“When the dear, mild Ivan Ossipovitch hurriedly and trustfully inclined his ear Stavrogin bit it hard. The poor Governor would have died of terror but the monster had mercy on him, and let go his ear.”
“When the dear, mild Ivan Ossipovitch hurriedly and trustfully inclined his ear Stavrogin bit it hard. The poor Governor would have died of terror but the monster had mercy on him, and let go his ear.”
The doctor testified that he was temporarily unbalanced, and after a few weeks' rest and isolation he went abroad for four years and there Lizaveta Nikolaevna, Shatov's wife, and several others succumbed, and he also met his old tutor's son, Pyotr Stepanovitch, his deputy in the Internationale, who from that moment became his apologist, his tool, his agent, and finally the instrument of his destruction. The gratification of Stavrogin's perverted passion, the machinations of the Republicans and nihilists, and the revelations of Shatov's limitations and of Mr. Kirillov's nihilistic idealism are the threads of the story. Shatov was the son of a former valet of Stavrogin's mother who had been expelled from the University after some disturbance, a radical with a tender heart, who had held Stavrogin up as an ideal.
“He was one of those idealistic beings common in Russia who are suddenly struck by some overmastering idea which seems, as it were, to crush them at once and sometimes for ever. They are never equal to coping with it, but put passionate faith in it, and their whole life passes afterward, as it were, in the last agonies under the weight of the stone that has fallen upon them and half crushed them.”
“He was one of those idealistic beings common in Russia who are suddenly struck by some overmastering idea which seems, as it were, to crush them at once and sometimes for ever. They are never equal to coping with it, but put passionate faith in it, and their whole life passes afterward, as it were, in the last agonies under the weight of the stone that has fallen upon them and half crushed them.”
Shatov's overmastering idea was that Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch could do no wrong, and the stone that crushed him was Nikolay's misdeeds. Mr. Kirillov, the engineer, believed that he who conquers pain and terror will become a god.
“Then there will be a new life, a new man, everything will be new ... then they will divide history into two parts: from the gorilla to the annihilation of God, and from the annihilation of God to the transformation of the earth and of man physically. Man will be God and will be transformed physically and all men will kill themselves.”
“Then there will be a new life, a new man, everything will be new ... then they will divide history into two parts: from the gorilla to the annihilation of God, and from the annihilation of God to the transformation of the earth and of man physically. Man will be God and will be transformed physically and all men will kill themselves.”
“He who kills himself only to kill fear will become a god at once.” Kirillov believed or feared that eternal life was now, not hereafter. There are moments when time suddenly standsstill for men, and it was fear that it might become eternal that he could not tolerate. In Dostoievsky's books there is always one contemptible character, a sanctimonious hypocrite, a fawning holier-than-thou, a pious scandal monger, a venomous volunteer of first aid to the morally injured. In this book his name is Liputin, an elderly provincial official.
These are the chief figures of the drama.
When Shatov had been killed; when Kirillov's promise: namely, that he would commit suicide on request, had been exacted; when Stavrogin's imbecile wife and her brother Lebyadkin had been despatched; when Lisa, who was abducted by Stavrogin on the eve of her marriage and then abandoned, had been knocked on the head and killed by the mob because she was Stavrogin's woman who “had come to look at the wife he had murdered”; when Shatov's wife had come back to him and borne Stavrogin's child in his presence; when Stepan Trofimovitch had displayed his last infantile reaction and his son Peter, the Russian Mephistopheles, had made a quick and successful get-away, Stavrogin wrote to Darya and suggested that she go with him to the Canton of Uri, of which he was a citizen, and be his nurse. Darya, for whom humiliation spelled happiness, consented and Varvara Petrovna, hearing of the plan, succumbed to the sway of maternal love and arranged to go with them.
The day they had planned to begin their journey Stavrogin was not to be found, but search of the loft revealed his body hanging from a hook by means of a silken cord which had been carefully soaped before he slung it around his neck.
At the inquest the doctors absolutely and emphatically rejected all idea of insanity.
“The Possessed” has been the most enigmatic of the writer's books because critics could not agree as to the motives of Stavrogin's crimes and conduct. With the publication of “Stavrogin's Confession” the riddles were solved. In the book as originally planned (and modified at the request of the publisherof the periodical in which the novel originally appeared), Stavrogin, instead of hanging himself, went to Our Lady Spasso-Efimev Monastery and confessed himself to Bishop Tikhon. Dostoievsky recruited his spiritualmenschenkennersfrom the ranks of those who, in youth, had played the game of life hard, transgressed, and repented. Tikhon was one of them, a strange composite of piety and worldliness chained to his cell by chronic rheumatism and alcoholic tremours.
