Within hours of my arrival in Florence to research a magazine article about a Dante marathon, I found myself standing outside the apartment on the Via Guicciardini where Dostoevsky spent nine miserable months ravaged by debt and epilepsy. The building faces the Palazzo Pitti and is surmounted by a plaque:
IN QUESTI PRESSI
FRA IL 1868 E IL 1869
FEDOR MIHAILOVIC DOSTOEVSKIJ
COMPÌ IL ROMANZO “L’IDIOTA.”
Until recently, I had no particular interest in Florence, and had no idea that Dostoevsky had finished The Idiot there. Moreover, in the eternal debate of “Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?” I have always been in the Tolstoy camp. But fate brought me to Dante’s city at the precise moment when I was obsessed by Dostoevsky’s Demons, the novel whose hero, Nikolai Stavrogin, is considered to be the diabolical double of The Idiot’s Prince Myshkin, and the early notes for which were composed right there in Florence.
• • •
In my free time from researching the drama of Florence’s centuries-long repentance for having exiled their greatest poet in 1302, I raced through The Miraculous Years, the fourth volume of Joseph Frank’s five-volume life of Dostoevsky.
I learned that forty-six-year-old Dostoevsky had gone abroad shortly after his marriage in 1867 to Anna Snitkina, the twenty-one-year-old stenographer who had helped him meet the deadline for The Gambler. The couple left Russia partly because Dostoevsky believed that the European climate was better for his epilepsy, and partly to escape the creditors, relatives, and hangers-on who were making Anna’s home life a misery. Ironically, considering the text that brought them together, Dostoevsky was seized anew in Dresden by his pathological obsession with roulette. He made a three-day trip to the famous casino of Homburg, which in fact dragged on for ten days, during which he lost not only all his money but also his watch, so that afterward, he and his wife never knew what time it was.
When the newlyweds decided to move to Switzerland that summer, Dostoevsky was unable to resist the lure of a stop in Baden-Baden. In between epileptic fits, he lost most of Anna’s jewelry and managed to cement a lifelong animus against longtime Baden resident Ivan Turgenev. The contretemps was precipitated by a chance meeting with Ivan Goncharov, author of Oblomov, who told Dostoevsky that Turgenev had seen him on the street but had decided not to say anything, “knowing how gamblers do not like to be spoken to.” Because he happened at that time to owe Turgenev fifty rubles, Dostoevsky couldn’t be seen to be avoiding him (which he was). At their subsequent meeting, Turgenev said such terrible things about Russia that Dostoevsky finally suggested he buy a telescope. “What for?” Turgenev asked. Dostoevsky said the telescope would help Turgenev see Russia better, so he would know what he was talking about. Turgenev became “horribly angry.” Dostoevsky had taken up his hat and was preparing to leave when he “somehow, absolutely without intention,” ended up disburdening himself of everything that had “accumulated in [his] soul about the Germans in three months.” Nothing good, it turned out, had accumulated in his soul about the Germans, whom Turgenev, by contrast, admired deeply. The two writers parted, vowing never again to set eyes upon one another.
The Dostoevskys were by this point desperate to leave Baden-Baden, but Fyodor Mikhailovich had gambled away the necessary funds. Finally Anna’s mother sent them a money order. On the day of their departure for Geneva, Dostoevsky was unable to restrain himself and lost fifty francs and a pair of Anna’s earrings at roulette. One of Anna’s rings had to be pawned. An hour and a half before their train was scheduled to leave, Dostoevsky rushed back to the casino and lost twenty more francs.
The next year, in Switzerland, Dostoevsky worked on The Idiot, and Anna gave birth to a little girl. Three-month-old Sonya died of pneumonia that spring. The devastated parents resumed their travels, crossing the Alps to Italy late that summer and eventually settling in Florence. “In my opinion,” wrote Dostoevsky in a letter to his niece, “it is worse than deportation to Siberia. I’m speaking seriously and without exaggeration . . . If here in Florence one finds such a sun and sky, and if there are marvels of art, quite literally unheard-of and indescribable, nonetheless in Siberia, when I left the penal colony, there were other advantages, which here are lacking.” Having to write “without continuous and firsthand Russian impressions” was a particular torment for Dostoevsky, who spent long hours in the Gabinetto Scientifico Letterario G. P. Vieusseux, poring over the Russian periodicals to which he was addicted.
Dostoevsky didn’t have an easy time finishing The Idiot. “I wrote the final chapters day and night in anguish and terrible uncertainty,” he reported to his niece. “I had two epileptic attacks, and I was ten days over deadline.” The last installments of the novel appeared in the journal Russian Messenger early in 1869.
Because of a delayed payment from his publishers, Dostoevsky ran out of money that spring. He and his wife (who took to calling each other Mr. and Mrs. Micawber) left the Via Guicciardini apartment and relocated to a single room overlooking the Mercato Vecchio, later described by Dostoevsky as “a market-square with arcades and splendid granite pillars [and] . . . a municipal fountain in the form of a gigantic bronze boar from whose throat the water flowed (it is a classic masterpiece of rare beauty).”
I, too, had been struck by that fountain, which is for some reason known as Il Porcellino: “the piglet.” It was quite jarring to come into the square for the first time and see, not the piglet one had been expecting, but a huge disaffected-looking boar. Gazing upon the Porcellino, I found myself recalling a line from Gogol’s “Overcoat,” in which a police officer is knocked off his feet by “an ordinary adult piglet which came tearing out of a private house.” This sentence is sometimes cited as an example of Gogol’s absurd use of language: If it’s an adult, then how is it a piglet? Apparently, the same absurd use of language was made by the Florentines when naming their gigantic bronze boar fountain.
In the apartment overlooking the Porcellino, Dostoevsky and his wife caught two tarantulas. On the night of the first tarantula, Dostoevsky lay awake for hours, remembering a certain Cossack of his acquaintance who had died of a tarantula bite fifteen years earlier in Semipalatinsk. Only by repeatedly “reciting aloud Kozma Prutkov’s didactic fable ‘The Conductor and the Tarantula’ ”* did he finally calm himself enough to drift into uneasy dreams.
From Florence, the Dostoevskys returned to Dresden. Over the next twenty months, Dostoevsky wrote “The Eternal Husband” and the first section of the novel that would eventually become Demons.
Arguably Dostoevsky’s most enigmatic novel, sprawling, ideologically overpopulated, generically ambiguous, Demons—formerly translated as The Possessed—haunts me like a prophetic dream. The title comes from the novel’s epigraph: the verses Luke 8:32–36, in which demons leave the man whom they have possessed and enter a herd of swine; the swine rush down a steep bank into a lake and are drowned.
