#18: Dostoevsky's The Possessed and Our Times

The novel The Possessed (sometimes The Devils) was written by Fyodor Dostoevsky between 1870 and 1872. It is not much read these days, being considered one of his lesser works, but perhaps more because of its politically unpopular inclination. Briefly put, Dostoevsky is hostile to the revolutionaries of his time, the socialists, the communists, and the anarchists. And, yes, these terms were already in circulation at that time. After all, Marx’s Communist Manifesto came out in 1848 and the revolutionary intellectuals of Russia thought of themselves as Socialist-Anarchists. Fourier style Socialism had been germinating all over Western Europe for most of the century.

Twentieth century literary critics found themselves in a terrible bind over a book like The Possessed, since they were duty bound to acknowledge Dostoevsky’s greatness as a novelist, but they were so terribly disturbed by his political “blindness.” How could a novelist of such extraordinary power, they asked themselves, not be a Socialist? The standard way of negotiating this impasse was for them to blame his outré politics on the trauma of his exile to Siberia and the stresses under which he was writing during the opening years of the 1870s. That was certainly the take of Avraham Yarmolinsky, who revised Constance Garnett’s translation and wrote the introduction to my edition. Since we now know that Russia had become hell on earth in the early 1930s, the time in which Yarmolinsky penned the introduction (1935) (Stalin’s 1920s having been devoted to successive purges and deportations, his 1930s economy sinking, the people starving, and the Soviet concentration camps filling at a horrifying rate) one would like to ask Yarmolinsky in retrospect the rueful question: Who was the deluded one? Was it Dostoevsky or was it yourself?

Dostoevsky’s evil protagonist was Pyotr Stepanovitch Verhovensky, whom he made to be the social agitator (“community organizer”?) son of the political idealist and self-styled intellectual, Stepan Trofimovitch Verhovensky. Trofimovitch, who loves everything European, particularly if it is French, thinks of himself as a true and daring “progressive,” but is at the same time a pathetically dependent buffoon and parasite, living off his patroness, Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin. One cannot help but feel that making Pyotr Stepanovitch the product of this foolish and useless man was no accident, and that the message is clear: fatuous idealism is the father of revolution and social chaos. Stepanovitch despises him, it is clear, as he weaves his schemes and plots throughout the novel.

But, for us, what is of special interest is Dostoevsky’s representation of the revolutionaries’ methods. Stepanovitch addresses his revolutionary minions as follows:

“The highest responsibility is laid upon each of you. You are called upon to bring new life into the party which has grown decrepit and stinking with stagnation. Keep that always before your eyes to give you strength. All that you have to do meanwhile is to bring about the downfall of everything—both the government and its moral standards.

None will be left but us, who have prepared ourselves beforehand to take over the government. The intelligent we shall bring over to our side, and as for the fools, we shall mount upon their shoulders. You must not be shy of that. We've got to re‑educate a generation to make them worthy of freedom. … We shall organise to control public opinion; it's shameful not to snatch at anything that lies idle and gaping at us.”

The conspirator Shigalov asks Stepanovitch:

“So far as I understand—and it's impossible not to understand it—you yourself at first and a second time later, drew with great eloquence, but too theoretically, a picture of Russia covered with an endless network of knots. Each of these centres of activity, proselytising and ramifying endlessly, aims by systematic denunciation to injure the prestige of local authority, to reduce the villages to confusion, to spread cynicism and scandals, together with complete disbelief in everything and an eagerness for something better, and finally, by means of fires, as a pre-eminently national method, to reduce the country at a given moment, if need be, to desperation. Are those your words which I tried to remember accurately? Is that the programme you gave us as the authorised representative of the central committee, which is to this day utterly unknown to us and almost like a myth?”

Hence Rahm Emmanuel's famous words: This is too good a crisis to waste!

And later in the book, after the plot has unravelled, another one of the conspirators, Lyamshin, confesses everything to the police, and describes a very familiar agenda:

“When asked what was the object of so many murders and scandals and dastardly outrages, he answered with feverish haste that ‘it was with the idea of systematically undermining the foundations, systematically destroying society and all principles; with the idea of nonplussing every one and making hay of everything, and then, when society was tottering, sick and out of joint, cynical and sceptical though filled with an intense eagerness for self-preservation and for some guiding idea, suddenly to seize it in their hands, raising the standard of revolt and relying on a complete network of quintets, which were actively, meanwhile, gathering recruits and seeking out the weak spots which could be attacked.’ In conclusion, he said that here in our town Pyotr Stepanovitch had organised only the first experiment in such systematic disorder, so to speak as a programme for further activity, and for all the quintets … (680)

