by Colin Wilson
Another interesting point was utilized in the novel. It transpired in the trials that a certain student who intended to kill himself had agreed to await the convenience of the ‘European Revolutionary Alliance’, and was to leave a death note in which he would take responsibility for any crimes the ‘Alliance’ cared to saddle him with. Out of this episode came the conception of Kirilov, the ‘suicide maniac’, and, incidentally, one of the most important treatments of the Outsider theme in Dostoevsky.
The structure of the novel is loose and unsatisfying. It opens with a long section about an old Russian liberal of the 40’s, and the General’s widow who supports him. These two are typical inhabitants of the small town where the action takes place. Having carefully set the scene and provided the background, Dostoevsky is then prepared to allow his terrible, maniacal characters to erupt into it. Enter Netchaev, [called Pyotr Verkovensky in the novel] who is the old liberal’s son, and Stavrogin, who is the widow’s son.
Netchaev’s part of the novel provides the ‘plot’ and continuity of the story; in spite of which, it has an odd air of irrelevancy. Stavrogin is the ‘hero’ of the novel, but there is no counterpart between him and Netchaev as hero and villain; from the point of view of the Netchaev affair, Stavrogin is irrelevant. Actually, the novel is really absorbing only when Stavrogin (or Kirilov) is on the scene, and it is Netchaev who seems to have intruded where he has no business.
The horrors and mystifications reach a climax when Netchaev’s terrorists set the town on fire and murder an ex-Captain and his imbecile sister (who is also Stavrogin’s wife). The old Russian liberal leaves home and dies; the student Shatov (Ivanov) is murdered, Kirilov commits suicide to Netchaev’s specification and Netchaev catches a train to Switzerland.
The Stavrogin story is the centre of gravity of the novel. Stavrogin is the outcome of a much earlier project of Dostoev-sky’s to write The Life of A Great Sinner. Dostoevsky always found crime absorbing; it is one of those limits of human character that can spring from the Outsider’s sense of exile. The great criminal is as distant from the average bourgeois as the great saint. In practice, of course, most ‘great criminals’ turn out to be mindless gorillas or Freudian neurotics; still, in theory, in the imagination of the artist, they could easily be men of unusually independent mind who simply give a different expression to the greatness of the saint or artist. In The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky gives accounts of the criminals he met in Siberia; and there is about all these men, mostly murderers, that slight element of the more-than-human that instantly grips the reader’s interest (in contrast with the all-too-human characters of most modern novelists, who produce acute intellectual constipation after fifty pages). At the same time, the criminal, in choosing crime (if he chooses it, and doesn’t just drift into it from laziness), has made the voluntary descent into the dark world which places him a step nearer the resolution of good and evil that the saint achieves. Salvation through sin recurs constantly in Dostoevsky’s work.
In Devils, Stavrogin’s story is told with many mystifications that are intended to define him as an Outsider. Actually, no reader who has grasped the concept of the Barbusse Outsider will find anything mystifying about Stavrogin’s actions. Conceive him as a Russian combination of Evan Strowde and Oliver Gauntlett, add a touch of Pushkin’s Eugene Onyegin, and you have a reasonably accurate picture. His story unfolds as a series of romantically paradoxical acts: he kisses someone’s wife in the middle of a respectable social gathering; he pulls the nose of a retired General and bites the ear of an inoffensive old man. In short, he plays the Rimbaud-roaring-boy in the drawing-room atmosphere of the town. ‘Old men and invalids are so respectable they ask to be boiled.’ For the inhabitants of the town, Stavrogin’s conduct is explained when he has a mental breakdown and has to be sent to a sanatorium to recuperate. For the discerning reader, of course, his strange actions and the brainstorm are both results of his Outsider tendencies.
PAGE NOTE: It always seemed to me that Henry Miller caught the very essence of this type of revolt in one of the ‘Tropic’ books, where he tells a story of how he managed to have sexual intercourse with a girl on a crowded dance-floor without anyone noticing. He emphasizes the pleasure that the situation gave him. The episode has psychological significance, and might almost be the foundation of a treatise on the revolutionary mentality.
