-
Chapter Five: A Grain of Eros in the Madonna, a Spark of Beauty in Sodom
- Northwestern University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
80 Chapter Five A Grain of Eros in the Madonna, a Spark of Beauty in Sodom MADONNA AND SODOM While Tolstoy argues that beauty is not genuine when its goodness is doubtful , Dostoevsky conveys the idea that the human heart has enough room for the ideal of the Madonna and that of Sodom. Mitya Karamazov’s declaration, as part of his confession to Alyosha, represents a concise formula of Dostoevsky ’s dialectic of beauty: Beauty is a fearful and terrible thing! Fearful because it’s indefinable and it cannot be defined, because here God gave us only riddles. Here the shores converge, here all contradictions live together. I’m a very uneducated man, brother, but I’ve thought about it a lot. So terribly many mysteries! Too many riddles oppress man on earth. Solve them if you can without getting your feet wet. Beauty! Besides, I can’t bear it that some man, even with a lofty heart and the highest mind, should start from the ideal of the Madonna and end with the ideal of Sodom. It’s even more fearful when someone who already has the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not deny the ideal of the Madonna either, and his heart burns with it, verily, verily burns, as in his young, blameless years. No, man is broad, even too broad, I would narrow him down. Devil knows even what to make of him, that’s the thing! What’s Sodom? Believe me, for the vast majority of people, that’s just where beauty lies—did you know that secret? The terrible thing is that beauty is not only fearful but also mysterious. Here the devil is struggling with God, and the battlefield is the human heart. (108) The struggle between opposite principles was well known before Dostoevsky . Mitya’s terrible secret and Dostoevsky’s discovery consist in the fact that man’s polar ideals interact with one another. Before we examine their relations, we must specify terminology. A Grain of Eros in the Madonna, a Spark of Beauty in Sodom 81 The word “Sodom” has been associated with vice and corruption since ancient times. It should be noted, however, that in nineteenth-century Russia , this word was synonymous with the word “bedlam” and signified “noisy uproar,” “confusion,” “tumult,” “brawl,” “shouting,” and “commotion.”1 Dostoevsky uses the word “Sodom” in this sense in Poor Folk (1844), Netochka Nezvanova (1849), The Village of Stepanchikovo (1859), “A Nasty Story” (1862), “The Crocodile” (1865), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Eternal Husband (1870), and The Devils (1871). Crime and Punishment’s “Sodom” reigns in the noisy Haymarket Square, with its smoky pubs and cheap brothels on the adjacent streets, full of drunkards, prostitutes, and criminals. By merging the romantic concept of “pure beauty” and the portrayal of Petersburg slums in one narrative, Dostoevsky produces a literary hybrid that Donald Fanger called “romantic realism .”2 A similar paradigm can be found in Gogol’s story “Nevsky Prospect,” but if Gogol is concerned with the schism between ideal and earthly reality, Dostoevsky is more concerned with the point of their intersection. In The Idiot, “Sodom” is a frenzy of scandals and frustrated passions, with its climax at Nastasya Filippovna’s name day party when Rogozhin and his crew come “with noise, clatter, and shouting.” Myshkin is stupefied; General Epanchin groans, “It’s bedlam, bedlam!” (Eto Sodom, Sodom!) (169). As the commotion increases, Nastasya begins to brag of her shamelessness , proclaiming, “And now I want to carouse, I’m a streetwalker! I sat in prison for ten years, now comes happiness!” (170). Dazzled by her unconventional behavior, Rogozhin screams in a frenzy, “She’s mine! It’s all mine! A queen! The end!” (170). Eventually, the thirst for possessing Nastasya’s beauty leads him to killing the object of his desire. Nastasya Filippovna has a reputation of a courtesan, but her beauty has some saintly feature. Vyacheslav Ivanov suggests that Dostoevsky models her portrait on Rafael’s Sistine Madonna. He maintains, “Beauty who comes down upon earth to save the world (‘it is beauty that will bring the world salvation’), but then, like the Ashtaroth of the Gnostics, becomes imprisoned in matter and desecrated—she, the ‘Eternal Female’ herself, who is depicted, in The Idiot, by the symbolic figure of Nastasya Filippovna.”3 It must be noted that Ivanov does not view Nastasya’s beauty as demonic. The English translation of this passage contains a regrettable confusion, for in the Russian original, Ivanov...