This breast, however, is rather abstract and idealized by comparison to the one in Blok’s poem.
There is a sequence in Blok’s unfinished long poem “Retribution” (“Vozmezdie”) where another bird of prey, this time a hawk, circles over a meadow in search of a victim. Suddenly the hawk plunges down and captures a baby bird in its claws. There is a sad squeaking of little chicks, feathers fly, and again a maternal image appears:
In this case it is Mother Russia herself who has to learn to accept suffering, that is, the repeated victimization of her offspring. This is her fate (sud’ba)—a notion so often associated with the mother, as we saw earlier. Mother Russia has no choice, her children have no choice but to suffer. Here, however, she is not so much to blame as in the other poem, for she does not admonish her offspring to submissively carry a cross. The hawk is the source of any resulting masochism. The passage is not sexist, but it is also less insightful psychoanalytically, than “Korshun.”
Dostoevsky’s Maternal Collective
We saw earlier that Dmitrii Karamazov welcomes the punishment about to be meted out to him by the collective which arrested and imprisoned him: “I accept the torture of accusation, and my public shame, I want to suffer and by suffering I shall be purified.” The motivation for this, as we saw, had something to do with the dream-image of a babe at the dried-out breast of its mother: “It’s for that babe I am going to Siberia now.” But Dmitrii is not satisfied to limit the psychological problem to himself. He needs to involve the collective as well. At his pretrial hearing he declares: “Gentlemen, we’re all cruel, we’re all monsters, we all make men weep, and mothers, and babes at the breast….”103 Not only the individual Dmitrii, then, but all of society around him is guilty. How Dmitrii should happen to know so much about the moral character of those individuals around him is unexplained. Indeed he does not “know” whether others are actually guilty monsters, he surmises that they are, he projects his own guilt on to others. The boundary between himself and the collective breaks down even further when he declares:
One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in [the] convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are all to blame for them. Why was it I dreamed of that “babe” at such a moment? “Why is the babe so poor?” That was a sign to me at that moment. It’s for the babe I’m going. Because we are all responsible for all [vse za vsekh vinovaty]. For all the “babes,” for there are big children as well as little children. All are “babes.” I go for all because someone must go for all.104
We may gather from this somewhat incoherent discourse that Dmitrii is taking on the guilt of others, that is, of the collective which he can hardly distinguish himself from any more. In his masochistic ecstasy he feels that he can withstand the Siberia others deserve for their sins, because the boundary between these others and himself no longer obtains. When “all are responsible for all,” or to translate more accurately, “all are guilty for all,”105 individuals hardly matter anymore. Dmitrii loses himself in something greater than himself, he merges with the collective, fuses with it and this makes his suffering tolerable, even welcome.
The idea of “all guilty for all” occurs again and again in the novel. The monastic elder Zosima goes so far as to ask the birds in the heavens for forgiveness. At one point Zosima bows down before Dmitrii because he feels responsible for another man’s patricidal impulse. His advice on the obligation to suffer for others is practically psychoanalytic in its explicitness:
If the evil doing of men moves you to indignation and overwhelming distress, even to a desire for vengeance on the evildoers, shun above all things that feeling. Go at once and seek suffering for yourself [idi i ishchi sebe muk], as though you were yourself guilty for that wrong. Accept that suffering and bear it and your heart will find comfort, and you will understand that you too are guilty.106
If normal guilt feelings over one’s own transgressions have a slightly masochistic tinge, guilt over the sins of others is certainly masochistic, involving as it does a gratuitous disregard for the boundaries between individuals.
It is curious that Zosima acquired this masochistic philosophy from his brother Markel who, in turn, developed it specifically in the context of trying to please his mother. Markel was originally an atheist, but when he learned that he was dying of consumption he deliberately started going to church for his mother’s sake. In his conversations with her shortly before he died he would say such things as: “Mother, little heart of mine… my joy, believe me, everyone is really responsible [vinovat] to all men for all men and for everything.”107 By this time he is sincere about his masochism, and his mother weeps with joy and grief.108
The idea of “all guilty for all” is not original with Dostoevsky. Gary L. Browning has pointed to sources in the Russian Orthodox liturgy, in the philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, in French Utopian socialism, and elsewhere.109 The idea accords well with the typically Russian attitude—especially among the peasantry—about the displaceability of responsibility between individuals, or between the individual and the collective. For example, Dahl’s 1862 collection of proverbs contains the following items:
Dump [everything] on to the mir: the mir will bear anything (Vali na mir: mir vse sneset).
A hateful tiaglo has fallen upon the mir (during apportionment; a tiaglo which no one would take on) (Postyloe tiaglo na mir poleglo [pri raskladke; tiaglo, kotoroe nikto na sebia ne prinimaet]).
In the mir no one is guilty. You can’t find the culprit in a mir (V miru vinovatogo net. V miru vinovatogo ne syshchesh’).
All for one, and one for all. Mutual responsibility (Vse za odnogo, a odin za vsekh. Krugovaia poruka).110
In most of these examples responsibility is being shifted away from the individual and on to the collective—a decidedly non-masochistic move, but one in which boundaries are questioned nonetheless. In the last item the direction of the shift can be projective (“all for one”) or introjective and masochistic (“one for all”—Dmitrii Karamazov’s position precisely).
As for the curious expression “krugovaia poruka,” it has taken on a derogatory meaning similar to English “passing the buck.” In English, however, “the buck stops” (e.g., President Truman’s famous phrase, “The buck stops here”). In Russia the buck tends not to stop (or the attitude is that it does not stop). Rather, it goes on in endless circles (“krugovaia”), so that no one individual ever has to end up taking the blame for a morally questionable act. The collective answers for the irresponsible action of an individual.111