Demons is the story of certain “very strange events” unfolding in a provincial Russian town, a place “hitherto not remarkable for anything.” The narrator—whose eccentric, discursive chronicle includes scenes at which he himself can’t possibly have been present—is a friend of one of the key characters in the novel: an aging pedagogue, poet, and lapsed scholar named Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, whose academic distinction consists of having once “managed to defend a brilliant thesis on the nearly emerged civic and Hanseatic importance of the German town of Hanau, in the period between 1413 and 1418, together with the peculiar and vague reasons why that importance never took place.” Twenty-two years before the events narrated in Demons, Stepan Trofimovich is appointed as tutor to the only son of Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, a wealthy local landowner. He becomes very close with his ten-year-old pupil, frequently waking him up at night “to pour out his injured feelings in tears before him”; the two then “throw themselves into each other’s embrace and weep.”
A few years later, the boy is sent to the lycée in Petersburg, but Stepan Trofimovich remains at the estate. Varvara Petrovna’s husband dies, and she and Stepan Trofimovich fall into a bizarre, intimately acrimonious relationship. Stepan Trofimovich regularly writes Varvara Petrovna two letters a day; Varvara Petrovna lies awake at night worrying about the latest imaginary slight to Stepan Trofimovich’s “reputation as a poet, scholar, or civic figure.” Although “some unbearable love for him” lies hidden in her heart, it subsists “in the midst of constant hatred, jealousy, and contempt.”
Years have passed in this fashion, when “strange rumors” begin to reach the town about Varvara Petrovna’s son, Nikolai Stavrogin, now a twenty-five-year-old officer in the prestigious Horse Guards. There is talk “of some savage unbridledness, of some people being run over by horses,” of Stavrogin having fought two duels, killing one opponent and crippling the other. Finally, Stavrogin himself turns up in his hometown: not loutish and “reeking of vodka,” as everyone has been expecting, but unspeakably elegant, irreproachably dressed, eerily handsome: “His hair was somehow too black, his light eyes were somehow too calm and clear, his complexion was somehow too delicate and white, his teeth like pearls, his lips like coral—the very image of beauty, it would seem, and at the same time repulsive, as it were. People said his face resembled a mask.” All the women in town have soon lost their minds over him—“one party adored him, one party hated him to the point of blood vengeance; but both lost their minds”—and the town’s dandies are utterly eclipsed. The townspeople are particularly surprised to find Stavrogin “quite well educated, and even rather knowledgeable,” and “an extremely reasonable man.” Then, with no warning, “the beast put[s] out its claws”: one day at the club, upon overhearing a senior member exclaim, “No, sir, they won’t lead me by the nose!” Stavrogin seizes the elderly clubman by the nose and manages to pull him two or three steps across the room, nearly provoking a seizure. Stavrogin is unable to explain his actions afterward, and his apology is “so casual that it amount[s] to a fresh insult.” After multiple incidents of this kind, he falls sick with brain fever and goes abroad.
The real action begins in book 2, three years later. Stavrogin returns to town, together with various other locally connected young people with whom he has been associating in Europe. These include Liza, a beautiful heiress; Pyotr Verkhovensky, the estranged, nihilistic son of Stepan Trofimovich; Marya, a crippled “holy fool”; Shatov, a freed serf and a “typical Russian soul,” who is constantly rushing from one ideological extreme to another; Shatov’s sister, Darya, a ward of Varvara Petrovna; and Shatov’s friend Kirillov, a young engineer who is obsessed by his plan to perfect society by being the first person on planet Earth to commit a 100 percent fully willed suicide. With the exception of Kirillov, these young people were all educated by Stepan Trofimovich. Every one of them is obsessed with Stavrogin. Darya, Marya, and Liza are in love with him, while Shatov, Kirillov, and Verkhovensky accord him an obscurely central role in their tormented ideologies.
Like much of Dostoevsky’s work, Demons consists primarily of scandalous revelations, punctuated by outbreaks of mass violence. It emerges that the aristocratic Stavrogin, apparently in an effort to see how far grotesqueness can be taken, has secretly married the saintly, demented cripple Marya. Stepan Trofimovich’s son Pyotr turns out to hold a position of authority in a terrorist organization, the goal of which is to overtake Russia by means of secret five-person cells. Having established a cell of five townsmen, Pyotor begins plotting to propagate chaos, despair, and revolution. Book 2 concludes with a demonstration by workers from a factory just beyond the town limits, where poor conditions have led to an outbreak of Asiatic cholera. In addition to the cholera, which has affected both workers and cattle, the province has also been beset by an epidemic of robberies and fires. Pyotr exploits the burgeoning mass hysteria to convince the governor that the peaceful workers’ demonstration is actually “a rebellion [threatening] to shake the foundations of the state,” and seventy workers are brutally flogged.
Book 3 opens with an elaborate fête organized by the governor’s wife to benefit indigent governesses. The proceedings commence with a “literary matinee,” featuring a reading by a famous expatriate writer, a transparent parody of Turgenev: “It’s now seven years that I have been sitting in Karlsruhe,” the famous writer announces, “and when the city council decided last year to install a new drainpipe, I felt in my heart that this Karlsruhian drainpipe question was dearer and fonder to me than all the questions of my dear fatherland . . .” Pyotr and his five-man cell sabotage the fête, filling the hall with drunkards and criminals, and reading aloud a highly offensive poem about governesses. The escalating mayhem is curtailed only by the announcement of a terrible new incident of arson: the saintly cripple Marya and her alcoholic brother have been burned alive in their house.
Everyone immediately suspects Stavrogin. They all think that he wanted to get Marya out of the way so he could marry Liza, the beautiful heiress. In fact, the fire was set by an escaped convict, Fedka, who believed that he was fulfilling Stavrogin’s orders. Stavrogin guessed at the convict’s intentions, but did nothing to thwart them. Meanwhile, Liza, who knows that Stavrogin doesn’t return her love, has slept with him anyway. Stavrogin admits to having “ruined her without loving her,” but says that after all she might be his “last hope,” so maybe they should run away to Switzerland together. Liza refuses. When word of the fire reaches her, she rushes in horror to the scene of the crime, where a mob has gathered. Holding her to blame for the arson—“ ‘They don’t just kill, they also come and look!’ ”—the mob beats her to death.
The day after the fête, Pyotr convinces his terrorist cell that Shatov is scheming to betray them, and must be silenced at all costs. He then convinces Kirillov, who is still plotting his humanity-liberating suicide, to leave a note assuming the blame for Shatov’s murder: he’ll be dead anyway, so what difference can it make to him? Shatov is killed and his body dumped in a lake. Kirillov signs the fake confession and shoots himself.
In the novel’s closing chapters, Stepan Trofimovich, appalled by the deeds of his son and former pupils, sets off on foot into the countryside, takes up with a woman selling gospels, checks into an inn, and falls into a raving fever. In his fever, he begs to hear the verses from Luke about “ces cochons,” which excite him to a morbid degree. “These demons who come out of a sick man,” he says, represent the accumulated “sores” and “miasmas” that have come out of Russia; the swine they have entered are none other than “us, us and them, and [Pyotr] . . . et les autres avec lui, and I perhaps am the first, standing at the very head; and we shall throw ourselves, the madmen and the possessed, from a rock into the sea, and we shall all drown.” Having delivered himself of this idea, he dies. Varvara Petrovna has the body moved to the churchyard on her estate.
