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CHILD MURDER, PEASANT SINS, AND THE INFANTILIZING OF EVIL IN TOLSTOY'S THE POWER OF DARKNESS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2008

Jefferson J. A. Gatrall
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Extract

In The Power of Darkness (Vlast' t'my; 1886), Tolstoy examines the nature of human evil in the unlikely context of the Russian peasantry, a class with a privileged relation to the Good throughout most of his oeuvre. Tolstoy's first major play chronicles Nikita's rise as a philandering laborer who succeeds to the fortune of his peasant employer (Pyotr) through a murder that is conceived by his mother (Matryona) and carried out by his employer's wife (Anisya). After marrying Anisya, Nikita descends into drunkenness, seduces his sixteen-year-old stepdaughter, Akulina, and fathers her child. Many commentators—taking their cue from the play's subtitle, “If the claw is caught, the bird is lost” (kogotok uviaz, vsei ptichke propast’)—have followed the logic of Tolstoy's plot in search of an original sin, usually locating it somewhere in the confrontation between a backward peasantry and the forces of progress, especially money—a bane of civilization that corrupts the play's characters from without. This same logical sequence can be reversed so as to foreground not the causes of evil but its victims. Nikita's final and greatest crime is the killing of Akulina's newborn. Here Tolstoy's oft-disparaged moralism proves no less groundbreaking than his play's cutting-edge naturalism. Through an artistic strategy of moral provocation, The Power of Darkness contributes to a modern revaluation of evil through the figure of the murdered child, a tradition that runs from Swift to Dostoevsky to the photojournalism of twentieth-century warfare.

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , November 2008 , pp. 253 - 275
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2008

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References

Endnotes

1. Andrew Donskov addresses this line of criticism in The Changing Image of the Peasant in Nineteenth Century Russian Drama (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1972), 125–6. For Russian criticism on the role of money in the play, see Durylin, S. N., “Drama L. N. Tolstogo ‘Vlast’ t'my,'” Tvorchestvo L. N. Tolstogo: Sbornik statei (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1959), 203–49Google Scholar, at 210–19; Lomunov, K. N., Dramaturgiia L. N. Tolstogo (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1956), 128Google Scholar; Osnovin, V. V., Dramaturgiia L. N. Tolstogo (Moscow: Vyshaia shkola, 1982), 18Google Scholar.

2. Letter to M. G. Savina, December 1886, quoted in N. K. Gudzii, “Vlast' t'my,” in L. N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [hereafter PSS], ed. V. G. Chertkov, 90 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1928–58), 26: 705–37, at 715. Unless otherwise indicated, translations from Russian and French sources are mine.

3. Tolstoi, Vlast' t'my, ili “Kogotok uviaz, vsei ptichke propast',” in PSS, 26: 123–243. Act and scene numbers are hereafter provided in parentheses.

4. See de Vogüé, Eugène-Melchior, “Puissance des ténébres,” Révue des deux mondes 298 (15 March 1888): 426–45Google Scholar, at 435–7; Antoine, André, “Mes souvenirs” sur le Théâtre-Libre (Paris: Fayard, 1921), 105Google Scholar.

5. E. M. Feoktistov, quoted in Gudzii, 715.

6. Letter to M. G. Savina, quoted in Gudzii, 715.

7. Concerning recent performances, the first variant was used in both Temur Chkheidze's 2006 production at the Bolshoi dramaticheskii teatr imeni G. A. Tovstonogova in St. Petersburg and Martin Platt's 2007 production at the Mint Theatre in New York.

8. Bakhtin, for instance, defines the Tolstoyan chronotope as one of “biographical time,” which “flow[s] smoothly in spaces—the interior spaces—of townhouses and noble estates.” Bakhtin, Mikhail, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Holquist, Michael, trans. Emerson, Carol and Holquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84–258Google Scholar, at 249.

9. Dates from Russian sources refer to the Julian calendar.

10. “Mikita” is one of the colloquial variations on Nikita's name in the play.

11. Stakhovich, A. A., “Klochki vospominanii (‘Vlast’ t'my', drama L. N. Tolstogo),” Tolstovskii ezhegodnik (1912): 27–47Google Scholar, at 38–9. Biriukov, the third cofounder of Posrednik and a possible attendee that evening, quotes Stakhovich's account and yet identifies the peasant as “Mikh. Fom.” Biriukov, Pavel, Biografiia L. N. Tolstogo, 2 vols. (Moscow: Algoritm, 2000)Google Scholar, 2: 72.

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15. Ispoved', in L. N. Tolstoi, PSS, 23: 1–59, at 40.

16. On Russian peasant plays, see Donskov, Changing Image of the Peasant. On the subject of peasant actors on the Russian stage, see Senelick, Laurence, Serf Actor: The Life and Art of Mikhail Shchepkin (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984)Google Scholar.

17. See, for instance, Stanislavsky's attempt to incorporate Tula peasants in major roles for his 1902 production. Stanislavskii, K. S., Sobranie sochinenii v devyati tomakh, ed. Efremov, O. N., 9 vols. (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1988)Google Scholar, 1: 333–6.

