SOURCE: “Dostoevsky: The Nihilist Imagination,” in On the Dark Side of Russian Literature, 1709-1910, Peter Lang, 1987, pp. 145-81.

[In the following essay, Ponomareff explores Dostoevsky's spiritual conflict and views the nihilist perspective as the defining characteristic of his fiction.]

In his famous essay on Dostoevsky Freud made the culturally perceptive observation that the “compromise with morality” was “a characteristic Russian trait.”¹ Dostoevsky's life fully corroborates this view and allows us to add to the study of the causal connection between a traditional moral ambivalence in the Russian writer and the nihilist consequences of this spiritual state on his spirit and his work. For, Dostoevsky began his life as a revolutionary and was in 1849 condemned to ten years of prison and exile in Siberia; but he ended his life, as Mochulsky has shown,² a staunch conservative who enjoyed frequenting aristocratic salons and cultivated his friendship and connections with Pobedonostsev and the Royal family. Inner spiritual ambiguity marked his whole life. This is true if we look at his emotionally paradoxical life with his first wife Maria Isaeva³ (whom he married in 1857 while still in exile and who died of consumption in 1864); or if we contrast his passionate and disastrous affair with the “infernal” Apollinaria Suslova which had begun even while his wife lay dying⁴ with his second marriage to Anna Snitkina in 1867 and its happy domesticity.⁵ But even this second marriage was a burden to the extremely possessive Doestoevsky: for though he believed that Anna had been given him by God so that he might “do penance” for his “great sins,”⁶ he must have viewed even this love as a mixed blessing, judged by the remark in one of his letters that “The joy of love is great, but the sufferings are so terrible, that it might be better never to love.”⁷ And if he was a touching father with his own children, what of the charge of his paedophilia which Slonim summed up in the following words:

One thing is indisputable: the theme of corrupting minor girls sounds so often in his works, and he reverted to it so frequently in his conversations, that it assumes a persistent, if not a truly manic character.⁸

In this connection we are reminded of Nicholas Strakhov's letter to Leo Tolstoy where he contrasted Dostoevsky's “literary humanity” with his attraction to “abominations” in real life.⁹

Dostoevsky's inner strife was reflected not only in his social and emotional life but more importantly for him, in his religious beliefs. As he himself confessed to his friend, the poet Apollon Maykov in 1870, the main problem he wanted to deal with in a future sequence of novels was “the very one which has tormented me consciously and unconsciously during my whole life and that is, the existence of God.”¹⁰ The same spiritual conflict had been aired in a letter of 1854 when, fresh out of prison, he seemed to have nothing more important on his mind than to express his idealization of Christ side by side with his organic incapacity to believe:

I shall tell you about myself [he wrote to Natalie von Wiesen, the wife of a convicted Decembrist] that I am a child of our age, a child of unbelief and doubt now and (I know this) to my very grave. What terrible torments this thirst for faith has cost me and is costing me now, a thirst which grows stronger in my soul the more arguments against it arise within me.¹¹

Undoubtedly his epilepsy aggravated his state of mind,¹² but it does not explain, for example, why he should have risked his happiness with Anna by repeated bouts of gambling.¹³ His innate penchant for extremes was also expressed in his deep hostility to Europe¹⁴ and his love of Russia¹⁵ which, as he wrote to Maykov in the summer of 1867, he needed “for my writing and for my labour” (Dostoevsky's italics).¹⁶

But there was even greater spiritual ambiguity in his theory and practice of writing: for if his theory about writing seemed infused with a moral passion, his works, especially in the eyes of critics, seemed to articulate the exact opposite. Thus he could write, in theory, as he did to Strakhov from Dresden in 1870 that “man on the surface of the earth has no right to turn away and to ignore what happens on earth and for this there are higher moral reasons” (Dostoevsky's italics).¹⁷ This higher moral imperative was artistically transformed into a higher realism, an “idealism” as he called it in a letter to Maykov:

My idealism is more real than theirs [the realists and critics]. My God! If you were to sensibly recount what all of us Russians have experienced in our spiritual development for the past ten years, wouldn't all those realists start screaming that this was too fantastic a thing to undertake! And yet this is a primordial, authentic realism! This is the only kind of realism, but one which is deeper, whereas theirs skims the surface.¹⁸

In practice however his works did not look at all like what they were supposed to be in theory. The first to point to this disparity was the Russian critic Nikolay Mikhaylovsky in his celebrated article of 1882 “Zhestokiy talant” (A Cruel Talent). Ranging over Dostoevsky's literary work, Mikhaylovsky singled out his propensity for inhumanity, his voluptuous enjoyment of cruelty and torture, that pleasurable “play of his imagination” which was drawn to tyranny, malice and spite.¹⁹ Dostoevsky had an enormous artistic gift and there had been a “humanist strain” in his writing up to about 1861, but in his later and major work this stream of consciousness, Mikhaylovsky wrote, “gradually disappears and eventually completely runs dry in a desert of sugary and cachectic maxims about love of one's fellow man.”²⁰ Mikhaylovsky held Dostoevsky morally responsible for the excessive human suffering in his work which in the end caused him to move away from a “‘humanist’ direction to an unmotivated and aimless infliction of pain.”²¹ But Mikhaylovsky, to be fair, tempered his criticism in order to explain, if not to exonerate, Dostoevsky. His cruelty, thought Mikhaylovsky, was the direct result of his not having been given an opportunity to participate freely and meaningfully in the real life of his society. Here, if anywhere, Mikhaylovsky suggested a causal relationship between the effects of autocracy on a society and inhumanity and nihilism in literature. Mikhaylovsky implied that Dostoevsky, victimized by political oppression, withdrew into his books in order there to vent his pent-up rage.²² Other critics such as the Comte Melchior de Vogüé, Maxim Gorky, Thomas Masaryk and, more recently, Mario Praz and Vaclav Cerny, have seen Dostoevsky in an equally morally and humanistically negative light.

It seems to me a fact hard to deny that, in looking at Dostoevsky's major fiction, the nihilist perspective is the imaginative centre of his work.

In Dostoevsky's development as a writer his “Zapiski iz Podpol'ya” (Notes from Underground, 1864) is a seed core for all his subsequent major fiction. Part I, “Podpol'e” (The Underground) expresses the underground man's philosophy of life. He rejects the Crystal Palace which stands for reason and morality, goodness and the civilized consciousness in favour of an independent self will which would allow him the fullest individual freedom to follow any of his arbitrary whims and desires. As such he personifies the irrational in human existence, and elevates suffering as a measure of his personal being.²³ His voluptuous pleasure in experiencing pain or humiliation is thus a measure of his willful freedom.²⁴

He admits that he is a sick and vicious man.²⁵ And we sense that his vindictive will bent on chaos and destruction (so as to insure his continuous freedom to be)²⁶ seems, for all its powerful intent, paralyzed, as if it were being practiced in the vacuum of his subconscious symbolized by the Underground. One gets the distinct impression that the Notes were meant as a true spiritual autobiography,²⁷ as the record of a spiritual paralysis very much akin to nihilism. For, the underground man admits that he himself does not really believe anything he has said in the first part of his Notes.²⁸ The underground man suggests the reason for his nihilism through his imaginary reader's response:

You boast of your consciousness, but you are only in fact vacillating, because, though your mind works, your heart is sullied by corruption, and without a pure heart you cannot have a full and normal consciousness.²⁹

This is the underground man's tragedy and probably explains why he has spent forty years in his Underground hitting out against all that is “‘wonderful and noble’” (the author's ironic quotation marks).³⁰ He hopes his Notes would have at least some therapeutic value for him.³¹

