Mike's Reviews > Under Western Eyes

Published in 1911, Conrad’s Russia novel (or so I’ve decided to call it) seems to predict the Bolshevik Revolution. It begins with a young student of philosophy, Razumov, who returns to his flat one night to find a classmate, Victor Haldin, standing in his kitchen- or rather, in Conradian fashion, with an English narrator relating Razumov’s story, pieced together from Razumov’s diary and a few encounters with the man. Haldin, it turns out, has just assassinated a high-ranking Russian official, the repressive Minister of State, Mr. de P ---- (read: Vyacheslav von Plehve); Haldin and an accomplice lobbed bombs at de P ----‘s carriage from the side of a road. A few innocent bystanders, we’re told, were also killed. Haldin wants Razumov to help him organize his escape; they are not close friends, in fact they barely know each other, but Haldin, having noticed Razumov listening quietly to the other students’ discussions about the injustice of the Tsar and the autocracy, has inferred that Razumov shares his, Haldin’s, convictions. There is something a little unbelievable about this, especially when we learn how many sympathetic associates Haldin had; why not go to one of them? Furthermore, his entirely improvised getaway seems inconsistent with the meticulously planned assassination. But setting that aside, Haldin has inferred wrongly; Razumov, after searching his conscience (although who can with absolute certainty distinguish in one’s self moral choice from the fear of punishment?), makes the decision to go to the police. “Razum”, or “разум”, in Russian means “mind”, but Conrad renders Razumov’s decision almost as a darkly religious experience, particular to Russians:

In Russia, the land of spectral ideas and disembodied aspirations, many brave minds have turned away at last from the vain and endless conflict to the one great historical fact of the land. They turned to autocracy for the peace of their patriotic conscience as a weary unbeliever, touched by grace, turns to the faith of his fathers for the blessing of spiritual rest. Like other Russians before him, Razumov…felt the touch of grace upon his forehead.

Haldin is promptly arrested and hanged without trial. But the reader comes to understand what Razumov, consciously or not, knows immediately; from the moment Haldin appeared in his apartment, his life as he understood it was over. Sheltering Haldin would have drawn him into revolutionary activity, and he’d likely have shared the same fate. But reporting to the authorities, while simultaneously receiving the confidences of Haldin’s friends and associates (who, after Haldin’s execution, believe Razumov to be one of them), also places Razumov under the authorities’ suspicion- and insures that he will serve as their well-placed vassal. Soon enough he travels to Geneva, although it’s not clear whether he is acting as that vassal or as the person Haldin believed him to be. He meets a small group of Russian political exiles living in “little Russia”- the group is led by a Madame Blavatsky-like pseudo-occultist named Eleanora Maximovna de S---- and Peter Ivanovitch, the latter supposedly a great author and brilliant revolutionary. Razumov also meets Haldin’s young sister, Natalia, who is straight out of Dostoevsky: young, beautiful, intelligent, stoic, she believes Razumov is a trusted friend of her brother’s, the last to see him alive, and is the one character in the novel who seems to suggest hope for Russia’s future. “I believe that the future will be merciful to us all”, she tells Razumov. “Revolutionist and reactionary, victim and executioner, betrayer and betrayed, they shall all be pitied together when the light breaks on our dark sky at last.” 

The novel is prescient, but prescience often seems to involve just paying a reasonable amount of attention in the present. It probably would’ve been hard for Conrad not to: he was writing after the failed revolution of 1905 and during the social unrest that followed. Furthermore, both of his Polish parents, when he was a child, were persecuted by the Tsarist authorities for dissidence. It's probably safe to say that he never became too unfamiliar with events in Russia; and one of the main themes of the novel is the way autocracy affects ordinary people, perhaps like his parents, and forces them into moral conflict. “Whenever two Russians come together”, the English narrator (who nevertheless, we’re told, spent a few early years of his life in St. Petersburg, and is therefore, like Conrad, someone familiar with both the west and the east) says, “the shadow of autocracy is with them, tinging their thoughts, their views, their most intimate feelings, their private life, their public utterances- haunting the secret of their silences.” But if the autocracy is unjust, the revolutionaries as Conrad depicts them are grotesque and sadistic, tyrannical in their dealings with others; they’re as fit to be heads of government as Colonel Kurtz. So what’s the correct form of government? Well, that’s not Conrad’s job- he had a tragic view of life, and it seems to me in line with the sentiment expressed in his earlier novel, Nostromo: things may not be great, but revolution doesn’t really fix anything, and it might make things worse. As the narrator says,

...in a real revolution the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first...such are the chiefs and the leaders. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures...may begin a movement- but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims...

The book’s introduction calls Under Western Eyes a “response” to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It’s true that there are aspects of the book that seem like a satire and homage to Crime and Punishment and Dostoevsky in general- the main character’s name, the insouciance of language and emotion, the unlikely meetings and coincidences, the beautiful and suffering Russian woman who helps the main character find a form of redemption, the themes of political dissidence and revolution (Dostoevsky was once a young revolutionary as well, and nearly died for it), and even the strange quality (intentional, I'll claim, having read enough of Conrad now to see how he varied his style from book to book) that it seems to have been translated from Russian. 

Conrad is far from the first to suggest autocracy as a defining aspect of Russian life, and many have invoked it in a positive light. Count Sergei Uvarov, for example, in the early 19th century, proposed three pillars of Russian identity: autocracy, Orthodoxy and nationality. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov ultimately succumbs to his conscience and the beneficence of Orthodoxy; he vanquishes in himself the western ideas that allowed him to believe he had the moral right to take a life. In Under Western Eyes, the country’s true religion, the presence that people carry with them even in “the secrets of their silences” and eventually find peace in, is autocracy.