Violence and Russian Nationalism in Gogol’s Taras Bulba

Of course, Gogol was a rather odd bird. He had to be, to write such curious little tales as his Nose or Overcoat, which are full of bodies and accessories doing what they aren’t supposed to do, in a city – Saint Petersburg – that seems to have a mind of its own too. But that madness, which most depressingly led him to throw the second part of Dead Souls into the fire, and then try to retrieve it from the flames, and then die, also had its darker side. For Gogol, the most famous writer of Ukrainian heritage, was also a rabid Russian nationalist lunatic who makes even Dostoevsky seem sensible by comparison. In fact, it was for reading the famous response of Nikolai Belinsky, a noted Russian liberal thinker, to Gogol’s miserably moralising hypocritical imperialist codswallop Selected Passages from Correspondence to Friends, that Dostoevsky was sentenced to exile. That, and for being in a terrorist cell. But we digress, however much Gogol would have approved.

I wanted to read Taras Bulba because it seemed the most overtly Ukrainian of Gogol’s works. Unlike the earliest works, it is not designed to sanitise and place in a display cabinet the customs of the Little Russians (as Gogol occasionally refers to them). Rather, by focusing on the Cossacks of the Zaporozhian Sech, I had expected to find in it a work that would fit just as easily into the hands of Ukrainian nationalists. I was mistaken, badly so. This is a book for our times, but not for either side of the present war. If we read it, we will find it hard not to see it as an accidental statement of the hollowness of (Russian) nationalism, and the wastefulness of war and of martial societies. But unlike Tolstoy’s brilliant anti-war Hadji Murat, it seems Gogol stumbled into this all by accident and was only half aware of what he wrote.

Plot

Taras Bulba tells the story of veteran Cossack Taras Bulba and his two children, Andrii and Ostap. It is an earlier century and the boys have returned home from study in Kiev, to their father and mother. One education has been completed, but now it is time for the real one, the one that will turn them into Cossacks, men who are comfortable only when out on the open plains or by the side of the great Dnieper, free and killing indiscriminately. For that is the one-word answer to what the book is about: violence. Taras takes his sons away from their mother after only one night at home and off they head to Zaporozhe, here a kind of travelling circus of macho manliness and bacchanalian delights.

Immediately Taras is bored. He wants violence. He is disappointed to hear that the Cossacks have agreed to stop attacking the native Tatars and tries to work out whom they can fight instead. Luckily, a rumour spreads that the Polish (the Zaporozhian Sech is nominally part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) in conjunction with the hated Jews are destroying the noble Orthodox faith of the people. Great news. The Cossacks mount up and begin a campaign of destruction and slaughter. All is going well until they begin sieging Dubno. Andrii Bulba, who in Kiev had not just learned his Latin and Greek but had also had a fling with a Polish noble’s wife, and is spotted by her again – she is trapped behind the castle’s walls – and brought into the city through a secret tunnel.

The Cossacks are bored by sitting around, waiting for the people to starve to death. Eventually, fighting breaks out, and Taras uses some of the Cossacks to draw Andrii – now a turncoat – into a forest, where he murders him for betraying his fatherland. Unfortunately, by leaving the battlefield, Taras has abandoned his men, and the battle is lost. He himself is captured but miraculously escapes. He then learns that Ostap is alive but has been taken with the other Cossacks to Warsaw, where he will be executed. With the help of a mistreated Jew, Yankel, Taras gets to Warsaw and witnesses Ostap’s execution,  to then disappear before he being caught again.

Of the Cossacks that remain at the Sech none are left of his former comrades. The new leader wants to sign a peace agreement with the Poles, but Taras has none of it. Taking a band of Cossacks for himself, he goes around the Commonwealth pillaging, before being trapped in a castle on the Dniester river, where he is burned to death by the Poles. So much for the story. The fun, as ever, begins when we get the knife out to begin the dissection.

Violence and Militarism

Some of the most spectacular passages of Taras Bulba concern “the infinite, the free, the sublime steppe” of South Ukraine where the Cossacks are free to roam on horseback and hunt and fish to their hearts’ content. But these are rarities. As a whole, the story is about war and the people who wage it. Andrii and Ostap may have been studying diligently the classics in Kiev, but as soon as they go home it’s time for a better sort of education – “the school of war.” Now, militarised societies have existed for a long time – the archetypal one, of course, is Sparta in Ancient Greece. But the Sech is different for two reasons – first, the emphasis on freedom, and secondly the tension present there.

