Creating his harlequin to embody the colorful darkness of the colonial endeavor, Conrad smuggled into the tragedy of the European colonization of Africa the trauma of the Russian colonization of Poland. Tambov is even further from the Arctic Circle than Vologda, but the temper of this Russian matched those selfless souls of Arctic explorers whom Conrad adored in his youth:
He surely wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to breathe in and to push on through. . . . If the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure had ever ruled a human being, it ruled this bepatched youth. I almost envied him the possession of this modest and clear flame. (p. 55)
These are almost the same words that Marlow had used at the start of his story, when he contrasted the greedy travelers to the south with the pure explorers of the north, "whose aims were as pure as the air of those high latitudes." This Russian's purity was connected to his glamor, a word that Marlow used with some insistence. "Well, I haven't been there [to the North Pole] yet, and shall not try now. The glamour's off," Marlow said at the start of his story. It is the same northern glamor that he found in his new Russian acquaintance. "Glamour urged him on, glamour kept him unscathed" (p. 55).
As Marlow approaches the Central Station, he makes "an extraordinary find" in an abandoned hut: a technical book, An Inquiry Into Some Points of Seamanship. The copy is 60 years old, published about the time of John Franklin's travels. In the margins, there are penciled notes that refer to the text. These notes are in a cipher that Marlow cannot read. He sees it as "an extravagant mystery," but when he meets the motley-dressed Russian he realizes that the notes were written in Cyrillic. The whole episode reads out of context, as a kind of textual cipher in itself. It is strange, of course, to meet a Russian adventurist in Central Congo; but, given that fact, there can be nothing mysterious about his annotating a book in his own language. In a text bursting with meaning, what is the meaning of these Cyrillic notes?
Post factum notes play significant roles in the Heart of Darkness and "Geography and Some Explorers," Conrad's self-commentary on Heart of Darkness. Kurtz's note, "Exterminate all the brutes!" changed the meaning of his anthropological report. Added to their previous message, "All is well," the dying sailors' note reported John Franklin's death. In both cases, Kurtz's and Franklin's, the texts were untrue but the later comments revealed the truth. Conrad's later essay, "Geography and Some Explorers," plays exactly this same role, partly explanatory and party deconstructive, in relation to The Heart of Darkness. The unread comments in the margins of the British book of seamanship play the same role.
Almost all that Marlow learned, and that we know, about Kurtz, came from the Russian (Brooks 1996: 70). This is particularly true of the most interesting part of Kurtz's story, his methods of treating the natives: "[T]his amazing tale that was not so much told as suggested to me in desolate exclamations . . . in interrupted phrases . . . in hints" of the Russian (p. 56). Marlow could not verify this interpretation of Kurtz's activities because, when he finally reaches Kurtz, he is about to die. But this interpretation made sense for Marlow; he did not question it, his interlocutors did not question it, and we the readers rarely do so, either. However, Marlow says that this Russian harlequin crawled before Kurtz "as much as the veriest savage of them all" (p. 58), which makes the Russian a little bit too involved for an observer.
Interpretation is important; it is terribly important if it is the only source of evidence, raw or processed. Told in Africa by the Tambovian to the Londoner, the story of Kurtz is very Russian indeed. Kurtz did not just go native (Rothberg 2009: 83). Like his Russian friend, he also became more savage than the savages, installing himself into the native system of beliefs with an amazing "efficiency." Combining charismatic leadership with violent coercion, Kurtz reformed the natives with the sole purpose of enriching himself in a way that was foreign to them. He did not act as a missionary, struggling to replace the belief system of the natives with his own. He worked, rather, as a virus, entrenching himself in the center of the native spiritual system and forcing this system to offer sacrifices to him. It was an internal colonization of a sort.
Imperialism was at its worst not when it acted by pure force but when it sought a project of hegemony on top of the usual domination, a religious or ideological faith in its activities that would be felt by the exploited population. Reading about the fictional colonizer, Kurtz, in the Heart of Darkness, we find a composite of various sources, from the inherited knowledge of Polish methods of leasehold management in Ukraine, to memories of Russian massacres in Poland, to British massacres in India, to Conrad's feelings about his own visit to the Congo, to his vague expectations for the Russian and colonial revolutions that would, he knew, create new kinds of darkness. Going to the people, inhabiting their religion and forcing them to work for his own "idea," Kurtz did what two generations of Russian radicals did before and after him. Though these Russian populists were driven not by the lure of profit but, rather, by their utopian ideals, Conrad saw their methods as similar. On top of the violent capability of his firearms, Kurtz's particular sort of "efficiency" needed social sciences and humanities. This is why Conrad made his brutal, greedy character a scholar who was respected by learned societies. In the late nineteenth century, sociology and anthropology opened new vistas for understanding the people and, also, for trying to change them. In the transformationist spirit of the time, some enthusiastic experts called this process "God-building."[11] Reading Durkheim and Marx together, these radical intellectuals asked themselves: If rituals instill values, why not create new rituals? If gods replace one another like tsars, why not enthrone new gods? Since Russia did not feature a rational proletariat but, rather, a mystical peasantry, would it be not the disenchanting enlightenment but, instead, the re-enchantment of the world that would launch the Russian revolution? This process of purposeful, pre-planned God-building would absorb the beliefs among the common folk and direct them toward revolution. Since only the experts - ethnographers, historians, and sociologists - could claim knowledge of these beliefs, these experts became essential for the social revolution (see Chapter 10). In fact, these sons of priests and connoisseurs of sectarian communities, some of them professional revolutionaries and convinced God-builders, looked and sounded like Conrad's harlequin, though they chose to go to the Volga rather than to the Congo. Working among the exotic sectarians with the aim of becoming their leaders and exploiting them for the revolution, these intellectuals would emulate Kurtz in his "unspeakable" inventions. I can imagine finding the note, "Exterminate all the brutes!" in the vast archive of Anatolii Lunacharsky, a prominent God-builder. It would be "an extraordinary finding" but it would not change history as we know it. After studying philosophy in Zurich, writing plays about Faust and Cromwell, and recanting his God- building teachings, the pan-European Lunacharsky became the first People's Commissar of the Enlightenment.