Nihil sub sole novum est – Im Westen ein neues Nichts?

Whether the terrible farces on today’s world-⁠stages did enact once more some pieces from the tragedies of years gone by, shoddily? – a question these times will leave behind themselves, in a better eventuality, for consideration by the sharpest theatre critics of history who may emerge tomorrow or the day after tomorrow; while what strikes more directly the present’s eyes and ears, are the rhymes in all that is observed. Much as though history were a species of poetic drama, parts of it live on when the sonorous endings of the lines in the script are repeated, for otherwise the spectacle’s verses would have been written too freely to be understood by much of the audience. Without these repetitions, absent the mnemonic recurrence of the same sounds, how else would one ever parse this text? by what other marks could the similarities possibly be noticed and interpreted, in order to interrupt and alter them, in the best case?

Whether attentive to the res gestæ themselves or only to their various retellings, upon a closer examination the regularities in history are manifest in arrangements akin to those in a dramatic poem in verse an auditor or reader will hear. (Will? – rather, did hear, as the decline in the taste for this genre of literature, from the nineteenth century onwards, needs a forthright acknowledgement.) Without laying an emphasis upon this analogy it could not really sustain, nonetheless, the notion that the things found in the realm of history, the facts, the persons, and the other material and ideal items of interest, do enter into an ensemble which rhymes, does perhaps intimate how the historical sphere’s first addressee is the ear, even before the eye, and this long prior to its furnishing of materials for monuments, for antiquarian inquiries, or for the gnawing criticism of the – scholars or those who take themselves for such. Readiness to discern patterns within history, would then be an aptitude of the listening mind, akin to the predisposition whereby the latter will bestow its loving care on some particular, ideally on the worthiest poems – and similarly on the most meaningful pieces of music.

Whether such rhymes are apprehended within the scope of a single era of history, however broadly or narrowly delimited, or heard in a comparison of elements from two separate ones, or more than two, the presentiment of kinship amongst the historical, the poetic, and the musical realms is equally pronounced; each of this triad warrants a parsing, evinces a legibility like those of the others. Yet the greater the distance which the verses in a recounting of a history have to span, the longer the temporal and spatial interval between the endings of events which are thought to match, the bolder finally will be their rhyming, the quicker the meter without which their quality as history, their historicality never would cohere. For is it solely the poet or the composer who, in saying rhyme, or, perhaps, rhythm, also says pace and even feet or bars? When history is recounted, the verb signifies otherwise than as a mere figure of speech: the better practitioners did not strew their words, opting to say more with less, just as their peers amongst the poets measured out the syllables, those in music, the notes. In accord with this frugality, histories that deploy their means providently will be the stronger for it.

The sound of similar endings – the rhyming of a few lines in the long dramatic poem called history – tantalises the ears when certain moments of the early nineteenth century and afterwards are juxtaposed to some events of today. Such a sense of their likeness has certainly tantalised mine, for some time now, prompting me to affix a reminder for closer study at some opportune point. Recently, I have thought more and more, that moment is here, and thus some of these rhymes will be remarked upon throughout the text which follows (it has been assembled in the mode of historical commentary).

From rhymes, though not quite in the literal nor entirely in the figurative sense of the term, this commentary sets out, to reflect upon today’s destitution. For their sound can recall to mind some findings gleaned from another era, other countries. Or vice versa: starting amidst that distance, then coming back to the present. Strange reversal! – Nullities espoused now with a fervour still lit by scant rays from the west, do appear to have surprising forerunners, despite themselves, and regardless of their advocates’ unsettling ignorance of the history. (Would or could the latter notice this lineage? Unlikely, as the penchant for self-⁠destructive activity fills most of the time at their discretion. Yet even so, one does wonder how less dire the conditions of the 2020s might have been, had only earlier on a greater number of our contemporaries attended carefully to the humour of situations and its aggregation of ironies.) Not new, I believe, are the acts carried out by the many self-⁠sacrificers to nothingness . . .

Without anticipating unduly, where will this essay end up? – What rhymes shall the makers of history ever think to devise for “nothing”?

Not much more than two hundred years ago, the vogue for the poetry of Byron and for the man himself, was strong in London, and already considerable abroad. By no means did it emerge in a void: some part of his appeal may be traced back to the general circumstances of the time. The Napoleonic period had just flamed out; on the Continent the powers of the restoration had the advantage, for the moment, abetted by squads of police, spies, and informers, on one side, swollen ranks of officialdom, on another, while wafting over these ranks, there was a capricious and pervasive censorship. The example set by all of this was felt across the Channel too, and just two years into the new era, during the summer of 1817, Westminster witnessed Castlereagh, in his capacity as Foreign Secretary, outline the policy of supporting the legitimist cause on the Continent, even to the point of neglecting to defend British subjects residing there against unwarranted depredations, lest those rulers be given offence, while in the role of leader of the House of Commons, he proposed the use domestically of espionage organised along lines similar to its establishment in the main Continental states, and even heralded the profession as being one fit for honourable gentlemen. By reason of what threat would he have introduced the “spy system,” as it was called, into Britain? The supposition of an imminent insurrection which the government he represented itself sought to provoke, deliberately – for this duplicity one acute contemporary, William Hazlitt, upbraided him. He has suspended the laws of the country to save us from the danger of anarchy! Plainly he envisioned the prospect of that danger as expedient, indeed as indispensable to the framing of the state’s own plans for self-⁠aggrandisement – against the fallacy that served here as a pretext the critic was forthright and firm. If a Government’s conspiring against itself were a sufficient ground for arming it with arbitrary power, no country could for a moment be safe against ministerial treachery and encroachment, against real despotism founded on pretended disaffection. Government would be in perpetual convulsions and affected hysterics, like a fine lady who wants to domineer over her credulous husband.*

* untitled text (July 15, 1817)

That last comparison remains à propos today, or our present circumstances sharpen it even further. A government which sows the unrest and tries to guide the outbursts amongst the populace in order to domineer over, to dominate, and even to domesticate the governed the more effectively, by these adept stagings of bits of theatre attaining a larger co-⁠efficient of support from the docile amongst them, is a régime of the kind of which the unacquiescent do now see instance after instance, especially since 2020: régimes which arise when the types of relations amongst human beings specific to the political and the public realms, are supplanted by those that can fester in the private domesticity of the household.

Later on, the perplexing spectacle of a state conspiring against itself so as ultimately to aggrandise its power and control, will be addressed at some length. Here, for a moment I shall pause at Hazlitt’s blunt typification of the state’s devious comportment, convulsions and affected hysterics (so apt for today’s conditions too!), for just such shoddy self-⁠interested theatrics left behind

Such small distinction between friends and foes,*

that one should recognise these deceitful simulations on the part of the state as being amongst the conditions from which Byron sought in ire to separate himself, in literature, in laughter, and in life, and with him a part of his public, if not in act then at least in virtual agreement.

* Don Juan, Canto xiv, xxv

The threat from Westminster of imposing some version of the spy system one already knew of across the Channel, on a pretext of the flame of insurrection, as Hazlitt said, which the government itself was fanning with a visible hand, seemed to announce that the scrutiny directed at the individual whenever he entered society, and not least the searching look he aimed at himself, would soon be augmented by a surveillance emanating from every angle generally and none in particular. In response, some probably began to contemplate fortifying one layer of defence against this reign of observation, namely, the individual’s attitude of reserve, an insulation to prevent unwanted attention from impinging too far upon one’s privacy, a mode of self-⁠protection which might be put into practice in a number of different ways. So, perhaps not least amongst the causes prompting Byron to depart the country, was some anticipation that there as on the Continent a spy system would be established; already in 1816 he had bidden England farewell and, as it happened, never returned.

Along with the reserved attitude, and often allied closely to it, was a readiness to circulate ideas about oneself which were not strictly veracious, but rather, in the more literal sense of the term, fantastic, as a variety of personal myth-⁠making whose function was to distract others’ attention from those personalia which one did really want to shield from too exact a scrutiny. By these red herrings one might obtain the advantages of concealment without foregoing the benefits of a high profile; and, applied skilfully, this kind of stratagem might even envelop one in an aura of mystery having an efficacy of its own. In the poet’s case, this contrivance deployed hearsay, bits of gossip, and erotic suspicions – that it operated by sound and had a rhythm he was quite aware, and, in a self-⁠referential move which added something further to the appeal of the illicit he enveloped himself in, he would at times underscore how thus he himself played sonically with secrecy.

My music has some mystic diapasons;

And there is much which could not be appreciated

In any manner by the uninitiated.*

The off-⁠balance movement of the last two lines (iambically syncopated, one might call them) does, generally speaking, frustrate the reader’s metrical expectations, but it is just such a frustration which was sought in these two lines with their particular mystic diapasons, as delivering a knowing pleasure in its own right, and this the poet did provide while at the same time remarking that he is doing so, subtly, to be sure, for he also speaks of the initiated – and signals to them. Now, in many cases one could object to a deliberate embrace of mystification such as this, but in his, one is given grounds for accepting the wrapping of mystery, if only because, unlike the more common run of writers, he neither considered to be

most consequential –

The real portrait of the highest tribe**

– that is, the beau monde of his day – nor sought above all to indict its denizens. Quite the contrary,

I wish to spare ’em,

For reasons which I choose to keep apart.***

And since these reasons may well have stemmed from his decided reluctance to assist in any form the government’s surveillance over against the governed, the reader might understand better and with sympathy his declaration:

The grand Arcanum’s not for men to see all;****

for it is framed quite broadly, and does not simply iterate once more the old exclusion of the profanum vulgus. Rather, the poet’s reticence on this point expressed his scruple to avoid unwittingly aiding an intrusive régime or state in a capacity he hated, as an informer, a trader in private information.

* Canto xiv, xxii   ** Canto xiv, xx  *** Canto xiv, xxi  **** Canto xiv, xxii

To this basic principle the poet held firmly, though without wanting to proclaim it from the rooftops – better to let it speak implicitly to those capable of hearing him. The erotic notoriety of his life, and its reverberations in his work –

there are songs and quavers, roaring, humming,

Guitars, and every other sort of strumming*

– were most likely meant as distractions, decoys to divert the attention of all the others. – But if this was so, then, one wonders, did he conceive this stratagem all by himself, or had he perhaps derived the idea of it from another source?

* Beppo, ii

As it happens, such a stratagem, oddly enough, does have a proximate history which Byron may have known of, most likely at second hand, he whose dates make him a contemporary of the whole period of the French Revolution and its direct aftermath. Early on, during those years, in a necrological work devoted to Friedrich II, in a chapter touching on his “feigned Greek taste in matters of love” (vorgeblich griechischer Geschmack in der Liebe), the erstwhile physician and confidant of the Prussian monarch sought to clear his name of this mark against him, as it was then commonly thought to be, and at last to say why the king himself had wanted it to circulate.

The explanation sounds less than plausible on an initial hearing, but in this it somehow accords with the unlikely impression made by the philosophising and flute-⁠playing* first servant of the state. So: in this recounting, in his younger years, having contracted a venereal disease, the king had undergone an operation that went awry and, he imagined, left him impotent; then, to hide this outcome, on behalf presumably of his injured personal vanity, or else to quiet whatever sense of shame he may have had, he posed as a lover of men. Hence his erotic notoriety would have been wielded as a dissimulation or pretence (Verstellung), being merely a blanket over the effects of a surgical procedure he disliked, concealing also his own imaginary malady, eunuchdom – eine blosse Decke über die Folgen einer ihm unangenehmen chirurgischen Operation, und seiner eingebildeten Eünuchheit. In actual fact, however, this necrology assures us, hat Friedrich diese Neigung nie gehabt, und ist auch nie in diese Ausschweifung verfallen – this inclination never was his, and he never fell into this sort of debauchery either. But nonetheless this extraordinary disguise was donned perfectly, as the king did all he could that the whole world would believe it – alles that Er, damit es die ganze Welt glaube.**

* In this role he was perhaps portrayed, standing to the left, next to a castrato and in front of a version of the “Rape of Ganymede” by Michelangelo, in the fourth of Hogarth’s “Marriage A-⁠la-⁠Mode” series. (This identification is argued for in a recent essay by the art-⁠historian Bernd Krysmanski.)

** Johann Georg Zimmermann, Fragmente über Friedrich den Grossen, vol. i, ch. 5

Now, this attempt to illuminate for posterity the secret truth which the monarch himself was said to have kept under wraps as far as possible, is hard to credit on its own terms. Evidently seeking to deflect an as it believed unpalatable calumny from the deceased, though one largely self-⁠inflicted, what the necrologist alleged instead, itself embodied an even greater injury in the eyes of many of their contemporaries, an even more outrageous reduction of the late king’s stature. Thus was its account rejected by other eyewitnesses at the time, with indignation, and it has fared no better in the estimation of the public subsequently.

But to pursue these matters of historical fact is not my purpose here. Rather, let me simply note that the disputes about “den alten Fritz” and his real character, in their aggregate, augmented (and still continue to deepen) the mystique which this most enlightened of the eighteenth-⁠century autocrats found to be indispensable to his rule, and without the divertissement of which, taking his case as a paradigm, an end might have come for the Ancien Régime sooner than it did (if ever it fully did). Yes, the Prussian king’s adroit manipulation of his image furnished a bit (or should that be, two bits?) of entertainment and thus distracted the public’s attention to some degree from other pressing questions, thereby extending the lifespan of that kind of form of government, slowing down the emergence of its successor: hence Potsdam furnished quite a lesson, and it has been, I submit, studied assiduously since then by other sovereigns or those who want to rule.

Yet why should it not have been studied by the other side as well? That is what I surmise Byron, and he by no means alone, undertook to do at some point. By a deft utilisation of provocative items of news, the larger (“uninitiated”) portion of the reading public might be given something to chew on, while before the informers and spies of the state, on both sides of the Channel, lures would be dangled in order to lead them down false trails, so that he and his fellows could pursue their work with fewer hindrances, and attain the results the more quickly. For, if the deployment of scandalising pieces of information did lend some last bit of longevity to the type of régime that was in command, could not the very same stratagem also just as readily, in dexterous hands, contribute noticeably to quickening the pace of the arrival of the next form of government? – which would they hoped be aligned better with the demands of the people, and with liberty.

Such seems to have been Byron’s assessment of the terrain of the political realm, considered as if it were a battlefield, directly after 1815. The struggle had to be waged with a maximum of strategic intelligence. – But to set the aspect of πόλεμος aside for a moment, what was this conflict actually about, what was its content?

A few years before, his sense of the battlefield then rather more simple, in his maiden speech in the House of Lords, during the debate on the proposed Frame Bill (passed into law on March 20, 1812), whereby capital punishment could have been meted out to workers who destroyed the industrial machinery which was rendering them unemployed and superfluous, at least the beginnings of an answer were given voice by Byron in an energetic tenor which still catches the ear more than two centuries afterwards. By his arraignment of the legislation, I would submit, though without digressing to itemise its flashes of phrase in detail, some new combative quality of utterance was entered into the storehouse of English political rhetoric. – Yet even if that contribution is denied, already, more specifically, throughout these lines can be heard the coruscating Byronic irony.

There follows a selection of moments drawn from his address, interspersed by remarks presenting some ideas he had no need to state directly, in that venue.

The rejected workmen in the blindness of their ignorance, instead of rejoicing at these improvements in arts so beneficial to mankind, conceived themselves to be sacrificed to improvements in mechanism. (They are become human sacrifices – in an unheard-⁠of cult of the machines. Though labour is esteemed as an essential feature in the human being’s definition, and considered as a basic necessity in the process of life, yet by mechanisation fewer opportunities to labour will be offered, thus excluding a greater and greater number of persons from it. What is to be done with them?) In the foolishness of their hearts they imagined, that the maintenance and well doing of the industrious poor, were objects of greater consequence than the enrichment of a few individuals by any improvement, in the implements of trade, which threw the workmen out of employment, and rendered the labourer unworthy of his hire. (Machines and their administration are supplanting the government of human beings, amongst the items of first concern in the state’s political economy, that is, in the calculative action of the rulers. Their ulterior aim looks as though it is to increase the ranks of the paupers, in order to treat them as things, something like objects to be disposed over – and, as needed, disposed of. Mass starvation will be an ever more likely and an imminent consequence of this change of priorities, thus bringing closer to the point of realisation, albeit by another route, the worst Malthusian anticipations.) When we are told that these men are leagued together not only for the destruction of their own comfort, but of their very means of subsistence, can we forget that it is the bitter policy, the destructive warfare of the last 18 years, which has destroyed their comfort, your comfort, all mens’ comfort? (War with revolutionary and then with Napoleonic France, nearly unbroken since 1793, has brought on a rapid invention of new industrial technologies, an explosion of ingenuity which, at one and the same time, is encouraging an expansion of some opportunities of employment while also cutting down others to the ground, the result an evident maldistribution of the wealth labour did generate, the utter disproportion of luxury and poverty.)

Once one understood all this, circa 1812, it was but a step or two to the quite perplexing awareness of subsequent decades that the motor of the economy’s and also the society’s advancement could rightly be termed a creative destruction, the latter embodying a power which, akin in this to a few well-⁠known characters in literature, had escaped from humanity’s service, to become instead a heartless world’s controlless core* (to adapt the poet’s own somewhat later image). But already from the earlier vantage-⁠point, it could be foreseen that this creatively destructive force would become more and more ineluctable, the further its origination from an ever-⁠present warfare was forgotten.

* Don Juan, Canto i, cxvi

Do not misconstrue those last lines! – I do not attribute any prophetic visions to Byron. His great stature as a poet suffices. He looked around himself, and could reckon with consequences, forehearing how one day they would be found to rhyme.

That policy – here he did bring thunder – has survived the dead to become a curse on the living, unto the third and fourth generation! These men never destroyed their looms till they were become useless, worse than useless; till they were become actual impediments to their exertions in obtaining their daily bread. (For themselves and, very often, for their families. Under circumstances of vital deprivation, the sentiment of being made superfluous strikes each of them, and the latter also. But then, turning to view the government, they see the perpetrators of real crimes and many who are indeed dispensable.) Can you, then, wonder that in times like these, when bankruptcy, convicted fraud, and imputed felony are found in a station not far beneath that of your lordships, the lowest, though once most useful portion of the people should forget their duty in their distresses, and become only less guilty than one of their representatives? But while the exalted offender can find means to baffle the law, new capital punishments must be devised, new snares of death must be spread for the wretched mechanic who is famished into guilt. (When that piece of the very definition of the human being which pertains to his labour and its fruits is heeded no longer, or else is affirmed only with a flagrant hypocrisy, the elementary sense of justice protests and turns against the institutions of the law. What will happen then?) But all the cities you have taken, all the armies which have retreated before your leaders are but paltry subjects of self congratulation, if your land divides against itself, and your dragoons and your executioners must be let loose against your fellow citizens. (The warfare almost unbroken for decades on behalf of the old order abroad, reveals better the constituents of its counterpart at home, and thus it may, seemingly despite itself, put them in greater peril than before. How poorly advised all this war was, therefore, albeit perhaps, regarded from another perspective, how necessary, if from an upheaval a more fundamental rectification will issue!) You call these men a mob, desperate, dangerous, and ignorant; and seem to think that the only way to quiet the “Bellua multorum capitum” is to lop off a few of its superfluous heads – the slight emphasis on the word “superfluous” well conveys the poet’s agile irony. (Whose heads shall roll, does remain to be seen. Real justice may yet be done, and if so, it will call forth a sanction on the ineptitude of measures that fell short of the mark or overshot it.) Setting aside the palpable injustice and the certain inefficiency of the Bill, are there not capital punishments sufficient in your statutes? Is there not blood enough upon your penal code, that more must be poured forth to ascend to Heaven and testify against you?*

* debut speech, February 27, 1812

Thus, I suggest, already announced in 1812 was a clear answer to the question of the specific content of the great struggle, on behalf of which, Byron would later intimate, the adoption of stratagems was needful and justified. His early advocacy presents one of the first and also an emblematic instance of that pairing of political causes typical of the century, that is, Liberty and Justice of, for, and by the people – just as some moments in his poetry exemplify the bitterness which their conjoint defeat, even if merely temporary, did inspire.

Brute demonstrations by the state that its political economy was rendering an increasing number of human beings superfluous, were requited by the irony which the poet introduced into the language, even if they did remain unpaid for in blood.

