PARTISAN REVIEW
explored more keenly and provocatively than in this unique dialogue –
between two friendly antagonists. The dialogue takes on added sig–
nificance from the conditions of extreme revolutionary change under
which it is held. Both authors are in a sense defining their attitude
toward the Russian Revolution as they debate the future of culture.
However, the chief issue which they raise, that of primitivism versus
tradition, is not at all peculiar to Russia, for it has become one of
the central conflicts of W estern civilization in our time.)
I.
To M . 0. Gershenzon:
I know, my dear friend and neighbor, that you have come to
doubt personal immortality and the existence of a personal God, and
it hardly seems fitting for me to defend the rights of the human per–
sonality to metaphysical status and elevation. For in truth I feel in
myself nothing that might lay claim to eternal life- nothing except
that which, in any event, is not myself but only the general and uni–
versal part of myself which, like some luminous visitor., gives spiritual
unity and meaning to my limited and inevitably temporary existence,
with all the complexity of its capricious and contingent content. And
yet it seems to me that it is not for nothing that this visitor has come
and "created a dwelling in me."
His purpose, I cannot help thinking, is to endow his host with
an immortality incomprehensible to my reason. My personal being
is immortal not because it exists, but because it has been called upon
to awaken to existence. And like all awakenings, indeed, like my
birth into this world- it seems an outright miracle. I see clearly that
I cannot fmd
in
my manifest personality and its multiple expressions
one single atom that approximates even to the most rudimentary no–
tion of autonomous and true (i.e., eternal) being. I am a seed that
has died in the earth ; but "if the seed doth not die, how shall it come
to life .again?" God will resurrect me because he is with me. I know
him in myself as a dark birth-giving womb, as that eternally higher
source which brings forth the best and most sacred in me, as the
living principle of being, more comprehensive than myself, and there–
fore containing, among my other energies and qualities, the quality
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