"We Will Bury You"
These words, attributed to Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev during the 1960's appeared on numerous posters in the U.S. with his picture during that time. I remember seeing them. I also remember him being shown pounding his shoe (with a hole in the sole) on a desk at the U.N. presumably and saying "nyet" or no in English (apparently the original party of NO!).
Mr. K, as he was unaffectionately known here, said this to strike fear into American hearts. The posters were displayed to fan anti-Communist sentiment in the U.S. This wasn't all that long after Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) purported to have discovered and have "proof" of many, many (the number kept changing and usually growing) card-carrying Commies and Commie sympathizers in our government, State Department, and even the armed services, until he was finally gagged by Congress under the urging of President Dwight Eisenhower. Many Americans, particularly writers, artists, poets, film makers and actors did turn to Communism as a potential solution to the problems of the Great Depression; others, even a greater number, were Communist sympathizers, Socialists and "fellow-travelers" as they saw capitalism faltering in stemming rampant poverty and hunger. Usually they later recanted, but were persecuted in the 50's anyway, including veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who had fought fascism during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930's.
ANYWAY! I do want to talk about the Russians, but Russians prior to the 1917 Revolution and Russians who were writers and novelists. Dostoevsky, of course, is my favorite, but he was surrounded by a host of others who were great in their own right. These include Tolstoy, Turgeynev, Checkov, Gogol, and Belinsky.
These gentlemen wrote about the human condition, often with deep psychological insights. Many suffered great deprivation, poverty, and sentencing to years of hard, frigid labor in Siberia. Much of this was due to their passion to write, to write about life as they saw it in Russia, and to condemn the injustices they saw under the rule of the Czars.
They had something to say, and they said it well and poignantly.
Most American fiction writers today, I’d say, have little or nothing to say, particularly when compared to these folks. They face almost no privation or struggle. They write for fame and fortune, to pay the rent and grow rich if possible. They have almost no understanding of the true grit of human existence that the Russians had. They write to entertain only, to entertain a public that is already entertained to excess, almost to boredom.
Nikolay Gogol in 1835 wrote his short story Diary of a Madman in which he chronicles the ever deeper slide of his main character into insanity. The man starts out, however, with bizarre ideas and ends up even more into himself and his madness. He thinks a woman’s dog talks to him; then even worse, supposedly digs out some letters this dog has written to another dog, going to the startled woman’s apartment to retrieve them from the dog’s bed. He soon starts to believe he is the new king of Spain, coming up with all kinds of reasons and explanations for doing so. He acts totally strangely at his job and they end up throwing him in the booby hatch where he is, of course, badly treated. And there the story ends with him wishing his mother would come to save him but still believing nonsensical ideas.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, in 1846, published a quite similar story titled The Double. His main character starts out a little more rational than Gogol’s, but ends up acting crazy and doing nonsensical things also. He ends up with the same fate, in the same sad place.
I think Dostoevsky may have gotten some of his ideas from Gogol’s story, although I suspect there were earlier roots to this theme among Russian authors of the time. Neither says much about why the two characters become insane, but it is suspected by commentators that the pressures of trying to achieve status (rank) in the Russian bureaucratic system plus their unrequited yet deeply felt attraction for ladies of distinction who don’t even know they exist and wouldn’t pay any attention to them if they did both contributed to their interior downfall.
An interesting counterpoint to this is what G K Chesterton says in his short book Orthodoxy. He says the “lunatic” is not illogical, rather he is TOO logical – he inhabits a small box which is his world and everything inside that box makes perfect sense to him. He can see no shades of gray in anything. And so the two characters of Gogol and Dostoevsky do things that make perfect sense to them… but not to others who observe them. And thus the clash.