Ilya Repin, "Vechornitsy" (Evening Revels of Ukrainian Peasants, 1881)
Oh, irony of fate!
- D.F.K.
Greetings, fellow readers! How do you feel about that cliffhanger, eh? As always, feel free to participate regardless of how far you’ve gotten, but please keep spoilers labeled so that new readers have a chance to discover the material on their own.
Last week we looked at the Slavophile movement and the ways Dostoevsky was influenced by their alternatives to Westernization and focus on rationalism. This week the author cranks up the plot and leaves us right on the edge: a surprising moment that “changes everything” and sets the back half of the novel in motion.
At first glance, Book 8 is the most episodic we’ve read so far, but readers of mystery novels will recognize the game here: D. is carefully tracing each of Dmitri’s actions — what he did, who he talked to, what he said — as groundwork for the inevitable investigation. How does Dmitri fare after all this? Are we optimistic about his chances?
Notes and Comments:
Since there’s less context to explore in this book, and since Grushenka is such a central figure to the action in this section (albeit as passive motivator rather than major player in her own right), I thought it might be worth revisiting an earlier discussion about women in the book, and more broadly: women in Russian literature.
Early on, a few readers expressed frustration that TBK is something of a sausage party: whether and to what extent that may have changed, I’ll let you discuss in the comments. But I do think it’s true that, with the exception of Grushenka’s chapter in “The Onion”, the women in this novel are somewhat less well-developed than other Dostoevsky heroines — certainly less so than his greatest creation, The Idiot’s Nastasia Filipovna, herself the fulcrum of a love triangle with a personality so enormous she nearly refuses to be contained by the novel, practically setting the whole thing on fire. Dostoevsky tends to work with “types,” and many of his fictional women are drawn from the sharply pronounced dichotomies of stage melodrama.
Much like it Western counterparts, Russian literature can be a mixed bag as far as women in literature (both as authors and characters). Many of the same tropes appear, and many of the same barriers were erected against women entering the field — the differences, however, are worth noting.
Let’s start with medieval literature (this will be a quick survey, I promise!) Most of what we have was written and copied by monks and focused on history, so we’re left with a mass of texts that deals almost entirely with male rulers, battles, and saints of both genders (though mostly male). In addition to Boyarina Morozova, a prominent Old Believer and martyr, there are two female figures who stand out above the rest:
The first is Princess Olga of Kiev, a 9th-10th century ruler with two claims to fame. First, after the murder of her husband Prince Igor, she embarked on a legendarily careful, systematic vengeance against the town that killed him, eventually wiping them all out. The story is short and well-worth reading. Her complex vengeance has the clever implausibility of fairy tales, or mythology, and Olga is a major symbol of a value called khitrost’, or guile. (Dorothy Atkinson notes that, complimentary as it is toward Olga, it later curdles into a stereotype of women as sly and untrustworthy.) Later in her life Olga converts to Christianity, the first major figure of medieval Rus’ — male or female — to do so, and she is the one who convinces her nephew, Prince Vladimir, to follow and convert the whole nation.
(The women of major families in medieval Kiev were better educated than their Western counterparts. When the 11th century Anne of Kiev married Henry I of France, she was the only literate member of that family.)
The second major figure wasn’t even “known” until the 19th century: Princess Yaroslavna in The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, a 15th century document only rediscovered in 1795. Yaroslavna has only one scene in the genre-unclassifiable Lay, an otherwise battle quasi-epic that laments the inability of Rus’ scattered tribes to unite against a common enemy. When her husband, Prince Igor (not the same one) is taken captive, Yaroslavna stands on the ramparts and delivers a powerful, animist-laced appeal to natural forces (wind, water, sun) to spare her husband. (For the Nabokov translation, scroll down or CTRL-F for “Yaroslavna’s incantation” here.) Rediscovered just as the Romantic movement was seeping into Russia, Yaroslavna’s combination of marital devotion, deep national spirit, and connection with nature hit all the right aesthetic and ideological buttons.
Most of medieval Rus’ through Muscovy and the early Russian empire forced women into increasingly narrow boxes. We can see certain attitudes expressed in the 16th century Domostroi, a “how-to” book on home management likely given as gifts to newlyweds (and probably never used as a how-to, as much as an ornamental object for the home). The Domostroi lays out a strict hierarchy for happiness at home and in society, where women are predictably instructed to obey their husbands, manage their servants, or expect to be beaten. It also has recipes.
Things improved, at least for the aristocratic class, with Peter the Great’s death. His wife Catherine (not “the Great” one) took the throne, busting a glass ceiling we still haven’t managed in 21st century America. In fact, Russia’s 18th century was defined by its empresses — Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth, Catherine II — rather than its forgettable and short-term male emperors. Where Peter’s reforms had focused mostly on Westernizing Russia’s military and civil institutions, the empresses imported language, literature, publication, philosophy, music, dance, architecture, i.e. the cultural and humanistic trappings of the West.
Catherine the Great is surely the major figure here, not just because of the extent and power of her time in office, but because — in addition to promoting publication and education, literacy and literature — she was a well-respected author in her own right. Most of her legacy as an author relies on a series of plays, both serious and comic (Lurana O’Malley has published two of the comedies in English translation), but she also held a spirited debate in the newspapers under an anonymous byline (that everyone knew was her. Also, “spirited” = she often banned her opponents from publication.) She also penned her own memoirs and an “Instruction” for the development of Russian law which dips deeply into Montesquieu.
Catherine’s interest in literature also opened the door for other women. One of the most interesting in the 18th century was a member of her court, Princess Dashkova, herself a massively accomplished woman: the first in the world to head a national science university, the only to be invited to Benjamin Franklin’s Philosophical society, and a friend of Voltaire and Diderot, among others. Dashkova’s memoirs are one of the best documents on court life in 18th century Russia (and beyond, since she traveled widely). Women finally began to be published in the late 18th century, usually for their poetry, but often relegated to the very margins of literary culture. (Highly recommended on this point: A History of Women’s Writing in Russia, ed. Adele Marie Barker and Jehanne M. Gheith, one of the sources for this diary.)
In fiction women were most relegated to wives and mothers, early in the century allegorized as Greek and Roman goddesses, later in the century satirized on the stage, though much of it was derivative of Western models. Highlights include Gavriil Derzhavin’s Felitsa, a brilliant, mock-heroic ode to Catherine the Great, who appreciated its inappropriate humor — it turns her into a goddess, but also finds room for sex jokes — and the exceptionally awful Prostakova in Denis Fonvizin’s The Minor, a play mocking the short-sighted stupidities of the aristocratic class.
A real breakthrough for female characters in Russian literature came with the 1792 publication of Nikolai Karmazin’s “Poor Liza” (pdf of the story here). Modern scholars still argue about how to read the story, but Karamazin’s contemporaries saw it as an exemplar of Western sentimentalism — the story of an innocent young country girl, seduced and abandoned, guaranteed to make you reach for your handkerchief. Stereotypical as the character may be, the story paints Liza delicately and sympathetically. It was a massive success (as the link above notes, it inspired pilgrimages!) and the name “Poor Liza” became shorthand for a particular kind of pure, vulnerable young woman in fiction. (Dostoevsky’s first novel was pointedly named Poor Folk, and the heroine is an innocent young country girl, then orphan suffocating under multiple layers of misery, eventually seduced away by a rich man.)
No one took better advantage of that shorthand than Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s greatest writer (yeah, I said it). Well aware of the way that contemporary literature was drowning in tropes, Pushkin found ways to play on reader expectations and deliver, for the first time, a complete roster of memorable, complex female characters under a single author: among others, Onegin’s Tatyana and Olga, Countess Fedotovna and her ward Lizaveta in “The Queen of Spades”, the title character Masha in The Captain’s Daughter, Donna Anna and Laura from his Don Juan riff “The Stone Guest,” and of course, “The Stationmaster’s” Dunya, a subtle but savage overturning of “Poor Liza” (and to be fair, a few stereotypes of his own, like The Gypsies’ Zemfira).
(Dostoevsky built them back up as tropes. For him, Pushkin’s Tatyana was “the apotheosis of the Russian woman”:
Could Tatiana’s great soul, which had so deeply suffered, have chosen otherwise? No, a pure, Russian soul decides thus: Let me, let me alone be deprived of happiness, let my happiness be infinitely greater then the unhappiness of this old man, and finally let no one, not this old man, know and appreciate my sacrifice: but I will not be happy through having ruined another.
