Character of Marya Lebyadkina in Dostoevsky’s “Demons”
...le its perpetrators may be. The deaths of Marya Lebyadkina and son, however, should pointedly unsettle Bakhtin's notion about the inconsequentiality of the departure of a character's consciousness in Dostoevsky's work. To begin with, had both or even just the infant lived, the result might have been the novelist's most convincing hopeful ending--even more powerful than Alyosha's "hand-in-hand, all of us" that closes The Brothers Karamazov. Their two deaths, although or perhaps because they seem to be almost afterthoughts, are the nails in the coffin of this fledgling redemption surrounded by catastrophe. The brutality of Dostoevsky's artistic honesty does not relent even when it seems feasible to do so. These deaths, unlike the "abnormal" deaths above, have no intratextual marker of consciousness which, by failing to recognize them, disputes their ability to produce meaning. That is, these deaths do not even feed into the discourse about the finalizability of consciousness. This fact prompts the reader to look beyond Bakhtin's observation about the insignificance of "normal" death in Dostoevsky. Walter Benjamin writes that the novel genre is significant "not because it presents someone's fate to us, perhaps didactically, but because this stranger's fate by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about."(1) But these deaths in Dostoevsky should make us shiver. Notwithstanding Bakhtin's somewhat disembodied idealism ("to kill does not mean to refute"), Dostoevsky kills and thereby refutes.(2) But who or what does he really refute? If Myshkin is abortive of the character of Marya Lebyadkina because of a failed ethic, why do characters like Shatov--even when they approach a concretely infinite worship of the other--suffer similar fates? It is because, literally or figuratively, all of them--Shatov, Kirillov, Marya Lebyadkina, and the newborn child--are the offspring of a chimeric fertility: Stavrogin. Contrary to Murav's suggestion that Stavrogin is an antihero, I think he is not even that much.(3) He is an aesthetic error, and, because the only criteria for his entrance are aesthetic, a failure pure and simple. This claim and its importance require some explanation. Before we meet Stavrogin, the narrator window-dresses him without actually showing us any substance. All is in the realm of rumor or scandal: readers will recall the tantalizingly bizarre stories about this handsome and "remarkable" young man, his delightfully subversive nose-pulling and ear-biting antics, and his unspecified past "influence" over a wide assortment of the novel's primary and secondary characters. When he finally arrives--veiling himself in a kind of revisionist insensibility and aloof from his former "devotees"--the reader has certain aesthetic expectations of Stavrogin, of his capacity to give a center to the novel. These expectations psychologically parallel those of Marya Lebyadkina, Pyotr Verkhovensky, Darya, and Lise. By the end of the novel, reader and character of Marya Lebyadkina alike are sorely disappointed. Even in the extracted "Tikhon" chapter--the only place where Stavrogin almost talks enough to live up to being a main character--he is a creature of mere transitory sensationalisms, engaged in a desperate and futile attempt to acquire narrative substance through his confession of a tabloid-style crime committed seemingly for no other reason than to confess it, than to showboat the empty gyrations of his will. Why did Dostoevsky choose not to reintegrate this episode after it was no longer suppressed by his editor? Perhaps because he felt ambiguous about Stavrogin's artistic status, which is why he removed Stavrogin's only potential showcase, "At Tikhon's", from the whole and left it dangling in take-it-or-leave-it fashion. Here, t...