Russia after the reign of Nicholas I was in a state of change. These changes were partially related to Russia’s heroic defeat against much of Europe during the Crimean conflict, and was largely fanned by a press overpoweringly liberal and utterly defeatist. Regardless of the causes and myths of the connection between social change and the post-Crimean life, this era, Dostoyevskii’s era, was one of struggle–a struggle for a Russian identity outside of Europe and yet very much linked to her and her ideas, for better or worse. The genius of Russian literature is its highly social character; but this is its greatest challenge, the idea that events and characters in Russian novels and plays represent forces in Russian life often invisible or misunderstood to Russian historians, let alone literary theorists. Uncle’s Dream, written in 1859, almost completely unread today, is an excellent example of this.

Russian literature in the Imperial period cannot be approached from the standpoint of a literary theorist divorced from historical and religious reality (as most are). In fact, I began this series of brief essays on key works on this literature precisely to counteract this trend–a trend of myth-making and mal-understanding in reference to the purposes or Russian writers. Russian literature is almost entirely social and social-theological in content, and it is precisely in this understanding do literary theorists interested in Russia fail, and fail miserably.

At the very least, the reign of Peter and Catherine II are the most significant, representing a break between two Russias: the old, Orthodox and decentralized, the Russia of the Old Belief. The new, European, militarist and centralized, with taxes and regulations high, and religious life struggling. Dostoyevskii, just to name one, is a major figure in dealing with this schism, and in figures of “The Prince,” whether in The Idiot or in the present work, is dealing with the identity of Old Russia.

This novel, one of the shorter of the Dostoyevskii corpus (about 130 pages), takes place in a small provincial town called Mordasov. Like so much of Russian literature, it sets up a schism within a schism: the nature of modernity in parts of Russia that have the most difficult time in absorbing it: small, provincial towns who often take modernism as a means merely to plastic prestige, without the slightest idea of its philosophic content. This is a major device for Gogol, and can either be the source for pathos or hilarity, or both. In this novel, it is the former.

Mordasov has within it what might be called a mini-salon; some form of imitation of the Petersburg salons, but provincial, thus imitative, and much smaller in scope and influence. Its leading lady, and the main character of this novel, is the overbearing and plastic Marya Moskalev. She is a wonderful embodiment of the average woman living in Fairfax County, Virginia: Vain, arrogant, manipulative, and all of this under some syrupy covering of “love” or “devotion.” She is a deceiver and liar, but she is these things in an environment of pathetic powerlessness. In other words, this town takes the many vices of Petersburg (as the archtypal European capital, archtypal in that it is purely an imitation), but removes these vices from actually mattering. In other words, in Petersburg, the salon ladies, superficial and phony, do actually have some indirect influence over public affairs. In Mordasov, however, they have none, and thus, the manipulation of Marya is done for its own sake.

Marya has a daughter, Zina. Zina is very beautiful, but confused and headstrong. She wants to be honorable in her dealings with men, but, first, has no domestic examples, and, second, truly believes herself too good for the locals. Remember: Peter the Great released women from the terem, or the Asiatic means of segregating women from male company, largely to protect them from predators in the age of Mongol devastation. But much like modern feminism, this “liberation” was male-directed and simply bought the vices of the terem into public life, leading to the disgusting spectacle of the salon, where mal-digested liberalism and fashionable ideology took the place of mindless gossip, and was mingled with it, and was thence labeled “liberation” in classic western fashion.

Hence, Zina’s confusion: at some level, she knows her life is meaningless, and especially, that of her mother. Her father is the typical Dostoyevskian petty bureaucrat: another creation of Peter. His name is Anfasii, and is a complete fool completely ignorant and having received his position solely based on connections and malleability. He is absolutely clueless, irrelevant and dominated by Marya: the irrelevant leading the absurd, and both are creations of Petrine modernism.

Zina is being pursued by many men, but the most significant is a rather impulsive and half-sympathetic Pavel Mozglyakov, who uses every conceivable rhetorical technique to woo Zina, and the latter responds by using her beauty as power: she strings him along, and thereby, perhaps unconsciously, creates a system of power over the unfortunate suitor. But it is a power without purpose: typical of the life of this town in a 19th century context.

