Vrubel, Mikhail. Seated Demon. 1890. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia. Public Domain URL
Some rituals are stranger than others. Some are directed toward our edification, others our sanity, and some have no point at all.
Over the past four years, I adopted a ritual that I have only recently completed.
When going on a recreational trip for a week or more, I would bring a Dostoyevsky novel with me. Again and again, over the years. In this way, I inched through his corpus start-to-finish.
This has embued many of my trips with a particular flavor of Dostoyevsky, a faint scent characterizing many distinctive memories of my early twenties.
Crime and Punishment haunts the autumnal tone of some Rhineland Hauptbahnhof, as I sat waiting for a train.
The Idiot with sitting in the dried grasses of Montpellier’s Jardin de Peyrou under the sun's graze.
And the finale, Brothers Karamazov, on an Italian veranda in the deep heat of the Tuscan summer.
I would be remiss to have undertaken such a series of journeys without attempting to commit some written words to the memory of this excursion, with Dostoyevsky as my Dantean guide.
So that is what I will attempt to do here. To pay homage to a man of such profound, deranged innocence. Starting with his oeuvre in general and then homing in (eventually) on one particular chapter which captivated my attention: the deleted Demons chapter “At Tikhon’s”.
Fyodor and the Use of Shock
Dostoyevsky is not an easy author to read. I frankly find reading him unenjoyable.* Ponderous, wide-ranging dialogues spiced with little interactions that seem just a bit too overmarinated with emotionally fraught subtext. But that is not to say he is not good to read.
Even through hundreds of pages of what could be uncharitably labeled as rants, Dostoyevsky does not forget to take hold of the reader. For it cannot be denied that Dostoyevsky is a graphic author. And many will perhaps find the stories I cite here disturbing. His plots and characters may merely be ideologies and psychological automatons cloaked in flesh, but one cannot forget Dostoyevsky’s powerful and masterful employment of anecdote.
Anecdotes encrust the interpersonal sparring of his characters, episodic moments drawn as materiel for debate or as some impetus for a character's personal epiphany. Some of these anecdotes recount moments of charity or kindness that have a significant impact on a character's outlook. Yet, many others are graphic depictions of human depravity.
Here are a few particularly grotesque ones that come to mind now (and I hope my memory does not alter too significantly in my recollection).
Take for example, the commoner family that had pooled their savings over the course of a dozen years so that the daughter could have a decent dowry for her marriage. The father had died, so the mother and brother worked arduously to prepare for the day. When the sister received a marriage offer that was much more than could have been hoped for, they gathered all their money and had the son bring it into town so that they could finalize the marriage.
The old mother, wrinkled by years of work, and the sister, with her entire future before her, circled round and prayed over their brother.
That he would make it safely with their money into town and that the marriage could be officiated and their family hopes restored.
Then he was on his way. No dangers presented themselves on his journey and he arrived with all the paper rubles entrusted to his care. But no sooner did he arrive, than did he find himself in a gambling house. In the course of a single day he spent all the money on expensive drinks, women, clothes, with the rest gambled away.
He woke the next morning realizing what happened and begged for coins on the street.
As soon as he had collected a small portion, he went to the store.
He bought a gun. He went back to the hotel and then promptly shot himself.
His sister and mother none the wiser, sitting at home praying for his safety. How long did they sit in eager hope as the flower of expectation slowly wilted?
Or take another story from the Brothers Karamazov.
On a feudal estate, a servant woman's seven year old son tosses a stone at one of his master’s dogs and hits one of its legs. The dog yelps and limps over to its master. Being a just man, the master decides upon a punishment. He brings the boy's mother out and has two guards hold her tight.
He brings out all his hunting dogs. He gives the boy ten seconds to run.
The boy sprints as fast as he can into the woods. When the ten seconds expire, the master whistles for his dogs.
They rush forward, reaching the boy quickly. Her eyes may be closed, but the mother hears her boy’s screams as his limbs are torn from their joints, his flesh from his body.
Imagine the evolution of noises in this child's transformation. Disembowlment from a healthy, smiling boy into stringy chunks of flesh, stripped clean to the bone. From verbal yells to inarticulate screams to fading whimpers, finally eclipsed by the sound of feeding dogs.
And what can his mother do but weep. The master, having executed his justice, heads inside. He lives the rest of his long life in peace. Not a single moment of approbation for self-doubt for executing this child. The mother never has another child.
Such things are disturbing. They are meant to be. But why does Dostoyevsky work so hard and effectively to unsettle the reader?
I find it moving, but isn't this just trying to tug the heartstrings, to make us upset?
It is right to be skeptical of shock content. Our media culture has so thoroughly monetized and packaged outrage content to provoke us, to garner attention, and thereby increase clickstream revenue.
Even without the dimension of money, gratuitous shock content is not some invention of capital. Rome, what we consider the peak of civilization, mastered the art form of shocking gore and violence and other such things. But one must ask at what point the intent to shock is merely gratuitous.
Shock can be employed to titillate or to make a point. And one of Dostoyevsky’s goals is often to make present to the reader the unrelenting sickness of the world.
In doing so he challenges a well-circulated mode of thought, one which I still encounter today, though I admittedly fail to grasp how people can sincerely claim this: the idea that people are basically good.
This principle is a difficult one to challenge. For it is not a conclusion arrived at after stages of argumentation. Rather, it is an originating principle that one starts from and which generates other beliefs about the world and its people.
