On Moral Movement and Moral Vision: The Last Supper in Russian Debates

Comparative Literature, Winter 2004 by Medzhibovskaya, Inessa

19 In The Denions, arguments between the young conspirators amass treacheries, suicide, and murders (involving the sacrificing of "weak" and "kind young men"). Frank recounts Dostoevsky's criticism of Ge through the narrow prism of Dostoevsky's acquaintance with the young radicaljournalist Timofeyeva, a staff proof-reader for Grazhdanin (The Citizen), in which Dostoevsky was then publishing chapters of A Writer's Diary. Describing their work on the proofs of Dostoevsky's analysis of Ge, Frank writes: "Timofeyeva was struck by the analysis of one painting in particular, a work of a wellknown artist N.N. Ge called A Mysterious Evening. It referred in fact to the Last Supper; but the momentous eventwas painted as if it had taken place in the Petersburg of the present, and the work was a favorite of the radicals precisely for the same reason. Timofeyeva gives their point of view when she speaks of 'all the apostles in the picture [being shown] as if they were present-day 'Socialists. Christ-as we see him-a good, simple man with an ecstatic temperament, and Judas-the most ordinary spy or agent provocateur receiving payment for denunciation'" (Frank 43). Timofeyeva is also quoted as saying that Dostoevsky "criticized this reduction of the great Christian theme to a day in the life of a Russian radical ..." (Frank 44).

20 See Shatov's conversation with the "Prince" in the Besy drafts ("Mir stanet krasota Khristova," Dostoevsky 11:188). Gatrall points to the pictorial (silent) aspect of Christ's excursions in Dostoevsky's logoceniric novels, particularly "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" and Versilov's dream in The Adolescent. Christ hovers in a space that is tangible to the characters yet excludes them, like a noncommensurate plane in a painting. He expresses himself in subdued gestures: his articulations in Versilov's dream are not only imagined, they are rendered in reported speech.

21 Lipps never actually mentions the Last Supper in relation to Einfuhlung. Here is a typical statement: "Ich stimme in die Freude des Anderen ein, mache sie innerlich mit. Und das Gleiche gilt dann weiterhin von jedem Affekt. Auch den Zorn eines Menschen billige ich, wenn ich zum Gegenstand des Zornes mich innerlich ebenso verhalte wie er" (Asthetic 1:110; "I join in the joy of the Other, participate in it internally. The same, furthermore, is valid for every emotion. And so I can justify a man's anger, when I connect myself to the subject of anger in the same inner spirit as he." My emphasis and translation).

22 Bakhtin argues that the Catholic body of the Renaissance "sought but could not find an authoritative author in whose name an artist might create" (Art and Answerability 57). This "solitary" body, a thing by itself, was so dissociated from the Eucharist that it could not be offered for Christ's remembrance. The early Bakhtin rejects the tyranny of the Renaissance flesh over the authority of its creator, only to accede in the 1940s to the body's productive self-destruction and renewal (selfauthoring in the act of carnival) that he found in Rabelais. See his comments on Leonardo and other Renaissance painters after Giotto (Art and Answerability 57-58).