‘Under Western Eyes’: A Study in Conscience
A review of ‘Under Western Eyes’, by Joseph Conrad; Harper & Brothers, 1911.
Conrad hated Dostoevsky. He thought his novels were ‘too Russian’ and that Russian literature in general was ‘repugnant’. So when Dostoevsky published Crime and Punishment, Conrad took it as a challenge. Under Western Eyes was his response. When, after five years, he delivered the manuscript to his agent, a row broke out Conrad collapsed soon after. His doctor said he had suffered a complete nervous breakdown that Conrad’s wife blamed on the novel: ‘He lives mixed up in the scenes and holds converse with the characters.’
The influence of Crime and Punishment is plain to see. The novel deals with Kirylo Sodorovitch, called Razumov, a student in St. Petersburg whose quiet, cautious life is turned topsy-turvy by an act of violence. A fellow student, Victor Haldin, has killed the Minister of State. Now, he seeks refuge with Razumov. Torn between his duty to himself and support for the cause of revolution, Razumov dithers. Then he rats on Haldin, which seals the killer’s doom. Out of this treachery comes the narrative, unspooling with a grim inevitability. We follow Razumov as he slips and slides into guilt, self-hatred and political conspiracy.
The novel deals with Kirylo Sodorovitch, called Razumov, a student in St. Petersburg.
This is all complicated by Haldin’s writing of Razumov to his ‘revolutionist’ friends. He has spoken of his betrayer in glowing terms. In La Petite Russie, a Russian expat neighbourhood in Geneva, these friends anxiously await Razumov’s arrival, and none more than Peter Ivanovitch, their devoted ringleader. Also in Geneva, are Natalia, Haldin’s sister, and their mother, who learn of Victor’s death from an English-language newspaper the narrator gives them. Ivanovitch plans to recruit Natalia; he also tells her Razumov, Haldin’s great friend, is coming to the city.
Our narrator in all this is an Englishman, a ‘teacher of languages’ who admits to knowing little of Russian life and thought. His admission is both disclaimer and theme. Through this intermediary, who claims to have come upon the diary of Razumov, Conrad frames Russia as a place where human freedom shakes, buckles, then collapses under autocracy’s weight. Here, truth and lies are impossible to tell apart. It is a sick society. His perspective, distant and analytical, casts Razumov’s predicament as a microcosm of the moral, social breakdown of the age.
Conrad frames Russia as a place where human freedom shakes, buckles, then collapses.
Betrayal, guilt and the isolation of the person under systems of oppression sound like a drumbeat through the book. Razumov’s dobbing-in of Victor Haldin is no ‘mere’ betrayal but a reflection of his failure to square his values with the world’s demands. He informs in rebellion against Haldin’s ideals, which put a moral and practical pressure on Razumov that he neither sought nor can bear. But he also gives in to the czarist state, unable to assert himself or impose his own will.
As ever, Conrad’s prose is lucid and meticulous. It wraps itself around us like a lovely fog, beautiful to look at it but opaque. It is as if, in writing of Russia, the narrator takes on the hallmarks of his subject:
‘That propensity of lifting every problem from the plane of the understandable by means of some sort of mystic expression, is very Russian. I knew her well enough to have discovered her scorn for all the practical forms of political liberty known to the western world. I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a terrible corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naive and hopeless cynicism. I think sometimes that the psychological secret of the profound difference of that people consists in this, that they detest life, the irremediable life of the earth as it is, whereas we westerners cherish it with perhaps an equal exaggeration of its sentimental value. But this is a digression indeed …’
Much of the text deals with the intangible and so the mysterious: fear, guilt, fate. We find these difficult to break down, to analyse, to deal with.
As in Crime and Punishment, a strength of Under Western Eyes is its relentless depiction of Razumov’s inner turmoil, which reflects the obsessive character of negative thought. It is intensely introspective to the point of claustrophobic: not for nothing did T.E. Lawrence call Joseph Conrad ‘a giant of the subjective.’ Moreover there is a seriousness at work that leaves little room for humour or humanity. Conrad is almost zealous in his attempt to render Russia as a place of unyielding fatalism, where nothing can go right, for there is scant comfort or relief in this book.
It is intensely introspective to the point of claustrophobic.
Yet the Russians still have to choose. That is the cruelty of the thing. One chooses, knowing that whatever one chooses things are not likely to go well. Every choice is necessary and damning. There is a letter Conrad wrote to Cunninghame Graham that is revealing. He describes the universe as a huge machine:
‘The most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself; made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart. It is a tragic accident — and it has happened. You can’t interfere with it. . . . It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions — and nothing matters.’
The guilt of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment grows out of a mistake: that a pawnbroker’s murder can be justified. His error overwhelms him and drives him into guilt. The turmoil felt by Razumov, in contrast, has less to do with the wrongness of his crime and more to do with his fear of being found out. In fact, Razumov is at times is triumphant. He experiences ‘duper’s delight’—the small thrill at having ‘got away’ with some sin. We may or may not sympathise with him, for he never wanted any of this. The Czar and his regime is corrupt and asphyxiating; but the revolutionaries and thugs and liars with no consideration for those caught in the cross-fire. All Razumov wanted was to keep his head down. He wanted to get on with his life as best he could. Is this cowardly? Is it wrong? Dante, after all, put people who didn’t pick sides in hell (though he might have just resented finding himself on the losing one).
In fact, Razumov is at times is triumphant. He experiences ‘duper’s delight’.
Perhaps Conrad was defending his own choices. His father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was a revolutionary: a passionate Polish patriot who fought against the Russians, got arrested, and was exiled. His mother, too. Conrad, left with a deep distrust of revolution, chose neither to support the regime nor to fight it. He left Poland, sailed with the French and British merchant navies, then became a British subject. (We are glad to have him.) Dostoevsky, in contrast, picked a side, and more than once. He was part of the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of intellectuals who condemned the Tsar’s regime. He was then arrested and suffered a mock execution, which transformed his worldview. He had a religious awakening in Siberia, rejected revolution, and came to the conclusion that Orthodox Christianity could save Russia. Morality looms large in Dostoevsky.
Under Western Eyes is, in the end, about the failure of conscience in a world where principles eat the men who hold them. In that sense it is the opposite of Crime and Punishment: a response which frames Dostoevsky as naïve. For Conrad, life is pointless. If we are born screaming, it is because we have entered a world that intends to chew us up and spit us out.
