DOSTOEVSKY'S 'HOLY TRUTH'

...A kind lady thrusts the ragamuffin out, placing a coin in his hand...

...to the spirit of Qururvunist Russia...

...To deny its appeal to millions of normal men on every continent of earth, including our own, is to be disqualified by ignorance, beforehand, from creating a deeper, truer human value Incidentally, the antionmianism of Dostoevsky and the communist state will help remind the reader of our own domestic brands...

...Pan-Slav and Russian 'Westerners," he argues, seem apart aecause they are focussed upon different stages of the same apocalyptic process: the universal Redemption...

...still justify war, the massacre of innocents, the annulment of personal liberty...

...both "damn Russia's past," and "he who damns Russia's past^is ours...

...It is important also to remember that antinomianism has had great enemie.' in Russia: such men as Kropotkin, 8 first victim of the Bolshevists, and Tolstoy whom Stalin would have handled with less squeamishness thar the Czars...

...and that Russia-with leader of the world...

...The "Christmas tree" has been transposed from heaven into the Marxist future...

...But he is the world's leader because in his heart he has "faith arid repentance...

...The major novels—Notes from Underground, The Idiot, A Raw Youth, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov (1864-1880)—are organic works of art intense as the tragedies of Sophocles or Racine...

...But it will be objected: Dostoevsky hated socialism jn every form, and was a Christian mystic, whereas the communists are socialists and atheists...

...But the little hand is frozen too stiff to grasp it and the coin falls in the snow...

...in his attacks on trade-unionism, or his hymns to a society "without segregation or isolation" which might have inspired Hitler...

...At last, the child sinks in the snow and lo...

...At times he wrote nonsense . . . even repulsive nonsense, as in his sneers at England's and America's democracy, in his poisonous lucubrations on "The Jewish Problem," worthy of a Nazi, in his glorification of War, which Mussolini with more literary skill might have signed...

...The synthesis is the world communist movement, under a new form of Slav priesthood and a new'Slav "little father...

...are mere Englishmen in masks, Pushkin's Italians ire truly Italian...

...This is compensation for the labor-camps and other unpleasant necessities while "the holy truth" marches on...

...Evidently, the popular columnist of Petersburg could talk about anything: his personal health or religion, scandal or world-prophecy, provided of course he did not attack the basic Russian institution of Czar and Church...

...They are related therefore in one sense to the 18th century journalism of The Spectator, The Rambler, The Tatler, or to the broadsides of Voltaire: and in another sense to the "columns" of our own papers...

...he is warm, and angels lead him to Christ's tree, heavy with gifts and good things to cat...

...the antinomianism of Dostoevsky's Christanity has remained...

...The point is the casual ease with which he discussed God, Cosmos, Man, and the misfortunes of the humblest creature, without change of focus, almost in one breath, and in the form of a periodical whose distribution throughout the Empire was large enough to earn him a living...

...A Little Boy at Christ's Xmas Tree" tells of a child in a Petersburg cellar slum, hungry and cold, who cannot wake his mother (she lies dead on her bed) and runs out into the wintry streets, seeking food...

...The central and ever-recurrent theme of the whole Diary, in fact, ia a polemic against these "Westerners...

...Dostoevsky's meditations are often amateurish...

...Each was regularly baptised, starved to death, and buried...

...It is a potpourri, ranging from short stories to political polemic, with reports of criminal trials, personal reminiscence, replies to correspondents, and reviews...

...The peasant, Dostoevsky says, is divinely careless of the "materialist" values of the West: he accepts poverty, pain, filth, he obeys his pope and his zemstvo, he cares not a fig for the delusions of the vote and of jury trial...

...The Diary, except in the stories, reveals no such integrations...

...finally, as a clue . . a very sizable clue...

...As the stages pf this process, Dostoevsky saw, fln^f the fatherhood of Russia over) J*T Slavs, then the spread eastward of Slavism over Asia, and finally (to Doptoevsky less important), after the temporary military success of Prussia, the Slav cultural conquest of Europe...

...These were "minor problems," doubUess, \p be confronted later...

...he did not know enough to tackle many of his favorite problems...

...In this case, thi> maimed man drives his child-wife, whom he adores, to suicide...

...Tolstoy's muzhik is essentially the same...

