Dostoevsky on the Eastern question. Part 2

← Dostoevsky on the Eastern question, Part 1 (February 1877)

May/June 1877
Saint Petersburg, Russia

I. On those who love Turks

It would appear that there are now many lovers of Turks among us; that is, of course, because of the war. I cannot recall a single time in my entire life ever before when someone would start a conversation by sharing their admiration for Turks. Now, however, I often hear about those who are eager to defend them, and I have even met some of those zealots myself. Naturally, all this stems from a desire to be different, and yet there are even scholars and professors who say this.

'The Muslim world brought science to the Christians. The Christian world was drowning in ignorance when the Arabs were already enjoying the bright light of science.'

Oh, you see, it is Christianity that is the source of ignorance. You have Buckle and even Draper here^[1]. It turns out that Islam is light, and Christianity is the root of darkness. How charming! That must be why Islam is so much more enlightened these days compared to Christianity. Why did they snuff their light so soon, then?

'Yes, but they're monotheists, whereas the Christians...'

Many lovers of Turks exhibit this penchant for praising Muslims for their monotheism, that is, the supposed purity of their teaching that there is only one God. The key part, however, is that those lovers have been out of touch with the common people for so long that they do not understand them even one bit. Because of this, they often have their own, very peculiar idea of how the Russian commoner thinks. Yet the Russian commoner, who is often assumed to know nothing about faith and prayer, will very often—if not always—have in his mind and heart a very clear and firm idea of what he believes in. Although, of course, few commoners would be able to properly articulate their beliefs. Our refined, genteel Russian, so cultured and so estranged from his people, would be very surprised to learn that this illiterate man quite firmly believes that God is one and there is no other God. A Russian commoner knows and believes that Christ, his one true God, was born of God the Father and conceived by the Blessed Virgin Mary.

First of all, the genteel Russian, having long been out of touch with his people, would not even consider it to be possible for an uneducated Russian commoner to have such knowledge. 'He is so dull, so unsophisticated; he was never taught anything, where is his teacher?'. He would never understand that the commoner's teacher on the matters of faith is the soil itself, the Russian soil; this faith was born with him and keeps strengthening in his heart over the course of his life. Yet what is the most confusing for the Russian thinker is how the Russian commoner manages to be consistent in his views! The genteel thinker has long been unable to understand the common people's genuine, childlike faith. That's why he cannot even imagine that the commoner, while still believing in the great mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God, would still be able to adhere to strict monotheism. He would rather explain this firmness of belief with something else, claiming it must be because the commoner is not accustomed to thinking for himself, cannot approach anything critically, and is all too used to confusion, because he is lazy and his mind is dull. He would then attribute this 'pitiful' state of his mind to oppression, poverty, depravity, serfdom, etc. Behold, this is the majority of Russian scholars studying the Russian people.

You could take the same exact approach to condemn the Russian Orthodox for venerating icons, for example. Some Lutheran pastors cannot understand how you could believe in one true God and worship a 'plate', an image of a saint, all while not falling into idolatry. Most of our intellectuals would agree with such a pastor. Meanwhile, not a single Russian commoner who would in any way at all conflate the icon he is venerating with God Himself, even though the Orthodox do believe in some icons being miraculous. Yet there is no commoner who would ascribe those miracles to the icon itself and not God's will. And that is entirely different.

This is precisely what neither the Lutheran pastor nor the genteel Russian who is out of touch with his people would ever accept or believe to be possible. It would do them a lot of good to remember what the Mohammedan notion of Heaven looks like, to support their conviction of just how pure this Turkish monotheism is. I am not, of course, saying all this to start a theological argument with admirers of Turkish monotheism. Those admirers mostly concern themselves with the common people having healthy notions of what is right, and outside of that, as far as they are concerned, everyone is free to believe whatever they want. That is why I have only focused here on the common folk's day-to-day beliefs.

