Second Five-Year Plan

The Second Five-Year Plan appears as a marker in the narrator’s satirical taxonomy of humanists: the Communist writer, he observes, has been loving humanity since the plan began, and punishes in the name of that love. The reference gives the writer’s supposedly timeless devotion a political date, sharpening the narrator’s suspicion that humanitarian ideals can become stock poses.

Historical Reference

The plan is mentioned during a conversation with the Self-Taught Man, who describes his solidarity with ordinary people going to work. He imagines them as the goal of his efforts and says that their presence makes the morning journey feel like a holiday. The narrator recognizes in this profession of universal friendship the familiar language of humanism, but feels that it lacks something genuine.

The Communist Writer in the Catalogue

The narrator sets the Communist writer among several recognizable humanist types. This writer’s love of humanity is dated from the Second Five-Year Plan, and his punitive acts are presented as expressions of love. He conceals his feelings with the modesty attributed to strong men, yet supposedly reveals his devotion through a look or an inflection beneath harsh judgments. The political reference thus anchors the type in a specific historical vocabulary while exposing the tension between benevolent sentiment and coercive action.

Satirical Function

The Communist writer is only one role in a crowded list: the narrator also describes radical, left-wing, Catholic, philosophical, and other varieties of humanist. These figures disagree and hate one another as individuals even as they claim to love humanity. The Self-Taught Man, the narrator suggests, has gathered these incompatible roles within himself without noticing their conflict. The plan’s mention contributes to this wider irony; it is not developed as a political history, but used to date one of the narrator’s caricatures and to question the authenticity of idealized declarations of human solidarity.