A Desperate Character | Page 2

us again one of those ragged ones, one
of 'the poor in spirit,' the idealist Punin, a character whose portrait
challenges Dostoievsky's skill on the latter's own ground. That
delicious Punin! and that terrible grandmother's scene with Baburin!
How absolutely Slav is the blending of irony and kindness in the
treatment of Punin, Cucumber, and Pyetushkov, few English readers
will understand. All the characters in Punin and Baburin are so
strongly drawn, so intensely alive, that, like Rembrandt's portraits, they
make the living people, who stand looking at them, absurdly grey and
lifeless by comparison! Baburin is a Nihilist before the times of
Nihilism, he is a type of the strong characters that arose later in the
movement of the 'eighties.'
A pre-Nihilistic type is also the character of Sophie in A Strange Story.
But the chief value of this last psychological study is that it gives the
English mind a clue to the fundamental distinction that marks off the
Russian people from the peoples of the West. Sophie's words--'You
spoke of the will--that's what must be broken' (p. 61)--define most
admirably the deepest aspiration of the Russian soul. To be lowly and
suffering, to be despised, sick, to be under the lash of fate, to be
trampled under foot by others, to be unworthy, all this secret desire of
the Russian soul implies that the Russian has little will, that he finds it
easier to resign himself than to make the effort to be powerful,
triumphant, worthy. It is from the resignation and softness of the
Russian nature that all its characteristic virtues spring. Whereas religion
with the English mind is largely an anxiety to be moral, to be right and
righteous, to be 'a chosen vessel of the Lord,' religion with the Russian
implies a genuine abasement and loss of self, a bowing before the will
of Heaven, and true brotherly love. The Western mind rises to greatness
by concentrating the will-power in action, by assertion of all its inner
force, by shutting out forcibly whatever might dominate or distract or
weaken it. But the Russian mind, through its lack of character,

will-power, and hardness, rises to greatness in its acceptance of life,
and in its sympathy with all the unfortunate, the wretched, the poor in
spirit. Of course in practical life the Russian lacks many of the useful
virtues the Western peoples possess and has most of their vices; but
certainly his pity, charity, and brotherliness towards men more
unfortunate than himself largely spring from his fatalistic acceptance of
his own unworthiness and weakness. So in Sophie's case the desire for
self-sacrifice, and her impregnable conviction that to suffer and endure
is right, is truly Russian in the sense of letting the individuality go with
the stream of fate, not against it. And hence the formidable spirit of the
youthful generation that sacrificed itself in the Nihilistic movement: the
strenuous action of 'the youth' once set in movement, the spirit of
self-sacrifice impelled it calmly towards its goal despite all the forces
and threats of fate. Sophie is indeed an early Nihilist born before her
time.
We have said that the lack of will in the Russian nature is at the root of
Russian virtues and vices, and in this connection it is curious to remark
that a race's soul seems often to grow out of the race's aspiration
towards what it is not in life. Is not the French intellect, for example, so
cool, clear-headed, so delicately analytic of its own motives, that
through the principle of counterpoise it strives to lose itself and release
itself in continual rhetoric and emotional positions? Is not the German
mind so alive to the material facts of life, to the necessity of getting
hold of concrete advantages in life, and of not letting them go, that it
deliberately slackens the bent bow, and plunges itself and relaxes itself
in floods of abstractions, and idealisations, and dreams of
sentimentality? Assuredly it is because the Russian is so inwardly
discontented with his own actions that he is such a keen and incisive
critic of everything false and exaggerated, that he despises all French
rhetoric and German sentimentalism. And in this sense it is that the
Russian's lack of will comes in to deepen his soul. He surrenders
himself thereby to the universe, and, as do the Asiatics, does not let the
tiny shadow of his fate, dark though it may be, shut out the universe so
thoroughly from his consciousness, as does the aggressive struggling
will-power of the Western man striving to let his individuality have full
play. The Russian's attitude may indeed be compared to a bowl which

catches and sustains what life brings it; and the Western man's to a
bowl inverted to ward off what drops from the impassive skies.