University of Oregon

Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky

Author(s): J. M. Coetzee
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Summer, 1985), pp. 193-232
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
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SUMMER1985
Volume 37, Number 3

J. M.COETZEE

Confession

and

Double

Thoughts: Tolstoy,
Rousseau,

Dostoevsky

N BOOK II of his Confessions, Augustine relates the story of how

he, as a boy, together with some friends, stole a huge load of pears
from a neighbor's garden, stealing them not because they wanted to
eat them (in fact they dumped them to the hogs) but for the pleasure
of committing a forbidden act. They were being "gratuitously wanton,
having no inducement to the evil but the evil itself,... seeking nothing
from the shameful deed but the shame itself ... We were ashamed not
to be shameless."i
In the time-before of which the Confessions tell, the robbery brings
shame to the young Augustine's heart. But the desire of the boy's heart
(the mature man remembers) is that very feeling of shame. And his
heart is not shamed (chastened) by the knowledge that it seeks to know
shame: on the contrary, the knowledge of its own desire as a shameful
one both satisfies the desire for the experience of shame and fuels a
sense of shame. And this sense of shame is both experienced with satisif it is recognized, by self-conscious searching,
faction and
as a further recoglnized,
source of shame; and so on endlessly.
In the "numberless halls and caves, in the innumerable fields and
dens and caverns of memory" (X.xvii; p. 217), the shame lives on in
the mature man. "Who can unravel such a twisted and tangled knottiness ? It is unclean, I hate to reflect upon it" (II.x; p. 60). Augustine's
plight is truly abysmal. He wants to know what lies at the beginning of
the skein of remembered shame, what is the origin from which it
springs, but the skein is endless, the stages of self-searching required
to attain its beginning infinite in number. Yet until the source from
1 Confessions, trans. Albert C. Outler (London, 1955), II.iv, ix; pp. 54-55, 59;
hereafter cited in the text.
193

COMPARATIVE

LITERATURE

which the shameful act sprang is confronted, the self can have no rest.
Confession is one element in a sequence of transgression, confession,
penitence and absolution. Absolution means the end of the episode, the
closing of the chapter, liberation from the oppression of the memory.
Absolution in this sense is therefore the indispensable goal of all confession, sacramental or secular. In contrast, transgression is not a fundamental component. In Augustine's story, the theft of the pears is the
transgression, but what calls to be confessed is something that lies behind the theft, a truth about himself that he does not yet know. His story
of the pears is therefore a twofold confession of something he knows
(the act) and something he does not know: "I would ... confess what I
know about myself; I will also confess what I do not know about myself ... What I do not know about myself I will continue not to know
until the time when 'my darkness is as the noonday' in thy sight" (X.v;
p. 205). The truth about the self that will bring an end to the quest for
the source within the self for that-which-is-wrong, he affirms, will remain inaccessible to introspection.
In this essay I follow the fortunes of a number of secular confessions,
fictional and autobiographical, as their authors confront or evade the
problem of how to know the truth about the self without being selfdeceived, and of how to bring the confession to an end in the spirit of
whatever they take to be the secular equivalent of absolution. A certain
looseness is inevitable when one transposes the term confession from a
religious to a secular context. Neverthless, we can demarcate a mode of
autobiographical writing that we can call the confession, as distinct
from the memoir and the apology, on the basis of an underlying motive
to tell an essential truth about the self.2 It is a mode practiced at times
by Montaigne,3 but the mode is essentially defined by Rousseau's Confessions. As for fictional confession, this mode is already practiced by
Defoe in the made-up confessions of sinners like Moll Flanders and
Roxana; by our time, confessional fictions have come to constitute a
subgenre of the novel in which problems of truth-telling and self-recognition, deception and self-deception, come to the forefront.4 Two of the
2 In the words of Francis R. Hart, confession is "personal history that seeks to
communicate or express the essential nature, the truth, of the self," while apology
is "personal history that seeks to demonstrate or realize the integrity of the self"
and memoir is "personal history that seeks to articulate or repossess the historicity of the self." Thus "Confession is ontological; apology ethical; memoir
historical or cultural." ("Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography," in
Ralph Cohen, ed., New Directions in Literary History, Baltimore, 1974, p. 227.)
3 For example, in the essays "Of Exercise or Practice" (Bk. II, Ch. vi) and
"Of Presumption" (Bk. II, Ch. xvii). Montaigne sets out his intent to "see and
search myself into my very bowels" in Bk. III, Ch. v. Michel de Montaigne, Essays, trans. John Florio (London, 1891), p. 430.
4

194

See Peter M. Axthelm, The Modern ConfessionalNovel (New Haven, 1967).

TOLSTOY,

ROUSSEAU,

DOSTOEVSKY

fictions I discuss in this essay, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground

and Tolstoy's Kreutser Sonata, can strictly be called confessional fictions because they consist for the greater part of representations of confessions of abhorrent acts committed by their narrators. Ippolit Terentyev's "Explanation" in The Idiot is a deathbed apologia which soon
engages the problems of truth and self-knowledge that characterize
confession. Finally, Stavrogin's confession in The Possessed raises the
question, left in abeyance since Montaigne's time, of whether secular
confession, for which there is an auditor or audience, fictional or real,
but no confessor empowered to absolve, can ever lead to that end of the
chapter whose attainment is the goal of confession.5
It is the second evening of a long train journey. Conversation among
the passengers has turned to marriage, adultery, divorce. A grey-haired
man speaks cynically about love. He reveals his name: Pozdnyshev,
convicted wife-killer. His fellow passengers edge away, leaving him
alone with the unnamed narrator to whom he now offers to "tell everything from the beginning."6 Pozdnyshev's confession, as repeated by
this narrator,constitutes the body of Tolstoy's Kreu[tzer Sonata (1889).
Pozdnyshev's story is of a man who lived his life in an "abyss of
error" concerning relations with women, and who finally underwent
an "episode" of pathological jealousy in which he killed his wife. Only
later, after being sent to prison, did it happen that "my eyes [were]
opened and I [saw] everything in quite a different light. Everything
reversed, everything reversed !" The moment when everything becomes
reversed (navyvorot' 'turned inside out') is the moment of illumination
that opens his eyes to the truth and makes true confession possible. The
confession on which he embarks in the train thus has two sides: the
facts of the "episode," which have already of course come out in court,
and the truth about himself to which his eyes have since been opened.
Telling the latter truth, in turn, is closely allied to denouncing error, a
state of error in which, in his opinion, the entire class from which he
comes still lives.
5 Throughout this essay I use the term confessor to denote the one to whom
the confession is addressed and the term confessant for the one who confesses. It
is worth noting that Oswald Spengler, quoting Goethe's lament over the end of
auricular confession brought about by Protestantism, suggests that it was inevitable that after the Reformation the confessional impulse should find an outlet in
the arts, but also that, in the absence of a confessor, it is inevitable that such confession should tend to be "unbounded" (The Decline of the West, trans. Charles
F. Atkinson [London, 19321, II, 295).
6 The Kreutzcr Sonata and Other Stories, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude
(Oxford, 1924), p. 233. Where I give the Russian, I quote from "Kreitserova
sonata," in L. N. Tolstoi, Sofineniya, IV (Berlin, 1921), 160-293. Subsequent
references appear in the text.
195

COMPARATIVE

LITERATURE

With his air of agitation, the funny little sound he makes (half cough,
half broken-off laugh), his strange ideas about sex, and the history of
violence behind him, Pozdnyshev is plainly an odd character, and one
would not be surprised if the truth he told were at odds with the truth
understood by the quiet, sober auditor who later retells his truth to us.
We would not be surprised, in other words, to find ourselves reading
one of those books in which the speaker believes himself to be telling
one truth while to us it slowly emerges that somehow another truth is
being told-a book like Nabokov's Pale Fire, say, in which the narrator
believes he is speaking for himself but we are all too easily able to read
him against himself.
Let me begin by summarizing the truth as Pozdnyshev sees it, allowing him to speak in his own voice.
Pozdnyshev's truth. As a child of my class, I received my sexual
initiation in a brothel. Experience with prostitutes spoiled my relations
with women forever. Yet with "the most varied and horrible crimes
against women" on my soul, I was welcomed into the homes of my
peers and permitted to dance with their wives and daughters (p. 239).
I became engaged to a girl. It was a time of sensual promise heightened by alluring fashions in clothes, by rich food, by lack of exercise.
Our honeymoon brought disillusionment; and married life turned into
an alternation between bouts of animosity and bouts of sensuality. What
we did not understand was that the animosity we felt for each other was
a protest of our "human nature" against being overpowered by our
"animal nature" (p. 261).
Society, via its priests and doctors, sanctions unnatural practices:
sexual intercourse during pregnancy and lactation, contraception. Contraception was "the cause of all that happened later," for it permitted
my wife to move among strange men "in the full vigour of a thirty-yearold, well fed and excited woman who is not bearing children" (pp. 281,
283).
A man named Trukachevski came on to the scene, a violinist. Led by
"a strange and fatal force," I encouraged his friendship with my wife,
and "a game of mutual deception" began. He and my wife played duets,
I seethed with jealousy but kept a smiling front, my wife was excited by
my jealousy, while an "electric current" flowed between her and him
(pp. 293-94). In retrospect I now see that playing music together, like
dancing together, like the closeness of sculptors to female models or of
doctors to female patients, is an avenue that society keeps open to encourage illicit liaisons.
I left home on a trip but kept remembering something Trukachevski's
brother once said: he slept only with married women because they
were "safe," he would not pick up an infection. Overcome with jealous
196

TOLSTOY, ROUSSEAU, DOSTOEVSKY

rage, I raced home. Trukachevski and my wife were playing duets. I

burst in on them with a dagger. Trukachevski escaped. My wife pleaded,
"There has been nothing... I swear it !" (p. 328). I stabbed her.
In prison a "moral change" took place in me and I saw how my fate
had been determined. "Had I known what I know now, everything
would have been different ... I should not have married at all" (pp.
328, 334).
Tolstoy's truth. In 1890, in response to letters from readers asking
"what I meant" in The Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy published an "Afterword" in which he spelled out what he "meant" as a series of injunctions. It is wrong for unmarried people to indulge in sexual intercourse.
People should learn to live naturally and eat moderately; they would
then find sexual abstinence easier. They should also be taught that
sexual love is "an animal state degrading to a human being." Contraception and the practice of intercourse during lactation should cease.
Chastity is a state preferable to marriage.7
The other truth "of" Pozdnyshev. If one rereads the story of Pozdny-

shev, however, stressing elements other than those elements Pozdnyshev and the Tolstoy of the "Afterword" choose to stress, one comes
up with another truth. I could allow this alternative truth "of" Pozdnyshev to speak in its own voice from its own "I." But then I may be read
as prejudging the case by asserting the same authority for this second
voice as for the first, the voice Pozdnyshev believes to be his own. So
let me write the other truth simply as something postulated "of" or
"about" Pozdnyshev, something extracted from his utterances yet not
the truth he avows in his own person.
In the ballrooms and drawing rooms of Pozdnyshev's class a convention reigns: no one is to look beneath the "carefully washed, shaved,
perfumed" exteriors of young men to see them as they are in their filthy
naked nocturnal debauches with prostitutes. Another convention says
that there are two kinds of women, decent women and prostitutes, even
though on occasion decent women dress like prostitutes, with "the same
exposure of arms, shoulders and breasts, the same tight skirts over
prominent bustles." In fact, women literally dress to kill. Pozdnyshev:
"I am simply frightened [by them]. I want to call a policeman and ask
for protection from the peril" (pp. 239, 244, 249).
Pozdnyshev gets married and goes on a honeymoon. The experience
is disillusioning: he compares it to paying to enter a sideshow at a fair,
discovering inside that you have been cheated, but being too ashamed
of your gullibility to warn other sightseers of the fraud. He thinks
particularly of a sideshow advertising a bearded woman that he visited
7"An Afterword to The Kreutser Sonata," in Essays and Letters, trans.
Aylmer Maude (London, 1903), pp. 36, 38.
197

