Abstract

In what is probably the most arresting of all the textual developments of the Saturnalian dialogues, the reader’s emotional identification with the voice of rage and thwarted rebellion is ever more thoroughly compelled by the structure and tone of succeeding works, at the same time that the dangers of that role, both for its bearer and for others, are ever more explicitly argued. Readers of Le Neveau de Rameau are not forced by the inner logic of the text to choose between Moi and Lui, and they can find in each a welcome counterbalance to and relief from the demands of the other. But in Notes from Underground the “gentlemen-readers” have nothing left to offer us, and the novel makes it impossible to feel anything less than the same contempt for their platitudes that the Underground Man himself flaunts. The clearest index of the development I am tracing is the formal shift from Diderot’s dialogue proper to Dostoyevski’s first-person novel, but this mutation is itself already a consequence of a more indirect and disturbing cause. Dostoyevski, in the famous cry of The Possessed, was certain that “‘the fire is in the minds of men and not in the roofs of houses’”;9 he believed that only the prior corruption of Russia’s intelligentsia, their eager surrender to the lure of conspiracy and violence, could have led so many of them to the acts of senseless catastrophe, fueled by ressentiment, false pride, and incoherent utopian fantasies, marks all of his most important post-Siberia political and cultural writings.10 9. Dostoyevski, The Possessed, trans. Garnett , p. 533.10. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevski explicitly states that the future revolution will be made by the Smerdyakovs. In the chapter “Over the Brandy,” for example, Ivan tells his father that Smerdyakov is “a prime candidate” to initiate a revolutionary uprising . Michael André Bernstein is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic and a book of poetry. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is “‘O Totiens Servus’: Saturnalia and Servitude in Augustan Rome”