Source: Encounter 1956-11

In 1956, Italian writer Alberto Moravia visited USSR and published articles about it in the newspaper Corriere della Sera. Later, in 1958, he published a book Un mese in Urss. Newspaper articles were translated by British magazine Encounter that was covertly funded by CIA at the time. So, thanks to CIA, some of the chapters are translated to English. Below is the first chapter Marx e Dostoevskij.

I

MARX AND DOSTOEVSKY

This spring Leningrad’s sky, filled with grey clouds, had a vast melancholy, and in the misty distances the city looked flat and indistinct, almost levelled out on its horizon to a smoky relief of long, uniform buildings over which here and there the spire of a tower rose or the gold of a minaret gleamed forth. It was raining; or rather the atmosphere was so humid that it covered everything, the marble walls of the great public buildings and the trees in the parks, with a thin film of gelid moisture.

In this atmosphere, under this sky, Leningrad appears diaphanous, evanescent, completely submerged in a cold and swampy greenish colour which, rather than an artificial hue, seems a mould deposited by centuries of humidity. Here are the aristocratic palaces along the banks of the Neva, magnificent, empty shells; here is the bridge before which stands rampant Peter the Great’s horse; here are the public gardens, still bare and wintry-looking; here is the square of the Winter Palace, a huge amphitheatre which reminds one of Paris’s Napoleonic squares; here is crowded, chaotic Nevsky Prospect; here is the Fontanka Canal, set between two rows of frigid, severe buildings and full of black, motionless water.

And here we are finally in the city’s ancient quarter where the streets, wide but short, form a sort of checkerboard pattern and are flanked by gloomy, unpainted tenements, the old pavement broken up by pot-holes and puddles, all blackly lustrous under the drizzling rain.

Empty streets, peaceful and lugubrious, in which one sees a few street urchins playing, heedless of the rain. We enter an enormous street door, its threshold unpaved and clogged with mud, and then we come to a halt in a courtyard which is completely occupied by tall stacks of wood used as fuel for the stoves. The walls of this courtyard are leprous, stripped bare of plaster and paint and traversed here and there by malign, zig-zagging black cracks. A middle-aged woman appears at one of the stairways and asks us if we wish to visit the apartment in which Feodor Dostoevsky lived for quite a long time.

We reply that this is just why we’ve come, and follow her up the stairs. The staircase is wide, but it has a brutal and sinister gloominess: black walls stained by humidity, steps of squalid, unfinished, cracked stone, some of them broken or missing entirely, a railing of rough wood cut without care, black and sketchy-looking. This stairway is dark, filled with an atrocious sadness, and this is, remember, the springtime; one has to imagine it during the long, snowy winters when the murk shuts down both inside and outside the house.

Why have I stopped to describe this stairway? Because this is the stairway which Dostoevsky used to walk up and down, when for years he lived in this tenement house; but it is also the stairway which Dostoevsky’s hero, Raskolnikov, walked up and down, before and after he killed the usurer. Yes, and because I am here together with two Dostoevskian scholars who tell me that this is without a doubt the tenement where Raskolnikov lived; while being, at the same time, the house occupied by the author of Crime and Punishment. In other words, Dostoevsky’s identification with Raskolnikov was total; he placed Raskolnikov in his own apartment, indeed in his own room, had him walk up and down his own stairs, and, generally speaking, made him move through all those places which he himself frequented at that time in St. Petersburg.

At last we have reached the top-floor landing and in the half-darkness the woman opens a bituminous-black door and precedes us through a very narrow little hallway completely crowded with wardrobe closets; we can barely squeeze through. Along this hallway two doors are placed, behind which, because of the crowding in all large Russian cities, two families are living; the third door in the rear is the woman’s apartment, that is, Dostoevsky’s, or rather, Raskolnikov’s. But let Dostoevsky speak: “His little room under the very roof of a tall five-storey tenement was more like a closet than a place to live.” And, actually, the room we enter is very tiny and above all narrow, looking almost like a continuation of the cramped hallway. On one side of it arc aligned a bed, a wardrobe closet, a small table which holds a sewing machine. At the back of the room there is a window covered with the customary curtains, drapes, and counter-drapes, yet I really can’t see how one can manage to get there since the rest of the room is completely taken up by a round table on which, alongside a porcelain tea service, rests an old-fashioned iron, its carbon burning, and a shirtwaist with its sleeves laid out which the woman had been ironing. In this tiny room Dostoevsky lived, and here, in turn, he had placed Raskolnikov. Here it was that the writer meditated the killing of the usurer, and here he made his character do the same sort of meditating.

