Abstract
Here, the influence of Goethe is explored through Turgenev, and through Dostoevsky, in his writings on suicide, including the short story ‘A Gentle Creature’, and through the characters Kirillov and Stavrogin in his novel Demons. The fullest analysis, however, is reserved for The Brothers Karamazov, of which this chapter attempts to give a close reading in terms of its diabolism. Drawing on Bakhtin, the chapter takes issue with many ‘traditional’ and Christian readings of this text.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Nozdryov was a crazily comic landowner in Dead Souls (chapter 4), his every word a braggadocio’s lie, e.g.: ‘.… he had given [Chichikov, at school] a bit of a going over, which later made it necessary to apply two hundred and forty leeches to his temples alone, that is, he meant to say forty but two hundred somehow popped out all by itself…’ (Gogol 2004: 236).
- 2.
A Writer’s Diary, of incalculable significance for studying Dostoesvky, began as occasional pieces in 1873–1874 as a literary column in a journal, The Citizen, which he edited, but which became an independent magazine (1876–1877). It was suspended in 1878 and 1879 for The Brothers Karamazov, which it had prepared for, resuming in single issues in August 1880 and January 1881 (Dostoevsky died February 1881).
- 3.
Dostoevsky, of course, was epileptic. In The Idiot, Myskhin, about to suffer an epileptic fit himself thinks of the moment it occurs as supreme, when ‘there should be time no longer’. It was ‘the same second in which the epileptic Mahomet’s overturned water-jug failed to spill a drop, while he contrived to behold all the mansions of Allah’ (Dostoevsky 1992: 238). The passage is virtually quoted in The Satanic Verses: see next chapter. See also Fung 2014.
- 4.
John Donne wrote Biathanatos, subtitled ‘A Declaration of that Paradoxe, or thesis, that Selfe-Homicide is not so Naturally Sinne, that it may never be Otherwise’ in 1608, justifying suicide; it was published posthumously.
- 5.
The meaning of ‘lackey’ for Dostoevsky would also include beyond its class sense the sense of ‘nihilist’ and ‘Westerniser’; it indicates how much anxiety is being dumped upon Smerdyakov: see Kanevskaya 2002: 367–368.
- 6.
In Balzac, it is a Chinese Mandarin: see Balzac 1991: 124.
- 7.
As a related point, it should be noted how the holy fool – divinely mad – is central to Dostoevsky (Murav 1992: 124–169).
- 8.
The play on Genesis 4:9 which Smerdyakov quotes back to Alyosha, without saying ‘brother’ because he is excluded, and the repetition of the phrase by Ivan with reference to Dmitri (231), is significant: Cain, of course, as the vagabond on the earth, is the poor devil.
- 9.
There are differences, too. Freud’s ‘superego’ has as part of its power, the function of enforcing the ego’s single identity. Freud calls what holds sway in the superego a ‘pure culture of the death instinct’, adding that it can drive the ego into death (‘The Ego and the Id’, SE 19.53).
Bibliography
———. 2002. On Genesis. Ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Edmund Hill. New York: New City Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984a. Rabelais and his World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana U.P.
———. 1984b. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. Caryl Emerson. Manchester: M.U.P.
Balzac, Honoré de. 1991. Père Goriot. Trans. A.J. Krailsheimer. Oxford: O.U.P.
Belknap, Robert L. 1990. The Genesis of The Brothers Karamazov: The Aesthetics, Ideology and Psychology of Making a Text. Evanston: Northwestern U.P.
———. 1996–2003. Selected Writings. 4 vols. Ed. Marcus Bullock, Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P. (quoted as SW plus volume and page).
Blanchot, Maurice. 1982. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: Nebraska U.P.
Boss, Valentin. 1991. Milton and the Rise of Russian Satanism. Toronto: Toronto U.P.
Connolly, Julian W. 2013. Dostoevesky’s The Brothers Karamazov. London: Bloomsbury.
De Jonge, Alexis. 1973. ‘Gogol’. In John Fennell (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature: Studies of Ten Russian Writers. Faber: London.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. London: Athlone.
Dickens, Charles. 2004. David Copperfield. Ed. Jeremy Tambling. London: Penguin.
