Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  The Village of Stepanchikovo

  The Village of Stepanchikovo is more ambitious than Uncle’s Dream, although pitched at the same level and written in the same key of farcical comedy. Considering it his best work up to that time, Dostoevsky spoke of it as an authentic personal expression of his own point of view. “I have put into it my soul, my flesh and blood,” he tells his brother. “I do not wish to say that I have expressed myself completely in it; that would be nonsense! . . . but it contains two immensely typical characters, created and noted down over a five-year-period, worked out flawlessly (in my opinion)—characters entirely Russian and only badly presented up to now in Russian literature.”19 Dostoevsky is obviously referring to his two main figures, Foma Fomich Opiskin and Colonel Rostanev, whose strange relationship constitutes the heart of his story.

  For at least the first of these characters, Foma Fomich (his last name, Opiskin, means a mistake in writing or a slip of the pen), the passage of time has verified Dostoevsky’s conviction that he had produced an “immensely typical” figure; no less a judge than Thomas Mann has called him “a comic creation of the first rank, irresistible, rivaling Shakespeare and Molière.”20 Indeed, the name Foma Fomich has since become a byword in Russian for any kind of insolent and impertinent hypocrite, toady, and sponger and is used much as the names of Uriah Heep and Pecksniff are used in English. As Mann’s mention of Molière suggests, the role Foma Fomich plays in the household of Colonel Rostanev reminds one strongly of Tartuffe in Molière’s famous play, unquestionably one of Dostoevsky’s sources. Others of lesser importance have been unearthed; and important as they may be, it is more illuminating to view Foma as a new version of a type that Dostoevsky had often depicted in the 1840s. Like most of the protagonists of these early works, Foma is (or had been) one of the downtrodden, with just enough education to make him feel his obscure social status as a wounding humiliation. In the past, we learn, Foma had tried his hand at everything, at last finding employment as a reader and paid companion to a vicious general, an invalid who enjoys degrading his flunky for amusement: “there was no ignominy which he had not to endure in return for eating the General’s bread” (3: 8).

  Previously, Dostoevsky had treated such characters with sympathy, if occasionally also, as in The Double, mixed with ironic condescension; but in his very last work before Siberia, Netotchka Nezvanova, where he emphasizes the lack of any social cause for the failed musician Yefimov’s resentment against the world, he was moving toward the placement of moral responsibility squarely on the person himself for the consequences of his actions. Now, with Foma Fomich, Dostoevsky firmly and finally confronts the philanthropic moral assumptions of the Natural School—within whose ranks he had begun his own career and whose values he had once accepted—and rejects them out-of-hand. There is no mistaking the indictment that Dostoevsky levels against Foma’s conduct when his fortunes are reversed and he achieves a position of power: “He paid us out for his past! A base soul escaping from oppression becomes an oppressor” (3: 13). Not even the most extreme humiliations that Foma endured because of his social inferiority can absolve him from the onus of being “a base soul,” whose definition is precisely the inability to overcome a need to dominate and humiliate others as revenge for one’s own humiliation and sufferings.

  Foma Fomich is framed in the story by two other characters, who serve as “quasi-doubles” to highlight this authorial judgment of his baseness. The personal history of the wealthy heiress Tatyana Ivanovna, a guest in the hospitable home of Colonel Rostanev, is an exact parallel to that of Foma’s. All the same, the native sweetness and kindness of her nature remain unaltered when her position changes overnight. Closer in character to Foma is the clerk Yezhevikin, the impoverished father of the young governess Nastenka with whom Colonel Rostanev is in love. Like Foma, Yezhevikin has a rankling envy of his betters and, while pretending to be “the most abject, groveling flatterer” (3: 166), clearly is mocking and sneering at those before whom he is verbally subservient. At the same time, though, he is genuinely honest, possessing a sense of dignity that does not allow him to exploit others in his own interest or even to accept any but the most essential financial aid offered out of kindness by the Colonel.

