Over the past decade or so, a very particular type of character has made its presence known in many of our offices and institutions, veritably tyrannising our lives. Countless numbers of us have suffered this type in silence or experienced humiliations — or worse — at their hands. Only now are they being acknowledged, as articles appear on activist capture, notably at the BBC. Yet readers of one of Dostoyevsky’s lesser-known novels will recognise the type, epitomised by the compellingly awful Foma Fomich Opiskin in the early novel The Village of Stepanchikovo.
A rollicking country estate comedy, the novel tells of an educated young man, Sergey, summoned to his uncle Colonel Rostanev’s estate to help with some unnamed trouble. Trouble he finds, in the form of a former tutor and now in-house despot, the aforementioned Foma Fomich. Despite being unprepossessing in terms of background, qualifications and looks, Foma is the darling of the colonel’s mother and terror of the household. Foma lords it over gentry and servants alike. All live in terror of his changeable moods. A person only has to say a wrong word and Foma is shouting and crying, surrounded by sycophants who attempt to placate him with flattery and favours.
We recognise Foma immediately as the pattern of the office and institutional activist. For Foma advertises his virtuous capacity for seeing past stale conventions to create a more egalitarian society. It is this self-proclamation as an avatar of a better world which has impressed his host’s mother and others, and even seems to have drawn in the colonel. For Foma turns the colonel’s instinct towards fairness against him, guilt-tripping his host for perceived slights.
Here we see Dostoyevsky’s prescient genius. It is not by sheer bad luck that cuckoo activists, proclaiming unique insights and moral virtues, have nested throughout the West in recent years. They prey on the West’s decent aspirations towards more democratic, equal and caring societies. For Foma and his real-life descendants, egalitarian rhetoric is deployed to maintain a hierarchy that benefits them. They position anything they do not like as a betrayal of virtues to which their host is now said to pay mere lip-service.
To demonstrate how uncannily the novelist predicts our contemporary troublemakers, at one point Foma demands that the colonel use an inappropriate form of address. Foma creates a kerfuffle about the forthcoming visit of an old general, friend of the colonel. He fears that such an important personage will take attention away from himself. Foma makes such a carry-on that the colonel cancels the general’s visit. But this is not enough for Foma. The colonel was wrong to invite such a relic of ancient privilege as a general of the hussars. Foma therefore insists that the colonel address he — Foma — with the honorific reserved for senior officers: Your Excellency.
The colonel’s bemused and scandalised reaction to this imposition will be familiar to those of us who have been blackmailed, cajoled and emotionally pressured to address men as “she”, women as “he”, and single individuals as “they”, not to mention such nonsenses as “ze”, “xe” and “ey”. To address someone who is not a member of the officer class as “Your Excellency” goes against everything the colonel believes. Except, of course, his wish for egalitarianism. This Foma weaponises in order to inculcate guilt in his host and, after an unfortunate episode in which the colonel sends Foma berserk by offering him a great deal of money to live in the town — Foma’s presence having become the cause of constant upset and tension in the household — the poor old colonel is shamed into agreeing to address this brazen nobody as “Your Excellency.” Thus have so many of us been bullied into using pronouns that go against our sense of reality.
Yet Foma Fomich’s own commitment to egalitarianism is questionable. His attempts to “improve” the household servants, by forcing them to learn French, leave them feeling humiliated. Foma takes a particular dislike to the orphaned houseboy Falaley, a handsome youth and beloved by the colonel. It is clear that Foma is jealous, and he is furious when his attempts to prevent the boy recounting his dreams are unsuccessful.
We can recognise this double standard. In academia, I was always struck by how those academics who railed against hierarchy were always the most hierarchical. One day they would pompously read statements denouncing all hierarchy, including that between lecturers and students, at the outset of meetings. The very next, they would snootily report students to Heads of Department for addressing them incorrectly.
Falaley is a fine dancer and enjoys showcasing the Kamarinskaya folk steps he has mastered. This sends Foma into paroxysms of fury, as he lectures the assembled household at length on how the low, vulgar origins of the dance are an insult to egalitarian attempts to raise the peasant class. Foma believes peasants should be portrayed for moral uplift. He rails against anything which shows peasants realistically, as poor, disorderly or drunken. He wants literature to be edifying. For him, the purpose of art is moral instruction, and any depiction that shows human flaws is an offence against taste. Our contemporary Fomas have similarly propagandised our drama, comedy and popular culture, excising anything they think incorrect or vulgar, leaving us with mere advertisements for their social engineering.
The narrator Sergey spends the novel watching Foma’s antics in horror and amazement, expecting at any minute that others will see that the former tutor is a scoundrel. And Foma does overstep the mark when he crudely insults Nastasya, the woman the colonel loves. In a scene of delightful comeuppance, Foma is thrown bodily from the house, runs off into the night, falls into a ditch, then returns when frightened by a storm. Yet Foma is nothing if not a resourceful manipulator — he convinces the colonel that he insulted Nastasya in order to test whether the colonel was worthy of her love. The entire household falls for this ruse, except of course our narrator.
Like Sergey, we have had to stand by and watch activists use the most obscene and violent language whilst retaining their image as strivers for a utopia of loving kindness. The novel’s action ends ironically with Foma a permanent fixture at the colonel’s. The narrator reports Foma’s later death and the discovery of the meagre output of this self-styled genius — a half-finished novel, a rotten poem, an absurd academic paper, and an abandoned story. To this will the culture produced by our academic and cultural rogues amount.
Contemporary stages, sitcoms and novels should be full of Foma’s likenesses
Foma is well-known in the Russian-speaking world. Stanislavsky was obsessed with the book and produced the play twice, unsuccessfully in 1891 and to great applause in 1917 at the Moscow Art Theatre, where Foma reminded audiences of Rasputin. Ignat Avsey, in the introduction to the Penguin edition of the novel, tells us that Stanislavsky gave up the role of the colonel as he was unable to reconcile the character’s Christian humility and benign personality with the aggression needed to confront Foma’s tyranny. Here might be a lesson for us, as we tussle with our instincts towards accommodation, when resisting the tantrum-wielding activists in our midst requires mettle.
Foma is a character on a par with Shakespeare’s portraits of overweening rogues; he has something of Malvolio’s Puritan scornfulness, Iago’s manipulative genius and Parolles’ bravado and cowardice. He also bears a strong resemblance to Molière’s Tartuffe. Contemporary stages, sitcoms and novels should be full of Foma’s likenesses, mirroring and mocking our encounters with them in reality. But Foma has control of our media and publishing just as he did the colonel’s household. We must on no account allow him to become the fixture Dostoyevsky pictures him becoming in the Stepanchikovo estate. For if we cannot resist this mere popinjay, how will we resist the Demons that Dostoyevsky shows us to be following him?
