In a theater piece entitled “The Prisoners”, Solzhenitsyn illustrated the price paid by those who serve the Empire and the gift granted to those who struggle against it. Here is the key dialog of this drama. It confronts Vorotyntsev, а monarchist White Russian officer about to be executed and Roublev, an officer of the Soviet secret police who suffers from terminal cancer.
Hands behind his back, Vorotyntsev enters the room. Roublev decisively waves the escort away. The latter, annoyed, walks past Vorotyntsev and leaves.
Roublev. How are you feeling, Georgii Michailovich? (Stands up. Turns on the ceiling light.)
Vorotyntsev. You will be disappointed. Good.
Roublev. You did not expect this call, did you?
Vorotyntsev. I have signed all the papers, what else?
Roublev. It is just that… Well, I just wanted to let you know… privately – you see… your case has been passed on to the military tribunal – the session is tomorrow.
Vorotyntsev. You shouldn’t have gone to such great lengths to inform me on this.
Roublev. Apart from that… (An acute fit of pain. His head tilted back, Roublev staggers across the room. Stumbles upon an arm-chair, sits down. Puts himself together.) Apart from that, I was going to forewarn you that your fate is…
Vorotyntsev. Predetermined? I knew that. Everyone’s is.
Roublev. Yes, but in a different way.
Vorotyntsev. I know that as well. Gun.
Roublev. (Steadfast gaze) You are mistaken. Hanging.
Vorotyntsev. (Sedate) In a sneaking manner, of course? Somewhere in alleys?
Roublev. The day after tomorrow.
Vorotyntsev. So I have figured out. Is that all?
Roublev. What else do you want?
Vorotyntsev. What else can I ask the Bolshevik authority for? Only the edge. Can I take my leave?
Roublev. Do you really prefer there to here? It is fresh air here, cozy chairs; there – stink, shit, straw.
Vorotyntsev. People are pure there.
Roublev. Now you will understand what it was I called you for. Sit down. Not there – here, on the couch!
Vorotyntsev sits down, but there – at the table for convicts. Roublev moves to him, dragging a chair behind. Sits close to the table.
Roublev. Tell me, colonel, why are your eyes shining so brightly? Why are your shoulders not bent? Why is your head not lowered? We will execute you and you know it, you have known it for a long time. You will die – you will die the day after tomorrow! Are you not scared having to part with your life, colonel, are you not? (Eying each other attentively) I am not asking out of mere curiosity. I am too condemned. I am too hopeless. I am terminally ill. Forget it what I was. I am not your foe anymore. I have called you out of compassion. I am no longer a foe for you.
Vorotyntsev. If only you were a foe! As a Russian saying goes, there is some goodness even in a Tatar. But you are not a foe. You are an executioner.
Roublev. Have you never had ones? Will you never have?
Vorotyntsev. Not in such numbers, not of this nature.
Roublev. I was just lying here, on this couch, in fever, in pain, and understood that they only needed me as long as I controlled them, pushed them in the back; now I am nothing but a burden, they haste to get rid of me, they even have a substitute handy… And I remembered you, going the same way, and I felt relieved… Forget it that I am a PCSS* (People’s Commissariat for State Security) colonel. This difference between us is very soon going to be eliminated. From a human to a human, from a wanderer to a wanderer, can you help me? advise me?..
Vorotyntsev. Truth be told, it is quite hard for me – just from a jail cell, right before being hanged – to be willing to help you.
Roublev. I understand that! But let us look deeper. I have never been a coward but if you only knew how frightened I am now! Why am I – who used to be a stone – now turning to rubble? I want to face the death with my eyes impudently bright – like yours. Teach me the secret of your strength.
Vorotyntsev. There is not any secret. I am 69 years old and I know that through all of them I was going the right way. Why should I lose heart now?
Roublev. Right? The right way? You are a military man. How many wars have you participated in?
Vorotyntsev. Five.
Roublev. The war with Japan? You lost it. The one with Germany? You lost it.
Vorotyntsev. Not us. Because of you.
Roublev. The Civil war? You lost it too. The Second World War? Beaten, again.
Vorotyntsev. You have skipped the one with Spain.
Roublev. For twenty-eight years we have been beating you everywhere and in everything, today you are completely defeated – and you say you have no reason to lose heart? Your whole life way is the one of endless defeats – and you think it the right way?
Vorotyntsev. It is right because I had not erred which side to be on. I have always been on the right side – against you. Never swaying, never doubting that, perhaps, your way is the one that is truthful, perhaps, I should have chosen you… No. Every second of your triumph – against you. Yes, we have lost. But so have you. Therefore my eyes are shining; finally I see it – you have not won either.
To be with the Roublevs or the Vorotyntsevs of our times is the choice we all have. I would even say that we all have to choice whether to be Roublevs or Vorotyntsevs. Just like Roublev and Vorotyntsev, we will all die eventually. We cannot change that, but what we can change is how and whom we die. Do we die as faithful servants of the Empire, or will we die with Vorotyntsev’s light in our eyes?
The Saker
Beautiful.
All Men die. Not all live
Anonymous 03:03
One of the best posts I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. Says it all in six words.