COMPARATIVE

LITERATURE

in Paris (p. 251). As for intercourse, it leads to hatred and thence ultimately to killing. The killing goes on all the time. "They are all killing,
all, all .. ." Yet even when a woman is pregnant, when "great work"
is going on within her, she permits the entry of the male instrument
(pp. 261,263).
Then comes Trukachevski, with his "specially developed posterior,"
his "springy gait," his habit of "holding his hat against his twitching
thigh." Though Pozdnyshev dislikes Trukachevski, "a strange and
fatal force led me not to repulse him . .. but on the contrary to invite
him to the house." Trukachevski offers to "be of use" to Pozdnyshev's
wife, and Pozdnyshev accepts, asking him to "bring his violin and play
[igrat']with my wife." "From the first moment [their] eyes met . . . I
saw that the animal in each of them asked, 'May I ?' and answered, 'Oh
yes, certainly' " (pp. 286, 295, 294, 293, 296).
Racing home to trap the couple together, he exacerbates his passion
of jealousy by imagining how Trukachevski sees his wife: "She is not
in her first youth, has lost a side-tooth, and there is a slight puffiness
about her," but at least she will not have a venereal disease. Pozdnyshev's greatest anguish is that "I considered myself to have a complete
right to her body . . . and yet at the same time I felt I could not control
that body ... and she could dispose of that body as she pleased, and she
wanted to dispose of it not as I wished her to" (pp. 315, 318).
Creeping up to the room from which the music comes, Pozdnyshev
fears only that they will "part hastily" before he gets there and so deprive him of "clear evidence" of their crime. As he is about to stab his
wife, she cries out that there "has been nothing." "I might still have
hesitated, but these last words of hers, from which I concluded just the
forth a reply," and he
everything had happened-called
opposite-that
kills her (pp. 322, 326).
The collage of extracts I have taken from Pozdnyshev's text literally
tells a different story from the one he tells. The story is of a man who
sees the phallus everywhere, peeking mockingly or bulging threateningly from the bodies of men and women all around. He marries in the
hope of learning the sexual secret (the woman's beard) but is disappointed. He imagines sexual intercourse as a probing by the vengeful
phallus after the life of the unborn child, with whom he identifies, within
the mother. At the thought that his wife/mother's body does not belong
to him alone, he feels the anguish of the Oedipal child. He tries to solve
the problem by giving her to the threatening rival (whom he sees as a
walking phallus), thereby retaining magical control over the couple;
when they do not enact the scene he has prescribed and permitted them
he loses control and flies into murderous rage.
We hear Pozdnyshev speak this "other" truth about himself if we
198

TOLSTOY,

ROUSSEAU,

DOSTOEVSKY

stress a certain chain of elements of his text and ignore those elements
he wants us to attend to-his visits to prostitutes, his meat diet, etc. No
doubt we can read third and fourth truths out of the text by the same
method. But my argument is not a radical one involving an infinity of
interpretations. My argument is merely that Pozdnyshev and Pozdnyshev's interlocutor and Tolstoy and Tolstoy's public operate within an
economy in which a second reading is possible, a reading that searches
in the corners of Pozdnyshev's discourse for instances where the truth,
the "unconscious"truth, slips out in strange associations, false rationalizations, gaps, contradictions. If the "unconscious"truth of Pozdnyshev
is anything like the one I have outlined, then Pozdnyshev's confession
becomes one of those "ironic" confessions in which the speaker believes
himself to be saying one thing but is "in truth" saying something very
different. In particular, Pozdnyshev believes that since the "episode"
his eyes have been "opened"and he has attained a certain knowledge of
himself both as individual and as representative of a social class that
qualifies him to say what was "wrong" with him and is still wrong with
his class (whose representatives, all but one, refuse to hear the diagnosis
and move to another carriage). But the true truth "of" Pozdnyshev
turns out to be that he knows very little about himself. In particular,
while he knows that "had I known [then] what I know now ... I should
not have married at all," he does not know why he should not have
married or why he killed his wife. Yet the peculiar thing is that this
incompetent diagnostician is given explicit support by Tolstoy as author
in his "Afterword": what Pozdnyshev believes to be wrong with society, says Tolstoy, is indeed what is wrong.
Little I have said thus far about The Kreutzer Sonata is new. "The
conventions which govern it are confused," says Donald Davie. "The
reader does not know 'which way to take it.' Nor, as far as we can see,
was this ambiguity intended by the author. It is therefore a grossly imperfect work."8 "Broken-backed" is T. G. S. Cain's verdict: a "magnificently handled narrative of the moral decay of a marriage ... introduced by, and partly interwoven with, an obsessively unintelligent,
simplistic series of generalizations ... spoken by Pozdnyshev but ...
undoubtedly endorsed by Tolstoy."9 Both the comments of Davie and
Cain and my comments above point to a problem of mediation. A
confession embodying a patently inadequate self-analysis is mediated
through a narrator who gives no hint that he questions the analysis,
and the analysis is then reaffirmed (as "what I meant") by the author
writing outside the fiction. These mediators of Pozdnyshev are too
8 Donald Davie, "Tolstoy, Lermontov, and Others," in Donald Davie, ed.,
Russian Literature and Modern English Fiction (Chicago, 1965), p. 164.
9 T. G. S. Cain, Tolstoy (London, 1977), pp. 148-49.

199

COMPARATIVE

LITERATURE

quickly satisfied, one thinks: it is all too easy to read another, "deeper"
truth in Pozdnyshev's confession. Yet when one looks to Pozdnyshev
himself for evidence that he is disturbed by the strain of articulating
one truth with one voice ("consciously") while another truth speaks
itself "unconsciously," one finds nothing but the cryptic symptom of
the preverbal half-cough, half-laugh, which may signal strain but may
equally well signal scorn; when one looks to the narrator for signs of a
questioning attitude, one finds only silence; and when one looks to
Tolstoy one finds belligerently simplistic support for Pozdnyshev's
truth. At all levels of presentation, then, there is a lack of reflectiveness.
The Kreutzer Sonata presents a narrative, asserts its interpretation (its
truth), and asserts as well that there are no problems of interpretation.
A willed belief that things are one way when they are another way is
a form of self-deception. Whether Pozdnyshev is self-deceived and
whether the narrator is deceived are questions the text will not answer.
For the question "Is Pozdnyshev self-deceived?" can only mean "Is
Pozdnyshev a representation of a self-deceived man?" and the text
does not reflect on this point. Whether the narrator is deceived or not
by Pozdnyshev we cannot know, since the narrator is silent. But it is
meaningful to put the question of whether Tolstoy himself, as writer
and self-aware self-critic, is, at best, self-deceived when, by asserting
that Pozdnyshev is a trustworthy critic of society, he implies that
Pozdnyshev understands his own history, and therefore that his confession can be trusted to mean what he says it means. For, in the first
place, there is a plethora of biographical evidence that the habit of keeping a diary in the peculiar circumstances of the Tolstoy household
brought Tolstoy literally every day face to face with the temptations of
deception and the problems of insincerity and self-deception inherent
in the diary form and in confessional forms in general.10 And secondly,
the focus of the psychology of the novels of Tolstoy's middle period is
as much on mechanisms of self-deception as on anything.
On becoming engaged, Pozdnyshev (like Levin in Anna Karenina) hands
o10
over his intimate diaries to his future wife, who reads them with horror. Tolstoy
draws in both novels on the episode in his own life when he gave his intimate
diaries to his fiancee Sonya Behrs. In his biography of Tolstoy, Henri Troyat
describes the part the diaries played in the marriage. Quoting an entry from 1863
("Nearly every word in this notebook is prevarication and hypocrisy. The thought
that she [Sonya] is still here now, reading over my shoulder, stifles and perverts
my sincerity"), Troyat comments that the "private confessions" the couple made
in their diaries "unconsciously turned into arguments of prosecution and defence"
against each other. As Tolstoy's fame grew and it became clear that his diaries
would one day become public, the question of what he might write in them became
a matter of strife, his wife on occasion denouncing him in her diary for insulting
her in his diary. In the last year of his life Tolstoy kept a secret diary which he
hid in his boot (his wife ferreted it out while he was asleep). (Troyat, Tolstoy,
trans. Nancy Amphoux [1967; rpt. Harmondsworth, Eng., 1970], pp. 371, 397,
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TOLSTOY,

ROUSSEAU,

DOSTOEVSKY

What must surprise one, with this background in mind, is that Tolstoy should write a work so blank as The Kreutzer Sonata on the ambivalences of the confessional impulse and the deformations of truth
brought about by the confessional situation, a situation in which there
is always someone confessed to, even if, as in the private diary, the
nature of this Other might be left undefined, in suspension. Around
neither the confession within the confession (Pozdnyshev's presentation of his diaries to his fiancee) nor the confession of Pozdnyshev to
the narrator is there any frame of questioning. Just as one effect of seeing the light has been to make it easy for Pozdnyshev to discard his
earlier self, to regard that self without sympathy, so it would seem that
the effect of "knowing the truth" has made it easy for the Tolstoy of
1889 to turn his back on the earlier self who had regarded the attainment of truth as perilously beset with self-deception and complacency,
and to see the problematics of truth-telling as trivial compared with the
truth itself. One might say that The Kreutzer Sonata is not only open
to second and third readings, it is carelessly open to them, as though
Tolstoy were indifferent to games of reinterpretation that might be
played by people with time to waste. Thus The Kreutzer Sonata seems
to mark a turning of his back by Tolstoy on a talent whose distinguishing feature was a capacity "to know himself," as Rilke says, "right into
his own blood."'1
Pozdnyshev's life falls into a before and an after, the before being
"an abyss of error," the after a time of "everything reversed." His
temporal position in the after gives him, in his own eyes, that complete
self-knowledge which William C. Spengemann finds characteristic of
the "converted narrator," whose knowing, converted, narrating self
stands invisibly beside the experiencing, acting self he tells about.12 On
Pozdnyshev's conversion experience the text is silent except to say that
awareness comes after "torments" (p. 235). Still, as long as we continue to read The Kreutzer Sonata as the utterance of a converted self,
rather than as a frame for a schedule of pronouncements ("abstain from
prostitutes, abstain from meat, . . ."), we can continue to seek in the
text traces of the sense of truth-bearing that comes to the converted
narrator with the attainment of what he believes to be full understanding of the past.
366, 718-19, 902, 917.) Countess Tolstoy regarded The Kreutzer Sonata as neither
a free-floating fiction nor a sermon but a personal attack "directed against me,
[mutilating] me and [humiliating] me in the eyes of the whole world." She wrote
a novel in response, denouncing Tolstoy, the preacher of celibacy, as a sexual
brute, and was barely restrained from publishing it (Troyat, pp. 665-68).
11 Letter of 21 October 1924, in Henry Gifford, ed., Tolstoy: A Critical Anthology (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1971), p. 187.
12 The Forms of Autobiography (New Haven, 1980), p. 15.
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

To confirm that this sense of truth-embodying selfhood-and indeed

the process of the conversion experience itself-was of acute interest
to Tolstoy, we may turn not only to Anna Karenina but to a document
written ten years before The Kreut[er Sonata. A Confession is, in the
main, an analysis of a crisis Tolstoy passed through in 1874, when reason told him that life was meaningless and he came close to suicide, till
a force within him that he calls "an instinctive consciousness of life"
rejected the conclusions of his reason and saved him.l1
The language in which Tolstoy sets out this contest of forces is worth
examining in detail. Though associated with reasoning, the condition
of mind that leads him to " [hide] away a cord, to avoid being tempted
to hang myself, . .. and [cease] to carry a gun" is described as a passive
state, "a strange state of mind-torpor . . . a stoppage, as it were, of
life" (pp. 29-30, 24). Conversely, the impulse that saves his life is not
simply a physical life-force but partakes of the intellect: it is "an inkling
that my ideas were wrong," a sense that "I [had] made some mistake";
it is "doubts" (pp. 72, 76, 77). And though the impulse is finally named
as "an instinctive consciousness of life," it is accompanied by "a tormenting feeling, which I cannot [in retrospect] describe otherwise than
as a searching after God" (p. 109). Thus the opposition is not between
a clear and overwhelming conviction that life is absurd, and an instinctually based animal drive to live: error, the drive to death, is a gathering sluggishness, like the running down of life itself, while the saving
truth springs from an instinctive intellectual power that obscurely mistrusts reason. The second force does not clash with the first and defeat
it. Strictly speaking, there is no conflict. Rather, there are two states of
mind simultaneously present, the one a death-directed stoppage of life
that simply happens (na menya stali naxodit' minuty sna'ala nedoumeniya, ostanovki 22ini: "it happened that I was seized over and over
with moments of puzzlement, stoppages of life"), the other a mistrust, a
caution; and for reasons wihichreason cannot fathom the tide reverses,
the second slowly begins to supervene, the first begins to dissipate.
We are not wrong to detect a certain philosophical scrupulousness in
this account. There is another, conventional kind of language Tolstoy
might have slipped into to describe this conversion experience, a language in which the self chooses selfishly to follow the voice of reason
but is then saved from error by another voice speaking from the heart.
This would be a language of the false self and the true self, the false self
being rational and socially conditioned, the true self instinctual and individual. In Tolstoy there is no such simple dualism of false and true
13
"My Confession," in My Confession and The Spirit of Christ's Teaching,
trans. N. H. Dole (London, n.d.), p. 77. Where I give the Russian, I quote from
Ispoved' (Letchworth, Eng., 1963).

