Winter Notes on Summer Impressions - Alma Classics

winter notes on summer impressions
His analysis of Western Europe, first outlined in the Summer
Impressions and thereafter relentlessly pursued through the pages of
most of his books and particularly of his Diary of a Writer, presents
a strange amalgam of Slavophile prejudice and Fourierist ideals, of
religious utopianism and historical materialism, and of traditionalist
concepts expressed in terms of the Communist Manifesto. His earlier
enthusiasm for Fourier – the cause, indeed, of his sojourn in the
“House of the Dead” – and his acute awareness of those social and
economic forces that lie at the bottom of our cultural edifice, lead him
to give certain historical events an interpretation rendered familiar to
us by Marxist writings. Thus he regards the French Revolution as a
mere sham, benefiting no one but the middle classes, the bourgeoisie,
whom it enabled to obtain a firm grip on the proletariat in order to
exploit it. The hollowness of the Revolution, he says significantly
enough in his Diary of a Writer, was exposed by the execution of
Babeuf, the apostle of early communism.
This attitude colours the whole of his approach to France, with
which a large part of the book is concerned. Like Marx, he refuses
to see in the Revolution’s, and later the Republic’s, slogan – Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity – anything but a piece of bourgeois hypocrisy,
a gigantic bluff; he considers, like Marx, that there can be no real
freedom in Western Europe without economic power; like Marx, he
believes that proletarians are bound to unite – “form their own heap”
– in defence of their own interests without the fraudulent pretence
of speaking for humanity as a whole; he has the true Marxist (and
Slavophile) contempt for Western liberalism and for all forms of
parliamentary government, and, like Marx again, sees in the whole
network of European social policy and behaviour nothing but
the bourgeoisie’s frantic attempt to retain the status quo. But the
proletariat, he says, is knocking at the door and one day will force it
open. Repudiated by the bourgeoisie and kept away from this world’s
goods, it is ready to join in the class struggle and eager to repudiate
the repudiators.
It is obviously a theme that haunted Dostoevsky, for, having dealt
with it in some detail in his Summer Impressions, he returned to it
and repeated it with exasperating frequency in his Diary of a Writer
many years later. No doubt his insistence on the dire fate awaiting the
Western capitalist world, though often expressed in quasi-Marxist
x