The second part of the Notes exemplifies the application of his philosophy to life. It is especially his cruel treatment of the young prostitute Liza—who resembles a child,³²—which brings out his sadistically compulsive self-will. He had already decided in the brothel that he would humiliate and make a mockery of her.³³ His only self-justification is: “For without power and without tyrannizing over somebody I cannot live”; “They won't let me … I cannot be … kind!”; and finally—“First of all, I couldn't even love anyone anymore because, I repeat, for me to love meant to tyrannize and to excel morally. All my life I've not been able to imagine any other love.”³⁴ The underground man's final self humiliation as a human being both with his partying “friends” and with Liza is but the tragic proof of his free will.³⁵

In the final analysis there is, I think, much truth in Lev Shestov's view of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground as expressing his bankrupt idealism. In Shestov's words—

The wonderful and the lofty in quotation marks is not my invention. I found it in Notes from Underground. In the Notes all “ideals” are presented in this way. Schiller, humaneness, Nekrasov's poetry, the Crystal Palace, everything that had ever filled Dostoevsky's soul with tenderness and exaltation, is now covered in a hail of the most venomous and the most personalized sarcasm. The ideals and the tenderness expressed for them evoke in him a feeling of disgust and horror. And it isn't that he questions the possibility of realizing ideals. He doesn't even think of it, he doesn't want to. In fact, it would be all the worse, if the magnanimous dreams of his youth should ever come true. And if ever the ideal of human happiness on earth should be realized, Dostoevsky anathematizes it ahead of time. I shall speak directly: no one had ever dared before Dostoevsky to express such thoughts, be it, with corresponding notes. For such thoughts to spring up in a human mind, there had to be a great despair, and there had to be a superhuman impertinence to carry them before the people.³⁶

In his Prestuplenie i nakazanie (Crime and Punishment, 1866) Dostoevsky gave a more dramatic form to the problem of nihilism which he had broached in Notes from Underground. As a novel it was an attempt to purge himself of the underground man through the nihilist Raskolnikov's ultimate salvation. But this novel, like all his other novels, also had a wider socio-historical meaning which transcended the immediate personal one, as Joseph Frank has reminded us: “As always, however, Dostoevsky transforms his own psychic dilemmas into artistic structures relevant to the moral social issues of his time.”³⁷ We can therefore view Raskolnikov not only as a personal but as a social and cultural metaphor of Russian life. It is intriguing to conjecture on the possibility that Dostoevsky's purpose in Crime and Punishment may have been to raise the crucial question for nineteenth century Russia, if not indeed for Russian culture as a whole: for in asking whether a sinner and a criminal—whether he, the author—could still find back to his own humanity and whether he still had any inner moral resources left to be saved for life, was he not in effect at the same time asking whether a corrupted, nihilist Russian society living under despotic rule still possessed sufficient spiritual reserves for a moral reprieve?

This is perhaps why crime and salvation play such a central role in the novel, and why Raskolnikov, this morally far more terrifying nihilist than Bazarov, could not avoid facing the human consequences of his murder of the old pawnbroker and her sister.

The post-analysis of a crime which became the self-analysis of a “living soul” (Dostoevsky's italics),³⁸ revolved around Raskolnikov's attempts to find the real cause for his crime, for only this knowledge would help him ascertain the degree of his own guilt in the crime and his chances for personal moral salvation.

The search for the real cause of his crime best explains why Dostoevsky (in chapter IV of Part five) provided such a variety of motives for Raskolnikov's crime.³⁹ Of course the very variety of motives undercut their and Raskolnikov's credibility, especially since sometimes Raskolnikov himself knew better than to believe in his fabrications of motive.⁴⁰ Raskolnikov's stubborn pursuit of motive was all the more strange since we are told in the Epilogues by Dostoevsky that Raskolnikov “did not feel remorse for his crime.”⁴¹

I think that Dostoevsky used Raskolnikov's stubborn pursuit of motive (such as it was) in order to suggest the idea he had once raised in an earlier work “that in the most fallen creature there may yet be left the highest of human feelings”.⁴² In other words, he wanted to show that even Raskolnikov was not yet morally indifferent to the question of his own salvation. That is why Dostoevsky showed us a Raskolnikov racked by mental suffering, both before and after the murders were committed. Raskolnikov's interest in Lazarus,⁴³ for example, suggested a need for spiritual rebirth and for moral absolution which in the end brought him to confess his crime to Sonya without whose help, it seems, he could not live with his burdened conscience.⁴⁴ Nor was he yet so emotionally disabled as to be invulnerable to Sonya's love and compassion: “Long unfamiliar feelings poured like a flood into his heart and melted it in an instant.”⁴⁵ He himself still nurtured a shred of hope in his humanity when he responded to Sonya's attempt to save him with “‘Perhaps I am still a man and not a louse, and I was in too much of a hurry to condemn myself’” (Dostoevsky's italics).⁴⁶ That there might still be some hope for Raskolnikov was suggested by the fact that Svidrigaylov, whose conscience was also burdened with a crime, actually sought salvation from him.⁴⁷

Dostoevsky's desperate attempt to salvage Raskolnikov in our eyes suggests how deeply perturbed he was over Raskolnikov's incapacity to feel any remorse for his crime. Dostoevsky suggested as much in a telltale sentence of Epilogue II which brought out Raskolnikov's moral bankruptcy, irrespective of his occasional moral or emotional stirrings: “How happy he [Raskolnikov] would have been,” Dostoevsky wrote, “if he could have put the blame on himself!”⁴⁸ In other words, how happy he would have been if he had had enough moral conscience to feel genuine remorse even if he were not totally to blame for his act.

It seems to me that, after everything has been said and done, Dostoevsky simply could not find it in himself to accept the novel's austere judgement and admit Raskolnikov's moral bankruptcy or nihilism because he was too much a part of Dostoevsky himself. Instead, he tried to save him by minimizing his responsibility for the crime. This he did in Epilogue II, in a passage where he made the point of Raskolnikov's spiritual recovery coincide with his remembering the terrible nightmares he had had of an “unknown pestilence” which infected men, deranged and confused their moral and intellectual judgement and made them become “like men possessed.”⁴⁹

Dostoevsky's “Deus ex machina” could do no more for Raskolnikov. For the critical reader, however, the question remains whether the Epilogues are an organic part of the whole, that is to say, whether Raskolnikov's “recovery”⁵⁰ was in fact in character; or whether as authorial intrusions into the spiritual development (or lack of it) of Raskolnikov, they actually undermined his credibility as a character?

For my part, the unredeemed Raskolnikov is psychologically far more credible than his counter in the Epilogues. He is far more credible as a victim, be it, of a “terrible unknown pestilence” which has all the earmarks of nihilism. The history of his infection, that nihilist obsession with ideas that thrive in a human vacuum, is far more believable than his cure.

