“The thirty-six hours remaining before Pyotr’s departure witness the murder of Shatov, the suicide of Kirillov, the birth of Stavrogin’s son, Lyamshin’s access of folly, and the disintegration of the revolutionary group. This section of The Possessed contains some of Dostoevsky’s highest achievements: the two encounters between Pyotr and Kirillov culminating in the latter’s nightmarish death, Shatov’s reunion with Marya and the reawakening of their love after the birth of her child, the actual assassination in the nocturnal park, and Pyotr’s hypocritical farewell to the most pathetic of the murders, young Erkel.
[But for now] I want to draw attention mainly to the feat of dramatic control and temporal organization which allows Dostoevsky to conduct his plot without causing confusion or disbelief. Lacking the traditional mirror for man which the rhythm of the seasons and the coordinates of normal life provide in the Tolstoyan epic, Dostoevsky makes a virtue of disorder. The frenzied happenings in the novel trace onto the surface of reality the patterns of chaos in the mind. In Yeats’ term ‘the centre cannot hold’ and the Dostoevskyan plot incarnates the forms of experience when ‘mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’ The failure of tragedy took place, as Fergusson notes in his Idea of a Theater. when it became increasingly difficult for ‘artists, or anyone else, to make sense out of the human life they could actually see around them.’ Dostoevsky made of this difficulty a new focus of understanding. If there is no sense in experience, then that style of art which conveys the tragedy of disorder and of the absurd will come nearest to realism. to reject coincidences and extremes of tone would be to read into life a kind of harmony and respect for the probable which it simply does not have. Hence Dostoevsky unworriedly accumulates the unlikely on the fantastic. It is bizarre that Marya should return and bear Stavrogin’s son on the eve of Shatov’s death, it is implausible that none of Pyotr’s terrified accomplices should have betrayed himself or his secret, or that Kirillov should not warn Shatov that there is something afoot. It is nearly incredible that Virginsky and his wife — it is she who delivers Marya’s child — do not stop the crime once they both realize that Pyotr is lying about Shatov’s alleged treason. Finally, it is difficult to believe in Kirillov’s suicide after his experience of ‘illumination’ and after Pyotr has told him of the intended murder.
but we do accept all these things as we accept the Ghost in Hamlet, the binding force of prophecy in Oedipus, Macbeth, and Phedre, and the series of interlocking accidents and chance revelations in Hedda Gabler. For as Aristotle, Huizinga, and Freud have said (in very diverse contexts), the drama is related to the notion of games. Like a game it sets its own rules, and the determining canon is internal coherence. The validity of the rules can only be tested in the playing. Moreover, games and dramas are arbitrary delimitations of experience, and in so far as they delimit they conventionalize and stylize reality. Dostoevsky believed that his ‘true, deep realism’ would, by virtue of contraction and intensification, portray the authentic meaning and temper of a historical era in which he saw the coming of the apocalypse.
Dryly, Dostoevsky records the chronology of pandemonium: Shatov is murdered at about seven o’clock, Pyotr arrives at Kirillov’s at about one in the morning and his host kills himself at around two thirty; at five fifty Pyotr and Erkel arrive at the station; ten minutes later the nihilist enters a first-class compartment. It has been, in the words of the novelist, ‘a busy night.’ Possibly things could have happened at such a pace; probably not. But no matter; the sense of fatality and forward motion is maintained to the last — the train pulls out and gathers speed.”
It is, I think this sense that the “style of art which conveys the tragedy of disorder and of the absurd will come nearest to realism,” that gives Dostoevsky, despite his very deep and underlying 19th century Russian and religious base, his peculiar, appealing, and somewhat disorienting sense of modernism.
—
“In Dostoevsky’s novels we cannot separate ‘the tragic’ from ‘the fantastic.’ Indeed, the tragic ritual is presented and lifted above the current flatness of experience by means of the fantastic. There are moments in which we can clearly make out how the tragic agon penetrates and ultimately transforms the gestures of melodrama. But even transformed, the latter have been no less of an essential medium to Dostoevsky than the established myths were to Greek dramatists or the opera seria was to the young Mozart.
