There are not many of them, of these refugees from Sovietdom. A small group of people with nothing in common; a small motley herd huddled by the cliff’s edge before the final leap. Creatures of different breeds and with coats of different colours, entirely alien to one another, with natures that have perhaps always been mutually antagonistic, they have wandered off together and collectively refer to themselves as “we”. They have wandered off for no purpose, for no reason. Why?
The legend of the country of the Gadarenes comes to mind. Men possessed by demons came out from among the tombs, and Christ healed them by driving the demons into a herd of swine, and the swine plunged from a cliff and drowned.
Herds of a single animal are rare in the East. More often they are mixed. And in the herd of Gadarene swine there were evidently some meek, frightened sheep. Seeing the crazed swine hurtling along, these sheep took to their heels too.
“Is that our lot?”
“Yes, they’re running for it!”
And the meek sheep plunged down after the swine and they all perished together.
Had dialogue been possible in the course of this mad dash, it might have resembled what we’ve been hearing so often in recent days:
“Why are we running?” ask the meek.
“Everyone’s running.”
“Where are we running to?”
“Wherever everyone else is running.”
“What are we doing with them? They’re not our kind of people. We shouldn’t be here with them. Maybe we ought to have stayed where we were. Where the men possessed by demons were coming out from the tombs. What are we doing? We’ve lost our way, we don’t know what we’re…”
But the swine running alongside them know very well what they’re doing. They egg the meek on, grunting “Culture! We’re running towards culture! We’ve got money sewn into the soles of our shoes. We’ve got diamonds stuck up our noses. Culture! Culture! Yes, we must save our culture!”
They hurtle on. Still on the run, they speculate. They buy up, they buy back, they sell on. They peddle rumours. The fleshy disc at the end of a pig’s snout may only look like a five-kopek coin, but the swine are selling them now for a hundred roubles.
“Culture! We’re saving culture! For the sake of culture!”
“How very strange!” say the meek. “‘Culture’ is our kind of word. It’s a word we use ourselves. But now it sounds all wrong. Who is it you’re running away from?”
“The Bolsheviks.”
“How very strange!” the meek say sadly. “Because we’re running away from the Bolsheviks, too.”
If the swine are fleeing the Bolsheviks, then it seems that the meek should have stayed behind.
But they’re in headlong flight. There’s no time to think anything through.
They are indeed all running away from the Bolsheviks. But the crazed swine are escaping from Bolshevik truth, from socialist principles, from equality and justice, while the meek and frightened are escaping from untruth, from Bolshevism’s black reality, from terror, injustice and violence.
“What was there for me to do back there?” asks one of the meek. “I’m a professor of international law. I could only have died of hunger.”
Indeed, what is there for a professor of international law to do — a man whose professional concern is the inviolability of principles that no longer exist? What use is he now? All he can do is give off an air of international law. And now he’s on the run. During the brief stops he hurries about, trying to find someone in need of his international law. Sometimes he even finds a bit of work and manages to give a few lectures. But then the crazed swine break loose and sweep him along behind them.
“We have to run. Everyone is running.”
Out-of-work lawyers, journalists, artists, actors and public figures — they’re all on the run.
“Maybe we should have stayed behind and fought?”
Fought? But how? Make wonderful speeches when there’s no one to hear them? Write powerful articles that there’s nowhere to publish?
“And who should we have fought against?”
Should an impassioned knight enter into combat with a windmill, then — and please remember this — the windmill will always win. Even though this certainly does not mean — and please remember this too — that the windmill is right.
They’re running. They’re in torment, full of doubt, and they’re on the run.
Alongside them, grunting and snorting and not doubting anything, are the speculators, former gendarmes, former Black Hundreds and a variety of other former scoundrels. Former though they may be, these groups retain their particularities.
There are heroic natures who stride joyfully and passionately through blood and fire towards — ta-rum-pum-pum! — a new life!
And there are tender natures who are willing, with no less joy and no less passion, to sacrifice their lives for what is most wonderful and unique, but without the ta-rum-pum-pum. With a prayer rather than a drum roll.
Wild screams and bloodshed extinguish all light and colour from their souls. Their energy fades and their resources vanish. The rivulet of blood glimpsed in the morning at the gates of the commissariat, a rivulet creeping slowly across the pavement, cuts across the road of life for ever. It’s impossible to step over it.
It’s impossible to go any further. Impossible to do anything but turn and run.
And so these tender natures run.
The rivulet of blood has cut them off for ever, and they shall never return.
Then there are the more everyday people, those who are neither good nor bad but entirely average, the all-too-real people who make up the bulk of what we call humanity. The ones for whom science and art, comfort and culture, religion and laws were created. Neither heroes nor scoundrels — in a word, just plain, ordinary people.
To exist without the everyday, to hang in the air without any familiar footing — with no sure, firm earthly footing — is something only heroes and madmen can do.
A “normal person” needs the trappings of life, life’s earthly flesh — that is, the everyday.
Where there’s no religion, no law, no conventions, no settled routine (even if only the routine of a prison or a penal camp), an ordinary, everyday person cannot exist.
At first he’ll try to adapt. Deprived of his breakfast roll, he’ll eat bread; deprived of bread, he’ll settle for husks full of grit; deprived of husks, he’ll eat rotten herring — but he’ll eat all of this with the same look on his face and the same attitude as if he were eating his usual breakfast roll.
But what if there’s nothing to eat at all? He loses his way, his light fades, the colours of life turn pale for him.
Now and then there’s a brief flicker from some tremulous beam of light.
“Apparently they take bribes too! Did you know? Have you heard?”
The happy news takes wing, travelling by word of mouth — a promise of life, like “Christ is Risen!”
Bribery! The everyday, the routine, a way of life we know as our own! Something earthly and solid!
But bribery alone does not allow you to settle down and thrive.
You must run. In pursuit of your daily bread in the biblical sense of the word: food, clothing, shelter, and labour that provides these things and law that protects them.
Children must acquire the knowledge needed for work, and people of mature years must apply this knowledge to the business of everyday life.
So it has always been, and it cannot of course be otherwise.
There are heady days in the history of nations — days that have to be lived through, but that one can’t go on living in for ever.
“Enough carousing — time to get down to work.”
Does this mean, then, that we have to do things in some new way? What time should we go to work? What time should we have lunch? Which school should we prepare the children for? We’re ordinary people, the levers, belts, screws, wheels and drives of a vast machine, we’re the core, the very thick of humanity — what do you want us to do?
“We want you to do all manner of foolish things. Instead of screws we’ll have belts, we’ll use belts to screw in nuts. And levers instead of wheels. And a wheel will do the job of a belt. Impossible? Outdated prejudice! At the sharp end of a bayonet, nothing is impossible. A theology professor can bake gingerbread and a porter give lectures on aesthetics. A surgeon can sweep the street and a laundress preside over the courtroom.”
“We’re afraid! We can’t do it, we don’t know how. A porter lecturing on aesthetics may believe in the value of what he is doing, but a professor baking gingerbread knows only too well that his gingerbread may be anything under the sun — but it certainly isn’t gingerbread.”
Take to your heels! Run!
Somewhere over there… in Kiev… in Yekaterinburg… in Odessa… some place where children are studying and people are working, it’ll still be possible to live a little… For the time being.
And so on they run.
But they are few and they are becoming fewer still. They’re growing weak, falling by the wayside. They’re running after a way of life that is itself on the run.
And now that the motley herd has wandered onto the Gadarene cliff for its final leap, we can see how very small it is. It could be gathered up into some little ark and sent out to sea. But there the seven unclean pairs would devour the seven clean pairs and then die of overeating.8
And the souls of the clean would weep over the dead ark:
“It grieves us to have suffered the same fate as the unclean, to have died together with them on the ark.”
Yes, my dears. There’s not much you can do about it. You’ll all die together. Some from eating, some from being eaten. But “impartial history” will make no distinction. You will all be numbered together.
“And the entire herd plunged from the cliff and drowned.”
Translated from Russian by Anne Marie Jackson
8 A slightly inaccurate reference to a passage in Genesis, where God tells Noah, “Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and the female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and the female.”