There is every indication that Demons might productively be viewed as a frame narrative, one where the front and back sections (introduc-tion and conclusion) meet to contain the central por(introduc-tions of the text.
But it’s a bit tricky to define the parameters of the frame in Demons.
The novel begins with the biography of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky.
The novel’s final chapter completes his tale (his enlightenment and demise). The novel’s introduction would, therefore, seem to represent the first half of a frame narrative. The first and last chapters together seem to frame the text perfectly. But there is one wrinkle in the design.
The novel also contains a Conclusion, which follows the final chap-ter treating Stepan Trofimovich. The Conclusion summarizes the fates of many of the dramatis personae. Furthermore, the dramatic closure of the novel centers on the depiction of Nikolai Stavrogin’s suicide. This would seem to nullify the framing capacity of the final chapter.
Typical of the opening games Dostoevsky often plays in his fic-tion, and as we have seen in the several titles to the opening chapter/
introduction to Demons, Dostoevsky alters the parameters of the frame.
He doubles them. There are in fact two introductory and two conclud-ing chapters. The first two chapters of the novel’s Part One, “Instead of an Introduction” and “Prince Harry. Matchmaking,” treat, in the largest measure, Stepan Verkhovensky and Nikolai Stavrogin, respectively. The novel’s last two chapters, “The Last Peregrination of Stepan Trofimovich”
and the “Conclusion,” treat the same two characters in the same order.
They enter and exit the text twinned. Chapter Two of Part One opens with both characters presented together: “There was one other person on earth to whom Varvara Petrovna was attached no less than to Stepan Trofimovich—her only son, Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin. It was for him that Stepan Trofimovich had been invited as a tutor.”24
Drawing the two chapters together even further, Chapter Two is no less comic than Chapter One. Both Stepan Verkhovensky and Nikolai Stavrogin appear to be buffoons, play actors, and innocuous
24 Dostoevsky, Demons, 40; 34.
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wordsmiths. Stavrogin bites people, pulls a distinguished gentleman around by the nose, and in general behaves in a manner that leaves all the characters baffled, the chronicler-narrator included. And it leaves the reader laughing, if uncomfortably, for we sense the riveting edge of chaos about to impinge on the tale.
The conclusion of Chapter Two brings the narrative to the moment when the “recent and strange events” of the work’s first sentence begin to occur. This makes the related chapters unified as an introductory, or opening, frame. The counterpoised generations figured by Stepan Trofimovich and Nikolai Stavrogin (clearly in response to Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons of 1862), are brought before the reader in a temporal setting distinct in two ways from the events that overtake the town.
First, they take place in the past. Second, they both set the stage for the intrigue to come.
Frame narratives have a history in Russia going back at least to the late eighteenth century. Nikolai Karamzin’s “Poor Liza” (1792), for example, and Ivan Turgenev’s “First Love” (1860) bookend the tradition Dostoevsky inherited. As we have seen already, in Charles Isenberg’s conception, frame narratives render a variety of services to the author and to the fictional enterprise itself. They occur “any time one speech event contextualizes another, that is, frames it . . . [in such a way as to create] a product, a complete text, where the frame-and-insert structure is relevant to the entire work.”25 What he means by “frame-and-insert structure” refers to the introductory and any concluding material that make up the frame versus the storyline proper that is presented within it. Although Isenberg’s discussion addresses short stories and novellas only, his remarks have relevance to our discussion of Demons’ frame structure.26
Isenberg points out that the mere presence of an inserted narrative (say, “Captain Kopeikin” in Gogol’s Dead Souls) is insufficient evidence for establishing the presence of a frame narrative for the remainder (and the bulk) of the text. Rather, “we are dealing with a frame narrative whenever we are aware of the frame as a frame; that is, whenever we
25 Isenberg, Telling Silence, 1.
26 Isenberg does not insist on a closure to the frame. It can be implied (Telling Silence, 1–21). He also restricts his treatment of frame narratives to tales of
“renunciation,” as his book’s title states, a theme to which Demons, in its way, also adheres.
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104 FIRST WORDS On Dostoevsky’s Introductions
can speak of at least two separable stories rather than a simple reminis-cence in which a narrator speaks directly to the reader about events in the past.”27 Isenberg’s definition has relevance to Demons in that “. . . there must be a tension between the speech event and the narrated event such that the former, losing its degree-zero transparency, calls attention to itself, developing into a kind of parallel plot of its own.”28 Which is to say that in Dostoevsky’s novel, and in its Chapter One/“Instead of an Introduction,” we are made aware of the narrator’s speech as a discur-sive event that occupies a separate temporal field than does the insert story about the generations. As we have seen already, the first two utter-ances of the novel are made up of a discourse that calls attention to itself.