The episode of the death of Kirillov in [Demons] illustrates in perfect detail how Gothic fantasy and the machinery of horror lead us into the tragic effect. The presuppositions are blatant melodrama: Pyotr must see to it that Kirillov commits suicide after signing a paper charging himself with Shatov’s murder. But the engineer, who moves between states of metaphysical ecstasy and raw contempt, may not go through with it. Both Mephistopheles and his equivocating Faust are armed. Pyotr is too astute not to realize that if he goads Kirillov too far, their devil’s bargain will collapse. After a passionate dialogue, Kirillov yields to the temptation of despair. He takes his revolver and rushes into the next room, shutting the door. What ensues is strictly comparable — in terms of literary technique — to the climactic moments in the House of Usher or the frenzied death of the hero in Balzac’s Peau de chagrin. After ten minutes of tortured expectancy, Pyotr seizes a dying candle:
‘He did not hear the slightest sound. He suddenly opened the door and lifted up the candle: something uttered a roar and rushed at him. He slammed the door with all his might and pressed his weight against it; but all sounds dies away and again there was deathlike stillness.’
Pyotr reckons he will have to shoot it out with the reluctant metaphysician and flings the door open, revolver in hand. A horrible sight greets him. Kirillov is standing against the wall, motionless, unnaturally pale. With blind fury Pyotr longs to scorch the man’s face and make sure that he is alive:
‘Then something happened so hideous and so soon over that Pyotr Stepanovich could never afterwards recover a coherent impression of it. He had hardly touched Kirillov when the latter bent down quickly and with his head knocked the candle out of Pyotr Stepanovich’s hand; the candlestick fell with a clang on the ground and the candle went out. At the same moment he was conscious of a fearful pain in the little finger of his left hand. He cried out, and all that he could remember was that, beside himself, he hit out with all his might and struck three blows with the revolver on the head of Kirillov, who had bent down to him and had bitten his finger. At last he tore away his finger and rushed headlong to get out of the house, feeling his way in the dark. He was pursued by terrible shouts from the room.
“Directly, directly, directly, directly.” Ten times. But he still ran on, and was running into the porch when he suddenly heard a loud shot.’
The motif of the bite is a curious one. It was probably derived from David Copperfield, and we find it in the early sketches for the figure of Razumihin in Crime and Punishment. It appears three times in [Demons]: Stavrogin bites the Governor’s ear; we are told of a young officer who bit his superior; and we see Pyotr being bitten by Kirillov. The latter instance is one of peculiar horror. The engineer seems to be drained of human consciousness. The part of reasons is frozen to the thought of self-destruction. Death, in the form of an animal which ‘roars’ and uses its savage teeth, is master of him. When the human voice erupts, it is with a single cry ten times repeated. Kirillov’s insane ‘directly’ i s a counterpart to Lear’s five-fold repetition of ‘never.’ In the case of Lear, a man’s spirit refuses annihilation and clings to a single word as to the gates of life; in the other, it is shown embracing darkness. Kirillov kills himself in abject despair, because he could not kill himself in an affirmation of freedom. Both cries moves us unutterably though arising out of circumstances which are wholly fantastic.
Pyotr crawls back and finds ‘splashes of blood and brains’ on the floor. The guttering candle, the dead engineer, Pyotr with his bleeding finger and inhuman visage — we have here as set a piece of melodrama as Fagin’s appearance at the window or the awesome scene of torture in Conrad’s Nostromo. But the conventions do not blunt or deflect the tragic purpose; they serve it. The episode confirms a distinction proposed in Aristotle’s Poetics: ‘Those who employ spectacular means to create a sense not of the terrible but only of the monstrous, are strangers to the purpose of tragedy.’ The Dostoevskyan novel is a ‘novel of terror’; but it expounds the term in the sense in which Joyce defined it in A Portrait of the Artist:
‘Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.’