Dostoevsky, Fydor. 1964. Crime and Punishment. Ed. George Gibian, trans. Jessie Coulson. New York: Norton.
———. 1972. Notes from Underground and the Double. Trans. Jessie Coulson. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
———. 1994b. A Writer’s Diary. 2 Vols. Trans. Kenneth Lantz. Evanston: Northwestern U.P.
———. 2004. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokonsky. London: Vintage.
Frank, Joseph. 1977. Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849. Princeton: Princeton U.P.
———. 1995. Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1965–1871, Princeton: Princeton U.P.
Freeborn, Richard. 1960. Turgenev: The Novelist’s Novelist. Oxford: O.U.P.
Fung, Paul. 2014. Dostoevsky and the Epileptic Mode of Being. Oxford: Legenda.
Gillespie, Michael Allen. 1995. Nihilism Before Nietzsche. Chicago: Chicago U.P.
———. 2013. The Sufferings of Young Werther. Trans. Stanley Corngold. New York: Norton.
Gogol, Nikolai. 1985. The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol. 2 vols. Trans. Constance Garnett, revised Leonard J. Kent. Chicago: Chicago U.P.
Gogol, Nikolay. 2004. Dead Souls. Trans. Robert A. Maguire. London: Penguin.
Hingley, Ronald. 1967. Nihilists: Russian Radicals and Revolutionaries in the Reign of Alexander II (1855–1881). London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Holquist, Michael. 1977. Dostoesvky and the Novel. Princeton: Princeton U.P.
Kanevskaya, Maria. 2002. ‘Smerdiakov and Ivan: Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov’. The Russian Review 61: 358–376.
Leatherbarrow, W.J. 2005. A Devil’s Vaudeville: The Demonic in Dostoesvky’s Major Fiction. Evanston: Northwestern U.P.
Lehning, Arthur. (ed.). 1973. Mikhail Bakunin: Selected Writings. Trans. Steven Cox and Olive Stevens. New York: Grove Press.
Lowe, David. 1983. Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Ann Arbor: Ardis.
Merezhkovsky, Dmitry. 1974. ‘Gogol and the Devil’. In Robert A. Macguire (ed.), Gogol from the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton U.P.
Murav, Harriet. 1992. Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique. Stanford: Stanford U.P.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1956. The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Francis Golffing. New York: Doubleday Anchor.
Passage, Charles. 1954. Dostoevski the Adapter: A Study in Dostoevski’s Use of the Tales of Hoffmann. Chapel Hill: North Carolina U.P.
Peace, Richard. 1992. Dostoevsky: A Study of the Major Novels. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press.
Pushkin, Walter. 1984. Collected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry. Ed. and Trans. Walter Arndt. Ann Arbor: Ardis.
Rice, James L. 1985. Dostoevsky and the Art of Healing: An Essay in Literary and Medical History. Ardis: Ann Arbor.
———. 2009. ‘The Covert Design of The Brothers Karamazov: Alesha’s Pathology and Dialectic’. Slavic Review 68: 355–375.
Shneidman, N.N. 1984. Dostoesvky and Suicide. New York: Mosaic Press.
Terras, Victor. 1981. A Karamazov Companion. Madison: Wisconsin U.P.
Thompson, Diane Oenning. 1991. The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory. Cambridge: C.U.P.
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich. 1907. A Lear of the Steppes etc. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: William Heinemann.
———. 1975. Fathers and Sons. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Verhoeven, Claudia. 2009. The Odd Man Karakazov: Imperial Russia, Modernity and the Birth of Terrorism. Ithaca: Cornell U.P.
Wasiolek, Edward. 1964. Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ziolkowski, Margaret. 1988. Hagiography and Modern Russian Literature. Princeton: Princeton U.P.
———. 1992. The Idiot Trans. Alan Myers. Oxford: O.U.P.
———. 1994a. Demons, Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. London: Vintage.
———. 2002. Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet (1871–1881). Princeton: Princeton U.P.
Paperno, Irina. 1997. Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia. Ithaca: Cornell U.P.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tambling, J. (2016). Chapter 7: Dostoevsky: Murder and Suicide. In: Histories of the Devil. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51832-3_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51832-3_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-51831-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-51832-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)