18. Gudzii, 708, 725.

19. Tolstoy in Semenov, S. T., Vospominaniia o L've Nikolaeviche Tolstom (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia Pol'za, 1912), 137Google Scholar, trans. and quoted in Donskov, Changing Image of the Peasant, 120.

20. Stakhovich, 43.

21. E. M. Feoktistov, quoted in Gudzii, 715.

22. For published editions and figures, see Gudzii, 717–20. Even as late as 1898, when a new request for publication was put forward by an independent people's press, one censor deemed The Power of Darkness “unsuitable for peasant reading” (726).

23. Stakhovich, 42.

24. Ibid., 43–4.

25. An unnecessary precaution, as it turned out. The tsar admitted to Stakhovich that the play had remained unread on his night table “for a whole week.” Stakhovich, 40.

26. Italics in the original. Letter to Aleksandr III, 18 February 1887, in Gudzii, 722.

27. Stanislavskii, 1: 529.

28. In Gudzii, 722.

29. E. Halpérine, in the introduction to his translation, La Puissance des ténèbres: Drame en cinq actes (Paris: Perrin, 1887), v–vii.

30. Vogüé, 426, 432.

31. Antoine, 105.

32. “À la Russie,” Le Figaro, no. 60, Wednesday, 29 February 1888.

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35. Antoine, 84.

36. Vogüé, 434.

37. In Halpérine, “La ‘Puissance des ténèbres’ sur la scène française,” 622.

38. Adolphe Brisson, in Pruner, 33–4; Mirbeau, Octave, “Une Nouvelle pédagogie,” Le Figaro no. 56 (Saturday, 25 February 1888)Google Scholar.

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41. Vogüé, 430.

42. Quoted in Pruner, 37.

43. Achkinasi, Mikhaïl, “Un Drame populaire du Comte Léon Tolstoi,” Révue d'art dramatique 6.33 (1 May 1888): 144Google Scholar.

44. Quoted in Gudzii, 725–6.

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46. Like its English equivalent “power,” vlast' has the secondary meaning of “realm.” In the most recent English translation, the play's title is rendered as The Realm of Darkness. See Tolstoy, Leo, Tolstoy: Plays, vol. 2, trans. Kantor, Marvin and Tulchinsky, Tanya, intro. Andrew Baruch Wachtel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 1–90Google Scholar.

47. McDonagh, Josephine, “Infanticide and the Boundaries of Culture from Hume to Arnold,” in Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science, and Literature, 1650–1865, ed. Greenfield, Susan C. and Barash, Carol (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 215–37Google Scholar.

48. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” in The Basic Political Writings, trans. and ed. Cress, Donald A. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 25–82Google Scholar, at 54, 55; partially quoted in McDonagh, Josephine, Child Murder and British Culture, 1720–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 35Google Scholar.

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55. McDonagh, Child Murder, 88–95, 137–44. For colonial attitudes toward infanticide, see also Spuy, Patricia van der, “Infanticide, Slavery, and the Politics of Reproduction at Cape Colony, South Africa, in the 1820s,” in Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550–2000, ed. Jackson, Mark (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 128–48Google Scholar.

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60. Donskov, Changing Image of the Peasant, 120. Italics in the original.

61. Wachtel, Andrew Baruch, The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 4Google Scholar.

62. Tolstoi, “Komu u kogo uchit'sia pisat', krest'ianskim rebiatam u nas ili nam u krest'ianskikh rebiat?”, PSS, 8: 301–24, at 322.

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64. Ibid., 23: 16–17.

65. Tolstoi, Khristianskoe uchenie, in PSS, 39: 117–91, at 183.

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70. See Pruner, 31–3. See also Erich Auerbach, who relegates nineteenth-century Russian realism as a whole to “old-Christian [rather] than to modern occidental realism.” Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 520–4.

71. A. M. Skabichevskii, “Vlast' t'my,” Sochineniia A. Skabichevskago: Kriticheskie etiudy, publitsisticheskie ocherki, literaturnye kharakteristiki, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Izd. F. Pavlenkova, 1903), 2: 530–42, at 538.

72. The playwright Arkady Averchenko wrote a parody of the play for the Crooked Mirror, a turn-of-the-century theatre specializing in satire. Laurence Senelick, trans. and ed., Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists: An Anthology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 302n.

73. Stakhovich, 45.

74. Sarcey in Pruner, 36.

75. “No, the way the little one plays it, it's still such a pity!” Quoted in S. A. Tolstaia, “Vospominaniia S. A. Tolstoi. ‘Vlast’ t'my,'” Tolstovskii ezhegodnik 1912: 17–23, at 22.

76. Ransel, 101–2.

77. Chekhov, A. P., “Spat' khochetsia,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, ed. Balykhatyi, S. D., 30 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 1974–83), 7Google Scholar (1977): 7–12, at 7, 12.

78. Quoted in the notes to “Spat' khochetsia,” 7: 626. It is worth noting that Tolstoy included a second work of infanticide literature, George Eliot's Adam Bede, in this exclusive category of “universal art” as well. Tolstoi, Chto takoe iskusstvo?, in PSS, 30: 27–203, at 160.

79. Woolf, Virginia, Three Guineas (San Diego: Harcourt, 1966), 11Google Scholar.