The Flight From Reality: 21. The Bent to Destruction

Dr. Carson is Professor of American History at Grove City College, Pennsylvania. Among his earlier writings in THE FREEMAN were his series on The Fateful Turn and The American Tradition, both of which are now available as books.

The Lorelei is a rock with an un­usual echo, in the Rhine River near St. Goar. There is an old legend surrounding the sounds emitted from this rock: the Song of the Lorelei. The legend is to the effect that a maiden who had been betrayed by a faithless lover threw herself into the river. She was turned into a siren, and her song has since that time lured fishermen to their destruction against the rock. There is a con­nection between this tale and the myth of Holda, the queen of the elves. The man who beholds Holda loses sight of reason. If he listens to her, he is compelled to wander with her forever.

This legend provides a kind of parable for our era. And it is ap­propriate at this point in the ac­count to turn to story, legend, and myth. Rational analysis of the data of history can provide us with a great deal of information and ex­planation about how we came to be where we are at present. Yet, reason and evidence are inade­quate to the task; at least, the facts which this writer has in hand and his reason are inade­quate to the task of describing the movement toward the triumph of reformism in America. Much as has been told, there is more that has not, or has been touched upon only lightly. Many aspects of the development and spread of ideas and methods of reform have not been described. Yet, the time has come to bring this aspect of the story to an end. This requires a summary that will hold the movement up whole and grasp its char­acter. We still want to know why reformers have been so deter­minedly attached to their effort, even in the face of the near obvi­ous contradictions involved. For grasping things whole, reason is the wrong instrument. It proceeds by taking things apart, not by wholes. The nearest man comes to talking about things whole is by way of parable, story, poem, leg­end, and myth. Men have ever had a penchant for these tools of sim­plicity by which to see things whole, even though such accounts lack precision.

The Vision of Utopia

The song of the siren, the lure which has led reformers on and the lure they have held out to others, has been the vision of the good society they would create for the future. It has been a vision of peace, plenty, and progress, of a time when all struggle and tension would be removed from this world, when felicity and goodness would reign without end. The vision, fabricated by utopians, embedded in an historical eschatology by ideologues, rendered into a kind of idealism by philosophers, de­scribed in glowing terms for the vulgar by politicians, finally has become a mirage which men see just before their eyes. The vision has such powers of attraction that before it men do indeed lose sight of reason and wander hither and yon over the face of the earth seeking devices to fulfill it.

The rock upon which the re­formers are continually ship­wrecked is, above all, human na­ture and the nature of the uni­verse. The projections from the rock may be described in many ways, however. They are the at­tempts to apply force to the ac­complishment of ends which can only be achieved by willing con­sent. They are the tendencies to concentrate power and to leave it unchecked in the hands of men. They are the treatment of men as if they were things.

But why, it may be asked, if the boats launched by reformers are one after another and time and again foundering upon the same rock, are markers not placed around the rock and why do not pilots take care to avoid it? We know, of course, from earlier ex­position that reformers have cut themselves off from their experi­ence; they have deactivated his­tory. But the answer runs deeper than this. The answer will not be believed at first, for it appears in­credible. The reformers will the destruction: part of it intentionally, part of it unintentionally through the methods that they employ.

The reformist effort does found­er upon the rock of human nature, but that is only part of the story. Reformism appeals to something deep and enduring in human na­ture. Reformism appeals to the desire to destroy, the desire to build or reconstruct, and the will to power. (The latter — the will to power — will not be discussed at this point in the account.) Thus far, the story of the flight from reality has been told largely in terms of the vision of a recon­structed society which has lured men on. Destruction, however, is what we encounter when we follow the trail left by reformers. In the wake of reformers we find customs and traditions trampled upon, sacred beliefs gutted and lifeless, institutions toppled, constitutions rifled, the wreck and ruin of econ­omies, and the lives of peoples in disarray because of the dissolu­tion of moral codes.

