Dostoevsky and The Trial of Nastasia Kairo - Ronald LeBlanc

Dostoevsky and the
Trial of Nastasia Kairova:

Carnal Love, Crimes of Passion,
and Spiritual Redemption
RONALD D. LEBLANC
“Why, gentlemen, in our town during Lent an actress was acquitted who had
cut the throat of her lover’s lawful wife.”
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“But then again all these Kairovas are detestable.”

Dostoevsky, Notebooks, 1876–1877
T he implementation of the judicial reforms of 1864, which among other things introduced
jury trials and instituted the bar in tsarist Russia, greatly interested Dostoevsky.1 Even
while he was living in Europe during the late 1860s and early 1870s, Dostoevsky would
follow closely the newspaper reports about some of the more sensational court proceedings
that were being published in the Russian press. Upon his return to St. Petersburg in 1871,
he not only continued to read about Russian trials in the press, but even started to attend
some of these trials in person and to write journalistic commentaries on them. One of the
more scandalous judicial proceedings he wrote about in his Diary of a Writer was the case
of Nastasia Kairova (1844–88), a thirty-year-old actress who was charged with the attempted
murder of the estranged wife of her lover, Vasily Velikanov, a retired naval officer who
served as the director of her acting troupe.2 On the evening of July 7, 1875, Kairova found
1
For studies that analyze the effectiveness of the new legal institutions created by these judicial reforms, see
Girish Narayan Bhat, “Trial by Jury in the Reign of Alexander II: A Study in the Legal Culture of Late Imperial
Russia, 1864–1881” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1995), as well as his two articles, “The
Moralization of Guilt in Late Imperial Russian Trial by Jury: The Early Reform Era,” Law and History Review
15:1 (1997): 77–113, and “The Consensual Dimension of Late Imperial Russian Criminal Procedure: The
Example of Trial by Jury,” in Reforming Justice in Russia, 1864–1996: Power, Culture, and the Limits of
Legal Order, ed. Peter H. Solomon, Jr. (Armonk, NY, 1997), 61–81.
2
For biographical background on Kairova, see Mary F. Zirin, “Meeting the Challenge: Russian Women
Reporters and the Balkan Crisis of the late 1870s,” in An Improper Profession: Women, Gender, and Journalism
in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Barbara T. Norton and Jehanne M. Gheith (Durham, NC, 2001), 140–66.
The Russian Review 71 (October 2012): 630–54

Copyright 2012 The Russian Review
Dostoevsky and the Trial of Nastasia Kairova 631
Velikanov and his estranged wife in bed together at the dacha in the St. Petersburg suburb
of Oranienbaum that Kairova and her lover were renting. She attacked Mrs. Velikanova
with a razor she had recently purchased, inflicting deep, but non-fatal wounds to her neck,
breast, and head before finally being subdued.
Arrested immediately and placed in jail to await trial, Kairova was sent a few months
later to a mental hospital in St. Petersburg, where she underwent an evaluation of her
psychological condition before her scheduled court appearance on April 28, 1876. During
her pre-trial incarceration in prison (from early July to early November 1875), Kairova
wrote a brief autobiographical sketch. In addition to biographical information about her
genealogy, upbringing, formal education, family life, and material situation during her
childhood and youth, it provides a brutally honest self-analysis that evaluates her character,
behavior, and complex (as well as contradictory) inner self. During her subsequent stay at
the mental hospital (from early November 1875 to early April 1876), Kairova recorded a
series of diary entries that reveal her observations about, as well as her interactions with,
some of the other patients and members of the psychiatric staff. Although neither of these
two manuscripts was published during Kairova’s lifetime, both have been preserved in
archives and are currently available to researchers.3 These memoirs are truly fascinating,
especially since Kairova’s impressions and observations are recorded in her own
characteristically ascerbic, unapologetically honest voice.
Our primary concern in this article, however, is not Kairova herself, nor her brutally
honest self-analysis. Nor is it Kairova’s unpublished writings, of which Dostoevsky did
not have knowledge and to which he did not have access. The focus will instead be
centered on Dostoevsky’s commentary on her trial in Diary of a Writer. This commentary,
as we will see, is of compelling interest because of what it reveals about Dostoevsky’s
attitude toward human sexuality in general and about female carnality in particular. At first
glance, Dostoevsky’s commentary on the Kairova trial seems to focus largely on the
questionable tactics employed by the defense attorney, Evgeny Utin, to gain his client’s
acquittal for a violent crime she had obviously committed.4 Dostoevsky felt that the incorrect
verdict of “not guilty” reached in the Kairova trial was the result not only of the wrongly
formulated charge of premeditated attempted murder (a charge that he felt was extremely
difficult, if not virtually impossible, to prove in this case), but also of the misleading rhetoric
3
The manuscript of Kairova’s autobiographical sketch is located in the Manuscript Division of the Russian
National Library (OR RNB) (f. 327: Kairova, A. V.), while her diary extracts are located in the Russian State
Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI) (f. 275: Leskov, N. S.). The former has been published by O. A. Babuk
as “Avtobiograficheskii ocherk A. V. Kairovoi,” Rossiiskii arkhiv 11 (2001): 375–87, while the latter appears
as an appendix to Ol'ga Makarova, “‘Sud'ba kakim-to rokovym obrazom stavit menia poperek Vashei dorogi
...’: ‘Delo Kairovoi’ i ego sled v biografii A. S. Suvorina,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 75 (2005) (“Prilozhenie:
Dnevnik Nastas'i Vasil'evny Kairovoi v sumasshedshem dome [podgotovlen k publikatsii N. S. Leskovym],”
110–21).
4
Harriet Murav summarizes the newspaper accounts of the Kairova trial that appeared in Golos in Russia’s
Legal Fictions (Ann Arbor, 1998), 145–46. Makarova, meanwhile, cites some of the more prurient details
from the courtroom testimony—testimony about Mrs. Velikanova’s purported sexual frigidity, about the
dysfunctional Velikanov marriage, about Mr. Velikanov’s weakness of will and character (as well as his recent
bankruptcy problems), about Kairova’s domineering personality and stormy love affair with Velikanov, and so
on—that was published in such periodicals as Novoe vremia, Peterburgskaia gazeta, and Sankt-Peterburgskie
vedomosti (“‘Sud'ba kakim-to rokovym obrazom stavit menia poperek Vashei dorogi ...,’” 93–94).
632 Ronald D. LeBlanc
and oratory the defense attorney employed in the courtroom.5 Dostoevsky’s commentary
on the Kairova case, as a rule, has interested scholars of law and literature mainly for the
author’s attack upon the way the lawyer Utin—much like the defense attorney Spasovich in
the Kroneberg case (which Dostoevsky had discussed a year earlier in his Diary)—put the
interest of his client above the search for truth or justice, and advanced his own careerist
ambitions through his shameless display of verbal bombast in the courtroom.
Gary Rosenshield, for instance, examines Dostoevsky’s commentary on the Kairova
case—along with his commentary on the earlier Kroneberg case—mainly as a “conservative
critique” that excoriates the new judicial system that followed in the wake of the Russian
legal reforms of 1864.6 Rosenshield demonstrates how Dostoevsky’s commentary on both
cases expresses his growing disappointment with, and serious misgivings about, the recently
introduced jury trials, which the writer felt were failing to bring about the moral renewal in
Russian society that he had hoped for. As Rosenshield observes, one of Dostoevsky’s main
concerns about the acquittals granted to obviously guilty defendants in the Kroneberg and
Kairova cases was the wrong kind of moral message these verdicts were sending not just to
the criminal defendants themselves, but also to the Russian public at large. Harriet Murav
likewise contends that Dostoevsky’s response to the Kairova trial—much like his responses
to the trials of Kroneberg earlier and Kornilova later—reflects his growing disillusionment
with the impact of the legal reforms of 1864.7 Dostoevsky, she points out, was dismayed at
the large number of “compassionate” acquittals being handed out in the new jury trials and
at the fashionable defense strategies, such as “temporary insanity” (vremennyi affekt), that
were now being used by attorneys seeking zealously to gain “not guilty” verdicts for their
clients. Despite the many inconsistencies and sometimes even outright contradictions that
Murav finds in Dostoevsky’s wide-ranging commentary on these various court cases, she
does identify a fundamental continuity: the self-fashioning of a public persona Dostoevsky
constructs in the process of writing the Diary of a Writer. Subscribing to Igor Volgin’s
5
According to Dostoevsky, the jury really had no other choice but to acquit Kairova on this particular charge
because it had to answer in the negative when asked by the court: “Did Kairova, having premeditated her act,
inflict upon Aleksandra Velikanova, with intent to take her life, several wounds with a razor on her neck, head,
and chest, but was prevented from the ultimate consummation of her intent of murdering Velikanova by
Velikanova herself and by her husband?” “But truly, can one give an answer to a question posed that way?
Who, and whose conscience, would undertake to answer such a question in the affirmative?” Dostoevsky
asked his readers. “One can only give an affirmative answer to a question posed that way if one has supernatural,
divine omniscience. Indeed, even Kairova herself might have no idea of whether she would slash her rival to
death or not ... and so they answered in the negative because they could not answer otherwise.” See F. M.
Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (PSS) (Leningrad, 1981), 23:9. All citations from
Dostoevsky’s works in this article are from this edition, and where appropriate will be given as in-text
parenthetical references.
6
See Gary Rosenshield, Western Law, Russian Justice: Dostoevsky, the Jury Trial, and the Law (Madison,
2005). Rosenshield examines Dostoevsky’s commentary on Russian jury trials in a series of articles as well:
“Dostoevskii and the Kornilova Case: The Realization of Russian Justice,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies
31:1 (1997): 1–32; “The Imprisonment of the Law: Dostoevskij and the Kroneberg Case,” Slavic and East
European Journal 36:4 (1992): 414–34; and “Western Law vs. Russian Justice: Dostoevsky and the Jury Trial,
Round One: The Kroneberg Trial,” Graven Images: A Journal of Culture, Law, and the Sacred 1 (1994):
117–35.
7
Murav, Russia’s Legal Fictions, esp. chap. 4, “Dostoevsky’s Diary: A Child Is Being Beaten,” 125–55.
Murav also discusses the Kroneberg and Kornilova cases (but not the Kairova case) in “Legal Fiction in
Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer,” Dostoevsky Studies 1:2 (1993): 155–73.
notion that the Diary of a Writer is “always and everywhere about Dostoevsky himself,”
Murav argues that Dostoevsky, in authoring the Diary, “authors himself as a child of, and
as a father to, a new Russia.”8 Murav’s interest in Dostoevsky’s commentary on the Kairova
case, consequently, resides largely in the way it contributes to the theme of fathers and
children (especially the neglect and/or abuse of children at the hands of their parents), a
theme that is developed more extensively in the Kroneberg and Kornilova cases than in the
Kairova case.
“Becoming a father to Russia,” Murav observes at one point in her discussion of the
author’s commentary on the Kornilova case in Diary of a Writer, “requires that Dostoevsky
discipline unruly female sexuality.”9 It is precisely the issue of a female sexuality that
Dostoevsky found “unruly” and in serious need of disciplining that I intend to address in
more detail in this article.10 Rather than examine Dostoevsky’s commentary on the Kairova
case as an example of his views on moral, legal, criminal, and/or judicial issues, I will be
exploring it primarily against the background of the author’s views on female sexuality.
More specifically, I will be focusing upon how Dostoevsky’s conceptualization of carnal
desire as a cruel, violent, and destructive passion shapes his understanding not only of sex
and love, but also of justice and mercy. It thus influences in a very fundamental way his
view of the role that love—maternal as opposed to romantic, conjugal as opposed to
adulterous—should play in helping to establish the moral structure of an individual, a family,
and a society. Dostoevsky believed that Kairova’s crime of passion was triggered by the
unbridling of her carnal lusts—by the unleashing of a dangerous and destructive appetite
for power, aggression, and domination that he linked closely with human sexual desire. As
we will see, Kairova’s unruly carnal lusts, in Dostoevsky’s opinion, not only led her to
commit a violent crime of passion; they ultimately stood in the way of any subsequent
moral regeneration and spiritual redemption she might experience.
DOSTOEVSKY’S COMMENTARY ON THE KAIROVA TRIAL
Dostoevsky’s commentary on the Kairova case appeared in the May 1876 issue of Diary
of a Writer. Three out of the five sections of the first chapter of that issue address directly
and exclusively the Kairova case. They are, in succession, “The Court and Ms. Kairova”
(section 3), “The Defense Attorney and Ms. Kairova” (section 4), and “The Defense Attorney
and Mrs. Velikanova” (section 5). In the first of these three sections (“The Court and Ms.
Kairova”), Dostoevsky acknowledges that he is pleased to learn that the troubled young
8
Murav, Russia’s Legal Fictions, 127.
9
Ibid., 144.
10
In a number of publications, Gary Saul Morson discusses Dostoevsky’s account of Kairova’s violent act as
an edifying example of what he calls “processual” intention: that is, the kind of intentionality that is never
fixed or fully formed (and could thus be located at a precise moment in time), but that instead evolves over
time in response to changing circumstances. See “Introductory Study: Dostoevsky’s Great Experiment,” in
Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, trans. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston, 1993), 1–120, esp. “Sideshadowing in
the Diary: Kairova Time,” 90–93; Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven, 1994), esp.
“Sideshadowing in the Diary: Kairova Time,” 142–45; “Contingency and Freedom, Prosaics and Process,”
New Literary History 29:4 (1998): 673–86; and “Paradoxical Dostoevsky,” Slavic and East European Journal
43:3 (1999): 471–94.
woman has been released, but he is displeased that she has been acquitted (Dostoevsky
uses here the verb opravdat', which in a narrow legal sense means “to acquit,” but in a
broader, more general sense means “to vindicate,” “to excuse” or “to justify”). He admits
that he feels some pity for the defendant; she is, in his opinion, an emotionally disordered
and psychologically unstable person. But he is upset that Kairova has steadfastly refused
to acknowledge that she is the one who was the offending party in this case. She persists in
feeling that it is exactly the other way around—that she is the victim in this episode, that
she has done nothing wrong. Dostoevsky writes angrily,
This wretched, heinous criminal, who is completely guilty, represents in essence

