other” (bk. 12, chap. 5). The Oedipal rivalry that Freud describes in the psychoanalytic literature can thus be understood as the repression of a desire for oral cannibalism: it reenacts a mythological fall from grace and harmony in which primal sons seek to eat the original father in an attempt to incorporate his power and authority. “In literature, cannibalism is not anthropological (still less gustatory),” Mervyn Nicholson reminds us; “it is a metaphor for power.”³⁵

This Oedipal struggle for power in Dostoevsky's novels can be extended beyond the boundaries of the immediate family to include the socioeconomic dynamics at work in the larger society as well, whereby empowered groups attempt to cannibalize those who are disenfranchised. Such socioeconomic cannibalism is, after all, the point behind all the predatory imagery that we find in Ostrovsky's Wolves and Sheep, Pisemsky's The Predators, Leskov's At Daggers Drawn, and numerous other literary works from the 1860s and 1870s that dramatize the deleterious effect that the entrepreneurial spirit of capitalism was having upon social relations in post-Emancipation Russia. Dostoevsky likewise attacks the social, economic, and political ideologies that accompanied the rise of modern capitalism, blaming them for having created the ruthlessly competitive atmosphere of modern life, a pernicious social environment that severely exacerbates man's materialistic lusts as well as his carnivoristic inclinations. Thus the members of the current generation of Russian nihilists, who have been nurtured on the liberal ideas of atheism, secular humanism, and utopian socialism preached by their fathers, the “European” Russians of the 1840s, are often described as cannibalistic creatures. “Madmen! Conceited creatures!” Mrs. Yepanchin screams at the members of Burdovsky's gang who have come to Prince Myshkin “seeking their rights” in The Idiot. “They don't believe in God, they don't believe in Christ! Why, you're so eaten up with vanity and pride that you'll finish up by devouring each other” (pt. 2, chap. 9). Similarly, in part 1 of Crime and Punishment, in the scene where Raskolnikov witnesses a fat dandy trying to proposition a young prostitute who is sitting drunk on a park bench, Dostoevsky's hero changes his mind about intervening on the poor girl's behalf and we hear him exclaim instead, “Let one devour the other alive” (pt. 1, chap. 4). In the “Necessary Explanation” that he reads at Prince Myshkin's nameday party in The Idiot, Ippolit conceptualizes the modern world as a place that could not exist without the lives of millions of human beings being sacrificed daily: “I agree that otherwise—that is to say, without the continual devouring of one another—it would be quite impossible to organize the world” (pt. 3, chap. 7). In The Devils, when attempting to explicate Shigalyov's paradoxical social theory, Petr Verkhovensky asserts that “once in thirty years Shigalyov resorts to a shock and everyone at once starts devouring each other, up to a certain point, just as a measure against boredom” (pt. 2, chap. 8).³⁶

As we have come to discover during our own violent century, it often turns out to be but a short step from theory to practice: in this instance, from Shigalyov's philosophical system to Stalinist political reality. Tatyana Tolstaya, who recently characterized the long years of oppressive totalitarian rule in her homeland as “cannibalistic times,” compares this barbaric period of twentieth-century Russian history with the reign of Ivan the Terrible during medieval times, when someone is quoted as having said: “We Russians do not need to eat; we eat one another and this satisfies us.”³⁷ What underlies such “Asiatic savagery,” Tolstaya explains, is “the sense of sin as a secret and repulsive pleasure,” or what she calls “Dostoevskyism.”³⁸ The creator of this “Dostoevskyism” was, of course, simply providing commentary (highly prophetic commentary, if you will) upon the workings of the human mind, especially the darker recesses of the psyche, where our deep-seated urges for cruelty and brutality lie hidden. Projecting from the prevailing trends of human isolation and social fragmentation that he observed in the world around him, Dostoevsky envisioned a gloomy apocalyptic future for mankind, a dark and somber period of the Antichrist that would be characterized by widespread cannibalism. This apocalyptic vision of a godless human society, plagued by widespread anthropophagy, is sometimes communicated symbolically in Dostoevsky's novels through microbe imagery. In the epilogue to Crime and Punishment, for instance, Raskolnikov has a frightful dream about a devastating pestilence—“a new strain of trichinae, microscopic parasitic creatures”—that infects mankind and makes people act like men possessed: “Men killed one another in a senseless rage … they bit and ate one another” (chap. 2). Likewise in the “Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” the narrator contaminates the happy and innocent inhabitants of the harmonious utopian land he visits “much like a filthy trichina or pestilential germ infecting whole countries” (chap. 5). This evil, pestilent germ, according to Dostoevsky, is nothing other than the cruel carnality that is being nurtured in people by the current social and ideological climate in Russia. “We are approaching materialism,” the author warned in an entry for March 1877 in his Diary of a Writer, “a blind, carnivorous craving for personal material welfare, a craving for personal accumulation of money by any means” (chap. 2). The main ethical tenet of the nineteenth century, Dostoevsky insisted in this entry, proclaims the Hobbesian slogan “Everybody for himself and only for himself, and every intercourse with man solely for one's self” (chap. 2).