Now, Pavel Mozglyakov is distantly related to a scion of the old gentry, the old boyar class, and a typical character in Dostoyevskii, he is normally referred to as “The Prince.” He has a small fortune and some land, but, like almost all the characters in the novel, is as clueless about the world as anyone else. In fact, his cluelessness is the funniest part of this parade of absurdity. The Prince, however, as always in Dostoyevskii, represents Old Russia, represents the Russia permanently altered by Peter and preserved in the Old Ritual. Regardless of the hilarious confusion of the man, the prince is a sympathetic character: he does have the old manners of pre-European Russia (only in Russian history can you use a phrase like “pre-European”), but his age has shown itself rather badly: he is very ill, has difficulty walking and has a glass eye. His facial hair is artificial, as is his hair. He is amiable, but apparently, only out of stupidity. He is old Russia to Dostoyevskii: beneath, dignified and intelligent; outwardly, ignorant, fake and confused. It is this old Russia that failed to diffuse Peter’s reforms, found a place within them, and superficially adopted their outward forms (hence the fake hair and the glass eye). What is worse, his confusion seems to stem from this class being out of its depth in the modern world, representing the (superior) virtues of Old Russia, but, in the modern context, appears ignorant in spite of himself.

Apparently, though there is little said of this, Zina had once been in love with a starving poet, so to speak. Vasya, some time ago, was a suitor for Zina, but Marya, seeing his lack of funds, sought to derail the relationship, in which she succeeded. It is Vasya’s death scene near the end of the novel, which is in reality the heart of the narrative.

The plot of the novel is as follows: The Prince comes into town, which, in the provinces, creates a large stir among the society ladies. Marya, as always the first fiddle, seeks to monopolize his attention, for there, at first, is a superficial desire to partake of the mannerisms of Old Russia, a half-hearted slight at Petrinism, but as always, everything here is superficial. Marya is exasperated at Pavel’s continuing proposals to Zina, and, suddenly, gets an idea: she will arrange a marriage between Zina and the broken down, but wealthy, prince. Soon, the prince will die, and Zina will be the inheritor of substantial wealth. This wealth can then be used to attract a suitor more physically desirable, and it is hoped, will lead Zina to become a part of Petersburg society, the only real goal that Marya has. The novel hinges on this dynamic. Zina’s beauty, in short, is the only means Marya has to escape Mordasov and become one of those “important” Petersburg ladies.

The Prince is invited to Marya’s house, and is given plenty to drink. Zina is then asked to play a song on the piano, a song designed to evoke the passions necessary to induce the Prince to propose. In a swoon, he does so. In the meantime, Marya has convinced Zina to go along with the plan, though over some substantial protestations of her daughter, who recoils at the prospect of marriage to a man much older than herself, and one that is literally falling apart physically. Marya provides a brilliant performance of her manipulative skills in convincing Zina of the morality in such an act. Unconvinced but oddly cowed, Zina goes along with the absurdity. Unsurprisingly, Pavel hears about this by spying though a keyhole in a door and is predictably outraged. He realizes that, as always, Marya has concocted this for herself, for her own advancement, and also realizes, therefore, that she will be throwing a large ball so that the entire town can hear this announcement: that she, Marya, has the manners of an “Old Russian” that permits a Prince, no less, to propose to her daughter. Pavel’s plan is then, to convince the prince that it was only a dream (hence the title), which, given the perpetually muddled state fo the prince, takes minimal effort to accomplish.

The punch line to the entire affair is the spectacle made of Marya by both the unwitting prince and the disgusted Pavel. Marya throws the largest banquet she can muster, making certain that all the society ladies in town show. As they have little else to do, they are all there. Marya is waiting for the prime moment when the announcement can be made, but, alas, the prince is “quite certain” the entire affair was a dream. A mortified Marya does whatever possible to salvage this event, but the prince remains adamant in his denial. Flustered and humiliated, Marya throws a fit, calling the prince an “imbecile” and the entire affair ends in a massive humiliation for Marya. I imagine few readers outside of faculty offices are remotely sympathetic to Marya. A short time later, the prince expires.

Briefly after that, the poet, Vashya, dies a horrid death of consumption, and Zina is by his side every minute, clearly showing the love she has for this penniless, but clearly brilliant and creative, literary mind. This scene is a strange interlude, but, in the context of the novel, makes Dostoyevskii’s point brilliantly. Here, Dostoyevskii is making an argument for the rule of true love over personal lives, while Marya has been its antithesis, that is, love and marriage for gain and personal rank. In this context, that is, the death of Vashya, the set of symbols personified by the characters become clear: the novel is a dialectic, a method well familiar to Dostoyevskii.

