THE POSSESSED by Dostoevsky
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Dostoevsky's letters tell us more about The Possessed than any other of his great books. What they say is little enough, but it is very precious. He had infinite difficulty in writing the book. " None of my works," he writes to Strakhov in 1870, " has given me so much trouble as this one. At the beginning, that is at the end of last year, I thought the novel very ' made ' and artificial, and rather scorned it. But later I was seized by real enthusiasm ; suddenly I fell in love with my work. . . . Then in the summer came another transformation : up started a new, vital character, who insisted on being the real hero of the book ; the original hero (a most interesting figure, but not worthy to be called a hero) fell into the background. The new one so inspired me that I once more began to rewrite the whole. And now when I have already sent the beginning to the office of the Roussky Viestnik, I am suddenly possessed with terror— I fear that I am not equal to the theme I have chosen. ..." Two months later he tells Maikov that he " has undertaken a task to which his powers are not equal." In yet another three months he writes again to thank Maikov for a criticism of the first part — " They are Turgeniev's heroes in their old age" — and explains his letter to Strakhov. " Stepan Trofimovitch is a figure of superficial importance, the novel will not in any real sense deal with him ; but his story is so closely connected with the principal events of the book that I was obliged to take him as a basis for the whole. This Stepan Trofimovitch will take his benefit in the fourth part ; his destiny is to have a most original climax. I won't answer for anything else ; but for that I can answer without limitations. And yet I must say once more : I tremble like a frightened mouse. ..." The new hero who rose up suddenly, like a spirit out of the earth, and drove Stepan Tro- fimovitch Verhovensky from the stage was Nikolay Stavrogin. He, too, descended like his predecessors from out of a mysterious past into life. The narrative tells us that he was Varvara Petrovna's son and Stepan Trofimo- vitch's pupil ; but between that childhood and the manhood in which he appears to us, dark and mysterious years have passed in that strange city of Petersburg, which Dostoevsky reveals to us as like that chasm in the earth, the mundus where the old Romans communed with the awful spirits of the dead.
And though they cannot tell why, the in- habitants of the provincial capital which is the scene of the drama, are terrified of Stavrogin. They fear him and they hate him, in a frenzy of fear and hatred, as though he were a portent. He did strange things ; he pulled by the nose the harmless Gaganov, who had the innocent habit of saying on occasion that " he couldn't be led by the nose " ; he bit the governor's ear, pretending that he would whisper to him. But it was not for these stupid and outrageous acts that he was hated ; it was for the manner and the intention with which he did them. By some instinct they knew that he was not mad. 4 The general outburst of hatred with which everyone fell upon the 4 ruffian and duelling bully from the capital ' also struck one as curious," says the imaginary eye-witness in whose mouth the narrative is put. " They insisted on seeing an insolent design and deliberate intention to insult our whole society at once." For reasons of which they can give no account to themselves the citizens hate Stav- rogin for his being, and in spite of their old convictions, it is a relief to them that they can after all ascribe his actions to derangement, when he is seized by a brain-fever while under arrest for the most serious of his outrages.
But they were right before. Stavrogin was not mad. The crafty enthusiast Liputin knew it when he sent his message. And we too now know the nature of the spirit which embodied awakens the unreasoning hatred and fear of society. Stavrogin is one of those who must be taken outside the city walls and stoned until he is dead. Those stupid and outrageous acts were but the trials of his will, for he is Will incarnate. He is utterly alone, having set his individual consciousness against life. He has gone so far on his lonely path that we can see him no more. The far cold distance holds him. In the years that passed between his first descent upon the city and the second, it was rumoured that he had been on an expedition to the icy North. Svidrigailov, too, had talked of such a journey. In the history of both of them this travelling in the cold and silent wastes of the earth was only a symbol, by which Dostoevsky could convey in temporal terms, the lonely and infinite distance to which their spirit had been driven. The chill, still desolation of the timeless world to which Stavrogin has ruthlessly pursued his way, hangs about him, striking terror into the heart of his own mother.
He remained standing for two minutes in the same position by the table, apparently plunged in thought, but soon a cold and listless smile came on to his lips. He slowly sat down again in the same place on the corner of the sofa, and shut his eyes as though from weariness. . . . Varvara Petrovna knocked at the door gently as before, and again receiving no answer, she opened the door. Seeing that Nikolay Vsyevolodo- vitch was sitting strangely motionless, she cautiously advanced to the sofa with a throbbing heart. She seemed struck by the fact that he could fall asleep so quickly and that he could sleep sitting like that, so erect and motionless, so that his breathing even was scarcely perceptible. His face was pale and for- bidding, but it looked as it were numb and rigid. His brows were somewhat contracted and frowning. He positively had the look of a lifeless wax figure. She stood over him for about three minutes, almost holding her breath, and suddenly she was seized with terror. . . .
The cold horror of that portrait is terrible. Stavrogin is not a man, but a presence. He has looked upon the frozen waste of eternity. We cannot see him ; his physical body is only a shell. His spirit is infinitely away. We can follow the road he has gone only by the vision of his dead selves, Kirillov and Shatov and Pyotr Verhovensky. These are the things he has passed beyond, and having passed beyond them, he is lost to sight. To each of these men he has been a leader and a God : each of them, in his supreme moment, cries to Stavrogin in the same words : " Remember how much you have meant in my life ! " Even the pitiful Lebyadkin, who had crossed his path in the dark Petersburg days, echoes the words ; though of what Stavrogin had taught him, he can express only a remembered, yet significant phrase. " One must really be a great man even to make a stand against common sense." That rang in Lebyadkin's memory ; it was the oracle delivered to him by his God. And Le- byadkin had known by sure instinct that Stavrogin had had this greatness. Was it not upon his own sister, the cripple and demented Marya Timofeyevna, that Stavrogin had made trial of it ?
" It takes a great man to make a stand even against common sense." It was worth remembering, for even though the message was apportioned to Lebyadkin's understanding, it yet contained all Stavrogin's secret. To have the instinct of common sense in his heart, and ,q to trample upon it just because it was an instinct, and therefore an impediment to the working of his conscious will ; to sacrifice all things to his will, all instincts, all impulses, all emotions, all loves, all loyalties ; to know him- self apart from life and to stamp out the embers of the flame in his soul ; to be in all things conscious, since to yield to that which was unconscious was to declare himself a slave to the life which he hated and denied ; to will that his own will should be the master absolute of all things — " it takes a great man to make a stand even against common sense." And there were impulses more overwhelming even than common sense.