At this juncture, one influential judgment, even a censure, upon the poet’s work, published more than a century after his death, ought to be addressed – especially as it may disclose itself as not quite the condemnation it first appears to be.

Evidently the Byronic conjunction of poetry and politics had disturbed its author, or perhaps his hostility had been aroused by a peer who had died young. Possibly he felt himself provoked for yet further reasons as well: one does wonder whether two such very different creators could tolerate one another’s company on the way to Parnassus. – But I shall not pursue the motives behind the passage, quoted in its entirety, wherein T. S. Eliot summed up his idea of the earlier poet.

Of Byron one can say, as of no other English poet of his eminence, that he added nothing to the language, that he discovered nothing in the sounds, and developed nothing in the meaning, of individual words. I cannot think of any other poet of his distinction who might so easily have been an accomplished foreigner writing English. The ordinary person talks English, but only a few people in every generation can write it; and upon this undeliberate collaboration between a great many people talking a living language and a very few people writing it, the continuance and maintenance of a language depends. Just as an artisan who can talk English beautifully while about his work or in a public bar, may compose a letter painfully written in a dead language bearing some resemblance to a newspaper leader, and decorated with words like ‘maelstrom’ and ‘pandemonium’: so does Byron write a dead or dying language.*

* “Byron”

With respect, this summation, taken on its face, is simply preposterous: a moment’s scrutiny, and there collapses the belittling of Byron’s rapport with the language. His contribution to rhetoric was mentioned earlier. As for its dimensions of sound, consider these lines:

Sun of the sleepless! melancholy star!

Whose tearful beam glows tremulously far,

That show’st the darkness thou canst not dispel,

How like art thou to joy remembered well!

So gleams the past, the light of other days,

Which shines, but warms not with its powerless rays;

A night-⁠beam Sorrow watcheth to behold,

Distinct, but distant – clear – but, oh how cold!*

under the aspect of their sonority, and the falsity of the Eliotic assessment is obvious. Does one not hear something even more brittle in the basic word “cold” than before, after encountering it in its ultimate position in these lines? For my purposes here this example does suffice – and I can dismiss the charge concerning the sense and its supposed stagnation, if not decrepitude or death in his writing.

* Hebrew Melodies, “Sun of the sleepless!”

Furthermore, when the next sentence implied Byron was déraciné, it carried a distinctly nasty undertone during those years. After all, throughout that period, the book containing the poem of which some lines were just recited, though it does not appear on the lists of items for the bonfires readied with plentiful assistance by the German libraries themselves in 1933, as far as I know, would nonetheless most likely have been treated roughly by them and sequestered from their own shelves, whether in its original version or in its many German translations, on account of the poet’s depth of understanding of the historical experience of this oppressed people, as signalised by the title.

Not least amongst the points which seemed to have drawn Byron’s attention, was music’s share in forming and preserving a people’s long memories; while off in the distance he may already have espied the possibility that some day a venerable language largely unspoken for centuries would revive, an improbable event confounding all manner of expectations, and even exemplifying that most paradoxical occurrence, a secular miracle . . .

Occasioned by the appearance of an early translation of the Hebrew Melodies, in its debut issue the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung published a significant review. Struck by the work’s interest as art (künstlerisches Interesse), the anonymous writer pointed out the kind of memory without which this music could never have flowed, and suggested it was precisely this which had caught the poet’s attention. Such a memory – to avoid an obvious misunderstanding – did not pertain only to the past; rather, it spanned both a recollection of the homeland from which the people had been exiled long before and an imagination endowed with the strength of a faith that some day its restoration there would come about, and as long as the people holds to its belief, its manner of thinking will also necessarily remain unchanged, und so lange es an seinem Glauben festhält, wird auch seine Sinnesart unverändert bleiben müssen. Precisely this constancy is sustained also by its main, indeed the sole weapon it has against the oppressors, namely, hatred, this people which nur Eine Waffe gegen den Unterdrücker hat – den Hass, though it is a hatred whose outbursts of fury each of them must again and again restrain with great care, dessen zornige Ausbrüche er wiederum sorgfältig zurück drücken muss.*

* review of Byron, et al., Sammlung hebräischer Original-Melodien

The distinctive strains and metricality of this music, from bittersweet joys to very sorrowful lamentations, have emerged by virtue of an inner power both furious and self-⁠restrained, indeed continuously so. – A power endurant on this very account. – In this disposition the poet recognised something of his own.

Hatred, here, diverges from ressentiment or the spirit of revenge (Geist der Rache) – to avoid some other misconceptions embraced, alas, rather often – and one may go astray if these terms are confused. (Need I add, the reference is to this inward force as it ought to be, when it perdures at its best? In this connection, as with all that is principled in human affairs, the adage corruptio optimi est pessima should be borne in mind.) Now, why, in this context, are those two other ideas improper and inadmissible? Not simply because this hatred arises against the oppressor – for a moment’s reflection should clarify how this characteristic could not entirely suffice to allay the suspicion that at bottom the hatred, indeed, all hatred, is nothing other than ressentiment or something worse. No, beyond this negative attribute there also supervenes one which is inherently positive: in principle this hatred has never ceased to point forward in the earthly order of time to a moment of restoration when some justice shall be rendered and recompense made to these downtrodden, in accordance at long last with a specifically human vocation, namely, the contemplation by earth-⁠bound beings of the work of creation when provisionally their labour is done, their minds turning upwards in answer to the most lasting concept of humanity.

What becomes of this conception of the human when in point of economic fact many individuals are becoming superfluous? – such may have been the question which Byron posed to himself throughout his poetic and political life. And on this question does not the other, the query concerning the continuance and maintenance of a language, depend? Hence the latter was rather inaptly posed in Eliot’s essay. Yet perhaps, just possibly, had what seems at first like a misstep been actually deliberate on his part, it too a kind of subterfuge?

If so, smuggled in, there would have been, between the lines, an acknowledgement that superfluity as a more and more obvious datum in the economic realm did not leave the consistency of the language unscathed. Soon enough attrition would cut a swath through the undeliberate collaboration without which, to take the essay’s line of thought but a step further, literature too would begin to wither away. Advance indications of this process, Byron’s acoustic sensitivity had already begun to collate, and the sounds that the words would later on give off, were escorted to the threshold of audibility by his poems’ syncopes and irony. Raising a finger to the doorbell, they are aural anticipations at most, but that may suffice to inspire ears to listen for those provocations to thought the rhymes in history.

Some few adjustments might then be made to the last and to the first sentence in the excerpt, as though at its own behest, in order to express what remains latent in them, a bold appreciation of the poet’s achievement.

Just as an – this portion the Eliotites could supply ad libitum – so does Byron write against a dead or dying language. Of Byron one can say, as of no other English poet of his eminence, that he added Nothing to the language, that he discovered Nothing in the sounds, and developed Nothing in the meaning, of individual words.

Unearthing a Lewis Carroll layer under the surface of this Eliotic prose? . . . Well, “Nothing” may be said in more than one way, and though there are in the world not nearly as many of these nonentities as their positive counterparts, the number of the “Nothings” an observer probably ought not to underestimate. – Their sort did swell as the size of the state grew, in tandem with the unbroken decades of war, the maelstrom and pandemonium to whose consequences Byron was also poetically attuned. Expansion of the ranks of the functionaries, whether amongst the officialdom, or amidst the less official cohorts, the obscure armies of spies, informers, and yet lower creatures, on one side, the unnecessary enactment of ever more bad laws and ordinances, on another: so much superfluity (and stupidity correlate to it)! – which the other concern aroused by the immiseration of those rendered superfluous by the workings of the industrial economy, whatever the degree of “necessity” then ascribed to the “forces” bringing it about, would, when wise, in the nineteenth century as now, neither overlook nor forget.

Superfluity of this variety affected the condition of the language, much as did the other; with the rapid accumulation of officialese and langue de bois, in the thickets of the state and elsewhere in the society too, after some stretch of time one began to hear how some part of the interior in the meaning of words was as though hollowed out, and thus their sound would convey a different tone, less robust, more brittle and vapid. Byron, I submit, had already started to hear the effects upon the sense and the sonority, and these changes for the worse were then, as Eliot despite himself may have intimated, echoed in the “Nothings” discovered and developed in his poetry (and possibly also in his parliamentary speeches).

Where was the state tending? A presentiment that it might end by nullifying itself, speaking half-⁠figuratively, half-⁠literally, was no stranger to the poet.

Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,

And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropp’d

– the gusts of war no longer in their sails, or having turned on and shredded them, who could foretell which?

They slept on the abyss without a surge –

The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,

and with them untold numbers of innocents. (Where ever had the captains gone?) A scene that even the skies could not bear to look upon,

And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need

Of aid from them – She was the universe.*

So seems the world when observed from the heart of superfluity. These lines were a warning in advance to states that they desist from their present course, lest they, humankind, and the planet altogether be cut down by it. – Today again one has grounds to hear some rhyme in them, though it be low and terse.

* The Prisoner of Chillon, “Darkness”

Around a decade before this poem, much the same dire event was predicted in a novel by Jean-⁠Baptiste Cousin de Grainville that appeared posthumously, soon after the coronation of Napoléon.

Tout le ciel attendoit avec impatience ce grand événement ; ses voûtes retentissent aussi-⁠tôt de cris d’alégresse. Le règne du temps est fini, les siècles éternels vont commencer ; mais au même moment, les enfers jettent des cris de rage, le soleil et les étoiles s’éteignent. La sombre nuit du chaos couvre la terre, il sort des montagnes, des rochers et des cavernes des sons plaintifs, la nature gémit. On entend dans l’air une voix lugubre qui s’écrie : Le genre humain est mort.*

* Le Dernier Homme, vol. ii, Chant x

Sentiment of things ending in a void, echoed widely throughout the first years of the nineteenth century. The scene just presented transcribes that expectation – this is evident. Yet one can perceive something more specific in it, especially if it is taken on its own, extracted from the work, and considered a bit against the grain.

Although the entire supplanting of the règne du temps by eternity figures in this passage, perhaps the idea was meant largely to suggest how that present moment, or a moment then soon to arrive, constituted an interregnum, a crossing in time from which one possible route would lead to the mort du genre humain. Not a notation of inevitability, but a warning and admonition, like the one “Darkness” would deliver, around ten years later: it was anticipated that it might yet be avoided. – But then, how can mortality ever befall the “genre humain” collectively? While the term does roll easily over the tongue (much more than do some others which rhyme with it), what precisely may it signify, if its referent could die?

Hints towards an answer can be gleaned from the responses to this conjectural event on the part of the various regions above, below, and around the properly human domain.

Most obvious is a last re-⁠statement of an inimical attitude towards humanity on the part of the lower depths (les enfers). Though they be ghastly locales fit for the culpable, in accord with virtually all images or imaginings of the occurrences there, at bottom something else is transpiring down in the infernal regions. They exist, or rather, as per the letter of the text, very soon would once have existed, only by dint of a continuous stream of human entrants. Should the latter cease to flow, as in this anticipation, they would starve and die. Hence their incensed cries, compelled in extremis to acknowledge how necessary to them this alimentation had always been. (Life, even with an after-⁠ before it, cannot live without enemies.)

Much as with the shouts of joy (cris d’allégresse) from on high just prior to the cessation of time, however, here too the whole point of the scene may be to bring readers to think about something else closer to the sphere of common experience: in this instance, the question of the relation between earth and that earthly creature, the human being. If humankind perishes, what then will happen to the earth, in particular that fertile uppermost layer of it which depends so much on human cultivation and which through the latter does humanity so much good in its turn? (What vocal protest could it raise to ward off this abandonment?)

Such a metabolism between human beings and the fecund soil is one of the oldest of all topics of reflection. Etymology attests this quite easily, as the linkage is practically announced by the most basic terms themselves. – Back in the earliest period of the original Indo-⁠European language, as per scholarly conjecture, from the oldest term for earth, *⁠dhg̑hem‑, was derived the word for the human being typified as an earthling, *⁠(dh)ghm̥-⁠on- or *⁠(dh)ghom-⁠on-, whence the word for man in the ur-⁠Germanic, *⁠gumōn-, from which came the Old English guma that still lives on inconspicuously in another guise today. – Yet the parallel development in Latin, which has bequeathed to English much of the vocabulary at issue, is even more significant, as the relevant entry in Calvert Watkins’ etymological dictionary confirms. For the reader’s convenience, I include it now verbatim. (His work is less broad than Julius Pokorny’s, whose findings it incorporates only in part, and so those curious about the comparable derivations in Old Lithuanian, Tocharian, etc., may consult the latter, s. v. “g̑hđem-, g̑hđom-.”)

dhghem- Earth. (Oldest form *⁠dhg̑hem-.) 1. Suffixed zero-⁠grade form *⁠(dh)ghm̥-⁠on-, “earthling.” bridegroom, from Old English guma, man, from Germanic *⁠gumōn-. 2. O-⁠grade form *⁠dh(e)ghom-. chthonic; autochthon, from Greek khthōn, earth. 3. Zero-⁠grade form *⁠(dh)ghm̥‑. chamaephyte, chameleon, chamomile, germander, from Greek khamai, on the ground. 4. Suffixed o-⁠grade form *⁠(dh)ghom-⁠o-. humble, humiliate, humility, humus¹, omerta; exhume, inhume, transhumance, from Latin humus, earth. 5. Suffixed o-⁠grade form *⁠(dh)ghom-⁠on-, “earthling.” a. homage, hombre¹, hominid, homo¹, homunculus, ombre; bonhomie, homicide, from Latin homō, human being, man; b. human, humane, from Latin hūmānus, human, kind, humane (in part from dhghem-). 6. Suffixed form *⁠(dh)ghem-⁠yā-. chernozem, sierozem, zemstvo, from Old Russian zemĭ, land, earth. 7. Full-⁠grade form *⁠(dh)ghem-. zamindar, from Persian zamīn, earth, land. [Pokorny g̑hđem- 414.]

A likeness between the fertile top-layer of the earth and the cultured human being, did evidently captivate the imaginations of the first Romans, and then it was but a step towards drawing comparisons between these two varieties of cultivation: from this elaboration there arose the distinctive ideal of humanitas which was tendered to the successor languages of the Romance family almost automatically, as a function of the vocabulary they inherited, and amongst them by adoption, as it were, in this respect English as well, while something of the ideal did also pass over to the other Germanic languages, to the degree that the Latin concept, however strange at first it sounded, was also naturalised within some of those environs, as for example by a few German authors, during the eighteenth century.

Yet, retracing this part of Roman history, one stumbles on an odd melancholic fact: the ties between the words humus, humanus, and homo, were not acknowledged by authoritative writers until very late, indeed, only during the Empire’s aftermath. – Nowhere in his remarks about “earth” (terra) did Varro say the “human being” (homo) stemmed from it, nor from the “soil” (humus), though these two terms for the ground were handled by him largely as synonymous.* – For his part, though he did address the matter, Quintilian made light of the words’ kinship by means of a half-⁠humorous, half-⁠rhetorical question, in effect denying the relation.** – Would this etymological affirmation, by its suggestive notion of humanity, perhaps have cast some shadow over the conditions of social and economic life as they then were? – Unspoken and discounted it stood for centuries, but at last, in the seventh, in Seville, Isidore embraced it. Homo dictus, quia ex humo est factus*** – finally an honest statement of these Latin terms’ affiliation. To it he adduced the Biblical text: Et creavit Deus hominem de humo terræ.**** (In the Hebrew wording, “from dust of the ground” (עָפָר֙ מִן־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה, apar min ha’adamah) it was that “man” (הָֽאָדָ֗ם, ha’adam) had first been brought forth.) Even if it were dry or barren to begin with, the earth could become productive, and by virtue of the lineage, the earthling, its first and greatest product, likewise. The result in both cases stemmed from a fertilisation, and so the fertilising of each could be comprehended better as the store of plausible analogies in both directions between humus, on one side, humanus and humanitas, on the other, was augmented. With ongoing cultivation, the quality of soil would be raised gradually by the activity of the human being sprung from it, while conversely humankind could assess its own humanity more fully, including the lower depths and higher reaches, when it treated the soil with some proper degree of consideration.

* De lingua latina, bk. v, 21, and 23-24
** De institutione oratoria, bk. i, ch. 6, 34
*** Etymologiæ, bk. xi, ch. i, 4
**** Genesis, 2, 7

Much as the first product of the earth had been drawn forth by an act from without, so too the immaterial fertility of the human substrate would require an impetus from elsewhere, most likely supplied or self-⁠supplied from above, some infusion of spirit. This anthropology in nuce was not unique to the Bible, though that book had established its deepest underpinnings, but it also encouraged truly philosophical flights of wonder. Such, so it seems to me, is the import of the additional gloss on the terms given by the etymologist after the remark I quoted: Abusive autem pronuntiatur ex utraque substantia totus homo, id est ex societate animæ et corporis. Nam proprie homo ab humo. Græci autem hominem ἄνθρωπον appellaverunt, eo quod sursum spectet sublevatus ab humo ad contemplationem artificis sui.* It is a wrong usage, moreover, which announces the whole man as being of two substances, that is, constituted by an alliance of soul and body. For, to speak properly, “man” is from “soil.” The Greeks, furthermore, have called man “ἄνθρωπος” because he looks upwards, being raised from the soil up to the contemplation of his maker. – Drawing upon the fund of analogies amongst these related terms which this anthropology keeps in reserve, one can plausibly say that the propensity to bestow contemplative thought on everything above, is awakened within the human nature of an individual and then brought to manifest itself, upwards and outwards, in much the way that some plant species require a dedicated cultivation if they are ever to root themselves fully and then burst forth from the ground, in answer to the higher intention unfolding their most beautiful parts in, even towards the light. – In short, superior acts, in both cases, will inspirit some better potentiality and raise it up to show itself and thus to flourish, an event that otherwise simply could never happen.

* Certainly these two sentences do both admit more than one construal of their aim, but I take each second-⁠position “autem” to indicate not any contrast to, but rather an agreement with the prior statement.

Superintendence, as action and as concept, merited esteem in this anthropology, which from the start was patently inspired by agricultural effort, especially as the results were so often considered with surprise and admiration. Ranging the gamut from the shortest-⁠lived to the most venerable, the works of agriculture afforded an ample stock of comparisons by which the possible conditions of the human being’s fertile layers could be described more fully. So too, when in breeding a cultivar that, once produced, might last into perpetuity, the cultivators felt themselves attaining as near an approximation to sempiternity as mortals may ever reasonably expect to realise on this globe, their sense of achievement might be compared in some respects to the sentiment which creativity in its higher and better launchings may engender, notably in music and the fine arts. (When sheer permanence accrues to these winged works as though by right, in keeping with our common notions, this honour is both entrancing and thought-⁠provoking.)

Analogies between the soil and humanity run in the other direction as well, and so more specifically human terms are applied plausibly in the domain of agricultural endeavours. To take a prime example, in his discussion of shoots and trunks in the vineyard and the pruning they invite, another Roman authority, also Iberian, Columella, noted how there were several factors to consult: Modus itaque materiarum is erit quem dictabit humi atque ipsius stirpis lætitia.* Therefore, a fitting treatment of the harder branches, will be that which the fertility of the soil and of the stem itself shall prescribe. The curious anthropomorphic tendency in this sentence (akin to the common practice amongst gardeners of speaking to their plants) is a consequence, I submit, of the implicit context, namely, cultivation as a process. Because it is a process, its duration encourages a certain amount of trial and error in order to ascertain the optimal treatment of whatever is being cultivated, while the latter does indeed prescribe limits to this experimentation upon its specificities, actual and potential. All this the cultivator will do well to heed, and doing so is not simply an option, but even something proper to the activity itself, and thus he does owe it to himself and to all that he is cultivating.

* Res rustica, bk. iv, xxiv, 4

To say “cultivation,” therefore, may also be to say “justice.” And not the practice of cultivation alone, but also the concepts pertaining to it conduce to acknowledging this. For, by virtue of the principle of cultivation, on the humanus some light is shed by the humus and vice versa, and by this cross-⁠illumination each can be inspired to develop better the contents proper to it. Thus it seems more than a mere figure of speech when one states that to both of them this reciprocity is owed.

