The hypocrite, among other things, may be a deformed ambassador of the truth. By so obviously misrepresenting the truth, he enables us to trace its smothered outlines. In fiction and drama, this traditional hypocrite acts rather like a reliably unreliable narrator. The reliably unreliable narrator is rarely truly unreliable, because his unreliability is manipulated by an author without whose reliable manipulation we would not be able to judge the narrator’s unreliability. Similarly, the traditional hypocrite is always reliably hypocritical, which is why we so enjoy, indeed are so unthreatened by, the prospect of Polonius, Tartuffe, Parson Adams, Pecksniff, and others. Such characters are comic, and certify our rectitude, giving us the satisfaction that, whatever we have become, we have not become that kind of person. Though, in a curious, unintended way, such characters may turn us into hypocrites: the content and well-fed audiences watching Molière suggest that this has already happened.
We can see through the hypocrite because his zeal tends to be a perversion, almost a parody, of a visible moral code. He is nourished by the same food we consume; but, as it were, he eats far too much of it, and has become bullyingly large. Yet what would the hypocrite
represent in a world starved of moral nutrition? A world in which no moral code exists, and in which the only one at hand—religion—has already been perverted, long before the hypocrite gets to it? What happens when the reliable hypocrite is no longer a reliable hypocrite? When the familiar hypocrite of the theatrical tradition is removed from the theater and put into an unreliable modern novel? Such a character becomes much more menacing than the traditional hypocrite, for there is no longer any truth for him reliably to misrepresent, and our reading of his motives becomes more difficult. Indeed, in a sense, he becomes opaque to us because he ceases to be that familiar and stable category, a “hypocrite’” and he ceases to be a hypocrite precisely because he is not a liar: there is nothing for him to lie about. Accordingly, he would be more likely to be a tragic than a comic figure—or perhaps a tragicomic figure—and more likely to be a solipsist or fantasist than a liar. He has merged with his own horrid world.
In his extraordinary novel The Golovlyov Family (1875-80), Shchedrin (the nom de plume of M. E. Saltykov, sometimes known as Saltykov-Shchedrin) depicts just such a character and just such a world. The hypocrite is Porphiry Golovlyov, one of the sons of Arina Petrovna and Vladimir Mikhaylovich Golovlyov. This novel, called by D. S. Mirsky “certainly the gloomiest in all Russian literature,” is set on the Golovlyovs’ dismal estate, known as Golovlyovo. The Golovlyovs are minor landowners, a class Shchedrin satirized in many stories and sketches (and from which he himself came). The Golovlyov males are drunken, semieducated, grasping fantasists. Supported by the labor of their serfs, they squander a privilege of which they are unaware. As if color-blind without knowing it, they see only the world their vision falsely constructs.
Vladimir, the father, spends most of his time in his study drinking, imitating the songs of starlings, and writing bawdy verse. Golovlyovo is run by Vladimir’s wife, the ferociously continent, parsimonious, and cruel Arina Petrovna. She has little but contempt for
her three sons, Stepan, Porphiry, and Pavel. Of her middle son, Porphiry, known to his family as Little Judas or Bloodsucker, she has something like fear. Even when the child was a baby, “he liked to behave affectionately to his ‘dear friend mamma
’ to kiss her unobtrusively on the shoulder and sometimes to tell tales … But even in those early days Arina Petrovna felt as it were suspicious of her son’s ingratiating ways. Even at that time the gaze that he fixed at her seemed to be enigmatic, and she could not decide what precisely was in it—venom or filial respect.”
’ to kiss her unobtrusively on the shoulder and sometimes to tell tales … But even in those early days Arina Petrovna felt as it were suspicious of her son’s ingratiating ways. Even at that time the gaze that he fixed at her seemed to be enigmatic, and she could not decide what precisely was in it—venom or filial respect.”Golovlyovo is a house of death. One by one, the members of the family try to escape, and return there to die. Of course, they only come home because they are in desperate straits. Thus, having run through a family allowance, only forty but looking a decade older, Stepan comes back from Moscow, his eyes bulging and bloodshot, “inflamed by drink and rough weather … He looked around him morosely from under his brows; this was due not to any inward discontent, but rather to a vague fear that at any minute he might suddenly drop dead with hunger.” Stepan hopes to squeeze a little more life out of the family estate, but the punitive Arina, who has her own survival to think of, rations her indulgence.
Stepan is already dying, in a sense. On the Golovlyov estate, where everyone is barely hanging on to existence, the best means of survival is a kind of shutting down of the moral system, as the body sleeps in very cold weather. Thus, the commonest emotion at Golovlyovo is the moral equivalent of boredom: a vacuous blindness. Stepan, for instance, is described thus: “He had not a single thought, not a single desire … He wanted nothing, nothing at all.” His mother is no less sealed off. She allows him a diet that is just sufficient to keep him from starving; Stepan takes to the bottle. When his mother is told that Stepan is ailing, the words “did not reach her ears or make any impression upon her mind.” For Arina has the Golovlyov disease: “She had lost all sight of the fact that next door to her, in the office, lived a man related to her by blood.”
