2M
PARTISAN REVIEW
The historian Kliuchevsky once summed up Russian history in
a single sentence: "The state thrives while the people grow sickly."
It is this brutalizing national experience which makes for the com–
pelling force of the Legend and is by far the deeper explanation of
it. Whatever Dostoevsky's manifest intention, actually it is one of
the most revolutionary and devastating critiques of power and author–
ity ever produced. What
it
comes to in the end is a total rejection
of Caesar's realm, a rejection of power in all its forms, in its actuality
as in its rationalizations; and
it
exposes above
all
the fatal effect of
power on such ideals and aspirations of humanity as are embodied in
the original Christian teaching. Clearly, then, the Legend cuts under
Dostoevsky's persistent efforts to present Eastern Orthodoxy as a
viable alternative to the Orthodoxy of the West; the czars, autocrats
of Church and State alike, were after all quite as grand as any Roman
Pontiff in their inquisitorial absolutism. Hence it can be said, on this
ground and other grounds too, that the implications of the Legend
belie the "official" national-religious thesis of the novel as a whole.
For implicit in the Legend is another thesis altogether, that of
Russian Christian anarchism. And apart from the Legend there are
many intimations of this latent thesis in the novel. It almost emerges
to the surface in chapter 5 of Book II, where Ivan, beginning with
an exposition of the ideas in his article on the ecclesiastical courts,
ends up by advocating the dissolution of all "earthly states" and their
absorption into a Church that has in truth abjured "every purpose
incongruous with its aims as a Church." To this sketch of a religious
Utopia Father Zossima assents, if anything going even further than
Ivan, while Father Paissy cries: "So
be
it, so be it!" One must know
how to read the Aesopian language of this singular dialogue, with
(Footnote continued from
p.
263 ) seeks power for its own sake. . . . Power
is not a means; it is an end... . The object of power is power. Now do
you understand me?" Orwell's "correction" of Dostoevsky is acceptable in terms
of strict realism, but it seems to roe to fail psychologically. As I wrote, if
I roay be permitted to quote myself, in a review of 1984 (PR, July 1949):
"Undoubtedly
it
is O'Brien, rather than the Grand Inquisitor, who reveals the
real nature of total power; yet that does not settle the question of O'Brien's
personal psychology, the question, that is, of his ability to live with this naked
truth as his sole support ; nor is it conceivable that the party-elite to which he
belongs could live with this truth for very long. Evil, far more than good, is in
need of the pseudo-religious justifications so readily provided by the ideologies
of world-salvation and compulsory happiness. Power is its own end, to be sure,
but even the Grand Inquisitors are compelled, now as always, to believe in
the fiction that their power is a means to some other end, gratifyingly noble
and supernal."
