Let it be clearly understood that the Russian is a delightful person till he tucks his shirt in. As an Oriental he is charming. It is only when he insists upon being treated as the most easterly of Western peoples, instead of the most westerly of Eastern, that he becomes a racial anomaly extremely difficult to handle. The host never knows which side of his nature is going to turn up next. (Kipling 1952: 28)[3]
Kipling's contemporary, George Nathaniel Curzon, visited Russia before his appointment as Vice-Roy of India (1898-1905). In his first book, which happened to be his Russian travelogue, he wrote, "Upon no question there is greater conflict of opinion in England than Russia's alleged designs upon India." Based on his experience of traveling to Russia, he felt this split internally: "Every Englishman enters Russia as a Russophobe and leaves it a Russofile" (Curzon 1889: 11, 20). No doubt an overgeneralization, this early version of a "from Russia with love" story speaks volumes about the British attitude toward Russia. Having entered and left Russia, Curzon was still anxious about the Russian threat: "Russia is as much compelled to go forward as the earth is to go round the sun," he wrote. But on the other hand, the Russian advance in Asia would just be "a conquest of Orientals by Orientals" and therefore acceptable (Curzon 1889: 319, 372). As Foreign Secretary (1919-24), Curzon drew a line between revolutionary Russia and the newly independent Poland, which many decades later materialized as the border of the European Union. For all practical purposes, the Curzon line is still dividing the world into the west and the east.
To the revolution in Russia, Kipling responded with the poem, "Russia to the Pacifists." His unexpected mourning for the Russian Empire reflected his anxiety that the distant tragedy would repeat at home: "So do we bury a Nation dead / And who shall be next to fall?" It turned out to be another version of the boomerang story: "We go to dig a nation's grave as great as England was" (Kipling 1925: 274-5).
Balfour's Declaration
According to Said, orientalism was a form of thought and of action, and the two were cyclically connected. The politics created the knowledge, which, in its own turn, guided the behavior of the colonizers and directed their scholarship. One of Said's initial examples was the ideas and policies of the early twentieth-century British statesman Arthur James Balfour, who in 1917 laid the foundation for the Jewish migration to Palestine. Said declared that Balfour's "argument, when reduced to its simplest form, was clear. . . . There were Westerners, and there were Orientals. The former dominate; the latter must be dominated." The double doctrine of western power and orientalist knowledge was based on the "absolute demarcation between East and West." These two categories, of east and west, were "both the starting and the end points of analysis." Their "polar distinction," "binary opposition," or "radical difference" secured the "streamline and effective" operations that Said ascribes to Balfour's type of orientalism. In Balfour's mind "the Oriental becomes more Oriental, the Westerner more Western"; Said calls it "to polarize the distinction." To Balfour, " ' Orientals' for all practical purposes were a Platonic essence" (Said 1978: 36-45).
A Platonic essence cannot change, expand, or polarize. It cannot merge with other essences. Finally, it cannot be aware of itself. No doubt, Balfour deserved much of this criticism. In 1917, he told his colleagues in the Cabinet that since "East is East and West is West," they should not use the idea of self-governance when they are talking about places like India. Even in the west, said Balfour, parliamentary institutions had rarely been a great success, "except among the English-speaking people." Curzon found this statement, which could have come straight from an ironical Kipling story, "very reactionary" (Gilmour 1994: 485). Responding to the events that were triggered by the revolution in Russia, Balfour projected his orientalism not only onto Indians and Arabs, but onto Jews as well, especially Russian Jews. When Balfour met the aspiring Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in 1906, he asked this Belarusian Jew whether his people would go to Uganda rather than to Palestine. Weizmann responded with a question: "Mr Balfour, supposing I was to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?" Balfour said, "But Dr Weizmann, we have London." "That is true," Weizmann said, "but we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh." Instead of questioning this concept of "we," Balfour asked, "Are there many Jews who think like you?" To this Weizmann said, "I believe I speak the mind of millions of Jews whom you will never see and who cannot speak for themselves" (Weizmann 1949: 144).
Meeting in Manchester, the statesman and the immigrant discussed oriental places such as Uganda, Palestine, and the Pale. Born in the village of Motol, near Pinsk, in what is now Belarus, Weizmann seemed exotic to Balfour. Of course, Balfour knew how to talk to orientals and his questions were exacting; but Weizmann also knew his game. He conversed with Balfour not just as a member of a foreign tribe, but as a representative of a people who were unknown and unseen, a people who could not speak for themselves. A decade later, as Foreign Secretary, Balfour passed Weizmann his famous Declaration that conveyed British "sympathy" for Zionist aspirations and established "a national home" for the Jews in Palestine. It was not the state, though. Often criticized and rarely understood, Balfour was pursuing the policy by analogy: the Russian Pale of settlement was not a state, either. The stateless Jews from the old, by then destroyed, Pale of the Russian Empire were moving to the newly drawn Pale of the British Empire. The Balfour Declaration was signed on November 2, 1917, five days before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. It had a double purpose, to create a British protectorate for Jews in Palestine and to discharge the explosive situation in Russia, where the Bolsheviks, many of them Jews, were contemplating a separate peace with the Germans.
It so happened that Weizmann became a dear friend of Balfour, a distant analogue of Robinson's Russian prince. Balfour's practices and theories were essentialist, but they changed over the decades. His "orientals" included Weizmann from Pinsk and the Mufti of Jerusalem, both of whom were important for British politics in Palestine. British policies toward the east, including Eastern Europe, also changed dramatically. Dividing the vastly different orientals and mediating between them in the name of the Empire, Balfour's east was not really a world of Platonic essences. It was, rather, a Wittgensteinian constellation of images, people, and places that had little in common but their perceived distance from Trinity College, Cambridge, where Balfour received his Law degree.
If for Kipling, Russia was a mythical enemy that had always threatened but never penetrated his India, Joseph Conrad was still living after this event actually happened to his Poland. Russian colonization was the site of the catastrophe, accomplished or anticipated - the crime of partition, the truce of the bear. I find it amazing that Edward Said's first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966) all but ignored Conrad's tortured relation to the Russian Empire, which was central both to his fiction and to his autobiography(see Chapter 11). An enthralled critic of Balfour and Curzon, Kipling and Conrad, Said took no notice of their obsessions with Russia. By doing so, he reduced their multipolar worldliness to the one-dimensional concept of traditional orientalism.
An Uncle's Lesson