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Dostoevskii's Geography: Centers, Peripheries, and Networks in Demons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Anne Lounsbery
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Abstract

Demons takes an infamous real-life Moscow event (the “Nechaev Affair“) and moves it to a nameless provincial city. What can this geographic shift tell us about both Fedor Dostoevskii's novel and the particular vision of Russian geographic space that informs it? Anne Lounsbery argues that Demons’ representation of the provinces responds to a certain imaginary geography of Russia, one that can locate meaning only in a center. The ideological implications of this geography are played out in Dostoevskii's representation of the railroad as a sinister and ever-widening network extending across a blank landscape. The interlocking rail lines “covering Russia like a spider web” reflect the provincial revolutionaries’ paranoid political vision as well as their inability to see themselves as anything but tiny points on this network, insignificant without the web's power to connect them to a hub of meaning. Lounsbery relates Dostoevskii's geographic vision to patterns that structure the representation of Russian space in works by many nineteenth-century writers, including Nikolai Gogol', Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Anton Chekhov.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 66 , Issue 2 , Summer 2007 , pp. 211 - 229
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2007

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References

Honoré de Balzac, “La Femme de province,” in Balzac, , Les francais prints par eux-memes: Encyclopédie morale du XIXe siécle, 8 vols. (Paris, 1840-1842), 6:8 Google Scholar; Chekhov, A. P., Polnoesobranie sochinenii i pisem v 30-i tomakh (Moscow, 1974-1, 10:93 Google Scholar (hereafter cited as PSS). Other Chekhov citations refer to this edition as well; translations are mine.

1. Dostoevskii was living in Dresden when he learned of the Nechaev Affair in the Russian press, which he followed almost obsessively while abroad. The writing of Demons (which was serialized in Russkii vestnik from January 1871 through December 1872 before being published as a book in 1873) largely predated detailed newspaper accounts of Nechaev's crime, but once these accounts appeared in the papers—in July 1871, after about half the novel had already been serialized—Dostoevskii declared that he had been successful in imagining the kind of person who would be capable of such an act. See Dostoevskii, F. M., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30-i tomakh (Leningrad, 1972-1990), 12:192-218Google Scholar (hereafter cited as PSS) for a detailed account of Dostoevskii's use of the press while writing Demons. All citations from Demons reference this edition; translations are mine. On Dostoevskii and the Nechaev Affair, see also Frank, Joseph, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871 (Princeton, 1995)Google Scholar.

2. Dostoevskii, PSS, 10:375.

3. See notes ibid., 12:223-24.

4. Ibid., 10:252.

5. As Melissa Frazier has pointed out, in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century, the place-name “Tver“’ was at times used simply to stand for a “quintessentially average address … an abstraction, the imaginary home of a Russian Everyman who doesn't really exist.” Melissa Frazier, “Simulating Romantic Space: The Three Landowners from Tver’ and Mme. de Stael” (paper, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, November 2005, Salt Lake City, Utah), 5. Frazier analyzes Osip Senkovskii's “First Letter of Three Landowners from Tver’ to Baron Brambeus” (1837), in which “our Tver' province” stands for what the imaginary landowners/letter writers call “all intelligent provinces, all of Russia.” Here Frazier quotes O. I. Senkovskii, “Pervoe pis'mo trekh tverskikh pomeshchikov k baronu Brambeusu,” Biblioteka dlia chteniia 22, no. 1 (1837): 72.

6. Dostoevskii, P5S, 10:7.

7. As one scholar has written of Skotoprigon'evsk, “the action in The Brothers Karamazov could have developed in any other town of a similar size and location … Skotoprigon'evsk stands for the province, it is the small town typically opposed to the metropolis, to the urban area traditionally well-known to Dostoevsky's readers. The geographical description of Skotoprigon'evsk is deliberately vague, place-names are very general (Bol'shaia ulitsa, Bazarnaia ploshchaa”, Sobornaia ploshchad“).” Thus the town “has little significance of its own,” just as it has “no boundaries, no historic centre, no particularly relevant or evocative monuments for the action to revolve around. There is only a monastery, but at about a verst or more away, immediately suggesting, in fact, that it belongs to another world.” Furthermore, much as in Demons, in Brothers Karamazov “the characters' movements are almost entirely confined to the territory of the town,” a fact that intensifies our sense of the town's isolation. Gian Piero Piretto, “Staraia Russa and Petersburg; Provincial Realities and Metropolitan Reminiscences in The Brothers Karamazov,“Dostoevsky Studies, vol. 7 (1986): 82-83.

