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PARTISAN REVIEW
both in his politics and his private life, whose political and criminal ends
stem from his unbounded ego and his cultivation of his sel£ But, as with
some of the other people, his verging on madness after his assault on the
young girl leads one to think ofDostoevsky's mad gambling drives.
To be sure, Dostoevsky was himself an ideologist. But he was pri–
marily a novelist, and his ideology was imbedded in his fiction. He
advocated religion as a bulwark against political and personal criminality.
But he thought of Christianity as a form and a source of a universal code
of morality, as the basis of the difference between good and evil. For ex–
ample, he said repeatedly of the Godless Stavrogin, that he could not
distinguish between good and evil.
Dostoevsky also was a Russian populist, believing in the basic in–
stincts of the Russian people. But this was related to his conviction that
the alien nihilist revolutionary ideas came from the West and polluted the
minds of the upper class and the Russian intellectuals. In fact, many of his
most effective scenes are satires of Westemized Russian liberals. (One is
tempted to find par.illels in contemporary radical chic.)
Dostoevsky was a great novelist of ideas. One cannot forget some of
his epigrammatic formulations put in the mouths of his characters. For
instance, one of them makes the penetrating statement, "If there is no
God, how can I be a captain?" Another says, "If there is no God, any–
thing is possible." And there is the remark that summarizes the evil nature
of revolutionary nihilism, "You start with absolute freedom, and you ar–
rive at absolute despotism."
I sometimes think that a great novel could be written about contem–
porary politics - not about daily events or ordinary politicians but about
the interaction of ideological forces today and the lives of trendy intel–
lectuals and social :figures. One thinks of Saul Bellow as a novelist who
might deal with this central and complex subject. Like Dostoevsky, Bel–
low has transformed ideas into narratives, and his fiction is notable for its
added intellectual and social dimension, largely through the use of satire
and irony.
Orwell
On the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of George Or–
well's
Animal Farm,
Harcourt Brace has announced its reissue in a new
edition. The celebration of the book, which has become a little classic,
reminds me of my own experience with it fifty years ago.
r
was the first one in America to read the manuscript. Orwell had
sent it to me to try to have it published here. I was a consultant to Dial
Press, a small publishing house in New York City.
r,
and Philip Rahv,
