Assessing Russian national character or behavior from the novels
presents a greater problem than that found in any other national
literature. One must first separate Russian Communism from the Russian
people. In the same way one must distinguish the old Russian from the
new. And this dichotomy has to be made after the Revolution as well as
before it. Turgenev’s fathers are hardly more different from their sons
than are Koestler’s Old Guard from the Neanderthalers they have sired.
When Rubashov’s old comrade Ivanov is shot, Gletkin replaces him as
interrogator. Rubashov looks at the shaven skull, appraising the huge
ominous figure in the stiff heavy uniform: “You consequential brute in
the uniform we created--barbarian of the new age which is now starting.”
The pattern of Russian political behavior which emerges from the novel
is filled with more violence, more misery, more oppression than that
of any other national group. The dying Stepan Verhovensky described
Russia in _The Possessed_ as a “great invalid” inhabited by devils
and plagued with impurities, sores, and foul contagions. This Czarist
Russia is a land in which “harmless ... higher liberalism” is possible,
but it is also a country in which serfs live in incredible poverty and
aristocrats live in oriental splendor. Within this social structure,
whose opposite ends are separated by an even greater distance than the
rich and poor of Italy, the forces of destruction are already at work.
The basic situation reveals opposed characteristics: authoritarianism
on the ruling level, immense capacity for dumb suffering in the
submerged masses, and an intense drive toward a reorientation of the
social structure on the part of the militant intellectuals. These
factors, on a smaller scale, are to be found in other literatures. But
Dostoyevsky also portrays a conflict peculiar to Russia. It is the
struggle between those culturally oriented toward the West and the
Slavophiles who reject its influence. A Slavophile himself, Dostoyevsky
seems to speak through Shatov, who says that the Russians are “the only
‘god-bearing’ people on earth, destined to regenerate and save the
world in the name of a new God, and to whom are given the keys of life
and of the new world....” This extreme national consciousness pervades
these novels, whether it is expressed in terms of a messianic mission
or a deep sympathy for a people with a tragic history.
Conrad, in _Under Western Eyes_, made a definite effort to assess
the Russian character. He felt, though, that this was an extremely
difficult task in which the language barrier was the least of the
obstacles which stood in the way of understanding. He describes
Russians as great players with words, manipulators of abstract ideas.
He feels that in other areas their behavior, like that of Nathalia
Haldin, is sometimes almost incomprehensible. His narrator says:
I knew her well enough to have discovered her scorn for all the
practical forms of political liberty known to the Western world.
I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity,
a terrible, corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe
a naïve and hopeless cynicism. I think sometimes that the
psychological secret of the profound difference of that people
consists in this that they detest life, the irremediable life of
the earth as it is, whereas we Westerners cherish it with perhaps
an equal exaggeration of its sentimental value.
Nathalia tells the old teacher that “the shadow of autocracy”
hangs over each Russian, much as does its more substantial modern
counterpart, the Soviet MVD. Razumov is another Slavophile who believes
that Russia is sacred. But later Conrad returns to the subject of
Russian incomprehensibility when he says that Western ears “are not
attuned to certain tones of cynicism and cruelty of moral negation, and
even of moral distress already silenced at our end of Europe.”
Koestler’s two novels considered here describe Russia after the deluge.
The bloodbaths have changed the names and faces, but the same moral
negation is there. More accurately, there is not even a negation,
for there is no positive assertion of moral values to negate. The
doctrine that history has no conscience had removed for the Soviets
the need for moral reference points. As a result, they had sailed
without the ethical ballast that Rubashov, at the end of his life,
decided was essential. In his judgment this was the fatal break in
the logical chain which caused the betrayal of the revolution which
Mailer mourned in _Barbary Shore_. In this case, perhaps, history is
character. The span of events covered by these novels might even be
graphed. The line would form itself into two low plateaus separated by
a single tremendous peak. This eminence would represent the ill-fated
revolt against tyranny. On either side would be the depths in which a
people was submerged with not quite passive suffering under a rigid,
repressive rule made possible by a long historical pattern and the mass
conditioning to obedience which it produced.