by Philipp Blom
Bryusov’s secretly diseased ideal city is finally destroyed by an outbreak of ‘contradiction’, an illness that makes sufferers rebel against all that is reasonable: Overcome by this sudden attack of senselessness and destruction, the city sinks at last into ruin and desolation.
The stricken, instead of saying ‘yes,’ say ‘no’, wishing to say caressing words, they splutter abuse. The majority also begin to contradict themselves in their behaviour: intending to go to the left they turn to the right, thinking to raise the brim of a hat so as to see better, they would pull it down over their eyes instead and so on. As the disease develops, contradiction overtakes the whole of the bodily and spiritual life of the patient, exhibiting infinite diversity conformable with the idiosyncrasies of each. In general, the speech of the patient becomes unintelligible and his actions absurd.
While many fashionable artists like Bryusov, Bely and the mystical poetess Zinaida Gippius wrote much of their work in the ‘perfumed pastures’ of symbolist language and tried to grasp a higher reality with the help of spiritualist seances, others chose a confrontational approach to the unbearable reality. Leonid Andreyev created a scandal when his novel The Seven Who Were Hanged was passed by the censor and published (a clear indication of how times had changed), giving bewildered readers a pitiless journalistic depiction of a night spent in prison by seven condemned terrorists awaiting execution in the morning. They are kind, thoughtful people driven to an extreme act (a failed assassination) by extreme circumstances. The novel retells the trial, gives the reactions of the parents - respectable people all of them - and reveals the conversations between the prisoners, as well as their lonely thoughts: As grimly as it began, Andreyev’s novel ends with the dead bodies being laid into cheap coffins.
He has been transformed into an animal waiting to be slaughtered, a deaf-mute object which may be taken from place to place, burnt and broken. It matters not what he might say, nobody would listen to his words, and if he endeavored to shout, they would stop his mouth with a rag. Whether he can walk alone or not, they will take him away and hang him.
And if he should offer resistance, struggle or lie down on the ground - they will overpower him, lift him, bind him and carry him, bound, to the gallows. And the fact that this machine-like work will be performed over him by human beings like himself, lent to them a new, extraordinary and ominous aspect - they seemed to him like ghosts that came to him for this one purpose, or like automatic puppets on springs. They would seize him, take him, carry him, hang him, pull him by the feet. They would cut the rope, take him down, carry him off and bury him.
Nothing like this had been published in Russian before, and readers were disturbed not to be able to see these young people as terrorists. Their motives, the grief of the old officer paying a visit to his son before his execution, the noble young woman who comforts others - all this was far removed from official propaganda. Values like justice and truth appeared to crumble under the novelist’s cold, concentrated stare. Other authors discarded values altogether. In Mikhail Artsybashev’s erotic novel Sanine, the hero prowls through life like a modern Marquis de Sade, totally amoral, totally indifferent, looking for nothing but the gratification of his lust. The joyless sex is described as graphically as the censor would permit, and almost all protagonists end badly. ‘What a bad joke is man!’ exclaims the protagonist at the end of the work.
‘One can say without exaggeration that all Russia echoed to the cri de coeur that “it is impossible to live this way any longer”,’ Sergei Witte had written about these years, during which Russia’s culture took on all the traits of advanced schizophrenia, a time of violence violently crushed rather than of peace. Things could not end well, that much was clear. How and when the catastrophe would happen was still unsure, but as the students in The Seven Who Were Hanged keep saying to each other, ‘It won’t be long now!’
7
1906: Dreadnought and Anxiety
We will glorify war - the world’s only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
- F. T. Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto
Almost all the grand houses around the Champs-Elysées and the
Parc Monceau are in Jewish hands; sometimes through an open
window, one heard in the solitude echoes of some concert: some
Jew who is treating his neurosis.
