32
PARTISAN REVIEW
evsky's blas came in was in presenting Nechayev
as
typical of social–
ism; in selecting data from life, he was oblivious to the thousands of
examples of idealistic self-sacrifice which the class war in Russia had
to show. "Tendencious" in that vital respect, he was realistic, how·
ever, in his social sensitivity to one particular and highly important
element of the Russian revolution whose recent recrudescence lends
his novel its singular interest.
The actions of Nechayev-Verhovensky are divorced from demo–
cratic principle and scientific theory because he is essentially a belated
Jacobin separated from the proletariat. In point of fact, Nechayevism
developed at a time when the industrial proletariat had not yet crystal–
lized within Russian society. Since he has no real historic validity,
Nechayev-Verhovensky is stripped of moral norms. His peculiar "mad·
ness" is determined by the fact that he strives to substitute his own
sovereign will for those formidable class forces which alone are capable
of consummating revolutionary changes. While confusing and compro–
mising it, this type serves the revolution before the seizure of power
as one of its part-time agents; but after the seizure of power, if given
conditions encourage him to breed and 'grow, he turns against the
revolution and seeks to divert it from its original course. In the Ther·
midorean period, rising to the surface of social life, he seizes control.
Now Stalinism is, in one sense, Nechayevism plus state power,
Stalinism, too, acts "for the masses" instead of with and through them;
equally divorced from democratic principle and scientific theory, it
strives to manipulate the historic process by means of criminal methods
and bureaucratic cunning.
Nechayev~Verhovensky's
attempt to over·
-throw the Czar without the active intervention of the masses is equi.
valent to Stalin's attempt to build socialism in Russia in isolation from
the fate of the international working class. The Marxist movement, on
the other hand, distinguishes itself from the Jacobin and Blanquist
types in that it is "the first one in the history of class societies whiCh
in
all its factors is calculated upon the organization and initiative of the
masses" (Luxemburg). The strong resemblance between Nechayev.
Verhovensky and Stalin-Yezhov is to be explained, to my mind, by the
coincident manifestations of two specific phases in Russian politics.
If Nechayevism represents the pre-Marxist stage of the revolution,
Stalinism represents its post-Marxist one.
In Stavrogin and his alter egos, Kirillov and Shatov, Dostoevsky
was imitating his own obsessions.
As
against radicals like Verhovensky
and Karmazinov, they personify the "pure" Russians. Shatov, for
instance, becomes the spokesman of the national destiny. What is a