In view of the foregoing, I submit, these interactions occur on the terrain of justice. Then, as the sentence in the Res rustica from which these notions are gleaned, does evince several anthropomorphisms, it is tempting to adjust it so that it would refer directly to humanity, and thus emended to bring it into English, as follows: the due measure of sustenance will be that which the flourishing of the human being and of humankind shall prescribe. So, what is right for each, cultivation may reveal.

With some inkling now in mind of the age-⁠old idea of cultivation (itself virtually inexhaustible as a topic for reflection), let me turn back to Grainville and his anticipation of the “last man.” A great ending was envisioned, but what really would it entail? Examined in this light, the règne du temps in the text does seem to comprise the long span of properly human history, commencing once the soil began to be cultivated, and subsequently, as though by the inspiration of this process, the self-⁠cultivation of the cultivator; throughout this history, the specific duration of the process of cultivation on all scales, as a virtually sempiternal enterprise of generation upon generation, establishes the domain wherein it becomes feasible to determine what is each’s own: hence only during it and not before, did there emerge the ideal of justice, the venerable adage suum cuique. Accordingly, if humanity is threatened with extinction, as this author feared, not least amongst the consequences would be the foundation of all justice overturned. Its overturning – unearthed, so to speak, and primed for an entire demolition.

What then will happen with those witnesses of its aftermath, they who would have been called human beings? Agriculture has at a minimum been interrupted, its own Arcadian, bucolic ideal extinguished, while chaos scours the country. At this point, brushing the text against the grain, one might conclude, provisionally, that the lower depths of the human, or even the regions subjacent to it – here an implicit comparison is drawn with the stratified layers of earth – are splintering off, turning against the being to which they had been joined. And similarly with the higher reaches within or just above the human – likened to the skies overhead – they too become its adversaries. As its death nears, the genre humain no longer sustains its inner cohesion; thus there is cause to notice what is at the very least a strong correlation between its former unity and the cultivation to whose history an end has been put.

To forestall an undue misunderstanding at this point, I hasten to emphasise that the foregoing provisional conclusions are not an attempt to imagine into existence any new mythic beings, nor to uncover remnants of belief in a few very old ones still contained within today’s common observances: neither on my own part nor, by ventriloquism, in the stead of a long-⁠deceased author. Conducting research into the murky lower depths of the element of earth, or the obscure upper regions of the air or the sky, that is to say, into the conceptions of these locales in the human imagination, is not my métier. Bachofen explored these matters best, but there is no need to introduce any of his findings here. What does suffice, is to extract from his work one clarification about a pair of Latin words, the sanctum and the sacrum.

Das Sanctum steht unter dem Schutze der chthonischen Mächte, das Sacrum ist den obern Göttern geweiht – thus he summed up the antithesis of these τόποι. Jenes hat seine Wurzel in einer Eigenschaft des tellurischen Stoffes, dieses entspricht dem Lichtreiche.* The “sanctum” stands under the protection of the chthonic powers, while the “sacrum” is dedicated to the higher gods. – The former has its roots in one quality of tellurian matter, the latter corresponds to the realm of light. Neither these “powers” nor these “gods” concern me at present, in their own right: real beings are so much more interesting. Even so, insofar as the terms might be shifted, to designate forces adjacent to the human on both sides, above and below, which were in some manner welded to it throughout the epochs of cultivation, compressed into a unity which was precarious and yet perdurant, up until the end of this history, then they can be brought in.

* Versuch über die Gräbersymbolik der Alten, “Die drei Mysterien-Eier,” § 13

Accordingly, it is the forces in the lower regions of, or subjacent to, not the soil (humus), but the human (humanus), otherwise quite readily inimical to the whole human being, which would be placated by the making of a sanctum, a structure under the ground entrusted to their safeguarding: hence these lower forces will be pressed into service when subterranean buildings such as this are constructed. And as in architecture, on one side of the analogy, so in agriculture, on the other, now even more primordially: through planting, the animosity of the forces rooted in “tellurian matter” (tellurischer Stoff) is assuaged, and the seed given over to their protection. Yet where in this matter, to be specific, are they thought to have struck root? In its essential quality (Eigenschaft) of sanctitas. Hence, once again by the basic analogy, situated upon an underlying stratum within the humanus, or directly underneath, there is also a locus of “sanctity” – bending this word back to the original Latin – from which, on behalf of the entire human being, assistance can be sought only if it is approached and treated properly.

Similarly with the forces towards the higher side, or just above, the human. They too could become its adversaries, if proper respect is not shown them, that is, if they are hindered from seeking, growing upwards towards, and indeed offering themselves to the light, in fulfilment of their phototropic nature. In so doing, one might say, they answer to the sacrum; thus their inmost tendency inspires them towards the places and especially towards the edifices dedicated to activities that are ends in themselves, structures which in keeping with this purpose are set apart – sacred venues inspiring conversance with higher things. In this connection, the analogies between humus and humanus, and between agriculture and architecture, should probably not be pressed too hard; of greater significance is the act of setting apart, dedicating, reserving. There is much which could not be appreciated in any manner by the uninitiated, and though etymology does not attest a connection between the sacred and the secret, still it is tempting to associate them together on account of their overlapping meanings (also even by virtue of their near rhyme). And doing so, furthermore, might serve as a prudent reminder that there are several avenues of response available to the higher forces within or just above the human, if their distinct position apart is threatened.

While the long reign of agriculture abides intact and the analogies continue to be heeded which its practice bodies forth, the sanctum and the sacrum are leagued in concord by humanitas on behalf of human beings, and thus that prerogative of humanity, the pursuit of self-⁠cultivation, may properly be termed, in a word, sacrosanct. Conversely, once the coherence of all this is gone (with decomposition, not only of the genre humain, setting in), then the forces whose loci those places had been, which no longer are bound into a unity, will be heard from perhaps even more often, speaking with an evidently greater adversarial force, against the – posthumous remains of the human.

During the 1860s, Zola espoused vehemently a pure variety of hatred, in which the age-⁠old sanctitas was heard from unalloyed, in its French guise, “sainteté.” Haïr c’est aimer – a blunt equation! – c’est vivre largement du mépris des choses honteuses et bêtes. (He saw no need to dignify them as humaines . . . ) La haine est sainte. Elle est l’indignation des cœurs forts et puissants, le dédain militant de ceux que fâchent la médiocrité et la sottise. – Provoking that aggrieved disdain was abundant debris . . . So much to clear away: l’insolente royauté des médiocres a lassé le monde, les médiocres doivent être jetés en masse à la place de Grève.*

* “Mes Haines”

Circa sixty years later, Valéry told of visiting a museum and finding there, as it were, a shrine to inhumanity, a counterfeit sort of temple, sterile in its profusion, without spirit. Je suis saisi d’une horreur sacrée* – he remarked and exited the place, leaving this counterfeit of a sacrum suffused with pseudo-⁠solemnity behind, his act inspired by an idea of the thing in its absence. Whereas the sacrum had emboldened the human penchant for contemplation in particular and habits of thoughtful consideration more generally, to what were the “cultural” institutions dedicated, when cultivation itself was dead or dying? The specific mood in which one tried to answer this and like questions, was sacral.

* “Le Problème des Musées”

If the hypothesis is plausible that cultivation, considered as the proper endeavour of the human being, had drawn upon both the lower and the higher forces (which, hypostatised, the sanctum and sacrum respectively were built to propitiate), thus rendering them dual tributaries to an activity that was sacrosanct: then, in reality, what would happen to human justice once the basic institution of agriculture began to mutate or to disappear entirely (to refer again to the gnawing prospect glimpsed already in the early nineteenth century)?

A singularly explosive reply to this question, can be elicited from that often denounced but also unread opus, Les Soirées de Saint Pétersbourg, one of the last works by the Savoyard author and diplomat, Joseph de Maistre, who passed those years of upheaval and restoration in that capital as his country’s Envoyé extraordinaire and Ministre Plénipotentiaire, from 1803 until 1817, and who, along the route of his homeward voyage, left a memorable impression which bears relaying – Pare il nostro Etna; la neve in testa ed il fuoco in bocca – upon a Sicilian nobleman who saw him in Paris.*

* These details stem from George-⁠Marie Raymond, “Éloge historique de S. Excellence le Comte Joseph de Maistre.”

Although horreur is the topic of the remarks that can supply an answer, I dissent from the common view that what this work prescribes is horror, even if its interlocutors indeed appear to do so. Instead the overall aim was to understand better a variety of horror which can assume command of human beings, precisely so that this, and subsequently the events which then become ineluctable, may be averted as far as is humanly possible. Whereas the lines of thought as Maistre articulated them do not eschew conditional provisions or clauses, unfortunately his detractors (as though entranced by his surname) all too often mistake them as the simplest imperatives. In his case, especially, a fatal misstep!

Now, if agriculture is instituted with a view towards its permanence, or so that some expectation of permanence be upon the earth; and through its sempiternal duration what is proper to each will be determined gradually; and only once this terrain has been established and not before will justice be born, insofar as it never can be done, or thought or spoken of, without some recourse to the suum cuique, whether in the original Latin or in another guise – if these propositions seem right, then whenever cultivation, and especially the self-⁠cultivation of humanity by human beings, yields results beyond a due measure, their profusion becomes luxurious; then the self-⁠cultivators disregard the conditions of their activity, that is, everything which was, is, and shall be required for the latter to take place; then finally, not the least amongst those requisites, justice too is neglected, or cared for badly though espoused hypocritically, or even wholly forgotten.

Laws which justice did observe, too much luxury then threatens to engulf; justice then, in extremis, calls the human being to its aid. Yet his reply to the appeal may then surprise everyone, himself above all, he who has become so lax. What the response may comprise, the Sénateur in these dialogues by Maistre sums up, and his verdict constitutes one reason why the Soirées are scorned: wrongly, in my view, and, as regards this senatorial pronouncement, unjustly, though, I stress, it is handled as it deserves if it is listened to by itself, without reference to the scenes in which it was spoken. So treated, one can hear in it not advocacy, nor reckless incitement, but a well-⁠considered warning.

A human being, even despite himself, is called upon to support justice, that is, the lawfulness the reign of luxuries threatens to overwhelm entirely. Mais comment pourra-⁠t-⁠il accomplir la loi, lui qui est un être moral et miséricordieux ; lui qui est né pour aimer ; lui qui pleure sur les autres comme sur lui-⁠même ; qui trouve du plaisir à pleurer, et qui finit par inventer des fictions pour se faire pleurer – the Sénateur asks rhetorically. This delight taken in one’s own sensitivity – mendacious as these tears show themselves to be – is not the least of the luxuries at issue: by what route, then, are such human beings (over-⁠saturated with their own humidity, one might perhaps say) to do their part on behalf of a beleaguered justice? C’est la guerre qui accomplira le décret. Quite a serious warning, I contend, though one which ears that frivolity has stopped do seek to mishear. – If this war is provoked into erupting, along its path towards arriving, fury seizes those human beings away from their luxuries, sets aside the fictions they revel in, and surprises them so thoroughly that afterwards they will hardly recognise themselves nor what they are about to do. L’homme, saisi tout à coup d’une fureur divine étrangère à la haine et à la colère, s’avance sur le champ de bataille sans savoir ce qu’il veut ni même ce qu’il fait. Rien n’est plus contraire à sa nature, et rien ne lui répugne moins : il fait avec enthousiasme ce qu’il a en horreur.

Justice, in the shape of laws, will be defended, if all else fails, by war. “All else fails,” in this case, not least on account of the prevalence of luxury and its concomitant, the satiety induced in the human being, including not least the moral indolence which attenuates his nature. The higher forces within or directly above him, those that turn themselves upwards towards separate ends (thus meriting the term sacral ), are not exempted, and, their tone enervated, they conduce to the horreur of which the Sénateur speaks; and yet the enthousiasme sweeping over the human being, in the event, emanates from that same source, although, I suggest, the appearance of it as having been engendered externally will seem all the stronger, in direct proportion to the degree to which those higher human forces were previously weakened. But be its origination what it will: in the upheavals inside him brought on when at last justice asserts itself, the force of enthusiasm (taking the concept at its word) will be perhaps the most surprising factor.

(The horreur sacrée felt by Valéry during his visit to the museum, aghast at the arbitrary displays, on account, as he said, of the inhumanity and, one may infer, even the injustice in their arrangements, might represent an incipient stage in the outbreak of enthusiasm about which the Sénateur raised his notes of caution.)

If justice itself should somehow relent, then war will not arrive as a last resort – but it will arrive, and indeed then with a vengeance. This the Sénateur did predict, again in warning, in the remark, even more notorious and less well understood than those already quoted, which follows.

N’entendez-⁠vous pas la terre qui crie et demande du sang ? Le sang des animaux ne lui suffit pas, ni même celui des coupables versé par le glaive des lois. Si la justice humaine les frappoit tous, il n’y auroit point de guerre ; mais elle ne sauroit en atteindre qu’un petit nombre, et souvent même elle les épargne, sans se douter que sa féroce humanité contribue à nécessiter la guerre, si, dans le même temps surtout, un autre aveuglement, non moins stupide et non moins funeste, travailloit à éteindre l’expiation dans le monde. La terre n’a pas crié en vain : la guerre s’allume.*

* Les Soirées de Saint Pétersbourg, vol. ii, Septième Entretien

As an ensemble, these four sentences show how far from dealing only or mainly in imperative lines of thought was Maistre. – If the figurative language is pruned, what does the passage say? That, like their higher counterparts, the lower forces, those which pertain to the sanctum, will take umbrage if justice is not carried out strictly: so again it is a question of the consequences to follow if human beings devolve into softness or rottenness under the reign of an excess luxury, which does include the penchant for preening themselves on their “mercy,” or the inclination towards displaying other “virtues.” – To say what the Sénateur merely implies, in such a case these “humanitarians” will have rendered themselves grossly culpable.

(In this connection, the haine sainte propounded by Zola comes to mind. Moral mediocrities and cretins often attempt to disguise themselves by their obtrusive shows of virtue, and so the vehemence of his attack would have been a warning con odio e amore of the corrective which ultimately might fall on their heads.)

Allowance made for his figurative style of speaking, what might the Sénateur have meant when he mentioned the earth’s thirst for blood? Perhaps he alluded to the institution of agriculture, for, if its own permanence is the sine qua non of all human justice, then to it also some is due, justice for which it itself evinces a sort of hunger. Or, at the very least, innumerable generations of human effort which have been put into it, in effect on behalf of an indefinite betterment in cultivation, do continue to raise a claim on the inheritors. Not entailed is anything on the order of an obligation or a right (a moment’s thought should clarify how nonsensical such demands would be), but rather an informal desire which it would be ungrateful, improper, and distinctly unwise simply to ignore.

By seeking a due measure in the cultivation of one’s own human nature: and even amidst the dimness of today, the family of terms which Western languages have inherited may continue to sustain the implicit belief that such a mean is there to be found through the practice of cultivation itself – by setting out to find this measure, one does what one can not to disappoint that immemorial expectation. And if, along this unobtrusive route, one bypasses the self-⁠indulgent morals (with outfits so colourful) who despite themselves and their protestations do seem to thirst for a corrective from above or from below, so much the better.

A small lesson about the cultivation of human nature, then, is given by this speech of the Sénateur. As regards Maistre himself, if the Soirées are read carefully, one may conclude that there it is not he who deserves to be called calomniateur de la nature humaine – an early critic’s broad accusation notwithstanding.

During long evenings amidst the palaces of Saint Petersburg, however, Maistre had made the acquaintance of those whom that allegation did fit. They disregarded the activity through which human nature might be, not perfected, but bettered by its own cultivation. It was quite another creature they worshipped, or they made a show of doing so. Was there then, behind their adulation of the state as a power, much which could not be appreciated by the unwary? How surprised would they themselves have been by the consequences of these public professions of their political faith, however honestly held or feigned, if they lived to see the fruition?

Not to the Soirées per se, but to Petersburg’s ambiguous advocates of the state, presciently – he had cause to put it as a rhetorical question – this critic’s judgment did indeed attach: Ceux qui professent ou défendent de telles doctrines, ne sont-⁠ils pas une sorte d’athées politiques, dont les incitations funestes provoquent des révolutions sans cesse renaissantes en faveur du pouvoir de fait ?*

* Alphonse Rabbe, “MM. de Maistre et Lamennais”

The rejoinder was made in 1823. Two centuries later – a question for us once more!

Broad fields, in view of the sad conditions of its economic and political life during the nineteenth century, stood open in Russia to an influx of ideas and impulses encountered in the works and the deeds of Byron.* Soon his presence there was unmatched in other countries, his mystique striking a twofold chord amongst Russians, he in whom the spirit of negation arose so high against the superfluity inflicted on human lives, and by whom were announced and yet withheld from society’s and the state’s inquisitive eyes several sorts of strumming.**

* An overview of his influence there is provided in an essay by Nina Diakonova and Vadim Vacuro, “Byron and Russia.”   ** The verb “strum” has no etymology, according to Ernest Klein’s dictionary, but is an onomatopoeia, although its synonym, “thrum,” derives from a noun related to the German “Trumm,” fragment or piece, and “Trümmer,” ruins, and cognate with the Greek “τέρμα,” boundary or end, amongst other words.

Conditions in Russia pertaining to the country’s political economy, the dependence of the agricultural system upon serfdom, the uneven distribution of cities and the difficulties amongst the several peoples throughout the Empire, especially in the Polish provinces and within the Pale of Settlement (Черта осѣдлости) – all these factors attuned a significant part of the Russian reading public to sympathise with Byron in the years after 1815.*

* Another possible factor – which would provide an interesting topic for detailed inquiry – may have been the time spent in Paris by the Russians in the occupying army, from 1815 until 1818, during which some of them could easily have gained acquaintance with the new modes and moods in the literatures of Western Europe.

Not as any manner of origin or source, no, but as though it were a catalytic agent, the Byronic example did work to stir up the dissatisfactions already existing in Russia. Though in any case they never would have blown over, still, how often did his influence help to meld them into solid shapes! – These developments would often foment ironies of their own.

During the years of this influence, some moments stand out with distinction.

Amongst poets, the effect of Byron upon Pushkin is clear; Herzen said it was a Wahlverwandtschaft. Pouchkine avait la nature panthéiste, épicurienne des poètes grecs, mais il y avait encore dans son âme un élément tout moderne. En se repliant sur lui-⁠même, il trouvait au fond de son âme la pensée amère de Byron, l’ironie corrosive de notre siècle.* – From this similarity, even if he himself was not read, his presence, corrosive or constructive as it may have been, would be profoundly felt in Russia.

* Du Développement des idées révolutionnaires en Russie, ch. iv

Under the sign of action, the secret societies which assembled after 1815, dedicating themselves to the cause of changing the form of government and reforming the constitution of the body politic, drew not a little of their inspiration from Byron. Amongst the Decembrists ( Декабристы) the Hebrew Melodies especially was held in great esteem. Perhaps by those poems especially their commitment to abolishing serfdom was emboldened, and through them they came to feel yet more deeply what a scandalous injury it inflicted on the very principles of agricultural life. Nor was the plight of the Jews themselves overlooked; indeed, the draft of a new constitution, written by the leading figure in one main group of conspirators, the Southern Society (Южное Общество), the army officer Pavel Pestel (Павелъ Ивановичъ ​Пестель​, 1793-⁠1826), the Русская Правда (Russian Truth or perhaps Law), included a paragraph foreseeing that the Jewish communities of the Empire, the Polish provinces included, might transplant themselves en masse to the people’s ancient homeland in the Levant.* – After the conspiracy was discovered and its coup d’état suppressed, in December of 1825, this endeavour on the part of the government to be established once Tsardom had been removed, did figure amongst the items addressed in the subsequent official report.

* See ch. ii, § 14.

