Ideas and the Novel (10 page)

Much of this appearance of logic is due to the device of the supposedly objective narrator used here by Dostoievsky. In
Crime and Punishment,
the reader was mostly inside Raskolnikov, listening to his thoughts. In
The Possessed
—with the exception of the suppressed chapter, “Stavrogin’s Confession”—everything is told from the outside, by a gossipy young friend of Stepan Trofimovich’s, who enjoys his confidence as well as that of the governor’s wife, so that he is well placed to tell what went on. He draws no moral conclusions, not being qualified to serve as the author’s representative; he simply and somewhat excitedly reports, as though setting the facts straight for some visitor who had missed out on that momentous period “among us.” The events are related from hindsight, as he has pieced them together, looking back and verifying where he can. And, like anything seen from hindsight, they fit into a clear sequence of cause and effect—the opposite of what we experience with Raskolnikov, whose perspective is toward the future, hence still open-ended. Moreover the narrator of
The Possessed,
in the interests of historical accuracy, feels obliged not to leave out any detail that might complete the picture. Since he is not quite confident, even looking backward, of being able to distinguish what was important from what was unimportant, we get that comical mixture, typical of gossip, of the relevant and the irrelevant. The mountains are confused with the valleys; the whole moral landscape is obligingly flattened out for our inspection.

This unconsciousness of scale on the part of the narrator is one of the delights of the novel. We understand that we can trust his veracity but not always his judgment; some of the opinions he utters echo in our minds more loudly than he seems to expect. For instance, the well-known passage in the introductory chapter: “At one time it was reported about the town that our little circle was a hotbed of nihilism, profligacy, and godlessness, and the rumor gained more and more strength. And yet we did nothing but engage in the most harmless, agreeable, typically Russian, light-hearted liberal chatter.” He is referring to the circle around old Stepan Trofimovich and is saying considerably more than he is aware of saying. To Dostoievsky’s mind, the little circle, in the last analysis, has been pretty much what rumor said, all the while maintaining a double screen of illusion about itself. Its members are less dangerous than they generally like to think (here the narrator is right) but more dangerous in their frivolity than he is capable of knowing. In lightly dismissing their talk as harmless, he shows an obliviousness of real consequences that marks him for Dostoievsky as a typical unthinking liberal. The circle of idle chatterers around Stepan Trofimovich was dangerous because it prepared the way for the hyper-active circles that sprang up on the cleared ground.

There is no doubt that Dostoievsky meant to pass a stern judgment when he made the “harmless” old liberal the father of Pyotr Stepanovich and the former tutor of Stavrogin. The devils that were loosed on the community were incubated in that muddled, innocent brain, which when put the question cannot even say unequivocally whether or not it believes in God: “I can’t understand why they make me out an infidel here. I believe in God,
mais distinguons.
I believe in Him as a Being who is conscious of Himself in me only. ... As for Christianity, for all my genuine respect for it...I am more of an antique pagan, like the great Goethe. ...” Liberalism is the father of nihilism; it is only a step to Kirillov and his ruling idea of the man-god, and Kirillov at least has the manhood— or god-hood—to act on his crazed conviction.

The town was “ready” for Pyotr Stepanovich and his quintet, which was only the inner circle of activists. There was a less clearly defined outer circle—possibly there were several concentric ones—of adherents to a secret organization referred to as “the Society.” And a proof of the town’s “readiness” to catch fire was that there were people in it who did not know whether they were members or not. Long after the scare had died down, an elderly Councillor, wearing the decoration of the Stanislas Order, came forward and confessed that for three months he had been under the influence of the
Internationale;
unable to produce evidence for the claim, he insisted that “he had felt it in all his feelings.” Earlier, at the height of the strange affair, the quaking Stepan Trofimovich, who has undergone a police search of his rooms, is queried suddenly by the narrator: “ ‘Stepan Trofimovich, tell me as a friend...do you belong to some secret society or not?’ ...‘That depends,
voyez-vous.’
‘How do you mean “it depends”?’ ‘When with one’s whole heart one is an adherent of progress and...who can answer it? You may suppose that you don’t belong, and suddenly it turns out that you do....’ ” In his uncertainty, which fear and pompous vanity make a half-certainty, he is convinced that he is going to be taken “in a cart” to Siberia. The chosen few of the nihilist inner circle are, on the whole, uncompromising in their positions, but those who are outside and somewhat envious (i.e., virtually the entire educated population) behave vis-à-vis the terrorists with the wildest inconsistency. Stepan Trofimovich professes to abhor his son’s activities—and maybe he does—yet the narrator learns that on his premises the police have found two manifestoes. “Manifestoes!” cries the narrator. “Do you mean to say you...” “Oh, ten were left here,” the old man answers with vexation.