As the novel goes on, Stavrogin does even stranger things: he accepts a slap in the face from Shatov; he engages in a duel in which he allows his opponent to shoot, and then fires his own pistol into the air; he acknowledges a poverty-stricken imbecile to be his wife (although most of the women in the town are willing to fling themselves at his head). Finally, he produces a ‘confession’ that is nightmarish in its horror and hangs himself. The verdict of our doctors’, the narrator states, ‘was that it was most definitely not a case of insanity.’
PAGE NOTE: This ‘confession’ chapter was rejected by Dostoevsky’s printer, and only appeared in print many years later, when the Soviet Government opened the Dostoevsky archives. Merezhkovsky has described it as ‘the concentrated essence of horror’. It has been published as a booklet by the Hogarth Press in England, but for some reason, has not yet been incorporated into any complete edition of Devils.
An important assertion, this; Dostoevsky will allow his readers no easy way out. Stavrogin was his most important attempt, to date, to summarize his ideas of good and evil. To interpret Stavrogin as a psychopath is as shallow as to interpret Raskolnikov as a ‘cold monster’.
On the other hand, there is no point in the novel at which Stavrogin gets on a soapbox to explain himself. Dostoevsky wrote no systematic treatise on the Outsider, in spite of his exhaustive treatment of the theme. His business was ‘not to reason and compare, but to create’, and although it is only slovenly thinking not to recognize that the critical faculty is eighty per cent, of the creative, it would still be unreasonable to expect Dostoevsky’s people to be as lucid in self-analysis as Pirandello or Shaw characters. Fortunately, from our point of view, there is no problem touched on in Devils that we have not already examined in this study; and Stavrogin presents no problems. The suicide letter, for instance, might be an epilogue to The Seven Pillars of Wisdom:
I’ve tried my strength everywhere. You advised me to do that so as to learn to ‘know myself. When I’ve tried it for my own sake and for the sake of self-display, it seemed infinite, as it has been before in my life. Before your eyes I put up with a blow in the face from your brother; I acknowledged my marriage in public. But what to apply my strength to— that’s what I’ve never seen and don’t see now. My desires are never strong enough. They cannot guide me. You can cross the river on a tree-trunk, but not on a chip... .21 [Italics mine.]
Stavrogin, the Evan-Strowde Outsider who has lost motive, can acknowledge the power of motive in others, in Kirilov, the ‘suicide maniac’:
...Kirilov, in his magnanimity, could not compromise with an idea and shot himself.
But Stavrogin knows he cannot imitate him:
I can never be interested in an idea to the same extent. I could never shoot myself.
In spite of which, he commits suicide, although he has no hopes from suicide:
I know it will be another delusion, a delusion in an infinite series of delusions.
Nothing is real—consequently he has nothing to live for and no reason for dying:
My love will be as petty as I am myself.... I know I ought to kill myself, to brush myself off the earth like some loathsome insect....
Always in Dostoevsky there is this comparison of men to insects: half a dozen passages spring to mind. It is the Hemingway position, ‘Most men ... die like animals’, or the comparison of Catherine Barkely’s death with that of ants on a burning log. There is no belief. Men’s lives are futile, and they die ‘not with a bang but a whimper’. And when they are inspired by a belief, it depends on their blinding themselves with their emotions. This is Stavrogin’s position, and he hates it. He w
ould like to breathe clean air and feel a sensation of power. But how? To do good? That is out of the question; he sees it as a game of emotional profit, self-flattery, nothing more. Then evil ? His ‘confession’ is an account of his attempt to do evil. It is a deliberate sensation-seeking, rather like Dorian Gray’s, except that Dorian goes in for sensual pleasures, and Stavrogin experiments with moral depravities too, robbing a pathetic bank clerk of his last rouble notes, seducing a ten-year-old girl and then deliberately allowing her to kill herself. Reading the ‘confession’, we begin to feel a stifled irritation with Stavrogin. Why doesn’t he get away from his effete surroundings, and discover how powerfully the urge to live inheres in the body itself? We feel that ten years in Siberia would teach him the value of life; and, in fact, we shall find that this is the solution that Dostoevsky produces for another of his characters who had allowed himself to be blinded by his own pettiness in The Brothers Karamazov. Stavrogin thinks that he has explored life from end to end and found it all hollow, when actually he is only constipated with his own worthless-ness. He fails to apply his intellect to the question, Why do all living things prefer life to death?
