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Stavrogin and Prince Hal: The Hero in Two Worlds
By Norman Leer
Indiana University
figure who can really be called the main character of the novel. This
other figure (Nikolaj Stavrogin) is also a gloomy individual, also a vil-
lain. But it seems to me that his figure is tragic. I took him out of my
heart. "5
We can acknowledge that Stavrogin' s heroism has qualities in com-
mon with Faust, the Byronic hero, and perhaps other literary heroes as
well. But he must still be seen as a specific hero in the context of a
specific novel. For as we shall see, the meaning even of references ex-
plicitly made to a former hero-that is, to Shakes peare' s "Prince Harry" -
is very much controlled by the world of the novel.
This paperwill then hold itself to suggesting the nature of the stated
relationship between Henry V and Stavrogin. Although there is a lack of
decisive evidence in Dostoevsky's other works, such as the letters and
the Diary of A Writer, significant materialcan be found in the structural
action and character relationships even of the novel itself. I hope to look
briefly at Shakespeare's "Harry, " more extensively at Stavrogin, and to
show how the explicit and implicit relationships are used by Dostoevskij
to embody two ironic statements-the first about the nature of Stavrogin's
career, and the second about the nature of his world.
Shakespeare's soldier-king is also surrounded by a highly diverse
body of criticism, most of which centers around the morality of his youth
andhis war against France. Dover Wilson, for example, in the New Cam-
bridge edition of Henry V, affirms the judgment of the play's Chorus that
Henry is "the mirror of all Christian kings. "6 But some critics, among
them Harold C. Goddard, contend that the Chorus does not represent
Shakespeare's view, but that of average public opinion, and that the re-
quests that the audience use its imagination to compensate for the inade-
quacies of the stage are actually a veiled separation of public or patriotic
imagination from reality. Goddard feels that the play is pervaded by a
strong irony between what Henry says and the results of his actions, the
rejection of Falstaff and the destruction and chaos wrought by his con-
quests. Henry, Goddard.feels, is a dual personality, embodying the po-
tential for a rightly or wrongly used imagination.7 About this view, I
shall have more to say shortly. Roy W. Battenhouse agrees that the pre-
sentation of the king is pervaded by irony. In fact, he regards Henry V
as heroic comedy, heroic in that Henry is acting in accord with his own
ideal, and comic in that this ideal is very limited and a false one which
totally evades the responsibilities of the king. 8 Other critics, particu-
larly Derek Traversi and John Palmer, do not feel that Shakespeare's con-
demnation was so complete, and they see the play as embodying a con-
flict between Henry the man and Henry the king. For Traversi, this conflict
is tragic, while for Palmer it creates satiric comedy.9 Nevertheless,
Palmer contends that Shake s peare's portrayal of the king is a neutral one.10
Mark Van Doren regards the whole play as a disunified embodiment of un-
resolved conflict. 1 My own view of the play is very much indebted to
Goddard and Battenhouse. I believe that Henry is a dual personality, but
that by the time of his rejection of Falstaff in Henry IV, Part II, he has
resolved this conflict, so that the hero of Henry V is committedto the
Stavrogin and Prince Hal 101
of play in its adult estate." 13 By the time of his kingship, Henry had
adopted the first choice of war, and Goddard sees the overall play as
"pervaded with an irony that imparts intense dramatic value to practically
every one of its main scenes. "14 Goddard also finds in the later play,
however, the continuation of Henry's double personality. I feel, as I
hope to show briefly, that in this play the good, or ideal, is located ex-
ternally to the main character. In the play we can see King Henry creating
causes and justifications for his war against France. This war, based
on a false claim to the French throne, is actually Henry's following of his
father's deathbed-advice to "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels. "
Thus, the king embraces false imagination, and creates his own reality.
