Русское зазеркалье (двуязычная версия)

Or perhaps getting old is a tragedy, after all. Imagine the most horrible situation that you can ever think of—a deadly pandemic, a nuclear bomb attack, or another such global disaster. Even then, each of us would die only once. Please try to fully grasp this very simple fact, namely, that even a world war, when seen strictly from a personal perspective, is not more painful than our own death from old age from which we absolutely cannot escape. In fact, such a planetary deadly disaster would probably be less painful for us than our death from old age, complicated through numerous illnesses when—allow me to quote from Sting’s 2014 musical The Last Ship—

[y]ou're tied to a pump and a breathing machine,

With their X-rays and probes and their monitor screens,

And they'll wake ye up hungry, saying ‘How do ye feel?’

And then you're stuffed full of pills and a barium meal—

and when

…you’re laid like a piece of old meat on the slab,

And they’ll cut and they’ll slice, and they’ll poke and they’ll jab,

And they'll grill ye and burn ye, and they'll wish ye good health,

—whereas our death in a war would be instantaneous and almost painless.

The fact that everyone most certainly dies was an absolute revelation for Leo Tolstoy during his stay in Arzamas, a city in Nizhniy Novgorod province. This coincidence is widely known in the history of Russian literature as the so-called ‘Arzamas horror.’ I know that what I am saying has an element of ridicule in it, because it sounds as if the celebrated world famous author had suddenly discovered that two plus two equals four—‘and for him, it was an absolute revelation.’ Please don’t be in a hurry to ridicule Leo Tolstoy, though: only a limited number of people actually can go through the emotional acceptance of their own death when they are still very much alive and not quite old. I am not certain that I am among those people; as for you, I am not even certain that you have ever tried to imagine your own death. My recommendation for your further reading on the Arzamas horror is ‘The Arzamas Horror: a Sample of Tolstoy’s Psychopathology,’an article by Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, published in Tolstoy on the Couch in 1998 (the publisher is Palgrave Macmillan). Please do not forget to answer the question: Do you agree with what Daniel Rancour-Laferriere says about Leo Tolstoy’s psychopathology? Why do you, or why don’t you?