something so lacking in seriousness, so careless, so totally uncomprehending and
unaccomplished, trivial, licentious, incapable of self-control, and mediocre—and
such she was to the very last moment of the verdict, so that it somehow was a
relief when she was released. It is a pity only that this could not have been done
without acquitting her. (23:8)
Kairova is, to Dostoevsky’s mind, a “wretched, heinous criminal” because she was unable
to control her impulses of sexual possessiveness and, as a result, brutally attacked Velikanov’s
lawful wife in an outburst of jealous rage. If he is somewhat relieved that the defendant has
been released from custody, it is only because he feels some pity for her. Murder is, after
all, a difficult and complex thing, Dostoevsky observes, as he wonders aloud how Kairova—
whom he considers a “disorderly and unstable soul”—would ever find the inner strength
needed to bear such a burden of torment for having attempted to commit such a terrible
crime. “The burden is too heavy for her to bear; one seems to hear her groans as she is
crushed by its enormous weight” (23:8). Although Dostoevsky is disappointed with the
verdict, he exonerates the jury of any responsibility for this miscarriage of justice in acquitting
Kairova. “So it was that the court let Kairova off,” Dostoevsky writes. “The jury found it
difficult to render any other verdict because of the charge that was filed against her. But at
least one could not say that by letting Kairova off, or even, so to speak, by showing mercy
to her, the court vindicated the defendant; but Mr. Utin certainly did try to vindicate the act
of this criminal, and he almost found it right and good” (23:11).
In the following section of Chapter One (“The Defense Attorney and Ms. Kairova”),
Dostoevsky focuses his remarks almost exclusively on Kairova’s lawyer, criticizing Utin’s
speech in defense of his client, which is filled with so much high-flown language and so
many clichés of liberal humanism. Like numerous other ambitious lawyers in Russia at the
time who aspired to make a name for themselves and advance their careers through their
exaggerated courtroom theatrics, Utin is accused of caring less about the personal misfortunes
of his client than about his own professional success.11 For the most part, however,
Dostoevsky criticizes Utin’s courtroom oratory chiefly because it is pitched far too high.
Kairova’s defense attorney, according to Dostoevsky, presents his client in an idealized,
romantic, and fantastic light, depicting her jealous, passionate love for Velikanov as
something inherently appealing, ennobling, and highly moral. Upon seeing her lover in
11
This will also prove to be the case, of course, with Fetiukovich, the fictional attorney who defends Dmitry
Karamazov during his murder trial in Book 12 of The Brothers Karamazov.
bed with his estranged wife, for example, Kairova is said to have roused herself “like a
lioness whose cub is being taken away” (23:14). As we will see later, this odd rhetorical
mixture of conflicting metaphors, whereby maternal love (a lioness protecting her cub)
collides with erotic passion (a lover fiercely attacking her sexual rival), especially aggravated
Dostoevsky because of the way the former kind of love, which the author championed, was
adulterated by the latter, which he feared and condemned. Utin is thus criticized for
portraying his client as a protective mother whose violent assault upon the person who
threatened to abscond with her “child” was justified since it occurred while Kairova’s mind
was overwhelmed by her passion and jealousy. “But, after all, gentlemen of the jury, is it
really possible that this woman could remain calm?” Utin asks rhetorically in regard to
Kairova’s angry, jealous reaction when she discovers her lover in bed together with his
wife at the dacha.
The man she’s passionately in love with—in her bedroom, in her bed, with another
woman! That was beyond her strength. Her emotions roiled up inside her like a
stormy torrent that destroys everything that stands in its path: she ranted and
raved, she was capable of destroying everything around her. (23:15)
Dostoevsky, who complains that Utin did not take sufficient time to study the case carefully
and merely filled his conventional courtroom speech with poetic “dithyrambs for what in
essence is an extremely tawdry love affair,” takes the defense attorney to task for trying not
merely to justify his client’s violent outburst, but actually to glorify it. He castigates Utin
for essentially “singing praises to crime” during his speech in defense of the passionate,
jealous Kairova and thus of failing to remember that in a court of law “evil must all the
same be called evil” and not be elevated to the level of a heroic deed or a virtuous act
(23:15, 16).
In the final section of Chapter One (“The Defense Attorney and Mrs. Velikanova”),
Dostoevsky continues to provide scathing commentary on Utin’s courtroom performance,
focusing here on the defense attorney’s extremely harsh, venomous, and unjust remarks
about the person who is the true victim of the crime: namely, the innocent, lawful wife who
was nearly stabbed to death by her jealous assailant. Mrs. Velikanova suffered some very
real torment during her ordeal, Dostoevsky points out, but Utin unfairly trivializes her
genuine suffering. “He who has too much pity for the offender probably has no pity left for
the offended,” Dostoevsky writes. “Mr. Utin would take away from Mrs. Velikanova even
her status as the victim of a crime” (23:16). Much like the abused young daughter in the
Kroneberg case—and much like many rape victims today—Mrs. Velikanova is the victim
of a violent crime who is essentially “revictimized” in the courtroom through the ruthless
character assassination she receives at the hands of an overly zealous defense attorney.
As Dostoevsky’s concluding remarks in Chapter One reveal, the writer’s main concern
about Utin’s defense of his client—and ultimately about Kairova’s acquittal—is the kind of
moral message it sends both to the defendant personally and to the Russian public at large.
“After all, the tribunes of our new courts are truly a school of ethics for our educated
society and for our common people,” Dostoevsky writes. “This is the school in which our
common people learn truth and morality; how, then, can one listen with sang-froid to the
things one sometimes hears from these tribunes?” One of the more disturbing things
Dostoevsky heard from this particular “tribune” is the citation from the New Testament that
Utin, in an attempt to exonerate his client, applied to the defendant (whom he characterized
as being “dominated by passion” and whose emotions simply “burst forth like a raging
torrent” at the sight of her lover being reunited with his lawful wife): “She loved much, and
therefore much is forgiven her” (23:19). “Mr. Defense Attorney knows perfectly well,”
Dostoevsky strongly objects, “that Christ’s words did not at all have that kind of love in
mind when he forgave the woman taken in adultery. I consider it a sacrilege to refer here to
this great and moving place in the Gospels.”12 Christ did indeed forgive the woman taken
in adultery, Dostoevsky acknowledges, but He also admonished this sinner to go and sin no
more. Christ, in short, still called what she had done a sin: although He forgave the adulterous
woman her sin, He did not justify or vindicate it.
THE WOMAN TAKEN IN ADULTERY: DOSTOEVSKY ON CARNALITY
The kind of love that Christ had in mind in this famous parable, as Dostoevsky well knew
and as conventional Biblical exegesis continues to explain today, was not the carnal love
exhibited in her past life by the woman taken in adultery. Rather it was the spiritual love, as
well as the deep appreciation and gratitude, now being shown by this great sinner upon
receiving forgiveness from Christ for her many transgressions and thus feeling that she has
much to be thankful for (she expresses some of this gratitude by washing Christ’s feet with
her hair). In Dostoevsky’s view, it profanes something he holds quite sacred when Utin
refers to this touching New Testament episode (one that illustrates the powerful spiritual
impact of Christ’s selfless love and forgiveness) and distorts its core message precisely
“here”—that is to say, in a Western-style courtroom at the trial of an adulterous woman
who is prepared to kill the wife of a married man she desires sexually and who feels no guilt
or remorse for her sinful, criminal actions. Indeed, she does not even consider what she did
to be sinful or criminal.13 Worse yet, this modern Russian version of the “woman taken in
adultery” is being defended here by a liberal-minded attorney who seeks to glorify sexual
12
I am grateful to one of the anonymous referees for The Russian Review for reminding me that Dostoevsky
has a couple of his fictional characters refer to the same scriptural passage in two of his novels. In the tavern
scene with Raskolnikov early in Crime and Punishment (Part 1, Chapter 2), the drunken Marmeladov voices
his confidence that Christ will forgive Sonia’s many sins as a prostitute because she loved much (as a daughter
who took pity on her drunkard of an earthly father, “undismayed by his beastly nature” [PSS 6:21]). In Book
2, Chapter 6 of The Brothers Karamazov, meanwhile, Fyodor Pavlovich makes a lewd reference to the same
passage during the scene at the monastery, where he defends Grushenka’s moral character before the assembled
crowd (Miusov had just referred to her as a shameful “creature” and a “woman of loose behavior”). “What is
shameful?” he asks. “That ‘creature,’ that ‘woman of loose behavior’ is perhaps holier than you are yourselves,
you monks who are seeking salvation! She fell perhaps in her youth, ruined by her environment. But she
‘loved much,’ and Christ himself forgave the woman who loved much.” “It was not for such love that Christ
forgave her,” breaks impatiently from the gentle Father Iosif. “Yes, it was for such [carnal] love, for that very
kind of love, monks, it was!” Fyodor Pavlovich stubbornly insists (PSS 14:69). Utin thus profanes Christ’s
spiritual message in exactly the same manner that the lecherous Papa Karamazov does.
13
As Carol Apollonia points out in her “apophatic” readings of Dostoevsky’s novels, for his fictional characters
admitting guilt is the necessary first step toward attaining grace. “Recognition of one’s own guilt brings
forgiveness,” she writes in explaining the dynamics of redemption in the author’s fictional universe, where
confession serves as a conduit to revelation and grace: “The moment a person confesses with fullness of spirit,
passion, romantic love, and marital infidelity. For the staunchly Christian author of Diary
of a Writer, this is deeply sacrilegious. Dostoevsky proceeds to observe how he has noticed,
since his teenage years when he was a young military cadet himself, that a seriously mistaken
notion has for some reason taken root in the minds of many male adolescents in Russia:
namely, that “Christ forgave the woman taken in adultery precisely for that carnal kind of
love: that is to say, he forgave her precisely for her amorousness or, better to say, for her
excess of amorousness, that he pitied her for what we might call this enticing feebleness.”14
The strong implication here, of course, is that Utin, with his “most unexpected pun on
Christ’s words from the Gospel about the woman taken in adultery,” is as seriously mistaken
about the kind of love Christ was referring to in this parable as are pubescent Russian
teenage boys besieged by raging hormones (23:12).
One possible explanation for why Utin’s invocation of Christ’s words about forgiving
the sinful woman for her carnal indulgences disturbs Dostoevsky so much is that these
words are being used here to vindicate the kind of love the writer consistently associated
with human evil. As several critical observers have noted, carnal passion for Dostoevsky is
almost invariably linked with aggression, violence, and cruelty. “Dostoevsky’s view of
sexual relationships is distorted by intensity and operates along an axis of violence and
pain,” observes one commentator. “In Dostoevsky’s world the object of one’s desire tends
to become a victim, to be tortured without mercy. The torturer derives his pleasure from
the victim’s suffering.”15 In Notes from Underground (1864), the bilious narrator, who
cannot imagine living without the feeling that he has someone completely in his power and
that he is free to tyrannize over some other human being, spells out a perverted ethos of
“love” that anticipates the sexual philosophy of power, domination, and humiliation to
which many other Dostoevskian characters from the 1860s and 1870s will subscribe (5:176).
Equally cynical, mean-spirited, and rapacious is the view on love propounded in The Gambler
(1866) by Aleksei Petrovich, whose love-hate relationship with Polina is patterned in large
measure upon Dostoevsky’s own turbulent affair with Apollinaria Suslova. “Man is a despot
by nature,” confesses the young male hero, “and he loves to be a tormentor.” Aleksei
openly admits that he is tempted to kill the woman he claims to love so passionately.
“I shall kill you not because I shall cease to love you or be jealous,” he explains to Polina.
“I shall kill you simply because I have an impulse to devour you” (5:231). As these and
numerous other examples illustrate, Dostoevsky tends in his works of fiction to represent
sexual desire as a violent, brutalizing passion, as a murderous desire to consume and thus
destroy the Other.
truthfully and reverently, to having committed an act of evil, he or she is by that act of confession purged and
forgiven.” See Apollonia, Dostoevsky’s Secrets: Reading Against the Grain (Evanston, 2009), 11, 129. This
dynamic, it seems to me, applies not only for Dostoevsky’s fictional characters (like Raskolnikov), but also for
the real-life people (like Kairova) whom he writes about in Diary of a Writer.
14
PSS 23:20. Dostoevsky surmises that the reason why such an extremely high number of young males
continue to think this way is most likely physiological. “In light of the indubitable geniality of Russian boys,”
he reasons, “what is probably acting upon them as well is that particular excess of youthful energy that is
aroused inside them whenever they look at any woman” (ibid.). Dostoevsky thus seems to blame raging male
hormones in large part for the robust sexual appetite of Russian adolescent boys as well as for their predisposition
to view carnal love as an eminently forgivable offense.
15
Alex De Jonge, Dostoevsky and the Age of Intensity (New York, 1975), 179.
The violence that characterizes many of the relations between the sexes portrayed in
Dostoevsky’s oeuvre, some critics have asserted, seems to derive from a masculinist
psychology the author categorically condemns, a mindset that endorses male aggression
and violence toward women.16 “Dostoevsky’s eroticism is constructed upon the fact that
for the characters in his works sensuality—in their imagination, feelings, and dreams—is
inseparable from the desire to torment others,” explains one critic. “What appears in the
forefront for all of his characters, as the fundamental motif of their sexuality, is either a
thirst for power over the other sex or a thirst to become a sexual victim.”17 For many of
Dostoevsky’s male heroes, accordingly, “love opens out upon a dark abyss of cruelty, hatred,
pride, and the urge to dominate.”18 In Dostoevsky’s novelistic universe, egoistic “love” of
this sort, as Konstantin Mochulsky once observed, can quite easily—even quite naturally—
drive a man to murder his beloved (such as the passionate and rapacious Rogozhin does to
Nastasya Filippovna in The Idiot), since passion here generally “borders on madness.” It is
“irrational, demonic, and destructive,” he observes; it is “the yearning for power over
another.”19 Sexual passion, portrayed as a rapacious and nearly obsessive love of power,
permeates many romantic relationships throughout Dostoevsky’s fictional oeuvre, from the
tyrannical love Murin possesses for Katerina in “The Landlady” (1847) to the despotic
dominion over his inexperienced young bride the pawnbroker-husband seeks so diligently
to establish in “A Gentle Creature” (1876).20 The true essence of Dostoevsky’s power-
hungry characters is, as one commentator puts it, their “insatiable carnivorousness.”21
In terms of gender domination, however, the power gradient in these tyrannical romantic
relationships does not always favor the male exclusively. Witness how—in language that is
likely to summon forth in the minds of many readers of Dostoevsky’s novels familiar images
of such strong-willed, passionate women as Varvara Petrovna in The Devils, Nastasia
Filippovna in The Idiot, and Katerina Ivanovna in The Brothers Karamazov—Dostoevsky
describes the rapaciousness of certain females (in this instance, he is describing the wife of
the protagonist in a story by M. A. Nedolin, titled “The Deacon,” that appeared in the
journal Grazhdanin in 1873):
Women with an excess of spirit and character, particularly women who are
passionate by nature, cannot love otherwise than despotically; they even have an
especial attraction toward those men, like the artistically inclined deacon, who
16
Nina Pelikan Straus discusses the male sexual violence and cruelty toward women one encounters in
Dostoevsky’s novels (what she calls the “masculinist disease” that afflicts a number of his fictional characters)
in Dostoevsky and the Woman Question: Rereadings at the End of a Century (New York, 1994).
17
T. Enko, F. Dostoevskii – intimnaia zhizn' geniia (Moscow, 1997), 135.
18
Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans. Michael A. Minihan (Princeton,
1967), 110.
19
Ibid., 318.
20
“For the most part,” writes Robert L. Jackson, “sexuality in Dostoevsky’s novelistic universe is disclosed
in its negative, or destructive, manifestations.” See Jackson, “In the Darkness of the Night: Tolstoy’s Kreutzer
Sonata and Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground,” in his Dialogues with Dostoevsky: The Overwhelming
Questions (Stanford, 1993), 213.
21
Anna Kashina-Evreinova, Podpol'e geniia (Seksual'nye istochniki tvorchestva Dostoevskogo) (Petrograd,
1923), 65.
possess a weak, childish character. ... He weeps and she cannot help but detest his
tears, but, suffering agonies herself, she takes carnivorous enjoyment in his tears.
... It seems as if she could swallow him alive out of love. (21:85)
This description of female rapaciousness, which serves as an example of what I have