These things are justified in the ethos of the reformer, for the de­struction is claimed to be the nec­essary clearing away of the rubble that must precede the reconstruc­tion. That they are destroying when they claim to be building also is not clear to them. My point here is that destruction is not simply a device for getting rid of the old, not merely an unintended consequence of the methods em­ployed and the ends sought, but part and parcel of the appeal of the reformist effort.

Civilizing Inhibitions and the Urge to Destroy

I suspect that each of us has within his breast a desire to wreck, to plunder, to lay waste, to make havoc — in a word, to destroy. It may be tamed by civilization, be held in abeyance by the threat of punishment, be inactivated by the Grace of God, but it is nonetheless there. Some find innocuous ways for it to come out. They follow the fire trucks to the scene of the fire to watch the building burn. They line the highway in the vi­cinity of a collision of automobiles in order to view the wreckage. They stand on the sidewalks and peer up at the work of men who have been employed to wreck old buildings. Other men find more subtle ways to express their urge to destroy. They defame men, denigrate con­ventions, make wisecracks, write satires, hold up to scorn, sneer at, and make fun of things held sa­cred by others. When civilizing in­hibitions are removed, the bent to destruction in men comes out ever more violently, as those who have participated in wars may testify.

Reformism (and its more le­thal companion, revolution) fo­cuses attention upon and sanctions destruction in an area that is par­ticularly rewarding for the release of the bent to destruction. It sanc­tions as assault upon civilization itself. Every person of any spirit and initiative must have felt the galling burden of customs, of tra­ditions, of rules, of regulations, of the mysterious imperatives of an adult world when he was grow­ing up. Many surely have resented the restrictions that private prop­erty represent, the limitations that the rights of others impose upon them, the hardness of the disci­pline imposed upon them by hav­ing to learn the structure of the language, the workings of mathe­matics, and the lessons of history. Any healthy child surely can think of more exciting things to do than sit in a church or a schoolroom. The young child knows only the order that is exemplified and im­posed upon him by adults. This order will seem arbitrary and capricious to him quite often; he would not be equipped to under­stand it if it were explained to him, and the adults who accept the order often have not thought it out themselves. The child does not even know his own nature, much less that of the universe; in­stead, he feels his impulses strong­ly and hardly understands why he cannot follow their promptings.

The resentment of and resis­tance to the restraints of civiliza­tion usually reaches its peak in adolescence when the youth is be­ing pressed into the role of man­hood. He must learn to subdue his impulses himself, must undergo the disciplinary rigors of learning to do some job, must prepare him­self for the responsibilities that attend being an adult. Ahead of him looms the routine and order into which the lives of men must fall if they are to be effective.

Reformist Appeals to the Adolescent in Man

The reformer (or revolutionary, as the case may be) offers a most attractive alternative to this pro­saic ordering of one’s life. He holds out the prospect of casting off the galling restrictions, leav­ing behind the authority of the past, having done with that which hampers and restrains the full and free development of personal­ity. He offers a license to the ad­olescent — and some of the adoles­cent remains in men — to lash out and destroy the appurtenances of civilization which have so often set unwanted bounds to his activi­ties. More, when he has destroyed the old, he can build a new so­ciety in keeping with his wishes. Thus does the reformer conjure up a prospect that appeals both to the delinquent and the construc­tive in us. We have been studying the development of a mental out­look which, when accepted, per­petuates this moment of adoles­cence throughout life and within which the vision of the reformer appears attainable.

Turgenev Points the Problem

The bent to destruction of re­formist intellectuals was pinned down and imaginatively portrayed by Russian novelists in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It is ironic, in view of later develop­ments, that it should have been Russians who saw with such lumi­nous clarity the nature of the ill that was even then becoming epi­demic among intellectuals. The bent to destruction reaches its in­tellectual epitome in a nonphiloso­phy called nihilism. Ivan Turge­nev laid bare this particular view­point in 1862 in the novel, Fathers and Children (also called, some­times, Fathers and Sons). It is a novel of ideas, but it is not simply a novel of ideas. Turgenev tells an engrossing story with characters who come alive on the pages of the novel.