Argle bargle.)
Buoyed by the new types of women appearing in Romantic fiction and poetry, Russia’s early-to-mid 19th century generally sees a wide range of prominent female characters: Zhukovsky reshaping gothic German heroines into Russian “Liudmilla” and “Svetlana,” Baratynsky’s Finnish heroine “Eda,” Lermontov’s “Bela” (in A Hero of Our Time), Griboedov’s Sofia Pavlovna (Woe from Wit), Turgenev’s Lukeria (Notes of a Hunter) or Madame Odintseva (Fathers and Children), Gogol’s Madame Korobochka (Dead Souls)… but especially the powerful women of stage, like Katerina in Ostrosvky’s The Storm. (Anna Karenina and Natasha Rostova were still a generation away.) While this is an impressive range, female characters more commonly fell into the usual slots: wives and mothers, virgins and whores, romantic ideals with no motivation other than to the support the hero’s development.
And all those authors I just listed were men. Women writers themselves had a harder time of it in the early 19th century. Only a handful were published, and often ruthlessly satirized for it. Even the most accomplished of the generation’s poets, like Anna Bunina, were eventually erased from the history by a certain level of scorn directed toward female accomplishment. Some writers maintained a respectable reputation as long as their primary social contribution was not literary: like the singer and hostess Zinaida Volkonskaia, who was praised by her contemporaries — including Pushkin — for her beauty and her music, but pointedly not her writing. It would only be in the late 19th century that a wave of extremely talented, impossible-to-ignore authors, critics, and poets would dismantle the pejorative “female writer.”
So that’s where we are now.
Questions for Discussion:
I mentioned above that Dostoevsky is structuring this book like an early chapter in a detective novel. Now that we know Fyodor was murdered and Dmitri is the prime suspect, what pieces of evidence do you think might have the strongest impact on the case for or against Dmitri Karamazov?
First-time readers: do you have any guesses about what “really” happened? Fyodor is dead, Ivan is out of town, Grigory is wounded, Smerdyakov is bedridden, and the only person the author gives a complete alibi is Dmitri!
No Russian writer of this era is more focused on money — the love of, the need for, the obligation to. How does money function in this book?
I spilled a lot of digital ink of female character tropes, but let’s put them into practice: do the women in TBK tend to conform to these tropes, or to undermine them? Or do we have a range of characters that do both to varying degrees?
Am I alone in loving Madame Khokhlakova in this section?
For Next Week:
Let’s keep this pace going, shall we? Book 9, the Preliminary Investigation, is up next...
Characters Appearing in This Section:
- The Karamazovs (Fyodor and Dmitri — the others are only mentioned)
- their servants: Grigory and Marfa, Smerdiakov
- Madame Khokhlakova (Hohlakov)
- Grushenka (Agrafena Alexandrovna)
- her landlady, the widow Morozov(a)
- her “patron,” the widower Kuzma Kuzmich Samsonov, and his servant
- her two servants: an old cook Matryona and her granddaughter Fenya
- the house porter, Nazar Ivanovich
- her Polish “officer” she believes will save her
- Lyagavy (Gorstkin), Fyodor’s would-be business partner;
- the priest and forester who keep Dmitri company on his visit
- Petr Ilyich Pekhotin, a young officer who pawns Dmitri’s revolver
- Plotnikov, the grocer
- Timofei and Andrei, coachman
- Mokroe:
- Trifon Borisovich, a powerful peasant
- Kalganov, a young relative of Miusov’s
- Maximov, an older landowner
- Vrubelsky, the other Polish guy
- a bunch of young women, incl. Maria
- The police:
- Mikhail Makarovich, the police captain
- Mavriky Mavrikeevich, chief inspector
- Mentioned, not appearing:
- Katerina Ivanovna
- Rakitin, Grushenka’s cousin and seminarian
- Maria Kondrateva, Smerdiakov’s love interest
Previous Entries in the Series:
- Announcement
- Introduction
- Book 1
- Book 2
- Book 3
- Book 4
- Book 5
- Books 6-7
