Alexander II by Edvard Radzinsky;
Author:Edvard Radzinsky;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2005-07-14T16:00:00+00:00
Dostoevsky published The Devils in 1873, when he had returned to Russia. In explaining the novel, Dostoevsky wrote that The Devils was not specifically about the Nechaev case, but much wider. “My view is that these phenomena are not random, not isolated, and therefore my novel does not have copied events or copied persons.”
The Devils was a warning. The trouble sown in a single city by a pathetic group of five conspirators could turn up on a greater scale and affect all of Russia. The “pure of heart” who become tempted by the Nechaev devils pose a great threat. The ideas of universal equality (the eternal Russian dream) as interpreted by devils will end in universal slavery and could become Russia’s terrible future. He saw apocalyptic visions.
Dostoevsky’s novel elicited a storm of protest. The educated reading public was primarily liberal, and it saw the Nechaev case as an exception, a tragic episode. The Devils was universally panned. “The Nechaev case is a monster to such a degree that it cannot serve as a theme for a novel,” wrote one of the main critics, Nikolai Mikhailovsky. The novel marks a lapse in the author’s talent; it is a horrible caricature and slander on revolutionary youth. Russia rejected The Devils.
Dostoevsky himself, as he completed the novel, tried to persuade himself that the Nechaev case had been a horrible but now finished episode in the life of young Russia. After Nechaev’s sentencing and incarceration, the writer tried to believe that it was the end. The devil was captured, shackled, and was gone “forever.” This is why he chose as epigraph to the novel the biblical parable of the devils who on the command of Jesus fled a man they had possessed and settled into pigs. Dostoevsky wrote in a letter to the poet Maikov, “The devils have left the Russian man and went into a herd of pigs, that is, the Nechaevs, the Serno-Solovyoviches, and so on. They have drowned or will drown, probably, while the healed man whom the devils have left sits at the feet of Jesus. That is as it should be.”
But that is not how it was. The great prophet was mistaken. Everything would happen in exactly the opposite way—as he had predicted in the novel rather than in the epigraph. The future history of the Russian revolutionary movement would be imbued with Nechaevism. A few years would pass and the indignant readers of The Devils would see Russian terror born of the “pure of heart.”
The twentieth century would belong to the devil Nechaev, and the victory of Bolshevism would be his victory. In Bolshevik Russia, people were appalled when they read The Devils and the monologue of the book’s hero, Petr Verkhovensky (Nechaev), on the society he would create after the revolution: “Every member of society looks after the other and must inform on them. All are slaves and are equal in their slavery…. First of all, the level of education, science, and talent is lowered. A high
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