Child murder, peasant sins, and the infantilizing of evil in Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness

In The Power of Darkness (Vlast' t'my; 1886), Tolstoy examines the nature of human evil in the unlikely context of the Russian peasantry, a class with a privileged relation to the Good throughout most of his oeuvre. Tolstoy's first major play chronicles Nikita's rise as a philandering laborer who succeeds to the fortune of his peasant employer (Pyotr) through a murder that is conceived by his mother (Matryona) and carried out by his employer's wife (Anisya). After marrying Anisya, Nikita descends into drunkenness, seduces his sixteen-year-old stepdaughter, Akulina, and fathers her child. Many commentators - taking their cue from the play's subtitle, "If the claw is caught, the bird is lost" (kogotok uviaz, vsei ptichke propast') - have followed the logic of Tolstoy's plot in search of an original sin, usually locating it somewhere in the confrontation between a backward peasantry and the forces of progress, especially money - a bane of civilization that corrupts the play's characters from without. This same logical sequence can be reversed so as to foreground not the causes of evil but its victims. Nikita's final and greatest crime is the killing of Akulina's newborn. Here Tolstoy's oft-disparaged moralism proves no less groundbreaking than his play's cutting-edge naturalism. Through an artistic strategy of moral provocation, The Power of Darkness contributes to a modern revaluation of evil through the figure of the murdered child, a tradition that runs from Swift to Dostoevsky to the photojournalism of twentieth-century warfare.