In its pride of numbers, in its strange pretensions of sanctity, and in the secret readiness to abase itself in suffering, the spirit of Russia is the spirit of cynicism. It informs the declarations of her statesmen, the theories of her revolutionists, and the mystic vaticinations of prophets to the point of making freedom look like a form of debauch, and the Christian virtues themselves appear actually indecent… But I must apologize for the digression.
Much of the novel takes place in Russia and the portrait that Conrad delivers of the country is certainly less than positive. There is humor in the admittance of a digressive quality to this jeremiad against a nation because many scholars assume that this focus on the negative aspects of the Russian character is not exactly digressive at all, but rather a manifestation of Conrad’s deep-seated feelings. He was, after all, born in Poland at a time when Russia’s designs on his homeland was at one its peaks of aggression.
His existence was a great cold blank, something like the enormous plain of the whole of Russia levelled with snow and fading gradually on all sides into shadows and mists.
The description here is of the novel’s protagonist, Kirylo Sidorovich Razumov. The novel is deeply concerned with the nature of appearances and for Razumov’s outward appearance is that of a rather quiet, introspective, studious, reflective and thoughtful individual. Thus manifest outwardly, he makes himself subject to a variety of misinterpretations by others since inwardly none of these attributes actually apply to any serious degree. The cold blankness of the Russian plain described here becomes a metaphor for the Razumov himself; he is an empty slate upon which other write a narrative which still others wipe away and write anew themselves.
Razumov had a vision of General T—-'s goggle eyes waiting for him—the embodied power of autocracy, grotesque and terrible. He embodied the whole power of autocracy because he was its guardian. He was the incarnate suspicion, the incarnate anger, the incarnate ruthlessness of a political and social regime on its defense.
This is a political novel in the sense that Conrad is not exactly famous for writing political novels. He is famous writing novels that examines the natural consequences of ideology, but not of writing about politics and politicians specifically. The specifics of this novel is that appearances can be deceiving to the point that even an autocratic system of government can look enticing to some. (And not just the autocrats, either.) The powerlessness and visceral evil inherent in a system of localized and absolute power is made manifest: it by no means appears ambiguous.
I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a terrible corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naive and hopeless cynicism. I think sometimes that the psychological secret of the profound difference of that people consists in this, that they detest life, the irremediable life of the earth as it is, whereas we westerners cherish it with perhaps an equal exaggeration of its sentimental value. But this is a digression indeed…
Again, what the narrator dismisses as a digression is not so much digressive after all. In fact, it is in observations like this that the novel derives its title. The narrator, it should be noted, is British and he occasionally reminds the reader of this be prefacing an observation with the phrase “to my western eyes.” Appearance are deceiving, especially when one gauges the outward appearance of an entity through eyes looking used to judging from a foreign perspective.
