418
PHILIP RAHV
German propensity
IS III
us associated with a special national
element-which we might call the Araktcheyev* element–
a ruthlessness, a passionate rigidity, and an eagerness to dis–
patch their victims. To satisfy his grenadier ideal, Araktcheyev
flogged living peasants to death; we flog to death ideas, arts,
humanity, past leaders, anything you like. In dauntless array
we advance step by step to the limit and overshoot it, never
sinning against logic but only against
truth;
unaware, we go on
further and further, forgetting that real sense and rea;l under–
standing of life are shown precisely in stepping short before
the extreme...."
In truth Raskolnikov is one of those young men whose
coming was foreshadowed with fear by Joseph de Maistre, the
author of
Soirees de St. Petersbourg,
when he observed, in dis–
cussing the peasant uprisings of the eighteenth century, headed
by such leaders as Emelian Pugachev, an obscure and illiter–
ate Cossack, that if another such revolt ever took place in Russia
it would be headed by a Pugachev "armed with a university
degree." But the hour of the university Pugachevs had not quite
struck when Raskolnikov set out entirely on his own, cut off
from any social effort or collective historical action, to remove
"certain obstacles." Proclaiming the necessity of breaking once
and for all what must be broken, in other words, of killing not
simply an old woman but the principle of authority bolstered
by the moral law, he yet proceeds to commit not an act of
political terror but another crime altogether that inevitably
stamps him as no more than a common criminal, a criminal
from egoism. He is a dissenter and rebel
(raskol,
the word from
which his name derives, means schism or dissent), in essence
the type of revolutionary terrorist of that period, whose act
of terror is somehow displaced unto a private object. The ter-
*
Alexis Araktcheyev (1769-1834) , a high official and trusted adviser
of Alexander
I
in the closing years of his reign, put into effect such
inordinately cruel administrative practices as to give rise to the dread
term
Araktcheyeuchina.
