The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  At the center of the drama stands Stavrogin, the magnetic yet empty aristocrat around whom the other characters, in Dostoevsky's words, "revolve as in a kaleidoscope." "Everything is contained in the character of Stavrogin-Stavrogin is EVERYTHING," Dostoevsky wrote in his notebooks.25 An air of mystery hangs over his entrance onto the scene. His face is likened to a mask; and his first activities-grabbing one man by the nose and biting another one's ear-are seen as offenses against society by a "wild beast showing his claws." Like the beast of the apocalypse, this human beast has many heads. He is the progenitor of all the "devils" in the novel ("Devils" being a more accurate translation of the Russian title, Besy, than "Possessed").

  Superficially he is "a paragon of beauty," surrounded by women, yet unable to have a complete relationship with any of them. Dasha is only a nurse to him, Lisa an unsatisfactory sex partner, and Maria Lebiadkin a maimed and estranged wife. There is a hint of illicit relationship with a small girl in his confession; but whether or not the novel includes this section, the story is still dominated by his ideological relationships with other men. Three of his disciples are among the most original creations in Russian literature: Shigalev, Kirillov, and Shatov. Each is inspired by Stavrogin with an idea that drives him to destruction. Each incarnates one aspect of the revolutionary trinity, liberty, equality, fraternity. Their collective epitaph is provided by the words of Babeuf, which Kirillov writes just before killing himself: Liberte, egalite, fraternite ou la mort. Shigalev represents absolute equality with his demand that mountains be leveled and human anthills raised in their place. Kirillov preaches absolute freedom,

  which he asserts by committing an heroic and purely ideological suicide. Shatov's ideal is absolute fraternity, which he associates with the peasant life of the Russian people.

  Shigalev is modeled on Bartholomew Zaitsev, one of the most extreme iconoclasts of the sixties, who had been a close journalistic associate of Pisarev and then had fled abroad to join Bakunin in active revolutionary agitation. Kirillov offers a majestic distillation of the Schopenhauerian argument for suicide and is one of Dostoevsky's greatest creations. The only ultimate way to prove one's freedom is freely to will one's own destruction. Any other act merely serves some earthly purpose and is subject to the various determining factors of the material world. But uncaused suicide is a supreme vote of confidence in man's freedom from, and triumph over, the natural world. By this one heroic stroke man can become a kind of God. Shatov is, together with Kirillov, the figure with whom Dostoevsky demonstrates greatest sympathy. They are both brought back from America to Russia by Stavrogin to live on Bogoiavlensky (Epiphany) street. They are both looking for a new epiphany, the appearance of the lost God: Kirillov in himself, Shatov in the Russian people. Shatov was originally modeled on an Old Believer whom Dostoevsky met in 1868; but he becomes a kind of God-seeking spokesman of Dostoevsky's own curious brand of populism. Stavrogin has taken away his belief in God and his roots with his peasant past. Unlike Kirillov, whose name is derived from one of the founding saints of Russia and whose dedication to an idea is saintly in intensity, Shatov is plagued by doubts, as his name (derived from shatanie, or "wavering") indicates. Whereas Kirillov's moment of truth comes in self-destruction, Shatov's comes in hitting Stavrogin. "I can't tear you out of my heart, Nicholas Stavrogin," he cries, as he-like populism itself-slowly drifts into alliance with the revolutionary forces around him. "I believe in Russia … in Orthodoxy … I believe that the new advent will take place on Russian soil. … In God. I, I will believe in God."

  Stavrogin is the dark, malignant force in Russian intellectual life which kept Dostoevsky, like Shatov, from making a confident affirmation of belief in God and of harmonious communion with his creation. Dostoevsky is very explicit in stating what the nature of that evil force is, when he compares Stavrogin to the radical Decembrist Lunin and the brooding poet Ler-montov:

  There was perhaps more malice in Stavrogin than in these two put together, but this malice was cold, calm, and if one may put it that way rational, which means that it was the most abominable and terrible kind of malice.