Meanwhile, back in town, one of the terrorists has confessed to his role in Shatov’s murder, and all five members of the cell are arrested. (Only Pyotr escapes justice, fleeing to Petersburg.) At this time, Stavrogin writes to Darya, inviting her to accompany him to Switzerland to be his “nurse.” “The fact that I’m calling you to me is a terrible baseness,” he writes. “Realize, also, that I do not pity you, since I’m calling you, and do not respect you, since I’m waiting for you to come.” Darya rushes to join him, but it’s too late. Stavrogin has hanged himself in his mother’s attic, leaving a note: “Blame no one; it was I.”
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.”
As suggested by the emphasis on conversion narrative, mimetic desire is a fundamentally Christian theory. Just as “the false prophets proclaim that in tomorrow’s world men will be gods for each other,” so does mimetic desire entail worshiping another human being as a god, with inevitably disastrous results. There is one and only one human who actually is a god, and that’s Jesus Christ. Accordingly, it is only by taking Christ as a model for our actions that we can redeem mimetic desire as a positive force.
Although I am unconvinced that mimetic desire is the fundamental content of the novelistic form, or that humans’ mimetic desires can be channeled productively only by imitating Christ, Girard’s theory unquestionably explains a great deal in the work of certain novelists, particularly those such as Stendhal and Dostoevsky, who were deeply engaged with Christian thought and the practice of a Christian life.* The solution is particularly convincing in the case of Demons. Girard characterizes Stavrogin—whose name combines the Greek stavros (cross) and the Russian rog (horn), suggesting the Antichrist—as a test case of the ultimate mediator of desire: one who has no desires himself. “It is not clear whether he no longer desires because Others desire him or whether Others desire him because he no longer desires”; in any case, Stavrogin is trapped in a deadly cycle:
No longer having a mediator himself, he becomes a magnetic pole of desire and hatred . . . all the characters in The Possessed become his slaves . . . Kirillov, Shatov, Pyotr, and all the women in The Possessed succumb to Stavrogin’s strange power and reveal to him in almost identical terms the part he plays in their existence. Stavrogin is their “light,” they wait for him as for the “sun”; before him they feel they are “before the Almighty”; they speak to him as “to God himself.”
Stavrogin, Girard continues, is “young, good-looking, rich, strong, intelligent, and noble,” not because Dostoevsky “feels a secret sympathy for him,” but because the test subject must “unite in his own person all the conditions for metaphysical success”—it has to be without any effort on his part that men and women alike “fall at his feet and surrender to him.” Stavrogin is “rapidly reduced to the most horrible caprices,” ending with suicide; this is how Dostoevsky illustrates the price of “the ‘success’ of the metaphysical undertaking.” Because the purest culmination of mimetic desire is self-annihilation, Stavrogin’s demise is accompanied by “a quasi-suicide of the collectivity”: Kirillov shoots himself; Shatov, Liza, and Marya indirectly bring about their own murders; and Stepan Trofimovich self-destructs in a fit of madness.
Girard’s interpretation accounts for Stavrogin’s psychic emptiness, for the desperate mania of others to be near him and to co-opt him into their philosophies. It answers Stavrogin’s question “What the devil do you need me for?” It explains the metaphor of demonic possession and, through the idea of mimetic contagion, the mass effect on the whole town. It also accounts finally for the role of Stepan Trofimovich in the novel: it is Stepan Trofimovich’s “Russian liberalism,” the valorization of self-fulfillment, the deism, freethinking, and Francophilia, that create the vacuum embodied by Stavrogin. “Stepan Trofimovich is the father of all the possessed. He is Pyotr Verkhovensky’s father; he is the spiritual father of Shatov, of [Darya], of [Liza], and especially of Stavrogin, since he taught them all,” Girard writes. “Everything in The Possessed starts with Stepan Trofimovich and ends with Stavrogin.”
The strange thing is that, during the “demonic” years of my graduate-student career, Girard himself played the role of Stepan Trofimovich: the pedagogue-father who gave birth to monsters. It wasn’t just mimetic sickness that we had, my classmates and I, but the idea of mimetic sickness, and we had learned it from him.
When I returned to Stanford after fifteen months of trying to write a novel, the department dynamics had changed completely. There were two years’ worth of new admits. Unlike the other students in Luba’s and my class—an extremely efficient young man who completed a PhD on the Chinese reception of Shakespeare in just four years; a Romanian girl who briefly studied unreliable narrators before dropping out of the program and moving to Canada—they had coalesced into a community, taking classes together, reading one another’s papers, going to lectures, discussing their work long into the night.
“They’re so . . . enthusiastic,” Luba said, not altogether approvingly, with reference to these students. She had just gotten back together with a college boyfriend and had moved off campus. My relationship with my college boyfriend was, by contrast, increasingly strained. I found myself spending less time at home or with Luba, and more time on campus with my new classmates.
The circle was polarized around Matej, a fast-talking philosophy major from Croatia, who combined Stavrogin’s “masklike” beauty—narrow glinting eyes, high cheekbones, too-black hair—with a long-limbed, perfectly proportioned physical elegance, such that his body always looked at once extravagantly casual and flawlessly composed. The first time I saw him—as it happens, in an introductory meeting of Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky seminar, which neither of us ended up taking—the overall effect struck me as excessive, almost parodic. But the more time I spent around Matej, the more vividly I realized that I was for the first time in the presence of pure charisma, the real thing. It was an elemental power, like weather or electricity. Recognizing it had no effect on your physical response.
Like the related phenomenon of charm, charisma resides largely in speech. Matej, who had spent the last three years working for a radio station in Zagreb, had a deep, mesmerizing, immediately recognizable voice, as well as a rhetorical talent for provoking conflicts with one hand while smoothing them over with the other, making concessions and winning them at the same time, producing the impression on everyone involved that great, collegial, and somehow intimate progress was being made in the working out of ideas.
I knew of at least two extremely smart and attractive women who were in love with Matej. Both were dating other men, whom Matej befriended. He then behaved very flirtatiously with the women. The flirtation was cloaked in a kind of gallantry that everyone found exciting, until one day they suddenly didn’t. One of the couples broke up; the boy transferred to Harvard and the girl, a formerly lively and charming person, wandered around campus like a ghost, her eyes red, talking about her cats.
Then there was my comp lit classmate Keren. She and her boyfriend, Ilan, a linguist, were inseparable from Matej. The three of them shared a car, and one summer they all lived together in Berlin. Keren and Matej were office-mates and spent a lot of time alone in each other’s company, but Ilan and Matej would also sometimes go watch basketball together, without Keren. Matej, like Stavrogin, had a magnetic effect on both sexes.