Discipline is how wars are won. The endless drill of the Prussians and their legendary goosestep was partly what made that marshy state a great power over the course of the 18th century. The Cossacks of Taras Bulba are greedy, raucous, and have no time for order. As things go wrong during the battle at Dubno, many of the little death-vignettes that Gogol gives us show Cossacks becoming vulnerable because they get distracted by little things – here it is an adversary’s armour, ripe for the looting; there it is a desire to desecrate his body. These are not disciplined people.

Secondly, there is this tension, by which I mean a real desire for violence. These people are bloodthirsty. They want a fight. When news comes that the Poles may be converting their people, there is no desire among the Cossacks to actually check this is the case. They want to kill and are glad of the excuse provided. Immediately, they set upon the Jews who help service the Sech, slaughtering them indiscriminately. When besieging the castle at Dubno they get bored because they are not doing enough fighting and seem half-willing to just leave the starving residents alone.

In all of this, there is something elemental about them. At times it is almost funny, as when one Cossack – after starving and besieging Dubno for some time already – declares “first we hit them nicely, now we’ll hit them so much that they won’t carry as much as five of them home again.” But this shouldn’t distract us. When the Cossacks go through the Commonwealth what is the result? “Beaten children, women with breasts cut off, the skinning of all those who were allowed to keep their lives – in a word, it was a heavy price the Cossacks extracted for the Poles’ debt.”

What we see in Taras Bulba is a society that is so set on war, on violence, that it creates the conditions for it, at the cost of all deference to the truth. It is telling that against the marauders are ranged all those who are not part of the Cossack host – the women, the Jews, the Poles. Nothing unites a people like violence done against it. And what is the result, the glory that the Cossacks earn? Death. Repeatedly, for character after character. Taras dies, Ostap dies, Andrii dies, all manner of minor Cossacks die. They spout idiotic drivel about God and the fatherland which all might seem heroic to someone braindead, but we end the book to find a whole lot of dead, and nothing earned for all that suffering.

Religion and Hypocrisy

I have no interest in saying that violence is never justified, but Taras Bulba undermines the validity of its own violence with awesome consistency, and this is nowhere more obvious than in its treatment of religion. The Cossacks follow the Eastern Orthodox faith. Taras himself considers himself “a lawful defender of Orthodoxy”. But in the Sech, what holiness do we find? The whole host is ready to defend their faith “to the last drop of blood, although they did not wish to hear anything about fasting or restraint.” Characters declare that “for faith we’re ready to lay down our lives”. And yet they go about defending their faith against people who, a few doctrinal differences aside, share it, using the most unchristian means.

This irony is possibly deliberate. In chapter 6, when Andrii is smuggled into the city during the siege, he enters through a church, coming face to face with a monk – the exact type of person he had been ravaging the countryside in search of. But he is surprised, all the more so when he hears the prayers: “He prayed for the sending down of a miracle: for the saving of the city and the fortification of a wavering soul, for patience and the removal of temptation”. In short, he is praying for rather familiar things. Then he hears the organ music, and by that point, his defences really are beginning to crumble. He has stepped out of this narrow, macho, male, Cossack society and come into one that seems much fuller, with music, women, and peace instead. And what does he lose? “Moved by compassion,” we can say he loses the active voice. The Cossack loses his freedom and gains a heart.

All of this humanising stands in stark contrast to the description of the Cossacks in the next chapter and morning, who declare they are fighting an “enemy of Christ.” There is more than a little ridiculousness in this. Taras is referred to as “father” by his men, but he commits filicide on Andrii. Though the text has described Andrii as Judas, his death being like the death of “an ear of wheat” also suggests there is something deeply wrong about it. In short, we can say that the faith of the Cossacks, even as Taras himself dies by being burnt at the stake, is not quite a sham, but just an excuse for their violence. These people do not seem heroic as they throw babies into fires, or fight for their faith, because it is obvious that there is no real concern for the faith at all. As with their violence, the Cossacks’ hypocrisy leaves an unpleasant impression upon the modern reader.

National Myths

Still, if we are reading Taras Bulba today, we are interested in the national myth-building it engages in. What does it tell us about Russian nationalism in particular and the place of Ukraine within that? It’s important to remember that in the 1830s and 1840s when Gogol was writing, the annexation of much of what we now think as Ukraine had taken place relatively recently, especially of the south and west where the story takes place. These places needed to be integrated into Russia, and literary culture had some part to play in that.