A distinguished group of critics have not believed Raskolnikov's spiritual regeneration and have questioned the Epilogues as forming an organic part of the novel. Konstantin Mochulsky has put it this way: “The novel ends with a vague anticipation of the hero's ‘renewal’. It is promised, but it is not shown. We know Raskolnikov too well to believe this ‘pious lie’”.⁵¹ A.L. Bem wrote that Raskolnikov's rebirth did not “with any inner necessity follow out of the novel itself.”⁵² Speaking of Raskolnikov, Victor Shklovsky observed: “He [Dostoevsky] could promise absolution through love and religion, but this was already in the epilogue, and epilogues are to novels, what life in the other world is to ours.”⁵³ Of epilogues in general Shklovsky had this to say: “The existence of so-called epilogues in a novel shows that a writer very often has to finish speaking his work of art, that he has to finish it precisely because it is not finished and fully resolved.”⁵⁴ And Masaryk, referring to scepticism in Dostoevsky, said: “He [Dostoevsky] cannot portray a single character who has really overcome his own scepticism. We see Raskolnikov only in a state of crisis. … Nowhere does Dostoevsky paint a sceptic returned to the faith.”⁵⁵ Masaryk asserted that Strakhov was right “in defining Dostoevsky's major motif as being that of ‘penitent nihilist’. The nihilist does public penance in Dostoevsky's many works, submits to the severest penance, and even to self-torment. And still he does not free himself of nihilism.”⁵⁶

In his novel Idiot (The Idiot, 1868-69) Dostoevsky, like Turgenev before him, tried to create a thoroughly good man, a character who would be a creative antidote to his creatures from Underground. As he wrote to Maykov at the beginning of 1868:

For a long time a certain thought has tormented me, but I was afraid to make a novel out of it, because the thought is too difficult and I am not prepared for it, although the thought is absolutely tempting and I love it. The idea is to fully portray a beautiful human being. There cannot be anything more difficult, in my opinion, than this, especially in our time. (Dostoevsky's italics)⁵⁷

He reiterated these thoughts in a letter from Geneva to S.A. Ivanova in January of 1868, adding that, so far, only Christ had been a “positively beautiful character” and that in literature the one closest to this ideal was Don Quixote.⁵⁸ And indeed, Prince Myshkin, the idiot, had something of both in his naive and childlike helplessness coupled with a surprising wisdom concerning human nature.

One should stress Dostoevsky's personal motive in writing the novel as a way out of his Underground. As Mochulsky pointed out “Dostoevsky's novels are the history of his soul,”⁵⁹ and Bem thought that only in his artistic work was Dostoevsky's inner self truly reflected.⁶⁰

But as Dostoevsky himself suspected he was not prepared for writing such a novel. The Idiot was a creative and psychological failure as a work of art. Mochulsky, for example, recorded Dostoevsky's creative anxiety and dissatisfaction with the novel.⁶¹ And for all of Mochulsky's appreciation of The Idiot, he himself had to admit that “actually, the image of Prince Myshkin bears traces of not being fully embodied” (Mochulsky's italics).⁶² Both Shestov⁶³ and Cerny⁶⁴ had extremely negative appraisals of Myshkin as a character. We can thus take the prince as a measure of what goodness meant to Dostoevsky, but we cannot accept his failure as a literary character as anything but Dostoevsky's creative impotence to give substance to the good in his artistic work.

What weakened Prince Myshkin as a character still further was that Dostoevsky made him into a spokesman of his native soil philosophy,⁶⁵ into a kind of saviour of the aristocracy⁶⁶ and confessor to the Russian people⁶⁷ without any real knowledge of either. This political guise of Myshkin jarred with his image as the ideal man, making him even less credible as a character. Dostoevsky's politicization of the prince reached a crescendo in a speech that Myshkin delivered at the Epanchins:

“Russian atheists and Russian Jesuits are surely not all solely created out of pride and out of nasty, vainglorious feelings, but out of spiritual pain, from a spiritual thrist, from a yearning for higher things, for a solid shore, for one's native country in which they have stopped believing because they did not ever even know it! And a Russian can so easily become an atheist, even more easily than anyone else in the rest of the world! And we Russians (nashi) do not simply become atheists, we definitely come to believe in atheism as if it were a new faith without noticing that we have come to believe in nothing. Such is our thrist! ‘Whosoever has no soil under him, has no God either.’”

(Dostoevsky's italics)⁶⁸

This idealized version of Russian nihilism came from Dostoevsky and not from the prince who did not know Russia at all and who certainly could not have used the word “nashi” (we Russians) with any such confidence.

To me The Idiot conveys a far deeper meaning in its emotional and spiritual hysteria whether personified in the two hysterical women of the novel—Nastas'ya Filippovna and Aglaya—or evoked in the highly strung group scenes which helped structure the novel (for example at Nastas'ya Filipovna's and the Epanchins). A great deal of Dostoevsky's nihilism was expressed in the spiritually devastating impact of Holbein's painting “The Dead Christ in the Tomb” which was hung on a wall in Rogozhin's gloomy house.⁶⁹ And the theme of “little time left to live” which recurred in the novel with obsessive urgency harked back to the hysteria of the novel and to Dostoevsky's own spiritual despair. Dostoevsky expressed this theme in the stories of the two consumptives Marie and Ippolit;⁷⁰ in Myshkin's tales of impending capital punishment and the guillotining of Mme. du Barry;⁷¹ and finally in the prince himself who not only collected this material⁷² but became a victim of this theme when in the end he slipped back into a state of incurable idiocy. Perhaps this might explain the feeling of terror that some critics have found lurking in the novel.⁷³

Ultimately The Idiot signified Dostoevsky's failure to find a cure for himself as much as for his prince. What was left was an idealization of idiocy, of epilepsy and disease, a psychological defense of self which reminds us in turn of the underground man's rationalizations of spiritual inadequacy.

Tyrannical self-pride motivated Dostoevsky's demons in Besy (The Demons, 1871-72) a trait symptomatic of the nihilist condition. Dostoevsky's demonology included the very petty demons—Lyamshin, Erkel', Lebyadkin, Virginsky and Liputin—ready to serve and even to kill for the “cause”. Then came the greater demons. Foremost among them was Petr Verkhovensky who projected the illusionary existence of a network of revolutionary cells spun across Russia with the ultimate aim of overthrowing state and morality and establishing a centralized political elite. A nihilist and informer, stricken with totalitarian madness, he was a cold-blooded tyrant, an assassin, a moral monster who thrived on lies and deceit.⁷⁴ Dostoevsky compared him at one point to a huge spider.⁷⁵ His attempt to enlist Stavrogin to head his inhuman empire underlined his derangement, his delirious vision of a world brought down to a grey mass of humanity without imagination, without genius, without morality.⁷⁶

Then there was the cool-headed fanatic Shigalev who had, quite independently of Petr Verkhovensky, devised a blue-print for this totalitarian world. He was an advocate of “limitless despotism” and the theorist of the oppression of nine tenths of humanity who would make up his “earthly paradise” of slaves.⁷⁷

Aleksey Kirilov had also been drawn into this “universal” plot and ultimately his decision to kill himself was made to serve the “revolutionary cause.” What he had in common however with the demons was not his idea to commit suicide in order to prove his freedom, but the tremendous self-pride that his idea involved.

Kirilov believed that his suicide would make him into the first “new man”: “‘There will be a new man [he said to the narrator], happy and proud. He who will be indifferent to whether he lives or dies, will be a new man! He who will conquer pain and terror, will be God himself.’”⁷⁸ There was tragedy in Kirilov's idée fixe: “‘I cannot [think] about anything else, all my life I've been thinking about one and the same thing. God has tormented me all my life,’ he [Kirilov] concluded suddenly with an amazing effusiveness.”⁷⁹

As Petr Verkhovensky told him, he, Kirilov, had been “eaten up” by an idea.⁸⁰ And there was a certain tragic irony in that Kirilov took his symptoms of epilepsy for an ecstatic mystical experience of being.⁸¹ His suicide, Kirilov thought, would prove once and for all that there was no God,⁸² and in the light of his maddened logic he saw himself as a saviour of mankind leaving it as his legacy his “new terrifying freedom” through self-will.⁸³ During his last moments of life his madness was shown in a night-marish sequence of events, the high point being his biting Petr Verkhovensky's finger before putting an end to himself.⁸⁴

The last of the greater demons was Shatov who was murdered by Petr Verkhovensky in order to consolidate his revolutionary cell. It was his exclusive and fanatical slavophilism which brought him close to the demons in spirit and it was this intransigence which branded him as their spiritual brother.⁸⁵ Shatov's nihilist resemblance to the demons was furthermore suggested by his admission that he was a slavophile because he could not be a Russian⁸⁶ and that he could not preach a God he himself did not believe in.⁸⁷ To Stavrogin's question whether he believed in God he could only reply: “‘I … I shall believe in God.’”⁸⁸

The most terrifying of the demons however was Nicholas Stavrogin. It is of some significance to note a letter of October, 1870 to Katkov, the editor of The Russian Messenger, where Dostoevsky revealed the central importance that Stavrogin had for him as a character:

This other character (Nikolay Stavrogin) is also a gloomy character and a villain [he wrote]. But it seems to me that he is a tragic character, although many on reading the novel will say: “What is this?” I sat down to write this poem about this character because I have been wanting to depict him for much too long a time now. In my opinion, he is both a Russian and a typical character. I shall be very sad, if I do not succeed in portraying him. I shall be even sadder, if I should hear him sentenced as a stilted character. I have taken him right out of my heart.