ANTHROPOPHAGY, ANTICHRIST, AND APOCALYPSE

People are themselves becoming acutely aware of the serious consequences that will result from the current “chemical decomposition” of society, Dostoevsky maintained, and therefore they are desperately searching to find any form of universal solidarity in order to avoid cannibalism. In the bleak, apocalyptic description of modern London's urban blight provided in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863), Dostoevsky declares quite unequivocally that man's craving for even an artificial and synthetic unity of mankind—his yearning to bow down collectively in worship of Baal—arises out of a desperate effort to find an alternative to human cannibalism and mutual annihilation:

And yet there too [in London] the same stubborn, silent and by now chronic struggle is carried on, the struggle to the death of the typically Western principle of individual isolation with the necessity to live in some sort of harmony with each other, to create some sort of community and to settle down in the same ant-hill; even turning into an ant-hill seems desirable—anything to be able to settle down without having to devour each other—the alternative is to turn into cannibals.

(chap. 5)³⁹

In The Brothers Karamazov, it is Ivan's Grand Inquisitor who recognizes the hidden potential for cannibalism that lies dormant within modern man, a primordial urge that he believes must be restrained through the institution of the Roman Catholic Church. “Oh, ages are yet to come of the confusion of free thought, of their science and cannibalism (antropofagiia),” he predicts to a silent Christ. “For having begun to build their Tower of Babel without us, they will end, of course, with cannibalism. But then the beast will crawl to us and lick our feet and spatter them with tears of blood” (bk. 5, chap. 5). For Dostoevsky, this new “Tower of Babel” constitutes—like the Crystal Palace—but another misguided attempt undertaken by human beings to construct a harmonious “anthill” as a way to satisfy their craving for a community of worship and for universal unity.

For Father Zosima, who voices some of Dostoevsky's own most cherished ideas about the messianic role of the Russian Orthodox faith, the worrisome tide of modern men's mutual envy and ruthless rivalry with one another can only be stemmed by means of the model that Christ has provided us: that is, the Russian Orthodox idea of salvation through a moral brotherhood of man and active Christian love. “They aim at justice,” Zosima says of those secular humanists and socialist dreamers who scorn his deeply Christian views of brotherhood and love, “but, denying Christ, they will end by flooding the earth with blood, for blood cries out for blood. … And if it were not for Christ's covenant, they would slaughter one another down to the last two men on earth” (bk. 6, chap. 3). According to Zosima, those who deny Christ “feed upon their vindictive pride like a starving man in the desert sucking blood out of his own body” (bk. 6, chap. 3). Zosima's final exhortations thus acquire decidedly apocalyptic overtones as he warns prophetically of the cannibalism (even to the point of self-cannibalism) that is certain to visit human beings if the affairs of men on earth are allowed to continue to be dominated by the modern spirit of “isolation” (uedinenie) rather than “communion” (edinenie), by the spirit of worldly materialism rather than spiritual love. Zosima sadly predicts that today's egoistic “gluttons” (plotougodniki), who live only for mutual envy, “soon will drink blood instead of wine” (bk. 6, chap. 3).

