Johns Hopkins University Press Is Collaborating With JSTOR To Digitize, Preserve and Extend Access To The Sewanee Review

The Masks of Stavrogin
Author(s): Joseph Frank

Source: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 77, No. 4 (Autumn, 1969), pp. 660-691
Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27541763
Accessed: 27-01-2016 18:55 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Sewanee Review.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 160.36.178.25 on Wed, 27 Jan 2016 18:55:13 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
THE MASKS OF STAVROGIN
By JOSEPH FRANK
NO other work of Dostoevsky's poses so many and such

formidable problems for the critic as does The Devils
(more familiarly known in English under the less
accurate title of The To with the most obvious
Possessed). begin
matters, The Devils contains the richest assortment of comic
parodies and satirical caricatures that Dostoevsky ever assembled
between the covers
of one volume; and unless these are noted and
taken into critical account, one can hardly do justice to Dostoev
sky's dominating artistic purpose. More subtly, the very concep
tion of the book requires Dostoevsky to present aborted or de
formed versions of doctrines and attitudes to which he himself is
passionately committed; and this has led to endless misunder

both about his own convictions and about the
standings signifi
cance of the novel. Finally, The Devils is further complicated
by its tangled genesis?Dostoevsky changed his idea of
the theme after a part of it was written?and also
good
by the refusal of Katkov, the editor of the journal in which
The Devils was being serialized, to print the chapter containing
Stavrogin's confession. The book must, of course, be interpreted
primarily in terms of what Dostoevsky actually succeeded in
getting on the page; but this can sometimes be clearly seen only
if we are aware of the unwritten novel whose outlines can be dis
cerned in the history of the written one.
Originally, Dostoevsky's first grasp of his subject was purely

satiric and he had intended to concentrate on the
caricatural;
comic confusion of the Liberal and Idealist generation of the
1840's confronted with the disastrous consequences of their own
ideas in the Nihilists of the later 1860's. At this stage of his con
referred to the novel as a "pamphlet", and
ception Dostoevsky
said that he was resolved to sacrifice "art" to "tendentiousness".
JOSEPH FRANK 661
"Art" for Dostoevsky always meant the serious treatment of a

basic moral conflict?a conflict which, whatever its point of depar
ture in the contemporary socio-cultural situation, far transcended
this context in the range of its human implications. In The Devils,
however, Dostoevsky did not set out to portray any such inner
discord or dilemma from the inside 3 he thought he would limit
himself only to castigating the beliefs and principles of the radi
cals (as well as the frivolity and stupidity of Russian "educated"
society) with withering scorn. The narrative technique of the
novel was thus conceived of very early in terms appropriate to
this idea?as, that is, the report of a relatively detached observer,
a down a series of unusual and gro
provincial chronicler, setting
tesquely horrible events. (Among the notes for an early draft,
there is a phrase in italics, probably a
provisional in which
subtitle,
the book is called: "Extracts from a By
provincial chronicle".)
the choice of such a narrator was able to "distance"
Dostoevsky
himself very effectively from his characters?he could view them
externally, retain his freedom to comment, and, at the same time,
keep the narrative focused on the and social nature of the
public
events depicted.
It is well known that, having already to write
begun according
to this original was confronted with a crisis when
plan, Dostoevsky
Stavrogin erupted into the manuscript as a major Stavro
figure.
gin was unquestionably a "tragic"
character, and this meant that
he would ordinarily have been treated internally and psycho
logically; but in this case Dostoevsky did not fundamentally
change his narrative perspective. Stavrogin too is seen completely
from the outside except in the and even here
confession-scene;
he "confesses" by means of a document which itself
interposes
between his consciousness in the scene and the reader. In other
words, we are never inside Stavrogin, living with the life of his
feelings, as we are inside the underground man Raskolnikov or
Prince Myshkin. To be sure, neither Stavrogin nor his two main
interlocutors, Shatov and Kirillov, are satirized or parodied; but
662 THE MASKS OF STAVROGIN
while their for an absolute

obsessive
quest value has more in
herent dignity than the posturings of Stepan Trofimovich, or the
machinations of Peter Verkhovensky and his "quintet", they are
not presented in a radically different fashion. All the characters
are seen from the outside, and their consciousnesses (as distinct
from their emotive responses to particular situations) are rarely
if ever dramatized directly at any length. Hence the book pre
serves a considerable degree of artistic unity, despite the marked
differences in tone between the satirical and non-satirical sections.
Dostoevsky's handling of his narrative, all the same, is by no

means perfect or consistent from a purely technical point of view.
An unregenerate Jamesian could well quarrel with his failure to
make the chronicler an integral part of the story; and the feeble
indication of the narrator's infatuation from afar with Liza Tushin
only makes matters worse rather than better. Moreover, the

"voice" the chronicler
of fades away entirely in certain scenes
where is not present,

he and about which we are simply told that
he has gathered information. "... I will pass on," he writes at
one point, "to the description of the succeeding incidents of my
so to say, with full knowledge, and describing
chronicle, writing,
as they became known and are clearly seen
things afterwards,
today." It is quite clear, however, that the chronicler could not
have learned exact words,
the the physical movements,
possibly
and the inner responses of the characters as they are represented
in these scenes: has substituted an objective

Dostoevsky simply
narrator for the eye-witness
here account of the chronicler. There
narrators in The who alternate
are, as a result, really two Devils,
with each other and are hitched together rather apologeti
cally with remarks like the one just quoted.
the inconsistencies of this Dostoevsky was
Despite procedure,
nonetheless very well advised to run the artistic risks that it en
For it has the great advantage of allowing him to
gendered.
narrow and to widen his focus on the action easilv and at will,
and to step back from the intensity of the dramatic closeups to
JOSEPH FRANK 663
the sweeping and summarizing commentary of the chronicler

whenever he wishes to do so. And while an third
objective,
person narrator might have given him a similar freedom, he
would have been forced to sacrifice the effects he obtains with his
chronicler. No narrator could have had the same
third-person
inflection as the chronicler's and this "voice" an
"voice"; plays
important part in controlling the effect of the book, to which it
a and
imparts special quality atmosphere.
The "voice" of the chronicler, in the first place, is that of a
"moderate liberal", who sympathizes with progress and im
provement and is against both the extreme reactionaries and the

extreme radicals. It is the voice of the average educated Russian,
a good citizen and a faithful subject, for whom both the hopes of
Peter Verkhovensky and the fears of Stepan Trofimovich are
nightmare and fantasy; they are the extravagances and excres

cences that come and go on the surface of Russian but which
life,
cannot possibly have any permanent effect. Moreover, the
chronicler is a friend and neighbor of the main figures?a some
what gossipy and malicious but fundamentally good-hearted soul,
who wavers between exposure and apology. He knows the
petty and excusable personal weaknesses that lie at the root of so

much of the chaos he depicts; and his comments thus constantly
reduce the turbulent events of the book to eccentric and isolated
manifestations. In this way their importance is continually being
softened and muted, and their scale tends to be reduced to the
level of personal fallibility and social tittle-tattle. Finally, the
constant reappearance of the "voice" of the chronicler, taking up
the thread after the hallucinatory intensity of the dramatic epi
sodes, breaks their spell and recalls to the reader that all this is
part of a past now happily done with. It thus throws a certain
veil of epic serenity even over the hecatomb of murders and
deaths that make this book the goriest of Dostoevsky's novel
tragedies.
II
Dostoevsky immediately establishes the social and historical
perspective of his theme by the leisurely and superbly ironical

portrait of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, the Liberal Ideal
ist of the 1840's. Stepan Trofimovich is here portrayed against
the of a brilliantly evocation of Russian
background parodistic
culture from the 1830's to the point at which the novel begins in
1869-1870. Almost every concrete cultural detail of this
masterly mosaic is taken from one or another actual source,
whether an event or a text; but it would be tedious and, for our
purposes, critically unenlightening, to identify them all.1 More
important is to note that the chronicler's account of Stepan

