He has told Hydie that the French Revolution substituted its slogan for the Holy Trinity, that the scalpel which excised autocracy from the body politic also removed its soul. The French thus seem to be suffering from a malady which, in somewhat different form, infects the Spaniards, Italians, and Greeks. Their splinter parties, their disorganization, their pervasive political cynicism are a legacy of centuries of conflict, inequities, and colonial misrule. But beyond this there is exhaustion, a vitality sapped by past efforts and a sadness increased by awareness of faded glories.
RUSSIA: A COMPOSITE PORTRAIT
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.
UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA: A SELF-PORTRAIT
The Boers of South Africa are presented, especially in Paton’s novels, as a simple and stern people who are also good fighters and good haters. Subduing part of a continent and making it their own, they regard themselves as the elect among the children of men quite as much as do the Slavophiles. Yet these Afrikaners suffer from a curious case of schizophrenia. Singled out by the Almighty, they are nonetheless so fearful of the colored population that they repress them as harshly as any European nation ever did its colonial peoples. Early in Too Late the Phalarope Paton epitomizes this national group: