Dostoevsky and the Catholic Underground

Chapter Four: Dostoevsky’s Portrayal of Transnational Catholicism in Demons

114 Chapter Four Dostoevsky’s Portrayal of Transnational Catholicism in Demons “And take my advice, which is never take up with actors, who are a privileged people.” —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605) D E P I C T I O N S O F C AT H O L I C I S M in Dostoevsky’s novel written abroad—Myshkin’s merging of socialism with the Roman faith, the near-seduction of Pavlishchev by the archetypal Jesuit Goureau, and Aglaya’s succumbing to an émigré count (along with his pater confessor )—attest that Dostoevsky’s encounters with revolutionaries from Catholic nations during his 1867–71 European sojourn inform his impressions of Western Christendom. The importance of the Roman faith for Demons may be gleaned from the Catholic connections of the novel’s lead conspirators, Petr Verkhovensky and Nikolai Stavrogin, as well as from the allusions in Demons to the seventeenth-century Catholic-Orthodox conflict, the Time of Troubles. Not long before the novel’s publication, Dostoevsky considers another East-West spiritual encounter in his unrealized novel The Life of a Great Sinner (Zhitie velikogo greshnika), between Chaadaev, who informs the novelist’s linking of Jesuitism and revolution, and Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk in a monastery—a meeting that prefigures a similar exchange between Stavrogin and Tikhon in Demons (Pss, 20:190; 29.1:118). In his novel about Sergei Nechaev’s conspiracy, about Nechaevs (Nechaevy) and Nechaevists (nechaevtsy), Dostoevsky repeatedly underscores the influence that Catholics and Catholicism exert on Westernized Russians, since the Moscow barin and landowner “drew the quit-rent in order to live on it in Paris . . . and to end with Chaadaev’s or Gagarin’s Catholicism” (Pss, 11:87). This link may arise from his tendency to reduce the hundreds of Russians he met abroad to a few types such as old socialists in the tradition of Belinsky (e.g., Herzen and Bakunin) and Russians-turned-Jesuits, like Ivan Gagarin, S.J. (Pss, 23:43).1 Dostoevsky unites these types more explicitly in an 1871 letter to Strakhov in which he finds that Belinsky, Granovsky (a prototype Dostoevsky’s Portrayal of Transnational Catholicism in Demons 115 for Stepan Verkhovensky), and “all this riff-raff” will make of Russia “a vacant nation, capable of becoming at the head of the common humanity [obshchechelovecheskii ] cause. Jesuitism and the lie of our progressive movers it would take up with pleasure” (Pss, 29.1:215). The jesuitical behavior of the revolutionaries, allusions to the Roman pontiff, as well as a comparison of the Chaadaev figure, Stavrogin, to Otrepev, attest to a Catholic presence in Dostoevsky’s novel. The Catholic interest is multi-generational, since the circle of Stepan Verkhovensky, who declares “I do not wish to be a Jesuit,” discusses the role of the pope in the new Italy: “For the pope we ages ago foresaw the role of a simple metropolitan in a united Italy and were completely convinced that all this 1000-year question in our age of humanity, industry, and the railroads is only a trifling matter” (Pss, 10:33, 30). Such a discussion of the age resonates well with Vakhrameev’s letter in The Double, which similarly finds that Grishka Otrepev could not appear “in our business-oriented and industrial . . . century” (Pss, 1:414).2 Yet, both Otrepev and the pope play a role in the conspiracy in Demons organized by the Nechaev figure Petr Verkhovensky, and in his 1875–76 notebook , Dostoevsky himself discloses that the pope’s pretension to “universal dominion” (i.e., the new decree on papal infallibility)—that “idea of ancient Rome”—through which the pope intends to unite with the people is “the idea I expressed before all others in the novel Demons” (Pss, 24:149). This note accounts for the theocratic proposal by Petr Verkhovensky to Stavrogin: You know, I thought to return the world to the Pope. Let him come out, the Pope, discalced and on foot, and show himself to the mob: “Look what they’ve driven me to!” And they will throng him, even the army. The Pope is at the top, we are around him, and under us—Shigalevshchina [equality in slavery]. We need only for the Internationale to agree to the Pope. . . . the Pope will be in the West and we will, will have you! (Pss, 10:323) Petr, therefore, draws on the papal model to create for Stavrogin the position of a dictatorial Russian leader, “with a halo of a...