But I have not a spark of pity.
I drink; for a time, as you know, I drugged myself; but the vice of pity I have up till now managed to avoid.
The smallest dose of it, and you are lost.
Weeping over humanity and bewailing oneself—you know our race’s pathological leaning to it.
Our greatest poets destroyed themselves by this poison.
Up to forty, fifty, they were revolutionaries—then they became consumed by pity and the world pronounced them holy.
You appear to have the same ambition, and to believe it to be an individual process, personal to you, something unprecedented. ...”
He spoke rather louder and puffed out a cloud of smoke.
“Beware of these ecstasies,” he said:
“Every bottle of spirits contains a measurable amount of ecstasy.
Unfortunately, only few people, particularly amongst our fellow countrymen, ever realize that the ecstasies of humility and suffering are as cheap as those induced chemically.
The time when I woke from the anaesthetic, and found that my body stopped at the left knee, I also experienced a kind of absolute ecstasy of unhappiness.
Do you remember the lectures you gave me at the time?”
He poured out another glass and emptied it.
“My point is this,” he said; “one may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.
That is the first commandment for us.
Sympathy, conscience, disgust, despair, repentance, and atonement are for us repellent debauchery.
To sit down and let oneself be hypnotized by one’s own navel, to turn up one’s eyes and humbly offer the back of one’s neck to Gletkin’s revolver—that is an easy solution.
The greatest temptation for the like of us is: to renounce violence, to repent, to make peace with oneself.
Most great revolutionaries fell before this temptation, from Spartacus to Danton and Dostoevsky; they are the classical form of betrayal of the cause.
The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan.
As long as chaos dominates the world, God is an anachronism; and every compromise with one’s own conscience is perfidy.
When the accursed inner voice speaks to you, hold your hands over your ears. ...”
He felt for the bottle behind him and poured out an other glass.
Rubashov noticed that the bottle was already half empty.
You also could do with a little solace, he thought.
“The greatest criminals in history,” Ivanov went on, “are not of the type Nero and Fouche, but of the type Gandhi and Tolstoy.
Gandhi’s inner voice has done more to prevent the liberation of India than the British guns.
To sell oneself for thirty pieces of silver is an honest transaction; but to sell oneself to one’s own conscience is to abandon mankind.
History is a priori amoral; it has no conscience.
To want to conduct history according to the maxims of the Sunday school means to leave everything as it is.
You know that as well as I do.
You know the stakes in this game, and here you come talking about Bogrov’s whimpering. ...”
He emptied his glass and added:
“Or with conscience pricks because of your fat Arlova.”
Rubashov knew from before that Ivanov could hold a lot; one did not notice any change in his behaviour, beyond a slightly more emphatic way of speaking than usual.
You do need consolation, thought Rubashov again, perhaps more than I do.
He sat down on the narrow stool opposite Ivanov and listened.
All this was not new to him; he had defended the same point of view for years, with the same or similar words.
The difference was that at that time he had known those inner processes of which Ivanov spoke so contemptuously, merely as an abstraction; but since then he had experienced the “grammatical fiction” as a physical reality in his own body.
But had these irrational processes become more admissible merely because he had a personal acquaintance with them now?
Was it any the less necessary to fight the “mystical intoxication” merely because one had oneself become intoxicated by it?
When a year ago he had sent Arlova to her death, he had not had enough imagination to picture the details of an execution.
Would he now behave differently merely because he now knew some of its aspects?
Either it was right—or it was wrong to sacrifice Richard, Arlova and Little Loewy.
But what had Richard’s stutter, the shape of Arlova’s breast or Bogrov’s whimpering to do with the objective rightness or wrongness of the measure itself?
Rubashov began again to walk up and down his cell.
He felt that everything he had experienced since his imprisonment had been only a prelude; that his cogitations had led him to a dead end—on to the threshold of what Ivanov called the “metaphysical brothel”—and that he must begin again from the beginning.
But how much time was there left?
He stopped, took the glass out of Ivanov’s hand and drained it.