II. On golden tailcoats

Apart from these lovers of Turks, we now have a lot of people overcome with a burning desire to have their own unique opinion: 'It is all nonsense, there is no movement of any kind. Those pro-Slavic addresses^[2] are nonsense, they are un-Russian; the sanitary corps are nonsense, they are also un-Russian. It is all mawkish sentimentalism. The Slavs are made up, the Bulgarians are made up, the Turks are better than the Bulgarians, it is all nonsense. I love the Turks...'.

This is not because of some kind of malignant, cancerous varieties of higher politics. We do have 'higher politics', no doubt, yet this is nothing but conceited vanity. This vanity comes in two kinds: it is either extremely suppressed, which is where this burning desire to be different comes from, or it stems from putting too much faith in your own grandeur. The Russian 'great man' most often cannot handle his greatness. Indeed, if you could wear a golden tailcoat so that no one would ever confuse you for a mere mortal, the Russian 'great man' would readily put it on without any shame. I am convinced that the only reason I am yet to see any of our 'greats' wearing a golden tailcoat is that tailors refuse to make those. 'I am smarter than everyone, and I am so great. They all think about the war this way, and I do not want to think about it like everyone else does. I will prove I am great...'.

I would love to speak more of these golden tailcoats, of the quintessentially Russian social and psychological roots of this phenomenon, of all the various examples and so on. Perhaps I shall not forget to do this later. Right now, however, I would like to put the golden tailcoat aside and say a few words about those who are 'forthright'. Those come in various kinds: they can be kind and vile, smart and stupid, honest and not, and so on. We have so, so many of those. They will keep charging in the same direction, and there is nothing you could ever do to make them change their trajectory: 'J’y suis et j’y reste'. These are our de MacMahons^[3].

We hear tales of heroism and remarkable self-denial from the military, of both officers and regular soldiers. That is our youth. Up until fairly recently, no one believed in our youth, who is nevertheless our hope. Many saw nothing but cynicism in them; they would get accused of stubborn, obtuse denialism, coldness, indifference, and mindless suicide. Yet now it is almost as if the air has cleared. That same youth is noble; they are yearning for great heroic deeds, for sacrifice, and for duty. They are marching before all the far more experienced soldiers, and they are the first to charge into grave danger...

'Yes, but only a drunkard or a madman could knowingly charge towards certain death. There can be no other explanation.'

'How so? Would you not even consider he could be sacrificing himself for Russia, looking to serve it...'

'With a fist.'

'Well, it is war, which means you are supposed to fight. How else could he make himself useful?'

'Hmm... Well, for example, there are schools.'

'Yes, schools, but in their due time. He will eventually bring to those schools his sense of fulfilled duty, noble memories, and an openness to rapprochement with the common people.'

'Rapprochement with the common people? What do you mean?'

'To be joined together in the name of a common cause. The soldier and his officer are now living there perfectly united in spirit. The intellectuals are growing closer to the people, coming back to them with action and not just abstract theory. They are learning to respect the common folk this soldier came from, and they are teaching the common folk to respect them, not as a master but as a human person. This recent story about a commoner who gave Chernyaev a teary hug at the Uspensky Cathedral is very symbolic. You want to educate the people, but you will much rather achieve that if you manage to get the people to respect your ideas and your works, and find a way to their hearts. The more personal respect the common people have for the educated, the more interest they will have in education. So therefore, managing to earn the respect of the common people means already serving the cause of public education, of those schools you care about so much.'

'To earn respect with a fist; to make the common people respect the fist?'

'It is not just the fist, it is first and foremost about self-sacrifice in front of everyone's eyes. Look, you are asking what could make a man in the prime of his life risk near-certain death. You are clearly confused, there is no other way to explain what you said about the drunkard and the madman. Although surely, that is just an allegory, a manner of speaking. But really, what could make a man do that? I will tell you: they yearn for glory and to do great things. They want to earn good fame, they want to be recognised and praised by all their compatriots who are now all watching them. They want to bring glory to their names.'