A similarly dire apocalyptic prediction is made elsewhere in the novel by Dostoevsky's intellectual paradoxicalist, Ivan Karamazov, who is reported to have argued that

there is nothing in the whole world to make men love their neighbors. That there exists no law of nature that man should love mankind, and that, if there had been any love on earth hitherto, it is not owing to a natural law, but simply because men have believed in immortality … that the whole natural law lies in that faith, and that if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism.

(bk. 2, chap. 6)

When Smerdyakov at last confesses that it was indeed he who committed the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich (acting upon the belief that Ivan wished him to kill their despicable father), he reminds his brother—whom he idolizes so much—of those fateful words he had uttered earlier: “You yourself said, ‘everything is lawful’” (bk. 11, chap. 8). However, when Ivan's devil quotes back to him excerpts from the poem he had once written, The Geological Cataclysm, we are presented with a much more hopeful vision of the future. Belief in God and the immortality of the soul need to be replaced with a benign and brave humanism, one that in many respects echoes the atheistic notion of the “man-god” that Kirilov had preached in The Devils.

There are new men … they propose to destroy everything and begin with cannibalism. Stupid fellows! They didn't ask my advice! I maintain that nothing need be destroyed, that we only need to destroy the idea of God in mankind, that's how we have to set to work. That's what we must begin with. Oh, blind race of men who have no understanding! As soon as men have all of them denied God—and I believe that period, analogous with geological periods, will come to pass—the old conception of the universe and, more importantly, the old morality will fall of itself, without cannibalism, and then everything will begin anew. Men will unite to take from life all it can give, but only for joy and happiness in the present world. Man will be lifted up with a spirit of divine, titanic pride and the man-god will appear … and he will love his brother without need of reward.

(bk. 11, chap. 9)

Thus the goal of brotherly love, according to Ivan, can indeed be achieved without the necessity of believing in the Christ of Zosima and Alyosha; it can be reached instead through the development of purely human (what Nietzsche would call “all too human”) potentialities. Dostoevsky is able to discredit Ivan's dream of utopian humanism largely through the irony of having it be the devil who—with a highly sardonic reaccentuation—recites the words of this poem back to its half-crazed author. Moreover, Ivan's lofty and highly abstract goal of brotherly love seems quite ludicrous to readers of the novel when it is considered within the context (and against the dialogizing background) of the markedly inimical relationships that he has managed to develop with his own flesh and blood, his actual Karamazov brothers—Alyosha, Dmitry, and Smerdyakov. Ivan's dream of a future utopia is destined to fail, Dostoevsky strongly implies, because it is based not upon a solid and authentic Christian foundation of love but upon a counterfeit humanist one. As Lebedev, the author's interpreter of the Apocalypse in The Idiot, makes clear, without Christian morality even such an ostensible “friend of humanity” as Malthus can just as quickly turn from a putative benefactor of mankind into a human “cannibal” (pt. 3, chap. 4). Indeed, the whole point of Lebedev's anecdote about the conscience-stricken cannibal monk seems to be to convey to his listeners the point that only the compelling spiritual force of a “binding idea,” instilled in people during the Christian Middle Ages, could have driven this repentant sinner to make a free confession of his terrible transgression. Such a powerful “binding idea” is conspicuously absent in the contemporary age of growth capitalism, a cannibalistic age of railways, banks, and commodity trading. “Lebedev tells the tale of a real cannibal,” Robin Feuer Miller rightly observes, “to underline the worse horror existing in a spiritual cannibal (Malthus).”⁴⁰

REDEMPTION: CHRISTIAN LOVE, POLYPHONY, AND COMMUNION

Through his use of predatory, carnivoristic, and cannibalistic imagery Dostoevsky is suggesting that in a world that has foresaken Christ and his message of love—in an atheistic world that believes instead in Darwin and the laws of science—human beings will behave no differently than insects, birds of prey, or reptiles. Reduced to his most primitive animal instincts, man will indeed act in accord with the Malthusian paradigm of struggle, conflict, and competition. What then constitutes, to Dostoevsky's mind, a viable solution to this problem of the predatory instincts that lurk within human beings? What can possibly curb their innate carnivorism, their apparently insatiable appetite for power, control, and domination? How can man's bestial nature—the insect lust of Karamazovism—be overcome and his truly human face restored? And what can be done to prevent the realization, in the very near future, of a gruesome apocalyptic nightmare of human cannibalism and mutual annihilation?

Dostoevsky's journalistic writings suggest that the solution to all these pressing human problems consists in somehow stemming the tendency toward what he called the “chemical decomposition” of society.⁴¹ According to Dostoevsky the journalist, human isolation and social atomization only further aggravate the bestial tendencies within human beings—their innate predatoriness, carnivorism, and cannibalism. Modern efforts to reverse the prevailing trends toward increasing social fragmentation by means of an ideology that champions human solidarity—whether it be the ideology of secular humanism, utopian socialism, or Roman Catholicism—have all been misguided, he would argue, because in their neglect of Christ and their rejection of his ethical model they have considered only man's material needs and not his spiritual demands: they have considered mainly man's belly rather than his soul. Since it lacks a firm moral basis for its actions, even the humanistic philanthropy of Malthus (emblematized in Dostoevsky's novels by the rumble of carts bringing “bread” to a starving mankind) is in his eyes most decidedly inferior to true spiritual peace and harmony. For Dostoevsky, an authentic utopia can only be the result of a Christian brotherhood—more specifically, a Russian Orthodox brotherhood (sobornost')—that is based on spontaneous active love and on voluntary self-sacrifice rather than on law, calculation, and self-interest, which serve as the foundation for the secular utopias of Western socialism. In some of the later entries of his Diary of a Writer, where Dostoevsky concerned himself in great part with issues of international politics (especially the so-called “Eastern question”), the Russian author repeatedly prophesied the rapidly approaching collapse of Europe and the imminent establishment of an Orthodox utopia, a millennium of Christian brotherhood, just as soon as Russia recaptured the ancient capital of Constantinople from the heathen Turks.⁴²

In Dostoevsky's artistic texts, meanwhile, this prophetic and polemical voice from the realm of journalism (the voice that champions a politics of Russian nationalism, messianism, and Panslavism) is considerably muted and modulated as it merges polyphonically within a broad matrix of other dialogized voices. Dostoevsky the artist, in other words, predominates over Dostoevsky the ideologue. Or, as Mikhail Bakhtin puts it, “the social and religious utopia inherent in his ideological views did not swallow up or dissolve in itself his objectively artistic vision.”⁴³ The way to overcome both human carnivorism and social atomization, according to Dostoevsky the novelist, is through the inner spiritual transformation of individual human beings. As Joseph Frank observes, Dostoevsky's fictional characters are invariably faced with the choice between a Christian doctrine of love and a secular doctrine of power.⁴⁴ The discovery and subsequent liberation of the “man within man” is what compassionate, kenotic characters such as Sonya Marmeladova, Prince Myshkin, Marya Lebyadkina, Father Zosima, and Alyosha Karamazov all seek to effect. Considered metalinguistically, in Bakhtinian terms, all these characters point toward Dostoevsky's dream of attaining a true polyphony by means of their “penetrative” words and their “hagiographic” discourse: “a firmly monologic, undivided discourse, a word without a sideward glance, without a loophole, without internal polemic.”⁴⁵ They champion a polyphony not of battling and internally divided (dialogized) human voices but rather of harmoniously reconciled and merged voices. Dostoevsky's ideal, as a religious thinker if not as a literary artist, seems to have been to transform social heteroglossia, with its wide diversity of different speech patterns and tonalities, into one harmonious and melodious chorus in which, as Bakhtin puts it, “the word passes from mouth to mouth in identical tones of praise, joy and gladness.”⁴⁶ Redemptive polyphony would come in the form of a specifically Russian chorus, in which the voices of the intelligentsia and the narod would merge together at last to sing a joyful hymn to God and proclaim aloud, “Hosanna!”