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TOLSTOY, ROUSSEAU, DOSTOEVSKY

selves. Rather, the self is a site where the will goes through its processes
in ways only obscurely accessible to introspection. It is not the self, or
a self, that reaches out toward God. Rather, the self experiences a reaching-out (iskaniemi Boga 'a searching after God'). The self does not
change (does not change itself); rather, a change takes place in the
site of the self: "When and how the change took place in me [soversilsya vo rne etot perevorot] I could not say" (p. 114).
Insofar as it gives an answer to the question of what the condition
of truthfulness is like, then, A Confession says that it arises out of an
attentiveness and responsiveness to an inner impulse which Tolstoy
calls an impulse toward God. The condition of truthfulness is not perfect self-knowledge but truth-directedness, what the peasant in Anna
Karenina calls "living for one's soul," in words that come as a blinding
illumination to Levin.14In his scepticism about rational self-knowledge,
in his conviction that men act in accord with inner forces in ways of
which they are not aware, Tolstoy remains in sympathy with Schopenhauer ;15 where he parts company with Schopenhauer is in identifying
the impulse toward God as one of these forces.
All of Tolstoy's writing, fictional and nonfictional, is concerned with
truth; in the late writings the concern with truth overrides all other
concerns. The restless impatience with received truths, the struggles to
uncover the grounds for a state of truthfulness in the self that are common to both the Levin sections of Anna Karenina and the later autobiographical writings, have left on one reader after another the impression of "perfect sincerity" that Matthew Arnold records.16Common to
both the autobiographical Confession and late stories like "The Death
of Ivan Ilyich" is the crisis (a confrontation with his own death) that
brings about an illumination in the life of the central character that
makes it absurd for him to continue in a self-deceived mode of existence.
Thereafter he may or may not live on as a (limited) witness to the
truth. The sense of urgency that the crisis brings about, the relentlessness of the process in which the self is stripped of its comforting fictions,
the single-mindedness of the quest for truth: all these qualities enter
into the term sincerity.
One would therefore expect that a fiction in confessional form would
provide Tolstoy with a congenial and adequate vehicle for the literature
14 Anna
Karenina, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1954),
p. 829.
15 Man "knows himself in consequence of and in accordance with the nature
of his will, instead of willing in consequence of and in accordance with his knowing" (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane
and J. Kemp, 4th ed., London, 1896, I, 378).
2nd series
16 Matthew Arnold, "Count Leo Tolstoi," in Essays in Criticism,
(London, 1888), p. 283.

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of truth that he wanted to write-that is to say, a fiction centering on

a crisis of illumination, retrospectively narrated by a speaker (now a
truth-bearer) about his earlier, (self-)deceived self. But what we have
found instead in The Kreutzer Sonata is a lack of interest in the potential of the confessional form in favor of another, dogmatic notion of
what it means to tell the truth. In consequence there occur two crippling
silences in the text. The first is the silence about the conversion experience, an experience in which, as the example of Tolstoy's own Confession shows, the inner experience of being a truth-bearer is felt most
intensely by contrast with the previous self-deceived mode of existence.
Silence about this experience thus entails a failure of dramatization.
The second and more serious silence is that of the narrator. Since
Pozdnyshev's confession is a narrative monologue characterized by
newfound self-certainty, the function of doubling back and scrutinizing
the truthfulness of the truth enunciated by Pozdnyshev must, faute de
miieux,fall to his auditor. His auditor performs no such function, thereby implicitly giving his support to the notion of truth that Tolstoy himself presents in the "Afterword": that truth is what it is, that there are
more important things to do than scrutinize the machinations of the
will at work in the utterer of truth. This authoritarian position denies,
in the name of a higher truth, the relevance of interrogating the interest
of the confessant in telling the truth his way: whatever the will behind
the confession might be (ultimately, thought Countess Tolstoy, a will
in Tolstoy to get at her), the truth transcends the will behind it. The
truth also transcends the suspicion that "the truth transcends the will
behind it" might be willed, self-serving. In other words, the position
taken up in The Kreutzer Sonata, both in the framework of interpretation with which Tolstoy surrounds it and in its own lack of armament
against other, unauthorized readings, other truths-a lack of armament
that one must finally read as contemptuous, disregarding-is one of
short-circuiting self-doubt and self-scrutiny in the name of an autonomous truth.
Because the basic movement of self-reflexiveness is a doubting and
questioning movement, it is in the nature of the truth that the reflecting
self tells itself not to be final. This lack of finality is naturally experienced with particular anguish in a writer as truth-directed as Tolstoy.
The endless knot of self-awareness becomes a Gordian knot. But if it
cannot be loosened, there is more than one way of cutting it. "Man cuts
the Gordian knot of his life, and kills himself simply for the sake of
escaping from the torturing inward contradictions produced by intelligent consciousness, which has been carried to the last degree of tension
in our day," Tolstoy wrote in 1887.17Alternatively, man can cut the
17 Life, trans. Isabel F.

204

Hapgood (London, 1889), p. 70.

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ROUSSEAU,

DOSTOEVSKY

knot by announcing the end of doubt in the name of the revealed truth.
But this maneuver, followed by Tolstoy in The Kreutzer Sonata, raises
its own problem. For whatever authority a confession bears in a secular
context derives from the status of the confessant as a hero of the labyrinth willing to confront the worst within himself (Rousseau claims to
be such a hero). A confessant who does not doubt himself when there
are obvious grounds for doing so (as in Pozdnyshev's case) is no better
than one who refuses to doubt because doubt is not profitable. Neither
is a hero, neither confesses with authority.

The impact on Tolstoy of reading Rousseau for the first time is well
known. For a while, as a youth, he wore a medallion with Rousseau's
picture around his neck. "There would be a certain justice," writes
Zenkovsky, "in expounding all of Tolstoy's views as variations on his
Rousseauism-so
deeply did this Rousseauism influence him to the end
of his life."'" Rousseau's Confessions first impressed Tolstoy for "the
contempt for human lies, and the love of truth" they revealed,19 though
in later life he delivered to Maxim Gorky his verdict that "Rousseau
lied and believed his lies."211 The terrain of truth, self-knowledge and
sincerity where Tolstoy spent so much of his writing life was mapped
out by Rousseau, and it is only here and there that Tolstoy goes further
than Rousseau in exploring it.
withThe Confessions begin: "I am commencing an undertaking...
out precedent ... I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man
in all the truth of nature, and that man myself." Rousseau goes on to
imagine himself appearing before God, book in hand, saying: "I have
shown myself as I was: mean and contemptible, good, high-minded and
sublime ... I have unveiled my inmost self."21 The task Rousseau sets
himself is therefore one of total self-revelation. Yet one might at once
ask how any other reader of the book of Rousseau's life save all-knowing God can know that he has truly told the truth.
Rousseau's first defense is that he passes the test Montaigne fails:
whereas Montaigne "pretends to confess his defects" but confesses only
"amiable" defects (Bk. X; II, 160), he, Rousseau, is prepared to confess to defects that bring shame upon him, like the sensual pleasure he
18 V. V. Zenkovsky, A History of Russian Philosophy, trans. George L. Kline
(London, 1953), I, 391.
19 Quoted in Cain, Tolstoy, p. 9.
20 Maxim Gorky, Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreev, trans.
Katherine Mansfield, S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (London, 1968), p. 30.
21 Confessions, trans. anon., 2 vols. (London, 1931), I, 1; hereafter cited in the
text. Where I give the French, I quote from (Euvres completes, ed. Bernard
Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris, 1959), vol. I.

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LITERATURE

takes in being beaten by women (Bk. I; I, 13). This defense does not,
of course, answer the charge that he may believe he is telling the truth,
yet be self-deceived. Here his response is that his method in the Confessions is to detail "everything that has happened to me, all my acts,
thoughts and feelings" without any structure of interpretation: "it is
[the reader's] business to collect these scattered elements and to determine the being which is composed of them; the result must be his
work" (Bk. IV; I, 159). And if this response seems evasive (if it does
not answer the charge of selective recollection, for instance), Rousseau's position is as follows:
I may omit or transposefacts, I may make mistakes in dates, but I cannot be deceived in what I have felt or what my feelings have promptedme to do ... The
real object of my Confessions is, to contribute to an accurate knowledge of my
inner being in all the different situations of my life. What I have promised to
relate is the history of my soul; I need no other memoirs to write it faithfully; it
is sufficientfor me to enter again into my inner self. (Bk. VII; I, 252)
Rousseau's position is thus that self-deception with respect to present
recollection is impossible, since the self is transparent to itself. Present
self-knowledge is a donnce.
How does this position work out in practice? Here let us turn to the
oft-discussed story of the theft of the ribbon told not only in Book II of
the Confessions but in the fourth of the Reveries. While employed as a
manservant, Rousseau steals a strip of ribbon. The ribbon is found in
his possession. Rousseau claims that the maidservant Marion gave the
ribbon to him, and repeats the charge to her face. Both Rousseau and
Marion are dismissed. Rousseau comments: "It is not likely that she
afterwards found it easy to get a good situation"; he wonders darkly
whether she might not have done away with herself (Bk. II; I, 75-76).
Though remorse has weighed on him for forty years, Rousseau writes
in 1766, he has never confessed his guilt till now. The act was "atrocious," and the spectacle of poor falsely accused Marion would have
changed any but a "barbarous heart." Nevertheless, the purpose of the
Confessions would not be served if he did not also try to present the
inner truth of the story. The inner truth is that "I accused her of having
done what I meant to do," that is to say, he accused Marion of having
given him the ribbon because it was his "intention" that he should give
Marion the ribbon. As for his failure to retract his lie when confronted
with Marion, this was because of an "unconquerable fear of shame." "I
was little more than a child": the situation was more than he could
handle (Bk. II; I, 75-77).
Paul de Man distinguishes two strains in this story: an element of
confession whose purpose it is to reveal a verifiable truth, and an element of excuse whose purpose it is to convince the reader that things
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TOLSTOY, ROUSSEAU, DOSTOEVSKY

are and were as Rousseau sees them.22Though de Man errs in asserting

that the truth one confesses must in principle be verifiable (one can
confess impure thoughts, for example), his distinction between confession proper and excuse does allow one to see why confessions of the
kind we encounter in Rousseau raise problems of certainty not raised
by confessions of fact. The act of theft was bad, says Rousseau, but there
was an intention behind it that was good, and therefore the act was not
entirely blameworthy. Similarly, the act of blaming Marion was bad,
but it was caused by fear and was therefore to some extent excusable.
Rousseau's self-examination ceases at this point. But the process of
qualification he has initiated can be continued further. How can he
know that that part of himself which recalls the good intention behind
the bad act is not constructing that intention post facto to exculpate
him? Yet on the other hand (we may imagine the autobiographer continuing), we must be careful to give the good in us as much credit as
the bad: what is it in me that might wish to minimize good intentions
by labeling them post facto rationalizations?23 Yet is a question like the
last one not precisely the kind of question I would be asking if I were
trying to shield myself from the knowledge of the worst in myself ? And
yet ...
To get to the "real" truth of the ribbon story, de Man moves past a
balancing of the claims of good intentions against those of bad acts to a
scrutiny of the language of the confession. "The obvious satisfaction in
the tone and the eloquence of the passage ... ,the easy flow of hyperboles . . . , the obvious delight with which the desire to hide is being
revealed"-these features of tone all indicate that "what Rousseau
really wanted is neither the ribbon nor Marion, but the public scene of
exposure which he actually gets." Both the theft and the belated breastbeating thus conceal Rousseau's "real" desire to exhibit himself. And
if self-exhibition is the real motive, then the more crime there is, the
more concealment, the more delay over revelation, the better. The "truly
shameful" desire that Rousseau is too ashamed to confess is the desire
to expose himself, a desire to which Marion is sacrificed. And, de Man
points out, this process of shame and exposure, like the process of confession and qualification, entails a regression to infinity: "each new
22 Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke,
and Proust (New Haven, 1979), p. 280.
23 This strategy is common in Rousseau. For example: "Far from having been
silent about anything or suppressed anything that might have been laid at my door,
I often found myself tending to lie in the contrary sense, and accusing myself with
too much severity rather than excusing myself with too much indulgence; and my
conscience answers me that one day I will be judged less severely than I have
judged myself" ("Quatrieme promenade," in (Euvres completes, I, 1035; my
translation).

