The plot is that of
"Shenandoah" and "Held by the Enemy"--but how brilliantly it is endowed
with a new significance, how penetratingly its remotest currents are
followed out, how magnificently it is made to fit into that colossal
panorama of Holy Russia! It is always this background, this complex of
obscure and baffling influences, this drama under the drama, that Conrad
spends his skill upon, and not the obvious commerce of the actual stage.
It is not the special effect that he seeks, but the general effect. It
is not so much man the individual that interests him, as the shadowy
accumulation of traditions, instincts and blind chances which shapes the
individual's destiny. Here, true enough, we have a full-length portrait
of Razumov, glowing with life. But here, far more importantly, we also
have an amazingly meticulous and illuminating study of the Russian
character, with all its confused mingling of Western realism and
Oriental fogginess, its crazy tendency to go shooting off into the
spaces of an incomprehensible metaphysic, its general transcendence of
all that we Celts and Saxons and Latins hold to be true of human motive
and human act.
Pages:
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59