Isenberg finds, too, that frame closures often do not accord with frame openings, that a variety of narratological events take place at a tale’s end that represent shifts of a great variety. As he puts it,
“. . . even in our most ‘traditional’ frame narrative, Turgenev’s ‘First Love,’ . . . such stories always involve hazards to storytelling, albeit more obviously in the narrative situation (here the relations between tellers and listeners) than within the inner stories themselves.”29 There is something of value here that we might bring to the issue of inconsistency in Dostoevsky’s narrative form that has been noted by critics. Demons begins with a skaz-like voice, then shifts to an omni-scient-sounding narrative voice of matter-of-fact discourse. The satiric voice of the initial frame of Chapter One/“Instead of an Introduction”
gives way to a reportage that better houses the novel’s many acts of violence. The narrator’s mocking tone is overwhelmed by the insert story’s sheer negativity. A new voice appears that replaces the one in the opening frame. “Instead of an Introduction” leads to a quasi- omniscient-sounding narrator who stands, so to speak, “Instead of our Original Narrator.” Isenberg states that this type of shift is nor-mative in frame narratives.30 In the final chapter of the novel and its conclusion, the narrative voice shares more with the insert story than with the introductory framing voice of Anton Lavrentievich. In any case, the front and back of the narrative together frame both Parts Two and Three, which contain the insert novel of intrigue.
27 Isenberg, Telling Silence, 2.
28 Isenberg, Telling Silence, 2.
29 Isenberg, Telling Silence, 7.
30 Isenberg, Telling Silence, 12.
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More important than the fact that Demons represents frame narrative, if in a unique way, we encounter what Isenberg calls the frame tale’s “third story”: “The double action brought about by the juxtaposition of frame and insert is a way of making two stories tell a third.”31 The two stories combine to deliver up another, synthetic tale that Dostoevsky was deeply committed to and that extraliterary materials (letters, notebooks) support. This third story is the heart of his narrative and accounts for the reason that it took him a good long time to shape (to paraphrase Kate Holland again) an aesthet-ically coherent novel about a fragmented time. The composition of this story is the result of the combination of the frame narrative and the insert novel—what seeds the 1840s sowed were harvested in the 1860s.
In the final chapter (preceding both Stepan Trofimovich’s and Stavrogin’s deaths), Stepan Trofimovich makes explicit the connection between the frame and insert narratives, putting it, of course, in his own unique language (and as reported by Anton Lavrentievich, who was not in attendance, yet again). In Stepan Trofimovich’s account, a Bible seller, Sofya Matveevna, reads him the passage on demons inhabiting swine that then plunge into the sea; this Gospel verse, the narrator says,
“I have placed as the epigraph of my chronicle.”32 Stepan Trofimovich responds to Sofya Matveevna’s reading:
“My friend,” Stepan Trofimovich said in great excitement, “savez-vous this wonderful and . . . extraordinary passage has been a stumbling block for me all my life . . . dans ce livre . . . so that I have remembered this passage ever since childhood. And now a thought has occurred to me;
une comparaison. Terribly many thoughts occur to me now; you see, it’s exactly like our Russia. These demons who come out of a sick man and enter into swine—it’s all the sores, all the miasmas, all the uncleanness, all the big and little demons accumulated in our great and dear sick man, in our Russia, for centuries, for centuries! Oui, cette Russie que j’aimais toujours. But a great will and a great thought will descend to her from on high, as upon that insane demoniac, and out will come all these demons, all the uncleanness, all the abomination that is festering on the surface . . . and they will beg of themselves to enter into swine.
And perhaps they already have! It is us, us and them, and Petrusha
31 Isenberg, Telling Silence, 10.
32 Luke 8: 32–36; Dostoevsky, Demons, 654; 498.
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[his son, chief conspirator, and amoralist] . . . et les autres avec lui, and I, perhaps, down into the sea, and all be drowned, and good riddance to us, because that’s the most we’re fit for. But the sick man will be healed and ‘sit at the feet of Jesus’ . . . and everyone will look in amazement . . . Dear, vous comprendrez après, but it excites me very much now . . . Vous comprendrez après . . . Nous comprendrons ensemble.”33
In thrusting the voice of his narrator into the foreground (“the epi-graph to my chronicle”) in the final pages of the novel, and in providing a retrospective view of his tale’s paratextual phenomena (title, epigraph, and introductions) Dostoevsky reinvented the preface, providing a new rationale for it.34 In this way he composed a form unique to him—a framed novel.