Trofimovich's career is an excellent example of how he deflates
and reduces whatever he describes. In this case the reduction is
accomplished bothby the vagueness of his recollection of Stepan

Trofimovich's works, and by the burlesque heightening of lan
guage when he speaks about them. Stepan Trofimovich's famous
article, he writes, contained "the beginning of a very profound
investigation into the causes, I believe, of the extraordinary moral
nobility of certain knights at a certain epoch or something of that

nature. Some lofty and exceptionally noble idea was maintained
in it, anyway." The choice of such a subject, of course, also de
fines the sublime elevation of Stepan Trofimovich's ideals, which
form such a pathetic and touching contrast to the actual circum
stances of his life.
A similar effect is obtained by the chronicler's account of Stepan
Trofimovich's inflammatory prose-poem, which was written in
the style of the romantic epic popular in France during the 1830's.
of this effusion "had been round a
Manuscript copies passed
circle consisting of two poetical amateurs and one student", and
aThe job of spotting Dostoevsky's sources has been very well done in Russian
scholarship. A good summary of its results may be found in the article by F. I.
Yevnin, "Roman Besi". Tvorchestvo Dostoevskogo, ed. by N. L. Stepanov, Moscow,
1959, pp. 215-264.
JOSEPH FRANK 665
it is described as "some an allegory
sort in lyrical-dramatic
of
form, recalling the second part of Faust". The extremely funny

parody of such a work is too long to quote entire; but the conclud
ing passage must be cited as the first suggestion of the book's sym
bolism.
Then a youth of indescribable

beauty rides in on a black
steed, and an immense multitude of all nations follow him.
The youth represents death, for whom all the peoples are
yearning. And finally, in the last scene we are suddenly

shown the Tower of Babel, and certain athletes at last finish
building it with a song of new hope, and when at length
they complete the topmost pinnacle, the lord (of Olympus,
let us say) takes flight in a comic fashion, and man, grasping
the situation and seizing his place, at once begins a new life
with a new insight into things.
For all its humor, this parody contains the basic theme of the
book and foreshadows the appearance of Stavrogin. He too is of
an "indescribable beauty"; he too is death and not life; he too is
followed, if not by a multitude of all nations, then by the
multitude of all those who look to him for inspiration. He too
believes that man can replace?not of course the lord of Olym
pus, who has nothing to do with the Tower of Babel, but the
God of the Old Testament and His Son of the New. He is the
pretender and the impostor to the throne of God, just as Death
in the poem aspires to be the Source of Life; and everything that
stems from him is thus marked with the seal of supreme falsity
and deception and leads to Death. It is a counterfeit and fraudu
lent facsimile of the Truth; and this symbolism of the usurper,
the pretender, the impostor runs through every aspect of the
book, underlying and linking together its action in a way that has
generally escaped attention.
Nobody, to be sure, is more of an impostor?more of an en
dearing and charming old fake?than Stepan Trofimovich; even

hostile critics of The Devils, enraged at its lampooning of the
radicals, greeted his appearance as a triumph. Dostoevsky paints

him with such an overflowing abundance of traits that it is diffi
cult to do justice to them all; but each reinforces the comic dis
crepancy between his rhetorical postures and his practical per

formances. To take
only example, one lazy, self-coddling the
Stepan Trofimovich, who is always on the point of beginning to

write his great masterpiece (but somehow never quite gets
started), is very fond of indulging in a little homily on the vir
tues and importance of work for the Russian character. "For the
last twenty years I've been sounding the tocsin and calling to
work. ... I shall hold on to the bell-rope till they start tolling
for my requiem," he declaims impressively to his deferential au
dience.
His tender and frustrating relationship with his domineering
patroness, based on a pattern of alternating moods of exasperation
and adoration on both sides, is irresistibly funny broad comedy;
and it shows, incidentally, that Dostoevsky could use his famous
love-hate situation in whatever key was required by his theme.
Moreover, despite his personal loathing for the Nihilism of Peter

Verkhovensky, Dostoevsky does not fail to let him puncture his
father's self-protective poses with deadly accuracy. The pitiless
realism of the Nihilist, always viewing everything in terms of
the crudest self-interest, time and again reveals the skeleton in
Stepan Trofimovich's beautifully bedecked closet; but this only

serves to make the fickle old Idealist even more sympathetic and
appealing. For whatever the material basis of his existence, he

has never exploited it cynically or basely; and he has always been
aware that he is unworthy of the great ideals that he proclaims
and reveres. Stepan Trofimovich, in other words, has never
allowed his conscience to become blunted or dulled; and this,
for Dostoevsky, is always the key to salvation.
This first chapter not only establishes the historical framework

within which the action will be placed, but also serves a more
discreet aesthetic function. These pages have a static quality
JOSEPH FRANK 667
that transmits an of the calm tranquillity and lulling
impression
routine of the pattern of life that would soon be upset by the
incursion of "the devils", who gradually filter into the provincial
town from outside to shake it to its very roots. The chronicler,
significantly, stresses the perfectly innocuous, commonplace, and
almost ritual nature of the gatherings of Stepan Trofimovich's
group of visitors and some of whose members will soon

friends,
serve as the of Peter
nucleus Verkhovensky's "quintet". "At
one time it was
repeated about the town that our little circle was
. . .And
a hotbed of Nihilism, profligacy, and godlessness. yet we
did nothing but indulge in the most harmless, agreeable, typi
cally Russian, light-hearted liberal chatter." Life would have
continued to go on very much as before without the external
stimulus provided by Peter Verkhovensky's determination to
change words into deeds; and the gradually tightening web of
the plot, with its accelerating tempo and intricate network of con
cealed communicates an almost sense of this
relations, physical
gradual invasion of a
long-established order by occult forces sur
reptitiously taking over its destiny. In this respect the undramatic

and (for Dostoevsky) unusually slow opening chapter works
to set off by contrast the tension of the rest of the book, and to
an formal analogue for the thematic action.
provide appropriate
Ill
Following the opening chapter devoted to Stepan Trofimo

at
vich, we are introduced next to Stavrogin; and this is the point
which, in my view, Dostoevsky's organization of his plot damages

the effectiveness of his symbolic pattern. Nikolai Stavrogin, up
to the age of sixteen, has been the pupil of Stepan Trofimovich,
who was entrusted with his education. This makes a Liberal
Idealist of the 1840's the spiritual progenitor of a Byronic type,
a blood-brother of Eugene and Lermontov's
Onegin Pechorin,
associated in Russian culture with the 1820's and the 1830's. How
can one account for this peculiar feature of the book?
With the aid of Dostoevsky's notebooks, it is not too difficult to

reconstruct what occurred. Initially, the ideological center of the
novel was to have been the relation between Stepan Trofimovich
and his son, Peter. In this version, the plot contained a colorless
a former
character called the "Prince", pupil of Stepan Trofimo
vich's who had no socio-cultural function. The
particular
"Prince" then later emerged as Stavrogin, and replaced Stepan
Trofimovich as the thematic center; it was the Byronic Stavrogin
who, historically, had indeed been the original source of all the
foreign id?ologies that had infected the ailing body of Russia with
madness. Trying^ though, to preserve as much of his old manu
script as possible after Stavrogin appeared, Dostoevsky failed to

alter the plot-pattern to fit his new thematic conception; and the
result is an unfortunate confusion that obscures the real meaning
of his symbolic chronology. Stavrogin's Byronism loses much of
its historical point when he is turned into Stepan Trofimovich's
disciple; and so does the nature of Stavrogin's relation to Kirillov
and Shatov, which can be adequately understood only in
historical-symbolic terms.
Dostoevsky accurately underlines the heritage of Romantic
sensibility that linked the generations of Stepan Trofimo

