The question of freedom and the master-slave dialectic in Herman Melville's novella Benito Cereno and Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Village of Stepanchikovo

This essay studies the typological links between Herman Melville's novella Benito Cereno (1855) and Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Village of Stepanchikovo (1859). Both writers have experienced a loss of freedom: due to his family's impoverishment Melville had to become a mariner, who could hardly leave his ship for around three years; while Dostoevsky experienced five years of imprisonment and five more years of exile, during which he wrote The Village of Stepanchikovo. Against this background, both works can be interpreted as an artistic reflection on freedom, on being a master or (in some sense) a slave. This question is topical in Benito Cereno, on the eve of the American Civil War. That is one of the reasons why Melville writes a novella with its radical focus on one topic: who is the master and who is the slave? Is the strange Don Benito the master of a criminal gang or a slave of his weaknesses? It is crucial that Captain Delano's racism makes him unable to believe that the former slaves have become true masters. Dostoevsky's novel raises more questions about freedom set against the background of reforms expected from Alexander II during the first years of his reign: serfdom and liberation of peasants, emancipation of women, a legal system to protect people's rights. So, Dostoevsky tells the story of several "village residents" who switch the roles of "master" and "servant." The central story tells about a colonel and landowner, whose meekness turns him into a servant, and Foma Fomych, who becomes the true master. However, Dostoevsky includes another main character, Nastya, who achieves discrete power because she is courageous enough to insist on her views, yet she is free from ambition, thus overcoming the dialectic of mastership and serfdom and achieving freedom. Both writers are influenced by German idealism, and both, indeed, are close to the master-slave dialectic described in Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit, according to which masters can only be masters if they are recognized as such, so that they also depend on their slaves. According to Hegel, people sometimes become slaves if they lack courage to fight, so that masters can also stop being masters once slaves find this courage. In both works, those who should officially be masters become servants. This creates what Bakhtin calls a carnival, a "world inside out." Finally, it is crucial for the narratological strategy of both Benito Cereno and The Village of Stepanchikovo that the events are set in a remote location - a boat in the middle of the ocean, or a manor in the middle of fields and woods. The story, then, is told from the perspective of somebody who arrives and finds it hard to understand what is happening in this little world.