(my italics)⁸⁹

I must admit that as a reader I belong to the category that “will say: ‘What is this?’”. And it is curious how many critics of note, whatever their final judgement of Stavrogin, have glorified him as a personification of Power: will power and total independence of man;⁹⁰ spiritual power;⁹¹ cerebral power;⁹² tempestuous Faustian power;⁹³ the attractive power of a “distinguished and unusually gifted man”;⁹⁴ the power of his “superhuman fascination”;⁹⁵ destructive, chaotic power;⁹⁶ and evil, satanic power.⁹⁷ But on closer scrutiny, we find behind Stavrogin's omnipresent and imposing power facade a man least of all capable of living up to his “superhuman” stature, one whose traits are in fact the opposite of what we would associate with such a protean power figure. What we find in effect is a creature whose malice and sadism seem to be symptoms of innate weakness, fear and cowardice.

Stavrogin's malice and sadism knew no bounds. As the narrator has it:

… There was perhaps more malice in Nikolay Vsevolodovich [Stavrogin] than in those two put together [the Decembrist Lunin and Lermontov], but it was a cold malice, an imperturbable one and, if one may say so, an intelligent malice, that is to say, the most disgusting and the most terrifying kind of malice, which can ever be.

(Dostoevsky's italics)⁹⁸

And indeed events in the novel corroborated this view. For example, it was Stavrogin who gave Petr Verkhovensky the idea of collective murder to which Shatov fell victim.⁹⁹ He was indirectly responsible both for the Lebyadkin murders¹⁰⁰ and for Liza's violent end.¹⁰¹ But it was especially in the chapter “U Tikhona” (At Tikhon's)¹⁰² that we witness the total range of Stavrogin's depravity. His rape of Matresha [who was either fourteen or ten years of age (sic!)]¹⁰³ and his cruel and fiendish wait to see her hang herself;¹⁰⁴ the death of a woman with whom, he said, he had dealt “even worse”; two innocent men whom he had killed at duels and someone whom he poisoned,¹⁰⁵ completed a sequence of murders he had on his conscience. We are not surprised, if the pitiful captain Lebyadkin described him as hating human kind (chelovekanenavistnika).¹⁰⁶ To Dasha, his confidante, Stavrogin confessed that he was “base and vile.”¹⁰⁷ Petr Verkhovensky compared him to Hamlet.¹⁰⁸ Stavrogin's inability to love Liza¹⁰⁹ suggested that he could not really love anyone.

Stavrogin's inner self had a great deal in common with the heroes of Pushkin's The Little Tragedies. Here is how this descendant of the underground man portrayed himself to Tikhon:

All those situations which I have ever experienced in my life, situations which were highly disgraceful, immeasurably humiliating and foul and, what is most important, comic and ludicrous, always aroused within me alongside an immense rage an equally incredible sense of delight. It is the same as at moments of crime and at such times when life is in danger. Thus while stealing I would feel a sense of rapture over the extent of my meanness. It was not meanness I loved … but the ecstasy I derived from the tormenting consciousness of my baseness.¹¹⁰

Stavrogin's motives for marrying the half-witted cripple Mar'ya Lebyadkina fell into the same category of malice and sadism. As Kirilov correctly observed, Stavrogin's marriage was “‘a new study of a satiated man who had set himself the aim of finding out how far one could drive a crazy cripple.’”¹¹¹ Shatov was also close to the truth when he suggested to Stavrogin that he had married the crippled Mar'ya “‘out of a passion for cruelty, from a passion for pangs of conscience, out of a moral sensuality. It was a kind of nervous disorder.’”¹¹² Another motive for Stavrogin's marriage, which connects with the Matresha affair, is brought to light when Stavrogin once visits Mar'ya and she suddenly becomes terrified of him. This motive seems associated with his lust for violating children:

Her face [we read] became contorted with spasms, trembling, she raised her arms and suddenly burst out crying exactly the way a child will who has become frightened.¹¹³

We cannot call a man who violates children, mocks the feeble-minded, and destroys and murders the innocent and the helpless a power figure in any sense of the word. Nor is it therefore surprising to find the narrator sounding the theme of cowardice in Stavrogin when he compares him to the Decembrist Lunin and others. For these men, it seems, the ever present consciousness of potential cowardice became a relentless psychological goad to action which might disprove the sense of personal inferiority: “… to conquer cowardice in oneself [the narrator observed], this is after all what fascinated them. The continuous rapture over victory and the consciousness that there was no one who could conquer one, this is what fascinated them.”¹¹⁴ In Stavrogin, however, the “continuous rapture over victory” had become a delight in the “tormenting consciousness” of his “baseness”. Liza intuited much in Stavrogin when she told him; “‘It always seemed to me that you would lead me astray into a place, where there lives a huge malicious spider the size of a human being and we would look at it our whole life long and fear it.’”¹¹⁵

Fear was a crucial psychological factor in Stavrogin's make-up. It is significant, for example, that what made Stavrogin unable to blot out the image of little Matresha was not any moral guilt, but simply the fact that he could not forgive himself a moment of terror and fear he had experienced during his destruction of the girl.¹¹⁶ Real fear and the fear to be afraid were combined in Stavrogin with that other curious fear of ridicule, the fear of being made the laughing stock in front of a public that he himself courted.¹¹⁷ No doubt Stavrogin's fear of ridicule was intimately connected with his inordinate demonic pride,¹¹⁸ but it was also at the same time, as Mochulsky has suggested, based on Stavrogin's sense of his own fraudulent heroism.¹¹⁹

It is Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground which provides us with a motivational model for an understanding of Stavrogin's character. By way of the Notes we acquire a context for viewing, for example, Stavrogin's “deranged” biting of the governor's ear, pulling Gaganov senior by the nose and kissing Liputin's wife in public. This transgressing of the limits of the socially accepted was typical for Stavrogin. The underground man's irrational willfulness in him was clearly put into words by Kirilov before his suicide: “‘Stavrogin [he said], if he believes [in God], then he does not believe that he believes. If, however, he does not believe, then he does not believe that he does not believe.’”¹²⁰ It seems that for the underground man, as much as for Stavrogin, the aim in life was to commit an endless series of crimes causing the self ceaseless “pleasurable” suffering in order to augment the power of self-will and self-pride. This was what I would understand to have been Stavrogin's “burden”, to use Kirilov's word.¹²¹ And this was probably also the meaning of Stavrogin's admission in his pre-suicide letter to Dasha, that he had always been intent on testing his strength in order to come to know himself.¹²²

But any self-knowledge he achieved did not bring about the anticipated apotheosis of the “super-man”. In the end he himself pronounced judgement on his weakness and, therefore, on his failure:

