The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

148 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

which he wished to be remembered. And everything is a fiasco: the audience guffawsat it, the pistol misfires, and Ippolit dieswithout fanfare,in the margins, almost unnoticed further on in the novel.

The Demons [mistranslated as The Possessed] contains an equivalently “false” and failed document, a chapter censored from the first publication of the novel: “Stavrogin’s Confession.” In it the blighted hero confesses, among other ugly incidents, his violation of a fourteen-year-old girl and her subsequent suicide by hanging. As Stavrogin informs his confessor, Bishop Tikhon, this statement is to be printed up in 300 copies and distributed. Tikhon, something of a holy fool, begs his visitor not to broadcast his sins but to atone in some other less boastful way. Stung to the quick, Stavrogin accuses him – as the fictional Devushkin had accused the Gogol who authored “The Overcoat” – of spying on him, prying into his soul. This contradictory gesture of desiring publicity and yet resenting it as an abuse of privacy is part of Russian literature’s rich assimilation of Rousseau’s Confessions. Dostoevsky understood it as the book writer’s permanent lure. “Writing something up” and “making my own what another has written” were for him always primal acts, demonically attractive.

A poor clerk like Devushkin fretting over his look-alike in “The Stationmas-ter” or “The Overcoat” is a form of affectionate parody. Other sorts of Dos-toevskian interventions, not in secular books but in the Book – the Christian Bible – were closer to blasphemy. One such is the Grand Inquisitor’s recasting of the Three Temptations of Christ in the Wilderness (Matthew 4:1–11) in The Brothers Karamazov, where the Catholic Church is shown to be serving Satan. Dostoevsky embeds that extraordinary monologue in several layers of “relativizing” text. In the inner narrative frame, Christ receives the Inquisitor’s tirade silently and bestows upon the old man a kiss (the kiss of forgiveness? the kiss of Judas?). Alyosha bestows an equivalent kiss on his brother in the outer frame. And Ivan, who recites the tale, dismisses the entire literary effort as an “absurd thing” – even though, he insists, every author should have at least one listener. But the force and eloquence of this blasphemous replay of the Gospels was such that Dostoevsky himself despaired of creating an image of the Elder Zosima that could compete with the rhetoric of the Grand Inquisitor.

Such embeddings and re-accentings of prior literary texts were not of special urgency to Leo Tolstoy. He distrusted equally both the original and its subsequent wrappings.

Tolstoy and doing without words

Tolstoy hoped that the media revolution would not only advertise his own moral message, but also make all verbal art more honest. In August 1908,