Marco Ceccarelli's "Revolutionary Self-Fulfillment? Nihilism, Terrorism and Self-Destruction in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Devils"
Read this article. As you read, jot down definitions of nihilism, terrorism, and self-destruction, as they are suggested by Ceccarelli. Also consider the ways in which revolutionary action can fulfill a person's sense of self and identity.
AAEH XXII Conference – Marco Ceccarelli
Revolutionary Self-fulfilment? Nihilism, Terrorism and Self-destruction in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Devils
On the 21st of November, 1869, the young Russian revolutionary Sergei Nechaev, leader of a secret organisation, beat, strangled and shot one of his own members, a student named Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov at the Petrovsky Agricultural Academy in Moscow. Ivanov’s body was weighed down with stones and dumped into a nearby lake through a hole made in the ice. Although the actual reasons behind the murder remain shrouded in mystery, it is alleged that Ivanov had intentions of acting as informer to the police regarding the terrorist plans of his underground group. Carelessly leaving many clues at the crime scene, Nechaev and his followers were soon captured and tried. As Nechaev’s trial unfolded, the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky lent his attentive eyes and ears to published documents, word-of-mouth accounts and newspaper reports connected to what would later be labeled “The Nechaev Affair.” The cold-blooded murder of Ivanov had given Dostoyevsky the incentive to change his literary course and devote his time to the creation of a new novel with a strong relevance to this contemporary issue. Thus Dostoyevsky put all other work aside and, having collected as much material possible on the Nechaev affair, threw himself into a novel he would later entitle The Devils.
In the time that is today available to me I will focus on Dostoyevsky’s discussion of nihilism, terrorism and self-destriction in The Devils. Placed in the context of Dostoyevsky’s works dealing with radicalism, The Devils is perhaps the novel in which Dostoyevsky’s discussion of individual radicalisation reaches it its apex. From the Underground Man’s psychological struggle with radical ideology in Notes from Underground, to Raskolnikov’s attempt to test the validity of radical ideals in Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky’s radical youth matures into the full-fledged nihilist terrorist of The Devils. I will particularly focus on the characters from the novel who belong to the underground terrorist organisation of the book, also known as ‘The Group of Five,” with more emphasis on Peter Verkhovensky and Nikolai Stavrogin, the leaders and idealists of the group. I believe these individuals best represent Dostoyevsky’s vision of the nature of the terrorist mentality in the context of late nineteenth-century Russia as well as his identification of the philosophy of nihilism as the source from which this desire for universal destruction originates.
The Devils is first and foremost a novel dealing with ideology and its use by men and women living in a period of revolutionary. It concentrates on the philosophies of life possessed by a group of radicals interested, each in their own way, in solving Russia’s greatest social, political and economic problems. These are “men of ideas”, as Bakhtin defined them, “possessed men, tormented, devoured by an idea, by an omnipotent conception of reality, men who believe themselves to be in possession of the “truth,” but each one of whom has built his own “truth” in an abhorrent, destructive and catastrophic way.”[1]
I would also like to lay emphasis on the theme of self-destruction as a method used by Dostoyevsky to comment on those revolutionary terrorists he believed were destroying Russian culture and tradition. Indeed, throughout the novel each individual’s desire to bring about radical change in Russia gradually turns into a desperate and excessive pursuit of extreme ideals which either culminates in the murder of others, or in their own self-sacrifice.
Much of The Devils is filled with symbolism and allegories used to convey Dostoyevsky’s opinion regarding young radicals of late 19th century Russia. Yet it is the epigraph of the novel which renders perhaps the most striking image of the author’s true intent in creating this literary wok. Dostoyevsky quotes a passage from the New Testament, namely St. Luke’s gospel, of the Gerasene demoniac in which Jesus Christ drives out several demons from a young man. The demons are exorcised from the man and driven into a herd of swine which runs violently into a nearby lake and drowns.
One of Dostoyevsky’s greatest desires in life was that Russia would be healed in the same way as the possessed man. He had by this stage of his life re-discovered Christianity and had identified the solution to his country’s troubles in the recognition of traditional national values and in Orthodox faith. However, he knew that his aspirations would remain just that, remote possibilities, and thus concentrated on documenting the process of infection and self-destruction rather than the end result of purification. The Devils consequently focuses more on the image of the Russian revolutionary nihilists as swine than on the young
man sitting at the feet of Jesus.
It must be noted that Dostoyevsky was no stranger to radical activity and insurrectionist thought. Unlike his predecessors in Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin and Mkhail Lermontov, and his rivals, Ivan Turgenev and Lev Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky did not come from the cultured gentry class but from an insecure middle class background. Although he was pointed towards a career in engineering, he changed the course of his studies and devoted himself writing. It was towards throughout the latter half of the 1840s, that Dostoyevsky began to attend discussions of the Petrashevsky Circle, an underground group which considered socialist utopian schemes for the regeneration of society. Dostoyevsky was more deeply involved in these conversations than is generally supposed, and when several members of the Circle formed a secret revolutionary society, he joined. He was subsequently arrested and sentenced to death. Tsar Nicholas the first, particularly after the European revolutions of 1848, was very stern with any kind of underground organisation that could put the autocracy in danger. On the day of Dostoyevsky’s execution, moments before the Tsarist guards were to fire upon the first set of members of the society, a roll of drums signalled the arrival of an officer on horseback carrying a pardon for the prisoners. The execution had been staged. The real sentences of the prisoners were read – Dostoyevsky would be exiled and condemned to four years hard labour in Siberia. Tsar Nicholas the first was well aware that a revolutionary subculture was secretly taking shape in major cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg. The assimilation of Western radical ideology by Russian intellectuals posed a serious threat to the stability of the autocracy. Nonetheless, he enjoyed playing the role of all-powerful yet temperate ruler.
Dostoyevsky returned to St. Petersburg ten years later a changed man. During his time spent in a Siberian prison and in the Siberian army he underwent major changes in his political and religious convictions. He turned away from the world of political radicalism and re-discovered an interest in traditional Russian values such as respect for the established order, the spirituality of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the unique, religiously based, communistic spirit of the Russian people. What he witnessed on his return to Russia, however, disappointed him and seized him with concern. Those very socialist ideals which he had championed ten years earlier had gained widespread popularity among the youthful student population of major Russian cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg. The currents of Western radical thought and philosophical expression had entered the universities throughout the 1860s where an attentive, aware and above all exasperated body of students had opened its eyes and ears to the news delivered from Europe of new rights granted to people. Freedom of speech, freedom of press, revolutionary upheaval, the dethroning of monarchies. The backward, stagnant and repressive Tsarist Russia needed to change….Western methods of revolution seemed the most viable way of bringing this change about.
It is thus that throughout the 1860s the Russian a revolutionary student sub-culture appeared throughout the major Russian cities. Small groups of intellectuals, popularly known the new Russian intelligentsia, emerged to discuss what could be done regarding Russia’s social, political and economic situation. Some of the radical ideas discussed within these groups ranged from atheism, utilitarianism, rational egoism, materialism and an ascetic belief in science. Thousands of young men and women gradually became radicalised within these concepts; many of them would eventually take their radicalisation a step further and engage with political violence against that which had been identified as the source of all of Russia’s social ills: the Tsarist autocracy.
Gaining popularity among this new generation of intellectuals was the term Nihilism. The label “Nihilist” was introduced in Russia by Ivan Turgenev in the novel Fathers and Sons, published in 1862. In the novel a nihilist is defined as someone who expresses total negation of the existing tradition, namely all the obligations imposed upon the individual by society, family and religion. Russian nihilism negated not the normative significance of the world or the general meaning of human existence, but rather a particular social, political and aesthetic order . The central character, Bazarov, trusts only in the exercise of his own rational faculties in the spirit of scientific inquiry. Russian nihilists espoused a thoroughgoing materialism, positivism and scientism and were led by the theories of the revolutionary intellectual Nikolai Chernyshvskii. Nihilists also went by the name of ‘men of the sixties’ or ‘new-men’ and purposefully saw their way of life as a rejection of the social romantic ideals of their fathers: ‘men of forties’ or simply ‘men who had not done enough to oppose the status quo.’
