Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

Stage 4: Self-criticism. In order to defend himself in a trial that refuses to declare the charge, K. ends up looking for the crime himself. Where is it concealed? Certainly somewhere in his curriculum vitae. 'He would have to recall his entire life, including the most minute acts and events, and then to explain and examine it in every regard.'

The situation is not at all unreal: this is actually the way some simple woman hounded by misfortune will wonder: what have I done wrong? and begin to

comb her past, examining not only her actions but her words and her secret thoughts in an effort to comprehend Gods anger.

To describe this state of mind, Communist political practice coined the term self-criticism (used in this political sense since the 1930s; Kafka never used it). This usage of the term does not correspond exactly to its etymology. It is not a matter of criticism (distinguishing good features from bad with the aim of correcting faults); it is a matter of finding your offense to let you help your accuser, let you accept and ratify the accusation.

Stage 5: The victim's identification with his executioner. Kafka's irony attains its horrifying peak in the last chapter: two men in frock coats come for K. and take him into the street. At first he struggles, but then he thinks: 'All I can do now… is keep a clear head to the end… Should I show now that I've learned nothing in a year of this trial? Should I go off like a dimwit with no sense?'

Then, from a distance, he sees some policemen walking their beats. One of them approaches this suspicious- looking group. Thereupon, on his own initiative, K. forcibly drags the two men away, even starting to run with them to escape the policemen who, after all, might disrupt or perhaps-who knows?-prevent his coming execution.

Finally, they arrive at their destination; as the men prepare to stab him, an idea (his ultimate self-criticism) crosses K.s mind: 'It would be his duty to seize the knife himself… and plunge it into his own body.' He deplores his weakness: 'He could not prove himself completely, he could not relieve the officials

of the whole task; the responsibility for this ultimate failing lay with the one who had denied him the remnant of strength he needed.'

For How Long Can a Man Be Considered Identical to Himself?

In Dostoyevsky, the characters' identities lie in their personal ideology, which more or less directly determines their behavior. Kirilov is completely absorbed by his philosophy of suicide, which he considers to be a supreme manifestation of freedom. Kirilov: an idea become man. But in real life, is a man really such a direct projection of his personal ideology? Tolstoy's characters in War and Peace (particularly Pierre Bezukhov and Andrei Bolkonsky) also have a very rich, very developed intellectuality, but theirs is changeable, protean, so that it is impossible to describe them in terms of their ideas, which are different in each phase of their lives. Tolstoy thus offers us another conception of man: he is an itinerary; a winding road; a journey whose successive phases not only vary but often represent a total negation of the preceding phases.

I've said road., a word that could mislead, because the image of a road evokes a destination. Now, what is the destination of these roads that end only randomly, broken off by the happenstance of death? Its true that, at the end, Pierre Bezukhov arrives at the state of mind that seems to be the ideal and final stage: he comes to believe that it is futile to keep searching for a meaning to his life, to struggle for this or that cause;

God is everywhere, in all of life, in ordinary life, so it is enough to live all there is to live and live it lovingly: and he turns happily to his wife and family. Is his destination reached? The summit that, retrospectively, makes all the earlier stages of the journey into mere steps on the stairway? If that were the case, Tolstoy's novel would lose its essential irony and come to resemble a novelized morality lesson. But it is not the case. In the Epilogue that summarizes the events of the next eight vears, we see Bezukhov leaving his house and wife for a month and a half to engage in some semi-clandestine political activity in Petersburg. So again he is off to seek a meaning to his life, to struggle for a cause. The roads never end and know no destinations.

One might say that the various phases of an itinerary do have an ironic relation to one another. In the kingdom of irony, equality rules; this means that no phase of the itinerary is morally superior to another. When Bolkonsky sets about the task of serving his country, is he seeking thereby to expiate the wrong of his earlier misanthropy? No. There is no self-criticism here. At each phase of the way, he focused all his intellectual and moral powers to arrive at his position, and he knows that: so how can he blame himself for not having been what he could not be? And just as one cannot pass judgment on the various phases of one's life from a moral viewpoint, similarly one cannot judge them as to authenticity. It is impossible to say which Bolkonsky is more true to himself: the one who withdrew from public life or the one who devoted himself to it.

If the various stages are so contradictory, how do we determine their common denominator? What is the common essence that lets us see Bezukhov the atheist and Bezukhov the believer as the selfsame person? Where does the stable essence of an 'I' reside? And what moral responsibility does Bolkonsky No. 2 have toward Bolkonsky No. 1? Must the Bezukhov who is Napoleon's enemy answer for the Bezukhov who was once his admirer? Over what period of time can we consider a man identical to himself?

Only the novel can, in concrete terms, explore this mystery, one of the greatest known to man; and Tolstoy was probably the first to do so.

Conspiracy of Details

The metamorphoses of Tolstoy's characters come about not as a lengthy evolution but as a sudden illumination. Pierre Bezukhov is transformed from an atheist into a believer with astonishing ease. All it takes is for him to be shaken up by the break with his wife and to encounter at a post house a traveling Freemason who talks to him. That ease is not due to lightweight capri-ciousness. Rather, it shows us that the visible change was prepared by a hidden, unconscious process, which suddenly bursts into broad daylight.

Gravely wounded on the battlefield of Austerlitz, Andrei Bolkonsky is regaining consciousness. At this moment his entire universe, that of a brilliant young man, is set rocking: not by rational, logical reflection, but by a direct confrontation with death and a long look at the sky. It is such details (a look at the sky) that play a great role in the decisive moments experienced by Tolstoy's characters.

Later on, emerging from his deep skepticism, Andrei returns to an active life. This change is preceded by a long discussion with Pierre on a ferry crossing a river. Pierre at the time is positive, optimistic, altruistic (such is that brief stage in his evolution), and he disputes Andrei's misanthropic skepticism. But in their discussion he shows himself rather naive, spouting cliches, and it is Andrei who shines intellectually. More important than Pierre s words is the silence that follows their discussion: 'Stepping off the ferry he looked up at the sky to which Pierre had pointed. For the first time since Austerlitz he saw that high everlasting sky he had seen while lying on the battlefield, and something that had long been slumbering, something better that was within him, suddenly awoke, joyful and youthful, in his soul.' The sensation is short-lived and vanishes immediately, but Andrei knows 'that this feeling, which he did not know how to develop, was alive in him.' And one day much later, like a dance of sparks, a conspiracy of details (the sight of an oak trees foliage, the happy talk of girls overheard by chance, unexpected memories) kindles that feeling (that 'was alive in him') and sets it blazing. Andrei, still content the day before in his retreat from the world, abruptly decides 'to go to Petersburg that autumn' and even 're-enter government service… And Prince Andrei, clasping his hands behind his back, paced back and forth in the room for a long time, now frowning, now smiling, as he reflected on all those irrational, inexpressible thoughts, secret as a crime, that were connected with Pierre, with fame, with the girl at the window, with the oak, with woman's beauty and with love, which had altered his whole life. And if anyone came into the room at such moments he was particularly curt, stern, firm, and, above all, disagreeably logical… as if to punish someone for all the secret, illogical work going on within him.' (I emphasize the most significant lines.) (Let us recall that it is a similar conspiracy of