324
PARTISAN REVIEW
to grab." In politics, Shestov added, "he is forced to go in tow of others
who compared with him are utter nonentities, and he goes." The truth
is that this classic novelist of psychic dissociation, who surpassed all
others in his mastery of the theme of the double, was himself the victim
of the malady he so frequently described ; and his double was a peculiarly
nasty one. This second Fyodor Mikhailovitch was very adept in mimicking
the Christian pathos of the first Fyodor Mikhailovitch-the pathos of
universal love and of man's absolute freedom to choose between good and
evil-all for the purpose of aggrandizing his own and the Russian ego
generally at the expense not only of the Poles but of Jews, Germans,
and Frenchmen as well, and of justifying predatory wars for the greater
glory of the autocracy and the Orthodox Church.
Of course, the political content of Dostoevsky's work is by no means
exhausted by these reflections. His writings are profoundly related, and
in a positive no less than in a negative sense, to the disruptive processes
in Russian · society which culminated in the October Revolution. Yet
Mr. Lloyd make no effort to establish any sort of correlation between
the revolutionary process and the movement of Dostoevsky's thought.
Nor will you find in his book any recognition that ·psychoanalytic ideas
may with some degr.ee of relevance be applied to the study of Dostoevsky.
Here the author takes the position, by now canonized, of the respectable
critic who witl have nothing to do with such horrors. Where is the evi–
dence? he asks. The evidence, Mr. Lloyd---quite apart from Dostoevsky's
personal experience, which abounds in Freudian motives-is in
The
Brothers Karamazov,
the greatest novel ever written on the Oedipal
theme. One might think that a professed student of Dostoevsky would at
the very least have examined Freud's essay on him. But no, nowhere
is any serious attempt made to analyze, let alone disprove, the Freudian
argument.
From long experience one has learned that the ways of publishers
are inscrutable. Still, one cannot but wonder what motives the present
publisher could have had in bringing out this book, which is far and
away the worst of all the biographies of Dostoevsky available in English.
PHILIP RAHV
A SIGN OF WORTH
THE
MouNTAIN LION.
By Jean Stafford. Harcourt Brace,
$2.75.
J
EAN
STAFFORD's second novel is a work so finely designed and so
meticulously executed as to put to shame most current fiction. With
it she achieves, seemingly in a single, confident stride, a control and
fluency of performance for which
Boston Adventure
was only a falter–
ing, sleepwalking kind of rehearsal.
The Mountain Lion
is on the whole
so satisfactory that I want in this note to document only my praise of it.
It is nearly impossible, in a book as well-made as this, to distinguish
knowledge from presentation. To begin with, Miss Stafford
knows