vich and Stavrogin; but he anachronistically requires Stepan
Trofimovich to bear the onus of having exercised a morbid
and unhealthy influence on his youthful and impressionable
charge. "More than once he awakened his ten-or-eleven year
old friend at night, simply to pour out his wounded feelings and
weep before him, or to tell him some family secret, without
noticing that this was totally The tutor com
impermissible."
municated all the moral uncertainty and instability of his own
character to his unfortunate pupil, without providing anything
positive to counteract their unsettling effects; the result was to
leave an aching emptiness at the center of Stavrogin's being.
"Stepan Trofimovich succeeded in reaching the deepest chords
in his pupil's heart, and had aroused in him a first vague sensa
JOSEPH FRANK 669
tion of that eternal, sacred longing which some elect souls, once
having tasted and discovered it, will then never exchange for a
cheap gratification. (There are some connoisseurs who prize this
longing more than the most satisfaction of it, if

complete
such were possible)." This passage both defines Stavrogin as
being emotionally engaged in the quest for an absolute of some
kind, and also suggests the perversity springing from his lack of
any positive goal. His quest is a spiritual experimentation totally
preoccupied with itself, totally enclosed within the ego, and hence
incapable of self-surrender to the absolute that it is presumably
seeking.
All through this first evocation of Stavrogin, Dostoevsky ac
centuates the pure gratuity of his scandalous behavior, the im
possibility of explaining it by any ordinary and commonplace

motives. Stavrogin is not simply exhibiting the customary inso
lence of his class and personal position when he lives the riotous
life of a Guards officer; this is not merely the "cheap gratifica
tion" of an overbearing social vanity, or of an uncontrollable itch
for sensual pleasures. There is something mysterious about Stav
rogin's violence, about his taste for self-degradation,

particularly
that transcends the norm; he is not, as Stepan Trofimovich con
suggests to his mother, a young Prince Harry out of

solingly
"immortal chronicle", sowing his wild oats and
Shakespeare's
rubbing elbows with the people before settling down to assume
his rightfully exalted position in society.
The sheer gratuitousness of his defiance of social convention is
stressed even more strongly in the episodes that scandalize his
hometown on his return. He suddenly the nose of a harm
pulls
less old gentleman who has been in the habit of asserting, "No,
you can't lead me by the nose!"; on the spur of the moment he
publicly kisses Liputin's pretty wife with genuine passion; called

in by his distant relative, the Governor of the province, for some
explanations, he surpasses himself by biting the Governor's ear.

All these incidents suggest Stavrogin's refusal to bridle or check
his impulses in any way, his rejection of any internal or external

restraints on the absolute autonomy of his self-will; and when he
goes mad with an attack of "brain fever", this, as the chronicler

remarks, was thought by some to be "neither here nor there" so
far as explaining his actions was concerned.
The first physical description of Stavrogin given by the chroni
cler pinpoints his strange appearance of indefinable artificiality?
an appearance that obviously derives from his symbolic function.
"His hair was of a peculiarly intense black, his light-colored eyes
were was
peculiarly light and calm, his complexion peculiarly soft
and white, the red in his cheeks was too bright and clear, his teeth
were like pearls and his lips like coral?one would have thought
the very acme of beauty, yet at the same time somehow repellent.
It was said that his face suggested a mask. . . ." mask
Stavrogin's
like beauty reminds one of the vampires and ghouls of Gothic
fictional mythology; like them he is a living corpse, whose un
earthly beauty is the deceptive fa?ade behind which festers the
horror of evil and corruption. Several years later, however,
when the chronicler observes him face-to-face a change
again,
has occurred. "Now?now, I don't know why he impressed me
at once as absolutely, incontestably beautiful, so that no one could
have said that his face was like a mask"; now he seemed to have
"the light of some new idea in his eyes".
This "new idea" is clearly that of his decision to reject and
transcend his past, to humiliate himself publicly and sincerely by
acknowledging his marriage to Marya Lebyadkin and confessing
his violation of Matryosha. By seeking forgiveness and absolu
tion, he hopes to save himself from the madness that he feels to

be his impending fate. On the purely moral-personal level,
Stavrogin's r?le as a character is defined by his despairing struggle
to triumph over the egoism of his self-will and to attain a state
of genuine humility. The first overt manifestation of this "new
idea" is the self-control that he exhibits under the provocation of
Shatov's blow; but in the same scene he lies about his relation to
JOSEPH FRANK 671
the crippled Marya, which he wishes to reveal only under the
conditions of his own choosing. And this is the first evidence for
Tikhon's later
judgment that Stavrogin's egoism, far from having
been conquered by his new resolution, has taken on its subtlest
form of all as a of contempt.
carefully staged martyrdom
The comments of the chronicler at the end of this scene, who
compares Stavrogin both with a legendary Decembrist of the
1820's and with Lermontov, try to compensate for his his
torical anomalousness and, at the same time, throw further
light
on his inner desiccation and emotional In the past, such
apathy.
"rapacious" Byronic types?as Apollon Grigoriev2 had called
them?had at least enjoyed the consciousness of their own
superiority and strength; but while Stavrogin would have per

formed the same feats from which they derived pleasure, it would
have been "without the slightest thrill of enjoyment, languidly,
even with ennui and entirely neces
from
listlessly, unpleasant
sity". had even more than such gentle
Stavrogin "malignancy"
men of the past, "but his was
malignancy cold, calm, and, if one
may say so, rational?therefore, the most and terrible
revolting
possible." All the springs of human feeling of whatever kind
have dried up in Stavrogin; his demonism is that of a total
rationalism which, once having emptied life of all significance and
values, can no longer make any direct, instinctive response even
to its most primitive solicitations. Byron's Manfred has different
reasons for his despair with life (his crime of incest, which re
sembles Stavrogin's of
violation innocence, is at least a crime of
passion), but his self-characterization accurately applies to Stavro
gin as well :
aApollon Grigoriev was the best Russian critic of the mid-nineteenth century, a
close friend of Dostoevsky's, and an important contributor to Dostoevsky's maga
zines, Time and Epoch. He developed a view of Russian culture as a conflict between
"rapacious" Byronic types imported from the West, and indigenous Russian "meek"
types.
. . . or evil, life,
Good,
Powers, all I see in other beings,
passions,
Have been to me as rain unto the sands,
.... I have no dread,
And feel the curse to have no natural fear,
Nor throb, that beats with hopes or wishes,
fluttering
Or lurking love of something on the earth.
IV
The action in the first four chapters of Part II, which concen
trate on as he makes a round of visits to Kirillov,
Stavrogin
Shatov, and the Lebyadkins, indirectly illuminates both his
historical-symbolic significance and the tragedy of his yearning for
an unattainable absolution and humility. The first two figures
represent an aspect of himself that he has discarded, but

which has now become transformed into one or another ideological
"devil" permanently obsessing his spiritual disciples. In the case
of Kirillov, this "devil" is the temptation to self-deification logi
cally deriving from the atheistic humanism of Feuerbach. "The
turning-point of history," Feuerbach had written in The Essence

