This is an exaggeration, of course, for in Russia there have been and there are individuals who take personal responsibility. Indeed, there are those Dostoevskian masochists who take more responsibility than is really their due—yet another manifestation of the fuzziness of Russian interpersonal boundaries.
The notoriously Russian question “Who is to blame?” (“Kto vinovat?,” as in the title of Herzen’s novel) would not come up so often in Russia if the answer were not so elusive. But the answer would not be so elusive if the individual person were more distinctly delineated from other persons or from the collective.
In the second half of the twentieth century the guilty individual continues to be elusive. When the post-Soviet Russian government tried to identify a culprit for some of the atrocities perpetrated during the Soviet period, the defendant in the courtroom was not an individual, but a collective, that is, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (imagine trying the Republican Party rather than, say, Caspar Weinberger or Oliver North for the Iran-Contra affair!). When on the front page of Moskovskie novosti in late 1990 Aleksandr Kabakov described a religious gathering on the notorious Lubianka Square, he referred to the location as a “symbol of our general inescapable guilt,” and declared that spiritual cleansing entails “the soul of the people [dusha narodnaia],” and not “just our individual souls.”112 When journalist Oleg Moroz criticized the Russian congress for not permitting a referendum early in 1993, he castigated everyone for having brought such a congress into existence. His rhetoric, moreover, was rather picturesque: “In the last analysis, we are all guilty of the fact that we are sitting up to our ears in shit [my vse sami povinny v tom, chto sidim po ushi v der’me].”113
In his 1973 essay “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn urged his countrymen to repent for their sins under Soviet rule. But in this work Solzhenitsyn did not so much name names as blame everyone generally, including himself:
No country in the twentieth century has suffered like ours, which within its own borders has destroyed as many as seventy million people over and above those lost in the world wars—no one in modern history has experienced such destruction. And it is true: it is painful to chide where one must pity. But repentance is always painful, otherwise it would have no moral value. These people were not the victims of flood or earthquake. There were innocent victims and guilty victims, but they would never have reached such a terrifying total if they had suffered only at the hands of others: we, all of us, Russia herself, were the necessary accomplices.114
Solzhenitsyn’s article is nothing less than a call for “general repentance” among Russians. Anticipating protests that certain individuals or groups of individuals (e.g., members of the secret police) might be more blameworthy than others, Solzhenitsyn holds his ground: “But we must all answer for everything [vse—za vsë].”115 Dostoevsky would certainly have agreed with this conflation of the innocent with the guilty. Better that everyone be slightly guilty than separate the truly guilty from the truly innocent. That way no one has to be very guilty. Better that everyone engage in the mild masochism of breast-beating than engage in sadistic revenge against real, specific criminals. In this essay Solzhenitsyn does not seem to understand that general repentance precludes real justice. One cannot hold a Nuremberg-style trial, one cannot bring genuine, individual criminals to justice by operating in an impractical fantasy world which blurs distinctions between individuals and the collective.116
But to return to Dostoevsky. When Dmitrii Karamazov asserted that “all are guilty for all,” he was failing to see boundaries within a Russian context. But such a failure need not happen only in such a context. In The Diary of a Writer, for example (particularly in the so-called “Pushkin Speech”), the ideal Russian is characterized as some kind of universal human being (“vsechelovek”). The boundary between Russian and non-Russian is itself questioned. In grandiose fashion Dostoevsky asserts that “among all nations the Russian soul [russkaia dusha], the genius of the Russian people is, perhaps, most apt to embrace the idea of the universal fellowship of man, of brotherly love.”117
According to Dostoevsky, the Russian national poet Aleksandr Pushkin is so great that he possesses “the faculty of completely reincarnating in himself an alien nationality.” Pushkin’s version of Don Juan seems utterly Spanish, A Feast During the Plague is perfectly in tune with “the genius of England,” and the Imitations of the Koran captures the very spirit of Mohammedanism (whereas Shakespeare’s Italians are “invariably Englishmen”).118 This alleged quality of Pushkin’s is, however, specifically Russian:
It is exactly in this that his national, Russian strength revealed itself most—the national character [narodnost’] of his poetry, the national spirit [narodnost’] in its future development, and the national spirit [narodnost’] in our future, which is concealed in that which is already present—and this has been prophetically revealed by Pushkin. For what else is the strength of the Russian national spirit [sila dukha russkoi narodnosti] than the aspiration, in its ultimate goal, for universality and all-embracing humanitarianism [ko vsemirnosti i ko vsechelo-vechnosti]?119
I have had to doctor up the translation a bit in order to capture the striking repetition of the Russian word “narodnost”’ (which derives from “narod,” “people” or “folk,” and is cognate with such words as “rodina,” “motherland” and “rodit’sia,” “to be born”). Dostoevsky’s grandiose idea of Pushkin seems inseparable from the Russian folk idea.
A little later in the same essay grandiosity takes the form of a reaching out to all of humankind by the Russian people:
Yes, the Russian’s destiny is incontestably all-European and universal. To become a genuine and all-round Russian means, perhaps (and this you should remember), to become brother of all men, a universal man [vsechelovekom], if you please. Oh, all this Slavophilism and this Westernism is a great, although historically inevitable, misunderstanding. To a genuine Russian, Europe and the destiny of the great Aryan race are as dear as Russia herself, as the fate of his native land [svoei rodnoi zemli], because our destiny is universality acquired not by the sword but by the force of brotherhood and our brotherly longing for fellowship of men.
I am speaking merely of the brotherhood of men and of the fact that the Russian heart is more adapted to universal, all-humanitarian brotherly fellowship than any other nation [iz vsekh narodov]. I perceive this in our history, in our gifted men, in the creative genius of Pushkin. Let our land be poor, but this destitute land “Christ, in a slave’s garb, has traversed, to and fro, with blessing.” Why shouldn’t we embrace His ultimate word? Wasn’t He Himself born [rodilsia] in a manger? I repeat: at least we are already in a position to point to Pushkin, to the universality and all-humanitarianism of his genius. For wasn’t he capable of embracing in his soul foreign geniuses as his own [kak rodnye]?120
The grandiosity exists despite the humble character of Russia and of Russians. The collective known as Russia is destitute (“nishchaia”), it has been visited and blessed by Christ “in a slave’s garb” (Dostoevsky is quoting the famous line from Tiutchev). Humble Russia has “served” Europe, and so on. All of these ideas have clear masochistic implications.