Auslander
Author
Never The Last One http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ZGCY8KK Love And Honor, Courage And Treachery. A Small War Fought In A Dark Corner Of A Vast Land.
An Incident On Simonka https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01ERKH3IU NATO Is Invited To Leave Sevastopol, One Way Or The Other.
Classic Solzhenitsyn. But remember – Vorotyntsev will always triumph whether he lives or dies.
“Roublev”, a allusion to the money changers as the satanic enemy?
That read like golan globus script from one of their polemics for the pindos from the 70s.
Prefer these exchanges from the novel Shibumi that take place over a period of a couple of years. Also from the 70s, one can see how what is written here applies to the israeloamerican problem today. Excerpts, not full passages, I don’t have the stamina…:
Only then did he lift his expressionless bottle-green eyes to the Major’s face. “What did you say?”
“I am Major Diamond, CID.”
“OH?” Nicholai’s indifference was not feigned.
The Major opened his attache case and drew out 3 typed sheets stapled together. “If you just sign this confession, we can get on with it.”
Nicholai glanced at the paper. “I don’t think I want to sign anything.”
Diamond’s lips tightened with irritation. “You’re denying murdering General Kishikawa?”
“I am not denying anything. I helped my friend to his escape from…” Nicholai broke off. What was the point explaining to this man something his mercantile culture could not possibly comprehend? “Major, I don’t see any value in continuing this conversation.”
And from the second:
“He was a soldier.” The more accurate response would have been that he was a warrior, but that distinction would have meant nothing to these Americans with their merchantile mentalities.
Nicholai sighed and shook his head. He had worked with the American military mentality for 2 years, but could not pretend to understand it’s rigid penchant for forcing facts to fit convenient preconceptions.
“If I understand you, Major–and frankly I don’t much care if I do–you are accusing me of both being a communist and a nazi, of being both a close friend of General Kishikawa’s and his hired assassin, of being both a Japanese militarist and a Soviet spy…None of this offends your sense of rational probability?”
Nicholai recognized the haggling tone of the marketplace. Like all Americans, this major was a merchant at heart; everything had a price, and the good man was he who bargained well.
“But you just said—”
“I said I would not protect or assist the Russians. I also have no intention of assisting your people. If it is your intention to execute me–eith or without the mockery of a military trial–please get to it.”
“Nicholai, we will get your signature on that confession. Please believe me.”
Nicholai’s green eyes settled calmly on the Major’s. “I am no longer a part of this conversation.” He lowered his eyes and returned his concentration to the patterns of stones in a Go game he had temporary Frozen in memory.
The third session was not painful at all, but it was by far the most frightening. With perfect, but insane, lucidity, Nicholai both received and observed the punishment. Again, he was both audience and actor, and he watched it happen with only mild interest. He felt nothing; the drugs had short-circuited his nerves. The terror lay in the fact he could hear the beating as though the sound were amplified by powerful microphones within his flesh. He heard the liquid crunch of tissue; he heard the crisp splitting of skin; he heard the granular grating of fragmented bone; he heard the lush pulsing of his blood. In the mirror of the mirror of his consciousness, he was calmly terrified. He realized that to be able to hear all this while feeling nothing was insane, and to experience anesthetized indifference to the event was beyond the verge of madness.
Consider the tragic realization of Gilgamesh towards the end of his failed quest
“For whom, have my hands toiled?
For whom is spent the passion in my heart?
For Myself I seek, yet not obtained the boon
For a serpent a boon I affected..” (Epic of Gilgamesh)
“I was just lying here, on this couch, in fever, in pain, and understood that they only needed me as long as I controlled them, pushed them in the back; now I am nothing but a burden, they haste to get rid of me, they even have a substitute handy…”
In real life, the Roublevs hide behind their masks to the very last breath, but great writers like Solzhenitsyn can see through the veil and articulate the drama that rages in their psyche – everybody’s psyche.
The Roublev, Solzhenitsyn portraits, is not a comatose psychopath of the Soros-Hillary type, but a troubled human being, whose remorse and sense of guilt carries with it the hope that one day – if not in this lifetime, then in the next – he will gather all his courage and stand up to the challenge of what it means to be true human being.
Roublev. …..The one with Germany? You lost it.
Vorotyntsev. Not us. Because of you.
Vorotyntsev – or rather Solzenytsyn – is lying here.
And it makes his moral high ground shake.
World War I
Neil Young:
Soldier, your eyes,
they shine like the sun
I wonder why.
Soldier, your eyes
shine like the sun
I wonder why.
Thanks; profound; Vorotyntsev; the correct road taken…
The question mooted may seem to be a binary choice – Saker presents it thus.
However it escapes that this aspect is unsupported. This is to say that Saker merely assumes that one must choose.
Alas.
Perhaps others might see it differently.
But there also exist families that simply obey their internal lights and thus cannot choose, as their choice is made. It’s probably genetic…old breeding experiment…
Nevertheless I am open to logic about this idea that people all must choose. Perhaps I am obsolete.
Pax
LZ
Well, evidently it’s a tough question, eh?
Why must we chose?
How is it that we may chose?
Claims alone may be true, but it is customary to proffer evidence for opinion. “Agency” is what this is known as in the Rhetoric… And it is essential.
Answers are harder than questions.
LZ