Русское зазеркалье (двуязычная версия)

Duty is another very important word whose meaning we probably are unable to understand as long as we do not reject our individualism, as long as we pretend that it is this very individualism that is ein feste Burg, a mighty fortress of our weltanschauung. Over the last century, the word duty became somewhat pale: we do not use such phrases as ‘your sacred duty is to give up your life for the sake of your own country’ any longer. We instinctively feel that there is too much pathos in them. We are simply not up to this pathos, so we just call such phrases ‘pathetic’—forgive the unintentional pun. We seem to fully misinterpret the very concept of duty which we see as something external, as a task that can be forced upon a person. When a teacher says that an essay is ‘due tomorrow’ he or she means that he or she is able to academically penalise those students who won’t submit their compositions by tomorrow and that he or she most certainly will do so. It works very nicely with things that are less important than your life, but this reading of the concept becomes impossible when it is your life that is asked from you. You absolutely cannot force a person to sacrifice his or her life for whichever sake because you have no means of coercion, the most severe punishment that you can impose on this person being his or her execution—but you have asked for his or her life, anyway. Strange as it seems, duty, in the loftiest sense of this word, is based entirely on our free will to transgress the boundaries of our personality—of our individualistic self, rather. (Please give some examples of people who you think have transgressed the boundaries of their selves.) ‘Jeder stirbt für sich allein’, ‘Every Man Dies Alone,’ or, maybe, ’Dies for His Own Sake,” to remember the title of Hans Fallada’s famous novel. But ‘we do not live alone’ (I am quoting a character from An Inspector Calls, a meaningful play by John Boynton Priestley who was an English novelist, playwright, screenwriter, broadcaster and social commentator), and we cannot possibly live for our own sake only, however much the mainstream mass media would try to convince you in the opposite. Some of us, who fully understand that they do not live alone, are lucky enough to dispose of their own death, making it either a death ‘für sich allein,’ for their own sake, or a meaningful death for the sake of other human beings.