In gastronomical terms, a genuine brotherhood of man will come about, according to Dostoevsky, only when the wolves lie down peacefully with the sheep, when human beings start to live for their souls rather than their bellies, and when people begin to find joy in the sense of commensalism that results from sharing communally in the banquet of life rather than in the false sense of superiority that they seem to derive from egoistic acts of cruel, bestial sensuality. A true utopia of universal harmony will be realized only when we finally lose our carnivoristic appetite for power, when we decide to stop devouring each other (as well as our own selves), and when we turn at last from the individualistic struggle for self-preservation that engenders human cannibalism to a joyful communion through Christ with all other human beings.⁴⁷ Darwin's clever theory of natural selection, with its Malthusian notion of the “struggle for existence,” may well help to explain predatory human behavior in a modern world that is becoming increasingly secularized, capitalistic, and atheistic. But Darwinism, Dostoevsky insisted, can never impart to us the profounder spiritual truth about the human condition that Christ endeavored to teach us: that man can be a brother—rather than a wolf—to his fellow man. Indeed, it is only by learning to share—chorally and communally—in the spiritual banquet of life, such as the one that Alyosha is beckoned to join in the “Cana of Galilee” chapter of The Brothers Karamazov, that humankind can ever hope to avoid an otherwise inevitable and terribly destructive banquet: the anthropophagic feast of Thyestes.

Notes

1. Richard Brautigan, The Abortion: A Historical Romance (New York: Pocket Books, 1972), 28.

2. Simon Karlinsky, “Dostoevsky as Rorschach Test,” in Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, ed. George Gibian (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964), 636. The Dostoevsky character who would deny a crust of bread to a starving little boy is no doubt Arkady Dolgoruky's friend Lambert in A Raw Youth, who claims that when he becomes wealthy, he will derive great pleasure from feeding his dogs bread and meat while the children of the poor starve to death (pt. 1, chap. 3). The “neurotic young girl” who dreams of eating pineapple compote while witnessing the suffering of a crucified child is, of course, Lise Khokhlakova in The Brothers Karamazov (bk. 11, chap. 3).

3. Karlinsky, “Dostoevsky as Rorschach Test,” 636.

4. Mikhail Lermontov, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh [Collected works in four volumes] (Moscow-Leningrad: Akademiia nauk, 1958-1959), vol. 4, 401, 438.

5. In his study of Molière's L'Ecole des femmes (1662), Ronald W. Tobin interprets the central romantic plot as a semiotic collision between the code of power, communicated by the verb manger (“to devour”), and the code of pleasure, with its concomitant notion of goûter (“to taste”). Whereas the carnivoristic and predatory Arnolphe seeks to “devour” Agnes, hoping to dominate and control her as soon as she becomes his wife, Horace wishes instead to enjoy a “taste” of Agnes's sexuality and tender affection as a love partner. See Tobin, “Les Mets et les mots: gastronomie et sémiotique dans L'Ecole des femmes,” Sémiotique, vol. 51 (1984), 133-145. This same paradigm of eating as power and violence seems to operate in the works of one of Dostoevsky's polemical arch-enemies, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. In a paper entitled “The Myth of Nourishment in The Golovlyov Family” delivered at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, in Washington, D.C., in October 1990, Darra Goldstein demonstrates quite convincingly how in Saltykov-Shchedrin's novel “food and eating are used both symbolically and structurally to dramatize the gluttonous appetite for power that the family members share” (p. 2).

6. “Not only is eating itself of huge importance in the Dickens world,” John Bayley points out about the British novelist, “but in a broad sense all his characters are engaged in eating each other, or being eaten.” See “Best and Worst,” New York Review of Books, January 19, 1989, 11. For a more detailed study of Dickens's purported obsession with human carnivorism, an obsession rooted in his earliest childhood days and stimulated in large part by his boyhood reading of fairy tales, travel accounts, and “penny dreadfuls,” see Harry Stone, The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1994).

7. In Dostoyevsky: The Novel of Discord (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), Malcolm V. Jones examines the trope of “cannibalism” as a recurring theme in Dostoevsky's fiction and as one pole of the author's vision of humanity. Unfortunately, Jones's fine study came to my attention only after this chapter had been written.

8. See Alexander Vucinich, Darwin in Russian Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Daniel Todes, Darwin without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); James Allen Baker, “The Russian Populists' Response to Darwin,” Slavic Review, vol. 22, no. 3 (1963), 456-468, and “Russian Opposition to Darwinism in the Nineteenth Century,” Isis, vol. 65, no. 229 (1974), 487-505; and George L. Kline, “Darwinism and the Russian Orthodox Church,” in Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought, ed. Ernest J. Simmons (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), 307-328.