The thesis of this dialectic is the prince, the prince who himself symbolized old Russia, the pre-Petrine Russia immortalized by Kerevskii or Aksakov. The Prince represents simplicity and grace, but also shows the signs of old age, obsolescence, senility, but in a pathetic rather than in a comic manner. He is the only one to refer to the Old Russian religion, as he is going to spend some them with Father Michael at a nearby monastery. In a telling and comic line in the story, the Prince proudly tells a local gathering at Marya’s house that he is going to go abroad to soak in the “new ideas” of western Europe, just after he returns from the monastery with Fr. Michael. Of course, those two ideas are opposites, and the prince has not the foggiest idea that they are, having no concept whatsoever what the “new ideas” are in western Europe, he just knows that the elites speak that way, and therefore, he must as well.

Old Russia is to be found throughout Dostoyevskii’s corpus, and, as in Prince Mishkin in The Idiot, shows a simple yet perpetually confused and manipulated character. Old Russia for Dostoyevskii seems to be a time of grace and simplicity, but one that cannot return to Russian soil due to the antithesis, Marya, or socially speaking, the reforms of the westernizing monarch, Peter I.

Peter the Great created modern Russia, at least in outline. Peter created a new bureaucracy, in response to the militarization of Prussian society under Frederick William. He created a bureaucracy staffed largely by foreigners and open to all, based on merit, or, what is the same thing, based on those whose ideas and abilities were of use to Peter and Petrinism. He created the woman symbolized by Marya, the creature of “liberation,” or the alienated, sullen manipulator whose entirely life revolves around getting the better of her foes, either real or imagined. She is the archtypal liberated woman, whether American or Russian. She is liberated from family, community and religion, and liberated into the fallen world of power politics, arrogance, aggression and abortion.

Marya is feminism: she is the creation of modernity; she is living death; where the most crude manifestations of power are the only reality, and are systematically confused with strength and virtue. Marya, or the modern woman, uses the ancient concepts of “chivalry” and old civility for her own uses, in a manner little different from the modern American woman, who, while throwing away the baggage of old femininity, still uses old concepts of chivalry so as to better manipulate the men around her. Modern feminism has guttred out. According to the online medical journal Health 24, 1 out of every 3 doctor visits made by an American woman concerns her mental instability. 1 out of every 10 women is taking some form of anti-depressant (SSRIs), while more are on stronger medications, or illegal drugs. When these are factored in, the ratio is closer to 1 out of 4.

She will insist, unlike her male counterparts, that she be immune from physical violence, while using that ancient shield of chivalry to get away with the most vicious of tirades directed against the men in her life. Men of course, are still quite subject to slaps, punches and, more seriously, potentially debilitating hits to the groin, popularized and pushed by modern American media.

She will shield herself as being the "weaker sex" in an argument, but will insist on her equality, if not superiority, to the male principle while looking for work. She will claim to be the “weaker sex” (and thereby be in need of state protection) when her boss treats her poorly, but claim to be identical to a man in any context where her power and income are augmented, such as a promotion. Modernity recognizes nothing but raw, Machiavellian power, and thus, “liberation” is little more than a codeword for the ability to use femininity: looks, suggestive phrases, dress and her protected status to manipulate the environment (i.e. the men) around her.

Marya is the antithesis of Old Russia not merely because she is the negation of such virtues, but that she uses the illusion of such virtues to promote her own demented agenda, an agenda understood as demented by Zina. Therefore, she is even lower than merely an antithesis, in that she is represented as not even human, but a mere machine that uses her environment and social status to augment her standing. Dostoyevskii makes her environment an inconsequential provincial town to underscore the absurdity of such standing.

The most interesting aspect of the novel, however, is the synthesis, or the rather loose set of characters and symbols that might be brought under the heading of “synthesis.” They are four: Pavel, Vashya, Zina and Marya’s husband, Anfasii. They represent the struggle between Old and New, or Petrine Russia, and the various social responses to this awful battle.