Quoted within this portion of the report was a sentence in the Русская Правда which the Commission of Inquiry found to be distinctive enough to mention. Le gouvernement provisoire devait rétablir un État de Judée, et le peupler de tous les juifs de Russie et de Pologne. Leur nombre va bien à deux millions, dit Pestel dans son projet, y compris les femmes, les enfans et les vieillards, et ils pourront facilement, même sans le secours de troupes auxiliaires, traverser toute la Turquie Européenne, choisir une contrée fertile sur les côtes de l’Asie mineure et y former un État indépendant.* – Surely such a policy, if adopted by the new government, would have been at once provocative and ambiguous, within the Russian realm and internationally; but leaving that aside as a matter of conjecture, this proposal exemplified the agenda of Russification which Pestel advocated, as a program to bind a far-⁠flung country together through the establishment of one common language and even in some sense a single ethnicity, whereby this uniformity of its population would be promoted in order to elevate Russia to a superior degree of well-⁠being, glory, and power, къ возведенію Россіи на высшую степень благоденствія, величія и могущества.** – Although thus stated this aim displays notable ambiguity, as regards the country’s profile in its international relations, that too can be set aside, at least for the moment; considered solely as a prescription for the internal unity of the nation, it answers to the ideal of the République une et indivisible: but then, because the quasi-⁠geometrical theories which inspired the French Revolution guided his thought likewise, it is no surprise if, given the real diversity of the populations living within the Russian borders, as one scholar has put the matter, The full and merciless implications of Pestel’s abstract logic become apparent in his attitude towards the problem of nationalities.***

* Alexander Tatischev, et al., Rapport de la Commission d’enquête
** Русская Правда, ch. ii, § 16
*** Jenny Schwarz-Sochor, “P. I. Pestel”

And not only there. Although his thought did diverge on some points from the ideal of the République in France, especially pertaining to agriculture, on account of Russia’s territorial size and its density of population, and also with respect to the distinctions amongst the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of government, where he did seem to heed the constitutional arrangements in the United States, nonetheless, the example of the French Revolution was hewed to closely when he addressed the functions of oversight and security in the state. As the scholar notes, Pestel’s Executive of five members, which is responsible for the centralized Administration of the country and its Foreign Affairs, is aided by a highly significant force, the Secret Police. From the moment of inception of the new form of government onwards, seemingly with permanence, many tasks of surveillance would have been assigned to this agency, which then could “police” in a quite broad sense of the term. By means of espionage they supervise all foreigners, including members of foreign legations, they observe the institutions of Government, they watch over heresy and immorality, they uncover preparations for revolt and secret societies. (It appears the Decembrists did fully intend their own to be the last conspiracy.) For in Pestel’s Russia there is no room for secret societies. (No place!) Once Russkaya Pravda is the law of the land, secret societies become subversive conspiracies, both harmful and dangerous. While at present the country had need of them, quickly enough it would be outgrown, according to this conception, after the old arrangements were supplanted.

The Decembrist uprising was crushed; and as though the conspirators had been, though without knowing it, agents dispatched by some higher force in order to abet the growth of the state generally while more particularly emboldening the secret departments to ramify and set the agenda for the rest covertly, and then discarded once this mission was accomplished,* in the conspiracy’s aftermath there would be established for the first time lastingly an intelligence service and police force combined within one organisation, including (officially from 1839, but in reality before) a para-⁠military corps, whereas earlier the continuity of the Russian state’s enterprises in surveillance and espionage had been maintained haphazardly, often by administrative subterfuges: the Third Department (Третье Отдѣленіе, 1826-⁠80) was born.**

* What might Byron have thought of this outcome? And how, from his chair in Berlin, did Hegel regard it?   ** Peter Squire, The Third Department, chs. 1 and 2, is succinct.

[His] study of the secret police under Nicholas I, stemmed directly from his horror of totalitarian society and it was pursued with all the rigour of a former intelligence officer. When published, as The Third Department (1968), its contemporary significance was emphasised by the blue binding, the colour of the KGB.

— “Peter Squire: intelligence officer,
Russianist and Cambridge don”

During the years (until 1855) under the new Tsar the Russian government did extend its reach in the covert sphere, but not as Pestel and his fellows had hoped. And yet the turn of events unforeseen by them, their unwitting role in the consolidating of the state and the existing order, in this or that guise, would soon enough reveal itself as a precedent, suggestive in advance of what the actual result of further conspiracies might be. Because even right after the collapse of the insurrection such a consequence could already have been anticipated, especially by the more observant amongst the many Russians who had initiated themselves into the Byronic, should one not expect to hear in what they began to whistle from that moment forwards a grimmer tone, the sound of ironies more bitter than before? – probably one should indeed. In their own anticipatory imaginations they began to espy how from out of their own efforts a bleak fate might well turn around and strike them all down, and yet, the outcome of events being less than certain, defiantly undeterred they set themselves to carry on. Perhaps, then, they can be called fatalists in some sense of the term, though for them the epithet of fanaticism is less than apt. – Nor ought one to ignore the trepidations of those who found themselves amidst confused alarms of struggle and flight, in an exposed position on dark terrain with the rival forces of contending secrecies all around, whether in Petersburg or Moscow or wherever else ignorant armies clashed by night, for these neutrals also dreaded the after-⁠event, that from all this strife nothing new nor better would issue; and for their precarious situation too one should be able to call up some measure of humane sympathy.

In any case, amongst Byron’s partisans in Russia, towards the end of the 1820s, another tone and mood came to the fore, and one writer, Nicolai Nadezhdin (Николай Ивановичъ Надеждинъ, 1804-⁠56),* put this alteration into print, in a narrative whose satire of a “gathering of nihilists” pokes fun at the conversations with political implications which were a mainstay of literary evenings during that period, and at the flights of thought these occasioned (especially when the ideas rehearsed had been heard too often already). Varieties of Byronic irony were beginning to turn back upon the Byronians themselves, and a number of them may even have found this to their liking, at least on occasion. Thus, in a parodic vein, the narrator tells of attending such a gathering in Moscow where the main eminence appeals to the shades of revered philosophers, and so summoned “Kant” gently reproved the guests, some admirers of the poet amongst them. Грустно видѣть, грустно думать – he declared** – что направленіе умовъ къ романтизму и Байронизму, происходящее отъ сущности и потребностей нашего вѣка, не обратилось еще во всеобщую стихію просвѣщеннаго человѣчества.*** It is sad to see, sad to think that the mind’s inclination towards Romanticism and Byronism, which originated from the essence and the needs of our century, has not yet passed into the universal element of an enlightened humanity. – No, indeed it had not, for what then would become of that which the uninitiated could not appreciate in any manner?

* He was also an ethnographer. Years later, at the Interior Minister’s request, he composed a study of the Skoptchi (Скопцы).   ** Omitted from the speech is a footnote with a topical reference. – Although Nadezhdin may not have known it, some irony is introduced because it was Kant who first used the word “Nihilismus” in German.

*** “Сонмище Нигилистовъ,” pt. ii

The idea that the needs of an age may give rise to higher tendencies of the mind that are however not adopted satisfactorily by humanity at its more reflective or thoughtful – there is a provocative element in this complaint, the pointed sense of some frustration lodged within history, which Byron for his part sounded deeply. How far the poet’s many adherents have done so – that is a relevant query, implies Nadezhdin. (To be clear: not at issue here are res gestæ grouped under an -⁠ism, but the sum of their tellings and retellings.) While he refrains from bringing his narrator to endorse the sentiment that, somehow, history when its principle is progress cannot be fully in the right, never entirely “on the right side,” nonetheless to a degree its force does affect him. (Even satire, if it is an errant genre of history, could not be written without some measure of impartiality.) This two remarks in his informal preamble do suggest.

The childlike simplicity and gullibility of our forefathers already are too outdated for the present age, младенческая простота и довѣрчивость нашихъ праотцевъ слишкомъ уже устарѣли для настоящаго вѣка, observes the narrator. – Now, the tincture of admiration in his retrospective disparagement, rendered to the attitudes of those earlier generations, to put the matter rather less personally, a mixture of justice and injustice: justice, insofar as their gullibility and simplicity did have a share in maintaining the existing order in the state, with its institutions such as serfdom and its organisations like the antecedents of the Third Department; and injustice, given how those ancestors were not simply beneficiaries of the status quo, synchronically and diachronically, but suffered under it as well, such that the later remark comes across as delivering a further insult to them. – Yet here the main point to mention, is how the Byronic posture regarding all that the present time had inherited, for better and for worse, was beginning to elicit consideration beyond the ranks of the poet’s partisans, calling forth thought and even qualms of conscience from amongst those whom his poetry per se did not move. These respondents too were turning their attention to the immense and increasing challenge posed by the superfluous.

Similarly: the “good old days” is a subject for bitter laughter or pitying condolences amongst today’s unflappable non-⁠humans, he remarks, le bon vieux temps составляетъ предметъ горькаго смѣха или жалкаго состраданія для нынѣшнихъ недоступныхъ нелюдимовъ* – and this last word may convey an echo of the inference from Grainville, that the human species might soon become antiquated, loading this idea with a further implication that the Byronians did comport themselves either as though they anticipated the event or as if it already were transpiring. (Moreover, one can see in Nadezhdin’s word a presage of the idea shared amongst the later revolutionaries of themselves as “dead men on furlough,” and also of the even later term for those who were disappeared from the history books or into prison camps or cells, “unpersons.”) – With this remark, too, the main point is how the narrator suggests sotto voce that the gestures of disdain for the past on the part of the “unflappable non-⁠humans,” otherwise known as adherents of Byron, might be warranted: at least he seems willing to consider the attitude as a possible option.

* “Сонмище Нигилистовъ,” pt. i

Satire of this sort remains open to the satirised, and so its author did show himself ready to think about the discovery by Byron of voids of Nothingness within the (as they might seem to be at first glance) securities of contemporary language and life. Moreover, when his humour struck the Byronians’ “Nihilism” (Нигилизмъ), the literary resources he drew upon to do so came to him largely by grace of the poet himself; otherwise his rapport with the term could hardly have been as deft. For, from his pen, “Nihilism” still resonated with the ambiguous, even playful sense it had acquired during the French Revolution, from Anacharsis Cloots onwards, yet its nuances in this new iteration were adjusted in accord with the bittersweetness of Byronic disappointment after 1825.

Three instances should suffice to illustrate how, with “Nihilism,” some flashes of the poet’s irony were turned back around upon the Byronians themselves.

During his return home after the literary evening, the narrator retraces the evening in thought, and what then does he see? A terrible phantasmagoria of monstrous Nihilism unfolded before my eyes, развернулась предъ глазами моими страшная фантазмагорія чудовищнаго Нигилизма, he says, half-⁠seriously, half-⁠facetiously. Then, nearing his house, he asks himself whether another summertime might come for the country’s literature. Or – approaching the matter from the opposite angle – has it not already gotten entangled forever in the murky underworld of a ruinous Nihilism? Не уже ли ей вѣчно мыкаться въ мрачной преисподней губительнаго Нигилизма? His answer to these questions? Ambiguous! No! This is not possible! – нѣтъ! это не возможно!

Nor is his prognosis, if there was one, much clarified by the witty words which may be taken as his last on the subject. Nothing comes out of nothing! This proverb is justified even now by unprecedented experiences, изъ ничего ничего не бываетъ! Она оправдывается и теперь непреложными опытами. Curious harvest! Chaos in our literature, inseminated by a grim philosophy of nothingness, is bursting with – nullities! Нашъ Литтературный хаосъ, осѣменяемый мрачною філософіею ничтожества, разрожается – Нулиными! Sterile addition! Whether you multiply or divide zeros by zeros, they always remain zeros! Множить ли, дѣлить нули на нули – они всегда остаются нулями!*

* “Сонмище Нигилистовъ,” pt. ii

Hence the outlook did remain gloomy, especially with that dark ascendant power the Third Department unaddressed in the background, even if writers in compensation could shine in the art of saying the essential through subtraction, with subtle underscorings of silence, inconspicuously to all the uninitiated.

The particular emptiness of literary life as cultivated during those years in Russia, was summarised well by Herzen, who lived through it before his emigration in 1847. In that period, civilisation, he wrote a few years after settling in London, nous désoriente, c’est elle qui fait que nous sommes à charge aux autres et à nous-⁠mêmes, désœuvrés, inutiles, capricieux ; que nous passons de l’excentricité à la débauche, dépensant sans regret notre fortune, notre cœur, notre jeunesse, et cherchant des occupations, des sensations, des distractions – and indeed, ample supplies or an oversupply of the latter, while more and more human beings were being made superfluous throughout the political economy and the other realms under the purview of the state, conversely became ever more necessary at all levels. Nous faisons tout, de la musique, de la philosophie, de l’amour, de l’art militaire, du mysticisme, pour nous distraire, pour oublier le vide immense qui nous opprime.*

* Du Développement des idées révolutionnaires en Russie, ch. iv

That “vide immense” was described some years earlier in another, complementary way by Lermontov, in the person of Pechorin: я вступилъ въ эту жизнь, переживъ ее уже мысленно, и мнѣ стало скучно и гадко, какъ тому, кто читаетъ дурное подражанiе давно ему извѣстной книгѣ.* I entered this life, having already experienced it in my mind, and I became bored and repulsed, like someone who reads a bad imitation of a book he has long known.

* “Фаталистъ”

Of some few older books, amidst the “vide” from which distraction was vainly sought, the developments that occurred subsequently did confirm the prescience – just as long as these likenesses were not taken too exactly, leading those who were comparative readers of the history astray into the details. A commonality of theme might furnish enough of a thread, sufficiently long to unroll into the future so that one might in imagination venture forwards and return again intact to the present. Thus, the critic Dmitry Pisarev (Дмитрий Ивановичъ Писаревъ, 1840-⁠68)* offered a variation upon the theme of the “dernier homme” as Grainville did anticipate him and, with him, the world’s last night. To be sure, nearly six decades having gone by, the Russian envisioned the death of humanity in another shape than had that melancholy Frenchman; numerous changes supervened during the interim at home and on other shores, some of the largest greeted appreciatively, not least the abolition of serfdom in 1861, and the ending of the institution of slavery as this change was then on the agenda in the United States: yet these thoroughgoing alterations in the systems of agriculture, and the rapid arrival of the inventions of science and technology which did help render economically conceivable such broadenings of the polity, nonetheless did not overcome the great problem of the superfluous and its supplement, the surfeit of distractions requisite to divert the public mind away from considering it. Not at all! – for nowhere could one honestly repress an awareness that grave difficulties were burgeoning, nor a presentiment that in the near future some solution was abrew.

* He was a political prisoner; several of his works were written while incarcerated.

In accord with such a mood, the conscientious would have tended to adopt some anterior-⁠future vantage-⁠point, the better to fathom the course of the times; and in an 1864 essay this the Russian did. Ominously he foresaw a “dramatic moment” (драматическая минута) looming ahead, if the current trajectory continued, when, commiserating with the last of the theoreticians, the last poet will say: другъ мой, мы съ тобою одни. Мiръ прокисъ и развратился. Микроскопъи скальпель не даютъ намъ покоя. Если мы не спрячемся, или не притворимся натуралистами, то насъ съ тобою могутъ посадить за-⁠живо въ спиртъ, чтобы сохранить въ полной цѣлости послѣднiе экземпляры исчезнувшей породы, имѣвшей удивительное внѣшнее сходство съ человѣкомъ. My friend, you and I are alone. The world is sour and corrupted. The microscope and the scalpel are not giving us any peace. If we do not hide, or pretend to be naturalists, you and I may be deposited alive in alcohol, in order to preserve in complete integrity the last specimens of an extinct species with a marvellous likeness to man. – Another sort of corrosive irony, adapted for the age of Darwin! Yet the prospect Pisarev had espied, represented perhaps more than a mere excursion into science-⁠fiction; later, and now in his own voice, he issued a note of warning. Despite the remoteness of the decisive catastrophe, ominous signs are already evident in our times, не смотря на отдаленность рѣшительной катастрофы, зловѣщiе признаки показываются уже и въ наше время.* – That the prophetic idiom here selected had been chosen in irony, seems clear; not the clairvoyance of charlatans, but rather an extrapolation from the tendencies of the present was this critic’s strength. Much as Byron did, he too undertook to reckon with consequences.

* “Цвѣты невиннаго юмора,” i

What was culture? – this question, set in the past imperfect, would be but poorly understood in that future whose arrival Pisarev reckoned with. And the collection of immaterial things which had closely been bound up with culture would be grasped even less well: agriculture, cultivation, sacrosanctity, and justice no longer realities, but riddles. Yet in lieu of a proper answer to this question, off in a dim corner in the ill-⁠tended precincts (or ruins) of a natural-⁠history museum, the intrepid might encounter and be perplexed by a large vitrine wherein those two samples of what humanity once had been were embalmed. – All of this together was the “decisive catastrophe” (рѣшительная катастрофа). Its sheer remoteness from the crystal palaces of the present, by 1864, could no longer be counted on.

Already decades before, during the first years of the Third Department, the philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev (Петръ Яковлевичъ Чаадаевъ, 1794-⁠1856) had addressed – initially in French, as though either to avoid or to attract the attention of officialdom, in his Lettres philosophiques adressées à une dame – the problem of superfluity on the largest scale, issuing a sharp judgment that carried nearly the finality of a medical or natural-⁠historical observation.

From the safety of London, later on, in two separate publications Herzen laid great weight upon these missives against the conditions prevailing in the country. Sévère et froid, l’auteur demande compte à la Russie de toutes les souffrances dont elle abreuve un homme qui ose sortir de l’état de brute. Il veut savoir ce que nous achetons à ce prix ; par quoi nous avons mérité cette situation. Il l’analyse cette situation, avec une profondeur désespérante, inexorable ; et, après avoir terminé cette vivisection, il se détourne avec horreur, en maudissant le pays dans son passé, et dans son avenir. – The room where these dissections were done, was both an anatomical auditorium and a sacrum. Indeed, a sacrum, if only on account of, as Chaadayev thought, the notable absence of such places in Russia, pretences aside, and the numbers of worshippers of state power whom the French opponent of the Soirées de Saint Pétersbourg and other works of Maistre denounced as “athées politiques” a few years before the Lettres were published.

Oui, cette sombre voix ne s’est fait entendre que pour dire à la Russie qu’elle n’a jamais existé humainement – here Herzen agreed – qu’elle ne représentait « qu’une lacune de l’intelligence humaine, qu’un exemple instructif pour l’Europe. » Il dit à la Russie que son passé a été inutile, que son présent est superflu et qu’elle n’a aucun avenir.*

* “Nouvelle Phase de la littérature russe,” ii
(reprised from Du Développement, ch. v)

Existence in agreement with the humane (humanus) would have been scant at best in a country where the soil (humus) was apportioned according to the institution of serfdom. How far the legacy of such conditions could be laid aside, after the emancipation of the serfs, was a pressing question; and so, whether prior to that event or afterwards, the history of Russia might indeed be found to furnish an instructive lesson for Europe, as Herzen remarked, indeed a cautionary tale for the most advanced countries there, in North America, and elsewhere, as he implied. For, as the nineteenth century progressed, one did have cause to suspect that their future development might turn out to have been strangely prefigured in the present-⁠day realities of the Russian Empire, if these were considered with critical eyes and ears. What they are, we one day shall be – such might have been the suspicion, from the second half of the century onwards, amongst English, French, American observers, and later others too. On them all an inkling was beginning to dawn that at some not so distant future point the conditions of their countries might resemble – rhyme with – those they saw and heard in the Russia of their own times. De illis fabula narratur.

Far be it from me, however, to venture an opinion on Chaadayev’s last verdict, as Herzen repeated it. As a non-⁠Russian, offering one would represent a great importunity and arrogance at any time, and especially when, as is now the case, alas!, Russia has been made into an “enemy” by the machinations of the régimes in the West which are seeking, in an astounding mélange of seriousness and frivolity, the consequences be damned, to start the old Great Game up again, not least in order to distract the attention, such as it is, of public opinion from the imminent extinction of freedom at their very own hands. (The spectacle is nauseating, yes, but also instructive: witnessing this change de places on a global scale, provides food for thought.) The awful impasse where Westerners have arrived, unavoidably evident since 2020, should impel us to reconsider what was the use of our past, how superfluous is our present, and whether our future shall be, full stop. – Мыслители русского девятнадцатого века: спасибо за мудрые советы!

About the impulses of negation that are engendered out of unbearable conditions whenever these do happen to disclose the nothingness latent within themselves and that then turn upon them, whether in the activities of outright nihilism or by some other route, the Russian nineteenth century does continue to instruct us generally. And a still more specific light is shed on the role in their genesis which the educational system itself did play. Although this is a tricky subject, which the researchers have ex officio not deigned to touch! Attesting by this scholarly refusal the limits of their impartiality, not to mention their imaginations, they direct curiosity elsewhere. An interesting work, one come across by chance (never have I seen it mentioned in conversations about nihilism and negation), does aver in its conclusion that after the state takes control of the schools, voids are introduced into these institutions, a nothingness instilled into them by which later the mœurs will become infected, as though by viral contagion.