  That The Village of Stepanchikovo explicitly involves a critical revision by Dostoevsky of his own past is also clearly indicated by the narrative perspective. For the story is told by a young man, a nephew of the Colonel, brought up by him and a recent graduate of the University of St. Petersburg. What happens in Stepanchikovo is recounted through his startled and disbelieving eyes, and the change he undergoes is of first-rate thematic importance. Before meeting Foma Fomich in the flesh, the narrator responds to all the rumors about him in accordance with the humanitarian principles inculcated by his progressive university education. And these principles turn out to be, in a simplified and parodistic form, precisely those that had inspired Dostoevsky’s own works in the 1840s. Perhaps, says the young narrator fumblingly, Foma is “a gifted nature” who “has been wounded, crushed by sufferings,” and so is avenging himself on humanity (“and perhaps if he could be reconciled to humanity . . . he would turn out to be a rare nature, perhaps even a very remarkable one”) (3: 29). This point of view is abandoned instantly by the narrator once he sees Foma in action; and his change of heart reveals to what extent Dostoevsky was conscious of having broken with the ideology of his earlier work. From this time on, the social-psychological perspective he had largely maintained throughout the 1840s will be replaced by one in which the moral responsibility of the person takes precedence over all other considerations.

  As the narrator rightly observes, Foma Fomich could not have achieved the “insolent domination” he exercises at Stepanchikovo if not for the equally remarkable character of the owner of that estate, Colonel Rostanev. No single Dostoevskian character anticipates Colonel Rostanev as clearly as Yefimov does Foma Fomich, but the Colonel may nonetheless be linked to a thematic tendency already observable in Netotchka Nezvanova. Just as in the case of Yefimov, that is, without overtly clashing with the social-psychological framework, Dostoevsky stressed the need to overcome the instinctive impulse of the humiliated ego to hit back; each important episode illustrates in some way the nefarious moral consequences of a failure to conquer resentment and the ravages of an egoism so self-absorbed as to be incapable of forgiveness or even of mercy. Now, in The Village of Stepanchikovo, Dostoevsky essays his first positive embodiment of this thematic motif in a single character, his first attempt to create that ideal of a “perfectly good man” to which he will return repeatedly throughout the remainder of his life. And the juxtaposition and pairing of Foma and the Colonel—the face-to-face opposition of an egomaniacal member of the Russian intelligentsia with a simple Russian soul, overflowing with charity and love—anticipates a similar pattern in many later works.

  Dostoevsky presents his first ideal figure in the unlikely guise of an officer, now retired to run his estate. While appearing the very image of presumably self-assertive masculine health and strength, Colonel Rostanev possesses a moral disposition seraphic in its mildness, amiability, and lack of self-regard. “He was a perfect child at forty, open-hearted in the extreme, always good-humored, imagining everybody an angel. . . . He was one of those very generous and pure-hearted men who are positively ashamed to assume any harm of another . . . and in that way always live in an ideal world, and when anything goes wrong always blame themselves first. To sacrifice themselves in the interests of others is their natural vocation” (3: 13–14). Colonel Rostanev is thus a “weak” character in the best sense of that word; and one has the distinct impression that in dealing with his qualities, Dostoevsky is doing so with a side-glance at the Chernyshevsky-Annenkov controversy. Why otherwise should the narrator have felt called on to meet the following objection: “Some people would have called him cowardly, weak-willed and feeble. Of course he was weak, and indeed he was of too soft a disposition; but it was not from lack of will, but from fear of
wounding, of behaving cruelly, from excess of respect for others. . . . He was, however, weak-willed and cowardly only when nothing was at stake but his own interests, which he completely disregarded, and for this he was continually an object of derision, and often with the very people for whom he was sacrificing his own advantage” (3: 14).

  Foma Fomich obtains his initial hold over the Colonel when he arrives in the retinue of the Colonel’s mother, the widow of the general who had used (and abused) Foma as his buffoon. Foma has succeeded in gaining control over this credulous and superstitious woman, who rivals him in selfishness and self-indulgence while lacking his cunning and intelligence. “He (Foma) read aloud to them [Madame le générale and her repulsive hangers-on] works of spiritual edification; held forth with eloquent tears on the Christian virtues; told stories of his life and heroic doings; went to mass and even to matins; at times foretold the future; had a peculiar faculty for interpreting dreams, and was a great hand at throwing blame on his neighbors” (3: 8). As the narrator bitingly remarks: “And this idiot woman my uncle thought it his duty to revere, simply because she was his mother” (3: 14). As a result, the Colonel’s reverence for his mother is transferred to Foma, and Foma exploits this filial devotion to turn the Colonel into a plaything at the mercy of the whims of a malicious underling. It is the consummate moral imposter Foma who displays all the sins he imputes to the Colonel, but the latter, incapable of finding fault with others and only too ready to accuse himself, is tremendously impressed by Foma’s high-minded regurgitations of snippets from Gogol’s Selected Passages (and his earlier Testament).