There is the anger of pride. Nikolay Stavro- gin was proud. " You are beautiful and proud as a God," says Pyotr Verhovensky to him. His pride was superhuman, as his will. Yet when his will demanded that his pride should yield, he broke his pride. So when Shatov struck him, he withheld his hand.
He had scarcely regained his balance after being almost knocked over in this humiliating way, and the horrible as it were sodden thud of the blow in the face had scarcely died away in the room when he seized Shatov by the shoulders with both hands, but at once, almost at the same instant, pulled both hands away and clasped them behind his back. He did not speak, but looked at Shatov, and turned as white as his shirt. But strange to say the light in his eyes seemed to die out. Ten seconds later his eyes looked cold, and I'm sure I'm not lying — calm. Only he was terribly pale. Of course I don't know what was passing within the man, I saw only his exterior. It seems to me that if a man should snatch up a bar of red-hot iron and hold it tight in his hand to test his fortitude, and after struggling for ten seconds with insufferable pain end by overcoming it, such a man 1 fancy would go through something like what Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch was enduring those ten seconds. . . .
" But, strange to say, the light in his eyes died out." But was it strange ? The will of Lucifer had broken Lucifer's pride. Stavrogin had put upon himself the last torment of all and had endured it. Pride was the unconscious form of his triumphant conscious will, and that too he had crushed. Yet not even for that would the light of his eyes have grown dim. He had struck at the inmost of his being, be- cause he willed the omnipotence of his will ; and in the very moment of his triumph he knew that it was of no avail. In his soul each succeeding victory could bring only instant desolation, and this was the last desolation of all. When he had killed his pride, he had killed even that which had urged him to kill . I his pride. The spring of the will itself was broken. There was not only nothing left to will, but of the will itself nothing remained.
That moment was the pinnacle of his assertion of his will. Beneath it were ranged all the other trials which he had imposed upon his unconquerable will. His rumoured debauchery in Petersburg, which was not debauchery but the assertion of his conscious will against the instinct for good whose sovereignty he could not accept ; his marriage with the demented cripple, which was the triumph of his will, not over common sense, but over the innate sense of harmonious beauty which resides in all great souls ; — these were trials which only his pride could give him strength to sustain. By that he had found in himself the power to pass with- in his own soul beyond good and evil, beyond beauty and ugliness. There remained one instinct to him, upon which his whole desperate life was built, the instinct of pride. This in- stinct he had himself created. It was the unconscious counterpart of his conscious will to assertion. It had grown strong with his triumphs. It had borne him beyond good and evil, beyond beauty and ugliness. It bore him now beyond itself, beyond pride and submission ; and his spirit died within him. " Only he was terribly pale." The last, the only virtue had gone out of him.
After this moment, Stavrogin in the land of living is dead. He has submitted himself to the last mortification of the flesh. He is now conscious will and nothing more ; he is not even incarnate, seeing that the extreme assertion of consciousness itself depends upon supporting instinct. He had killed his last instinct, and by the act he is become a pure spirit. He is will that cannot work its will any more. There is no more contact between him and the physical world which is the vehicle of life.
So Nikolay Stavrogin dies on the day that he makes his first appearance in the body in the story of The Possessed. For a moment, as it were, in the supreme incandescence of his earthly struggle, he puts on surpassing human beauty. " Now— now, I don't know why," says the narrator, " he impressed me at once as absolutely, incontestably beautiful, so that no one could have said that his face was like a mask. Wasn't it perhaps that he was a little paler, and seemed rather thinner than be- fore ? . . ." But Dostoevsky could not tolerate the grossness of his imaginary narrator's vision, and despite himself, he adds : "Or was there perhaps the light of some new idea in his eyes ? ': And we know what was this new idea. His eyes shone with the joyous expectation of the final battle ; he was elate with his own determination to make his pride bow to his will. He had come determined to publish abroad his marriage with the half-witted cripple. To have married her in secret was his victory over his own sense of ugliness ; to proclaim his marriage would be the triumph over his pride. But when he entered the room, the occasion had been taken out of his hands. Whether his pride was too great to be thus suddenly over- thrown, or whether his mother's instant question diminished from his own will, he was silent. And Shatov, for whom he was a God, felt the lie in his silence, and struck him before them all, before Lise, and Darya, his lovers, and before his mother. Shatov struck his God for failing of his Godhead, and this time his God did not fail. Stavrogin held his hand ; the final victory was won, and the light of the new idea died down in his eyes. The moment of his absolute beauty passed, and his face be- came a mask again.
The story of The Possessed passes between this death of the spirit of Stavrogin and the death of his body. He has no fear of bodily death ; then he might kill himself, to conquer the fear. He has no hope in death ; he is only afraid that he might deceive himself with such a hope. " I know I ought to kill myself," he writes to Darya Shatov before the end, " to brush myself off the earth like a nasty insect ; but I am afraid of suicide, for I am afraid of showing greatness of soul. I know it will be another sham again — the last deception in an endless series of deceptions. What good is there in deceiving one's self ? Simply to play at greatness of soul ? " And in the brief time of his phantom life, his life in death, which remained to him, he is haunted by the souls that he himself has created, by Kirillov and Shatov and Pyotr Verhovensky. He, the God, has fashioned these men, and given them life, while he himself is dead. They believe in the creeds which he has given them, and believing, they live. But they believe the creeds because they believe in the man.
At the end of the strange and terrible scene between Stavrogin and Shatov, which must have cost Dostoevsky an agony to write, Shatov cries out : —
" Stavrogin, why am I condemned to believe in you through all eternity ? Could I speak like this to any- one else ? I have modesty, but I am not ashamed of my nakedness because it's Stavrogin I'm speaking to. I was not afraid of caricaturing a grand idea by hand- ling it because Stavrogin was listening to me. . . . Shan't I kiss your foot-prints when you've gone ? I can't tear you out of my heart, Nikolay Stavrogin."
