The Russians and Me

Patrick Hunter S.J. introduced me to the Russians one day in 1962 by way of a little Chekhov story called Gooseberries. If you can even call it a story, direct and artless as it was. There was little plot and less drama, a first person story within a story about a retired government clerk who had realized his fondest lifelong dream of retiring in the country, only to be consumed by an empty all-consuming greed and without the spiritual resources to recognize or even admit to himself his utter failure. "You must never forget there are people in pain", summed up the narrator as I remember it, "We all need someone in the wall to knock on occasion to remind us." Mr. Hunter was a sly one, my religion and home room as well as English teacher. Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam -- he lived it (still does, God willing).

Chekhov wears well over the years and Gooseberries stands as a good short statement of his world view. It's not so much that he held the venal, selfish, corrupt, and complacent in contempt (he did, and heaped withering scorn on them); rather he found complacency profoundly uninteresting and seemed unable to focus concentrated attention on such characters. Take Lady with a Pet Dog, which starts with the calculated seduction of a married woman by an uncaring and practiced philanderer. But something happens to the seducer, he begins to care for the woman more and more as her inaccessibility dawns on him. He becomes nearly hysterical towards the end, a stark contrast to the urbane sophisticate at the beginning. I believe Chekhov found such characters not only interesting, but also truly human and worthy of love.

While aware of class as a fertile venue for human meanness and cruelty, his work unerringly concerns deep human emotions common to all. One memorable character is an illiterate aging carriage driver whose drunken fares, the "respected young sirs", have no time to hear of his collapsing family life, the son who will not call and all the rest. No one will listen. The story ends with his explaining it all patiently to his horse, a scene of pathos rivaling any I've read. Then there's the dying old medical professor in A Dull Story, a man who knows exactly what's happening to him but can't do anything about it (Chekhov was a physician). I admire this cranky old man who loved the university and his students (his "dear boys") and worked hard at being a good teacher. Chekhov shows us a dying character over time and, though uplifting in a special sense known to Chekhov readers, tells a different and more profound truth than the romantic Tolstoyan one in The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Death means disintegration, moral and spiritual as well as physical, and it happens to every one of us, this is the lesson. Or consider An Anonymous Story, another exquisite first person account of a hardened terrorist who takes a position as the servant of a leading bureaucrat in order to spy on, and eventually exterminate, him. Chekhov seems moderately sympathetic with the terrorist (whose last name we never learn) -- whatever his faults, he is a man of conviction and feeling, if repressed. Not so his bureaucratic prey, guilty as he is of the unpardonable Chekhovian crime of complacency. Eventually the terrorist falls hard for his boss's abandoned mistress, with bleak consequences.

In high school I devoured Dostoyevsky, oblivious to the damage such psychopatholgy can wreak on young minds: multiple murder on ideological grounds (Crime and Punishment), parricide (The Brothers Karamazov), child rape (The Possessed), self-destructive compulsive behavior (The Gambler), and so on. Maybe Stalin said it best when asked about Dostoyevsky by Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslavian Communist and revolutionary: "A great writer, and a great reactionary" (Dostoyevsky remained in print in cheap, widely disseminated paperbacks throughout the Soviet period). Dostoyevsky toyed with the liberal ideas slowly intruding into Russia in the 19th century, and was imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Tsarist regime -- his execution was commuted moments before death. The effect was particularly pronounced, moving Dostoyevsky to renounce his early liberalism and assume a radical reactionary agenda identifying God and Tsar. A character in The Brothers Karamazov (I think it was) says "If there is no God, then all is permitted". That sums up the Dostoyevskian ethos, which is deeply hostile to modernism of any kind, including the bedrock democratic precept of separation of church and state so successful in republics like the United States. In the end, my favorite Dostoyevsky novel is The House of the Dead, a searing account of life in the Tsarist gulag related from direct experience. Deeper and truer than any ideology, this work expresses the humanity of those who refuse to be broken by mistreatment, much as Chekhov might.

Of Tolstoy I remember little except Anna's bravery and Vronsky's teeth (Anna Karenina), the pointlessness of military glory (War and Peace), and the immortal opening line of Anna Karenina: "All happy families are the same; all unhappy families are unhappy in their own special way". I think it sad that later in life Tolstoy renounced his art from religious motives.

I was transfixed more recently by Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don about the effect of the revolution on the Don Cossacks. The brutality of the opening scene sets the stage for one of the great blood-lettings of the 20th century, and Sholokhov does not pull his punches. I like Gorky too -- Bolshevik he may have been, but his art is of the old school.

Devotedly Russian in younger days, I even turned to minor writers like Lermontov and Goncharov. The latter's Oblomov made a lasting impression based on the pathetic title character, a minor nobleman with no material cares who has trouble getting out of bed each day, stuck hopelessly in pointless lethargy. He even lent his name to the condition (Oblomovschina, or "Oblomovitis"). In my Russian class at college, our teacher would read us Pushkin or Anna Akhmatova and a more beautiful language I have never heard, even when struggling for the most basic meaning -- full of shooshing sounds like one of Gogol's troikas gliding across the steppes. I got reasonably good at Cyrillic script, enjoyed it, and think it improved my penmanship.

Subsequent political reading has confirmed the deep sickness of this society, not that anything is needed but the texts cited here to reach this conclusion. The brittle political system resisted change, change that was it's only hope. The economic system was corrupt beyond understanding, leaving little scope for incentive or industry. The state religion shamelessly supported the autocracy, and there was no autocracy more extreme than Tsarism -- think of the scene in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin where the disgusting priest closely examines rotting meat swarming with maggots and says, "What maggots, there are no maggots." Officially ended in 1861, the residue of serfdom continued to cast a pall of authoritarianism over rural society. Plagued by unimaginable poverty, large sections of the population succumbed to ignorance, drunken violence, and misguided religiosity, even as a small elite participated in all the modern developments of European and world society. The field was ripe for the Bolsheviks and they reaped the whirlwind. This sick society produced writers who reflected the dysfunction and human pain rife in their midst and turned it into timeless art capable of reaching us today, so far from them in time, place and circumstance, so near in human space.

Mike Bertrand

December 15, 2003