Intriguingly, it might have been Dostoevsky, that chronicler of the “accidental family,” who came closest to achieving what we might call carnal dignity. He created several unforgettable portraits of the beautiful, hungry, wounded, and predatory female (Nastasya Filippovna in The Idiot, Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina in Demons, Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov). The final woman in this sequence, the temptress Grushenka, under pressure of Mitya’s arrest and imminent Siberian exile, evolves before our eyes into a loyal helpmeet, almost a pravednitsa, but - and this is key - without losing any of her earlier, sexually
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alluring skills. This should not surprise us. Key to Dostoevsky’s extraordinary popularity in hisown timewas hisgenius at devising solutionsto socialailments that were hopelessly cliche?d in Europe (concubinage, libertinage, unjust inheritance, urban crime) through the righteous and foolish heroes of the Russian tradition.
The villains of Russian literature – those heroes or anti-heroes who attack a readership’s most precious values – are to some extent continuous with the rogues, especially, as we saw, in the economic sphere. From the Baron in Pushkin’s “Little Tragedy” The Miserly Knight (1830) through Gogol’s miser Plyushkin to Dostoevsky’s despicable Luzhin, healthy lives are polluted and destroyed by hoarders. If these hoarders hurt strangers or obstruct tax-collectors sent by an impersonal state bureaucracy, their sin is not so heinous. They can become attractive rogues and sometimes even positive heroes. But if their hoarding destroys their family, it is unforgivable. Albert, the miserly Baron’s neglected son, complains bitterly that money, for his father, is neither servant nor friend but a master whom the Baron serves “like an Egyptian slave,” like “a dog on a chain”: the gold quietly glistens in its chests while his father sustains himself on “water and dry crusts, never sleeps, runs about and barks.” Albert’s first impulse is to spend, which is a form of giving. Money, like love, only has value if it circulates. Pin it to yourself and you will lose everything.
The nadir of such greed and money-driven villainy is reached with the darkest nineteenth-century novel, The Golovlyovs (1870s), by the civil servant and satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826–89). The tone is set by its grasping matriarch Arina, successful businesswoman. She doles out pittances to her eldest and youngest sons (depraved, resentful, drunken) while the hypocritical middle son, Porfir y Yudushka [Little Judas], sweet-talks his way into the entire inheritance after his brothers’ deaths. The second generation slips into prostitution, Siberian exile, suicide. On the final pages Porfiry is found frozen to death en route to his mother’s grave, in an attempt to ask forgiveness. But of whom? As with Gogol’s Plyushkin, the money vice leaves no values behind. Thus the practitioners deserve no mercy and can be rubbed out. Villains at Golovlyov levels of greed were revived officially in the early Stalinist period as kulaks (“fists”: well-off peasants) and as cartoon-strip Western capitalists. Popular support for their extermination was easy to incite. From the perspective of the terrorized economics that governed Russia’s modernizing – but at the same time re- medievalized – Soviet 1930s, it is sobering to recall a seventeenth-century didactic verse written by the court poet Simeon Polotsky (1629–80), on the theme of the cheating, profiteering, speculating “Merchant Class”:
52 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature
The merchant class can hardly keep from sinning. The Evil Spirit to his ways is winning . . . Shady business practices lead to Darkness Eternal, deprived of the Lord’s Light in punishment infernal.19
Evil takes more than economic form, however, and we might note two other categories. One is the “Gothic villain,” originating in the horror novels of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew “Monk” Lewis,20 whose sensational cruelties were imitated in early Russian Romantic fiction and later popularized in the serialized press through gruesome crime and bandit tales.21 When Realist-era literature absorbed this type – again most stunningly by Dostoevsky – it was with a crucial difference. Consider the most famous portrait, Nikolai Stavrogin from Demons. This appropriately tall, handsome, dark-haired and mysterious hero, no stranger to the sexual abuse of children and profligate with other men’s wives, is (also appropriately for the genre) a man with a mask [lichina] rather than a communicating face [lik]. But Stavrogin becomes progressively weaker as a result of his amoral profligacy, not stronger. The authentic Gothic villain does not weaken. Vigorous to the end of his evil life, he can – like the sadistic Ambrosio in Lewis’s The Monk – rape his own sister in the charnel house of a convent and then go on to other things. Dosto-evsky’s parody on this type of villain might be rumored to have attempted such feats (and he might even boast to himself of them). But in a Russian cosmos, evil rewards him with impotence.