My love [he wrote to Dasha] will be as shallow as I myself and you will be unhappy with me … [and again]. … But only negation has come out of me, negation without any generosity and without any strength. Even negation has not come out of me. Everything was always shallow and dull.¹²³

This final confession of personal and spiritual bankruptcy echoed the biblical words of Christ to the angel at the Church of Laodicea, words which Stavrogin had already accepted as self-judgement¹²⁴: that he was in fact neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm and therefore inwardly indifferent. Christ's words to the angel had been:

“These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the prime source of all God's creation: I know all your ways, you are neither hot nor cold. How I wish you were either hot or cold! but because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. You say ‘How rich I am! And how well I have done! I have everything I want.’ In fact, though you do not know it, you are the most pitiful wretch, poor, blind and naked.”¹²⁵

Stavrogin was thus cast out, weak and pitiful demon that he was, as were those demons exorcised by Christ in the parable of the Gadarene swine which Dostoevsky took as a leitmotif for his novel. It was not to be his fate to sit at Christ's feet and to be cured of his madness, but to perish with the swine drowned in the lake.¹²⁶ On the historical-social plane it was left to old Stepan Verkhovensky, Petr's father, to pronounce the final judgement on the Russian demons, himself included.¹²⁷ Referring to the parable, Stepan Verkhovensky drew an analogy:

“You see, this is just like our Russia. These demons, coming out of the sick man and entering the swine, these are all the ulcers, all the miasmas, all the filth, all the demons and little demons who have accumulated over the ages in our great and dear sick man, in our Russia!”¹²⁸

In retrospect we finally understand why Stavrogin who had meant so much to so many people (to Shatov, Kirilov, captain Lebyadkin and his sister and to Petr Verkhovensky)¹²⁹ ended up by disappointing them all.¹³⁰ Kirilov's “‘You are not a strong person,’”¹³¹ was echoed in Tikhon's words: “‘You are not prepared, you are not tempered for it.’”¹³²

We should, I think, in approaching Stavrogin who had been taken right out of Dostoevsky's heart, be much more wary of him (and of his creator) than those critics for whom, in Panichas's words, he “has become an enigma fascinating to behold and explore.”¹³³

Dostoevsky's Brat'ya Karamazovy (The Brothers Karamazov, 1879-80) was his final attempt to exorcise his nihilism, that underground man who still held sway in his consciousness. But the attempt proved equally abortive. The novel which Dostoevsky hoped would establish his reputation as a writer once and for all,¹³⁴ and which did in fact exert great literary power on the Russian public,¹³⁵ caused him much anxiety. His main problem in The Brothers Karamazov was how to counter his own “irrefutable”¹³⁶ argument against God in Book Five which contained Ivan's rejection of God and his world and the “Poem about the Grand Inquisitor.” Dostoevsky was aware of the artistic and spiritual power of these sections of “extreme blasphemy” and of the desperate need to refute them. What made it more difficult for him was his own admission that he considered Book Five “the culmination point of the novel.”¹³⁷ To get around this problem he devised a second culmination point in Book Six in the figure of the Elder Zosima.¹³⁸ But he was full of misgivings as to how to refute Book Five. In August of 1879 he wrote Pobedonostsev, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church:

Your opinion of what you've read in the Karamazovs has flattered me a great deal (as regards the power and the energy of what I have written to date), but at the same time you put to me the most indispensable question: that is, that I have so far no answer to all these atheistic positions, and yet answers are needed. That's it precisely, and it is this that now concerns and worries me. For I have proposed to give an answer to all this negative side in the sixth book, The Russian Monk, which will appear on the 31st of August. And this is why I am so very anxious about it, anxious whether it will be a sufficient answer. All the more so, since my answer is not a direct one, does not directly relate point by point to the positions expressed earlier (in the Grand Inquisitor and before that), but is only an indirect answer.

(Dostoevsky's italics)¹³⁹

As Dostoevsky had feared, Book Six was not a sufficient answer to Book Five. His indirect rebuttal of Ivan's and the Grand Inquisitor's positions was in effect an indirect admission that he was not able to depict the good and the positive with the same artistic power that infused his negative, nihilist vision. As Camus has put it: “One commentator [Boris de Schloezer] correctly pointed out that Dostoevsky is on Ivan's side and that the affirmative chapters took three months of effort whereas what he called ‘the blasphemies’ were written in three weeks in a state of excitement.”¹⁴⁰ Others have also noted this creative discrepancy in the novel, especially as it relates to the weak portrayal of the “saintly” Alesha.¹⁴¹ It seems to me therefore more appropriate to turn Mochulsky's perspective on the novel, i.e., “The religious idea of the novel—the struggle of faith with disbelief,”¹⁴² around to read “The nihilist idea of the novel—the struggle of disbelief with faith.”

As one reads this spiritually most searching of Dostoevsky's novels, one becomes aware that The Brothers Karamazov was the expression of his spiritual nihilism, of his inability to believe which in turn was reflected in the blasphemous parodying of the sacred.

The sacred was, for example, ridiculed through old Karamazov when, during his visit of Zosima, he was caricatured as a demon poking fun at the holy and revered.¹⁴³ Immediately after his visit it was he again who purposely upset the religious decorum of supper at the abbot's.¹⁴⁴ Then it was Dostoevsky who made light of Zosima's prophetic powers when he had him foretell the widow Prokhorovna that her son would write her from Siberia.¹⁴⁵ This was followed by the travesty of Father Ferapont's holiness.¹⁴⁶ In a more serious vein faith was ridiculed when, instead of the expected miracle at his death, Zosima's corpse began to give off a stench causing Alesha's disillusionment over the elder's ordinariness.¹⁴⁷

Centrally significant to this view of the novel as a disparagement of what was sacred was Book Five which recorded Ivan's magnificently argued rejection of God's world.¹⁴⁸ Ivan's rejection was later echoed by Alesha himself during his momentary disillusionment over Zosima's end, when he said to Rakitin: “—I am not rebelling against my God, I only ‘do not accept His world,’—said Alesha with a crooked smile suddenly appearing on his face.”¹⁴⁹ Dostoevsky's use of the Snegirev family was a graphic example of God's injustice on earth and the unpardonable suffering inflicted. This cumulative profanation gave body to the major theme of sacrilege in the novel. The most outstanding scene in Book Five in this connection was of course “The Poem about the Grand Inquisitor.”¹⁵⁰

The Poem (or Legend, as it has been called) is one of the most powerful critiques of Christian civilization. In it the iconoclastic challenge was flung at the very source of the Divine, at Christ. And, I think, D. H. Lawrence was right when he pointed out that:

… we cannot doubt that the Inquisitor speaks Dostoevsky's own final opinion about Jesus. The opinion is, baldly, this: Jesus, you are inadequate. Men must correct you. And Jesus in the end gives the kiss of acquiescence to the Inquisitor, as Alyosha does to Ivan. The two inspired ones recognize the inadequacy of their inspiration: the thoughtful one has to accept the responsibility of a complete adjustment.¹⁵¹

That Ivan spoke for Dostoevsky has been noted by others.¹⁵² The Poem was built on the paradox of the Grand Inquisitor's humanism with its realistic appraisal of the limits of human nature, and of Christ's inhumanity for saddling man with an almost impossible ideal of perfection. But the paradox within the paradox was that the humanism of the Grand Inquisitor was ultimately nihilist, for it implied the eventual deformation of man. Man in the Grand Inquisitor's vision was no longer a free spirit, but a happy slave having bought his peace of mind at the price of his spiritual longing and the sacrifice of his conscience. Hence, the real thrust of the Poem was the total destruction of man, whose spirituality alone distinguished him from all other living non-human creatures. And if Dostoevsky stood behind Ivan (and behind his mouth piece, the Grand Inquisitor), we should not wonder at Christ's silence and his enigmatic kiss. The ambiguity of that kiss, more than anything else, suggested Dostoevsky's avoidance of a direct answer to the Grand Inquisitor and his impotence to counter his own irrefutable argument and its consequences for man.