After the house of Dostoevsky and . Raskolnikov, the two Russian scholars make me walk over the entire, exact distance (“seven hundred and thirty steps in all,” Dostoevsky informs us) that lies between the house of the killer and the house of the killed. We pass the melancholy, black Fontanka Canal, the bridge shaped like an ass’s back that stands between two rows of marble palaces, the shapeless Sennaia Square or Hay Market, and here at last is the street where the usurer used to live, very similar to the one on which Dostoevsky dwelt.

Again I go through a great gloomy doorway, climb up a tenebrous stairway, damp and sinister, and halt on a dark landing before the usurer’s door. The bell that Raskolnikov rang so many times before and after the crime is there, beside the door; perhaps if I ring it, the door will creep open very slowly and the old woman’s repulsive head will appear. But no, there has been a revolution, there are no more usurers in Russia. On our way back, the two Russian scholars assure me that Dostoevsky, so psychological, so abstract as to verge on the fantastic, was photographically precise in his topographical references and generally in all the descriptions of his settings. “We know everything there is to know about Dostoevsky’s characters, and at Leningrad everything has remained exactly as it was in Dostoevsky’s time; and, in his turn, Dostoevsky has described everything without the slightest alteration or addition.” The morning ends on the Neva, at the precise point where the demoniac Svidrigaylov shot himself in the temple. You remember? “A thick, milky mist hung over the city. Svidrigaylov walked along the slippery, muddy wooden pavement in the direction of the Little Neva. …”

I have wished to describe this visit minutely first of all to give an idea of the surroundings in which Dostoevsky’s novels were meditated and composed; and then because this visit, during which, with the Russian’s typical capacity to take literature as seriously as life and to regard literary characters as though they were living persons, we did nothing but talk of Dostoevsky’s novels and heroes—this visit can indicate the great change which has taken place in the U.S.S.R., above all since the de-Stalinisation, in the official and therefore also in the private attitude towards this writer. Perhaps some years ago I could not have made this visit. The Russians deny, though weakly and with much hesitancy, that Dostoevsky was outlawed under Stalin. The truth was that Dostoevsky was not being re-published, old editions of his work passed from hand to hand among his faithful readers, getting dirtier and more tattered, and the literary periodicals didn’t mention him. Dostoevsky, in short, as Fadeyev told me some years ago in Rome, was of course a Russian writer, indeed someone whom one could not and must not forget, yet he was also a reactionary, a supporter of Czarism and Orthodoxy, a psychological, decadent, individualistic, and introspective writer. But was this evaluation completely true? I believe that the Stalinists were partly right in regarding Dostoevsky as their adversary (just think of his novel, The Devils’), but in large part they were wrong.

Let us take, for example, the best and most famous of Dostoevsky’s novels: Crime and Punishment. This masterpiece will for a long time remain an indispensable key to understanding what has happened in Russia and Europe during the last fifty years. Who is Raskolnikov? He is the intellectual before the advent of Marxism, indignant against the social injustice and abject misery of Czarist Russia, and resolved to carry out a demonstrative, symbolic action against these conditions. Raskolnikov had not read Marx and he admired Napoleon, the model for the entire 19th century of the superman; yet it is symptomatic that, contrary to the Stendhalian Julian Sorel, another admirer of Napoleon, Raskolnikov does not dream of greatness, but rather of justice. And further, that his hate centres on a usurer, that is, on the extreme instance, according to the Marxist formula, of the exploitation of man by man. But who then is the usurer? He is the European bourgeoisie that speculates on the stock exchange with industrial stocks, the fruit of the working-class’s surplus value, lives on the income furnished by the national and colonial proletariat, and does this all unawares and with a tranquil conscience. He is a symbol, in sum, fundamentally not very different from the conventional banker-figure of antibourgeois satire, with his pendulous fat and high silk hat, and the financier, his huge paunch wrapped in a white waistcoat and his hands loaded with rings that scatter glittering rays.

Although he had not read Marx and regarded himself as a superman beyond good and evil, Raskolnikov was already, in embryo, a people’s commissar; and, in fact, the first people’s commissars came out of that same class of the intelligentsia to which Raskolnikov belonged, and possessed his identical ideas—the same thirst for social justice, the same terrible ideological consistency, the same inflexibility in action. And Raskolnikov’s dilemma is the very same one that confronts the people’s commissars and Stalin: “Is it right for the good of humanity to kill the old usurer (read: liquidate the bourgeoisie)?” So why should the Communists have such an aversion to Dostoevsky?