elsewhere termed “Dostoevskian plotoiadnost'” (literally, a psycho-sexual appetite for
“consuming flesh”), seems to echo Utin’s courtroom rhetoric about the beastly impulses
and emotions of his client, the aroused “lioness.”22
But where Kairova’s lawyer accepts this flesh-eating, psycho-sexual appetite as a
necessary component of passionate romantic love and even glorifies it, Dostoevsky instead
warns of the inherent destructiveness of carnal desire and strongly advises that people
should attempt to sublimate and transcend their bodily urges. In several other entries in his
Diary of a Writer during 1876 and 1877, Dostoevsky explicitly addresses the dangers—for
both men and women—involved in gratifying one’s carnal instincts, warning his readers in
the April 1876 issue, for instance, that sensual delectations invariably become carnivorous.
“Sensuality provokes voluptuousness,” he observes, “and voluptuousness always produces
cruelty” (22:124). A year later, in the April 1877 issue, the narrator of his “Dream of a
Ridiculous Man” states: “Voluptuousness spreads awfully. Voluptuousness gives rise to
cruelty and cowardice. The corpulent and coarse soul of the voluptuary is more cruel than
any other soul, even a depraved one” (25:101). Indeed, voluptuousness—the excessive
pursuit of carnal pleasures—is said to generate jealousy, the Ridiculous Man warns elsewhere
in that same story, and jealousy in turn generates cruelty (25:116). Cruelty, specifically, the
desire to torment others, is, of course, a central leitmotif in Dostoevsky’s fictional oeuvre,
as Nikolai Mikhailovsky pointed out long ago when analyzing the “cruel talent” of his
famous contemporary.23 “The disclosure of the evil and the impulse to torment that lurk in
the souls of his characters,” Anna Kashina-Evreinova writes when explaining Dostoevsky’s
psycho-sexual poetics, “is the secret behind the powerful impression one gets from reading
his works.”24
FRAMEWORK OF CARNALITY I: KAIROVA’S UNBRIDLED LUSTS
One indication that Dostoevsky’s aggravation over the Kairova case—and over the verdict
reached at it—is perhaps due in large part to his conceptualization of sexual desire as a
violent, aggressive, and destructive passion is provided by the way his commentary on the
case is framed within the particular issue of Diary of a Writer in which it appears.25 The
22
See my Slavic Sins of the Flesh: Food, Sex, and Carnal Appetite in Nineteenth-Century Russian Fiction
(Durham, NH, 2009). The term “carnivorousness” (plotoiadnost') is initially discussed on pages 3–5. The
entire second chapter of the book (“Eating as Power: Dostoevsky and Carnivorousness”) is devoted to an
examination of manifestations of plotoiadnost' in Dostoevsky’s writings (pp. 40–97).
23
N. K. Mikhailovsky, Dostoevsky: A Cruel Talent, trans. Spencer Cadmus (Ann Arbor, 1978).
24
Kashina-Evreinova, Podpol'e geniia, 69.
25
What I have in mind when I speak of the “framing” of Dostoevsky’s commentary on the Kairova case is
what Straus calls its “textual site” in the Diary. In chapter 6 (“Female Suicides and A Gentle Creature in The
Diary of a Writer,” 97–117) of Dostoevsky and the Woman Question, she discusses the placement of the story
“A Gentle Creature” amidst Dostoevsky’s discussion of female suicides in the Diary.
first section (“From a Private Letter”) of Chapter One of that May 1876 issue of the journal—
a chapter that deals almost exclusively with the Kairova case—is devoted not to the case
itself but to a letter to the editor that Dostoevsky had received recently from a provincial
reader, asking him whether he intended to comment upon the Kairova trial in Diary of a
Writer. Dostoevsky cites a lengthy passage from this angry letter, in which the unidentified
correspondent lashes out virulently at the moral depravity of the recently acquitted female
defendant. “It is with a feeling of the deepest repugnance that we read about the Kairova
case,” this provincial reader writes. “Like a camera lens, this case focuses to reveal a
picture of the carnal instincts that the leading personage of the case (Kairova) developed
under the influence of her cultural milieu ... out of this milieu there emerged a despotic
person who was unbridled in her carnal lusts” (23:5). The correspondent never does identify
exactly what “cultural milieu” he has in mind (Kairova’s own family upbringing and
childhood? her socioeconomic class? the dissolute “theater world” of actors and actresses
she inhabits?), but he leaves no doubt as to the pernicious effects that milieu has had upon
her moral character.26
It is not an insane woman that one sees throughout the entire Kairova trial, the
correspondent insists; it is instead “a woman who has reached the extreme limits in her
rejection of everything that ought to be held sacred: for her there exists neither the family
nor the rights of another woman—that other woman’s right not only to her husband, but to
her very own life. Everything exists only for the selfish Kairova herself and her carnal
lusts.” The lengthy citation Dostoevsky quotes from this letter concludes with the
correspondent expressing his puzzlement and ire at the applause that broke out among the
women in attendance at the Kairova trial when the “not guilty” verdict was announced.
“What was the applause for?” he asks incredulously. “Was it for the acquittal of an insane
woman? Or was it for the triumph of an uncontrolled, passionate nature? Was it for the
cynicism this type of woman personifies?” “Ladies are applauding!” he exclaims. “Wives
and mothers are applauding! They ought not to be applauding; they ought instead to be
weeping at the spectacle of such a desecration of the feminine ideal” (23:5). The provincial
correspondent is obviously irked by the applause that erupts among the liberal female
members of Russian educated society (obshchestvo) in attendance at the trial when Kairova’s
acquittal is announced, because it signals so unequivocally their approval of what he calls
“the triumph of an uncontrolled, passionate nature.” He clearly condemns this modern-
day, secular profanation of an old-fashioned (and paternalistic) feminine ideal that
Dostoevsky himself, as we shall see, eulogizes in the final section of this May 1876 issue of
Diary of a Writer. There he provides a highly idealized portrait of the “Russian woman,”
who chastely avoids not only the debauchery of acquisitive money-grubbing and selfish
materialism to which the “Russian man” is said to have given himself up, but also the
26
In the court chronicle (sudebnaia khronika) published in the April 30, 1876, issue of Peterburgskaia
gazeta, it is mentioned that the Kairova family has a history of mental illness (“frequent episodes of psychic
illnesses”). Indeed, the paper’s reporter claims that the jury found the defendant not guilty because this history
of mental illness in the Kairova family was believed to have “created the soil for abnormal and harsh actions in
unfavorable conditions.” This may well be the “cultural milieu” that, according to the provincial correspondent,
was responsible for influencing Kairova to develop into such a despotic person with unbridled carnal lusts.
See Makarova, “‘Sud'ba kakim-to rokovym obrazom stavit menia poperek Vashei dorogi ...,’” 93–94.
self-destructive cynicism and carnality to which liberal-minded women like Kairova are
increasingly surrendering themselves. Emancipated ladies applauding Kairova’s acquittal
for a crime of passion is bad enough, the provincial correspondent believes, but wives and
mothers applauding this wrong-headed verdict is terribly disconcerting.
In the ensuing section (“A New Regional Voice”), Dostoevsky briefly discusses how
“our provinces truly want to start living their own kind of life and emancipate themselves
altogether from the capitals” (23:6). The discussion here seems designed to serve largely
as Dostoevsky’s way of validating the unfashionably conservative views on sexual morality
expressed in the private letter from the provinces that he has now made public in the Diary.
Before he proceeds in the next three sections to provide his own direct commentary on the
Kairova case, however, Dostoevsky makes it a point to acknowledge explicitly that he
agrees wholeheartedly with his angry provincial correspondent’s old-fashioned moral views,
especially his condemnation of the “dissoluteness” of the defendant’s libidinal instincts
and the “despotic unbridling” of her carnal urges (23:7). Like his provincial letter writer,
Dostoevsky appears to view Kairova as, in Murav’s words, “a textbook case of the inherited
predisposition to crime, which in her manifests itself as unbridled sexual impulses.”27 The
characteristic linkage we find in Dostoevsky’s writings between carnal passion and
aggression, violence, and cruelty directed at anyone who stands in the way of someone
attaining the object of his or her sexual desire (and, in many cases, directed even at the
object of desire itself) soon makes it appearance in the way the author—in an edifying
example of what Gary Saul Morson calls “multiple sideshadows”—speculates upon some
of the possible actions that Kairova, impetuously and without any apparent premeditation,
might have committed that fateful evening with the razor she had recently purchased:
And what if, after having slashed Velikanova once across the throat with the razor,
she had given out a scream, had started to tremble, and had run off? How can you
know that this might not have happened? ... And what if it so happened that, after
having slashed Velikanova once across the throat with the razor and after having
taken fright, she had started to slit her own throat instead? Yes, might she not
perhaps have started here to slit her own throat? And, finally, what if she not only
had not taken fright, but, on the contrary, having felt the first splashes of hot
blood, she had flown into a frenzy and not only had finished slicing up Velikanova,
but had also begun to mutilate her body, cutting off her head “completely,” then
cutting off her nose and lips, and only later, after this severed head had already
been taken away from her, she had suddenly asked: “What is it that I have done?”
I am asking you this because all of these things could well have happened, all of
these things could well have come out of one and the same woman, one and the
same soul.28
27
28
PSS 23:10. See also Morson, Narrative and Freedom, 144. Murav speculates that Dostoevsky’s disturbing
image of Kairova violently decapitating the corpse of her sexual rival and then mutilating Velikanova’s facial
features might well have been suggested by Euripedes’s play, The Bacchae. In this scenario, Kairova here
plays the role of the raging Agave, who decapitates her own son (she believes that she has ripped off the head
of a mountain lion with her bare hands) and finally realizes what terrible deed she has done only after she holds
the severed head in her hands for her father to see (Russia’s Legal Fictions, 152–53).
This disturbing image of Kairova violently decapitating the corpse of her sexual rival and
then mutilating Velikanova’s facial features ought to remind Dostoevsky’s readers of
the various instances of human bestiality described so memorably in some of his own works
of fiction.
In Notes from the House of the Dead (1861), for instance, many of the narrator’s
