Dostoevsky (134 page)
Authors: Joseph Frank
It is not necessary to detail all the differences that exist between the partly revised manuscript of
Part III
and its published form, but one is of particular importance. In
Chapter 7
, which narrates the touchingly pathetic “pilgrimage” of Stepan Trofimovich, he listens to a reading of passages from the Gospels and then takes on himself the primary responsibility for having infected the body of Russia with the devils. No such scene is found in the manuscript, which means that it was added
after
Dostoevsky had learned that his confession chapter would not be printed. The omission of this scene in the manuscript may indicate that Dostoevsky had originally intended to portray Stavrogin as having assumed this burden of guilt (which would make more thematic sense) but was unable to do so because, without the glimpse he had hoped to give into the torments of Stavrogin’s conscience, a sudden display of such conscience in the final pages would have been insufficiently motivated.
The remainder of
Demons
was finally published, after a year’s delay, in the November and December 1872 issues of
The Russian Messenger
, arousing a fury of abuse and recrimination in the radical and progressive press. As Anna puts it mildly, serenely looking back on the turbulent past, “I must say that
Demons
had an enormous success with the reading public, but at the same time it brought my husband a great many enemies in the literary world.”
20
When the novel appeared in book format the next year, it had once more been extensively revised. Several passages in
Part II
foreshadowing and motivating the encounter with Tikhon were eliminated, and these, along with the suppressed chapter itself, now must be taken into account in any consideration of the book. Dostoevsky himself did not include this chapter in later editions, but both internal and external reasons provide a plausible answer for his failure to reinstate it. For one thing, he had altered the published text as much as possible
before
magazine publication to meet the crisis he had not foreseen; the work thus no longer represented his original conception, and extensive rewriting would have been required to transform it once again. Also, he would then have had to face the formidable hurdle of the
official
censorship, and perhaps fail.
Dostoevsky decided to leave well enough alone, and Stavrogin remains a far more enigmatic and mysterious figure than he was initially meant to be. He lacks the clarifying moral-philosophical motivation that Dostoevsky had intended to provide, and it is remarkable that so much is still conveyed of the stature of his personality even without the both diabolic and penitential effect such motivation was meant to furnish. If Dostoevsky could not give us the book as he had originally conceived it, however, he still did nothing less than to write a symbolic history of the moral-spiritual travails of the Russian spirit in the first half of the nineteenth century.
1
PSS
, 29/Bk. 1: 218; July 18, 1871.
2
Ibid.
3
Anna Dostoevsky,
Reminiscences
, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York, 1975), 176.
4
Ibid., 178–179.
5
PSS
, 29, Bk. 1: 226; February 4, 1872.
6
V. P. Meshchersky,
Moi vospominaniya
, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg), 2: 144.
7
Cited in
PSS
, 12: 259.
8
Ibid., 235; April 20, 1872.
9
Reminiscences
, 191.
10
PSS
, 29/Bk. 1: 240; May 28, 1872.
11
Ibid., 242; June 3, 1872.
12
Ibid., 245; June 5, 1872.
13
Ibid., 250; June 14, 1872.
14
Reminiscences
, 205.
15
PSS
, 29: Bk. 1: 184–185; March 2/14, 1871.
16
Ibid., 164; January 6/18, 1871.
17
This is the version of events given in
Reminiscences
, 378–379. It is accepted as accurate by the editors of the commentary to the novel,
PSS
, 12: 239.
18
Ibid., 29/Bk. 1: 227; February 4, 1872.
19
Ibid., 232; end March/beginning April 1872.
20
Reminiscences
, 206.
