THE SUPERFLUOUS AND THE EMBITTERED

The Onyegins⁠[43] and the Petchorins⁠[44] were perfectly true to life, they expressed the real misery and dislocation of the Russian life of the period. The melancholy type of the superfluous man, lost merely because he had developed into a man, was to be seen in those days not only in poems and novels but in the streets and the villages, in the hotels and the towns.... But the days of the Onyegins and the Petchorins are over. There are no superfluous men now in Russia: on the contrary, now there are not hands enough to till the vast fields that need ploughing. One who does not find work now has no one else to blame for it. He must be really a frivolous person, a wastrel or a sluggard.—‘The Bell,’ 1859, p. 44.

These two classes of superfluous men, between whom Nature herself raised up a high mound of Oblomovs,⁠[45] and History, marking out its boundaries, dug out a ditch—the one in which Nicholas is buried—are continually confounded. And so we want, with a partiality like that of Cato for the cause of the vanquished, to champion the elder generation. Superfluous men were in those days as essential, as it is now essential that there should be none.

Nothing is more lamentable than, in the midst of the growing activity as yet unorganised and awkward, but full of enterprise and initiative, to meet the flustered, nervously overwrought lads who lose their heads before the toughness of practical work, and hope and expect to arrive without effort at a solution of difficulties, and to find answers to problems, which they can never state clearly.

We will lay aside these voluntary superfluous men, and just as the French only recognise as real grenadiers les vieux de la vieille, so we will recognise as honourably and truly superfluous men only these of the reign of Nicholas. We ourselves belong to that unhappy generation, and, grasping very many years ago that we were superfluous on the banks of the Neva, very practically took our departure as soon as the rope was loosened.

There is no need for us to defend ourselves, but we are sorry for our former comrades and want to distinguish them from the batch of invalids that followed them from the hospital of Nicholas.

One cannot but share the healthy realistic attitude of one of the best Russian magazines, in attacking the effete moral point of view which in the French style seeks personal responsibility for public events. Historical formations can no more be judged by a criminal court than geological ones. And men who say that one ought not to direct one’s thunders and lightnings against bribe-takers and embezzlers of Government funds, but at the environment which makes bribes a characteristic symptom of a whole tribe, such as the whole race of beardless Russians for instance, are perfectly right. All we desire is that the superfluous men of Nicholas’s reign should have the rights of bribe-takers and enjoy the privileges granted to the embezzlers of public funds. They deserve it the more, since they are not only superfluous, but almost all dead; while the bribe-takers and embezzlers are alive, and not only prosperous, but historically justified.

Whom have we here to attack, whom have we here 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 scrofulous and lymphatic children for the poorness of their parents’ blood.

There can be but one serious question about them: were these morbid phenomena really due to the conditions of their environment, to their circumstances?...

I think it can hardly be doubted.

There is no need to repeat how cramped, how painful, was the development of Russia.

We were kept in ignorance by the knout and the Tatars: we were civilised by the axe and by Germans: and in both cases our nostrils were slit and we were branded with irons. Peter the Great drove civilisation into us with such a wedge that Russia could not stand the shock and split into two layers. We are only just beginning now, after a hundred and fifty years, to understand how this split was made: there was nothing in common between the two parts; on the one hand, robbery and contempt; on the other, suffering and mistrust: on the one hand, the liveried lackey, proud of his social position and haughtily displaying it; on the other, the plundered 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 privileged class despise the Russia of the peasant. There is no instance in history of a caste of the same race getting the upper hand so thoroughly and becoming so completely alien as our military nobility.

A renegade always goes to the extreme, to the absurd and the revolting, to the point at last of clapping a literary man in prison for wearing the Russian dress, refusing to let him enter a restaurant because he is wearing a kaftan and has a sash tied round his waist. It is colossal, and reminds one of Indian Asia.

On the margins of these savagely opposed worlds strange figures appeared, whose very distortion points to latent forces, cramped and seeking something different. The Raskolniks and Decembrists stand foremost among them, and they are followed by all the Westerners and Easterners, the Onyegins and the Lenskys, superfluous and disillusioned people. All of them, like Old Testament prophets, were at once a protest and a hope. By them Russia was striving to escape from the Petersburg period, or to transform it to her real body and her healthy flesh. These pathological formations called forth by the conditions of the life of the period invariably pass away when the conditions are changed, just as superfluous people have passed away now; but it does not follow that they deserved 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 another inmate who called himself the Apostle Paul, while he who was Christ himself knew that the other was not the Apostle Paul, but simply a shopkeeper from Fleet Street.

