The Village of Stepanchikovo: The Comedy of Foma’s Demands

Part of: The Deep Reader

Spoiler note: This essay discusses the ending of The Village of Stepanchikovo.

Falaley has been instructed to dream of something more refined. Gentlemen playing cards would do, or ladies walking in a lovely garden. He promises to oblige, prays before bed, and wakes to discover that he has spent another night with the white bull. In Dostoevsky’s The Village of Stepanchikovo, even sleep can leave a servant owing someone an apology.

The order comes from Foma Fomich, a dependent who has established himself as the moral authority of Colonel Rostanev’s household. To Foma, the bull proves Falaley’s vulgarity. Its second appearance suggests a conspiracy: someone must have prompted the boy to repeat the story. The colonel himself falls under suspicion. Soon the entire household is waiting for a more acceptable dream, while the bull returns every night for a week.

Dostoevsky keeps enlarging the disturbance around an image that remains obstinately simple. Falaley cannot produce the elegant scene required of him, and the narrator tells us that he cannot even manage the lie that would end the trouble. We begin to anticipate the bull with a pleasure that belongs to repetition, although for the boy each recurrence brings fresh distress. The joke can continue because the household takes Foma’s demand seriously enough to hope that tomorrow it will be fulfilled.

That misplaced seriousness gives the novel much of its comic force. People wait, rehearse, apologize, and try again until an absurd demand has consumed their day. By the ending, Foma will direct a far larger performance, with the lovers, their relatives, and even his exasperated critics taking their places. He will help produce a happiness we have good reason to welcome, and receive their gratitude for resolving the trouble he helped create.

A household learning its lines

Before the bull, there is a proverb. Falaley has eaten some pie and compared his appetite to Martin eating soap. Foma demands to know who Martin is. Is he a clerk, an astronomer, a poet, a captain? When the frightened boy finally identifies him as a servant, Foma wants the name of his master. A passing expression has acquired the burden of supplying a social identity.

The interrogation keeps finding new questions because it refuses the kind of answer the expression can give. Martin needs no employer for the comparison to work; Foma’s insistence makes the missing employer an offense. And once Falaley cannot answer, the consequences spread beyond him: Foma leaves in anger, the colonel’s mother becomes unwell, and the colonel begs forgiveness and spends the day walking on tiptoe. An idiom occupies a few words; the labor of appeasing its offended listener occupies the house.

Foma’s own comparisons enjoy more freedom. During a later quarrel he likens himself to a rooster blamed for failing to lay eggs, then expressly defends the rustic image. Falaley’s language had supposedly offended Foma’s refined taste. Here Foma can authorize the exception because the comparison serves his grievance. Dostoevsky lets the discrepancy recur in speech, where it is much funnier than a general description of hypocrisy: the same man who demanded Martin’s credentials supplies his own imaginary poultry with an explanation of its innocence.

When the colonel tries to end their arrangement, Foma makes him practice a more consequential phrase. The proposed separation comes with money and the offer of a nearby house. Foma denounces the insult, announces that he will tear and spit on the banknotes, and scatters them about the room. The narrator carefully notices that he only crumples them a little. His violent speech and his economical fingers conduct different versions of the scene.

The colonel is overwhelmed by this apparent disinterestedness. His attempt to dismiss Foma turns into a plea for forgiveness, and forgiveness requires him to address his dependent as “your Excellency.” Even agreement takes time. Tomorrow will not do; the words must be spoken now. A greeting sounds too much like a joke. The colonel’s hesitant “Well” must disappear. Then come corrections to his tone, a small bow, a forward inclination of the body, and an apology dictated phrase by phrase.

Dostoevsky makes us stay through the revisions, delaying the moment when a merely obedient answer will suffice. Each concession seems to settle the quarrel until Foma discovers another defect. The colonel must supply the words, posture, and feeling appropriate to his instructor’s imaginary rank. Watching from outside, his nephew Sergey—the narrator—blushes and chokes with rage. Yet the dialogue keeps slipping out of Foma’s elevated register. Asked whether his heart feels steeped in holy oil, the colonel says that everything seems to be in butter. Foma briefly objects, then accepts the result.

The butter leaves something of the colonel alive within his obedience: his awkward, practical language has not become the language he is being taught. It also lets the reader laugh in a scene Sergey finds almost unbearable. Dostoevsky sustains both responses by keeping the actual exchange before us, including the small verbal accident that its self-appointed director cannot quite prevent.

