Last week, Pres Bush used a phrase in his
inaugural
speech which James Meek in the
Guardian claims
came from Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel
The Possessed.
Meek and people repeating his claim have ripped Bush's phrase from
the context in the speech and ripped the Dostoevsky quote (if he
was in fact quoting Dostoevsky) from the novel's context.
The immediate context in the speech is '[by our actions] in the
great liberating tradition of this nation ... we have lit a fire as
well - a fire in the minds of men'.
The Possessed is much, much more, than a novel about
terrorists in a small Russian village trying to bring down the
Tsarist regime, as James Meek claims. That's like saying
Moby
Dick is about 19th century New England sea men.
The Corner mentions James Billington's book
With Fire in the
Minds of Men. Meek is ignorant of, or ignores, the book, yet
Billington has been known all over the world as the Librarian of
Congress for nearly 20 years.
Here's another Meek howler:
The novel belongs to a period in Dostoevsky's life
which the White House might find attractive, after he had been sent
by the Tsar to a kind of Russian Guantanamo and emerged a deeply
religious conservative.
Dostoevsky was sent to Siberia in
1849 and released in
1854. He wrote
The Possessed in
1872, 18 years
after his release from prison, and
- after The House of the Dead (1861),
- after Notes From the Underground (1864),
- after Crime and Punishment (1865-1866),
- and after The Idiot (1868).
(Sources:
Dostoevsky and
Time, a timeline of his life and works and
Fyodor
Dostoevsky (1821-1881).)
The only major works after
The Possessed were
A Raw
Youth and
The Brothers Karamazov.
The context in the speech.
I don't know what speech writer inserted the phrase Bush used, and
whether the speech writer had in mind Billington or Dostoevsky. I
haven't been able to find anything on the 'net naming the speech
writer and neither have my searches turned up anything about the
phrase except pure speculation, some of it wild use of
cut-and-paste without any familiarity with Billington, Dostoevsky
or
The Possessed, only a simplistic recitation of one event
in the book, and no analysis of the book's theme. We simply don't
know the provenance of the phrase in the speech.
First, here is the Bush speech paragraph containing the phrase:
'From all of you, I have asked patience in the hard
task of securing America, which you have granted in good measure.
Our country has accepted obligations that are difficult to fulfill,
and would be dishonorable to abandon. Yet because we have acted in
the great liberating tradition of this nation, tens of millions
have achieved their freedom. And as hope kindles hope, millions
more will find it. By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well - a
fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it
burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire
of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our
world.'
It's clear that Bush is saying that America's efforts at liberating
foreign peoples have lit a fire in the minds of men. Only snarky
interpretations and prejudices could twist what Bush means to say.
You may not agree with what he says, but this context has nothing
whatsoever to do with Russian villages terrorized by nihilists: the
words happen to be identical, but the context proves that their
meaning is very different.
Meek's attempt to tie the speech to
The Possessed is
absurd.
The context in The Possessed.
First, the title may equally be translated as
The Demons or
The Devils, since it is demonic forces, the ideas
'possessing' the nihilists, which are explicitly a large part of
the novel's theme: it is not the individuals who are committing
atrocities and seeking destruction of Russian society who are truly
responsible. Dostoevsky expresses the idea clearly when Alyosha, in
The Brothers Karamazov, says to Ivan, his brother
"It was not you who killed father . . . You've accused
yourself and confessed to yourself that you and you alone are the
murderer. But it was not you who killed him, you are mistaken, the
murderer was not you, do you hear, it was not you! God has sent me
to tell you that."
Ivan himself didn't murder his father, and the nihilists aren't
bent on destroying Russian society: they are possessed just as the
man in Luke 8:26-39 is possessed: the demons flee from him at
Jesus' command and enter the Gadarene swine. The nihilists are not
drunk on ideology, they are not insane, they are demonically
possessed, and the novel's message is that only repentance can save
the nihilists and save Russia. Sofya Matveyevna, taking care the
ill Stephan Trofimovich at the end of
The Possessed, quotes
the verses from Luke, and Stephan says:
A great number of ideas keep coming into my mind now.
You see, that's exactly like our Russia, those devils that come out
of the sick man and enter into the swine. They are all the sores,
all the foul contagions, all the impurities, all the devils great
and small that have multiplied in that great invalid, our beloved
Russia, in the course of ages and ages. Oui, cette Russie que
j'aimais tou jours. But a great idea and a great Will will
encompass it from on high, as with that lunatic possessed of devils
. . . and all those devils will come forth, all the impurity, all
the rottenness that was putrefying on the surface . . . and they
will beg of themselves to enter into swine; and indeed maybe they
have entered into them already! They are we, we and those . . . and
Petrusha and les autres avec lui . . . and I perhaps at the head of
them, and we shall cast ourselves down, possessed and raving, from
the rocks into the sea, and we shall all be
drowned— and a good thing too, for that is all
we are fit for. But the sick man will be healed and 'will sit at
the feet of Jesus,' and all will look upon him with astonishment. .
. . My dear, vous comprendrez apres, but now it excites me very
much. . . . Vous comprendrez apres. Nous comprendrons
ensemble.