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PARTISAN REVIEW
have generally either assigned some sacred, unfathomable quality to
a work of genius, or have dissolved
it
in the underground streams
of the psyche. Even Freud, in his masterful essay on the parricide
motif
in Dostoevsky, (PARTISAN
REVIEW,
Fall
1945)
shies away
from any connection between the novelist's creations and his personal
drives. "Dostoevsky's place," says Freud, "is not far behind Shake–
speare.
The Brothers Karamazov
is the most magnificent novel ever
written; the episode of the Grand Inquisitor, one of the peaks in
the literature of the world, can hardly be overpraised. Unfortunately,
before the problem of the creative artist, analysis must lay down its
arms."
The purpose of Freud's essay was to sketch a broad, hypothetical
analysis of the writer from his work and the known facts of his life,
and he therefore restricted himself chiefly to the two main themes
in Dostoevsky's character of parricide and gambling-onanism. The
task of the critic is necessarily different from that of the psychoanalyst;
interested as he may be in the whole analytic picture of the writer, the
critic cannot help but be more deeply impressed by the fact that the
conflicts, tensions, and neuroses of the literary man have become
symptoms of the fate of culture in the West and are connected with
at least one side-perhaps the most important one-of the modern
sensibility. And once we take this wider point of view, the neurotic
elements in Dostoevsky's writings are seen to be not only much more
numerous and characteristic than those themes singled out by Freud,
but organically related to the
primary
meaning of his fiction. What,
accordingly, I should like to do in this essay is to elucidate further
the nature and the literary form of the neurotic strains in Dostoevsky's
work which have become prevailing in modern literature; and thus
provide some further data in the discussion on art and neurosis that has
been continuing, on and off, for some time in the pages of this
rev1ew.
As
Thomas Mann, Andre Gide, and others have noted, the
strain of disease runs through the highest products of Western culture.
We have only to think of Nietzsche, Melville, Baudelaire, Proust,
Kafka-the list is really too long to cite. But, from a historical point
of view, what is most striking is that they
all
have in common an
atmosphere of revolt and anxiety, and have all created what might
be called a dominant type: a morbid, frustrated, sensitive and pro–
phetic man-in short, a browbeaten superman. One has only to take
a second glance at this divided person to recognize the artist or the in-