How does Gogol do it? Well, for one thing, the Cossacks all have “Russian” souls, and live on “Russian land” – this description of the land in particular as Russian is repeated and particularly jarring to the reader of today. “Ukraine” is mentioned, but its people are the Cossacks, and the Cossacks are, after all, Russian. (N.B. The word “Ukrainian”, unlike “Ukraine”, had no real place in either the Russian or Ukrainian language until later. It is absent even from Shevchenko’s works. Until the later 19th century, it was primarily used by the Poles). The reason for this, of course, is because they are Orthodox and in Gogol’s version all speak Russian with only occasional Ukrainianisms for local colour. The Poles, the only other people who could claim control over the Cossacks, are a bunch of church-desecrating heretics who capture, torture and kill a great many proud Cossacks at the end of the story – showing that they cannot be the people to whom the Cossacks should swear their allegiance.

After noting that the Cossacks are practically Russians and that they do not belong to Poland, devalues any notion of independence through the decimation of the Sech. The Cossacks of the story are brave and honourable – for does not Taras go so far as to kill his own son for the sake of his honour? But everyone dies, and the decisions made in the story are poor. Gogol does not say it, but he certainly seems to imply that what the Cossacks lack is an organising force, an empire that could allow them to use their energies productively. Taras’ men die because he focuses on punishing Andrii – his false child – instead of protecting his real children, the people. If only he had a bit of guidance. Certainly, this man can kill, can fight. But wouldn’t things be better for the Cossacks, Gogol seems to ask, if they were engaged in something productive, like the genocide of the Circassians and the conquest of the Caucasus?

The character of Andrii, the traitor, is a complicating factor. Whereas the other Cossacks are motivated only by their desire for violence built upon rickety religious foundations, Andrii has a slightly more complex character. When he meets his old flame in the besieged city, he falls so madly in love that he forswears his own homeland: “Who said that my homeland is Ukraine? Who gave her to me? A homeland is what the soul seeks, what is sweeter than everything else in the world. My homeland is you.” Now, readers, I don’t think this is an unreasonable thought, but that’s just me. Within the story, we must ask what the Sech has done for Andrii. It has shocked him with its justice system, where murderers are buried alive, and thieves are tied to beams to be beaten by passersby. It has gone through the countryside burning, destroying, and killing, for no good reason. When he enters Dubno he sees, for the first time individualised, the consequences of the Cossacks’ actions – all these starving, miserable, mostly innocent people. When the choice is between love and music on the one hand and war on the other, his decision doesn’t seem unreasonable. What differentiates Andrii from the other Cossacks is that he realises there is a choice here.

But Andrii is a traitor, whatever else he is and whatever sense he speaks. (And given he is described as a “schoolboy” caught misbehaving at school when Taras confronts him and does not speak to defend himself, we can say that the scene has been constructed to delegitimise him.) That is what we should understand, at least if we are a Russian or Ukrainian nationalist. He deserved his death. Speaking of Ukrainian nationalists, Taras Bulba is not a good book for them either. Of course, you have the heroic Cossacks, fighting bravely and living enviable lives of freedom. But really, that’s the only positive thing you can take from this book. The women are excluded, and perpetual war and horrible crimes are a delight. And not just the women, by the way. In its description of a mini pogrom at the Sech and its repulsively anti-Semitic characterisation of Yankel (who would do anything for money, and is the one who tells Taras about Andrii’s betrayal) and all the other Jews, and in its demonisation and dehumanisation of the Tatars (like “chased dogs”) and Poles, Taras Bulba depicts the worst hateful and exclusionary tendencies of both Ukrainian and Russian nationalisms.

Conclusion:

Poor Ukraine, to have as its most famous writer a man who would have despised its independent existence. Lucky us, to have a writer like Gogol, who could write the works he did. Gogol, reactionary, religious, nationalistic, insane, was of course an odd one. But he took the ambiguities of his life and heritage and created good and often great literature, as did Kafka and so many others. Ambiguities and conflicts within the writer are what make for works that are worth reading. Taras Bulba is such a book. It is both pro-violence and pro-Russia, while also being undercut by a sense almost of disgust at itself and its hypocrisy, occasionally hinted at by the narrator. It is a more complex book than it seems at first glance, but perhaps not as complex as we would wish.