Rumor and imagination, naturally, add fuel to the fire that the devils have set. In fact it is a question whether Pyotr’s vast organization is not largely imaginary, an idea in his mind. This is Stavrogin’s suspicion. It has occurred to him more than once that Pyotr is mad, and Pyotr’s worship of him, which he finds repulsive, seems to decide the issue. That happens at a peculiar moment, when Verhovensky finally articulates a credo. He has been saying that he is a scoundrel and not a Socialist. “But the people must believe that we know what we are after. ... We will proclaim destruction. ... Well, and there will be an upheaval! There’s going to be such an upset as the world has never seen before...the earth will weep for its old gods. ... Well, then we shall bring forward...whom? ...Ivan the Tsarevich. You! You!” After a minute, Stavrogin understands. “A pretender? ...So that’s your plan at last!” He himself is slated to be the pretender. “...In this we have a force, and what a force!...the whole gimcrack show will fall to the ground, and then we shall consider how to build up an edifice of stone. For the first time! We are going to build it, we, and only we!” “Madness,” answers Stavrogin. A few minutes later, Verhovensky, pretty much back to normal, is offering to have Stavrogin’s wife murdered free of charge. This comes as a relief. It had been almost a disappointment to find that he had a “positive” side, a “constructive” side, after all.

I am willing to accept that Verhovensky is mad, Stavrogin, the child-violator, is mad, the quintet is mad, Kirillov is mad, and that among the founding members of the local “Society” not even Shatov is sane. A clinical finding to that effect would not greatly alter our understanding of the novel. Possession by an idea is a common form of insanity. But did the entire community go temporarily mad—the governor’s wife, the governor, Stepan Trofimovich’s protectress, who broke with him because he had not kept her abreast of the new ideas, the old gentleman who was sure that he had been under the influence of the Socialist International for “fully” three months? That, too, is not out of harmony, I think, with the impression Dostoievsky wanted to make. The fact that the whole pathological episode, if that is what it was, is viewed from the outside, as though offered to a clinician for judgment, is surely meant to suggest that. As is known, the story was planned originally as a satire on liberal and nihilist ideas, and much that is satirical survives in the final version: the grotesque members of the “quintet,” the governor and his wife, Stepan Trofimovich and his domineering sympathizer, the landowner Varvara Petrovna, “a tall, yellow bony woman with an extremely long face, suggestive of a horse.” To picture the new ideas as a virulent illness attacking a body politic is classical strategy on the part of a satirist, and the course of the disease is represented here in what often seems a dry, mock-medical vein: predisposing conditions, first symptoms, onset (Stavrogin biting the governor’s ear), temporary remission, aggravated symptoms, spread to other parts of the body, subsidence, final recovery.

Once the figures of Stavrogin, Kirillov, and Shatov were developed—they must have been present in germ from the outset—a gloomy religious element began to suffuse the novel, which up to then one could imagine as a sort of Russian
Headlong Hall,
with perfectibilians, deteriorationists, status-quo-ites contentedly discoursing while Squire Headlong-Stavrogin set a charge of dynamite to his property. Stavrogin, Kirillov, and Shatov brought suffering—unacceptable to satire—into the tale. Not a ray of comedy falls on them, and yet by a miracle, which I think is effected through the “redemption” of Stepan Trofimovich—a half-ludicrous King Lear of the steppes—the antagonistic elements are able to coexist, the satiric metaphor and something like a Slavophil myth of the Passion.

The loosing of the devils yielded a total of five murders, two suicides, one death-by-manslaughter, one death as a result of exposure (Stepan Trofimovich), two other related deaths, the burning down of a considerable area of the town, general damage to property. Pyotr Stepanovich, the author of it all, escapes as though in a cloud of brimstone, by taking the train to Petersburg.

