1860
These two classes of superfluous men [ The Onegins and the Perchorins], between whom Nature herself raised up a mountain chain of Oblomovs, and History marking out its boundaries, dug a frontier ditch – the very one in which Nicholas is buried- are continually mixed up. And therefore we want, with a partiality like that of Cato for the cause of the vanquished, to champion the older generation. Superfluous men were in those days as essential as it is essential now that there should be none.
Nothing is more lamentable than, in the midst of the growing activity, as yet unorganized and awkward but full of enterprise and initiative, to meet those gaping, unnerved lads whose lose their heads before the toughness of practical work, and expect a gratuitous solution of their difficulties and answers to problems which they have never been able to state clearly.
We will lay aside these volunteers who have appointed themselves superfluous men an, just as the French only recognize as real grenadiers les vieux de la vieille [the old of the old], so we will recognize as honorable and truly superfluous men only those of the reign of Nicholas. We ourselves belong to that unhappy generation and, grasping may years ago that we were superfluous on the banks of the Neva, we very practically made off as soon as the rope was untied.
There is no need for us to defend ourselves, but we are very sorry for our former comrades and want to protect them from the batch of sick that followed them after being discharged from Nicholas’s infirmary.
One cannot but share the healthy, realistic attitude of one of the best Russian reviews in attacking the flimsy moral point of view which in the French style seeks personal responsibility for public events. Historical strata can no more be judged by the criminal court than geological ones. And men who say that one ought not to bring down one’s thunder and lightning on bribe-takers and embezzlers of government funds, but on the environment which takes bribes a zoological characteristic of a whole tribe, of the beardless Russians, for instance, are perfectly right. All we desire is that the superfluous men of Nicholas’ reign should have the rights of bribe-takers and enjoy the privileges granted to the embezzlers of public funds. They are the more deserving of this in that they are not only superfluous but almost dead; and the bribe-takers and embezzlers are alive, and not only prosperous but historically justified.
With whom are we going to fight here? Whom have we to ridicule? On the one hand, men who have fallen from exhaustion; on the other, men crushed by the machine; to blame them for it is as ungenerous as to blame the scrofulous and lymphatic children for the poorness of their parents blood.
There can only be one serious question; were these morbid phenomena really due to the conditions of their environment, to their circumstances?
I think it can be hardly doubted.
There is no need to repeat how cramped, how panful, was the development of Russia. We were kept in ignorance by the knout and the Tartars: we were civilized by the axe and by Germans: but in both cases our nostrils were slit and we were branded with irons. Peter I drove civilization into us it such a wedge that Russia could not stand it and split into to layers. We are hardly beginning now, after a hundred and fifty years, to understand how this split diverged. There was nothing in common between the two parts; on the one side there was robbery and contempt; on the other side, suffering and mistrust; on the one side, the liveried lackey, proud of his social position and haughtily displaying it; on the other, the plundering peasant, hating him and concealing his hatred. Never did Turk, slaughtering men and carrying off women to his harem, oppress so systematically, nor disdain the Frank and the Greek so insolently, as did the Russia of the nobility despise the Russia of the peasant,. There is no other instance in history of a caste of the same race getting the upper hand so thoroughly and becoming so completely alien as our class of upper government servants.
The renegade always goes to the extreme, to the absurd and the revolting, to the point at last of clapping a man in prison because, being a writer, he wears a Russian dress, refusing to let him enter an eating house because he is wearing a caftan and is girt with a sash. This is colossal and reminds one of Indian Asia.
On the borders of these savagely opposed worlds strange phenomena developed, whose very distortion points to latent forces, ill at ease and seeking something different. The Raskolniki and the Decembrists stand foremost among them, and they are followed by all the Westerners and Easterners, the Onegins and the Lenskys, the superfluous and the jaundiced. All of them, like Old Testament prophets, were at once and protest and a hope. By them Russia was exerting itself to escape from the Petrine period, or to digest it to her real body and her healthy flesh. These pathological formations called forth by the conditions the life of the period pass away without fail when the conditions are changed, just as now superfluous men have already passed away; but it does not follow that they deserve judgment and condemnation unless from their younger comrades in the Service. And this is on the same principle on which one of the inmates of Bedlam pointed with indignation at a patient who called himself the Apostle Paul, while he, who was Christ himself, knew for certain that the other was not the Apostle Paul but simply a shopkeeper from Fleet Street.
