Apocalyptic Imagery in Dostoevskij's the Idiot and the Devils

William J. Leatherbarrow aPoCalyPtiC imagery in dostoevskij’s The IdIoT and The devIls Dostoevskij’s period of penal servitude in Siberia, amongst the lowest depths of criminal humanity, wrought a decisive change in both his personality and his art. His estrangement from naive utopianism, from the belief that human nature was capable of sustaining a paradise on earth, whether erected upon a rational, moral or social order, was caused, or at least accelerated, by this profound personal experience. It is to this event, too, that we must ascribe Dostoevskij’s development as a Christian artist in the years following his return from Siberia. Robert L. Jackson has argued that Dostoevskij’s fictional memoirs of his prison experiences, Notes from the House of the Dead (1860), are “the pivotal literary and spiritual work in Dostoevsky’s writing career” and “a kind of programmatic statement of a Christian poetics of insight and transfiguration,” which becomes the binding vision of Dostoevskij’s mature fiction.1 Parallel to Dostoevskij’s emergence as a Christian writer is his developing use of Christian mythology, symbolism and allegory in the works written after The House of the Dead. His commitment to a Christian ideal was expressed in the weaving of Christian motifs into the fabric of his art. Thus the conversion of Raskol’nikov is implicitly likened to the raising of Lazarus; Dostoevskij’s ethical ideal, the “positively good man,” Prince Myškin, is developed as a latter-day Christ; an attack on the intellectual contagion of Russia’s radicals is couched in the parable of the Gadarene swine (The Devils); and the family drama of the Karamazovs is a microcosm of metaphysical conflicts. There are, of course, many other such examples, 1 Robert l. Jackson, The Art of Dostoevsky. Deliriums and Nocturnes (princeton: princeton University press, 1981), Xi. William J. Leatherbarrow 123 imagery in Dostoevskij’s The Idiot and The Devils large-scale and small, embedded in the fictional world of the mature Dostoevskij. Within this pattern of biblical motifs, imagery and allegory drawn from the apocalyptic revelations of St. John occupy a particularly significant place, and reveal much about the nature of Dostoevskij’s Christian vision. This apocalyptic colouring emerged suddenly in Dostoevskij’s works of the 1860s, and appears to be linked to his increasing awareness of the nature of Western European society. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863), which chronicles Dostoevskij’s first trip abroad in 1862, draws apocalyptic conclusions from the widespread materialism, rationalism, and capitalism which Dostoevskij had observed in the major European capitals. Thus, for example, London and its Crystal Palace, erected for the world exhibitions of 1851 and 1862, are compared directly to Babylon and a “prophecy from the Apocalypse.”2 Moreover, there is a pressing sense of imminent doom in Dostoevskij’s descriptions of European life. In Crime and Punishment too, disturbing apocalyptic echoes are to be found, suggesting the passing of the present order. While in Siberia Raskol’nikov dreams of a plague, or trichina, which infects all but a few in Europe with madness: New kinds of germs (trichiny) appeared, microscopic creatures which lodged in the bodies of men. But these creatures were spirits endowed with reason and will. Those infected with them at once became possessed and insane. But never before had people considered themselves so wise and so unshakably right as these infected men… Whole populations, whole towns and nations were infected and went mad… Fires began, famines began. Everyone and everything was being destroyed... 3 Not only is the whole tenor of this passage apocalyptic, but certain details are also clearly drawn from Revelation, in particular the outbreaks of pestilence, famine and fire. A puzzling feature of Raskol’nikov’s dream is that plague comes from the east, from Asia, whereas, given Dostoevskij’s political views, we might well have expected it to originate in the West. 2 Fëdor m. Dostoevskij, Polnoe sobranie sočinenij v tridcati tomach, vol. v (leningrad: nauka, 1972), 70. (this edition is hereafter designated as PSS.) 3 PSS. vol. VI, 419-420. shapes of Apocalypse: Arts and philosophy in slavic thought 124 Part Two: Literature Such a minor inconsistency does not, however, detract from the dream as an indicator of Dostoevskij’s apocalyptic vision. But the two most apocalyptic of Dostoevskij’s works are The Idiot, completed in 1869, and The Devils, completed in 1872.4 Both possess a distinctive, urgent, almost hysterical tone not matched by Dostoevskij’s other great novels. In Crime and Punishment one feels that the spiritual disease that afflicts Raskol’nikov has not yet spread to everyone in the novel, and the work ends with a promise of reconciliation, not the threat of Armageddon. The Brothers Karamazov too ends with a promise, as Alëša and the children meet over little Iljuša’s grave and pledge loyalty to his memory. But The Idiot and The Devils end with the eruption of that death and