It was a great mystery how Keren and Ilan managed to stay together despite Matej. I asked her about it once, in a roundabout way; she told me that she and Ilan were committed to each other for the foreseeable future, but that they both understood and accepted that each might not be the most intensely thought-about person in the other’s psyche 100 percent of the time. “You know how intense things can get with the people you work with,” she said.
For his first two years at Stanford, Matej had a roommate, Daniel, whom he rapidly reduced to a state of near paralytic dependence that persisted long after they stopped living together. Daniel and Matej had been assigned to each other by the housing services, on the basis of their shared two-pack-a-day smoking habit. Daniel, a mathematician, was overweight, although not grotesquely so, and would have been a pleasant and entertaining person were it not for a kind of deep, inexplicable pathetic quality that he seemed to be at great pains to convey to others, even to the point of aggressiveness. He had a knack for attracting people even more forlorn than he, who then became his demons. One of them, a homeless guy called Bobby, eventually moved into Daniel’s apartment and refused to leave; you could always find him lurking on the balcony, making insulting remarks. Daniel, meanwhile, became increasingly unable to make even the smallest decisions without first pouring out his heart to Matej, who patiently listened and then explained at great length the impossibility of his actually advising Daniel one way or another, because he, Matej, was powerless to cure Daniel’s ontological sickness.
To my bemusement, after having met me only a few times with Matej, Daniel began addressing me long e-mails full of the most detailed and depressing confessions, many of them health-related. “I think I have never had sex with a woman,” he wrote once. “Also, I haven’t done laundry in almost a month and all my underwear is dirty.” After debating for a long time how and whether to reply, I counseled him to go out and buy more underwear. Daniel wrote a full single-spaced page to thank me for this brilliant advice. He began telling me dreams he’d had about me. In these dreams I inevitably appeared as a benevolent figure, floating several feet off the ground.
Among my friends, only Luba was unaffected by Matej. “It’s true there was some addictive quality about him,” she said later. “I felt it, too. I remember sitting on that bench outside the library. He would start talking, and you would be unable to get up and leave. But afterward, hours had gone by, and what had he really said? It was all empty.”
Was it really all empty? All of it? I still don’t know. Sometimes I think it was, other times I think it wasn’t. At any rate, the rest of us spent much of our time in much the way Luba described, reading until late at night in the library, periodically reconvening outside to drink coffee and smoke Matej’s cigarettes. The library became the psychic center of our lives. We all dreamed about it—intense, elaborate dreams. Keren, for example, dreamed that I had filmed a “protest documentary” about the early Friday closing hours, the restriction of graduate-student loan privileges, and the overcrowding of dissertation study carrels; this mordant social critique, which I had apparently shot digitally in collaboration with Keren’s high-school classmate Anat (“in reality, now a belly dancer in Tel Aviv”), had been screened in the library basement, where it actually fomented a violent revolution and resulted in the severe beating of one of the library guards.
In retrospect, the beating of the library guard probably derived from the story of Miguel, the genial three-hundred-pound guard who sat at the front desk, checking IDs and bags. Miguel stood out from among the other library workers, who fit a more or less Dostoevskian mold: a tiny old woman whose organism seemed designed to combine maximum disgruntledness with minimum body mass; a giant white-bearded Santa Claus look-alike who spent all his breaks sitting outside under an olive tree, playing a balalaika. But Matej said that Miguel had confessed to him, late one night when the library was almost empty, that he had an incurable cancer, and would be dead in four months.
This story, which restored Miguel to the Dostoevskian milieu of his workplace, nevertheless accorded with neither his robust physique nor his jovial demeanor. “If he really had cancer, why would he still be checking bags at the library?” someone asked.
“What do you expect him to do, spend his last hundred and eighty days in Disneyland?” Matej demanded.
But four months passed, six months, a year. Miguel was still checking bags, still smiling and saying “Take care, guys,” like some obscure warning.
It turned out that Matej and I were both usually up past four in the morning, and I got in the habit of occasionally going back to his place after the library closed at midnight. Daniel would be in the bathtub, solving math problems; sometimes he would fall asleep, and we would hear him snoring. We sat in the living room, where Matej put away five or six bottles of beer and became more forthcoming about his past.
One night, to my incredulity, he told me that he had been celibate for the past seven years. Seven years ago, he explained, he had experienced a period of total, shattering lucidity, and fell in love with a girl who was obsessed with a Slovenian disc jockey. He had pursued the girl desperately, determined to tear her away from the DJ, regardless of whether he had to annihilate himself in the process. He got the girl, for a time, but they drove each other mad, quite literally. She ran away to Ljubljana. He followed her. She rushed to the top floor of her hotel and tried to throw herself from a window. Realizing he was on the verge of destroying both her and himself, Matej fled to Venice, holed himself up in a pension, and decided to read every book Nietzsche had ever written. In his state of lucidity, he not only understood immediately everything Nietzsche was trying to say, but also effortlessly identified where Nietzsche had made his mistakes. Matej began to write a philosophical work addressing the mistakes made by Nietzsche, but became distracted by a message being spelled to him by the keys hanging behind the desk of the pension. He spent three more weeks in Venice, obsessed by those keys, before he ran out of money and returned to Zagreb, where he was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He refused to take lithium. He said his brain was trying to convey a message to him, an important message about how he was living his life, and he had to figure it out on his own.
A few nights after this confession, when we had both drunk more than usual, Matej and I ended up in bed together. The next morning, I had never seen anyone in so black a mood, almost visibly black. It was as if I had stolen his soul.
People were usually surprised to learn that chain-smoking, hard-drinking Matej came from a seriously Catholic family. He was the eldest of eight brothers and sisters spaced out over fifteen years.
“Man, that is one long history of your dad banging your mom!” yelled one of the weird characters who followed Matej everywhere—a Portuguese mathematician who I think had a mild form of Tourette’s.
“I’m glad to hear you have an accurate grasp of the mechanism,” Matej replied.
The most unexpected feature of Matej’s family background was his great-uncle Pavao, who was not only a cardinal but had been archbishop of Zagreb for more than twenty years. We only half believed in the existence of Matej’s ecclesiastical great-uncle—until the day he died and The New York Times ran an obituary remembering Pavao, aka “the Rock of Croatia,” for rebuilding the Croatian Church after communism and preaching tolerance during the Balkan wars.
In his capacity as a leftist Catholic intellectual, Matej had already read Girard in college, and at Stanford he persuaded us all to take a class on French social thought taught by a Girardian with a joint appointment at the École Polytechnique. And when Girard himself came out of retirement to teach a literature class on mimetic theory, we all signed up.