8. Dostoevskii, PSS, 14:463, 252.

9. A passage from Dostoevskii's working notebooks confirms this. Here the narrator asserts, “I am not describing the city, its layout, daily life, people, and official positions, nor its social relations, nor the curious shifts in these relations peculiar to the provincial life of our city, as consequences of the ancient, customary mores according to which the city has taken shape or as consequences of new disturbances in these mores owing to recent reforms. / don't have time to occupy myself with a picture of our little corner of the world.” The narrator concedes that “since the affair took place not in the sky but, after all, among us, then it is really impossible for me never to touch, purely picturesquely, on the everyday side of our provincial life,” but he warns, “I will do this only as much as is required by absolute necessity. I will not deliberately undertake any description of our contemporary daily life.” Dostoevskii, PSS, 11:240-41; my emphasis.

10. Ibid., 10:287. This characterization holds true only for the more or less “educated“ minority who make up nearly the whole cast of Demons. Peasants—who have their own culture, in Dostoevskii's estimation—would be another matter entirely.

11. See Bassin, Mark, “Inventing Siberia: Visions of the Russian East in the Early Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 96, no. 3 (June 1991): 763-94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bassin, , “Russia between Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geographical Space,” Slavic Review 50, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 1–17 Google Scholar.

12. See Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (London, 1999). Of course the assimilation of places like the Scottish Highlands into “English” literature was a political project involving both ideology and direct domination. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Katie Trumpener has argued, English literature participated in this project by working to incorporate the “Celtic fringe” into an idea of Britain, much as Russian literature assimilated Ukraine into itself, often with the help of Ukrainian elites willing to identify themselves more or less, or intermittently, with Russian imperial culture. See Trumpener, Katie, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, 1997)Google Scholar. On die role of Ukraine in Russian literature and in Gogol“s oeuvre in particular, see Edyta Bojanowska, “Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2002).

13. Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1994), 72, 74Google Scholar. Of course this does not hold true for all European literatures; but it certainly applies to the American tradition.

14. Despite the virtual absence of regionalism in Russian literature, the fact of the contiguous empire meant that non-and semi-Russian borderlands like Siberia, Ukraine, and the Caucasus tended to foster the attention to local detail that often marks regionalist writing in other traditions. The role of Ukraine was particularly important and complex. For example, it has been argued that Gogol“s early writings uphold Ukrainian national/ folk identity as a standard of authenticity against which Russia, an imperial power lacking genuine narodnost', could be judged. See Bojanowska, “Nikolai Gogol.” Yet if Gogol', for one, could sometimes choose to see Ukraine as symbolically opposed to Russia, this seems only to have encouraged his tendency to elide differences between the regions of European Russia, intensifying their amorphousness and interchangeability by collapsing them under the generalizing label “the provinces.”

15. Gogol', N. V, Polnoesobraniesochinenii v 14-i tomakh (Moscow, 1952), 6:206 Google Scholar (hereafter cited as PSS).

16. I address both the genesis of this symbolic geography and Gogol“s elaboration of its key terms in my article “'No, This Is Not the Provinces!’ Provincialism, Authenticity and Russianness in Dead Souls,” Russian Review 64, no. 2 (April 2005): 259-80. Russia's symbolic geography is also the subject of my current book-length project, “Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces.”

17. “Po delam sluzhby,” Chekhov, PSS, 10:93.

18. Ibid., 10:92-93.

19. Ibid., 10:96; my emphasis. Note that the Russian noun “environment” (sreda in vdali ot kul'turnoi sredy) is derived from the root for “center, middle.”

20. Dostoevskii, PSS, 10:509. See, for example, how the final chapter of Demons recalls Dead Souls by dwelling not on the resolution of the plot but on the swirl of wild rumor and uncertainty that persists after the cabal is “revealed.” Ibid., 10:508-9.

