One challenge for the humanities is to articulate subjectivities able to reach across national and regional divides without reestablishing the "cosmopolitan" or "ironic" sensibilities at the core of our ideological predicament. This article is such an attempt in a re-reading of Baudelaire, the writer who gave us "modernity" at the same moment he offered us a discourse on the "flâneur." In such re-reading we answer his call to countersign his text, achieving thus the very subject position he is purportedly describing, in his, and our, search for modernity. While many commentators have suggested the flâneur aristocratically uses the masses as means to enjoyment (purportedly finding cause for this critique in the Baudelairean text itself), we will, in contrast, gesture toward a more fundamental ambiguity surrounding the figure—and modernity itself.
… Freud … on the occasion of his seventieth birthday paid the extraordinary tribute to Dostoevsky acknowledging … that everything he had discovered was already to be found in Dostoevsky's worksEdward WasiolekDostoevsky [was] the only psychologist … from whom I had anything to learn: he belongs to the luckiest finds of my life, even more so than the discovery of Stendhal. This deep man …NietzscheThe whole second half of a man's life is usually made up of nothing but the habits accumulated in the first half.StavroginStavrogin is an immense and bewildering character. In the opinion of Konstantin Mochulskii, he is "Dostoevsky's greatest artistic creation." He is complex and mysterious—and frightening because plausible. There is much more to him than the obvious Byronic dimension, and we are clearly confronted by more than just another Russian hero who is bored, passive, and las de vivre. He is strikingly handsome, powerful, and brilliant—exceptional in every way—but a miserable failure as a human being. In the excluded chapter "At Tikhon's," Tikhon tells Stavrogin, "I was horrified to see your great unused powers had been so deliberately turned toward filth" (434). How can a person of such intelligence and talent fail so abjectly in life and do so little good but so much evil? This question obviously fascinated Dostoevskii who probed Stavrogin deeply, looking for the answer, and ended up with a character whose complexity is rare even for Dostoevskii.
Perhaps the most mysterious and elusive figure in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is Afranius, a man who has been in Judea for fifteen years working in the Roman imperial service as chief of the procurator of Judea's secret police. He is present in all four Judean chapters of the novel (chapters 2, 16, 25, 26) as one of the myriad connecting links, though we really do not know who he is for certain until near the end of the third of these chapters, "How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas of Karioth." We first meet him in chapter 2 (which is related by Woland and entitled "Pontius Pilate") simply as "some man" (kakoi-to chelovek), face half-covered by a hood, in a darkened room in the palace of Herod the Great, having a brief whispered conversation with Pilate, who has just finished his fateful talk with Caiaphas (E, p. 39; R, pp. 50-51). Fourteen chapters later, in the chapter dreamed by Ivan Bezdomnyi and entitled "The Execution" (chapter 16), we meet him for the second time, now bringing up the rear of the convoy escorting the prisoners to Golgotha and identified only as "that same hooded man with whom Pilate had briefly conferred in a darkened room of the palace" (E, p. 170; R, p. 218). "The hooded man" attends the entire execution sitting in calm immobility on a three-legged stool, "occasionally out of boredom poking the sand with a stick" (E, p. 172; R, p. 220). When the Tribune of the Cohort arrives, presumably bearing Pilate's orders to terminate the execution, he (the Tribune) speaks first to Krysoboi (Muribellum), who goes to pass on the orders to the executioners, and then to "the man on the three-legged stool," according to whose gestures the executioners arouse Yeshua from his stupor, offer him a drink which he avidly accepts, and then kill him by piercing him "gently" (tikhon'ko) through his heart with a spear.