But let me not get ahead of myself. The passage occurs in a book published in 1867, during the first flush of interest in Russian Nihilism by Western publics, in the train of Turgenev’s Отцы и Дѣти (Fathers and Children), by a Russian noble whose identity I could not ascertain by the data he provided. (Presumably he had reason for caution.) Although as a whole the work – Alexeï de G., Les Nihilistes – did deal with nihilism amongst Russian women, the Épilogue is broader in its scope, written with fewer anecdotes and more emphasis, in such a way that this text may be presented integrally. It is the following.

L’école a tué la famille.

Les parents cherchent à se débarasser de leurs enfants aussi vite que possible, pour les placer dans des pensionnats ou les envoyer aux écoles, qu’ils ne quittent que pour prendre leurs repas chez leurs parents.

Il y a beaucoup de pays où l’état force même les parents de le faire.

La conséquence logique en est que les enfants se deshabituent de la vie de famille ; puis viennent les années universitairent, les voyages qui les rendent étrangers à la famille.

De là ces tristes avortons sociaux qui se parent du nom de nihilisme, communisme e tutti quanti et qui ne sont pas la suite du prolétariat croissant, mais qui le propagent, en créant ces êtres mécontents de leur destin, jaloux de celui des autres, ne voulant pas devoir leur bien-⁠être à une vie de labeur, et n’ayant rien à perdre posent leur seule espoir en une révolution.

La vie de famille est incompatible avec le nihilisme et toutes les autres excroissances maladives qui minent l’ordre social et le mettent en danger.

Voulant réglementer les écoles et ôtant aux parents la direction de l’éducation de leurs enfants, les gouvernements ont créé une génération mécontente du présent, et voulant en jouir sans s’inquiéter de l’avenir.

Much as before, to offer an opinion about the verisimilitude of these statements would be, I feel, out of place on my part. However, I should like to suggest that implicit in them is an assumption that the family also is a locus of cultivation, most obviously of the children by the parents, though possibly in other directions as well. If that is so, then when the activity of education is transferred into other hands, and especially once it is placed under the state’s supervision, the eliciting of the humane (humanus) from this soil (humus) will be affected quite considerably, even irreversibly, with ramifications upon “human existence,” as Herzen would say, and Chaadayev perhaps too, within a country where this usurpation is routinely permitted. At the very least, then the parents themselves become, even allow themselves to be made superfluous to some degree. Moreover, confiscations of their power and authority were carried out roughly simultaneously with the succession of stages in the abolition of serfdom, as though to insinuate that the state itself had need of large cohorts of superfluous people cut off from the realities of cultivation, as a basic condition of its survival.

From the expansion of the state, as an agent of supervision, the dissensions that erupted in “nihilism” flowed relatively immediately – this was one great difficulty, or contradiction, for which advocates of state power were hard pressed to devise answers, if solving it had even been on their agenda (here the “athées politiques” would have found it easy to play-⁠act). Whereas those who were honest did admit, when the coast was clear, that dissatisfaction had to be the sine qua non of institutions such as the secret police . . . What ever would they do in its absence?

Out of the history of the gradual establishment of educational institutions in Russia, then, if these schools were regarded with due suspicion as agents of supervision whose sheer existence was fostering habits of self-⁠surveillance amongst the populace: all the more during the era of the Third Department and even more after the abolition of serfdom – from this history, then, lessons instructive for the countries in the West, that is, for their critical spirits, could certainly be drawn. – No one applied himself to this task more sensitively than Herzen. In particular, his French essay of 1864 conveys several observations de profundis. Amongst its aims, prominent was to profile the ascetic character, so evident in the literary works, the music, and the country’s culture more broadly, in a historical, even genealogical manner. Surprising insights can be gleaned from it.

The portion of this ascetic character’s history which is of interest here, commenced when Peter I instituted his programs of Westernisation, and created a city nearly ex nihilo to be the capital. From it the yearnings which Herzen identified as being the most vital source of the people’s literature and music were excluded – during Saint Petersburg’s first years, at least: for later this asceticism, deepening meanwhile in response to the country’s miseries, did express itself in sonic forms which were heard around and throughout the precincts of state power too.

Yet what need is there of summary, when five paragraphs extracted from the first part of “Nouvelle Phase de la littérature russe” tell the story so well?

Il y avait bien, avant la civilisation, une autre littérature en germe. Mais celle-⁠ci n’avait rien de commun avec la littérature civilisée. La langue, les caractères même de l’impression, tout était différent. C’était une littérature vulgaire et pauvre, dans laquelle se faisaient entendre les premiers sons d’un lyrisme tout populaire, et les pieuses méditations des sectaires proscrits et persécutés. Les chants en étaient doux, tristes, mélancoliques, se laissant aussi quelquefois aller à des accès de gaité folle. Quant aux traités religieux, ils étaient toujours sombres, austères, ascétiques. Les chants, grâce aux nourrices, aux bonnes, à quelques vieux serfs, pénétraient parfois dans le monde civilisé. La littérature souterraine des sectaires restait cachée dans les forêts, au sein des communautés assez éloignées pour échapper à la double surveillance de la police orthodoxe et de l’église policière. Ce n’est que dans les derniers temps que l’on a commencé à recueillir de la bouche même des paysans ces chants et ces mélodies.

[…]

Rien ne saurait être plus erroné que de croire que cette littérature artificielle, transvasée de l’Occident et frelatée d’une infusion allemande, n’ait pas été effectivement assimilée par le milieu russe, et ne se le soit pas assimilé à son tour. C’est tout le contraire. Elle a poussé des racines très-⁠vivaces dans un sol pierreux, dur, couvert de boue, où elle s’est développée, maladive mais tenace, dès qu’elle s’est sentie tant soit peu délivrée de jardiniers pédants, qui sacrifiaient tout à la régularité classique et aimaient la taille des arbres plus que les plantes elles-⁠mêmes. Elle s’est développée, avec la satire sur les lèvres et le dédain du milieu qui l’entourait dans le cœur, comme se développent ces pauvres gamins des grandes villes dans des carrefours sans air et sans lumière, entre une remise et un ruisseau, malingres, nerveux, étiolés, pâles, mais possédant un fond inépuisable de forces et de précocité. Comme eux, la littérature russe, dans sa première période, n’a jamais vu les champs.

[…]

Ce premier rire […] retentit au loin, et alla réveiller toute une phalange de grands rieurs. Et c’est à ces rieurs à travers les larmes, que la littérature doit ses plus grands succès et la plus grande part de son influence en Russie.

Le rire, cette flagellation de nous-⁠mêmes, a été notre expiation ; la seule protestation, la seule vengeance qui nous fût possible, et cela dans des limites très-⁠resserrées.

Dès que la conscience se réveillait, l’homme voyait avec dégoût la vie hideuse qui l’entourait : aucune indépendance, aucune sécurité individuelle, aucun lien organique avec le peuple. L’existence même n’était qu’un genre de service public. Se plaindre, protester ! Impossible. Radistchev en fit l’essai. Il écrivit un livre sérieux, triste, plein de larmes. Il osa élever la voix en faveur des malheureux serfs. Catherine II le fit déporter en Sibérie, disant qu’il était plus redoutable que Pougatchev. Se moquer était moins dangereux : le cri de rage prit le masque de rire ; et voilà que de génération en génération, se mit à retentir un rire lugubre et fou, qui s’efforçait de rompre toute solidarité avec ce monde étrange, ce milieu absurde, et qui, de crainte d’être confondu avec lui, le montrait du doigt. Il n’y a peut-⁠être pas d’autre peuple au monde qui l’eût souffert, pas de littérature qui l’eût osé. S’il y a une exception, elle n’appartient qu’à l’Angleterre. Et encore le grand rire de Byron et la raillerie amère de Dickens trouvent-⁠elles des limites. Notre implacable ironie, notre autosection passionnée ne s’arrête à rien, et n’a peur de rien dévoiler, car elle n’a rien de sacré à profaner. Le système d’éducation de Pierre I^er a porté ses fruits.

Rien n’est vrai, tout est permis. But who did put such an adage into practice first – the “athées politiques” of Petersburg, or the Nihilists who subsequently would rise up against the whole system? Obviously the question is rhetorical.

Biting irony directed by Russians at themselves, already recognised tacitly the political void as a brute fact, the official hypocrisies and artifices in which it was swaddled notwithstanding. Hence, from the outset of the nineteenth century on, dissecting oneself so passionately and “nihilistically,” did amount implicitly to a serious protest: it spread rapidly. More specifically, the laughter with which they flayed themselves, kept the memory of justice alive even when the thing itself was absent, before and after the abolition of serfdom, and set their imaginations to dwell on the prospect that one day, by some passage à l’acte, it would be restored, and with it the cultivation of an existence that was properly human.

Le système d’éducation a porté ses fruits. Not so strange a twist, however, since that system, though it was conceived as one major piece in the effort to Westernise the country, did often regard with suspicion intellectual imports from the West. And thus exacerbated further the dissatisfactions it already was engendering.

This development did indeed offer an instructive lesson to Western countries, as a Russian commentator, Pyotr Boborykin (Петръ Дмитріевичъ Боборыкинъ, 1836-⁠1921), noted in 1868, in an English text composed during a sojourn in London. In Russia, he told his readers, during the emergence of Nihilism as a recognisable current in intellectual life, impatient pupils gathered from the vast fields of European science as much as they could, and transplanted all the remarkable productions immediately to their native country. (Note his agricultural terms.) This explains the feverishness of the propaganda, the inconsequence in the choice of authorities, the naïve enthusiasm towards some doctrines and names, and the rapidity with which some Nihilists, like capricious children, conceived their beliefs and then threw them away like old playthings.* – Perhaps by that point Boborykin had begun to suspect that the trajectory of his own country might at some future moment be traversed again elsewhere. For, as he did insist, Russian Nihilism possesses a serious significance for the whole of the civilised world. Abroad, therefore, one should take care to regard it as being instructive in a fuller sense, and not merely as a hypothetical entertainment. In the young men of the most advanced European countries – England, France, and Germany – we see the same philosophical, social, political, and moral tendencies which manifest themselves in the Russian rising generation. Even all the peculiarities of Nihilism may be recognised in the intellectual movement of the young men of Paris, London, Berlin, and Heidelberg** – a prescient statement: the likenesses which a Russian observer could already see, might dawn upon Western onlookers before too long.

* “Nihilism in Russia”
** “Nihilism in Russia,” iii

One element in Boborykin’s summary, the rapidity with which the Nihilists in Russia exchanged particular beliefs for others, stands out. The disparagement of them as acting like children, may be left aside; instead this characteristic should be related to the condition and tone of the will. It could very well have represented a declaration of the latter’s strength, an intimation of its reserves of force.

In 1867, Theodor von Fircks (Федоръ Ивановичъ Фирксъ, 1812-⁠72), another Russian writer, likewise for an international audience, though pseudonymously, touched on the question of the will in the study of Nihilism in his ten-⁠volume work devoted to the past and present of his country on behalf of its future. And he too compared the Nihilists and certain counterparts of theirs in Western countries, though without failing to mention the differences between the two sides at that time. Here once again, ambiguously, an instructive lesson was offered to the West for its consideration.

According to this book by Fircks, especially typical of the Russian Nihilist it was qu’à force de dénigrer la valeur des lois existantes il en est venu à en nier la nature obligatoire. Obligation fell away, and then, one can add in retrospect, to Nechayevite methods (Нечаевщина) it would be but a step. When he continued, however, Fircks delivered a summary even more provocative: Selon lui, toutes ces prescriptions qui ordonnent ou défendant, qui permettent ou interdisent, sont bonnes pour la plèbe, la foule, les hommes ordinaires qui consentent à s’y soumettre, mais ne sauraient être appliquées aux intelligences privilégiées, à des hommes hors ligne tel que lui. Fort de cette conviction, le nihiliste se met au-⁠dessus de la loi et ne la respecte ni dans les mesures qu’il recommande au gouvernement, ni dans les conseils qu’il donne à ses concitoyens.

Not on account of intellectual prowess more strictly speaking, but by virtue of the qualities of his volition, the Nihilist set himself apart from the herds. One might well discern something sacral in this attitude – an implicit assertion that higher forces were manifest in him, and above all in his faculty of will, of the sort which once had consented to abide within the sacrosanct unity of the humane.

Contempt for the law, Fircks went on, was a major point of divergence between the Nihilist and the figures most closely related to him in Western countries. And here too, one might infer that their faculties of will differed markedly.

In the West, a reticence that was pragmatic. Le socialiste déclare que les lois sous lesquelles il vit sont mauvaises, il demande leur abolition, et serait heureux si la majorité du pays allait se prononcer en faveur des siennes, mais il veut que ces lois imparfaites soient respectées tant quelles subsistent encore, car il se dit que c’est la majorité de la nation qui les a votées par l’organe de ses représentants, et il se soumet sans réplique à cette autorité.

Under the Tsars, a resolution of will. Le nihiliste russe fait tout le contraire : il nie la force obligatoire de la loi, sous prétexte qu’elle n’a pas été approuvée par la nation à laquelle elle arrive toute faite, et néanmoins, quand il s’agit de la réalisation des rêves creux qu’il appelle ses plans pour la prospérité de la patrie, il s’inquiète si peu de la vraie majorité, du peuple, qu’il se met hardiment, lui et sa coterie, aux lieu et place de la nation et parle au nom de la Russie entière dont il se croit l’unique représentant.

Of course, in Western countries, by that date, the Socialists were already relatively numerous; while in Russia the number of professed Nihilists, though not virtually zero, was very small, and as regards the spirit of negation upon which they drew, the union of intellect and will conducive to their activity, le virus du nihilisme, malheureusement si répandu dans les classes éclairées, est demeuré absolument inconnu chez le peuple.*

* Études sur l’avenir de la Russie, neuvième étude, ch. i

In 1867, Nechayev had not yet been widely heard of, but the Nihilists did aim to engender that spirit amongst the people, and had begun to tailor their writing style so as to reach them more easily. This is substantiated in a letter that an unnamed respondent in Petersburg sent to Ernest Édouard Fribourg, earlier a delegate to the International Workingmen’s Association, dated January 17, 1870, which reported on the arrest of several Nechayevites in the city, at the end of 1869; amongst the papers seized from one of them – probably Alexander Cherkesov (Александръ Александровичъ Черкесовъ, 1838-⁠1913), not Nechayev’s other associate Varlaam Cherkesov (Варлаамъ Николаевичъ Черкезовъ, 1846-⁠1925) – was a call for a popular insurrection, of which the letter included numerous paragraphs (of course in French translation).

Most of the latter part of this Petersburg letter follows integrally, with a few cuts.

Afin d’être mieux compris des paysans, l’auteur de ces pièces a eu recours à la langue populaire :

« Frères ! dit-⁠il, nous sommes à bout de patience, l’existence nous devient de jour en jour plus dure. On nous a trompés avec de vaines promesses. Cette terre que Dieu avait faite pour tous les hommes, nos maîtres s’en sont emparés. Où donc est la justice ? – Hélas ! nulle part ; partout règne la tyrannie.

« Autrefois il n’en était pas ainsi. Les champs appartenaient à ceux qui les cultivaient. Nos ancêtres ne connaissaient ni nobles, ni prêtres, ni marchands, ni accapareurs ; aussi ils vivaient libres et heureux ! Mais vinrent d’au delà de la mer les princes étrangers traînant à leur suite leur noblesse, leurs fonctionnaires, leurs accapareurs ; ils subjuguèrent le pauvre peuple et ils s’emparèrent de ses champs […] !….

« Après s’être rendus maîtres de notre pays, les conquérants y ont construit des villes d’où ils nous dominent encore. C’est à eux que nous devons ces lois oppressives et ces lourds impôts qui nous réduisent à la misère. Ils sont contents ! Comment ne le seraient-⁠ils pas ? ils s’engraissent de notre pain ! Leurs villes sont si bien fortifiées qu’il nous est impossible de les attaquer, à moins de lancer sur elles le coq rouge (dans le langage populaire, lancer le coq rouge veut dire incendier)….

« Ils se sont dit : tout appartient au czar, aux nobles, aux popes, aux commerçants ; le peuple n’est que notre esclave.

« En vérité, nous autres paysans nous ne sommes pas plus que de vils animaux pour nos maîtres ; ils nous ont sellés et bridés, puis ils sont montés sur notre dos. Malheur à celui qui ose proférer une plainte ! la Sibérie et la fusillade sont là pour faire raison de l’audacieux…. Mais si le mécontentement commence à se traduire en agitation, il est vrai que nos seigneurs le prennent sur un autre ton ; oh ! alors ils sont prodigues de promesses et de mensonges. La tranquillité rétablie, les belles paroles sont oubliées et la persécution recommence plus violente que jamais….

[…]

« Les popes nous ont dit : le czar est le Dieu de la terre, les membres de la noblesse remplissent auprès de lui l’office des anges…. Nous nous sommes contentés de courber l’échine….

« Il y a dans notre histoire un moment où il fut permis d’espérer…, le czar et toute sa progéniture venaient de crever ! Malheureusement la noblesse fit venir du pays allemand un principicule, et c’est de cet étranger qu’est sortie la lignée des souverains qui nous oppriment depuis si longtemps. Cette famille allemande s’est multipliée à l’infini ; […] elle mange beaucoup, et ses courtisans dépensent énormement…. Aussi nous sommes en plein dans le gouffre du déficit, et nous avons perdu l’espoir de payer nos dettes…. Imbéciles que nous sommes ! Nous sommes gouvernés par des Allemands qui daignent le faire pour remplir leurs poches…. Notre czar et les grands-⁠ducs sont incapables de nous gouverner ; ils se contentent de courir le long des grandes routes et de remarquer si nous crions bien fort, hourrah ! et si nous rattrapons avec adresse nos bonnets, après les avoir lancés en l’air en signe d’allégresse….

Il ne nous reste plus qu’une seule chose à faire, c’est d’étrangler nos maîtres comme des chiens ! Pas de quartier ! Il faut que tous disparaissent !… il faut incendier leurs villes ! il faut que notre pays soit purifié par le feu !… À quoi bon ces villes ? elles ne servent qu’à engendrer la servitude. Quand le paysan sera le seigneur de sa maison, de son champ, quand il pourra travailler dans la fabrique de son village, il n’éprouvera plus le besoin de se faire domestique dans une ville…. Comme ils ont des canons et des fusils et que nous sommes désarmés, ce n’est que par le feu que nous pouvons les attaquer et les vaincre. Une fois les murailles derrière lesquelles cette canaille se retranche réduites en cendres, il faudra bien qu’elle crève de faim. »

How efficacious this incendiary proclamation would have been in arousing the ire of the Russian people, around 1870, is not my concern here: the attempt is all. Its provocations may be taken on their own terms, and from there one can read back to the states of will of its anonymous author. For, first and foremost it was these which he – or they – did aim to communicate, virally, as had been said by Fircks.

Animus against an oppressive nobility and royalty originally German – this anger reprised rather precisely one of the main themes of historical inquiry in France during the eighteenth century and after. A very instructive parallel! The sentiment that those classes in their dominance were an imposition from without, gradually heightened by these publications, did subsequently contribute stores of energy to the Revolution, when it broke out. (“Class war” is never a mere figure of speech: this one really should seek to understand.)

The letter from Petersburg was published by Fribourg sometime in the second half of 1871 – in the aftermath of the Commune. The pæan to the coq rouge in the proclamation it excerpted, could very well have been composed by French hands, mutatis nominum, and with some adjustments in the ideas. The affinity is striking. So one does wonder what part, if any, an impetus blowing this time from Russia over to France did play during the spring. Had a few sparks of Nihilist propaganda somehow alighted upon the tinder piling up in Paris?

This is a conjecture not least about the state of the will in France – which, in subsequent years, was diagnosed as perilously enervated and stricken by keen observers, both French and foreign. How closely do those later observations apply to the volitions which expressed themselves in 1871? Did an even greater debility set in after a shattering event that would have been, in effect, mainly a paroxysm?

