34
PARTISAN REVIEW
form taken by atheism today, the question of the tower of Babel
built without God, not to mount to Heaven from earth, but to set up
Heaven on earth." Nevertheless he was as much fascinated as repelled
by the demonstrations of reason. Like Stavrogin, he never really at–
tained the peace of religious faith, and when he believed he did not
believe that he believed. He hated socialism because
it
ob–
jectified
his
lack of belief and his heretical love for the
boundless expansion and change of which the human mind
is
capable. In his compulsion to test theory by practice he came close to
the methods of the revolution; and when he subjected Christianity to
this rigorous test he found that only
an idiot
(Prince Myshkin) could
possibly succeed in leading a Christian life. His plebeianism
was another element that tended to subvert his support of the autocra–
cy and the church. In his work we do not experience that sense of
social hierarchies which affects us so strongly in Tolstoy. The plebeian
world-feeling is one of the essential conditions of heresy, and the
spiritual equality which reigns in Dostoevsky's novels seems like a kind
of inverted socialism, a commune of the spirit.
For his ideological power Dostoevsky paid by his exclusion from
the sensuous-material world. He gives us sensations of time, but not
of space. He has a prodigious appetite for people, but he is insensitive
to textures and objects; his characters are morally sensual, not physi–
cally. This over-production of spirituality makes for a constant inner
crisis, for a "moralizing and analyzing attitude" which shuts him off
from nature. It is this quality which permits his narratives their break–
neck pace- there is no need to stop when there is nothing to look at.
The excessive sociability of his people has the same source. Criticism
has often observed how perpetually dependent they are on
externalization through talk and debate. Even in committing
suicide they are not alone, and a love-scene seldom takes place without
the presence of a third person. Dostoevsky stages his climaxes only
after he has assembled his characters into one room: his novels are
. constructed like plays.
In
his
preface to Edward Hallett Carr's biography of Dostoevsky,
the Soviet critic, D. S. Mirsky, expresses his gratification with Carr for
"showing up," as it were, his subject. Carr had laid great stress on the
literary and Romantic antecedents of Dostoevsky, and Mirsky con–
cludes that Dostoevsky is "modern only insofar as the term modern
can be extended to Rousseau, Byron, and Benjamin Constant." He
was produced by Russia precisely because she was backward and be–
cause "he was a belated parallel in his country to what the Romantics