As to Dostoevsky's Book Six “The Russian Monk”,¹⁵³ which was in any case already compromised by Christ's silence, Shestov rightly described the Elder Zosima's dreams of a happy future brotherhood of man as “reeking of the most trite Zukunftsmalerei”¹⁵⁴ (futuristic pipe-dreams). What made Zosima's teaching less effective still was the fact that it was rent by inner contradictions. For one, his loving acceptance of human existence in all its manifestations—including the submissiveness of the Russian people which would save Russia(!),—his ecstatic view of earth as God's paradise, was counterbalanced in this “non-violent” monk by a surprising degree of hostility. Zosima expressed hostility not only to socialism which of course to Dostoevsky was evil incarnate, but also to the upper classes and culture generally, and to man's critical faculties.¹⁵⁵ But there were other contradictions in Zosima's teaching as well. For example, though he taught that the earth was a paradise, man's life, he maintained, was a continuous asking for forgiveness because everyone was guilty for everyone else.¹⁵⁶ An even more curious contradiction to Zosima's existential optimism was “The Mysterious Visitor” section¹⁵⁷ which taught that life could not be lived with a burdened conscience, and, in context, suggested that, given man's collective guilt, life was not worth living. Finally we have Zosima's vision of hell as a “suffering because one can no longer love”¹⁵⁸ which, in contrast to his idealization of the Russian people and the religious life, seemed much closer to the nihilist spirit of the Grand Inquisitor.

Ivan's nightmare of self in the figure of the devil in Book Eleven was the final significant link to Books Five and Six. It was a frightening dramatization of Dostoevsky's intense preoccupation with the problem of his own inner duality and writing as therapy,¹⁵⁹ and within the nihilist context of the novel represented a justification of evil.¹⁶⁰

That books five, six and eleven were the nerve centre of the whole novel was also clearly suggested by Ivan when he equated the spirit of the Grand Inquisitor with Karamazovism, the “power of baseness.”¹⁶¹ The plot structure of the novel with its suspenseful denouement in detective form merely dramatized this spirit of Karamazovism or nihilism in action. Finally, a very few words should be said about the Epilogue which did not seem to add anything significant to the novel. The Epilogue is abrupt and fragmented and presents us first with a sentimental “reconciliation” of two hysterical women, Katerina Ivanovna and Grushenka. It then proceeds to give us an equally sentimental burial of Ilyusha where Alesha's wistful speech to the children is just about as utopian and ineffectual as was Zosima's.¹⁶²

As mentioned earlier, others have noted Dostoevsky's nihilism, the cruel and inhuman reach of his imagination. The Comte Melchior de Vogüé, for example, one of the first significant European historians of Russian literature, wrote of Dostoevsky in 1899 that “he lived the Nihilist's life in a nightmare evoked by the epileptic disorder of his imagination,” and that he was cruel because he inflicted “upon the readers a torture comparable to the procedure of the medieval inquisitor who kissed his patient while he applied the red hot irons to his flesh.”¹⁶³ A more recent view in 1947 was Vaclav Cerny's, an outstanding Czech scholar, for whom Dostoevsky was “an enormously evil creature, unthinkably cruel, a sadist whom Turgenev, in a letter to Saltykov-Shchedrin in 1882 rightly compared to the Marquis de Sade.”¹⁶⁴ Cerny wrote:

But then put the pale saint Alyosha side by side with his brother Ivan Karamazov, and then you will be amazed at the successful artistic miracle of that blasphemous and God-killing man! And add to him Dostoevsky's other bearers of spite, cruelty, baseness and sin—Raskolnikov, Dmitry Karamazov, Stavrogin, Kirilov, Verkhovensky—characters immortalized through the author's art: with what power, conviction and expressiveness they are created! How alive they are! How the poet must have loved them; how close to them he must have felt, their evil included.¹⁶⁵

Nor should we forget to mention Masaryk's view of Dostoevsky as a nihilistic atheist¹⁶⁶ and, consequently, his [Masaryk's] critical judgement of Russian (and Slavic) character and “sensibility.”¹⁶⁷ Shestov spoke of Dostoevsky's pretense at “love and meekness”¹⁶⁸ and observed:

Accordingly everything that was ugly, repulsive, heavy to bear and painful, in short, everything that was problematic in life found in Dostoevsky its passionate and most gifted spokesman. In front of our very eyes, as if on purpose, he crushes talent, beauty, youth and innocence. …¹⁶⁹

It was, we might add, as if Dostoevsky's experience of tyranny was recreated by him with a vengeance in his novels. Shestov wrote of Dostoevsky's personal tragedy on a road that took him away from humanity and brought him onto the willful path of despotic self assertion and cruelty.¹⁷⁰

Small wonder, if Rozanov, writing of the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, described it as “the most poisonous drop” that had ever trickled out of two centuries of Russian spiritual development.¹⁷¹ For Rozanov the Legend suggested Dostoevsky's “most ardent thirst for religious faith and yet his total incapacity for it”;¹⁷² and it was this “real absence of God and the presence of this other” [terrifying and repulsive being, i.e., the devil; Rozanov's italics] which lay at the root of his tragic and lonely life.¹⁷³

Ultimately, we can surmise, the only “love” that Dostoevsky could pretend to as a writer, was an emotional substitute, a pathological feeling of guilt for human suffering,¹⁷⁴ and even that must have been a rationalization of his own cruelty to man. His “consciousness of unfulfilled love” (Tikhon's definition of hell to Stavrogin) was Dostoevsky's own inner hell of nihilism, and it brought him in the end to a dismal place he called “Skotoprigonevsk” (The small town where the Karamazovs lived).¹⁷⁵Skotoprigonevsk became metaphorically and psychologically the final collecting point for all that was beastly within him and which during a life-time he had been unable to extirpate. Sadly, and more positive interpretations of Dostoevsky's works notwithstanding,¹⁷⁶ Velchaninov's self-definition in Vechnyy muzh (The Eternal Husband, 1870) can, I think, with equal justice be applied to Dostoevsky himself: “The most ugly monster is a monster with noble feelings. I know this from personal experience, Pavel Pavlovich!”¹⁷⁷

Notes

1. Sigmund Freud, “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” in René Wellek, ed., Dostoevsky: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962), p.98.

2. Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work (Princeton, 1973), p.580.

3. See F.M. Dostoevsky. Pis'ma, ed. and annotated by A.S. Dolinin (4 vols.; Moscow-Leningrad, 1928, 1930, 1934, 1959), I, 398. Henceforth cited as Pis'ma.

4. See for example Marc Slonim's Three Loves of Dostoevsky (London, 1957); A.P. Suslova, Gody blizosti s Dostoevskim (Moscow, 1928); and Pis'ma, I, 403.

5. See Pis'ma, I, 449, 452, 454 and passim in II, and esp. IV.

6. Ibid., II, 5.

7. Ibid., I, 169.

8. Slonim, pp.278-79; see also pp.276-78. See also Albert J. Guerard, The Triumph of the Novel: Dickens, Dostoevsky, Faulkner (Chicago and London, 1982), pp.88-108.

9. See Dostoevsky Portrayed by His Wife: The Diary and Reminiscences of Mme. Dostoevsky, tr. from the Russian and ed. by S.S. Koteliansky (London, 1926), pp.231-34. Dostoevsky's wife's reply to Strakhov's accusation follows on pp.235-44.