Stavrogin had been obsessed by a phrase from the Apocalypse: “I know thy works; that thou art neither hot nor cold. I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.” He would be lukewarm no longer. He handed Tikhon three little sheets of ordinary small-sized writing paper printed and stitched together. It was entitled “From Stavrogin” and was a confession of his sins. He couldn't dislodge from his mind the vision of the little girl Matryosha. He identified her with photographs of children that he saw in shop windows. A spider on a geranium leaf caused the vision of her as she killed herself to rise up before him, and this vision came to him now every day and every night
“not that it comes itself, but that I bring it before myself and cannot help bringing it although I can't live with it. I know I can dismiss the thought of Matryosha even now whenever I want to. I am as completely master of my will as ever. But the whole point is that I never wanted to do it; I myself do not want to, and never shall.”
“not that it comes itself, but that I bring it before myself and cannot help bringing it although I can't live with it. I know I can dismiss the thought of Matryosha even now whenever I want to. I am as completely master of my will as ever. But the whole point is that I never wanted to do it; I myself do not want to, and never shall.”
Tikhon suggested that he would be forgiven if his repentance was sincere, and told him he knew an old man, a hermit and ascetic of such great Christian wisdom that he was beyond ordinary understanding. He suggested that Stavrogin should go to him, into retreat, as novice under his guidance, for five years, or seven, for as many as were necessary. He adjured him to make a vow to himself so that by this great sacrifice hewould acquire all that he longed for and didn't even expect, and assured him that he could not possibly realise now what he would obtain from such guidance and isolation and repentance.
Stavrogin hesitated and the Bishop suddenly realised that he had no intention of repenting. It dawned upon him that Stavrogin's plan was to flaunt his sin in the face of God as he had previously flaunted it in the face of society, and in a voice which penetrated the soul and with an expression of the most violent grief Tikhon exclaimed,
“Poor lost youth, you have never been so near another and a still greater crime as you are at this moment. Before the publication of the 'Confession,' a day, an hour perhaps before the great step, you will throw yourself on another crime, as a way out, and you will commit it solely in order to avoid the publication of these pages.”
“Poor lost youth, you have never been so near another and a still greater crime as you are at this moment. Before the publication of the 'Confession,' a day, an hour perhaps before the great step, you will throw yourself on another crime, as a way out, and you will commit it solely in order to avoid the publication of these pages.”
Stavrogin shuddered with anger and almost with fear and shouted “You cursed psychologist!,” and left the cell without looking at Tikhon.
The annihilation of the sense of time in Dostoievsky's stories was first dwelt upon by Merejkowski, and it has been much discussed by all of his serious commentators. Events occur and things take place within a few hours in his books which would ordinarily take months and years. The reason for this timeless cycle of events may be sought in the experiences that the author had in the moments preceding his attacks of epilepsy in which he had thoughts and emotions which a lifetime would scarcely suffice to narrate.
Dostoievsky is the greatest of subjective writers because he goes deepest and is the most truthful. His books are narratives of sins and crimes and descriptions of attempts at expiation. He didn't invent sins, he took them from life; he presented those he had committed and seen committed. He invented only the expiation, and some of that, it must be admitted, he experienced. His sinners are never normal mentally.They are never insane legally, but all of them are insane medically.
Dostoievsky himself was far from “normal” mentally, aside from his epilepsy, though he made approximation to it as he grew older. His mind was a garden sown with the flower seeds of virtue and the thistle seeds of vice. All of them germinated. Some became full blown, others remained stunted and dwarfed.
“I have invented a new kind of enjoyment for myself,” he wrote to his brother, “a most strange one—to make myself suffer. I take your letter, turn it over in my hand for several minutes, feel if it is full weight, and having looked on it sufficiently and admired the closed envelope, I put it in my pocket. You won't believe what a voluptuous state of soul, feeling and heart there is in that!”
“I have invented a new kind of enjoyment for myself,” he wrote to his brother, “a most strange one—to make myself suffer. I take your letter, turn it over in my hand for several minutes, feel if it is full weight, and having looked on it sufficiently and admired the closed envelope, I put it in my pocket. You won't believe what a voluptuous state of soul, feeling and heart there is in that!”
