Europe does not know what it really means to despair

 

The Trial describes what happens to a man when he starts to think: sooner or later he condemns himself as unjustified, and then despair begins (K.’s execution, the execution of hope, is the beginning of despair—henceforth he is a dead man, like Connolly and Camus and so many other intelligent Europeans, and do what he may he can never quite forget it). It is only at this point that the Buddha’s Teaching begins to be intelligible. But it must be remembered that for Connolly and the others*, death at the end of this life is the final death, and the hell of despair in which they live will come to an end in a few years’ time—why, then, should they give up their distractions, when, if things get too bad, a bullet through their brain is enough? It is only when one understands that death at the end of this life is not the final end, that to follow the Buddha’s Teaching is seen to be not a mere matter of choice but a matter of necessity . Europe does not know what it really means to despair.

Nanavira Thera →

* Lichtenberg: To live when you do not want to is dreadful, but it would be even more terrible to be immortal when you did not want to be. As things are, however, the whole ghastly burden is suspended from me by a thread which I can cut in two with a penny-knife.
***

He stayed late on deck, after dinner, but that did not help him, for when he went below, he could not sleep. This surcease from life had failed him. It was too much. He turned on the electric light and tried to read. One of the volumes was a Swinburne. He lay in bed, glancing through its pages, until suddenly he became aware that he was reading with interest. He finished the stanza, attempted to read on, then came back to it. He rested the book face downward on his breast and fell to thinking. That was it. The very thing. Strange that it had never come to him before. That was the meaning of it all; he had been drifting that way all the time, and now Swinburne showed him that it was the happy way out. He wanted rest, and here was rest awaiting him. He glanced at the open port–hole. Yes, it was large enough. For the first time in weeks he felt happy. At last he had discovered the cure of his ill. He picked up the book and read the stanza slowly aloud:-

'From too much love of living,

From hope and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving

Whatever gods may be

That no life lives forever;

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.'

He looked again at the open port. Swinburne had furnished the key. Life was ill, or, rather, it had become ill—an unbearable thing. "That dead men rise up never!" That line stirred him with a profound feeling of gratitude. It was the one beneficent thing in the universe. When life became an aching weariness, death was ready to soothe away to everlasting sleep. But what was he waiting for? It was time to go.

He arose and thrust his head out the port–hole, looking down into the milky wash. The Mariposa was deeply loaded, and, hanging by his hands, his feet would be in the water. He could slip in noiselessly. No one would hear. A smother of spray dashed up, wetting his face. It tasted salt on his lips, and the taste was good. He wondered if he ought to write a swan–song, but laughed the thought away. There was no time. He was too impatient to be gone.

Turning off the light in his room so that it might not betray him, he went out the port–hole feet first. His shoulders stuck, and he forced himself back so as to try it with one arm down by his side. A roll of the steamer aided him, and he was through, hanging by his hands. When his feet touched the sea, he let go. He was in a milky froth of water. The side of the Mariposa rushed past him like a dark wall, broken here and there by lighted ports. She was certainly making time. Almost before he knew it, he was astern, swimming gently on the foam–crackling surface.

A bonita struck at his white body, and he laughed aloud. It had taken a piece out, and the sting of it reminded him of why he was there. In the work to do he had forgotten the purpose of it. The lights of the Mariposa were growing dim in the distance, and there he was, swimming confidently, as though it were his intention to make for the nearest land a thousand miles or so away.

It was the automatic instinct to live. He ceased swimming, but the moment he felt the water rising above his mouth the hands struck out sharply with a lifting movement. The will to live, was his thought, and the thought was accompanied by a sneer. Well, he had will,—ay, will strong enough that with one last exertion it could destroy itself and cease to be.

He changed his position to a vertical one. He glanced up at the quiet stars, at the same time emptying his lungs of air. With swift, vigorous propulsion of hands and feet, he lifted his shoulders and half his chest out of water. This was to gain impetus for the descent. Then he let himself go and sank without movement, a white statue, into the sea. He breathed in the water deeply, deliberately, after the manner of a man taking an anaesthetic. When he strangled, quite involuntarily his arms and legs clawed the water and drove him up to the surface and into the clear sight of the stars.

The will to live, he thought disdainfully, vainly endeavoring not to breathe the air into his bursting lungs. Well, he would have to try a new way. He filled his lungs with air, filled them full. This supply would take him far down. He turned over and went down head first, swimming with all his strength and all his will. Deeper and deeper he went. His eyes were open, and he watched the ghostly, phosphorescent trails of the darting bonita. As he swam, he hoped that they would not strike at him, for it might snap the tension of his will. But they did not strike, and he found time to be grateful for this last kindness of life.

Down, down, he swam till his arms and leg grew tired and hardly moved. He knew that he was deep. The pressure on his ear–drums was a pain, and there was a buzzing in his head. His endurance was faltering, but he compelled his arms and legs to drive him deeper until his will snapped and the air drove from his lungs in a great explosive rush. The bubbles rubbed and bounded like tiny balloons against his cheeks and eyes as they took their upward flight. Then came pain and strangulation. This hurt was not death, was the thought that oscillated through his reeling consciousness. Death did not hurt. It was life, the pangs of life, this awful, suffocating feeling; it was the last blow life could deal him.

His wilful hands and feet began to beat and churn about, spasmodically and feebly. But he had fooled them and the will to live that made them beat and churn. He was too deep down. They could never bring him to the surface. He seemed floating languidly in a sea of dreamy vision. Colors and radiances surrounded him and bathed him and pervaded him. What was that? It seemed a lighthouse; but it was inside his brain—a flashing, bright white light. It flashed swifter and swifter. There was a long rumble of sound, and it seemed to him that he was falling down a vast and interminable stairway. And somewhere at the bottom he fell into darkness. That much he knew. He had fallen into darkness. And at the instant he knew, he ceased to know.

From Jack London

Martin Eden

The indictment

The surrounding world is all lies and treachery. Dissimulation is among the most notable qualities of this century.. . .1 [Deceit] maintains and feeds most of men’s occupations.”’2 People massacre one another under cover of noble pretexts which, in reality, merely mask base interests.

By accumulating such scattered observations, Montaigne develops an ancient theme, older than Plato, who first cast it in mythical form. Exploited by Stoics and Skeptics; developed by Boethius; given wide currency by various medieval authors, most notably John of Salisbury, and repeatedly invoked by moralists and preachers, this is the theme of the world as theater, in which men do no more than play out their roles, speaking their lines and gesticulating like actors on a stage—until death decrees their final exit. This theme was at times employed to exalt the omnipotence of God, simultaneously author, director, and spectator of this vast production; on other occasions it was used to denounce the idle fictions in which gullible mer allow themselves to believe. Montaigne does not fail to cite the words at- tributed to Petronius, ‘Mundus universus exercet histrioniam,’’4 later echoed within the walls of the Globe Theatre by melancholy Jaques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It: ‘’All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.’’.

What Montaigne, in common with many of his contemporaries, uses this image to emphasize is the idea that the world, like a theater, creates illusions. It is a play of shadows that holds us in its grip. The grandeur of princes is pure theater: clever imitators are able to mimic majesty and win the respect of the populace. No less illusory are the wisdom extolled by the champions of prudence and the doctrines propounded by learned scholars. Everywhere there is trumpery, knavery, affectation, and artifice. ‘Yes, even the mask of greatness put on in our plays affects us and deludes us somewhat.’’ Everything is borrowed “for mask and show” in a cruel and futile display.” More from weakness than from malevolence, ordinary men are susceptible to this sort of deception. Prisoners of their imaginations, forgetful of themselves, they let themselves be gulled. They mistake the appearance for the essence. Both monarchs, for their bellicose purposes, and religious factions, through their propaganda, are perfectly capable of taking advantage of this human blindness. Both need credulous men, men easily swayed by opinion and ready to shed their own blood and the blood of others for the sake of the cause. “Any opinion is strong enough to make people espouse it at the price of life.’’8 Wherever one looks, triumphant impostors and satisfied dupes are to be found. “I have in my time seen wonders in the undiscerning and prodigious ease with which people let their belief and hope be led and manipulated in whatever way has pleased and served their leaders, passing over a hundred mistakes one on top of the other, passing over phantasms and dreams.’’?

In denouncing the viciousness of false appearance, Montaigne is at one with the spirit of his age. Flattering the prevailing taste, he exploits a commonplace idea, which he varies and amplifies and embellishes with abundant citations and conceits. Yet through this commonplace he is in fact aiming at an aspect of contemporary reality on which the traditional antithesis of being and appearance bears more directly than at any other time in history. The wars through which the princes of Europe are seeking to augment their power (with the formation of the major European states still in the offing); the religious conflicts that threaten to undermine the very principle of authority (with the elevation of man’s “inner conscience” to the position of supreme authority still looming on the horizon); and the ubiquitous violence, the constant danger that besets all men—all of these circumstances provide pressing reasons for dissimulation and deception; as a result, these have become generally accepted forms of behavior and are frequently taken as themes of literature. In this age of excess, the teachings associated with the ethical and religious tradition of contemptus mundi have been exaggerated: the temptations of this world are traps, the true goods lie elsewhere. Before long, the baroque theater would depict disillusionment (desengaño) as a moment of bitter grace, in which characters too long sunken in blindness would suddenly regain their sight.10

The world against which Montaigne levels a finger of accusation is a labyrinth in which the counterfeit passes for legal tender. Hypocrisy, far from being regarded as a mask that one must penetrate, is everywhere praised as “this new-fangled virtue of hypocrisy and dissimulation, which is so highly honored at present." !11 The juggling of offices and ranks is a scandal for all to behold. Anybody involved in public affairs is aware of what goes on and must, since everybody is doing it, take steps at once to protect himself and remain on his guard. “Our truth of nowadays is not what is, but what others can be convinced of.”’12 Duplicity and cunning are not discoveries that men make in time, but handles to the world available to anyone bold enough to grasp them. Men learn to dissimulate as they learn to talk, by listening to what is going on all around and mimicking what succeeds. Education is quickly acquired. Politics is defined, in principle, as ostentation, trickery, and ruse—wholly legitimate defenses against an enemy’s ambush and the hazards of fortune. “Innocence itself could neither negotiate among us without dissimulation nor bargain without lying.”13 So little trouble is taken to hide a lie that lying has become the universally accepted convention. Concealment and duplicity are the common “form,” the normal way of doing business—lying, at first tacitly tolerated, is now the general rule.

