September 13, 2021

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

Feodor Dostoevsky, Confederate Flag Day, and "The Possessed"

Recently, I finished viewing a made-for-television Russian series titled “Demons,” based on the novel by Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. Sometimes known by the title, “The Possessed” (1872), the plot is fairly complex and difficult to compress into a filmed series. Yet, enough of that complexity and meaning comes forth in the Russian series (it is subtitled).

I had read the novel many years ago. Even back then I recall that it was a difficult read, especially for someone unfamiliar with Russian history of the mid-19^th century and Dostoevsky’s interest in the ideological visions of various revolutionary and nihilist movements then existent in Imperial Russia.

But the television series does an admirable job of encapsulating the novel’s main themes and storyline. And like much of Dostoevsky, the theological question of good and evil, sin and redemption, and order and disorder are never far from the surface. For the great Russian author saw deeply into the hearts of his fellow men, in particular into the vacuous and empty souls of the fanatical idealists who professed a secular vision of a future socialist and globalist paradise on earth, a paradise without the encumbrances and limits of tradition, tsarist authority, and God…those natural and real lineaments which both regulate our innate freedom of will (so that it will not become license), but also provide a safe and ample space for our existence.

In tracing the evolution of revolutionary thinking, personified in his diverse characters, he captures and illustrates as perhaps no other author before or since, the true nature of evil which inevitably ends not only in the destruction of the individual but also eventually the dissolution and decay of the social fabric of society.

That evil, and it is pure demonic evil as he reveals in “Demons,” is all consuming, a madness which both historically and theologically he identifies with rebellion against God and, in his particular view, in opposition to the traditional Russian Orthodox Church. But that meaning is applicable for all of traditional Christianity.

In another Dostoevsky novel, “The Brothers Karamazov,” he has his worldly and secular character Ivan near the beginning declare: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted,” only to realize at the novel’s end that God does—must—exist, and therefore there must be—and are—rules and law, both Divine and human, that must be observed for there to be any kind of human society. Indeed, that without them, there can be no genuine liberty, no justice, no true happiness.

In “Demons” the revolutionary cell in Dostoevsky’s imagined provincial town is composed of mostly young members of the upper classes, a couple of disaffected military officers and intellectuals, and the magnetic personality of Nikolai Stavrogin.  Stavrogin is high-born, refined, handsome, self-assured and intelligent. And yet there is, as the narrator of the story informs us, something repellent, deeply cynical, and inherently foul about him. The other revolutionaries are fascinated by him, including specifically Pyotr Verkhovensky, perhaps the most loathsome and manipulative character Dostoevsky ever created, a man capable of murder simply on caprice or whim, without any apparent sense or thought of regret. Truly he is a man possessed who radiates through his presence complete subservience to evil.

Verkhovensky, who claims to be taking orders from a central committee in St. Petersburg, is bedazzled by Stavrogin and wishes him to lead the revolutionary efforts; but Stavrogin hesitates. In the depths of Stavrogin’s consciousness, there is that awkward awareness of his own misshapen and fatally damaged soul.  Finally, after some hesitation, he visits a spiritual guide, Father Tikhon, where he confesses "that I neither know nor feel good and evil and that I have not only lost any sense of it, but that there is neither good nor evil... and that it is just a prejudice." Stavrogin is a man who refuses God, but in his frustration he innately realizes that nothing else can satisfy that emptiness. Indeed, without God, without the fullness of faith, it is the Devil, Evil Incarnate, who fills the void. Without God, everything is permitted.

Ivan Shatov is perhaps the character with whom Dostoevsky most identifies: he had once idolized Stavrogin and looked up to him as a potential leader who would inspire Russia to Christian regeneration. Disillusioned, he has now come to regard him as "an idle, footloose son of a landowner."  Stavrogin, he declares, is driven by a passion for inflicting torment, not merely for the pleasure of harming others, but to torment his own conscience and wallow in the sensation of "moral carnality."

