DOSTOEVSKY AND POLITICS: NOTES ON
"THE POSSESSED"
Philip Rahv
T
HE TENDENCY
of every age is to bury as many classics as it
revives.
If
unable to discover our own urgent meanings in a creation
of the past, we hope to find afIlple redress in its competitive neighbors.
A masterpiece cannot be produced once and for all; it must be con–
stantly reproduced. Its first author is a man. Its later ones- time,
social time, history.
To be means to recur. In the struggle for survival among works
of art, those prove themselves the fittest that recur most often. In
order to impress itself on our imagination, a work of art must 'be
capable of bending its wondrous, its immortal head to the yoke of
the mortal and finite- that is the contemporary, which is never more
than an emphasis, a one-sided projection of the real. The past retains
its vitality insofar as it impersonates the present, either in its aversions
or ideals; in the same way a classic work renews itself by imperson–
ating a modem one.
Of all the novels of Dostoevsky, it is
The Possessed
which now
seems closest to us. Not many years ago what attracted us most were
problems of individual morality, of the opposition between society and
the private ego, such as
Crime and Punishment
exemplified. Today we
find
The Possessed
more congenial to our mood, for it analyses prob–
lems of politics and radical ideology that have become familiar to us
through our own experience. It is a work at once unique and typically
Dostoevskyean. Shaken by the Karamazov frenzy and full of Dosto–
evsky's moral and religious obsessions,
it
is at the same time the one
novel in which he explicitly concerned himself with political ideas
and with the revolutionary movement.
The fact is that it really contains two novels. It was begun as a
"tendencious" study of the evolution of ideas from fathers to sons, of
the development of the liberal idealism of the thirties and forties of
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