Zina represents one such reaction, and that is confusion. Her reactions to her mother’s manipulation takes the form of loud and tearful tirades, but she is ignorant as to its basis. Old Russia represents that basis, but, being the child of Peter (in a sense), she is unaware of this basis, a basis that might well add “meat” to her arguments against her mother’s materialist view of the world. In some vague sense, her final conversation with Vasya adds, to some extent, that necessary content to her inchoate struggles and anger. Vasya depicts himself at his death scene as an evil man, one who, out of his foolish love for Zina, would have had her marry him, and thus to live in poverty. Vasya is a romantic (in the true sense of the word), one unconcerned with money but with poetry, feeling and love. He might well represent the first wave of Slavophiles enraptured with Schelling and Schlegel, or the creation of a romantic utopia in opposition to Peter and westernism, but one incapable, for better or worse, of imposing itself on the consciousness of the new Petrine elites. Therefore, it dies, in all its beauty, glory and sensibility, in an irrelevant provincial town, having and wanting nothing to do with Peterburg and its false glory.

Speaking of which, the false glory of “the service” is the third reaction to Peter, and that is found, most comically, in the character of Marya’s hapless husband, Anfasii. This man might be flattered to be called an empty shell, a uniform without ability, a human form without intellect. He is weak in a way that only Russian writer could represent. He is everything that is absurd about the Petersburg elite.

He is Goladykin from The Double combined with Akakii from Gogol’s “The Nose.” He is the ultimate bureaucrat, for he exists only to receive orders. He is also the creature of modern feminism in that he is purely a tool of Marya. At the end of the story, when it is seen how Zina and Marya have moved to Siberia and take up with the local elite there, Anfasii is no where to be found: he evidently had been ditched somewhere and few seem to notice. Again, this is a comic mockery of liberation. The question is never asked in modern, staged, political discourse: What is liberation? Liberation into what, exactly? Of course, this is no accident. Westernism sought to “liberate” the state from the old princely families in the name of “merit.” Of course, the practice has nothing to do with the theory, and what it actually created is a bureaucracy of idiots, trained solely to be the hands and feet of the Petrine agenda. The old princely families, contrary to official myth, were the repositories of civility, religion and elite bulwarks against the west. It was they who staffed government offices before Peter. Anfasii staffed them after, in the name of merit and “liberation.” Of course, as Marya is feminism, Anfasy is modern masculinity: weak, malleable and ignorant.

Pavel is the last and least significant of the responses to Peter laid out in this novel. While Zina retains, in an unconscious manner, the ways of Old Russia (and, as such becomes Dostoyevskii’s heroine), Anfasii and his wife represent the full conclusion to westernism and modern liberalism, Vasya represents German idealism in some vague way, Pavel seems to represent a man without identity, but an identity-less existence that is continually reaching out for some form of fulfillment, the content of which Pavel confuses for love, or what he thinks is love, specifically, Zina’s hand. He seems to have no further purpose, but is nowhere near the sick manipulator of Marya’s type. Perhaps he might be Anfasii before the westernizing ideology of the Petrine bureaucracy warped him. But his health is shown by Dostoyevskii in that he seems to find something alluring in Zina apart from her looks (though this remains vague and undefined). Zina contains a vague heroism, vague precisely in that this is the post-Petrine and -Crimean era. The disaster fo the Crimea merely gave false ammunition to the westernizing faction in Russian life, claiming that Peter had not gone far enough in his reforms. Pavel is a blank slate, and, depending on Zina, his conclusion is indefinite. He is the young generation of the 1850s. Caught between two worlds, and may not even have the mental apparatus to make a decision. Zina’s salvation can only come from a decisive break with her mother–a break which never happens as they move to Siberia and marry into wealth and power there, showing a grave pessimism in Dostoyevskii. Could their be salvation in marriage to the prince? This idea, as grotesque as it is on the physical plane, might have deeper significance in “wedding” the youth of Dostoyevskii’s day to representatives of Old Russia. It might be precisely that that saves the Prince, as much as the other way around.

Uncle’s Dream is too powerful a work to make any impression on modern, American literary theorists and “Russia specialists,” and thus remains unread. It is a condemnation of Peter and westernization (the latter more specifically), and represents that mentality in Marya, her husband, and to a lesser extent, Pavel. He represents the young generation as insecure, unhealthy, but possessed of an unspoiled soul slowly being degraded by the older generation. It remains pessimistic, in that the Prince remains an idiot and Zina goes the way of her mother. Pavel has taken a post in the service, and is sent to Siberia on a surveying mission (there is where he, years later, meets up with Zina, and her fate is known–she has become her mother.) Dostoyevskii’s conclusion then, it seems, is that westernism and liberalism have corroded society too far to be saved. Doom is not too far ahead.