Fire and Sword
Fyodor Dostoevsky listened with growing bewilderment to the celebrity peace activists gathered in Geneva.
1867
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Fyodor Dostoevsky listened with growing bewilderment to the celebrity peace activists gathered in Geneva.
1867
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
On September 9th-12th, 1867, some of the noisiest political activists of the day, including Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx, Victor Hugo and Guiseppi Garibaldi, gathered in Geneva for the inaugural Congress of the League of Peace and Freedom. In a letter to his niece, Sofia Alexandrovna, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky complained that they had a peculiar notion of peace.
When I arrived here, the Peace Congress was just beginning, to which Garibaldi himself came.* He went away immediately afterwards. It was really incredible how these socialist and revolutionary gentlemen, whom hitherto I had known only from books, sat and flung down lies from the platform to their audience of five thousand! It’s quite indescribable. One can hardly realise, even for one’s self, the absurdity, feebleness, futility, disunion, and the depth of essential contradictoriness. And it is this rabble which is stirring up the whole unfortunate working-class! It’s too deplorable. That they may attain to peace on earth, they want to root out the Christian faith,* annihilate the Great Powers* and cut them up into a lot of small ones, abolish capital, declare that all property is common to all, and so forth. And all this is affirmed with no logical demonstration whatever; what they learnt twenty years ago,* they are still babbling to-day. Only when fire and sword have exterminated everything, can, in their belief, eternal peace ensue. But enough of this.
From ‘Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to his Family and Friends’ (?1914), by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), edited and translated by Alexander Eliasberg (1878-1924) and Ethel Colburn Mayne (?-1941).
* Guiseppi Garibaldi (1807-82) played a major role in the formation of modern Italy, helping to liberate and unite the various states of the region, sovereign and subject, created by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Like the Hungarian activist Lajos Kossuth, Garibaldi was popular in England, and he praised the English for a love of liberty he had not found on the Continent. He was cheered when he spoke in Trafalgar Square in 1864, and warmly received by Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister (1855-58 and 1859-65). On instructions from Downing Street, the Royal Navy ran interference for Garibaldi in his voyages among Italy’s scattered states.
* It was Dostoevsky’s fellow-countryman Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76), one of the attendees, who declared in God and the State, an unfinished manuscript published in 1882, that God and liberty are mutually exclusive. “If God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty — by ceasing to exist. A jealous lover of human liberty, and deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.”
* The Great Powers of the day, at any rate in Europe, would arguably be the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Austria (which only that June had joined with Hungary), and Prussia. Turkey (the Ottoman Empire) deserves a mention. As yet there was no country called Germany, and the Holy Roman Empire had collapsed fifty years earlier thanks to Napoleon. The United States was undoubtedly growing into a great power, especially after the defeat of Mexico in 1848 gave the US California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming; but in those days, Washington generally minded its own business still and did not interfere in Europe.
* Dostoevsky is referring to the upsurge of revolutionary sentiment in the 1840s that led to the ‘year of revolutions’ in 1848. Most of them failed, crushed by centralised power and undermined, as Dostoevsky says, by their own internal contradictions.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
What was it about the Conference that Dostoevsky decried as ‘deplorable’?
The socialist speakers’ relentless manipulation of workers.
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
The speakers called for peace in Europe. Dostoevsky didn’t think they meant it.
See if you can include one or more of these words in your answer.
IGoal. IISincerity. IIISuspect.