Our final category is the political villain, the villain backed by governmental power. In a country as poorly managed as Russia, this type of villainy abounds – together with high-minded expose?s of it. Thunderous denunciations of tyrants have had a place in Russian letters ever since Ivan the Terrible’s illustrious general, Prince Andrei Kurbsky, defected to Lithuania in 1564 and sent blistering letters back across the border to his former master, condemning his villainies. This Terrible tsar [lit. Groznyi, “terrifying to his foes”] was long a Russian touchstone for the political villain, albeit often sentimentalized with Gothic or melodramatic traits in historical drama and opera. His rehabilitation as an exotic, patriotic, divinely decreed precedent for Stalin, in a campaign that began in 1937 and recruited the best talent in literature, film, and music, formed the aesthetic backdrop for those fabricated charges of treason that claimed the lives of so many artists during the Great Terror. The greatest poets fought back literally with their lives. In the autumn of 1933, after witnessing the effects of collectivization in the south of Russia, Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) composed his “sixteen line death sentence,” the so-called “Stalin Epigram,” in which he compared the fat fingers of the “Kremlin mountaineer” to “slimy slugs,” the tyrant’s face to “cockroach whiskers laughing,” and his pleasure at ordering
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executions to a red berry squashed against his savage chest. Six months later the poet was arrested, exiled, given a reprieve, and required to produce an “Ode to Stalin.” Then in 1937 Mandelstam was re-arrested, to meet his end near Vladivostok in winter 1938. The tyrant in Russia has always been threatened by acts of straightforward outrage and feats of more private loyalty. But tyranny has also been successfully undone by more double-voiced means – through parable, satire, the fantastic, the absurd, and perhaps with greater effectiveness.
Chekhov delivers one such parable of despotism in his “Ward Number Six” (1892), a provincial hospital ward- turned-madhouse-turned-prison. Its fulcrum is the doorman Nikita, an impenetrable bully with the power to lock in or lock out as commanded by his superiors. It is Nikita who redefines a slothful, recalcitrant doctor first into a patient and then into an inmate. This story was one of a handful of tales that turned Lenin into an implacable enemy of the tsarist state. Laughter can be equally terrible, especially with its demonic undercurrent. When the evil is off to the edge of the action, behind a closed door, seen imperfectly by some na??ve folksy narrator, the story becomes all the more truthful and terrifying for being only partly understood by its teller. In Leskov’s 1881 yarn Levsha [The Left-handed Craftsman], a provincial’s hilariously misspoken account of competition between the Russian and British empires unfolds blandly against the brutal, violent, wasteful Russia of Nicholas I. In the comic masterpiece Sandro from Chegem (1979) by the Abkhazian- Russian writer Fazil Iskander (b. 1929), we glimpse Stalin and his NKVD henchman Beria at a drunken feast through the eyes of a member of a Georgian dance troupe brought north to entertain their former fellow mountaineers in the Kremlin. And finally: avant-garde drama is well acquainted with political villainy. In the Kafkaesque playscript Elizabeth Bam (1927) by the absurdist writer Daniil Kharms (1905–42), two men behind a closed door accuse a woman of murder “in the name of the law” – and until the last moment it seems as if she will be saved from these thugs outside by the impossibly fantastical room in which she is trapped. But that room turns out to be reality.
Society’s misfits in the European style
Our final category of heroes is more familiar to a Western readership. These are the “European-style misfits”
