Russia is here personified. She is “unwashed,” as a person would be, she is spoken to (“Farewell”), as one would speak to a person. Her person is multiplied by the many who occupy her—the “slaves,” the “masters,” and the “pashas” (i.e., the tsarist gendarmes). She is despicable not only for her oppressors, but also for her oppressed who seem to welcome their oppression, who appear to be united in their willingness as one collective people (“narod”) to obey the oppressors (“devoted people,” or, in other variants, “obedient [poslushnyj] people” or “submissive [pokornyj] people”).95 Lermontov’s contempt for the “land of slaves” is clearly very much in the spirit of Custine’s critique of the “nation of slaves.”
Given that so many accomplished writers—Radishchev, Chaadaev, Mickiewicz, Custine, and Lermontov96—had already dealt with the phenomenon of Russian slavishness by the middle of the nineteenth century, it is not difficult to understand why the definition of Russia as a “land of slaves” has stuck. It is now a topos taken for granted by many scholars of Russia. For example, writing in a 1992 issue of The Times Literary Supplement Leszek Kolakowski was able to speak of a “gloomy image of the eternal Russia, country of slaves,”97 without bothering to use quotation marks or to mention his nineteenth-century predecessors in this matter.
Even the “iron tsar,” Nicholas I, with whom Custine spoke personally, admitted to the sadomasochistic nature of his government’s relationship with the Russian people: “Despotism still exists in Russia: it is the essence of my government, but it accords with the genius of the nation.”98 For this despotic “essence” to accord with the nation’s “genius” implies that Nicholas was indeed dealing with a “nation of slaves.” The people ruled by Nicholas took, in his own view, a specifically masochistic stance with respect to his “despotism.” Psychoanalysis offers a more straightforward terminology than the euphemistic phrase “genius of the nation [le génie de la nation]” uttered in French by the Russian tsar.
So, the Russian people have a genius for masochism. This talent, in Custine’s estimation (although not in his terminology), applies to the lower as well as to the higher social orders, but in the former actual physical violence is very often involved as welclass="underline"
Here, among a thousand, is another example. The postillion who brought me to the post-house from whence I write, had incurred at the stage where he set out, by I know not what fault, the wrath of his comrade, the head hostler. The latter trampled him, child as he is, under his feet, and struck him with blows which must have been severe, for I heard them at some distance resounding against the breast of the sufferer. When the executioner was weary of his task, the victim rose, breathless and trembling, and without proffering a word, readjusted his hair, saluted his superior, and, encouraged by the treatment he had received, mounted lightly the box to drive me at a hard gallop four and a half or five leagues in one hour.99
Custine seems to have witnessed such violence on a daily basis during his stay in Russia: “A man, as soon as he rises a grade above the common level, acquires the right, and, furthermore, contracts the obligation to maltreat his inferiors, to whom it is his duty to transmit the blows that he receives from those above him.”100
The idea about transmitting blows down a dominance hierarchy is remarkable. In Fedor Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer for the year 1876 the idea is expressed in a similar context. Dostoevsky as a young man had once observed how a government courier repeatedly struck his coachman on the back of the neck while the coachman, in turn, whipped his horse mercilessly:
This little scene appeared to me, so to speak, as an emblem, as something which very graphically demonstrated the link between cause and effect. Here every blow dealt at the animal leaped out of each blow dealt at the man.101
One could argue that Dostoevsky borrowed his image from Custine. But a merely literary approach would disregard the real contribution these authors make: Custine and Dostoevsky were depicting the same, objective social reality in Russia. People were beaten upon in old Russia, and those who were beaten upon tended to beat others.
Dostoevsky appends a further insight to his observation: “Oh, no doubt, today the situation is not as it used to be forty years ago: couriers no longer beat the people, but the people beat themselves [narod uzhe sam sebia b’et], having retained the rods in their own court.”102 What Dostoevsky has in mind here is the alcoholism prevalent among the common folk. He clearly understands that it is masochistic in nature, otherwise he would not metaphorize it as self-beating.
If Dostoevsky’s reaction to the horrifying reality of Russians beating themselves and one other was to praise “the people” for its Christlike sufferings (see below, 240), Custine’s response was to castigate the Russians for their essentially sadomasochistic social order:
Thus does the spirit of iniquity descend from stage to stage down to the foundations of this unhappy society, which subsists only by violence—a violence so great, that it forces the slave to falsify himself by thanking his tyrant; and this is what they here call public order; in other words, a gloomy tranquility, a fearful peace, for it resembles that of the tomb. The Russians, however, are proud of this calm. So long as a man has not made up his mind to go on all fours, he must necessarily pride himself in something, were it only to preserve his right to the title of a human creature.103
I have italicized two revealing aspects of this passage. First, there is an underlying masochistic attitude without which the sadistic practice could not continue. The one who is beaten upon “thanks” the one who beats (there are Russian proverbs on this topic, as we saw earlier), or at least accepts the beating without complaint. Second, the beating, which for what Custine would consider a normal person in a Western society would injure self-esteem, is instead consciously understood to support self-esteem. The victim pretends no damage has been done and experiences instead a special kind of pride. This compensatory or reactive pride is encountered time and again in accounts of Russian national character.
The Slavophiles
The notion of Russian slavishness was also taken up by the so-called Slavophiles (“slavianofily,” who might more accurately have been characterized as Russophiles). For example, the philosopher Aleksei Khomiakov (1804–60) spoke of the “servility toward foreign peoples” (“rabolepstvo pered inozemnymi narodami”) characteristic of Russians.104 Generally the Slavophiles were uncomfortable with Russian slavishness. They looked forward to the liberation of the serfs, and they believed in something like free speech. At times they would even try to deny the existence of slavish attitudes in Russia. This led to some convolutions of thought which are quite fascinating for a psychoanalyst to consider.