"will be the moment when man becomes aware
of Christianity,
that the only God of man is man himself. Homo homini Deus.v
There is an obvious echo of this famous declaration in the scene
in Part re
between Kirillov and the chronicler I, when Kirillov
marks that history will be divided into two parts, "from the
to the annihilation of God, and from the annihilation
gorilla
of God to . . . ['To the gorilla?' ironically interjects the narrator]
... to the transformation of the earth and of man physically.
Man will be God and be transformed physically."
Kirillovis one of Dostoevsky's most remarkable creations, who?
like Raskolnikov, displays his intimate understanding of the moral
afflatus inspiring so many of the radicals whose concrete political
aims he abhorred. A secular saint, Kirillov's whole being has
been consumed by a need for self-sacrifice; and his part in the
JOSEPH FRANK 673
plot-action is determined by this need. Having resolved to

own has offered to do so at the moment that
take his life, he
would most aid the "cause" as represented by Peter Verkhoven
sky; and Peter to use this magnanimous resolution to cover

plans
the murder of Shatov. This same need for sacrifice is evident in
Kirillov's original decision, which is taken out of a desire to free
man from the pain and fear of death. God, Kirillov believes as
a good Feuerbachian, is nothing but the projected image of this
pain and
fear; and by committing suicide solely with the aim of
expressing the highest capacity of man's self-will?-solely to free

man from a God who is nothing but his fear?Kirillov is con
vinced he will initiate the era of the man-god predicted by Feuer
bach. Kirillov's suicide will thus be a martyrdom for mankind,
but a martyrdom which reverses the significance of that of
Christ; rather than testifying to the reality and existence of God,

it will mark His definitive elimination from human consciousness.
With a daring that has created a great deal of confusion, Dos
toevsky does not hesitate to endow Kirillov with many of the
attributes of Prince Myshkin?his love for children, his ecstatic
affirmation of life, his eschatological apprehension of the end of
time. The symbolism of the book, it should be remembered, re
quires Stavrogin always to a deformed and distorted

inspire
image of the Truth?but an image which resembles its original
as closely and uncannily as Stavrogin's "mask" resembles healthy
human beauty. Hence Dostoevsky gives Kirillov the "mask" of
Myshkin's apocalyptic intuitions and feelings, while revealing

the monstrosities that result when these religious aspirations, di
vorced from a faith in Christ, become exclusively secular and sub
jective ideas. Kirillov's deification of Man leads to his own

self-destruction, as well as to that of all mankind ("it will be the
same to live or not to live") ; his conviction that the Advent has
already arrived deludes him into denying the existence of evil

("everything is good") ; and he sees no difference between wor
shiping
a sacred ikon or "a spider crawling along a wall". Stav
demonism is refracted in Kirillov through a sensi

rogin's religious
bility haunted, like Ippolit Terentyev in The Idiot, by the loss
of Christ; and his natural goodness makes him oblivious and
immune to the horrible consequences of his own
personally
doctrines. Stavrogin, though, has lived through other possi
bilities, and he indicates the most crucial of them in his question:
". . . and if anyone and is that
insults [a] little girl,
outrages
good?" It is little wonder that, throughout this scene, he regards
Kirillov "with disdainful though, as Dostoevsky
compassion",
carefully adds, "there was no mockery in his eyes."
This dialogue with Kirillov is followed by a parallel scene with
and here uses some of his own most
Shatov; again Dostoevsky
cherished thoughts and feelings to dramatize Stavrogin's "mask".
Just as Stavrogin had inspired Kirillov with an atheistic human

ism based on the supremacy of reason, so he has inspired Shatov,
at the same with a Slavophilism founded on the very op
time,
"Reason has never had the power to define
posite principle.
and evil," Shatov says, repeating Stavrogin's teaching, "or
good
even to distinguish between good and evil, even
approximately;
on the contrary, it has always mixed them up in a disgraceful and
science has even the solution the fist." The
pitiful way; given by
distinction between and evil can never come from reason
good
but only from the irrational, from religion. "There has never
been a nation without a religion, that is, without an idea of good
and evil." For a Russian, the idea of good and evil can only come
from the Orthodox faith, and Shatov accepts Stavrogin's dictum
that "a man who was not Orthodox could not be Russian." Here
then, growing directly out of Stavrogin's preachments, is the

essence of the two ideologies (Westernism
metaphysical-religious
and Slavophilism) that succeeded the Russian Byronism of the
1830's.
The relation between Shatov and Stavrogin is much more com
and much more difficult to define accurately, than that be
plex,
tween Stavrogin and Kirillov. It is quite clear that Kirillov's
JOSEPH FRANK 675
attempt literally to incarnate the man-god can lead only to self

destruction; and this of course
represents the demonic and Luci
ferian aspect of Stavrogin's personality (but only in a morally
elevated form). Shatov, on the other hand, represents the need
and the search for faith that is also an essential aspect of Stavro
gin, the need that is leading him to confess and to repent his
crimes. Moreover, the effect of Stavrogin on Shatov has been the
very opposite of his effect on Kirillov; he has helped Shatov to
break with his revolutionary past, and has imbued him with the
Messianic idea of the Russians as a "god-bearing people" destined
to regenerate the world. influence has thus led
Stavrogin's
Shatov along the path that Dostoevsky could only consider to be
that of salvation; but according to the symbolic of the
pattern
book, this path too must be blocked by the fatality of Stavrogin's
doom.
To understand why this should be so, it is necessary to know
that Shatov's ideas are very largely taken from N. Ya. Danilev
sky's book Russia and Eurofe, which had recently expounded
a new "scientific" and Pan-Slavic version of Slavophilism. Dos
toevsky's enthusiasm for Danilevsky's predictions of the future
triumph of an impending, world-wide Slavic civilization did not
prevent him from noticing that Danilevsky's ideas lacked a re
ligious foundation.3Moreover, Dostoevsky had also come round

to considering the overtly Old of Kireev
religious Slavophilism
sky and Khomiakov, despite its emphasis on as an
Orthodoxy,
artificial, Western-imported substitute for the genuine
simplicity
and spontaneity of the people's faith. "The Slavophil," Dostoev
^ 3In an important letter explaining the meaning of his title The Devils, and discus
sing the symbolism of the book (9/21 October, 1870), Dostoevsky writes: "The en
tire mission of Russia lies in Orthodoxy, in the light from the East, which will flow
to the blinded in the West who have lost Christ.
Humanity All the misfortunes of
Europe, all, all. without any exception, have arisen because they lost Christ with the
Roman Church, and then decided they could get along without Christ. Now just
imagine, my dear friend, that even in Russians of such a stature as, for example, the
author of Russia and Europe?\ have not encountered this thought about Russia, i.e.,
of its exclusively Orthodox mission for humanity." This letter indicates how closely
Dostoievsky's reservations about Danilevsky were linked to the creation of The
Devils.
sky writes in his notes for The Devilsy "thinks that he can manage
solely thanks to the natural attributes of the Russian people, but

without Orthodoxy one will not manage at all, no attributes will
do anything if the world has lost faith." On the same page, in a
speech not included in the text, Shatov calls Slavophilism "an
aristocratic whim"; and he adds: "They [the Slavophils]will
never be able to believe directly." This idea is finally given to
who says much the same thing?and here
Stepan Trofimovich,
he certainly for the author?when he declares that "Shatov
speaks
believes by forcing himself to> like aMoscow Slavophil." (Italics
in text.) Dostoevsky translates his disagreement
Objectively,
with Danilevsky into Shatov's view (which again smacks of
Feuerbach) that God is "the synthetic personality" of a people
?a view which reduces religion to nationalism. Subjec
Stavrogin forces Shatov to admit that he does not
tively,
yet believe in God, and hence cannot muster the simple and un
questioning faith that would infuse his ideas with the inner fire
of true emotional commitment. It is significant that the name of
Christ is never once mentioned in their dialogue; nor do Shatov's
convictions contain any trace of the note of love and universal

reconciliation for Dostoevsky, was the essence of Russia's
which,
"mission".
has thus here a mutilated version of
Stavrogin again inspired
the Truth, which falls short of its ultimate in true re
grounding
ligious faith?even though he knows abstractly that such faith is
the only answer to the chaos of his unlimited freedom. Shatov
a
diagnoses the malady afflicting them both in key speech which
helps to place them in Dostoevsky's perspective:
'You're an atheist [Shatov tells Stavrogin] because you're

a nobleman's son, the last nobleman's son. You've lost the
distinction between and evil because you've ceased to
good
know vour people. A new generation is coming, straight
from the heart of the people, and you will know nothing of
neither you nor the Verkhovenskys, father or son, nor I,
it,
JOSEPH FRANK 677
because I am also a nobleman's son, I, the son of your serf

