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The Sexuality of the Male Virgin: Arkady in A Raw Youth and Alyosha Karamazov
- Northwestern University Press
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Susanne Fusso The Sexuality of the Male Virgin: Arkady in A Raw Youth and Alyosha Karamazov IVAN KARAMAZOV ASKS, “Who doesn’t desire the death of his father?” thus seeming to anticipate Freud’s Oedipal theory of human sexual development. But one must remember that Ivan speaks out of madness and error and that the novel ends by emphasizing the love that exists between fathers and sons, not the hatred and rivalry. In pre-Freudian thought about sexuality, and in Dostoevsky’s created world, there are no master narratives of human desire—there are only case studies. There are temperamental quirks, moral choices, and, especially in Dostoevsky, divine intervention. A close examination and reconstruction of the pre-Freudian, nineteenth-century European understanding of sexuality is central to a better understanding of Dostoevsky’s artistic representation of human desire.1 In this essay I would like to consider one of his case studies, the sexual development of Alyosha Karamazov. The corruption of female innocence is of course a major theme in Dostoevsky’s novels, where the rape of female children is a haunting, obsessively recurring motif. But Dostoevsky was also concerned with depicting the way in which the virginity of young men is assaulted by the world. In the Diary of a Writer for January 1876, Dostoevsky described the hero of his 1875 novel A Raw Youth in terms that emphasize the theme of virginity and corruption: Ia vzial dushu bezgreshnuiu, no uzhe zagazhennuiu strashnoiu vozmozhnost ’iu razvrata, ranneiu nenavist’iu za nichtozhnost’ i “sluchainost’” svoiu i toiu shirokost’iu, s kotoroiu eshche tselomudrennaia dusha uzhe dopuskaet soznatel ’no porok v svoi mysli, uzhe leleet ego v serdtse svoem, liubuetsia im eshche v stydlivykh, no uzhe derzkikh i burnykh mechtakh svoikh,—vse eto ostavlennoe edinstvenno na svoi sily i na svoe razumenie, da eshche, pravda, na boga.2 I took a soul that was sinless, but already befouled by the terrible possibility of depravity, by an early hatred caused by his insignificance and “accidental” 142 birth, and by that breadth with which a still chaste soul already consciously admits vice into his thoughts, already nurtures it in his heart, feasts his eyes upon it in his shamefaced but already daring and passionate daydreams—all this being left exclusively on his own strength and his own powers of understanding , and also, it’s true, on God. There are several ideas in this passage that I would like to develop in relation both to the hero of A Raw Youth, Arkady Dolgoruky, and to the ostensible hero of The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha Karamazov, the course of whose sexual development, I will argue, is being unobtrusively narrated alongside the more lurid story of his father’s murder. First is the idea that physical virginity does not coincide with moral virginity, that the sexually inexperienced person can yet have a rich and even debauched sexual life. The second, related idea is the power of mechty (dreams) to create such a life. Finally, there is the idea that God may play a role in helping the individual in his or her struggle with what Dostoevsky calls “depravity.” How does depravity—razvrat—enter the virginal soul? Through the ears. Arkady has been educated in a typical Russian boarding school, where conversations “on a certain nasty subject” (Ps, 13:273) are the norm. By the age of nineteen, he knows about “various nasty and swinish things” that “the filthy imagination of the filthiest debauchee could not dream up” (Ps, 13:78). “I of course acquired all this knowledge in elementary school, even before the gymnasium, but only the words, not the deed [lish’ slova, a ne delo]” (Ps, 13:78).3 The typical next step after hearing dirty stories is to develop them in fantasy, those “shamefaced but daring and passionate daydreams” of which Dostoevsky speaks in the Diary of a Writer. In Emile, Rousseau warns of the power of such images: “The memory of objects that have made an impression upon us, the ideas that we have acquired follow us in our retreat and people it in spite of ourselves with images more seductive than the objects themselves.”4 Such dreams are apt to lead to masturbation, which in turn leads to countless physical maladies: It would be very dangerous if instinct taught your pupil to trick his senses and to find a substitute for the opportunity of satisfying them. Once he knows this dangerous supplement, he is lost. From then on he will always have an...