The reason is quite simple. Raskolnikov’s hatred of the usurer has a Christian origin. In reality, this hate is the hate of the medieval Christian for commerce and profit-making, the irreconcilability of the Bible’s teachings with banking and interest rates. This hate, this irreconcilability placed banking and commerce for centuries in the hands of the Jews until the day when the Christian peoples of Europe (and first among them the Italians) realised that they could be bankers or merchants and at the same time upright folk fearful of God, at peace with themselves and their religion. But Raskolnikov belonged, as did the people’s commissars and Stalin, to a medieval country where banking and commerce were controlled by restricted racial and social groups, a backward peasant country attached to a still primitive and mystical Christianity. Thus for Raskolnikov banking and commerce are usury and the European and Russian bourgeoisie which practises usury becomes the old usurer; one must therefore kill the old usurer, that is, liquidate the bourgeoisie.

But at this point the until-then united roads of Dostoevsky and Marxism divide and branch off. The Marxists, who are not Christians, say: “Let us eliminate the usurers and go forward. After the death of the usurer we shall inaugurate a new society without classes and without usury. The creation of this society fully justifies the murder of the usurer.” On the other hand Dostoevsky, who has remained a Christian, after having led us step by step through all the stages of a crime that he had doubtlessly meditated, fondled, and approved a thousand times in his heart, suddenly, with an unexpected volte-face, puts Raskolnikov in the wrong, that is, the Marxists and Stalin, and declares: “No, it is not right to kill, even if it be for the good of mankind. Christ has said: You must not kill.” And in fact Raskolnikov repents, and reads the Bible together with Sonia. Dostoevsky swathes the end of his novel in a mystical aura: “But here begins a new story, the story of the gradual rebirth of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his gradual passing from one world to another, of his advance towards a new and hitherto unknown reality.” The Marxists, however, would have ended it thus: “But here begins the revolution.”

This divergence between Dostoevsky and Marxism is the result of different evaluations of what constitutes evil. For the Marxists evil is the usurer, that is, the bourgeoisie; Dostoevsky, however, after having at first accepted this thesis, rejects it and comes to the Christian conclusion that the evil is not so much the usurer as the means adopted by Raskolnikov to eliminate the usurer, namely, violence. In the novel this evil as seen by Dostoevsky is not only represented by the violent death of the usurer, but also and above all by that of the innocent and pious Lizabeta, the usurer’s sister, whom Raskolnikov murders so as to get rid of a witness to his crime. In short, for the Marxists evil does not really exist, since it is solely a matter of a social evil which can be eliminated by the revolution. But for Dostoevsky evil exists as an individual fact, in each man’s heart, and expresses itself precisely in the violent means used by the revolution. With their historic and social justifications the Marxists can wash clean even the blackest of consciences. Dostoevsky rejects this sort of cleansing and affirms the ineradicable existence of evil.

So, for the last ninety years, we have witnessed in Russia a kind of match between Dostoevsky and Marx. The first round was won by Dostoevsky, since he had written a masterpiece; the second round went to Marx, since his theories produced a revolution; yet the third round seems to have been won by Dostoevsky: the evil thrown out the window by Marxism has returned in torrents through the door of Stalinism, that is, through the means adopted by the revolution to establish and maintain itself. And what is this evil? Khrushchev has already told us in his speech; I will touch on it more briefly: The evil in the U.S.S.R. is represented by the innumerable Lizabetas, the innumerable innocents tortured, imprisoned, murdered in the name of the revolution, who are now being rehabilitated but to whom can never be given back what was taken from them. In short, the evil is the pain, the immense quantity of pain which has submerged Russia during the last fifty years. This pain, in turn, is the blow of Raskolnikov’s axe, justified by the good of humanity. Unfortunately the axe blow, at least in reality, weighs much more than the good of humanity. On the scales, the good of humanity leaps up in the air, light, high, very high; while the axe blow pushes down the other plate, low, low, very low. Therefore: Dostoevsky’s victory, at least for the time being. It is true that the Marxists will still insist on saying that the evil does not exist, that the evil is really, or rather objectively, capitalism. But is it possible to maintain, be it only “objectively,” that Stalin and Beria were capitalists?