  Stavrogin's evil is reason without faith: cold intellect born in aristocratic boredom, nurtured during a scientific expedition to Iceland, confirmed by study in a German university, and brought by way of St. Petersburg to the Russian people. It is because he is rational, because he is "a wise serpent" that his power is so truly terrifying.

  Yet Stavrogin is also a symbol of the Russian intelligentsia, a bearer of its prophetic hopes, which Dostoevsky himself partially shared. Stavrogin was tutored by Stepan Trofimovich, the incarnation of the romantic aristocratic intellectual; he is compared to figures like Lunin and Lermontov and represents a kind of fulfillment of both of their quests. He was created by Dostoevsky in the midst of his search for a new positive hero. He bears the Greek word for cross (stavros) within his name, has been to Jerusalem, and is called "Prince Harry," Shakespeare's future king Henry V who was destined to save England after sowing his wild oats. In his notebooks Dostoevsky referred to Stavrogin as "Prince" and, in a key chapter heading, as "Ivan the Tsarevich": the murdered son of Ivan the Terrible whom Russian folklore taught would return to deliver Russia. In some sense, Dostoevsky is saying that the future of Russia belongs to Stavrogin: to the aristocratic intelligentsia. The intelligentsia-the alienated and elect of history-cannot be bypassed because it is possessed by ideas; and without "a great idea," "the people cannot live and will not die."

  The drama of the novel results largely from the struggle of two very special personalities for the raw power that Stavrogin generates and the dark fire that he bears within him. Traditional and revolutionary ideals are struggling for the mind-and thus the future-of Russia. The old is represented by a woman, Maria Lebiadkin, the new by a man, Peter Verkhovensky. The names immediately dramatize the contrasting forces. Maria suggests, of course, the mother of God, the missing Madonna; Peter suggests Peter the Great and the arrogant march of technology and irreverent innovation. Lebiadkin is derived from "swan" Qebed'), the popular symbol of purity, grace, and redemption; Verkhovensky from "height," the classic symbol of pride and arrogance.

  The old never has a chance. Just as Musorgsky's "white swan" is killed early in Khovanshchina, so is Dostoevsky's afflicted with some strange, deep wound even before we meet her. Yet she never blames Stavrogin, who has spurned and humiliated her. Feeling that "I must have done him some wrong," she accepts suffering gladly in the spirit of the Old Believers and denounces Stavrogin as the False Dmitry before dying with her

  infant baby.

  The new and victorious force is that of Verkhovensky, who is, of course, modeled on the conspiratorial Nechaev. Unlike Nechaev, however,

  who rejoiced in the total nihilism of his revolutionary ethos, Verkhovensky feels the need of links with the prophetic intelligentsia. Without Stavrogin, he considers himself only "Columbus without America, a bottled fly." Verkhovensky's revolutionary party gives us a kind of anticipatory glimpse at the conspiratorial confusion of the Bolsheviks awaiting the arrival of Lenin at the Finland Station. The scene in which Verkhovensky inspires a thug to desecrate an icon by putting a mouse inside its container is an anticipation of the organized sacrilege by the league of the militant godless. The Shpigulin scene, in which Verkhovensky appears in the streets actively agitating among striking workers, illustrates Dostoevsky's unique ability for depicting where events were going rather than merely where they had already been. Based on the first real industrial strike in Russia (which occurred in St. Petersburg in May-June, 1870, while Dostoevsky was completing the novel), the scene is treated not as an isolated, economically motivated demonstration of confused protest but rather as part of the fire in the minds of men. The professional revolutionary organizers who were not to move in among the urban workers for some years are already there in Dostoevsky's novel.26

  The future, we are led to believe, belongs to Verkhovensky; for, although his immediate plan came to nought, he escapes at
the end and is the only major figure who still seems to have a future ahead of him. There is, to be sure, the hope voiced by Stepan Trofimovich in his last wanderings that the devils will be driven out of Russia, which will then sit repentant at the feet of Christ in the manner of the passage in Luke (8:32-7), which introduces the novel. But compared to most of the rest of the action, this is an unconvincing, almost comic scene-prophetic in some ways of the shortly forthcoming "movement to the people" by the "repentant nobility" and by the other great novelist of the age, Leo Tolstoy.

