Philip Rahv
THE LEGEND OF THE
GRAND INQUISITOR *
Until recently Dostoevsky's western interpreters were open
to the reproach of making far too little of
his
Legend of the Grand
Inquisitor. The same, however, can hardly be said of his Russian
critics, who repeatedly stressed its significance long before the onset
of totalitarianism in our time brought on the widespread recognition,
if not of the Legend's actual content and meaning, then surely of its
dose relevance to modern historical experience.
The late Nicolas Berdayev, writing from a philosophical stand–
point, maintained that in the Legend Dostoevsky reached the summit
of his creation; and some five decades ago V. V. Rozanov, whose
insight into Dostoevsky is unsurpassed among Russian commentators,
declared it to be of exceptional profundity as a revelation of the
structure of human destiny-"terrifying unbelief and the deepest and
most ecstatic faith are inconceivably mingled in it." There is some
evidence, too, that its author himself thought of it in such terms. In
1902 one witness (V. F. Putzikovitch) published an account of a
conversation he had had with the novelist in the summer of 1879,
while
The Brothers Karamazov
was still running serially in the
Russky
Vestnik,
in which he speaks of the chapter on the Grand Inquisitor
as the "culminating point" of his creative career; and when questioned
as to his reasons for interpolating a devised legend of sixteenth–
century Spain into a narrative of contemporary Russia, his reply
was that its theme had haunted
him
since early youth and for fear
that he might not live to complete another major work he had re–
.solved to try his hand at it without delay and incorporate it in the
novel he was then engaged in writing.
One need not agree with Berdayev that the Legend of the Grand
... This is a chapter from a longer study of Dostoevsky.
