408
PHILIP RAHV
integration with its fine contrapuntal effects which makes for
verisimilitude of a higher order, for novelistic truth and density,
and for structural cohesion.
But though the Svidrigailov sequence
is
successfully inte–
grated into the main a;ction, there
is
no denying that he is
invested with an originality and expressive power that invite
comment. It will not do to see him, in the fashion of most
critics of Dostoevsky, as being merely Raskolnikov's double,
representing the pole of self-will in his character. The formal
abstractness of this traditional approach to Svidrigailov cannot
do him justice; and so far as the element of self-will
is
con–
cerned, Raskolnikov, like all "the children of darkness" in
Dostoevsky, has more than enough of it in himself and
is
in
no need of Svidrigailov's services. No, the latter has an in–
dependent existence in the novel though his position in it is
structurally subordinate; his function is not simply that of
ministering to its hero. There is no innate relationship between
the two, no affinity of the mystical order such as is posited in
so many Dostoevsky studies. Actually Svidrigailov enters the
novel by way of the external plot or intrigue (his pursuit of
Dounia) , yet once he is in it he provides the story not only with
an additional perspective on Raskolnikov but also with the
psychosexual vitality which it otherwise lacks, for both Raskol–
nikov and Sonia are singularly sexless. Svidrigailov exemplifies
a distinct character-type in Dostoevsky, the type of the nihilist
in the realm of sensuality. He
is
a more elaborate and refined
version of the rather coarse-grained libertine Valkovsky in
The
Insulted and Injured
and he anticipates the figures of Stavrogin
and the elder Karamazov in the later novels (like Stavrogin he
is
guilty of outraging a little girl). In this character-type, sen–
suality becomes a flight from the vertiginous consciousness of
freedom and from a kind of ennui which has gone beyond the
psychological and has acquired a metaphysical status. Thus
Svidrigailov believes in ghosts who "are as it were shreds and
fragments of other worlds" and who appear only to people
