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PARTISAN REVIEW
conceiving of it as an interaction between the writer's intimate self
and the given conditions of life he is able to observe. In one of
his
letters, for example, he revealed his literary methods: "I have
my
own idea of art, and it is this: What most people regard as fantastic
and lacking in universality,
I
hold to be the inmost essence of truth.
Arid observations of everyday trivialities I have long ceased to re–
gard as realism-it is quite the reverse. In any newspaper one takes
up, one comes across reports of wholly authentic facts, which never–
theless strike one as extraordinary."
That profound and fantastic figure, the underground man, was
created by Dostoevsky out of the Russian experience. His immediate
literary ancestor is the pathetically absurd creature of Gogol, whose
sociology is to be found in the discovery of the eternal sufferer in
the course of the early populist revolt against feudal Russia. Dos–
toevsky, however, enlarged him to include the man of ideas, the
destiny-laden as well as the downtrodden individual, thus giving him at
once a larger human and a larger national meaning, by making
him
a composite of both the intellectual and the average man.
It
will be
noted that the common type of Dostoevsky's shorter fiction is the
student or the clerk, who, just like the intellectual, is most sensitive to
the movement of society because he is socially uprooted.
In the longer novels, the cast of characters has a somewhat
more observable connection with the middle class or the aristocracy,
but they, too, are in essence anchorless people, perpetually riding the
crest of their emotions. They lack those moral and intellectual props
normally provided by social tradition. Now this is exactly what Dos–
toevsky conceived to be the predicament of the aliens of city life,
and particularly the intellectuals, condemned to become spiritual
orphans. In a letter written right after
The Idiot
was completed, Dos–
toevsky said, "Precisely such characters
must
exist in those strata of
our society which have divorced themselves from the soil-which
actually are becoming fantastic."
As
for the intellectuals, Dostoevsky
never tired of lashing them for looking to the West instead of iden–
tifying themselves with the common people of holy Russia.
Yet, for all his attacks on the estranged intellectual, Dostoevsky
was, himself, a disjointed intellectual, containing within himself all
the elements of the underground man. And while nothing like a
clinical record of his life is available, what we do know of it reveals
a striking correspondence with the life of his villains as well as his
heroes.
Superficially, Dostoevsky was a man in the grip of a violent