Likewise, Pavel, who locks himself away and drinks himself to death, is described as “one of those apathetic, strangely morose people who are incapable of any positive action … He was the most perfect instance of a man devoid of any characteristics at all.” And near the end of the book, when Porphiry’s niece, Anninka, also returns to die, she spends the time pacing up and down, “singing in an undertone and trying to tire herself out and, above all, not to think.”
Golovlyovo is a place of evil in the sense that Augustine and Calvin understood evil: as nothingness, the absence of goodness. The religious emphasis is proper, for in this vacated world, the man who briefly prospers, Little Judas, is above all a brilliant manipulator of religious hypocrisy. He fills the abyss with a diabolic version of traditional religion. Once Stepan, Vladimir, and Pavel have died (the latter is “comforted” by the unctuous Porphiry, but has enough life in him to shout from his deathbed, “Go away, you bloodsucker!”). Porphiry comes alive, and takes control of the estate.
Porphiry is Shchedrin’s great creation. His vivacity as a character proceeds, in part, from a paradox, which is that he is interesting in proportion to his banality. Traditionally, the great fictional hypocrites are generally interesting as liars are interesting. But Porphiry does not really lie to himself, for he has lost touch with the truth. He speaks the “truths” (as he sees them) that are all around him, and they are the most dismal, banal, lying platitudes. Shchedrin is explicit about this at one point in his novel. The hypocrites of French drama, he writes, are “conscious hypocrites, that is they know it themselves and are aware that other people know it too.” Porphiry, he writes, “was a hypocrite of a purely Russian sort, that is, simply a man devoid of all moral standards, knowing no truth other than the copy-book precepts. He was pettifogging, deceitful, loquacious, boundlessly ignorant, and afraid of the devil. All these qualities are merely negative and can supply no stable material for real hypocrisy.”
Porphiry grinds down his mother and his servants with endless banalities. His usual technique is to invoke God: “What would God
say?” His sure idea of God’s providence is used to justify his cruelty, his swindling, his meanness, and his theft. There is a vivid and comic scene as his brother Pavel is dying. Porphiry arrives in a coach-and-four; his mother immediately thinks to herself, “The Fox must have scented a carcass.” Porphiry enters the house with his two sons, Volodenka and Petenka (Volodenka mimicking his father, “folding his hands, rolling his eyes and moving his lips”). Seeing his mother unhappy, Porphiry says to her: “You are despondent, I see! It’s wrong, dear! Oh, it’s very wrong! You should ask yourself, ‘And what would God say to that?’ Why, He would say, ‘Here I arrange everything for the best in My wisdom, and she complains!’” He continues:
As a brother—I am grieved. More than once, in fact, I may have wept. I am grieving over my brother, grieving deeply … I shed tears, but then I think: “And what about God? Doesn’t God know better than we do?” One considers this and feels cheered. That’s what everyone ought to do … Look at me. See how well I’m bearing up!
Still, Porphiry is afraid. He spends much of his time crossing himself, or praying before his icons. In true Golovlyov fashion, he prays not for anything positive, but to be saved from the devil. (It is a nice implicit joke that Porphiry is afraid of the devil, but is in fact the devil.) “He could go on praying and performing all the necessary movements, and at the same time be looking out of the window to see if anyone went to the cellar without permission, etc.” He uses religious platitudes to protect himself from anything that would threaten his survival; religious hypocrisy is his moral camouflage.
One of the most horrifying events in the novel occurs when Porphiry’s son Petenka comes home to beg for money. He has gambled away three thousand rubles belonging to his regiment, and if he cannot pay them back, he will be sent off to Siberia. When Petenka enters his father’s study, Porphiry is kneeling, with uplifted arms.
Porphiry keeps him waiting for half an hour (Petenka rightly thinks that his father is keeping him there on purpose), and when Petenka finally explains that he has lost money, Porphiry replies, “amiably”: “Well, return it!” When Petenka tells him that he doesn’t have that kind of money, Porphiry warns him not to “mix me up in your dirty affairs. Let us go and have breakfast instead. We’ll drink tea and sit quietly and perhaps talk of something, only, for Christ’s sake, not this.” Bitterly, Petenka says to his father: “I am the only son you have left.” His father replies: “God took from Job all he had, my dear, and yet he did not complain, but only said, ‘God has given, God has taken away—God’s will be done.’ So that’s the way, my boy.”
Hypocrisy is a familiar subject in Russian literature, and within it, religious hypocrisy has a special place. Chekhov makes fun of a priest in his story “In the Ravine’” who pompously comforts a woman who has just lost her baby while pointing at her with “a fork with a pickled mushroom at the end of it.” In “The Malefactor,” a peasant standing before the examining magistrate yawns, and immediately makes the sign of the cross over his mouth.