Unfortunately, to the modern reader, it still makes for uncomfortable reading. Although there are some similarities with Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, especially in the scenes after the siege of Dubno has failed and Taras has lost his sense of balance in the world and feels desperately isolated (as Hadji does in Tbilisi), the tone is completely different here, much less tolerant, much less repulsed by the violence it is forced to describe.

Perhaps the best argument for reading this book is that it and its author are so ambiguous about their identities. In that, you end up getting a far more accurate picture of Ukraine and its people than you might otherwise get. But this is a poor reason, all told. Gogol’s other works are much more thought-provoking. The only ones you get reading this one ar e the thoughts you don’t want to have.  


Update: for those here trying to write essays, there’s a good comment from Vladimir Golstein of Brown which provides some context on the work which I missed.

Ecce Homo and the Eternal Recurrence in Practice

I have spent the past two months reading Nietzsche. I had already read many of his works when at university, where I was lucky enough to have a teacher who seemed, with his dashing good looks and masterful command of the lecture hall, to embody Nietzsche’s idea of the superman himself. This time, however, I was reading them not for an essay, but for myself.

Nietzsche as self-improvement, as self-knowledge, is of course a dangerous path to follow. But I reasoned to myself that as I am no longer a teenager, I must be immune, or at least somewhat resistant, to the worst excesses of misinterpretation that people tend to employ as they let a cursory acquaintance with the philosopher allow them to be a complete asshole to everyone around them. Reading through Walter Kaufmann’s biography of Nietzsche also helped.

The last of Nietzsche’s works that I have made it to is his autobiography, Ecce Homo: How one Becomes What one is. I didn’t write about Nietzsche’s other books because I didn’t feel sufficiently confident in my grasp of them to write usefully about them. Check back in a few years, and maybe we’ll be there. Karl Jaspers used to tell people never to be satisfied with a passage of Nietzsche’s until they had found a passage elsewhere saying the exact opposite; this approach does not make for a decent blog post, but nor does resorting to rather weather-beaten interpretations that add nothing new. I would want to be able to go through Nietzsche with a knife (one of his favourite images is that of a vivisectionist), finding nuances in what at first seems absurd. This will take both time and living. And so, you are spared, for now.

Ecce Homo is not just an insane attempt at writing about oneself, it is also a fascinating attempt, I think, at putting into practice one of Nietzsche’s key ideas from his mature period – that of the eternal recurrence. That is the lens through which I will interpret the book in this piece, as a wilful struggle with his own history to say of every moment of it not just that it was worth it, but even that it was good. To affirm, where others would be resigned or even negative.

We begin with aphorism 341 of The Gay Science, also known as The Joyous Science. Here Nietzsche first suggests (“What if…”) the idea that things may run back on themselves in a loop. Here it is a mere thought experiment, but later on, Nietzsche even had plans of proving it scientifically and aimed to study seriously the natural sciences to find the necessary evidence. (Kaufmann notes that commentators seem unsure whether Nietzsche actually believed he had stumbled upon a secret truth of the universe, or whether it was and remained just an experiment. As far as I am concerned, it’s not important.)

Here is the aphorism in full:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?

If life is repeated, over and over, exactly as it was, then that makes every action have unlimited significance. It also means that every action that we take out of cowardice, that we regret, will haunt us for the rest of time. But Nietzsche does not ask us to act differently, per se. He asks instead “how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?” to withstand such a thought. The problem of cowardly actions is not as great as the problem posed by every minor, meaningless action, the ones that day by day cover our lives in sticky meaninglessness. The eternal recurrence is a demand primarily for a change in attitude. We must say to ourselves that everything that happens is just as we wanted it, and vest our actions with significance, affirming them for their essential value in making us who we are.

Growth, in modern-day parlance “personal development”, is everything to Nietzsche. And an attitude of affirmation (“the highest formula of affirmation that can possibly be attained”, so he informs us of the eternal recurrence), where we desire everything that happens to us, joyous or sad, awesome, or awful, is most likely to lead to the achievement of our most full potential.

The Gay Science is, of course, not the only work of the eternal recurrence. Thus Spoke Zarathustra treats the theme in greater detail, and it returns, briefly, in some other of his later works, such as Beyond Good and Evil, and in his notes. Here is an extract from Zarathustra which gives some indication of the creative process of reformulating one’s life into something one can affirm:

               I walk among men as among fragments of the future: of that future which I scan.

And it is all my art and aim to compose into one and bring together what is fragment and riddle and dreadful chance.