The novelist takes for his theme a universal condition: the differ­ences between the older and young­er generations and the conflicts that arise from them. But it is particularized as to time, place, and people. The setting is in the provinces of Russia, and the time is past the mid-point of the nine­teenth century. The parents are landlords and would-be liberals of the nineteenth century variety. They would have their sons believe that they believe in and practice the new ways. Both fathers in­volved are eager to hold on to the affections of their sons, anxious to please them, and cautious about doing or saying anything that might alienate them. Yet they are men of tradition, also; their lib­eralism has not cut them off from their past. It has only made them uncertain about taking a stand against any change or any new viewpoint.

The sons are home for the sum­mer from college. There are two families involved in the story, the Kirsanovs and Bazarovs. Young Kirsanov has just graduated from college. Bazarov is a young physi­cian who has not yet completed his work at the university. Baza­rov is the nihilist, and, when the story begins, Kirsanov is his wor­shipful disciple. Bazarov is a veri­table bull in the delicate china shop of human relations. He proudly proclaims in the presence of the elder Kirsanovs that he is a nihilist, or rather young Kir­sanov does for him.

"A nihilist," said Nikolai Petro­vich [Kirsanov, the father]. "That comes from the Latin nihil, nothing, as far as I can judge; the word must mean a man who… recognizes noth­ing?"

"Say — who respects nothing," in­terposed Pavel Petrovich [Kirsanov, an uncle] and lowered his knife with the butter on it.

"Who regards everything from the critical point of view," said Arkady [young Kirsanov].

"Isn’t that exactly the same thing?" asked Pavel Petrovich. "No, it’s not the same thing. A ni­hilist is a person who does not bow down to any authority, who does not accept any principle on faith, how­ever much that principle may be revered."¹

Bazarov takes up the delinea­tion of his view a little farther on in the story.

"A decent chemist is twenty times more useful than any poet," inter­rupted Bazarov.

"Oh, indeed!" remarked Pavel Petrovich…. "So you don’t acknowl­edge art?"

"The art of making money or of advertising pills!" cried Bazarov, with a contemptuous laugh.

"Ah, just so; you like joking, I see. So you reject all that. Very well. So you believe in science only?"

"I have already explained to you that I don’t believe in anything; and what is science — science in the ab­stract? There are sciences, as there are trades and professions, but ab­stract science just doesn’t exist."2

Elsewhere, Bazarov explains his position more fully.

"We act by virtue of what we rec­ognize as useful," went on Bazarov. "At present the most useful thing is denial, so we deny —"

"Everything."

"What? Not only art, poetry… but… the thought is appalling…" "Everything," repeated Bazarov with indescribable composure….

"But allow me," began Nikolai Petrovich. "You deny everything, or to put it more precisely, you destroy everything… But one must con­struct, too, you know."

"That is not our business… we must first clear the ground."3

The Object Is Reform

We learn eventually, however, that nihilism does have a func­tion; it is preparing the way for reform. This time the conversa­tion is between Bazarov and a wo­man. Bazarov has been maintain­ing that all people are essentially alike, that significant differences are the product of disease or poor education. He continues:

"… We know more or less what causes physical ailments; but moral diseases are caused by bad educa­tion, by all the rubbish with which people’s heads are stuffed from child­hood onwards, in short, by the dis­ordered state of society. Reform so­ciety, and there will be no diseases.

"And you suppose," said Anna Sergeyevna, "that when society is reformed there will be no longer any stupid or wicked people?"

"At any rate, in a properly organized society it will make no dif­ference whether a man is stupid or clever, bad or good."

"Yes, I understand. They will all have the same spleen."

"Exactly, madam."4

Bazarov’s stance is that of a god. He views all beings as ob­jects. Even human beings are ob­jects to be studied and discerned just as all other objects. The dif­ferences between men and frogs are unessential to him. He makes this clear in a conversation with peasants while he is hunting frogs for his experiments.

"What do you want frogs for, sir?" asked one of the boys.

