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PARTISAN REVIEW
"authorized representative" of an invisible Central Committee, which
is located somewhere abroad and which turns out to be a myth,
describes himself as "a scoundrel of course and not a socialist." He
methodically uses blackmail, slander, drunkenness, and spying to
achieve his ends. But what in reality are his ends? Give him state
power and you get a type like Yagoda or Yezhov. His plan is to organ–
ize a network of human knots whose task is to proselytize and ramify
endlessly and aim "by systematic denunciation to injure the prestige
of local authority, to reduce villages to confusion, to spread cynicism
and scandals, together with complete disbelief in everything and an
eagerness for something better, and finally, by means of fires, a pre–
eminently national method, to reduce the country at a given moment,
if need be, to desperation." He actually carries out this ingenious plan
in the town where the scene of the novel is laid. His pupil Shigalov, a
character who fits Lenin's definition of the petty-bourgeois "gont
mad," busies himself with constructing-on paper-a new form
01
social organization to guarantee complete equality. Starting with
"unlimited freedom" as its postulate, his Utopia, however, arrives at
"unlimited despotism." This throws him into despair, yet he insists
that there can be no other solution to the problems of society. A
well-born and well-to-do lady, Yulia Mihailovna, dreams of recon–
ciling the irreconcilable in her own person, of uniting in the
adoration of herself "the correct tone of the aristocratic
salons
and the free-and-easy, almost pot-house manners" of the youthful
nihilists, the system of big landed property with free-thinking socialist
notions. (More ideal and more systematic in its hypocrisy, Stalinism
"has considerably facilitated the efforts of the Yulia Mihailovnas of our
time to install an " advanced" society-hangout inside the labor move–
ment.) She is preyed upon by Liputin, an unwashed intriguer, who
propounds the theory that there are people on whom clean linen is
unseemly. Practising petty usury, he at the same time holds forth in
the language of "the universal social republic and harmony of man–
kind." But the odd thing about him is that he is sincere".
It
is precisely through such complex and conflicting motivation
that the inevitability of the social breakdown is impressed on the
reader's mind. Here the impulse to be rid of a rotting order has
reached such intensity as to become
objective;
penetrating into the
innermost, the most differentiated cells of human psychology, it has
ceased to be incompatible with degenerate habits and desires. In one
scene the philistine Karmazinov, a figure through whom the author
mercilessly derided Turgenev, describes Russia in terms that ,approx–
imate Lenin's well-known exposition of what makes a revolutionary
situation. In Dostoevsky the revolution appears in self-alienated forms.
