LOST WEEK-END OF THE SPIRIT
Ezorsky, Edwin L.
Lost Week-End of the Spirit BAXTER BERNSTEIN: A HERO OF SORTS. By Stephen Seley. Charles Scribner's and Sons. 239 pages. $3.00. Reviewed fry EDWIN L. EZORSKY HERE IS AN ADOLESCENT novel exalting...
...That Baxter is an egotist without the egotist's iron self-confidence should puzzle no one, for his view of life forces him back onto his own small resources even as it sanctifies the bloodless 'masses...
...The most important contribution to our understanding of Soviet law is made, however, by the book under review...
...But one quickly senses the pseudo-heroism of debility or a new restlessness...
...In effect, what the propagandists now said was this: "What's all this talk about the state withering away, and with the state, the law...
...We cannot reject, as Baxter glibly does, the office of "childhood trauma" in his personal story, or whatever else it was that made him falter at every new gust...
...his rc-lf-ordination as Muse for all the "Intellectual Sailors of the Western (or Eastern) World''—-a role, incidentally, which is animated by examples of his v ork and so betrays any illusion that he might actually have that talent for which we could forgive him all else...
...But the veterans of Spain are everywhere...
...University oj Michigan L,aw School...
...Even his vagaries with women silhouette in part the growing sexual spinelessness of Baxter's idols in l.'fe or between pages...
...WHAT CRYSTALIZES is a Hamlet far gone in decay...
...Baxter's gift for cleveristic, sophisticated double-entendre...
...We assume, too, that laws are macfe in the interests of the people by the people or their freely elected representatives...
...Americans claim to be living under a government of laws, not men...
...They maintained that a state cannot be neutral...
...Seley evokes o brilliant case-history, mocking and betraying the unwary Baxter with extremely flexible, ironic language...
...Pashukanis was its official spokesman...
...If anything can be called 'good' or 'bad...
...And some ox tne most fascinating sequels of all time have dealt with the slow emergence out of the Sea of Self of characters as articulate, as potentially wise, as Baxter Bernstein...
...Price $10...
...wither away after the proletariat and the Communist party gain power, just as the proletarian state will wither away...
...Baxter's basic handicap, one suspects, is not at all his mental "burden...
...uui this contradiction is a living thing, and completely reflects Marxist dialectics.' Don't we all know that Stalin has said: 'We need stability of laws now more than ever.' Now that we have attained the glorious state of socialism, the world for the first time will know what law really means, for only under socialism can true law find a place for itself...
...The hierarchies of every revolutionary movement since Edwin L. E'oriky is a young writer doina gradual* work in literature...
...Yet more is involved than intellectual tabloidism, than a mere cavern tour of one man's weaknesses...
...It means that both governor and governed are subject to law...
...If the government cannot point to such a law, it may not act...
...By Vladimir Gsovski...
...How fitting thai the perversion into which he soothes her should be at once whimsical, entirely mental, and thoroughly cruel...
...He was branded a Trotskyist counter - revolutionary...
...One can foresee the popularity of this novel among many avant-garde youths, certain to be intrigued as much by Baxter's "liberated" behaviour as by his meditations...
...that our state is a capitalist state owned and operated by the exploiters of the proletariat...
...the government printing presses work overtime turning out legal treatises...
...Legal' Lawlessness SOVIET CIVIL LAW...
...Stalin now uses all sorts of opiates, among them law and religion...
...that the law stands above the organs of government and the officials of the state...
...He moves through a narrative balanced bridgewise upon two savage episodes of drunkenness and sexual debasement out of the many in bis life and upon his betrayal of two women of the many who have loved him and been betrayed by him: and f-.escoed by long interim introspections of his cravings for artistic greatness and dialogues with the kinetic European pulitieos and soldiers he admires and the traditionless Americans he scorns...
...the Jacobins have swarmed with grotesque egotists...
...But it is the communal philosophy of a whole' "sensitive," modernity-ridden generation...
...what we call dictatorship and terfor, he calls democracy...
...Other men, quite as acute arid reflective, manage nevertheless to walk upright no matter how the winds blow...
...Now we have Tlie Law of the Soviet State, attributed to Vyshinsky (see Mark Vishniak's able review in The New Leader of January 8, 1949...
...The old revolutionaries said that law is an opiate, like religion...
...It is but one thread, however, in a Joseph's coat of self immolation, plaited with incisive needles by the author of The Cradle Must Fall...
...that by a "free" contract he now can know how much labor is expected from him daily, how much he will get for his labor, what will happen to him if he should be tardy or absent...
...Nor is his vein of political idealism out of place...
...Only a person who wants to be fooled will fail to see Soviet "law" as an opiate of the masses...
...that the capitalist dictatorship veils itself in legality, which is only a bourgeois hypocrisy...
...Baxter Bernstein, smiling wryly, chides himself just after Pearl Harbor...
...MARX...