On the other hand, it is not uncommon in this verbose age to find false appearances being denounced. There were accepted formulas for decrying the universality of lying and for protesting one’s own sincerity, one’s willingness to engage in flattery, one’s eagerness to tell the truth, however imprudent it might be. ‘“Parrhesia’” and protestations of sincerity or candor were devices commonly used by smooth talkers.14 The rhetorical contrast between being and appearance, the topos according to which this world is the world of fraud and deception, were among the common tricks of the duplicitous. Hypocrites could deliver admirable speeches condemning hypocrisy. Anyone who saw profit in so doing could rail against deception, buttressed by innumerable citations, yet remain a character wearing a false mask, an actor in the ultimate role of disillusioned sage. The rules of dissimulation would have been incomplete had they not included among their recommended strategems the refusal to dissimulate. The enemy of concealment is often just an other stage device: the play becomes (or appears to become) believable because it includes a character who ostensibly refuses to believe in the appearances he encounters. In the baroque era this ultimate illusion was expressed symbolically by the play within a play. The actor defending himself against illusion takes on the status of a real being, thanks to the interplay of relative oppositions. The spectator believes that the actor is not on the stage because he denounces yet another stage. (And so it goes today with ideology, one of whose most effective diversionary tactics is the denunciation of ideology.’ Montaigne is obviously making use of this kind of rhetoric.

Indeed, he goes it one better, drawing from the humanist tradition methapors of disloyalty and indictments of lying. But he does what he does with a new seriousness and irony. 

He is to be believed when he insists on his veracity, when he declares that it “is painful for me to dissemble,’”16 or that "I have ordered myself to dare to say all that I dare to do,"17 or when he tells how his “face” and “frankness’’18 have on several occasions saved his life. The traditional precepts find in him a ready welcome: for him, to live with an open heart is no mere turn of phrase but an injunction that he has no difficulty putting into practice. By the same token, the gate of his castle remains open to all comers.

Montaigne casts the net of his skepticism quite widely. Looking at the history of mankind, he determines that the consequences of sincerity and deception are quite unpredictable. “By diverse means we arrive at the same end,” says the title of the very first essay in book. Unpredictability means that deception can never be certain of achieving its goals even in the world of facts; hence Montaigne decides in favor of that which the moral tradition has established, in law, as being of higher moral value: sincerity. Whatever the outcome of our actions (which outcome depends on God alone), Montaigne is in no doubt as to the correct moral choice: insistence on veracity remains his unvarying standard of judgment, his permanent criterion for criticizing morals and for governing his own behavior. This standard is, admittedly, a commonplace, but Montaigne’s desire for originality is not so great that he rejects it. Such is his concern for honesty that it is untouched even by his recognition of the mutability of all things.

Montaigne shaped his response to the world-theater by drawing on the humanist tradition. If it is true that “most of our occupations are low comedy," 19 should we laugh or cry? To the sorrowful compassion of Heraclitus Montaigne preferred its fabled opposite, the laughter of Democritus. This comparison heightens the contrast between the two positions and renders compromise less likely. Once again, we have every reason to believe that Montaigne wholeheartedly subscribes to the lesson that he draws from the traditional cultural stereotype:

(A) Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first, finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and compassion on this same condition of ours, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears. . . . I prefer the first humor, not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve. . . . We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not so wretched as we are worthless.20

Here, Montaigne is temporarily adapting to his own purposes an attitude that dates from the beginnings of philosophy: Democritus laughs at the world’s folly, but it grieves him just the same, and in fact he exacerbates his melancholy by his relentless efforts to get at the causes of the folly he mocks.21 (Later, in 1621, Robert Burton would publish his Anatomy of Melancholy under the pseudonym Democritus Minor, invoking the name of Montaigne among his precursors.) Hamlet repeats a line remarkably similar to one in the passage of Montaigne cited above: ‘Use every man after his desert, and who should escape whipping?’’22 And Freud mentions this verse from Hamlet more than once, most notably in “Mourning and Melancholia,”” where it is adduced as evidence for the clear-sightedness of self-accusation on the part of the melancholic.23 By what special privilege do such judgments of melancholy, more than other words, pass down through the ages, linking the author who pronounces with the reader who reads and pronounces in his turn? Should we conclude that the propensity to quote (about which we shall have more to say later on) is a consequence of the self-denigration of the melancholic? Montaigne’s excuse for the borrowings that serve him as embellishment is that he prefers to speak through the stronger voice of a Seneca or a Plutarch. Citation, an avowal of weakness, shows a marked predilection for the discourse of melancholy.

But Montaigne does not merely take seriously the lessons of the masters of antiquity and try to live in accordance with precepts consecrated by tradition. He goes even further. When he casts his eyes about him, he thinks he sees the end of the world: ‘“Now let us turn our eyes in all directions: everything is crumbling about us... . It seems as if the very stars have ordained that we have lasted long enough beyond the ordinary term. And this also weighs me down, that the evil that most nearly threatens us is not an alteration in the entire and solid mass, but its dissipation and disintegration, the worst of our fears.’’24 When everything seems to be in collapse, is it not time time to remedy our dissatisfaction, to press our questioning with ever-greater urgency, to arm ourselves with higher standards, to shun every vanity (including even learned discourse on vanity), and to bring to our defense every available resource of sophistication and irony? Desire for independence becomes the main source of energy, though this need not interfere with listening to the past or reading the exemplary texts it provides.

Votive space

To have discerned so clearly the “banishment of truth,’’25 Montaigne must have formulated within himself a standard of candor and veracity which the world constantly disappointed. Would he have spoken so often of inconstancy and fraud had he not imagined a possibility of constancy and honesty, however vague his hope of living up to this standard may have been? To charge that the world is false presupposes belief in an opposite value: a truth situated elsewhere (whether in this world or out of it) which would authorize us to intervene in its name, to act as the prosecutors of falsehood. In denouncing the “prestige of appearance” Montaigne implicitly declares himself in favor of the unequivocal plenitude of true being.26 But he knows this plenitude only through the force of his refusal to accept falsehood and deceit. At the moment he declares his opposition to the world, Montaigne cannot claim to possess any truth: he merely proclaims his hatred of “sham.” The truth is the still-undiscovered positive implicit in the negation of proliferating evil; the truth has no fixed visage but is merely the unappeased energy that animates and arms the act of refusal.

The opposition between truth and falsehood initially has no way of manifesting itself other than through spatial figures. Skeptical refusal is expressed metaphorically in the act of standing aloof, abstaining.

Montaigne feels the need to create a private place for himself at a distance from the world—a place where he can make himself a spectator of human life and feel protected from all its pitfalls. If the world is a deceptive theater, one must not remain on the stage; instead, one must find a way to establish oneself elsewhere. To exile oneself from a world where truth has been banished is not really to go into exile.

(And Montaigne expresses his astonishment that Socrates, who saw the “horribly corrupt laws” of Athens for what they were, did not choose to accept a “sentence of exile.’’27) The secession from the world thus figures as an inaugural act. It determines the site where Montaigne withdraws from the trade in deception; it establishes a frontier, consecrates a boundary line. The site in question is no abstract height: in Montaigne everything has substance. His separate place will be his tower library—a belvedere in the family manor which offers a commanding view of the surrounding countryside. It is no secret that Montaigne did not make this his permanent residence: he continued to devote much of his time to public affairs, to conciliatory negotiations. He did not shirk what he saw as his duty to the common weal. 

What mattered in his eyes was to have secured the possibility of occupying his own private territory, the possibility of withdrawing at any moment into absolute solitude, of quitting the game: the important thing was to establish a concrete as well as symbolic embodiment of the imagined distance between himself and the world, a place always ready to receive him whenever he felt the need; but he felt under no obligation to reside there permanently. Thus a hiatus was opened up between the gaze of the spectator and the agitation of mankind, a pure interval, which enabled Montaigne to perceive how the mass of men voluntarily choose bondage while he, each time he withdrew to his library, assured himself of a new liberty. He saw the shackles in which other men remained bound but felt his own fall away. For the first conquest is not knowledge but self-presence (présence à soi).

Now, this occupation of a place, this creation of a space inaccessible to the world’s falsehood, also marks a caesura in time. To see this we have only to pay attention to the wording of the inscriptions that Montaigne had painted in 1571. A precise date is attached to the break in his life. A new era had begun, and it was important to situate it precisely in relation to both the collective time of Christendom (Anno Christi 1571 . . . pridie cal. mart.28) and his own biographical time (aet. 38 . . . die suo natali). Mention of his birthdate reinforces the idea of a voluntary birth. Time takes on a new origin and at the same moment acquires a new meaning: it is the limited lifespan that remains (quantillum in tandem superabit decursi multa jam plus parte spatii), the few days that will be added to the life already elapsed.

A new law or rule comes into effect. Renewed attachments compensate for the detachment that is at once voluntary and involuntary. The new order is no longer that of servitium but that of libertas. Liberation goes hand in hand with constriction. A strict opposition emerges between the expressions of disgust and of desire to make a break (servitii aulici et munerum publicorum pertaesus) and the votive act which both consecrates and narrowly circumscribes the place of retreat (libertati suae, tranquillitatique, et otio consecravit). This place is metaphorically the “bosom of the learned Muses” (doctarum virginum sinus): the allusion, of course, is to the round shape of the library, to the walls that “in curving round”29 hold the collection of works of poetry, philosophy, and history with which Montaigne wishes to surround himself.

