The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

At that time I despised people. I had an amazing ability to find the bad (the vile, as I put it) in everyone, and had a very high opinion of myself. I considered myself to be better and more intelligent than others and categorized all people as either the chosen few or the masses, placing myself in the former group, of course.

There is something else I must mention. From my earliest childhood I had experienced, not so much thoughts, as feelings, that life was meaningless. I remember, once when I was about six I crawled under a table and wouldn’t come out. My father tried this and that, but I wouldn’t budge.

“Well, at least explain what’s with you,” my father finally asked anxiously.

“What’s the point of all of this, if we die?” I asked.

“What do you mean by ‘all of this’?”

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“Everything,” I said, and made a sweeping gesture with my arms.

“You’re a little young to worry about such things!” father laughed.

Then I really did stop worrying about such things. But now, at fifteen/sixteen years of age, it all came back, and with much greater force. I considered the chosen ones to be those who understood that life was meaningless and did not attempt to dissuade themselves of this. Though man always strives for happiness, he will never be happy; the same is true for individuals as for humanity as a whole. So why go on living and drag out this drudgery? Why endure sixty or eighty years of stagnant existence; is it not better to cut things short at sixteen? I could take that step myself now, before I become stricken with disease or too attached to life. We all die, after all, so what difference does it make whether it’s now or in fifty years? Life is worth living when one has a goal or purpose, but if there is none—then what’s the point? What’s the point of living if people will never be happy; if cruelty and arbitrariness will always reign in human relations? And if humanity should someday achieve happiness—so what? “I’ll still just become fertilizer for burdock.” And death would be harder to bear for a happy humanity than for an unhappy one. So what should one live for—for fame? One tires of fame. For women? But they grow old and die the same as you. It remains only to live as animals: eat, drink, breed and die. That’s how the majority lives, after all. Simply in order to eat and to cover their nakedness, the majority works and attempts to sweeten this bitter life with movies, books, stamps or with their labor.

So, for what purpose do we have reason? And is it worth occupying oneself with art, science, philosophy, technology, just to eat, drink, reproduce, and die? Of course not.

In school at this same time I was learning the basics of Darwinism. The basic law of the animal world, I was taught, is the struggle for survival. The strong devour the weak. Those who adapt, survive, and those who don’t, perish. And man, too, is an animal, isn’t he? This means that among humans the basic law is the same: the strong devour the weak; those who adapt, survive, and those who don’t, perish. It then follows, that the accommodating careerists are the most normal of people, and morality is just a fabrication of the weak, made up to console them in their weakness. Yet what if I don’t want to live without morality, only filling my own stomach and taking away my neighbor’s portion? Why the devil would I want such a life? I thought incessantly of suicide, but kept waiting for something and putting it off.

Then I had a revelation. Once, while reading that same textbook, Principles of Darwinism, I came upon a certain passage on coal, about how the ancient vegetation that formed coal absorbed lots of solar energy, and that’s why coal releases so much heat. A sudden spark illuminated my mind. How is it that in nature everything is so interconnected, so well thought-out? Can that

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Chapter Twenty-Eight

really be by accident? Now, if a man doesn’t look after his garden, the garden will die. So how come in nature no one looks after things, but everything is in its place, everything reasoned and wise? We need oxygen, so plants make oxygen for us. Plants need humus, so animals die and their decaying bodies provide humus.

From that moment, I concluded that nature was created by a higher intelligence, God, in other words. But this belief was still far from Christianity or any other religion.

“Of course, God is creator of all in the universe,” I thought, “but that still doesn’t mean that people could see Him or that He could give them some sort of commandments. Can we fathom the soul of an ant? Can an ant understand us? In religions, man has simply tried to comprehend God in human terms.”