away, he would forget about his own physical weakness and come to believe that he was as tough and tireless as Metelitsa. He was even secretly proud that a man like that was under his command. 139 The reason a man like that is under his command is that Levinson belongs to the chosen. It was not always clear whether conscious Communists received true knowledge because they were naturally endowed with special qualities (such as an innate sense of justice or an iron will), or whether they developed special qualities as a consequence of receiving true knowledge (through sudden illumination, mortification of the flesh, or formal apprenticeship). Either way, their election as interpreters of the gospel and leaders of the masses was revealed through visible bodily signs, usually the combination of physical corruption and the penetrating gaze so typical of iconic Jews (as well as Christian saints and intelligentsia martyrs). Levinson, for one, had renounced all falsehood when he was a “feeble Jewish boy” with “big naive eyes” staring with “peculiar, un- childlike intentness” from an old family photograph. He never lost that gift: Levinson’s “unblinking eyes” could pull a man from the crowd “the way pincers could pull out a nail.” “Perfectly clear,” “deep as lakes,” and “otherwordly,” they “took in Morozka [the proletarian daredevil], boots and all, and saw in him many things that Morozka himself was probably unaware of.” 140 Levinson’s clairvoyance, however acquired, allows him to “conquer his frailty and his weak flesh” as he leads the often reluctant people to their salvation. Ideologically, he did not have to be Jewish (most of the elect were not), but there is little doubt that for reasons of both aesthetic and sociological verisimilitude, canonical Jewishness seemed an appropriate expression of the Bolshevik vision of disembodied consciousness triumphing over “Oblomov’s” inertia. “Only here, in our country,” thought Levinson, quickening his pace and puffing even more ferociously at his cigarette, “where millions of people have lived for centuries under the same slow, lazy sun, languishing in filth and poverty, plowing with antediluvian wooden plows, believing in an angry and stupid god—only in a country like this can such lazy and weak- willed, such good-for-nothing people be born. . . .” Levinson grew very agitated because these were his deepest, most intimate thoughts; because the defeat of all that poverty and misery constituted the only meaning of his life; because there would have been no Levinson at all, but somebody else, had he not been moved by an