The images of withdrawal (recessit) and the hidden place (dulces latebras) coupled with the feminine figure of the Muses (Montaigne will later declare that he might well have preferred to have produced a child “by intercourse with the Muses [rather] than by intercourse with [his] wife’’30) evoke for the modern reader the psychoanalytic concept of “regression” and all the ideas associated with it. When Montaigne refers to tranquillity (quietus and later tranquillitas), security (securus), and repose (otium), it may seem that he is merely confirming the regressive nature of his desire. The house containing his library is, to be sure, the ancestral seat (avitas sedes) handed down through the male line, but this masculinity (associated with domanial property since 1477) is counterbalanced (so far as the psychoanalytic argument is concerned) by the feminine gender of the word sedes and by the predominance of feminine nouns in the list of terms consecrated by the inscription (libertas and tranquillitas; only otium is not feminine, but neuter!). But in all of this it is important to recognize, as Hugo Friedrich has shown, the traditional formulas of otium cum litteris, a “contemplative” variant of the humanist life, which was recommended after the more active path of civic humanism turned out to be impracticable or fraught with peril! (Montaigne, who diligently discharged his political duties, is proof that the two attitudes could alternate.) The inaugural inscription of 1571 should not be read primarily as a psychological document: it conforms to a cultural paradigm— impersonal and generalizable. One might, however, argue that in the present case the humanist tradition, by its exaltation of antiquity as a wellspring and source of nourishment and its justification of withdrawal into solitude (sibi vivere), placed at the disposal of Montaigne’s desire ready-made formulas in which to pour his dissatisfaction, nostalgia, sublimations, and need for security: a full “instinctual” use of a coded language can be guessed at...

The inscription with which Montaigne dedicated his “library” to his liberty and personal tranquillity stood alongside another inscription (which for some time has been harder to decipher) dedicating the premises also to the memory of Montaigne’s lost friend, Etienne de La Boétie.32 The dedication to his departed ‘brother’ is coupled with the dedication to himself: the library that Montaigne hoped to enjoy also held the books bequeathed to him by La Boétie. The tranquillity he hoped to relish in the second half of his life (that which links up with death) was to prolong and perpetuate his dialogue with his best friend. The time spent in the library is thus framed on either side by death: the death that awaits Montaigne himself, and the death that he survives. The role of identity is important in both perspectives. On behalf of La Boétie, Montaigne felt responsible for an image, a resemblance: he took care in editing his friend’s works (1570-71) and took it upon himself to preserve, to transmit, whole and intact, his admired companion’s likeness as he was in life.33 The rule of identity is this: to lose nothing, to alter nothing, to wrest from death and time images that would otherwise be lost in oblivion and obscurity. (We shall have to consider this point several more times in what follows.) On his own behalf, Montaigne hoped above all that by securing for himself repose, freedom, leisure, tranquillity, and security, he might escape the “mutation” and vain ceremony to which public life condemns those whom it subjugates: his purpose will be to live in dialogue with himself, faithful to his nature and to Nature in the larger sense, and thus to cease to go astray.

From Jean Starobinski
Montaigne in Motion

The theoretical life and the function of the example

 

The relation to the world that Montaigne initiated from his refuge of reading and repose was what the ancients called theoria, or the theoretical life, i.e., comprehension of the world as it offers itself to the contemplative gaze. In a passage added to the manuscript by Montaigne’s own hand (subsequent to 1588) we find one of many classical topoi justifying theoria: ‘Our life, Pythagoras used to say, is like the great and populous assembly at the Olympic games. Some exercise their bodies to win glory in the games, others bring merchandise to sell for gain. There are some, and not the worst, who seek no other profit than to see how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of the life of other men in order to judge and regulate their own.’’48 This is not merely a “chrie,” or rehearsal of an authorized opinion, an opinion worthy of approval, but even more a statement of the attitude that Montaigne himself intends to adopt in the face of contemporary reality: ‘’As I seldom read in histories of such commotions in other states without regretting that I could not be present to consider them better, so my curiosity makes me feel some satisfaction at seeing with my own eyes this notable spectacle of our public death, its symptoms and its form. And since I cannot retard it, I am glad to be destined to watch it and learn from it. Thus do we eagerly seek to recognize, even in shadow and in the fiction of the theaters, the representation of the tragic play of human fortune.’”49

Gazing upon the agitation of men absorbed by battles and interests of their own, the stationary spectator looks to the causes of things: his concern is to discover the how and the why, in order to satisfy his curiosity. This does not mean that he is disinterested, however; he can, if he wishes (and Montaigne seems to have so wished, at least when he began his work), strive to ensure that the truth revealed in the spectacle of the world is applied in his inner life. To succeed in this he must enlist the aid of his judgment (i.e., the intellectual act in which an individual looks at himself and compares himself with others) and his will (i.e., the formative or transformative act by which an individual governs his life).

The aim of the investigation, acutely pursued through the varied spectacle of human action, is to discover regular sequences, which will possess, in addition to explanatory value, direct or indirect regulative value. The fortune or misfortune of illustrious men may serve as models or warnings: even the errors of great men disclose principles of conduct and in so doing help to unify our moral lives. A moral truth perceived externally in its universal validity should be capable of being reexperienced internally in the same way; its efficacy should be apparent in the identity of its inner and outer forms, i.e., in the consistency and cohesiveness of the soul. The hope that animates this view is that mimetic fidelity will guarantee inner fidelity. Once the truth has been grasped by the contemplative gaze (i.e., theoria), it cannot be changed in any essential way, only repeated; hence the subject who has taken possession of the truth is himself assured of maintaining a stable identity. Internal continuity comes about as a result of fidelity to the external model. In particular, this is the function that the spectator ascribes to exemplary lives: an exemplum, or figure that stands apart (ex-emplum) and yet stimulates imitation and generalization, can help strengthen the individual through its unique virtue. An individual who constantly strives to resemble an ex-emplum that is in itself a marvel of constancy is actually striving to achieve an identity of his own. To live up to such a standard, or at least to begin to do so, it ought to be enough merely to recall the exemplum or its emblem, an effigy on a medal. The impersonal literature of adages and lessons will be effective to the extent that the reader puts all his personal energy into his response. But histories will be even more effective. We have only to fix our gaze upon examples so admirable that we cannot help rehearsing them within ourselves:

Until you have made yourself such that you dare not trip up in your own presence, and until you feel both shame and respect for yourself, (C) let true ideals be kept before your mind [Cicero], (A) keep ever in your mind Cato, Phocion, and Aristides, in whose presence even fools would hide their faults; make them controllers of all your intentions; if these intentions get off the track, your reverence for those men will set them right again. They will keep you in a fair way to be content with yourself, to borrow nothing except from yourself, to arrest your mind and fix it on definite and limited thoughts in which it may take pleasure; and, after understanding the true blessings, which we enjoy in so far as we understand them, to rest content with them, without any desire to prolong life and reputation. That is the counsel of true and natural philosophy, not of an ostentatious and talky philosophy like that of Pliny and Cicero.50

We must turn our eyes toward exemplary individuals so that we can in turn imagine their eyes fixed on us: under the scrutiny of those who are set over us much as teachers and parents are, we are assigned our private truth, we learn the act of reaffirmation that constitutes our personal identity, and we do so purely in confrontation with ourselves (dans la pure présence à soi).

The efficacy of the example depends in large part on its being a completed event; the image of moral perfection that it holds out is conjugated in the past perfect tense. The sharpness of its outline is associated with its remoteness in time. But the past of the example is for those devoted to it secretly inhabited by the future of the must-be. What the exemplary man was we must be in our turn, we shall be if we apply ourselves with all the energy at our disposal. For the ex-emplum, as I hardly need point out, is a preexisting cultural form that offers itself for us to emulate: the goal is to construct our own egos, to shape ourselves by surmounting all that is amorphous and vague in everyday life. It is to surround all that is soft and fluid in our “conditions and humors” with a firm outline copied from life in order to gather our substance together and cause it to solidify. A stamp is thus always impressed upon us. (La Boétie, Montaigne says, is a ‘soul of the old stamp.’’51)

The imitation of the exemplum is a simulacrum, but a simulacrum that aims at identification. It is a role, but a role into which we must pour ourselves by allowing its law to inhabit us. We give ourselves over wholly to the formative power of the example. The latter, by giving us contour and firmness, at first seems either to rob us of our spontaneity or to oblige us to repress it. But before long the example has invaded us fully, pervaded our life. And our second spontaneity will then effortlessly carry out the acts required by the embodied model. To assimilate the exemplary lesson: such is the classical program of a pedagogy whose aim is to inculcate norms through imitation of great lives in which those norms have seen actualized. (This is a good point at which to measure the distance that separates the world of humanism from the contemporary cultural situation. In the humanist world, the example stands out against a horizon of achieved perfection—the ancient world; or else it offers itself in the form of a figure that is at once familiar and transcendent—Christ. By contrast, contemporary ideals—heroes, stars, charismatic figures, many of them ephemeral and interchangeable—are usually taken from the contemporary world itself; they are frequently subject to “manipulation,” which, since exemplary figures are a powerful means of directing our desires, allows them to be exploited for economic and political ends.) 

The ancient exemplum is a figure in a theater that has nothing to do with the theater of the world (un théâtre absolu); it is separated from our world as the “Italian stage” is separated from the hall: the ex-emplum speaks, it carries the force of an admirable maxim, it is simultaneously maxim and act. Even more: it judges us, for it determines the scale of values, the measuring rod against which our merits and demerits are gauged. Exemplary words and images are too powerful ever to vanish from memory. Their imprint is indelible: for the example, as we shall see more than once, is usually deployed in a memorable scene, in which we are offered the hero’s words inextricably intertwined with his life and death. We shall be looking more closely in what follows at two important illustrations of this point: the death of La Boétie and the suicide of Cato.

