We are told on the wrapper of this book that Prince Mirsky considered Rozanov “one of the greatest Russians of modern times . . . Rozanov is the greatest revelation of the Russian mind yet to be shown to the West.”
We become diffident, confronted with these superlatives. And when we have read E. Gollerbach’s long “Critico-Biographical Study,” forty-three pages, we are more suspicious still, in spite of the occasionally profound and striking quotations from Solitaria and from the same author’s Fallen Leaves. But there we are; we’ve got another of these morbidly introspective Russians, morbidly wallowing in adoration of Jesus, then getting up and spitting in His beard, or in His back hair, at least; characters such as Dostoievsky has familiarized us with, and of whom we are tired. Of these self-divided, gamin-religious Russians who are so absorbedly concerned with their own dirty linen and their own piebald souls we have had a little more than enough. The contradictions in them are not so very mysterious, or edifying, after all. They have a spurting, gamin hatred of civilization, of Europe, of Christianity, of governments, and of everything else, in their moments of energy; and in their inevitable relapses into weakness, they make the inevitable recantation; they whine, they humiliate themselves, they seek unspeakable humiliation for themselves, and call it Christ-like, and then with the left hand commit some dirty little crime or meanness, and call it the mysterious complexity of the human soul. It’s all masturbation, half-baked, and one gets tired of it. One gets tired of being told that Dostoievsky’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor “is the most profound declaration which ever was made about man and life.” As far as I’m concerned, in proportion as a man gets more profoundly and personally interested in himself, so does my interest in him wane. The more Dostoievsky gets worked up about the tragic nature of the human soul, the more I lose interest. I have read the Grand Inquisitor three times, and never can remember what it’s really about. This I make as a confession, not as a vaunt. It always seems to me, as the Germans say, mehr Schrei wie Wert.
And in Rozanov one fears one has got a pup out of the Dostoievsky kennel. Solitaria is a sort of philosophical work, about a hundred pages, of a kind not uncommon in Russia, consisting in fragmentary jottings of thoughts which occurred to the author, mostly during the years 1910 and 1911, apparently, and scribbled down where they came, in a cab, in the train, in the w.c., on the sole of a bathing-slipper. But the tnought that came in a cab might just as well have come in the w.c. or “examining my coins,” so what’s the odds? If Rozanov wanted to give the physical context to the thought, he’d have to create the scene. “In a cab,” or “examining my coins” means nothing.
Then we get a whole lot of bits, some of them interesting, some not; many of them to be classified under the heading of: To Jesus or not to Jesus! if we may profanely parody Hamlet’s To be or not to be. But it is the Russian’s own parody. Then you get a lot of self- conscious personal bits: “The only masculine thing about you — is your trousers”: which was said to Rozanov by a girl; though, as it isn’t particularly true, there was no point in his repeating it. However, he has that “self-probing” nature we have become acquainted with. “Teaching is form, and I am formless. In teaching there must be order and a system, and I am systemless and even disorderly. There is duty — and to me any duty at the bottom of my heart always seemed comical, and on any duty, at the bottom of my heart, I always wanted to play a trick (except tragic duty). . . .”
Here we have the pup of the Dostoievsky kennel, a so-called nihilist: in reality, a Mary-Mary-quite-contrary. It is largely tiresome contrariness, even if it is spontaneous and not self-induced.
And, of course, in Mary-Mary-quite-contrary we have the ever- recurrent whimper: / want to be good! I am good: Oh, I am so good, I’m better than anybody! I love Jesus and all the saints, and above all, the blessed Virgin! Oh, how I love purity! — and so forth. Then they give a loud crepitus ventris as a punctuation.
Dostoievsky has accustomed us to it, and we are hard-boiled. Poor Voltaire, if he recanted, he only recanted once, when his strength had left him, and he was neither here nor there. But these Russians are for ever on their death-beds, and neither here nor there.
Rozanov’s talk about “lovely faces and dear souls” of children, and “for two years I have been ‘in Easter,’ in the pealing of bells,” truly “arrayed in white raiment,” just makes me feel more hard- boiled than ever. It’s a cold egg.
Yet, in Solitaria there are occasional profound things. “I am not such a scoundrel yet as to think about morals” — ”Try to crucify the Sun, and you will see which is God” — and many others. But to me, self-conscious personal revelations, touched with the guttersnipe and the actor, are not very interesting. One has lived too long.
So that I come to the end of Gollerbach’s “Critico-Biographical Study” sick of the self-fingering sort of sloppiness, and I have very much the same feeling at the end of Solitaria, though occasionally Rozanov hits the nail on the head and makes it jump.