Let us recall how superfluous men were evolved..
The executions of 13th July, 1826, at the Kronverk wall could not at once check or change the current ideas of the time, and as fact the traditions of the reign of Alexander and the Decembrists persisted through the first half of Nicholas’s thirty year reign, though disappearing from sight and turning inward. Children caught in schools dared to hold their heads erect, for they did not yet know they were the prisoners of education.
They were the same when they left school.
These were far different from the serene, self-confident, enthusiastic ads, open to every impression, that Pushkin and Pushkin appear to us to have been when they were leaving the Lycee. They have neither the proud, unbending, overwhelming daring of a Lunin, nor the dissolute profligacy of a Polezhayev, nor the melancholy serenity of Venevitinov. But yet they kept the faith inherited from their fathers, and elder brothers, the faith that ‘It will rise – the dawn of enchanting happiness, the faith in Western liberalism in which all then believed- Lafayette, Godefroy Cavaignac, Borne and Heine. Frightened and disconsolate, they dreamed of escaping from their false and unhappy situation. This was that last hope which every one of us has felt before the death of one we love. Only doctrinaires (red or parti-colored- it makes no difference) readily accept the most terrible conclusions because properly speaking they accept them in effigie, on paper.
Meanwhile every event, every year, confirmed for them the frightful truth that not only the government was against them, with gallows and spies, with the iron hoop with which the hangman compressed Pestel’s head, and with Nicholas putting this hoop on all Russia, but that the people too, were not with tem, or at least were completely strangers to them. If the people were discontent, the objects of their discontent were different. Together with this crushing recognition they suffered, on the other hand, from growing doubt of the most fundamental, unshakeable principles of West European opinion. The ground was giving way under their feet; and in this perplexity they were forced actually to enter the Service or to fold their arms and become superfluous, idle. We venture to assert that this is one of the most tragic situations in the world. Now these superfluous men are an anachronism, but of course Royer-Collard or Benjamin Constant would also be an anachronism now. However, one must not cast a stone at them for that.
While mean’s minds were kept in distress and painful irresolution, not knowing where to find an escape or in what direction to move, Nicholas went his way with dull, elemental obstinacy, trampling down the cornfields and every sign of growth. A maser at his craft, he began from the year 1831 to make war on the children; he grasped that he must erode everything human in the years of childhood in order to make faithful subjects in his own image and after his likeness. The upbringing of which he dreamed was organized. A simple word, a simple gesture was reckoned as much an insolence and a crime as an open neck or an unbuttoned collar. And this massacre of the souls of innocents went on for thirty years!
Nicholas –reflected in every inspector, every school director, every tutor and guardian- confronted the boy at school, in the street, in church, even to some extent in the parental home, stood and gazed at him with pewtery, unloving eyes, and the child’s heart ached and grew faint with fear that those eyes might detect some budding of free thought, some human feeling.
And who knows what chemical change in the composition of a child’s blood and nervous system is caused by intimidation, by the checking or dissimulation of speech, by the repression of feeling?
The terrified parents helped Nicholas in his task; to save their children by ignorance, they concealed from them their one noble memory. The younger generation grew up without traditions, without a future, except a career in the Service. The government office and the barracks little by little conquered the drawing room and society; aristocrats turned gendarmes. Kleinmikhelas turned aristocrats; the narrow minded personality of Nicholas was gradually imprinted on everything, vulgarizing everything and giving everything an official, governmental aspect.
Of course, in all this unhappiness, not everything perished. No one plague, not-even the Thirty Years War, exterminated everyone. Man is a tough creature. The demand for human progress, the striving for independent initiative, survived, and most of all in the two Macedonian phalanxes of our civilization. Moscow University and the Tsarskoye Selo Lycee. On their youthful shoulders they carried across the whole kingdom of dead souls the Ark in which lay the Russia of the future; they carried her living thought, her living faith in what was to come.
History will not forget them.
But in this conflict they too lost, for the most part, the youthfulness of their early years: they were overstrained, grew over-ripe too soon. Old age was on them before their legal coming of age. These were no idle, not superfluous men; these were exasperated men, sick in body and soul, men wasted by the affronts they had endured, who looked everything askance, and were unable to rid themselves of the bile and venom accumulated more than five years before. They offer a manifest step forward, but still it is a sickly step; this is no longer a heavy, chronic lethargy, but an acute suffering which must be followed by recovery or the grave.
