The Silent Prophet

Prologue

On New Year’s Eve 1926–1927 I was sitting with some friends and acquaintances in Moscow in room Number Nine of the Bolshaia Moskovskaia Hotel. For some of those present this private mode of celebrating the New Year was the only one possible. Their views would clearly have permitted them a public expression of festive spirit. But certain considerations had to be taken into account, and to be feared. They could mix neither with foreigners nor with the local citizens and although each and every one of them had functioned long and often as an observer to further an idea, he rightly shunned becoming himself the object of observation.

In my room there floated the haze of cigarette smoke familiar to those acquainted with the novels of Russian literature. I opened intermittently the small transom of the window — my guests had restrained me from opening the entire window — and presently the door, which led into the corridor and through which entered the sounds of music, voices, glasses, footsteps, song.

‘Do you realize,’ said Grodzki, a Ukrainian Pole who had worked for a long time for the Cheka in Tokyo, and for whom I had developed a certain fellow feeling when he approached me with the request to write some reports about me and I had replied at once that I still recalled his activities in Japan. … ‘Do you realize,’ asked Grodzki, ‘who used to live here three years ago, in this very room, Number Nine?’ A few regarded him questioningly. For a few seconds he made the most of the silence. Like many of those who had been employed in the secret service, he craved not only to know something but to have known about it longer than anyone else. ‘Kargan,’ he said after a pause. ‘Oh, him!’ exclaimed B., a journalist whose orthodoxy was well-known. ‘Why so scornful?’ said Grodzki. ‘Because we have probably already harboured several of his kind here, in this room Number Nine,’ replied B. with a glance in my direction.

The others joined in. Almost all professed to have known Kargan and almost all expressed a more or less critical view of him. The appellations invented by orthodox theory for revolutionaries with an intellectual past are familiar and I need hardly rehearse the meaning of the wording of each. ‘Anarchist,’ exclaimed one, ‘sentimental rebel,’ another, ‘intellectual individualist,’ a third.

I may possibly have seized the opportunity to defend Kargan rather too eagerly just then. Although I suspected him at that time of being in Paris, and not without reason, I felt quite unaccountably as if he were now my guest and that it was my duty to protect him. Possibly Grodzki’s information that Kargan had lived in this room of mine years before provoked me to a long speech in his defence. It was not, in fact, a speech. It was a history. It was an attempt at a biography. Apart from Grodzki, whose vocation compelled him to know everybody, I was the best placed of all those present to know everything about the man attacked. I began my narration, supported by Grodzki, and both of us did not finish that night. I continued the story the next night and the third night; but by the third night the listeners had dwindled to two. They were the only ones not officially obliged or afraid to hear the truth.

In consequence I felt it necessary for my narrative to reach a more extensive audience than my voice could provide. I decided to write down what I had been recounting.

Kargan’s life is described below, set out in the same sequence as it was recounted then. The interruptions of the listeners, their gestures, their jokes, their questions, are omitted. Omitted too, even deliberately suppressed, are certain indications that might lead to Kargan’s identification and might further the reader’s natural impulse to recognize in the individual portrayed a definite, historically existing personality. Kargan’s life-story is as little related to actual events as any other. It is not intended to exemplify a political point of view — at most, it demonstrates the old and eternal truth that the individual is always defeated in the end.

Is Friedrich Kargan destined finally to sink into oblivion?

In the light of news of him received by some of his friends, indirectly but reliably, some weeks ago, he seems to have abandoned any intention to seek out the civilized part of the world of his own accord. It is therefore possible that one day he will be engulfed in empty solitude, unnoticed and without trace, like a falling star in a silent obscure night. Then his end would remain unknown, as until now were his early beginnings.