10. Pis'ma, II, 263.

11. Ibid., I, 142.

12. See ibid., I, 215, 266-67, 318, 431; references to his illness abound in his letters especially in vols. I and II.

13. Ibid., II, 7-21, 55 etc.

14. Ibid., II, 26 and passim. See also his “Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniyakh,” (1863) in Dostoevsky, V, 46-98, where he had already written a malicious parody of the West. See also Slonim, op.cit., p.239.

15. See, for example, Pis'ma, II, 81, 100, 336.

16. Ibid., II, 25. See also his “Ryad statey o russkoy literature” (1861) in Dostoevsky, XVIII, 41-103 and XIX, 5-66, in which he already then idealized Russia and its people and expressed his populist faith in the “salvation in the native soil.”

17. Pis'ma, II, 274.

18. Ibid., II, 150; see also II, 169.

19. N.K. Mikhaylovsky, “Zhestokiy talant,” Literaturno-kriticheskie stat'i (Moscow, 1957), pp.181-263; here pp.185, 191, 206, 213-14, 226, 230, 236, 248.

20. Ibid., p.233.

21. Ibid., p. 255; see also pp.240, 242, 251.

22. Ibid., pp.259-60.

23. Dostoevsky, V, 99-179, here V, 113, 115, 117, 119.

24. Ibid., V, 102, 105, 106, 107.

25. Ibid., V, 99.

26. Ibid., V, 118.

27. Ibid., V, 122. See also Philip Rahv, “Dostoevsky: Descent into the Underground,” in Essays on Literature and Politics 1932-1972, Edited by Arabel J. Porter and Andrew J. Dvosin, with a Memoir by Mary McCarthy (Boston, 1978), pp.175-85, here pp.177-79.

28. Dostoevsky, V, 121.

29. Ibid., V, 122.

30. Ibid., V, 109.

31. Ibid., V, 123.

32. Ibid., V, 163.

33. Ibid., V, 173, 155.

34. Ibid., V, 175-76.

35. Ibid., V, 147.

36. L. Shestov, Dostoevsky i Nitshe (Filosofiya Tragedii) (St. Petersburg, 1903), pp.55-56; see also pp.99-100.

37. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt 1821-1849 (Princeton, 1976), p.351. See also his Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal 1850-1859 (Princeton, 1983).

38. References are to Feodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, ed. by George Gibian, trans. by Jessie Coulson, A Norton Critical Edition (revised; New York, 1975), p.217. Henceforth cited as Crime. See also Dostoevsky, VI.

39. See for instance Crime, pp.291, 387, 348, 350, 415, 354, 458, 352, 438, 353, 354, 416,

40. Ibid., pp.232-33.

41. Ibid., p.458; see also pp.459, 438, 439.

42. “Selo Stepanchikovo i ego obitateli. Iz zapisok neisvestnogo,” (1859) in Dostoevsky, III, 160.

43. Crime, p.274.

44. Ibid., pp.347, 349.

45. Ibid., pp.347-48; see also pp.443, 445, 435-36.

46. Ibid., p.355.

47. Ibid., pp.428-31, 397-98.

48. Ibid., p.458.

49. Ibid, pp.461-62. In this connection it is interesting to remember Dostoevsky's “Son smeshnogo cheloveka,” (1877) with its view of civilization as a moral disease, yet of man as nevertheless capable of experiencing a kind of mystical revelation of the Truth - see Dostoevsky, XXV, 104-19. See also James M. Holquist, “Disease as Dialectic in Crime and Punishment,” in Robert Louis Jackson, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of Crime and Punishment: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1974), pp.109-18.

50. Crime, pp.463-64.

51. Mochulsky, op.cit., p.312.

52. A.L. Bem, ed., O Dostoevskom: Sbornik statey (3 vols.; Ann Arbor 1961), III, 61-62. First published in Prague 1929, 1933, and 1936 respectively.

53. Viktor Shklovsky, Za i protiv: Zametki o Dostoevskom (Moscow, 1957), p.185.

54. Ibid., p.176. See also Guerard, The Triumph of the Novel, op.cit., p.178.

55. Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, The Spirit of Russia, Volume three, ed. by George Gibian (New York, 1967), pp.62-63.

56. Ibid., p.61. See also Rahv, “Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment,” in Essays on Literature and Politics 1932-1972, op.cit., pp.149-73, here pp.150, 156-57, 172.

57. Pis'ma, II, 61.

58. Ibid., II, 71.

59. Mochulsky, p.369.

60. A.L. Bem, Dostoevsky: Psikhoanaliticheskie Etyudy (Prague, 1938), pp.32-33.

61. Mochulsky, pp.344, 346, 347, 348, 349, 351.

62. Ibid., p.344; see also pp.380-81. See also Guerard, The Triumph of the Novel, op.cit., where the Idiot of the Notebooks is shown to have been far closer, in my view, to Stavrogin than anyone else, see pp.99-100, 102, 105-6. See esp. Sven Linnér, Dostoevsky on Realism (Stockholm, 1967), pp.92-94, 197-201.

63. Shestov, Dostoevsky i Nitshe, pp.110-11.

64. Vaclav Cerny, Dostoevsky and His Devils (Ann Arbor, 1975), pp.26-27.

65. Dostoevsky, VIII, 450-54.

66. Ibid., VIII, 458.

67. Ibid., VIII, 257.

68. Ibid., VIII, 452.

69. Ibid., VIII, 338-39.

70. Ibid., VIII, 57-65, 247, 326 and passim.

71. Ibid., VIII, 52, 164.

72. Ibid., VIII, 319.

73. See for example George A. Panichas, The Burden of Vision: Dostoevsky's Spiritual Art (Grand Rapids, 1977), p.53.

74. See Dostoevsky, X, 169, 193, 240, 273, 274, 276, 278, 298-99, 317, 404, 426, 428, 460, 463, 476.

75. Ibid., X, 421.

76. Ibid., X, 322-25.

77. Ibid., X, 311, 312, 322, 459.

78. Ibid., X, 93.

79. Ibid., X, 94.

80. Ibid., X, 426-27.

81. Ibid., X, 450-51.

82. Ibid., X, 471.

83. Ibid., X, 472.

84. Ibid., X, 472, 475-76.

85. Ibid., X, 196, 198-200.

86. Ibid., X, 436.

87. Ibid., X, 442-43.

88. Ibid., X, 201.

89. Pis'ma, II, 288-89. See also Mochulsky, pp.407, 409, 410, 411.

90. Edward Wasiolek, Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), pp.119, 124-25, 130-31.

91. Dmitry Chizhevsky, “K probleme dvoynika (Iz knigi o formalizme v etike),” in A.L. Bem, ed., O Dostoevskom: Sbornik Statey, op.cit., I, 21.

92. Leonid Grossman, Dostoevsky: A Biography (London, 1974), pp. 473, 474.

93. Mochulsky, pp.435, 463.

94. Nicholas Berdyaev, Dostoevsky (New York, 1959), p.124.

95. Vyacheslav Ivanov, Freedom and the Tragic Life: A Study in Dostoevsky (New York, 1971), p.63.

96. Irving Howe, “Dostoevsky: The Politics of Salvation,” in his Politics and the Novel (New York, 1970), pp.53-77, here p.65.

97. Panichas, The Burden of Vision, op.cit., pp.90-91, 99, 102, 107. See also Geoffrey C. Kabat, Ideology and Imagination: The Image of Society in Dostoevsky (New York, 1978), p.134.