Moreover, althoughhe forms his own reality, Henry is constantly assign-
ing the responsibility of creation to someone else. In fact, he seems al-
most ignorant of the responsibilities of the king. Thus, he will go through
ceremonies of justice against the three traitors, Cambridge, Scroop, and
Grey, and of love for Princess Katherine of France. But these are essen-
tially false, for the traitors are advocating a counter-claim to the English
throne (we should recall that Henry IV had deposed Richard II from the
English kingship), and Henry regards "Kate" as another of his French
spoils. Furthermore, Henry's pretensions of mercy and righteousness
must be played against his actions as given in the play. The king is con-
stantly setting up his own reality. Thus, he looks upon his public rejec-
tion of Falstaff as a declaration of independence and righteousness. But
the play indicates otherwise. In Act II we witness the death of the child-
like, comic knight and see the honest feeling of his friends. Mistress
Quickly, the innkeeper, suggests that Henry killed Falstaff, and this
accusation is repeated by Captain Fluellen, just before the announcement
of the English victory at Agincourt. The Captain is comparing the King to
Alexander the Great ( "Alexander the Big" is transformed by his Welsh
dialect into "Alexander the Pig"), and he says: "As Alexander killed
his friend, Cleitus, being in his ales and cups, so also Harry Monmouth,
being also in his right wits and good judgements, turned away the fat
knight with the great belly doublet" (IV, vii, 47-51).15
The claim to the French throne is equally a falsification of reality
to suit self-interest. This claim is based on the fact that Henry's great-
great-grandmother was the daughter of Philip IV of France. The only bar
to its legitimacy is the Salic Law, under which succession through the
female line is illegal. The Archbishop of Canterbury sophistically dis-
credits this law, by saying that the French kings who have opposed Henry' s
claim are in themselves crooked, because their own titles come through
the female. "The very thing, " says Goddard, "that proves the title of
a French king crooked-namely, inheritance through the female-serves,
by some twist of ecclesiastical logic, to prove the title of an English
king good. "16
Throughout the play we see Henry evading responsibility for the
violence and disorder caused by the false claim. Thus, when he asks the
Archbishop of Canterbury to sanction the contest on which he has already
decided, he cautions the cleric:
Stavrogin and Prince Hal 103
his mask. And yet, as Tixon notes, the confession is probably exagger-
ated, and the desire for punishment is in part a mask for arrogant self-
assertion. This chapter was originally suppressed by Dostoevskij's edi-
torbecause of its indelicate subject, the sexual violation of a child. But
the author himself omitted it from later editions, and it did not appear in
Russia until the 1920's, orin American printings until Avrahm Yarmolinsky
added his translation to the Modern Library edition. Yarmolinsky specu-
lates that the reason for the omission by Dostoevskij was that he might
have felt that despite the spirit of.challenge in which it was given, the
confession was out of keeping with his final intention of showing Stavro-
gin's utterly lost soul. 28 The narrator introduces the confession by noting
that it shows "a terrible undisguised need of punishment, the need of the
cross, of public chastisement." Stavrogin, himself, relates that previous
to the incident with the child, MatreBa, he was "so utterly bored that I
could have hanged myself, and if I didn't it was because I was still look-
ing forward to something, as I have all my life." Tixon questions, how-
ever, whether the document is in its very frankness not another kind of
egoism. He wonders whether Stavrogin will be able to endure the inevi-
table laughter, since "nowadays moral serenity is nowhere to be had. A
great conflict is going on everywhere. Men do not understand each other
as in the time of the confusion at Babel" ( pp. 701, 704-705, 724-725).
Tixon, inotherwords, senses that the confession may be a kind of nega-
tive agression, a desire on Stavrogin's part to establish a superior moral
identity by castigating himself. In a similar manner, as Yarmolinsky
notes, the violation was itself a doubly-motivated act. It was in part a
release from boredom, but Stavrogin seems also to have enjoyed the sense
of guilt which followed the act. 29 The priest, because he senses the
aggressive impulse behind the document, tries to dissuade Stavrogin
from its publication. Yet he also perceives that the hero, with his pres-
ent attitude, will substitute other catastrophic crimes for the publication.
