Faust's Stages of Spiritual/Economic Growth and Takeoff into Transcendence

is Stalin. Can we take two wildly disparate images and yoke them together by violence? Have we gone too far in saying Faust is rather than Stalin is Faust? To what extent are we permitted to map objects from the domain of literature onto the universe of politics, economy, violating historical event-sequences? Shall we, going from the is-like to the is, compare the once-lived with the never-lived? is a literary construct elevated into a tutelary deity to guide and drive mass populations of the West toward an ever-receding, evolutionary, orgiastic future; is the spirit of the west. He lives. Stalin was a particular person who lived in a particular time. The west has hypostasized him into an evil, eternal and haunting spirit whose constantly evoked, demonological name has all the mythic stature and immortality of a who never lived; Stalin is the spirit of the He lives. is supposed to belong to the freedom-loving, democratic-striving, humanist west, not the totalitarian east. Tormented, tragic, said he initiated his great land reclamation project for the benefit of all mankind. (To use a word like always implies psychic depth, remorse, sensitivity, intelligence, a deeper morality, inner torment, final illumination, and thus, to western intellectuals, worthiness of endless rumination.) Stalin, on the other hand, was supposed to be a cunning, byzantine, irrational, bloodthirsty tyrant who enslaved mankind, although he made similar claims about service to mankind. Have we any indication that Stalin suffered and agonized over his hard decisions, that he had the tragic insight that has been demanded of those who are passed into our pantheon of the elect? Yet a clever tragedian might write a classic tragedy of a remorse-stricken, finally insightful Stalin. On the other hand, upon reading the text, we must come to the conclusion that has a distinctly Stalinist, ends-justify-the-means tinge. When builds his landreclamation project

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