That’s it—that’s the whole thing (minus a chapter excised by Dostoevsky’s editors, in which Stavrogin confesses to having once seduced a twelve-year-old girl and driven her to suicide; opinions vary on whether the novel is better or worse without this information). You never do find out what the deal was with Stavrogin, or why everyone was so obsessed with him. The various characters simply announce their obsession, as if in passing. Kirillov, explaining his theory of the transformation of men into gods by suicide, adds enigmatically, “Remember what you’ve meant in my life, Stavrogin.” Shatov, in the middle of an agonized rant about Slavophilism and the body of God, shouts, “Stavrogin, why am I condemned to believe in you unto ages of ages?” Even Pyotr, the puppeteer who so deftly manipulates others while remaining unmoved himself, pursues Stavrogin relentlessly, determined to draw him into his circle by either bribery or blackmail.
“But what the devil do you need me for?” Stavrogin finally asks Pyotr. “Is there some mystery in it, or what? What sort of talisman have you got me for?” Pyotr’s astonishing reply is that he loves and worships Stavrogin as a worm worships the sun, and that the new era of Russia will begin only when Stavrogin has assumed the identity of the mythical “Tsarevich Ivan,” who will turn out to have been “in hiding” for years, and then Pyotr and Stavrogin-Tsarevich will take over the world together, with specially trained gunmen . . .
The first time I read Demons, none of this made any sense to me. I was willing to accept the enigma of Stavrogin as a literary convention, but what did this human enigma have to do with the large-scale possession of an entire town by arson, robbery, cholera, and terrorist conspiracies? Furthermore, what was the point of Stepan Trofimovich—why did his life take up a third of the novel? Why was it precisely Stepan Trofimovich’s pupils who were so susceptible to Stavrogin? I thought about it for a while, although not for too long. I decided that this must be what critics meant when they talked about “flawed novels.”
As I later learned, many interpretations of Demons do rely on the notion of technical flaws. Joseph Frank, for example, theorizes that Stavrogin is a composite of two inconsistent, irreconcilable characters from earlier drafts. The first character, a young aristocrat of the 1860s, is embroiled in a Fathers and Sons–style ideological clash with the generation of the 1840s, but undergoes a moral regeneration, overcomes his own nihilism, and becomes a “new man”; the second is a young aristocrat in the earlier, Byronic type of Eugene Onegin, who has already undergone, or seems to have undergone, a moral regeneration, but who then, to quote Dostoevsky’s notes, “suddenly blows his brains out—(Enigmatic personage, said to be mad).” Because he was working “under great pressure,” Frank suggests, Dostoevsky was obliged to consolidate these two heroes in the person of Stavrogin. Stepan Trofimovich, “a Liberal Idealist of the 1840s,” is thus made into “the spiritual progenitor of a Byronic type associated with the 1820s and 1830s”—a relationship that is doomed never really to make sense.
My favorite part of Frank’s interpretation is that, in the attempt “to compensate for the anachronism inherent in his plot structure,” Dostoevsky must represent Stavrogin as “a contemporary development” of the Onegin type. There is something convincing in the picture of Stavrogin as an Onegin taken one step further, an Onegin beyond Pushkin, a machine for provoking duels, incapable of returning anyone’s love. It’s as if Stavrogin has himself read Eugene Onegin and no longer has any illusions of what awaits him.
On the other hand, to say the relationship between Stavrogin and Stepan Trofimovich is anachronistic doesn’t really resolve its mystery. How is Stepan Trofimovich, and not Stavrogin, supposed to be at the head of the procession of swine who are running into the sea? Frank again finds the answer in a technical flaw: namely, the removal of Stavrogin’s seduction of the twelve-year-old girl, which Frank characterizes as “a great moral-philosophical experiment” in the style of Raskolnikov’s murder of the pawnbroker. Dostoevsky was frantically finishing book 3 when the editors told him that the scene of Stavrogin’s confession was unpublishable; he was thus “forced to mutilate the original symmetry of his plan” and to shift part of Stavrogin’s moral responsibility onto Stepan Trofimovich. In other words, the real explanation for Stepan Trofimovich’s enigmatic claim to being the leader of the demons is that those words were never supposed to come from Stepan Trofimovich to begin with; they originally belonged to Stavrogin, but had to be reassigned once the confession was removed.*
• • •
So is Demons really just a botched novel, an aggregation of mutilated drafts, lacking any unified meaning? It isn’t. Graduate school taught me this. It taught me through both theory and practice.
The theoretical part of the revelation came from René Girard, an emeritus in the Stanford French department. In the 1960s, Girard introduced his widely influential theory of mimetic desire, formulated in opposition to the Nietzschean notion of autonomy as the key to human self-fulfillment. According to Girard, there is in fact no such thing as human autonomy or authenticity. All of the desires that direct our actions in life are learned or imitated from some Other, to whom we mistakenly ascribe the autonomy lacking in ourselves. (“Mistakenly,” because the Other is also a human being, and thus doesn’t actually have any more autonomy than we do.) The perceived desire of the Other confers prestige on the object, rendering it desirable. For this reason, desire is usually less about its purported object than about the Other; it is always “metaphysical,” in that it is less about having, than being. The point isn’t to possess the object, but to be the Other. (That’s why so many advertisements place less emphasis on the product’s virtues than on its use by some beautiful and autonomous-looking person: the consumer craves not the particular brand of vodka, but the being of the person who chose it.) Because mimetic desire is contagious, a single person is often the mediator for a number of different desiring subjects, who then enter into the ultimately violent bonds of mimetic rivalry.
In the next decades, Girard developed mimetic contagion into an anthropological theory, using it to explain historically and geographically diverse manifestations of social violence from Chukchi blood feuds to the cult of Dionysus. But he first presented mimetic theory in a book about literature. In this first book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Girard posits mimetic desire as the fundamental content of “the Western novel.” Don Quixote, it turns out, doesn’t really want any of his ostensible objects (Dulcinea, Mambrino’s golden helmet, etc.); what he wants is to become one with his mediator: Amadís of Gaul. It’s only because his imitation of Amadís of Gaul demands a beautiful lady that he invents Dulcinea. According to an analogous delusional mechanism, Raskolnikov only thinks he wants the pawnbroker’s money—in fact, he wants to be Nietzsche’s Superman. Emma Bovary only thinks she wants Léon—she actually wants to be the heroine of a romance. Julien Sorel only thinks that his ambitions are directed toward beautiful women and brilliant promotions—what he really wants is to achieve some Napoleonic ideal of authentic being.
Because the mimetic desire of the novelistic hero is never directed at its true object, which is in any case unattainable, it is fundamentally masochistic, violent, and self-destructive. “Great” novels, for Girard, are those that end by exposing the illusory and pernicious quality of mimetic desire. This exposure takes place in a fever or a penal colony, through suicide or by the guillotine, in the form of a “deathbed conversion”: the hero transcends his egoism and renounces the values that have driven the novel up to that point. Don Quixote falls into a fever, realizes he isn’t really a knight, and dies a Christian death; Madame Bovary swallows arsenic; Raskolnikov turns himself in; Julien renounces Mathilde and submits to the guillotine. “Great novels always spring from an obsession that has been transcended,” Girard writes. “The hero sees himself in the rival he loathes; he renounces the ‘differences’ suggested by hatred.”