Let us recall how superfluous people were evolved.

The hangings of the 13th of July 1826 on the Kronverg Courtyard could not at once check the current of ideas, and as a fact the traditions of the reign of Alexander and the Decembrists persisted through the first half of Nicholas’s reign, though disappearing from sight and turning inwards. Children still at school dared to hold their heads erect, they did not yet know that they were the prisoners of education.

They were the same when they left school.

These were far different from the serene, self-confident, enthusiastic lads, open to every impression, that Pushkin and Pushtchin⁠[46] were when they were leaving the Lyceum. They have neither the proud, unbending, overwhelming daring of a Lunin,⁠[47] nor the dissipated recklessness of a Polezhaev,⁠[48] nor the melancholy serenity of Venevitinov.⁠[49] But yet they preserved the faith inherited from their fathers and elder brothers, the faith that ‘It is coming—the dawn of radiant happiness,’ the faith in Western liberalism in which all—Lafayette, Godefroi Cavaignac, Börne, and Heine—believed. Frightened and disconsolate, they dreamed of escaping from their false and unhappy position. This was like that last hope which every one of us has felt before the death of one we love. Only doctrinaires (whether red or parti-coloured, makes no difference) readily accept the most terrible deductions, because they really accept them in effigy, on paper.

Meanwhile every event, every year, confirmed for them the dreadful truth that not only the Government was against them, with gallows and spies, with the irons with which the torturer compressed Pestel’s head, and with Nicholas putting those irons on all Russia, but that the people, too, were not with them, or at least were completely alien. If the people were discontented, 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 principles of the Western European outlook. The ground was giving way under their feet; and in this perplexity they were forced either to enter the Service or to fold their hands and become superfluous, idle. We venture to assert that this is one of the most tragic positions in the world. Now these superfluous people are an anachronism, but, of course, Royer Collard or Benjamin Constant would be an anachronism now, too. But they cannot be blamed for that.

While men’s minds were kept in misery and painful hesitation, not knowing where to find an outlet, how to move, Nicholas went his way with dull elemental obstinacy, trampling down the tilled fields and every sign of growth. A master in his work, he began from the year 1831 his war upon children; he grasped that he must beat out everything human in the years of childhood, in order to make faithful subjects in his own image and semblance. The training of which he dreamed was organised. A simple word, a simple gesture was reckoned as much an insolence and a crime as an open neck, as an unbuttoned collar. And this torture of the souls of children went on for thirty years!

Nicholas—reflected in every inspector, every school director, every tutor—confronted the boy at school, in the street, in church, even to some extent in the parental home, stood and stared 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 of speech, by the concealment of thought, 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 gradually conquered the drawing-room and society, aristocrats turned gendarmes, Kleinmihels turned aristocrats; the stupid character of Nicholas was gradually imprinted on everything, vulgarising everything and giving everything a formal red-tape aspect.

Of course, in all this misery, not everything perished. No plague, not even the Thirty Years’ War, exterminated every one. Man is a tough creature. The craving for humane culture, the striving for independent initiative, survived, and most of all in the two Macedonian phalanxes of our culture, the Moscow University and the Tsarskoe Syelo Lyceum. On their youthful shoulders they carried across the whole kingdom of dead souls the Ark in which lay the Russia of the future, her living thought, her living faith in what was to come.

History will not forget them.

But in this conflict they lost, for the most part, the youthfulness of their early years: they were overstrained, grew up prematurely. Old age reached them before their legal coming of age. These were not idle, not superfluous people; these were embittered people, sick in body and soul, people who had been wrecked by the insults they had endured, who looked at everything askance, and were unable to shake off the bitterness and venom accumulated more than five years before. They unmistakably stand for a step in advance, but still it is a morbid step; it is no longer a heavy, chronic lethargy, but an acute suffering which must be followed by recovery or death.

The superfluous people have made their exit from the stage, and the embittered, who are more angry with the superfluous than any, will follow them. Indeed, they will be gone very soon. They are too forbidding, and they get too much on one’s nerves to last long. The world, in spite of eighteen centuries of Christian austerities, is in a very heathen fashion devoted to epicureanism and à la longue cannot put up with the depressing faces of Nevsky Daniels, who gloomily reproach them for dining without gnashing their teeth, and for enjoying pictures or music without remembering the troubles of this life.