...Dostoevsky's great point vas that under the surface of their diferences the Russian "Westerners," decoding Europe and socialism, and the Slavophile, defending Church and Czar, vere brothers...

...Petersburg in the decades following the liberation of the serfs (1862) and during the Pan-Slav Drang riach Osten when Russia at warfever pitch, would have conquered Constantinople — had the Western Powers permitted...

...and the interests of Voltaire, whose audience was the most cultivated people of Europe, ar^ provincial against the vistas of world-fate and of men's relations with God and Cosmos, to which Dostoevsky found it natural to invite his readers...

...There is, then, a remarkable kinship to the methods of the two programs...

...Listen to this: "The story of Maslova is just an everdny affair...

...but In the choice of subject, In the security of what he felt would appeal to his readers, the freedom of Dostoevsky was infinitely wider...

...This paradox he brillantly expounded The "Westerners" vere concerned with the salvation of nankind...

...journalism of 18th century London and Paris...

...First, of course, his conviction that Western Europe was doomed, soon to collapse or explode its "holy Truth" would replace it as the in bloody disaster...

...Reinhold Nlebuhr's acute phrase "moral man in immoral society" points to an antinomianism which Conatantine may be said to have founded, when he—the murderer of his wife and son—"Christianized" Rome...

...But what an immense difference in their tone and subject master...

...despite his doctrine of love, hated the Jew, the British and the Turk...

...Does Dostoevsky's Diary help us to understand what is happening in Russia today...

...What we must understand, is that antinomianism always • points to a higher justificatory value...

...but here is the insight, here the passionate concern, that mined his material for the artist...

...A CLUE IS PROVIDED by two beautiful little tales in The Diary...

...preached his campaign of solidarity and equality without being troubled by the prevailing economic system in which the powerful rhinority garnered the produce of the myriad masses...

...Russians alone can understand ill peoples, alone" have in their hearts ill the great Aryan races," because the Russians alone are universal...

...To prove t, he points to the universality of Pushkin who, he claims, was greater ;han Shakespeare because, whereas Shakespeare's Italians et al...

...But what is this particllar truth...

...hence the universal hypocrisy of state departments (including our own...

...They' are great, not because of their psychological insight but because this insight, energized by Russia's collective power, provides substance for vast aesthetic forms, strict as a poem...

...The baby was simply a hindrance to her work: she had to do her work, consequently, tha baby, neglected, soon died of hunger...

...Reviewed by WALDO FRANK DOSTOEVSKY'S The Diary of a Writer appeared during the years 1873, 1877, 1378, after all the great novels except The Brothers Karamazov...

...Is the author of The /mwaVr...

...the Slavophiles with the lominion of the Slavs—with the "worhip of the holy Russian people's truth," is Gogol put it...

...indeed has just begun to march...

...With no strain, the author's attention modulates from a humble police court case . . . perhaps a harried mother who in a fit of nerves drops her nagging child from a window . . . to Europe, to Russia's destiny: from current articles and books to grandiose conceptions of the Orthodox Church...

...The key to these easy modulations is Dostoevsky's sense of the unitariness of life in all its phases: the principles, here, in intellectual terms, of the aesthetic integration of his novels...

...These men too point to a potential of the Russian future...

...The ona reality Is faith and tha love that makes men real under Christ...

...hence, specifically, the new Puritanism which-the police state has imposed on sex morality and education in Russia...

...The popular modern American columnist is also free, within our nationalreligious premise of democracy and free speech...

...yet here again there is startling contrast: Dostoevsky, it seems, could range farther, penetrate more deeply...

...But there are limits to the difference...

...Moreover, both foresee "the :ollapse of bourgeois Europe, without a trace...

...Tolstoy's Anarchist conclusions about leadership differed, of course, radically from Dostoevsky's...

...The deathless values of Christ, although undoubtedly still alive in the Russian people, have, at least theoretically, been discarded by the communist leaders...

...This "Utopia," Dostoevsky proclaims as the Realpolitik of the century beyond him...

...The greatest success of his life was his speech on Pushkin, published in The Diary in 1880...

...The second tale, "A tyeek One," is a variation on the author's perpetual theme of the "offended and injured," unable to articulate their love because of the wounds which this false world of "life" inflicts...

...Thus, the Christian Dostoevsky extolled war, particularly Russian war...

...Oh, the peoples of Europe do lot dream how dear they are to us...

