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Dostoevsky's The Devils and the Antinihilist Novel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Serge V. Gregory
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Extract

The majority of nineteenth-century literary critics identified The Devils as an antinihilist novel. The basic theme of Dostoevsky's work, the journal in which it was published, and the author's own journalistic commentary on his novel all seemed to link Dostoevsky to such conservative writers as Pisemskii, Leskov, and Krestovskii. Modern critics, both Soviet and Western, are aware that The Devils has qualities which make it vastly superior to the antinihilist works of the writers mentioned above. But in stressing Dostoevsky's artistic superiority, there is a danger of underestimating the powerful influence of badly written conservative novels upon his desire to write The Devils.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , September 1979 , pp. 444 - 455
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1979

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References

1. For a good anthology of nineteenth-century reviews of The Devils, see Zelinskii, V., Istoriko-kriticheskii kommentarii k sochincniiam F. M. Dostoevskogo, 3 vols, in 1 (Moscow, 1885-86)Google Scholar, vol. 3. For a summary of these and other reviews, see Zamotin, I. I., Dostoevskii v russkoi kritike, vol. 1: 1846-1881 (Warsaw, 1913)Google Scholar; see also Serge V. Gregory, “The Literary Milieu of Dostoevsky's The Possessed” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1977), pp. 49-62.

2. See Moser, Charles A., Antinihilism in the Russian Novel of the 1860's (The Hague: Mouton, 1964.Google Scholar Chapter 6 ( “Characteristic Aspects of the Antinihilist Approach in Russian Literature of the 1860's,” pp. 137-80) is especially relevant.

3. Edel'son, Evgenii, “Russkaia literatura,” Biblioteka dlia chtcniia, 1864, no. 6, p. 33.Google Scholar

4. See N. I. Solov'ev, “Dva romanista: Kritika Pcterbargskikh trushchob V. V. Krestovskogo, Nekuda, Oboidennykh, Voitel'nitsy, Chaiushchikh dvishenii vody i Rastochitelia M. Stebnitskogo,” Vsemirnyi trad, 1, no. 12 (December 1867), section 2, pp. 35-66; Aleksandrov, N, “Sovremennoe obozrenie. Melochi dnia. Kriticheskaia zametka o tendentsioznykh pisateliakh,” Delo, 1868, no. 12, pp. 1–29Google Scholar; Okr-ts, [pseud.], “Zhurnalistika 1869 goda: Stat'ia 1 (Novye romany starykh romanistov),” Dclo, 1869, no. 9, pp. 72–112.Google Scholar

5. See Sorokin, Iu. S., “K istoriko-literaturnoi kharakteristike antinigilisticheskogo romana (Dilogiia Vs. Krestovskogo Krovavyi puf),” Doklady i soobshcheniia filologicheskogo fakid'teta MGU, no. 3 (Moscow, 1947), pp. 79–87 Google Scholar; Tseitlin, A. G., “Siuzhetika antinigilisticheskogo romana,” Literatura i marksizm, 1929, no. 2, pp. 33–74Google Scholar; and Bazanov, V. G., Iz literatarnoi polemiki 60-kh godov (Petrozavodsk, 1940).Google Scholar

6. Dostoevsky wrote: “Don't do as other novelists do, that is, from the very beginning blow your horn that here is indeed a most unusual person. On the contrary, conceal it and reveal it slowly with strong artistic strokes” ( Dostoevskii, F. M., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 17 vols, to date [Leningrad: Nauka, 1972- ], 11: 264 Google Scholar [hereafter cited as PSS]).

7. Beletskii, A. I., “V masterskoi khudozhnika slova,” in Lesin, B. A., ed., Voprosy teorii i ptikhologii tvorchestva (Kharkov: Nauchnaia mysl', 1923), p. 155.Google Scholar

8. Ibid.

9. In discussing the transformation of the clichés of popular literature in the works of Gogol and the young Dostoevsky, Peter Hodgson writes: “The familiar appurtenances of the literary subculture are so presented here that they not only expose their literary shortcomings as the articulatory agents of a bankrupt literary sensibility, but they also reveal the underlying chaos and despair which the specious epistemology of that literary sensibility was attempting to mask” ( Hodgson, Peter, From Gogol to Dostoevsky: Jakov Butkov, A Reluctant Naturalist of the 1840's [Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1977], p. 66).Google Scholar

10. See Bazanov, Is literaturnoi polemiki, p. 52. In Leskov's Cathedral Folk the nihilist Termosesov is described as a centaur who simultaneously looks like a man, a woman, and a horse.

11. Erkel’ and Tolkachenko are. recognizable as the Nechaevists Nikolaev and Pryzhov, respectively (Dostoevskii, PSS, 12: 207).