21. Ibid., 10:234.

22. Mikhail Epstein, “Provintsiia,” Bogdetalei: Narodnaia dusha i chastnaia zhizri v Rossii na ishhode imperii (Moscow, 1998), 24-30. Also helpful for thinking about the subaltern status of provincials and provincial places are Julia Kristeva's Strangers to Ourselves (1989; reprint, New York, 1991), and Pierre Bourdieu'sDistinction: A Social Critique of theJudgement of Taste (1979; reprint, Cambridge, Mass., 1984).

23. Dostoevskii, PSS, 10:28.

24. Ibid., 10:278; emphasis in the original.

25. Ibid., 10:420; emphasis in the original. Stepan Trofimovich, too, is known for his associations “there—that is, abroad” (again with tarn in italics), since he is famous among the locals for having published a politically sensitive poem decades ago in a foreign journal. Ibid., 10:10.

26. Epstein, “Provintsiia,” 24-30.

27. Dostoevskii, PSS, 10:302.

28. Ibid., 10:418.

29. Ibid., 10:510, 424.

30. Ibid., 10:416, 424, 418.

31. Ibid., 10:424.

32. Ibid., 10:418.

33. Ibid., 10:303.

34. Words related to set’ include setka (grid, coordinates) and setevoi (netting, mesh).

35. Gogol', PSS, 6:220.

36. Quoted in Christopher Ely, This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 2002), 146-47. Ely's chapter “Outer Gloom and Inner Glory” analyzes many landscapes of this type.

37. Saltykov-Shchedrin, M. E., Sobraniesochinenii v 20-i tomakh (Moscow, 1972), 13:96.Google Scholar

38. Ibid., 13:47.

39. Ibid., 13:30, 96. Even observers whose goal was to fashion a positive vision of European Russia's geography had a hard time dealing with the landscape's monotony. For example, the influential geographer K. I. Arsen'ev, writing in 1848, had to concede that “the interior of European Russia“—the region that he very much wanted to present as “the genuine fatherland of the Russian people, the center of all of European Russia,“ and “the true keystone of the Russian state“—confronted “the observer with [a view of] exhausting uniformity,” notwithstanding the list of advantages (navigable rivers, moderate climate, and so on) that Arsen'ev dutifully compiled. Arsen'ev is cited in Leonid Gorizontov, “The ‘Great Circle’ of Interior Russia: Representations of the Imperial Center in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in Jane Burbank and Mark von Hagen, eds., Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700-1930 (Bloomington, 2007).

40. But as Demons makes clear, these linked nodes can also act as what might be described as disease vectors, a distribution network facilitating the “viral” spread of noxious ideas. Here one recalls the epilogue to Crime and Punishment, widi Raskolnikov's nightmare of an ideology epidemic in which a terrible “pestilence” attacks the world's whole population, “infecting” people with the conviction that their ideas are infallible. See Dostoevskii, PSS, 6:419.

41. For alternative constructions of Russia's landscape, see Ely, This Meager Nature, esp. chaps. 2-4. Lev Tolstoi (whose family property and noble lineage of course allowed him to feel supremely at home at Iasnaia Poliana) and Ivan Goncharov (whose roots were in the entirely traditional merchant culture and middle gentry of the Volga region) seem to have been able to imagine gentry estates as meaningful “centers” in a way that was not possible for Dostoevskii. Dostoevskii's background connected him instead to a significantly lower and more precarious stratum of die gentry, often struggling to maintain noble status. With no Iasnaia Poliana to retire to, Dostoevskii made his way to the capital—the undisputed center of Russian intellectual and especially journalistic life—where he proceeded to make a name for himself. Here the new (to Russia) mechanisms of print culture allowed him to publish works that could then be distributed far and wide: so even as Dostoevskii critiques, in Demons, the idea of a center that serves as an organizing Logos, making meanings for and dispensing them to passive “outliers,” in his own life he was careful to locate himself in such a center so as to make use of its power to spread ideas.

42. Dostoevskii,PSS, 10:421,375.

43. Ibid., 10:432.

44. Ibid., 10:516.

45. Ibid., 10:416.

46. Fanger, Donald, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 135, 133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47. Dostoevskii, PSS, 10:510.