Pashka. . . .'
lackey
On the symbolic level of the book, this can only mean that all
the ideologies deriving from Stavrogin (and here one feels very
acutely that Stepan Trofimovich should be among them! ) are
equally tainted by the original sin of their birth among aWestern
educated "aristocracy" totally divorced from the people ; all are
doomed to be swept away by an authentically Russian culture of
the future springing from the people's faith.
Stavrogin's personal behavior in these scenes also makes clear

that he will never be able to achieve the total abandonment of
self necessary for a conversion. Even with Shatov,
religious
whom he comes to warn about the impending and to
danger,
whom he is closer than anyone else except Darya Shatov, he can
not confess the truth about Matryosha. He denies that he has
"outraged children", just as he had lied earlier about his marriage

to Marya Lebyadkin; and he refuses to answer when Shatov
poses the question that was to be clarified in his visit to Tikhon:
"Is it true that you saw no distinction between some brutal obscene
action and any great exploit, even the sacrifice of life for the
good of humanity? Is it true that you have found identical beauty,

equal enjoyment, in both extremes?" Shatov the same
displays
insight into Stavrogin that Tikhon was later to exhibit when he
diagnoses the motives of his marriage to Marya. "You married,"
Shatov says, "through a passion for martyrdom, from a craving
for remorse, through moral sensuality." The first two impulses
in Stavrogin, genuinely moral, are always and distorted
crippled
by the third, which stems from his enjoyment of the outrageously
perverse, shocking, and sheerly gratuitous manifestations of his
absolute self-will.
Stavrogin's next visit to the Lebyadkins, framed by his two

encounters with Fedka the this sequence
convict, completes by
unmasking Stavrogin as the that he has been im
"impostor"
plicitly shown to be all along. Lebyadkin himself, who antici
pates Dimitri Karamazov, is a sleazy, down-at-heels comic parody
of the extreme stretch of human taste for
possibilities?the
poetry and beauty on the one hand, the bestiality on the other?
that we see in
Stavrogin on the level of tragedy. His sister
Marya, Stavrogin's virginal wife, is one of Dostoevsky's most
poetic and enigmatic creations, whose exact purport has excited

a good deal of discussion. Childish and mentally feeble, unable
to distinguish between reality and dreams and desires,
objective
she yet pierces through the "mask" of Stavrogin with a
clairvoy
ance similar to that of Prince Myshkin or Father Zossima. And
her sense of the sacredness of the cosmos, her affirmation that "the
Mother of God is the great mother, the damp earth," who brings
great joy to men when they "water the earth with tears
[their]
a foot smacks of the esoteric, heretical lore of certain
deep",
mystical sects of the raskolniki.
It is not necessary to decide here between the various allegori
cal and theological interpretations that have been offered of
Marya; but she can scarcely be, as some critics have maintained,
the positive heroine of the book. Certainly, in some sense, she
represents Dostoevsky's vision of the primitive religious sensi
bility of the Russian people, particularly in her feeling for the

theurgic union between the Russian soil and "the Mother of
God". But the debasement and
pathos of her condition recall
Dostoevsky's statement, in an article, that while the raskolniki
demonstrated the unconquerable desire of the Russian people not
to submit to alien ways of life, they themselves sometimes went
to "hideous" and "misshapen" extremes as a reaction. In this
context, Marya's poignant longing for a "Prince" who would not
be ashamed to acknowledge her as his own takes on a good deal
of historical-symbolic force; and her false and unnatural manage
JOSEPH FRANK 679
blanc with Stavrogin, which has never been consummated, surely
indicates that no true union is possible between the Christian
Russian people and even the very finest flower of godless Russian
Europeanism.
Symbolically, again, it is entirely appropriate that Marya
should finally unmask Stavrogin and label him unequivocally as
the "impostor". Whatever confusions have existed in the
might
past, her demented second sight has now pierced through to his
ultimate incapacity for true selflessness. "As soon as I saw your
mean face when I fell and you picked me up?it was as if a worm
had crawled into my heart," she says; "it's not he, I thought to
myself, not he! My falcon would never have been ashamed of

me in front of a young "
society lady! Stavrogin starts with rage
and terror when she prophetically alludes to his "knife", i.e., his
lurking desire to have her murdered (on which Peter Verkhoven
sky hopes to And at the same time that she reads his
capitalize).
inmost soul, she also speaks for the Russian people in assigning
him his true historical-symbolic dimension. He is not the
"Prince", notthe genuine Lord and Ruler of Russia, but only

Grishka Otrepeyev, "cursed in seven cathedrals", the impious
and sacrilegious "impostor" and "false pretender" to the throne
of God's Anointed Tsar.
How justly Marya has seen into Stavrogin becomes even
clearer when he tosses his wallet to Fedka the convict in the
solitary darkness of the storm-tossed night. By this

gesture,
Stavrogin silently connives at the murder of the Lebyadkins and
gives way once again to the temptation of evil ; and his inner de
feat is dramatized again in his duel with Gaganov. Here Stav
rogin is striving to achieve self-mastery and to avoid useless
bloodshed; but his manner is so arrogant and contemptuous that

he only arouses the uncontrollable hatred of his opponent all the
more. The to his life for man
truly good Kirillov, ready give
kind, tries to explain to Stavrogin that moral self-conquest means
a total of egoism and the patient of
suppression acceptance any
humiliation, even the most unjust and unwarranted. "Bear your

he says. "Or else there's no merit."
Stavrogin But
burden,"
cannot bear of good because, whatever
the burden his desire to
do so, he can never negate his egoism entirely to the point of a
total abandonment of reflexive self-concern.
This crucial sequence of scenes is climaxed by Stavrogin's un
expected meeting with Darya Shatov, which in the published text

is about a page and a half shorter than in the original maga
zine version. The section that Dostoevsky cut contained Stav
rogin's admission that he was haunted by hallucinations and

"devils" which he knew were only part of himself. But his be
havior makes it clear that he is gradually beginning to believe
in their and this menace of madness was eventually to
reality,
have driven him to visit Tikhon. When it proved impossible to
include the confession-chapter Dostoevsky eliminated this prepa
ration from the text, but one passage of the variant is important
in clarifying the historical-symbolic structure that Dostoevsky
had been planning. Stavrogin tells Darya that he has begun to
be obsessed with a new which has taken on a different
"devil",
shape from any in the past. "Yesterday he was stupid and inso
lent. He's a thick-headed seminarian with the soul of a lackey,
self-satisfied, fully persuaded of his irresistible beauty; and

what's with the conceit of the generation of the 1860's. . . .
more,
Nothing more repulsive! I was furious that my own devil could
put on such a debasing mask." Stavrogin's obsessions, as we see,
no take the form of the Romanticism, tinctured with reli
longer
gious feeling, of the 1840's; now they have degenerated into the
arrogant and boorish Nihilism of the 1860's, whose leading pro
ponents had all been "seminarians" (graduates of Russian theo
logical seminaries). The ultimate consequences of this ideology

are, of course, incarnated in the destructive and ruthless political
activities of Peter Verkhovensky.
JOSEPH FRANK 681
VI
This scene, was to have served as a transition be