The question does pertain to the conditions in France especially, and comparably though less dramatically in other Western countries, conditions under which nihilisme, Nihilismus, nichilismo, nihilismo, nihilism, and the like, were to burgeon as political and philosophical problems in the course of the 1870s and afterwards.

How easy it would be, in this context, to rely on medical or quasi-⁠medical concepts, or to moralise! Here, with some luck, nothing will be prescribed.

From the 1870s, a few items come to mind which, if approached obliquely, may offer some insight into the state of the will in that period.

First, an aphorism published by Alexandre Weill in 1872.

Chose curieuse ! pour pouvoir prédire l’avenir, il faut non-⁠seulement nier tout miracle, toute suspension de loi naturelle, mais il faut surtout rejeter toute idée de pardon, sous n’importe quelle forme.*

* Qu’est-ce que le rêve ?, xv

The desire for justice, in view of the injuries inflicted upon the Communards who survived, not to mention those who perished, it may be surmised, weighed heavily on his mind, from 1871 onwards – justice as the visiting of due retribution upon the unjust. From this, under the given circumstances, arose the desire to predict the future, that is, to attain some certainty that this justice will be done, and along this route to witness it oneself, albeit only in imagination. However, such a power of foresight would require from him in return that he make his faculty of thinking over into a simple follower of the logic of natural laws, and exclude as well the possibility of his ever undertaking that variety of human action which consists in pardoning. But such a deliberate abandonment of his own freedom he also was not inclined to accept, not least because doing so would detract from justice in other respects. Hence his divergent motives turned against one another, both together putting themselves into a stalemate, at least provisionally. And these two impulsions might immobilise themselves inwardly in a further way. Namely, were one in all honesty to pose a question to the first motive, and ask: What was the real aim if one wanted to predict the future? – what then would it answer? To have stripped oneself categorically of the power of pardoning? And addressing the second motive similarly about its real goal, how would it respond? In order so that it be possible to predict the future – or that some other end could be reached? Neither, therefore, would hold up very well under even a little self-⁠scrutiny; rather, the motives behind the two motives would begin to show through, and each would be as though transfixed in consequence, no longer appearing as itself fit to be acted on, nor as offering an adequate support to the other so that it might be.

The inward hardships of these two motives and their manifold relations, when taken together, can plausibly be understood as a description of the state of the will, that is, the disposition of its volitions, at that specific time and place.

Second, an apothegm by Proudhon – admittedly, it predates the 1870s, but its first appearance was in the middle of that decade, in a posthumous book.

On ne se prostitue pas, en réalité, à un autre ; on ne se prostitue qu’à soi-⁠même.*

* La Pornocratie, “Notes & Pensées”

Justice generally, he says elsewhere in the same work, has been eliminated,* but the sentiment of it persists, while the inward relation of an individual to himself becomes unjust, in both directions. Henceforth there are mercenary exchanges within oneself, between oneself at one level and at another, which with bitter irony can be called the “self,” while corrosive distaste suffuses the transactions; and prostituting oneself to another person is a secondary iteration of this ever-⁠repeated sale. The primacy of self-⁠prostitution entails that some desires, strivings, inclinations, which otherwise one would have entertained spontaneously and accorded considerable freedom to range as they wished, are instead made to offer themselves to one’s “self” insofar as each person seems continually to pursue some impersonally personal phantasm, most likely egoism’s self-⁠interest, or vanity’s amour-⁠propre, or a compound of these obsessions. As compensation, a propensity is raised higher than the others, in the more fortuitous cases, or is given something baleful in return for its services, in the least. But regardless of how well any one of them fares, it always is prostituting itself to something above itself at the behest of the “self.”

* La Pornocratie, v

Hence, it seems plausible to describe the faculty of the will, circa 1875, as a marketplace, house of ill repute, nocturnal street-⁠corner in one, where volitions put on a show while withholding as much of themselves as they possibly could. Such a will, nearly by definition, semblance and self-⁠disdain would permeate.

Third, an item which, in this context, does seem more far-⁠fetched to adduce: not anything written, but an image.

However, a painting by Édouard Manet from around 1877, I contend, does provide some insight into the state of the will at that time. Let me explain.

Édouard Manet, “Le Suicidé” (ca. 1877)

The finished act shown here, remains affecting – but it is the immortalisation by this painting of the impressions made by the conditions of light and atmosphere at that one moment, which may, as it were, illuminate the contemporary state of the will. (In order not to beg an obvious question: if one focuses upon the wall as it emerges directly above the bed, leaving out of consideration the portrait towards the left, one sees a slight glow and obscure distance suggestive of an overcast horizon, and this part especially says emphatically on behalf of the whole work, “Regardez-⁠nous, nous sommes un tableau impressionniste !”) The room is lit subtly from the right, thus permitting an inconspicuous touch of clair-⁠obscur in the painterly rendering, though whatever is visible cares not whether one sees it – and yet by the tones of their colour these effects do apparently echo and answer to the deed that is the painting’s subject. The volitions which at last determined the dead man in his passage à l’acte, have deposited some of their qualities upon the surfaces of this sombre interior itself.

From this picture, therefore, as though it illustrates them in miniature, one can read back to the states of the will. Accordingly, how to characterise them? – Within the chamber of this will, around 1877, volitions flitted about, some quite without interest in getting themselves noticed, others uncertain whether they wanted to be – that is, if they wished to be seized upon and put into effect, being entered into memory in the process: while a few proved themselves in the end decidedly less hesitant to sacrifice their anonymity, which would happen eo ipso whenever they asserted themselves imperatively, by issuing commands or in other ways.

Now, if one finds plausible each of these elucidations of the condition of the faculty of the will in France during the 1870s, then, when they are juxtaposed, several tales about this strange protagonist could be fabulated. That is a temptation and a risk, agreed. But why stray into the construction of a “narrative” at all, at this point?

A more minimal conclusion does suffice, for my purposes here.

Taken together, these three snapshots of the faculty of the will in France at different stages of the decade, do bolster the contentions of contemporary observers who noted the fragility of its condition. How it might convalesce of its own accord, or whether some other power might affect it, catalytically or by contagion, even from afar, and thereby summon forth from it lasting deployments of energy – these representing the better eventualities – or whether its debility would worsen: the outcomes remained undecided, but the matter itself was regarded with increasing concern as the fin de siècle approached. And, of course, not only in France; though the problem manifested itself most obviously in Paris, it was far from negligible elsewhere in Western countries from those years onwards.

Russian Nihilism, this is rather clear, was thought of almost automatically whenever minds turned to the question of another source from which a revitalisation of Western wills could proceed, by whatever mode of influence it might result.

The vogue for the Russian novelists owed much to this vital interest.

Almost immediately upon its first periodical appearance in 1877, Turgenev’s Новь (Virgin Soil ) was reviewed in English, anonymously, by Pyotr Lavrov (Петръ Лавровичъ Лавровъ, 1823-⁠1900). Probably he understood the reasons why some Westerners were so interested in the latest works of Russian literature; he paid them heed in formulating his summary of the novel’s characters, though without falsifying any of their traits.

The last to be characterised, was perhaps the one whom many readers would most have wanted to hear about.

Finally, there is the revolutionist who has mistaken his vocation, Neshdanof, a student of philology, and the illegitimate son of a great noble, the inheritor of artistic and sceptical leanings which prevent him from sympathizing thoroughly with the party. At heart he believes neither in the movement nor in his own exertions in the cause, yet he is ashamed of his scepticism and stifles it. He throws himself into the revolutionary intrigues with all the more energy and fanaticism, inasmuch as this enables him to stifle the doubt and aversion which torment him. At last the moment arrives when he can no longer conceal from himself his moral deficiency, and nothing remains for him but suicide. This is the central figure in the romance, a new modification of the type of useless people, of those intelligent Russians thrown out of their true sphere, examples of whom are to be found in all M. Tourguénief’s novels and romances.

Thrown out of their true sphere. That was a thought-⁠provoking way of categorising the injustice they themselves suffered, phrased in order to point an instructive lesson, as superfluity as experienced by these Russians, real and fictional, was more and more often found to be a significant problem in the West also.

A year later, many Western eyes were directed towards Petersburg, on the occasion of the trial of Vera Zasulich (Вѣра Ивановна Засуличъ, 1849-⁠1919), who had shot the Governor of the city, on account of an order he had given for the flogging of one political prisoner.* She had not intended to kill him, she averred, but to deliver both a retribution and a warning. Indeed, subsequently her act did become a precedent, though not really as she had foreseen; the Народная Воля (“People’s Will”) soon arose. – After the acquittal by the jury, she went into hiding, and some weeks later into exile, fearing another arrest for the same offence, returning only decades later (apart from two surreptitious visits), after the general amnesty in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1905.

* This famous chapter in the history of the Russian opposition, including the repercussions, is recounted by Richard Pipes in The Trial of Vera Z. As his book shows, the reasons for the jurors’ verdict were probably less than simple. – Amongst the proceedings’ attendees, was Dostoevsky.

Following the jury’s decision, a far-⁠sighted summary of the prospects for Russia, as upon the Nihilists in effect a great victory had been conferred, was published in a New York newspaper by its unnamed Paris correspondent.

So ends this affair, which caused all St. Petersburg to forget for a moment the graver questions of foreign politics, but the effect produced has been painful, as with similar incidents at Kiew and Moscow, in which students and butchers were the chief actors, it shows that there is an anarchy and a chaos of ideas throughout this vast Empire, mined by Nihilism and worked upon by secret societies, oscillating between the most arbitrary absolutism which has ever existed and a revolutionary movement whose explosion will perhaps sink into nothingness the horrors of 1793 in France. The doctrines of Nihilism are nothing more nor less than a variety of the frightful principles of the Skoptchi. Just as these mutilate themselves physically in order to exclude themselves from the conditions essentially necessary to existence, in a search after an ideal which is naught but a grotesque counterfeit of humanity, so the Nihilists submit to a moral mutilation in order to gratify a savage instinct for destruction.*

* “A Russian Chief of Police”

To introduce this report, is not to agree with the slant of its evaluations, but simply to recognise its sharp anticipation, its intuition of the dramatic moment and even of a decisive catastrophe to come, as Pisarev might have said.

Perplexing, however, on an initial reading of this newspaper entry, was the comparison of the Nihilists and the – Skoptchi? When I chanced upon it, I did not know even their name, let alone who they were, nor what they had been about. But, my curiosity peaked, I did a little research, the mnemonic ending of a history rhyme perhaps then already in my ears, and the significance of likening the two began to dawn on me. – A bit later I started to plot out the present essay.

So, the Skoptchi (Скопцы): who or what were they? – Expect no more than the briefest possible summary; I do not wish to tarry over such an unlovely chapter, even though the aim of brevity should not detract from the impartiality which any writing of history ought to observe.

They were adherents of a sect (sinister word!) which emerged in Russia late in the eighteenth century; its creed took to a unique conclusion the human inclination towards ascetic practice, a tendency which, after all, is widespread – and from which derives, more particularly, as Herzen noted, something of the typical character of the country’s literature, laughter, and life.

The Skoptchi sect required its adherents to undergo physical operations by which their organs of generation were excised, either mainly or completely, including the inner ones, in the case of the women.

An obvious question does then pose itself: how ever could their ranks have been augmented? – They did find ways to proselytise quite extensively throughout the country, convincing by one means or another more than sufficient numbers to be “baptised” into the sect.

During the nineteenth century, clusters of Skoptchi were discovered repeatedly by the police, in various locales, each time eliciting consternation from the public and the government. It was thus occasioned that Nadezhdin wrote his study of them.

In 1869 there occurred the most notable exposure of a Skoptchi network – the term is apt, as communications were maintained amongst their clusters throughout Russia and beyond (some resided also on Romanian territory). A merchant in a provincial city, Maxim Plotitsin (Максимъ Кузьмичъ Платицынъ), had attempted to intercede with authorities on behalf of a few members of the sect who found themselves in legal difficulties and was arrested; investigations were initiated which revealed him to be one of its leaders, and that not only locally, but farther afield in the country, by virtue of his profession.

Various aspects of the sect’s existence came to light. Expert advice was sought from a specialist in forensic medicine in the Interior Ministry, Evgeny Pelikan (Евгеній Венцеславовичъ Пеликанъ, 1824-⁠84), and he compiled a report on the matter.*

* It was published in 1872; a German version, Gerichtlich-⁠medicinische Untersuchungen über das Skopzenthum in Russland, appeared in 1876. – See also an 1875 study by an anthropologist in Gotha, Friedrich von Stein, “Die Skopzensekte in Russland, in ihrer Entstehung, Organisation und Lehre.”

The report entailed, amongst other points of research, a thorough medical examination of the defendant; this revealed that the latter’s sexual organs were extant, in keeping with what apparently was one principle in the sect’s doctrine, namely, that its leaders themselves remained exempt from the initiation required of all the regular members.*

* Gerichtlich-⁠medicinische Untersuchungen, sec. i, ch. ii, ad finem (and the footnote).

Regarding the ordinary Skoptchi, however, the physical operation they underwent had the result of arresting the development of their minds and characters, fixing them at that moment in time for the rest of their lives.*

* Gerichtlich-⁠medicinische Untersuchungen, sec. ii, ch. iii, and, with sharper wording, “Die Skopzensekte in Russland.” – Was the consequence correlate to a goal? – The likeness of the procedure to the treatment of some varieties of domestic animals, is hard to ignore.

Yet, if such were the result of the ordinary procedures for admittance to the sect, how then to account for its appeal, the great facility with which it accrued new members, as though by a psychic contagion (psychisches Contagium)?*

* In the final section in the Gerichtlich-⁠medicinische Untersuchungen, “Die wichtigsten gerichtlich-medicinischen Schlussfolgerungen,” in the concluding remarks, this term is employed.

From Paris, an answer was provided by a popular author who is little known or regarded today, Pierre Zaccone.

As had many foreigners, this Frenchman too followed with attention the legal proceedings against Plotitsin, and not quite ten years afterwards, in the third volume of his Histoire des sociétés secrètes politiques et religieuses, he published an account of the Skoptchi, which, although several fictional touches are patent, does evince a sure sense for the attraction which the sect could exert, amidst the given conditions in Russia.

In view of its thorough hostility to the physical organs of generation, Zaccone categorised it as a variety of nihilism. Cette secte s’est donnée pour mission la destruction de la race humaine.

What did this aim signify, more precisely? Elle a pour dogme principal que l’homme est mauvais et ennemi de Dieu, qu’il faut le détruire afin que Dieu, qui est juste et bon, reste seul. This solitude would be marked by a kind of quiet, which the adherents sought to adumbrate through their own activity. Ce dogme admis, les sectaires cherchent le moyen de l’appliquer sans scandale et sans bruit. An inconspicuous approach they regarded as the best means of clearing away everything that exists. If a new beginning is to be brought about at all – which however may not even be the aim – all the room in the world must be made for it. Le premier point de leur doctrine est qu’il faut avant toute organisation nouvelle faire table rase du monde actuel. Reduction would be effected most simply from within the existing order by breaking off the replenishment of the generations: the fullest destruction achieved when as many as possible leave no one behind themselves. Détruire ; ne rien laisser ni des religions, ni des philosophies, ni des systèmes politiques, ni des institutions qui concourent actuellement à l’existence des nations. Those last strands in the thread by which the present ensures that the years after it will be similar, are easily cut. Nihil, Rien : telle est leur devise.*

* “Les Skoptzi,” “Les Colombes blanches et les nihilistes,” iii

Plotitsin himself, in a statement which evidently is a fictional addition to the record, albeit one in keeping with the practice in the history writing of antiquity, suggested much the same. A sect which turned against procreation so radically, had in view the reigning conditions, those which persisted also after the formal abolition of serfdom, conditions wherein such great numbers of human beings were made superfluous in the economic and even familial realm: many were neither permitted, nor able to begin families at all.

This he averred outright in the “Confessions d’un Skoptz.” Un serf de plus ou de moins en ce monde ne compte pas. – A condemnation of serfdom and its legacy, yes, and yet perhaps also a tacit acknowledgement that without it, there would not be felt as deeply any need to clear away the extant from existence. Thus the suffering was given a meaning, thus it was redeemed – by a general negation.

Il ne faut pas s’étonner que dans un pays où le servage a fait de la vie de famille un privilége, où des populations naissent et meurent comme des troupeaux de bétail, où la vie humaine dans la classe sociale la plus nombreuse est si peu de chose, il se trouve tant d’hommes qui prennent pour devise le mot : Rien.*

* “Les Skoptzi,” “Les Colombes blanches et les nihilistes,” v

Such a negation from within by which the world would be brought to dissolve away, largely perhaps in order to make room for a new start for . . . ?, should not be likened to the fate that Zaccone did mention, in his own voice, to provide a clear contrast, namely, the degradation inflicted on the political life of antiquity once the usage was widespread. Les instruments infâmes se retournèrent contre leurs auteurs, les esclaves prostitués et eunuques firent descendre les maîtres au derniers degrés de l’abrutissement.*

* “Les Skoptzi,” “Les Colombes blanches et les nihilistes,” iv

Or is the difference on this point somewhat other than it may appear at first?

This sect encountered in the history books, is perplexing and – instructive. Several questions could be posed, though into their labyrinth one really hesitates to stray.

How readily the impetus of the Skoptchi can be typified in the terms of Nihilism! – or can it be? Conversely, how plausibly may one discern the, in a word, apocalyptic expectancy of the sect amongst their contemporaries the Nihilists!?

Nicolai Berdyaev (Николай Александровичъ Бердяевъ, 1874-⁠1948), in 1918, looking back at the earlier period, spoke of the uncanny proximity of the nihilistic and apocalyptic strivings amongst Russians, indeed of their inner compatibility. Русскій человѣкъ можетъ произвести нигилистическій погромъ, какъ погромъ апокалиптическій; онъ можетъ обнажиться, сорвать ​всѣ​ покровы и явиться нагишомъ, какъ потому, что онъ нигилистъ и ​всё​ отрицаетъ, такъ и потому, что онъ полонъ апокалиптическихъ предчувствій и ждетъ конца ​мира.* A Russian man can carry out a nihilistic pogrom as an apocalyptic pogrom; he can strip bare, rip off all the veils and appear naked, both because he is a nihilist and negates everything, and because he is filled with apocalyptic premonitions and awaits the end of the world.

* “Духи русской революции,” ii

In 1880 the Third Department was disbanded.

At its inception several organisational challenges had had to be surmounted. Not the least of these was recruitment: the well-⁠born were reluctant to enter into this sort of covert enterprise, within their own country at least.* Of this impediment the initiators of the Third Department were quite aware.** In part to allay this objection, there was established a corps of gendarmes with a conspicuous profile, including a distinctive sky-⁠blue uniform: this division was intended to be a body whose presence was not “shady,” hence not dishonourable to join.

* A similar difficulty had faced Castlereagh in his advocacy of a system of espionage within Great Britain itself.   ** See the memorandum drafted after the Decembrist uprising, included in The Third Department, Appendix A.

Another was the opposition which came from within the state, especially from the parts it supplanted. At the beginning of its official life – writes its historian – the Third Department had to contend with some inevitable rivalry, a situation aggravated by the facilities already possessed by long-⁠established police organs but not yet enjoyed by their new superior.* And to control, as venal officials were not few in number: being thought of by the Tsar as his own personal instrument, it was invested implicitly with arbitrary power. Although no specific ukaz was ever issued to establish the supra-⁠legal powers enjoyed by the Third Department over the administration – he remarks elsewhere – in practice its authority to act as well as to supervise was generally recognized by contemporary society to be unquestionable.** Thus it exercised supervision of the country’s courts and its embassies (and undertook to surveil Russians abroad, including the émigrés and exiles); the further it established itself, the less could any part of the government or society hope to elude its notice or its instructions.

* The Third Department, ch. 2   ** ch. 6

More and more it became de facto a state within the state. Scruples could not always be expected from it. At times it covered over the misdeeds of some bureaucrats; sometimes it would even invent conspiracies out of nothing so as to alarm the government and show its own indispensability. And especially from 1860 onwards, it itself was frequently accused of having committed such acts as it was intended to prevent: for example, the fires which broke out in 1862 in Petersburg were often attributed to it. – Beginning in 1831, it was consulted in matters pertaining to the censorship of literary works. This field of activity, too, provided it with numerous raisons d’être. Of one of its heads, an anecdote was told by an emigrant Russian writer: Il lui avait échappé de dire un jour, en pleine séance du conseil des ministres, que tout littérateur est un conspirateur né.* From those potential conspirateurs many things were learned by the Third Department, and this indeed in more than one way. – Later its successor would develop even greater expertise in this connection.