History and Myth in
Demons
Dostoevsky had in the past created fictional characters who, as the embodiment of certain social-cultural ideas and attitudes, could be considered “historical” in a broad sense, but not until
Demons
(
Besy
) had he ever based himself on actual events that were a matter of public knowledge. Obviously, his novel is not limited to the actual, rather insignificant dimensions of the Nechaev affair. If this had been the case, “the facts” would have given him only a rather pitiful tale of a distressing event that had occurred among a handful of students and hangers-on in the student milieu, who had been duped by a revolutionary zealot into the useless murder of an innocent victim. Rather, this incident furnished only the nucleus of Dostoevsky’s political plot, and he enlarged and magnified it, according to the technique of his “fantastic realism,” into a full-blown dramatization of the far more ambitious tactics and aims set down in the writings of Nechaev and his supporters.
What happens in
Demons
is thus myth (the imaginary amplification of the real) and not history, art and not literal truth—just as Raskolnikov may be considered a “myth” engendered by the “immoderate Nihilism” of Pisarev and Zaitsev. Much of what he learned from the documents at his disposal, in any case, hardly taught him anything new, for he could draw on recollections from his own days as a revolutionary conspirator when his secret group had worked in the shadows to manipulate the larger Petrashevsky Circle. Dostoevsky thus remained faithful to the spirit, if not the letter, of what his documentation revealed about the Nechaev affair.
It may seem, at first sight, as if this monster of deviousness, Peter Verkhovensky—who resembles Shakespeare’s Iago as a destructive inciter of evil in others—would be light-years removed from any conceivable image of a nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary or of the real Nechaev in particular. Yet the actions taken by Peter Verkhovensky with such masterful relish are exactly the same ones that Nechaev accomplished, or would have accomplished had it been within his power to turn desires into deeds.
An indelibly vivid portrait of Nechaev at work is sketched in a letter we are fortunate to possess from no less a pen than that of Bakunin. He had been—along with Dostoevsky’s Geneva acquaintance, the sympathetic but weak-willed Ogarev—one of Nechaev’s most enthusiastic supporters. Many scholars have speculated on the curious personal relations between the young revolutionary and the passionately eloquent veteran of a hundred subversive plots, who was crowned with the aureole of his fabulous insurrectionary past. For Bakunin soon found himself in thrall to the young man, whom he admiringly called an
abrek
(a pitiless Muslim warrior of the Caucasian peoples) and “a young eagle.” But this was before Nechaev, after escaping to Europe in the wake of the Ivanov murder, began to use the methods they had both agreed upon against Bakunin himself and the circle of their common friends. Once Nechaev did so, Bakunin felt it necessary to write in July 1870 to a family with whom Nechaev had entered into contact. The letter is revelatory and precise in its depiction of Nechaev’s limitless unscrupulosity.
25. A page from Dostoevsky’s notebooks for
Demons
My dear friend, I have just learned that N[echaev]. has called on you and that you hastened to give him the address of your friends (M. and his wife). I conclude that the two letters by which I warned you, and begged you to turn him away, arrived too late; and, without any exaggeration, I consider the result of this delay a veritable misfortune. It may seem strange to you that we advise you to turn away a man to whom we have given letters of recommendation addressed to you. . . . But . . . since then we have been obliged to admit the existence of matters so grave that they have forced us to break all our relations with N. . . .
It remains perfectly true that N is the man most persecuted by the Russian government, which has covered the continent of Europe with a cloud of spies seeking him in all countries; it has asked for his extradition both from Germany and Switzerland. It is equally true that N. is one of the most active and energetic men I have ever met. When it is a question of serving what he calls the cause, he does not hesitate; nothing stops him, and he is as merciless with himself as with all the others. This is the principal quality which attracted me, and which impelled me to seek an alliance with him for a good while. Some people assert that he is simply a crook—but this is a lie! He is a devoted fanatic; but at the same time a very dangerous fanatic whose alliance cannot but be harmful for everybody. And here is why: at first he was part of a secret committee which really existed in Russia. The Committee no longer exists; all its members have been arrested. N. remains alone, and alone he constitutes what he calls the Committee. His organization in Russia having been decimated, he is trying to create a new one abroad. All this would be perfectly natural, legitimate, very useful—but the methods he uses are detestable. . . . he has gradually succeeded in convincing himself that, to found a serious and indestructible organization, one must take as a foundation the tactics of Machiavelli and totally adopt the system of the Jesuits—violence as the body, falsehood as the soul.