The superfluous men have left the stage, and the jaundiced, who are more angry with the superfluous than any, will follow them. Indeed, they will be gone very soon. They are too morose, and they get too much on one’s nerves, to stand their ground for long. The world, in spite of eighteen centuries of Christian contrition, is in a very heathen fashion devoted to epicureanism and a la longue cannot put up with the depressing face of the Daniels of the Neva, who gloomily reproach men for dining without gnashing their teeth, and for enjoying pictures or music without remembering the misfortunes of this world.
Their relief is on the way; already we see men of quite a different stamp, with untried powers and stalwart muscles, appearing from remote universities, from the sturdy in Ukraine, from the sturdy north-east, and perhaps we old folks may yet have the luck to hold out a hand across the sickly generation to the fresh stock, who will briefly bid us farewell and go on their broad road.
We have studied the type of jaundiced men, not on the spot, and not from books: we have studied it in specimens who have crossed the Neman and sometimes the Rhine since 1850.
The first thing that struck us in them was the ease with which they despaired of everything, the vindictive pleasure of their renunciation, their terrible ruthlessness. After the events of 1848 they were at once set on a eight from which they saw the defeat of the republic and the revolution, thee regression of civilization, and the insulting of banners – and they could feel no compassion for the unknown fighters. Where the likes of us stopped short, tried to restore animation, and looked to see if there was no spark in life, the went farther through the desert of logical deduction and easily arrived at those final, abrupt conclusions which are alarming in their radical audacity but which, like spirits of the dead, are but the essence gone out of life, not life itself. In these conclusions the Russian on the whole enjoys terrific advantage over the European; he has in this no tradition, no habit, nothing germane to him to lose. The man who has no property of his own or of others passes most safely along dangerous roads.
The emancipation from everything traditional fell to the lot not of healthy, youthful characters but of men whose heart and soul had been stained in every in every fiber. After 1848 there was no living in Petersburg. The autocracy had reached the Hercules’s Pillars of absurdity; they had reached the instructions issued to teachers at the military academies, Buturlins scheme for closing the universities and the signature of the censor Yelagin on patterns for stencils. Can one wonder that the young men who broke out of this catacomb were crazy and sick?
Then they faded before their summer, knowing no free scope, nothing of frank speech. They bore on their countenances deep traces of soul roughly handled and wounded. Every one of them had some tic, and apart from that personal tic they all had one in common, a devouring, irritable and distorted vanity. The denial of every personal right, the insults, the humiliations they had endured evolved a secret claim to admiration; these underdeveloped prodigies, these unsuccessful geniuses, concealed themselves under a mask of of humility and modesty. All of them were hypochondriacs and physically ill, did not drink wine, and were afraid of open windows; all looked with studied despair at the present; they reminded one of monks who from love of their neighbor came to hating all humanity and cursed everything in the world from the desire to bless something.
One half of them were constantly repenting, the other half constantly chastising.
Yes, deep scars had been left on their souls. The world of Petersburg in which they had lived was reflected in themselves; it was thence they took their restless tone, their language – saccade, yet suddenly deliquescing into bureaucratic twaddle- their shuffling meekness and haughty fault-finding, their intentional aridity and readiness on any occasion to blackguard one, their offensive acceptance of accusations in front of everyone, and the uneasy intolerance of the director of a department.
This knack of administering a reprimand in the style of a director, utter contemptuously with eyes screwed up, is more repugnant to us than the husky shout of a general, which is like the deep bark of a steady old dog, who growls in deference to his social position rather than from spite.
Tone is not a matter of no importance.
Das was innen- das its drauussen!
Extremely kind at heart and noble in tendency, they, I mean our jaundiced men – might be their tone drive an angel to fighting and a saint to cursing. Moreover, they exaggerate everything in the world with such aplomb – and not to amuse but to mortify – that there simply no bearing it. Every time anyone mentions a mole-hill they will start talking darkly about mountain.
‘Why do you defend these sluggards’ (a jaundiced friend, sehr ausgeziechnet in seine Fache, said to us lately), ‘parasites, drones, white-handed spongers a la Oneghine? . . .They were formed differently, please observe, and the world surrounding them is too dirty for them, not polished enough; they will dirty their hands, they will dirty their feet. It was was much nicer to go on moaning over their happy situation and at the same time eat and drink in comfort.’