Stavrogin missed the point, but his creator was not fooled. The man who had stood in front of a firing squad in the Semyonovsky Square knew all about the value of life. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov meditates:22
...someone condemned to death says, or thinks an hour before his death, that if he had to live on a high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only have room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than die at once.
Only to live, to live and live. Life, whatever it may be...
In opposition to this, there is the vision of Svidrigailov, the criminal sensualist who speculates whether eternity may not be like a dusty corner of a small room, full of spiders and cobwebs. Svidrigailov shoots himself; Raskolnikov prepares to endure a ten-year ordeal in Siberia that will ‘raise him from the dead5.
In Devils, Stavrogin is the criminal sensualist who cannot conceive eternity, except in terms of his own dreary, imprisoned existence. Kirilov, the suicide maniac, also kills himself, but it is Kirilov who had seen the way out of the nightmare of unreality. It is in Kirilov that Dostoevsky embodies the highest vision of the novel. Kirilov is to kill himself when Netchaev gives the order, but he has already decided to die. His reason is Outsider-logic. If God exists, then everything is his Will. If he doesn’t exist, then Kirilov himself is God and must show his Will by the Ultimate Unreversible definitive act—to kill himself.
Because all will has become mine. Is there no man on this planet who, having finished with God, and believing in his own will, will have enough courage to express his self-will in its most important point? It’s like a beggar who has inherited a fortune and is afraid of it....23
Kirilov has finished with God because he cannot believe in an external principle that is more important than his own subjectively known reality. Kirilov reasons: If God exists, he must be an external reality, like the Old Testament Jehovah.’ His Existentialist logic disposes of such a God. It is the opposite of Lawrence’s Bedouin, who ‘could not look for God within him; he was too certain he was in God’; but, unfortunately, Kirilov does not believe in ‘God within him’ either.
But the decision that life was valueless compared with his own Will gives Kirilov the insight he needed. Without realizing it, he has attained the ideal non-attachment that is the religious ideal. Being willing to give up his life at any moment, he has voided it of the pettiness that ties most men to their delusions. He has destroyed the ‘thought-riddled nature’. He asks Stavrogin:
‘Ever seen a leaf—a leaf from a tree?’
‘Yes.’
‘I saw one recently—a yellow one, a little green, wilted at the edges. Blown by the wind. When I was a little boy, I used to shut my eyes in winter and imagine a green leaf, with veins on it, and the sun shining. ...’
‘What’s this—an allegory ?’
‘No; why? Not an allegory—a leaf, just a leaf. A leaf is good. Everything’s good.’
‘Everything?’
‘Everything. Man’s unhappy because he doesn’t know he’s happy ... he who finds out will become happy at once, instantly....’
‘And what about the man who dies of hunger, and the man who insults and rapes a little girl. Is that good too?’
‘Yes, it is. And the man who blows his brains out for the child, that’s good too. Everything’s good....’
‘When did you find out you were so happy?’
