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.
If people are basically good, as classical liberals like Stavrogin would purport, then the evaporation of institutions of morality is incidental and will have little effect upon society. Since people naturally tend to behave well when they are threatened by survival or oppression, then these nice-to-haves may become relics of nostalgia without threat to the societal order.
But if people are not basically good, then the dissolution of morality entails the erosion and devolution of society as the safeguards provided by the church and the law become irrelevant. The bestial, evil nature of man may manifest itself unchecked. And for radical leftists like Verkhovensky who see no reality in what is good or evil, this becomes a world where the strongest enforce their will upon the rest.
The radical anarchists are not sympathetic characters. One hears their arguments, speeches, one can see their logic. It is perhaps Dostoyevsky's strategy to show that the radicals are rationally correct given the grounding principles of liberalism. But the ethical conclusions are so vile, one would be hard pressed to agree with the radicals. It makes you wonder what went wrong that such young men could become so misguided and poisoned, “What brought you to this point?” one could ask.
And for Dostoyevsky that impetus is Western liberalism, untethered from the Orthodox faith or Russian tradition. Rejecting the goodness of humanity turns the devolution of liberalism into a historical necessity, even if spread over decades and generations. It is only by embracing the depravity of man, and the necessity of faith in Christ, that true hope can be born.
Again, these are just general descriptors of a much more embellished narrative within the imaginative landscape of Dostoyevsky's oeuvre. There are counter-arguments and counterpoints, to be sure. I hope this to be merely a gateway to more richly engage with Dostoyevsky for those who are provoked or intrigued by such a perspective.
At Tikhon's - The Theatrics of Self-Loathing
While much of Demons features the spliced dynamics of politics and family drama in the Dostoyevsky vein, one chapter "At Tikhon's" moves into a psychological reflection not nearly as polemical as other chapters are.
It features one of our protagonists Stavrogin visiting his old friend--the bishop Tikhon. He arrives carrying a letter. Stavrogin hands Tikhon this letter, urging him to read it.
The opening words introduce a narrative, an account of Stavrogin's younger years when he lived as a young man in Switzerland. The tale wanders through details and reminisciences, but the ultimate plot of the story is that Stavrogin's landlady had a ten year old daughter whom she constantly abused: physically, verbally, emotionally, etc.
Upon one of these occasions when the landlady left, Stavrogin promptly molested the young girl.
As he strictly repeatedly iterates, he felt no sexual temptation when doing so. He was not overcome by lust or passion. He prefaces this story by telling us how much control he had over his impulses his entire life. This was not something done in the spirit of the moment. No, it was a pure act of will. And he found in the midst of this act, that he hated this girl even more than before. Her innocence disgusted him. He even wanted to kill her right there. But he did not. She went away. Thereafter, when she sought him for approval, he avoided her and eventually moved out and on with his life. That is the disgusting act which he wished to act.
This is the letter Tikhon reads alongside us the reader. Like many characters in Dostoyevsky's universe, Tikhon is an awkward man full of nervous ticks and mannerisms which one can easily imagine as discomfiting in real life. His face twitches, he rapidly breaks eye contact, his arms and legs jerk suddenly.
However, when Tikhon finishes the letter, he appears relatively nonplussed. In fact, the nervous bishop hardly seems agitated at all.
Stavrogin is at first bemused and increasingly surprised. He pokes and prods at the bishop asking him if he isn't shocked at how evil his genteel philanthropist friend is--the great champion of progressivism. In fact, Stavrogin has arranged for copies of this letter to be sent to newspapers across Russia so that everyone may understand that his magnaminous celebrity is little more than a farce. He wishes to confess and display to the world the darkness within his soul.
At this moment, Tikhon looks up with unrestrained directness and gazes into Stavrogin's eyes, asking him, what is your motivation to print all this? This letter is indeed quite a letter. It is a literary exercise of the highest splendor. It is a masterful essay in psychological self-analysis. In his narrative, Stavrogin interjects himself as a narrator to explain his own psychological motives to us, to make it known why he did what he did.