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LITERATURE

stage in the unveiling suggests a deeper shame, a greater impossibility

to reveal, and a greater satisfaction in outwitting this impossibility"
(pp. 285-86).
It is perhaps naive of de Man to write of "what Rousseau really
wanted" as if that were historically knowable. It may also seem incautious to base interpretation on an analysis of features of style. However,
in the latter respect de Man has the authority not only of Rousseau but
of Romantic poetics behind him. From an early merely anti-classical
position that finds in sincerity, understood as a truthful relation of the
writer to himself, a substitute for an apprenticeship to the classics,24
Romanticism moves rapidly to the formula of Keats that reverses the
entailments: not only does truth entail beauty, beauty entails truth,
too. From here it is not far to the position that poetry creates its own,
autonomous standards of truth.25
The notion that the artist creates his own truth takes a particularly
radical form in the Confessions, since Rousseau is working in a medium
-autobiography-with closer ties to history, and to referential criteria
of truth, than to poetry. We can conveniently trace the stages by which
Rousseau feels his way toward this position if we follow the theme of
exhibitionism in the Confessions.
In Book III Rousseau describes a series of sexually exhibitionistic
acts he performed as a youth. The description of these acts is itself, of
course, a kind of exhibitionism. What motive lies in common behind
these two forms of self-revelation? Jean Starobinski suggests an answer: they represent a recourse to the "magic power" of "immediate
seduction": the subject reaches out to others without leaving himself;
he shows what he is like while remaining himself and remaining within
himself.26

Rousseau's self-revelations in fact always have in view the goal of

winning love and acceptance. Self-revelation offers the truth of the self,
a truth that others might be persuaded to see. Thus, in the words of
Starobinski, whose analysis of Rousseau's exhibitionism I follow, "the
Confessions are on the most important account an attempt to rectify the
error of others and not an investigation of a temps perdu. Rousseau's
24 See, for example, Wordsworth's second "Essay upon Epitaphs" of 1810:
"where [the] charm of sincerity lurks in the language of a Tombstone and secretly
pervades it, there are no errors of style or manner for which it will not be, in some
degree, a recompence" (Prose Works, ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser, Oxford, 1974, II, 70).
"A
25 See, for example, T. S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921):
philosophical theory which has entered into poetry is established, for its truth or
falsity in one sense ceases to matter, and its truth in another sense is proved"
(Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward, Harmondsworth, Eng., 1953, p. 118).
26 Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la transparence et l'obstacle
(Paris, 1957), pp. 214-15. Translation mine.

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ROUSSEAU,

DOSTOEVSKY

interest ... begins with the question: Why does this inner feeling ...
not find its echo in the according of immediate recognition ?" (p. 228).
For this persuasive intent to be carried out, a language (dcriture) must
be invented to render the unique savor of personal experience, a language "supple enough and varied enough to tell the diversity, the contradictions, the slight details, the minuscule nuances, the interlocking
of tiny perceptions whose tissue constitutes the unique existence of
Jean-Jacques" (p. 240). Rousseau's own comment on this stylistic
project is as follows:
I will write what comes to me, I will change [my style] accordingto my humour
without scruple, I will express everything as I feel it, as I see it, without affectation, without constraint, without being upset by the resulting medley. Yielding
myself simultaneouslyto the memory of the impression I received [in the past]
and to present feeling, I will give a twofold depictionof [je peindraidoublement]
the state of my soul.27

The immediacy of the language Rousseau projects is intended as a

guarantee of the truth of the past it recounts. It is no longer a language
that dominates its subject as the language of the historian does. Instead,
it is a naive language that reveals the confessant in the moment of confession in the same instant that it reveals the past he confesses-a past
necessarily become uncertain. In Starobinski's formulation, we are
moving from the domain of truthfulness, where confession still remains
subject to historical verification, to the domain of authenticity. Authenticity does not demand that language reproduce a reality; instead it demands that language manifest its "own" truth. The distance between
the writing self and the source of the feelings it writes about is abolished
-this abolition being what distinguishes authenticity from sincerityfor the source is always here and now. "Everything takes place, in
effect, in a present so pure that the past itself is relived as present feeling" (Starobinski, p. 248). The first prerequisite is thus to be oneself.
One is in danger of not being oneself when one lives at a reflective distance from oneself (a revealing reversal of values for autobiography).
Language itself therefore becomes for Rousseau the being of the
authentic self, and appeal to an exterior "truth" is closed off. Furthermore, the only kind of reader who can judge between truth and falsity
in Rousseau while accepting-even if only provisionally-the premises
of his confessional project, must be one like de Man, who tries to detect

inauthentic moments in Rousseau via inauthentic moments in his lan-

guage. De Man's analysis of the ribbon episode depends on the premise

that confession betrays inauthenticity when the confessant lapses into

the language of the Other. Thus, though de Man accuses Rousseau of
27

Annales, quoted in Starobinski, p. 243.

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LITERATURE

(self-) deception on the basis of the "satisfaction" he detects in his tone,

a "delight" in his own revelations, the satisfaction and delight are themselves detected in "eloquence" and "an easy flow of hyperbole," that is
to say, in features of language that do not belong to Rousseau. Rousseau
is not speaking (for) himself, someone else is speaking through him.28
Without contesting this identification of authenticity with truth, we
may seem to have as little hope of giving the Confessions a second reading as we have of giving The Kreutzer Sonata a second reading without
contesting Tolstoy's authoritarian truth. De Man is only able to give a
second reading of the ribbon episode by exploring a fissure in the text,
a lapse of authenticity. As long as his language is his own, Rousseau
would seem to be the sole author of his own truth. We may show, however, that a way may be opened to a second reading of Rousseau's text
as much by moments of inconsistency as by false moments of style. To
this end I should like to consider a passage in which Rousseau discusses
his attitude toward money (Confessions, Bk. I; I, 30-32; (Euvres
complktes, I, 36-38).

Rousseau presents himself as "a man of very strong passions," who

under the sway of feeling is capable of being "impetuous, violent, fearless." But usually the fit is brief, after which he lapses into "indolence,
timidity," overpowered by "fear and shame," embarrassed by the looks
of others to such an extent that he would like to hide.
Not only are his desires limited by a natural indolence and timidity:
the range of his tastes is also limited. "None of my prevailing tastes
center on things that can be bought," he writes. "Money poisons all."
"Women who could be bought for money would lose for me all their
charms; I even doubt whether it would be in me to make use of them."
"I find it the same with all pleasures within my reach; unless they cost
me nothing, I find them insipid."
Why should money poison desire? The explanation Rousseau offers
is that for him the exchange is always an unfair one. "I should like

something which is good in quality; with my money I am sure to get it

28
Though it is an easy eloquence that betrays Rousseau here, the language of
the Other from which he more often strives to free himself is the language of La
Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere and Pascal. "The great prose writers of seventeenthcentury France," writes Margery Sabin, "established an authoritative language
of psychological description which drew strength precisely from the public character of language." Rousseau carries his protest against this language of feeling
down to "every level of the work, even to the implications of syntax and the meanings of individual words." Sabin goes on to give an exemplary analysis of Rousseau's style in his description of his feelings for Mme de Warens, where phrases
"circle" the elusive feeling rather than pinning it down. "If his emotion remains
elusive, confusing, paradoxical-well, the style argues, that is the true nature of
his inner life" (English Romanticism and the French Tradition, Cambridge,
Mass., 1976, pp. 19, 29).

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DOSTOEVSKY

bad [je suis silr de l'avoir mauvaise]. If I pay a high price for a fresh
egg, it is stale; for a nice piece of fruit, it is unripe; for a girl, she is
spoilt."
This first explanation, which blames the egg or the fruit or the girl
is not supported by the facts (the only girl he ever buys is not "spoilt";
rather, Rousseau is impotent29). The phrase "I am sure to get it bad"
is more revealing: in comparison with what he wants, what he buys
(not what he gets) is sure to be bad/unripe/spoilt. "Unless [pleasures]
cost me nothing, they are insipid." The prophecy that what I buy is sure
to be bad is self-fulfilling.
Rousseau now gives examples of how he experiences the transaction
of buying. He goes to the pastrycook's and notices women laughing
among themselves at "the little glutton." He goes to the fruiterer's but
sees passersby whom his short-sightedness turns into "acquaintances."
"Everywhere I am intimidated, restrained by some obstacle; my desire
increases with my shame, and at last I return home like a fool, consumed
with longing, having in my pocket the means of satisfying it, and yet
not having the courage to buy anything."
What is it that the eyes around him threaten to know and laugh at
when he walks into a shop? Is it what he wants (to buy.) ? Is it the act
of asking? Is it the act of proffering money? Instead of pursuing an
answer, Rousseau makes a typically veering and retracting motion. As
the reader follows the story of his life, he says, and gets to know his
"real temperament, he will understand all this, without my taking the
trouble to tell him." To the entire syndrome he gives the label of an
"apparent inconsistency [contradiction]," namely "the union of an almost sordid avarice with the greatest contempt for money." For avarice
the excuse is that "I keep [money] for a long time without spending it,
for want of knowing how to make use of it in a way to please myself
'
[faute de savoir l'employer ma fantaisie ] "; and he at once goes on to
distinguish between the possession of money (where money becomes
"an instrument of freedom") and the pursuit of money (where it is "an
instrument of slavery"), a distinction which neatly nullifies the vice of
avarice he admitted to a moment ago.
Why is it that he has no desire for money ? Rousseau's answer is that
money cannot be enjoyed in itself, whereas "between the thing itself
and the enjoyment of it there is [no intermediary]. If I see the thing, it
tempts me; if I see only the means of possessing it, it does not. For this
reason [donc] I have committed thefts, and even now I sometimes pilfer
trifles which tempt me, and which I prefer to take rather than ask for."
The logic of this passage is worth scrutinizing. As Starobinski reads
29The episodeis recountedin Book VII (I, 261, 292-94).
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LITERATURE

it, Rousseau is giving an example of how "money poisons all."30 But if

we paraphrase Rousseau's logic accurately, it reads as follows: "I desire the thing but not the means that leads to it, therefore I steal the
thing but not the means," not: "I desire the thing but not the means,
therefore I take (steal) the thing so as not to use the means." To the
question: "Why steal at all ?" this passage gives no better explanation
than: "I prefer to take rather than ask for." Nor does Rousseau take
the exploration of his attitudes towards money any further, though the
topic is returned to several times in the Confessions.l'
Since Rousseau makes no headway in explaining his "apparent inconsistency," and since the illumination he promises the reader does
not, at least for some readers, ever arrive, we may try to give our own
explanation to the complex of behavior he describes. Attending less to
his reflections than to the shop scenes he describes, we note that what
offends him is the openness and legitimacy of monetary transactions.
By going into the shop and saying "I want a cake" and proffering
money, he is acquiescing in a mode of treating his own "I want" that
effectively "poisons" it. It is brought into the public, equalized with the
"I want" of every Tom, Dick and Harry who enters the shop; it loses
its uniqueness; it becomes known (by all the knowing eyes) in the
same moment at which Rousseau loses control of the terms on which
he wants it known (it becomes spent on a public scale of sous and
francs). To Rousseau, his own desires are resources as long as they
remain unique, hidden-in other words, as long as they are potentially
confessable. Brought into the public eye, they are revealed to be merely
desires like everyone else's. The system of exchange that agitates Rousseau, the system he will not participate in, is thus one in which his desire
for an apple is exchanged for an apple, via the public medium of money;
for every time such an exchange takes place the desire loses its value.
the
Shamefulness and value are thus interchangeable terms. For-in
the
of
confession-the
only appetites
only unique appetites,
economy
that constitute confessable currency, are shameful appetites. A shameful
desire is a valuable desire. Conversely, for a desire to have a value it
must have a secret, shameful component. Confession consists of a double
movement of offering to spend "inconsistencies" and holding back
enough to maintain the "freedom" that comes from having capital. This
30 Starobinski comments that Rousseau first uses "the principle of immediacy"
to clarify his psychology, but almost at once this principle "takes on the value of
a superior justification, of a moral imperative" of higher validity than "ordinary
rules of right and wrong" (p. 132). In fact, the principle is not given a moral
coloring in the passage we are considering.
31 For example, in the discussion of his "miserliness" during his time with
Mme de Warens, or of his dislike of giving money for sex (Bks. V, VII; I, 188,
261).