We were all fascinated by Girard’s theory, but it also irritated us. Matej said our resistance only testified to the strength of our romantic individualist delusions, and to the truth of mimetic theory. His Girardianism became the sign and symbol of his inaccessibility, the thing we all resented about him: the way he always came late and left early, inhabited a near-empty apartment, insisted on dining every day at exactly six fifteen at his depressing eating club. Such behavior was consistent with a Girardian mediator, with an iron-willed narcissist who “universalizes, industrializes asceticism for the sake of desire”; by acting in this way, Matej was thereby supporting his side in the ongoing argument, proving that we were all the slaves of our own egotistical desires.
After the night we spent together, Matej began avoiding me. When I confronted him about it, he said that my obsession with him—it was true that by that time I, like everyone else, was obsessed with him—was a sign of sickness. “I can’t cure your metaphysical lack,” he told me irritably. “I can’t do anything for you. All I can do is make you miserable.” He paused and started patting his pockets, looking for his cigarettes. “You think I’m different from you; you think I have something you lack. But there’s no difference between us. You and I are very similar—we’re exactly the same.”
Matej often brought up the subject of our supposed similarity, which struck me as frankly ludicrous. What about us was the same? He had spent his high-school years drinking coffee in basements during bomb scares, reading Max Scheler, becoming convinced that he was a member of the zoo commission and had to inspect the living conditions of every elephant in Europe. He believed that the only way to be good was to imitate Jesus, that Kant’s categorical imperative represented a dilution of the Sermon on the Mount, that suicide was immoral because human life doesn’t belong to the individual. What did it mean to say we were the same, when all our experiences and beliefs were different?
In the final analysis, this is what was so hurtful about Girardianism: it made love totally worthless. The curiosity and empathy engendered by love, which I found so valuable, were redescribed as flaws of human nature. The drive to commit generous errors, which I thought of as the only possible egress from the prison of self-interest and inertia, was made out to be a form of egotism. “The characters in The Possessed offer themselves as sacrifice, and offer to Stavrogin everything that is most precious to them,” Girard writes, and such sacrifice is understood to be shameful, vain, the opposite of generous.
Furthermore, the entire Girardian enterprise began to strike me as hypocritical. If Girard was right about the human condition, the only appropriate course of action was to stop what we were doing, all of us, right now. If novels were really about what he said they were about, then their production should cease. All we really needed was one novel, and we would all read it and realize, like St. Augustine, that the basic premises of literary narrative—love and ambition—could bring only misery. Renouncing our desires, we would give ourselves up to spiritual contemplation. We would abandon our program of becoming scholars: what use were scholars in a world where knowledge, learning, and the concept of difference turned out to be a mirage?
The mood in our circle became increasingly strained. Keren dreamed that the Turks had taken over the world, and that she herself had been complicit: she had had a job in Jerusalem interviewing people about their fears, and now the Turks were using this information to terrorize people into submission.
Fishkin, who was also in the Girard class, dreamed that he was beating up Matej, in a fight over the Ottoman occupation of the Balkans. Fishkin hit Matej in the face, and Matej, bleeding from his nose, kept saying: “We just can’t forget.”
I dreamed that Matej and I were in the Rose Garden in Konya, immobilized by swarming hordes of pilgrims. Matej wanted to go inside the mausoleum of Mevlana Rumi, which filled me with inexplicable dread. I tried to discourage him, but he dodged me in the crowd. I hurried up the steps after him, but couldn’t go inside—I didn’t have a head scarf. I asked the custodian to lend me one of the scarves they keep there for tourists. In my haste, I posed the request in an undiplomatic way, not bothering to hide that my aim was only to get my friend, and not to pay my respects to Rumi. The custodian drew himself up. “If you really want to get in,” he said, not meeting my eyes, “you have to tell me one thing: do you know the difference between the Lord our Father and the Holy Ghost?”
I said I did.
“Oh? Then you can’t go in!”
“But—but I don’t really know the difference. I mean, I know they’re two separate parts of the trinity, but then they say the trinity is the same as the godhead . . . I hear that even for Catholics it’s supposed to be a big mystery. Anyway, if I’m not allowed in,” I added, “you should definitely send someone in there to get my friend, because he really does know the difference between the Lord our Father and the Holy Ghost.”
“Not my problem,” said the custodian, blocking the door. I tried to look around him, but all I could see was the tomb itself, covered with its green cloth.
Matej spent the summer in Croatia, and I managed to stop thinking about him. In fact, I ended up dating one of his best friends, Max, who had formed the deep conviction that he and I belonged together.
“I think it’s an illusion,” I told Max when he explained to me his views. “I can’t actually cure your metaphysical lack.” But I didn’t have it in my heart to turn away what looked to me, and what turned out really to be, love.
Nonetheless, when school started again in September, Matej and I found ourselves living in the same on-campus single-student residence, and somehow immediately lapsed into our old habits, meeting several nights a week, staying up half the night, talking about Proust (whom we were both reading for the first time), and making sentimental declarations to each other. “But what will become of us?” I remember asking.
“You’ll become a writer,” he replied.
“But what about you?”
“Oh, don’t you worry about me.”
The idea that I had fallen prey to Matej’s Onegin-like Byronism had meanwhile become a joke between us. One day as we were leaving his apartment, he picked up a scarf that Keren had forgotten there, and stuffed it in the back pocket of his jeans.
“OK, let’s go,” he said. I started to laugh. “What? Do I look ridiculous?”
“No—you look jaunty and Byronic!”
But then one night it happened again. We were talking about the problem of the person: “If you’re stroking someone’s hair, is that a sign of affection, or is that the affection itself?” We spent the night together, and I somehow even thought things might work out this time—I would just have to find some way of explaining it to Max. But the next morning, over stale English muffins, Matej informed me that he was thinking of joining a Carthusian monastery he had seen in Slovenia, where the monks grew some kind of herbs. Staring at him in disbelief, I said the first thing that came to my head: “But they take a vow of silence, and you can’t be quiet for two minutes straight!”
“That’s the point,” he snapped. “It would be hard for me.”
I threw out my half-eaten muffin and left, feeling like someone had kicked me in the stomach, like I had hit the bottom of some kind of abyss and had lost touch with everything real.
“There are strange friendships,” Dostoevsky writes, with reference to Stepan Trofimovich and Varvara Petrovna in Demons. “Two friends are almost ready to eat each other, they live like that all their lives, and yet they cannot part. Parting is even impossible: the friend who waxes capricious and breaks it off will be the first to fall sick and die.” A marvelous passage, communicating so economically the diabolical undercurrent of certain friendships, their weird fatalism.
On the same subject, Proust writes of a moment when, “after a certain year,” extremely close friends, as if by agreement, “cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.” These lines occur in a passage about old age—about how death insidiously seeps into life toward the end, enveloping the stillliving subject in its chrysalis. But who knows how these things really happen? Maybe death didn’t separate those friends at all. Maybe they had to will themselves to stop seeing one another, precisely in order to let death in.
