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PARTISAN REVIEW
to be confounded with goodness or happiness. Goodness festers if
bred by constraint, and happiness turns into brutish contentment.
Only when freely chosen do they acquire a human content. This is
precisely what makes Dostoevsky a novelist of tragic freedom, his per–
ception that genuine freedom, being open to the choice between good
and evil, is unthinkable without suffering. That is the price of free–
dom, and he who refuses to pay it can only dream of freedom with–
out experiencing it, without substantiating it within the actual process
of living. It is a conception which on one side of it is close to existen–
tialist thought. For Dostoevsky, as for the existentialists, it is above
all through the experience of choice and decision, resolutely entered
upon, that the individual comes to self-realization. But this grasp
and possession of one's own being, which is the human creature's
truest rapture, is at the same time inescapably associated with anxiety
and suffering, and for this reason men are continually driven to shirk
meaningful choices. However, the difference between some of the
latter-day existentialists and Dostoevsky is that for him the act of
choosing is wholly a moral if not always a religious act while for them
it is an act unconditionally open to existence in all its sheerness and
totality, not limited to any single sphere, ethical or otherwise.
Now in the Legend Dostoevsky so represents the truth of his–
tory-that is, the truth not of what ought to be but of what is and
has been-that we see it as patently belonging to the Inquisitor, not
to Christ. Dostoevsky none the less takes his stand with Christ. This
should not surprise us; if we consider his biography in its temporal
depth, so to speak, we find that he committed himself very early to
this clinging to Christ in the face of all the malignant realities of
history and man's nature. More than twenty-five years before com–
posing the Legend he wrote in a letter from his place of exile in
Siberia that
if
it were proven to him that Christ is "outside the truth,
and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay
with Christ and not with the truth."
This paradoxical attitude is not to be taken as mere sentiment.
It has its consequences. In the context of the Legend it means that
if Dostoevsky rejects the wisdom of the Inquisitor, it is solely in the
terms of the desperate paradox of his faith in Christ. Otherwise he
apparently neither doubts nor denies that malign wisdom. What is
to be observed, too, is that he thus indirectly fulfills his ideological
