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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Russian writers on war
Alexander Herzen: War and “international law”
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Alexander Herzen
From My Past and Thoughts
Translated by Constance Garnett
In the Vatican there is a new gallery in which Pius VII., I believe, has placed an immense amount of statues, busts, and statuettes, dug up in Rome and its environs. The whole history of the decline of Rome is there expressed in eyebrows, lips, foreheads; from the daughters of Augustus down to Poppaea, the matrons have succeeded in transforming themselves into cocottes, and the type of cocotte is predominant and persists; the masculine type, surpassing itself, so to speak, in Antinous and Hermaphroditus, divides into two. One one hand there is sensual and moral degradation, low brows and features defiled by vice and gluttony, bloodshed and every wickedness in the world, petty as in the hetaira Heliogabalus, or with sunken cheeks like Galba; the last type is wonderfully reproduced in the King of Naples…But there is another – the type of military commander in whom everything social and moral, everything human has died out, and there is nothing but the passion for domination; the mind is narrow and there is no heart at all; they are the monks of the love of power; force and austere will are manifest in the features. Such were the Emperor of the Praetorian Guard and of the army, whom the turbulent legionaries raised to power for an hour…
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[H]ouse-serfs were sent for soldiers, and this punishment was a terror to all the young men; without kith or kin, they still preferred to remain house-serfs, rather than be in harness for twenty years. I was greatly affected by these terrible scenes…Two soldiers of the police would appear at the summons of the landowner: they would stealthily, in a casual, sudden way seize the appointed victim. The village elder commonly announced at this point that the master had the evening before ordered that he was to be taken to the recruiting-office, and the man would try through his tears to put a brave face on it, while the women wept…
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