               And how could I endure to be a man, if man were not also poet and reader of riddles and the redeemer of chance!

               To redeem the past and to transform every “it was” into an “I wanted it thus!” – that alone I would call redemption.

              

The eternal recurrence is a creative act, where life is treated as an artwork. If everything experienced can be transformed successfully into a masterpiece, then that is enough – we do not ask questions about the experiences, we have eyes only for the work. Thus should we live, building a being of ourselves that makes use of everything that has ever happened to us, so that we could discard nothing, and everything – when experienced again – would appear to us joyfully, as a piece of the grand puzzle that is our developed self. 

Where, then, does Ecce Homo fit in? Written in a final burst of creativity, alongside The Twilight of the Idols, The Wagner Case, and The Antichrist, it was finished only a few weeks before Nietzsche went mad on the streets of Turin, allegedly after seeing a horse being beaten. It was almost as if he foresaw the end of his life and wanted to wrap it up nicely. Thus does it seem with hindsight, but it is more likely that he saw the end of a particular period of his authorship, and wanted to bookend it before carrying on. It is interesting to note in connection with this, for example, that The Antichrist is not given a chapter here, while all his other major books are. This is because itwas supposed to be the first volume of the epic Revaluation of all Values – it belongs to the new Nietzsche.

Ecce Homo is an autobiography, it is “one of the most intriguing yet bizarre examples of the genre ever written,” as Michael Tanner notes in my volume’s introduction. It ranges from “manic self-celebrations” to “parodistic orgies”, “high spirits”, and even “a tone of elegy”. Not only does it have a remarkable tonal range, but it is also full of outright lies about Nietzsche’s past which anyone can check up on with little difficulty. As a book, then, we oughtn’t go to it to work out what Nietzsche lived or even felt – we should go to it to see him crafting his life into something he can affirm. This is where its particular curiosity lies. After reading all of his other books, Ecce Homo is like seeing the practice of what had hitherto been simply theory.

The more we understand of his actual autobiography, the more challenging his interpretations of his life seem. The key moments – his friendship and break with the composer Richard Wagner, his unhappy three-way relationship with Lou Salomé and Paul Rée that cost him the friendship of both, his general ill-health, and his awful sister – are here transformed or disguised, so that saying anything negative about his life seems impossible.

Of Wagner, a man against whom he had written a book (The Wagner Case), whose Human, All too Human, was written after the crisis of their break, Nietzsche has only positive things to say. “Richard Wagner was by far the most closely related man to me… The rest is silence.” The reference to silence seems to suggest some resentment repressed, but Nietzsche does not stop here. Later on, he writes “I call Wagner the great benefactor of my life”. Why, how? Here he comes closest to expressing explicitly the project of Ecce Homo: “as I am strong enough to turn even the most questionable and most perilous things to my own advantage and thus to become stronger”, he can do this. The praise of Wagner as a man contrasts with Nietzsche’s savagery about his work. But the friendship was what was lived, and it is the friendship that needs affirming. 

Wagner is that big dark spot in Nietzsche’s life without which he may never have become himself: thus, Wagner was necessary. Other things were too. “It is my sagacity to have been many things and in many places so as to be able to become one person – so as to be able to attain one thing. For a time I had to be a scholar”, he says of his work as a university professor. He thanks his own sickness for allowing an easy, natural break with Wagner: “it permitted, it commanded forgetting”. He even thanks “Fräulein Lou von Salomé”, a woman of “astonishing inspiration”. The reality of their friendship was much less fun, but Nietzsche, without giving details (in the case of Salomé, he definitely seems to prefer silence), does at least allow himself to mention one of his characteristic views: “Pain does not count as an objection to life”.

In the chapter “Why I am so Clever”, Nietzsche decides to really embrace his role as a life coach. He tells us in great detail all the important “little things” we need to thrive: “nutriment, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness”. We get a detailed description of what to drink and eat, of the importance of knowing “the size of one’s stomach”, and how to relax (walking). This may seem ridiculous to us in the era of self-help, but to his readers, this emphasis would have been scandalous, for the alternative sources of personal growth and development – “all the concepts “God”, “Soul”, “Virtue”, “Sin,” “the Beyond”, “truth”, “eternal life” – are chucked out as only getting in our way. Now, in exploring those things that made him healthy – in his sense of affirmatively-minded, rather than physically fit – Nietzsche is giving a formula for living so life can be affirmed.

