The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (33 page)

A few years later, the boy is sent to the lycée in Petersburg, but Stepan Trofimovich remains at the estate. Varvara Petrovna’s husband dies, and she and Stepan Trofimovich fall into a bizarre, intimately acrimonious relationship. Stepan Trofimovich regularly writes Varvara Petrovna two letters a day; Varvara Petrovna lies awake at night worrying about the latest imaginary slight to Stepan Trofimovich’s “reputation as a poet, scholar, or civic figure.” Although “some unbearable love for him” lies hidden in her heart, it subsists “in the midst of constant hatred, jealousy, and contempt.”

Years have passed in this fashion, when “strange rumors” begin to reach the town about Varvara Petrovna’s son, Nikolai Stavrogin, now a twenty-five-year-old officer in the prestigious Horse Guards. There is talk “of some savage unbridledness, of some people being run over by horses,” of Stavrogin having fought two duels, killing one opponent and crippling the other. Finally, Stavrogin himself turns up in his hometown: not loutish and “reeking of vodka,” as everyone has been expecting, but unspeakably elegant, irreproachably dressed, eerily handsome: “His hair was somehow too black, his light eyes were somehow too calm and clear, his complexion was somehow too delicate and white, his teeth like pearls, his lips like coral—the very image of beauty, it would seem, and at the same time repulsive, as it were. People said his face resembled a mask.” All the women in town have soon lost their minds over him—“one party adored him, one party hated him to the point of blood vengeance; but both lost their minds”—and the town’s dandies are utterly eclipsed. The townspeople are particularly surprised to find Stavrogin
“quite well educated, and even rather knowledgeable,” and “an extremely reasonable man.” Then, with no warning, “the beast put[s] out its claws”: one day at the club, upon overhearing a senior member exclaim, “No, sir, they won’t lead me by the nose!” Stavrogin seizes the elderly clubman by the nose and manages to pull him two or three steps across the room, nearly provoking a seizure. Stavrogin is unable to explain his actions afterward, and his apology is “so casual that it amount[s] to a fresh insult.” After multiple incidents of this kind, he falls sick with brain fever and goes abroad.

The real action begins in book 2, three years later. Stavrogin returns to town, together with various other locally connected young people with whom he has been associating in Europe. These include Liza, a beautiful heiress; Pyotr Verkhovensky, the estranged, nihilistic son of Stepan Trofimovich; Marya, a crippled “holy fool”; Shatov, a freed serf and a “typical Russian soul,” who is constantly rushing from one ideological extreme to another; Shatov’s sister, Darya, a ward of Varvara Petrovna; and Shatov’s friend Kirillov, a young engineer who is obsessed by his plan to perfect society by being the first person on planet Earth to commit a 100 percent fully willed suicide. With the exception of Kirillov, these young people were all educated by Stepan Trofimovich. Every one of them is obsessed with Stavrogin. Darya, Marya, and Liza are in love with him, while Shatov, Kirillov, and Verkhovensky accord him an obscurely central role in their tormented ideologies.

Like much of Dostoevsky’s work,
Demons
consists primarily of scandalous revelations, punctuated by outbreaks of mass violence. It emerges that the aristocratic Stavrogin, apparently in an effort to see how far grotesqueness can be taken, has secretly married the saintly, demented cripple Marya. Stepan Trofimovich’s son Pyotr turns out to hold a position of authority in a terrorist organization, the goal of
which is to overtake Russia by means of secret five-person cells. Having established a cell of five townsmen, Pyotor begins plotting to propagate chaos, despair, and revolution. Book 2 concludes with a demonstration by workers from a factory just beyond the town limits, where poor conditions have led to an outbreak of Asiatic cholera. In addition to the cholera, which has affected both workers and cattle, the province has also been beset by an epidemic of robberies and fires. Pyotr exploits the burgeoning mass hysteria to convince the governor that the peaceful workers’ demonstration is actually “a rebellion [threatening] to shake the foundations of the state,” and seventy workers are brutally flogged.