fellow convicts are portrayed as cruel sensualists, and the camp guards as sadistic tyrants.
“There are people who, like tigers, thirst for blood. Any person who has once tasted this
power, this unlimited dominion over the body, blood, and spirit of a human creature like
himself ... loses control over his own sensations,” the narrator writes in an attempt to explain
the perverse psychology of these bestial sadists who behave like wild predatory animals. “I
maintain that even the finest of human beings may become coarsened and degraded, by
force of habit, to the level of a wild beast. Blood and power are intoxicating; insensitivity
and perversity develop and grow; the greatest perversions become acceptable and finally
sweet to the mind and heart” (4:154). The gruesome actions that Kairova is imagined to
have been capable of committing on the night of the crime suggest that within her too there
lies hidden a wild beast capable of becoming so intoxicated by the taste of blood and power
as to decapitate and mutilate the body of the woman who stands in the way of this predatory
female gaining the object of her psycho-sexual desire. Dostoevsky’s “sideshadowing”
speculation on Kairova’s possible actions with the razor allows the author to transform the
defendant’s carnal lusts, excoriated by his angry provincial correspondent, into “one of the
most grotesquely violent images in his entire corpus.”29 More importantly, this instance of
“sideshadowing” allows Dostoevsky to show his readers quite graphically the terrible evil
that can result from the unbridling of Kairova’s carnal lusts. As Murav rightly notes,
Dostoevsky’s reading of the Kairova case offers “a moral lesson on the disastrous
consequences of women’s sexuality outside the discipline of marriage and family.”30
FRAMEWORK OF CARNALITY II: ABANDONED BABIES, UNFIT MOTHERS
The second component of what we might call the “framework of carnality” that surrounds
Dostoevsky’s commentary on the Kairova case is provided by the journal’s two immediately
ensuing sections—namely, the first two sections of Chapter Two in that same May 1876
issue of Diary of a Writer—which are titled, respectively, “Something About a Certain
Building. Some Corresponding Thoughts” and “One Non-Corresponding Idea.” In the
first of these two sections, Dostoevsky describes a visit he paid recently to the St. Petersburg
Foundling Home. “Lies and falsehood, that’s what we have on all sides, and that’s what is
sometimes so hard to bear!” he writes in the opening sentence, referring apparently to
Utin’s inappropriate use of Christ’s words about the woman taken in adultery, which he had
criticized in the final paragraph of the preceding chapter. “And at exactly the very same
time that Ms. Kairova was being tried in court, I happened to visit the Foundling Home, a
place I had never before visited and one I had long wanted to see” (23:20). Dostoevsky
29
30
Ibid.
proceeds to describe the facilities, the orphaned children, and the dedicated staff members
who work there, but his visit to a downstairs room, where young mothers bring their newborn
babies and leave them there forever, suddenly prompts some troubling reflections about
mothers, motherhood, and the challenges of child-rearing. He makes reference here to
actual instances where crying children are thrown out of windows, drowned in a shallow
pool of water, or have their hand scalded by the boiling water flowing from the opened tap
of a steaming samovar, all because their exasperated young mothers have had their fill of
hearing these small infants wail unrelentingly. “This isn’t merely some idle fancy of mine,”
Dostoevsky assures his readers, as he proceeds to document several cases where young
women perform very poorly—even criminally—in their new roles as mothers (23:21). As
Dostoevsky points out frequently in his non-fictional writings, parenting ought to be viewed
as an extremely important yet highly challenging responsibility, especially in post-
emancipation Russia, where “accidental” families were now becoming quite common.31
In the opening of the next section (“One Non-Corresponding Idea”) of Chapter Two,
Dostoevsky suddenly shifts from talking about the foundling home, abandoned babies,
volunteer wet nurses, and unfit young mothers to reflecting upon the idea of “independence.”
He notes, “Our average, unexceptional person, whether rich or poor, prefers not to think
about anything and, without paying any mind to it, simply to engage in sexual debauchery,
while he still has the strength and the interest” (23:24). There are, he adds, some people,
better than the average, who give the appearance of believing in something; and then there
are paradoxicalists who, especially if they are honest, end up committing suicide.32
Bemoaning the apparent lack of belief in any higher ideal in life that he observes in so
many young people nowadays (he will proceed to cite the recent suicide of Nadezhda
Pisareva—committed ostensibly out of boredom with life—as a case in point), Dostoevsky
asks, “Why was it that in this building, looking at this nursery and at these little babies, I
began to reflect upon suicides? Now that really is a non-corresponding idea” (23:24). The
answer to this leading question seems to be that the “outcast” children he observed in the
foundling home expressed such a strong desire to live and the wet-nurses who were feeding
them expressed such a genuine maternal love and affection for these abandoned babies that
Dostoevsky cannot comprehend how people can grow tired of life and commit suicide.
“These are not merely hired breasts, taking the place of the breasts of the mothers who
abandoned them,” Dostoevsky says of these volunteer wet-nurses. “This is motherhood,
this is that ‘living life’ (zhivaia zhizn') of which Pisareva had grown so tired.”33 In his
paean to the volunteer wet nurses, Dostoevsky thus invokes images of wholeness (and
31
Dostoevsky’s A Raw Youth (Podrostok, 1875) is commonly regarded as a novel largely about an “accidental”
family. Dostoevsky’s commentary on the Dzhunkovsky case in Diary of a Writer (PSS 25:181–93) is also
largely concerned with this theme.
32
For studies of suicide in Dostoevsky’s oeuvre, see N. N. Shneidman, Dostoevsky and Suicide (Oakville,
NY, 1984); and Nikolai Nasedkin, Samoubiistvo Dostoevskogo: Tema suitsida v zhizni i tvorchestve pisatelia
(Moscow, 2002). The seminal work on this topic remains Irina Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in
Dostoevsky’s Russia (Ithaca, 1997), esp. chap. 6, “Diary of a Writer: Dostoevsky and His Reader,” 162–84.
33
PSS 23:26. Speculating as to why Dostoevsky would think about suicides while visiting the foundling
home, Paperno argues that it is because the author considered young suicides to be society’s “miscarried
children.” “The juxtaposition of the two images,” she writes, “creates a metaphor: suicide is a miscarriage
suffered by the social body, mother Russia” (Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia, 165).
wholesomeness)—these kind people are not mere body parts (hired breasts), but rather
emblems of motherhood and living life—that serve as an effective counterpoint to the bodily
fragmentation (slit throat, severed head, cut off nose and lips) that characterizes the earlier
sideshadow speculation about what Kairova with razor in hand might have done to her
sexual rival.
It is precisely here, in the positive images of wholeness and wholesomeness, that the
association—or “non-corresponding idea”—is made with Kairova, whose court case he
had just been discussing in the preceding chapter of this issue of the Diary:
And, of course, there are many babies here also born of that interesting sort of
mother who will sit on the steps of her dacha, sharpening a razor for her rival. I
will say in conclusion: this razor may be a very nice thing in its own way, but I
was very sorry that I came here, to this building, at the very time when I was
following the proceedings in the Kairova trial. I know nothing at all about Ms.
Kairova’s life story, and I certainly cannot apply to her anything that concerns
this building, nor do I have the right to do so. But this whole extramarital love
affair of hers and all of this eloquent exposition of her carnal passions at the trial
somehow lost absolutely all their power for me and destroyed within me any
sympathy I might have felt for her, just as soon as I walked out of that building. I
admit this quite openly, because perhaps this was the reason why I wrote so
unsympathetically about the “case” of Ms. Kairova. (23:27)
In this passage, the egoistic, carnally unbridled Kairova is closely associated with those
self-absorbed young mothers, woefully unfit for the challenges of motherhood and parenting,
who abandoned their newborn babies downstairs at the foundling home.34 As a strong
corrective to Utin’s characterization of his client as a protective mother lion instinctively
defending her young cub, Dostoevsky portrays Kairova instead as a razor-sharpening
adulteress who is preparing to slit the throat of the innocent woman she has already wronged
by entering into an extramarital affair with her husband. Utin’s poetic dithyramb about
Kairova’s carnal passions at her trial thus rings particularly hollow for someone who has
just visited a foundling home and witnessed there first-hand the legacy of abandoning babies
(and maternal obligations) at its doorsteps. This explanation of the “non-correspondence”
Dostoevsky finds between the fate of the poor motherless babies, who live as abandoned
orphans in the foundling home, and the fate of the carnal Ms. Kairova, who is acquitted of
the crime of violently assaulting her lover’s wife, is then followed immediately by the final
section (“An Indubitable Democratism. Women”) of Chapter Two. The discussion in this
final section, to which we will now turn, completes the framework of carnality that surrounds
Dostoevsky’s commentary on the Kairova case.
34
In her memoirs, Kairova, who was characterized by one of her friends as the most “selfish” woman in the
world, openly confesses that she has no fondness for children. “I like children close by me only when they’re
sleeping,” she writes in her autobiographical sketch. “Their cries and the noise they make irritate me so much
that if I’m forced to hear them for a long time, I run off to a separate room and begin there to sob, pull at my
hair, and bite into a pillow, a kerchief, my hands, or whatever else my teeth happen upon.” “Sometimes I feel
within myself such hatred toward children in general,” she adds, “that I simply become terrified and I go away,
only so that I won’t somehow give myself up involuntarily to some violent fit” (“Avtobiograficheskii ocherk
A. V. Kairovoi,” 383–84).
FRAMEWORK OF CARNALITY III: THE RUSSIAN WOMAN
In this final section of Chapter Two, after arguing that Russian democracy is vastly superior
to the kind found in Europe (since the Russian people are, he claims, more satisfied with
their fate), Dostoevsky proceeds to speak in praise of the Russian woman, upon whom the
country, during this current period of rapid modernization and intense capitalist development,
has placed enormous hopes for its renewal and regeneration:
The Russian woman chastely (tselomudrenno) scorned obstacles and mockeries.