"I’ll tell you what for," answered Bazarov…; "I shall cut the frog open to see what goes on inside him, and then, as you and I are much the same as frogs except that we walk on legs, I shall learn what is going on inside us as well."5

Bazarov makes it clear in other connections that this is to be tak­en literally. What goes on inside people is either physical or it is of the nature of illusion. Faith is an illusion. Principles are only il­lusions. Even the sentiment of love is an illusion; it is all a matter of sex, which is all a matter of physi­ology. It follows from this that human beings are to be studied, manipulated, and made to con­form to the correct pattern as are other things. Such are the prem­ises from which melioristic re­form (as well as revolution) must proceed. Sociology is the instru­ment for studying the ills of so­ciety and correcting them just as medicine is that for studying the body (though Bazarov does not say so). The god-like stance of Bazarov, the clinical attitude, the lack of emotion, the treating of all beings as objects, the absence of all values (except for the ulti­mate one of a reconstructed so­ciety), the use of nature in the existential sense as a model, are the appropriate tools for the so­cial reformer.

Mortal, After All

But Bazarov was not a god, any more than other men are. Arkady Kirsanov assured Bazaroy’s father that his son would be a great man some day. Not in medicine, most likely, but in some broader field where his talents would have full play. Perhaps in government ser­vice, who knows? None of this was to be. Even before the end, there are many intimations that Baza­rov is only a man, culture bound and limited, moved by those pas­sions that spring from the deeper nature of man, living in a universe that is not fundamentally altered by genius and talent. Although his ideas would place him above such things, Bazarov fought a duel with Arkady Kirsanov’s uncle. Nor did he evade the fate of most hu­mans; he fell in love, blindly, ir­rationally, and passionately. Even in his relations with his parents, he showed more sensitivity than his ideas would warrant. To the extent that he falls short of living up to his ideas he becomes under­standable and almost a character with whom we can sympathize.

Bazarov dies at the end of the book. He dies young, even in that same fateful summer away from the university. The cause and man­ner of his death are prosaic enough. He has assisted a physi­cian in performing an autopsy on a typhus case. In so doing, he cut himself, and the medical instru­ments were filthy enough if they had not been employed on the mat­ter in hand. In consequence, he gets blood poisoning and dies. There is nothing out of the ordi­nary in all this. After all, Bazarov was a physician, a man of medi­cine, a student, and might be ex­pected to avail himself of any op­portunity to advance his skill. He had not, as he explains, had an oc­casion to open up a man before. Yet all of these details are joined to the main theme and bring it to its appropriate conclusion. There is no civilized act that more aptly demonstrates the treatmentof the human body as an object than the performing of an autop­sy. There is no more common in­stance nor better illustration of human weakness than of a man cutting himself with a sharp in­strument. The god-like Bazarov had succumbed to this weakness in the very area of his specializa­tion. Nature makes no exceptions even for a Bazarov; germs enter a cut in his flesh and blood poison­ing follows its course in him as for other men.

The skill of physicians cannot aid him in the end. He does re­ceive solace in his last waking moments from the one he has loved, for she has come to be with him. The concluding conversation leaves little doubt of the author’s point. Bazarov is speaking:

"Ah, Anna Sergeyevna, let’s speak the truth. It’s all over with me. I’ve fallen under the wheel…."

"…You see, what a hideous spec­tacle, a worm, half-crushed, but writhing still. Of course I also thought, I’ll break down so many things, I won’t die, why should I? There are problems for me to solve, and I’m a giant! And now the only problem of this giant is how to die decently, though that too makes no difference to anyone…."

And, at last,

"Good-by," he said with sudden force, and his eyes flashed with a parting gleam. "Good-by… Listen

… you know I never kissed you then…. Breathe on the dying lamp and let it go out."

Anna Sergeyevna touched his fore­head with her lips.

"Enough," he murmered, and fell back on the pillow. "And now… darkness…"6

The giant had fallen; the god was dead.

