Every Woman Loves a Nihilist: Stavrogin and Women in Dostoevsky's "The Possessed"

Abstract

Dostoevsky's title (Besy), translated The Possessed or The Devils, suggests that inhabitants of Skvoresniki are possessed by a modern revolutionary ideology dedicated to violence and separatism from ordinary community. Dostoevsky's attitude towards modern social problems, to his characters' discussions of the incidence of robbery and violence ... doubled (326), to unrestrained attitude [that] was fashion (303), and particularly to the woman question, frequently read as evidence of his Slavophile conservatism. Yet, as philosopher Charles Taylor has recently noted, what significant about The Possessed is way in which modern identity, with its transforming powers, has become incorporated in Dostoevsky's vision, even while he opposes (452). In what sense Dostoevsky's against socialist/terrorist feminism modernist, and what that polemic's subtext? What does author mean by surrounding his nihilist hero Stavrogin with several women with whom he sexually intimate and who successively expose his weakness? A woman reading text in 1995 may seek different answers to this question than mostly male traditional commentary offers. The tradition now includes an incorporation of Bahktinian poetics: notion that Dostoevsky's against modernist women disturbed, undermined, and confused by a double-voiced discourse and hidden polemic (Problems 196). Does this polyphony effect sympathy for forces satirized and an exposure, through Stavrogin, of masculinist tyranny from which feminism springs?1 The Possessed suggests how deeply question of women disturbed Dostoevsky, how in writing against it he would be compelled to explore it, particularly in once suppressed chapter, At Tikhon's, in which Stavrogin confesses to his rape of girl Matryosha. Dostoevsky's association of violence with demonic possession, coded as great physical strength of Stavrogin (44) and phallic flickering tip of [Verkhovensky's] tongue (172), inscribes biblical allusions that, while losing only some of their original force, can now be re-contextualized within a late twentieth-century reading horizon of modernist/feminist questions and critiques of masculinist culture. Surprising intersections beween Dostoevsky and contemporary feminism emerge from novel's references to Dostoevksy's affair with feminist Appolinaria Suslova, fact that feminist words were air he breathed and evidence that a perverse, willful revisionism might be an important part of his own writing tendency, indicate that Dostoevsky's relation to the feminine was anything but simple. Female heroism during Crimean war had persuaded him that women deserved full equality of rights with male in fields of education, professions, tenure of office, she