Dostoevsky's The Possessed and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In his review of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov in October 1945, George Orwell wrote, "here was a country of the mind which one had always known to exist, but which one had never thought of as lying within the scope of fiction. More than almost any novelist, Dostoevsky is able to give his reader the feeling: 'He knows my secret thoughts; he is writing about me'" (Complete Works, ed. Peter Davison, London: Secker & Warburg, 1998, 17.296). In addition to these two novels, Orwell also owned Poor Folk, The Idiot and The Possessed.

The Grand Inquisitor chapter in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is a well-known influence on O'Brien's interrogation of Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The totalitarian Grand Inquisitor questions the ordinary man's capacity for freedom and ironically "claims it as a merit for himself and his Church that at last they have vanquished freedom and have done so to make men happy" (The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett, NY: Modern Library, 1943, 308-9). O'Brien, the modern Grand Inquisitor, informs Winston Smith that "the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better" (Nineteen Eighty-Four, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1949, 265). The Grand Inquisitor, like O'Brien, defends the omnipotence of the State and maintains that men are terribly weak and unable to choose between good and evil. He tells Christ that "man is weaker and baser by nature than Thou hast believed him! ... By showing him so much respect, Thou didst, as it were, cease to feel for him, for Thou didst ask far too much from him" (314).

But Dostoevsky's The Possessed (1872) also had a significant but unrecognized impact on the ideas of the entire novel. Shigalyov, a social theorist and member of Peter Verkhovensky's revolutionary cell of five, advocates, for compulsory happiness, "the division of mankind into two unequal parts"--masters and slaves. "One tenth is granted freedom of person and unlimited rights over the remaining nine tenths," who are deprived of all freedom and individuality. Similarly in Orwell's novel, two percent of the people belong to the elite, all powerful Inner Party, thirteen percent to the Outer Party and eighty-five percent to the proles.

Shigalyov also argues, cruelly and nihilistically, that "the level of education, science, and talents [must be] lowered.... No need for higher abilities! Higher abilities have always seized power and become despots.... They are to be banished or executed. Cicero's tongue is cut off, Copernicus's eyes are put out, Shakespeare is stoned.... Slaves must be equal" (an alternate title: Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, London: Everyman, 2000, 403, 417). In Orwell, the aim of the Party, through surveillance and oppression, is "to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought." This ruthless destruction of intellectuals and artists actually took place during the Chinese Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976.

Shigalyov believes "there has never yet been either freedom or equality without despotism" (417). Two of the dominant, all-pervasive slogans in Orwell's novel are "IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH" and "FREEDOM IS SLAVERY" (5). Shigalyov insists that "slaves must have rulers," that there must be "complete obedience, complete impersonality" (418). To enforce this obedience in 1984, the Party prevents the proles from forming loyalties it can't control. O'Brien boasts that "we have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer" (270). Shigalyov has "got each member of society watching the others and obliged to inform" (417). In Orwell, a child hero is praised in the newspapers for "overhearing some compromising remark and denouncing his parents to the Thought Police." Parsons is actually proud of having been denounced by his own seven-year-old daughter and exclaims, "It shows I brought her up in the right spirit" (26, 237).

Dostoevsky wanted to transform Russia by bringing intellectuals into meaningful contact with the masses. Winston wrote, "If there is hope it lies in the proles" (69). But like the Russian masses, his proles are doomed to hopeless and permanent oppression. Both writers shared a bleak vision of lost illusions and the revolution betrayed. Verkhovensky betrays and murders his co-conspirator Shatov. Parsons' daughter betrays her father; Charrington and O'Brien betray Winston; Winston betrays Julia. In both novels the betrayal of political ideals leads directly to the totalitarian state. Shigalyov admits, "starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism" (402). This malignant mutation of ideas foreshadows the dangers and corruptions of socialism in Stalin's Soviet Union. Yet Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet Commissar of Culture, wrote admiringly of Dostoevsky, "we marvel at the visionary clairvoyance of the dreamer who cast the spell of Revolution on Russia" (Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel, Cleveland: Meridian, 1957, 69n). Dostoevsky and Orwell had an acute historical sense, and an imaginative sympathy with the millions of people persecuted and murdered in the name of absolutist ideologies.

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, Berkeley, California

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Author:	Meyers, Jeffrey
Publication:	Notes on Contemporary Literature
Article Type:	Book review
Date:	May 1, 2013
Words:	835
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