Dostoyevski, on the contrary, belongs to no band, unless it be the band of the Apostles of primitive Christianity. His “Dæmons” were denounced by the Russian Intelligentsia as reactionaries. But he himself was quite unconscious of such conflicts--“conservative” and “revolutionary” were terms of the West that left him indifferent. Such a soul as his can look beyond everything that we call social, for the things of this world seem to it so unimportant as not to be worth improving. No genuine religion aims at improving the world of facts, and Dostoyevski, like every primitive Russian, is fundamentally unaware of that world and lives in a second, metaphysical world beyond. What has the agony of a soul to do with Communism? A religion that has got as far as taking social problems in hand has ceased to be a religion. But the reality in which Dostoyevski lives, even during this life, is a religious creation directly present to him. His Alyosha has defied all literary criticism, even Russian. His life of Christ, had he written it--as he always intended to do--would have been a genuine gospel like the Gospels of primitive Christianity, which stand completely outside Classical and Jewish literary forms. Tolstoi, on the other hand, is a master of the Western novel--_Anna Karenina_ distances every rival--and even in his peasant’s garb remains a man of polite society. Here we have beginning and end clashing together. Dostoyevski is a saint, Tolstoi only a revolutionary. From Tolstoi, the true successor of Peter, and from him only, proceeds Bolshevism, which is not the contrary, but the final issue of Petrinism, the last dishonouring of the metaphysical by the social, and _ipso facto_ a new form of the Pseudomorphosis. If the building of Petersburg was the first act of Antichrist, the self-destruction of the society formed of that Petersburg is the second, and so the peasant soul must feel it. For the Bolshevists are not the nation, or even a part of it, but the lowest stratum of this Petrine society, alien and western like the other strata, yet not recognized by these and consequently filled with the hate of the downtrodden. It is all megalopolitan and “Civilized”--the social politics, the Intelligentsia, the literature that first in the romantic and then in the economic jargon champions freedoms and reforms, before an audience that itself belongs to the society. The real Russian is a disciple of Dostoyevski. Although he may not have read Dostoyevski or anyone else, nay, perhaps _because_ he cannot read, he is himself Dostoyevski in substance; and if the Bolshevists, who see in Christ a mere social revolutionist like themselves, were not intellectually so narrowed, it would be in Dostoyevski that they would recognize their prime enemy. What gave this revolution its momentum was not the intelligentsia’s hatred. It was the people itself, which, _without hatred_, urged only by the need of throwing off a disease,