The grand idea which Stavrogin had given to him and he had learned by heart in Stavrogin's words was this : —
" Not a single nation has ever been founded on principles of science or reason. There never has been an example of it, except for a brief moment, through folly. Socialism is from its very nature bound to be atheism, seeing that it has from the very first pro- claimed that it is an atheistic organisation of society, and that it intends to establish itself exclusively on the elements of science and reason. Science and reason have from the beginning of time played a secondary and subordinate part in the life of nations ; so will it be till the end of time. Nations are built up and moved by another force which sways and dominates them, the origin of which is unknown and in- explicable : that force is the force of an insatiable desire to go on to the end, though at the same time it denies that end. It is the force of the persistent assertion of one's own existence and a denial of death. It's the spirit of life, as the Scriptures call it, the ' river of living water,' the drying up of which is threatened in the Apocalypse. It's the aesthetic principle as the philosophers call it, the ethical principle with which they identify it, ' the seeking for God ' as I call it more simply. The object of every national movement in every people and at every period of its existence is only the seeking for its god, who must be its own god, and the faith in Him as the only true one. God is the synthetic personality of the whole people, taken from its beginning to its end. It has never happened that all or even many people have had one common god, but each has always had its own. It's a sign of the decay of nations when they begin to have gods in common. When gods begin to be common to several nations the gods are dying and the faith in them together with the nations themselves. The stronger a people the more individual their god. There never has been a nation without a religion, that is without an idea of good and evil. Every people has its own conception of good and evil, and its own good and evil. When the same conceptions of good and evil become prevalent in several nations, then these nations are dying, and then the very distinction between good and evil is beginning to disappear. Reason has never had power to define good and evil, or even to distinguish between them even approximately ; on the contrary, it has always mixed them up in a disgraceful and pitiful way ; science has even given the solution by the fist. This is particularly characteristic of the half-truths of science, the most terrible scourge of humanity, unknown till this century and worse than plague, famine or war. A half-truth is a despot such as has never been in the world before. A despot that has its priests and slaves, a despot to whom all do homage with love and super- stition hitherto inconceivable, before which science itself cringes and trembles in a shameful way. These are your own words, Stavrogin, all except that about the half-truth ; that's my own because I am myself a case of half-knowledge, and that's why I hate it particularly. I haven't altered anything of your ideas or even of your words, not a syllable."
" I don't agree that you've not altered anything," Stavrogin observed cautiously. " You accepted them with ardour, and in your ardour have transformed them unconsciously. The very fact that you reduce God to an attribute of nationality ..."
He suddenly began watching Shatov with intense and peculiar attention, not so much his words as him- self.
" I reduce God to an attribute of nationality ? " cried Shatov. " On the contrary, I raise the people to God. And has it ever been otherwise ? Every people is only a people so long as it has its own god and excludes all other gods on earth irreconcilably ; so long as it believes that by its god it will conquer and drive out of the world all other gods. Such, from the beginning of time, has been the belief of all great nations, all anyway who have been specially remark- able, all who have been leaders of humanity. ... A really great people can never accept a secondary part in the history of Humanity, nor even one of the first, but will have the first part. A nation which loses this belief ceases to be a nation. But there is only one truth and therefore only a single one out of the nations can have the true God, only one nation is • god-bear- ing,' that's the Russian people, and . . . and . . . and can you think one such a fool, Stavrogin," he yelled frantically all at once, " that I can't distinguish whether my words at this moment are the rotten old commonplaces that have been ground out in all the Slavophil mills in Moscow, or a perfectly new saying, the last word, the sole word of renewal and resurrec- tion, and . . . what do I care for your laughter at this minute ! What do I care that you utterly fail to understand me, not a word, not a sound. ..."
These words had need to be quoted in their fullness ; for they are Dostoevsky's public profession of faith. They contain the substance of all that Dostoevsky, when he wrote as a publicist, professed to believe. In The Possessed, he dared, rather by the force of his own inward sincerity he was compelled, to represent them as the discarded beliefs of Nikolay Stavrogin. With these words Stav- rogin had sowed the seed of God and the father- land in Shatov's heart, while he lay on straw beside Kirillov in America. With them he had raised Shatov from the dead. Yet, " perhaps at that very time, perhaps during those very- days, " Shatov says to him, " I have learnt that you were infecting the heart of that hapless creature, that maniac Kirillov, with poison . . . you confirmed malignant ideas in him, and brought him to the verge of madness." There may at some other time be occasion to con- sider the political and religious faith to which Dostoevsky gave public expression. But the essence of the matter lies here. The public Dostoevsky was Shatov, the real Dostoevsky Stavrogin, or rather since his mind conceived Stavrogin, a spirit that passed even beyond this. And it is well to remember that in this chapter we may hear the real Dostoevsky putting the final question to the public one : " Have you caught your hare ? "
" I only wanted to know, do you believe in God, yourself ? "
And what does the public one reply ?
" I believe in Russia. ... I believe in her ortho- doxy. . . .1 believe in the body of Christ .... I believe that the new Advent will take place in Russia. ... I believe. ..." Shatov muttered frantically.
"And in God? in God?"
"I ... I will believe in God ! "
Shatov is not big or strong enough to face his own unbelief. Though he knows that he cannot believe in God, he can almost deceive himself with a Gospel of Russia. But his belief in that Gospel depends not upon his belief in God but upon his belief in his Stavrogin, who even while he was like a Teacher instructing his disciple in the gospel of salvation through Russia, was pouring a bitter poison into the ears of Kirillov, a gospel in which the strange childlike and brave man, of incomprehen- sible speech, had also found illumination and ecstasy.
This creed of Kirillov's is the dialectic of a Stavrogin received into a simple mind. If there is no God, as there can be no God, seeing that this life is pain and terror, then I am God. If there is no will greater than mine and in- cluding it, then my will is omnipotent. There- fore a man must be found to express his own omnipotent will on " the most vital point," a man who will kill himself just to assert his own will. So will he himself become God, for now God is the pain of the fear of death.
" He who will conquer pain and terror will himself become a god. Then there will be a new life, a new man ; everything will be new . . . then they will divide history into two parts : from the gorilla to the anni- hilation of God and from the annihilation of God to . . ."
" The Gorilla ? "
" To the transformation of the earth and man physically. Man will be God, and will be transformed physically, and the world will be transformed and things will be transformed and all thoughts and feel- ings. ..."
Kirillov will be the man who shall take upon himself the burden of this symbolic death on behalf of all men. He will be the first of the men-Gods, and in him will perish that epoch of the human consciousness in which man was afraid of the pain of the fear of death, and sought belief in God and in the assurance of immortality to sustain him. The new man will live in the timeless world ; he will have within him the living knowledge of the eternal har- mony. For Kirillov, by long brooding upon his determination, has been in the ecstasy of contemplation rapt to the timeless world.
Kirillov came out of his reverie and, strange to say, spoke far more coherently than he usually did ; it was clear that he had formulated it long ago and perhaps written it down.
" There are seconds — they come five or six at a time — when you suddenly feel the presence of the eternal harmony perfectly attained. It's something not earthly — I don't mean in the sense that it's heavenly — but in that sense, that man cannot endure it in his earthly aspect. He must be physically changed or die. This feeling is clear and unmistakable ; it's as though you apprehend all nature and suddenly say,
' Yes, that's right.' God, when he created the world, said at the end of each day of creation, ' Yes, it's right, it's good.' It . . . it's not simply being deeply moved, but simply joy. You don't forgive anything because there's no more need of forgiveness. It's not that you love — oh, there's something in it higher than love — what's most awful is that it's terribly clear and such joy. If it lasted more than five seconds the soul could not endure it and must perish. In those five seconds I live through a lifetime, and I'd give my whole life for them, because they are worth it. To endure ten seconds one must be physically changed. I think man ought to give up having children — what's the use of children when the goal's been obtained ? In the gospel it is written that there will be no child- bearing in the resurrection, but that men will be like the angels of the Lord. That's a hint. . . ."
Kirillov is happy ; but the reasoning to which he will sacrifice his life will not hold. Stavrogin, who planted the seeds of his wisdom in his heart, could not have deceived himself with it. Stavrogin could not lose his reason ; he knew that mortal death was no assurance of the eternal harmony, and he knew also that to kill himself with his own hands was not the vital point wherein man's self-will must be asserted. To kill himself were easy, even a joyful consummation, if it might be done in the belief that a new consciousness would descend upon the world. But that is not self-will ; that is only to sacrifice one's self, as Raskolnikov had done, for the good of humanity. By such a death the individual will is sacrificed, not asserted. Kirillov had only denied one god, to believe in another which Stavrogin had created for him — the dawn of a new consciousness wherein man should eternally behold the eternal harmony and be transfigured in the flesh.
This new god of Stavrogin's creation was and is a possibility. Stavrogin had contem- plated the possibility. To Kirillov he had shown one side, to Shatov another. Shatov's belief in the Second Advent, and Kirillov's be- lief in the physical transfiguration of man that he may be able to behold the eternal harmony, are the same. Stavrogin, who had pondered all things, had pondered the Apocalypse.
" You've begun to believe in a future eternal life ? " he asks Kirillov.
" No, not in a future eternal life, but in eternal life here. There are moments, you reach moments, and time suddenly stands still, and it will become eternal.'
" You hope to reach such a moment ? "
" Yes."
" That'll scarcely be possible in our time," Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch responded slowly and as it were dreamily : the two spoke without the slightest irony. " In the Apocalypse the angel swears that there will' be no more time."
There was indeed no irony in Stavrogin's words then. The possibility of the miracle of a new consciousness was all that was left to him. But that miracle " will scarcely be possible in our time " ; no act of his could give him assurance of it. Kirillov might be able to believe in it and make it his God. Stavrogin could not ; he could not bow down to a god of his own creation.
But, though he could not believe in that which he contemplated, there was no irony in him when he spoke to Kirillov of the new epoch when there should be no more time. Neither had there been irony in him when he taught them both while they lay on straw in America. This Shatov could not understand ; he could not see that the poison with which Stavrogin had infected Kirillov's heart was the very elixir of life when poured into his own. Much less could he understand what seemed to him the enigmatic words of Stavrogin : "I wasn't joking with you then ; in persuading you I was perhaps more concerned with myself than with you. ... I repeat I was not deceiving either of you." Yet those words contained the simple truth. He was desperately concerned with himself. He, who was in himself the man- God, who knew that the way of assertion of his individual will was not the broad path of self-destruction, but the hard and narrow one of passing within his own soul beyond good and evil, beyond beauty and ugliness, and j finally beyond pride and submission, and had the greatness and the courage in himself to tread the way to his divinity — this man-God's belief in his own godhead failed him. He had lost, for the moment, his one belief, in the omnipotence of his will. If having lost belief he could make another human being who had lost belief, believe, then he might in their conviction find the conviction of his own divinity again. Shatov and Kirillov were his desperate ex- periments. For their belief he offered them all that he had, the surmise of the possibility of a new consciousness ; outside himself there was nothing beside this. He himself was, he knew, the very culmination of consciousness as it is now, the last embodiment of the spirit of the present Dispensation. Therefore there were two things, and two alone, in which he might believe — the omnipotence of his own will, and a consciousness which should transcend the present consciousness of man ; his own divinity and the second Advent ; himself as the final possibility of the present Dispensation and the New Dispensation. No matter in which Shatov and Kirillov should believe, they would believe in him. They would believe in him first because he had created their Gods, and secondly because their belief in a new consciousness inevitably implied belief in him as the last perfection of the old.
