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Chapter 7: After Crime and Punishment: An Afterword on the Later Novels
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In the major novels that Dostoevsky wrote after Crime and Punishment, he does not forget Pushkin,but he recalls him differently; Pushkin is less confronted than venerated, less challenged than treated as a cultural icon and reference. Rather than discuss the major novels after Crime and Punishment in exact chronological order, I am reserving for last the discussion of The Idiot, the novel that directly follows Crime and Punishment , since Pushkin’s texts play a greater role in The Idiot than in the other novels. The Possessed employs a stanza of one of Pushkin’s famous lyrics in its epigraph; and it also includes a “debate” about the usefulness of Pushkin, as writer, for Russian society. The other novels, in one form or another, pay homage to The Covetous Knight. The Idiot cites Pushkin’s poem“There Lived a Poor Knight”(“Zhil na svete rytsar’bednyi ,” , ), which features a “poor knight” rather than an avaricious and rich one. It also includes a moneylender as a minor character. In A Raw Youth, the hero, Arkady Dolgoruky, inspired by Pushkin’s Baron in The Covetous Knight, attempts to realize the Baron’s ideas in nineteenth-century Russia. The Brothers Karamazov blends the themes of avarice and inheritance. The central plot of the novel revolves around a son’s demand for his inheritance from his father, a rich moneylender, and his wrongful conviction for his father’s murder. The Possessed The Possessed (or The Devils [Besy]) takes its title from its epigraph, a stanza from Pushkin’s poem “The Devils” (“Besy,” ). The poem chapter After Crime and Punishment An Afterword on the Later Novels recounts the anxieties of a man and his driver who, lost in a terrible snowstorm, begin to think that they are being led to their death by swarms of devils. Dostoevsky exploits the poem as a political allegory, envisioning the political radicals of his day,in fact all those infected with the germs of Western rationalism,as devils leading Russia astray.But his use of the poem is not really a response to Pushkin. There is nothing political or ideological about Pushkin’s lyric. Just as important, there is almost nothing in The Possessed recalling Pushkin’s imagery.There is no snowstorm, no winter, no horses, no carriages, no visions, no one physically lost.1 The Russian radicals do not think that they are confused, disoriented, or being led astray. On the contrary, they think that they know the truth, that they are heading in the right direction—it is those who disagree with them who are confused and lost, just as in Raskolnikov ’s dream in the epilogue.And many are not at all afraid. The more relevant reference in the novel’s epigraph, reiterated by Stepan Trofimovich , the father of all the troubles, is the parable of the Gadarene swine, which tells of Jesus sending devils into a herd of swine, who rush over a precipice into the sea and drown.As Kondratyev and Suzdaltseva maintain , the closest parallel between the poem and novel are the “wanderings ” of the respective heroes,2 but in contrast to the generally dire tone of the rest of the novel, the wanderings of Stepan Trofimovich, despite the allusions to the Gadarene swine, are presented comically; they have nothing of the ominousness of Pushkin’s lyric, and the personal danger that Stepan Trofimovich feels is imaginary. The peasants take care of him and see to his safety. The parable could easily be interpreted as wishful thinking,because Pyotr Stepanovich,the chief villain,and Erkel, his assistant,escape.The implication is that they are far from having finished their work. Pushkin plays the role of prophet, into whose words one can read whatever one wishes, much like the enigmatic prophecies of the Greek seers. The prophecies all turn out to be correct, but all the interpretations turn out to be wrong. More consequential than Pushkin’s role as prophet in The Possessed is his status as writer and author, and by virtue of that, as representative of the highest aspirations of Russian culture and the Russian spirit. Of the four references to Pushkin (one is the citation in the epigraph and another is to Pushkin as a writer of epigrams), two cite him as a figure in the cultural wars between the progressives, who pronounce the uselessness of Pushkin (and by extension all uncommitted, socially irrelevant art) and the cultural conservatives, who argue for the importance After Crime and...