ABSTRACT
I In Dostoevsky's vision of evil the figure of the devil assumes a powerful role and brings to mind the contention that a writer's obsessive concern with the devil can result in "indelible burns" and "incurable wounds." In a trenchant essay, "The Devil in Contemporary Literature," Claude-Edmonde Magny declares that an artist who has too strong a desire to look the devil in the face may even seek "to vie in cunning with him." "Once the mere thought of evil is present in the mind," she goes on to observe, "it loses no time in invading the imagination; then the soul, which has taken delight in the thought, makes a movement towards it, and ends by consenting to it."1 In a more realistic and conciliatory vein, Friedrich Schleiermacher has remarked that the poetic use of the devil is to be accounted the least harmful, and "no disadvantage is to be feared from an emphatic use of this idea in pious moods."2 André Gide, in his Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs, has also expressed a keen interest in this subject (though from another angle of aesthetic vision), pointing out that the devil is best served when he is unperceived. The devil's securest hiding place, Gide stresses, is behind any approach that dismisses him as une puérile simplification, that argues his non-being according to explications rationnelles, and that relegates him to l'hypothèse gratuité.0
