Under Western Eyes - Page 2

moral and emotional reactions of the
Russian temperament to the pressure of tyrannical lawlessness, which, in
general human terms, could be reduced to the formula of senseless
desperation provoked by senseless tyranny. What I was concerned with
mainly was the aspect, the character, and the fate of the individuals as
they appeared to the Western Eyes of the old teacher of languages. He
himself has been much criticized; but I will not at this late hour
undertake to justify his existence. He was useful to me and therefore I
think that he must be useful to the reader both in the way of comment
and by the part he plays in the development of the story. In my desire
to produce the effect of actuality it seemed to me indispensable to have
an eye-witness of the transactions in Geneva. I needed also a
sympathetic friend for Miss Haldin, who otherwise would have been too
much alone and unsupported to be perfectly credible. She would have had
no one to whom she could give a glimpse of her idealistic faith, of her
great heart, and of her simple emotions.

Razumov is treated sympathetically. Why should he not be? He is an
ordinary young man, with a healthy capacity for work and sane
ambitions. He has an average conscience. If he is slightly abnormal it
is only in his sensitiveness to his position. Being nobody's child he
feels rather more keenly than another would that he is a Russian--or he
is nothing. He is perfectly right in looking on all Russia as his
heritage. The sanguinary futility of the crimes and the sacrifices
seething in that amorphous mass envelops and crushes him. But I don't
think that in his distraction he is ever monstrous. Nobody is exhibited
as a monster here--neither the simple-minded Tekla nor the wrong-headed
Sophia Antonovna. Peter Ivanovitch and Madame de S. are fair game. They
are the apes of a sinister jungle and are treated as their grimaces
deserve. As to Nikita--nicknamed Necator--he is the perfect flower of
the terroristic wilderness. What troubled me most in dealing with him
was not his monstrosity but his banality. He has been exhibited to the
public eye for years in so-called "disclosures" in newspaper articles,
in secret histories, in sensational novels.

The most terrifying reflection (I am speaking now for myself) is that
all these people are not the product of the exceptional but of the
general--of the normality of their place, and time, and race. The
ferocity and imbecility of an autocratic rule rejecting all legality and
in fact basing itself upon complete moral anarchism provokes the no less
imbecile and atrocious answer of a purely Utopian revolutionism
encompassing destruction by the first means to hand, in the strange
conviction that a fundamental change of