Rumor and imagination, naturally, add fuel to the fire that the devils have set. In fact it is a question whether Pyotr’s vast organization is not largely imaginary, an idea in his mind. This is Stavrogin’s suspicion. It has occurred to him more than once that Pyotr is mad, and Pyotr’s worship of him, which he finds repulsive, seems to decide the issue. That happens at a peculiar moment, when Verhovensky finally articulates a credo. He has been saying that he is a scoundrel and not a Socialist. “But the people must believe that we know what we are after. ... We will proclaim destruction. ... Well, and there will be an upheaval! There’s going to be such an upset as the world has never seen before...the earth will weep for its old gods. ... Well, then we shall bring forward...whom? ...Ivan the Tsarevich. You! You!” After a minute, Stavrogin understands. “A pretender? ...So that’s your plan at last!” He himself is slated to be the pretender. “...In this we have a force, and what a force!...the whole gimcrack show will fall to the ground, and then we shall consider how to build up an edifice of stone. For the first time! We are going to build it, we, and only we!” “Madness,” answers Stavrogin. A few minutes later, Verhovensky, pretty much back to normal, is offering to have Stavrogin’s wife murdered free of charge. This comes as a relief. It had been almost a disappointment to find that he had a “positive” side, a “constructive” side, after all.
I am willing to accept that Verhovensky is mad, Stavrogin, the child-violator, is mad, the quintet is mad, Kirillov is mad, and that among the founding members of the local “Society” not even Shatov is sane. A clinical finding to that effect would not greatly alter our understanding of the novel. Possession by an idea is a common form of insanity. But did the entire community go temporarily mad—the governor’s wife, the governor, Stepan Trofimovich’s protectress, who broke with him because he had not kept her abreast of the new ideas, the old gentleman who was sure that he had been under the influence of the Socialist International for “fully” three months? That, too, is not out of harmony, I think, with the impression Dostoievsky wanted to make. The fact that the whole pathological episode, if that is what it was, is viewed from the outside, as though offered to a clinician for judgment, is surely meant to suggest that. As is known, the story was planned originally as a satire on liberal and nihilist ideas, and much that is satirical survives in the final version: the grotesque members of the “quintet,” the governor and his wife, Stepan Trofimovich and his domineering sympathizer, the landowner Varvara Petrovna, “a tall, yellow bony woman with an extremely long face, suggestive of a horse.” To picture the new ideas as a virulent illness attacking a body politic is classical strategy on the part of a satirist, and the course of the disease is represented here in what often seems a dry, mock-medical vein: predisposing conditions, first symptoms, onset (Stavrogin biting the governor’s ear), temporary remission, aggravated symptoms, spread to other parts of the body, subsidence, final recovery.
Once the figures of Stavrogin, Kirillov, and Shatov were developed—they must have been present in germ from the outset—a gloomy religious element began to suffuse the novel, which up to then one could imagine as a sort of Russian Headlong Hall, with perfectibilians, deteriorationists, status-quo-ites contentedly discoursing while Squire Headlong-Stavrogin set a charge of dynamite to his property. Stavrogin, Kirillov, and Shatov brought suffering—unacceptable to satire—into the tale. Not a ray of comedy falls on them, and yet by a miracle, which I think is effected through the “redemption” of Stepan Trofimovich—a half-ludicrous King Lear of the steppes—the antagonistic elements are able to coexist, the satiric metaphor and something like a Slavophil myth of the Passion.
The loosing of the devils yielded a total of five murders, two suicides, one death-by-manslaughter, one death as a result of exposure (Stepan Trofimovich), two other related deaths, the burning down of a considerable area of the town, general damage to property. Pyotr Stepanovich, the author of it all, escapes as though in a cloud of brimstone, by taking the train to Petersburg.
It is clear that Dostoievsky stood in awe of the power of ideas. The most fearful, evidently, in his eyes were socialistic ideas with their humanitarian tinge. And here at any rate he could speak from experience: his having belonged to a group—the Petrashevsky circle—that engaged in discussions of Utopian socialism had taken him to Siberia and nearly to the firing squad. Yet this experience, he believed, had not only taught him a lesson in the ordinary sense (“Stay out of discussion groups”), but had brought about a spiritual rebirth. His dread of the power of ideas combined with a fatal attraction to them; like so many Russian writers then and now, he was drawn to ideas as if to a potent drug. In Geneva, long after he had returned, a new man, from Siberia, he could not resist going to hear Bakunin expound his theories, and he expressed disappointment that Bakunin was not more constructive. In Dostoievsky, ideas may lead those they fasten on to extreme suffering, but they can also be bringers of redemption, the one in fact leading to the other, as had happened in his own case.