Others are coming to take their place; already we see men of quite a different stamp, with untried powers and stalwart muscles, coming from remote universities, from the sturdy Ukraine, from the sturdy North-east, and perhaps we old folks may yet have the luck to hold out a hand across a sickly generation to the newcomers, who will briefly bid us farewell and go on their wide road.

We have studied the type of embittered people, not on the spot, and not from books, we have studied it from specimens who have crossed the Nieman and sometimes even 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 denial, and their terrible ruthlessness. After the events of 1848 they saw themselves at once in a superior position, from which they looked down on the defeat of the Republic and the Revolution, on the decay of civilisation, on the defilement of banners, and could feel no compassion for those who still struggled on. Where we stopped short, tried to restore animation, and looked to see if there were no spark of life, they went further into the desert of logical deduction, and easily arrived at those final, violent, abrupt conclusions, which are alarming in their radical audacity, but which, like the spirits of the dead, are but the essence gone out of life, not life itself. In these deductions the Russian enjoys a terrible advantage over the European; he has no traditions, no habits, nothing akin to him to lose. The man who has no wealth of his own or of others goes most safely along dangerous roads.

This emancipation from everything traditional fell to the lot not of healthy youthful characters, but of men whose heart and soul had been strained in every fibre. After 1848 there was no living in Petersburg. The autocracy had reached the Hercules’ Pillars of absurdity; they had reached the instructions issued to teachers at the military academies, Buterlin’s scheme for closing universities, the signature of the censor Yelagin on patterns for stencils. Can one wonder that the young men who broke out of this dungeon were nervous wrecks and invalids?

So they faded without ever blossoming, knowing nothing of space and freedom, nothing of frank speech. They bore on their countenances deep traces of a soul roughly handled and wounded. Every one of them had some special neurosis, and apart from that special neurosis they all had one in common, a sort of devouring, irritable, and distorted vanity. The denial of every right, the insults, the humiliations they had endured developed a secret craving for admiration; these undeveloped prodigies, these unsuccessful geniuses, concealed themselves under a mask 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, and reminded one of monks who from love for their neighbour came to hating all humanity, and cursed everything in the world from desire to bless something.

One half of them were continually remorseful, the other half continually damning and denouncing.

Yes, the iron had entered deeply into their souls. The Petersburg world in which they had lived was imprinted on themselves; it was thence they took their restless tone, their language—saccadé, yet suddenly passing into bureaucratic vapidity—their elusive meekness and haughty fault-finding, their intentional frigidity and readiness on any occasion to break out into abuse, the insulting way in which they scorned to justify themselves, and the uneasy intolerance of the director of a department.

This tone of a director’s reprimand, uttered contemptuously with eyes screwed up, is more hateful to us than the husky shout of the general, like the deep bark of an old dog, who growls in deference to his social position rather than from spite.

Tone is not a matter of no importance.

Das war innen—das ist draussen!

Extremely kind at heart and noble in theory, they, I mean our embittered people, may drive an angel to fighting and a saint to cursing by their tone. Moreover, they exaggerate everything in the world with such aplomb—and not to amuse but to wound—that there is simply no bearing it. To every criticism, to every censure, they are always ready to add gloomier details. ‘Why do you defend these sluggards (an embittered friend, sehr ausgezeichnet in seinem Fache, said to us lately), drones, cumberers of the earth, white-handed laggards à la Onyegin?... They were formed differently, if you please, and the world surrounding them was too dirty for them, not polished enough; they will dirty their hands, they will dirty their feet. It was much nicer to go on moaning over their miserable position, at the same time eating and drinking in comfort.’

We put in a word for our classification of the superfluous people into those of the Old Dispensation 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 defence and, shrugging his shoulders, said that he looked upon us as on the fine skeleton of a mammoth, as at an interesting bone that had been dug up and belonged to a different world with a different sun and different trees.

‘Allow me on that ground and in the character of a Homo Benkendorfii testis to defend our contemporaries. Surely you do not really imagine that these men did nothing, or did something silly of their own choice?’