That is theanlageof masochism. In the outline of “The Life of a Great Sinner,” the novel whose completion would permit him to die in peace, for then he should have expressed himself completely, one sees the wealth of detail taken by the author from his boyhood and early manhood. The hero of the “Life” was unsociable and uncommunicative; a proud, passionate, and domineering nature. So was Dostoievsky. So here was to be apotheosis of individualism, consciousness of his superiority, of his determination, and of his uniqueness. Dostoievsky wrote of himself in 1867, “Everywhere and in everything I reach the furthest limits; I have passed beyond the boundaries of all life.”
The most inattentive reader of his “Letters” will be reminded of Dostoievsky when they read that the hero of the “Life” “surprised everybody by unexpectedly rude pranks,” “behaved like a monster,” “offended an old woman,” and that he was obsessed with the idea of amassing money; and the alternative stages of belief and disbelief of the hero are obviously recollections of his own trials. “I believe I shall express the whole of myself in it” he wrote of it to a friend, and no onefamiliar with his books and his life can read the outline of it and doubt that he would have succeeded. Wherever Dostoievsky looked he saw a question mark and before it was written “Is there a God? Does God exist?” He was determined to find the answer. He had found Christ abundantly and satisfactorily, but the God of Job he never knew, nor had He ever overthrown him or compassed him with His net.
Dostoievsky was a rare example of dual personality. His life was the expression of his ego personality (and what a life of strife and misery and unhappiness it was!), revealed with extraordinary lucidity in his “Letters” and “The Journal of an Author”; and his legacy to mankind is the record of his unconscious mind revealed in his novels. The latter is the life he would have liked to live, and in it he depicts the changes in man's moral nature that he would have liked to witness. His contention was that man should be master of his fate, captain of his soul. He must express his thought and conviction in action and conduct, particularly in his relation to his fellow-man. He must take life's measure and go to it no matter what it entails or how painful, unpleasant, or disastrous the struggle, or the end.
Many thoughtful minds believe that Dostoievsky has shown us the only salvation in the great crisis of the European conscience. The people, it matters not of what nationality, still possess the strength and equilibrium of internal power. The conviction that man shall not live as a beast of burden still survives in the Russian people and is shared with them by the masses throughout the civilised world. Salvation from internal anarchy was his plea, and it is the plea that is today being made by millions in other lands than his.
As a prophet he foresaw the supremacy of the Russian people, the common people succoured to knowledge, faith, and understanding by liberty, education, and health, and by conformation to its teaching the Renaissance of the Christianfaith, which shall be a faith that shall show man how to live and how to die, and which shall be manifest in conduct as well as by word of mouth; primacy of the Russian church; and the consummation of European culture by the effort and propaganda of Russia. “Russia is the one God-fearing nation and her ultimate destiny shall be to make known the Russian Christ for the salvation of lost humanity.” No one can say at this day that his prophecies may not come true, and to the student of history there may seem to be more suggestive indication of it in the Russia of today than in that of half a century ago; for from a world in ferment unexpected distillations may flow. But to the person who needs proof Russia is silent now. Dostoievsky's doctrines have not dropped as the rain, nor has his speech been distilled as the dew, though he published the name of the Lord and ascribed greatness unto our God. Indeed, the fate that has overtaken Russia would seem to deny the possibility of the fulfillment of his prophecies either for his country or his people.
As a narrator of the events of life here, and of the thoughts of life here and hereafter, he has had few peers of any nation or language. That he did it in a disorderly way must be admitted; that the events of his tragedies had little time incidence is obvious to the most casual reader; that the reader has to bring to their perusal concentration and application is beyond debate; and that his characters are “degenerates,” using that word in its biological sense, there is no doubt. But despite these defects, Dostoievsky succeeds in straining the essence of the Russian's soul through his unconscious to his conscious mind, and then expressing it; and his books are the imperishable soul-prints of his contemporaneous countrymen. Not only does he stand highest in literary achievement of all men of his time, but he is a figure of international significance in the world of literature. His life and struggle was Hauptmann's song,
“Always must the heart-strings vibrate in the breath of the world's sorrow, for the world's sorrow is the root of heaven's desire.”
“Always must the heart-strings vibrate in the breath of the world's sorrow, for the world's sorrow is the root of heaven's desire.”
He foresaw with clairvoyancy the necessity of making religion livable, not professed with the lips and scorned in action, but a code or formulation that would combine Life, Love, and Light pragmatically; and although he was not able to formulate his thought or to express it clearly and forcibly, to synthetise and codify it, as it were, formulators of the new religion, of Christianity revivified or dematerialised, will consult frequently and diligently the writings of Feodor Dostoievsky.