Books in Brief: Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor

Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, by Ellis Sandoz (Louisiana, 263 pp., $8.95). Dostoevsky is a strange case. A popular writer, an esteemed writer, a fashionable writer—yet not a liberal, but a rightthinking man. How can it be? Maybe “they” simply don’t know. There is, after all, a good bit of the seamy side in Dostoevsky, and it is possible that many read him as an incipient William Burroughs struggling to be free of oppressive nineteenth-century czarist Russia. Certainly many have read him as some kind of fancy anarchist. But no more. Ellis Sandoz, equipped with the formidable armory of Voegelin-style political and theological analysis, here examines the meaning of “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” from The Brothers Karamazov. Not a literary analysis, Sandoz’ impressive study is, first, an examination of the intellectual and theological background out of which Dostoevsky’s thought comes, and then a careful examination of the “Legend” itself. Against the background of Russian religious and quasireligious thought mixed with Western revolutionism and Hegelianism that Dostoevsky knew in his time, the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” can best be understood as a “political apocalypse.” Which is to say, an “unveiling or revealing” of the relationship of man to God and man to the world. Dostoevsky, Sandoz makes clear, does not try to immanentize the eschaton. General Readers, beware. Dostoevsky buffs and Voegelin buffs, this is for you.

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Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, by Ellis Sandoz (Louisiana, 263 pp., $8.95). Dostoevsky is a strange case. A popular writer, an esteemed writer, a fashionable writer—yet not a liberal, but a rightthinking man. How can it be? Maybe “they” simply don’t know. There is, after all, a good bit of the seamy side in Dostoevsky, and it is possible that many read him as an incipient William Burroughs struggling to be free of oppressive nineteenth-century czarist Russia. Certainly many have read him as some kind of fancy anarchist. But no more. Ellis Sandoz, equipped with the formidable armory of Voegelin-style political and theological analysis, here examines the meaning of “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” from The Brothers Karamazov. Not a literary analysis, Sandoz’ impressive study is, first, an examination of the intellectual and theological background out of which Dostoevsky’s thought comes, and then a careful examination of the “Legend” itself. Against the background of Russian religious and quasireligious thought mixed with Western revolutionism and Hegelianism that Dostoevsky knew in his time, the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” can best be understood as a “political apocalypse.” Which is to say, an “unveiling or revealing” of the relationship of man to God and man to the world. Dostoevsky, Sandoz makes clear, does not try to immanentize the eschaton. General Readers, beware. Dostoevsky buffs and Voegelin buffs, this is for you.