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process of half-revealing and then withdrawing into mystery, a process

intended to fascinate, is neatly exemplified in the passage as a whole.
If buying is unacceptable because it places desire on a public scale
(such being the nature of money), stealing, though it too reveals the
equivalent of the desire in the object stolen, has its compensations in
(a) replacing the revealed, and no longer shameful, desire with a crime
-itself confessable currency; and (b) bringing into being the mystery
of why Rousseau steals when he can afford to buy, the very mystery
that he introduces and then withdraws from solving.
I do not wish to advance the reading I have given as the truth that
Rousseau ought to have told about money, but did not or could not, just
as I do not wish to advance the reading I have given of Tolstoy's
Pozdnyshev as the truth Pozdnyshev failed to see about himself. Indeed,
one of the minor functions of these rereadings is to bring the notion of
the truth into question.
On the other hand, there seems to me a narrower and more productive direction to follow at this point than the direction indicated by
Jacques Derrida, which would be to argue that the idea of truth belongs
to a certain epoch, the "epoch of supplementarity,"and that the practice
of writing is made possible by the idea of truth, which is a kind of
"blind spot" toward which writing moves by an endless series of "supplements" that continually defer the truth.32 The readings that Rousseau and Pozdnyshev have given themselves, and the rereadings I have
given them, insofar as these rereadings have justified themselves in the
name of the truth, are certainly Derridean supplements; and the deconstruction of the practices I have followed in rereading Rousseau and
Pozdnyshev could certainly lead to a "better,""fuller"pair of new readings; and so on to infinity. But the point Derrida makes is relevant to
all truth-oriented writing; whereas the point I wish to argue is that the
possibility of reading a truth "behind"a true confession has implications
peculiar to the genre of confession.
Returning to The Kreutzer Sonata and Rousseau's Confessions, we
note that we have passed through a similar progression in each case. A
crime is confessed (murder, theft) ; a cause or reason or psychological
origin is proposed to explain the crime; then a rereading of the confession yields a "truer" explanation. The question we should ask now
is: What must the response of the confessant be toward these or any
other "truer" corrections of his confession ? The answer, it seems to me,
is that to the extent that the new, "deeper" truth is acknowledged as
true, the response of the confessant must contain an element of shame.
For either the confessant was aware of the deeper truth but was con32 Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore,

1976),

pp. 157, 163-64, 245.

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COMPARATIVE

LITERATURE

cealing it, in which case he was deceiving his confessor, or he was not
aware of the deeper truth (though now he acknowledges it), in which
case his competence as a confessant is in question: what was being
offered as his secret, the coin of his confession, was not the real secret,
was false coin, and a de facto deception has occurred, which is fresh
cause for confession.33
I have considered thus far the hypothetical case of a Pozdnyshev or a
Rousseau who, confronted with a reading of his confession that yields a
"deeper" truth than the one he has acknowledged, acknowledges the
new truth and shifts his ground. In such a case, we might ask, where
will the confessant stand his ground ? For, in principle, if we have given
one rereading of his story we can give a second. If the confessant is in
principle prepared to shift his ground with each new reading as long as
he can be convinced that it is "truer" than the last one, then he is no
more than a biographer of the self, a constructor of hypotheses about
himself that can be improved on by other biographers. In such an event,
his confession has no more authority than an account given by any other
biographer: it may proceed from knowledge, but it does not proceed
from self-knowledge.
Whether the confessant yields to the new truth about himself depends
on the nature of his commitment to his original confession. The more
deeply he has avowed the truth of this confession, the more deeply its
truth has become part of his personal identity. Yielding subsequently
to the new truth entails damage to that identity. In the case of a Pozdnyshev or a Rousseau the damage is particularly acute, since part of his
being is that he has become a confessant, a truth-teller.
Alternatively, the confessant may refuse to yield to the new truth,
thereby adopting precisely the stand of the self-deceived subject who
prefers not to avow the "real" truth of himself to himself, and prefers
not to avow this preference, and so on to infinity.34 In this case, how
can he tell the difference between himself and the self-deceived confessant, the confessant whose truth is a lie, since both "believe" they
know the truth ?
A third alternative is to confess with an "open mind," acknowledging
from the beginning that what he avows as the truth may not be the
truth. But there is something literally shameless in this posture. For if
33 It might be objected that I draw too sharp a line between being aware and
not being aware of the "deeper" truth, ignoring the gradations and subtleties of
self-deception that stretch between the extremes of innocence and mendacity. But,
as Michel Leiris for one recognizes, the autobiographer takes on himself in the
same way that the torero takes on the bull: there are no excuses for defeat (Man-

hood,trans. RichardHoward, London,1968,p. 20).

34 For this account of the mechanismof self-deception I am indebtedto Her-

bert Fingarette, Self-Deception

214

(London, 1969), pp. 86-87.

TOLSTOY,

ROUSSEAU,

DOSTOEVSKY

one proceeds in the awareness that the transgressions one is "truly"

guilty of may be heavier than those one accuses oneself of, one proceeds
equally in an awareness that the transgressions one is "truly" guilty of
may be lighter than those one accuses oneself of (Rousseau is explicit
about the latter kind of awareness in his own case: see note 23). To be
aware of oneself in this posture-which
follows inevitably from having
an open mind on the question of one's own truthfulness-is
already
matter for confession; to be aware that the posture is not a guilty one
(because it is inevitable) is a matter for further shame and confession;
and so on to infinity.
What I have written thus far indicates that the project of confession
when the subject is at a heightened level of self-awareness and open to
self-doubt raises intricate and, on the face of it, intractable problems
regarding truthfulness, problems whose common factor seems to be a
regression to infinity of self-awareness and self-doubt. It is by no means
clear that these problems are visible to the Rousseau of the Confessions
or the Tolstoy of The Kreutser Sonata. But to trust that evidence of
such an awareness must necessarily surface in the text, when it is precisely not in the interest of either writer to bear such awareness, would
be incautious. All we can say at this stage is that the problems are not
articulated. For the time being we are in the position of Hume, who,
confronted with an interlocutor who claims unmediated knowledge of
of his
this is not in Hume-knowledge
himself (and therefore-though
of
lack
for
discussion
but
the
has
no
recourse
to
own truth),
interrupt
common ground.35

Confessions are everywhere in Dostoevsky. In simpler cases Dostoevsky uses confession as a way of allowing a character to expose
himself, tell his own truth. The confession of Prince Valkovsky in The
Insulted and Injured (1861), for example, is little more than an expository means of this kind."6 Even in this early novel, however, an
element of gratuitousness creeps into the confession: the freedom of
revelation is not strictly necessitated by demands of plotting or motivation, its frankness is not strictly in character. In the later novels the
level of gratuitousness mounts to the extent that one can no longer think
of confession as a mere expository device: confession itself, with all its
attendant psychological, moral, epistemological and finally metaphysical problems, moves to the center of the stage. Though in other critical
35 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest Mossner (Harmondsworth,Eng., 1969), p. 300.

36 The Insulted and Injured, trans. Constance Garnett (London, 1915), pp.
240-51.

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LITERATURE

contexts it may be fruitful to treat confession in the major novels as, on

the one hand, a form of masochism or a vice that Dostoevsky finds
typical of the age,37 or on the other as one of the generic forms yoked
together to make up the Dostoevskian novel,38 I propose here to single
out three of the major confession episodes, in Notes from Underground,
The Idiot, and The Possessed, and ask how the problem of ending is
solved when the tendency of self-consciousness is to draw out confession
endlessly.
Notes from Underground (1864) falls into two parts, the first a dissertation on self-consciousness, the second a story from the narrator's
past. Though both parts can be thought of as confessions, they are confessions of different kinds, the first being a revelation of personality,
the second the revelation of a shameful history. In the first and more
theoretical part, however, self-revelation is subsumed under a wider
discussion of whether it is possible to tell the truth about oneself in an
age of self-consciousness or "hyperconsciousness," the disease of what
the unnamed narrator calls "our unfortunate nineteenth century" and
of St. Petersburg, "the most abstract and intentional city in the whole
world." The "laws of hyperconsciousness," which dictate an endless
awareness of awareness, make the hyperconscious man the antithesis of
the normal man. Feeling no basis in certainty, he cannot make decisions
and act. He cannot even act upon his own self-consciousness to freeze
it in some position or other, for it obeys its own laws. Nor can he regard
himself as a responsible agent, since accepting responsibility for oneself is a final position. (This is not of course to say that he blames
himself for nothing: on the contrary, he blames himself for everything.
But he does so in a reflex motion originating in the laws of self-

consciousness.)"9
37 This is in essence the position taken by Alex de Jonge, Dostoevsky and the
Age of Intensity (London, 1975). De Jonge's thesis is that many of Dostoevsky's
Marmeladov, and Svidrigailov among them--are adconfessants-Valkovsky,
herents of a "cult of intensity," founded by Rousseau, who exploit the masochistic
pleasures of self-abasement. De Jonge sees Dostoevsky as a psychologist of confession exploring the ways in which people with no sense of self, no sense of guilt,
no interest in the truth, use self-revelation as an instrument of power and pleasure (pp. 175-76, 181, 186-87).
38 Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the Dostoevskian novel is a form of Menippean
satire, a mixture of fictional narrative with philosophical dialogue, confession,
hagiography, fantasy, and other usually incompatible elements. In addition, says
Bakhtin, Dostoevsky exploits the old European tradition of the carnival, where
customary social restraints may be dropped and utter frankness may reign in
human contacts (La Poetique de Dostoivski, trans. Isabelle Kolitcheff, Paris,
1970, Ch. iv). To Bakhtin the confession is thus in the first place a structural element of Dostoevsky's fiction, though he goes on to explore a "dialogic attitude
toward the self" in Dostoevsky's first-person narrators, the self becoming its own
interlocutor (p. 167).
39 "Notes from Underground," in Notes from Underground and The Grand

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TOLSTOY, ROUSSEAU, DOSTOEVSKY

So much for theory. But before embarking on his own shameful

reminiscences, the narrator-heroinvokes the precedent of Rousseau.
I want to try the experiment whether one can be perfectly frank ... Heine maintains that a true autobiography is almost an impossibility, and that man is bound
to lie about himself. He considers that Rousseau almost certainly told lies about
himself in his confessions, and even intentionally lied, out of vanity. I am convinced that Heine is right. (p. 35)

In his own case, on the other hand, he will have no readers and therefore, he asserts, will have no temptation to lie.
The project of not lying is put to the test most severely in the story
of his relations with the young prostitute Liza. After a night of "vice ...
without love," he recounts, he wakes up in her bed to find her staring
intently at him. Feeling uncomfortable, he begins to talk without forethought, urging her to reform and offering to help her. Why is he doing
this ? he later asks himself. He explains it as "sport," the sport of
"turning her soul upside down and breaking her heart." However, he
has an inkling that what attracts him is "not merely the sport" (pp. 82,
91).
The next day the "loathsome truth" dawns on him that he has been
sentimiental.His reaction is to begin to hate Liza; nevertheless, he cannot forget the "pitiful, distorted, inappropriate smile" she wore as she
gazed at him. "Something was rising up, rising up continually in my
soul, painfully, refusing to be appeased" (pp. 94, 97, 96).
A short while later Liza visits him to take him up on his promise.
With a feeling of "horrible spite" he embarks on a cruel confession. All
the time he was mouthing fine sentiments, he says, he was inwardly
laughing at her. For, having been humiliated by his friends, he had
turned on her as an object to humiliate in turn. All he had wanted was
"sport." Now she can "go to hell." Surely she realizes that he will never
forgive her for coming to his apartment and seeing the wretched conditions in which he lives ? He is bound to make her suffer, since he is "the
nastiest, stupidest, pettiest, absurdest and most envious of all worms on
earth"; and for eliciting this abject confession, for hearing him speak
"as a man speaks . .. once in a lifetime," she must be punished even
more; and so forth (pp. 106-08).
At first Liza is taken aback by his "cynicism"; then, surprisingly,
Inquisitor, ed. and trans. Ralph E. Matlaw (New York, 1960), pp. 6, 8, 9, 16, 8;
hereafter cited in the text. The metaphor of self-consciousness as a disease is a
commonplace in Europe by the 1860s. "Self-contemplation . . . is infallibly the
symptom of disease," writes Thomas Carlyle in 1831: only when "the fever of
Scepticism" is burned out will there be "clearness, health" ("Characteristics"
[18311, in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, London, 1899, III, 7, 40). See also
Geoffrey H. Hartman, "Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-Consciousness,' " in Harold
Bloom, ed., Romanticism and Consciousness (New York, 1970), pp. 46-56.