- Edouard Drumont, La France juive
Portsmouth, 10 February 1906 With a soft but resonant ‘plonk’ the bottle of Australian wine made contact with the huge steel hull, but a garland of flowers prevented the bottle from breaking. Swinging from a long rope, the bottle was fished out of the air and His Majesty King Edward, wearing the uniform of an admiral of the fleet complete with plumed hat and still visibly puffing from the exertion of climbing up to the platform, let go once again. This time the bottle obligingly cracked and spilled its contents over the grey expanse of steel dominating the scene and dwarfing the attending crowds. ‘I christen you Dreadnought,’ the monarch declared. He then took a small mallet and began tapping away at the last rope holding the newly named vessel in its dry dock. The colossus started sliding down the ramp: ‘The ship diminished sharply before one’s eyes,’ the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent noted. ‘Then a crash of waters aroused one’s other senses. There came a roar of hurrahs, the first sounds of the band playing “God save the King” and tugs blowing their horns and the perfume of spilt wine and of flowers.’
Even for a King who was an old hand at cutting ribbons, smashing bottles and tapping ceremonial mallets, this was not an everyday occasion. The launch of the 18,000-ton, 527 feet, all-big-gun HMS Dreadnought, a ship faster, more powerful and more destructive than anything afloat, was the beginning of a new era. In honour of this special moment, the Royal Navy had pulled out all the stops: the bishop of Winchester had begun the service with the 107th Psalm (‘They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep’) and had blessed the ship, a boy’s choir had sung hymns, thousands of workmen, seamen and holidaying onlookers jostled to catch a glimpse of the huge steel structure crowned by four triumphal arches, and on the water, military ships and innumerable pleasure craft added dash and colour to the spectacle.
The launch of a big ship is always an emotional, exhilarating sight. No flag-waving little boy, though, could match the excitement of the First Sea Lord, Admiral John Arbuthnot ‘Jackie’ Fisher, who was standing next to the King, inundating him with a spate of technical data and enthusiasm, with top speeds, fire power, range, armament, manoeuvrability, and other details the monarch politely feigned interest in. For Fisher, this was the culmination of a campaign that had taken many years to accomplish, a personal crusade to reform the British navy and forge it once again into the efficient, awe-inspiring fighting force it had been at Trafalgar, a hundred years before. The Dreadnought, supreme symbol of Britain’s naval might, was all he had dreamt about for well over a decade.
Fisher’s uncompromising and steely determination was both the outcome and the continuation of an international arms race that brought European countries to the brink several times before 1914, fuelled in part by one man’s nostalgic childhood memories of seaside holidays. Kaiser Wilhelm II was not shy about admitting this very personal motivation for his fleet-building programme. ‘When I was a little boy,’ the Emperor told his uncle, Edward VII, during an official dinner, ‘I was allowed to visit Portsmouth and Plymouth hand in hand with kind aunts and friendly admirals. I admired the proud English ships in those two superb harbours. Then there awoke in me the wish to build ships of my own like these someday, and when I was grown up to possess as fine a navy as the English.’
The relationship between the German monarch and Britain with its navy showed the Emperor at his most maddeningly narcissistic, insecure, and ambivalent. Born to an English mother, the Empress Victoria (who was always homesick for
her native country, and detested heel-clicking, officious, military Prussia from the bottom of her soul), the ambivalence was planted early in the boy’s mind. ‘She delivered judgement on everything and found everything wrong with us and better in England which she habitually called “home”,’ Wilhelm would write in his memoirs. To the young prince, his mother’s ‘beloved England’ became a reference point in many ways, all the more so because it was almost impossible for him to excel at the skills valued and admired at the Potsdam court. A medical blunder at his birth had left his left arm withered and almost useless, making riding, hunting and other aristocratic pastimes an ordeal for him. Riding, especially, was to be the terror of his childhood. His mother judged it ‘intolerable’ that the heir to the throne should not cut a good figure on horseback and instituted a harsh training regime, which involved hauling the weeping eight-year-old onto a horse without stirrups and making him gallop. ‘He fell off continually; every time, despite his prayers and tears, he was lifted up and set upon his back again. After weeks of torture, the difficult task was accomplished: he had got his balance,’ his tutor noted with obvious satisfaction.