* Pyotr Dolgorukov, La Vérité sur la Russie, vol. ii, ch. xiii

It also extended its purview to the policing of morals, a power exerted on behalf of the paternal (as it thought itself) Tsarist order, wherein the starting of a family became in effect a privilege, one often not granted to the serfs. And yet in this capacity it was also acquainting itself with conditions throughout the Empire, as a state within the state will do; there even are indications that in so doing it may have come to entertain the idea that the security of the state would require the abolition of serfdom at some point. – Yet this, as with many points of fact pertaining to such an organisation, will in all likelihood always remain a matter of interpretation and conjecture.

Definite by contrast is the role it did play in major enterprises, in the person of its gendarmes. Amongst them was the building of the first railway line between the capital and Moscow, a state project entrusted in 1842 to the American engineer George Washington Whistler (father of the painter, who accordingly spent his boyhood in Petersburg). Surveillance accompanied all the construction works; along Whistler’s line, the sky-⁠blue uniform of a gendarme was everywhere. – Thus the Third Department signalised itself. – The sight of it was dreaded, and men scuttled aside if they had time to do so unnoticed, or stood as if frozen to the spot when it was too late to escape. Spies sent in reports all too often. Engineers and contractors were called to the carpet with the suddenness of a summer storm.

The head of the secret police concerned himself with everything, even the effects. His gendarmes looked after the serf-⁠laborers’ spiritual welfare also: six military field-⁠churches, borrowed from the grenadier corps and an artillery division, were erected by these police along Whistler’s line. Priests and their assistants were borrowed with the churches. A field-⁠church was nothing more than a tent with sacred equipment made of canvas. To show to the serfs precisely what branch of the Tsar’s service bossed these churches, two emblems were painted on the holy gates of the altar screen: an all-⁠seeing eye on the left gate, and an all-⁠hearing ear on the right one.*

* Albert Parry, Whistler’s Father, bk. i, ch. xiii, v

Such had been the Third Department. As the years went on, the demoralisation it induced throughout the country ramified. – Then, fallen into disrepute when it showed itself unable to deal preventatively with the assassination attempts launched by the Народная Воля starting at the end of the 1870s, it was succeeded in quick stages by the Okhrana (Охранное Отдѣленіе, Security Department, in full: Отдѣленіе по Охраненію Общественной Безопасности и Порядка, 1880-⁠1917). And even so, that groupuscle did take the life of Alexander II in 1881.*

* See Maurice Laporte, Histoire de l’Okhrana, ch. ii.

This assassination, to Western eyes, did show the increasing disorganisation of the Russian state, conveying moreover, to the sharper amongst them, an inkling that it was beginning to conspire against itself (as Hazlitt would have said) – an inner disarray portending a very serious imperilment there. And by dint of this uneasy anticipation, they, turning their attentions back to consider the conditions at home, may have felt some foreboding strike them, in apprehension that the events in Russia might signalise upheavals soon to arrive in their own countries.

An underground such as the Народная Воля disposed over, hardly existed amongst the Socialist movements in Western Europe – but perhaps its relative absence could not be counted on for much longer. Furthermore, it was this very difference itself which lent an extra cachet to the Nihilist actions, as acts to be emulated abroad. Such an influence one Russian exile, Mikhail Dragomanov (Михайло Петровичъ Драгомановъ, 1841-⁠95), had in view in his comments on the significance of the deed. Cette différence seule nous oblige à voir dans les tentatives d’assassinat politique de l’Europe occidentale, ou des accidents occasionnels, ou, du moins en partie, une sorte de contagion épidémique venue de Russie. It might act catalytically and quite explosively – or perhaps it would pass without leaving much trace. Mais toute cette crise russe, si distincte qu’elle soit dans son caractère du mouvement socialiste moderne de l’Europe occidentale, ne s’effectuera pas, sans doute, sans exercer une certaine influence sur celui-⁠ci. Elle lui communiquera son caractère sanguinaire, excitera les instincts qui procèdent plus des passions que de raisonnement, et qui ne sont pas absents chez les classes déshéritées, même dans les pays les plus avancés.* – Did the lips of those last words curl slightly with a Byronic smirk?

* Le Tyrannicide en Russie et l’action de l’Europe occidentale

Towards the end of 1881, a discerning critic in Paris, Paul Bourget, his ear to the underground, drew a portrait of those years’ state of mind, more and more tensely fixated upon events to come, however they might unfold. (By no means should this concern be disparaged as merely emanating from a fin de siècle mood.) The future prospect, while dim, did require some exertion of intellect to apprehend, which as long as it lasted would lend some meaning to an existence otherwise at a standstill. Certes, l’ennui a toujours été le ver secret des existences comblées. Byron and his experiences still had lessons to confer, even to the uninitiated. Ceux qui croient au progrès – Bourget shook his head – n’ont pas voulu apercevoir cette terrible rançon de notre bien-⁠être mieux assis et de notre éducation plus complète. With the advance of the decades, the poet’s spirit of negation, strewn in numerous locales, was working its variegated effects. Une nausée universelle devant les insuffisances de ce monde soulève le coeur des Slaves, des Germains et des Latins, et se manifeste, chez les premiers par le nihilisme, chez les seconds par le pessimisme, chez nous autres par de solitaires et bizarres névroses. (In this section of his text, it was the “Pessimisme de Baudelaire” which Bourget sought to describe.) La rage meurtrière des conspirateurs de Saint-⁠Pétersbourg, les livres de Hartmann, les furieux incendies de la Commune et la misanthropie acharnée des romanciers naturalistes – all these developments evinced and, each in its own way, amidst its own circumstances, did embolden, even intensify ce même esprit de négation de la vie qui, chaque jour, obscurcit davantage la civilisation occidentale. – Well, today’s light is at least as poor.

Where, when, how would it next show itself? Nous sommes loin, sans doute, du suicide de la planète, suprême désir des théoriciens du malheur. Mais lentement, sûrement, s’élabore la croyance à la banqueroute de la nature, qui promet de devenir la foi sinistre du xx^e siècle si la science ou une invasion de barbares ne sauve pas l’humanité trop réfléchie de la lassitude de sa propre pensée.* Such tremulous expectancy – already that conditional clause was half-⁠unbuttoned.

* “Psychologie contemporaine,” iii

An uneasy awareness of something looming in a proximate future, during the mid-⁠1880s, perhaps led a few readers or journalists, in their free hours, to parse the works of older philosophers, looking for anything bearing some resemblance to the Nihilism of their day. On at least one occasion it was found – and not exactly in the records of any Grand Inquisitor or the texts of other “athées politiques,” no, but in a book by Augustine. Perhaps from one of his treatises on the utility of belief or the good of marriage some pithy utterance had been unearthed which, incorrectly cited, and circulating as a precious find, then furnished a few moments of surprise to a reading public hoping to divert itself from a surfeit of exhaustion or ennui.*

* Though to no avail, I have attempted to locate the sentence in question, and thus am inclined to categorise it simply as apocryphal, if not a piece of wishful thinking. But who knows what disclosures tomorrow or the day after may still bring?

Regardless of the authenticity or lack thereof of this rather sensational statement, it did enter into the historical record, and on that basis it may be introduced here – or rather, they may be, since three items from 1884, when it circulated in the press and was jotted down from there, are interesting enough to be included.

First, two brief notices, from an Italian periodical and a Hungarian newspaper, respectively. These I found by chance; their interest is manifold: not least the sheer curiosity value in the latter instance.

– Si è lungamente disputato intomo all’ origine della parola nichilisti, che è stata da alcuni attribuita a V. Hugo, da altri al Turghenieff. C’ è ora chi l’ha scoperta in S. Agostino, e adoperata precisamente nel senso che le si dà oggi. « Nihilisti appellantur, quia nihil credunt et nihil docent. » Pur troppo – osserva l’Illustrated London News – non c’ è niente di nuovo sotto il sole!*

* “Notizie Varie”

– A nihilista elnevezés eredete, mint a Vorsz. Ztg. kimutatja, nem kevesebb mint tizenötszáz esztendős. Már 382 Kr. u. Sz.-⁠Ágoston hippoi püspök azt mondá, »Nihilisti appellantur, quia nihil credunt et nihil docent« (Nihilistáknak neveztetnek, mert mitsem hisznek és mitsem tanitanak) E szerint elveikre nézve az akkori nihilisták semmiben sem különböztek a jelenkoriaktól, csakhogy nem volt még dinamitjok. A nihilisták, a kikről a tudós egyházi iró szól, társu latot alkottak, a melynek czélja a léterőnek lerombolása volt.* The origin of the term “nihilist,” as the Vossische Zeitung [?] shows, is no less than fifteen hundred years old. As early as 382, Saint Augustine of Hippo said, “Nihilisti appellantur, quia nihil credunt et nihil docent” (“they are called nihilists because they believe nothing and teach nothing”). It follows from his account that the nihilists then were no different in principle than those of today, except they did not yet have dynamite. The nihilists of whom the learned ecclesiastical writer spoke, formed a society whose aim was the destruction of the force of the ether.

* entry in the “Különfélék”

Secondly, the same sentence, likely noted down that year, was included in an entry in a volume of memoirs by Malwida von Meysenbug, kin by choice of the Herzen family (it was she who translated several volumes of his into German), tutor and companion of the daughters, and later the friend of Nietzsche. Where she found it, I do not know, but her remark on it is suggestive, and bears repeating. Er sprach von einer Gesellschaft, deren Zweck Verneinung und Vernichtung alles Bestehenden war. Also ist auch das nichts Neues, nur das Dynamit ist ein moderner Zusatz.* Augustine spoke of a society whose purpose was the negation and annihilation of everything existing. Thus even that is nothing new; added recently is only the dynamite.

* Der Lebensabend einer Idealistin, Gedachtes

Perhaps the ancient pre-⁠history of Nihilism, if presented truthfully and impartially, would have surprised some of its adherents, had they time to consider it, in their whirlwind of activity. – Just as interesting is an observation one meets in the play (staged in 1883) by Oscar Wilde published in 1880, Vera; or, The Nihilists, before the assassination of the Tsar yet pondering the accomplishment of the deed as being likely. Uttered by the General while some questions were put to Vera, is this enigmatic line: Your answers are too honest to be true.*

* act i

Commonly, without much thought, one takes the qualities of truthful and honest as though they overlap well enough to be practically synonyms. Yet if one must presume the eyes and ears of surveillance to be all around, no longer do their two meanings in effect co-⁠incide . . .

– How so?

Amidst such circumstances, those who dedicate themselves to some worthy aim above themselves, or who think the most of their friends, will very often have to speak and act untruthfully, in the strict sense, if they are to comport themselves honestly. False information might have to be tendered, inescapably: to meet this demand one may need to go considerably beyond the more minimal expedient of refusing to reply at all when questions are put. Hence, in extremis, implicitly circumscribed by the requirements of the ideal one has taken upon oneself, namely, honesty, the adage rien n’est véridique, tout est permis cannot but be heeded as one’s maxim of conduct; wherever and whenever this becomes the case, there the usual compunctions are set aside, and allowance, albeit with a wink, is made for the purported right to lie for love of the humane (ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen). Conversely, if the given conditions are understood such that everyone seems to take account of surveillance as an omnipresent power, anyone for whom truthfulness of speech represents the highest duty, cannot aspire in conduct to honesty; indeed, he could neither know nor say what it is, plausibly.

Right in medias res of the general surveillance, as it was thought to be, all the more impressive is the willed disregard of it on the part of some Russians, who thereby made a clearing wherein they could meet one another openly, such that honesty and truthfulness too would again unite, so long as those encounters lasted. In them a measure of humanitas found some moments of refuge, and for this shelter a main condition of possibility was these Russians’ intense hatred of hypocrisy.

All of this caught the attention of Georg Brandes when he visited Russia in 1887, the Danish writer having been invited to Petersburg to deliver a course of lectures. Publishing his impressions of the country the next year – at just the moment when he was most fully occupied with Nietzsche – he voiced his wonderment at those Russian spaces of openness, so unlike anything he really had known. Ingensteds hører den Fremmede Mænd og Kvinder, der staa paa Civilisationens Højde, udtale sig saa aabent og saaledes uden Forbehold. Nowhere else does the stranger hear men and women who stand at the peak of civilisation speak so openly, so unreservedly. This attitude of openness – what could its wellspring be? The sentiment behind it: «Saadan er jeg; jeg giver mig, som jeg er – for bredt og stort anlagt til at være forbeholden og forsigtig, og for livssikker til ikke udelukkende at være afhængig af min egen Dom.» “That’s how I am: I give myself as I am. Too broad, too large-⁠minded to be reserved and cautious, and too sure of life not to depend exclusively upon my own judgement!” And as an invitation to someone else to enter into a personal rapport, how did this attitude express itself? «Jeg er saadan, sig, hvordan du er. Hvortil al denne Tilknappethed! Livet er kort, Tiden sparsomt tilmaalt; skal vi faa noget ud af vort Samkvem, maa vi aabne os for hinanden.» “This is what I’m like; do tell me what you are like. Why all this modesty! Life is short, time has to be apportioned sparingly; if we are to get anything out of our relations, we must open ourselves to each other.” Очень интересное отношение! – Provocative, too, is what the traveller added directly. Og bag denne Frimodighed ligger den Følelse, som virker mest fremmed af alle paa den, som kommer fra Norden, en Rædsel og Afsky for Hykleri, og en Stolthed, der viser sig i Sorgløshed – saa ulig engelsk Stivhed, fransk Forsigtighed, tysk Standshovmod, dansk Vrøvl.* And behind this boldness is the feeling that seems most strange to those who hail from the North: fear and loathing of hypocrisy, and pride that shows itself in being carefree – so unlike English stiffness, French caution, German obstinance, Danish frivolity. – Yes, amongst the better minds, more direct experience of Russia not infrequently prompted a biting self-⁠criticism, as though suddenly the presentiment seized them that otherwise they might be overtaken by events to come. An ironic reversal!

* Indtryk fra Rusland, “Iagttagelser og Overvejelser,” iii

Such an attitude of openness, however, stood precariously over against the surveillance which became ever more intrusive during the 1880s, as the Okhrana was set up – an agency by whose illicit activities at times the Russian Empire did indeed seem as though it were conspiring against itself. And yet the state’s internal disarray may also have added further strength to the feeling incipient amongst some Westerners, that their future too was foreshadowed by everything unfolding in Russia, for better and for worse.

Early in 1885, Zola, remarking in an interview with a journalist upon Germinal, then appearing as a book after its serialisation during the preceding months, did describe the crossroads to which the times were come, regarded from Paris, in a few prescient words. Listening closely to them, one may hear again the warning issued in the Soirées by the Sénateur: his caution, instructive when it was first emitted, had by the end of the century become even more pointed.

Il y a un grand mouvement social qui se prépare, une aspiration de justice dont il faut tenir compte, sinon la vieille société sera balayée. Cependant, je ne pense pas que le mouvement commencera en France, notre race est trop amollie. C’est même pour cela que, dans mon roman, c’est dans un Russe que j’ai incarné le socialisme violent.*

* “Émile Zola”

Were the admonitions to the “vieille société” not heeded soon enough, its injustice might one day not be swallowed up, but rather swept away (balayée).

The successor of the old, however, might well prove to be even worse, proverbial “good intentions” notwithstanding. Even then – hindsight is never so superior! – indications of what likely was to come, and not only in Russia, could be gleaned from the activities of the Okhrana. During its first decades, instructive lessons were conveyed. The use made of them, of course, did depend on the students.

Starting in the 1880s, intricate examples of policeman-⁠terrorist symbiosis – as these interactions are termed by one historian (the years of its predecessor had already yielded a number of them)* – were provided as the Okhrana established itself, more and more as one power acting against others within the state, or even a state in nuce within the state and in effect conspiring against it. – One almost novelistic episode illustrated such a “symbiosis” especially well.

* For the last quarter-⁠century of the Third Department, see Ronald Hingley, The Russian Secret Police, ch. 3.

Towards the end of 1882, Sergey Degayev (​Сергѣй Петровичъ Дегаевъ, 1857-⁠1921), a member of the Народная Воля and in prison at the time, was turned by Georgy Sudeykin (​Георгій Порфирьевичъ Судейкинъ, 1850-⁠83), an agent of the Okhrana in Petersburg. How did he manage such a coup? Sudeykin employed subtlety, posing as a former revolutionary sympathiser and student of Marx who aimed to set up a liberal régime in Russia, using the Okhrana as his springboard for this ambition. If only terrorists and political police, both specialists in violence, could combine forces, they might be able to impose their own terms on the defenceless Empire. The proposal won the assent of Degayev, all the more as the first target in this charade of a conspiracy, was to be the Interior Minister Dmitry Tolstoy (Дмитрій Андреевичъ Толстой, 1823-⁠89), an official whom the underground and many other Russians especially detested. Sudeykin now plans to launch terrorists headed by Degayev against leading state officials, including Dmitry Tolstoy. A botched killing of Sudeykin himself will also be arranged, thus making confusion worse confounded, and one crucial item in the programme is Sudeykin’s resignation from his police post. This will be timed to provoke his recall by a terrified Emperor as the new Minister of the Interior. He will receive dictatorial powers – for who else can save Russia from the mysterious wave of terror in fact mounted by himself? – This fictive prospect evidently sufficed as bait, and the unwitting (?) accomplice began to talk. Granted, there was perhaps something flattering, even intoxicating in the very pretence, while it went on; had the element of play-⁠acting taken hold of each of them? – For the time being Degayev’s role is to reveal his fellow-⁠conspirators, who might otherwise interfere with Sudeykin’s grand design. He obligingly complies, giving names, cover names, addresses and other details against a promise that his friends will remain unmolested – an undertaking soon proved worthless by numerous arrests. – By then, surely, a sense of the reality must have dawned on him. But perhaps because he understood the predicament into which he had manœuvred himself, vis-⁠à-⁠vis his erstwhile fellows, it seems he continued to play along. – At some stage even Degayev began to suspect that he was valued more as an informer in the present than for his promise as a future duumvir, but he was permitted to vanish from custody while under transfer from one prison to another. Such mock escapes were often essential when a revolutionary had agreed to become a police spy. – Then he was dispatched abroad to lure one of the group’s leaders into a trap, where the latter was to be kidnapped and brought back to Russia. Finally meeting the latter, however, instead he tried to rectify the situation. He unburdened himself – this represented another kind of openness – addressing his victim-⁠designate with one of those lengthy confessions which come so easily to the Russian tongue. – Putting aside the motives and the minor embellishments, his was an instructive disclosure! – From this tirade various amazing details of Okhrana procedure emerged. The illegal publication People’s Will had, it turned out, been printed for a time with type supplied by Sudeykin at police expense, having been subjected in effect to police censorship, besides which the Okhrana had also been supplying revolutionaries with their false documents. The entire terrorist organisation had, in fact, been taken over by the police – as though in revanche for an earlier victory by the group in its heyday, when it successfully recruited a well-⁠placed official within the police ranks to its side. – After this encounter, the exculpation accepted, at least for the time being, his penance came in the form of a directive to return to Russia and – strike down the one who had turned him. Which he proceeded to do, though not in haste, nor single-⁠handedly: as part of a squad, Degayev killed Sudeykin at the end of 1883.*

* After the denouement, he escaped to England; fearing reprisals, he left in 1886 for Canada, then the United States, where in 1891 he was naturalised as Alexander Pell, and in 1897 became a professor of mathematics. – See Richard Pipes, The Degaev Affair, ch. 5 and the Epilogue.

This entire episode reads like fiction, certainly. And yet at the very centre of the pretence, that is, in the feint by which a collaboration of convenience and/or of conviction was proposed from one side to the other, there is a foreshadowing of close relations maintained in obscurity. By this last word I mean the night which falls upon the public realm once the secret parts of the state have consumed the whole from within, while supposedly “non-⁠governmental organisations” of one kind or another fulfil their end of the tacit agreement, and spread all the varieties of terror and demoralisation as far as they possibly can. – Now I am speaking of the condition of most Western countries, especially since 2020. A bit further on I shall round off this essay by a squinty glance at one or two of the crimes we all have witnessed since then; their darkness is more palpable if one has the rhymes in one’s ears of some old line-⁠endings in Russian history. – Such is my hypothesis.