We put in a word for our classification of the superfluous men into those of the Old Disposition and those of the New. But our Daniel would not hear of a distinction: he would have nothing to say to the Oblomovs nor to the fact that Nicholas cast in bronze had been gathered to his fathers, and just for that reason had been cast in bronze. On the contrary, he attacked us for our defense and, shrugging his shoulders, said he looked upon us as on a fine skeleton of a mammoth, as at an interesting bone that had been dug up and belonged to a world with a different sun and different trees.
‘Allow me on that ground and in the character of a Homo Benckendorfi testis to defend my fellow fossil. Surely you do not really think that these men did nothing, or did something absurd, of their own choice?’
‘Without any doubt; they were romantics and aristocrats; they hated work, they would have thought themselves degraded if they had taken up an axe or an awl, and it is true they would not have known how to use them.’
‘In that case I will quote names: for instance, Chaadayev. He did not know how to use an axe but he knew how to write an article which jolted the whole of Russia, and was a turning point in our understanding of ourselves. That article was a first step in the literary career. You know what came of it. A German, Wiegel, took offense on behalf of Russia, the Protestant and future Catholic Benckendorf took offense on behalf of Orthodoxy, and by the lie of the Most High, Chaadayev was declared mad and forced to sign an undertaking not to write. Nadezhdin, who published the article in the Telescope, was banished to Ust-Sysolsk; Boldyrev, the old rector, was dismissed: Chaadayev became an idle man. I grant that Ivan Kireyevsky could not make boots, yet he could published magazine; he published two numbers and the magazine was forbidden; he contributed an article to the Dennitsa, and the censor, Glinka, was put in custody: Kireyevsky became a superfluous man. N. Polevoy can not, of course, be charged with idleness; he was a resourceful man, and yet the wings of the Telegraph were clipped, and, I confess my feebleness, when I read how Polevoy told Panayev that he, as a married man, handicapped by a family, was afraid of the police, I did not laugh but almost cried.’
‘But Belinsky could write and Granovsky could give lectures; they did not sit idle.’
‘If there were men of such energy that they could write or give lectures within the sight of the police-troika and the fortress, is it not clear that there were many others of less strength who were paralyzed and suffered deeply from it?’
“Why did they not actually take to making boots or splitting logs? It would have been better than doing nothing.’
“Probably because they had enough money not to be obliged to do such dull work; I have never heard of anyone taking to cobbling for pleasure. Louis XVI is the only example of a king by trade and a locksmith for the love of it. However, you are not the first to observe this lack of practical labor in superfluous men: in order to correct it, our watchful government sent tem to hard labor.”
‘ My fossil friend, I see you still look down upon work.’
‘As on a far from gay necessity.’
These two classes of superfluous men [ The Onegins and the Perchorins], between whom Nature herself raised up a mountain chain of Oblomovs, and History marking out its boundaries, dug a frontier ditch – the very one in which Nicholas is buried- are continually mixed up. And therefore we want, with a partiality like that of Cato for the cause of the vanquished, to champion the older generation. Superfluous men were in those days as essential as it is essential now that there should be none.
Nothing is more lamentable than, in the midst of the growing activity, as yet unorganized and awkward but full of enterprise and initiative, to meet those gaping, unnerved lads whose lose their heads before the toughness of practical work, and expect a gratuitous solution of their difficulties and answers to problems which they have never been able to state clearly.
We will lay aside these volunteers who have appointed themselves superfluous men an, just as the French only recognize as real grenadiers les vieux de la vieille [the old of the old], so we will recognize as honorable and truly superfluous men only those of the reign of Nicholas. We ourselves belong to that unhappy generation and, grasping may years ago that we were superfluous on the banks of the Neva, we very practically made off as soon as the rope was untied.
There is no need for us to defend ourselves, but we are very sorry for our former comrades and want to protect them from the batch of sick that followed them after being discharged from Nicholas’s infirmary.
