The Icon and the Axe

Yet Stavrogin is also a symbol of the Russian intelligentsia, a bearer of its prophetic hopes, which Dostoevsky himself partially shared. Stavrogin was tutored by Stepan Trofimovich, the incarnation of the romantic aristocratic intellectual; he is compared to figures like Lunin and Lermontov and represents a kind of fulfillment of both of their quests. He was created by Dostoevsky in the midst of his search for a new positive hero. He bears the Greek word for cross (stavros) within his name, has been to Jerusalem, and is called "Prince Harry," Shakespeare's future king Henry V who was destined to save England after sowing his wild oats. In his notebooks Dostoevsky referred to Stavrogin as "Prince" and, in a key chapter heading, as "Ivan the Tsarevich": the murdered son of Ivan the Terrible whom Russian folklore taught would return to deliver Russia. In some sense, Dostoevsky is saying that the future of Russia belongs to Stavrogin: to the aristocratic intelligentsia. The intelligentsia-the alienated and elect of history-cannot be bypassed because it is possessed by ideas; and without "a great idea," "the people cannot live and will not die."

The drama of the novel results largely from the struggle of two very special personalities for the raw power that Stavrogin generates and the dark fire that he bears within him. Traditional and revolutionary ideals are struggling for the mind-and thus the future-of Russia. The old is represented by a woman, Maria Lebiadkin, the new by a man, Peter Verkhovensky. The names immediately dramatize the contrasting forces. Maria suggests, of course, the mother of God, the missing Madonna; Peter suggests Peter the Great and the arrogant march of technology and irreverent innovation. Lebiadkin is derived from "swan" Qebed'), the popular symbol of purity, grace, and redemption; Verkhovensky from "height," the classic symbol of pride and arrogance.

The old never has a chance. Just as Musorgsky's "white swan" is killed early in Khovanshchina, so is Dostoevsky's afflicted with some strange, deep wound even before we meet her. Yet she never blames Stavrogin, who has spurned and humiliated her. Feeling that "I must have done him some wrong," she accepts suffering gladly in the spirit of the Old Believers and denounces Stavrogin as the False Dmitry before dying with her

infant baby.

The new and victorious force is that of Verkhovensky, who is, of course, modeled on the conspiratorial Nechaev. Unlike Nechaev, however,

who rejoiced in the total nihilism of his revolutionary ethos, Verkhovensky feels the need of links with the prophetic intelligentsia. Without Stavrogin, he considers himself only "Columbus without America, a bottled fly." Verkhovensky's revolutionary party gives us a kind of anticipatory glimpse at the conspiratorial confusion of the Bolsheviks awaiting the arrival of Lenin at the Finland Station. The scene in which Verkhovensky inspires a thug to desecrate an icon by putting a mouse inside its container is an anticipation of the organized sacrilege by the league of the militant godless. The Shpigulin scene, in which Verkhovensky appears in the streets actively agitating among striking workers, illustrates Dostoevsky's unique ability for depicting where events were going rather than merely where they had already been. Based on the first real industrial strike in Russia (which occurred in St. Petersburg in May-June, 1870, while Dostoevsky was completing the novel), the scene is treated not as an isolated, economically motivated demonstration of confused protest but rather as part of the fire in the minds of men. The professional revolutionary organizers who were not to move in among the urban workers for some years are already there in Dostoevsky's novel.26

The future, we are led to believe, belongs to Verkhovensky; for, although his immediate plan came to nought, he escapes at the end and is the only major figure who still seems to have a future ahead of him. There is, to be sure, the hope voiced by Stepan Trofimovich in his last wanderings that the devils will be driven out of Russia, which will then sit repentant at the feet of Christ in the manner of the passage in Luke (8:32-7), which introduces the novel. But compared to most of the rest of the action, this is an unconvincing, almost comic scene-prophetic in some ways of the shortly forthcoming "movement to the people" by the "repentant nobility" and by the other great novelist of the age, Leo Tolstoy.