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PARTISAN REVIEW
Inquisitor represents the summit of Dostoevsky's creation in order to
make out that as an excursus on the theme of man's historical fate,
its terror, despair and absurdity, it is nearly without equal in world
literature. It enriches the ideological content of the novel in which it
is embedded, enabling us to understand more fully the far-ranging
implications of Ivan Karamazov's "rebellion," but it is even more
meaningful
in
terms of Dostoevsky's development as a whole; and
the figure of the Grand Inquisitor is dramatically compelling enough
to stay permanently in our minds as a symbolic character-image of
the dialectic of power. Moreover, the Legend lends itself to analysis,
quite apart from its local narrative setting, as a unique essay in the
philosophy of history. Deceptively easy on the surface, it is at bottom
one of the most difficult texts
in
the Dostoevskyean canon. By the
same token, however, it is also one of the most rewarding. And the
difficulty is not in its dramatic form but in the complexity of the
ideas, their immense suggestiveness and scope, and the dissonances
of belief and emotional discords that sound in them.
But the dramatic form is indispensable to Dostoevsky. That he
would have been capable of making substantially the same statement
without recourse to the dramatized consciousness of a fictional char–
acter is extremely doubtful. For the truth is that this most daring
of novelists is apt to decline abruptly to lower levels of performance
whenever he puts himself in the position of addressing the reader
directly-a stance that rarely suits him, as is shown by the inferior
quality of most of the articles included in his
Diary of
a
Writer.
Now
a disjunction of this sort would scarcely surprise us in a novelist defi–
cient in intellectual force and stamina. In Dostoevsky's case, however,
the felt disjunction between the qualities of his direct discourse and
those emerging through the sustained imaginative projection of his
fiction is due, I think, to the fact that when writing in the first
person--out in the open so to speak-he at once loses the advan–
tages of complicity. For it is complicity above all which is the secret
of his creative triumph over the propagandist
in
himself. It arises
in the process of his identification as novelist with his characters, but
it is necessary to distinguish between its genesis and the larger uses to
which he puts it.
It
saves him from the one-sidedness, the fanaticism
of commitment, and the casuistry to which as an embattled reaction–
ary ideologue he was all too prone. There is an ambiguity of feeling
