The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

which he wished to be remembered. And everything is a fiasco: the audience guffawsat it, the pistol misfires, and Ippolit dieswithout fanfare,in the margins, almost unnoticed further on in the novel.

The Demons [mistranslated as The Possessed] contains an equivalently “false” and failed document, a chapter censored from the first publication of the novel: “Stavrogin’s Confession.” In it the blighted hero confesses, among other ugly incidents, his violation of a fourteen-year-old girl and her subsequent suicide by hanging. As Stavrogin informs his confessor, Bishop Tikhon, this statement is to be printed up in 300 copies and distributed. Tikhon, something of a holy fool, begs his visitor not to broadcast his sins but to atone in some other less boastful way. Stung to the quick, Stavrogin accuses him – as the fictional Devushkin had accused the Gogol who authored “The Overcoat” – of spying on him, prying into his soul. This contradictory gesture of desiring publicity and yet resenting it as an abuse of privacy is part of Russian literature’s rich assimilation of Rousseau’s Confessions. Dostoevsky understood it as the book writer’s permanent lure. “Writing something up” and “making my own what another has written” were for him always primal acts, demonically attractive.

A poor clerk like Devushkin fretting over his look-alike in “The Stationmas-ter” or “The Overcoat” is a form of affectionate parody. Other sorts of Dos-toevskian interventions, not in secular books but in the Book – the Christian Bible – were closer to blasphemy. One such is the Grand Inquisitor’s recasting of the Three Temptations of Christ in the Wilderness (Matthew 4:1–11) in The Brothers Karamazov, where the Catholic Church is shown to be serving Satan. Dostoevsky embeds that extraordinary monologue in several layers of “relativizing” text. In the inner narrative frame, Christ receives the Inquisitor’s tirade silently and bestows upon the old man a kiss (the kiss of forgiveness? the kiss of Judas?). Alyosha bestows an equivalent kiss on his brother in the outer frame. And Ivan, who recites the tale, dismisses the entire literary effort as an “absurd thing” – even though, he insists, every author should have at least one listener. But the force and eloquence of this blasphemous replay of the Gospels was such that Dostoevsky himself despaired of creating an image of the Elder Zosima that could compete with the rhetoric of the Grand Inquisitor.

Such embeddings and re-accentings of prior literary texts were not of special urgency to Leo Tolstoy. He distrusted equally both the original and its subsequent wrappings.

Tolstoy and doing without words

Tolstoy hoped that the media revolution would not only advertise his own moral message, but also make all verbal art more honest. In August 1908,

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on his eightieth birthday, he was interviewed about the cinema. Of course this new technology will be exploited by businessmen – “where are there not businessmen?”, Tolstoy remarked – but films were wonderful: responsive, infectious, and so much more flexible to write for than the stage, which was “a halter choking the throat of the dramatist.” “You will see that this little clicking contraption with its revolving handle will make a revolution in our life – in the life of writers,” he insisted. “The cinema has divined the mystery of motion, and that is greatness.”27 At the end of his life, the world’s most famous word-smith and enemy of technology contemplated writing a screenplay. He foresaw in the art of (still silent) film a chance for images to live forever, sacrificing none of their wholeness, visibility, or mobility: one answer, perhaps, to the insult of death. Significantly, it was capturing the motion that mattered. Tolstoy leapt at the possibility of communication that reduced the need for uttered words.

For just because a writer is a superb craftsman with his chosen material – in this case, words – does not mean that he need trust or respect the morality of his medium. Tolstoy often found himself in this dilemma. His despair was not that of the Romantic or Symbolist poet who lamented that inspiration was always so divine and execution so tedious. Tolstoy was just as suspicious of poetic inspiration (in his view, a markedly indulgent form of intoxication) as he eventually became of meat, liquor, grand opera, and sexual arousal. What appalled Tolstoy was second-hand experience, and from that perspective his relation to books is fascinating. One of the best read and most learned men of his age, Tolstoy detected falsehood in almost all formal systems of education. He was a compulsive diarist and a superb letter-writer. But early on, Tolstoy wished to express what he felt to be true more directly, from the point of view of nature itself.