One cannot but share the healthy, realistic attitude of one of the best Russian reviews in attacking the flimsy moral point of view which in the French style seeks personal responsibility for public events. Historical strata can no more be judged by the criminal court than geological ones. And men who say that one ought not to bring down one’s thunder and lightning on bribe-takers and embezzlers of government funds, but on the environment which takes bribes a zoological characteristic of a whole tribe, of the beardless Russians, for instance, are perfectly right. All we desire is that the superfluous men of Nicholas’ reign should have the rights of bribe-takers and enjoy the privileges granted to the embezzlers of public funds. They are the more deserving of this in that they are not only superfluous but almost dead; and the bribe-takers and embezzlers are alive, and not only prosperous but historically justified.
With whom are we going to fight here? Whom have we to ridicule? On the one hand, men who have fallen from exhaustion; on the other, men crushed by the machine; to blame them for it is as ungenerous as to blame the scrofulous and lymphatic children for the poorness of their parents blood.
There can only be one serious question; were these morbid phenomena really due to the conditions of their environment, to their circumstances?
I think it can be hardly doubted.
There is no need to repeat how cramped, how panful, was the development of Russia. We were kept in ignorance by the knout and the Tartars: we were civilized by the axe and by Germans: but in both cases our nostrils were slit and we were branded with irons. Peter I drove civilization into us it such a wedge that Russia could not stand it and split into to layers. We are hardly beginning now, after a hundred and fifty years, to understand how this split diverged. There was nothing in common between the two parts; on the one side there was robbery and contempt; on the other side, suffering and mistrust; on the one side, the liveried lackey, proud of his social position and haughtily displaying it; on the other, the plundering peasant, hating him and concealing his hatred. Never did Turk, slaughtering men and carrying off women to his harem, oppress so systematically, nor disdain the Frank and the Greek so insolently, as did the Russia of the nobility despise the Russia of the peasant,. There is no other instance in history of a caste of the same race getting the upper hand so thoroughly and becoming so completely alien as our class of upper government servants.
The renegade always goes to the extreme, to the absurd and the revolting, to the point at last of clapping a man in prison because, being a writer, he wears a Russian dress, refusing to let him enter an eating house because he is wearing a caftan and is girt with a sash. This is colossal and reminds one of Indian Asia.
On the borders of these savagely opposed worlds strange phenomena developed, whose very distortion points to latent forces, ill at ease and seeking something different. The Raskolniki and the Decembrists stand foremost among them, and they are followed by all the Westerners and Easterners, the Onegins and the Lenskys, the superfluous and the jaundiced. All of them, like Old Testament prophets, were at once and protest and a hope. By them Russia was exerting itself to escape from the Petrine period, or to digest it to her real body and her healthy flesh. These pathological formations called forth by the conditions the life of the period pass away without fail when the conditions are changed, just as now superfluous men have already passed away; but it does not follow that they deserve judgment and condemnation unless from their younger comrades in the Service. And this is on the same principle on which one of the inmates of Bedlam pointed with indignation at a patient who called himself the Apostle Paul, while he, who was Christ himself, knew for certain that the other was not the Apostle Paul but simply a shopkeeper from Fleet Street.
Let us recall how superfluous men were evolved..
The executions of 13th July, 1826, at the Kronverk wall could not at once check or change the current ideas of the time, and as fact the traditions of the reign of Alexander and the Decembrists persisted through the first half of Nicholas’s thirty year reign, though disappearing from sight and turning inward. Children caught in schools dared to hold their heads erect, for they did not yet know they were the prisoners of education.
They were the same when they left school.
These were far different from the serene, self-confident, enthusiastic ads, open to every impression, that Pushkin and Pushkin appear to us to have been when they were leaving the Lycee. They have neither the proud, unbending, overwhelming daring of a Lunin, nor the dissolute profligacy of a Polezhayev, nor the melancholy serenity of Venevitinov. But yet they kept the faith inherited from their fathers, and elder brothers, the faith that ‘It will rise – the dawn of enchanting happiness, the faith in Western liberalism in which all then believed- Lafayette, Godefroy Cavaignac, Borne and Heine. Frightened and disconsolate, they dreamed of escaping from their false and unhappy situation. This was that last hope which every one of us has felt before the death of one we love. Only doctrinaires (red or parti-colored- it makes no difference) readily accept the most terrible conclusions because properly speaking they accept them in effigie, on paper.