To turn everything into a blessing, to respond creatively to absolutely every stimulus – that is how I understand the command of the eternal recurrence. The creative response, however, is not merely individual pieces of art, but a holistic picture of the entire self. Life as art – as one long unbroken masterpiece of affirmation and reformulation. Within Ecce Homo, we see both the attempt to make a life-picture, and we also see the individual works of art that burst out of Nietzsche’s receptivity, such as this poem he wrote about Venice after the experience of hearing lovely music:

Lately I stood at the bridge

in the brown night.

From afar there came a song:

a golden drop, it swelled

across the trembling surface.

Gondolas, lights, music –

drunken it swam out into the gloom…

My soul, a stringed instrument,

touched by invisible hands

sang to itself in reply a gondola song,

and trembled with gaudy happiness.

– Was anyone listening?

Is Ecce Homo successful as the practice of some concept of affirmation, of laying the groundwork for life to eternally recur? We must ask late Herr Nietzsche, hurtling repeatedly back through his own life, to see what he thinks. As for us, there is enough here to see the book as a struggle to affirm that does not always work. Nietzsche successfully praises the friends who left him or whom he himself left. He finds such joy in certain moments that we can almost taste it – take, for example, the moment he completes the forward to The Antichrist: “The forward was written on 3 September 1888: when in the morning after this writing I stepped outside I found awaiting me the loveliest day the Ober-Engadin had ever shown me – transparent, glowing in its colours, containing in itself every antithesis, every mediant between ice and south”.

And yet, there is a lot of dissatisfaction here too. My book’s introduction by Michael Tanner notes the book’s parodistic elements, almost to excuse this. Any autobiography is self-centred and a little egotistical, so isn’t Nietzsche merely parodying that when he gives himself chapter titles like “Why I am So Wise”, “Why I Write Such Good Books”, and “Why I am a Destiny”? Yes and no. I don’t read this as a sign of his oncoming madness either. What we have here, however, is a struggle to justify himself against a world that just doesn’t seem to care about the way that he has completely overturned it. Yes, he says that some people are born “posthumously”, and he does praise Georg Brandes, the Danish academic who first started popularising him. But as for the Germans? All he heard were crickets, and it hurt him.

And so, he became more strident, his voice reaching a pitch that hurts to listen to, as if his assurances that he is perhaps the greatest human being ever to have lived is what was missing, the final push needed to convince people that they should take him seriously. “I come from heights no bird has ever soared to, I know abysses into which no foot has ever yet strayed, I have been told it is impossible to put a book of mine down”. “I am not a man, I am dynamite”. “I was the first to discover the truth, in that I was the first to sense – smell – the lie as lie … My genius is in my nostrils”. Of course, I write my “ha!” in the margin at such things. And there’s no denying that these are fun, brilliant descriptions. But it’s also sad. This is the desperate yelling of a lonely man into the void.

Or, perhaps, not even a void, but something still worse. Because the other sign of Nietzsche’s dissatisfaction in Ecce Homo comes from his feeling that he is already being misunderstood, that he is about to be misunderstood in terrible ways. (As indeed he was, after his scummy fascist sister started controlling his memory and his works, peddling them to the Nazis as the supreme justification of their hate). The closer we approach the end of Nietzsche’s oeuvre, the more he begins his aphorisms with the question “Have I been understood?” And less, because of his increased desperation and extremity of imagery, can we say “yes” to him.

Let’s take one example from the final chapter, “Why I am a Destiny”:

“I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful – of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against  everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified… There will be wars such as there have never yet been on earth. Only after me will there be grand politics on earth.”

Here’s what Kaufmann, whose book saved Nietzsche from the Nazis for new generations, writes: “He speaks of “war” even when he is evidently thinking of strife, of “power” rather than “self-perfection”. This approach generally works with Nietzsche’s other books, like The Gay Science, but by the time we look at his later works, it really is impossible. In Ecce Homo, he seems to want violence, not just of the spirit to “overcome” itself, but also between individuals, countries, men and women. Is that what he really means here? He hated nationalism, especially German nationalism, he really seemed to think that only weaker people would seek power over others as a substitute for power over themselves. But that’s not obvious at all here.