Verkhovensky detests and hates Shatov, and conceives a plan to assassinate him, for Shatov, he believes, stands in the way of the triumph of the revolution. And, in fact, one of the conspirators lures Shatov to a remote location where he is cruelly murdered, much to the insane delight of Verkhovensky.

But the conspiracy unravels, and the conspirators are arrested or, in the case of Verkhovensky, flee to St. Petersburg where he can again work his revolutionary mischief. And Stavrogin, understanding finally the futility of his life, and understanding more profoundly than any other of the revolutionaries the nature of the revolutionary contagion—a true “demonic possession”—does what for him is the only logical action: he hangs himself. Unable or unwilling to make repentance and knowing darkly that he has been possessed by demons, but refusing the mercy of God, like a brightly burning supernova, he collapses upon himself, extinguished and damned.

Of all the great counter-revolutionary works—novels, autobiographies, narrations—Dostoevsky’s stands out for its very human, very real description of the sheer personal evil and demonic lunacy of the then-nascent Marxist revolution incubating in Russia. In more recent times, we have a George Orwell, an Arthur Koestler, and an Aleksander Solzhenitsyn who recount what they experienced and what they saw and observed. But it was Dostoevsky, almost clairvoyantly, who visualized it a century earlier and who plumbed the depths of the human psyche and the inherent and personal nature of what is essentially a “revolution against God AND Man.”

For the rejection of God as He desires to be known and obeyed through his Word, His law and through His church does not result in a secular paradise, a kind of secular “Parousia.” The revolutionary madness is, as Dostoevsky declares, a form of possession of men who have misshapen and empty souls which have then been occupied by demons, by evil.

As I watched “Demons” I was put in mind of a day several years ago: Back in March of 2019 I was chairman of the Confederate Flag Day at the North Carolina State Capitol. Our commemoration was besieged by several hundred screaming, raving demonstrators—Antifa-types and others. It took a mammoth police escort to enable us to exit the surrounded Capitol building. But I clearly recall the horridly disfigured expression of one of the protesters, his flaming eyes, his foul imprecations: he was young, white, and obviously not impoverished, probably the son of some well-to-do parents who had shelled out thousands for his education at one of North Carolina’s premiere universities.

His face, his angry grimace, was that of a possessed soul, made mad by years of slow and patient educational indoctrination, by our complacent society which tolerates and encourages everyday evil in nearly every endeavor we experience.

I vividly recalled the image of that fanatic as I finished watching the series, and I recalled images flashed across the television screen more recently of our latter-day violent Verkhovenskys, and of the Stavrogins, those wooly-brained woke academicians, effete Hollywood celebrities and media personalities, and political epigones who have turned the American republic into a charnel house where the bones of a once-great nation lie in trash heaps.

We have over the past many decades permitted our government to impose on us and much of the world what we term liberal democracy and something we call “human rights.” But those precepts and that vision are of a secular, globalist world where the Verkhovenskys dominate a complacent and obedient population, where our culture has been so infected and so poisoned that, as William Butler Yeats prophesied a century ago, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

It does not and will not end well. The “American century,” without the kind of repentance that was offered to Nikolai Stavrogin and which he could not accept, is over. 

And despite our insouciance and material gratification, there will be a price, a severe and unimaginable price to pay.

Observing the pre-World War I revolutionary fervor which would soon overtake the world, English critic and essayist Hilaire Belloc wrote these lines:

“[T]he Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this that he cannot make; that he can befog or destroy, but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilisation exactly that has been true.  We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.” (This and That and the Other, 1912)

Dostoevsky, through Father Tikhon, reminds us that there is a way out of the fetid and poisonous bog we are drowning in. In his day it was not taken by the revolutionaries who eventually would have their way in Russia and later.

Like Pyotr Verkovensky, that frenzied youthful demonstrator back in March 2019 was possessed, incapable—unlike Nikolai Stavrogin—of recognizing his diabolical possession.

Good and evil stand in eternal conflict; one must triumph and one must be extinguished. Fyodor Dostoevsky fully understood that, and so must we.

[A slightly different version of this essay was published by Chronicles Magazine in November 2021.]