He was alone
in his room, but in his mind, in his thoughts, he was talking to Anna Sergeyevna”:
Do you know? At the very worst of times I imagined being embraced by a woman. I used to imagine this embrace as something so wonderful that it would make me forget everything I had been through. It would be as if nothing of it had ever happened. But it turns out that it’s you that I have to talk to, that it’s you I have to tell about the very worse time of all. . .
It was a conversation in a prison cell, at dawn, after an interrogation. One of my cell mates – he’s no longer alive, he died soon after – was called Aleksey Samoilovich. I think he was the most intelligent man I’ve ever met. But he frightened me, I found his mind very frightening. Not because it was evil – an evil mind is not really frightening. His mind wasn’t evil, but indifferent and mocking; he mocked faith. He appalled me but, more important, he also attracted me. It was if I were being sucked in, and I could do nothing about it. I couldn’t make him share my faith in freedom.
His life had gone badly for him, but there was nothing special about it. It was no different from the lives of many other people. He had been accused of spreading anti-Soviet propaganda – Article 58, Section 10, the most common accusation of all.
I was brought back from my cell after being interrogated. What a list one could make of techniques of violence; burning at the stake, today’s prison fortresses the size of a provincial capital, and the labor camps themselves. The original instruments of capital punishment were a hemp rope and a club that crushed your head; nowadays, though, an executioner just turns on the master switch and does away with a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand people. There is no need to raise an axe. Our age is an age of supreme violence on the part of the State – supreme violence against the individual human being. But in this lies our strength and hope. It is the twentieth century that has shaken Hegel’s principle of the rationality of the world historical process, of the rationality of everything that is real. After decades of troubled debate, nineteenth-century Russian thinkers came to accept this principle, but now at the height of the State’s triumph over human freedom, Russian thinkers in padded jackets are overturning Hegel’s principle and proclaiming this supreme principle of universal history; ‘All that is inhuman is senseless and useless.’
Yes, yes, yes, at this time of total triumph of inhumanity it has become clear that everything created by violence is senseless and useless. It exists without a future; it will leave no trace.
This was my faith and with it I returned to my cell. I am lying half dead on the bedboards, and the only thing alive in me is my faith: my belief that human history is the history of freedom, of the movement from less freedom to more freedom; my belief that the history of life – from the amoeba to the human race – is the history of freedom, of the movement from less freedom to more freedom; my belief that life itself is freedom. And this faith gives me strength, and I keep turning over in my mind a precious, luminous, and wonderful thought that has been hidden in our prison rags. As if with my hands, I keep exploring this thought; ‘All that is inhuman is senseless and useless.’
Do you know? At the very worst of times I imagined being embraced by a woman. I used to imagine this embrace as something so wonderful that it would make me forget everything I had been through. It would be as if nothing of it had ever happened. But it turns out that it’s you that I have to talk to, that it’s you I have to tell about the very worse time of all. . .
It was a conversation in a prison cell, at dawn, after an interrogation. One of my cell mates – he’s no longer alive, he died soon after – was called Aleksey Samoilovich. I think he was the most intelligent man I’ve ever met. But he frightened me, I found his mind very frightening. Not because it was evil – an evil mind is not really frightening. His mind wasn’t evil, but indifferent and mocking; he mocked faith. He appalled me but, more important, he also attracted me. It was if I were being sucked in, and I could do nothing about it. I couldn’t make him share my faith in freedom.
His life had gone badly for him, but there was nothing special about it. It was no different from the lives of many other people. He had been accused of spreading anti-Soviet propaganda – Article 58, Section 10, the most common accusation of all.
I was brought back from my cell after being interrogated. What a list one could make of techniques of violence; burning at the stake, today’s prison fortresses the size of a provincial capital, and the labor camps themselves. The original instruments of capital punishment were a hemp rope and a club that crushed your head; nowadays, though, an executioner just turns on the master switch and does away with a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand people. There is no need to raise an axe. Our age is an age of supreme violence on the part of the State – supreme violence against the individual human being. But in this lies our strength and hope. It is the twentieth century that has shaken Hegel’s principle of the rationality of the world historical process, of the rationality of everything that is real. After decades of troubled debate, nineteenth-century Russian thinkers came to accept this principle, but now at the height of the State’s triumph over human freedom, Russian thinkers in padded jackets are overturning Hegel’s principle and proclaiming this supreme principle of universal history; ‘All that is inhuman is senseless and useless.’
Yes, yes, yes, at this time of total triumph of inhumanity it has become clear that everything created by violence is senseless and useless. It exists without a future; it will leave no trace.
This was my faith and with it I returned to my cell. I am lying half dead on the bedboards, and the only thing alive in me is my faith: my belief that human history is the history of freedom, of the movement from less freedom to more freedom; my belief that the history of life – from the amoeba to the human race – is the history of freedom, of the movement from less freedom to more freedom; my belief that life itself is freedom. And this faith gives me strength, and I keep turning over in my mind a precious, luminous, and wonderful thought that has been hidden in our prison rags. As if with my hands, I keep exploring this thought; ‘All that is inhuman is senseless and useless.’
Aleksey
Samoilovich hears me out, half alive as I am and says “That’s just a comforting
lie. The history of life is the history of violence triumphant. Violence is
eternal and indestructible. It can change shape, but it does not disappear or
diminish. Even the word ‘history,’ even the concept of history is just
something people have dreamed up. There is no such thing as history. History is
milling the wind; history is grinding water with a pestle. Thinkers
mistake its constant chaotic transformations
for evolution and search for its laws. But chaos knows no laws, no evolution,
no meaning, and no aim. Man does not evolve from lower to higher. Man is as motionless as a slab of granite. His
goodness, his intelligence, his degree of freedom are motionless; the humanity
in humanity does not increase. What history of humanity can there be if man’s
goodness always stands still?”
And, you know, it felt as if nothing in the world can be worse than all this. I’m lying on the bedboards and, dear God, I start to feel an anguish that is more than I can bear – all from talking to one very clever man. It feels like death, like an execution. Even breathing feels more than I can bear. I only want one thing: not to see, not to hear, not to breathe. To die. But relief came from a quite unexpected direction. I was dragged off again to be interrogated. They didn’t give me time to get my breath back. And I felt better, I felt relieved. Freedom, I knew again, is inevitable. To hell with the troikas that fly, thunder and sign death warrants. Freedom and Russia will be united!
And, you know, it felt as if nothing in the world can be worse than all this. I’m lying on the bedboards and, dear God, I start to feel an anguish that is more than I can bear – all from talking to one very clever man. It feels like death, like an execution. Even breathing feels more than I can bear. I only want one thing: not to see, not to hear, not to breathe. To die. But relief came from a quite unexpected direction. I was dragged off again to be interrogated. They didn’t give me time to get my breath back. And I felt better, I felt relieved. Freedom, I knew again, is inevitable. To hell with the troikas that fly, thunder and sign death warrants. Freedom and Russia will be united!
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