The Possessed - Volume One

THE POSSESSED - VOLUME ONE - FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY — INTRODUCTION — rhe Possessed, the last but one of Dostoevskys major novels, an be most simply comprehended as a vast imaginative ievelopment of the parable from which it takes its name. Dostoevsky made this aspect of his intention clear. Not nly did he put the story of the Gadarene swine in his half f le but at the end of the novel Stepan Trofimovitch, in the lairvoyance of half-delirium, asks the gentle colporteuse to read him the parable. You see Fe says that S exactly like our Russia, those devils at come out of the sick man and enter into the swine. They are tll the sores, all the foul contagions, all the impurities, all the devils peat and small that have multiplied in that great invalid, our 3eloved Russia. in the course of ages and ages. But a great idea tnd a great will will encompass it from on high, as with that lunatic ossessed of devils . . . and they will beg of themselves to enter nto swine and indeed may be they have entered into them already I rhey are we and those . . . and Petrusha and les autres avec lui . . . n dI perhaps at the head of them, and we shall cast ourselves iown, possessed and raving, from the rocks into the sea, and we ihall all be drowned, and a good thing too, for that is all we are it for. But the sick man will be healed and will sit at the feet of lesus, and all will look upon him with astonishment. The actual happening has been far different from what Dostoevsky dreamed it might be. But the failure of his lope does not make him a false prophet. The true prophet s not he who foretells events in the world of Time, but he who nakes the advised human soul conscious of the momentous md eternal issueswhich are decided in itself. Dostoevsky, f he could return to look upon Russia to-day, could say with ruth that he prophesied only too well not his prophecy has een falsified, but only his hope. The devils have not entered nto the swine they have remained in the man and multiplied, intil he is no more a man. Instead of sitting at the feet of lesus, the new Russia has openly repudiated Jesus. That repudiation, for Dostoevsky and I may humbly add, or me also is a definite and deliberate lapse from humanity That is why the great Russian experiment is of such tremendous significance. It is a bold and though the word seems paradoxicaI a noble experiment. An absolute negation of Jesus is better, fraught with more promise for the future of humanity, than lip-honour to him. Russia is making a crucial experiment upon the souls of men, and is making it openly. The result of the experiment will decide whether a great nation can live without that aspiration towards spirituality of which Jesus is the Western symbol. Dostoevsky did not believe it possible neither do I believe it possible. But he may have been wrong. And if he is proved to be wrong-the proof is not a matter of years or even decades, but of one or two generations-then we shall know something of the utmost importance to humanity namely, that a permanent dehumanization of man is possible, and simply because it is possible, is in the long run inevitable. This is the great issue that is being decided in our time visibly and deliberately in Russia, secretly and only halfconsciously in the rest of the Western world. Of course, the devils by which Russia and the chief characters in this novel are possessed are not just devils...