DOSTOEVSKY AND POLITICS
31
pirism into the formulae of the class struggle. During the Fete-the
description of which includes the novel's most superb scene.s-Stepan
Trofimovitch defies the political mob by shouting at them, "What is
more beautiful, Shakespeare or boots, Raphael or petroleum?" The
reply is rude but amply deserved.
((Agent provocateur,"
they growl.
In his generalizations Dostoevsky recognized no differences be–
tween liberals, nihilists, and socialists. But within the living organism
of the novel he . distinguished clearly between the elder Verhovensky
and his revolutionary son. Paternity
in
this case is symbolic of a· rela–
tion of ideas. The socialist doctrine negates liberalism even as it grows
out of it. In an historical sense what Pyotr represents is his father's
ideas thought out to their logical conclusion, but for that very reason
he becomes his father's enemy.
What kind of revolutionary, however, is Pyotr? According to the
Marxist critic, Vyacheslav Polonsky, there is nothing realistic in the
picture of the revolutionary movement given in
The Possessed.
Here '
Polonsky, it seems to me, is falling into that critical routine with regard
to Dostoevsky which has become habitual with Marxists. Instead of
perceiving the particular significance of Dostoevsky, in that more than
any other writer he concentrates within himself the ideological pos–
sibilities of literary art, Marxist criticism has been inclined to ignore
and disparage him; and in doing so it has permitted the immediate
political advantage thus obtained to distort its basic method. "A
poisonous genius," said Gorky-partly true, but no more than a
statement of dislike and fear. Lenin devoted several articles to Tolstoy,
but so far as I know, never concerned himself with Dostoevsky.
The biographers of Dostoevsky tell us that the activity of Pyotr
Verhovensky's circle in
The Possessed
is an imaginative imitation of
the Nechayev episode in Russian revolutionary history. Now in Necha–
yevism the Russian revolution had its first taste of Machiavellian de–
ception and double-dealing. Just as Verhovensky acted without prin–
ciple and out of relation to any definite theory of social reconstruction,
so Nechayev believed that it was his "exclusive task to destroy the
existing system-to build tip is not our task." Nechayev systematically
cultivated criminal methods (which are utterly different from the
methods of illegal struggle) in the pursuit of his revolutionary ends.
Verhovensky's murder of Shatov is patterned after Nechayev's murder
of the student Ivanov; and if we know that one section of the Cate–
chism of a Revolutionary, composed by Bakunin and Nechayev, called
for "acquaintance with city gossips, prostitutes and other private
sources" for gathering and disseminating information and rumors, we
realize to what an extent, even to the repetition of comic details, the
archetype of Nechayev is reproduced in
The Possessed.
Where Dosto-
