86. Berdiaev 1991, 177.
87. Ibid., 189.
88. Ibid., 177. Berdiaev mistakenly believes that his idea of freedom contradicts the traditional Russian idea of smirenie (he speaks of a “lozhnoe uchenie o smirenii”—ibid.).
89. Berdiaev 1990, 13.
90. Ibid., 17.
91. Ibid.
92. Berdiaev 1991, 209.
93. Ibid., 121.
94. Blok 1971, vol. 3, 178. As translated in Markov and Sparks 1967, 183.
95. Fellow bird-watchers please note that “korshun” is really a “kite,” but English “buzzard” comes closer to the menacing connotation of the Russian word.
96. Obukhova 1989. Another possible subtext for Blok’s poem is a poem by Ivan Savvich Nikitin (1824–61) about a falcon (“sokol”) which has been chained in the steppes of Rus’ for a thousand years, and which tears out its own breast in vexation (see Prokushev 1990, 31–32).
97. Nekrasov 1967, vol. 2, 144.
98. Freud, SE, vol. 21, 237.
99. See “Zagovor na ukroshchenie gneva rodimoi matushki” in Sakharov 1989 (1885), 50–51.
100. Obukhova comes close to this conclusion by means of religious imagery: “It is out of this that the personality of the Son striving for crucifixion began” (1989, 209).
101. Khomiakov 1955, 50.
102. My translation of Blok 1971, vol. 3, 208. Again, apologies to my ornithologist friends. The bird in question is an accipiter of some kind.
103. Dostoyevsky 1950, 617.
104. Ibid., 720; Dostoevskii 1972–88, vol. 15, 31.
105. See Browning 1989, 516.
106. Dostoyevsky 1950, 386; Dostoevskii 1972–88, vol. 14, 291–92.
107. Dostoyevsky 1950, 344; Dostoevskii 1972–88, vol. 14, 262.
108. The grandiose idea of bearing the guilt of others can apply temporally as well as spatially. In 1846 Khomiakov wrote a poem in which he asserted that Russians are responsible for, and should ask forgiveness for, the sins of their fathers (“Za temnye otsov deian’ia,” 1955, 61). In the twentieth century we have Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn saying essentially the same thing in his essay on repentance and self-limitation in the life of nations: “It is impossible to imagine a nation which throughout the course of its whole existence has no cause for repentance.” Or: “The nation is mystically welded together in a community of guilt, and its inescapable destiny is common repentance” (1976, 110, 112).
109. Browning 1989, 517.
110. Dal’ 1984, vol. 1, 315.
111. In Soviet politics such avoidance of responsibility was often referred to as “perestrakhovka,” which might be translated as “mutually playing safe.”
112. Kabakov 1990, 1, italics added.
113. Moroz 1993, 2.
114. Solzhenitsyn 1976, 118; Solzhenitsyn 1978-, vol. 9, 57.
115. Solzhenitsyn 1976, 132; Solzhenitsyn 1978-, vol. 9, 69.
116. In his recent essay Rebuilding Russia (1990) Solzhenitsyn gets more practical. He calls for “public repentance” from the Party, but he also notes that no one among the “former toadies of Brezhnevism” has expressed “personal repentance” (italics Solzhenitsyn’s). He also laments the fact that specific criminals such as Molotov and Kaganovich (the latter still alive at the time) had not been brought to justice (1991 [1990], 49–51).
In the late Soviet period calls for repentance, or outright acts of public repentance became common. The distinguished Russian philologist Dmitrii Likhachev, for example, declared that all Soviet citizens were responsible for not resisting their leaders, and should therefore repent. The prominent economist Oleg Bogomolov, in a 1990 article titled “I Cannot Absolve Myself from Guilt” castigated himself for failing to speak out against abuses under Brezhnev (see Teague 1990).
It seems to me that those who engage in loud cries of repentance are precisely the ones who need least to repent. Such breast-beating is masochistic in nature, and is not in character with the sadism required of a real murderer. A Solzhenitsyn will repent, but not a Molotov or a Kaganovich.
117. Dostoievsky 1949, vol. 2, 962; Dostoevskii 1972–88, vol. 26, 131.
118. Dostoievsky 1949, vol. 2, 977.
119. Ibid., 978–79; Dostoevskii 1972–88, vol. 26, 147.
120. Dostoievsky 1949, vol. 2, 979, 980; Dostoevskii 1972–88, vol. 26, 147, 148.
121. Quoted by Dostoevskii 1972–88, vol. 26, 139, translation in Dostoievsky 1949, vol. 2, 970.
122. Dostoievsky 1949, vol. 2, 970; Dostoevskii 1972–88, vol. 26, 139.
123. See Levitt 1989, 122–46.
124. Dostoievsky 1949, vol. 2, 970; Dostoevskii 1972–88, vol. 26, 139.
125. Cf. Fasmer 1986–87, vol. 2, 45, 490–93, and Townsend 1968, 251, on the linguistic aspects of this root morpheme. We should perhaps also keep in mind the ancient East Slavic pagan fertility figures of Rod and Rozhanitsa (cf. Ivanits 1989, 14–15; Fedotov 1975, vol. 1, 348–51; Hubbs 1988, 15, 81). Young (1979, 83–84) gives an interesting discussion of the use of -rod- words in Fedorov’s philosophy. Kathleen Parthé (1992, 8–9) finds that -rod- words play an important role in Russian Village Prose of the 1960s and 1970s.
126. Dostoevskii 1972–88, vol. 26, 143, 144.
127. Dostoievsky 1949, vol. 2, 968–70; Dostoevskii 1972–88, vol. 26, 137–39.
128. Cf. the maternal association in Nikolai Nekrasov’s lines “…Tseluias’s mater’iu-zemleiu, / Kolos’ia beskonechnykh niv” (Nekrasov 1967, vol. 2, 13).
129. E.g., Aksakov 1861–80, vol. 1, 298.
130. See, for example: Chances 1978, chap. 4; Dowler 1982. The focus on a fruitful womb in the form of “pochva” (soil), “zemlia” (land), “lono” (bosom), etc. is also characteristic of today’s village-prose writers in Russia, such as Vasilii Belov and Valentin Rasputin, as Natal’ia Ivanova has recently observed in a controversial article (1992, 200).
131. Breger has offered an interesting explanation for Dostoevsky’s emotionalism about Pushkin in the Diary. It happens that Pushkin died about the same time that Dostoevsky’s mother died. Dostoevsky would thus have been mourning these two deaths simultaneously. Later on, in Breger’s view, Pushkin’s “idealized love for his mother was displaced onto Pushkin” (1989, 60). All the more reason, then, to expect covert maternal imagery in the Pushkin passages of the Diary.
Breger also believes that Dostoevsky’s idealization of the Russian people is a remnant of his idealization of his mother (e.g., 150). But Breger does not concern himself with the masochistic aspects of this problem, nor does he adduce intrinsic evidence for maternal imagery from the original Russian text.
132. Worobec 1991, 6.
133. Ibid., 19.
134. Dostoievsky 1949, vol. 1, 204; Dostoevskii 1972–88, vol. 22, 45.
135. Dostoevskii 1972–88, vol. 22, 48–49.
136. See Rice 1989; Breger 1989, 150.
137. There is much else of psychoanalytic interest in this episode. See, for example: Rice 1989; Rosen 1993, 423–25.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 10
1. For a detailed study of apocalypticism in modern Russian fiction, see Bethea 1989.
2. Berdiaev 1968 (1921), 230.
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