The last time I saw Matej was on a beautiful September afternoon in San Francisco. His eighteen-year-old brother, Luka, was visiting from Zagreb, and the three of us went to the zoo. I remember that Matej treated me with a certain extra gentleness—he had always opened my car door, but that day he also closed it after me. Luka turned out to be a younger and impossibly skinnier copy of Matej, with the same narrow, slightly squinting eyes. It was like meeting a Matej from the past, one lost to me forever. In the zoo we spent a long time watching the penguins, the varied saucereyed creatures of Madagascar, and the primates, Matej’s favorite: “Human, all too human,” he sighed before the longfaced patas monkey. Luka had never seen an anteater before, and squinted at it with almost frightening intensity. Last of all we visited the koalas. “ ‘Blind, helpless, and smaller than a nickel, the tiny embryo must find its way to its mother’s pouch,’ ” I read from the educational display, and Matej and I both started laughing at the joke before he said it: “Such is the nature of life on this earth.”
Shortly after our trip to the zoo, Stanford comp lit held a departmental lunch for students and faculty. At this lunch, which I was unable to attend, Matej sat next to my adviser and told her, inaccurately and unaccountably, that I blamed her for my poor performance on the university orals exam the previous year, which I had passed, but just barely. (The exam had taken place at the height of the demonic period, during a record-setting heat wave, and I had delivered an apparently very weird talk on conspiracy theories in the nineteenth-century novel.)
To this day, I have no idea why Matej would have said such a thing to my adviser, with whom he wasn’t even acquainted; that was their first conversation, and was later relayed to me independently by both Luba and my adviser. I wrote Matej a caustic e-mail. He didn’t reply. A few weeks later I heard that he was dating an Israeli linguist who had been to high school with Keren; that Keren had passed her exams but had fallen into a depression and put on an improbable amount of weight; that the homeless guy, Bobby, had colonized Daniel’s bedroom and was using it to run a bicycle repair shop.
We were all living in San Francisco by then. Keren and Ilan were sharing an apartment with Matej and Daniel in Noe Valley. I had moved to Twin Peaks, where winds howled all day and all night, and giant clouds rushed across the street as if in a hurry to get somewhere, occasionally revealing dramatic views of the city. The others all made fun of me for moving there—Ilan called it Wuthering Heights—but I didn’t care. I barely saw any of them anyway, once I stopped talking to Matej.
That spring, Keren wrote me an e-mail announcing that she was pregnant. Several months later, she invited me to a going-away party for Matej: he was apparently moving back to Croatia for good. “I know you guys still aren’t speaking, but it seems absurd not to invite you,” Keren wrote. I didn’t go to the party.
Nearly a year passed before I next saw Keren. She and Ilan had moved back to Stanford when the baby was born, and we met for lunch one day when I was on campus to use the library. We walked from her apartment to a French café on California Avenue, the kind of bourgeois establishment we never used to frequent. It was one of the almost oppressively perfect days that succeed one another at Stanford in the spring and fall, so uniform that they might have been manufactured on an assembly line. We sat outside at a table in the sun. Conversation turned to the subject of René Girard, who had recently been elected to the French Academy.
“Good for him, I guess,” I said.
“Yeah,” Keren said unenthusiastically, picking at her salad. “But part of me thinks it’s grotesque and obscene, given what happened to Matej.” As I was debating whether to ask what she meant, Keren’s daughter, Malka, who was teething, began to make discontented noises. Keren absentmindedly stuck a finger in her mouth. As Malka was happily sucking at Keren’s finger, an unknown middle-aged woman descended upon us, beaming: “What a beautiful baby! Whose is she?” Not waiting for an answer, she peered into my face: “Is she yours?”
What weird people there are in the world, I thought. Why would Keren’s finger be in my baby’s mouth?
Keren identified herself as the mother, which made it her turn to have her face peered into. Finally the woman walked away across the street, still beaming. Curiosity overcame my reserve: “So what’s Matej doing now, anyway?” I asked.
That was when I learned that Matej had dropped out of Stanford more than a year ago. He had given up first drinking, and then smoking. He had sold or given away all his belongings, and applied to a theology program in Zagreb. Upon the conclusion of this program, he had entered a monastery on a small island in the Adriatic. Keren and Ilan had received one communication from him, an e-mail describing the scenery on the island.
“He says it’s beautiful,” Keren said.
I found myself thinking back to a long-ago conversation, when I had told Matej that he was a destructive element in the lives of others. He had surprised me by not objecting. “What can I do?” he had asked, and it sounded like a real question.
Now he had done something—like a novelistic hero, he had achieved a deathlike conversion, renounced narrative. There was a chapter in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel that explained it perfectly, a chapter on the secret affinity between the novelistic vaniteux and the religious ascetic. The “strange strength of soul,” which enables Julien Sorel to scale such brilliant heights in his romantic and political life, Girard writes, is exactly the same as the strength called upon by the man of God to resist his worldly desires. One renounces insincerely, to get what he is renouncing, while the other renounces sincerely, to become closer to God, but the motion is identical. This kinship also links the demonic Stavrogin and the saintly Myshkin: “Like Stavrogin, Myshkin acts as a magnet for unattached desires; he fascinates all the characters in The Idiot,” Girard writes. “We can understand why the Prince and Stavrogin have the same point of departure in the author’s rough draft.”
I was still in a daze when I got to the library. It was a day for surprises: sitting at the front desk, larger than life, was Miguel, who was supposed to have died of cancer at least four years ago. “Long time no see,” he said, beaming.
“It’s fantastic,” I stammered. When I got to the stacks I kept staring dumbly at the call numbers, unable to determine whether PG 3776.B7 came before or after PG 3776.B27. Eventually I found myself back downstairs, logged into a computer terminal, writing a pointless e-mail to Matej. I told him that I had been strongly impressed to learn that he was in a monastery, and that I wished him luck. To my amazement, a reply arrived the following day. “Dear Elif,” Matej wrote,
Thank you for your kind wish. I wish for you all the things I wish for myself. I have been living at the monastery for about four months now. I joined the order of discalced Carmelites, whose full name is: the Order of Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel. In the monastery I’m in charge of setting the tables and cleaning the dining hall. Until a few days ago I was the substitute, but now I’m already the main mess boy. You can see that, as usual, I make quick progress . . .
The main mess boy—I shook my head in wonder. Was he Fabrizio in the charterhouse or Julien in the seminary? Would we all live to see Matej be made cardinal?
The following year, Fishkin actually tracked down the Carmelites’ website and found several photographs of Matej taking his vows, together with two other novices: one looked like a twelve-year-old schoolboy, while the other, who had a shaved head and wore a heavy metal cross, resembled a repentant convict. One photograph showed a somehow obtuselooking friar pulling the black habit over Matej’s downcast head; another showed the three novices standing outside in the sunlight, Matej squinting with a familiar, irritable air.