accordingly,
tween the first and second sections of Part II of the novel, and to
have announced the thematic emergence of Peter Verkhovensky.
For, immediately following this meeting, Dostoevsky shifts his
focus from Stavrogin and moves out to the spread of the moral
and social chaos sown by Peter Verkhovensky. In these chapters,
Dostoevsky gives full play to his immense satiric verve in pillo

rying all the people whose stupidity and lack of principle turn
them into willing victims of Peter Verkhovensky's machinations.
The ambitious bluestocking Julia von Lembke, determined to im
press the most exalted spheres by the magic of her influence on the
rebellious younger generation; her well-meaning Russo-German
automaton of a husband, the Governor of the province, whose
passion for making complicated toys defines the extent of his

initiative and capacities; even the normally hard-headed Mrs.
Stavrogin?all fall under Peter Verkhovensky's spell, which is

powerfully aided and abetted by the patronage of the Great
Writer Karmazinov (Turgenev). Mrs. von Lembke picks up
the jargon of the Nihilists from Peter, and terribly impresses
Mrs. Stavrogin with her mastery of the latest mode. "You care
fully concealed all these new ideas from me," his irate patroness
tells Stepan Trofimovich, "though everyone's familiar with them
nowadays. And you did it simply out of jealousy, so as to have
power over me. So that even now Julia is a hundred miles ahead
of me." poor Stepan Trofimovich, more and more lonely,
Only
isolated and agitated, resists the general disintegration and still
plans to vindicate his ideals.
Starting as the personal foible of a few foolish people, the

becomes a demoralization in the most literal sense.
corruption
Dostoevsky introduces a whole series of incidents to illustrate this
from a breakdown of standards of per
demoralization, ranging
sonal conduct and social propriety to a disrespect for the dead
and the desecration of a sacred ikon. Politically, Peter Verkho
vensky demoralizes von Lembke by encouraging him to take the

harshest and most despotic measures; and Peter dupes, deceives,
and manipulates his followers no less than he has done with the
von Lembkes. Precisely as with his general influence on society
as a whole, the result of his effect on the radicals is a collapse of
their own moral-political standards and the approval of wanton
murder. There is a clear structural parallel between Stavrogin's
round of visits in the first half of this section and Peter's calls, in
the second half, on all the pawns he is engaged in maneuvering.
Dostoevsky intended to bring these parallel sequences together

by the two chapters of self-revelation that would have concluded
Part II?Verkhovensky's mad hymn to universal destruction in
spired by Stavrogin, and then the disclosure of the moral bank

ruptcy and despair of Verkhovensky's "idol" as he makes his con
fession to Tikhon.
From his first appearance in the novel, Peter Verkhovensky is
depicted as the very genius of duplicity; even the details of his

physical appearance are Under the surface
simple of
deceptive.
minded frankness and disarming caddishness, Verkhovensky car
ries on his work of sowing demoralization and destruction; he is
Stavrogin's demonism working as a political "I

will-to-power.
invented you abroad," he cries furiously to Stavrogin; "I in
vented it all, looking at you. If I hadn't watched you from my
corner, nothing of all this would have entered my head." What
Peter has invented, under the spell of Stavrogin, is the plan to
consecrate him as Ivan the Tsarevich?to use the very force he
wishes to destroy, the faith of the Russian people in a just and
righteous God-anointed ruler, as the means of their own destruc
tion. This plan has obvious symbolic affinities with Stavrogin's
relation to Kirillov and Shatov, and is foreshadowed in Marya's
charge that Stavrogin is "Grishka Otrepeyev"; here too it has in
spired a "mask" of the Truth shorn of its foundations in religion.
This "mask" is "beautiful", as Peter exclaims while
ecstatically
JOSEPH FRANK 683
gazing at Stavrogin, but it is the beauty of the demonic; and when

Peter passionately tells
Stavrogin, "You are my idol!" this last
word should be
taken in its full, blasphemous sense. Peter's
plan, however, implicitly contains its own self-negation, since it

reveals the impotence of his godless and amoral principles to es
tablish any basis for human life. Falsehood and idolatry must
speak deceptively in the name of Truth and God; and this is a
confession of its bankruptcy. Later, in The Brothers Karamazov,
the same dialectic will be used when the Grand Inquisitor speaks
in the name of Christ.
Doestoevsky had planned to place Stavrogin's confession to the

true God (in the person of His servitor Tikhon) following Verk
hovensky's "confession" to the false God Stavrogin. This would
have dramatized all the horror and abomination of the "idol"
that Peter Verkhovensky was After a
worshiping. sleepless
in warding off his
hallucinations, Stavrogin was to
night spent
have gone to Tikhon; and here the secret of his past, which has
been hinted at, was finally to have been revealed. Like
repeatedly
Onegin and Pechorin, Stavrogin is a victim of the famous mal du
the all-engulfing ennui that haunts the literature of the
si?cle,
first half of the nineteenth century and whose cause is invariably
the disappearance of religious faith. Baudelaire, its greatest poet,
called ennm the deadliest of the vices:
ne fous se ni grands ni grands

gestes
Quoiquyil
cris,
Il ferait volontiers de la terre un d?bris
Et dans un b?illement avalerait le monde. ...
Ennui is one of the symptoms of that "romantic agony" whose

dossier has been so industriously compiled by Mario Praz, and,
as he has shown, its usual result is one or another form of moral
perversion. Dostoevsky has depicted it as such previously in

Prince Valkovsky {The Insulted and Injured}, Svidrigailov
{Crime and Punishment), and in the sudden appearance of Cleo
patra inNotes from Underground sticking golden pins into her

slave-girls for amusement. WithStavrogin, it has led to the
abominable violation of little Matryosha and his unspeakably vile
observation of her death-throes.
All this is the result of Stavrogin's attempt to pass beyond the
limits of good and evil, to put into practice, with the maniacal
determination of Dostoevsky's negative heroes, the conviction
that good and evil simply do not exist. "I have neither the feel
ing nor the knowledge of good and evil," Stavrogin tells himself
just after the little girl's death, formulating the rationale by
which he has tried to live, "and not only have I lost the sense of
good and evil, but good and evil really do not exist (and this
pleased me) and are but a prejudice; I can be free of all prej
udices, but at the very moment when I achieve that freedom I
shall perish." These were, as Stavrogin says, "old familiar
thoughts" that he was at last putting clearly to himself for the

first time; these were the convictions that had been responsible
for all his behavior in the past. Like Raskolnikov's crime, Stav
rogin's revolting and despicable escapades had been a great moral
philosophical experiment; and this iswhy Dostoevsky had taken

such pains from the very start to dissociate his conduct from any
kind of banal and self-indulgent debauchery.
Stavrogin's desire to transcend the human, to pass entirely
beyond the bounds of good and evil, nonetheless runs aground on

the hidden reef of conscience. No matter what Stavrogin may
think he believes, he cannot entirely suppress his feeling for the
difference between good and evil; and this irrepressible instinct
erupts from his subconscious?almost always the guardian of
morality for Dostoevsky?in his famous dream of "The Golden
Age" inspired by Claude Lorrain's painting Acts and Galatea.

