In tracing different historical periods and literary movements, especially with literature written in Christian contexts, what becomes evident is a rich, literary history of the Devil in which religion and politics are deeply intertwined. Through the necessary, interdisciplinary approach of religion, literature, and politics, the Devil becomes a vital figure for interpreting authors’ reimagined political landscapes in their literature, and their engagement with Christianity’s complex relationship to politics. Drawing on my doctoral thesis, my paper will apply this argument to the reimagined political landscape that I find to be potent in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80), i.e., the landscape of the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary movement that is subsumed under the label of ‘nihilism’ and that evolves into revolutionary terrorism. Emphasizing the specific context of Alexander II’s assassination attempts, and the developments in the revolutionary movement that led up to its success shortly after Dostoevsky died in 1881, I aim to present a case for the Devil’s literary significance in The Brothers Karamazov with this particular, political backdrop in mind, especially if, as David McDuff claims, “The Devil is the central character in The Brothers Karamazov" (“Introduction” in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. David McDuff [Penguin Books, 1993], xxiii).
My paper will focus on the characterization of the ‘Gentleman Devil’ as he is depicted in Book XI, Chapter 9 entitled “The Devil. Ivan Fyodorovich’s Nightmare,” and will apply Daniel Brower’s analysis of the “social profile” of the revolutionary in the “guise of ‘the gentleman'" (Osip Aptekman, as cited by Brower, “Nihilists and Terrorists,” in Times of Trouble: Violence in Russian Literature and Culture, eds. Marcus C. Levitt and Tatyana Novikov [The University of Wisconsin Press, 2007], 99). I aim to demonstrate three things in answering the question of what Brower’s analysis of the revolutionary social profile would entail for Dostoevsky’s Gentleman Devil: first, that Dostoevsky’s “treatment” of revolutionary activity, including terrorism, is more explicit in The Brothers Karamazov, rather than implicit, as Derek Offord claims in Dostoevsky in Context (“Nihilism and Terrorism,” in Dostoevsky in Context, eds. Deborah A. Martinsen and Olga Maiorova [Cambridge University Press, 2016], 56), or as simply “tak[ing] glances at the revolutionary movement,” as Gary Saul Morson claims in A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov (“The God of Onions: The Brothers Karamazov and the Mythic Prosaic,” in A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov, ed. Robert Louis Jackson [Northwestern University Press, 2004], 111). Second, my analysis of the Devil will build upon existing scholarship on revolutionary terrorism and Russian literary culture, such as Lynn Ellen Patyk’s Written in Blood: Revolutionary Terrorism and Russian Literary Culture (1861-1881). I follow Patyk’s interpretation of Fyodor Karamazov’s parricide as an allegory for Alexander II’s tsaricide and analyze it through existing scholarship that has established the Devil’s omnipresence in the novel (Patyk, Written in Blood: Revolutionary Terrorism and Russian Literary Culture [1861-1881] [University of Wisconsin Press, 2017], 16, 154). Third, perhaps an offshoot of the second goal, it will illustrate the ways in which Dostoevsky’s portrayals of the Devil signal his own religious concerns and those of his time, found in responses to revolutionary activity.
The structure of my paper will consist of the following: first, I establish the “social profile” of the radical, nihilist revolutionary of the 1850s-60s, which includes manners of dress, and the evolutions of this profile into the 70s as the discourse and weighed consideration of terrorism as a legitimate, revolutionary tactic progresses. Unpacking Brower’s analysis of the “social profile,” I then shift to the portrayal of the smartly dressed, “Gentleman Devil” himself. In light of the novel’s setting of 1866 (although its composition began in 1878), I argue that the symbolism of the Devil’s appearance as a fluid, transitory representation of the nihilist and terrorist profiles falls in step with a recurring theme throughout Dostoevsky’s literature, specifically with his fiction of the 1870s: tensions between generations. As Dostoevsky demonstrated in Demons, his filial constructs have a significant political element that symbolically illustrates the evolution of ideas: present ideologies have a lineage. The Brothers Karamazov is a work set in the same year as the first modern assassination attempt on the Tsar by Dmitry Vladimirovich Karakozov, and it is serially published during the build-up to one of the first “crescendos” of revolutionary terrorism, in which assassination attempts on the Tsar’s life had not occurred since Karakozov (Offord, “Nihilism and Terrorism,” 51–2). Lastly, I analyze this reading of the Gentleman Devil within Ivan’s encounter in “The Nightmare” and flesh out the Devil’s development of one of the novel’s central concepts posed by Ivan: the “all is lawful” concept and its connection to Dostoevsky’s recurring trope of “the Man-God.” In placing the Devil’s appearance and discourse amidst revolutionaries, influential thinkers in exile, and identifiable religious frameworks reacting to the revolutionary movement, I draw out how Dostoevsky portrays, and re-presents, the revolutionary movement through a figure that threads together many crucial elements of The Brothers Karamazov, especially the novel’s “main event” of parricide, which, if Patyk is correct, is an allegory for tsaricide.
In my concluding remarks, I emphasize aspects of the revolutionary landscape to further express why studying The Brothers Karamazov is important for the political context of the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary movement. In briefly highlighting the evolution of the Devil’s depictions across Dostoevsky’s fiction from the 1860s onward, I make brief suggestions as to what this reading of the “Gentleman Devil” could have entailed if Dostoevsky’s plans for the sequel came to fruition and their importance for Dostoevsky’s own spiritual, literary framing of his political landscape: the character arc of the youngest Karamazov brother, the monk, the “pure” Alyosha, who, according to Dostoevsky’s statement to his editor, would come to “kill the tsar" (Joseph Frank, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, D. I. Iakubovich, as cited by Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism [Cornell University Press, 2009], 3).
Responding to perspectives on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as merely ‘glancing’ at its revolutionary backdrop, my paper will illustrate a more explicitly reimagined political landscape, labeled under ‘nihilism’ and the development of revolutionary terrorism. I focus on the characterization of the ‘Gentleman Devil’ in Book XI and present a reading through the evolving social profile of the nihilist revolutionary and the “gentleman” terrorist. The Brothers Karamazov’s “religious drama” frames the revolutionary movement as a national identity crisis, of which the Devil is central to understanding Dostoevsky’s portrayed consequences of the alienation of the (Russian) self. Underscoring the increasing presence of the Devil across Dostoevsky’s fiction of the 1870s, I seek to demonstrate how Dostoevsky’s portrayals of the Devil signal his own religious concerns and those of his time, found in responses to the revolutionary movement and its strands of terrorism that culminated in Alexander II’s assassination.