  However repelled by the idea of a coming rational social Utopia, Dostoevsky was fascinated by it. This was the "Geneva idea," so called perhaps because it represented a melange of the ideas of two famous Genevans: Calvin's moral puritanism and Rousseau's boundless faith in human perfectibility and equality. Dostoevsky's own image of the new social order was in part drawn from impressions of Switzerland and tales of Bakunin; and it is to Jura, Switzerland, center of Bakunin's revolutionary socialist activities at that time, that Stavrogin makes his final flight abroad. He becomes "like Herzen a naturalized citizen of the Canton of Jura" just before he returns by railroad to commit suicide; just as Kirillov's last self-applied name before his suicide was "citoyen du monde civilise."

  The "Geneva idea," with its emphasis on the bourgeois ideal of citizenship, is less attractive to Dostoevsky than the "dream of the golden age,"

  which we first meet in Stavrogin's confession and which is presented much more sympathetically in A Raw Youth, the otherwise less successful novel that he wrote in the mid-seventies, between The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov. A Raw Youth was published in the populist journal Annals of the Fatherland, and presents a generally more complimentary picture of radical aspirations than The Possessed. An older figure dreams of the golden age of perfect harmony after seeing Claude Lorraine's painting "Acis and Galatea" in Dresden; Dostoevsky interjects:

  Marvelous dream, lofty error of mankind. The golden age is the most implausible of all the dreams that ever have been, but for it men have given up their life and all their strength, for the sake of it prophets have died and been slain, without it the people will not live and cannot die….

  But Rousseauism becomes merged with Christianity in this new, more positive image of the golden age. For the old man concludes:

  … I always complete my picture with Heine's vision of "Christ on the Baltic Sea." I could not get along without Him. He comes to them, holds out His hands, and asks them, "How could they forget Him?" And then, as it were, the scales would fall from their eyes and there would break forth the great rapturous hymn of the new and last resurrection.

  In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky anatomizes this myth of a Christianized Utopia. His famed "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" depicts the fundamental split within this very dream between social and material well-being and the freely given love of Christ. The Inquisitor defends his authoritarianism as a form of philanthropy which keeps ordinary people from being weighed down by the "unbearable burden" of freedom. The people, he points out, are grateful for the assurance of daily bread and are dependent on-even attached to-his despotic leadership.

  Dostoevsky's Inquisitor represents all political authority which recognizes no higher principle than the effectiveness of its own exercise. He is a dedicated, rational man; and it is these qualities that make authoritarianism, whether Catholic or socialist, so seductive.

  The Inquisitor claims to have improved on Christ's work, to have remedied the mistakes Christ made in not succumbing to the temptations in the wilderness. He incarnates the principle of "truth without Christ," the cold certainty of the crystal palace, of Euclid's geometry and Claude Bernard's physiology, which Dostoevsky felt must inevitably be extended to a society not carrying within itself the image and ideal of Christ.

  But Dostoevsky had written long ago that

  I am a child of the age, a child of unbelief and scepticism; I have been so far, and shall be I know to the grave … if anyone proved to me that Christ was not the truth, and it really was a fact that the truth was not in Christ, I would rather be with Christ than with the truth.27

  Alyosha Karamazov reacts to the legend which his brother Ivan relates by saying: "Your inquisitor does not believe in God, that is his secret." But his real secret seems to be that he believes in God without Christ. Dostoevsky, following Belinsky, seems to believe in Christ even without God. Ivan Karamazov's recitation of human cruelties and atrocities just before reciting the legend leads him to "return his ticket of admission" to heaven and, in effect, accuse God of being the author of human suffering. The only explicit answer given to the Inquisitor is the final kiss of the silent Christ: an implausible, almost desperate call for freely given love as the only Christlike answer to human pride.