Nietzsche’s ambiguity about violence coming from his outrageous language, (“I am a nuance”, from the chapter on Wagner, I can imagine him yelling at me), just demonstrates the degree that he felt frustrated with his work’s reception, no matter how much the rest of the book is an attempt to tell us that his life was great. As an attempt to write eternal recurrence, “the unconditional and endlessly repeated circular course of all things”, is still the way I would read Ecce Homo. That the attempt is not wholly successful should not distract us from the sheer weight of affirmation that we do come across in the book: “supreme affirmation born out of fullness, of superfluity, an affirmation without reservation even of suffering, even of guilt, even of all that is strange and questionable in existence.”

This is a positive message, and if we do end up reading Nietzsche looking for some suggestions on how to improve our lives, it is one of the best things to take away. That he failed is of no matter to us. He thought he still had time… Let’s hope we do.  

Joseph Conrad’s anti-Russian novel: Under Western Eyes

Under Western Eyes was written by Joseph Conrad in 1911, after one unsuccessful revolution in Russia and before the rather more successful ones of 1917. It is a political novel, exploring the fates of revolutionaries abroad, while also displaying Conrad’s characteristic preoccupations with the conflicts of the human soul. When I read it for the first time, about four years ago, I did not like it. Its descriptions of Saint Petersburg were unrecognisable to anyone who had been there, but worse was Conrad’s virulent hatred of the Russian people and state, which in spite of assertions to the contrary in his author’s note, are neither well hidden nor very fair.

On a second reading, I now feel a little more understanding towards Conrad’s hate. I also have met various people whom we could call the Russian revolutionaries of our own day, including one friend who after a campaign against him involving physical beatings and bricks through windows was given 24 hours by the police to leave Russia or else his entire family would be charged with fabricated crimes. My personal experiences have also made me a little more sympathetic, including an incident one morning where the secret services raided my flat, throwing me against the wall and pinning me while masked men with machineguns and balaclavas conducted a search for something that wasn’t there and never had been (stolen cash).

Conrad’s novel talks a lot about the impulses we have to mysticise Russia: “that propensity of lifting every problem from the plane of the understandable by means of some sort of mystic expression is very Russian.” The problem is that the novel itself serves this mysticising impulse. Ultimately, Russia is not a special country. It is just a country with shoddy institutions and a consolidated media landscape which allowed autocratic rule to flourish in the early 21st century and reach a point where it was unchallengeable, even though the man in charge has lost his mind. Russia has sufficient democratic traditions to build upon, as some of the revolutionaries of the 19th century such as Alexander Herzen knew, but the informational control effected by the ruling powers has emphasised the more idiotic parts of Russia’s history – its sense of a special path, its victimisation and difference from everyone else. The result is that it is now indeed doing something unthinkable, insane, and uniquely awful in our day.

The story of Under Western Eyes concerns one Razumov (his name comes from the Russian for “reason”). An average student with no family, he dreams of winning a silver medal and establishing himself in a world where connections are everything. One evening, after the assassination of a member of Russia’s autocratic state apparatus, Razumov discovers in his rooms one Victor Haldin, who confesses to the murder. He asks for Razumov’s help in escaping the authorities and leaving Russia to join his family in Switzerland. Razumov, who has no revolutionary sympathies, first attempts to save Haldin, and then decides to betray him.

We next encounter Razumov in Geneva, where he meets Haldin’s sister Nathalie, and her mother. We also meet several other revolutionaries, encamped nearby, and the teacher of languages who narrates our story. To them, Razumov appears as Haldin’s successful accomplice, and he is welcomed in spite of his taciturnity and occasional outbursts of anger. In a letter to Nathalie Victor had described Razumov as one of those “unstained, lofty, and solitary existences.” He is the only friend he had ever mentioned, and this allows Nathalie to create a Razumov that blinds her to the real one.

But she is not the only one. Under Western Eyes is fundamentally about seeing – it’s in the title, after all – and what we cannot see. The characters are constantly making miscalculations and misjudgements. The first is Victor Haldin himself. He comes to Razumov, having come to believe that the latter’s quiet nature indicates his revolutionary sympathies – “There is a solidity about your character which cannot exist without courage.” It is not so. Razumov himself, like certain people I know in Russia, had believed that he could exist under autocracy without picking a side. That he could pursue his silver medal in peace. But as soon as Haldin enters his door, Razumov is forced to decide what he stands for. His illusions of the way his world is run are immediately knocked down.

When Razumov arrives in Geneva, Nathalie mentions her brother’s name to him and sees how “this distressed him. He was quite overcome.” She assumes it is affection for her brother and has no idea that it is rather guilt at being his Judas. When talking with Sophie Antonovna, another revolutionary, Razumov once again reveals something of his internal conflicts, to which she asks: “What is it? Self-reproach, or what? It’s absurd. You couldn’t have gone and given yourself up because your comrade was taken.”