The vision of a Earthly Paradise of happiness and in
primeval
nocence fills his heart with overflowing joy. "I woke and opened
my for the first time in my life literally wet with tears. . . .
eyes,
A feeling of happiness, hitherto unknown to me, pierced my heart
JOSEPH FRANK 685
till it ached." But then a tiny red spider, associated in Stavrogin's
subconscious with Matryosha's death, replaces this dream-reverie
of bliss, and he sees in his mind's eye the little girl standing on
the threshold of his room and threatening him with her little fist.
"Pity for her stabbed me," he writes, "a maddening pity, and I
would have given my body to be torn to pieces if that would have
erased what had happened." Stavrogin finds this vision of his
own evil but he continues to evoke
it voluntarily and
unbearable,
unendingly all the same; it is this unsupportable need to expiate
his crime?a need that nothing he knows of or believes in can
help him to absolve?that is gradually driving him mad.
Stavrogin's confession thus makes clear the source of his inner
torments; but these torments have never been strong enough

totally to over his supreme egoism and self-will. Even
triumph
his confession, as Tikhon senses, is only another and ex
rightly
treme form of the "moral sensuality" that has marked all his
previous attempts at self-mastery. "This document," Tikhon says

of his confession, "is born of a heart wounded unto death. . . .
But it is as though you were already hating and despising in ad

vance all those who will read what you have written, and chal
lenging them to an encounter." Tikhon knows that

Stavrogin
by himself can never achieve the true humility of genuine repent
ance; his need for suffering and martyrdom can thus only lead to
more and more terrible and disastrous This is why
provocations.
he urges Stavrogin to submit his will comfletely the secret to
control of a saintly staretz, and thus discipline himself by a total
surrender to another as the first step along the path to the accept
ance of Christ and the hope of forgiveness. But Stavrogin,
irritably breaking an ivory crucifix that he has been fingering dur
ing the conversation, rejects this final admonition and goes to his
self-destruction.
VII
The impossibility of including this confession-chapter?clearly

marked on one as 9 of Part II?in its proper
proof-sheet Chapter
place evidently forced Dostoevsky to mutilate the original sym
metry of his plan. In Part II, which would probably have termi
nated with Chapter 9, he exposes the origins of the disorder and
chaos sown by Stavrogin and his Peter Verkhoven
"worshiper"
sky; then, inPart III, he would have depicted as a unified move
ment the practical results of their handiwork. he tacked
Instead,
on the present Chapter 9 ("Stepan Verkhovensky is Raided") in
place of the confession-scene; but from this point on there is, all
the same, a continuous sequence developing the catastrophic social
consequences of Peter Verkhovensky's machinations. The first
symptom is the ridiculous raid on Stepan Trofimovich, prompted

by the political leaflets and his general decline in prestige; the
second is von Lembke's madness, brought on by jealousy and
resentment of Peter and by the irresponsible giddiness of his hare
brained spouse. As a result of von Lembke's hysteria, the per
fectly peaceful demonstration of the Shpigulin workers, who had

been shamefully cheated and wished to redress their grievances,
is broken up by brutal floggings. "I may mention, as character
istic of our society," bitingly remarks the narrator, "that there
were very few of the better-class who saw reason to sup
people
pose that there was anything wrong with him [von Lembke] ;
his conduct seemed to them perfectly normal, and so much so
that the action he had taken in the square the morning before was
accepted and approved."

Chaos reaches a climax, of course, in the weird and wonderful
"f?te" for the underprivileged governesses of the province, which
is certainly one of the greatest comic extravaganzas in the whole
history of the novel. For sheer verve it equals the exuberance of

similar scenes of mass mayhem in Smollett; but Dostoevsky's
satirical thrusts go much deeper than Smollett's ridicule
JOSEPH FRANK 687
of some fashionable social stupidities. All the demoraliza
tion that has been brewing in the depths suddenly spouts forth
like volcanic lava, beginning with Lebyadkin's drunken, off-color
poem and ending with the glow of burning houses across the
river in the night sky. And Stepan Trofimovich, finally screwing
up the courage to denounce the Nihilists publicly, restates the
symbolic meaning in his own personal

of the book aesthetic terms.
"The enthusiasm of our modern youth," he declaims, "is as pure
and shining as it was in our time. Only one thing has happened:
a shift of aims, a substitution of
beauty one
for another. The
whole misunderstanding in
lies only
this question: what is more
beautiful, or boots, or Begin

Shakespeare Raphael petroleum?"
ning with Stepan Trofimovich's prose-poem glorifying the
"beauty" of Death, and continuing with the various false ide
ologies inspired by the deceitful "beauty" of Stavrogin, the loss of

the true beauty of the Divine has led to the grotesque vulgariza
tion against which Stepan Trofimovich protests?the replacement
of the great creators of mankind's eternal ideals by the crudest
and coarsest materialism. The "f?te" is the moment when all the
"masks" are thrown off and the truth finally comes to light; it
is thus appropriate that Stepan Trofimovich's vehement denunci
ation should also be a disclosure of Dostoevsky's underlying
symbolic pattern.
The other incidents of the "f?te", almost all culled from one
or another historical source, add nothing to the denouement and
need not be discussed here. Stavrogin hardly appears in this
last third of the book; but Dostoevsky terminates his romance
with Liza by a scene where his incapacity to love (not sexually,
but ethically and humanly) is sharply stressed. Most of the con
cluding action is taken up with the murder of Shatov after the

arrival of his wife bearing Stavrogin's illegitimate child. The
scene between Shatov and his wife is in a mood of tenderness un
usual for Dostoevsky, and the brief portrait of the disillusioned,
betrayed, heartsick "new woman" is Dostoevsky's sole (but un
forgettable) treatment of the "woman question" theme of the

1860's. Maria's for her own femininity?her
self-contempt
struggle between a natural joy and tenderness on the one hand,
and an unwillingness to accept the humiliation of dependence on
the other?is beautifully rendered. The murder of Shatov, just
at the moment when he catches a glimpse of happiness at last, is
an excellent of Dostoevsky's skill in manipulating his
example
plot to achieve the strongest effects of contrast.
The murder of Shatov, and the suicide of Kirillov, both ex

hibit the same reversion and retrogression to the inhuman. The
hapless conspirators are far from sharing Peter's insouciance about

human life; and the murder terrifies both Lyamshin and Virgin
sky into a panic relapse into animality. "Lyamshin gave vent to
on shrieking
a scream more animal than human, [and] he went
without a pause, his mouth wide open and his eyes starting out of
his head. . . . was so scared that he too screamed out

Virginsky
like a madman, and with a ferocity, a vindictiveness that one
could not have expected of Virginsky." Kirillov's death is not

the triumphant assertion of a total but the demented act
self-will,
of a crazed and terrorized sub-human creature; the annihilation
of God does not lead to mastery over the pain and fear of death,
but to the animal frenzy with which Kirillov sinks his teeth into
Peter Verkhovensky's hand. Like Raskolnikov's deed of murder,
Kirillov's suicide is the self-negation and self-refutation of his
grandiose theories.
Neither Shatov nor Kirillov is developed in any new manner
in these final scenes. The comic odyssey of Stepan Trofimovich,
him into entirely new and unexpected circum
however, plunges
stances. Nothing is finer in the book than the bewildered contact
between the sheltered, pampered Liberal Idealist, who has spent
his life uttering fine phrases about "the people", and the dumb
founded Russian peasants whom he finally encounters. These
scenesare an astonishing anticipation of what actually happened
a few years after The Devils was published, when, with the self
JOSEPH FRANK 689
sacrificing zeal of the early Christians, the flower of Russian youth

decided to abandon everything, like Stepan Trofimovich, and "go
to the people". Exactly the same bewilderment and confusion
that Dostoevsky describes so amusingly was felt on both sides;
and there was, in addition, a by no means comic suspicion and
mistrust of the "educated" intelligents that often led to their
being denounced to the police. Poor Stepan Trofimovich, though

he does get swindled, was mercifully spared this final blow.4
Dostoevsky's picture of the dying Stepan Trofimovich is one of

the finest demonstrations of his artistic tact and scrupulosity.
Having been deprived both of his positive Christian figure in
Tikhon, and of the opportunity to confront Stavrogin's despair
with the divine mystery of Christ's all-forgiving love, Dostoevsky
must certainly have been tempted to nudge Stepan Trofimovich's
repentance in some dogmatic Christian direction; but he carefully
avoids violating the integrity of his superb creation. From the
first pages Stepan Trofimovich has been presented, not as an
atheist, to be sure, but as a species of Hegelian Deist. "I believe