Of such experiments Stavrogin's life had consisted. This was the most subtle of them all ; but there were others. The Possessed is as it were littered with the bodies of the living souls which Stavrogin had used for his own purposes. The third man, besides Kirillov and Shatov, is Pyotr Verhovensky. This cunning, terrible man who puts the cruel machinery of his " quintet " in motion, is Stavrogin's slave. " Stavrogin, you are beauti- ful," he cries ecstatically. " Do you know you are beautiful. . . . You are my idol. . . ." Look- ing at the face of his proud and beautiful God, he has conceived a plan for the destruction of the world and the creation upon its ruins of a new and harmonious kingdom with Stavrogin for its ruler and its divinity. In Stavrogin he has seen that " absolute beauty " which is not of this world, and he believes that he has but to reveal Stavrogin to the Russian world as the Ivan the Tsarevitch, who lives in legend, for the people to fall down and worship him. Brood- ing upon this ecstatic vision of a new heaven and a new earth with Stavrogin for its saviour, Pyotr has become crazy with fanatical enthusijism, and he is not only demented but inspired. The torrent of despairing, pleading, threaten- ing words which he pours out before Stavrogin when he reveals his plan, leaps at moments to flashes of a sublime beauty. ... " Russia will be overwhelmed with darkness and the earth will weep for its old gods. ..." In the service of this vision of destruction and recreation, he is cunning and brave and merciless : his secret machinations undermine the whole city. But he does not understand that he and his society are for Stavrogin only a means of experiment, one more trial of others' belief in him ; Pyotr only feels Stavrogin's power, his superhumanity and unearthly beauty, and he works like a blind mole to hold him fettered to the great, fantastic scheme of which he is to be the prophet. He does not understand Stavrogin because he is the slave of a Stavrogin whom he has imagined for himself. " Here now," says Fedka the convict of Pyotr, " he knows about me that I'm awfully keen to get a passport \ — so he thinks that he's snared my soul. I i tell you, sir, life's a very easy business for Pyotr Stepanovitch, for he fancies a man to be this and that and goes on as if he was." So, too, he thinks that he can snare Stavrogin's soul, because he knows that he has some mys- terious need of Lise. He works to implicate him somehow in the murder of his cripple wife, as he grappled the quintet to him by making them partake with him in the killing of Shatov. But he does not know that Stavrogin is a spirit whom no power on earth can hold, who, though he envies Pyotr for the delusion of his hopes, holds all his plots and intrigues in the extreme of contempt. Even Pyotr, like his fellow- slaves, Shatov and Kirillov, has not seen the real face of his god. By an uncomprehended instinct he knows that Stavrogin is the final form of the dispensation under which we live ; therefore his brain tells him that he must be the prophet of the new order. But in moments of inspiration, he speaks some words to Stav- rogin, which show that he had had a vision of their true relation. " I am a buffoon," he says to him, when Stavrogin has confessed to Lise his knowledge of the murder of his wife, " but I don't want you, my better half, to be one. Do you understand ? " For Pyotr really is an earthly caricature of that which Stavrogin's spirit is. All Stavrogin's dreams that belong like himself to the timeless world have in Pyotr put on a crude material garment. Pyotr dreams of earthly destruction and recreation ; Stavrogin knows that these things are possible only in the world of spirit. Pyotr devotes him- self to his vision of a future strongly built of stone ; out of earthly chaos earthly harmony will rise. That is no more than the coarse and visible sign of that for which Stavrogin in his own soul had striven. But Pyotr did not know this ; in a second of vision he saw himself as Nikolay Stavrogin's " monkey," but he saw no more.
Not one of Stavrogin's creatures understands him. He is beyond them, they know, and they are condemned to believe in him eternally. They grope blindly after the secret of their divinity. Shatov, too, has his moment of in- sight.
" I don't know either why evil is hateful and good beautiful ; but I know why the sense of that distinc- tion is lost in people like the Stavrogins," Shatov persisted, trembling all over. " Do you know why you made that base and shameful marriage ? Simply because the shame and senselessness of it reached the pitch of genius ! Oh, you are not one of those who linger on the brink. You fly head foremost. You married from a passion for martyrdom, from a craving for remorse, through moral sensuality. It was a laceration of the nerves. Defiance of common sense was too tempting. Stavrogin and a wretched half- witted crippled beggar ! When you bit the governor's ear, did you feel sensual pleasure, you idle, loafing little snob ? Did you ? "
Shatov was indeed " something of a psycho- logist," but he was mistaken ; he could not comprehend the lonely majesty of his deity, though he felt it within him. Instinctively he knew there was some terrible purpose in Stavrogin's denial of good and evil and beauty and ugliness ; but what that purpose was was hidden from him. And of what Stav- rogin had done in holding his hand and not killing him outright he had no inkling. Nor did Kirillov know more. He felt that Stavrogin was " seeking a burden " ; but he did not know what manner of burden it was, nor did he know, when he rode so clumsily away from the duel with Gaganov, slipping all the while from his saddle, that there were no more burdens for Stavrogin to bear. Therefore, when he bade good-bye to Stavrogin, and shook hands with him to show he was not angry, he could not tell that Stavrogin was appealing to him, not for moral approbation, but for understanding, aye and love. Stavrogin was weak with the loneliness of his exceeding strength, when he said to Kirillov : "I know I'm a worthless character, and I don't pretend to be a strong one." But there was a bitter tragedy in the unconscious irony of Kirillov's reply : " You'd better not ; you're not a strong person." Kirillov had never dreamed even of the possi- bility of such strength as Stavrogin's ; he had courage because he had no reason. He went
to his death in the strong happiness of devotion to an idea whose falsity he could not see. Stavrogin was weak because he was so strong that he could not deceive himself. Yet because Kirillov was simple, Stavrogin leaned upon him for a moment, when he fainted on his lonely way : for even simplicity is strength. But Kirillov's simplicity could avail him nothing. Kirillov was not only too simple to understand him, but too simple to know what it was that Stavrogin asked of him.
Stavrogin had killed his own invincible spirit, he had made the last trial of himself, and had conquered — barrenness and desolation. He was alone : there were not even any more burdens that he might seek, no more battles whose desperate prospect might fire his eyes. He had won the final victory, and he was finally alone. And in the pause and silence of his lone- liness, he looks back upon the road he came and he is afraid. He fears the grotesqueness of it all — the outward act that is so mean and ridiculous and shameful beside the inward in- tention. In the deathly calm of victory which is his own defeat, he can hear the echo of some far off malignant laughter, at the sordid shab- biness of the things accomplished, which being done were fraught with magnificent and eternal issues. He had found in himself the courageto ask life for an answer : for silence he had steeled himself ; but the laughter in the silence froze his heart. Against terror beyond the physical he was strong, but before the obscenity of timeless things he was afraid. Stavrogin is haunted by that which has been called the metaphysical obscenity, the devilish poverty of the human thing beside the superhuman intention ; and in his loneliness he is tortured by the thought of " something shameful and ridiculous." This same thought it is which stays him from suicide. Mortal death can be no more than a parody of the death which he desires : he will not cheat himself again with this last sham in an endless series of shams. He cannot live, he cannot end his life. Nothing remains.
