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104 Chapter Six The Demon of Doubt and the Revenge of the Neglected Son: Demons A paper hell will swallow you with a black ink Satan —Nikolai Kliuev Evil is lack of direction and that which is done in it and out of it as the grasping, seizing, devouring, compelling, seducing, exploiting, humiliating, torturing and destroying of what offers itself. —Martin Buber DEMONS (BESY, 1871) is the first of Dostoevsky’s three major contributions to the nineteenth-century Russian literature of generational conflict.1 In these last three novels the author joins the fervent “fathers and children” debates that played out in the politically heated literary world of mid-nineteenth-century Russia. Here he explores the responsibility borne by the idealistic, Westernized Russian intellectuals of the 1840s—his own generation—for the radicalism and nihilism of the younger generation (the “men of the sixties”). In 1873 Dostoevsky wrote to Alexander Romanov, the heir to the imperial throne: “Our Belinskys and Granovskys would not believe it if they were told that they are the direct fathers of Nechaev. It is this kinship and legacy of thought that has been passed from fathers to children that I wanted to express in my novel” (29, bk. 1, p. 260). A political tract teeming with often funny caricatures of real-life prototypes on the one hand, Demons is on the other a profound and prophetic religious tragedy. The question of paternal responsibility dominates on both levels. Dostoevsky’s protagonist Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, the novel ’s symbolic father figure, is the acknowledged source of the dangerous ideas that have led to the crises of the 1860s. But Stepan Trofimovich’s guilt is not simply a matter of choosing the wrong theory; it stems from a more profound inadequacy. There is an important causal relationship between his 104 The Demon of Doubt and the Revenge of the Neglected Son 105 retreat into the world of books and the catastrophes that befall his town of residence. In this analysis I will link the question of irresponsible fatherhood in Demons to the problems of language, literature, and action that I have been exploring in Dostoevsky’s poetics as a whole. Dostoevsky’s ideologically focused characters tend to have only the most tenuous of roots in the material world. The theme begins with Dostoevsky ’s first hero, the self-consciously “literary” Makar Devushkin, and is developed further in the White Nights dreamer. These early characters ripen into the weird protagonist of Notes from Underground, who has no evident family origin and inhabits a quintessentially liminal space. Dostoevsky’s dreamers and underground men substitute a life in letters for holistic contact with other human beings. An inheritor of their tradition, Stepan Trofimovich is a creature of Western education; he “represents an idea” (10:21); he is incapable of managing the practical details of everyday life. Even his speech, a weird combination of French and Russian, reflects his detachment from the Russian soil. He is guilty of an all-engulfing passivity that is directly related to his retreat into books. Once the layers of his confidant’s hyperbolic narration are peeled away, we discover that Stepan Trofimovich emits enormous amounts of verbal material, but is monumentally inactive. If the deadly sins can apply here, he is slothful. In the great tradition of Russian literary heroes of his generation, he does nothing. The careful reader will also realize that, despite his vehement claims to the contrary, Stepan has not even written anything that could be construed as relevant to public life. Like Makar Devushkin , he produces only personal letters—the shed skins of his attempts to love. Stepan Trofimovich exemplifies the tension between writing, speaking, and acting on which Dostoevsky builds his ethics. In spite of—or perhaps because of—the tenuous nature of his connection to the material world,2 he is the heart and soul of Dostoevsky’s great, and “most literary,”3 novel.4 Odd textual clues cast doubt on Stepan Trofimovich’s ontological grounding in the world of Skvoreshniki. A creature of literature, he fades in and out of life in a way impossible for a man of flesh and blood: “Someone wrote in the press that he had died and promised an obituary. Stepan Trofimovich instantly came back to life” (10:20). He is tagged with the leitmotif prizhival, “sponger” or “parasite” (one who “lives attached”), and indeed he resides on Varvara Petrovna’s estate, completely dependent on her. In language that moves beyond the merely figurative...

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