Quote from the book Montaigne in Motion (Jean Starobinski)

Shalamov - Pain

 This is a strange story, so strange that anyone who hasn’t been in a camp, who doesn’t know the dark depths of the criminal world, the realm of gangsters, cannot even understand it. The camps are the very bottom of life. The criminal world isn’t the bottom of the bottom. It’s an utterly, utterly different and inhuman world.

There is a banal saying that history repeats itself twice: the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce.

No. There is also a third reflection of the same events, the same plot, a reflection in the underworld’s distorting mirror. The plot is unimaginable but nevertheless real: it genuinely exists and is there alongside us.

The utterly real gallows “courts” and “courts of honor” that the criminals hold at the mines are reflected in the distorting mirror of feelings and actions. Here war games are played, scenes of war are reenacted, and real blood is shed.

There is a world of higher forces, a world of Homeric gods who come down to our world to reveal themselves and to improve the human race by their example. True, the gods tend to be late. Homer praised the Achaeans, but we are enthused by Hector: the moral climate has changed a little. Sometimes the gods would invite human beings to heaven to observe their “lofty spectacles.” All this is a mystery that the poet solved a long time ago. There is a world and an underground hell from which people sometimes return, where they do not disappear forever. Why do they return? These people have hearts filled with an undying anxiety, an eternal horror of the dark world, and that is not the world beyond the grave.

This world is more real than Homer’s heavens.

*

Shelgunov “got stuck” in the Vladivostok transit camp: he was a ragged, dirty, hungry, badly but not yet fatally beaten objector to work. People had an urge to live, but the ships and their prisoners, one party after the other, were constantly being transported across the sea, on ship after ship, like the train cars feeding the Auschwitz gas ovens. On the other side of a sea from which nobody ever returned, Shelgunov had been in the valley of death on which the hospital stood, and he was lucky enough to be sent back to the mainland: Shelgunov’s bones were not good enough for the gold mines.

At this moment danger was again coming close; the lack of certainty that affected all of a prisoner’s life was becoming more and more palpable to Shelgunov. And there was no escape from that uncertainty, from the fragility of hope.

The transit camp was an enormous settlement, divided in various directions into zones, which were precise squares, and entangled with barbed wire; it lay in the line of fire of a hundred or so guard towers, and it was lit, flooded with light by a thousand searchlights that blinded the prisoners’ weak eyes.

The bunks at this enormous transit camp were the gates to Kolyma: they could suddenly empty and then fill up again with exhausted dirty people, new parties of prisoners from the outside world.

The steamships came back, the transit camp belched out a new portion of men, was emptied and then filled again.

In the zone, the largest in the transit camp, where Shelgunov was staying, all the barracks had been cleaned out, except for the ninth. The ninth was where the gangsters lived. That was where the King, the godfather, held sway. Wardens didn’t show their faces there; the camp staff would go every day to the porch and collect the bodies of those who’d pushed their luck too far with the King.

The cooks carted off to this barracks the kitchen’s best dishes and best items—the clothes brought by all the parties of prisoners always ended up as stakes in the gambling games of the ninth barracks, the King’s.

Shelgunov, a direct descendant of the Shelgunovs of the People’s Will,19 had a father who was an academician and a mother who was a professor in civilian life; since childhood, he had lived on books and for books; a bibliophile and a bookworm, he sucked in Russian culture with his mother’s milk. Shelgunov was shaped by the nineteenth century, the golden age of humanity.

Share your knowledge! Trust people, love people! That was what Russian literature taught, and Shelgunov had some time ago felt enough strength to give back to society what he had inherited. Self-sacrifice was for everyone. To rise up against lies, however petty, especially if they were close by.

Prison and exile were the state’s first response to Shelgunov’s attempts to live as books had taught him to live, as the nineteenth century had taught him.

Shelgunov was struck by the vileness of the people surrounding him. There were no heroes in the camps. Shelgunov refused to believe that the nineteenth century had deceived him. A deep disillusionment in people, acquired during his interrogations, during his journey as a prisoner and in the transit camp, was suddenly replaced by his old cheerfulness, his old exaltation. Shelgunov found what he wanted, what he had been seeking and dreaming of: living examples. He met a force about which he had read a great deal, and which inspired a belief that was absorbed by his blood. This was the world of gangsters and criminals.

The bosses trampled down and despised Shelgunov’s neighbors and friends, as well as Shelgunov himself, but they feared and revered the professional criminals.

Here was a world that boldly set itself against the state, a world that could help Shelgunov in his blind, romantic thirst for good and for vengeance.

“You wouldn’t have a novelist here, would you?”

Someone had put a foot on the bunk to change his footwear. Judging by the necktie and the socks, in a world where only foot wrappings had existed for many years, Shelgunov quite rightly classified the man as someone from the ninth barracks.

“We have one. Hey, writer!”

“You’ve got a writer here!”

Shelgunov twisted himself around into the light.

“Let’s go and see the King. You can ‘print’ us something.”

“I’m not coming.”

“What do you mean, you’re not coming? You’ll be dead before nightfall, you stupid fool.”

The fiction he’d read was a good preparation for Shelgunov when he met the criminal world. Shelgunov crossed the threshold of the ninth barracks in a spirit of reverence. All his nerves, all his gravitation toward the good were tensed, as resonant as taut strings. Shelgunov had to have success, had to gain attention, trust, love from his noble listener, the barracks boss, the King. And Shelgunov did have success. All his miseries stopped the moment that the King’s dry lips parted in a smile.

God knows what Shelgunov “printed”! Shelgunov absolutely refused to begin by playing an ace, The Count of Monte Cristo. No. He resurrected before the King’s very eyes Stendhal’s chronicles, Cellini’s autobiography, the bloodthirsty legends of medieval Italy.

“Great stuff, great stuff!” rasped the King. “Those cultures really knew how to fill their bellies.”

After that evening there was no question whatsoever of Shelgunov doing any work in the camp. He was brought a dinner and tobacco, and the next day he was moved to live permanently in the ninth barracks, officially, if that could be done officially in a camp.

Shelgunov became the court novelist.

“What’s making you so miserable, novelist?”

“I’m thinking about home, about my wife . . .”

“Well . . .”

“You know, the interrogations, the train journey, the transit camp. I’m not allowed to write until I’m taken to the gold mines.”

“You really are dumb. What are we here for? Write to your little beauty, and we’ll send the letters . . . We don’t use the post, we have our own railway. Okay, novelist?”

So once a week Shelgunov sent letters to Moscow.

Shelgunov’s wife was a performer, a Muscovite performer and the daughter of a general.

Some time ago, at the time of his arrest, they had embraced.

“I don’t mind if I don’t get any letters for a year or two. I’ll wait, I’ll always be with you.”

“The letters will come before that.” Shelgunov confidently calmed his wife as husbands do. “I’ll find my own channels. And you’ll get my letters through those channels.”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!”

“Shall I get the novelist? Or are you bored with him?” Karzubyi, concerned, asked his boss, the King. “Shouldn’t I bring you a nancy from the new party? You can have one of our lot, or one of the politicals, the article fifty-eighters.”

“Nancy” was the criminal’s word for a homosexual.

“No, call the novelist. Mind you, we’ve stuffed ourselves enough on that literature. It’s nothing but novels and theory. There’s another game we can play with that freier. We’ve got all the time in the world.”

•

“My dream, novelist,” said the King, when all the ceremonies of going to sleep had been observed: he’d had his heels tickled, a cross hung around his neck, and prison “hot cupping”—tweaks with the fingernail—on his back. “My dream, novelist, is for a woman like yours to write to me from the outside. She’s a looker!” The King turned in his hands a crumpled, faded photograph of Shelgunov’s wife, Marina, which he’d managed to hang on to despite thousands of searches, disinfections, and thefts. “A real looker! Just right for a séance. A general’s daughter! A performer! You freiers really are lucky, all our lot get are the poxy ones. And we don’t even notice the clap. All right, time for bed. I’m already dreaming.”

The next evening the novelist printed no novels.

“There’s something I like about you, freier. You may be a dummy, but there’s a drop of crook’s blood in you. Write a letter to the wife of my pal, a real man, to put it in a nutshell. You’re a writer. Make it really tender and clever: you know all those novels. I’ll bet no woman can resist a letter from you. What are we? Just ignorant. Write. The man will copy it and send it. You even have the same name: Aleksandr. That’s a laugh. Mind you, he’s only Aleksandr for the job he’s in here for. But he’s still Aleksandr, Shura for short, or Shurochka.”

“I’ve never written that sort of letter,” said Shelgunov. “But I can have a go.”

For each letter the King told him the overall gist, and Shelgunov-Cyrano20 turned the King’s ideas into reality.

Shelgunov wrote fifty of those letters.

One said, “I’ve confessed to everything; I’m asking Soviet power to forgive me.”

“Do convicts, I mean gangsters,” asked Shelgunov, unable to go on with the letter, “really ask for forgiveness?”

“Of course they do,” said the King. “This bit of writing is a dummy, a hoax, a spoof. Military tactics.”

Shelgunov asked no more questions; he just meekly wrote whatever the King dictated.

Shelgunov would read his letters out loud, polish the style, proud of his still-flamboyant brain. The King gave his approval, his lips barely parting in his royal smile.

Everything comes to an end. So did writing letters for the King. But there may have been an important reason: there was a rumor through the camp grapevine that the King was eventually going to be sent with a party of prisoners to Kolyma, where he had sent, by murder and deceit, so many others. He was going to be grabbed while he was asleep, it was said, his arms and legs bound, and then put on board the steamship. It was time to stop the correspondence; after all, Shelgunov had been speaking words of love to Roxane in Christian’s voice for nearly a year now. But the game had to end the criminal way, with real live bloodshed . . . 

