Under Western Eyes - Joseph Conrad

It is no surprise that Hitchcock chose Conrad’s The Secret Agent - not as the 1936 film of that name but 'Sabotage' made the same year - as one of the style of espionage thrillers with which he would make his reputation. Conrad sets a high bar for the dark murky activities of the secret service, the value of his work evident in the wealth of experience and knowledge that goes into the dealings of international affairs, colonialism, not to mention the darkness at the heart of man. There is certainly plenty of the latter in Under Western Eyes but, other than the explosive opening, not much that would make a Hitchcock thriller.

Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov, a student at St Petersburg University, is a not the typical figure to get involved in murder and conspiracy, but when it lands at his door it presents him with a dilemma. He returns to his apartment one evening, intent on working on studies to secure himself a solid position as an academic, only to find Victor Haldin, a fellow student, seeking temporary refuge after carrying out a terrorist or revolutionary attack. Haldin only knows Kirylo in passing and considers him a person of discretion who can be trusted with radical ideas in "a country where an opinion may be a legal crime visited by death or sometimes by a fate worse than mere death".

Haldin has just been involved in an anarchist incident, the assassination of Mr de P–, a Minister of State who has been ruthless in the oppression of ordinary citizens suspected of being a threat to the state. Razumov listens with horror, expecting a knock at the door and hauled away by the police, his dreams of quiet academic prestige ruined in a moment. He nonetheless agrees to help Haldin make a getaway if only to get him out of his apartment, but frustrated and not knowing how to proceed he instead relies on the only person he knows who might be able to extricate him from this dilemma as having no part in it and hands Haldin over to the authorities.

Razumov is so disturned by the incident that it hardens his determination to set himself apart from it and documents his opposition of viewpoint as "History not Theory. Patriotism not Internationalism. Evolution not Revolution. Direction not Destruction. Unity not Disruption." Unfortunately this cuts no mustard with the authorities who question and harbour suspicions about him. That might make it sound like there is a strict division of ideals proposed in the novel, clear philosophical definitions outlined, but the intention of the narrator of Under Western Eyes, a professor of languages in Geneva, is to show that Russian thought is quite different from western ideas and mindsets.

The greater part of the novel ponders these questions in Geneva, a city which has a considerable population of Russian émigrés. Among them are the mother and sister of Haldin, sent there by the young man for security, and Peter Ivanovich a famous writer who was also once a convict of the state a “heroic fugitive” (who is described frequently as "the great feminist" and seems to be partly based on Dostoevsky) and Madame de S., the two of them forming a little clique with strange ideals and behaviours that the narrator finds incomprehensible to the Western mindset. It's there that Razumov, bearing some measure of guilt and presumably trying to remove himself from the suspicions surrounding him, has also turned up in Geneva

There he is introduced to various revolutionary friends of Peter Ivanovich who are looking for a certain young person or naive fool - to push their schemes forward. His association with Victor Haldin, who has been executed in the meantime, makes everyone think he is a man of character, but Razumov is even more troubled and unsure if his position, unable to even meet the Haldins, but putting his thoughts down on paper for the English teacher to read at a later point. It's positively Kafkaesque before Kafka, the young man pressurised from all sides, finding himself at the mercy of great forces to be something he doesn't believe in or even understand.

Inevitably being Conrad, the writing in Under Western Eyes is intense and the style challenging, but there are nuggets of tremendous insight there as well. I'm not sure about its success in casting an uncomprehending western eye on the Russian nature, character and behaviour, although it certainly corresponds with views you might ascertain from Russian literature of the period. It certainly succeeds in capturing the essence of that period and the mindset behind the Nihilists, which is challenging enough. More than that however, Under Western Eyes delves even deeper into human psychology around questions of the individual's response to such forces of power and anarchism, to question whether anyone can remain independent without being conformist, or whether you will carry a measure of guilt for both actions taken or not taken. That at least touches on the contradictions of being Russian and the considerations made here in 1911 may indeed be just as relevant today.

Reading notes: Long past copyright considerations, you can obtain collections of Joseph Conrad's work for very little or indeed as free eBook publications. I downloaded a free copy of Under Western Eyes from Amazon for the Kindle, and it's perfectly well formatted.