To argue for the inherent whateverness of human nature is a pointless exercise.
Merely swapping stories about people doing good, bad, or atrocious things cannot get at the heart of the matter. What one side takes as examples, the other takes as exceptions. Anecdotes are downstream from the principles, at least at the level of reason. We have prior commitments that predetermine our interpretation of these ancedotes.
To believe people are basically good, bad, or what have you is fundamentally a religious position.** One taken on faith and then subsequently applied to the world. This is not arrived at by evidence, rather the evidence is born out of the prior conviction. And so the barter and swap of empirical paraphernalia as pro et contra can never elevate circumstance to principle. It is an endless dance. To believe that this mode of argumentation can ever be persuasive is as misguided as presuppositional apologetics of both the Catholic and Reformed strains.
Those who claim that people are basically good typically fall under the belief that there is some innate disposition to goodness which is tainted or misdirected by the perils of life. The cliched (and misappropriated) line from Rousseau that “Man is born free but everywhere is in chains”.
Externalities condition the original goodness which causes deviation and thus results in the evil human actions which populate the pages of history. Acting out of need, retribution, or corrupt ideology. Often with the idea that there is some greater end which justifies the “bad”.
This is why Augustine’s pear moment in Confessions II.iv is such a pivotal example. When as a boy, Augustine and his friends snatch fruit from a neighbor’s pear tree, not to eat, but merely to smash and destroy them, he unequivocally states that he did so not from need or toward some external goal. He carried out such vandalism purely for the sake of doing something wrong.
While this example may seem banal compared to the atrocities that regularly occur across the world, no less in Dostoyevsky, it does capture the key principle that for Augustine, humans do bad things ex nihilo, for its very own sake.
Of course, one may reply, that this desire to do wrong is itself rooted in some Freudian pathology or a misbalance of neural chemistry. Thus extending the battle yet again.
So how does one challenge a conviction taken as a matter of faith?
By the corrosive gnaw of doubt.
Dostoyevsky extensively sketches out parables of atrocities not to provide shock for its own sake but rather to undermine faith in the inherent goodness of humanity. Reason may sidestep and categorize abominations in neat boxes, but the heart will still hear and begin to grow doubt.
And this is actually what happens to Dostoyevsky’s characters. They may spend dozens of pages arguing and bantering over ideas, but it is the personal encounters that so deeply affect these characters, that stir or undermine their convictions. That in effect produce a change of heart (and consequently of mind).
This is not meant just for the characters but for the reader as well. This is why Dostoyevsky so often paraphrases historical reality in his fiction. So often, he merely reiterates things that already did happen in his time. As the biographer Joseph Frank points out, with Demons, Dostoyevsky began the practice of appropriating stories and encounters directly from newspaper reports. His catalogue of horrors are merely accrued from facts of public record.
By making such things vividly present to the reader's imagination, Dostoyevsky is not hoping to use examples as logical operators but rather as vehicles of conviction so that the reader may come to affirm the villainous nature of humanity.
Demons: A Parable of Liberalism and Leftism
The question of the goodness of humanity is a cliched, tired debate, to be sure. So why is it so important to Dostoyevsky?
One answer can be seen in the central conflict of Demons.
This novel dramatizes a quite historical conflict between two generations in the Russian cultural elite: the Romantic Idealists of the 1840s and the more anarchic, radical left of the 1860s.***
Stavrogin is one of the primary characters of the novel. He is an older gentleman belonging to that earlier generation. We was well-respected and admired for his efforts and writings which attempted to bring progress and dignity to Russia, overcoming the backwards institutions which threatened to stifle the common man and continue the oppressive of autocracy which Russia was notorious for.
On the other hand is Verkhovensky, Stavrogin’s intellectual protegee. Verkhovensky is much more radical than his forebear, though he ostensibly is committed to the same ideals of equality and progress. However, unlike Stavrogin, Verkhovensky has no opposition to theft, rape, or murder.
And throughout the novel, as he carries out these disgusting things, he does not necessarily tether their purpose to an ends-justify-the-means explanation. He simply does not see himself tethered by antiquated considerations of morality.
While Stavrogin seems as committed to traditional moral principles as the religious or conservative parties he is working against, his heirs have no such conviction in any morality at all.
This parallels the real historical conflict between these two generations, as the younger turned more and more to acts of terrorism.
In both history and in the novel, the older generation is thoroughly shocked by and decries this "evil" behavior. In return, the younger generation mocks the older generation as hypocritical progressive who do not have the will to carry out what is necessary to achieve their goals. The old fuddy duddies are merely closeted conservatives. And besides their generation will be dead soon anyway.
Such, in very broad strokes, is the nature of the conflict in Demons, though there are many actors with more articulate dimensions, than I can give countenance to here.
Dostoyevsky’s novel is on one level an evolutionary argument.
Classical liberalism is rooted in notions of morality and dignity that belong to a presupposed religious faith. However liberalism untethers itself from pre-rational religious frameworks and inevitably undermines the moral roots upon which it stands. When the subsequent generation has no connection to this moral, religious background, they have no grasping of or conviction in morality at all. Liberalism thus devolves into pure instrumental radicalism.
Such is the general shape of Dostoyevsky’s argument. There is much more that could be said about the claims of this narrative, but it is the one he presents.
And this is where the question of human nature becomes the lynch pin of this pre-determined historical arc.