"Crime and Punishment"

Fyodor Dostoevsky, another and more famous Russian novelist, il­lustrated the destructiveness and futility of the reformer in another way. He probably wrote more nov­els exploring the psyche of the re­former and revolutionary than has any other writer. But the par­ticular novel to which I would re­fer is Crime and Punishment. The main character of the story is a student (or a former student, for he had dropped out of school) by the name of Raskolnikov. One of the main ideas which the novel ex­plores is the possibility of doing good by first doing evil. (This is surely the central ethical problem for social reformers and revolu­tionaries, however much it may be obscured by subtleties.) The story, of course, is about a murder and a murderer; the murderer is Ras­kolnikov.

In the course of the novel, he murders an old woman, a pawnbroker. But before this occurs, while the idea is just taking shape in his mind, he overhears a stu­dent and a young officer discus­sing the justice of the murder of this old woman. They talk about how wealthy she is, how she gives her patrons only a small portion of the value of their articles, and how she sells them for many times what she has paid for them. Not only that but she has a half-sister, a much younger woman, who lives with her and whom she treats like a servant. Not only does the half-sister work for the old pawnbroker but she cooks, washes, sews, and serves as a charwoman for her. The pawnbroker already has made a will; its contents are known to the half-sister, who virtually has been disinherited. The bulk of the woman’s wealth is to go to a mon­astery to pay the monks to pray for her. All of this prompts the student to remark that he "could kill that damned old woman and make off with her money, I as­sure you, without the faintest con­science-prick."

They then discuss the matter more seriously.

"Listen, I want to ask you a seri­ous question," the student said hotly. "I was joking of course, but look here; on one side we have a stupid, senseless, worthless, spiteful, ailing, horrid old woman, not simply useless but doing actual mischief, who has not an idea what she is living for herself, and who will die in a day or two in any case….

"Well, listen then. On the other side, fresh young lives thrown away for want of help and by thousands, on every side! A hundred thousand good deeds could be done and helped, on that old woman’s money which will be buried in a monastery! Hun­dreds, thousands perhaps, might be set on the right path; dozens of fam­ilies saved from destitution, from ruin, from vice, from the Lock hos­pitals — and all with her money. Kill her, take her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the ser­vice of humanity and the good of all. What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? For one life thou­sands would be saved from corrup­tion and decay. One death, and a hundred lives in exchange — it’s sim­ple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life, of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence! No more than the life of a louse, of a black beetle, less in fact because the old woman is doing harm. She is wearing out the lives of others…

The officer agrees that the wo­man does not deserve to live, but, then, he announces, somewhat am­biguously, that her living is a mat­ter of nature, that, in effect, there is nothing to be done about it. The student will take no such answer. He says,

"Oh, well, brother, but we have to correct and direct nature, and, but for that, we should drown in an ocean of prejudice…."

The officer has had enough of abstractions and so he puts the obvious question:

"You are talking and speechifying away, but tell me, would you kill the old woman yourself?"

"Of course not! I was only argu­ing the justice of it…."8

The student is the perfect ex­ample of the reformist intellec­tual. He would not personally steal and kill; he would not use terror and violence to effect his ends. But if it were done, he could see the justice of it.

Raskolnikov, who had listened to this talk with mounting ex­citement, lacked the intellectual’s schizophrenic capacity to objectify a situation in such a way as to make evil appear good and then to deny that it is good and proper when applied to the private and personal level. Raskolnikov was on the verge of insanity, if not actu­ally insane, but his was the insan­ity of subjectivism. The student was talking about what has come to be called social justice. His was that particular moral obtuseness, endemic in our era, that cannot or will not see that the moral character of an action is unaltered by raising it from an individual to a collective level. Raskolnikov, on the other hand, has the medi­cally detectable variety of insan­ity; he has drawn so deeply with­in himself that the question posed can only be personal and individ­ual. The student proposes that in­dividual morality does not apply to social questions. Raskolnikov places himself outside morality, be­yond good and evil, as Nietzsche phrased this position. The officer dismisses the question with the sane and common sense observa­tion, "But I think, if you would not do it yourself, there’s no jus­tice about it." There is, in short, no essential difference between murder done by an individual act­ing on his own and murder done in the name of society. From this point of view, Raskolnikov’s case becomes a test case for the social question as well as the individual one.