When he began to write The Golovlyov Family, in the latter half of the 1870s, Shchedrin, who was Russia’s greatest satirist, had already mocked religious hypocrisy in his Fables, a collection of Aesopian tales about feeble governors, greedy landowners, imbecilic bureaucrats, and cruel priests. In his fable “A Village Fire,” a widow loses her only son to the flames, and the priest, like Porphiry, accuses her of grieving too much. “Why this plaint?” he asks her, “with kindly reproach.” The priest tells her the story of Job, and reminds her that Job did not complain, “but still more loved the Lord who had created him.” Later in the story, when the daughter of the village’s landowner tells her mother of the widow’s suffering, the landowner, like Porphiry, invokes destiny: “It’s dreadful for her; but how worked up you are, Vera! … That will never do, my love. There’s a Purpose in all things—we must always remember!”
At times The Golovlyov Family seems less a novel than a satirical
onslaught. Its relentlessness has the exhaustiveness not so much of a search for the truth as the prosecution of a case. Indeed, Shchedrin would seem to enjoy shocking the reader by annulling the novel’s traditional task, that of the patient exploration of motive in domestic settings. Instead, he gives us his sealed monsters, people whom we cannot explore since they are shut off from the moral world. Shchedrin knows how terrible, how—in the novelistic sense—unconventional it is to witness Stepan’s homecoming, which is a cruel inversion of the parable of the prodigal son: “All understood that the man before them was an unloved son who had come to the place he hated, that he had come for good and that his only escape from it would be to be carried, feet foremost, to the churchyard. And all felt both sorry for him and uneasy.” All except Stepan’s mother, of course.
Shchedrin knows that it is a kind of affront both to decency and to the decency of the novel itself to present a family reunion in such inhuman terms, and his narration registers the offense. Usually Shchedrin breaks in to tell us what we should think about each character, acting as an omniscient satirist. In this novel, we do indeed see an older, more traditional kind of punitive satire availing itself of the greater tragicomic flexibilities of the novel form. For at other times Shchedrin writes as if from one of the characters’ minds. Thus, when Stepan returns, a family conference is held between Arina, Pavel, and Porphiry on Stepan’s fate. Arina tells Porphiry and Pavel that she has decided to grant Stepan a very mean allowance, on which he will be effectively living like a peasant, in one of the villages. Shchedrin comments: “Although Porphiry Vladimirich had refused to act as a judge, he was so struck by his mother’s generosity that he felt it his duty to point out to her the dangerous consequences to which the proposed measure might lead.” Since the reader can see that there is nothing “generous” about Arina, the novel’s narration, at this point, is ironic, affecting to think of Arina as Porphiry might think of his mother. Yet, in a devilish twist, we know that Porphiry can never be trusted, and that Porphiry never thinks well of anyone. What does it
mean to be told that Porphiry thought his mother generous? Is it possible that the moral sense has been so polluted in Porphiry that even though he hates his mother, he believes his own hypocritical lies, his own devious fawning and playacting, and actually believes his mother to be generous at this moment? Or, more simply, is it just that Porphiry truly thinks that Arina’s terms are too good for Stepan, that, in effect, Porphiry hates his brother more than his mother? We do not know, but in either reading Shchedrin the omniscient satirist has left us alone for a moment, has become a novelist, and has decided not to finalize the ambiguity by breaking in and telling us how to think.
This technique brings us closer to the characters, letting us, if only for a minute, inhabit the wilderness of their souls. The method is especially effective when used to inhabit Porphiry, for we are made to share Porphiry’s own self-deceptions. Here Shchedrin’s narration is genuinely “unreliable’” and unreliable about an already unreliable man. At one devastating moment in the novel, for example, Shchedrin writes, of Porphiry: “He had lost all connections with the outside world. He received no books, no newspapers, no letters. One of his sons, Volodenka, had committed suicide; to his other son, Petenka, he wrote very little, and only when he sent him money.” The reader starts at this: the last time Volodenka was mentioned by Shchedrin, he was a little boy, mimicking his father. This is the first time we have heard anything about his committing suicide. But again, if we see the sentence as, in effect, issuing from Porphiry’s mind, it is just the heartless way that Porphiry would think of his dead son—as an unimportant memory, hardly worth mentioning.
And yet the closer we come to Porphiry, the more unknowable he actually becomes. In this sense, Porphiry is a modernist prototype: the character who lacks an audience, the alienated actor. The hypocrite who does not know he is one, and can never really be told that he is one by anyone around him, is something of a revolutionarv fictional character, for he has no “true” knowable self, no “stable
ego,” to use D. H. Lawrence’s phrase. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Knut Hamsun, a novelist strongly influenced by Dostoevsky and the Russian novel, would invent a new kind of character: the lunatic heroes of his novels Hunger and Mysteries go around telling falsely incriminating stories about themselves and acting badly when they have no obvious reason to. It is difficult to know when they are lying and not lying, and impossible to understand their motives. They too are unknowable; and they are also, in a sense, antihypocrites, so deeply in revolt against the pieties of Lutheranism that they have become parodically impious. They shout their self-invented sinfulness in the streets, though no one is really listening. The line from Dostoevsky, through Shchedrin, and on to Hamsun, is visible. The Golovlyov Family, that strange, raucous book whose characters aspire to the condition of nothingness, a book which is at times broad satire, at times Gothic horror, and at times a novel, becomes more modern the older it gets.