She firmly announced her desire to take part in the common cause and set to work
on it not only unselfishly, without seeking any profit or gain, but also selflessly, in
a spirit of voluntary self-sacrifice. By contrast, the Russian man, during these
past few decades, has given himself up terribly to the debauch of acquisitive
money-grubbing, cynicism, and materialism. The Russian woman, meanwhile,
has remained much more faithful than he has to a pure worship of the idea, to a
pure service to the idea. (23:28)
Barbara Heldt has demonstrated convincingly how—as part of the cultural expression of a
widespread feminization of virtue that had occurred in late eighteenth-century Europe and
America—male writers in nineteenth-century Russia insisted upon mythologizing female
superiority in their fiction, creating a “terrible perfection” that was burdensome to women
and frightening to men.35 Dostoevsky, as his paean to the altruistic, self-abnegating nature
of the Russian woman in this section of Diary of Writer reminds us, was no exception to
that rule, extolling here what he calls the “excellent qualities” of the female heart and
asserting that, more than anything else, the Russian woman values “the fresh feeling, the
living word” (23:29). Dostoevsky deliberately selects such sexually loaded words as
“chastely,” “pure,” “debauchery,” and “faithful,” hoping that these lexical features will
strongly encourage the reader to see a “non-correspondence” (that is, an implicit contrast)
between this pure feminine ideal and the impure carnal reality of Nastasia Kairova as
emblematized by her violent crime of sexual passion in the attack upon her lover’s wife.
Thus ends Dostoevsky’s commentary on the Kairova case in the May 1876 issue of his
Diary of a Writer. The strong implication Dostoevsky makes here is that the morally depraved
life of a promiscuous young actress such as Kairova, who abandons herself to unbridled
sexual desire and, out of jealousy, commits a violent crime of passion against her lover’s
rightful wife, might well have turned out very differently if she had somehow managed to
discipline her unruly female sexuality and channeled that libidinal energy into selfless
maternal love rather than selfish romantic love. In any event, she was most certainly not, as
her attorney Utin had attempted to portray her at trial, “a lioness whose cub was being
taken away” (23:12). Nor was her lover—already a middle-aged, philandering married
man—a “sweet little baby” whom she sought to “raise up” and “ennoble,” although this is
precisely how Utin described their relationship in court.36 Her soul dominated by passion,
35
See Barbara Heldt, A Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington, 1987), esp. 4–5,
12–13.
36
To Utin’s assertion that his client viewed Velikanov as her own “sweet little baby” (miloe ditia), Dostoevsky
responds sarcastically: “Incidentally, this ‘sweet little baby’ is, they say, tall and thick-set, with the build of a
grenadier and curly hair on the back of his head” (PSS 23:13–14).
her mind consumed by jealousy, how could she have remained calm, Utin had asked
rhetorically at her trial, when she came upon Mrs. Velikanova in bed with her lover? “She
would have had to be made of stone, gentlemen of the jury; she would have had to be
without a heart,” Utin had asserted at her trial, for the defendant to have acted any differently
than the way she did. “She would not have been a woman but a stone, a creature without a
heart” (23:15). As we have seen, Dostoevsky’s counter-rhetoric about maternity, “living
life,” and the chastity of the ideal Russian woman that appears in the post-trial sections of
his commentary on the Kairova case provides the reader with a stark contrast to the modern,
Western ideology of romantic love (espoused by the defense attorney in the courtroom)
that sought to license as “natural” and “human” not only the eruption of sexual passion on
the part of Utin’s client, but also extramarital affairs in general. Where the lawyer in the
courtroom sings praises to the defendant’s crime (and sin), the editor of Diary of a Writer
sings praises in his journal to female virtue, purity, and maternity, all of which he feels were
being desecrated at the Kairova trial.
In his commentary on the Kairova case, Dostoevsky thus takes strong issue with
Utin’s assertion that his client was merely demonstrating a basic, heartfelt humanity when
she attacked her rival, for the lawyer’s words in defense of Kairova’s actions refuse to
allow for “any other clearer, more noble and magnanimous outcome” to her situation. “You
must pardon me, sir, for taking your words so seriously,” Dostoevsky writes, addressing
Utin directly.
But just stop and think for a moment: there are higher types and higher ideals
among women. There is no disputing the fact that these ideals have existed and
do exist in reality. And what if even Ms. Kairova herself, at the very last moment,
with the razor in her hand, had suddenly looked clearly at her own fate (don’t
worry, this sometimes is quite possible, and precisely at the last moment),
recognized her own misfortune (for loving such a man is a misfortune), recognized
all her shame and disgrace, all her moral degradation (for, in fact, it is not only
“nobility and self-denial” that one finds in such “a woman taken in adultery,” Mr.
Defense Attorney, but much falsehood, shame, vice, and degradation as well)?
What if she had suddenly sensed within herself a woman resurrected into a new
life, a woman who now recognized that she, after all, was the “offender” and, in
addition, that by leaving this man she would probably ennoble him even more?
And what if, having felt all this, she had raised herself up and left, tears pouring
from her eyes, saying, “To what depths have I let myself fall?” Well, what if this
really had happened, even to Ms. Kairova? Wouldn’t you have pitied her?
Wouldn’t you have found a responsive chord in your indisputably kind heart?
Would you have called this woman, who suddenly was resurrected in heart and in
spirit, a stone, a creature without a heart ... ? (23:15–16)
In the first instance of sideshadowing, when Dostoevsky had speculated about some of the
possible actions Kairova might have committed on the night of the crime, the possibilities
had consisted entirely of violent slashing attacks with the razor upon the defendant’s sexual
rival: namely, mutilating her victim’s body by cutting off her head, nose, and lips. Here, in
a second instance where Dostoevsky “sideshadows” some of the defendant’s unrealized
behavioral possibilities at the scene of the crime, he provides a scenario where the behavioral
response is guided by promptings that are spiritual rather than carnal, redemptive rather
than murderous.
Instead of unleashing the predatory beast within herself, Kairova suddenly becomes
reflective, making a critical examination of her past life and recognizing all the falsehood,
vice, shame, and moral degradation involved in being an adulteress. In this utopian scenario
she finally experiences a genuine spiritual epiphany, whereby she assumes moral
responsibility for her sinful crime and realizes that the way truly to ennoble her lover is not
by perpetuating their extramarital love affair but rather by letting him return to his wife in
an effort to try to repair their marriage. In short, Kairova is here depicted as a confused
Magdalene who appears to possess within her soul at least the potential for moral regeneration
and spiritual resurrection. But first she needs to acknowledge the dissoluteness of a
debauched past life dominated by unbridled carnal desires. This rapacious young woman
needs perhaps to visit the foundling home, as Dostoevsky himself had just done, in order to
be reminded that motherly love for abandoned babies would enrich her life much more
than her selfish and reckless pursuit of passionate sexual love for a married man. When
Christ forgave the woman taken in adultery, Dostoevsky reminds his readers, He also added,
“Go forth and sin no more.”37 The same words, the editor of Diary of a Writer implies
strongly, should have been addressed to Ms. Kairova by the judge and jury at her trial.
KAIROVA, KORNILOVA, AND SELFLESS MOTHERHOOD
Our discussion of Dostoevsky’s treatment of the theme of carnality in his commentary on

