COMMENT
Dostoevsky
Joseph Frank's monumental study of Dostoevsky is distin–
guished by its combination of meticulous research into the life and
superior literary criticism and interpretation of the work.
It
is a high-level
example of traditional criticism, without a trace of the new-fangled aca–
demic theory.
The subtitle of the fourth volume refers to the miraculous years
1866-1871. These six years were indeed miraculous, as Dostoevsky pro–
duced in this period
Crime and Punishment, The Idiot,
and
The Devils.
Dostoevsky, in my opinion, was one of the greatest - if not the greatest -
of novelists, and it is magical that he produced these masterpieces in se–
vere poverty, plagued by his debtors, and suffering many other difficulties.
Since we have no way of explaining such achievements, we ascribe them
to genius.
Dostoevsky's great power and fictional authority lay in his extraordi–
nary political prescience and his remarkable fusion of ideology and
psychology. And Frank, particularly in his discussions of
The Devils
and
Crime and Punishment,
provides a full account of the ideological forces that
Dostoevsky incorporated in his bearers of the revolution and merged with
their personal drives.
Thus the evil consequences of his characters' ideas are identified with
the corrupt impulses of their private lives. Some of Dostoevsky's nihilists
were modelled on prisoners he lived with when he was jailed, and many
of them are described in
The House
if
the Dead.
But so vivid are the por–
traits of lawbreakers in
Crime and Punishment
and
The Devils,
through the
fictional device of creating an atmosphere of verisimilitude, as some of the
central figures are seized with fevers and flights of madness when contem–
plating or in the midst of an illegal act, that one is tempted to speculate
that Dostoevsky was projecting some of his own fantasies and feelings.
In
Crime and Punishment,
which is more purely a novel of crime than
The Devils,
Raskalnikov rationalizes the murder partly by an ideology of
nihilism and partly by a belief in the historical egotism of superior indi–
viduals who are responsible for the taking of lives. In
The Devils,
the
revolutionaries justify their behavior by their presumably lofty human
ends. Most of Dostoevsky's radicals are nihilists rather than Marxists. But
Dostoevsky was actually asserting the political identity of both these ide–
ologies. And, of course, Dostoevsky's political and psychological insight
was borne out in the justification of terror by the supposedly desirable
ends of the Soviet regime.
All these tendencies are contained in what I believe to be Dosto–
evsky's most complex and mysterious creation in the person of Stavrogin,
the Prince of Darkness. Stavrogin is an aristocratic dandy and nihilist,