Yet one thing does remain, the thought that he may not be utterly alone. He who has killed all instinct and all power to love in his own soul, yet hungers to be loved. No man will give him this, for no man understands him ; but a woman may. She may know and yet love ; and in the knowledge of that love, he who knew that he could not love, might yet lose the tyrant consciousness, and be. If a woman should be found who should go open- eyed to her doom in him, should know what awaited her and yet make the sacrifice, then he too might find in her salvation, and be born anew by a belief in that which impelled her to him. Stavrogin had made the attempt, he had tried for love. The Possessed is strewn with the bodies of the women whose life-blood he had taken, and cast them away, — " i Vampire Stavrogin,' as a lady who loved him called him." Shatov's wife and Shatov's sister had been offered up upon his altar. But he had not found in them that of which he stood in need, and dreamed that he might obtain, not affec- tion, nor sympathy nor tender care, nor any of those things which a woman finds her life in giving, but the sacrifice of life itself in love, love that like himself " did not linger on the brink, but in its desperation reached the pitch of genius."
And when Lise came to him loving, knowing herself unloved, there was the blinding moment — a flash of hope kindled by a sudden and lovely sacrifice, an hour's forgetfulness ; an hour that quivered on the edge of happiness and expec- tation ; an hour taken in spite of all foreknow- ledge that this would be like all the hours before and end in barrenness ; an instant vision of a soul and body beautifully given ; a momentary ecstasy in the thought that he too might wholly give, and take back a living self again, his old soul mewed ; a spark of despairing hope that all might yet be well with that soul sick unto death ; one final challenge to his manifest destiny.
I knew I did not love you, and yet I ruined you ! Yes, I accepted the moment for my own ; I had a hope. ... I've had it a long time . . . my last hope. . . . I could not resist the radiance that flooded my heart when you came to me yesterday, of yourself, alone, of your own accord. I suddenly believed. . . . Perhaps I have faith in it still.
One can hear those last words die away as though they were frozen on his lips. Such faith, faith in a miracle, were useless to him, even if he had it : and he had it not. It was only another possibility that he had dreamed. For the wholly conscious mind there is no faith : there is only that which is and that which may be.
And Lise, because she saw and knew, was the keenest eyed, as she is the most poignantly beautiful of all Dostoevsky's women. " Ever since those days in Switzerland I have had a strong feeling that you have something awful, loathsome, some bloodshed on your conscience . . . and yet something that would make you look ridiculous." If she knew so much and so long, there was indeed no need of " the Operatic Boat," and that was spoken in great bitter- ness of heart, when she too had come near to feeling the vanity of all superhuman intention.
But she had not known so much ever since
those days in Switzerland ; she knew enough.
She knew by instinct that Stavrogin had played
high and greatly lost. Therefore she loved him.
But the knowledge of the secret things, even
that knowledge which compelled from her in
horror : " God save me from your secrets," the
knowledge of the something ridiculous, came
surely to her in the unforgettable hour when
they two were alone at Skvoreshniki, when for
a moment Stavrogin believed, but the flame
withered in his heart and dying withered hers.
Such knowledge bought at such a price might
well seem eternal and to have been before all I things, and in the ocean of its age " ever since
those days in Switzerland " to have been but
a drop. For in that hour not love but life itself
was dead.
Come, that's enough, that's enough. I am no good for anything and you're no good for anything ; it's as bad for both of us, so let's comfort ourselves with that. Anyway, it eases our vanity,
Lise was the only woman of them all who had the courage to enter the dark chamber of that heart. What she saw withered the soul within her as a moth's wings crumple and fall in a flame. She " burnt herself in a candle — nothing more." She alone tried the depths. She put all her life into one mortal hour, and in it went to the place where was " the huge evil spider." " I have put all my life into one hour, and I am at peace," she said, because she was brave, to Nikolay Stavrogin, but when she had escaped from the web and the presence, and found herself in the arms of her earthly lover, her voice dropped timidly and she said : " I kept a bold face there all the time, but now I am afraid of death. I shall die soon, very soon, but I am afraid, I am afraid to die," for in the icy waste of Stavrogin's spirit she had seen that which lay beyond mortal life and death.
Stavrogin's last hope had failed as he knew it would fail ; he had now only to wait and endure to the end. Kirillov went to his death in the joy of delirium : Shatov's cruel end overtook him when he had just learnt what it was to be happy, in the presence of the miracle of the living life. The Possessed is a merciless book, but its victims neither ask nor receive our pity ; they know what awaits them, and they have our wonder, our sympathy and our admiration. But Shatov has our pity. He alone has touched the living life, " the mys- terious coming of a new creature, a great and inexplicable mystery."
He needed to die, no doubt ; but with his death it is hardest of all to be reconciled. He was at least worthy to meet his fate with his eyes unbound. But, being such, his death is Stavrogin's justification ; it serves as yet another pitiless reminder that it is the fact of pain which drives Dostoevsky's spirits " To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield."
For Stavrogin is not a portent, but a pos- sibility ; he is mind with the courage of its own knowledge. He has greater courage and in- sight than any of Dostoevsky's like characters, and he has carried on the struggle of the indi- vidual will to heights far beyond theirs. The logic of his life has never faltered ; the last tremor of the unconscious has been stilled within him. Now he is wholly his own master, and wholly rebellious to life ; there are no more traitor instincts in the camp. He is now " from head to foot all marble constant," and he can- not deceive himself any more. He is Will, and he has no desire to will ; he has paid for victory with his last breath of life. Therefore he does not even desire to remain in the land of the living, and he will not purchase the appearance of reconciliation by suffering ; besides, he can- not suffer any more. He has passed the last torment of this life ; all that he can hope for is the miracle, the new consciousness, when there shall be no more time and the bodies of men shall be physically changed, and that, he knows, will " hardly be in our time." Death will bring no answer to his question, yet he cannot live on in the hope of a miracle which he knows will not be in his life, which yet must be in his life or it is only another sham. Still, it were better not to delude one's self with death.
