Plot points

[Jesse]

1. Stepan prepares to leave after denouncing the townsfolk as "little fools"

2. Pyotr secretly arranged some union of Stavrogin and Lizaveta Nikolevna

3. The fete is as much a disaster as the literary salon; Lembke breaks down

4. Lebyadkin and his sister murdered; a suspicious arson nearly conceals the evidence

[Amyjzed]

Here Dennis Abrams begins in his blog to share an essay called “Dostoevsky’s The Devils: The Role of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky," by R.M. Davison. (Since Karmazinov is supposed to be a lampoon of Turgenev, I wondered who Stepan Verkhovensky was supposed to be like, or in what ways he might have shared characteristics with Dostoevsky himself.)

“Discussion of this subject might seem to be unnecessary since Dostoevsky himself tells us in his notebooks why Stepan Trofimovich is in the novel: to bring about a meeting between the two generations of Westernizers, ‘the pure ones and the nihilists.’ This may well be true, but we can still usefully examine the way Dostoevsky uses Stepan Trofimovich, and certain aspects of his character deserve scrutiny… [Dostoevsky] wrote, rather confusingly, that Stepan Trofimovich was ‘secondary’ but ‘the cornerstone.’ The confusion can be reduced if we judge that Stepan Trofimovich’s personal ideological contribution puts him in most respects in the second rank of characters, whereas his circle is ‘both ideological and structurally the source of the public events that follow.‘

In arguing that our interest in the novel flags only when Stepan Trofimovich is off the stage, Carr and Simmons go too far, but at least they do not underrate him. It is easy to underrate him because frequently he is presented through the gossiping and malicious narrator who may count himself as Stepan Trofimovich’s friend but is not notably sympathetic to him. On other occasions, the image comes to us through the distorting vision of Mrs. Stavrogin whose sense of porpoition is, to say the least, unusual. When, for instance, she announces that Stepan Trofimovich is a man of ‘low habits’ she is probably agitated and outraged by nothing more reprehensible than his tendency to sputter when he talks. However, it is impossible to overlook that it is Stepan Trofimovich who unmasks the generation of the sons — a central proposition of the novel — and ‘two negative ideas…place him firmly in the center of the novel as the author’s mouthpiece.’ these ideas concern the Gadarene swine and the angel of Laodicea. On the positive side How has noted that it is Stepan Trofimovich ‘who is allowed the most honorable and heroic end.’ " ....

More to follow.

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