In England, when visiting his grandmother, Queen Victoria, Wilhelm was away from these torments and from his drill-like education with lessons from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. every weekday. He breathed more freely in the comparatively informal atmosphere of Osborne House, where he could play with other children and watch the grand navy battleships gliding by silently into Portsmouth harbour. Later, the ambitious prince took to sailing during the Cowes Week regatta at the Isle of Wight and had a luxury racing yacht, the Meteor, built for the express purpose of beating his uncle Bertie, heir to the British throne. Much to his fury, Wilhelm lost year after year, despite the flood of complaints about handicaps and regulations which he unleashed on the committee of the Royal Yacht Squadron, complaining of unfairness to him and him alone.
Wilhelm was desperately eager to belong to the languidly elegant Cowes set, the perfect embodiment of British aristocratic life. While there, he wore civilian clothes, spoke English almost like an Englishman and would host sumptuous dinners on his imperial yacht Hohenzollern, but it was his uncle who held all the attention: ‘He wore a white yachting cap, smoked large cigars and always carried an ebony walking stick. His prominent eyes were china blue and kindly ... He was always followed by an entourage of intimate friends;…the beautiful Mrs. George Keppel, the notorious Mrs. Langtry, and sometimes his wife, Queen Alexandra, who seemed to me the most beautiful of the ladies,’ one eyewitness remembered.
Wilhelm could not escape his uncle’s shadow. It was Edward who proposed his nephew for membership in the exclusive Royal Yacht Squadron; it was he whom the Queen designated to supervise and control him. This duty was much resented by Bertie, whose mind was on other things, particularly as, despite the British blood he was so proud of, the young Prussian proved simply unable to enter into the spirit of the event, which was in effect one large garden party garnished with splendid boats. As a racer he tried too hard and was obsessed by winning, a cardinal sin. As a participant, his habit of appearing with his yacht off the coast, surrounded by what looked like half the imperial battle fleet, attracted amused comments from the in-crowd. As a socialite, he was often too jovial, too loud, making gentlemen cringe under his back-slapping and familiarity. At other times, he would sulk at not being given due respect and complain loudly about matters that every public schoolboy could have told him were best left alone. In short, the forward prince made a nuisance of himself. Eventually, in 1895, he declared that the handicaps were unfair and he had decided not to race at Cowes again.
Still eager to outdo his uncle, the Kaiser founded his own racing week at Kiel, which he intended to be altogether grander than its British equivalent. The setting was magnificent, but once again, the officers and soldiers standing stiffly to attention amid the sound of military bands could not match the laid-back style of Cowes. Kiel became a very personal concern, as the monarch’s brother, Prince Heinrich, remarked: ‘There’s no doubt about it, our people buy yachts and race them only to please my brother ... Half of them have never seen the sea. But if they go to the seaside and read about the Emperor’s yacht ... and if the wealthy merchants who know nothing of the sea become yachtsmen to please the Emperor, then it stirs up interest and we can get money for the navy.’ In a country without a strong recent naval tradition, the Kaiser’s regatta week became a playground for the newly rich. Wealthy Americans liked to come over to rub shoulders with the aristocracy. Guests were put up in luxury ocean liners chartered for the purpose as floating hotels. Wilhelm was happy here, and during some races he even tried his hand at taking the helm, though not very well. ‘If the Kaiser steered himself, he regularly hit the buoy,’ as Chancellor Bülow, always effusive with praise to his employer’s face, remarked with acid effectiveness.
Germany’s aggressive naval policy also had a less personal, more properly political purpose. The Reich’s burgeoning industrial success and rapidly rising population put its politicians into an expansionist mood. As the country acquired colonies and prepared to use its power abroad, global aspirations faced a dilemma: with harbours in the Baltic and the North Sea, Germany’s ships had to circumnavigate Britain, either via the Channel or around Scotland, to reach open waters. In view of the overwhelming British naval force which could blockade these exits at any moment, Germany was effectively a colonial power at Britain’s mercy. Had the country contented itself with Continental and economic power, and had the imperial navy accepted the impossibility of breaking this stranglehold, this geographic conundrum would not have mattered. That, however, would have meant giving up any aspirations of becoming a serious colonial power and relying instead on its traditional strength, its formidable army, to establish prestige and security. Wilhelminian Germany, though, was determined to play a global role similar to, and eventually perhaps greater than, those of Britain and France. ‘Our future is on the water,’ the Kaiser declared. In the long run, conflict was inevitable.