So he sat down and wrote his letter to Darya Shatov. It is the final and complete confession of the defeat of consciousness.
Dear Darya Pavlovna, — At one time you ex- pressed a wish to be my nurse, and made me promise to send for you when I wanted you. I am going away in two days and shall not come back. Will you go with me ?
Last year, like Herzen, I was naturalised as a citizen of the canton of Uri, and that nobody knows. There I've already bought a little house. I've still twelve thousand roubles left ; we'll go and live there for ever. I don't want to go any- where else ever.
It's a very dull place, a narrow valley, the mountains restrict both vision and thought. It's very gloomy. I chose the place because there was a little house to be sold. If you don't like it I'll sell it and buy another in some other place. I am not well, but I hope to get rid of hallucinations in that air. It's physical, and as for the moral you know everything ; but do you know all ?
I've told you a great deal of my life but not all. Even to you ! Not all. By the way, I repeat that in my conscience I feel myself responsible for my wife's death. I haven't seen you since then, that's why I repeat it. I feel guilty about Lizaveta Nikolaevna too ; but you know about that ; you foretold almost all that.
Better not come to me. My asking you is a horrible meanness. And why should you bury your life with me ? You are dear to me, and when I was miserable it was good to be beside you ; only with you could I speak of myself aloud. But that proves nothing. You defined it yourself, " a nurse " — it's your own expression ; why sacrifice so much ? Grasp this, too, that I have no pity for you since I ask you, and no respect for you since I reckon on you. And yet I ask you and I reckon on you. In any case I need your answer for I must set off very soon. In that case I shall go alone.
I expect nothing of Uri ; I am simply going. I have not chosen a gloomy place on purpose. I have no ties in Russia — everything is as alien to me there as everywhere. It's true that I dislike living there more than anywhere ; but I can't hate anything even there !
I've tried my strength everywhere. You advised me to do this " that I might learn to know myself." As long I was experimenting for myself and for others it seemed infinite, as it has all my life. Before your eyes I endured a blow from your brother ; I acknowledged my marriage in public. But to what to apply my strength, that is what I've never seen and do not see now in spite of all your praises in Switzerland, which I believed in. I am still capable as I always was of desiring to do something good and of feeling pleasure from it ; at the same time I desire evil and feel pleasure from that too. But both feelings are always too petty, and are never very strong. My desires are too weak ; they are not enough to guide me. On a log one may cross a river, but not on a chip. I say this that you may not believe that I am going to Uri with hopes of any sort.
As always I blame no one. I've tried the depths of debauchery and wasted my strength over it. But I don't like vice and didn't want it. You have been watching me of late. Do you know that I looked upon our iconoclasts with spite, from envy of their hopes ? But you had no need to be afraid. I could not have been one of them for I never shared anything with them. And to do it for fun, from spite I could not either, not because I am afraid of the ridiculous — I cannot be afraid of the ridiculous — but because I have, after all, the habits of a gentleman and it dis- gusted me. But if I had felt more spite and envy of them I might perhaps have joined them. You can judge how hard it has been for me, and how I've struggled from one thing to another.
Dear friend ! Great and tender heart which I divined ! Perhaps you dream of giving me so much love and lavishing on me so much that is beautiful from your beautiful soul, that you hope to set up some aim for me at last by it ? No, it's better for you to be more cautious, my love will be as petty as I am myself and you will be unhappy. Your brother told me that the man who loses connection with his country loses his gods, that is, all his aims. One may argue about everything endlessly, but from me nothing has come but negation, with no greatness of soul, no force. Even negation has not come from me. Everything has always been petty and spiritless. Kirillov in the greatness of his soul could not compromise with an idea and shot himself ; but I see, of course, that he was great-souled, because he had lost his reason. I can never lose my reason, and I can never believe in an idea to such a degree as he did. I cannot even be interested in an idea to such a degree. I can never, never shoot myself.
I know I ought to kill myself, to brush myself off the earth like a nasty insect ; but I am afraid of suicide, for I am afraid of showing greatness of soul. I know that it will be another sham again — the last deception in an endless series of deceptions. What good is there in deceiving one's self. Simply to play at greatness of soul ? Indignation and shame I can never feel therefore not despair.
Forgive me for writing so much. I wrote without noticing. A hundred pages would be too little and ten lines would be enough. Ten lines would be enough to ask you to be a nurse. Since I left Skvoreshniki I've been living at the sixth station on the line at the stationmaster's. I got to know him in the time of debauchery five years ago in Petersburg. No one knows I am living there. Write to him. I enclose the address.
NlKOLAY STAVROGIN.
" A hundred pages would be too little and ten lines would be enough." Stavrogin said his say in even less than ten lines ; he said it without even opening his lips. Now, he was not any more afraid of the ridiculous, and he could face the terror of metaphysical obscenity as he had faced all other things. He could even smile at it and indulge it. I do not know if I am in this differently constituted to other readers of Dostoevsky ; but of all the cruel and terrible things in his books that which haunts me most is the vision of Stavrogin's suicide.
The citizen of the canton of Uri was hanging there behind the door. On the table lay a piece of paper with the words in pencil : " No one is to blame. I did it myself." Beside it on the table lay a hammer, a piece of soap and a large nail — obviously an extra one in case of need. The strong silk cord upon which Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch had hanged himself had evidently been chosen and prepared beforehand and was thickly smeared with soap.
What is most terrible is that piece of soap. He, who was after all too much of a gentleman to hang himself in a noose less delicate than one of silk, had almost deceived himself at the last with the elegance of his act of destruction. Perhaps the last instinct of all was one that he could not have foreknown, the instinct of thearistocrat to die finely. This too he crushed. I do not like to think of the cold and bitter smile with which he remembered a piece of soap. A silk cord runs easily without such aids. But while he smeared the noose thickly, he had won another victory. He had himself parodied his own determination ; he had taken thought at the last that he should not show greatness of soul nor leave the name of one who had shown it. With his piece of soap he had anti- cipated the last obscenity of things.