Meanwhile every event, every year, confirmed for them the frightful truth that not only the government was against them, with gallows and spies, with the iron hoop with which the hangman compressed Pestel’s head, and with Nicholas putting this hoop on all Russia, but that the people too, were not with tem, or at least were completely strangers to them. If the people were discontent, the objects of their discontent were different. Together with this crushing recognition they suffered, on the other hand, from growing doubt of the most fundamental, unshakeable principles of West European opinion. The ground was giving way under their feet; and in this perplexity they were forced actually to enter the Service or to fold their arms and become superfluous, idle. We venture to assert that this is one of the most tragic situations in the world. Now these superfluous men are an anachronism, but of course Royer-Collard or Benjamin Constant would also be an anachronism now. However, one must not cast a stone at them for that.
While mean’s minds were kept in distress and painful irresolution, not knowing where to find an escape or in what direction to move, Nicholas went his way with dull, elemental obstinacy, trampling down the cornfields and every sign of growth. A maser at his craft, he began from the year 1831 to make war on the children; he grasped that he must erode everything human in the years of childhood in order to make faithful subjects in his own image and after his likeness. The upbringing of which he dreamed was organized. A simple word, a simple gesture was reckoned as much an insolence and a crime as an open neck or an unbuttoned collar. And this massacre of the souls of innocents went on for thirty years!
Nicholas –reflected in every inspector, every school director, every tutor and guardian- confronted the boy at school, in the street, in church, even to some extent in the parental home, stood and gazed at him with pewtery, unloving eyes, and the child’s heart ached and grew faint with fear that those eyes might detect some budding of free thought, some human feeling.
And who knows what chemical change in the composition of a child’s blood and nervous system is caused by intimidation, by the checking or dissimulation of speech, by the repression of feeling?
The terrified parents helped Nicholas in his task; to save their children by ignorance, they concealed from them their one noble memory. The younger generation grew up without traditions, without a future, except a career in the Service. The government office and the barracks little by little conquered the drawing room and society; aristocrats turned gendarmes. Kleinmikhelas turned aristocrats; the narrow minded personality of Nicholas was gradually imprinted on everything, vulgarizing everything and giving everything an official, governmental aspect.
Of course, in all this unhappiness, not everything perished. No one plague, not-even the Thirty Years War, exterminated everyone. Man is a tough creature. The demand for human progress, the striving for independent initiative, survived, and most of all in the two Macedonian phalanxes of our civilization. Moscow University and the Tsarskoye Selo Lycee. On their youthful shoulders they carried across the whole kingdom of dead souls the Ark in which lay the Russia of the future; they carried her living thought, her living faith in what was to come.
History will not forget them.
But in this conflict they too lost, for the most part, the youthfulness of their early years: they were overstrained, grew over-ripe too soon. Old age was on them before their legal coming of age. These were no idle, not superfluous men; these were exasperated men, sick in body and soul, men wasted by the affronts they had endured, who looked everything askance, and were unable to rid themselves of the bile and venom accumulated more than five years before. They offer a manifest step forward, but still it is a sickly step; this is no longer a heavy, chronic lethargy, but an acute suffering which must be followed by recovery or the grave.
The superfluous men have left the stage, and the jaundiced, who are more angry with the superfluous than any, will follow them. Indeed, they will be gone very soon. They are too morose, and they get too much on one’s nerves, to stand their ground for long. The world, in spite of eighteen centuries of Christian contrition, is in a very heathen fashion devoted to epicureanism and a la longue cannot put up with the depressing face of the Daniels of the Neva, who gloomily reproach men for dining without gnashing their teeth, and for enjoying pictures or music without remembering the misfortunes of this world.
Their relief is on the way; already we see men of quite a different stamp, with untried powers and stalwart muscles, appearing from remote universities, from the sturdy in Ukraine, from the sturdy north-east, and perhaps we old folks may yet have the luck to hold out a hand across the sickly generation to the fresh stock, who will briefly bid us farewell and go on their broad road.
We have studied the type of jaundiced men, not on the spot, and not from books: we have studied it in specimens who have crossed the Neman and sometimes the Rhine since 1850.
The first thing that struck us in them was the ease with which they despaired of everything, the vindictive pleasure of their renunciation, their terrible ruthlessness. After the events of 1848 they were at once set on a eight from which they saw the defeat of the republic and the revolution, thee regression of civilization, and the insulting of banners – and they could feel no compassion for the unknown fighters. Where the likes of us stopped short, tried to restore animation, and looked to see if there was no spark in life, the went farther through the desert of logical deduction and easily arrived at those final, abrupt conclusions which are alarming in their radical audacity but which, like spirits of the dead, are but the essence gone out of life, not life itself. In these conclusions the Russian on the whole enjoys terrific advantage over the European; he has in this no tradition, no habit, nothing germane to him to lose. The man who has no property of his own or of others passes most safely along dangerous roads.