Blood was congealing on the temple of a corpse lying before the King’s eyes.

Shelgunov tried to cover the corpse’s face, the reproachful look in its eyes.

“You see who it is? It’s the man with your name, Aleksandr, Shura, the man you wrote the letters for. The special action squad finished him off today, cut his head off with an ax. He seems to have been walking around with his face covered by a scarf. Write: ‘It’s a friend of your Shura writing! Shura was executed today, and I am writing as fast as I can to let you know his last words . . .’ Have you written that?” asked the King. “We’ll copy it, and then we’re quits. No need to write any more letters. I could have written that letter on my own.” The King smiled. “We value education, writer. We’re an ignorant lot.”

Shelgunov wrote the funereal letter.

The King must have been clairvoyant: he was seized that night and sent overseas.

Shelgunov couldn’t get in touch with home, and despaired. He struggled on, all alone, for a year, for two, for three, moving from hospital to work, outraged with his wife for having turned out to be a bitch or a coward, not using the “safe channels” to get in touch, forgetting him, Shelgunov, and trampling on every memory she had of him.

But it so happened that the hell of the camps ended and Shelgunov was released. He came back to Moscow.

His mother told him that she knew nothing about Marina. His father had died. Shelgunov found the address of a girlfriend of Marina’s who worked in the same theater and he went to her apartment.

The girlfriend cried out.

“What’s happened?” asked Shelgunov.

“Didn’t you die, Shura?”

“What do you mean, die? I’m standing here, aren’t I?”

“You’ll live forever.” A man emerged from the next room. “That’s the belief.”

“Marina is dead. After you were executed, she threw herself under a train. Not where Anna Karenina did it but in Rastorguyevo. She put her head under the wheels. The head was cut off clean and even. After all, you’d confessed to everything, but Marina refused to hear of it, she believed in you.”

“I confessed?”

“You wrote so yourself. But a friend of yours wrote about your being executed. Look, that’s her chest.”

The chest contained all fifty letters that Shelgunov had written to Marina through his Vladivostok channels. The channels had worked perfectly, but not for freiers.

Shelgunov burned his letters. But where were Marina’s letters with her photograph, that she had sent to Vladivostok? Shelgunov imagined the King reading his love letters. He imagined the King using the photograph “for a session.” And Shelgunov burst into tears. After that, he wept every day for the rest of his life.

Shelgunov rushed to see his mother, to find at least something, at least a line in Marina’s hand. It didn’t have to be to him. There were such letters, two faded letters, and Shelgunov learned them by heart.

The general’s daughter, the performer, was writing letters to a gangster. Gangster slang has a word “blagging,” meaning “bragging.” The word, khlestat’sia in Russian, came into gangster jargon from the boastful hero of a major literary work, Gogol’s Government Inspector’s Khlestakov. The King certainly had something to “blag” about: that freier of a novelist. Good for a laugh. That nice Shura. But the proper way to write letters is “You disgusting bitch, you can’t put two words together . . .” The King was reading phrases from his own affair with the prostitute Zoya Talitova.

“I haven’t had an education.”

“There’s no such thing. You sluts should learn how to live.”

Shelgunov, standing under a dark Moscow arch, could see all that easily. It was the scene with Cyrano, Christian, and Roxane, but acted in the ninth circle of hell, almost on the ice of the Far North. Shelgunov had trusted gangsters, and they had made him kill his wife with his own bare hands.

The two letters had become moldy, but the ink hadn’t faded and the paper had not turned to dust.

Shelgunov read these letters every day. How could he keep them forever? What glue would repair the crevices, the cracks in these dark sheets of writing paper that once were white. Certainly not liquid glass: that would burn and annihilate them.

All the same, letters can be restored so that they last forever. Every archivist knows how to do this, especially one who works in a literary museum. All you have to do is make the letters speak.

The lovely woman’s face was fixed to the glass next to a twelfth-century Russian icon, just above an icon of the Three-Handed Virgin. A female face, Marina’s photograph was perfectly apt here: it was superior to the icon . . . In what way was Marina less of a Virgin, a saint? In what way? Why are there so many women who are saints, apostolic martyrs, while Marina was only an actress, an actress who put her head under a train? Or does the Orthodox religion not accept suicides as angels? The photograph was tucked away among the icons and was itself an icon.

Sometimes Shelgunov would wake up in the night and, without turning on the lamp, search the table with his hands for Marina’s photograph. His fingers, frostbitten in the camp, could not distinguish an icon from a photograph, or wood from cardboard.

But perhaps Shelgunov was merely drunk. He drank every day. Of course vodka is bad for you, alcohol is hell, while disulfiram, the cure for alcoholism, is good. But what can you do if Marina’s icon is on the table?

•

“Do you remember that freier, that novelist, the writer, Genka? Eh? Or did you forget him ages ago?” asked the King, when the time came to get to sleep after all the ceremonies had been carried out.

“Why should I forget him? I remember him. He was that jerk, that ass!” And Genka waved his stretched-out fingers over his raised ear.

1967

SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD

Further Kolyma Stories

VARLAM SHALAMOV

Herman Melville Billy Budd - review

 Billy Budd, a big, fair, good-looking sailor on board a merchantman, is impressed into the Royal Navy. His captain complains to the naval officer of the great loss this means to him. In Budd he is losing one of his best sailors and one who, by sheer kindness and availability, has made a peaceful crew of the wild rabble on board. When Budd first arrived, the captain says, only one person took an immediate dislike to him, a bad character whose motive he states precisely: envy of the newcomer because everyone else liked him so much.[1] After picking a quarrel with Billy Budd, however, the envious character was so promptly and thoroughly thrashed that from then on he, also, was one of his friends. The captain fears unrest in his crew if Budd, the peacemaker, leaves it. But characteristically Budd himself voluntarily submits to conscription aboard the warship.

Melville depicts Budd not only as an exceptionally handsome and skilled young seaman; we are also told that he is probably a foundling of aristocratic birth. But Budd has a slight impediment—excitement deprives him of the power of speech. Billy Budd’s downfall stems from the person of the master-at-arms, John Claggart. Melville intimates by hints about Claggart’s origins and his civilian career that this is a man who, on several counts, is seething with resentment against society and life in general.

Billy Budd gets on well with his shipmates. He is popular and in addition does his utmost to carry out his duties with painstaking efficiency. Having, at the very beginning of his service, witnessed the flogging of a sailor for a minor mistake, Billy seeks to avoid attracting the attention of his superiors. But he soon notices that minor accidents keep befalling him. His gear, carefully stowed, is in disorder. The malice of inanimate objects constantly thwarts his endeavour to be a perfect seaman. He discusses this with an old sailor who explains that the master-at-arms is down on him. This Billy cannot believe, since his shipmates have told him that the master-at-arms always calls him ‘the sweet and pleasant young fellow.’ For Billy, Claggart always has a friendly word and a smile.

Melville several times describes the petty officer’s envious look of hatred when he knows himself unobserved either by his victim or by the other sailors. Melville also muses on the fact that the envious man’s chosen victim is seldom able to detect the intentions and feelings of his persecutor from his expression or behaviour. Resentment and envy are hostile feelings that are easily concealed, and which it is often essential to disguise if the plot is to succeed.

Billy Budd, Melville’s embodiment of everything that is innocent, good and harmless, cannot comprehend why Claggart, whom he seeks to please by the exemplary performance of his duties, pursues him with the bitterest envy simply because Billy is the man he is. Thus, before relating the tragic events, Melville interpolates an analysis of envy.

After Melville has shown the reader what Billy and a number of his shipmates refuse to believe, namely, that ‘Claggart is down on him,’ and has confirmed this through the mouth of one of the crew, he looks for possible motives. Several are discussed and rejected before, very cautiously and gradually, Melville advances envy. At first, all he says is:

. . . yet the cause [of Billy’s persecution by the master-at-arms], necessarily to be assumed as the sole one assignable, is in its very realism as much charged with that prime element of Radcliffian romance, the mysterious, as any that the ingenuity of the author of The Mysteries of Udolpho could devise. For what can more partake of the mysterious than an antipathy spontaneous and profound, such as is evoked in certain exceptional mortals by the mere aspect of some other mortal, however harmless he may be, if not called forth by this very harmlessness itself?[2]The novelist thus perceives something that the modern social scientist is seldom able to perceive, because the latter seeks the primary cause of evil outside the perpetrator. Envy, hatred and hostility may be provoked in the aggressor while the man with whom the stimuli originated can in no way prevent this from happening. Only self-disfigurement or self-abasement might prevent envy in the other. With an understanding of the problems of human relations on board a warship—problems which modern small-group research, in costly and laborious experiments, claims to have solved anew—Melville describes the social climate in which the drama is played out:

Now there can exist no irritating juxtaposition of dissimilar personalities comparable to that which is possible aboard a great warship fully manned and at sea. There, every day among all ranks almost every man comes into more or less of contact with almost every other man. Wholly there to avoid even the sight of an aggravating object one must needs give it Jonah’s toss or jump overboard himself. Imagine how all this might eventually operate on some peculiar human creature the direct reverse of a saint.[3]

Many a novelist and most sociologists of our time would be content to cut short the analysis of Claggart at this point. Melville continues: ‘But for the adequate comprehending of Claggart by a normal nature these hints are insufficient. To pass from a normal nature to him one must cross “the deadly space between.” And this is best done by indirection.’[4]So far, Melville has not introduced the concept of envy or resentment. He first recounts a conversation he had once had with a scholar on the subject of worldly wisdom and the understanding of human nature. The scholar seeks to convince Melville that worldly experience does not of itself entail knowledge of the deeper labyrinths of human nature. He concludes with the remark: ‘Coke and Blackstone [jurists whose writings are legal classics] hardly shed so much light into obscure spiritual places as the Hebrew prophets. And who were they? Mostly recluses.’ At first, Melville says, he did not see this. Now, faced with the task of explaining Claggart’s antipathy to Billy Budd, he believes he understands his old friend’s advice and says:

‘And indeed, if that lexicon which is based on Holy Writ were any longer popular, one might with less difficulty define and denominate certain phenomenal men. As it is, one must turn to some authority not liable to the charge of being tinctured with the Biblical element.’[5] Melville is no doubt inferring that the problem of envy is frequently discussed in the Old and New Testaments. Yet he himself goes on for nearly three more pages before he lets fall the decisive word. He is set to prove conclusively that the malice in Claggart is something which the environmental theory, later so popular, cannot explain. The evil in Claggart lies at his very core, quite independent of the world around him.