the Kairova case would not be complete without some mention of a very different trial he
commented upon in Diary of a Writer during 1876: the case of Ekaterina Kornilova, yet
another young female defendant accused of having committed a violent crime. Kornilova,
a twenty-year-old, pregnant mother-to-be, threw her six-year-old stepdaughter out of a fourth-
floor window, a criminal act motivated by her desire to revenge herself upon her stern,
quarrelsome husband, who had berated and beaten her in front of relatives. Even though
the stepdaughter, by some miracle, was not seriously harmed from the fall and although
Kornilova went immediately to the police station to confess to the crime, the defendant was
found guilty of attempted murder and sentenced to thirty-two months of hard labor followed
by permanent exile in Siberia. Initially, Dostoevsky had responded to the news of Kornilova’s
crime with horror and dismay, penning a sarcastic caricature of how a defense attorney
would go about pleading for his client’s acquittal. When Dostoevsky learns, however, that
Kornilova was four months pregnant at the time of the incident, he suddenly changes his
tone radically and switches over to her defense, arguing that the temporary pathological
“affects” of pregnancy can sometimes cause a woman to commit an act she would not
otherwise commit. A pregnant woman, he explains, is very often subject to “certain strange
37
PSS 23:16. Near the end of his commentary on the Kornilova case, where Dostoevsky is insisting that the
court’s seeds of mercy have indeed fallen on good, fertile soil (because the defendant is genuinely repentant),
he again makes reference to this scriptural passage: “When the woman taken in adultery and condemned to be
stoned was told, ‘Go back to thy home and sin no more,’ do you really think that she returned home to commit
more sins?” (PSS 26:110).
influences and impressions that take a strange and fantastic hold on her psyche” (23:138).
Kornilova, he now reasons, might have been suffering from a special kind of temporary
insanity—a “madness without madness”—due to her pregnant condition (24:36). Had
Kornilova not been pregnant, Dostoevsky maintains, she might perhaps have contemplated
the crime, but she would not have actually committed it. Dostoevsky’s active intervention
on Kornilova’s behalf led subsequently to a retrial and eventually to an acquittal.
Dostoevsky scholars such as Rosenshield and Murav have linked the Kornilova case
closely with the Kroneberg case, mainly because they both involve a young girl who is the
victim of child abuse. As Murav puts it, “the Kroneberg and Kornilova cases curiously
mirror each other.”38 But the same might also be argued, it seems to me, about the female
defendants in the Kairova and Kornilova cases, both of whom stand trial for attempted
murder.39 The Kornilova case is significant for our purposes primarily because of the edifying
contrast it provides with the Kairova case in regard to Dostoevsky’s concern with the issue
of “unruly female sexuality” and the need to bridle carnal lusts. One indication that readers
are invited to link these two cases is the fact that Dostoevsky alludes to the Kornilova case
for the first time in the midst of his commentary on the Kairova case.40 He provides his
sarcastic caricature of a clever lawyer (who sounds suspiciously similar to Utin) defending
the stepmother who threw her young stepdaughter out the window in the section of Chapter
One of the May 1876 issue of Diary of a Writer that discusses how the defendant’s guilt is
not mitigated by the fact that the victim of the crime did not suffer serious physical injury.41
38
Murav, Russia’s Legal Fictions, 133. Rosenshield, in a similar vein, writes, “Dostoevsky originally saw
the Kornilova case in the context of Kroneberg” (Western Law, Russian Justice, 69).
39
Eric Naiman, meanwhile, reads the Kornilova case as mirroring neither of these two other legal cases
(Kroneberg or Kairova), but mirroring instead a short work of fiction embedded in the Diary: “The Dream of a
Ridiculous Man.” Naiman argues that this narrative maintains a metathetic as well as dialectic relationship
with the Kornilova case, whereby the repressed victim in that case (the stepdaughter thrown out the fourth-
floor window) resurfaces in “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” where she is restored to prominence as the
young girl who saves the hero from suicide. See Naiman, “Of Crime, Utopia, and Repressive Complements:
The Further Adventures of the Ridiculous Man,” Slavic Review 50:3 (1991): 512–20.
40
Dostoevsky segues from his discussion of the Kairova trial to mention of the Kornilova defenestration in
section 5 (“The Defense Attorney and Velikanova”), when he is in the midst of berating Utin for denying the
injured party her status as the victim of a crime, mainly by his failure to regard as significant the torment and
suffering she experienced during the violent razor attack upon her (Utin noted sarcastically that her injuries
could not have been too severe if she was back to work, performing on the stage as an actress, just two weeks
later). “Does that lessen the horror she had to endure two weeks earlier? And does that lessen the guilt of your
client?” Dostoevsky asks rhetorically. “We had a case not long ago of a stepmother who threw her six-year-old
stepdaughter out of a fourth-floor window, but the child got up on her feet quite unharmed. Well, does that in
any way alter the cruelty of the crime? And did this little girl really not suffer at all?” (PSS 23:19).
41
In the scathing caricature he provides of an attorney defending the stepmother, Dostoevsky is clearly
mocking the rhetorical style used by Utin in his defense of Kairova. “By the way, I cannot help but imagine
how defense attorneys would defend this stepmother,” Dostoevsky writes concerning Kornilova. “They would
cite her hopeless situation, the fact that she was recently married against her will or by mistake to a widower.
They would provide pictures of the impoverished lives of impoverished people, their endless labor. She, a
simple-hearted, innocent woman who, like an inexperienced girl (especially given our manner of child rearing!),
got married thinking that there were only joys awaiting her thereafter; but instead of joys she has the washing
of dirty linen, cooking, bathing the child—‘Gentlemen of the jury, it is only natural that she should conceive a
hatred for this child ... in a moment of despair, in a temporary fit of madness, scarcely knowing what she was
doing, she seizes this girl and ... Gentlemen of the jury, who among you would not have done the very same
thing? Who among you would not have thrown the child out the window?’” (PSS 23:19).
Considered in the context of Dostoevsky’s visit to the St. Petersburg Foundling Home in
the ensuing chapter of that May issue of the Diary, the Kornilova case, as Murav rightly
observes, “becomes emblematic of the neglect and abuse of children.”42 The same might
be said of Kairova, however, because she herself had, in effect, abandoned two young
children of her own, her illegitimate daughters Olga (born in 1865) and Liudmila (born in
1866), to pursue an acting career in Orienburg with the theater troupe headed by Velikanov.
Although Kairova’s common-law marriage with the journalist and dramatist Fyodor Koni
(who was thirty-five years her senior) and the existence of her two young daughters were
personal details not widely known in public circles, it is highly unlikely that Dostoevsky
would have been unaware of this aspect of Kairova’s private life, since he was friends with
Koni’s son, Anatoly Fyodorovich, a well-known jurist.
More important than Kairova’s identity as a mother who had abandoned her children,
however, is Dostoevsky’s discovery that Kornilova was not just a stepmother but a pregnant
mother-soon-to-be. At first, Kornilova’s defenestration of her young stepdaughter is likely
to bring to mind the unfit mothers who physically abuse their children or who abandon their
newborn babies at the foundling home.43 Indeed, Dostoevsky had initially characterized
the Kornilova case as “a rather simple and clear-cut story” of an evil monster-stepmother
who fits perfectly the widely disseminated stereotype because she appears to be trying to
kill her stepchild (23:136). But the discovery that Kornilova was pregnant at the time (and
perhaps the discovery that she was a simple peasant woman rather than a worldly, well-
travelled actress) changes Dostoevsky’s attitude radically. Suddenly the Kornilova case
becomes what he calls “A Case That Is Not as Simple as It Seems” (the title of the first
section of Chapter One in the October 1876 issue of Diary of a Writer, in which the author
discusses the case). This discovery links the young peasant woman in Dostoevsky’s mind
not with the reality of “unruly female sexuality” and the selfish pursuit of carnal lust and
romantic passion closely associated with Kairova, nor with the reality of the unfit mothers
who commit acts of violence against their own children or abandon their newborn babies at
a foundling home. Instead Kornilova becomes linked for Dostoevsky with the ideal of
selfless motherhood (materinstvo) associated with the volunteer wet nurses he encountered
at the foundling home. The author, as Naiman points out, effectively rewrites pregnancy by
“ridding it of [sexual] passion and redefining it as the rebirth of the soul.”44 Moreover,
where Dostoevsky dismisses the plea of temporary insanity (due to carnal passion and
romantic love) invoked by Utin in Kairova’s defense, he himself is the one who advances
the idea of temporary insanity (due to the affects of pregnancy) in Kornilova’s defense.45
42
43
In his notebooks Dostoevsky himself links Kornilova’s criminal act with his recent thoughts about
unfit mothers and the foundling home: “The foundling home (the stepdaughter thrown out the window). The
child’s hand scalded by boiling water from the samovar.” See Neizdannyi Dostoevskii: Zapisnye knizhki i
tetradi 1860–1881 gg., Literaturnoe nasledstvo 83, ed. I. S. Zil'bershtein and L. M. Rozenblium (Moscow,
1971), 535.
44
Naiman, “Of Crime, Utopia, and Repressive Complements,” 520.
45
In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky once again argues against temporary insanity due to romantic
passion as a legitimate defense for a violent crime (Dmitry’s alleged murder of his father). Rosenshield claims
that Dostoevsky is returning here to the dismissal of the temporary insanity defense he provided in the Epilogue
to Crime and Punishment (Western Law, Russian Justice, 141). It seems to me, however, that Dostoevsky is
Indeed, Utin’s invocation of beast imagery of a selfless, maternal nature—the image of a