Raskolnikov does not commit murder for some great social end. It is not quite clear why he does it. He is in straitened circum­stances; he long since has ceased paying his rent; he eats only oc­casionally; he has dropped out of school. His sister, as he sees it, is about to sacrifice herself for him by marrying a man who is well off. He could use the money that might be obtained by robbing the old pawnbroker.

At any rate, he does the deed, not a nice, hygienic, technological­ly proficient murder, but done in the most horrid manner imagin­able, botched as might be expected of an amateur. The author spares the reader none of the gory de­tails. Raskolnikov takes an axe to the old pawnbroker. He attempts to rob her, but while he is about the task the half-sister, Lizavetta, comes in, and he kills her, too, by splitting her head. He gets away with a few trinkets of little value, and these he does not use.

Raskolnikov has imagined that he will commit the perfect murder. He knows, as any reader of detec­tive stories knows, that murderers are trapped by not attending to details. If they attended to details, he thinks, there is no reason why they should not get away with murder. He theorizes that they do not attend to these matters properly because their reason is eclipsed at the time they commit the crime. But Raskolnikov is com­mitting no crime, or so he thinks. Therefore, he can be in full pos­session of his faculties.

It is not neglected details, how­ever, that bring Raskolnikov to the bar of justice. He is agitated and careless enough. Probably Sherlock Holmes would have had more than enough trivia to solve the crime. But the policeman who finally gets Raskolnikov is no Sherlock Holmes. He is a student of the human heart and psyche. He knows that the penalties for crime are not just something arti­ficially contrived society, that man has within his nature a need to pay these penalties. The criminal has by his act cut himself off from his humanity, from humanity, and from God. He cannot rest, at least Raskolnikov cannot, until he has confessed, repented, made retribu­tion, and found atonement. Ras­kolnikov had committed a crime. He came to know that, and as he did he came to know the rightness of punishment also. No man is be­yond good and evil; his very hu­manity is to be found in a life bounded by these poles. If he were continuing the story, the author says at the end, it would be "the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual re­generation, of his passing from one world into another, of his ini­tiation into a new unknown life." It would, we gather, be the story of a man living in the conscious­ness of morality.

There is further interpretation to be made of this story, however. We are led to believe that we are dealing not only with the question of whether crime pays for an in­dividual but whether it pays for larger social units. Of course, Dostoevsky might have put in the conversation between the student and the officer only as a piece of motivation for the actions of his main character. Had this been the only novel ever written by Dos­toevsky, such an explanation might be acceptable. The conversation did motivate Raskolnikov. But Dostoevsky wrote other novels. We can know from some of them, at least, that the casuistry of reform­ist intellectuals was one of his main themes and a great concern of his work. It is much more plausible, then, as I have sug­gested, that Raskolnikov’s story was a test case for the social ques­tion.

There seems to be a major flaw in the story, however, if it is to be taken as a test case. The stu­dent had suggested that it would be a justified action to kill the old woman. But Lizavetta was por­trayed as the innocent victim of the pawnbroker’s grasping mean­ness. It was her treatment of Liz­avetta as much as or more than anything else that made her un­worthy to live. Yet Raskolnikov killed the half-sister as well as the old woman. This act is plausible enough if we are dealing only with a murder by a man. If such a murder actually had taken place, it would have been quite possible for the innocent sister to have walked in and been slain also.

But in the novel, Dostoevsky seems to have altered the happen­ings so much that they can no longer be applicable to the social question. The student had pro­posed no justification for killing Lizavetta. She was one of those who would, at least in theory, be aided by the murder. Why did not Dostoevsky so tell his story that it could be interpreted in such a way as to answer the social question?

