I'm afraid for you, for all of you, for all of us together. I am a prince myself, of ancient family, and I am sitting with princes. I speak to save us all, that our class [the gentry estate] may not vanish in vain, in darkness, without realizing anything, abusing everything, and losing everything. (Dostoevsky 1996: 518)
The class of internal colonization, Myshkin warns, has lost the game. This class can only be saved, he thinks, by pilgrimage to the country of the east, to the interior regions of Russia. And soon, in 1874, many would indeed take this journey, "going to the people," which, more precisely, meant the Khlysty and other sects (see Chapter 10).
The positive orientalism of the imperial elite is characteristic of the later stages of colonization and coincides with the advent of nationalist movements in the colonies. From Rousseau to Levi-Strauss, the romanticization of the distant and noble savage has been an important element of the western tradition. Russia has also made its contribution to this, a contribution that is, as always, centripetal. Myshkin wishes to be the Russian Columbus, while Rogozhin guards his treasure like Montezuma, in that he is ready to give it up to whoever asks properly for it, and with similar consequences. Meanwhile, the society of the capital, blind to the genuine idyll of the interior, worships false idols like the "enormous, beautiful Chinese vase, standing on its pedestal." External orientalism can be smashed with a single gesture, thus revealing the treasures within; this is exactly what
Myshkin does at the peak of his ecstasy. The east is doubled; one version is embodied in the Chinese vase, the other in Myshkin's speech.
The Idiot, as has long been realized, is an ideological novel. One of the aspects of the bizarre union between Myshkin and Rogozhin is their ideological exchange. The prince has read "all" of Pushkin to the merchant, while the merchant has told the prince of the unity of God and soil. None of this explains, however, why it was necessary to kill Nastasia Fillipovna. This act resolves the triangular structure in the gravest of ways. The sacrifice of an innocent woman is the most malignant of all possible outcomes of the ritual action. As we see in the story, Myshkin and Rogozhin, who constitute the sacrificial community, are destroyed along with their victim. The novel's terrible conclusion is proof that its author did not believe in the resurrection of mankind through "the Russian idea, the Russian God," a belief he puts in the words of caricatured murderers. Such belief leads to terrible evil, and is entirely exposed in the process. Myshkin was not the Christ - and Dostoevsky not the idiot - they are made to look like in some interpretations.
The Real Day
If the social sciences rely on statistical criteria to demonstrate the significance of observed differences, the humanities rely on the reader's memory and the age-long work of selection that it does. When readers think about the Russian novel or drama of the 1860-70s, they remember the deaths of female characters: Ostrovsky's Thunderstorm, suicide; Dostoevsky's Idiot, murder; Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, suicide . . . too many Ophelias, too few Hamlets. Before and sometimes after the murder of Nastasia, violent deaths in Russian literature were predominantly those of women. A scholar of European opera observes a similar plotline of "undoing women" in the major masterpieces that were widely influential throughout the nineteenth century (Clement 1988).
Contemporaneous criticism was well aware of the special role that Russian stories, and Russian history, attributed to women. Reviewing Ostrovsky's play, Thunderstorm, which ended with the suicide of the central heroine, the radical critic Nikolai Dobroliubov speculated that two human conditions, males' "sovereign stupidity" and females' "wholesome decisiveness," interact in such a way that the only outcome is the death of the woman. Foreshadowing Joseph Conrad's metaphor of the heart of darkness, Dobroliubov wrote that provincial Russia was the tsardom of darkness. A suicidal woman was the only beam of light: the public was "glad to watch the escape of Katerina, even though through death" (1962: 6/362). Rather than giving a "realistic analysis of social issues," which was believed to be the task of literature, Ostrovsky's play, Dobroliubov's essay, and Dostoevsky's novel all produced simple, memorable symbols of human suffering. On the threshold of the 1861 Emancipation of the serfs, the public was in need of gestures of self-accusation, as strong as possible. Seeing female suffering and death, the public felt guilty. They hoped that men in power would change their ways. When they did not, the public, including men in power, read about even more female deaths in books, or watched them at the theatre. Collective participation in sacrificial rites, which were performed by high culture, enacted these men's guilt.
But the most radical men had further thoughts. In his famous review, "When Will the Real Day Come?," Dobroliubov attacked Turgenev's novel On the Eve (1860) for showing another beautiful and suffering Russian woman. She was in love with a revolutionary, but he was foreign. This Bulgarian nationalist brought Elena to his country and she died on the road. The Russian critic envies the Bulgarian character who lives and fights in an alliance with all groups of his society, because they all have a common enemy, the Turks. "Russian life has no such monotony; every estate, every little group lives its own life, has its particular goals," which confront each other. The real day will come, prophesized the critic, when a Russian revolutionary will come to struggle with "with our internal enemies." But his task will be challenging. In a memorable metaphor, Dobroliubov compares society to an empty box, which is easy to flip from the outside but impossible to overthrow for someone who sits inside of it. It is easier to be a nationalist who fights with a foreign oppressor than to fight one's own oppressors inside the same space:
A Russian hero . . .is connected by blood with all those that he rebels against. He is in a position of, say, a son of a Turkish sultan who would decide to emancipate Bulgaria from the Turks. . . . This is horribly difficult; such a decision demands a very different development from the one that the son of a Turkish sultan usually gets. (Dobroliubov 1962: 6/163)
For this critic of the 1860s, internal colonization was already connected with gender. The oppression of Russian women correlated with the internal colonization of Russian men. Women in Russia were like Bulgaria under the Turks: external colonization made things clear and heroism possible. "The real day" would come when Russian men would, like this son of the Turkish sultan, rebel against themselves.
Catechism of a Revolutionary, a programmatic document of Russian political terrorism that was composed by Sergei Nechaev in 1869, called for new sacrifices: "The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no pity for the state . . . and expects no pity for himself. . . . Every day he must be prepared for death. . . . Day and night he must have one single purpose: merciless destruction" (Nechaev 1997: 244). There was no gender ambivalence in this text. Both parts of the sacrificial act, executors and victims, were imagined to be men.