Grossman has clearly been influenced by Chaadaev, Custine, Lermontov, Berdiaev, and other writers on the slave soul of Russia. His contribution is to wield the notion of Russian masochism as a weapon against Bolshevism, and against Lenin in particular.
Grossman repeats and extends his personification of the “thousand-year-old slave.” At one point she is a “great slave” (“Velikaia raba”) who, having recently cast off the chains of tsarism, marries Lenin. She follows after him with obedient step. Seeing that she is so pliable, Lenin begins to lord it over her. Gradually he becomes alarmed and frustrated by her “soft Russian submissiveness and suggestibility.”46
Lenin could not change Russia’s age-old slavish essence. For this reason, according to Grossman, he was not a true revolutionary: “Only those who encroach on the very foundation of old Russia—her slave soul [ee rabskuiu dushu]—are revolutionaries.”47
Lenin was victorious, yes, but the Russian soul remained a slave. The narrator says that there is nothing mysterious about the “Russian soul,” for slavishness is no mystery. The real riddle is why Russia seems fated to be slavish:
What is this, really, an exclusively Russian law of development? Can it be that the Russian soul, and only the Russian soul, is fated to develop not in direct proportion to the growth of freedom, but in proportion to the growth of slavery? Do we have here, after all, the destiny [rok] of the Russian soul?48
“Of course not,” retorts the narrator to himself. There are other countries which have slavish traditions, too. But still, for Russia there is indeed no hope. Russia’s slavishness is predestined. Such is the fate of history (“rok istorii”). Even Lenin, who valiantly attempted to absorb Western ideas of freedom, failed to liberate Russians. Lenin—with his fanatic Marxist faith, his iron will, his intolerance of dissent, his cruelty toward his enemies—was himself a product of the slavish Russian mentality. Lenin only managed to re-enslave the peasants, the proletariat, the intelligentsia. He could not overcome Russian slavishness because he was a part of it. He, like Dostoevsky and the other “prophets of Russia,” “was born of our unfreedom.” In Grossman’s view, there simply is no possibility for Russians to escape their enslavement.
It is difficult to imagine a more pessimistic, fatalistic, and, for some, even offensive attitude. Many of Grossman’s readers were disturbed. He was doing something much more radical than criticizing the great Lenin. When it was published in the West, his novella offended Russian chauvinists of both the pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet bent.49 When more recently it was published in Russia, some writers accused Grossman of “Russophobia.”50 Anatolii Anan’ev, who was responsible for publishing it in the journal Oktiabr’, defended Grossman: “the phrase about Russian soul being a thousand-year-old slave provoked fury. But if we are not slaves, then why have we been submissively standing in lines for seventy years, why have we been applauding any dogma that happens to be spoken from the rostrum?”51
What the psychoanalyst is likely to notice in Grossman’s text is the association of masochism (“soft Russian submissiveness and suggestibility,” “slave soul”) with the notion of fate (here rok). In Grossman’s formulation, there is a predestined quality to Russian masochism.
The analyst also cannot miss the repeated images of birth in Grossman’s text: “the characteristics of the Russian soul were born [rozhdeny] not of freedom”; “the birth [rozhdenie] of the Russian state system”; Lenin was “born [rozhden] of our unfreedom;” “anywhere slavery exists, such souls are born [rozhdaiutsia],” etc.52 This kind of imagery suggests that the fatedness of Russia’s slave soul originates specifically from birth.
The one who gives birth is, of course, the mother. What Grossman seems to be saying in these philosophical passages is that the very earliest relationship with a mother of some kind is what predetermines Russian slavishness.
Three things, then, are connected for Grossman: masochism, fate, and the mother. This triple connection, as we saw earlier, also applies to Dostoevsky’s character Dmitrii Karamazov (and to some extent it applies to Tat’iana Larina, with Onegin a mother-surrogate rather than a literal mother).
Why should masochistic inclinations be connected to both fate and the image of the mother? This is a question that cannot be answered without a detailed consideration of the unconscious psychodynamics of masochism.
For that matter, many other aspects of the slave soul of Russia will remain a mystery until—at last—we delve into the psychoanalytic literature on masochism.
FIVE
Ontogeny and the Cultural Context
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the slave soul of Russia is best understood as an example of something Freud called moral masochism. Unlike erotogenic masochistic practices (sometimes called perversion masochism) in which an individual may need to be bound, beaten, or otherwise mistreated in order to achieve sexual orgasm, and unlike severe self-destructive and self-mutilative behavior based on a pervasive disintegration of psychic structures, moral masochism is a relatively mild disturbance in which the otherwise healthy individual searches for opportunities to suffer, to be humiliated, or to be defeated.
It does not matter, according to Freud, who it is that satisfies the “need for punishment”: “The suffering itself is what matters; whether it is decreed by someone who is loved or by someone who is indifferent is of no importance. It may even be caused by impersonal powers or by circumstances; the true masochist always turns his cheek whenever he has a chance of receiving a blow.”1
Karen Horney says that the masochist may be overwhelmed by a “feeling that good and evil come from outside, that one is entirely helpless toward fate, appearing negatively in a sense of impending doom, positively in an expectation of some miracle happening without one’s moving a finger.”2
The ideas of “impersonal powers,” “circumstances,” or “fate” in these formulations sound remarkably like the Russian ideas of sud’ba and rok. Freud discusses human acceptance of “the dark power of Destiny” elsewhere in his essay on masochism, and in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis he dwells further on the predestined quality of some forms of moral masochism:
There are people in whose lives the same reactions are perpetually being repeated uncorrected, to their own detriment, or others who seem to be pursued by a relentless fate [Schicksal], though closer investigation teaches us that they are unwittingly bringing this fate on themselves. In such cases we attribute a ‘daemonic’ character to the compulsion to repeat.3
Ultimately, says Freud, the sense of unavoidable fate in such cases is determined by previous experience of the parents, which is to say that fate is not so impersonal after alclass="underline" “The last figure in the series that began with the parents is the dark power of Destiny which only the fewest of us are able to look upon as impersonal”; “all who transfer the guidance of the world to Providence, to God, or to God and Nature, arouse a suspicion that they still look upon these ultimate and remotest powers as a parental couple.”4