Then come twenty pages extracted from Rozanov’s The Apocalypse of Our Times, and at once the style changes, at once you have a real thing to deal with. The Apocalypse must be a far more important book than Solitaria, and we wish to heaven we had been given it instead. Now at last we see Rozanov as a real thinker, and “the greatest revelation of the Russian mind yet to be shown to the West.”
Rozanov had a real man in him, and it is true, what he says of himself, that he did not feel in himself that touch of the criminal which Dostoievsky felt in himself. Rozanov was not a criminal. Somewhere, he was integral, and grave, and a seer, a true one, not a gamin. We see it all in his Apocalypse. He is not really a Dostoiev- skian. That’s only his Russianitis.
The book is an attack on Christianity, and as far as we are given to see, there is no canting or recanting in it. It is passionate, and suddenly valid. It is not jibing or criticism or pulling to pieces. It is a real passion. Rozanov has more or less recovered the genuine pagan vision, the phallic vision, and with those eyes he looks, in amazement and consternation, on the mess of Christianity.
For the first time we get what we have got from no Russian, neither Tolstoi nor Dostoievsky nor any of them, a real, positive view on life. It is as if the pagan Russian had wakened up in Rozanov, a kind of Rip van Winkle, and was just staggering at what he saw. His background is the vast old pagan background, the phallic. And in front of this, the tortured complexity of Christian civilization — what else can we call it? — is a kind of phantasmagoria to him.
He is the first Russian, as far as I am concerned, who has ever said anything to me. And his vision is full of passion, vivid, valid. He is the first to see that immortality is in the vividness of life, not in the loss of life. The butterfly becomes a whole revelation to him: and to us.
When Rozanov is wholly awake, and a new man, a risen man, the living and resurrected pagan, then he is a great man and a great seer, and perhaps, as he says himself, the first Russian to emerge. Speaking of Tolstoi and Leontiev and Dostoievsky, Rozanov says: “I speak straight out what they dared not even suspect. I speak because after all I am more of a thinker than they. That is all.” . . . “But the problem (in the case of Leontiev and Dostoievsky) is and was about anti-Christianity, about the victory over the very essence of Christianity, over that terrible avitalism. Whereas from him, from the phallus everything flows.”
When Rozanov is in this mood, and in this vision, he is not dual, nor divided against himself. He is one complete thing. His vision and his passion are positive, non-tragical.
Then again he starts to Russianize, and he comes in two. When he becomes aware of himself, and personal, he is often ridiculous, sometimes pathetic, sometimes a bore, and almost always “dual.” Oh, how they love to be dual, and divided against themselves, these Dostoievskian Russians! It is as good as a pose: always a Mary- Mary-quite-contrary business. “The great horror of the human soul consists in this, that while thinking of the Madonna it at the same time does not cease thinking of Sodom and of its sins; and the still greater horror is that even in the very midst of Sodom it does not forget the Madonna, it yearns for Sodom and the Madonna, and this at one and the same time, without any discord.”
The answer to that is, that Sodom and Madonna-ism are two halves of the same movement, the mere tick-tack of lust and asceticism, pietism and pornography. If you’re not pious, you won’t be pornographical, and vice versa. If there are no saints, there’ll be no sinners. If there were no ascetics, there’d be no lewd people. If you divide the human psyche into two halves, one half will be white, the other black. It’s the division itself which is pernicious. The swing to one extreme causes the swing to the other. The swing towards Immaculate Madonna-ism inevitably causes the swing back to the whore of prostitution, then back again to the Madonna, and so ad infinitum. But you can’t blame the soul for this. All you have to blame is the craven, cretin human intelligence, which is always seeking to get away from its own centre.
But Rozanov, when he isn’t Russianizing, is the first Russian really to see it, and to recover, if unstably, the old human wholeness.
So that this book is extremely interesting, and really important. We get impatient with the Russianizing. And yet, with Gollerbach’s Introduction and the letters at the end, we do get to know all we want to know about Rozanov, personally. It is not of vast importance, what he was personally. If he behaved perversely, he was never, like Dostoievsky, inwardly perverse, and when he says he was not “born rightly,” he is only yelping like a Dostoievsky pup.
It is the voice of the new man in him, not the Dostoievsky whelp, that means something. And it means a great deal. We shall wait for a full translation of The Apocalypse of Our Times, and of Oriental Motifs. Rozanov matters, for the future.