lioness protecting her cubs from harm—in his defense of Kairova’s violent attack upon
Mrs. Velikanova reflects just how convoluted and wrong-headed, from Dostoevsky’s
perspective, the defense attorney’s assessment of his client’s true nature and of her violent
assault really is: Kairova is not a caring, protective mother (a lioness), he objects, but
rather a feral, predatory beast (a lion).46
The sharp contrast Dostoevsky establishes, in terms of sexual morality, between the
“good” female defendant (the maternal Kornilova) and the “bad” female defendant (the
carnal Kairova) returns us to the issue of law and justice when his commentary touches
upon the question of the court showing mercy for a defendant. In arguing for Kornilova’s
acquittal, Dostoevsky asserts that it is better for the court to err on the side of mercy, which
would “soften” her soul, allow the potential for goodness inside her to develop, and
regenerate her faith in humanity. Punishment, on the other hand, would only harden and
embitter her heart, resulting in her sinking down into moral depravity, perhaps even
prostitution. Hard labor in Siberia would lead Kornilova to almost certain ruin, Dostoevsky
predicts, for it would destroy the possibility of her spiritual regeneration.47 The defendant
is deserving of compassion and mercy, he argues, because she is a kind and “meek” soul,
who is “the first to consider herself guilty: she confessed immediately after committing the
crime, and she confessed again in court six months later” (23:139). After Kornilova is
finally acquitted at her retrial, Dostoevsky, who had been visiting her in prison about once
a month, waits a full eight months before visiting the defendant and her husband at their
home in order to verify for himself—who had intervened so actively on her behalf—that
she had truly been worthy to receive mercy:
that the mercy of the court had fallen like a good seed on fertile soil; that the
accused truly had been worthy of compassion and mercy; that the fits of
incomprehensible and almost fantastic fury, in one of which she had committed
her evil deed, had not returned and could not ever return to her again; that she
really was a meek and kind soul, not a ravager and murderess. (26:93)
As a result of his visit to the Kornilov household, Dostoevsky thus becomes convinced that
the seeds of mercy had indeed fallen on fertile soil, in large part because he believes that
the spiritually regenerated Kornilova is not a “ravager” and “murderess” who is prone to
targeting instead the temporary insanity defense (due to romantic passion) advanced by Utin in the Kairova
case. Indeed, the audience at Dmitry’s trial, especially the female members of that audience, want the defendant
acquitted precisely because he appears to have killed for love. At the Kairova trial, as the provincial letter
writer noted, the women in attendance broke out into applause for the very same reason when the “not guilty”
verdict was announced for her crime of passion.
46
For a study that examines Dostoevsky’s use of beast imagery to characterize sexual behavior of the predatory
kind on the part of some of his fictional characters, see my essay, “An Appetite for Power: Predators, Carnivores,
and Cannibals in Dostoevsky’s Novels,” in Food in Russian History and Culture, ed. Musya Glants and Joyce
Toomre (Bloomington, 1997), 124–45.
47
PSS 24:43. Anna Schur devotes a chapter of Wages of Evil: Dostoevsky and Punishment (Evanston,
forthcoming, Northwestern University Press), to the Kornilova case, examining how Dostoevsky espoused a
complex theory of punishment that cannot be called simply “retributivist.” I wish to thank Professor Schur for
allowing me to read parts of her book manuscript before its publication.
fits of almost fantastic fury, as seems to be the case with the passionate and despotic Kairova,
who stubbornly persists in refusing to consider herself guilty of having committed any
crime or to feel any remorse for her violent attack upon Velikanov’s wife.48
FERTILE SOIL FOR MERCY: MEEKNESS, HUMILITY, AND PROSAICNESS
The determining factors for what, according to Dostoevsky, constitutes “fertile soil” for
receiving the court’s “seeds of mercy” thus appear to have much to do with the qualities of
“meekness” and “humility,” features that are used to describe one of the two suicides suddenly
discussed in the midst of his commentary on the Kornilova case. The author speaks first
about the “strange and unexplained” suicide of a seventeen-year-old girl, Liza Herzen (the
illegitimate daughter of the well-known Russian émigré, Alexander Herzen), who leaves
behind a rather vulgar suicide note, written in French, that is permeated by a cynical,
materialist outlook on life that Dostoevsky characterizes as “nasty, vulgar chic” (23:145).
Then he discusses a quite different suicide committed by Marya Borisova, a poor young St.
Petersburg seamstress, who jumps out of a fourth-floor window, clutching an icon of the
Mother of God in her hand, because she is unable to find enough work to support herself.
“This, now, is an instance of a meek and humble suicide,” Dostoevsky writes. “Here,
apparently, there wasn’t even any grumbling or reproach; it was simply a matter of being
unable to live any longer—‘God did not wish it’—and so she died, after having said her
prayers.”49 Dostoevsky ends his discussion of these two contrasting female suicides with
the exclamation: “But how different these two creatures are—just as if they had come from
two different planets!” (23:146). In light of the sharp distinction he makes elsewhere in
this issue of the Diary between the meek Kornilova and the rapacious Kairova, one might
well think that he was referring here to these two female defendants.50
The organic metaphor Dostoevsky uses for the important distinction he draws between
Kornilova and Kairova as, respectively, fertile and infertile (or, more properly, not-yet-
fertile) “soil” (pochva) for the court’s mercy alludes, of course, to the famous distinction
his two fellow native-soil enthusiasts (pochvenniki), Apollon Grigoriev and Nikolai Strakhov,
were making at this time between “humble” (smirnyi) and “predatory” (khishchnyi) cultural
types within Russian literature and society. Grigoriev had credited Pushkin with being the
first writer to have created—in the character of Ivan Belkin—a genuinely Russian “humble”
type to counter the “predatory” Western type, characterized by passion and strength, made
48
“And so the whole question in the Kornilova case amounts merely to the kind of soil in which the seed [of
the court’s mercy] fell,” Dostoevsky explains after visiting the Kornilov home. “It seems to me ... that I would
not err now in stating that the seed has fallen on good soil; that a person has been resurrected; that this [mercy]
has caused no injury to anyone; that the soul of the guilty woman has been crushed both by repentance and by
an eternal, beneficent impression of the boundless mercy of people; and that now, after experiencing such
goodness and love, it would be difficult for her heart to become evil” (PSS 26:110).
49
PSS 23:146. The “meek and humble” suicide of this poor seamstress apparently served as the inspiration
for the short story, “A Gentle Creature” (“Krotkaia”), which Dostoevsky published in the November 1876 issue
of Diary of a Writer.
50
Straus examines connections between these two female suicides and the fictional heroine in the story “A
Gentle Creature.” See Dostoevsky and the Woman Question, 97–117.
famous by the fictional heroes of Byron and other European romantics. Strakhov had
revived Grigoriev’s two terms in an 1868 article on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. According to
Strakhov, Grigoriev had demonstrated that
to the alien types, who predominated in our literature, belong almost everything
that bears upon itself the mark of the heroic—types that may be either brilliant or
gloomy, but that are in any event powerful, passionate, or, as our critic expressed
it, predatory. The Russian nature, meanwhile, our sincere, cordial type, made its
appearance in art mainly in the simple and humble types, apparently devoid of
anything heroic.51
In Strakhov’s view, Tolstoy’s patriotic epic, with its memorable portrayal of such
quintessentially national characters as Platon Karataev and General Kutuzov (as well as
such unsung heroes as Captain Timokhin and Captain Tushin), presents us with the very
apotheosis of the “humble” Russian type. The “predatory” types, meanwhile, who are
made to represent “evil” and “depravity,” include not just the French military and civilian
leaders, especially Napoleon, but also those Europeanized Russian aristocrats—such as
the Kuragins—who mimic their Gallic ways.52 The significance of Tolstoy’s national epic,
for Strakhov, lies mainly in the way it depicts the victory of the “humble” Russian type over
the “predatory” French type: “A voice on behalf of the simple and the good against the
false and the predatory—this is the essential, principal meaning of War and Peace.”53 The
“predatory” Western type was thus considered by Grigoriev and Strakhov to be a foreign
cultural import of European origin that was alien to the Russian national character and
detrimental to native Russian values.54
For a staunch native-soil enthusiast like Dostoevsky, Kairova represents the same
alien values of this “predatory” Western type—characterized by passion and power, evil
and depravity—described by Grigoriev and Strakhov. Indeed, in the brief autobiographical
sketch she wrote in prison while awaiting trial, Kairova agrees with those people who
consider her to personify passion itself. “There are times,” she writes, “when I truly do
become the very embodiment of passion.”55 Kairova even has this revealing comment to
make about her arguably “predatory” personality and character: “I have never met a more
capricious, despotic, and ungrateful woman than I am.”56 Sounding very much like a male
Byronic hero (or Pechorinesque superfluous man), Kairova confesses that she cannot endure
boredom, which drives her to depression, and then to spite and rage. “I need conflict, I
need agitation and excitement,” she writes, “and if I don’t have them, then I am prepared to
create them on purpose.”57 Kornilova, on the other hand, is portrayed in the Diary as a
“meek” and “humble” peasant type who embodies native Russian values. When Dostoevsky,
51
N. N. Strakhov, Kriticheskie stat'i ob I. S. Turgeneve i L. N. Tolstom (Kiev, 1908), 246–47.
52
Ibid., 265.
53
Ibid., 284.
54
“Much of Dostoevsky’s later work,” Joseph Frank points out, “may well be seen as a dramatization of the
conflict between ‘predatory’ Western (or Western-influenced) types and genuinely Russian ‘meek’ ones.” See
Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 (Princeton, 1986), 46.
55
“Avtobiograficheskii ocherk A. V. Kairovoi,” 380.
56
Ibid., 377.
57
Ibid., 386.
after Kornilova’s initial conviction and before her retrial, speculates as to what would happen
to her, to her stepdaughter, to her soon-to-be-born child, and to her ex-husband as she
prepares to depart for Siberia to begin her sentence of hard labor and permanent exile, he
paints for his reader a very touching picture of Russian domesticity, marked by a spirit of
forgiveness, reconciliation, and compassion among all the members of the Kornilov family.
He contrasts this “prosaic” picture of family love and togetherness favorably with what one
might encounter in a “heroic” and “poetic” Western version of this same story:
In a word, with our common people the result will never be an epic poem, isn’t
that true? They are the most prosaic people in the world, so that one almost
becomes ashamed for them in that respect. Now just compare this with how it
would have turned out in Europe. What passions, what vengeance there would
have been! And with what dignity would it have been portrayed! (23:141)
The author’s imaginative reconstruction of the fate of Kornilova and her family, the
“semifiction” he composes in picturing what would happen to them if she were not granted
mercy by the court, serves mainly as a cautionary tale. It is a cautionary tale not for Kornilova
herself, however, but for those who would punish her for a crime she would not have
committed if she had not been pregnant at the time.58
In Dostoevsky’s opinion, the heroine of this semifiction, a paradigmatically “meek”
and “humble” Russian cultural type, is worthy of receiving the court’s “seeds of mercy,”
which would not only regenerate her soul morally and redeem her life spiritually. They
would also restore her marriage and repair her family relations. Indeed, Rosenshield argues
that Dostoevsky portrays the Kornilova retrial, which ends in her acquittal, as the site of “a
communal religious experience,” one where the “moral regeneration of a Christian soul”
takes place. “The Kornilova article is not only a story about personal redemption,”
Rosenshield asserts,
it is an allegory about the fate of the Russian people. The good ground or soil
(pochva) on which the seeds of resurrection are sown relates directly to Kornilova’s
fate, but it also is a key concept of Dostoevsky’s political populist ideology
(pochvennichestvo), which held that Russia’s greatest problem was the rift dividing
the common people, the narod, from the educated classes, which had been cut off
from Mother Russia and their roots in the native soil. Dostoevsky uses Kornilova
as a symbol of Russia’s potential for regeneration. She is a great sinner, but she
is still young and her soil is deep and rich. By treating her with compassion and
forgiving her trespasses, the court makes possible the spiritual rebirth of all that
Kornilova symbolizes.59
The rapacious Kairova, on the other hand, is currently denied such salvific possibilities.
She still must learn to accept moral responsibility for her actions, to discipline her “unruly
58
The term “semifiction” comes from Morson, who uses it to describe Dostoevsky’s propensity in Diary of
a Writer for “combining fiction and nonfiction, of projecting, interrogating, and imagining real events in order
to arrive at their spiritual meaning” (“Introductory Study: Dostoevsky’s Great Experiment,” 45).
59
Rosenshield, Western Law, Russian Justice, 90.
female sexuality” (by bridling her carnal lusts), and to develop the necessarily prosaic
meekness and humility of the Russian cultural type. Only then, Dostoevsky suggests, would
her soul become capable of providing the kind of fertile soil in which the seeds of mercy
could take root, sprout, and blossom to produce the spiritual redemption and Christian
salvation that the author was quite confident Kornilova was bound to attain soon, if she had
not attained them already.

