DOSTOEVSK'l' AND POLITICS
27
victims,
all
that needs to be said about them is that they prove alto–
gether too much. The "Slav soul" is impartial in its testimony; as a
supra-historical essence it draws no distinctions between accusers and
accused, or between oppressors and oppressed.
If
you make the un–
fathomable perversity of the Slav nature your premise, then logically
your conclusion cannot exclude any explanation, no matter how wild
and incredible; and the "sympathizers" should be reminded that a
frame-up of one's real or potential political enemies is among the
least of the marvels known to man.
Through reading Dostoevsky no one will ferret out the truth
about the trials. About specific events one should make up one's mind
on the basis of specific evidence; empirical verification cannot be re–
placed by whatever insights into the general historical background of
the Russian revolution we can derive from Dostoevsky. The revolution
explains Dostoevsky infinitely better than Dostoevsky explains the
revolution. To look to the author of
The Possessed
for revelations is
futile; but much can be learned from a study of the interrelationship
between his works and the contending social forces which he c;ombined
into such extraordinary patterns. Although this analyst of contradic–
tions, who was ever vibrating between faith and heresy, made revolu–
tionaries the object of his venom, there is a real affinity between them.
If
in the past social critics dismissed
The Possessed
as a vicious
caricature of the socialist movement, today the emergence of Stalin–
ism compels a revision of that judgment. Its peculiar "timeliness"
flows from the fact that the motives, actions, and ideas of the revolu–
tionaries in it are so ambiguous, so imbedded in mystifications, as to
suggest those astonishing negations of the revolutionary ideal which
have come into existence since Lenin's death. The present-day Comin–
tern, emptied of principle, has converted politics into an art of illusion.
Stalin's "socialism" is devoid of all norms; never acting in its own
name, it can permit itself every crime and every duplicity. Its first rule
is to deny its own identity and keep itself solvent by drawing on the
inexhaustible credit of the proletariat. In public the rapacious bureau–
crat appears masked as a workingman. Marxism, and not the savage
doctrine of preserving at all costs the power of the usurpers, is his offi–
cial doctrine. It is a similar element of counterfeit, of a vertiginous
interplay of reality and appearance, which makes Dostoevsky's story
so prophetic in the light of what we know of the fate of the revolution.
In reading it one is never really certain whether Pyotr Verhoven–
sky, its chief revolutionary character, is not an agent of the Czar's
secret police. Even as he is engaged in preparing an insurrection, this
