Greetings, fellow readers! Apologies again for my slip-up last week, but we’re back on track today to discuss the remainder of Book 11. 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.
In the last installment we took a break from Karamazov itself to look at the artist (and movement) behind each week’s header images. This week’s selection is my favorite match-up of the series: Ivan may not be facing capital punishment like his elder brother, but the mix of defiance and resignation from the doomed atheist is as fitting as it gets. What’s more, Repin began painting this the same year Dostoevsky began serializing Karamazov. The painting’s official name is “Before Confession”, but “Refusal” became its popular title and a minor manifesto of revolutionary defiance.
This week, after devoting individual books to the other two sons (Book 7: Alyosha, Book 8: Mitya), Dostoevsky takes us deeper into the mind of Ivan Karamazov...
Notes and Comments
”Ivan’s Nightmare” is my favorite thing Dostoevsky ever wrote. It’s funny, dark, and unexpected — but he’s been laying the groundwork for it for hundreds of pages now. It could even be seen as unfair (we can discuss this below) in how it undercuts Ivan’s arguments by plot rather than by counterargument, although we know that’s part of Dostoevsky’s larger polemic.
Still, Ivan’s devil is a masterpiece of characterization, a “poor relative” whose entire being is an act of playful, constant irony with malevolent intent, of buffoonery turned into an anti-polemic, and an important turning point in Russian depictions of supernatural evil. So let’s take a minor detour and discuss Russia’s literary demons and devils, shall we?
Russia’s engagement with the Christian devil goes as far back as its medieval chronicles: the best-known example, cited by Dostoevsky in this very book, is “The Descent of the Virgin into Hell,” where Mary takes a guided tour of the netherworld and tries to bring some modicum of mercy to its sufferers. Saints lives have their tormenting demons, and folk tales in particular were full of devils, with the capital-D devil as a recurring character not unlike his use in Western literature: the trickster/tempter who uses cunning to steal souls, a clear ancestor of Dostoevsky’s devil.
In the modern era (19th century onward), depictions of the capital-D Devil as such were somewhat less popular with 19th century writers as small-D devils and demons, but we find a pretty broad array even among the best-known writers. Here’s a quick survey of some of the major works for those of you who find this theme interesting:
We see one of the first direct predecessors of Ivan’s devil in Pushkin. Pushkin occasionally flirted with, but also undercut, the horror genre (“The Queen of Spades,” “The Undertaker”), but also created a grumpy, disaffected creature who visits him “in secret” in his short poem, “The Demon.” Unlike Dostoevsky’s, there’s no humor here, but the nature of his nightly visits, to torment the creator with doubt, makes him a definite relative. “He called the beautiful a dream, / He scorned all inspiration, / Had no belief in love or freedom, / He looked on life with ridicule; / He wanted not to praise / A single thing in all creation.” Less charming and more direct than Ivan’s, but you can see the family resemblance.
The demonic received a major boost during the Romantic era, where the same lure of the exotic that drove authors to the south also inflamed their interest in the supernatural. The most famous of these devilish works is undoubtedly Mikhail Lermontov’s The Demon, an epic poem about an immortal soul who falls in love with a young Georgian girl and can’t prevent seducing her (both literally and figuratively, into damnation), as is his nature. As with Goethe’s Gretchen, her love ends up saving her, while the Demon must continue wandering in his eternal loneliness. Romantic epic poetry has gone somewhat out of style, but the Demon’s passionate plea to his Tamara is still a passage well-loved for its intensity (“I swear by the first day of creation, / I swear by its final day, as well / I swear by the shame of condemnation, / And the eternal triumph of the just...”) I wish my wedding vows had been this good, heh.
The king of mid-19th century demonic was undoubtedly Gogol, who uses it as a constant theme in his folk-ish writing (Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, a set of folk stories that include tales of horror) and his more metaphysical, Hoffmanesque fantasies (like “The Portrait,” a version of the “sell your soul” genre.) His most inventive contribution to the genre is the story “Viy,” about a young student of philosophy who endures three nights of trials from a revenge-bent witch’s corpse. On the third night, the exasperated witch calls on the title demon, a monstrous entity with eyelids stretching to the floor, which terrifies the student and leads to his death (and, because it takes them so long, traps all the demons in the church after daybreak, petrifying them all). It’s dark and weird and wonderful, if you like that kind of thing.
Dostoevsky’s contemporary Tolstoy was no stranger to the demonic, either, especially in his late work, which is focused more on moral instruction. Taking a cue from folk tales, Tolstoy crafted a number of works in which devils or demons tempt the morally wavering with promises of what they most desire, like “The Imp and the Crust,” where a minor demon has to impress his superior by damning a poor peasant (and wins, because vodka). More fulfilling is the appearance of Satan himself in “How Much Land Does a Man Need?,” a simple but excellent fable about how the machinations of greed contain their own undoing.
Of course Dostoevsky flirted with the malevolent supernatural a number of times: his second major work, The Double, also indebted to Hoffman and Gogol, involves a possibly evil doppelganger, his short story “Bobok” is a drunken sabbath of doomed souls communicating from beyond the grave, and though there is nothing supernatural per se in the novel, the choice of Demons as the title of his work on revolutionary Russia has its own very particular echoes.
