DOSTOEVSKY AND POLITICS
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Hence the perception that "Russia as she is has no future" and that
"everything here is doomed and awaiting the end" is put into the
mouth of his enemy, the man at whom we are supposed to laugh. But
in
those particular remarks Karmazinov predicts that while Europe,
that realm of stone, will last his time, "Holy Russia" has less power of
resistance and must fall. "How do you look at the manifestoes?" Ver–
hovensky asks him. "They openly unmask what is false and prove that
there is nothing to lay hold of among us, and nothing to lean upon....
To look facts straight in the face is only possible to Russians of this
generation." There is a slight miscalculation of the time factor here,
but in that respect even Marx was frequently wrong. It took several
decades longer before looking facts straight in the face became so
widespread as to deprive the traditional order of its capacity to defend
itself.
Setting out to report on the moral depravity of the revolution,
Dostoevsky was nevertheless objective enough to demonstrate that '
Russia could not escape it. The infidel, the
social
philosopher in him,
would not be submerged.
If
it is true, as has been charged, that there
was a good slice of the flunkey in his personal psychology, then he was
the kind of flunkey, or rather super-flunkey, who even while bowing
and scraping says the most outrageous things to your face. This novel,
which so delighted the autocratic regime, in reality generalized its
downfall in the sphere of values and personal relations.
Dostoevsky was a reactionary, bUl never a conservative; and .
with the other great cultural reactionaries of the bourgeois epoch he
shared that insight into the corruption of modern society which at
several points relates them to revolutionary thought. The philosophy of
the present is ever the philosophy of narrow minds-only from the
standpoint of the past or of the future is it possible to criticize that
which f.xists: yet the past, having been historically vanquished by the
present, must in practice come to terms with it. In that sense the great
reactionaries have been the great romantics; but the fact that history
has rejected and often put to equivocal uses their hankering after the
irremediable organicism of earlier ages did not prevent them from
living their nostalgias in art and thus renewing its imagination.
In
The Possessed
liberalism receives the broadest and most perspi–
cacious criticism in the history of the novel. The malevolence
w~th
which the portrait of the intellectual Stepan Trofimovitch, the elder
Verhovensky, is executed, in no way detracts from its enduring reality
and social truth. This characterization has enormous contemporary
meallings. It is only now, as fascism is heavily penalizing Western