...The tragedy is only borne elsewhere, propelled by the same anxieties and viscious "reasons" that brought it to Mexico in the beginning...
...Don't we all know that the great Stalin has said to us: 'We are in favor of the state dying out, and at the same time we stand for the strengthening of the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...A new spirit began to make itself felt in Soviet halls of law...
...What Mr...
...For every author learns something from his book, especially when the kinship between author and key character is so readily predicable...
...The people themselves are the source of the government's powers, and the government must justify the exertion of power by pointing to a law which delegates that power to the government...
...What we call criminality and lawlessness, Stalin culls law...
...What does that mean...
...Perhaps a third of the book is set in rqually vivid New Orleans...
...Reviewed fry EDWIN L. EZORSKY HERE IS AN ADOLESCENT novel exalting the sheer shock and torment of poignant and personal conflict...
...Americans are exploited by the capitalist monsters, and they call their exploitation law and legality...
...Official publications and speechmakers are trying to convince the Russian people and others that only in the "socialistic" state can "true" law express itself and flourish...
...many interesting articles by Professors Harold J. Berman of Harvard and John N. Hazard of Columbia...
...The excellence of this unholy tale lies in its point-blank portrayal...
...But the law and religion which Stalin feeds the Russian people, like the democracy which he has established, have absolutely no resemblance to the articles we call by the same names in Western society...
...only among us can it truly flourish...
...The books by Gsovski makes it possible to discover the extent of communist hypocrisy and fraud in resorting to legal concepts and theories to make slavery more palatable...
...Seley's purpose was in writing this Lost Weekend of the spirit suggests an interesting problem...
...He is crushed by it...
...The student who begins an investigation of Soviet law must first shed some important "bourgeois" notions...
...the references to Rilke, Kafka, Oide...
...Obviously, Baxter is not simply oppressed by his weight of "philosophy...
...We believe that the government of the United States has only the powers delegated to it by the U.S...
...Seley's own stay in Mexico has l.cen rewarding...
...ENGELS AND LENIN attacked this view of the law as a vicious fraud...
...It is, lather, the intrinsic disorder of that burden, a disorder so subtle and vast that it bogs his critics as well, for who among them does not in some measure share his complicated ideological heritage...
...To be sure, Baxter does finally gesture at a more "normal" sort of orientation before he is lost sight of...
...Survey...
...When the classless society will come into existence, there will be no exploiters and exploited, and so no laws will be required...
...Particularly commendable are his eye and ear for that lrridescent milieu, for the Continental melange quartered there...
...Until recently we had no way to discover what Russian propagandists meant by "socialist" law...
...WE CANNOT ASSIGN nil his fallibilities to his age, to its febrile, confused worship of the "scientific" gods who have expunged God, to the "radical" and "esthetic" postures which are its ethics...
...An attempt is being made to bring home to the individual citizen the meaning of the Stalin Plan by talk about the law: he is told that he enjoys rights of free contract, property, etc...
...socialist justice and equality are law and legality...
...The author and the University of Michigan I .aw School deserve our thanks for the preparation and publication of this objective, scholarly and revealing study of "private" rights under the Soviet regime...
...that law, as such, is an instrument of compulsion, which will Milton H. Konvits is a Cornell University professor, and author and editor of many books...
...The highest possible development of the power of the state, with the object of preparing the conditions for the dyingout of the state—that is the Marxist formula, is u contradictory: ica...
...Until 1936-1937 this Marxist view, this nihilist philosophy of the law, was the official Soviet position...
...Consitution, and that all other powers are reserved either to the states or to the people...
...The necessary earmarks are there: the pervasive (pre-atomic) vhat's-to-become-of-us morbidity underscored by the proper quotations from Eliot...
...Volume I: Cony^arative...
...Reviewed by MILTON R. KONVITZ LAW SCHOOLS ARE BUSY turning out lawyers in the USSR...
...the Trotskyist conception of current history...
...The Role of the Soviet Court (Public Affairs Press) by Golyakov, until several months ago Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union...
...The orthodox Marxist attack was not only on capitalist law, but on law as such, just as the Marxist attack was not only on the capitalist state, but on the state as such...
...909 pp...
...But in 1937 Pashukanis, misguided zealot, was removed from the law faculties which he graced, and since then his books have been banned and he has not been heard from...
...Among us no one is exploited...
...He has* fled to Mexico City to write in "freedom," to escape his country's ("Wall Street's") wars and resolve his own...
...Baxter had naturally been enthused over the "progressive" Loyalist cause- -and just as naturally, did nothing, but remained enthused...
...THIS IS THE NEW and present line...
...What he will think of it ten years from now is even more interesting...
...The turbulence and violence of his present history generate the paradox of a pilgrim becalmed in a thick contemporary darkness without a glimmer of dawn...
...There, Baxter gains the height—the abyss, rather—of his demoralization, in a dalliance with a little colored prostitute...
Vol. 32 • August 1949 • No. 34
