The Icon and the Axe

Thus, whereas Musorgsky in the Kromy scene of Boris ends his search for new answers with a cry of total despair, Dostoevsky's cry at the end of The Idiot is only the beginning of his search. But whereas Musorgsky was closer to the populists of the seventies in looking for sociopolitical leadership in the Kromy Forest, Dostoevsky was closer to the realists of the sixties in looking for metaphysical truth in the real St. Petersburg. Whereas Musorgsky looked to the Russian past, Dostoevsky looked to its present and future. The realism of historical lament in the one gives way to the realism of religious prophecy in the other.

In his first outline of "The Atheist" late in 1868, Dostoevsky indicated his intention to spend at least two years in preparatory reading of "a whole library of atheistic works by Catholic and Orthodox writers." From atheism his hero is to move on to become a Slavophile, Westernizer, Catholic, flagellant sectarian, and "finds at last salvation in the Russian soil, the Russian Saviour, and the Russian God."23 He attaches repeated importance to the need he feels to be in Russia to write such a work. The two great novels which he wrote during his fascination with this never fully realized idea both take the problem of separation out of the individual into a broader and more distinctively Russian context. The Possessed of 1870-2 anatomizes the ideological divisions in Russian society as a whole. The Brothers Karamazov of 1878-80, which is the closest Dostoevsky came to giving finished form to "The Atheist," illustrates the separation within individuals, society, and the family itself. The Brothers focuses on the ultimate form of human separation: that which leads man to murder his own progenitor. If The Possessed depicts "Turgenev's heroes in their old age,"24 the social denouement as it were of the philosophic nihilism of Fathers and Sons, The Brothers lifts the conflict of fathers and sons to the metaphysical plane, on which alone it could be overcome.

The scene of The Possessed is Skvoreshniki, the provincial estate which bears the name of an outdoor house for feeding starlings and migratory

birds. It is in truth a feeding place for the noisy black birds of revolution, a way station through which the unsettling ideas of the aristocracy are migrating out from St. Petersburg to the Russian countryside. All the characters are interconnected in a hallucinatory forty-eight hours of activity, most of which is a compressed and intensified version of real-life events. In a series of strange and only partially explained scenes we see the movement of Russian thought from the dilettantish aristocratic romanticism of Stepan Trofimovich, with whom the novel begins, to the activity of a host of young extremists. Conversation leads directly to murder and suicide; the "literary quadrille" of intellectuals to a strange fire. "It's all incendiarism," cries out one perplexed local official, adding prophetically that "the fire is in the minds of men and not in the roofs of houses." But he and others not caught up in the hot stream of ideas are powerless to understand, let alone check, the conflagration of events. This is a novel of ideas in action, and those who are not intelligentnye (whether they be babbling bureaucrats or garrulous liberals) are foreigners to it.

At the center of the drama stands Stavrogin, the magnetic yet empty aristocrat around whom the other characters, in Dostoevsky's words, "revolve as in a kaleidoscope." "Everything is contained in the character of Stavrogin-Stavrogin is EVERYTHING," Dostoevsky wrote in his notebooks.25 An air of mystery hangs over his entrance onto the scene. His face is likened to a mask; and his first activities-grabbing one man by the nose and biting another one's ear-are seen as offenses against society by a "wild beast showing his claws." Like the beast of the apocalypse, this human beast has many heads. He is the progenitor of all the "devils" in the novel ("Devils" being a more accurate translation of the Russian title, Besy, than "Possessed").