Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia (Soviet History, Politics, Society, and Thought) by Bogdanov Alexander

Author:Bogdanov, Alexander [Bogdanov, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780253013507
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 1984-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

2. Reality or Fantasy?

As I began to pay more attention to my surroundings, I wanted to know whether Werner and my other comrades knew anything about what had happened to me or what I had done. I asked Werner who had brought me to the hospital. He replied that I had come with two young strangers who were unable to tell him anything about my illness. They said that I was already ill when they happened to run into me in the capital, that they had known me earlier, before the revolution, and that when they heard me mention Dr. Werner they had decided to turn to him for help. They left the same day they had arrived. They impressed Werner as trustworthy people whom he had no reason to disbelieve. He had himself lost touch with me several years previously, and there was no one who could give him any information about me.

I wanted to tell Werner about the murder I had committed. It was difficult to do so, however, because the story was extremely complicated and contained a multitude of details which would appear very strange to any impartial listener. I explained the problem to Werner, who answered unexpectedly:

“It would be best not to tell me anything just now. It would not further your recovery. I do not intend to argue with you, of course, but I am not going to believe your story either. You are suffering from melancholia, a disorder in which people quite sincerely confess nonexistent crimes; their memory adapts to their delirium and fashions false recollections. But you will not believe me either until you have recovered, which is why it would be better to postpone your story until then.”

If this conversation had taken place a few months earlier, I would doubtless have interpreted Werner’s remarks as an expression of thorough distrust and contempt. Now, however, when my soul yearned for peace and comfort, I reacted quite differently. I was pleased by the thought that my comrades knew nothing of my crime and that even its very existence might be open to question. I thought about it less and less often.

My recovery began to proceed more rapidly. Occasionally I would suffer attacks of my former distress, but they never lasted long. Werner was obviously satisfied with my progress and even almost released me from medical observation. On one occasion, recalling his diagnosis of my “delirium,” I asked him to let me read a typical case history of an illness like mine, one that he had observed and recorded at the hospital. He hesitated considerably and was obviously reluctant, but he finally complied with my request. In my presence he selected and gave to me one of a large pile of case histories.

The report dealt with a peasant from a remote, isolated little village who had been forced by poverty to seek his living in the capital, where he had begun working at one of the largest factories. The life of the huge city evidently proved a great shock to him, and, as his wife put it, for a long time he was “not himself.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.