The Ethics of Bolshevism

Abstract

THE purpose of this paper is to offer a case study of the readaptation of moral ideas as they pass from one social environment to another. Otherwise stated, it is a study of the formation of what is sometimes called an operational by the rejection, modification, or semiconscious retention of current moral ideas for use in a situation very different from that in which the ideas originated. Specifically the purpose is to take some moral ideas as they appear in a few great Russian novels and plays-literary works that everyone reads-and to note how these, or their opponent counterparts, appear when they are restated by Lenin.' For Lenin created the code of the Russian revolutionist, and he used moral ideas current in Russian literature, though his purpose was to remake the society in which that literature was produced. The terms used in the title were purposely chosen: ethics to refer to maxims or rules or concepts of behavior as it should be; Bolshevism (a term now officially obsolete) to refer to a generation now extinct or well on the road to extinction. The study is intended to have philosophical rather than literary significance, for it is meant to illustrate characteristics of ethical language. Characters or situations represented in literature often are in effect moral criticism; they express moral judgments or generalizations about moral problems as truly as if they did so overtly. And such representations may leave their traces in moral language. They may be more effective than direct moral exhortation or argument, for they have something of the concreteness of real people and also perhaps the humor or pathos of literature. For an English reader Micawber, and for a Russian reader Oblomov, are types that combine the vividness of a personality with the generality of a proverb. The expressive-