[3] Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]
The tragedy of Raskolnikov is twofold: he is a Russian and an intellectual. The craving, religious soul of the child of the endless melancholy plains, keened by a profound, analytic intellect seeks in vain an outlet for its strivings and doubtings in the land where interrogation marks are officially forbidden. The young man should have plunged into the Revolution, the broad-breasted river that has welcomed thousands of Russian youth; but Dostoevsky willed not his hero to take the logical road. The epileptic Demon hated the “Possessed” revolutionists; he saw the Russian ideal in Christian suffering. “He is a great poet, but an abominable creature, quite Christian in his emotions and at the same time quite sadique. His whole morality is what you have baptised slave-morality”—this from Dr. Brandes’s letter to Nietzsche,—a specimen of professorial nomenclature.
I am thinking of a threefold—nay, of a manifold—tragedy of a young man, who, besides being a Russian and an intellectual, is a revolutionist and is a son of the eternal Ahasver, the people that have borne for centuries the double cross of being persecuted and of teaching their persecutors. What makes this tragedy still more tragic is the element of grim irony that enters it as in those of Attic Greece: the Russian-Jewish-Anarchist is hurled by Fate into the country of Matter-of-Fact, your United States. The boy is poetic, sentimental, idealistic; imbued with the lofty traditions of the Narodovoltzy, the Russian saints-revolutionists, he craves for a heroic deed, for an act of self-sacrifice for the “people.” “Ah, the People! The grand, mysterious, yet so near and real, People....”[4] He attempts to shoot an oppressor of the people, is delivered to the Justice, and is sentenced to twenty-two years of prison confinement. The curtain falls, but does the tragedy end here? No, it only begins.
[4] Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, by Alexander Berkman. [Mother Earth Company, New York.]
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.
Raskolnikov wanted to kill a principle; he wanted to rid the world of a useless old pawnbroker, in order to enable himself to live a useful life. He failed; the principle remained deadly alive in the form of a gnawing conscience. “I am an aesthetic louse,” he bitterly denounces himself. Alexander Berkman wanted to die for a principle, to render the people a service through his death. He has failed. At least he has thought so. The Attentat produced neither the material nor the moral effect that the idealist had expected. Society condemned him, of course; the strikers, for whose benefit he eagerly gave his life, looked upon his act as on a grave misfortune that would augment their misery; even his comrades, except a very few, disapproved of his heroic deed. The icy reality sobered the naïve Russian. Was it worth while? For the “people?”
The Memoirs have stirred me more profoundly than Dostoevsky’s Memoirs from a House of the Dead, far more than Wilde’s De Profundis: the tragedy here is so much more complex, more appalling in its utter illogicality. On the other hand the book is written so sincerely, so heartedly, so ingenuously, that you feel the wings of the martyr’s soul flapping upon yours. Berkman becomes so near, so dear, that it pains to think of him. You are with him throughout his vicissitudes; you share his anguish, loneliness, suicidal moods; your spirit and your body undergo the same inhuman tortures, the same unnecessary cruelties, that he describes so simply, so modestly; you rejoice in his pale prison joys, your heart goes out to the gentle boy, Johnny, who whispers through the dungeon wall his love for Sashenka; you weep over the death of Dick, the friendly sparrow whose chirping sounded like heavenly music to the prisoner; you are filled with admiration and love for the Girl who hovers somewhere outside like a goddess, “immutable,” devoted, noble, reserved; you are, lastly, out in the free, and how deeply you sympathize with the sufferer when he flees human beings and solicitous friends.... When I read through the bleeding pages, I felt like falling on my knees and kissing the feet of the unknown, yet so dear, martyr. Surely, thou hast known suffering....
Don’t sneer at my incurable sentimentality, you happy normal. The tragedy of Alexander Berkman is common to all of us, transplanted wild flowers. It is the tragedy of getting the surrogate for the real thing. Berkman and the Girl passionately kissing the allegorical figure of the Social Revolution—isn’t this the symbol of the empty grey life in this normal land? What do you offer the seeking, striving, courageous souls but surrogates, substitutes? Your radicals—they are nauseating! They chatter about Nietzsche and Stirner and Whitman, wave the red flag and scream about individual freedom; but let one of them transgress the seventh commandment or commit any thing that is not comme il faut according to their code, and lo, the radicalism has evaporated, and the atavistic mouldy morality has come to demonstrate its wrinkled face. Has not John Most repudiated the act of his disciple, Berkman, because it was a real act and not a paper allegory? Of course, Most was German....