The exit that fails to end the story

An expulsion ought to interrupt this pattern. When Foma publicly slanders Nastya, the young governess the colonel loves, the colonel finally seizes him and throws him through the glass door. Foma tumbles down the steps into the yard. After so much talk about leaving, the departure happens with a physical abruptness that neither he nor the room is prepared for. Sergey declares that he will not return.

The next exchanges immediately undo that confidence. The colonel proposes to Nastya, but his mother goes down on her knees to demand Foma back. She then kneels before Nastya to beg her not to accept the proposal. The posture that should accompany a blessing becomes an obstacle to it. Nastya refuses a marriage that would make the colonel miserable through conflict with his family. Removing Foma’s body has left the household’s allegiance to him intact.

A thunderstorm gives that allegiance something urgent to do. Now everyone can worry about the expelled man getting wet, being struck by lightning, lacking an overcoat. The colonel rides out to retrieve him. Foma is already on his way back, frightened by the storm. The narrator makes the circumstances plain enough to deny him a grand entrance on his own terms; nevertheless, the anxious household receives him as a sufferer.

From his chair, he begins rebuilding the story. His suspicion of the lovers becomes vigilance over a young woman’s honor. His insults become the excesses of a benevolent heart. Finally, the public accusation that led to his ejection becomes a test of the colonel. We have just witnessed the events he is explaining, and the narrator has explicitly said that the expulsion surprised him. Foma’s speech claims a purpose and coherence that the preceding action gives us reason to doubt.

His success depends on what he does while speaking. Taking the colonel’s hand and then Nastya’s, he joins them and pronounces a blessing. He calls for a cheer. Bahtcheyev, another loud critic of Foma, responds first; Sergey follows, and the voices accumulate. The couple kneels before the colonel’s mother. When she hesitates, Foma kneels too, and she consents.

Earlier he taught the colonel how to stand and speak. Now his directions arrange the whole room, converting a hostile gathering into a wedding party. Dostoevsky gives this conversion the bustle of a comic ensemble: a chair breaks under Bahtcheyev as he tries to place a candle before the holy image, another person completes the task, and the blessing proceeds. The ceremonial seriousness survives the collapsing furniture. The joy survives our knowledge of who is managing it.

Sergey’s earlier certainty that Foma would never return offered a satisfying end to the persecution, but it brought the lovers no settlement. Foma’s arrangement does. For a moment, the narrator who has shown us the performance from outside joins its chorus. Later he will raise objections again. Dostoevsky lets Sergey welcome the lovers’ happiness before he has finished judging the man who arranged it.

What the celebration carries forward

The white bull returns at the height of the rejoicing. Still demanding reassurance of his place among them, Foma calls Falaley over and asks what he dreamed. Two men prompt the terrified boy: he should say that he dreamed of Foma, or of Foma’s virtue. Falaley attempts the offered answer, but the bull breaks into it. He bursts into tears.

This time Foma praises his sincerity and forgives him. Sugar is ordered; the colonel, too excited to manage a few pieces, pours the contents of the bowl into the boy’s coat. The repeated dream has acquired a new consequence without changing its content. It formerly justified punishment; now it gives Foma an occasion to display mercy. Even during the reconciliation, Falaley needs to be forgiven for having dreamed it.

The lavish reward keeps the scene buoyant and uncomfortable at once. The colonel’s generosity is real, as are the boy’s tears. The familiar joke has returned with sugar, public affection, and the same presumption that Foma may judge an involuntary dream.

At the wedding, Foma complains that the new people in the family have made him dispensable, retreats to his room, and reduces the celebration to distress. The narrator then extends the pattern across seven years. Far from exhausting their gratitude, his caprices accompany its growth. The couple is so happy together that they fear they have received more than they deserve; their generosity gives his grievances a lasting welcome.

Over those years, however, Nastya gradually imposes limits on Foma. There are no more scenes like the demand for “your Excellency”: she will not allow her husband to be humiliated in that way. Her love protects him even as their shared gratitude continues to shelter the man who humiliated him. The marriage produces a real improvement without delivering the clean expulsion Sergey once expected.

The novel’s comedy lasts because the happy ending has consequences for everyone, including the person who obstructed it.

Foma can point to an accomplished good whenever his household might remember the means by which he secured it.

We can enjoy the lovers’ relief, the disastrous ceremonies, the bull’s repeated appearances—and still hear, in the seven years added after the wedding, how much longer these grateful people will have to listen to him.

Sources

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Village of Stepanchikovo, translated by Constance Garnett as The Friend of the Family (Heinemann; volume first published 1920). Part I, chapters VI and IX; Part II, chapters IV–VI, especially printed pp. 70–74, 98–108, 169–185, 188–200. Quotations and English phrasing follow Garnett; the digitized copy is a later reprint.