It is clear that Dostoievsky stood in awe of the power of ideas. The most fearful, evidently, in his eyes were socialistic ideas with their humanitarian tinge. And here at any rate he could speak from experience: his having belonged to a group—the Petrashevsky circle—that engaged in discussions of Utopian socialism had taken him to Siberia and nearly to the firing squad. Yet this experience, he believed, had not only taught him a lesson in the ordinary sense (“Stay out of discussion groups”), but had brought about a spiritual rebirth. His dread of the power of ideas combined with a fatal attraction to them; like so many Russian writers then and now, he was drawn to ideas as if to a potent drug. In Geneva, long after he had returned, a new man, from Siberia, he could not resist going to hear Bakunin expound his theories, and he expressed disappointment that Bakunin was not more constructive. In Dostoievsky, ideas may lead those they fasten on to extreme suffering, but they can also be bringers of redemption, the one in fact leading to the other, as had happened in his own case.

Moreover, once an idea has possessed Dostoievsky he seldom lets it drop but continues to examine it from all sides, at the risk of a certain monotony. Thus Raskolnikov’s All-is-permitted theory peeps through at intervals in
The Possessed;
it is Stavrogin who expounds it in his atrocious practice but also in words. As a “prince,” he has given the “No barriers” concept an aesthetic twist, almost a cool-headed twirl. “Is it true,” Shatov asks him, seemingly much worried, “that you declared you saw no distinction in beauty between some brutal obscene action and any great exploit, even the sacrifice of life for the good of humanity?” Stavrogin does not reply.

It is curious to turn from all this dark questioning to the homely English novel of the same time. George Eliot was a great moral writer, but no character in her novels, however thoughtful, would be asking a question like that of another character. It is not that she would have shrunk from such a phrase as “for the good of humanity”; she thought a great deal about our suffering race and clearly felt that it was her duty to devote her professional life to serving it. Besides she had an interest in theories of socialism and was perfectly familiar with abstract thought. With her competence in French and German, she must have read many of the same books that Dostoievsky read. But the kind of questions her characters put to themselves and to each other, though sometimes lofty, never question basic principles such as the notion of betterment or the inviolability of the moral law. Unlike the great novels of the Continent, the English novel is seldom searching, at any rate not on the plane of articulated thought.

I doubt, for instance, that it could ever have occurred to George Eliot to wonder about the validity of mental activity in itself. She could not have pictured ideas as baleful or at best equivocal forces. About the worst ideas can do, in her view, is to encourage a tendency toward headstrongness in a heroine. We see this in
Middlemarch
with Dorothea Brooke, whose determination to be the helpmeet of Mr. Casaubon springs from a fixed longing of her brain. “It would be like marrying Pascal,” she says to herself. “I should learn to see the truth by the same light as great men have seen it by.” But it is all a mistake, as with Emma’s obstinate plans for Harriet in Jane Austen’s novel: Mr. Casaubon is no Pascal; his “Key to All Mythologies,” to which Dorothea plans to devote her young energies, is a figment of his fussy, elderly brain, an “idea” he once had for a multi-volume work which is simply gathering dust in his head. In a sense, this, like
Emma,
is an education novel: Dorothea has finally grown up when she learns to stop asking her husband about the progress he is making on his master work.

Among George Eliot’s novels, the best place to look for an examination of ideas and their influence might be
Felix Holt, the Radical.
On the surface, this short novel has quite a lot in common with the novels I have been speaking of, especially
Crime and Punishment
and
The Red and the Black.
The hero is a Radical of independent mind. He comes from the lower middle class, is poor, indifferent to his dress, often proudly contemptuous in his manner, and ambitious, not for himself but for humanity or, more accurately, for the small part of it he knows. He wants them all and particularly Esther Lyon to be better than they are. He is angered by her reading-matter—Byron and Chateaubriand—by her ladylike ways and taste for fine gloves, all of which are proofs of shallowness. He is a reformer in the public sphere, too, who earnestly desires to improve the lot of working men and believes that the first step must be to win them from the slavery of drink through night and Sunday classes; without education, the working man cannot advance his cause. When we meet Felix, on the eve of a parliamentary election, he is deeply troubled by corrupt electoral practices: above all, the habit of treating in public houses. In short, he is a man of the Left with a number of stubborn ideas that unfit him for practical politics.