Victor Considerant: The Making of a Fourierist

Abstract

In Dostoevsky’s great novel The Devils we are introduced at an early point to “the insignificant and almost abject figure of a little provincial official, a jealous husband and coarse family tyrant”, named Liputin. When Liputin is visited by Nicholas Stavrogin, Stavrogin finds a book by the French Utopian socialist Victor Considerant lying “very conspicuously” on his table. It soon turns out that the little man, “a miser and a moneylender, who locked up the remnants of meals and the candle-ends”, was at the same time a Fourierist who spent his nights gloating ecstatically over “fantastic visions of a future Phalanstery”. Stavrogin is mystified by the discovery of this utopian dreamer in a sleepy provincial town where, for perhaps a hundred miles around, “there was not a single man, himself included, who bore any resemblance to a future member of ‘the universal social republic and harmony’”. Later we learn that Liputin is a “Fourierist with a strong leaning towards police work”. But at the end of this first encounter we are left only with a question: “‘Goodness knows where such people spring from,’ wondered Nicholas, as he sometimes recalled the unlooked-for Fourierist”.1