It may be, as Muller says, that Turgenev’s mind was with the sons and his heart with the fathers, that he tried to be fair. Here is a case in which, regardless of intent, a novelist helped to shape a movement which disrupted a world.
Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky reacted violently to Turgenev’s work. The former challenged him to a duel and the latter attacked and caricatured him mercilessly as Karamazinov in The Possessed (1872), a violent attack upon Nihilism. In his introduction to the Modern Library edition, Avrahm Yarmolinsky declares that
Dostoyevsky’s avowed intention in writing it was to drive home certain convictions of his, regardless of whether or not he met the requirements of the art of fiction. He wanted to deal a body blow to the rebels who threatened what he considered to be the foundations of Russian life. Originally he conceived his novel as a political lampoon, a pamphlet against the revolution.
In the massive book which he produced, Dostoyevsky fulfilled his purpose by showing the effect upon a provincial capital of a group of revolutionaries guided by a demoniac leader. Conspiracy, mob violence, arson, and murder temporarily disrupt government. Pyotr Verhovensky returns from revolutionary activity abroad to set up groups throughout Russia. He seeks to knit together this particular group by making all of them participate in the murder of a dissident member. Before he has fled and his group has been caught, three more people have been killed. Nikolay Stavrogin, the book’s perverted central figure, is meant to be the messiah of Pyotr’s movement. The ruin of the whole structure is complete when, on the last page, Nikolay dangles from his own silken noose. Recurring in the book and linked to its title is the image of the biblical Gadarene swine. Pyotr’s father, estranged from his abusive son, is dying partly because of a chain of events set in motion by him. He asks that this passage be read to him and then exclaims:
Those devils that come out of the sick man and enter into the swine. They are all the sores, all the foul contagions, all the impurities, all the devils great and small that have multiplied in that great invalid, our beloved Russia, in the course of ages and ages.
The swine had plunged into the sea and destroyed themselves. Dostoyevsky wanted to insure that his countrymen would not, like lemmings, follow each other to destruction.
André Malraux: Pro-Communism
An index of changing times is the contrast between The Possessed and André Malraux’s Man’s Fate. This novel represented the opposite pole of political thought. Published in 1934, Malraux’s book sympathetically followed the abortive Communist attempt to capture Shanghai in 1927. Under the leadership of half-French Kyo Gisors and others like him, the Chinese Communists wage a losing battle against the Kuomintang party of Chiang Kai-shek. This time the gallery of revolutionary types—theorists, assassins, hard-core Party workers—is presented in a different light. They are heroes. The professional revolutionists and disinherited peasants are following a vision. Even when they receive the coup de grâce or await death in the boiler of a locomotive, eventual victory is seen transcending temporary defeat. Having given his cyanide to wounded comrades, the Russian Katov is still able to reflect as he awaits his horrible end that “he had fought for what in his time was charged with the deepest meaning and the greatest hope; he was dying among those with whom he had wanted to live; he was dying, like each of these men, because he had given a meaning to his life.” These words are something like Robert Jordan’s valedictory to life. But Jordan fought to preserve Spanish democracy and Katov died to establish Chinese Communism. The novel serves all causes.
Ignazio Silone: Disillusionment on the Left
The first of a remarkable group of modern political novels appeared in the same year as Man’s Fate. It was Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara. “The poorest and most backward village of Marsica,” Fontamara is the scene of progressive encroachments of Fascism upon the life of its people. Exploited by The Promoter—a builder, banker, and local tycoon—the uneducated peasants successively lose most of their water supply, the profits from their hard-raised crops, and their right to talk about politics. When the protests of some of its people make it appear that Fontamara is resisting the Mussolini regime, Black Shirt thugs raid the village, abusing its people and wrecking houses. Goaded by the need for work, Berardo Viola and the son of the nameless narrator go to Rome to seek it. Fleeced of their money, they finally obtain the necessary certificates of moral character. But The Promoter has written upon them that the men are politically unreliable. Thrown into jail upon suspicion of distributing copies of The Unknown Hand, they meet the editor of this resistance leaflet. To save him, Berardo assumes responsibility for the paper and is beaten to death by the police. The editor succeeds in delivering a small press to Fontamara, where the villagers begin their secret paper, which they call What Shall We Do? This phrase is not only the title; it is printed at the end of each story of Fascist atrocity. At the book’s end, the nameless narrator and his family are in hiding with Silone. The village has been wiped out by the Fascists. The book’s last line—not in quotes and therefore Silone’s question as well as the narrator’s—is, of course, What Shall We Do?