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PARTISAN REVIEW
the theater becomes the repository for values no longer respected off–
stage. Although the bourgeois "openly proclaims that money is the
highest virtue and human obligation," at the same time" he passionately
loves to play-act," and, he notes, "at the theater, be sure you show him
characters uninterested in money."
Marriage has been reduced to a performance that only thinly con–
ceals avarice and deceit. When two people want to marry, "they square
their accounts, and if it turns out that francs and things are the same on
both sides, then they rna te." Dostoevsky heaps his harshest scorn on the
French woman. She is "affected, seasoned, completely unnatural" and
"rarely attractive," but she has "tricks and fancies," and she "possesses
the mystery of a counterfeit of feeling and nature to a remarkable
degree." Her husband is satisfied with her performance, for "genuine
love and a good counterfeit of love are both the same to the Parisian.
He might even prefer the counterfeit." Even the bourgeois's relationship
to himself is theatrical. Among his "serious needs," which he treats
"almost pathetically," is
"se rouLer dans L'herbe":
"he even fulfills this
need with dignity, feeling that in doing so he joins himself
avec La
nature,
and he particularly loves it if someone is watching him at the
same time."
The end of history takes a different form in London, where Baal's
reign is based on force rather than play-acting. Unlike the French bour–
geoisie, who receive francs, things, and candy in exchange for renounc–
ing all other gods but Baal, the London worker acquiesces to "the
triumphant finality of that spirit's creations"-"that polluted Thames,
that air saturated with coal dust"-to avoid annihilation. The "proud
and dismal spirit" of British materialism "does not even demand sub–
mission because he is sure of it"; Baal's "faith in himself is limitless; he
contemptuously and calmly gives out organized charity, just to get rid
of it." The injuries caused by British materialism are at least not com–
pounded by the insult of French hypocrisy-Baal "does not hide away
the poor somewhere, as in Paris...The poverty, suffering, grumbling,
and torpor of the masses do not trouble him in the least." The individ–
ual annihilation the Underground Man hysterically fears is an accom–
plished fact in London: "here you do not even see the people but a loss
of consciousness, systematic, submissive, encouraged."
The very features of Western materialist society that convinced many
of Dostoevsky's contemporaries of its impending destruction led him to
the opposite conclusion, that it could perhaps survive indefinitely. Lon–
don's injustices do not suggest to him that revolution or even reform are
likely; on the contrary, he finds that oppositions between rich and poor