Melville quotes a definition of ‘natural depravity’ attributed to Plato: ‘Natural Depravity: a depravity according to nature.’ Melville hastens to warn us against the error of believing that what is meant here is the depravity of the whole of mankind, in Calvin’s sense. It is found only in certain individuals. And ‘Not many are the examples of this depravity which the gallows and jail supply.’ Claggart’s depravity, for which Melville is seeking the right word, is always dominated by the intellect. In a brief and masterly paragraph that might have come from the pen of a Scheler or a Nietzsche, the author of Billy Budd takes us into the phenomenological sphere of the envious personality—without having once mentioned the word ‘envy’:

Civilization [by which Melville clearly means something like the educated, worldly-wise, urbane man], especially if of the austerer sort, is auspicious to it. It folds itself in the mantle of respectability. It has its certain negative virtues serving as silent auxiliaries. It never allows wine to get within its guard. It is not going too far to say that it is without vices or small sins. There is a phenomenal pride in it that excludes them from anything mercenary or avaricious. In short the depravity here meant partakes nothing of the sordid or sensual. It is serious, but free from acerbity. Though no flatterer of mankind it never speaks ill of it.[6]A man so endowed by nature should, Melville thinks, be altogether subject to the law of reason. In reality, however, such natures are capable of the greatest irrationality, and such a man will, ‘toward the accomplishment of an aim which in wantonness of malignity would seem to partake of the insane. . . direct a cool judgement, sagacious and sound.’[7] Melville sees such people as blinded by their madness, though to the ordinary observer their actions are indistinguishable from the normal. They never announce their true aim, yet their methods and mode of behaviour are always completely rational. Claggart was that kind of man, possessed of an inward malice not wholly explicable from his environment, but which, as Melville writes, was innate—in other words, ‘a depravity according to nature.’[8]The reluctance to attribute envy

Up to this point the author has not once used the word ‘envy.’ But in Claggart’s characterization there is some evidence of those envious characteristics so often found in literature: he hides behind the mask of negative virtues such as spartan asceticism, his malignity is not to be bought off, he is unbribable, he never speaks ill of mankind, he appears to be extremely reasonable and yet is capable of the folly of self-injury if he can thus get at the object of his envy.

Here Melville interposes the digression on lawyers, experts and clerics. He asks whether the phenomenon (still not called envy) just described in Claggart which is always denied, or at least concealed, is not the motive behind the deed for which juries in many a criminal case vainly rack their brains. Surely, then, recourse should be had to men who know about the ‘rabies of the heart,’ rather than to ordinary doctors?[9]This shows remarkable insight in Melville. There has remained in criminological literature and practice up to the present a noticeable aversion towards express reference to the envy-motive, although there is convincing evidence in other sources of its significance in crime.

Not till now, forty pages after the beginning of the story, does Melville introduce the concept of envy, in a section headed ‘Pale ire, envy, and despair,’ the words Milton uses to characterize Satan. From this point, envy recurs again and again as the motive behind the master-at-arms’ persecution of Billy Budd. Claggart is himself handsome, but his frequent ironic remarks about the sailor’s beauty are explained by the author as envy:

Now envy and antipathy, passions irreconcilable in reason, nevertheless in fact may spring conjoined like Chang and Eng in one birth. Is envy then such a monster? Well, though many an arraigned mortal has in hopes of mitigated penalty pleaded guilty to horrible actions, did ever anybody seriously confess to envy? Something there is in it universally felt to be more shameful than even felonious crime. And not only does everybody disown it but the better sort are inclined to incredulity when it is in earnest imputed to an intelligent man. But since its lodgement is in the heart not the brain, no degree of intellect supplies a guarantee against it.[10]The passion of envy is kept secret by all men, regardless of their culture and language, more fearfully and shamefully than any form of erotic passion or perversion. To become a topic for literature and polite conversation, the latter needed a Sigmund Freud and his school. And it is no coincidence that Melville wrote this novel, in which envy is depicted in all its dangerous ugliness, at the end of his very long life fraught with privation and disappointment; for he must completely have resigned himself to his personal fate and to his lack of success in his own time.

In Claggart it was no vulgar envy that the author depicted, not just morbid jealousy which ‘marred Saul’s visage perturbedly brooding on the comely young David.’ ‘Claggart’s envy struck deeper.’ He sensed that Billy’s outward beauty was related to a nature innocent of evil and envy. It was this strange moral phenomenon that drove Claggart to extremes of envy.

Melville even recognizes the paranoid aspect of such envy; because Claggart found it both inconceivable and intolerable that Billy should fail entirely to return his hatred, he read deliberate insults into chance happenings, like the spilling of the soup, so that his envy of Billy could find nourishment in self-righteous contempt and indignation.[11]The blind spot in Melville scholars towards the envy-motive in 

Billy BuddIt is not just the social sciences of this century that exhibit a blind spot so far as envy is concerned, but also its literary criticism. When a writer of Herman Melville’s standing devotes many pages of his last work to preparing the reader, in exemplary fashion, for the dominant motive of the drama’s enigmatic central character, when he provides in addition what amounts to a phenomenology of envy from the standpoint of depth psychology, and when he chooses this concept, in a special series of words taken from Milton’s Paradise Lost, as a chapter heading, it might be supposed that Melville scholars, at least when treating of this novel, would be bound to mention, if only once, Melville’s attempt to solve the riddle of envy and of crime resulting from it. We look in vain for any such mention. A systematic survey of works on Billy Budd reveals that most of them totally disregard the problem of envy. This is the more surprising in that Melville repeatedly referred to the motive in other works, and was concerned with its metaphysics in discussing John Milton.[12]In some 280 pages of what is now apparently a manual much used by American college students, Merlin Bowen offers an analysis of Melville. It deals exhaustively with Billy Budd, from page 216 to 233, and in ten other passages in various parts of the book. While there is frequent mention of Claggart as the symbol of evil, there is not one word about the envy-motive, so unmistakably stressed and carefully developed by Melville.

Bowen avoids the term, stating only that Claggart is filled with malice and evil. His longest section concerns the conflict of motives in Captain Vere. And even when he returns on occasion to the supposed motives of the informer, Claggart, he does not get beyond generalizations (the puzzle of depravity), or mentions only that most superficial motive, shown clearly enough by Melville to derive from envy: ‘. . . Claggart whose covert hatred, feeding upon a supposed injury . . .’[13] Melville would not have had to construct half the novel upon the envy-motive had he merely intended to explain Claggart’s hatred of Billy Budd in terms of what Claggart supposed to be insolence on Billy’s part. No reader, indeed, could possibly deduce from Bowen’s book that in Billy Budd Melville had given one of the most detailed analyses of envy and one, moreover, of crucial importance in the plot.

A. R. Humphrey’s Melville comprises 114 pages, more than three of which are devoted to Billy Budd. The author leaves no doubt as to the importance attached by Melville to the analysis of Claggart’s character: Among the finest things in Melville’s work is the analysis of Claggart’s mixed yearning and malice, real in its strangeness. . . . The analysis is probing, adumbrative, quietly troubled, and more interesting than any sensationalism could be. It presents, one might say, original sin according to agnosticism.’[14] There is no mention of envy in Humphrey’s work.

In a study devoted to Melville’s shorter works, Richard Harter Fogle has occasion to mention Claggart only once. All he says is: ‘Claggart, the master-at-arms . . . who is pure evil according to nature.’[15] The nature of this evil, made so plain by Melville, is not mentioned.

Tyrus Hillway, in the 176 pages given to the novelist’s work, unreservedly considers Billy Budd to be Melville’s best and most mature achievement. It is not only his final work, the product of the decade between his seventieth and eightieth birthdays, but a statement of his philosophy, a novel written without any thought of financial gain, or contemporary readership, a work hastened only by the prospect of premature death. One would have thought that Hillway would, if only in one sentence or phrase, have intimated to the reader that Melville discusses the problem of envy. But the word ‘envy’ does not appear even once. Claggart is the embodiment of evil—nothing more.[16]

Geoffrey Stone’s depiction of Melville, more than three hundred pages long, is aimed at the general reader. Billy Budd and Claggart are dealt with at length. The latter is one of the only two characters in the whole of Melville’s opus to be dominated by evil.[17]Yet here, too, we look in vain for an indication that in this novel and Claggart’s character Melville is investigating the problem of envy. Stone quotes long passages from the novel on the subject of the master-at-arms’ motivation, but avoids all those in which Melville uses the term ‘envy.’ Stone even goes into what he declares to be the modern interpretation of Claggart, according to which he is a homosexual, no less, whose unrequited love for the beautiful sailor turns into ambivalent love-hate and eventually into mortal hatred. This interpretation Stone rejects: ‘Melville constantly addresses himself to the metaphysical implications of Claggart’s depravity, and if these are not his chief concern with the matter, we are left with the curious spectacle of a highly intelligent old man devoting the last three years of his life to pondering a simple case of thwarted pederasty.’[18] Here Stone is right, but there is not a single word to suggest that Melville devoted three years of his life to the anatomy of envy. The few authors, however, who have gone into the matter, demonstrate how obvious the chief subject of Melville’s concern really is.