In fact, the letter is so exquisitely polished, it verges on the level of showmanship.
It is so artistic that, Tikhon asks, is it true that you repent of what you did.
Stavrogin, slightly offended, says yes of course. This is the most sincere thing he has written down. It is the most repentant.
But that's just it, says Tikhon, just because a confession is sincere, it does not mean it is repentant.
He asks Stavrogin again. Are you truly repentant? If you were, then you would not publish this letter and keep it secret the rest of your life.
For it is not out of sorrow and humility that Stavrogin wants his sin announced to the world, it is out of pride.
He wants to be seen, to be known, to be decried across Russia as an evil, wicked man. He wants people to behold his depravity, and he wants to stew in their ire.
In short, Stavrogin wants to be hated.
If there is one thing that Stavrogin is afraid of, it is not the people's hate, but their pity.
Tikhon goes on. The world is so corrupt that molesting an abused child is in no way unique. "As for the crime itself, many people sin in the same way, and live in peace and quiet with their conscience, even regarding it as one of the inevitable trespasses of youth. There are old men who sin in this way, even contentedly and playfully. The whole world is filled with all these horrors. But you have felt the whole depth of it, something which rarely happens to such an extent." (707)
And here Tikhon announces Stavrogin's true motive. "You are in the grip of a desire for martyrdom and self-sacrifice; conquer this desire as well, set aside your pages and your intention--and then you will overcome everything. You will put to shame all your pride and your demon! You will win, you will attain freedom" (Ibid.)
Few literary episodes feature such a construction of the repentance narrative, that scrutinize the vanity of guilt. At a superficial level, people want to be liked and hated to be disliked. They want to be seen as good people doing good things. To confess some wrongdoing, to cast blame squarely on themselves, runs against the self-interest of human nature, does it not?
This is the conventional wisdom, but Dostoyevsky's psychological understanding flows much deeper that this shallow ebb. For what the basic view neglects is one key facet of the human psyche: self-loathing. How much we hate ourselves.
To have consciousness is to experience the lack of what one is. To feel one's errors, one's limitations, one's finitude--crippingly so. Our flaws are etched as scars upon the soul.
Finitude is essential to being human, and once one becomes cognizant of this finitude, one must come to grips with it. Finitude not just in the sense of a limited being perfect and polished and pure within one's tidy little box, but rather a poxed, dessicated, pus-filled sludge of flesh. Our imperfections tabulated upon the ledger of eternity.
One must grapple with their flaws, even unto death.
And that is the trouble of it. We live so long and hard in denial of how repulsive we are.
To live without being recognized as fundamentally ugly, it works nasty effects upon the soul.
Stavrogin was universally lauded by his generation as a model citizen, a man of the highest character. But this only exacerbated his guilt, his self-loathing, for he knew how evil and ugly he truly was. To inhabit between the dissonance of these dual lives, that can only lead to madness.
Stavrogin knew that his sin was not a collusion of hormones, some overpowering temptation, but rather a pure act of willful hatred. The desire to crush a pear growing upon the tree.
He loathed this child's innocence much as he loathes himself, and he wants others to share in this hatred. For it is then that his "true" character may be disclosed, and he can be celebrated for how atrocious a man he was.
The desire to be hated is perhaps the most selfish desire of all.
Such self-loathing is far too easily cloaked in layers of sanctimonious humility, self-effacing hand-wringing, and public martyrdom. In ignominious depravity, one becomes the most pure, for one has the most to lose, and perhaps has already lost the most. But in this, one gains the earthly pride of the confessor. You become a holy celebrity through your depravity.
This is a common theme in evangelicalism as well. Evangelicals savor a "good conversion story". The deeper you sink and suck of the fruits of sin in your previous life, the higher you rise in your redemption, and the more appetizing the story. Pastors whose lives were ornamented with fornication and vice are often more respected than those who have lived in quiet piety their entire lives. There are other reasons for this, but this thread contributes.