Book 3 opens with an elaborate fête organized by the governor’s wife to benefit indigent governesses. The proceedings commence with a “literary matinee,” featuring a reading by a famous expatriate writer, a transparent parody of Turgenev: “It’s now seven years that I have been sitting in Karlsruhe,” the famous writer announces, “and when the city council decided last year to install a new drainpipe, I felt in my heart that this Karlsruhian drainpipe question was dearer and fonder to me than all the questions of my dear fatherland . . .” Pyotr and his five-man cell sabotage the fête, filling the hall with drunkards and criminals, and reading aloud a highly offensive poem about governesses. The escalating mayhem is curtailed only by the announcement of a terrible new incident of arson: the saintly cripple Marya and her alcoholic brother have been burned alive in their house.

Everyone immediately suspects Stavrogin. They all think that he wanted to get Marya out of the way so he could marry Liza, the beautiful heiress. In fact, the fire was set by an escaped convict, Fedka, who believed that he was fulfilling Stavrogin’s orders. Stavrogin guessed at the convict’s intentions, but did nothing to thwart them. Meanwhile, Liza,
who knows that Stavrogin doesn’t return her love, has slept with him anyway. Stavrogin admits to having “ruined her without loving her,” but says that after all she might be his “last hope,” so maybe they should run away to Switzerland together. Liza refuses. When word of the fire reaches her, she rushes in horror to the scene of the crime, where a mob has gathered. Holding her to blame for the arson—“ ‘They don’t just kill, they also come and look!’ ”—the mob beats her to death.

The day after the fête, Pyotr convinces his terrorist cell that Shatov is scheming to betray them, and must be silenced at all costs. He then convinces Kirillov, who is still plotting his humanity-liberating suicide, to leave a note assuming the blame for Shatov’s murder: he’ll be dead anyway, so what difference can it make to him? Shatov is killed and his body dumped in a lake. Kirillov signs the fake confession and shoots himself.

In the novel’s closing chapters, Stepan Trofimovich, appalled by the deeds of his son and former pupils, sets off on foot into the countryside, takes up with a woman selling gospels, checks into an inn, and falls into a raving fever. In his fever, he begs to hear the verses from Luke about “
ces cochons
,” which excite him to a morbid degree. “These demons who come out of a sick man,” he says, represent the accumulated “sores” and “miasmas” that have come out of Russia; the swine they have entered are none other than “us, us and them, and [Pyotr] . . .
et les autres avec lui
, and I perhaps am the first, standing at the very head; and we shall throw ourselves, the madmen and the possessed, from a rock into the sea, and we shall all drown.” Having delivered himself of this idea, he dies. Varvara Petrovna has the body moved to the churchyard on her estate.

Meanwhile, back in town, one of the terrorists has confessed to his role in Shatov’s murder, and all five members of
the cell are arrested. (Only Pyotr escapes justice, fleeing to Petersburg.) At this time, Stavrogin writes to Darya, inviting her to accompany him to Switzerland to be his “nurse.” “The fact that I’m calling you to me is a terrible baseness,” he writes. “Realize, also, that I do not pity you, since I’m calling you, and do not respect you, since I’m waiting for you to come.” Darya rushes to join him, but it’s too late. Stavrogin has hanged himself in his mother’s attic, leaving a note: “Blame no one; it was I.”

That’s it—that’s the whole thing (minus a chapter excised by Dostoevsky’s editors, in which Stavrogin confesses to having once seduced a twelve-year-old girl and driven her to suicide; opinions vary on whether the novel is better or worse without this information). You never do find out what the deal was with Stavrogin, or why everyone was so obsessed with him. The various characters simply announce their obsession, as if in passing. Kirillov, explaining his theory of the transformation of men into gods by suicide, adds enigmatically, “Remember what you’ve meant in my life, Stavrogin.” Shatov, in the middle of an agonized rant about Slavophilism and the body of God, shouts, “Stavrogin, why am I condemned to believe in you unto ages of ages?” Even Pyotr, the puppeteer who so deftly manipulates others while remaining unmoved himself, pursues Stavrogin relentlessly, determined to draw him into his circle by either bribery or blackmail.

“But what the devil do you need me for?” Stavrogin finally asks Pyotr. “Is there some mystery in it, or what? What sort of talisman have you got me for?” Pyotr’s astonishing reply is that he loves and worships Stavrogin as a worm worships the sun, and that the new era of Russia will begin only when Stavrogin has assumed the identity of the mythical “Tsarevich Ivan,” who will turn out to have been “in hiding” for years, and then Pyotr and Stavrogin-Tsarevich will take over the world together, with specially trained gunmen . . .