  A good many of the ideas uttered by Foma Fomich unquestionably contain injunctions and exhortations that speak for Dostoevsky’s own moral ideals. “Be softer, more attentive, more loving to others,” Foma admonishes the Colonel, “forget yourself for the sake of others. . . . Suffer, labor, pray and hope” (3: 89). Dostoevsky does not satirize the literal sense of such perfectly respectable Christian counsels, which he had no intention of undermining in themselves, but rather their perversion to obtain and justify domination over others. The target of Dostoevsky’s attack is Foma’s pose of self-glorification and almost self-deification. He repudiates Foma, after all, by juxtaposing him with Colonel Rostanev, who is the authentic embodiment of all the moral values that Foma is eternally proclaiming in words and totally ignoring in deeds. A remark made years later by Dostoevsky reflects his unchanging negative attitude toward the Selected Passages. “The ideal of Gogol is strange,” he wrote; “inwardly it is Christianity, but his Christianity is not Christianity.”21 Dostoevsky created Colonel Rostanev as his first “outward” image of what it meant to be a genuine Christian.

  Most of the action is taken up with the various devices invented by Foma, with ingenious nastiness, to harass and mortify the Colonel—all being calculated, at the same time, to exalt the insatiable vanity of the erstwhile flunky. A serious level of intrigue involves the plan, concocted by Foma and the Colonel’s mother, to force the Colonel into marriage with Tatyana Ivanovna. Actually, he is in love with Nastenka, the poor young governess of his two children by his first marriage. Aware of the Colonel’s inclination, Foma and Madame le générale persecute Nastenka unmercifully with the aim of driving her away, and the Colonel initially invites his young nephew to Stepanchikovo as a prospective suitor for Nastenka if he can win her consent. Once he is on the scene, however, the situation becomes clear, and the narrator urges his uncle to defy the plotters and marry Nastenka himself.

  The dénouement occurs when Foma finally goes too far, accusing the Colonel in public of having seduced and depraved the young woman. This is too much even for the long-suffering Colonel, who, enraged at the slur on Nastenka’s reputation, physically pitches Foma Fomich through a glass door and out of the house. The unbeatable Foma soon returns, bruised and battered, but chastened enough now to realize that he must change his tune. So he blesses the marriage, pretending to have been in favor of it all along, and lives happily ever after in clover with the grateful pair, posing, preaching, and carrying on much as before, but careful not to overstep the line that finally had been drawn: “She (Nastenka) would not see her husband humiliated and insisted on her wishes being respected” (3: 164).

  Dostoevsky was speaking truthfully when he declared that The Village of Stepanchikovo had been written with “his flesh and blood,” and one can already see reflected in its pages some of the important artistic consequences of his Siberian years. These consequences are most evident in Foma Fomich, who illustrates Dostoevsky’s deepened understanding of the explosive power of resentment and frustration simmering in the irrational depths of the human personality. For what had been suggested in Yefimov only as an aberration of the Romantic ego is now presented as a widespread human potentiality. Foma’s immeasurable vanity, the narrator remarks, may seem a special case, but in fact, “who knows, perhaps in some of these degraded victims of fate, your fools and buffoons, vanity far from being dispelled by humiliation is even aggravated by that very humiliation . . . and being forever forced to submission and self-suppression” (3: 12). Such a comment springs directly from Dostoevsky’s indelible recollections of the prison camp, where he had seen the need of the personality to assert itself in some way at all costs.

