DOSTOEVSKY AND POLITICS
35
had been in the West." To Mirsky it seems that by labeling Dostoevsky
the belated Romantic of a backward country he has removed him
from the terrain of the modern; what he has further in mind, of
course, is to connect him with the reactionary tendencies of the Ro–
mantic movement in Germany and to a lesser extent in France.
In relating Dostoevsky to Romanticism in the way he does, Mir–
sky suggests the use of the dialectical "law of combined development."
But to invoke this law is to disprove Mirsky's approach. The "law of
combined development" explains why a bourgeois revolution, when it
occurs in a backward country, tends to go beyond itself and be trans–
formed into a proletarian one. A backward country is thus enabled to
make up for lost time and outstrip its advanced neighbors, at least
politically. In one bound it leaps from the status of pupil to the status
of teacher. There is no reason, however, to confine this phenomenon
of accelerated mutation to politics. It also operates on the spiritual
plane. To say, then, in this sense, that Dostoevsky was a belated
Romantic does not at all mean that the Romantic world was his
world or that he restored the Romantic state of mind.
Why is the Russian novel of the' nineteenth century so great in
its achievement?
If
the "law of combined development" has any
application here, it would point to the need of the Russian novelist
to think his
way
out
from the historical impasse into which backward
and catastrophic conditions had driven his country. This same need
impelled him to augment his equipment by "taking over" as rapidly
as he could the acquisitions of Western culture. Even when he re–
pudiated this culture, as Dostoevsky did, he was strongly affected by it.
Before rejecting it he first had to acquire it.
To recognize the achievement of the Russian novel of the nine–
teenth century is to recognize Dostoevsky's supremacy as a modern
writer. His one
riva~
is Tolstoy. Only dogmatists of progress, who con–
ceive of it as an even and harmonious development, can presume to
commit Dostoevsky to a muse\lm of Romantic antiquities. It is true
that he labored to give his genius a religious sanctification, that in
his
philosophical and political views he ran counter to progressive
thought. But
it
must be kept in mind that in the sphere
of imaginative creation progress does not simply consist of
knowing what is true and what is false from the standpoint of materi–
alist science. Dostoevsky not only renovated the traditional properties
of Romanticism, but also discovered inversions and dissociations in
human feeling and consciousness which to this day literature has but
imperfectly assimilated. Reactionary in its abstract content, in its
aspect as a system of ideas, his art is radical in sensibility and sub–
versive in performance.
