The Russian Soul by Dostoevsky Fyodor; Bartlett Rosamund;

Author:Dostoevsky, Fyodor; Bartlett, Rosamund;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Notting Hill Editions

– My Paradox –

(June 1876)

Again a tussle with Europe (oh, it’s not a war yet: they say that we – Russia, that is – are still a long way from war). Again the endless Eastern Question is in the news; and again in Europe they are looking mistrustfully at Russia . . . Yet why should we go running to seek Europe’s trust? Did Europe ever trust the Russians? Can she ever trust us and stop seeing us as her enemy? Oh, of course this view will change someday; someday Europe will better be able to make us out and realize what we are like; and it is certainly worth discussing this someday; but meanwhile a somewhat irrelevant question or side issue has occurred to me and I have recently been busy trying to solve it. No one may agree with me, yet I think that I am right – in part, maybe, but right.

I said that Europe doesn’t like Russians. No one, I think, will dispute the fact that they don’t like us. They accuse us, among other things, of being terrible liberals: we Russians, almost to a man, are seen as not only liberals but revolutionaries; we are supposedly always inclined, almost lovingly, to join forces with the destructive elements of Europe rather than the conserving ones. Many Europeans look at us mockingly and haughtily for this – they are hateful: they cannot understand why we should be the ones to take the negative side in someone else’s affair; they positively deny us the right of being negative as Europeans on the grounds that they do not recognize us as a part of ‘civilisation’. They see us rather as barbarians, reeling around Europe gloating that we have found something somewhere to destroy – to destroy purely for the sake of destruction, for the mere pleasure of watching it fall to pieces, just as if we were a horde of savages, a band of Huns, ready to fall upon ancient Rome and destroy its sacred shrines without the least notion of the value of the things we are demolishing. That the majority of Russians have really proclaimed themselves liberals in Europe is true, and it is even a strange fact. Has anyone ever asked himself why this is so? Why was it that in the course of our century, virtually nine-tenths of the Russians who acquired their culture in Europe always associated themselves with the stratum of Europeans who were liberal, with the left – i.e., always with the side that rejected its own culture and its own civilisation? (I mean to a greater or a lesser degree, of course: what Thiers rejects in civilisation and what the Paris Commune of 1871 rejected are very different things). And like these European liberals, Russians in Europe are liberals ‘to a greater or lesser degree’ and in many different shades; but nonetheless, I repeat, they are more inclined than the Europeans to join directly with the extreme left at once rather than to begin by dwelling among the lesser ranks of liberalism.

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