‘Most certainly; 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, Tchaadayev. He did not know how to use an axe, but he knew how to write an article which thrilled all Russia, and was a turning-point in our understanding of ourselves. That article was his first step in the literary career. You know what came of it. The German Vigel took offence on behalf of Russia, the Protestant and future Catholic Benkendorf took offence on behalf of orthodoxy, and, by the falsehood of the Most High, Tchaadayev was declared mad and forced to sign an undertaking not to write. Nadyezhdin, who published the article in the Telescope, was sent to Ust Sysolsk; the old rector Boldyryev was dismissed: Tchaadayev was turned into an idle man. Granting that Ivan Kireyevsky could not make boots, yet he could publish a magazine; he published two numbers, the magazine was forbidden; he contributed an article to the Dennitsa, and the censor, Glinka, was put in custody: Kireyevsky was turned into a superfluous man. N. Polevoy cannot, of course, be charged with idleness; he was a resourceful man, and yet the wings of the Telegraph were clipped, and, I confess in my weakness, 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 Byelinsky could write and Granovsky could give lectures; they did not sit idle.’

‘If there were men of such energy that they could write and give lectures in sight of the police-chaise and the fortress, is it not clear that there were many others of less strength, who were paralysed and suffered deeply from it?’

‘Why did they not take to making boots or splitting logs—it would have been better than nothing?’

‘Probably because they had money enough 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 carpenter by inclination. However, you are not the first to observe this lack of practical work in these superfluous men; to correct it, our watchful Government sent them to hard labour.’

‘My antediluvian friend, I see that you still look down upon work.’

‘As on a far from entertaining necessity.’

‘Why should they not have taken their share of 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 born, not in the tax-paying classes of Russia, but in the gentry; perhaps that really is reprehensible, but, being at that period in the inexperienced position of unborn infants, they cannot, owing to their tender years, be held 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 day. And by the way, what right have you to demand of men that they should do one thing or another? This is some new compulsory organisation of labour; something in the style of socialism adapted to the methods of the Ministry of Crown Estates.’

‘I don’t compel any one to work; I simply state the fact that they were idle, worthless aristocrats, who led an easy and comfortable life, and I see no reason for sympathising with them.’

‘Whether they deserve sympathy or not, let every one decide for himself. Every 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. They believed in a future life. The Roman Muhanovs, Timashevs, and Luzhins compelled the Christians to bow down in the dust before the august image of the Caesar; the Christians would not make this trivial concession, they were thrown to the beasts in the arena. They were mad, the Romans were half-witted, there is no place here for sympathy or admiration.... But if so, farewell, not only to Thermopylae and Golgotha, but also to Sophocles and Shakespeare, and incidentally the whole long and endless epic poem which is continually ending in frenzied tragedies and continually going on again under the title of history.’

As is usual in argument, our Daniel did not give in. I began to be tired of it and, taking advantage of my palaeontological importance, said to him: ‘Have it your own way, but you know it is a silly business pitching into people who are either dead or not far off dying, and to pitch into them in a society where almost all the living—military and civilian, landowners and priests—are worse than they are; I tell you what, if you are so particularly attracted by censura morum, are so fond of the harsh duty of a moralist, do pick out something original. If you like, I can pick you out types more pernicious than any superfluous persons, dead or living.’

‘What types?’

‘Well, the literary ruffian, for instance.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘In our pale literature, maltreated by the censorship, there have been numbers of queer fishes of all sorts, but until lately they were for the most part clean, honest men. If there were any of the mercenary, the disingenuous, the dealers in false coin and genuine police reports, they were either on the side of the Government, or they scuttled about underground and never crawled into conspicuous places, like the London black beetles, which confine themselves to the kitchen and do not appear in the drawing-room. And so we have preserved a naïve faith in the poet and the writer. We are not used to the thought that it is possible to lie in the spirit and trade in talents, as prostitutes delude with the body and sell their beauty. We are not used to the money-grubbers who make profit out of their tears over the people’s sufferings, or the traders who turn their sympathy for the proletariat into a well-paid article. And there is a great deal that is good in this confidence, which has not existed for years in Western Europe, and we ought all to try and maintain it. Believe me, that the man who denounces duplicity, crying shame and curses upon the disgrace and decay of to-day, and at the same time locks up in his cash-box money evidently stolen from his friends, is in the present ferment of ideas, with our looseness and impressionability, more pernicious and contaminating than all the idle and superfluous people, all the embittered and the lachrymose!’

I do not know whether my Daniel agreed.