in God," he says, "mais distinguons, I believe in Him as a Being
who is conscious of Himself in me only." Nothing that Stepan
Trofimovich says in these last pages contradicts his aversion to
the vulgar anthropomorphism of the popular faith; and the
chronicler maintains a healthy skepticism
over "whether he was
or whether the stately ceremony of the adminis
really converted,
tration of the sacraments had impressed and stirred the artistic
responsiveness of his temperament". Nor does he lose his taste

for risque religious puns even on his deathbed; it is after an
irascible outburst of Varvara Petrovna that he smiles faintly, and
4?Tn the Summer of 1874 the radical youth, inspired by the signs of ^success that
they had themselves projected on reality, abandoned their academic pursuits to plunge,
inexperienced and untutored, into the countryside. Their hopes of an enthusiastic
welcome evaporated on first contact with the peasantry. The image of the peasant as
incipient revolutionary corresponded little with the sullen country folk they met,
who, seem'ngly resolute in their trust of autocracy, met them with distrust and
hostility. Hopelessly vulnerable to arrest once they strayed outside the capital, they
were herded into, prison bv the hundreds." Richard Wortman, The Crisis of Russian
Populism, Cambridge U. P., 1967, p. 18.
says: "God is necessary to me if only because He is the only

being whom one can love eternally."
Stepan Trofimovich, then, does not die a Christian in any strict

meaning of the word, but he is stirred by a reading of the
Sermon on the Mount to acknowledge: "My all my
friend,
life I've been lying" ; and after hearing the passage from St.
Luke about the "devils" who had entered into the herd of swine,
he says: are we, we and those . . . and Petrusha and les
"They
autres avec lui. . . and I at the head of them. . . ." This
perhaps
speech hardly accords with the subordinate r?le that Stepan
Trofimovich has played throughout the action -, it is Stavrogin
who has been shown, in fact, to have been "at the head" of all
the "devils" (the "perhaps" in the last phrase, which accurately
translates the Russian text, may indicate Dostoevsky's awareness
of the problem). This weakness of structure, however, springs
directly from Dostoevsky's original misstep in making Stavrogin
the pupil of Stepan Trofimovich. More convincing, and entirely
in character, is Stepan Trofimovich's final statement of his credo :
"The whole law of human existence is merely this, that man

should always bow down before the infinitely great. If people are
deprived of the infinitely great, they will not continue to live and
will die in despair. The infinite and immeasurable are as necessary
to man as the little planet on which he dwells. My friends, all,
all: Long live the Great Idea!" This is not Christian in any theo
sense, but it contains enough of a feeling for the tran
logical
scendent to constitute an answer to the hubris of the purely human
embodied in Stavrogin.
Stavrogin's suicide, which terminates the action, had been fore

seen by Dostoevsky from his very first grasp of the character; but
if he had been able to include the confession-chapter, it is likely
that Stavrogin would have been given a greater place in the last
third of the text. Some of Dostoevski's notes show Stavrogin in
strumental in solving the murder of Shatov, assembling the town
for a special service of repentance, making a speech denouncing
JOSEPH FRANK 691
the horrors of atheistic destruction, andonly then unexpectedly

committing suicide. There is no way of knowing, of course,
whether Dostoevsky would have used these ideas in his final re
daction; but they would have been far more consistent with Strav
rogin's importance in the first two-thirds of the book. In the pres

ent version, the reader knows neither that Stavrogin has made a
superhuman endeavor to transcend the boundaries of good and
evil, nor that his conscience has driven him to the point of mad
ness; thus his act loses much of its symbolic meaning as a self
condemnation of all the ideologies that he had spawned.
The Devils, it must be admitted, ends somewhat anticlimacti
cally, for reasons very largely outside of Dostoevsky's power

to remedy by the time he had reached the final pages. But the
scope of his canvas, the brilliant ferocity of his wit, the prophetic
power and percipience of his satire, his sheer imaginative capacity

to bring to life the most profound and complex ideological issues
?all combine to make this "pamphlet-poem" perhaps his most
original creation. It is an
unprecedented historical-symbolic
epic of nineteenth-century Russian culture, unlike anything in
its own time except, possibly, Flaubert's comparatively tame and
dispirited U?ducation sentimentale, and it is also, without doubt,

the greatest novel ever inspired by the theme of political con
spiracy and revolution.

Johns Hopkins University Press Is Collaborating With JSTOR To Digitize, Preserve and Extend Access To The Sewanee Review

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Johns Hopkins University Press Is Collaborating With JSTOR To Digitize, Preserve and Extend Access To The Sewanee Review

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Johns Hopkins University Press Is Collaborating With JSTOR To Digitize, Preserve and Extend Access To The Sewanee Review

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Masks of Stavrogin

Author(s): Joseph Frank

NO other work of Dostoevsky's poses so many and such

passionately committed; and this has led to endless misunder

primarily in terms of what Dostoevsky actually succeeded in

Originally, Dostoevsky's first grasp of his subject was purely

"Art" for Dostoevsky always meant the serious treatment of a

while their for an absolute

Dostoevsky's handling of his narrative, all the same, is by no

only makes matters worse rather than better. Moreover, the

where is not present,

in these scenes: has substituted an objective

and to step back from the intensity of the dramatic closeups to

the sweeping and summarizing commentary of the chronicler

provement and is against both the extreme reactionaries and the

nightmare and fantasy; they are the extravagances and excres

petty and excusable personal weaknesses that lie at the root of so

Dostoevsky immediately establishes the social and historical

perspective of his theme by the leisurely and superbly ironical

purposes, critically unenlightening, to identify them all.1 More

important is to note that the chronicler's account of Stepan

accomplished bothby the vagueness of his recollection of Stepan

article, he writes, contained "the beginning of a very profound

investigation into the causes, I believe, of the extraordinary moral

nobility of certain knights at a certain epoch or something of that

form, recalling the second part of Faust". The extremely funny

Then a youth of indescribable

yearning. And finally, in the last scene we are suddenly

generally escaped attention.

Nobody, to be sure, is more of an impostor?more of an en

dearing and charming old fake?than Stepan Trofimovich; even

radicals, greeted his appearance as a triumph. Dostoevsky paints

crepancy between his rhetorical postures and his practical per

Stepan Trofimovich, who is always on the point of beginning to

Moreover, despite his personal loathing for the Nihilism of Peter

Stepan Trofimovich's beautifully bedecked closet; but this only

appealing. For whatever the material basis of his existence, he

This first chapter not only establishes the historical framework

group of visitors and some of whose members will soon

reptitiously taking over its destiny. In this respect the undramatic

Following the opening chapter devoted to Stepan Trofimo

which, in my view, Dostoevsky's organization of his plot damages

With the aid of Dostoevsky's notebooks, it is not too difficult to

script as possible after Stavrogin appeared, Dostoevsky failed to

Dostoevsky accurately underlines the heritage of Romantic

sensibility that linked the generations of Stepan Trofimo

cheap gratification. (There are some connoisseurs who prize this

longing more than the most satisfaction of it, if

being emotionally engaged in the quest for an absolute of some

possibility of explaining it by any ordinary and commonplace

rogin's violence, about his taste for self-degradation,

suggests to his mother, a young Prince Harry out of

publicly kisses Liputin's pretty wife with genuine passion; called

explanations, he surpasses himself by biting the Governor's ear.

his impulses in any way, his rejection of any internal or external

goes mad with an attack of "brain fever", this, as the chronicler

tion, he hopes to save himself from the madness that he feels to