9. Todes, Darwin without Malthus, 29. As Peter K. Christoff points out, one of the leading Slavophiles maintained that “the best way to constrain man's animal, jungle proclivities was to raise him in a commune.” See K. S. Aksakov: A Study in Ideas, vol. 3 of Christoff's monumental study, An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Russian Slavophilism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 368. The peasant commune, according to another Slavophile, “does not comprehend the personal freedom of man alone, which for it is a wolf's freedom, not human freedom.” See A. Gilferding, Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works] (St. Petersburg, 1868), vol. 2, 478. Gilferding, in Christoff's words, “saw in the Russian communal principle salvation from jungle-like individualism and social Darwinism” (368 f.).

10. Theodosius Dobzhansky, “The Crisis of Soviet Biology,” in Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought, ed. Ernest J. Simmons (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), 338. James Allen Rogers voices a similar opinion. “The Darwinian controversy in Russia as in Europe,” he writes, “went quickly beyond the world of science and became a focal point of philosophical and political disputes.” See “Darwinism, Scientism, and Nihilism,” Russian Review, vol. 19, no. 1 (1960), 16.

11. Describing peasant culture in post-Emancipation Russia, the populist A. N. Engelgardt remarks that “everyone is proud of being a pike and strives to devour the carp.” See Cathy Frierson, Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural Life in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 141.

12. “In literature Darwinism became a topic of direct concern or a target of endless allusions,” Alexander Vucinich writes. “References to the letter or the spirit of Darwinian thought, sometimes of the most subtle nature, became an infallible way of depicting the world outlook and ideological proclivities of the heroes of literary masterpieces. Individual heroes of Dostoevsky's and Tolstoy's literary works provided graphic examples of the myriads of prisms refracting Darwinian science and showing the multiple strands of its impact on current thought and attitudes. More often than not, these heroes were alter egos of their literary creators, giving added scope to Darwinism as an intellectual and social phenomenon. A literary figure took note of Darwinian evolutionism not only by commenting on its scientific principles but also by making use of its metaphors.” See Vucinich, Darwin in Russian Thought, 4.

13. Alexander Ostrovsky, Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works] (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1960), vol. 7, 121-223.

14. Aleksei Pisemsky, Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works] (Moscow: Pravda, 1959), vol. 9, 285-359.

15. Nikolai Leskov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Complete collected works] (St. Petersburg, 1903), vol. 23, 90. Gordanov advises one of his acquaintances, “Living with wolves, act in a wolflike fashion.”

16. Dostoevsky, Diary of a Writer, May 1876 (chap. 1). “Perhaps Dostoevsky's extensive, and often biting, use of naturalist allegories,” Vucinich writes, in Darwin in Russian Thought, 110, “owed some debt to Darwin's suggestive ideas.”

17. “Notebook for Diary of a Writer, 1875-76,” in Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Complete collected works] (Leningrad: Nauka, 1982), vol. 24, 164. Everything in a such a world, Dostoevsky adds, is reduced to “despotism” over a piece of bread. “Too much spirit,” he sadly notes, “is being exchanged for bread” (164). For a brief discussion of Dostoevsky's reaction to Darwinism, see G. M. Fridlender, Realizm Dostoevskogo [Dostoevsky's realism] (Moscow-Leningrad: Nauka, 1964), 157-163.

18. N. K. Mikhailovsky, Dostoevsky: A Cruel Talent, trans. Spencer Cadmus (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978), 12.

19. Ibid. Mikhailovsky maintains that during Dostoevsky's early career the Russian writer's talents were devoted mainly to studying the psychology of the sheep being devoured by the wolf, while in his later career Dostoevsky turned his attention almost exclusively to the psychology of the wolf devouring the sheep.

20. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for “A Raw Youth,” ed. Edward Wasiolek, trans. Victor Terras (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 21-28. Jacques Catteau discusses A Raw Youth as “the novel of the predator” in Dostoyevsky and the Process of Literary Creation, trans. Audrey Littlewood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 265-268.

