In the massive book which he produced, Dostoyevsky fulfilled his purpose by showing the effect upon a provincial capital of a group of revolutionaries guided by a demoniac leader. Conspiracy, mob violence, arson, and murder temporarily disrupt government. Pyotr Verhovensky returns from revolutionary activity abroad to set up groups throughout Russia. He seeks to knit together this particular group by making all of them participate in the murder of a dissident member. Before he has fled and his group has been caught, three more people have been killed. Nikolay Stavrogin, the book’s perverted central figure, is meant to be the messiah of Pyotr’s movement. The ruin of the whole structure is complete when, on the last page, Nikolay dangles from his own silken noose. Recurring in the book and linked to its title is the image of the biblical Gadarene swine. Pyotr’s father, estranged from his abusive son, is dying partly because of a chain of events set in motion by him. He asks that this passage be read to him and then exclaims: Those devils that come out of the sick man and enter into the swine. They are all the sores, all the foul contagions, all the impurities, all the devils great and small that have multiplied in that great invalid, our beloved Russia, in the course of ages and ages. The swine had plunged into the sea and destroyed themselves. Dostoyevsky wanted to insure that his countrymen would not, like lemmings, follow each other to destruction. =André Malraux: Pro-Communism= An index of changing times is the contrast between _The Possessed_ and André Malraux’s _Man’s Fate_. This novel represented the opposite pole of political thought. Published in 1934, Malraux’s book sympathetically followed the abortive Communist attempt to capture Shanghai in 1927. Under the leadership of half-French Kyo Gisors and others like him, the Chinese Communists wage a losing battle against the Kuomintang party of Chiang Kai-shek. This time the gallery of revolutionary types--theorists, assassins, hard-core Party workers--is presented in a different light. They are heroes. The professional revolutionists and disinherited peasants are following a vision. Even when they receive the coup de grâce or await death in the boiler of a locomotive, eventual victory is seen transcending temporary defeat. Having given his cyanide to wounded comrades, the Russian Katov is still able to reflect as he awaits his horrible end that “he had fought for what in his time was charged with the deepest meaning and the greatest hope; he was dying among those with whom he had wanted to live; he was dying, like each of these men, because he had given a meaning to his life.” These words are something like Robert Jordan’s valedictory to life. But Jordan fought to preserve Spanish democracy and Katov died to establish Chinese Communism. The novel serves all causes. =Ignazio Silone: Disillusionment on the Left=