‘I was walking about the room. I stopped the clock.... It was twenty-three minutes to three.’24
Dostoevsky was haunted by that passage from ‘Revelation’:
And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea ... lifted up his hand and sware... that there should be time no longer, but the mystery of God should be finished....25
Possibly Dostoevsky’s knowledge of’Moments of timelessness’ came only in the strange insights before his epileptic seizures: this is how he describes one in The Idiot:
The next moment, something seemed to explode in front of him; a wonderful inner light illumined his soul. This lasted perhaps half a second, yet he distinctly remembered hearing the beginning of a cry, the strange dreadful wail that escaped him without his volition.... Then he was unconscious...26
The moment of ‘inner light’ is Nietzsche’s moment of ‘pure Will, free of the perplexities of intellect....’ His willingness to die to express the absolute supremacy of the Will is the supreme act of renunciation. St. John of the Cross writes of it:
And therefore, the soul that sets its affections upon created beings... will in no way be able to attain union with the infinite being of God: for that which is not can have no communion with that which is. [Ascent of Mount Carmel, IV, 4]
Without religion, without even belief in God, Kirilov has achieved the saint’s vision. His perfect non-attachment has made him into a visionary. He lives all the time in the insight that Meursault achieved only on the eve of his execution: ‘I had been happy and I was happy still.’
Dostoevsky did not stop to argue or explain his point; he dramatized it and now the novel is drawing towards its close; everything is moving faster. In the last hundred pages, he rises to a pitch of prophetic intensity that cannot be paralleled elsewhere in literature. Netchaev has arranged for the same night the murder of Shatov, the firing of the town and the murder of Stavrogin’s imbecile wife and her drunken brother. Shatov is to meet five ‘comrades’ on Stavrogin’s estate to hand over the printing-press. Before he sets out, his wife arrives, in the last stages of pregnancy (she had deserted him three years before, only a fortnight after their marriage, to go and live with Stavrogin). In a wild state of excitement, Shatov rushes off to borrow money and find a midwife. Then he looks on as the baby is born, and the revelation stirs him profoundly. He mutters: There were two, and now there’s a third human being, a new spirit, whole and complete ... a new thought and a new love ... it makes me feel afraid. There’s nothing bigger in the world‘27 Then a comrade arrives to fetch him away. Shatov asks him, as they walk through the dark, ‘Erckel, have you ever been happy?’
The murder that follows is perhaps the most terrible single episode in Dostoevsky; after the birth-scene, it is almost unbearable to read. But it is not the end of Netchaev’s work. After he has seen the body consigned to a pond, he goes to call on Kirilov. The moment has arrived for Kirilov to kill himself for the ‘European Revolutionary Alliance’. But first, there is a slight formality. Kirilov is to write a suicide note, confessing to having murdered Shatov. Again the scene reaches a dramatic tension that cannot be paralleled in modern literature, apart from the murder scene in Crime and Punishment. At first, Netchaev is convinced that Kirilov won’t do it; he encourages him to talk about his reasons for committing suicide; his cu
nning is rewarded, and finally Kirilov shoots himself through the head. Netchaev hurries off, a handkerchief bound around his hand where Kirilov had tried to bite off the top of his finger, and catches an early train out of the town. He leaves behind him a blazing town, three murdered bodies and a suicide; and the death-toll is not yet complete. That is the last we see of ‘the tiger cub’. He is not important; he is only the Iago of the story, He is no Outsider. The most important figure in the book lies dead in a shuttered room, the revolver still in his hand, to be found by Shatov’s wife the next morning when she goes to his room seeking her husband.
The nightmare is almost over. Dostoevsky’s last great study in the Outsider will bring it to a close.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE GREAT SYNTHESIS....
The brothers karamazov is Dostoevsky’s biggest attack on the Outsider theme.
We have seen Dostoevsky beginning with a portrait of the Barbusse-type Outsider—the spineless beetle-man, the underground man who cannot escape his loathing for human stupidity—and applying the formula The Outsider’s Salvation lies in extremes’, until he has created Raskolnikov, Myshkin, Stavrogin, all Outsiders who know who they are and where they are going. Extremes of crime or extremes of asceticism, murder or renunciation, both have the same effect. Both free the Outsider from his fundamental indecision, so that the problem is carried to a higher stage.