Dostoevsky and The Trial of Nastasia Kairo - Ronald LeBlanc

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Dostoevsky and the

Trial of Nastasia Kairova:

“But then again all these Kairovas are detestable.”

The Russian Review 71 (October 2012): 630–54

DOSTOEVSKY’S COMMENTARY ON THE KAIROVA TRIAL

This wretched, heinous criminal, who is completely guilty, represents in essence

THE WOMAN TAKEN IN ADULTERY: DOSTOEVSKY ON CARNALITY

This description of female rapaciousness, which serves as an example of what I have

FRAMEWORK OF CARNALITY I: KAIROVA’S UNBRIDLED LUSTS

FRAMEWORK OF CARNALITY II: ABANDONED BABIES, UNFIT MOTHERS

FRAMEWORK OF CARNALITY III: THE RUSSIAN WOMAN

The Russian woman chastely (tselomudrenno) scorned obstacles and mockeries.

KAIROVA, KORNILOVA, AND SELFLESS MOTHERHOOD

Our discussion of Dostoevsky’s treatment of the theme of carnality in his commentary on

Indeed, Utin’s invocation of beast imagery of a selfless, maternal nature—the image of a

FERTILE SOIL FOR MERCY: MEEKNESS, HUMILITY, AND PROSAICNESS

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