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

she embraces him, as if it has dawned on her that he too is unhappy. He

is overwhelmed. "They won't let me-I can't be-good !" he sobs in her
arms. Almost at once, however, he begins to feel ashamed to be in a
"crushed and humiliated" position. In his heart flares up
a feelingof masteryandpossession.My eyes gleamedwithpassion,andI gripped
her handstightly.How I hatedher andhow I was drawnto her at thatminute!
The one feelingintensifiedthe other.It was almostlike an act of vengeance!At
firsttherewas a lookof amazement,
evenof terroron her face,butonlyfor one
me. (pp. 107,109,110)
embraced
instant.She warmlyandrapturously
In the "fever of oscillations" typical of hyperconsciousness (p. 11),
his next moves are almost predictable. (1) He presses money into Liza's
hand to indicate that she remains a whore to him, then when she leaves
(2) he rushes after her "in shame and despair," reflecting, however,
(3) that the real cause of his shame is the "bookishness" of this gesture.
He gives up the chase, persuading himself (4) that a feeling of outrage
will "elevate and purify" the girl. He feels pleased with this formulation
and (5) despises himself for being pleased (pp. 112-13).
At this point the story of Liza comes to an end: "I don't want to
write more from 'underground',"the narrator says. However, his text
is followed by an "authorial" note: "The 'notes' of this paradoxicalist
do not end here ... He could not resist and continued them. But it also
seems that we may stop here" (p. 115).
The summary I have given of the "Liza" confession is not a disinterested one. I have emphasized those moments at which something comes
up out of the narrator's depths that he does not understand even in the
retrospect of fifteen years. Part I has prepared us for a confession in
which no motive will be hidden from the light of hyperconsciousness, in
which Rousseau will be exceeded in frankness. Those moments at which
the narrator does not understand himself therefore have a peculiar
status: either they were not understood fifteen years ago when he was
actor in his story, and now are recorded without interrogation by him
in the role of confessant; or they are now given a retrospective explanation, but an explanation odd not so much for being false as for being
final, i.e., for not being subjected to the endless regression of selfconsciousness (I shall give an example below).
Specifically, we might want to question the "Liza" confession at the
following points. (a) If it is "sport" to humiliate Liza, what motivates
the narrator that is "not merely the sport"? (b) "Something was not
dead within me, in the depths of my heart and conscience it would not
die ... Something was rising up, rising up continually in my soul, painfully, and refusing to be appeased. I returned home completely upset;
it was just as though some crime were lying on my conscience" (p. 96).
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TOLSTOY,

ROUSSEAU,

DOSTOEVSKY

What is the name of the "something," and what is the nature of the
crime? (c) "They won't let me-I can't be-good !" he sobs, uttering
words that seem to come from a stranger within him. What does the

utterance mean? One reading is that he is continuing his "sport" with

Liza, pretending to be tormented and unhappy. Another is that the
voice from within is the repressed voice of a better self which "they"
won't allow to emerge.
(d) In Liza's embrace he passes through a rapid series of states of
feeling remarkablefor their ambivalence.Though cryptically expressed,
these include: triumph that he has got his aggressive confession off his
chest without incurring a rebuff; a desire to set his seal on this victory
by sexually possessing the girl; and an abiding will to humiliate her
even further. There is no doubt that he and she have the makings of the
sado-masochistic couple so common in Dostoevsky. But the account I
have just given rests only on the report he gives of his own inner state,
and of what he reads on Liza's face; and what she reads in his face (he
in turn reads from her face) awakes in her first amazement and terror
but then rapturous response. Is she misreading him, seeing "true" love
where she should read sadistic desire? In a sense, yes: the burden of
his ridicule of her is that she is a bad reader who has misread him from
the beginning as being sincere when he is not. But one must remember
that as a writer of his own story he is in a privileged position to dictate
readings. His "Notes" dictate a reading in which Liza is duped in the
brothel and duped as well in his apartment. Not only is he the writer
of his story, he also plays the leader in the two dialogues he has with
Liza, asking her questions, telling her who and what she is. Only one
judgment of hers on him gets reported: "You speak exactly like a
book" (p. 86). For the rest, her reading of him is memorialized in his
"Notes" only in the two looks: the "wide-open eyes scrutinizing me
curiously and persistently" to which he wakes up in her room (p. 77),
and the look in his apartment that reads passion in his face. Not much
material from which to infer her reading of him. Yet we have a fair idea
of what her wide-open eyes see: a man who has paid his money and
spent two hours in her bed having sex with her "without love, grossly
and shamelessly" (p. 77). Her comment that he speaks like a book is
accurate too. Can we be convinced, then, that she misreads him when
he says he wants her to escape prostitution, and again when he says he
feels passion-or perhaps even need-for her? The possibility seems
open that Liza has a knowledge of, or at least an insight into, the narrator that he, as teller of his own story, cannot afford to acknowledge;
and that from his point of vantage (point of advantage) the three moments of perception he allows to Liza are flaws in the texture of his
story.
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

It would be naive to propose a reading of the story-filled out from

Liza's three moments and from the moments at which a voice speaks
unbidden from within him--in which the hero emerges as "in truth" an
unhappy, self-tormented young man longing for a woman's love yet
afraid to expose his longings. There is an irony at the heart of Notes
from Underground, but the irony is not that its hero is not as bad as he
says he is. The real irony is that, while he promises a confession that
will outdo Rousseau in truthfulness, a confession he believes himself
fitted to make because he is afflictedwith hyperconsciousness to the ultimate degree, his confession reveals nothing so much as the helplessness
of confession before the desire of the self to construct its own truth.
It is worth going back to Part I of the Notes to see what the hero has
to say about desire. The enlightened "Sixties" view, he says, is that
desire obeys a law, the law that man desires in accord with his own
advantage.40 But the truth is that every now and again man will desire
what is injurious to himself precisely "in order to have the right to
desire for himself" without being bound by any law. And he desires this
freedom from determination in order to assert "what is most precious
and most important-that is, our personality, our individuality" (p.
26). The primal desire is therefore the desire for a freedom which the
hero identifies with unique individuality.
The question one might immediately ask is: How does the subject
know that the choices he makes, even "perverse" choices that bring him
no advantage, are truly undetermined? How does he know he is not the
slave of a pattern of perverse choices (a pathological pattern, perhaps)
whose design is visible to everyone but him ? Self-consciousness will not
give him the answer, for self-consciousness in Notes from Underground
is a disease. What is diseased about it is that it feeds upon itself, finding
behind every motive another motive, behind every mask another mask,
until the ultimate motive, which must remain masked (otherwise the
endless regression would be ended, the disease would be cured). We
can call this ultimate motive the motive for unmasking itself. What the
underground man cannot know in his self-interrogation is therefore
why he wants to tell the truth about himself; and the possibility exists
that the truth he tells about himself (the perverse truth, the truth as a
story of perverse "free" choices he has made) might itself be a perverse
truth, a perverse choice made in accord with a design invisible to him
though perhaps visible to others.
We are now beyond all questions of sincerity. The possibility we face
is of a confession made via a process of relentless self-unmasking which
40 On the first part of Notes from Underground as a critiqueof the Nihilism of
the 1860s, see Joseph Frank, "Nihilism and Notes from Underground,"Sewanee
Rezview,69 (1961), 1-33.
220

TOLSTOY, ROUSSEAU, DOSTOEVSKY

might yet be not the truth but a self-serving fiction, because the unexamined, unexaminable principle behind it may be not a desire for the
truth but a desire to be a particular way. The more coherent such a
hypothetical fiction of the self might be, the less the reader's chance of
knowing whether it is a true confession. We can test its truth only when
it contradicts itself or comes into conflict with some "outer," verifiable
truth, both of which eventualities a careful confessing narrator can in
theory avoid. We would have no grounds for doubting the truth of the
underground man's confession, and specifically of his thesis that his
ultimate quality is consciousness, if there were not imperfections in the
surface the confession presents, moments, for example, when the body
under stress emits words like "I can't be good," signs of an unexamined
underlying struggle.
It would not be surprising, if the narrator's confession were a lying,
self-serving fiction, that the repressed truth should break through its
surface, particularly at moments of stress, in the forms of stirrings of
the heart, intimations of the unacknowledged, utterances of the inner
self, or that the truth should soon be repressed again. What is disappointing about Notes from Underground, if we think of it as an exploration of confession and truth, is that it should rely for its own truth not
only upon the return of the repressed at the level of the acting subject
(the hero of the story of Liza) but also upon a lack of subsequent censorship at the level of the narrating subject (the hero telling the story
of himself fifteen years later). It is as though the one process that is not
subjected to the scrutiny of self-awareness is the narrative process itself. By presenting the story of his relations with Liza as, in snatches,
the story of two autonomous selves (Liza being allowed her own say,
her own looks), by reporting the voice from underground that spoke
within him fifteen years ago, the narrator makes it easy enough to read
another truth, a "better" truth, than the one he is telling. Is the naivet6
that allows the voice of the "other" truth to go uncensored evidence of
a secret, devious appeal to the reader that the narrator does not acknowledge? Certainly he presents the question of whether his story is a "public" or a "private" confession in an ambivalent way: it becomes, in
effect, a pseudo-public but "really" private document.41But the Notes
end indeterminately. The paradoxes of self-consciousness could indeed
go on forever, as the authorial coda says in excuse. Nevertheless, the
questions I have raised remain not only unanswered (it is not in their
nature to be answered) but unexplored. Dostoevsky in Notes from
Underground has not found a solution to the problem of how to end
41 "I wish to declare . .
if I write as though I were addressing readers,
.that
I shall never
that is simply because it is easier for me to write in that way ..
have readers" (p. 35).

221

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

the story, the problem whose solution Michael Holquist rightly identifies as the great achievement of his mature years.42
The Idiot (1868-69) is in several ways a book about last things. One
thinks of the references to the Book of Apocalypse and the Holbein
painting of the dead Christ, of Ippolit Terentyev's confrontation with
his own imminent death, and of the many stories of the last moments of
condemned men. The pervading sense that there is a limit to time
affects attitudes toward confession too: there is much casting around
after an adequate confessor, and impatience with confessions that are
not serious.
The major confessional episodes in The Idiot are the game of truthtelling at Nastasya Filippovna's, and Ippolit's "Explanation." There is,
however, an episode I wish to take up first that succinctly expresses
some of the philosophical problems of confessions.
Keller, "overflowing with confidence and confessions," comes to
Prince Myshkin with shameful stories about himself, claiming to be
deeply sorry yet recounting his actions as though proud of them. The
Prince commends him for being "so extraordinarily truthful" but asks
what might be the motive behind his confession: does he want to borrow money ? Yes, confesses Keller, "I prepared my confession... so as
to pave the way ... and, having softened you up, make you fork out one
hundred and fifty roubles. Don't you think that was mean ?",4
We recognize that we are at the beginning of a potentially infinite
regression of self-recognition and self-abasement in which the selfsatisfied candor of each level of confession of impure motive becomes a
new source of shame and each twinge of shame a new source of selfcongratulation. The pattern is familiar from Notes from Underground
and is familiar to the people of The Idiot, who readily spot the worm of
vanity in the self-abasement of others, and barely react with indignation
when it is pointed out in themselves. At the kernel of the pattern lies
what Myshkin calls a dvoinaya mnysl',literally a "double thought," but
what is perhaps better imagined as a doubling back of thought, the characteristic movement of self-consciousness (The Idiot, p. 346). It is a
double thought in Keller to want sincerely to confess to Myshkin for
the sake of "spiritual development" while at the same time wanting to
borrow money; it is the doubling back of thought that undermines the
42 "Metaphysical concern for the end of Man is realized in the most formal
attributes of the structure of [Dostoevsky's] novels, the narrative shape. And
this is so because he was among the first to recognize that what a man might be
could not be separated from the question of what might constitute an authentic
history" (Dostoevsky and the Novel, Princeton, N.J., 1977, p. 194).
43 The Idiot, trans. David Magarshak (Harmonsworth, Eng., 1955), pp. 34446; hereafter cited in the text. Where I give the Russian I quote from Idiot
(Kishinev, U.S.S.R., 1970).