The last photograph, however, captured Matej in an expression I had never seen before, the eyes watchful, the mouth set in a somehow childish line. It had been taken at such close range that I recognized, with a jolt, a birthmark on his neck that I had half forgotten. As a child, Matej had once told me, he used to lock himself in the bathroom, desperately searching in the mirror for differences between his face and that of his father, whom even at that time he resembled to a remarkable degree; he would invariably find the differences, and reduce himself to tears with the thought that he was certainly a prince, lost forever to the throne.
On my third day in Florence, I tore myself from Dostoevsky long enough to visit Santa Croce, to see Dante’s cenotaph. The cenotaph hadn’t yet been constructed in 1817, when Stendhal famously visited the basilica and was awestruck by the tombs of Alfieri, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo: “What men! What an amazing group! And Tuscany can add to their number Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch . . .” Happening next upon Volterrano’s frescoes of the four Sibyls, Stendhal was utterly overwhelmed:
I was already in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty, I saw it up close—I touched it, so to speak. I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations . . . leaving Santa Croce, I experienced palpitations . . . my spirit was exhausted, I walked in fear of falling.
In the mid-1980s, based on a decade-long study of 106 tourists admitted to the psychiatric ward at Florence’s Santa Maria Nuova hospital, Italian scientists identified a new psychopathology: la sindrome di Stendhal, a state triggered by beautiful works of art and characterized by “loss of hearing and the sense of color, hallucinations, euphoria, panic and the fear of going mad or even of dying.” Unmarried European men between the ages of twenty-five and forty were found to be particularly susceptible. The average hospital stay was four days.
Walking over the tombs of knights and scientists, among my fellow tourists—still-recognizable humans who had been transformed into semi-robotic zombies, hypnotized by the screens of their digital cameras—I kept a close eye on the men in the unmarried, European, twenty-five-to-forty-year-old category, looking for signs of Stendhal’s syndrome.
In a coincidence that Girard would appreciate, a Brazilian neurologist recently diagnosed Dostoevsky himself with Stendhal’s syndrome. The diagnosis was based on both the “impressions left in the novel The Idiot, which was practically all written in Florence,” and Anna’s testimony of Dostoevsky’s reaction upon seeing Holbein’s Dead Christ in Basel the previous year. The great proto-existential novelist had spent fifteen or twenty minutes standing before the painting, riveted in place. “His agitated face had a kind of dread in it,” Anna wrote, “something I had noticed more than once during the first moments of an epileptic seizure.”
In The Idiot, Dostoevsky has Prince Myshkin encounter a reproduction of the Dead Christ in Rogozhin’s house. Myshkin, too, is bowled over by what appears to him to be Nature itself made visible “in the form of a huge machine of the most modern construction which, dull and insensible, has clutched, crushed, and swallowed up a great priceless Being, a Being worth all nature and its laws . . .” As Joseph Frank has observed, “no greater challenge could be offered to Dostoevsky’s own faith in Christ the God-Man than such a vision of a tortured and decaying human being.”
The location of Dostoevsky’s house in Florence was pointed out to me by an old Stanford classmate, the poet Eugene Ostashevsky, who had been living for the past two years on the Via Guicciardini: the Maison Idiot formed a permanent feature of his jogging route. Eugene and his wife, Oya, were now preparing to leave Italy for good, and, on the evening after our visit to Santa Croce, Max and I spent several hours helping them vacate their apartment. Having filled several suitcases with old clothes and shoes, we set out to carry them to a metal bin some blocks away, for donation to the Church. “An archbishop will be wearing this someday,” Eugene remarked, stuffing a woman’s tangerinecolored leather jacket into a plastic bag. On the streets the air was heavy and hot. Max, who had been given a suitcase with no handle, was gamely clutching it to his chest. At dinner afterward we all drank a good deal of Chianti, which, with the heat and the exertion, went straight to my head. Among my confused recollections of the evening, I remember Eugene saying that if he were to start out as a college student again, right now in 2009, he would study Islamic fundamentalism, because that was the richest and most significant cultural phenomenon in the contemporary world.
“Really?” I asked. “You mean you wouldn’t do literature?”
He stared at me. “You mean you would do literature? Knowing what you now know?”
I thought about it. “I’m too shallow to study Islamic fundamentalism,” I said. “You know . . . if it isn’t a thing of beauty . . .”
“Well, it is, in its way, a thing of beauty—it has beautiful aspects.” He said something about the mathematically beautiful complexity of terrorist informational networks. I found myself staring at the ceiling, at a stain that resembled a disembodied nose. “. . . like Dostoevsky,” Eugene was saying then, and I tuned back in. “It’s exactly the same thing.”
I struggled to regrasp the subject of the conversation. “You mean like Demons?”
“Like Demons. ‘If he believes, he doesn’t believe that he believes, and if he doesn’t believe, he doesn’t believe that he doesn’t believe,’?” Eugene said, quoting a line spoken in the novel by Kirillov. “And not just like Demons . . .”
Islamic fundamentalism was the Grand Inquisitor and the Underground Man, it was what the existentialists called “awful freedom,” the reinvention of irrationality by marginalized people, just in order to spite science. I tried unsuccessfully to imagine my life devoted to the study of Islamic fundamentalism. If I cared, then I didn’t care that I cared, and if I didn’t care, I didn’t care that I didn’t care.
As we were leaving, Eugene gave Max and me a copy of his new book, The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza. I immediately remembered DJ Spinoza, Eugene’s alter ego, from my early years at Stanford, when Eugene had only recently left. I remembered a party in a very narrow apartment in San Francisco, inhabited by two Germans, one of whom wore a strange nose ring that gave him the perpetual appearance of having to blow his nose. I saw a girl actually reach over and try to wipe it off with a napkin, but it was a nose ring and therefore made of metal.
I spotted Matej at the counter, pouring a drink. “I want one, too,” I said. He sloshed some gin and tonic in a plastic cup and handed it to me. We were standing in the doorway of the back stairs, drinking in silence, when an enormous, extremely drunk Russian approached us with a menacing expression. He marched directly up to Matej, as if he intended to walk right through him, stopping only when he was almost touching him with his belly.
“Do you know DJ Spinoza?” he demanded truculently.
Matej shrugged, stepping almost imperceptibly aside; he had a catlike talent, probably perfected over long years of practice, for evading potentially violent situations.
“Do you know DJ Spinoza?” the drunk man roared.
“No,” Matej said sharply. “I know Spinoza.”
From Eugene and Oya’s apartment, Max and I walked back across the Arno to the sublet we had found through one of Eugene’s friends—a minuscule, slope-ceilinged apartment on the top floor of an ancient building on the Via Vigna Vecchia. We collapsed into the tiny twin beds and fell asleep almost immediately. I dreamed of DJ Spinoza. In my dream, his initials stood for “Don Juan Spinoza.”