21. Dostoevsky's portrayal of “predatory” character types resembles in a number of important ways that of Dickens. J. R. Kincaid, in Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), writes that the narrator in David Copperfield “speaks of good people as harmless domestic animals and evil people as predatory beasts” (168). In a similar vein, R. D. McMaster examines the extensive use of predatory imagery in another of Dickens's novels. See his essay “Birds of Prey: A Study of Our Mutual Friend,” Dalhousie Review, vol. 40, no. 3 (1960), 372-381. Speaking of the avaricious world of mercantile London that Dickens describes in the novel, McMaster notes that “character after character is a bird, a beast, or a fish of prey in this swamp” (373).

22. Renato Poggioli explores this spider imagery as a symbol for modern man's existential alienation in his essay “Kafka and Dostoyevsky,” in The Kafka Problem, ed. Angel Flores (New York: Gordian Press, 1975), 107-117. In the essay “Piccola Bestia,” Dostoevsky relates how a tarantula once crawled about all night in his rented flat in Florence. He then proceeds to use this spider imagery in his ensuing discussion of international politics. See Diary of a Writer for September 1876 (chap. 1).

23. Ralph Matlaw, “Recurrent Imagery in Dostoevskij,” Harvard Slavic Studies, vol. 3 (1957), 206.

24. See Gary Cox, Tyrant and Victim in Dostoevsky (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1984). S. K. Somerwil-Ayrton employs Cox's notion of “dominance hierarchy” in Dostoevsky's fictional world as the foundation for a study in literary sociology entitled Poverty and Power in the Early Works of Dostoevskij (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988) that examines the power hierarchy along what is called “the tyrant-victim axis” (see p. 1). Martin P. Rice, meanwhile, explores the origins of Dostoevsky's concept of a power hierarchy in Hegelian philosophy in “Dostoevskij's Notes from Underground and Hegel's ‘Master and Slave,’” Canadian-American Slavic Studies, vol. 8, no. 3 (1974), 359-369.

25. In the chapter devoted to The Idiot in The Shape of the Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), David Bethea discusses how Dostoevsky came “to associate the railroad with the spread of atheism and the spirit of the Antichrist” (p. 77).

26. “Dostoevsky's view of sexual relationships,” Alex de Jonge observes, “is distorted by intensity, and operates along an axis of violence and pain.” See Dostoevsky and the Age of Intensity (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975), 179. “Even more or less normal sexual relationships,” de Jonge adds, “tend to be founded in sadism” (185). See also Robert L. Jackson, Dialogues with Dostoevsky: The Overwhelming Questions (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), esp. chap. 8, “Dostoevsky and the Marquis de Sade: The Final Encounter,” 144-161.

27. When discussing Pushkin's Egyptian Nights in his “Response to Russkii vestnik” [Response to The Russian Messenger], Dostoevsky characterizes Cleopatra as a black widow spider “who devours her male after mating.” See Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 19, 136. In his famous Pushkin Speech, he notes how the author of Egyptian Nights portrays the ancient gods as desperately seeking diversion “in fantastic bestialities, in the voluptuousness of creeping things, of a female spider devouring its male.” See Diary of a Writer for August 1880 (chap. 2). In The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 214-216, Mario Praz discusses literary representations of Cleopatra as an algolagnic woman by writers such as Gautier and Pushkin.

28. Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for “A Raw Youth,” 159.

29. During the Soviet period, Fazil Iskander wrote a novel that thoroughly exploits this particular predatory metaphor in the form of a satiric beast fable. See his Rabbits and Boa Constrictors, trans. Ronald E. Peterson (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1989).

30. Alyosha's response would seem to parallel Sonya Marmeladova's consternation (and indignation) in Crime and Punishment at Raskolnikov's assertion that in murdering the pawnbroker Alyona he had killed not a human being but a foul, noxious “louse” (pt. 5, chap. 4).

31. Leonid Grossman surmises that Dostoevsky got this image of cannibal flies from Balzac's Père Goriot, where Vautrin at one point is heard to remark, “Il faut vous manger les uns les autres, comme des araignées dans un pot.” See Grossman, Tvorchestvo Dostoevskogo [Dostoevsky's oeuvre] (Moscow, 1928), 89. It is entirely possible, however, that Dostoevsky took the idea of cannibal insects from Vladimir Odoevsky's beast fable, “Novyi Zhoko,” which appeared in 1833 as part of a cycle of stories called Pestrye skazki [Motley tales].