'A-ha! Yes, all of that is to build a career!'

'Yet all of those feelings and aspirations are noble. They are many, all joined together. A man cannot be reduced to just one of his aspirations; a man is a microcosm, so long as the main aspiration driving him is noble. Shedding your own blood—same as being ready to shed it—ennobles even someone who was not noble before, leaving him with a duty of honour for the rest of his life. We already have some newspapers expressing concern that those people will go on to take over; that they will be overcome with pride, they will despise public education and civilians, they will cause chaos, and those ideas will infiltrate our society. Yet those fears are unfounded. Some things take a lot of time. We will see a Kopeykin or two who "shed his blood and, so to say, almost sacrificed his life in a certain manner"^[4], that is true. Yet they will only make fools of themselves, all while the moral fruits will be numerous. The cynical dread will disperse, and people will respect genuine heroism...'

'And the fist.'

'It is not just fist fighters; some of them are still kids, pure in heart. Those kids were only just raised to their ranks, and they are bravely charging forth, thinking about what their mothers or sisters will say about them back home, somewhere far away... Is this all a joke to you, meaningless sentimentalism? After all, why not consider it possible that those heroes might be thinking of greater, higher matters? They understand that the task Russia has now undertaken is difficult, and it can get even harder. They can see that it is now not just Turkey that Russia is fighting. They can see that British generals are commanding Turkish armies, that British officers are building numerous fortifications with British funding, and that the British navy is encouraging Turkey to continue the war. Finally, they see that the British military itself was just about to appear in Asiatic Turkey... They know all this and still charge towards almost certain death, as they understand it is now time to serve Russia faithfully and diligently. I will not even start on the Bulgarians, on our oppressed Slavic brothers, insulted and tormented. To our great shame, this issue has now got old... but not in their hearts. Do you really not believe that many of them could be enlisting to protect the humiliated and the insulted, to serve mankind...'

'Serve mankind with a fist!'

'Let me tell you a story. I have already mentioned that in Moscow, at one of the orphanages where they are housing the Bulgarian children brought to Russia after those massacres, there is a 10-year-old girl who cannot forget how the Turks flayed her father alive right in front of her eyes. There is another Bulgarian girl there of about the same age who is also sick. Her illness is quite peculiar: she is gradually withering away, always languid and drowsy. She keeps sleeping, but the sleep does not rejuvenate her one bit; on the contrary, it wears her down even more. Her condition was grave; it could be that the girl has died by now. But she also had a memory she could not bear. The Turks took her younger brother, a baby of two or three years, poked his eyes out and impaled him. All of this they did right in front of her eyes, and she still cannot forget it. It could be that nature gives sleep to those afflicted hearts, simply as they cannot bear staying awake for long with that image in front of their eyes. Let us now imagine that you were there, right when they were poking the child's eyes out. Do tell me, would you not hurry to try to stop them, even if that had to be with a fist?'

'Yes, but it is still a fist...'

'My goodness, there is no need to fight them if you do not want to, but at least take their yatagans away! Do you think that even that cannot be done by force?'

By the way, could it be that there are people among us who love Turks so much they would not even want to take the yatagans away from them? I refuse to believe that.

Footnotes

1. Dostoevsky is talking about Henry Thomas Buckle's book History of Civilisation in England (1857) and John William Draper's History of the Intellectual Development of Europe (1862).
2. Before the Russo-Turkish war started, newspapers would regularly publish statements (addresses, 'адресы') from various organisations and schools expressing concern about the brutal oppression of Slavs in the Ottoman Empire. Those were not particularly well-received in liberal circles.
3. Dostoevsky is referencing an earlier chapter in the Diary where he talked about Patrice de MacMahon.
4. Captain Kopeykin is a character in Gogol's Dead Souls. He lost an arm and a leg in the 1812 war and could no longer work, which left him in abject poverty. Kopeykin sought aid and welfare from the government with no success. It is hinted he eventually became the chief of a band of robbers.