BOOKS
633
imo the regions of
kairos
(absolute time): "All the time I have been
hoping that I mi ght draw a deep brea th and wake up -to some hi gher
life." Here, as in many other ways, Siniavs ky's p hil osophy coincides
with Dostoevsky's. T hi s is certa inl y true of hi s p ronoun cemem s on
Russ ia. (He advan ces the thesis of Russia's fundamem al spi rituality,
and Orthodox religion. ) Orthodoxy, with its emphasis on the third
person of the T rini ty, the Holy Spirit, is seen to accord with Russia's
n ati onal characteristi cs, whi ch a re perceived in Slavophil e (or Dos to–
evski an ) terms: " ... fl u idi ty, amorphousness, readiness to adopt any
mould, our gift-o r vi ce- of thinking and li ving arti sti call y, combined
with an inability to man age the very serious p racti cal side of life." T hi s
sounds onl y too famili ar. But coul dn 't it be said, with as much
justifi ca ti on , tha t Russ ians have a penchant for reducing man to a
machin e or puppet, and human society
to
a scientifi c formul a - and
this with utopian fervor and a sincere hope to reach the mill ennium via
th at route?
It
is true, of course, th at bo th tendencies show u p, in
different forms, even among Soviet di ssidents: there is often just as
mu ch fervor in Ru ss ian "structurali st" thought as there is in the
rel igious idea lism of a Siniavsky or a Solzhenitsyn.
Sini avsky's God is Dostoevs ky's God: " How amazing is God 's
domini on over us-to tal and despoti c, yet painless and imperceptibl e;
graming freedom without end, yet not all owing us
to
deviate by a
single step from the p redes tined pa th. " Needl ess to say, thi s paradox is
analogous to the paradox about the fu sion of " freedom" and "neces–
sity" in art. At leas t in one passage of thi s book Siniavsky reach es the
heights of Dos toevsky at hi s best. He tell s about that fell ow p ri soner of
his who sees himself as " the other thi ef," the one who had not repem ed
on the cross - yet who fi rml y beli eves tha t " the other one" was saved,
too. With a trul y Dos toevs ki an touch , Siniavs ky merely o bserves that
shi vers ran down his spine as he heard this. T hus, Siniavsky, like
everybody and everything that is best about the Ru ssian di ssidem
movement, gets as fa r as Dostoevsky, and hardl y any further. Now the
q uesti on is: does thi s sugges t tha t the di ssidents are behind times and
tha t their movement has no future, or was Dos toevsky trul y very much
ahead of hi s time?
VICTOR TERRAS