48. Ibid., 10:416,418.

49. Ibid., 10:424.

50. Epstein, “Provintsiia,” 24-30.

51. For a fuller elaboration of these ideas, see my “'No, This Is Not the Provinces!'“

52. Dostoevskii, PSS, 10:478.

53. A more positive interpretation of this image of Russian towns as uzly is found in the (pre-railroad) “travel notes” V. V Passek published in 1834. Passek described Moscow, for example, as only one of several important “nodes of nationality” (uzly narodnosti), and he claimed that Russia “possesses a series of centers or points of concentration that operate as the very source of its life, the hearts of its circulatory system.” Passek cited in Gorizontov, “The ‘Great Circle’ of Interior Russia.”

54. Dostoevski!, PSS, 10:287, 303, 304, 488.

55. For a discussion of the role played by the railroad in The Idiot, see David M. Bethea, “The Idiot: Historicism Arrives at the Station,” in Liza Knapp, ed., Dostoevsky's Idiot: A Critical Companion (Evanston, 1998), 130-90. According to Bethea's fascinating and persuasive analysis, trains are closely linked to the apocalyptic vision that structures The Idiot.

56. Cocteau, Jean, Opium:Journald'unedisintoxication (Paris, 1993), 48.Google Scholar

57. Dostoevskii, PSS, 10:157.

58. Ibid., 10:515.

59. Ibid., 10:302-4.

60. On this topic, see my article “Print Culture and Real Life in Dostoevsky's Demons,“ Dostoevsky Studies (forthcoming).

61. And while stasis surrounded by movement would normally suggest an orbit and a gravitational force, in Demons die opposite seems to occur: the inert object (the provincial place) is subject to, or affected by, the pull of surrounding movement. Thus the province becomes a kind of absent center, much like the character of Stavrogin.

62. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, 1986), 37.Google Scholar

63. Quoted ibid., 37-38.

64. Ibid., 39.

65. Chekhov, PSS, 13:205. A great many Chekhov texts—including Three Sisters, “My Life (A Provincial's Story),” and “Ward No. 6“—take note of their settings’ physical relationship to the railroad tracks.

66. Dostoevskii,PSS, 10:313-14.

67. Ibid., 10:480-81; my emphasis.

68. Ibid., 10:480.

69. Ibid., 10:481.

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid.

72. Ibid., 10:483-84.

73. Ibid., 10:482.

74. Ibid., 10:479.

75. Chaadaev, P. la., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i izbrannye pis'ma (Moscow, 1991), 1:90 Google Scholar. A standard English translation can be found in Chaadaev, Peter Yakovlevich, Philosophical Letters and Apology of a Madman, trans, and intro. (Knoxville, Tenn., 1969), 34-35Google Scholar. The translation here is my own.

76. Epstein, “Provintsiia,” 24-30.

77. Ibid.

78. Cited in Bethea, “TheIdiot: Historicism Arrives at the Station,” 142-43.

79. James Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (1966; reprint, New York, 1970), 384. Within a few years of making his hopeful declaration, Kibal'chich had become a revolutionary terrorist devoted to blowing up trains—a fact that reveals how important railroads were, not just to progressives, but to various political factions and their contradictory visions of Russian historical development.

80. In The Idiot, too—despite the fact that here the image of a locomotive is far more significant than that of the tracks—the network of railway lines carries sinister implications. Characters in The Idiot ponder whether “the network of railways [set'zheleznykh dorog] spread across Europe” might be the fulfillment of biblical prophecies concerning the Star of Wormwood that falls to earth and poisons the waters of life (Revelation 8:11-12). As one character asks, “so do you think that the railroads are cursed, that they are the bane of humanity, a plague fallen upon the earth to muddy the ‘waters of life'?” Dostoevskii, PSS, 8:254,309,310-11.

81. Ibid., 8:315.

82. In The Idiot this climax is death (as in Cocteau's “express train racing towards death“), and perhaps the unnarratable possibility of what comes after. See Bethea, “The Idiot: Historicism Arrives at the Station,” 135, 160, 175. Dostoevskii's notebooks for The Idiot confirm Bethea's argument about this narrative's end-and death-directed quality. For example, despite Dostoevskii's early uncertainties about how the plot of The Idiot would develop, he seems always to have known that Nastasia Filipovna would die; in fact the climactic scene in which Myshkin and Rogozhin confront each other over her corpse appears early on in his notebooks. See Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 286, 290.