But arguably even more prescient is Stepanovitch’s conversation with, as it were, the “romantic” lead of the novel, the proud and darkly tormented aristocrat, Nicolay Vsyevolodovitch Stavrogin. Stavrogin’s motives are unclear as the novel progresses, he is mysterious in his intentions, his allegiances, and his affiliations. Yet, it becomes increasingly manifest, that he is indeed somehow involved with the conspirator group. It is also becomes clear finally what role Stepanovitch has in mind for Stavrogin. This is how the revealing conversation between the two unfolds:

“Listen. First of all we'll make an upheaval,”

[Pyotr Stepanovitch] Verhovensky went on in desperate haste, continually clutching at Stavrogin's left sleeve. “I've already told you. We shall penetrate to the peasantry. Do you know that we are tremendously powerful already? Our party does not consist only of those who commit murder and arson, fire off pistols in the traditional fashion, or bite colonels. They are only a hindrance. I don't accept anything without discipline. I am a scoundrel, of course, and not a socialist. Ha ha! Listen. I've reckoned them all up: a teacher who laughs with children at their God and at their cradle; is on our side. The lawyer who defends an educated murderer because he is more cultured than his victims and could not , help murdering them to get money is one of us. The schoolboys who murder a peasant for the sake of sensation are ours. The juries who acquit every criminal are ours. The prosecutor who trembles at a trial for fear he should not seem advanced enough is ours, ours. Among officials and literary men we have lots, lots, and they don't know it themselves. On the other hand, the docility of schoolboys and fools has reached an extreme pitch; the schoolmasters are bitter and bilious. On all sides we see vanity puffed up out of all proportion; brutal, monstrous appetites. . . . Do you know how many we shall catch by little, ready-made ideas? When I left Russia, Littre's dictum that crime is insanity was all the rage; I come back and I find that crime is no longer insanity, but simply common sense, almost a duty; anyway, a gallant protest. 'How can we expect a cultured man not to commit a murder, if he is in need of money.' But these are only the first fruits. The Russian God has already been vanquished by cheap vodka. The peasants are drunk, the mothers are drunk, the children are drunk, the churches are empty, and in the peasant courts one hears, 'Two hundred lashes or stand us a bucket of vodka.' Oh, this generation has only to grow up. It's only a pity we can't afford to wait, or we might have let them get a .bit more tipsy! Ah, what a pity there's no proletariat! But there will be, there will be; we are going that way. . .

…

“Well, Verhovensky, this is the first time I've heard you talk, and I listen with amazement,” observed Stavrogin. “So you are really not a socialist, then, but some sort of ... ambitious politician?”

“A scoundrel, a scoundrel! You are wondering what I am. I'll tell you what I am directly, that's what I am leading up to. It was not for nothing that I kissed your hand. But the people-must believe that we know what we are after, while the other side do nothing but 'brandish their cudgels and beat their own followers.' Ah, if we only had more time! That's the only trouble, we have no time. We will proclaim destruction. . . .. Why is it, why is it that idea has such a fascination. But we must have a little exercise; we must. We'll set fires going. . . . We'll set legends going. Every scurvy 'group' will be of use. Out of those very groups I'll pick you out fellows so keen they'll not shrink from shooting, and be grateful for the honour of a job, too. Well, and there will be an upheaval! There's going to be such an upset as the world has never seen before. . . . Russia will be overwhelmed with darkness, the earth will weep for its old gods.. . . . Well, then we shall bring forward . . .

whom?”

“Whom.”

“Ivan the Tsarevitch.”

“Who-m?”

“Ivan the Tsarevitch. You! You!” (427-429)

I said earlier that Pyotr Stepanovitch's agenda had a familiar ring to it, and now I give the reason why. In today’s world, Ivan the Tsarevitch is Barack Obama, the marketable front end of a totally cynical putsch. Who is the current Stepanovitch, who is the scoundrel conducting the Obama opera from the orchestra pit? We only know that he is here, as in the novel, a shadowy figure, perhaps one among several, and most likely the orchestra pit is Chicago, home to the Democrat political machine, arguably the most corrupt in the history of the United States.

Conservative writers have recently made much of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (1971), hoping to show that moves being made currently are not innocent of revolutionary intent. They are not wrong in this, but their case is actually stronger than they seem to realize. Alinsky’s tactics were not original, they had actually been developed over the past hundred and fifty years. His tactics had already been applied by Hitler in the 1930s, before him by Mussolini, and before him by Lenin and Trotsky. But that they were already clearly understood a good fifty years earlier is evidenced by these speeches and others like them in The Possessed.