The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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