The emancipation from everything traditional fell to the lot not of healthy, youthful characters but of men whose heart and soul had been stained in every in every fiber. After 1848 there was no living in Petersburg. The autocracy had reached the Hercules’s Pillars of absurdity; they had reached the instructions issued to teachers at the military academies, Buturlins scheme for closing the universities and the signature of the censor Yelagin on patterns for stencils. Can one wonder that the young men who broke out of this catacomb were crazy and sick?
Then they faded before their summer, knowing no free scope, nothing of frank speech. They bore on their countenances deep traces of soul roughly handled and wounded. Every one of them had some tic, and apart from that personal tic they all had one in common, a devouring, irritable and distorted vanity. The denial of every personal right, the insults, the humiliations they had endured evolved a secret claim to admiration; these underdeveloped prodigies, these unsuccessful geniuses, concealed themselves under a mask of of humility and modesty. All of them were hypochondriacs and physically ill, did not drink wine, and were afraid of open windows; all looked with studied despair at the present; they reminded one of monks who from love of their neighbor came to hating all humanity and cursed everything in the world from the desire to bless something.
One half of them were constantly repenting, the other half constantly chastising.
Yes, deep scars had been left on their souls. The world of Petersburg in which they had lived was reflected in themselves; it was thence they took their restless tone, their language – saccade, yet suddenly deliquescing into bureaucratic twaddle- their shuffling meekness and haughty fault-finding, their intentional aridity and readiness on any occasion to blackguard one, their offensive acceptance of accusations in front of everyone, and the uneasy intolerance of the director of a department.
This knack of administering a reprimand in the style of a director, utter contemptuously with eyes screwed up, is more repugnant to us than the husky shout of a general, which is like the deep bark of a steady old dog, who growls in deference to his social position rather than from spite.
Tone is not a matter of no importance.
Das was innen- das its drauussen!
Extremely kind at heart and noble in tendency, they, I mean our jaundiced men – might be their tone drive an angel to fighting and a saint to cursing. Moreover, they exaggerate everything in the world with such aplomb – and not to amuse but to mortify – that there simply no bearing it. Every time anyone mentions a mole-hill they will start talking darkly about mountain.
‘Why do you defend these sluggards’ (a jaundiced friend, sehr ausgeziechnet in seine Fache, said to us lately), ‘parasites, drones, white-handed spongers a la Oneghine? . . .They were formed differently, please observe, and the world surrounding them is too dirty for them, not polished enough; they will dirty their hands, they will dirty their feet. It was was much nicer to go on moaning over their happy situation and at the same time eat and drink in comfort.’
We put in a word for our classification of the superfluous men into those of the Old Disposition and those of the New. But our Daniel would not hear of a distinction: he would have nothing to say to the Oblomovs nor to the fact that Nicholas cast in bronze had been gathered to his fathers, and just for that reason had been cast in bronze. On the contrary, he attacked us for our defense and, shrugging his shoulders, said he looked upon us as on a fine skeleton of a mammoth, as at an interesting bone that had been dug up and belonged to a world with a different sun and different trees.
‘Allow me on that ground and in the character of a Homo Benckendorfi testis to defend my fellow fossil. Surely you do not really think that these men did nothing, or did something absurd, of their own choice?’
‘Without any doubt; they were romantics and aristocrats; they hated work, they would have thought themselves degraded if they had taken up an axe or an awl, and it is true they would not have known how to use them.’
‘In that case I will quote names: for instance, Chaadayev. He did not know how to use an axe but he knew how to write an article which jolted the whole of Russia, and was a turning point in our understanding of ourselves. That article was a first step in the literary career. You know what came of it. A German, Wiegel, took offense on behalf of Russia, the Protestant and future Catholic Benckendorf took offense on behalf of Orthodoxy, and by the lie of the Most High, Chaadayev was declared mad and forced to sign an undertaking not to write. Nadezhdin, who published the article in the Telescope, was banished to Ust-Sysolsk; Boldyrev, the old rector, was dismissed: Chaadayev became an idle man. I grant that Ivan Kireyevsky could not make boots, yet he could published magazine; he published two numbers and the magazine was forbidden; he contributed an article to the Dennitsa, and the censor, Glinka, was put in custody: Kireyevsky became a superfluous man. N. Polevoy can not, of course, be charged with idleness; he was a resourceful man, and yet the wings of the Telegraph were clipped, and, I confess my feebleness, when I read how Polevoy told Panayev that he, as a married man, handicapped by a family, was afraid of the police, I did not laugh but almost cried.’
