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PARTISAN REVIEW
culture for subjecting itself to the timorous and accomodating counsels
of the liberals, that we can fully appreciate Stepan Trofimovitch.
A gentleman pacifist and esthete, he simultaneously shines the
boots of reaction and revolution. His standing protest he makes by
lying down; he is subtle in his feelings, a self-indulgent humanitarian,
and a parasite. His author created him with unsurpassed verve, wholly
persuading us that his creation is objective. He is superior to Thomas
Mann's Settembrini, whose distant relative he is, for he is understood
not argumentatively but through a tangible social milieu. Dostoevsky
boldly reduces him to his primary political elements while holding
him
together on the spiritual plane in a delicate equlibrium. And what a
hazardous yet just simplification it was to place him in the position of
being the charge of a rich and patrician lady, of making an assertive
dramatic image out of her financial support of him. This exchange of
cash and culture, however, is not conceived as a simple transaction;
on the contrary, it entails mutual distrust, bitterness, and emotional
tempests-but in the end a sentimental reconciliation is effected. In
virtually the same terms Trotsky defines the basic relation of the intel–
lectuals to the bourgeoisie in his
Literature and Revolution.
Stepan Trofimovitch is a typical modern figure, a liberal ideo–
logue dispossessed by the social process and obstructing it. Are you
interested in the quarrel between the defenders of "pure art" and its
alleged political vulgarizers? Stepan Trofimovitch has much to say
on this subject. Time and again he maintains that "Shakespeare and
Raphael are more precious than the emancipation of the serfs, more
precious than Nationalism, more precious than Socialism, more preci–
ous than the young generation, more precious than chemistry...." He
is willing to acknowledge the absurdity of the term fatherland and the
harmful influence of religion, but "firmly and loudly" he declares that
"boots are of less consequence than Pushkin." To this day the esthetes,
insofar as they are secure in their possession of boots, display a scorn
for such objects out of all proportion to their love for Shakespeare and
Pushkin. (The aging Verhovensky was an erudite man, yet his knowl–
edge of history was defective. Without the self-definition of the na–
tional principle, neither Shakespeare nor Pushkin could have burst
the fetters of medievalism, just as without socialism the future is un·
.likely to emulate the past with Shakespeares and Pushkins of its own.)
In
Fathers and Sons,
Turgenev's Bazarov, the prototype of the
nihi·
lists in Russian fiction, held the view that a good chemist is worth
twenty poets. But Bazarov's nihilism was only a form of moral empiri–
cism; he was an individualist who had not yet grown to the level of
political thought. A few decades later, in the seventies, the adversaries
of Stepan Trofimovitch had already translated Bazarov's moral em-
