canny to realize that in some curious way we love these bad people, to realize that there must be in us something akin to them, something that is like them.
This does not come about by chance and still less has it anything to do with the obvious and literary in Dostoevsky's work. Puzzling as are certain of his characteristics—consider only the way he bears one forward towards a solidly constructed psychology of the Unconscious—we are not surprised at his work being the finished expression of a highly developed insight nor at its artistic interpretation of a daily world with which we are thoroughly familiar. What actually impresses us is its prophetic import, its foreshadowing of a disintegration and of a Chaos into which we have during these last years seen Europe obviously descending. It is not as though this world of Dostoevsky's were a picture of the future in an ideal sense. No one will accept it as that. No, we do not feel that Myshkin and the rest afford us a prefiguration in the sense of "This is what you must become." It is something different, but fully as significant: "We must pass through this. This is our Destiny."
The future is uncertain, but the road which he shows can have but one meaning. It means a new spiritual dispensation. This takes us beyond Myshkin, it points towards magical thinking, to the acceptance of Chaos, to a return to anarchy, back into the unconscious, into formlessness, into the beast, back far beyond the beast, back to the beginnings of everything. Not to stay there, not to become beast or primeval matter, but to start in a fresh direction, to discover new springs of development and action deep down in the roots of our being in order to reach to a higher and nobler creation and valuation and division of the world. No programme can teach us to find this road, no revolution will cast down the walls that we may enter into it. Each one must approach it alone, each one for himself. Each one of us must in one hour of his life stand on the threshold of the borderland where Myshkin stood, where truths cease and new ones begin. Each one of us must once, for one moment in his life, experience something of what Myshkin experienced in his flashlight seconds, of what Dostoevsky himself experienced in that moment when he stood facing his condemnation and with prophetic vision took his way onward.