Dostoyevsky’s representation of the nihilist generation is embodied in the character of Peter Verkhovensky. Verkhovensky is the chief agitator of political revolutionary activity in The Devils. In this character Dostoyevsky centres all his resentment towards the new generation of nihilist radicals, often exaggerating Verkhovensky’s passion for universal destruction and commitment to chaos so much that the character often takes on clownish features. Moulded on the figure of the revolutionary Sergei Nechaev, Verkhovensky is the leader of a small underground terrorist organisation which seeks the destruction or at least the injury of the State through the use of systematic violence. He manipulates, extorts and eventually kills as he pleases. Verkhovensky is a man utterly infatuated with the concept of universal destruction allowing nothing and no-one to stand in the way of his revolutionary cause. His words evoke many of the points made in the Nechaev-Bakunin propaganda of the late 1860s, particularly in the manuscript co-scripted by the two before their fall-out, Catechism of a Revolutionary, which states that the revolution requires a complete break with all laws, codes and moral injunctions of the civilised world. True to his role of instigator and manipulator, Verkhovensky speaks in accordance with the Catechism and states that the evils of society must be amplified, unrest must be sown and the feeling that the existing order is on the brink of collapse must be spread. All this, of course, is to be carried out with the underlying objective of recruiting the greatest possible number of people, peasants included, to fight for the revolutionary cause.[2]
Verkhovensky’s secret organisation is made up of different types of revolutionaries, each with his own theory on how to free man from suffering and oppression. Some, such as Shygailov, tend towards socialist theory, yet soon realise that the conclusions they draw are in direct contradiction to their original idea. “From unlimited freedom” Shygailov states “ I arrive to unlimited despotism.” Others, such as Kirilov, focus their entire existence on their self-will and belief in self-sacrifice as liberating mankind from the pain and fear of death. Kirilov, one of the most fascinating characters in The Devils, commits suicide in order to defeat death and allow the man of the future to live without God. He holds God in contempt for having given man pain and fear and thus believes he can challenge God by killing himself and taking his place. Other still, such as Lyamshin, would simply take nine-tenths of humanity, and, not knowing what to do with them, blow them up leaving only a small number of educated people who’d live happily.
Yet what distinguishes Verkhovensky as a both a nihilist and terrorist is his ideal of total destruction as a solution to the ills of society. Caught in a frenzy by his destructive intentions,
Verkhovesnky addresses his closest friend, Nikolai Stavrogin in the following manner:
one or two generations of vice are absolutely essential now. Monstrous, disgusting vice which turns man into an abject, cowardly, cruel and selfish wretch – that’s what we want. And on top of it, a little ‘fresh blood’…We shall proclaim destruction – why? why? – well, because the idea is so fascinating! But – we must get a little exercise. We’ll have a few fires – we’ll spread a few legends. Every mangy little group will be useful…There’s going to be such a to-do as the world has never seen, Russia will become shrouded in fog, the earth will weep for its old gods.
Verkhovensky’s isn’t an absence of belief, it is a belief in nothing, a cleansing and purifying nothing, a belief in upheaval itself devoid of any future utopian dream. Bazarov’s thoughts re-emerge: “firs the site must be cleared.” Verkhovensky has in some way emerged from the cracks of Shigalyov’s socialist theory, and of the theories of the other members of the group, to create an ideal which goes beyond the depravity of human freedom and justice and towards a greater, demonic ideal: the complete annihilation of the current society. Total destruction will turn society into a tabula rasa; Verkhovensky’s plan stops here. As for the future, he believes in the inevitable death of contemporary Russia and the coming of an imagined redeemer who will one day lead the country to prosperity. With this as the substance of his promise for future absolute justice the nihilist terrorist of The Devils once again fulfils his role of impostor and deceiver.
