Tikhon, who is a perceptive (but intrusive) psychoanalyst, sees that Stavrogin’s is not a straightforward Christian masochism, but a masochism that is heavily laced with narcissistic and exhibitionistic elements: “your intention to do this great penance is ridiculous in itself.” Stavrogin must not only make a spectacle of himself, he must also be sincerely humble in consequence. “You will triumph,” says Tikhon, “as long as you sincerely accept their spitting at you and trampling upon you—if you can endure it!”11 As it turns out, he cannot endure such humiliation, and opts for suicide, a different sort of masochistic act.
Less religious in orientation than the writers I have mentioned thus far is the bitter satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, whose novels are strewn with masochists. The inhabitants of Glupov (“stupidville”), for example, are moved by an “ardent love of authority [siloiu nachal’stvoliubiia].”12 They invent all kinds of ways to harm themselves. For example, they refrain from fighting a fire which is burning down their town, and instead rant and rave at their governor for what is happening. A later governor of the town is confronted with a crowd of protesters, all of whom are on their knees however. The ancestors of the Glupovites are characterized as follows:
There was in olden times a people called the Headbeaters [golovotiapami], and they lived in the far north, in that region where the Greek and Roman historians thought the Hyperborean Sea to be. These people were called Headbeaters, because it was their habit to beat their heads against anything that came in their way. If they came to a wall, they beat their heads against it; if they wished to pray, they beat their heads against the floor.13
The History of a Town (1869–70), from which these passages are quoted, is also full of sadistic fantasies to match the masochistic ones (e.g., under a certain governor Borodavkin “there was not a single Glupovite who could point to any part of his body which had not been flogged”; the governor Ugrium-Burcheev “beat himself not feigning,” although he is otherwise the arch-sadist of the novel).14 The laughter which Saltykov-Shchedrin elicits from his reader is itself sadistic in nature, being a form of aggression against the Glupovites. But to the extent that Russians recognize themselves in the Glupovites (just as they recognize themselves in the figure of Ivan the Fool—see below, chap. 6) they are laughing at themselves, that is, they are engaging in a mildly masochistic fantasy of their own.
In the twentieth century Russian writers continued to invent masochistic characters. The hero of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s long poem “Cloud in Trousers” mocks himself, nails himself to a cross, and compares himself to a dog which licks the hand that beats it. D-503, the hero-number of Evgenii Zamiatin’s futuristic novel We, explicitly welcomes the pain and punishment doled out by the dominatrix-number I-330. Boris Pasternak’s Doktor Zhivago never fails to infuriate my American students with his willing abandonment of his beloved Lara, and his subsequent self-willed going to seed at the end of the novel. Andrei Platonov’s works are full of mildly depressed, slightly childish characters who seem to welcome their abasement, for example, Nikita Firs of “Potudan River,” who descends to begging and cleaning latrines. Los Angeles Slavist Thomas Seifrid has written a fascinating analysis of Platonov’s later works, which he terms “literature for the masochist.”15
Igor Smirnov explicitly deals with the “masochistic culture,” “masochistic ideals,” and “kenosis” promoted by Soviet socialist realist fiction. Many heroes in this genre efface themselves totally in order to carry out instructions from on high or to fulfill “the plan” dictated by revolutionary authority. For example, the fanatic Pavel Korchagin (in Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered, 1935) repeatedly puts himself in great danger, or subjects himself to great deprivation for the sake of the Party. He emerges from the Civil War disabled and incapable of normal physical activity, but doggedly searches for new ways to serve the Bolshevik cause.16
Slavist Katerina Clark has also written on masochism in the Stalinist novel, although she prefers to use anthropological imagery rather than psychoanalytic terminology. Many socialist realist heroes go through what Clark calls a “traditional rite of passage” involving some sort of mutilation, ordeal, or sacrifice. Literal or metaphorical death may occur in the rite, and the result is fusion with some higher collective: “when the hero sheds his individualistic self at the moment of passage, he dies as an individual and is reborn as a function of the collective.”17
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has created some masochistic characters in his fiction. Many of Solzhenitsyn’s women are slavishly devoted to their husbands, for instance, Alina Vorotyntseva, Irina Tomchak, and Nadezhda Krupskaya in August 1914. Gleb Nerzhin of The First Circle is no slave, but he does something which, although perhaps noble, is very dangerous and potentially self-destructive: he spurns a cushy job in a special camp for mathematicians and scientists, and decides to plunge instead into the horrible depths of the gulag. Another of Solzhenitsyn’s characters, the quintessentially Russian General Samsonov of August 1914, marches submissively toward death when he realizes his army has been defeated:
The commander’s voice was kindly, and equally friendly were the looks that followed him as he rode on after thanking the men and wishing them well. There was not a hostile glare to be seen. The bared head and the solemn grief, the unmistakable Russianness, the unalloyed Russianness of his face [opoznavaemo-russkoe, nesmeshanno-russkoe volosatoe litso], with its bushy black beard and its homely features—big ears, big nose—the heroic shoulders bowed by an invisible burden, the slow, majestic progress, like that of some old Muscovite Tsar, disarmed those who might have cursed him.
Only now did Vorotyntsev notice… the doomed look imprinted on Samsonov’s face from birth [otrodnuiu obrechennost’]: this was a seven-pud sacrificial lamb led to the slaughter. He kept raising his eyes to something slightly, just slightly above his head as though he were expecting a great club to descend on his meekly upturned bulging brow. All his life, perhaps, he had been expecting this, without knowing it. Now he was resigned to it.18
This characterization of Samsonov as an “unmistakably Russian” masochist is quite appropriate, historically. The real Samsonov led a Russian army to sure defeat at the hands of the Germans in East Prussia during the opening weeks of the First World War. Nearly a quarter of a million Russian soldiers were lost. Supposedly the idea was to help the French by forcing the Germans to withdraw troops from the Western front. Historian Richard Pipes quotes a statement made by the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich to a French military representative at Russian Headquarters: “We are happy to make such sacrifices for our allies.”19
A list of masochistic characters in Russian literature would be long indeed. I have only begun to scratch the surface. Rather than continue with a list, however, I would like to look closely at some specific (but diverse) literary passages which offer interesting hints about the deep structure of Russian masochism.