Milton R. Stern, for instance, devotes seven pages to a detailed interpretation of Claggart, mentioning the envious element several times.[19] F. O. Matthiessen puts it most clearly, perhaps, in his work on American literature: ‘. . . Claggart . . . whose malignity seems to be stirred most by the envious sight of virtue in others, as Iago’s was.’ And elsewhere:

To characterize what Claggart feels, Melville has recourse to the quotation, ‘Pale ire, envy and despair,’ the forces that were working in Milton’s Satan as he first approached the Garden of Eden. Melville has also jotted down, on the back of his manuscript, some remembered details about Spenser’s ‘Envy’: and in his depiction of Claggart’s inextricable mixture—longing and malice—he would seem to be reverting likewise to the properties he had noted in Shakespeare’s conception of this deadly sin.[20].

ENVY

A Theory of Social Behaviour

by Helmut Schoeck

The “civilized” barbarians and two mothers

 The government, however, at that time, had not thrown off all appearance of law; yet the men who hesitated to throw my mother into prison did not scruple to attempt her assassination. The Septembriseurs, as these hired ruffians were called, were placed for several days about the precincts of the Palais de Justice; but though my mother was warned of her danger, nothing could deter her from daily attending the trial, and seating herself at the feet of her father-in-law, where her devoted mien softened even the hearts of his murderers.

Between each sitting of the court she employed her time in privately soliciting the members of the committees and of the revolutionary tribunal. A friend of my father’s, in costume à la carmagnole, generally accompanied her, and waited for her in the antiroom.

In one of the last sittings of the tribunal her looks had drawn tears even from the women in the gallery, commonly called “the furies of the guillotine,” and the tricoteuses of Robespierre. This so enraged Fouquier-Tinville, the chief prosecutor, that he sent secret peremptory instructions to the assassins outside.

After the accused was re-conducted to prison, his daughter-in-law prepared to descend the steps of the palace, in order to regain, on foot and alone—for none dared openly to accompany her—the hackney coach, which waited for her in a distant street. My mother, naturally timid in a crowd, stood trembling at the head of this long flight of steps, pressed on all sides by an enraged and bloodthirsty populace. Her eyes involuntarily sought the spot where Madame de Lamballe had been murdered some time before. She felt her presence of mind departing, as from the ferocious mob the cry, “It is the daughter of the traitor, it is La Custine,” mingled with horrid imprecations, reached her ears. How was she to pass through this crowd of infernal, rather than human beings? Already some, with naked swords, had placed themselves before her; others, half clothed, had caused their women to draw back—a certain sign that murder was about to be enacted. My mother felt that the first symptom of weakness she might betray would be the signal for her death: she has often related to me that she bit her hands and tongue so as to bring blood, in her endeavor to preserve a calm countenance at this juncture. At length she observed a fishwife among the foremost of the crowd. This woman, who was revolting in appearance, had an infant in her arms. Moved by the God of mothers, the daughter of the traitor approached this mother (a mother is something more than a woman), and said to her, “What a sweet babe you have in your arms!” “Take it,” replied the parent, who understood her by one word and glance; “you can return it to me at the foot of the steps.”

The electricity of maternal feeling had thrilled through these two hearts. It communicated itself also to the crowd. My mother took the child, pressed it to her bosom, and held it as an aegis in her arms.

Man, as the child of nature, resumed his superiority over man brutalized under the influence of social evils. The “civilized” barbarians were vanquished by two mothers. She, who was mine, descended, thus rescued, into the court of the Palais de Justice, unsaluted by even an abusive word. She returned the infant to her who had lent it: they parted without interchanging a syllable: the place was not favorable to thanks or explanations, and they never saw each other afterwards; but assuredly the souls of these mothers will meet in another world.

The young woman thus miraculously saved, could not save her father-in-law. He died, and to crown the glory of his life, the veteran soldier had the courage to die a Christian. A letter to his son attests this humble sacrifice, the most difficult of all, in an age of practical crimes and philosophical virtues. In proceeding to the scaffold he embraced the crucifix. This religious courage ennobled his death, as much as his military courage ennobled his life; but it gave great offense to the Brutuses of Paris.

During the trial of General Custine, my father had published a sober but manly defense of the former’s political and military conduct. This defense, which had been placarded on the walls of Paris, only served to bring upon the author the hatred of Robespierre. He was imprisoned soon after the death of his father. At this period the Reign of Terror was making rapid progress: to suffer arrest was to receive sentence; the process of trial had become a mere form.

From:

LETTERS FROM RUSSIA

ASTOLPHE DE CUSTINE

Shalamov - A Piece of Flesh

 YES, GOLUBEV had brought this blood-soaked offering. A piece of flesh had been cut out of his body and thrown at the feet of the almighty god of the camps: to appease the god. To appease him, or to deceive him? Life repeats Shakespeare’s plots more often than we think. Are Lady Macbeth, Richard III, King Claudius merely remote medieval figures? Is Shylock, who wanted to cut a pound of live human flesh out of the merchant of Venice, a fairy-tale figure? Of course, the wormlike bit of gut, an appendix, a rudimentary organ, weighs less than a pound. Of course, the blood-soaked offering was made under fully sterile conditions. Yet, all the same. . . . The rudimentary organ turned out to be not at all rudimentary. It was vital, active, and lifesaving.

The end of the year fills prisoners’ lives with anxiety. Anxiety besets everyone whose place is insecure (and what prisoner could be sure that he was secure), especially if they are convicted under article 58, once they have managed, after many years’ labor at the pit face, hungry and frozen, to win the illusory, uncertain good fortune of a few months, a few weeks working either in a job they were trained for or at some cozy idiot’s job—as a bookkeeper, a paramedic, a doctor, a laboratory assistant—everyone who’s won the fight for a job that is supposed to go to a free hired worker (except when there are no such workers available) or to a nonpolitical convict (and ordinary convicts look down on these “privileged” jobs, because they can always get one, and for that reason they spend their time getting drunk or worse).

Fifty-eighters can get permanent staff jobs, and they do them well. Very well indeed. And without hope. For a commission is bound to come, find them, and get them dismissed, and, what’s more, give their boss a reprimand. No boss wants to spoil his relations with this powerful commission, so he acts in advance by getting rid of anyone who is not entitled to work at these “privileged” jobs.

A good boss waits until the commission has arrived. Let the commission do the hard work of deciding whom they can dismiss and send away. Those who are sent away won’t be away for long, and those who aren’t dismissed will stay for some time, for a year, until the next December. At the very least, six months. If the boss himself does the dismissing, without waiting for the commission to arrive so he can report that everything is in order, he’ll do it worse and more stupidly.

The worst sort of boss, the least experienced, will conscientiously carry out his superiors’ orders and not allow anyone with article 58 to do any job that doesn’t involve pickax and wheelbarrow, saw and ax.

That sort of boss presides over the worst-run enterprises, and they are the ones who get dismissed quickly.

The flying visits by commissions always happen toward the end of the year. The top bosses have their own backlog of checks and control, and they therefore make an effort to catch up on the backlog by the end of the year. So they send out commissions. Sometimes they make personal visits. In person. That means they get travel expenses and their “hot spots” have not been left personally unsupervised. They can tick the boxes for fulfilling their duty, and they can simply relax, have a nice trip, or if they like, show what they’re made of, display their strength and their importance.

Both prisoners and their bosses, from the lowest to the highest rank with big stars on their epaulets, know all this. It’s an old game, a very familiar ritual. But it is still worrying, dangerous, and relentless.

A December flying visit can reverse the fate of many and quickly drive yesterday’s children of fortune to an early grave.

After such visits nobody in the camp ever experiences any changes for the better. Prisoners, especially if they come under article 58, expect only the worst from such visits. For them there were no good expectations.

Ever since the previous evening there had been rumors, camp “grapevine” whispers, the kind that always turn out to be true. People said some important bosses had come, with a whole truckload of armed soldiers and a prison bus, a Black Maria, to take their captives to a hard-labor camp. Faced with those masters of life and death, the local bosses went into a panic; even the senior figures began to seem juniors, unknown captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels. Lieutenant colonels were hiding deep in their offices. Captains and majors were running around the courtyard holding various lists, lists that probably contained surnames, and among those surnames Golubev’s was sure to be found. Golubev felt this, he knew it. But nothing had been announced and nobody had been summoned. Not one name in the zone had been listed yet.

About six months earlier, when a Black Maria had made its regular visit to the settlement and there had been another manhunt, Golubev, who was not on the lists then, was standing by the guardhouse next to a prisoner-surgeon. The surgeon was working in the hospital not just as a surgeon but as a general physician.

The new group of prisoners who had been caught, hunted down, or exposed were pushed into the Black Maria. The surgeon took his leave of a friend who was being sent away.

Golubev was then standing next to the surgeon. When the truck crawled off, raising a cloud of dust, and disappeared in the mountain ravine, the surgeon looked Golubev in the eyes and said, referring to his friend who had now gone to a certain death, “It’s his own fault. If he’d had an attack of acute appendicitis, he’d still be here.”

Golubev had committed those words to memory. It wasn’t the thought or the reasoning he remembered. It was a visual memory: the surgeon’s eyes, the mighty clouds of dust. . . .

“The clerk of works is looking for you,” said someone who had just run up to him. Golubev saw the clerk of works.

“Get your things!” The clerk was holding a paper list. It was a short one.

“Right away,” said Golubev.

“Then come to the guardhouse.”

But Golubev did not go to the guardhouse. He clutched the right side of his belly with both hands and groaned as he staggered in the direction of the clinic.

The surgeon came out onto the porch: it was the same surgeon. Something was reflected in his eyes, something he remembered. Perhaps it was the dust cloud that covered the truck that was taking his friend away forever. The examination was quick.