Whilst the theme of terrorism and revolutionary violence in The Devils revolves around Verkhovensky and his group of five, there is another character in the story who, although not as visible, yet is of equal significance to my argument: Nikolai Stavrogin. Standing as one of Dostoyevsky’s most enigmatic characters, Stavrogin is involved with a number of characters yet exerts his influence primarily on Verkhovensky, the aforementioned Kirilov, and Shatov, a character moulded on Ivan Ivanov, the student, presumed traitor and informer, murdered by Nechaev. His story is far more tragic than that of his predecessors, the Underground Man and Raskolnikov, and for that matter, even more tragic than Peter Verkhovensky’s. Although he constantly questions the world which he inhabits, Stavrogin’s existential inquiries are destined to drown in the same way as the Gerasene swine, for Stavrogin lacks the desire, let alone the capability, to obtain an answer.
Stavrogin is the key to understanding Dostoyevsky’s portrayal of the radicalism and terrorism in The Devils. Through his enigmatic and mysterious identity he embodies that which Dostoyevsky saw at the core of both radicalism and terrorism in Russia: the philosophy of nihilism.
Stavrogin is a slave to his uncertainty and consequential moral indifference. He does not seem to be able to distinguish evil from good, or if he does, he often regards the two concepts as one and the same thing; such is the extent to which his lack of interest in moral principles has arrived. The purpose of Dostoyevsky’s creation of Stavrogin is to exemplify the Russian intellectual who, having remained so bitterly disappointed by his endorsement of Western radical ideals, has let himself go to his own despair and permanent state of cynicism. This has proven devastating for those who have been in close contact with him, and fatal for himself. Yet how did Stavrogin manage to influence those around him to the point where they became radical proponents of terrorist activity? Dostoyevsky’s answer points to nihilism. Stavrogin is not himself possessed by an ideal, he does not wish to introduce a new doctrine through which Russia will be freed from the grasp of autocracy and begin marching towards prosperity. Propelled by the very absence of a guiding ideal, this character is symbolic of what Dostoyevsky saw as the explosive and contagious effect of the philosophy of nihilism. He corrupts those around him, indiscriminately sending them in random directions. The clearest example is the game he has played with Kirilov and Shatov; individuals symbolic of the two extremities of Stavrogin’s deepest desires. He turns Kirilov into a suicidal self-proclaimed god and Shatov into a hypocritical Slavophil. In Verkhovensky, instead, he inspires the path of terrorism, the way of ultimate destruction devoid of any future planning. In the final section of the novel we see Verkhovensky speaking to Stavrogin about the reasons behind the conception of his destructive plans. He confesses “I invented it all while looking at you. If I had not watched you from a corner, nothing of all this would have occurred to me!”[3]
Finally, Stavrogin’s violation of a twelve year old girl and subsequent indifference to her suicide triggers the concluding self-destructive event of the novel as he hangs himself in the loft of his home.
Dostoyevsky’s discussion of terrorism and nihilism in The Devils does not culminate with an assassination attempt on the Tsar or a government official by one of the members of Verkhovensky’s group of five. Nor does the reader see Verkhovensky’s apocalyptic plan come anywhere near fulfilment. A decade later, the assassination of Tsar Alexander the second by a terrorist organisation named The People’s will would draw attention to The Devils as a prophetic novel. On the contrary, the epilogue to this small terrorist group’s story is the execution of one of its own members: Shatov. Through this event, Dostoyevsky explicitly reveals the self-destructive element he saw at the root of the radical activity of Russian revolutionaries.
[1] Gian Lorenzo Pacini, "Introduzione de I Demoni," (2000), http://www.idemonidisanpietroburgo.it/fedorDemon.php. Translated from Italian into English by Marco Ceccarelli.
[2] H. A. Gomperts, "Contemporary Significance of Dostoevsky's Novel The Possessed," Literary Review: An International Journal of Contemporary Writing 5 (1961): 175. For further information on all the points made by Nechaev and Bakunin in the Catechism of a Revolutionary see Nechaev, “Catechism of a Revolutionary,” in The terrorism Reader, 68-72.
[3] Dostoyevsky, The Devils, 424.