alist loyalties. Arrested, sentenced to death, and then commuted to a decade
of imprisonment in Siberia during the 1850s, he returned just in time to
confront the new generation of materialist radicals. Turgenev had already
pioneered the description of his intellectual compatriots as material for novels;
Fathers and Sons (1862) became famous for contrasting the political sensibili-
ties of previous and current generations, and popularized the term “nihilist”
for the younger one. Dostoyevsky now resumed his writing career with a series
of anguished portraits of the new radicals. Notes from Underground (1864)
attacks the scientism and materialist determinism of Chernyshevski. Crime and
Punishment (1864), which made Dostoyevsky’s reputation, depicts a student
revolutionist who justifies a murder on Pisarev’s reasoning. The plot of The
Possessed (1871) fictionalizes a famous incident: Nechaiev, sent by Bakunin
from the exile community in Switzerland to set up an underground cell in
Russia, had ordered the murder of one of its student members in a Machiavel-
lian exercise of revolutionary discipline. The Brothers Karamazov (1877–1881)
again centers on a revolutionary intellectual, this time afflicted with guilt over
the consequences of his doctrines.
Dostoyevsky’s own explicit doctrines, no doubt sincerely held but serving
also to make his materials palatable to government censorship, extol a religious
doctrine of passive suffering; but it is his villains who drive the drama and
provide the atmosphere of impassioned philosophy that would appeal interna-
tionally to intellectuals. What made Dostoyevsky a literary success was that
he combined this material with the style of the mass market novel, often taking
the form of a murder mystery or police thriller. Dostoyevsky exploited the
intellectual’s self-examination made successful by Turgenev, purged of its polite
drawing room qualities and transposed into the melodrama of popular fiction.
This too fitted Dostoyevsky for the deliberately déclassé literary tastes of
French intellectuals in the 1930s.
Kafka started out even closer to the mainstream of the German philosophi-
cal networks. He was educated in the early 1900s in the German university
of Prague; among his teachers were Marty, from the Brentano lineage, and
Christian von Ehrenfels, who descends from Meinong (see Figure 13.8). Ehren-
fels conveyed with charismatic energy the main movements of the time: he was
a pioneer of Gestalt psychology and a friend of Sigmund Freud; he also
advocated Weltanschauung philosophy to replace lost religious faith.^9 Kafka
started out in an intellectual milieu not far removed from phenomenology and
Freudian dream symbolism. When existentialism was explicitly launched in
Sartre’s circle, such works were now relabeled as a canon leading up to
themselves. Sartre strove for a Kafkaesque tone of fatal inescapability as in No
Exit (1944). The sinister quality which Kafka gives to ordinary life is explicitly
subjected to philosophical reflection in Nausea (1938) through a protagonist
772 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths