258
PARTISAN REVIEW
and Catholicism as two aspects of the same heretical self-will driving
toward the obliteration of human dignity and freedom of conscience.
In
The Diary of a Writer
as in his private notebooks he predicted
time and again that the Catholics, deserting the "earthly potentates"
with whom they had been allied in the past, would inevitably join
forces with the socialists. At other times he varied the prediction
(and this
is
the variant given in the Legend) by saying that socialism
would fail and that thereafter the Catholic hierarchy would adopt
the socialist dogma of "earthly bread" and by uniting it with its own
dogma of "common worship" forge an ideological instrument for the
conquest of the universal power it had always striven for. And if
we go further back into Dostoevsky's fiction we learn that in
The
Idiot
(1868) he was already experimenting with the notions that
more than ten years later found their definitive form in the Legend.
Thus Myshkin, in a ranting monologue, denounces Catholicism as
an unchristian religion that preaching a "distorted Christ" is "even
worse than atheism itself." "The Pope," he cries, "seized the earth ...
and grasped the sword. . . . How could atheism fail to come from
them?" And socialism also comes "from despair in opposition to
Catholicism on the moral side, to replace the lost moral power of
religion ... and to save humanity not by Christ but by violence...."
The critique of socialism in the Legend has its source, too, in
a crucial experience of Dostoevsky's youth. This was his relationship
with Belinsky, the great radical critic and one of the most dominant
and fascinating figures in Russian cultural history, who intervened
decisively in Dostoevsky's early career by his laudatory appraisal of
his first novel,
Poor Folk.
It can be shown that a key passage in the
Inquisitor's speech is a direct transposition of arguments to which
Belinsky had recourse in the passionate debates of that early period.
Many years later, in a reminiscence entitled "Old People"
(The
Diary of a Writer,
1873), the intrinsic significance of which exceeds
any interest we may have in it from the standpoint of provenience
in the narrow sense, Dostoevsky summed up what was at stake for
him in those debates by recollecting certain scenes involving Belinsky
that had long haunted his mind; and the piece as a whole, with its
marvelously vivid portrait of the radical critic, suggests, as no purely
conceptual formulation could ever do, the agitation of soul and the
importunity and immediacy with which those people grasped ideas,