Truth, mutual confidence, serious and strict solidarity only exist among a dozen individuals who form the
sanctum sanctorum
of the Society. All the rest must serve as a blind instrument, and as exploitable material. . . . It is
allowed—even ordered—to deceive all the others, to compromise them, to rob them and even, if need be, to get rid of them—they are conspiratorial fodder. For example: you have received N. thanks to our letter of recommendation, you have taken him into your confidence, you have recommended him to your friends. . . . Here he is, transplanted into your world—and what will he do first? First he will tell you a pack of lies to increase your sympathy and your confidence; but he will not stop there. The tepid sympathies of men who are devoted to the revolutionary cause only in part, and who, besides this cause, have other human interests such as love, friendship, family, social relations—these sympathies are not, in his eyes, a sufficient foundation, and in the name of the cause he will try to get a hold on you completely without your knowledge. To do this, he will spy on you and try to gain possession of all your secrets; and in your absence, being alone in your room, he will open all your drawers and read all your correspondence. If a letter seems interesting to him, that is, compromising from any point of view either for yourself or one of your friends, he will steal it and preserve it very carefully as a document either against you or your friend. . . . when, at a general meeting, we accused him of this, he had the nerve to say—“Well, yes, that’s our system. We consider as our enemies all those who are not with us
completely
, and we have the duty to deceive and to compromise them.” This means all those who are not convinced of their system, and have not agreed to apply it to themselves.
If you have presented him to a friend, his first concern will be to sow discord between both of you by gossip and intrigue—in a word, to cause a quarrel. Your friend has a wife, a daughter; he will try to seduce them, to make them pregnant, in order to tear them away from official morality and to throw them into a forced revolutionary protest against society.
All personal ties, all friendship, all [gap in text] . . . are considered by them as an evil, which they have the right to destroy—because all this constitutes a force which, being outside the secret organization, diminishes the sole force of this latter. Don’t tell me that I exaggerate: all this has been amply unraveled and proven. Seeing himself exposed, poor N. is still so naïve, so childish, despite his systematic perversity, that he thought it possible to convert me—he went so far as to implore me to develop this theory in a Russian journal that he proposed to establish. He has betrayed the confidence of us all, he has stolen our letters, compromised us terribly, in a word, behaved like a villain. His only excuse is his fanaticism! He is terribly ambitious without knowing it, because he has ended by identifying the cause of the revolution with that of himself—but he is not an egoist in the banal sense of the word because he risks his life terribly, and leads the existence of a martyr full of privations and incredible activity.
He is a fanatic, and fanaticism carries him away to the point of becoming an accomplished Jesuit—at moments, he simply becomes stupid. The majority of his lies are woven out of whole cloth. He plays at Jesuitism as others play at revolution. In spite of his relative naïveté, he is very dangerous because
each day
there are acts, abuses of confidence, treacheries, against which it is all the more difficult to guard oneself because one hardly suspects their possibility. With all this, N. is a force because of his immense energy. . . . His last project was nothing less than to set up a band of brigands and thieves in Switzerland, naturally with the aim of acquiring some revolutionary capital. I saved him by persuading him to leave Switzerland because he would certainly have been discovered, he and his gang, in a few weeks; he would have been lost, and all of us lost with him. . . .
Persuade M. that the safety of his family demands that he break with them completely. He must keep N. away from his family. Their system, their joy, is to seduce and corrupt young girls; in this way they control the whole family. I am very sorry that they learned the address of M. because
they would be capable of denouncing him
. Didn’t they dare to admit to me openly, in the presence of a witness, that the denunciation of a member—devoted or only partly devoted—is one of the means whose usage they considered quite legitimate and sometimes useful? . . . I am so frightened at their knowledge of M.’s address that I beg him to change his lodgings secretly, so that they won’t discover him.
1