violence which has threatened throughout both novels. In The Idiot the murder of Nastas’ja Filippovna precipitates the return of Myškin to darkness, and the hope contained in Stepan Trofimovič’s last pilgrimage, which concludes The Devils, is not enough to offset the orgy of murder and suicide that accompanies it. Interestingly, these two most apocalyptic of Dostoevskij’s novels belong to that protracted period which the author spent abroad. He had fled Russia in early 1867 to escape debts and improve his health, and he was not to return until July 1871. Perhaps we can trace the hysteria of these two novels partly to the fact that Dostoevskij was separated from the Russia he was trying to describe and kept in touch through newspapers, hardly the source of a balanced picture of life’s texture. Moreover, Dostoevskij— touchy, overwrought and profoundly nationalistic—was compelled to spend his period of separation from Russian roots in Western Europe, that bustling, over-commercial, over-industrialized seat of rationalism, socialism and revolution, a source of plagues which since Peter the Great had been threatening to engulf his own native land. For Dostoevskij, Western Europe was a most eloquent symbol of modern man’s spiritual decline, and it was from this vantage point that he made his observations of Russia. The Idiot ends on a revealingly anti-Western note as Mrs. Epančina 4 the aim of the present paper is not to provide an exhaustive analysis of apocalyptic motifs in Dostoevskij’s works, but merely to indicate a profitable line of research. the material presented here is based largely on the treatment of these themes in my book: Fedor Dostoevsky (Boston: twayne publishers, 1981). William J. Leatherbarrow 125 imagery in Dostoevskij’s The Idiot and The Devils cries: “It’s time we came to our senses. And all this, all this life abroad, all this Europe of yours, it’s all just a delusion, and all of us abroad are just a delusion… Mark my words, you’ll see for yourself!”5 As Solženicyn was to do more than a century later, Dostoevskij marks his period of unwilling “exile” in the West with a bitter warning that the quest for material security without the framework of a governing moral principle will mean the fall of Western civilization, and he expands his warning to include Russia’s westernized ruling classes. From its earliest conception The Idiot was intended to portray the decline of a Russian family through its emphasis on material, rather than spiritual, riches. This idea survives and is expressed most vividly, if somewhat ridiculously, in the character of Lebedev, that comic mouthpiece of serious ideas. At the Prince’s birthday gathering (Part III, Ch. 4) Lebedev, a self-styled interpreter of the Apocalypse, is goaded into an attack upon the spiritual vacuum of modern society: “All of this as a whole is damned, sir? The whole spirit of these last few centuries of ours, taken as a whole with its scientific and practical emphasis, is perhaps indeed damned, sir!”6 Modern man in his relentless drive to satisfy the demands of reason, egoism and material necessity has lost the sense of spiritual well-being to be derived from an ideal which provides moral and metaphysical certainty. Modern man has no faith; only science, industry, commerce and capital. Lebedev complains that it is folly to try to erect a material fortune upon a basis of spiritual poverty, and directs this particular criticism at contemporary socialists with their “carts bringing bread to the whole of humanity, without a moral basis for this action” (a quotation that combines a well-known statement by the Russian socialist, Alexandr Herzen, with Christ’s injunction that man should not live by bread alone).7 In a deliciously irreverent anecdote Lebedev goes on to tell of a twelfth century man who, after twenty years of cannibalism, confessed and went to the stake for his sins. What was it, asks Lebedev, that drove him to confession despite the tortures that awaited him? 5 PSS. vol. VIII, 510. 6 Ibid., 310. 7 Aleksandr i. gercen, Sobranie sočinenij v tridcati tomach, vol. Xi (moscow: izd-vo An SSSR, 1954-1966), 402. shapes of Apocalypse: Arts and philosophy in slavic thought 126 Part Two: Literature There must have been something much stronger than the stake and the flames, stronger even than the habits of twenty years? There must have been an idea stronger than all misfortune, famine, torture, plague, leprosy and all that hell which mankind could not have endured without that binding idea which guided men’s hearts and enriched the waters of life. Show me something resembling that force in our age of vice and railways… Show me an idea that binds mankind today with even half the force as in those centuries… And don’t try to intimidate me with your prosperity, your riches, the infrequency of famine today and your rapid means of communication! There is more wealth now, but less strength; the binding idea is no more; everything has grown soft; everything and everyone is over-coddled!8 Lebedev’s frenetic ravings reveal the polemical core of the novel.

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