Without the slightest anachronism or partiality, the historian is quite within his rights to underscore the sheer prescience of that ill-fated officer of the Okhrana.

Fantastic as this projected alliance of predator and prey may have sounded when first mooted, such collaboration was later to become a commonplace. In any case, which was hunter and which was hunted? In the context of terrorism police agents played both roles – as also did the terrorists. Each side was therefore well equipped to understand the other, for they shared professional interests and skills from which outsiders were excluded.*

* For this and other similar episodes, see The Russian Secret Police, ch. 4.

Counterparts to the West did take note of the emergence of this sector, and the refinements of technique which came with it. Emergency measures in defence of state security were not regularised by being made permanent, formally speaking; rather, they were simply renewed every so often; thus the state of exception was enshrined as the norm, perhaps not least in view of the injuries this mode of handling “emergencies” inflicted upon the remnants of the sense of legality. – Pogroms erupted with the secret police’s connivance or worse. – Surreptitiously, agents provocateurs set to work en masse, and the corrosive practice extended beyond individuals, establishing whole organisations and periodicals in deceit.

How could I omit to mention, as briefly as possible, the single most poisonous legacy of the Okhrana, the forged document that did so much to foment the worst catastrophes of the twentieth century, which still circulates and is studied?* This document, purportedly a memorandum outlining the plans of a long-⁠lived cabal to attain domination of the world, made its first appearance within official Russian circles, in 1897; its main intention evidently was to bring, by a stratagem of indirect imputation, the policies of the Finance Minister into discredit. Already he and his staff surmised that behind the machination there stood the Okhrana. – Not much later another version of the document was stitched together in the Paris bureau of the Okhrana, where presumably the agents were following avidly the events in France, that is, the more and more evident disaggregation of the French body politic, manifest patently throughout the country in – the pogroms that had been catalysed not least by – a handwritten letter whose authorship was attributed wrongfully and a forgery. (Instruction is at times a two-⁠way street.) – This version was first published in Russia in 1905, included in a book by a well-⁠known “mystic.” – Its further career I shall not rehearse, noting only that both Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford, much like many others then and now, found it to be indispensable, especially when acknowledged as “the big lie” (die große Lüge) par excellence.

* The murderous import of this production was recognised as soon as it surfaced; subsequently it was exposed as the work of the Okhrana. – Some dissections: Lucien Wolf, The Jewish Bogey and the Forged Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (1920); Isaac Landman, “‘Protocols Forged in Paris’ Says Princess Radziwill” (1921); Herman Bernstein, The History of a Lie (1921) and The Truth About “The Protocols of Zion” (1935); Binjamin Segel, Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion kritisch beleuchtet (1924); Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer (1944), ch. i; Éric Conan, “Les secrets d’une manipulation antisémite” (1999); Cesare De Michelis, Il manoscritto inesistente (2001) and “Protocolli dei savi di Sion. Ritrovato il protografo” (2021); Hadassa Ben-⁠Itto, The Lie That Wouldn’t Die (2005); and Pierre-⁠André Taguieff, Hitler, les Protocoles des Sages de Sion et Mein Kampf (2020). – Several hands worked over the text at different stages in its production: there are a number of versions. A literary associate of the Okhrana in Paris, Matvei Golovinsky (Матвѣй Васильевичъ Головинскій, 1865-⁠1920), seems to have concocted the main one. (In his last years he lent his services to the Soviet government.) Whole passages of his were plagiarised, with small changes in names and like details, from an unrelated satire, an attack on the Second Empire, Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, published in 1864 by Maurice Joly.

The fabrication does illustrate at its worst a Russian propensity which in its best expressions one really can admire, characterised well by Brandes: namely, the energetic readiness to take thoughts, propositions, notions, no matter from where they come, to their ultimate conclusions (yderste Konsekvenser).* What was the idea whose implications were pursued all the way to the end? The covert empire of the state within the state itself, otherwise known as the secret police, once it would be assisted symbiotically by its counterparts operating throughout the undergrounds – the very alliance whose potentials Sudeykin lauded in his proposal to Degayev. Between them it had been offered merely as bait; in this later document it served as a model and was transfigured, elaborated into a full-⁠fledged instruction manual for an inconspicuous conquest of power.

* Indtryk fra Rusland, “Iagttagelser og Overvejelser,” iii

In 1884, a curious text retrieved from the Petersburg archives was published in Paris. During his sojourn at the court of Catherine II, Denis Diderot composed a memorandum for her; it remained behind upon his return to France, had been consigned ad acta and lay dormant for more than century.

One three-⁠sentence remark in it well exemplifies how different a statement can come to sound, read anew after a long period of history has elapsed.

With the second part of it, Diderot felicitated the reform-⁠minded Empress at her advantageous position, given that, he thought, the state in Russia being quite young, with her a new start could more easily be made than in countries like his own whose histories were considerably longer. Qu’un peuple est heureux, lorsqu’il n’y a rien de fait chez lui ! Les mauvaises et surtout les vieilles institutions sont un obstacle presqu’invincible aux bonnes. – These two sentences, in 1773, in Petersburg, must have seemed an innocent commonplace.

Coming to light in a period when Nihilism was arriving in France, after the Cherneshevskians and the Communards, they accrued a sinister undertone. “Obstacles” existed to be removed . . .

Today they sound yet more ominous, when all that “is being done” seems to be intentionally destructive, a means for transforming the polity into a tabula rasa, as a first act. Il n’y a rien de fait ! – Il n’y a rien à faire ! – Non, il n’y a Rien à faire ! – They are the zeroes they’ve been waiting for.

Currently, moral concepts are wielded by this sort with abandon, but at bottom the promulgators of the “fundamental transformation,” the “Great Reset,” or “2030,” and similar heaps of rubbish, are actuated only by their desire for power. The sole “evil” (le mal) these “athées politiques” can see, is done by those who recognise and reject the actual evil they do, standing against them and the destruction wrought by their quest; such mortal enemies they aim to repay in kind, indeed many times over (l’extrême du mal). Do not overlook their fanatical passion for vengeance! (They make little effort to disguise it anymore – for is there now a Western régime not under their control?) At present, very prominently in certain jurisdictions, but soon perhaps elsewhere, it threatens to consume whatever still remains of the spirit of an independent judiciary.

In accord with this finding, a small sonic experiment, as follows.

To these absolute believers in their own prerogatives, merely assign the first of Diderot’s three sentences, and then – hearing it spoken in their voices – a sound of horror is emitted for which he likely never had ears! Il y a des circonstances où l’extrême du mal est un bien, et où un palliatif qui invétère le mal est le plus funeste de tous les remèdes.*

* “Essai historique sur la police,” 7

Since 2020, we find ourselves in a wasteland where the word “justice” is heard everywhere, while the thing itself is ever scarcer. And probably the deepest reason for this verbal profusion which covers over a void, is the imminent disappearance of agriculture in anything like a recognisable form.

This idea sounds outlandish, surely, and yet one has simply to cast an eye at that experimental laboratory for the fanatical agendas of today, the Netherlands, to see what is in store for agricultural life throughout Western countries, if the train to “2030” is not stopped. Food, we are informed, will be grown in test tubes or created synthetically (not to mention the insects). In such an artificial economy, cultivation is slated to disappear, and therewith the sempiternal “ground” – the basic kinship of the humus and the humanus – without which the very ideal of justice itself cannot long endure or prosper. Hence, those who wilfully devalue this essential word, whether or not they know what they do, comport themselves as dysangels announcing the destruction to come of that which underlies the thing itself.

Neither agriculture nor justice, however, can be obliterated with impunity, even though Western régimes are striving towards this very goal. At least, one hopes not. – If one has one’s ears to the ground, currently, one may well hear a rumbling, a call to desist, of the kind which the Sénateur warned of in the Soirées.

Not only this frontal assault on agriculture, but also the drive to implement systems of state control – digital identity, the abolition of paper currency in favour of electronic, health passports, fifteen-⁠minute cities, and the rest of the structural elements of the incipient totalitarianism – all of this is moving us all step by step towards the re-⁠establishment in Western countries of something very like the old serfdom. If only for this reason, one is well-⁠advised to study up on Russian history.

What will be the profile of tomorrow’s serfs? Already today one notices signs that the general predicament is beginning to dawn on many, namely, that a large proportion of Western populations, or even of the total population of the globe, has already been written off as superfluous. Moreover, the expectation that the consequences of this political-⁠economic decision will soon have to be reckoned with, inescapably, is also spreading.

From 2020 onwards, so many basic human and civic rights have been transformed into privileges issued by the state, and susceptible to revocation or confiscation at its pleasure. Life itself is hardly acknowledged by our would-⁠be dictators as a right any longer, so could one expect procreation to be regarded as sacrosanct? It too, and the institution still linked essentially with it, namely, the family, may soon be subjected not merely to state control, but to rationing specifically. Whether adults will be permitted to start a family, may soon be decided entirely arbitrarily, quite possibly not even by human beings, but rather by computer systems or models whose decrees could not even be appealed. – What criteria they might employ, one shudders to think. – Who knows, perhaps under such auspices the endeavour, publicly denounced though it has remained a subterranean force in public policy, namely, eugenics, will again show itself openly, albeit with another “intention.” Eugenics is naughty and bad – thus one observer rehearses common opinion: Dysgenics is heavenly and virtuous.*

* Darren Beattie, Tweet, May 20, 2023

As though signals are being sent in advance warning of the intrusions to come, one is beginning to read of cases in some countries where children have been removed from their parents on the pretext that their wishes, as regards gender, from the novel stupidity of pronouns all the way to the decision to change it surgically and pharmaceutically, are not being heeded. The physical possibility of such a bodily transformation, owed entirely to the advances in medical science, now becomes a weapon in the hands of the state against an institution it wishes to subordinate entirely to itself, both practically and also on the plane of the incipient totalitarian ideology – the ideology, that is, the preparation of individuals to play both roles as needed in the type of social relations set to be established everywhere, the relation of perpetrators and victims. (This function of the new ideology, since 2020, was addressed in a previous essay on this website.) The transgender issue has begun to lend assistance to this aim of reconfiguring the family to be an incubator of the ideology, and alas, it seems many transgender people have no qualms when their lives are misused to this end. What is more, some, as has recently been seen, do take delight in serving as the totalitarianism’s foot-⁠soldiers, even as an incipient Sturmabteilung: this conclusion is reached by squinting hard at recent incidents.

May it remain, in the better case, no more than a provisional conclusion; yet the inauspicious trajectory is hard to ignore, taking a longer view. Around thirty years ago, bands of university professors and their acolytes wanted to make “trouble” for that either/or called “gender,” almost as a speculative pastime, a diversion from boredom or other grievous states in the psychic life of weak characters, or, essayed on a higher plane, as nearly akin to a Humean thought-⁠undertaking, whose actual effect back in daily existence was minimal. What haven’t changes in intellectual and other genres of fashion done in the interval! Soon enough these monsters were not so little, the ideas driving them not so precarious; they left the academic laboratory . . . Now, novel “genders” are born on a whim, their sum is virtually beyond counting, and in social contexts it is bon ton to affirm the most patent absurdities about these non-⁠matters; while amidst all this materialised pretence some of the more committed shoot off more than their mouths.

Laughter remains* one response to such enormous lunacy, though it may carry an undertone of self-⁠laceration, whenever one admits to oneself one’s own share of responsibility, by dint of having abetted in years gone by all the play-⁠acting now bursting out everywhere. Yes, in that case the laughter has a bitter tinge almost – Russian, as per the insight offered by Herzen. Thus a saddened mea culpa is also there, available to be heard by sharp ears. (“This isn’t what I was fighting for!”) – Beset by a mélange of sentiment, still defiant yet crestfallen, at last one may better understand Bazarov père when he ponders the quasi-⁠medical nihilism that overtook his son. And if one turns to read again the other prescient works of Russia’s nineteenth century, what further points of instruction might they convey?

* For how much longer? It too is slated for criminalisation, to judge by the measures now passing in the legislatures in some Western countries.

One year almost to the day before the mad rush to “2030” fully commenced, a London satirist pared away layers of the double-⁠talk, the obfuscation devised to shield from scrutiny the ideological function of “transgenderism.”*

* When this term is understood as a precise parallel to “transhumanism,” it tacitly discloses its meaning: not to facilitate any crossing from one gender to another, but to move beyond gender altogether, that is the aim, much as by the other, humanity itself is to be superseded. These are their meanings, both propagated not despite but in view of their absurdity; but since each enters into the amalgam currently being pieced together, the ideology, much more important is to analyse their functions, the preparations for conflict between individuals they – engender.

Gender is a destructive social construct, and the best way to prove this is to construct as many new genders as possible.

– Titania McGrath, Tweet, March 24, 2019

By the fictive or histrionic proliferation of these “genders,” the natural datum that subtends gender is set up to be volatilised, turned despite itself into a point of contention between individuals, who by this are manœuvred into participating in today’s ideology, even without realising it. Thus individuals will be prepared to play by turns both the perpetrator and the victim role in the relation that is specifically ideological: the relation, itself indeed binary and a “destructive social construct,” which supplies from within much of the motive energy for a totalitarian form of rule. – To all this the aphorism did alert us; from a further unfolding it sought to avert us.

Four years later, what is afoot in London? Reality has outstripped even the sharp eyes and ears of the satirist. How is laughter to respond? Into the horrors I will not delve, but merely cite the headlines luridly given to three newspaper reports, by Chris Matthews, Elizabeth Haigh, Laurence Dollimore, respectively. “Man who had his own penis, leg and nipple removed ran a ‘eunuch-⁠maker’ website that livestreamed castrations to a paying audience, court hears.” – “Duo admit removing penis and nipple of man accused of carrying out castrations and broadcasting footage on his ‘eunuch maker’ website.” – “What is the ‘Nullo’ castration cult? Inside horrifying world of ‘genital nullification’ that was inspired by Japanese artist who cut off his own penis and testicles and served them to the highest bidder.” – To construct as many new genders as possible, does seem to be the goal of these procedures, but here perhaps “transhumanism” and “transgenderism” already have hybridised: should these new “genders” be called “human” any longer?

Transgenders/transhumans (for want of a better term) such as these, compensated by the fifteen seconds of fame their dramatic show brought them, excised their organs of reproduction – much as the Skoptchi had done. Can one say that in London today, much as in Russia then, guiding the act is an awareness that within the existing order, many individual human beings have been made superfluous?* The inference is plausible. Of course, then serfdom was on its way out; now it is scheduled to arrive quite soon, in the West, and so these horrific transactions in London signify assent before the fact to the institutions of the serf system, however much the extremity of the deed may have underscored the acceptance with irony. These acts do constitute ratifications of the superfluity inflicted upon human beings.

* Moreover (but now with a greater quantum of hesitation), given that the participants in the London mutilations indicated eo ipso their willingness to take up residence in that restricted city otherwise known as prison, at least in principle, have they not already demonstrated that upon their release they would have scant objection to a life led within the confines of the other fifteen-⁠minute cities, those mainstays of the political-⁠economic arrangements to come?

The rhyming of these two bits of history, so distant from one another, can furnish a clue about the profile of those who, if “2030” is not averted, may well comprise the most docile amongst the vast flocks of serfs – the mind raped cattle,* as they have been called derisively (by the observer whom I mentioned before). Here I recur to the peculiar result of the operations carried out on the Skoptchi initiates: the fixing of their intellects and characters at that very age, inhibiting further development in this regard. Not exactly an unwelcome consequence, from the point of view of the stability of the system of serfdom itself – hence I do wonder what rhymes most closely with it, from amongst the data of today.

* Darren Beattie, Tweet, May 15, 2023

One finding is hard to discount: the great over-⁠reliance on the Internet generally and on social media particularly, supplemented by numerous other lax habits, seems closely correlate to the increase in the scores of people whose development – of mind, language, awareness, etc. – has been truncated, stunted, or retarded.

Today we are not yet at the end of the line: perhaps only in “2030” could one assess how well the two systems of subjugation do rhyme. As for myself, I would prefer not to find out, but in advance of the verses still unwritten, I shudder all the same.

There remains in conclusion one matter to address. What ever has all this to do with music?

Having parsed the rhymes that ring when some parts of history, and in particular Russian history, are placed side by side with conditions today in the West, and noted how Western states are reprising several of the steps that led Russia towards the domination of a system of total rule – strong is the temptation to come to rest with, to dwell upon a conclusion that would quickly cease to be provisional.* Namely, in the West, technology now is our fate. In this dispirited impasse, the reign of “technology” comprises not merely the technologies which are consuming from within the economy as a whole, nullifying the other productive forces which energised it, but equally the techniques by means of which the states within the state, that is, the police and intelligence agencies,** continue half-⁠surreptitiously to extend their dominance.*** Arrived at this point, all these inimical powers often seem to loom over us all inescapably! And if this is so, then out of desperation there may be engendered the semblance of a last conceivable response, and one begins to mull the falling of a curtain upon a nauseating farce, through an utter termination whose intent might be both nihilist and apocalyptical – one starts to adopt the attitude spoken of by Berdyaev.

* There may be an element of self-⁠fulfilling prophecy in this conclusion.   ** The term “deep state” is evocative, but in its reference it remains imprecise, and thus too easily gives rise to misunderstandings.   *** Within a given state, often they do not do so in unison, but at odds with one another. Or one allies itself with powers abroad: for example, the Dutch intelligence and security service, the Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst, now collaborates with the World Economic Forum. – De zelfvernedering van een land: wat een lesje!

This very attitude, pared down to the essential, reappeared some two decades later, in a notation Martin Heidegger confided to his black notebooks. Soon, he surmised, there would come to pass eine höchste Vollendung der Technik – technology will then reach its highest consummation. What would occur at its peak? Deren letzter Akt wird sein, daß sich die Erde selbst in die Luft sprengt und das jetzige Menschentum verschwindet. As technology’s last act, the earth will blow itself up and present-⁠day humanity will vanish: this prospect he seemed to welcome. Was kein Unglück ist, sondern die erste Reinigung des Seins von seiner tiefsten Verunstaltung durch die Vormacht des Seienden.* It will be not a misfortune, but an initial purging of being of the deepest disfigurement induced in it by the supremacy of beings. (My version offers the gist; the foul subtext I prefer not to touch, just as I spoke as briefly and summarily as possible of the Протоколы засѣданій сіонскихъ мудрецовъ.) – Now, when he reduced the nihilist/apocalyptical attitude down to its quintessence, by virtue of his choices in the phrasing one might observe a curious split in his own towards it. Reading what Heidegger wrote, evidently he endorsed this attitude, while at the very same time seeking to examine it, as if it were the transcription of a prejudice. Catalysed by it, one part of him was summoned to politics (and what a politics!); quizzically looking it over, the other had not abandoned entirely the venerable inclination of the human mind towards open inquiry. – Such co-⁠incidence of both attitudes in him brought his thinking’s “errancy” (wer groß denkt, muß groß irren) to a momentary standstill, which in turn may propel a reader to further thought.

* Überlegungen xii-⁠xv, xiv

Does it not remain premature to hasten towards the nihilist/apocalyptical attitude, as though no other option any longer avails against the injustice of polities rapidly turning into swamps, soon to be populated by teeming classes of serfs? In extremis we have not yet arrived, though that is not for any lack of trying on the part of the proponents of the new totalitarianism. But so far away from it we are not, either.

Right now, there still is music, live and recorded, instrumental and electronic, still the techniques in human hands for the calculations of meter, mood, and measure. Why polemicise against this technology? By it no individuals have been nullified. – Some of its modish detractors have mauvaise foi or worse to answer for.

So long as humanity does not vanish from the earth, music, poetry, and even rhyme may evince unsuspected potencies, when, as now, monsters, and amongst them the very coldest, have gotten whole polities into their grip.

Replicating virally throughout the West, there is nothingness and nihilism; yet while agriculture continues to be tended to properly, cultivation still cared for, civilised human beings may surprise themselves when the edifices they urgently require are roused from their long sleep underground, by instruments of sound. – This deeper stratum, intuited palpably in antiquity, was recalled by Bachofen.*

* Versuch, “Die drei Mysterien-Eier,” § 13