12. See, for example, Pisemskii's The Troubled Sea and In the Whirlpool, Leskov's No Way Out and At Daggers Drawn, and Goncharov's The Precipice.

13. Rabelais, François, The Heroic Deeds of Gargantna and Pantagruel, vol. 2 (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1929), pp. 117–22.Google Scholar

14. See V. V. Krestovskii, Sobranie sochincnii, vol. 3: Panurgovo stado (St. Petersburg, 1904), pp. 36, 151, 218.

15. Ibid., p. 175.

16. See Pustovoit, P. G., Pisemskii v istorii russkogo romana (Moscow, 1969), p. 167.Google Scholar

17. Dostoevskii, PSS, 11: 147.

18. Ibid., 10: 312.

19. Ibid., p. 322.

20. Ibid., p. 336.

21. Ibid., 11: 322.

22. See Bazanov, Is literaturnoi polemiki, p. 55.

23. Krestovskii, Panurgovo stado, p. 198.

24. Dostoevskii, PSS, 12: 310 and 312.

25. Krestovskii, Panurgovo stado, p. 229.

26. See Moser, Antinihilism in the Russian Novel, p. 17.

27. Dostoevskii, PSS, 10: 370.

28. Ibid., 12: 315.

29. Panov, S, “'Literaturnaia kadril1’ v romane Besy,” Zven'ia, vol. 6 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1936), pp. 573–82.Google Scholar

30. Krestovskii, Panurgovo stado, p. 227.

31. Dostoevskii, PSS, 10: 393.

32. Ibid., p. 395.

33. Dostoevsky's attitude toward student radicalism in the early 1860s was more lenient. In 1862, he wrote an article about the St. Petersburg fires that was subsequently censored. In it he tried to explain rationally why the frightened public might unfairly blame students for the blaze (see Dostoevskii, F. M., Novye materialy i issledovaniia, Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 86 [Moscow: Nauka, 1973], pp. 48–54).Google Scholar

34. Dostoevskii, PSS, 11: 240-41.

35. F. M. Dostoevskii, Pis´ma, vol. 2, ed. A. S. Dolinin (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel'stvo, 1930), p. 320. In the same letter, Dostoevsky expressed admiration for Leskov's depiction of one character, the female nihilist Vanskok.

36. The article has been published in V. V. Vinogradov, “Dostoevskii i Leskov v 70-e gody XIX veka (Anonomiia retsenziia F. M. Dostoevskogo na Soborian Leskova),” in Vinogradov, , Problema avtorstva i teoriia stilei (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1961), pp. 487–555. 37.Google Scholar Ibid., p. 514.

38. Ibid., p. 516.

39. Eikhenbaum, Boris, “Leskov i sovremennaia proza,” Literatura, kritika, polemika, reprint ed. (Chicago, 1969), p. 213.Google Scholar

40. Tkachev in Delo, 1873, no. 4, pp. 372-73.

41. See Tunimanov, V. A., “Rasskazchik v Besakh Dostoevskogo,” in Bazanov, V. G., Fridlender, G. M., and Vinogradov, V. V., eds., Issledovaniia po poetikc i stilistike (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972), p. 15O.Google Scholar

42. If we use the categories formulated by Tzvetan Todorov, The Devils is not a “fantastic” work. Todorov defines as fantastic those works in which there is an ambiguity as to whether the events related are possible or just imagined. Dostoevsky's concept of the fantastic is related to hyperbole and compression rather than the presentation of an ambiguous reality (see Tzvetan, Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975]).Google Scholar

43. Dostoevskii, PSS, 10: 231.

44. Ibid., 12: 141.

45. Ibid., 10: 499.

46. N. K. Mikhailovskii asked this very question in his review in Otechestvennye zapiski, 1873, no. 2, pp. 314-43. Mikhailovskii maintained that the Nechaev affair was a monstrosity which could not serve as a basis for a discussion of contemporary youth. He rejected the parable from Luke as a suitable correlative to the situation in Russia, because all the Russian types presented in the novel were eccentric and unrepresentative.

47. In his notes for a proposed afterword to The Devils, entitled “On the Question of Who Is Healthy and Who Is Insane: An Answer to Critics,” Dostoevsky stressed the turmoil of contemporary society: “Traditions, the literature of the gentry, ideas, suddenly chaos, people without form—they have no convictions, no science, no point of emphasis; they believe in the vague mysteries of socialism” (Dostoevskii, PSS, 11: 308). Dostoevsky felt that traditional prose forms, which he called “the literature of the gentry,” were no longer capable of expressing the new turbulence in Russian society.