Razumov himself notes that he has “the gift of inspiring confidence.” But of course, he too works at creating himself and cultivating these mistakes in others. While dealing with one revolutionary we read how “he remembered another detail and dropped it before her.” He uses what others know – the newspaper details of the crime, and secret letters that have reached the others, to tell them what they want to hear, while keeping himself from lying outright. They all believe him, some willingly, some after a little persuasion, but all do in the end.

The overall effect of this is to make an argument about the revolutionaries themselves – namely, that they are a bunch of incompetents. Conrad fits neatly into the tradition crafted by Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, which deals with revolutionaries, and he lies on the more cynical, dismissive end. His conservatism is similar to that of Dostoevsky in particular, which is funny because Conrad couldn’t stand the Russian. Peter Ivanovitch is a noted “feminist” whom Conrad demonises by showing how mean he is to a female servant. Various others are ridiculed by showing how dependent they are on money siphoned from the owner of the chateau where they all meet.

This is not new to us. Such irony we have encountered many times before, most obviously in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. The key revolutionary there, Bazarov, says one thing and eventually, after he falls in love, does another. At first, he demands the negation of emotions and the total reliance upon rationality and logic, and then he starts throwing around such ridiculous words as “feelings”. This irony was Turgenev’s secret weapon. It allowed him to create a novel which, when it came out, divided both conservative and liberal Russians – with both accusing him of being too soft towards the “other side”.

Conrad’s has two main problems in Under Western Eyes, at least when we look at it against the backdrop of its Russian forebears. The first is that it could never divide opinion in the way that Turgenev’s novel does. This book is obviously anti-Russian. The revolutionaries and the state are both stupid, mean, and petty. Or, as Conrad writes in the author’s note, Russian history is just a cycle of “senseless desperation provoked by senseless tyranny.” There are no sympathetic characters, except perhaps Nathalie Haldin. Even she appears out-of-touch and naïve. Razumov himself reads like a thing that an algorithm would churn out after having been forced to read Dostoevsky, over and over. He says cynical, spiteful, angry things without any real interest in them.

Sympathy is by common consent the thing that makes Russian literature most special. Conrad has no sympathy. He does not like his characters. He does not have any time for their views. And that leads to the novel’s second big artistic weakness – it really has very little to do with ideas. Nobody actually shares any interesting views on the rights of women or the future organisation of Russia. People are happy enough to advocate for a life of action and revolt over passivity, but that’s as far as we go. There are no debates, there is no passion. The only idea that really gets any airing is that Russia is a poisoned land, “where virtues themselves fester into crimes in the cynicism of oppression and revolt” and that autocracy is bad.

The attack on autocracy is made with some effectiveness. When at the end of the novel’s first part Councillor Mikulin, Razumov’s point of contact among the elite, asks Razumov where he will go next – “where to?” – it is positively chilling. We all know at this point that even though he has done something that benefits the state, he has also given up what little freedom he has had. Such relative subtleties are more effective than the constant complaints about autocracy, which quite frankly we do not need. Russian autocracy is/was awful – we do not need convincing. But learning about the way that it exerts its hold upon an individual is much more interesting for those of us with “Western Eyes.”

Razumov goes to Geneva as a servant of his state, and there his life unravels. The stories he is forced to tell about himself are insufficient to solidify his identity. In the end, it all collapses. To see the revolution from the side of an informer was new to me, and that is perhaps the most interesting thing about the novel. But the novel’s complex structure, namely a dramatization of Razumov’s journal by the teacher of languages, means that much of his soul is hidden from us. When we catch glimpses of it, it is suitably unattractive. “It was myself, after all, whom I have betrayed most badly.” Such words are ridiculous for a man whose actions lead to two deaths. So too are his excuses and justifications: “I was possessed!”

Taken as a whole, in its refusal to engage with the ideas of the revolutionaries, or even portray them, the novel comes across as somewhat empty. In some sense, amusingly, it conforms to its own ideas about how little those of the West can understand Russia. But this will not do. Russia is comprehensible, it just requires time and effort. It is not special, just extremely poorly run. An orientalising impulse serves no purpose other than to excuse and legitimise the actions of the people who control the place. And legitimisation is the last thing that these people deserve. All in all, the novel is just okay. In this at least in my opinion, four years later, has not changed.