98. Dostoevsky, X, 165.

99. Ibid., X, 299.

100. Ibid., X, 407; see also X, 396, 513.

101. Ibid., X, 412-13.

102. Mochulsky is quite right as to the crucial nature of this chapt for the whole novel, and whose “exclusion violates the equilibrium of the composition.” He sees the chapter as “the culmination point of the novel”; see Mochulsky, p.424, and also pp.457-62, 466-67. See furthermore Grossman, op.cit., who also considered the chapter to be a “focal chapter of the entire, composition,” p.471 and also p.472; see also Cerny, op.cit., pp.53-56.

103. Ibid., XI, 13, 22.

104. Ibid., 18-19; but see also X, 189, 201, 300.

105. Ibid., XI, 22.

106. Ibid., X, 106.

107. Ibid., X, 229.

108. Ibid., X, 151.

109. Ibid., X, 405.

110. Ibid., XI, 14.

111. Ibid., X, 150.

112. Ibid., X, 202.

113. Ibid., X, 215.

114. Ibid., X, 165.

115. Ibid., X, 402.

116. Ibid., XI, 16-17, 20. See also X, 400, where Liza says to Stavrogin: “‘Why are you always afraid?’”.

117. Ibid., XI, 26; X, 401.

118. See ibid., XI, 23, 24, 25, 29, 30.

119. Mochulsky, pp.461, 462, 467.

120. Dostoevsky, X, 469.

121. Ibid., X, 227.

122. Ibid., X, 514.

123. Ibid.

124. Ibid., XI, 11-12.

125. The English quote which renders Dostoevsky's quote in Russian is taken from The New English Bible (Revelation 3: 14-18), p.320.

126. See Luke 8: 26-39 in ibid., pp.82-83, esp. verses 32-36 which are the lines taken as a leitmotif by Dostoevsky.

127. Dostoevsky, X, 480, 497, 506.

128. Ibid., X, 499.

129. See for instance ibid., X, 191, 197, 208, 218-19, 322-23.

130. See ibid., X, 219, 228, 408, 453.

131. Ibid., X, 228.

132. Ibid., XI, 27.

133. Panichas, op.cit., pp.91-92. See also the highly interesting critical controversy on Stavrogin's historical prototypes in L.P. Grossman and Vyach. Polonsky, Spor o Bakunine i Dostoevskom (Leningrad, 1926).

134. Pis'ma, IV, 98.

135. Ibid., IV, 170, 171.

136. Ibid., IV, 53.

137. Ibid.

138. Ibid., IV, 65. See also Nathan Rosen, “Style and Structure in The Brothers Karamazov (The Grand Inquisitor and the Russian Monk),” in Ralph E. Matlaw ed., Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, A Norton Critical Edition (New York—London, 1976), pp.841-51.

139. Ibid., IV, 109.

140. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (New York, 1959), p.82.

141. See for example Mochulsky, pp.626, 587; see also Dmitry Tschizewskij, “Schiller and The Brothers Karamazov,” in Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, op.cit., p.806; and Cerny, op.cit., p.27; see also Charles I. Glicksberg, The Ironic Vision in Modern Literature (The Hague, 1969), p.167.

142. Mochulsky, p.600.

143. Dostoevsky, XIV, 38-39.

144. Ibid., XIV, 80-83; see also XIV, 117.

145. Ibid., XIV, 150-51.

146. Ibid., XIV, 153-54.

147. Ibid., XIV, 149, 295-305, 305-10 respectively.

148. Ibid., XIV, 215-24.

149. Ibid., XIV, 308; see also XIV, 199, 201, 221, 224, 305, 306, 307.

150. Ibid., XIV, 224-41.

151. D.H. Lawrence, “Preface to Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor,” in Wellek, ed., Dostoevsky, op.cit., p.91.

152. See for example V.V. Rozanov, Legenda O Velikom Inkvizitore (Rpt. of St. Petersburg 1906 ed.; Munich, 1970), pp.167-68; Shestov, Dostoevsky i Nitshe, op.cit., pp.116-17. But see also Wasiolek, Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction, op.cit., who provides a good counter argument on pp.164-71.

153. Dostoevsky, XIV, 257-94.

154. Shestov, Dostoevsky i Nitshe, p.111. See also Rahv, “The Other Dostoevsky,” in op.cit., pp.186-207, here p.189.

155. Dostoevsky, XIV, 263-67, 272-75, 284-93.

156. Ibid., XIV, 273, 263, 290-91.

157. Ibid., XIV, 273-83.

158. Ibid., XIV, 292.

159. See for example Pis'ma, IV, 108, 137, 190, 194.

160. See Dostoevsky, XV, 69-85, esp. p.83, but also pp.77, 82.

161. Ibid., XIV, 239-40.

162. Ibid., XV, 195-97.

163. Vicomte E.M. de Vogüé, “Russian Literature: Its Great Period And Its Great Novelists 1840-1880,” in Richard Garnett and others, eds., The International Library of Famous Literature (London, 1899), XIX, XXXVII-XXXVIII. See also Maxim Gorky's negative attitude to Dostoevsky in Vladimir Seduro, Dostoevsky in Russian Literary Criticism 1846-1956 (New York, 1957), pp.83-93.

164. Cerny, Dostoevsky and His Devils, op.cit., p.25; see also pp.28, 29. See also Turgenev, op.cit., XII, 559.

165. Ibid., p.27.

166. Masaryk, The Spirit of Russia, Volume Three, op.cit., p.55, and see also pp.75, 86, 91; see also Ivanov-Razumnik, “Peterburg” Belogo, op.cit., p.166.

167. Masaryk, p.118.

168. Shestov, Dostoevsky i Nitshe, p.159, but see also pp.171-72, 209.

169. Ibid., p.136.

170. Ibid., pp.222, 241.

171. Rozanov, Legenda o Velikom Inkvizitore, op.cit., p.199.

172. Ibid., p.182.

173. Ibid., p.166.

174. See Bem, Dostoevsky: Psikhoanaliticheskie etyudy, p.157. See especially Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (2d ed.; London and New York, 1970), where in speaking of the Marquis de Sade, he adds: “And the supreme joy of sadism should in fact be the joy of remorse and expiation: from Gilles de Rais to Dostoievsky the parabola of vice is always identical.” (pp.107-8); and “Profanation is the inevitable companion of cruelty.” (p.157). See also pp.147, 150.

175. Dostoevsky, XV, 15. Skotoprigonevsk means stock-yard in Russian.

176. Some of the best of these, including those already cited in this chapter by Rahv, Mochulsky, Frank, Linnér, Wasiolek, Berdyaev and Ivanov, are: Romano Guardini, Religiöse Gestalten in Dostojewskijs Werk: Studien über den Glauben (Munich, 1977); Konrad Onasch, Dostojewski als Verführer. Christentum und Kunst in der Dichtung Dostojewskis. Ein Versuch (Zurich, 1961); Robert Louis Jackson, The Art of Dostoevsky (Princeton, 1981); Renato Poggioli, “Dostoevsky, or Reality and Myth,” in his The Phoenix and the Spider: A Book of Essays about some Russian Writers and their View of the Self (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp.16-32; Wayne Dowler, Dostoevsky, Grigor'ev and Native Soil Conservatism (Toronto, Buffalo, London, 1982); Joseph Frank, “Nihilism and Notes from the Underground,” Sewanee Review, LXIX (1961), pp.1-33; Rudolf Neuhäuser, Das Frühwerk Dostoevskijs: Literarische Tradition und gesellschaftlicher Anspruch (Heidelberg, 1979); Colin Wilson, The Outsider (London, 1964), esp. pp.147-202; George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in Contrast (London and Boston, 1980).

177. Dostoevsky, IX, 103.