222

TOLSTOY,

ROUSSEAU,

DOSTOEVSKY

integrity of the will to confess by detecting behind it a will to deceive,

and behind the detection of this second motive a third motive (a wish to
be admired for one's candor), and so on.
Myshkin thus identifies in "double thought" the malaise that renders
confession powerless to tell the truth and come to an end. In fact, Myshkin does more than diagnose the malaise. "Everyone is like that," he
says: he too has experienced double thought. But the recognition that
double thinking is universal is itself a double thought, as Myshkin at
once recognizes: "I couldn't help thinking . . that everyone is like
that, so that [tak ?to] I even began patting myself on the back" (my
italics). The very movement of recognition thus entraps him in the
syndrome.
This point is worth stressing. Both Keller and Lebedev (who makes
a confession to Myshkin a page or two later) directly address the question of why they choose the Prince to confess to. Questions of the spirit
in which confession is made and of the adequate confessor can no longer
be ignored after the party game of confessions (pp. 173-87), where
after a round of confessing the worst actions of their lives the partygoers are left feeling ashamed and unsatisfied, and Totsky's cynical
comment that confession is only "a special form of bragging" seems to
be vindicated (p. 173). Keller and Lebedev give identical explanations
for their choice of Myshkin as confessor: he will judge them "in a
human way" (po-Felovei'eski'like a man'). Further, being not wholly a
man but an idiot, "simple-minded" (as Keller explicitly calls him, p.
345), a mouse (my'), he is not engaged in the all too human game of
using the truth for his own ends. He is a being neither godlike in severity (though Aglaya Yepanchin expresses her misgiving that in his
devotion to the truth he may judge without "tenderness," p. 465) nor
manlike in subjecting truth to desire. In choosing Myshkin to confess to,
Keller and Lebedev are therefore seeking-though obscurely and for
impure, "double" motives-forgiveness rather than judgment, Christ
rather than God.
We may set in contrast against this ideal confessor-figure the party
guests who find themselves acting as confessors to Ippolit Terentyev's
"Explanation." Even before Ippolit has begun reading out this confession, some of his auditors have formed their own ideas about what his
act of public confession, as such, might imply. Myshkin sees it as a
device Ippolit has created to force himself to carry out his suicide;
Rogozhin, on the contrary, sees it as a way for Ippolit to compel his
auditors to prevent his suicide. Thus both see his confession as in the
service not of truth but of a deeper desire (to die, to live). As for the
confession itself, it wrestles with its own motives in a way with which
we are by now familiar in Dostoevsky. First, claims Ippolit, his confes223

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sion will be "only the truth" because, since he is dying of tuberculosis,

he can have no motive for lying (in other words his confession is written in the shadow of last things). Second, if there is anything false in
the confession his auditors are bound to pick it up, since he deliberately
wrote the document in haste and did not correct it (the argument from
authenticity of style taken over from Rousseau). Third, while he is
aware that his confession may be thought of as a means to an end, a way
of justifying himself or asking forgiveness, he denies either of these as
a motive. Being, as it were, on the scaffold, and therefore privileged, he
asserts his right to confess simply "because I want to"; and he asserts
his right to assert such a motiveless, "free" confession against any imputation of a motive. His confession belongs to last things, it is a last
thing, and therefore has a status different from any critique of it. The
sincerity of the motive behind last confessions cannot be impugned, he
says, because that sincerity is guaranteed by the death of the confessant.
The sincerity of any critique of him, on the other hand, can and should
be subjected to the endlessness of criticism. His auditors impugn his
motive for a motive of their own; they do not want to know the truth
about life and death, and to this end are prepared to impose upon him
the silence and doubleness that must follow when silence is taken for
acquiescence: "There is a limit to disgrace in the consciousness of one's
own worthlessness and powerlessness beyond which a man cannot go,
and after which he begins to feel a tremendous satisfaction in his own
disgrace" (p. 452). The truth his auditors do not want to hear is that
there is no life after death and that God is simply "a huge and horrible
tarantula" (p. 448). His suicide is therefore an assertion of his freedom
not to live on the "ridiculous terms" laid down for man (p. 453).
The argument presented by Ippolit is thus that in the face of death
the division of the self brought about by self-consciousness can be transcended, and the endless regression of self-doubt overtaken by an overriding will to the truth. The moment before death belongs to a different
kind of time in which truth has at last the power to appear in the form
of revelation. The experience of time out of time is described most
clearly in Myshkin's epileptic seizures, where in the last instant of clarity before darkness falls, his
mind and heart were flooded by a dazzling light. All his agitation, all his doubts
and worries, seemed composedin a twinkling, culminatingin a great calm, full of
serene and harmoniousjoy and hope, full of understandingand knowledge of the
final cause . .. These moments were merely an intense heightening of awareness
. . and at the same time of the most direct sensation of one's own existence to
the most intense degree.44 (pp. 258-59)
is Magarshak's translation of imenno, which is better translated
44"Merely"
here as "precisely."

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Reflecting on such moments, Myshkin thinks of the words "There shall

be time no longer" (p. 259). With these words Ippolit later prefaces his
confession.
The moment in which earthly time ends, self-doubt ceases, the self
is integrated, and truth is known, recurs in the stories Myshkin tells of
executions. In one of these stories (pp. 86-88) he tells of the extraordinary richness with which the condemned man experiences the most
mundane details of life. In another (pp. 90-93) he imagines a man on
the scaffold who in his last moment "knows everything." Later Myshkin has his own experience of the "blinding inner light" that floods the
soul of the man under the executioner's knife (p. 268).
Ippolit claims to be on the scaffold as much as any of Myshkin's condemned men. From this position of privilege he wishes to bequeath to
mankind his "truth," which he imagines as a seed that may grow to
have great consequences. Specifically, he hopes that his death may have
meaning in a meaningless universe if he can sow the idea of a philosophical suicide like his own in the minds of men.
But does Ippolit "really" have the privilege of truth? The prognosis
of death within a month has been pronounced by a mere medical student; Ippolit is by no means on his deathbed; and most of the guests at
the party respond to his "Explanation" "without disguising their annoyance" (p. 454), taking it as a ploy by a vain young man to win
attention. They decline to take his vow to kill himself as sincere. He,
in turn, refuses to take their indifference to his confession as sincere
indifference, reading it as pressure to force him to go through with the
suicide. Faced with a suddenly ridiculous situation in which he and his
auditors have become like poker players each trying to outbluff the
other, in which, if he kills himself, he may be doing so out of spite or
frustration, and in which the most urgent demand that he spare his life
comes from Lebedev, who does not want a mess on the floor, he puts a
pistol to his head and pulls the trigger, only to find the gun not loaded.
What had started as a project in philosophical suicide degenerates into
a chaos of laughter and weeping. The question of whether or not Ippolit
had a privileged, "true" insight into life and death is reenunciated by
Keller in a new and banal form: did he forget to load the pistol or was
it all a trick ?
The farcical end of the episode reasserts the problem Ippolit claimed
he had transcended, the problem of self-deception and of the endless
regression of self-doubt. The project of suicide as a way of guaranteeing
the truth of one's story with the ultimate payment of one's life withers
under the corrosion of Rogozhin's comment: "That's not the way this
thing ought to be done" (p. 423). It ought to be done, Rogozhin implies,
without an "explanation," without a why and wherefore, in muteness
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and obscurity. The explanation, the privileged truth paid for with death,
is in truth a seed, a way of living on after death: it therefore casts into
doubt the sincerity of the decision to die. The only truth is silence.45
The dream that Ippolit recounts in his confession deepens the paradox. Ippolit dreams that he tells a man to melt all his gold down and
make a coffin, then dig up his "frozen" baby and rebury it in the golden
coffin (p. 446). The dream is based on a real-life incident in which Ippolit has done a good deed to a stranger, thinking of his deed as a seed
cast abroad into the world. In the complex condensations of the dream,
the eighteen-year-old Ippolit is the frozen baby, the "Explanation" the
golden coffin; planted in the ground like a seed, the dream foretells that
the baby will not be resurrected (immediately after the dream Ippolit
thinks of the Holbein painting of the dead Christ, a Christ who will
never rise). Speaking, like the unbidden utterances of the hero of Notes
from Underground, from a "deeper," "truer" level of the self, the dream
reveals Ippolit's doubt about the fertility of his "seed" and undermines
the privileged truth-status of the "Explanation" of which it constitutes
a part.
The poetic effect of the dream is powerful. However, rather than
read the dream as a privileged truth coming from "within" Ippolit-a
procedure which would unquestioningly assign to the unconscious the
position of source of truth-we might ask here, as we asked in Notes
from Underground, why these confessants fail to censor from their confessions traces of a "deeper" truth that contradicts the truth they seek
to express. One answer might be that, transferring into first-person
self-narration the same "Menippean" mixture of genres that characterizes his novels as a whole-a mixture that includes philosophical expositreats the self-betrayal of
tion, confessions, and dreams-Dostoevsky
the narrator as a purely formal issue that only a mundane realist would
take seriously. The question remains troubling, however. One continues to feel that when Dostoevsky falls back on a univocal "inner"
truth he betrays the interrogation of notions of sincerity that he otherwise carries out via a rigorously conscious dialectic.
The underground man sits down to write his confessions vaguely
oppressed by memories from the past, otherwise bored and idle. He will
tell his stories to soothe himself; he will tell the truth because, unlike
Rousseau, he will be writing for his own eyes alone. This is as far as
his examination of his motive for confessing, the spirit in which he confesses, and the significance of an audience, goes. It is precisely these
45 The paradox of the seed probably comes from St. John 12:24: "Except a
corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth
forth much fruit." The verse is quoted in The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (London, 1927), I, 320.

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questions that The Idiot brings into prominence. Confession, in The

Idiot, can be made only to an adequate confessor; and even Prince
Myshkin, the Christlike man, turns out to be inadequate, unable to
absolve the confessant (as he is unable to rescue himself) from the
spiral of double thought. As for the spirit of confession, The Idiot says,
it is ridiculous to believe that the truth can be told as a game, a way of
passing time. No act of will seems able to compel the truth to emerge,
even the willing of a moment of illumination via the willing of one's own
death, since that will may itself be a double thought. Dostoevsky's
critique of confession is clearly bringing us to the brink of a conception
of truth-telling as close to grace.
Dostoevsky takes his next, and last, steps in the exploration of the
limits of secular confession in The Possessed (1871-72). There are
two episodes that concern us. Kirillov, like Ippolit, plans to kill himself
to sow a seed of truth in the minds of men. The difference is that Kirillov actually kills himself; and the focus of interest is not on the explanation he gives for his suicide (the seed)-an explanation full of savage,
grandiose, blasphemous unreason"46-buton the actual suicide.
However, the questions of whether Kirillov scrutinizes his own motives for presenting his manifesto for suicide (one hesitates to call it a
confession), and of whether he is subject to self-doubt and self-deception, become almost meaningless, since the novel allows no access to his
mind. The scene of his suicide is presented through the eyes of Verkhovensky (it is an irony typical of the book that while Kirillov thinks he
kills himself to assert his freedom, he is all the while being nudged toward suicide by Verkhovensky). It is thus through gesture, posture
and external detail that we must read, as far as we can, the last moments of Kirillov, "grasp[ingi himself," as Rene Girard says, "in a
moment of vertiginous possession,"47 trying to achieve self-transcendence through death. Taking up a cryptic posture behind a cupboard in
a dark room, Kirillov enters a trance-like state, his eyes "quite unmoving and ... staring away at a point in the distance" (p. 635). He seems,
if one reads him correctly-with Myshkin's readings of condemned men
at the back of one's mind-to be waiting for the instant to arrive when
the self is entirely present to the self and time ceases, in which to blow
his brains out. In this reading, Kirillov goes further than any other
46 "There will be full freedom when it will be just the same to live or not to
live . . . He who will conquer pain and terror will himself be a god . . . Every
one who wants the supreme freedom must dare to kill himself ... He who dares
kill himself is God." The Possessed, trans. Constance Garnett, with a translation
of the chapter "At Tikhon's" by Avrahm Yarmolinsky (New York, 1936), pp.
114-15.
47 Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans.
Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, 1965), p. 276.