  In his last journalistic writings-and particularly his speech dedicating the Pushkin memorial in the last year of his life-Dostoevsky plays anew with the seductive idea that the Russian people carry within themselves a unique consciousness of the reconciling qualities of Christianity. He speaks of the "Russian idea" of universal reconciliation through love and suffering as an antidote to the "Geneva idea" of organized theocracy. In the West generally "all is now strife and logic," driven on by "the dream of Rothschild," the thirst for wealth and power.

  The idea that Russia was the bearer of some new Christ-like harmony among the nations is often extrapolated from his works as the essence of Dostoevsky's "message." Yet it would be more accurate to speak of it as his private version of the myth-common to populists and Pan-Slavs alike- of a special path of Russian development that would redeem the errors of recent Western history. He loved the idea, but his belief in it-like that of Shatov, its most articulate fictional exponent-was hypothetical, even "wavering." Sometimes-particularly in his Diary of a Writer-Dostoevsky's position seems chauvinistic, and he is usually characterized as an extreme conservative. But he is not at all interested in preserving the status quo, let alone returning to some idealized past. He is merely opposed to the "less real" ideals of the political and industrial revolutionaries. He is a counter-revolutionary in De Maistre's sense that a "contre-revolution ne sera point une revolution contraire mais le contraire de la revolution."2* But Dostoevsky was not primarily a social theorist or philosopher but a master of suspense, a novelist of dramatic temperament. Thus, it is best to look to his novels-and above all to The Brothers Karamazov, his last one -for such "answers" as Dostoevsky may have sought to provide in this age of agonized agitation and social messages.

  In The Possessed we are led to believe that the entire intelligentsia is possessed, that Verkhovensky and Stavrogin are the true and logical heirs of Stepan Trofimovich. There is no way out, and Stepan Trofimovieh's last repentant wanderings are even less convincing than Raskolnikov's final "conversion" in Crime and Punishment. In The Brothers, however, Dostoevsky, unlike Musorgsky, is able to end on a note of hope, without either the melodramatic deus ex machina of eleventh-hour repentance and conversion or the romantic blending of religion with nationalism. Dostoevsky had experimented earlier with both answers, and there is both a melodramatic murder and a romantic image of the "Russian monk" at the center of The Brothers. But both the "repentance" and the "conversion" of the Karamazovs is incomplete and unconventional.

  Yet Dostoevsky does conclude that man can eliminate the need for salvation by raising himself to the level of a superman for whom "all is permissible" since there is no God. The idea of a new breed of men "beyond good and evil" motivated the ideological murder by Raskolnikov and ideological suicide by Kirillov and lies behind much of Ivan Karamazov's thinking about the central crime in The Brothers. Yet Ivan is a tortured figure who comes close to the madness that was so characteristic of the age. Ivan wants to believe in God but is visited only by the devil; and there is, seemingly, no way out.

  But Ivan is only one of three brothers, all of whom share in the common crime of patricide. The name of Smerdiakov, the illegitimate fourth brother who actually commits the crime,
suggests the word for "stink" (smerdet'); and the word Karamazov is a compound of words meaning "black" (Tatar kara) and "grease" {maz'). Like Sophocles in Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare in King Lear, Dostoevsky's drama deals with injustice to one's father. Yet unlike these, The Brothers Karamazov is not a tragedy. None of the three brothers dies; and the story sounds a final message of

  redemption.

  Essential to any understanding of this "message" is the fact that it is conveyed dramatically and not didactically. The "Legend" in itself solves nothing for Dostoevsky-although it may for those who read it and take sides between the protagonists. It occurs relatively early in the novel and is itself an episode in the confrontation of the two extremes among the brothers: the humble Alyosha and the proud, intellectual Ivan. The movement toward resolution of this familiar Dostoevskian antinomy proceeds through the third brother, Dmitry, the most original creation of the novel. Dmitry is closest to the crime and is put on trial for it-thereby becoming the focus for most of the drama.