The Age of Suspicion Read Online Free Page A

Zverkov, the root of whose name is a word that means 'animal' or 'beast', with the stupid head of a ram and elegant, clever, self-assured manners, full of a remote sort of politeness, who 'examines him in silence as though he were some curious insect,' while he carries on before them, hurling in vain his shameful, ludicrous appeals at them—here, it will be recalled, the break does occur.
    This continual need to establish contact—which is one of the primal characteristics of the Russian people, in whom Dostoievski's work is so firmly rooted—has contributed to making of Russian soil the chosen soil, the veritable black loam of 'the psychological.'
    Indeed, nothing could be better calculated than are these impassioned questions and answers, these attractions, these feigned withdrawals, these pursuits and flights, these flirtings and rubbings, these clashes, caresses, bites and embraces, to excite, disturb, bring up to the surface and allow to spread, the immense, quivering mass, whose incessant ebb and flow, whose scarcely perceptible vibration, are the very pulse of life.
    Under the pressure of this tumult, the envelope that contains it wears thin and tears; there occurs a sort of displacement from outside inwards, from the centre of gravity of the character; a displacement that the modern novel has continued to stress.
    Many have noted the impression of unreality—as though we saw them transparently—that Dostoievski's characters make upon us, despite the minute descriptions that he felt obliged to give in order to satisfy the demands of his epoch.
    This comes from the fact that his characters tended already to be what, more and more, characters in fiction were to become, that is, not so much 'types' of flesh and blood human beings, like those we see around us, to enumerate whom seemed to be the novelist's essential goal, as simple props, carriers of occasionally still unexplored states of consciousness, which we discover within ourselves.
    It may be that Proust's snobbishness, which recurs in an almost maniacally besetting manner in all his characters, is nothing but a variety of this same need of fusion, only grown and cultivated in a very different soil, in the formal, refined society of the Faubourg St. Germain, at the beginning of this century. In any case, Proust's works show us already that these complex, subtle states (we should say, these movements) the slightest shadings of which, in the anxiety of his quest, he has succeeded in capturing in all his characters, remain what is most precious and soundest in his work, while the envelopes, which were perhaps a bit too thick—Swann, Odette, Oriane de Guermantes, or the Verdurins—are already on the way to the vast Wax Works to which, sooner or later, all literary 'types' are relegated.
    But, to return to Dostoievski. These movements upon which all his attention, that of all his characters and also of the reader, are concentrated; which derive from a common source and, despite the envelope separating them from one another, like little drops of mercury, continually tend to conglomerate and mingle with the common mass; these roving states that, from one character to another, traverse the entire œuvre, are to be found in everybody, refracted in each one of us according to a different index; and each time they present us one of their as yet unknown, innumerable facets, thus allowing us to sense something that might foreshadow a sort of new unanimism.
    The tie between this work, which is still a living source of research and new techniques, still rich in promise, and the work of Kafka, to which people tend to contrast it today, appears evident, and if literature were to be regarded as a continuous relay race, it would no doubt have been from Dostoievski's hands, more certainly than from those of any other, that Kafka would have seized the token.
    It will be recalled that his 'K.', whose very name is reduced to a mere initial, is but a slender prop. And the sentiment