Germany’s proposed way out of Britain’s ring of naval steel was formulated by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and was as simple as it was elegant: apart from Germany, Britain’s immediate rivals for naval superiority were France and Russia, both of whom also had expansionist naval policies. Germany would have gained independence if she could just build a navy strong enough to make defeating it too costly for the British forces, which would itself sustain heavy losses and be therefore unable to guarantee the defence of her coasts, her trade routes and her colonies against her other rivals. Simple as this policy was, it shackled German dreams of greatness to a pharaonically expensive naval construction programme.
Like the Kaiser, Tirpitz, whose daughters were sent to Cheltenham Ladies’ College, was an anglophile who spoke excellent English and read English novels and newspapers. Like his employer, the young officer had learned to admire the British navy while stationed in Plymouth, which the fledgling German navy used as a supply base: ‘Here we felt ourselves almost more at home than in the peaceful idyllic Kiel, which only grumbled at Prussia,’ he would later remember. ‘Our tiny naval officers’ corps looked up to the British Navy with admiration ... We grew up on the British Navy like a creeping plant. We preferred to get our supplies from England. If an engine ran smoothly…if a rope or a chain did not break, then it was certain to be not a home-made article but a product of English workshops ... in those days we could not imaging that German guns could be equal to English.’ Like Wilhelm, Tirpitz was also acutely sensitive to being patronized by British naval officers, and passionate about Germany’s role in the world.
It was Tirpitz who gave the Kaiser’s naval enthusiasm its decisive form. The question was strategic: Germany needed a strong navy, but for what purpose and with what strategy in mind? Propelled by his bitterness about having to stand on the sidelines in the Boer War, Wilhelm wanted a fleet of agile, long-range cruisers suited for becoming a global player, to apply pressure abroad and protect German shipping.
Cruisers, though, stood little chance against more powerful battleships with long-range artillery able to sink their adversaries before they themselves got close enough to open fire. Tirpitz therefore convinced the Kaiser that what he needed first and foremost were battleships to guarantee open sea routes and to counter any attempt at a naval blockade. ‘For Germany, the most dangerous naval enemy at the present time is England,’ as he bluntly put it in a memorandum in which he asked for a fleet of nineteen battleships to be ready by 1905 at a cost of 408 million marks. Battleships had heavier armament and therefore a shorter operational range; using them to protect German interests on the high seas was out of the question. They made sense only if Germany expected to fight a powerful enemy close to its own coast. Building them sent a clear signal to London.
Ruling the Waves
One man who heard this signal was Admiral Jackie Fisher, who had made it his mission to modernize the British navy. During his own early career on British training ships in China and in the Mediterranean, Fisher had come to know the fleet as anything but an effective strike force: its ships and guns dated from the time of the Crimean War, and its strategies were still modelled on Nelson’s victories, with broadsides exchanged, and weekly cutlass training for close combat after boarding enemy craft. The wooden three-decker ships of the line, with their muzzle-loading brass cannon that brought Britain victory at Trafalgar, remained the Admiralty’s ideal. HMS Victoria, the last of these ships to be built, was launched in 1879. In the age of steel ships and modern artillery with a range of several miles, all this was obsolete, but the hierarchy clung to tried and tested ways. The ambitious Fisher had no time for such preconceptions of glorious combat, or for the social ethos of the officer corps. He himself had risen through the ranks by merit: his father had been a colonial officer in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), who had ruined himself with a coffee plantation and sent his son into the navy at the age of thirteen. The boy had never seen his father again.