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PARTISAN REVIEW
must make is itself an extension of his interior conflicts. Thus Raskol–
nikov shrinks before the murder, because this fatal act is bound to
transform his person into his idea, or, more properly, into his mania,
just as his ultimate confession is a resurrection of his true self. So, too,
Prince Myshkin's essence is at stake in the choice between the two
women who are in love with him; as is Dmitri Karamazov's
in
a
similar predicament, as is Ivan's in facing his guilt, or that of the
many purposeful but shriveled people in the short stories who simply
cannot bring themselves to do what they seemingly most crave.
Throughout Dostoevsky's fiction we find this recurrent pattern of
compulsive want, paralysis, action, guilt, orgiastic confession and
expiation. And the significant point is not that a Dostoevskian char–
acter cannot act-that would be too simple-but rather that his
impulse to act is enmeshed in some primal lust that stirs up some
primal fear and guilt.
This clash between subterranean drives and the need to ful–
fill one's image of himself seems to me the primary conflict in
all of Dostoevsky's writing, and is almost the complete dramatic
mainspring of his shorter fiction. But the genius of Dostoevsky,
exhibited in full force in his four great novels, lifted this conflict
to an even higher plane, where it touched on some of the crucial
questions of Western consciousness. In these novels-though the
process is foreshadowed earlier-the conflict takes on a moral and
political cast, becoming an opposition between the moral sense
and a man's primitive urges, between good and evil, revolution–
ary action and saintliness, atheism and belief, finally culminating
in the duel between God and the Devil. Thus Raskolnikov and
Stravrogin, both in their own way arch-criminals, are not only the
victims of their compulsions, but they are also activated by such
satanic convictions as the belief in science, rationalism, and a revolu–
tionary ethic in which a sanctified end would presumably justify the
most debased means. In these two figures- as well as in a number
of minor characters throughout his work, including the old sorcerer
in
The Landlady--Dostoevsky
was, of course, attacking what he con–
strued to be the philosophy of the nihilists and the socialists. As we
know, his attack contained an element of malicious, perhaps neurotic,
distortion. But what is most interesting to us at this point is that he saw
the hand of the devil in the revolutionary principle, for its ruthless
practice appeared to Dostoevsky simply another version of the criminal
impulse. Raskolnikov, for example, is goaded both by a superman
ethic that grants an elite the right to kill in order to gain some larger
