overwhelming, irresistible desire to see the birth of the new man— beautiful, strong, and kind. 141 It is for the sake of creating a perfect human being—Apollonian in body and Mercurian in mind—that Levinson steels himself for doing what is “necessary,” including the requisitioning of a weeping farmer’s last pig and the killing of a wounded comrade too weak to be evacuated. The price he has to pay is as terrible as it is mysterious: “personal responsibility.” Clearly analogous to Christian sin, it was both inescapable and ennobling; the greater the personal responsibility for acts ordinarily considered evil, the more visible the signs of election and the inner strength they bespoke. Demonic as well as Promethean, Bolshevik commissars “carried within them” the pain of historical necessity. 142 In The Commissars by Yuri Libedinsky (Fadeev’s fellow “proletarian writer” and himself a Jew and a commissar), civil war daredevils are brought together for a special course on military discipline and political education. The man in charge of military training is a former tsarist officer (“military expert”); the chief ideologists are the frail but unbending Jews Efim Rozov and Iosif Mindlov. Both are sickly, stooped, pale-lipped, and bespectacled; both “give up hours of sleep to reading Marx”; both know what is necessary; and both have the inner strength to get it done. Rozov, the head of the district’s political department, had been a watchmaker’s apprentice when, in March 1917, he saw those “bent, immobile figures” for the last time. “Still, the watchmaker’s patient and careful dexterity had become a part of his being and proved useful for his work and struggle.” He had become the craftsman of the revolution, the Stolz to its many Oblomovs. “He was different from the unhurried local people. Skinny and short, Rozov moved quickly, abruptly, but without scurrying around, like a knife in the hands of an experienced carver.” His mission is “to look over the commissars as if they had been weapons after a battle, make sure they were not dented, cracked, or rusted, and then sharpen and temper them for the next battle.” 143 All revolutionary detachments needed someone like that. In A. Tarasov- Rodionov’s Chocolate (1922), the martyred Chekist Abram Katzman is stooped, sallow, bespectacled, and hook-nosed; and in Vasily Grossman’s “Four Days,” the grim Commissar Faktorovich despised his feeble body covered with curly black fur. He did not pity or love it—he would not hesitate for a second to ascend a gallows or turn his narrow chest toward a firing squad. Since childhood, his weak flesh had given him nothing but trouble: whooping cough, swollen adenoids, colds,