The first time I read
Demons
, none of this made any sense to me. I was willing to accept the enigma of Stavrogin as a literary convention, but what did this human enigma have to do with the large-scale possession of an entire town by arson, robbery, cholera, and terrorist conspiracies? Furthermore, what was the point of Stepan Trofimovich—why did his life take up a third of the novel? Why was it precisely Stepan Trofimovich’s pupils who were so susceptible to Stavrogin? I thought about it for a while, although not for too long. I decided that this must be what critics meant when they talked about “flawed novels.”

As I later learned, many interpretations of
Demons
do rely on the notion of technical flaws. Joseph Frank, for example, theorizes that Stavrogin is a composite of two inconsistent, irreconcilable characters from earlier drafts. The first character, a young aristocrat of the 1860s, is embroiled in a
Fathers and Sons
–style ideological clash with the generation of the 1840s, but undergoes a moral regeneration, overcomes his own nihilism, and becomes a “new man”; the second is a young aristocrat in the earlier, Byronic type of Eugene Onegin, who has already undergone, or seems to have undergone, a moral regeneration, but who then, to quote Dostoevsky’s notes, “suddenly blows his brains out—(Enigmatic personage, said to be mad).” Because he was working “under great pressure,” Frank suggests, Dostoevsky was obliged to consolidate these two heroes in the person of Stavrogin. Stepan Trofimovich, “a Liberal Idealist of the 1840s,” is thus made into “the spiritual progenitor of a Byronic type associated with the 1820s and 1830s”—a relationship that is doomed never really to make sense.

My favorite part of Frank’s interpretation is that, in the attempt “to compensate for the anachronism inherent in his plot structure,” Dostoevsky must represent Stavrogin as “a
contemporary
development” of the Onegin type. There
is something convincing in the picture of Stavrogin as an Onegin taken one step further, an Onegin beyond Pushkin, a machine for provoking duels, incapable of returning anyone’s love. It’s as if Stavrogin has himself read
Eugene Onegin
and no longer has any illusions of what awaits him.

On the other hand, to say the relationship between Stavrogin and Stepan Trofimovich is anachronistic doesn’t really resolve its mystery. How is Stepan Trofimovich, and not Stavrogin, supposed to be at the head of the procession of swine who are running into the sea? Frank again finds the answer in a technical flaw: namely, the removal of Stavrogin’s seduction of the twelve-year-old girl, which Frank characterizes as “a great moral-philosophical experiment” in the style of Raskolnikov’s murder of the pawnbroker. Dostoevsky was frantically finishing book 3 when the editors told him that the scene of Stavrogin’s confession was unpublishable; he was thus “forced to mutilate the original symmetry of his plan” and to shift part of Stavrogin’s moral responsibility onto Stepan Trofimovich. In other words, the real explanation for Stepan Trofimovich’s enigmatic claim to being the leader of the demons is that those words were never supposed to come from Stepan Trofimovich to begin with; they originally belonged to Stavrogin, but had to be reassigned once the confession was removed.
*

•  •  •

So is
Demons
really just a botched novel, an aggregation of mutilated drafts, lacking any unified meaning? It isn’t. Graduate school taught me this. It taught me through both theory and practice.

The theoretical part of the revelation came from René Girard, an emeritus in the Stanford French department. In the 1960s, Girard introduced his widely influential theory of mimetic desire, formulated in opposition to the Nietzschean notion of autonomy as the key to human self-fulfillment. According to Girard, there is in fact no such thing as human autonomy or authenticity. All of the desires that direct our actions in life are learned or imitated from some Other, to whom we mistakenly ascribe the autonomy lacking in ourselves. (“Mistakenly,” because the Other is also a human being, and thus doesn’t actually have any more autonomy than we do.) The perceived desire of the Other confers prestige on the object, rendering it desirable. For this reason, desire is usually less about its purported object than about the Other; it is always “metaphysical,” in that it is less about having, than being. The point isn’t to possess the object, but to
be
the Other. (That’s why so many advertisements place less emphasis on the product’s virtues than on its use by some beautiful and autonomous-looking person: the consumer craves not the particular brand of vodka, but the being of the person who chose it.) Because mimetic desire is contagious, a single person is often the mediator for a number of different desiring subjects, who then enter into the ultimately violent bonds of mimetic rivalry.