“The thirty-six hours remaining before Pyotr’s departure witness the murder of Shatov, the suicide of Kirillov, the birth of Stavrogin’s son, Lyamshin’s access of folly, and the disintegration of the revolutionary group. This section of The Possessed contains some of Dostoevsky’s highest achievements: the two encounters between Pyotr and Kirillov culminating in the latter’s nightmarish death, Shatov’s reunion with Marya and the reawakening of their love after the birth of her child, the actual assassination in the nocturnal park, and Pyotr’s hypocritical farewell to the most pathetic of the murders, young Erkel.
[But for now] I want to draw attention mainly to the feat of dramatic control and temporal organization which allows Dostoevsky to conduct his plot without causing confusion or disbelief. Lacking the traditional mirror for man which the rhythm of the seasons and the coordinates of normal life provide in the Tolstoyan epic, Dostoevsky makes a virtue of disorder. The frenzied happenings in the novel trace onto the surface of reality the patterns of chaos in the mind. In Yeats’ term ‘the centre cannot hold’ and the Dostoevskyan plot incarnates the forms of experience when ‘mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’ The failure of tragedy took place, as Fergusson notes in his Idea of a Theater. when it became increasingly difficult for ‘artists, or anyone else, to make sense out of the human life they could actually see around them.’ Dostoevsky made of this difficulty a new focus of understanding. If there is no sense in experience, then that style of art which conveys the tragedy of disorder and of the absurd will come nearest to realism. to reject coincidences and extremes of tone would be to read into life a kind of harmony and respect for the probable which it simply does not have. Hence Dostoevsky unworriedly accumulates the unlikely on the fantastic. It is bizarre that Marya should return and bear Stavrogin’s son on the eve of Shatov’s death, it is implausible that none of Pyotr’s terrified accomplices should have betrayed himself or his secret, or that Kirillov should not warn Shatov that there is something afoot. It is nearly incredible that Virginsky and his wife — it is she who delivers Marya’s child — do not stop the crime once they both realize that Pyotr is lying about Shatov’s alleged treason. Finally, it is difficult to believe in Kirillov’s suicide after his experience of ‘illumination’ and after Pyotr has told him of the intended murder.
but we do accept all these things as we accept the Ghost in Hamlet, the binding force of prophecy in Oedipus, Macbeth, and Phedre, and the series of interlocking accidents and chance revelations in Hedda Gabler. For as Aristotle, Huizinga, and Freud have said (in very diverse contexts), the drama is related to the notion of games. Like a game it sets its own rules, and the determining canon is internal coherence. The validity of the rules can only be tested in the playing. Moreover, games and dramas are arbitrary delimitations of experience, and in so far as they delimit they conventionalize and stylize reality. Dostoevsky believed that his ‘true, deep realism’ would, by virtue of contraction and intensification, portray the authentic meaning and temper of a historical era in which he saw the coming of the apocalypse.
Dryly, Dostoevsky records the chronology of pandemonium: Shatov is murdered at about seven o’clock, Pyotr arrives at Kirillov’s at about one in the morning and his host kills himself at around two thirty; at five fifty Pyotr and Erkel arrive at the station; ten minutes later the nihilist enters a first-class compartment. It has been, in the words of the novelist, ‘a busy night.’ Possibly things could have happened at such a pace; probably not. But no matter; the sense of fatality and forward motion is maintained to the last — the train pulls out and gathers speed.”
It is, I think this sense that the “style of art which conveys the tragedy of disorder and of the absurd will come nearest to realism,” that gives Dostoevsky, despite his very deep and underlying 19th century Russian and religious base, his peculiar, appealing, and somewhat disorienting sense of modernism.
—
“In Dostoevsky’s novels we cannot separate ‘the tragic’ from ‘the fantastic.’ Indeed, the tragic ritual is presented and lifted above the current flatness of experience by means of the fantastic. There are moments in which we can clearly make out how the tragic agon penetrates and ultimately transforms the gestures of melodrama. But even transformed, the latter have been no less of an essential medium to Dostoevsky than the established myths were to Greek dramatists or the opera seria was to the young Mozart.
