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practicing Orthodox Christians, and they regarded themselves as martyrs.
This was true with regard to Kalyayev, one of his friends and co-fighters
(about whom Camus wrote a famous play) as well as many others.
They were highly moral terrorists who knew that to kill was a mortal
sin and that sooner or later they would have to pay with their own lives for
having sinned. But this was not the only motivation. Savinkov wrote
another book in 1909,
The Pale Horse,
the title and the motto of which are
taken from the Revelation of St. John. The book was widely interpreted as
a break with terrorism and even betrayal of the progressive cause. The hero
(Savinkov) suffers from general, free-floating nausea. He writes in his diary:
"I do not want to live anymore. My own words bore me, my thoughts and
desires. People and their lives bore me. What should one believe? I do not
want the prayers of slaves . Let Christus's word lighten the world. I do not
love. I am alone." And so on. All this is a fairly succinct and typical reflec–
tion of the malaise at the turn of the century. It did not induce Savinkov
to commit suicide, even though his return to the Soviet Union later on
could be interpreted as a suicidal act. It did not prevent him from behav–
ing like a Russian patriot when war broke out in 1914,just as Barres and
d'Annunzio became superpatriots.
The Russian terrorists believed in certain ideals. To call them nihilists
as some misguided foreigners still did at the time (following Turgenev's
famous novel) was utterly misleading. They were ardent, deep believers,
perhaps the only ones in Europe to take ideas so seriously at the time.
There were also nihilist terrorists who appear in a novel by Stanislaw
Przybyszewski first published in 1899. Przybyszewski, a Pole by origin,
lived in Germany at the time and wrote his novel
Satanskinder
(Children of
Satan) in German. He later returned to Poland and his subsequent books
were written in his native language. The children of Satan believe in noth–
ing except destruction for its own sake. They are a small group headed by
a young man named Gordon; other members are the sickly Wronski, Ostap
(who hangs himself), Okanek (a criminal), and Boiko (a professional revo–
lutionary). Their slogan is to destroy for destruction's sake. They burn the
municipality and the only factory in town and expropriate the local bank.
What would be the greatest fortune? Gordon asks: "To destroy more cities,
the country, the whole world."
Satanskinder
was a great
sucres de scandale.
Were there such people or were they a product of the imagination of the
author, such as Dostoyevsky's villains were? It is doubtful whether
Przybyszewski had met any terrorists in the flesh. These villains had noth–
ing in common with the Russian terrorists of the B.o., nor with the
French or Italian anarchists who wanted not to destroy the world but to
build a more just social order. The Irish Invincibles and the South Slav
conspirators wanted freedom for their peoples, but not to see their coun–
tries in ruins.