With Stavrogin's death the last hope of con- sciousness and conscious will is gone. The most splendid of all the Possessed has rushed down the steep into the sea ; rather he has not rushed, but he has gone delicately, like the prince he was, and held himself proof against even the ecstasy of self-destruction. And he is the Prince of this world, for it is not certain proud spirits, but all an age, an epoch of the human consciousness that is possessed. Dosto- evsky lavished himself upon the creation of Stavrogin. If Shatov and Kirillov saw in him their God and Pyotr Verhovensky divined in him the prince of the world which should be built up on the ruins of the old, it was not be- cause they were blind, but because he was in very truth the man-God and the prince. Dosto- evsky knew that he was the perfect embodi-ment of an age, superhuman only because he had all the courage of his humanity. Yet he was possessed. Life cannot end in barrenness and destruction, yet it can have no other end. The old life — and it is this old life in which we live to-day — came to its perfect and inhuman flower in Stavrogin ; but, because this cannot be the end, a miracle must be at hand. It was left to Stepan Verhovensky to read the parable.
" My friend," said Stepan Trofimovitch in great excitement, " savez-vous that wonderful and . . . ex- traordinary passage has been a stumbling-block to me all my life . . . dans ce livre ... so much so that I remembered those verses from childhood. Now an idea has occurred to me ; une comparaison. A great number of ideas keep coming into my mind now. You see that's exactly like our Russia, those devils that come out of the sick man and enter into the swine. They are all the sores, all the foul contagions, all the impurities, all the devils great and small that have multiplied in that great invalid, our beloved Russia, in the course of ages and ages. Qui, cette Russie que faimais toujours. But a great idea and a great Will will encompass it from on high, as with that lunatic possessed of devils . . . and all those devils will come forth, all the impurity, all the rottenness that was putrefying on the surface . . . and they will beg of themselves to enter into swine : and indeed maybe they have entered into them already ! They are we, we and those . . . and Petrusha and les autres avec lui . . . and I perhaps at the head of them, and we shall cast our-selves down, possessed and raving, from the rocks into the sea, and we shall all be drowned — and a good thing too, for that is all we are fit for. But the sick man will be healed and ' will sit at the feet of Jesus,' and all will look upon him with astonishment. . . . My dear, vous comprendrez apres, but now it excites me very much . . . Vous comprendrez apris. Nous comprendrons ensemble."
From out of the desolation and sickness must arise a new life of which the man clothed and in his right mind is the symbol. But the sick- ness is a sickness unto universal death, for it is the human consciousness itself which is the disease. It is a manifestation of life which destroys life. In Stavrogin Dostoesvky had sent forth the greatest of its champions, and he had been vanquished. There remained only the new man, clothed and in his right mind, for a hope. In the new man must be found the new consciousness ; in him the assurance of eternal harmony which came to the old man only in the delirium of his sickness, shall be part of his waking knowledge.
It may be that this hope will seem to some a fantastic and unintelligible dream. The logician will say that the destruction of the present human consciousness and the creation of a new life, wherein spirit shall be no longer divided from body, is no more than empty words which correspond to no thought : the thought in them, they will say, is unthinkable. It is true ; yet on the foundation of such un- thinkable thoughts Dostoevsky's great work is builded. Those who are not prepared to think them have no business with his books ; they will consider his novels to be merely novels, his truth to be merely truth, and his art to be merely art. They should remain within their own garden and enjoy its fruits, which are by no means uncomely ; they have the hither to elect upon their side. Even among the Russians they have with them Turgeniev, who saw only a digger of psychological mole-runs or a Marquis de Sade in Dostoevsky, and Tolstoi, who could say that he had no intellect. Turgeniev was a novelist ; Tolstoi was a great novelist ; Dostoevsky was not a novelist at all. He cannot be measured by the old art or the old logic ; he transcended both.
1 Transcended " is a hard word, which can be too easily used ; yet it contains the truth of Dostoevsky's art and thought. His art was the way of escape from his tormenting doubts, the means of expression for his un- thinkable thoughts. The present consciousness he strained to its uttermost limits. Its forms of art and thought he tortured and loaded till they could bear the burden no longer, as his own body could not support the agonised strivings of his spirit. He had somehow to express within these forms visions and ideas which passed beyond them. He deliberately poured a new wine into the old bottles knowing that they would burst ; and in himself he felt the incessant ferment of conceptions which it passed even his power to make vocal. The old expressions he charged with a content that was fantastical ; his Christianity is not Christianity, his realism is not realism, his novels are not novels, his truth not truth, his art not art. His world is a world of symbols and poten- tialities which are emboded in unlivable lives ; for the art and the creative activity which was the only way of escape from the unendurable torments of his mind, had perforce to be com- mensurate with the doubts which were the cause of the torments. Therefore his art was metaphysical, which no art can be. He struggled to express conceptions which were truly inexpressible, for which he had need not only of a new art but of a new philosophy. In part he created both these things ; he was at least " the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come," and he strove to communicate his visions by the instrument of a language and thought that could hardly contain them, as Kirillov's broken and mysteri-ous speech seems like the translation of a frag- ment of a known, yet ineffable whole, into words which enfeeble and denature it. In one of his last letters Dostoevsky refers to a sen- tence of Vladimir Solovyev, the Russian phil- osopher, who in his youth was surely Dosto- evsky's disciple : "I am firmly convinced that mankind knows much more than it has hitherto expressed either in philosophy or art." " Just so it is with me," Dostoevsky adds. It was Vladimir Solovyev who used to call Dostoevsky a prophet : and a prophet he was, not in the vulgar sense of one who professes to foretell the incessant changes in the configuration of the material world, but of one who contem- plated and sought to penetrate into a new con- sciousness and a new mode of being which he saw was metaphysically inevitable for man- kind.
Dostoevsky stands upon the furthest edge of the old, which is the threshold of the new; In Stavrogin he had gone his lonely way to the ultimate outpost of the present Dispensation. One task fronted him now, to create, if he could, the miracle, and to step forward by one great and despairing effort across the chasm which divides that which is from that which is to come. He paused for long to gather all his strength for the salto mortale. That which he wrote between The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov is no more than an episode, a breathing space in the life-long struggle. A Raw Youth, which is a brilliant study in the adolescent consciousness of a nation which has in a hundred years lived through an eternity of the spirit, and The Journal of an Author, are only the constant exercise in arms of one pre- paring for the final onset, which is The Brothers Karamazov. In that crowning effort death overtook him.