The episode of the death of Kirillov in [Demons] illustrates in perfect detail how Gothic fantasy and the machinery of horror lead us into the tragic effect. The presuppositions are blatant melodrama: Pyotr must see to it that Kirillov commits suicide after signing a paper charging himself with Shatov’s murder. But the engineer, who moves between states of metaphysical ecstasy and raw contempt, may not go through with it. Both Mephistopheles and his equivocating Faust are armed. Pyotr is too astute not to realize that if he goads Kirillov too far, their devil’s bargain will collapse. After a passionate dialogue, Kirillov yields to the temptation of despair. He takes his revolver and rushes into the next room, shutting the door. What ensues is strictly comparable — in terms of literary technique — to the climactic moments in the House of Usher or the frenzied death of the hero in Balzac’s Peau de chagrin. After ten minutes of tortured expectancy, Pyotr seizes a dying candle:
‘He did not hear the slightest sound. He suddenly opened the door and lifted up the candle: something uttered a roar and rushed at him. He slammed the door with all his might and pressed his weight against it; but all sounds dies away and again there was deathlike stillness.’
Pyotr reckons he will have to shoot it out with the reluctant metaphysician and flings the door open, revolver in hand. A horrible sight greets him. Kirillov is standing against the wall, motionless, unnaturally pale. With blind fury Pyotr longs to scorch the man’s face and make sure that he is alive:
‘Then something happened so hideous and so soon over that Pyotr Stepanovich could never afterwards recover a coherent impression of it. He had hardly touched Kirillov when the latter bent down quickly and with his head knocked the candle out of Pyotr Stepanovich’s hand; the candlestick fell with a clang on the ground and the candle went out. At the same moment he was conscious of a fearful pain in the little finger of his left hand. He cried out, and all that he could remember was that, beside himself, he hit out with all his might and struck three blows with the revolver on the head of Kirillov, who had bent down to him and had bitten his finger. At last he tore away his finger and rushed headlong to get out of the house, feeling his way in the dark. He was pursued by terrible shouts from the room.
“Directly, directly, directly, directly.” Ten times. But he still ran on, and was running into the porch when he suddenly heard a loud shot.’
The motif of the bite is a curious one. It was probably derived from David Copperfield, and we find it in the early sketches for the figure of Razumihin in Crime and Punishment. It appears three times in [Demons]: Stavrogin bites the Governor’s ear; we are told of a young officer who bit his superior; and we see Pyotr being bitten by Kirillov. The latter instance is one of peculiar horror. The engineer seems to be drained of human consciousness. The part of reasons is frozen to the thought of self-destruction. Death, in the form of an animal which ‘roars’ and uses its savage teeth, is master of him. When the human voice erupts, it is with a single cry ten times repeated. Kirillov’s insane ‘directly’ i s a counterpart to Lear’s five-fold repetition of ‘never.’ In the case of Lear, a man’s spirit refuses annihilation and clings to a single word as to the gates of life; in the other, it is shown embracing darkness. Kirillov kills himself in abject despair, because he could not kill himself in an affirmation of freedom. Both cries moves us unutterably though arising out of circumstances which are wholly fantastic.
Pyotr crawls back and finds ‘splashes of blood and brains’ on the floor. The guttering candle, the dead engineer, Pyotr with his bleeding finger and inhuman visage — we have here as set a piece of melodrama as Fagin’s appearance at the window or the awesome scene of torture in Conrad’s Nostromo. But the conventions do not blunt or deflect the tragic purpose; they serve it. The episode confirms a distinction proposed in Aristotle’s Poetics: ‘Those who employ spectacular means to create a sense not of the terrible but only of the monstrous, are strangers to the purpose of tragedy.’ The Dostoevskyan novel is a ‘novel of terror’; but it expounds the term in the sense in which Joyce defined it in A Portrait of the Artist:
‘Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.’
----
From Dennis Abram's blog entry:
https://projectdblog.wordpress.com/20...