26

He was alone in the room, but in his mind, in his thoughts, he was talking to Anna Sergeyevna:

“Do you know? At the very worst times I used to imagine being embraced by a woman. I used to imagine this embrace as something so wonderful that it would make me forget everything I had been through. It would be as if none of it had ever happened. But it turns out that it’s you I have to talk to, that it’s you I have to tell about the very worst time of all. You yourself, after all, talked all through that night. Happiness, it turns out, will be to share with you the burden I can’t share with anyone else—the burden I can share only with you. When you come back from the hospital, I’ll tell you about that hardest hour. It was a conversation in a prison cell, at dawn, after an interrogation. One of my cell mates—he’s no longer alive, he died soon afterward—was called Aleksey Samoilovich. I think he was the most intelligent man I’ve ever met. But he frightened me, I found his mind very frightening. Not because it was evil—an evil mind is not really frightening. His mind wasn’t evil, but indifferent and mocking; he mocked faith. He appalled me but, more important, he also attracted me. It was as if I were being sucked in, and I could do nothing about it. I couldn’t make him share my faith in freedom.

“His life had gone badly for him, but then there was nothing particularly special about it. It was no different from the lives of many other people. He had been accused of spreading anti-Soviet propaganda—Article 58, Section 10, the most common accusation of all.

“But he had a powerful mind. The flow of his thoughts was like a great wave. Sometimes it would sweep me away. Sometimes I would tremble, as the earth can tremble when a wave breaks.

“I was brought back to my cell after being interrogated. What a list one could make of techniques of violence: burning at the stake, prisons, today’s prison fortresses the size of a provincial capital, and the labor camps themselves. The original instruments of capital punishment were a hemp rope and a club that crushed your head; nowadays, though, an executioner just turns on the master switch and does away with a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand people. There’s no need now to raise an ax. Our age is an age of supreme violence on the part of the State—supreme violence against the individual human being. But in this lies our strength and our hope. It is the twentieth century that has shaken Hegel’s principle of the rationality of the world historical process, of the rationality of everything that is real. After decades of troubled debate, nineteenth-century Russian thinkers came to accept this principle, but now, at the height of the State’s triumph over human freedom, Russian thinkers in padded camp jackets are overturning Hegel’s principle and proclaiming this supreme principle of universal history: ‘All that is inhuman is senseless and useless.’

“Yes, yes, yes, at this time of the total triumph of inhumanity it has become clear that everything created by violence is senseless and useless. It exists without a future; it will leave no trace.

“This is my faith, and with it I returned to my cell. And Aleksey Samoilovich said, as he often did, ‘Why try to defend freedom? Long ago it was indeed seen as the law of progress, the meaning of progress. Now, however, it’s entirely clear that there is no such thing as historical evolution. History is simply a molecular process. Man is always equal to himself, and there is nothing that can be done with him. There is no evolution. There is one very simple law, the law of the conservation of violence. It’s as simple as the law of the conservation of energy. Violence is eternal, no matter what is done to destroy it. It does not disappear or diminish; it can only change shape. It can be embodied in slavery, or in the Mongol invasion. It wanders from continent to continent. Sometimes it takes the form of class struggle, sometimes of race struggle. From the sphere of the material it slips into religiosity, as in the Middle Ages. Sometimes it is directed against colored people, sometimes against writers and artists, but, all in all, the total quantity of violence on earth remains constant. Thinkers mistake its constant chaotic transformations for evolution and search for its laws. But chaos knows no laws, no evolution, no meaning, and no aim. Gogol, our Russian genius, sang of a flying troika— and in the flight of this troika he saw Russia’s future. Russia’s future, however, turned out to lie not in Gogol’s troika of horses but in our faceless Soviet troikas: in the NKVD troikas that sentence men to be shot, in the village troikas that compiled lists of kulaks, in the troikas that expelled young people from universities, in the troikas that denied ration cards to an old woman they considered a “former” person.’

“There this man was, sitting on the bedboards, shaking an admonitory finger at Gogol: ‘You got it wrong, Nikolay Vasilyevich, you didn’t understand our Russian troika, you didn’t see it clearly enough. Human history is not a matter of flying troikas but of chaos, of the eternal transformation of one kind of violence into another. The troika flies, but everything round about is motionless and frozen. Man, above all, is motionless; his fate is motionless. Violence is eternal, no matter what is done to destroy it. And the troika flies on—and what does it care about Russian grief? And what does Russian grief care about the troika? What does Russian grief care whether the troika is flying or whether it’s come to a standstill?

“‘And in any case it’s not Gogol’s troika signing death warrants somewhere here in this building but our very own troika —our very own NKVD troika.’

“And I’m lying half dead on the bedboards, and the only thing alive in me is my faith: my belief that human history is the history of freedom, of the movement from less freedom to more freedom; my belief that the history of life—from the amoeba to the human race—is the history of freedom, of the movement from less freedom to more freedom; my belief that life itself is freedom. And this faith gives me strength, and I keep turning over in my mind a precious, luminous, and wonderful thought that has been hidden in our prison rags. As if with my hands, I keep exploring this thought: ‘All that is inhuman is senseless and useless.’

“Aleksey Samoilovich hears me out, half alive as I am, and says, ‘That’s just a comforting lie. The history of life is the history of violence triumphant. Violence is eternal and indestructible. It can change shape, but it does not disappear or diminish. Even the word “history,” even the concept of history is just something people have dreamed up. There’s no such thing as history. History is milling the wind; history is grinding water with a pestle and mortar. Man does not evolve from lower to higher. Man is as motionless as a slab of granite. His goodness, his intelligence, his degree of freedom are motionless; the humanity in humanity does not increase. What history of humanity can there be if man’s goodness always stands still?’

“And, you know, it felt as if nothing in the world can be worse than all this. I’m lying on the bedboards and, dear God, I start to feel an anguish that is more than I can bear—all from talking to one very clever man. It feels like death, like an execution. Even breathing feels more than I can bear. I want only one thing: not to see, not to hear, not to breathe. To die. But relief came from a quite unexpected direction. I was dragged off again to be interrogated. They didn’t give me time to get my breath back. And I felt better, I felt relieved. Freedom, I knew again, is inevitable. To hell with troikas that fly, thunder, and sign death warrants. Freedom and Russia will be united!

“You can’t hear me. When will you come back to me from the hospital?”

On a winter’s day Ivan Grigoryevich accompanied Anna Sergeyevna to the cemetery. He did not have the chance to share with her all that he had recalled, all that he had thought through, all that he had noted down during the months of her illness.

He took all her things to the village, spent a day with Alyosha, and returned to the workshop.