Dostoevsky would help pave the way for turn-of-the-century obsession with the demonic, a full flowering of evil in Russian literature. Many were tied to the era’s inflamed interest in the occult, like the demonic Shishnarfne, a possible hallucination from the fourth dimension that torments the revolutionary Dudkin in Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (my favorite Russian novel). Thought a relatively minor character in the overall plot, Shishnarfne, like Lermontov’s demon, is a wayward spirit of the Middle East, a Persian nightmare whose very name, read backwards, becomes a mantra of evil and torment. Things only get worse from there for the hapless Dudkin.
My favorite turn-of-the-century demon, though, is the untranslatable nedotykomka, which we might best render as “a thin-skinned little thing,” a nebulous fuzz of evil that torments the provincial schoolteacher Peredonov in Fyodor Sologub’s masterpiece The Petty Demon. Sologub’s work is a poison love letter to Russia, because the title demon is both the nedotykomka and the loathsome Peredonov himself, and just about every other character, the town itself, heck, the country of Russia, maybe even the nature of reality. It’s a wallow in filth and misery and hypocrisy that the author shrugged off as a mirror: it only reflects the world around it. (It’s also a very funny, horrifying little novel.)
We find more explicitly Christian occultism in Valery Briusov’s The Fiery Angel, difficult to find in English but at least on some people’s radar through the Prokofiev opera adaptation. Transforming his own ill-fated love triangle into fiction, Briusov recreated medieval Germany for the story of a woman visited by the capital-D Devil in the guise of the title angel, the religious hysteria that consumes the people around her, the man who loves her, and the demons they summon. Not surprisingly given the time period and focus, Dr. Faustus makes an appearance, as well, Mephistopheles in tow.
Though bringing in depictions of the anti-Christ would open up a whole ‘nother can of worms, I’d be remiss not to mention the most unusual example from early Soviet literature: the wandering Mexican revolutionary in Ilya Ehrenburg’s popular The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples. Julio Jurenito is less a revolutionary with a positive agenda than a provocateur, a single-minded force of destruction, and he brings together a multi-ethnic, multi-national group of disciples (including the author!) to plot against civilization as we know it. His life, actions, and death are explicit parody of the Gospels, but Ehrenburg describes Jurenito in ways that bring to mind the Devil, blurring the lines between anti-Christ and Satan, with the possibility that Jurenito is not exactly of-this-world. It’s a hilarious book, unfortunately difficult to find in English.
Continuing through Soviet literature, where devils and demons were incompatible with political ideology, the Dostoevskian influence is most keenly felt in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Here, the buffoonish interlocutor is split between a number of characters with different functions: Woland, who is possibly the capital-D Devil himself, is the voice of authority and philosophical contortion, though he occasionally winks at the humans he’s mocking (as in poor Berlioz, who has no idea what’s about to happen to him when he meets Woland that afternoon...). The more actively buffoonish elements go to the delightful pairing of Korovlev/Fagot and Behemoth, a Laurel-and-Hardy act that gets one of its biggest laughs out of Dostoevsky’s death (!). The more straightforward horror elements are reserved for the thuggish Azazello (another Middle Eastern “spirit of the desert”) and vampirish Helga. Bulgakov’s demons offer us a full buffet of options, and they are the best known 20th century examples for a very good reason.
There's so much more than this. We haven't even scratched the surface of the capital-D Devil's repeated reevaluations in the culture, the popularity of Satanism and the occult in turn-of-the-century Russia, and the hundreds of poems and short stories that examine the demonic from every possible angle. It's a very rich topic, so if you’re interested in learning more, check out Pamela Davidson’s essential Russian Literature and Its Demons, the very good collection edited by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, and Adam Weiner’s By Authors Possessed: The Demonic Novel in Russia.
Questions for Discussion:
Though the book is titled “Ivan,” an inordinate amount of the text is devoted to Smerdiakov. Critics typically see him as a “double” of Ivan, and the “double” is certainly one of Dostoevsky’s favorite techniques. If Smerdiakov is Ivan’s double, what, if anything, does distinguish them from one another? What other doubles do we see in the novel?
What do you make of Lise’s breakdown in front of Alyosha? The antisemitic nature of the discussion is also plain (many readers have complained that Alyosha’s response to Lise on that point is troubling), but what appears to be driving her strong reactions here?
A major theme of this book (and of the novel) is culpability: who is responsible for Fyodor’s death? Why?
What is it about Ivan’s devil that makes him such an effective interlocutor against Ivan’s arguments? In other words, even though he rarely sticks to the topic, why does the devil “win” his debate against the educated, articulate Ivan? (What a day to have this discussion, no?)
For Next Week:
We have one very long book and one very short book to go! Common sense suggests that we break this up into two roughly equal parts instead, and with Book 12 dominated by two long speeches, and I suggest we stop at the end of the prosecutor’s speech (Book 12.9) and save the defense and the rest for the following week. Each is perhaps a bit shorter than our usual weekly reading, but trying to do everything at once might be too much...
...Unless you’ve all passed me up after last week’s glitch, and would prefer to end it all in fell swoop. I can do either. What say you?
PREVIOUS ENTRIES IN THE SERIES:
- Announcement
- Introduction
- Book 1
- Book 2
- Book 3
- Book 4
- Book 5
- Books 6-7
- Book 8
- Book 9
- Books 10-11.2