I would like to thank Robert Louis Jackson, Robin Feuer Miller, Gary Saul Morson, Stephanie Sandler and two anonymous readers for Slavic Review for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

1. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevskii's Poetics, ed. and trans. Emerson, Caryl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 193–94Google Scholar. For a Bakhtinian approach to intertextuality in The Brothers Karamazov, see Perlina, Nina, Varieties of Poetic Utterance: Quotation in the Brothers Karamazov (Lanham: University Press of America, 1985.Google Scholar

2. Although many of the themes dealt with here are also relevant to Dostoevskii's other major novels, for purposes of clarity and conciseness I have restricted my discussion to The Devils and related shorter works. The present article deals with one short scene in The Devils, but that scene resonates with all the major issues of the novel; moreover, the type of parody embodied in this passage is important not only for Dostoevskii but for nineteenth-century Russian parody in general.

3. The significance of Fet's “Diana” for Dostoevskii's entire aesthetic system has been elucidated by Jackson, Robert Louis, in his Dostoevskii's Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966 Google Scholar, passim.

4. Dostoevskii, F. M., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–88), 18: 96 Google Scholar. All further citations from Dostoevskii's works are taken from this edition, with volume and page numbers given in parentheses in the text. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. See the discussion of the “Mr. Dobroliubov” article in Jackson; and in Frank, Joseph, Dostoevskii: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 77–85.Google Scholar

5. The body of Dostoevskii's article is an analysis of an analysis: Dostoevskii's critique of Nikolai Dobroliubov's discussion of a story by Marko Vovchok. Although Dostoevskii harshly criticizes the story for what he sees as its artistic ineptitude and its lack of verisimilitude, the plot of the story itself strangely anticipates Dostoevskii's own thesis about art. The heroine of the story is a serf girl who spends all her time and energy pining for freedom. It is only when she is granted her freedom that she becomes a productive worker: “Masha used to be considered a shirker of hard work [beloruchka, lit. one with white hands], but now they call her the foremost needlewoman, the foremost worker” (18: 89).

6. Marina Warner points out that “virginity” in the classical context is not identical with the Christian virtue of chastity. Virgin goddesses “spurned men because they were preeminent, independent and alone, which is why the title virgin could be used of a goddess who entertained lovers” (Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary [New York: Random House, 1976], 48). But Christianity shares with the classical world the attitude that “virginity [is] powerful magic and [confers] strength and ritual purity” (48). On the significance of the Sistine Madonna for Dostoevskii, see Jackson, 59, 214–15, 260n; and Billington, James H., The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Knopf, 1966), 36, 348–49, 431, 642n.Google Scholar

7. Against the background of the general preoccupation with Raphael's painting in The Devils, Stavrogin's allusion in his confession to “the gallery in Dresden” (11: 21) may be read as referring not only to the Claude Lorrain painting that he explicitly describes but also to the Sistine Madonna.

8. Zhukovskii, V. A., “Rafaeleva ‘Madonna, '” in his Estetika i kritika, eds. Kanunova, F.Z. et al. (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1985), 308.Google Scholar

9. See Iurii Tynianov on the notion of “hidden” or “undiscovered” parodies, especially in Dostoevskii ( “Dostoevskii i Gogol’ [K teorii parodii],” in his Arkhaisty i novatory [Leningrad: Priboi, 1929], 432–33, 455; and “O parodii,” in his Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino, eds. E.A. Toddes, A.P. Chudakov and M.O. Chudakova [Moscow: Nauka, 1977], 288). See also Bakhtin, , “Discourse in the Novel,” in his The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Holquist, Michael, trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 374.Google Scholar

10. Russkaia potaennaia literatura XIX veka, ed. N.P. Ogarev (London: Triibner, 1861). Although the notes to The Devils in vol. 12 of the complete works of Dostoevskii do not mention The Lay of Gabriel, they repeatedly cite Secret Literature as the only possible source for other specific allusions in the novel (see, for example, 12: 278, 311). For a recent study of the significance of The Lay of Gabriel both within Pushkin's oeuvre and for twentieth-century Russian writers, see Slobin, Greta N., “Appropriating the Irreverent Pushkin,” in Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age, eds. Gasparov, Boris, Hughes, Robert and Paperno, Irina (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.Google Scholar

11. In his introduction to Secret Literature, Nikolai Ogarev maintains that political literature and obscene literature are united by a common “free spirit” (vol'nyi dukh): “No matter how strange it is to find poetry with civic aspirations in the same book with indecent poetry, they are connected more closely than it may seem. In essence they are branches of the same tree, and in each indecent epigram you will find a political slap in the face” (Secret Literature, xlix-1).

12. Cf. Peter Michelson's characterization of the aesthetics of obscenity, which “redirects] attention from the ideal to the material nature of human being and doing” (Speaking the Unspeakable: A Poetics of Obscenity [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993], xi). For the source of The Lay of Gabriel, see Parny, Èvariste, La Guerre des Dieux, poȅme en dix chants (Brussels: Chez Vander Berghe, 1814 Google Scholar. The Virgin Mary as the object of sexual desire is a theme at least as old as Bernard of Clairvaux's twelfthcentury lectures on The Song of Songs (see Warner, 121–33). The multiplicity of denied “Marys” in The Devils reflects Dostoevskii's interest in this theme, as does his passion for Pushkin's poem “The Poor Knight” (“Rytsar’ bednyi,” 1829) about a knight's obsessive love for the Virgin, quoted in both The Devils and The Idiot (Idiot, 1874).

13. Letter to Pushkin, L.S., 4 September 1822, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. Tomashevskii, B.V. (Moscow: Akademii nauk SSSR, 1958), 10: 43 Google Scholar. The word “hymen” [tselka] is used as a vulgar metonymy for “virgin. “

14. See Nina Pelikan Straus's fine discussion of this theme in relation to Svidrigailov's suicide in Crime and Punishment (' “Why did I say “women! “?': Raskolnikov Reimagined,” Diacritics 23, no. 1: 59–64). See also R.L. Jackson, “Dostoevskii and the Marquis de Sade: The Final Encounter,” in his Dialogues with Dostoevskii: The Overwhelming Questions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 144–61.

15. The tradition that Joseph is an old man appears to have originated in the apocryphal Book of James (Warner, 27).

16. Dostoevskii's reference in The Devils to Pushkin's letter to Heeckeren (10: 186) reminds us that the man who laughingly invoked the “intercessor of cuckolds” in The Lay of Gabriel came to take the matter much more seriously after his own marriage. Irina Paperno has thoroughly analyzed Russian radicals’ attempts to rethink the problem of adultery in both life and literature; Dostoevskii was demonstrably interested in these attempts, especially as reflected in Nikolai Chernyshevskii's novel What Is To Be Done﹜ (1863). See Paperno, , Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 119–25, 133–55.Google Scholar

17. In Dostoevskii's early notes toward The Devils, mention of the prototype of Dasha's character is accompanied by the metonymic notation “belly” (briukho; 11: 58, 59).

18. Another woman linked to Stavrogin, Liza Tushina, probably remains a virgin after her night with him, since it is broadly hinted by both Liza and Petr that Stavrogin was impotent (10: 399, 406). Significantly, Liza is a Diana-like amazon-horsewoman. On the holy foolishness of Mar'ia Lebiadkina, see Murav, Harriet, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevskii's Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 99–123 Google Scholar; and Saraskina, Liudmila, “Besy”:-preduprezhdenie (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1990), 130–58.Google Scholar

19. Foreword to Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary, trans. Marmur, Mildred (New York: New American Library, 1964), xx.Google Scholar

20. Richard Peace has noted that Mar'ia Shatova is a “restatement” of both the Lebiadkins, (Dostoyevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971], 206).Google Scholar

21. By describing in detail the labor of his “Sistine Madonna,” Dostoevskii united the mythologies of Mary that prevail in the western and eastern Churches. In the west the emphasis is on virginity (the “Virgin Mary,” the “Holy Virgin “), while in the east, motherhood is stressed (the “Mother of God,” the “One Who Gives Birth to God “). See Warner on the significance of the granting to Mary of the title theotokos (the Godbearer, the mother of God; 65, 66, 67, 87, 105). Childbirth is a leitmotif in The Devils, ranging from Mrs. Stavrogin's charity “for the aid of the poorest women who have recently given birth [rodil'nitsy] in the town and province” (10: 123) to Liamshin's talent for mimicking the sounds of labor “and the child's first cry” (10: 30–31, 252).

22. The skilled Arina Virginskaia is the midwife of choice in the town, despite her penchant for distressing mothers in labor by uttering frightful blasphemies (10: 301). Her role corresponds to that of the “doubting midwife” in the Book of James, who refuses to believe in the virgin birth until she performs a primitive gynecological examination upon Mary; “her blasphemous hand is withered by fire” (Warner, 28). As wife of a member of Petr Verkhovenskii's “five,” sister of the cell's theorist Shigalev and lover of Petr's tool Lebiadkin, the midwife herself is deeply implicated in the political chaos at the heart of The Devils.

23. On the legacy of Lebiadkin in the twentieth century, see Zholkovskii, A. K., “Grafomanstvo kak priem: Lebiadkin, Khlebnikov, Limonov, i drugie,” in Velimir Chlebnikov (1885–1922): Myth and Reality, ed. Weststeijn, Willem G. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986.Google Scholar

24. Tynianov, “Dostoevskii i Gogol',” 433, 455;V. Novikov, Kniga o parodii (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1989)Google Scholar, 6; Rose, , Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 52 Google Scholar; Morson, G. S., The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevskii's “Diary of a Writer” and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 110 Google Scholar. For the purposes of this discussion, I use the definitions of parody formulated by four critics, two Russian and two western: Tynianov, Novikov, Morson and Rose. The definitions by Novikov and Rose are made on the basis of reviewing the history of the theory of parody in the Russian and western traditions, respectively. The fact that Dostoevskii's “target text” is a work of visual art does not, in my view, pose any particular problem; I accept Rose's definition of the parody's target as “preformed linguistic or artistic material” (52, emphasis mine).

25. “Proiskhozhdenie parodii” (1926), Trudy po znakovym sistemam (Tartu: Tartu Riikliku Ulikooli Toimetised, 1973), 308: 490. On Freidenberg's career, see Iu. M. Lotman's introduction to the above-mentioned publication (482–87); Pasternak, Boris, Perepiska s Ol'goi Freidenberg, ed. Mossman, Elliott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981; English edition, 1982)Google Scholar; and Perlina, Nina, “Ol'ga Freidenberg on Myth, Folklore, and Literature,” Slavic Review 50, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 371–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar (includes further bibliography).

26. See Morson, Gary Saul and Emerson, Caryl, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 152–55, 433–35Google Scholar; and the discussion by Novikov, 106–8. According to Kevin Moss, Freidenberg and Bakhtin never met and had only a superficial knowledge of each other's work. See his “Response” to the above-mentioned article by Perlina, Slavic Review 50, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 383–84.

27. Cf. Novikov: “In a comic situation, works of low artistic quality clearly show their concrete weaknesses, but works of high quality display their strongest features” (116). I would like to thank my student Matvei Yankelevich for helping me to define the nature of Prutkovian parody as outlined above. Morson's important category of “metaparody,” which offers the “contradictory hermeneutic directives … ‘this is a parody’ and ‘this is a parody of a parody'” (142), is not quite the same as what I call “restorative parody,” in which it is ultimately clear where the higher semantic authority lies. The case of Prutkov resembles that of Lebiadkin in that the reader is always aware that the author of the parody and the author behind the author of the parody (i.e., A.K. Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, respectively), have differing attitudes toward the target texts (cf. Novikov, 222–26).

28. In view of the historically conditioned nature of restorative parody, I would agree with Linda Hutcheon that “there are probably no transhistorical definitions of parody possible” (“Modern Parody and Bakhtin,” in Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges, eds. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989], 91).

29. O Pushkine (Berlin: Petropolis, 1937), 114. Another of Khodasevich's remarks has important implications for the aesthetic world of The Devils: “If … from the point of view of religion, parody is a form of profanation, the converse is also true: from the literary point of view, profanation is [just] one form of parody” (113). In an interesting but murky article, G.A. Levinton discusses Dostoevskii's use of obscenity ( “Dostoevskii i ‘nizkie’ zhanry fol'klora,” Literatumoe obozrenie, special issue: Erotika v russkoi literature ot Barkova do nashikh dnei [Teksty i kommentarii] [1992]: 46–53).

30. ‘ “Vliublennyi bes.’ Zamysel i ego transformatsiia v tvorchestve Pushkina 1821–1831 gg.,” in Pushkin: Issledovaniia i materialy, eds. V.E. Vatsuro et al. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1986), 12: 179.

31. The Virginskii family is oddly pervaded by the aura of virginity: the household includes Mrs. Virginskaia's sister, a “thirty-year-old maiden [deva]” and Mr. Virginskii's sister “the maiden Virginskaia” (devitsa Virginskaia; 10: 301–02, 445).

32. See Saraskina on the theme of sochinitel'stvo (composing literature) in the novel (115–29).