‘But Belinsky could write and Granovsky could give lectures; they did not sit idle.’
‘If there were men of such energy that they could write or give lectures within the sight of the police-troika and the fortress, is it not clear that there were many others of less strength who were paralyzed and suffered deeply from it?’
“Why did they not actually take to making boots or splitting logs? It would have been better than doing nothing.’
“Probably because they had enough money not to be obliged to do such dull work; I have never heard of anyone taking to cobbling for pleasure. Louis XVI is the only example of a king by trade and a locksmith for the love of it. However, you are not the first to observe this lack of practical labor in superfluous men: in order to correct it, our watchful government sent tem to hard labor.”
‘ My fossil friend, I see you still look down upon work.’
‘As on a far from gay necessity.’
Why should they have not shared in the general necessity?’
‘No doubt they should, but in the first place they were born not in North America but in Russia, and unluckily were not brought up to it.’
‘Why were they not brought up to it?’
‘Because they were not born in the tax-paying classes of Russia but in the gentry; perhaps that really is reprehensible, but being at that period in the inexperienced condition of cecaria they cannot, owing to their tender years, be responsible for their conduct. And having once made this mistake in the choice of their parents, they were bound to submit to the education of the tide. By the way, what right have you to demand of men that they should do one thing or another? This is some new compulsory organization of labor; something in the style of socialism transferred to the methods of the Ministry of State Property.’
‘ I don’t compel anyone to work; I simply state the fact that they were idle, futile aristocrats who led an easy and comfortable life, and I see no reason for sympathizing with them.’
‘Whether they deserve sympathy or not let each person decide for himself. All human suffering, especially if it is inevitable, awakens our sympathy, and there is no sort of suffering to which one could refuse it. The martyrs of the early centuries of Christendom believed in redemption and in a future life. The Roman Mukhanovs, Timashevs and Luzhins tried to compel the Christians to bow down in the dust before the august image of the Caesar; the Christians would not make this trivial concession and they were hunted down by beasts. They were mad; the Romans were half-witted, and there is no placed here for sympathy or surprise . . . But then farewell, not only to Thermopylae and Golgatha but also to Sophocles and Shakespeare, and incidentally to the whole long, endless epic poem which is continually ending in frenzied tragedies and continually going on again under the title of history.’
‘No doubt they should, but in the first place they were born not in North America but in Russia, and unluckily were not brought up to it.’
‘Why were they not brought up to it?’
‘Because they were not born in the tax-paying classes of Russia but in the gentry; perhaps that really is reprehensible, but being at that period in the inexperienced condition of cecaria they cannot, owing to their tender years, be responsible for their conduct. And having once made this mistake in the choice of their parents, they were bound to submit to the education of the tide. By the way, what right have you to demand of men that they should do one thing or another? This is some new compulsory organization of labor; something in the style of socialism transferred to the methods of the Ministry of State Property.’
‘ I don’t compel anyone to work; I simply state the fact that they were idle, futile aristocrats who led an easy and comfortable life, and I see no reason for sympathizing with them.’
‘Whether they deserve sympathy or not let each person decide for himself. All human suffering, especially if it is inevitable, awakens our sympathy, and there is no sort of suffering to which one could refuse it. The martyrs of the early centuries of Christendom believed in redemption and in a future life. The Roman Mukhanovs, Timashevs and Luzhins tried to compel the Christians to bow down in the dust before the august image of the Caesar; the Christians would not make this trivial concession and they were hunted down by beasts. They were mad; the Romans were half-witted, and there is no placed here for sympathy or surprise . . . But then farewell, not only to Thermopylae and Golgatha but also to Sophocles and Shakespeare, and incidentally to the whole long, endless epic poem which is continually ending in frenzied tragedies and continually going on again under the title of history.’
No comments:
Post a Comment