At three in the morning I opened my eyes, irremediably awake, and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. The window overlooked a sea of moonlit rooftops. Behind them loomed Santa Croce like a pale luminous spaceship, its rocketlike spires thrusting into the sky. I remembered Stendhal’s description of the church: “its plain carpentry roof, its unfinished façade, all of this deeply speaks to my soul. Ah! If only I could forget! . . . A monk came up to me; instead of repulsion bordering to physical horror, I found in myself a friendly feeling towards him.”* Stendhal didn’t care for monks, but this one was an exception: he unlocked the transept where he saw Volterrano’s Sibyls.
My thoughts drifted to Chekhov’s “Black Monk,” the story that opens with a young scholar’s arrival at the estate of his former tutor, a famous horticulturalist, on a night when frost threatens the orchards. The young scholar—his name is Kovrin, and he studies philosophy and psychology—falls in love with the horticulturalist’s daughter, Tanya. They become engaged. One day, Kovrin tells Tanya a legend about a monk all in black, who appeared a thousand years ago in the deserts of Syria or Arabia. That monk projected a mirage, in the form of another monk, floating on the surface of a lake, before the eyes of a faraway fisherman. “From that mirage there was cast another mirage,” Kovrin explains, “so that the image of the black monk began to be repeated endlessly from one layer of the atmosphere to another,” from Africa, Spain, India, and the Arctic Circle, to Mars, to the Southern Cross.
According to this legend—Kovrin can’t remember where he heard it—the mirage will return to earth exactly one thousand years from the day the monk first walked in the desert. “And it seems that the thousand years is almost up . . . we may expect the black monk any day now.”
In fact, the black monk appears before Kovrin the very next day, notifying him that he, Kovrin, is a scholar of genius, one of the elect servants of the eternal truth. Kovrin realizes that he is hallucinating. “So what?” replies the monk. “You’re sick because you have overworked and exhausted yourself, and that means that you have sacrificed your health to an idea, and the time is near when you will give up to it life itself.” Intoxicated by his own martyrdom to mankind’s brilliant future, Kovrin gives himself up entirely to his studies and to the monk’s visits, which spur him to ever-greater heights of exaltation, scholarship, and irritability.
One day Tanya discovers her husband in a terrible state: he is talking to the monk, and is clearly insane. She takes him back to her father’s house, where they prevent him from working, and nurse him back to health. But the black monk had been trying to tell Kovrin something, and in that something resided the entire meaning of his life. “Why, why have you cured me?” he demands, cursing Tanya.
The horticulturalist dies of grief. Kovrin receives a coveted professorship, but is unable to accept: he has begun to cough blood. As he finally expires of a tubercular hemorrhage, the black monk appears to him, whispering “that he is a genius, and that he is dying only because his weak human body has lost its balance and is no longer able to serve as a container for genius.”
Among Chekhov’s stories, “The Black Monk” is notable for its Gothic overtones, its clinically accurate picture of megalomania, and the number and diversity of its critical interpretations. Badgered by readers to reveal its true relevance to his soul, Chekhov explained that the story had been inspired by a dream in which he saw a black monk moving toward him through a whirlwind. Why is it that no consciously invented stories ever point beyond themselves as multifariously as dreams?
One way to interpret “The Black Monk” is as a cautionary tale about academic scholarship as a form of madness. This madness affects not just Kovrin but also the horticulturalist, whose articles on seemingly “peaceful and impersonal” subjects—intercropping, the Russian Antonovsky apple—invariably devolve into venomous invectives against other horticulturalists. The endlessly proliferating monk may be read as a figure for scholarly mimetic contagion. From a Girardian perspective it is fitting for ambition, the true “Stendhal’s syndrome,” to assume the form of a monk: “every element in the distorted mysticism” of mimetic rivalry has its “luminous counterpart in Christian truth.”
In the black monk, one also glimpses the shadowy outline of Fyodorov, philosopher of bodily resurrection, abolisher of death. Like the black monk, Fyodorov saw before him the whole glorious future of humankind. Freed from the shackles of mortality, men would set forth to collect the corporeal dust of past generations that had been scattered throughout the cosmos by the once omnipotent hand of death. The earth itself would be transformed into a spaceship, dislodged from its orbit and propelled into space “by either photo, thermal, or electric energy.” The armies of the resurrected would colonize the universe, transforming it into a work of art.
Fyodorov, a Christian mystic, saw his project precisely in terms of an imitation of Christ. Only the mass, universal enactment of Christ’s rising from the dead and ascent to heaven would finally dissipate the artificial rivalries that divide the brotherhood of man. A new classless society would arise, devoted to the shared task of “cosmic agriculture”: a unity of perfect horticulturists.
Now the spaceship is poised for takeoff, the Sibyls look down from the ceiling, and the black monk shimmers briefly in the air, before dematerializing and reappearing somewhere else. Martians are transporting the ice palace to Saturn, for it to take its place among Ulughbek’s 1,018 stars. They’re hoping it will teach them to understand adverbs. Somewhere even further away, the beast waits in its thicket, watching the snow pile soundlessly on the hillside. Now the black monk is calling me—he says it’s time to go, time to start collecting the ashes. This is the kind of work that will kill you. But I’ll have you know, DJ Spinoza, that I haven’t given up. If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that’s where we’re going to find them.
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* Kozma Prutkov was a fictitious poet-playwright-bureaucrat invented in the 1850s by Alexei Tolstoy and his cousins. The moral of “The Conductor and the Tarantula” is “Don’t set out on a journey without any money” (lest you meet the same fate as the tarantula, who was kicked out of the carriage by the conductor).
* Other critics think that Dostoevsky was himself dissatisfied with the confession. In his edition of the Demons notebooks, Edward Wasiolek proposes that “somewhere between his plans for the first published version and the publication of subsequent versions, Dostoevsky came to realize that ‘Stavrogin’s Confession’ was all wrong”: the Stavrogin of the confession is “still struggling and failing with the temptations of repentance and pride,” whereas “the Stavrogin of the final version is beyond moral struggle, and only the possible loss of self-control threatens his glacial calm.” Wasiolek also suggests that the formation of Stavrogin from the drafts of other novelistic characters represents not the contingent exigencies of deadlines and book publishing, but the necessary trial and-error of literary creation: Dostoevsky “resists the real Stavrogin by evasions, twists, and wrong turns,” so that the notebooks themselves “are in large part a record of wrong Stavrogins.”
* Girard, maintaining that mimetic desire holds a universal, central importance even in the works of “non-Christian” novelists, counts Stendhal as an atheist—even though Stendhal’s two greatest novels begin in a seminary (The Red and the Black) or end in a monastery (The Charterhouse of Parma). Moreover, Stendhal’s personal and vehement rejection of the Catholic Church is itself a form of engagement with Christianity.
* According to a note in the Pléiade edition, what Stendhal wanted to forget were “all the wrongs and misdeeds committed by the Catholic religion.”