My point is that he did. How­ever he arrived at the conclusion, the author must have felt or known that the sister had to be killed also. The student had set forth only half of his proposition. He only held that the killing of the old pawnbroker could be justi­fied. But the interior logic of his position leads to a question which few social reformers and revolu­tionaries have been willing to face, for when they do the inherent des­potism of their position is re­vealed: namely, could the killing of those who are supposed to be helped be justified?

The Remaking of Man

Let us examine the inherent logic of the position of the social reconstructionist. The student in the novel said that nature must be changed and directed. This is the necessary position of both the meliorist and revolutionary. Tak­ing men as they are and the situa­tion as it is, the reforms cannot be made. Men must be remade; conditions must be changed. Choice must be taken away from men, for this leads to the condi­tions that are deplored, even to the existence of pawnbrokers. The initiative must be taken away from men. They must be deprived of their powers to do good and evil. The social planner must plan and direct things so that men will behave in the desired way to pro­duce the desired ends. In brief, men as we know them must be destroyed; they must be deprived of their humanity. Men must be treated as objects or things, to be manipulated at the will of the planner. In a word, and speaking figuratively now, they must be killed.

The reformer no more divests men of their humanity, however, than Raskolnikov effectively robbed the old pawnbroker. He does cut himself off from his own hu­manity. By treating men as things, he wounds himself deeply. Reformist intellectuals have dreamed, above all, of ending their own alienation, of building a world in which they would be at home. Yet their approach to this by way of social reconstruction only increases the alienation, whether they are aware of it or not.

The prophetic warnings of the Russian novelists were not heed­ed. Much of history since their time has been the enactment of the consequences of ideas which they foresaw. Their beloved Rus­sia has been a principle theater for such a bloodbath. The point is that the reformist effort has a twofold impact: the old way must be destroyed — that is one; and the other is that even when they attempt to build, they destroy in­stead.

Thus far, an account has been given of the development of ideas, their propagation, and the adop­tion of methods for reform. The consequences that follow upon the application of the ideas must be examined in a like manner, that is, from an examination of the his­torical record. The imaginings of novelists may not be believed.

Redemption Through Love

But before leaving the Russian novelists behind, there is some­thing else we can learn from them. Neither Dostoevsky nor Turgenev wrote of reformers and revolution­aries simply to hold them up to scorn, to turn them into objects of hatred. They are men, too, not things, as we can learn from the pages of the novels. The Song of the Lorelei leads men to their de­struction, but those most surely destroyed are the reformers them­selves. Their great need is to be reclaimed for humanity, and that can be done, if at all, only by love. Turgenev said this in unforget­table language in the heart-rend­ing final passage of Fathers and Children. Bazarov’s old parents loved him dearly and could not forget him.

Often from the near-by village two frail old people come to visit it [the tomb of Bazarov] — a husband and a wife. Supporting one another, they walk with heavy steps; they go up to the iron railing, fall on their knees and weep long and bitterly, and gaze intently at the silent stone under which their son lies buried; they exchange a few words, wipe away the dust from the stone or tidy up some branches of a fir tree, then start to pray again and cannot tear themselves away from that place where they seem to be nearer to their son, to their memories of him… Can it be that their prayers and their tears are fruitless? Can it be that love, sacred devoted love, is not all powerful? Oh, no! However pas­sionate, sinful or rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers grow­ing over it peep at us serenely with their innocent eyes; they tell us not only of eternal peace, of that great peace of "indifferent" nature; they tell us also of eternal reconciliation and of life without end.°

The next article in this series will discuss "Divide and Conquer."

—FOOTNOTES—

1 Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Chil­dren, intro. Ernest J. Simmons (New York: Rinehart & Co., 1948), p. 24.

2 p. 28."Everything?"

³ Ibid., p. 56.

4 Ibid., p. 95.

⁵ Ibid., p. 21.

⁶ Ibid., pp. 225-26.

⁷ Fydor Dostoevsky, Crime and Pun­ishment, Constance Garnett, trans. (New York: Modern Library, no date), pp. 66­67.

⁸ Ibid., p. 67.

⁹ Turgenev, op cit., pp. 232-33.