...the "true religion," "my country right or wrong," "social justice," etc., becomes th» value greater than what is flouted, which may be health, honesty, life itself...

...The thesis belonged to the old Slavophiles: Russia's destiny to unite first all Slavs, then all peoples...

...BUT THIS WAS ONLY THE BEGINNING...

...but the mother never thought of nursing tha unwelcome stranger...

...There is always of cfturse a substratum oi guilt in the antinomian mind...

...Gogol's "holy Russia truth" still marches...

...But the termini of value are still in the domain of Faith...

...from spiritualism to the ethics of lawyers or the presence of Christ in the mute, squalid muzhik...

...It adds nothing to Dostoevsky's stature, but like the sketches of Rembrandt and Michelangelo, it is an intimate gloss on a great work...

...Nothing less than the uni'ersal...

...certainly not for the majority of the intellectuals of his day who proudly called themselves "Westerners" and under the leadership of expatriates lake Herzen, Turgenev, Tchernichevsky, despised what they called reactionary Slavophilism...

...Man upon earth is so corrupt, that all his creations and Institutions are unreal: mere feam upon the wave of illusion...

...He Is currently at work on a biography of Simon Bolivar...

...Again and again, Dostoevsky attacks them and all they defend under such terms as democracy, socialism, trade unionism, parliamentarism, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, science, positivism, or ¦imply "civilization...

...This second aspect of The Diary—its revelation of a state of mind in late 19th century Rifssia, leads into the third...

...Here the analogy ii rather with the personal Waldo Frank, well-known essayist and writer...

...In the morning, the body is found, frozen and starved...

...But they, are the meek, they shall inherit true life I The burden of these stories, found in its essence in Notes from Underground, is the unreality of the entire sensory world: tha world of institution*, of laws, and therefor* of morals and of ethics...

...and again, one issue each, in 1880 and 1881, the last years of his life...

...Its value might be appraised in three aspects: as intrinsic literature: as a revelation of the mind and culture of St...

...preached its inevitability against the infidel...

...Not a page of European history—and American—lacks the word, written in letters of blood...

...The chapters appeared in the form of a magazine, and by no means regularly...

...and ho who has this has more life than they who "live" by the law...

...IT IS IMPRESSIVE how the faith of Dostoevsky charts, in strict historic terms, the dialectic of Bolshevism...

...The one way to attack this value is not to preach against its bad manners and morals, but to supersede it...

...The antithesis fell to the Russian "Westerners," climaxed in Lenin: the revolutionary destruction "without a trace" of "the rotten bourgeois world" and the material liberation of all peoples...

...Observe how Dostoevsky's notion of the muzhik under an antinomian Orthodox Church can be corrupted to fit the role of the great masses in a Soviet regime...

...And today, when the world stands aghast and in suspense before the threat of an "irrespressible conflict" between the West and a Russian-led form of communism, implemented by the povv.er of the Russian state, which has already swept Eastern Europe and China and thrown tentacles over the entire world, this aspect is, of course, the most urgent...

...He gets into a rich, gay house where warm and well-fed children dance about a sumptuous lighted tree...

...Thus she disposed of five children...

...Tha Christianity of Dostoevsky is s rigorous nrrtlnomianism...

...The difference is supreme, and entails a distinction of values which cannot be discussed in this brief paper...

...Each of these aspects deserves attention...

...le cries...

...What is the substance of this oration...

...Addison, Steele and Johnson are shallow compared to the Russian...

...THE SECOND ASPECT of the Diary, its portrayal of a cultural milieu, would reward exploring...

...Is there a relation between what he sensed as the needs and desires of the masses of the world, and what they seem at least to put up with wherever the communist police state comes to power...

...She was the daughter of an unmarried serf . . . Once a year this unmarried woman became a mother, and, according to tha usual custom, the child was baptised...

...The .'nemy of both is "isolation and segregation...

...IT IS TRUE that Dostoevsky did not speak for all Russians...

...and this truth can be seen in the pragmatic convergences of Dostoevsky with his communist successors...

...But is it not clear how from the same premise of the nature and the ideal image of the masses, a Soviet State, promulgating a different form of "love, faith and repentance," could establish its rule, not only among Slavs, but —with variations —- among Chinese, Japanese, Hindus, Africans, South Americans—indeed, the overwhelming mass of the world's peoples...