All Russians have a talent for suffering, asserts Berdiaev. Our philosopher is perhaps not such a rare flower after all. This is evident from his discussion of Dostoevsky in The Russian Idea, a book originally published in 1946: “The problem of suffering stands at the center of Dostoevsky’s creation. And in this he is very Russian. The Russian is capable of enduring suffering [vynosit’ stradanie] better than the Westerner is, and at the same time he is exceptionally sensitive to suffering, he is more compassionate [bolee sostradatelen] than the Western person.”181
Suffering is much too important to the Russian to be separated from what Berdiaev sees as the traditional slavishness of the Russian: “The understanding of Christianity was slavish,” he says of the Russian Orthodox Church’s centuries-long subordination to tsarist will.182 Russians are characterized by a “love of freedom,” but they also demonstrate an “inclination to slavery” (“sklonnost’ k rabstvu”); “Russians… either riot against the government or they submissively bear its yoke.”183 Russians are thus a contradictory, ambivalent people, in Berdiev’s view (and in the view of many others of course, from Merezhkovskii to Freud, from Belinsky to Brodsky). But the positive side of this particular contradiction, the striving for freedom, does not eliminate the negative side, the “inclination to slavery,” nor does it eliminate the ability “to endure suffering” entailed by both sides.
There is a curious family background to Berdiaev’s obsession with freedom and slavery. In his autobiography Berdiaev repeatedly speaks of his alienation from his family, especially his French-speaking mother: “The expression ‘bosom of the mother [materinskoe lono]’ said nothing to me—neither that of my own mother nor that of mother earth.”184 Here Berdiaev, by his own terms, is being very un-Russian for elsewhere he had said: “The Russian people have always liked living in the warmth of the collective, in a sort of dissolution in the earthly element, in the bosom of the mother.”185
Berdiaev’s sense of alienation (“chuzhdost’”) extends to the whole world, yet the imagery he uses is persistently maternal, often involving birth: “I cannot remember my first scream, elicited by my encountering a world alien to me. But I know for certain that from the very beginning I felt that I had fallen into an alien world.”186 The positive result of this perpetual alienation was a quest for freedom (“svoboda”), a quest which is imaged as resistance to the familiar and familial. The verbal root -rod-, meaning “birth,” occurs again and again:
Everything familial [rodovoe] is opposed to freedom. My repulsion against familial life [rodovoi zhizni], against anything connected with the birthing element [rozhdaiushchei stikhiei], is most likely explained by my insane love of freedom and of the source of personality. Metaphysically this is mine most of all. Kin [Rod] always struck me as an enslaver of the personality. Kin [Rod] is the order of necessity, not freedom. Therefore the fight for freedom is the fight against the power of the familial [rodovogo] over the human being. The opposition of birth [rozhdeniia] to creativity was always very essential to my philosophical thinking.187
The linguistic play here is striking, it is a kind of bad poetry. Berdiaev is too concerned with notions expressed by means of the root -rod-, that is, by the overall idea of birthing. He can barely bring himself to mention his mother, yet a mother is precisely the one who gives birth. The last sentence is particularly revealing, for it suggests that Berdiaev set his own personal independence, expressed as creativity, over and against his mother’s ability to give birth. Yet the strength of the opposition only indicates the extent of the identification with the person opposed, that is, with the “birther” who would “enslave” him. Berdiaev’s beloved freedom is itself a mother: “I issued from freedom, she is my female parent [Ia izoshel ot svobody, ona moia roditel’nitsa].”188
In his early writings (during the First World War) Berdiaev was as interested in Russian ambivalence about being enslaved as in his late works. But the earlier writings reveal a greater preoccupation with the Russian willingness to be enslaved, and they contain a remarkable personification cum gendrification of Russia. Not only is Russia a slave, she is a female slave. The “slavish” (“rab’e”) in Russian character may be equated with the “womanish” (“bab’e”). Writing under the direct influence of Rozanov, Berdiaev says that there is not so much an “eternal feminine” in Russia as an “eternally womanish” (“vechnobab’e”):
The Russian people does not want to be a masculine builder, its nature may be defined as feminine, passive, and submissive [zhenstvennaia, passivnaia, i pokornaia] in governmental matters, it always awaits its bridegroom, its husband, its master. Russia is a submissive, feminine land. A passive, receptive femininity with respect to governmental power is so characteristic of the Russian people and of Russian history. There is no limit to the humble endurance of the long-suffering Russian people [Net predelov smirennomu terpeniiu mnogostradal’nogo russkogo naroda].189
This gendered imagery of Russia’s slavishness eventually became a commonplace in Russian cultural commentary. For example, writing at about the same time as Berdiaev, the poet Maximilian Voloshin characterized Russia as a “bride” and a “female slave.” Unlike Berdiaev, however, Voloshin metaphorized Russia’s self-destructiveness specifically as sexual promiscuity:
Approximately half a century later Vasilii Grossman, in his bitter novel Forever Flowing, would pick up on this sexist metaphor and would even specify Russia’s bridegroom, namely, Vladimir Ilych Lenin: “The Great Slave [Velikaia raba] rested her seeking, questioning, evaluating gaze on Lenin. He became her chosen one.”191
Lenin himself showed some appreciation of the Russian slave mentality. In his 1914 article “On the National Pride of the Great Russians” he says that the Russian people are oppressed by “tsarist butchers, nobility, and capitalists.”192 This is possible, in part, because of the Russian nation’s “great servility [velikoe rabolepstvo] before priests, tsars, landowners, and capitalists.” Lenin quotes, with approval, words he attributes to Nikolai Chernyshevsky: “a pitiful nation, a nation of slaves, all slaves from top to bottom.”193
True, admits Lenin, Russia also produced great liberals and revolutionaries, such as Radishchev, the Decembrists, Chaadaev, and others (there was antimasochism as well as masochism). Russia gave rise as well to a “powerful revolutionary party of the masses” in 1905. But, according to Lenin, the existence of “overt and covert Great Russian slaves,” that is, “slaves in relationship to the tsarist monarchy” cannot be denied. Lenin is particularly incensed by the use of slavish Russian peasants to stifle freedom in neighboring countries: