dence, not unlike the depression of John Stuart Mill under the guidance of his
father. Wagner corrected Nietzsche’s manuscripts. Nietzsche broke with him,
ostensibly in disagreement over the turn Wagner was taking in the mid-1870s
with the Ring cycle and especially with his religious outlook in Parsifal (1882).
The Wagner connection was a crucial part of Nietzsche’s creative field, and the
time of the break (January 1878) was just the time when Nietzsche developed
physical ill health (eyes, head, stomach), which led him to resign his chair in
1879 (EP, 1967: 5:504–510). Whatever other causes may have contributed to
Nietzsche’s health problems and to his eventual insanity (syphilis is suspected),
his symptoms also fit the pattern of stress reactions to his break with his
charismatic mentor. Nietzsche found the path of greatest creative energy with
an outburst of his best books right after the break: The Dawn (1881) and The
Gay Science (1882), then Zarathustra, with its radical attacks on religion and
on Wagner, patterned in a four-act drama to resemble the Ring. Nietzsche was
not a network isolate but a rebel among rebels; he made and unmade new
combinations on the fringes where the philosophical networks of his day
overlapped the popular markets opening up for religion, science, and enter-
tainment. The personal stress and the iconoclasm were alike facets of his crea-
tive energy and the central content about which he wrote.
The Retrospective Literary Canon
Existentialists labeled as their own the novels of the previous two generations
which best fit the philosophical-literary hybrid. Dostoyevsky’s fame outside of
Russia began to grow in the same time and place as the reputations of
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. The takeoff point for all these writings was Ger-
many just before World War I, which shows that the literary fashion was not
caused by postwar disillusionment. Kafka’s stories too were written before the
war (published 1913–1916), and came into vogue along with his posthumous
novels, published in 1926–27. The philosophical interpretation of this body of
literature was the work of the Sartre circle, and in this guise reached its peak
as a publishing phenomenon in the anglophone world of the 1940s and 1950s.
Dostoyevsky seems a sudden intrusion from a peripheral region never
before significant in European culture. Nevertheless, his works reflected back
to the intellectuals of core European networks a dramatized version of their
own ancestral ideas. For political reasons, the bases of intellectual production
in Russia were concentrated on the new middle-class market for novels which
opened around 1860. The universities, newly founded in the Westernizing
reforms of the 1700s, were forbidden to teach philosophy after the Decembrist
uprising in 1825; in a slight liberalization from 1863 until 1889 only commen-
taries on Plato and Aristotle were allowed (EP, 1967: 7:258). The role of the
770 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths