in which Dostoevsky would unleash all his satirical fury against the Nihilists. It is thus not surprising that, of all his major works, it contains the greatest proportion of satirical caricature and ideological parody. This becomes immediately apparent in the rhetoric of the narrator’s account of Stepan Trofimovich’s career, which both exalts and deflates him at the same time. Since the narrator feels a genuine sympathy for Stepan Trofimovich, he begins by delineating the exalted and ennobling image that the eminent worthy has of himself. But he immediately undermines it by revealing the completely exaggerated, even illusory nature of many of the poses that his subject strikes (as a supposed “political exile,” for instance, who was not an exile at all, or as a noted scholar whose “notoriety” was mainly fictitious). “Yet Stepan Trofimovich was a most intelligent and gifted man,” the narrator affirms, “even, so to say, a man of science . . . well in fact he had not done such great things in science.
