SUSAN MCREYNOLDS
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have produced an equilibrium, a society in which opposites "contradict
each other yet apparently in no way exclude each other." French society
is based on processes of forgery and performance that may elude an
ending-it commands the infinite flexibility of a continuously impro–
vised theater of the absurd. And although socialism presents itself as an
alternative to capitalism, Dostoevsky insists that they are superficial
variations of the same materialist denial of freedom. The "terrible
force" of capitalism has united the masses of London into "a single
herd," and the socialists would simply force the masses into an "ant–
hill" with the "sword" if given the chance.
Dostoevsky's belief in the power of Orthodox love to save Russia
and Russians from the threat of spiritual death posed by socialism and
capitalism has a complex genealogy. Its decisive emergence in the fiction
that re-established his reputation,
Notes from Underground
and
Crime
and Punishment,
cannot be traced to a single precipitating event. But
his conviction that the West was in its final death agonies, the convic–
tion that demanded and found a solution in Russian Orthodoxy,
received an incalculable stimulus from his experiences on his European
tour of
1862.
Winter Notes
establishes, for the first time in Dosto–
evsky's writings, the crucial element of his historical imagination out of
which his belief in Russia's unique role in a millennial conflict between
Russian Orthodoxy and Western materialism would grow. Dostoevsky
finds that the distinction between death and life has become blurred in
the West, where the bourgeois is a living fossil entombed in lies and
deceit, and the "the masses grow numb and wander about like zom–
bies."
Winter Notes
suggests that Western materialism enjoys the
potential immortality of a godless aberration, and so lays the founda–
tion for Dostoevsky's eventual conviction that destroying it will require
a holy war. In
Winter Notes,
we witness the beginning of the process by
which Dostoevsky removes social analysis from the sphere of politics,
translating it into spiritual terms.