And that is part of this psychological mechanism. By "giving up" your entire reputation by professing your evils to the world, to commit one's atrocities to the public square, that can often perversely lead to one's ascendance to sainthood. There is thus a moral superiority in confessing one's wrongdoing, for it is allegedly the greatest act of reununciation.
In this way, pride and self-loathing join hands in putting on a great dramatic martyrdom story. Makes good television.
What does true repentance look like? It does not entail vanity.
And that is why Tikhon explicitly tells Stavrogin he can only be free if he does not publicize this information. For Stavrogin would only lavish in the hatred of others.
Rather, he must seek forgiveness in Christ, not the contempt of man.
This particular exchange presents Dostoyevsky's solution to the larger problem of existential guilt.
Accept your wickedness, your ugliness, your finitude. It is what it is. But do not seek to make your wrongdoing a badge or sticker for attention. Nothing could be more vainglorious.
It is in the pure love of Christ and his forgiveness for our depravity that we can continue to live what we are and to heal.
Soliciting the hatred of others does not bring about our regeneration.
I think this is a point not often made.
Evangelicals, liberals, and other ilk will all join hands on this question. Public confession is without qualification a moral good.
Dostoyevsky problematizes confession, and this is all the more pertinent in a world which increasingly harps on questions of guilt, public apology, and the like.
What are our motives when we confess our wrongs publicly?
Many see it as a selfless act, but brokenness-signaling is a perverse vanity. Something used to attract anger or pity, or just attention in general. For these rhetorical exercises can prove strategically advantageous in the attention economy.
One should not taken this as an extreme option. This is not to say that all sins should be hidden and covered up. For the motive there is self-protection and egoism, just of a different sort.
This is merely a confession whose motive rests in a weaponized cynicism that seeks the lashes of others, a wish fulfillment of self-loathing, as we hate those around us. As Tikhon points out, "But it is as if you already hate beforehand all those who will read what is described here and are challenging them to battle." (706)
And this is the spirit of Dostoyevsky.
To comes to grips with who we are, what we are, and do so bravely. Whatever dark cloisters of our consciousness may come to light, and whichever patches of light may fade in the face of darker epiphanies about oneself. Continue on so that in your self dissection, you remember that peace is only found in love of Christ.
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It is not too well known that Dostoyevsky was mere minutes away from execution when he was a young man. He was a political activist, arrested for terrorism. He was imprisoned and stood upon the gallows. Death was there for him.
When a letter arrived from the Tsar pardoning him from the death penalty and instead sentencing him to Siberia for some years. He would go and serve his sentence. He would apparently develop his epilepsy from such an experience, but it perhaps also when his soul as a writer was born.
For if any man has known the dark night of the soul, it was Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He had come face-to-face with, lived with, ate with, worked with the most wicked criminals in all of Russia. And in the twenty-seven years of freedom that Tsar and God granted him following his release, he grappled with many questions. Far more beyond the few I have taken up in this post.
This was a man who knew the wickedness of the world, yet was brave enough to hope through this darkness. To present us with a vision of peace for those of us willing to set down our pride and open our ears to hear.
*But as a friend has pointed out to me, this may be because I made the dubious choice of experiencing Dostoyevsky through the translation of Pevear and Volokhonsky.
**Even more so because such concepts of people being “good” or “bad” are loaded, generic characterizations which ought to have more precise definition. But again in general conversation, it is more about the waving of the fists, than the hitting of the mark.
***Cf. Frank, Joseph, and Mary Petrusewicz. 2012. Dostoevsky : A Writer in His Time. Princeton, N.J., Woodstock: Princeton University Press. Pages 601-615.
This details the history behind Demons including the historical counterparts to the fictional characters. Also tying it with Turgenev's contemporaneous novel Fathers and Sons.