The intelligentsia regarded this hand-to-mouth existence as an admirable and highly moral condition. In part it reflected their voluntary renunciation of conventional values—it also went a long way towards satisfying the search for martyrdom which, whether consciously or not, underlay so much of their activity. In autocratic Russia martyrdom, in prison or exile, was not difficult to come by; it was accepted not merely courageously, but often, it seemed, eagerly. The cult of suffering, the idea of the necessity of sacrifice—sacrifice of oneself no less than of others—formed a vital element in their ethos. Suffering cleansed one, brought one nearer to the tormented people; the sacrifice of personal happiness, of the best years of one’s life, and, if need be, of life itself, was the price that had to be paid for the achievement of a new Golden Age; only through suffering and sacrifice could the guilt of privilege ever be expiated.147
There is considerable psychoanalytic insight here. Without mentioning Freud, Szamuely not only perceives the moral masochism of the Russian intelligentsia (he calls it “search for martyrdom” or “cult of suffering”), but grants that it might be unconscious (“whether consciously or not”). Szamuely also detects the role of guilt (“suffering cleansed one,” “guilt of privilege”) and the issue of separation from/merging with another suffering object (“brought one nearer to the tormented people”). These are all topics that are familiar to the clinician, as we will see in chapter 5.
Speaking specifically of the masochism of the literary intelligentsia, Vera Dunham says: “Fiction of social concern was inclined to paint a dark picture of contemporary society, much darker than might have been realistically warranted. The black tone was added by the intelligentsia’s need to be tormented.”148
Some scholars have been reluctant to accept the idea of a self-lacerating, masochistic Russian intelligentsia. In his essay on “The Birth of the Russian Intelligentsia,” Isaiah Berlin rejects “the generally held view of the Russians as a gloomy, mystical, self-lacerating, somewhat religious nation,” preferring to regard Russian intellectuals, at least, as possessing “extremely developed powers of reasoning, extreme logic and lucidity.” The problem here is that these two things are in no way mutually exclusive, as Berlin seems to think they are. The gloomy, self-punishing Stavrogin—to take a well-known literary example—certainly possesses “extremely developed powers of reasoning.” Yet Stavrogin is a cold calculator and a guilt-ridden masochist all wrapped in one. He eventually commits suicide, which is the most masochistic act possible.
Berlin says: “If you study the Russian ‘ideologies’ of the nineteenth and indeed the twentieth century, I think you will find, on the whole, that the more difficult, the more paradoxical, the more unpalatable a conclusion is, the greater is the degree of passion and enthusiasm with which some Russians, at any rate, tend to embrace it.”149 In other words, the Russian intelligent is capable of acting in accordance with perceived logical truthfulness, even if the logical conclusion harms someone—including the logical Russian who is reasoning so well! Berlin’s own Herzen offers Siberian exile as an example, as we saw above.
Berlin, too, offers an example, namely, the odd behavior of the social critic Vissarion Belinsky during his period (1839–40) of Hegelian resignation to the forces of tsarist autocracy. Nothing was more contrary to Belinsky’s own natural inclination to resist autocratic power and help the downtrodden, which is to say nothing could have been more masochistic for him personally: “Belinsky gloried in the very weight of the chains with which he had chosen to bind his limbs, in the very narrowness and darkness which he had willed to suffer; the shock and disgust of his friends was itself evidence of the vastness, and therefore of the grandeur and the moral necessity, of the sacrifice.”150
Perhaps the most eloquent Russian spokesman for the idea of a masochistic Russian intelligentsia was the writer and critic Dmitrii Merezhkovskii (1865–1941). In that volume of his collected works titled “Sick Russia,” Merezhkovskii repeatedly asserts that Russians—especially members of the intelligentsia—are slavish by nature. Russians cannot be “holy,” he says, without being slavish, because when they are free they are sinfuclass="underline" “In freedom they are sinful, in slavery they are holy”; “Holy Russia is a land of holy slaves.”151 Merezhkovskii advances the idea that the numerous rebellions in Russian history never amounted to much because the rebels (Pugachev and his crew, the Decembrists, etc.) always wanted to be defeated. The long line of Russian uprisings constitutes “an eternal rebellion of eternal slaves.”152 Characterizing the memoirs of the famous serf-turned-censor Aleksandr Nikitenko (1804–77), Merezhkovskii says: “A slavish book about a slavish life. The writer is doubly a slave, both by birth and by calling—a serf and a censor.”153
Merezhkovskii, writing under the influence of Viacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949), describes Russians in a way that strongly suggests the modern psychoanalytic conception of moral masochism: “Self-denunciation and self-humiliation [Samooblichenie—samooplevanie, literally “spitting on the self”] are generally characteristic of Russian people.”154 Among Russians there is a “terrible will to descent, to disrobing, to self-destruction, to chaos.”155 Merezhkovskii (unlike Ivanov) actually uses the word “masochism” (“mazokhizm”). It occurs in reference to the suddenly repentant attitude of some of the intelligentsia after the events of January 9, 1905 (so-called “Bloody Sunday,” when tsarist police fired on a crowd of peaceful demonstrators in Petersburg, killing over a hundred people). Here is how Merezhkovskii describes a “former Marxist” who was castigating the “ignoble Russian revolution”:
His eyes shone with that delight of self-flagellation, self-destruction [samoistrebleniia], that voluptuousness of shame which in the moral realm correspond to the physical voluptuousness of blows, to masochism [sootvetstvuiut fizicheskomu sladostrastiiu poboev, mazokhizmu].156
These words, written in 1909, predate Freud’s writings on moral masochism by some fifteen years.157 The similarity is remarkable. Both Merezhkovskii and Freud take the self-destructive element in (the original, erotogenic sense of) the term “masochism” as a model for self-defeating attitudes and behaviors generally.
Even more remarkable, however, is the primordial maternal imagery Merezhkovskii utilizes to depict the attitudes of failed revolutionaries. He refers to a passage in the story “The Holy Wanderer” by Zinaida Gippius.158 A little child named Vasiuta is dying. For several days Vasiuta has been in agony, and is so worn out he cannot even cry. His mother takes him into her arms. He looks into her eyes, she asks what she can give him. His little head hanging limp, he replies softly: “You could give me a bit of milk, Mamka, but I don’t feel like it [da ne khotstsa].”159 The child is so totally defeated by his illness that he does not even want his favorite milk.
The defeatist former revolutionaries, says Merezhkovskii, are like this little Vasiuta. They hang their heads. There is nothing left for them, their former desires are meaningless. The attitude of a defeated adult is like the attitude of a defeated child, a child that no longer even wants milk from its dear mother. The image is primal, it refers the reader back to a very early stage in the child’s relationship with the nurturing mother. Psychoanalytically speaking, the image is pre-Oedipal. Merezhkovskii anticipates what post-Freudian analysts will have to say about the ontogenetic origin of masochistic attitudes (see below, 94ff.).