And in accord with this prediction, Stavrogin does end his life with a
double crime. For one thing, he becomes morally guilty of Mar'ja
Timofeevna's murder, in that although he is aware of its imminence, he
takes no preventive steps. His failure to interfere is in part dictated by
a vague thought of marrying Liza Tusina. He accepts this girl in a moment
of impulse, when she gives herself to him. He hopes that she will some-
how redeem him, but at the same time knows that he is incapable of lov-
ing. Liza goes to the scene of Mar'ja's murder, almost as if driven by
a sense of guilt for the crime. And the mob, sensing Stavrogin's part in
the crime, also regards Liza as his woman. She is beaten to death, so
that in a sense his hands are stained with her blood too.30 Moreover, in
the sense that he knowingly serves as a kind of idol for the revolution-
ary "quintet, " Stavrogin could be said to be partly responsible for the
violence perpetrated by them at the hands of Petr Stepanovi6. Yet we
should recognize, I think, that Stavrogin's crime is not one of heroic ac-
tion, but of inaction in the awareness of catastrophe. He is too torn
within himself to prevent the tearing up of his world.
One of his great failings is his inability to love. He seems to feel
110 The Slavic and East European Journal
a vague sexual attraction for Liza, and also hopes that her love may re-
deem him. But he cannot love her, perhaps because she is too much his
emotional double. On his first full view of her, the narrator notices
that "everything in her seemed perpetually seeking its balance and un-
able to find it; everything was in chaos, in agitation, in uneasiness"
(pp. 107-108). Stavrogin's relationship to gatov's sister, Darja Pav-
lovna, is of a different sort. She senses that he needs a "nurse, " and
offers to wait until he summons her. But Stavrogin feels unworthy of her
love, and therefore cannot bring himself to love her. At the close of the
novel, he sends for her, but his promise is one of hardship rather than
love. He has still not found himself; he has "no ties in Russia-every-
thing is as alien to me as elsewhere. " He feels himself to be "still
capable of desiring to do something good, and of feeling pleasure from
it; at the same time I desire evil and feel pleasure from that too. But
both feelings are always too petty, and are never strong." Moreover, he
rejects the idea of suicide because he "is afraid of showing greatness of
soul." Yet suicide is a negative assertion of the self, and it is also, as
seen by Dostoevskij, the assumption of the right held only by God to take
life. So that Stavrogin's final act, his suicide, in which he leaves a
note that "No one is to blame, I did it myself, " is not really an accep-
tance or a sign of responsibility, but a last desperate attempt, related
to the confession, to assert the self through punishment( pp. 685-688).
If like Henry V, Stavrogin's central failing is an inability to com-
mit himself to an acceptance of human responsibility, unlike Henry, he
does not make a willful evasion of that virtue. In fact, Kirillov notes
that Stavrogin is himself " seeking a burden, " and the hero' s reaction to
this observation is one of being seriously impressed ( p. 294). Irving
Howe remarks that Stavrogin "lives below, not beyond, good and evil."
This is because he is really below the point of desire; he cannot even
bring himself to this much of an assertion. "The Nietzschean vision of
'beyond good and evil', " says Howe, "implies a harmonious resolution
of desires to the point where moral regulation becomes superfluous; Stav-
rogin, by contrast, is on this side of morality. Yet it is no mere perver-
sity on the part of his friends that they look upon him with awe, for in
his wasted energies they see the potential of a Russia equally disordered
and distraught. People expect Stavrogin to lead; he himself 'seeks a
' 31
burden.