32. Michael Holquist, “How Sons Become Fathers,” in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House 1988), 39-51. Gary Cox likewise examines the Oedipal rivalry depicted in The Brothers Karamazov in chap. 9 (“Primal Murders”) of his Tyrant and Victim, 86-101. Michael André Bernstein expropriates Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of carnival in an innovative way and discusses Ivan Karamazov's murderous intent toward his father as the manifestation of a modern cultural development. See Bernstein, “‘These Children That Come at You with Knives’: Ressentiment, Mass Culture, and the Saturnalia,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 17, no. 2 (1991), 358-385. The classic study on this topic remains Freud's “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” reprinted in Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Daniel Rancour-Laferriere (Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1989), 41-57.

33. August Strindberg, Six Plays, trans. Elizabeth Sprigge (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 52.

34. Holquist, “How Sons Become Fathers,” 40.

35. Mervyn Nicholson, “Eat—or Be Eaten: An Interdisciplinary Metaphor,” in Diet and Discourse: Eating, Drinking, and Literature, ed. Evelyn J. Hinz (Winnipeg, Manitoba: Mosaic, 1991), 198. For a study that provides a historical overview of the theme of cannibalism in Western literature (from Swift, Flaubert, and the Marquis de Sade to Artaud, Genêt, and Mailer), see Claude J. Rawson, “Cannibalism and Fiction: Reflections on Narrative Form and ‘Extreme Situations,’” Genre, vols. 10 (1977), 667-711, and 11 (1978), 227-313.

36. According to one of the petitioners who comes to visit the holy fool Semyon Yakovlevich in part 2 of The Devils, contemporary youths are already “cannibals” (liudoedy) for having issued a writ against this poor old widow (pt. 2, chap. 5).

37. Tatyana Tolstaya, “In Cannibalistic Times,” New York Review of Books, April 11, 1991, 3. Roger Dadoun discusses the connection between cannibalism and Stalinism in his essay “Du cannibalisme comme stade suprême du stalinisme,” in Destins du cannibalisme, ed. J.-B. Pontalis, special issue of Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse, no. 6 (Fall 1972), 269-272. For anthropological studies of cannibalism, see the following: William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Culture (New York: Random House, 1977); Eli Sagan, Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form (New York: Harper, 1974); Reay Tannahill, Flesh and Blood: A History of the Cannibal Complex (New York: Stein and Day, 1975); and Peggy Reeve Sanday, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

38. Tolstaya, “In Cannibalistic Times,” 3.

39. “Men all clamor for unity,” Kyril FitzLyon writes in paraphrasing Dostoevsky's view of this human desire for solidarity, “and, in default of genuine brotherhood, are all too eager to accept a counterfeit model in the shape of socialism or the Catholic Church, which can offer nothing but the brotherhood of an ‘ant-hill.’” See his Introduction in Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, trans. Kyril FitzLyon (London: Quartet Books, 1985), vii-viii.

40. Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky and The Idiot: Author, Narrator, and Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 202. The scene where Lebedev relates the cannibal anecdote is examined by Leon Burnett in “Hors d'oeuvre: Catering for the Consumer in The Idiot,” Essays in Poetics, vol. 15, no. 2 (1990), 68-93.

41. See, for instance, The Notebooks for “A Raw Youth,” 38, as well as Diary of a Writer for March 1876 (chap. 1).

42. See, for example, chap. 1 (“Once More on the Subject That Constantinople, Sooner or Later, Must Be Ours”) for March 1877 and chap. 3 (“Peace Rumors. ‘Constantinople Must Be Ours’—Is This Possible? Different Opinions”) for November 1877 of Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer.

43. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 250.

44. Joseph Frank, “The World of Raskolnikov,” in Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 570.

45. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 249.

46. Ibid.

47. In a recent study of what she calls metaphors of “incorporation,” Maggie Kilgour posits a whole spectrum of tropes for the process of ingestion, ranging from the pole of communion, which indicates a relationship that encompasses unity, identity, and harmony, to the opposite extreme of cannibalism, which represents, in her words, “the most demonic image for the impulse to incorporate external reality.” See Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 16.