“Admit him. And call out the theater nurse. Call a doctor from the free village to assist. It’s an urgent operation.”

In the hospital, about two kilometers from the zone, Golubev was undressed, washed, and registered.

Two male nurses took him in and laid him on the operating table. They tied him to the table with canvas straps.

“The injection’s coming,” Golubev heard the surgeon say. “But I think you’re brave enough.”

Golubev said nothing.

“Answer! Nurse, talk to the patient.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Yes.”

“It’s always like that with local anesthesia.” Golubev heard the surgeon’s voice explaining something to the assistant. “It’s all talk, it doesn’t really work. Here it is. . . .”

“Hang in there just a bit longer. . . .”

A sharp pain made Golubev’s whole body jerk, but the pain stopped being acute almost immediately. The surgeons started talking, interrupting each other cheerfully and loudly. The operation was coming to an end.

“Well, we’ve removed your appendix. Nurse, show the patient his bit of flesh. Can you see it?” The nurse held a snakelike piece of gut, about half as long as a pencil, over Golubev’s face.

“We have instructions to show patients that there was a good reason for an incision, that the appendix really has been removed,” the surgeon explained to his assistant, who was a free worker. “Well, this gives you a little bit of practical experience.”

“I’m very grateful to you,” said the free doctor, “for the lesson.”

“For a lesson in human kindness, a lesson in philanthropy,” said the surgeon, speaking in metaphors as he took off his gloves.

“If you get anything else like this, be sure to call me in,” said the free doctor.

“If we get anything else like this, I certainly shall,” said the surgeon.

The male nurses, convalescent patients wearing patched white gowns, carried Golubev into the hospital ward. It was a small, postoperative ward, but there weren’t many operations in the hospital and none of the patients there were surgical ones. Golubev lay on his back, cautiously touching the bandage wrapped around him, like an Indian fakir’s or yogi’s loincloth. When he was a child, Golubev had seen drawings of such people in magazines; for almost the whole of his adult life he hadn’t known whether those fakirs and yogis really existed or not. But the thought of yogis slipped past and disappeared from his brain. The efforts of his will and his nervous tension weakened, and a pleasant feeling of having done his duty flooded his body. Every cell of that body was singing, purring a happy tune. This meant a break for a few days, a reprieve from being sent into the unknown realm of hard manual labor. For the time being Golubev was saved. This was a postponement. How many days did a wound take to heal? Seven or eight. So danger would return in a fortnight. Two weeks is a very long time, as good as a thousand years, long enough to prepare oneself for new ordeals. And in any case the time it takes for a wound to heal according to the textbooks, and for healing by primary intention, is seven or eight days, so the doctors said. And if the wound gets infected? If the plaster stuck over the wound should come off the skin too early? Golubev cautiously felt the plaster: it was a piece of gauze impregnated with gum arabic, and it was firm, already drying. He felt it through the bandaging. Yes. . . . This was an emergency exit, a reserve, a few extra days, possibly months if need be. Golubev recalled the big ward at the mine where he had been a patient a year ago. Almost all the patients there would undo their bandages at night and put in a bit of salutary dirt, real dirt picked off the floor, which they would rub in with their fingernails and thus reopen the wounds. Golubev was then a novice and these nighttime changes of dressing used to arouse his amazement to the point of contempt. But a year had passed and Golubev now understood why the patients had acted as they did. It was time for him to profit from what he had learned there. He fell asleep and woke only when somebody’s hand pulled the blanket off his face. Golubev always slept as camp prisoners did, with his head under the blanket, trying above all to get warm and to protect his head. Someone’s very handsome face was bending over Golubev. The face had a mustache and a haircut, which was either short on the back and sides or a crew cut. That meant the head was not a prisoner’s head. Golubev opened his eyes and thought it must be the memory of the yogis or a dream, perhaps a nightmare, but perhaps just an ordinary dream.

“Just an ordinary freier,” the man rasped in disappointment, putting the blanket back over Golubev’s face. “An ordinary freier. No proper people about.”

But Golubev’s feeble fingers pulled his blanket down so that he could look at the man. That man knew Golubev, and Golubev knew him. There was no doubt about it. But he must not, must not be in any hurry to show he recognized him. He had to remember things properly. Remember everything. Golubev did remember. The crew-cut man was. . . . Any moment now the man would be taking off his shirt by the window and Golubev would see a cluster of intertwined snakes tattooed on his chest. The man turned around and the cluster of intertwined snakes appeared before Golubev’s eyes. This was Kononenko, a gangster with whom Golubev had been in a transit camp a few months ago, a man who had served several sentences for murder, a prominent gangster who had been “taking a break” for several years in hospitals and pretrial prisons. Whenever the time came for him to be discharged, Kononenko would murder someone in a transit camp: he didn’t care who, any freier would do, and he would suffocate them with a towel. A towel, a prison-issue towel was Kononenko’s favorite murder weapon, it was his calling card. He would be arrested, a new case would be opened, he would be tried again and get an extra twenty-five years to add to the many hundreds of years he already had to serve. After the trial Kononenko would do his best to get into the hospital “for a rest,” then he would murder again, and the whole process would start anew. At the time execution of common criminals by shooting had been abolished. The only people who could be executed were “enemies of the people” under article 58.

“Kononenko’s in the hospital now,” Golubev reflected calmly, every cell of his body singing for joy, afraid of nothing, confident of success. “Kononenko is in the hospital now. He’s going through the hospital cycle of his horrible transformations. Tomorrow, or perhaps the day after tomorrow, Kononenko’s well-known program will require yet another murder.” Would that not make Golubev’s efforts—his operation, his terrible effort of willpower—count for nothing? He, Golubev, would be the next victim whom Kononenko would strangle. Perhaps he shouldn’t have tried to get out of being sent to hard-labor camps, where prisoners had the “ace of diamonds,” a five-digit number, stitched to their backs and were issued striped uniforms. But at least you didn’t get beaten there and they didn’t strip the flesh off your bones. And there weren’t all those Kononenkos there.

Golubev’s bunk was by the window. Kononenko was lying opposite him. By the door, a third man lay, his feet close to Kononenko’s feet. Golubev could see the third man’s face clearly, he didn’t even have to turn his head to see that face. Golubev knew that patient, too. It was Podosionov, a permanent inhabitant of the hospital.

The door opened and a paramedic brought the medicines in.

“Kazakov!” he shouted.

“Here,” yelled Kononenko, getting up.

“Something for you to read,” said the paramedic, handing a piece of paper folded over several times.

“Kazakov?” the name wouldn’t stop pounding inside Golubev’s brain. But this was Kononenko, not Kazakov. Suddenly Golubev realized what was going on, and his body broke out in a cold sweat.

Everything had taken a turn for the worse. None of the three men was mistaken. This was Kononenko, a “cold fish” as the criminals called him, who had taken somebody else’s name and under that name, Kazakov’s name, along with Kazakov’s criminal record, had gotten himself admitted to the hospital as a “shift worker.” This made things even worse, even more dangerous. If Kononenko was just Kononenko, his next victim might be Golubev or it might not. In that case there would still be a choice, a chance, a possibility of salvation. But if Kononenko was Kazakov, then Golubev had no hope of survival. The moment Kononenko suspected anything, Golubev would die.

“You, have we met before? Why are you looking at me like a boa constrictor looking at a rabbit? Or a rabbit looking at a boa constrictor? Which is the right expression, in your learned opinion?”

Kononenko was sitting on a bedside table in front of Golubev’s bunk; he was crumpling up his message with his big, hard fingers, scattering crumbs of paper over Golubev’s blanket.

“No, we haven’t met,” said Golubev hoarsely. He was turning pale.

“Well, it’s a good thing we haven’t,” said Kononenko, taking a towel off a nail that was hammered into the wall over the bunk, and shaking the towel in Golubev’s face. “Only yesterday I was going to strangle that ‘doctor’ over there,” he said, nodding in the direction of Podosionov, whose face now expressed boundless horror. “After all, what is the bastard doing?” Kononenko went on cheerfully, pointing the towel at Podosionov. “He’s mixing his own blood into his urine—look at the jar under his bunk. . . . He scratches his finger and puts a drop of blood in his urine. He knows what he’s doing. He’s as good as the doctors. The laboratory analysis results: blood in his urine. Our ‘doctor’ stays in the hospital. Well, tell me, does a man like that deserve to live or not?”

“I don’t know,” said Golubev.

“You don’t? You do. And then you were brought in yesterday. You were in transit camp with me, weren’t you? Before I was tried. I went under the name of Kononenko at the time.”

“I’ve never seen your face before,” said Golubev.

“You have. So I’ve decided. Instead of the ‘doctor,’ I’ll finish you off. What has he done wrong?” Kononenko pointed to Podosionov’s pale face, which was very slowly turning red as the blood began to circulate again. “What has he done wrong? He’s trying to save his life. Like you. Or, if you like, me. . . .”

Kononenko paced the ward, tossing the crumbs of paper, all that was left of the message he’d received, from one hand to the other.

“And I would do you, I’d send you to the next world, and I wouldn’t hesitate. Except the paramedic’s just brought me a message, you see. I’ve got to get out of here as quick as I can. The bastards at the mine are trying to kill us. All the thieves in the hospital have been called on to help. You don’t know what our life is like. . . . You stupid freier!”

Golubev said nothing. He did know what their life was like. As a freier, of course, by observation only.

After dinner Kononenko was discharged and he was out of Golubev’s life forever.

While the third bunk was still empty, Podosionov managed to get himself to the edge of Golubev’s bunk, where he sat at Golubev’s feet and started whispering.

“Kazakov is going to strangle both of us, no doubt about it. We’ve got to tell the bosses—”

“Go fuck yourself,” said Golubev.

1964

KOLYMA STORIES

Volume One