If Shakespeare's Falstaff is the embodiment of the childlike or play-
imagination, Dostoevskij's counterpart of the fat knight, in line with the
more somber and chaotic world in which he finds himself, is differentiated
by a more predominant sense of suffering. The role of Sir John in Stav-
rogin's life is filled by Captain Lebjadkin, the brother of Mar'ja Timof-
eevna. PetrStepanovi6 informs Stavrogin's mother that "Nikolaj Vsevol-
dovic used to call this gentlemen his Falstaff, " but misreading Lebjadkin' s
nature, he goes on to say, "that must be ... some old burlesque char-
acter, at whom everyone laughs, and who is willing to let everyone laugh
at him, if they'll only pay him for it. Nikolaj Vsevolodovic was leading
at that time in Petersburg a life, so to say, of mockery"(p. 187).
Stavrogin and Prince Hal 111
"joined them, " but that he simply aided them "by accident as a man of
leisure. " Still not sensing Stavrogin's own alienation, Satov is appar-
ently compelled to discuss his own Slavophilic views. But he wants to
feel himself equal to the "sun, " so he asks Stavrogin to drop his mask:
"While I am talking... we are two human beings and have come together
in infinity ... for the last time in the world. Drop your tone, and speak
like a human being. Speak, if only for once in your life with the voice
of a man." But Stavrogin hears gatov's ideas of the "god-bearing people"
with an air of amused detachment. gatov insists that the very concept
was Stavrogin's, and says to his tired listener, "It's your phrase alto-
gether, not mine. " And then he asks Stavrogin, "If you've renounced
these words about the people now, how could you have uttered them them?"
Yet Stavrogin is able to reply quite seriously, "I wasn't joking with you
then; in persuading you I was perhaps more concerned with myself than
you. " And later he remarks that "Everyone of you for some inexplicable
reason keeps foisting a flag upon me. " By this point, Satov begins to
suspect that he can rely on neither God nor Stavrogin, yet he asks his
in you through all eternity? "
friend, "Why am I condemned to believe
Still, Stavrogin can only answer that he is "sorry" but he "can't feel
affection for Satov. " The latter then places his finger on one of Stavro-
gin's chief failings, his detachment from the spirit of the Russian people:
"You've lost the distinction between good and evil because you've lost
touch with your own people. " His advice to Stavrogin is to attempt to
"attain to God by work, " and he counsels him also to go to Father
Tixon (pp. 242-260). In this dialogue, we can see the essential dis-
placement of both Stavrogin and his followers; and we can see that al-
though Stavrogin is looking for a burden, he cannot because of his lack
of belief carry that placed upon him by one like Satov.
The idea of a political false pretender is explicitly brought out in
Stavrogin's relationship with Petr Stepanovi6 Verxovenskij. Stepan Tro-
fimovic' s son is the self-made leader of the terrorist Left, and he is con-
cerned not so much with belief as with political action. Thus, he wants
Stavrogin to spark the political revolt by masquerading as the legendary
Ivan the Tsarevich. Yet at the same time, Petr Stepanovic seems almost
to believe in the masquerade himself. He tells Stavrogin: "It's just
such a man as you that I need. I have no one but you. You are the leader,
you are the sun and I am your worm." Stavrogin thinks this all madness,
but only offers slight verbal protest. Similarly, when Petr Stepanovic of-
fers to "settle Mar'ja Timofeevna tomorrow!.. without the money, " and
to bring him Liza, Stavrogin is again not really enticed, but he does not
answer( pp. 426-430). Petr Stepanovic is, however, the almost Satanic
agent of social and political chaos; and for purposes of the plot, he must
exercise some control over Stavrogin. Thus, while he offers to be at
Stavrogin's service always, he imagines after he has made the offer and
left, "that as soon as he was left alone, Nikolaj Vsevolodovic would be-
gin beating on the wall with his fists, and no doubt he would have been
gladto see this, if thathad been possible" (pp. 227,231). Petr Stepano-
vic leads and typifies the violence let loose upon the world by the inac-
tion of a morally inert Stavrogin.
114 The Slavic and East European Journal
did not find her son's resemblances to the English prince very convincing.
But the difference was not so much in the men as in the worlds in which
they lived.
Note s