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character in Dostoevsky in the cultivation of death as the sole guarantee

of the truth of the story one tells of oneself. But we must remember that
Kirillov in his last hour is more and more a madman and a beast (his
last action before killing himself is to bite Verkhovensky) and that the
reading from outside forced upon us by Dostoevsky perhaps signals
that Kirillov's consciousness is unreadable, inhuman.
The chapter entitled "At Tikhon's," excluded from the serialized
version of The Possessed by the editor of The Russian Herald a- ater
excluded by the author from the separate edition of the novel, resumes
the skeptical interrogation of the confessional impulse. Stavrogin, visiting the monk Tikhon, shows him a pamphlet he plans to distribute
confessing to a crime against a child; but soon Stavrogin's motives for
offering the confession fall under scrutiny, and become in turn a subject of confession.
Stavrogin recounts his offence (an unspecified sexual crime followed
by a provocation to suicide) without explanation of the motive, unless
"being bored" (p. 705) counts as an explanation. Instead of an exwe see in Rousseau-shades
ploration of motive, which so easily-as
into self-justification, we have an insistence by Stavrogin on his own
guilt and responsibility (pp. 704, 705, 711). Even when, years later,
the child begins to appear to him in visions, he insists that these visions
are not involuntary: he is responsible for them, he summons them up
of his own accord, though he cannot help doing so (p. 717). The image
of the child is thus not an emanation of a guilty "inner" or "unconscious" self: the same self that committed the act compulsively confronts itself with its guilty memory; there is no distinction between a
self that intends and a self that acts.48
Stavrogin's act is understood as an abomination by both Stavrogin
himself and Tikhon. What Tikhon opens to question, however, is the
motive behind Stavrogin's desire to publish his guilt. Interrogation of
this motive, exteriorized in Tikhon's interrogation of Stavrogin, takes
the place of the interiorized self-interrogation we are accustomed to in
first-person confessional narratives. In interrogating it, Tikhon opens
up the gap Stavrogin has sought to close between the subject's selfknowledge and the truth.
The encounter between Stavrogin and Tikhon (pp. 717-30) consists
of a double testing. All the while that Tikhon tests the truth of the
series of motives Stavrogin claims for making public confession, Stavrogin tests Tikhon's adequacy as a confessor. He wants Tikhon to
48 However, the paradox inherentin the notion of self-compulsionstands. And,
at the momentof stress when Stavrogin confesses "the whole truth,"namely that
he wants to forgive himself, and asks for "measurelesssuffering," Dostoevsky
returns to a dualistic psychology in which an "inner"self utters itself: Stavrogin
speaks "as if the words had again issued from his mouthagainst his will" (p. 727).
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prove his power to absolve by seeing through the untruths he himself

proposes to the truth beyond. But just as there turn out to be limits on
the kind of penance and the kind of forgiveness Stavrogin is prepared
to accept, there turn out to be limits on the kind of truth Tikhon is to
be allowed to see. Specifically, Stavrogin is not prepared to permit
Tikhon to trouble a certain kernel of identity he wishes to claim for
himself. Thus despite his readiness to forgo any right to explain his
crime and excuse his guilt-a
readiness which gives the impression
that he wants absolute truth and true absolution-Stavrogin's
confession becomes a game whose essence is that certain limits will not be
transgressed, though the contestants will pretend to each other and to
themselves that there are no limits. It is thus a game of deception and
self-deception, a game of limited truth. Tikhon ends the game by breaking the rules.49
The identity Stavrogin is determined to assert is that of great sinner.
He presents his crime against the child as all the more contemptibleits motive was so idle, its passion
great in its contemptibility-because
so flat. Tikhon suggests that so mean and yet so pretentious a crime
might deserve only laughter, and counsels Stavrogin to undertake quiet
penitence rather than seek "measureless suffering." Tikhon thus draws
into question the scale on which Stavrogin thinks of his crime and his
punishment. Stavrogin wants "measureless suffering" to be prescribed
for him as a sign that his guilt is measureless; and the measurelessness
of his guilt must follow from the banality of the evil of his crime. Tikhon
places before Stavrogin's eyes the possibility that he may merely be a
dissolute, rootless aristocrat with Byronic pretensions who wants to
attain fame by the short cut of committing an easy abomination and
confessing it in public.
It is important to note that Tikhon does not present this account to
Stavrogin as the truth about him, since by that act Tikhon would be
presenting himself as a source of truth without question. He presents
it as a possible truth, a possibility that Stavrogin would have to confront
if he were seriously pursuing the truth about himself in a program of
spiritual self-interrogation (just as Tikhon would have to examine his
own motives for minimizing the scale of Stavrogin's evil in the course
of his own self-scrutiny). Thus Tikhon cuts short the bad infinity of
one regression of self-consciousness-a
regression more clearly typified
by such self-abasing breast-beaters as Marmeladov and Lebedev, in
whom the shamelessness of the confession is a further motive for shame,
49 Insofar as the meta-rule of the game is that the rules should not be spelled
out-in fact that it should not be spelled out that there are any rules, or any game
-the account of the mechanisms of self-deception given by Fingarette neatly
describes the game (see n. 34 above).

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and so on to infinity, than by Stavrogin, whose version of the regression

is that the meanness of his act is a kind of greatness, and the meanness
of this conscious trick a further kind of greatness, and so on--to replace
it by another regression of self-scrutiny which has the potential to extend to infinity but also has the potential to end in self-forgiveness. Selfforgiveness means the closing of the chapter, the end of the downward
spiral of self-accusation whose depths can never be plumbed because to
decide to stop at any point by an act of will, to decide that guilt ceases
at such-and-such a point, is itself a potentially false act that deserves its
own scrutiny. How to tell the difference between a "true" moment of
self-forgiveness and a moment of complacency when the self decides
that it has gone far enough in self-scrutiny is a mystery that Tikhon
does not elucidate. leaving it, perhaps, to the spiritual advisor "of such
Christian wisdom that you and I could hardly understand it" to whom
he recommends Stavrogin (p. 729) -though if one has read Dostoevsky
attentively one might guess that this monk would never articulate the
difference, on the principle that, once articulated, the difference would
invoke efforts to incorporate it into a new game of deception and selfdeception; further, that to articulate a decision not to articulate the
difference could similarly become part of a game; and so on to infinity.
The endless chain manifests itself as soon as self-consciousness enters;
how to enter into the possession of the truth of oneself, how to attain
self-forgiveness and transcend self-doubt, would seem, for structural
reasons, to have to remain in a field of mystery; and even the demarcation of this field, even the specification of the structural reasons, would
similarly have to remain unarticulated; and the reasons for this silence
as well.

The end of confession is to tell the truth to and for oneself. The
analysis of the fate of confession that I have traced in three novels by
Dostoevsky indicates how skeptical Dostoevsky was, and why he was
skeptical, about the variety of secular confession that Rousseau, and
Because of the nature of consciousness,
before him
Montaigne, attempt.
Dostoevsky indicates, the self cannot tell the truth of itself to itself and
come to rest without the possibility of self-deception. True confession
does not come from the sterile monologue of the Self, or the dialogue of
the self with its own self-doubt, but (and here we go beyond Tikhon)
from faith and grace. It is possible to read Notes from Underground,
The Idiot, and Stavrogin's confession as a sequence of texts in which
Dostoevsky explores the impasses of secular confession, pointing finally
to the sacrament of confession as the only road to self-truth.
In a long review of Anna Karenina that appeared in his Diary of a
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DOSTOEVSKY

Writer, Dostoevsky praises Tolstoy for the "immense psychological

analysis of the human soul" he finds in that novel. This depth of insight
he sees exemplified in the episode of Anna's near-fatal illness, during
which Anna, Vronsky and Karenin "remove from themselves deceit,
guilt and crime" in a spirit of "mutual all-forgiveness," only to find
themselves embarked after her recovery on a downward path into "that
fatal condition where evil, having taken possession of man, binds his
every move, paralyzes every desire for resistance."50 In the case of
Karenin, the pity, remorse and liberating joy he feels in forgiving Anna
are not proof against the shame he experiences when he returns to
society in the role prescribed for him: that of humiliated husband, "a
laughing-stock" (Anna Karenina, p. 533). First he feels self-pity, then
a shameful suspicion that in forgiving Anna he may have expressed not
the generosity of the self he aspires to be but the weakness and perhaps
impotence of the self he does not want to be. Thus introspection allows
him to deny what he had earlier experienced as a liberation of his true,
better self in the name of a new truth, "deeper" in the sense that it
undermines the earlier one. This "deeper" truth is of course, in truth,
a self-serving self-deception that (in Tolstoy's commentary) allows
Karenin to "forget what he did not want to remember" (p. 548) : in so
purely secular a creature ("He was a sincere believer, interested in
religion primarily in its political aspect," p. 538), self-scrutiny is an
instrument not of the truth but of a mere will to be comfortable, to be
well thought of, etc.
The question usually asked about The Kreutzer Sonata is: How,
after the "immense psychological analysis" that typifies Anna Karenina,
and in particular the analysis of the movements of self-deception we
find there, could Tolstoy have gone on to write so naive and simpleminded a book, in which the truth that the truth-teller tells emerges as
a bald series of dicta about controlling the appetites ? Yet before we pose
the question in this form, we ought perhaps to recollect three things.
The first is that, already in Anna Karenina, we have the example of a
truth-seeker who, though as riddled with self-doubt as any, finds the
truth not via the labyrinthine processes of self-examination but in illumination from outside (in Levin's case, the illumination of a peasant's
words). The second is that nothing we have seen in this essay contradicts the underground man's assertion that self-consciousness works
by its own laws, one of which is that behind each true, final position
lurks another position truer and more final. From one point of view
this is a fertile law, since it allows the endless generation of the text of
the self exemplified by Notes from Underground. From another point
50 The Diary of a Writer, trans. Boris Brasol (London, 1949), II, 787-88.

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of view, that of the hungerer after truth, it is sterile, deferring the truth
endlessly, coming to no end. The third thing to bear in mind is that the
transcendence of self-consciousness to which Dostoevsky points as a
way of coming to an end is not available to a rationalistic, ethical
Christian like Tolstoy, who can find the truth in simple, unselfconscious
people but is skeptical of a way to truth beyond self-consciousness
through self-consciousness.
With these considerations in mind, we can perhaps rephrase our
question in a way more sympathetic to Tolstoy: To a writer to whom
the psychology of self-deception is a not unlimited field that has for all
practical purposes already been conquered, to whom self-doubt in and
of itself has proved itself merely an endless treadmill, what potential
for the attainment of truth can there be in the self-interrogation of a
confessing consciousness ? There can be no doubt that Tolstoy was capable of making Pozdnyshev's confession psychologically "richer" or
"deeper" by making it ambiguous-indeed, material for creating such
ambiguity already lies to hand in the text-but (one must imagine Tolstoy asking himself) to what end? Thus, after all the machinery has
been set up (the narrator, ready to play the part of interrogating and
interrogated Other, the train of clues pointing to a truth that questions
and complicates the truth the confessant asserts), we see (I speculate
now) disillusionment, boredom with this particular mill for cranking
truth out of lies, impatience with the novelistic motions that must be
gone through before truth may emerge (a truth that anyhow always
emerges as provisional, tainted with doubt from the processes it has
gone through), and a (rash ?) decision to set down the truth, finally, as
though after a lifetime of exploring one had acquired the credentials,
amassed the authority, to do so.
University of Cape Town

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