PARTISAN REVIEW
sensed at the level of assumption than seen above ground. Consider his
essay on Dostoevsky. In an earlier essay he has been discussing
The
Charterhouse of Parma,
and in turning to the Russian novelist his im–
mediate concern is to establish the differences in tone and context, the
special intensity and hardening of the "Eastern" intelligentsia con–
fronted with the impasse of Czarist stagnation, which contribute so
heavily to Dostoevsky's style and whole
modus operandi
as a novelist.
He goes on to isolate the problems of Dostoevsky's particular genera–
tion, and provides a gloss on the obsessions and frustrations of the urban
intellectuals, caught between the Slavophile mystique, the promise of
socialism, and the terrifying inertia which colors the texture of all .life
and all ideas. He clarifies to some degree the ideological content of
Dostoevsky's religiosity, relating it to the goals of political radicalism
which the novelist ostensibly disavowed. In taking up
The Possessed,
Mr. Howe then has much to say about its literary character: its tone
of buffoonery, its cast of pretenders, its provincial setting; and he writes
at
his
best, I think, when he traces out the very meanings implicit in
this selection of literary materials. In fact, by shuttling back and forth
from historical materials to literary conceptions, Mr. Howe conveys
very well the contours of Dostoevsky's literary personalitY', distinguishing
it from the meaner vision of the ideologue. What follows is the series
of character sketches-of Stavrogin, of Shatov and KiriIIov, of Pyotr
Verhovensky (together with a very knowledgable repudiation of easy
correspondences between recent political movements and Verhovensky's
ideas), and of Stepan Trofimovitch-which form the critical denoue–
ment of the whole essay. As I have noted, these sketches conform rigor–
ously to the novelistic materials, but in themselves, I feel, they fall short
of conveying the peculiar power of Dostoevsky's mind; for that (need
one add?) we must be admitted to the text, we must have direct access
to some large and ramifying instance of concrete literary performance.
Unlike the critic of a lyric poem, the critic of fiction must forfeit any
claim of bringing before us the
whole
work he is discussing, except by
indirection; but this places upon him what is, if anything, the more
difficult task of bringing before the reader the most crucial contours
of novelistic action, those moments which illuminate not an isolated
·character or motif but which embody a paradigm of the writer's whole
conception. Now Mr. Howe is very good at focusing on the text in order
to illuminate a given character or theme, but he nowhere takes up the
challenge of this larger critical task. In writing about Stavrogin, for
:example, he alludes briefly to the fete in Chapters I and II of Part
Three-that terrible vision of. destruction which is the culmination of
·Dostoevsky's ·whole tropology .of character and ideology. Everything