  Indeed, it is possible—though probably a trifle premature—to regard Foma Fomich as a first sketch of the underground man. In general, Foma acts in a perfectly rational manner. Even though his behavior as a whole can hardly be compared with the willful self-destructiveness of the underground man, there is one scene in which he does exhibit a willingness to sacrifice immediate self-interest for the sake of an “irrational” ego satisfaction. When the Colonel offers Foma a large sum of money to leave Stepanchikovo and settle in the nearby town, proposing to buy him a house there as well, Foma rejects the inducement with monumental scorn and squeals of outrage that his “honor” is being insulted. Another character comments, on hearing of the incident, “I doubt whether Foma had any mercenary design on it [the refusal]. He is not a practical man; he is a sort of poet, too, in his own way. . . . He would have taken the money, do you see, but he couldn’t resist the temptation to strike an attitude and give himself airs” (3: 93–94). Such a predominance of emotive impulse over economic calculation is only a momentary velleity in Foma’s case, but it does point the way to the future elaboration of his psychology into that of the underground man.22

  We have already commented on the deflation of the narrator’s philanthropic sentiments once he catches sight of Foma in the flesh, and Dostoevsky reinforces this key motif at the conclusion, where he also adds another important touch to the characterization of the Colonel. For just after Foma has been tamed and placated, the Foma motif is reiterated in relation to another “great man” and “light of learning,” Korovkin, whom the Colonel has met by chance one day and invited to Stepanchikovo. This worthy gentleman turns up at the climax, amid the general rejoicing, attired in greasy rags and dead drunk. The Colonel begins to apologize for him in words almost identical with those earlier used by the narrator about Foma: “You know, he may be an excellent man, but fate. . . . He has had misfortunes. . . .” At which point the affectionate narrator, to comfort his embarrassed uncle, pretends to agree with him: “And I began fervently declaring that even in the creature who has fallen lowest there may still survive the finest human feelings; that the depths of the human soul are unfathomable; that we must not despise the fallen but on the contrary ought to seek them out and raise them up; that the commonly accepted standard of goodness and morality was not infallible, and so on, and so on; in fact, I warmed up to the subject, and even began talking about the Natural School. In conclusion, I even repeated the verses: ‘When from dark error’s subjugation . . .’ ” (3: 160–161).

  The verse, taken from a poem by Nekrasov, celebrates the magnanimity of a high-minded “progressive” lover who, having risen above social prejudice, “redeems” a prostitute by making her his wife. By this time, the narrato
r regards the words of Colonel Rostanev as typical of the indiscriminately benevolent attitude represented by the poem—the very same attitude he has just managed to slough off himself. He thus cites the poem ironically, as a notorious expression of such well-meant but naïve illusions. The Colonel, though, in his entire innocence, takes the narrator’s words at face value; but what he says, in supposed agreement, differs significantly from the narrator’s progressive litany. “ ‘My dear, my dear,’ he said, much touched, ‘you understand me fully, and have said much better than I could what I wanted to express: Yes, yes! Good heaven! Why is it man is wicked? Why is it I am so often wicked when it is so splendid, so fine to be good’ ” (3: 161).

  Dostoevsky, it seems to me, wishes the reader now to feel a distinct difference between the effusions of the Colonel and the narrator’s tongue-in-cheek recital of his benevolent commonplaces, which have already been exploded in the main action involving Foma. What separates the two attitudes is that, in the Colonel’s case, his spontaneous sympathy with his fellow man immediately involves a sense of his own weakness and human fallibility. Nothing of the kind can be seen in the humanitarianism of the Natural School, which contains, on the contrary, a latent self-complacency, an implicit posture of superiority to and patronage of the “fallen,” who must of course be “sought out and raised up.”

  In the brief epilogue, Dostoevsky comments on the same altruistic position as exhibited by Nastenka. It is she who keeps Foma in check after her marriage with the Colonel, but the narrator remarks that she nonetheless forgave Foma because of her happiness, “and what is more, I believe she seriously with all her heart entered into my uncle’s idea that too much must not be expected from a ‘victim’ who had once been a buffoon, but on the contrary, balm must be poured on his wounded heart. Poor Nastenka had herself been one of the humiliated, she had suffered and she remembered it” (3: 164). Once again Dostoevsky emphasizes the personal sense of identification with the victim or sufferer—a compassion springing not from any theoretical doctrine of social pity, with its implied sense of distance and hierarchy, but out of a frame of mind and heart placing the forgiver on exactly the same moral-human level as the forgiven.