From The Petchenyeg To The Little Prince: A debate on human malevolence
From The Petchenyeg To The Little Prince:
A debate on human malevolence
Dichotomy is relatively simple: if one considers a good person to be a person who occupies his time performing good deeds and worthy acts, then – consequently – an evil person would have to be a person who’s engaged in corruption and immoral actions.
However, modern reality offers a rather interesting perspective concerning the explicit terms of evil. There is a vivid conception of what evil should look like – witches, warlocks, etc. – but reality challenges this perception: realism deprives magic and supernatural forces from our lives.
Murder, theft, rape, violence, exploitation – should be prevented and rejected by society in various ways: rules, punishments and by condemnation. But what about acts which are not considered to be criminal? How one may judge a person’s immoral behavior when that person does not actually violate the law? How does our attitude towards his questionable conduct reflect on us, on our personality, community or society?
In Chekhov’s story, The Petchenyeg, Ivan Abramitch Zhmuhin is not a bad person. In the phase in his life, when the readers meet him for the first time, he is mostly a memory and a contrast between “who had once been young, strong, and vigorous, but now was old, dried up, and bent, with shaggy eyebrows and a greenish-grey moustache.”1
From his past as a Cossack officer there is only a pitiful shadow left: an empty shell with hard, long reflective thoughts about the useless nature of the world2. The betrayal of his body leads to the betrayal of his soul: the world he had known is long gone, vanished. An improvement, progress or any sort of benefit – in the existing conditions – is impossible. Not due to lack of ability but for lack of will; Abramitch the officer was a man of matter, not mind. He is utterly blind to humanity around him and to the potential of kindness3. How can such a man reform when he believes absolutely in the unchangeable nature of the world?
On his way home from the city, where he had just signed his will, Zhmuhin engages in a conversation with a fellow passenger, “a fair-haired, plump, middle-aged gentleman with a shabby portfolio”4. Zhmuhin discloses to his new acquaintance his long earned wisdom, thus, unintentionally, appointing him to be his confessor. The passenger, a lawyer, is polite and patient enough to tolerate Zhmuhin’s presence and lengthy speech – at least at the beginning. He listens to Zhmuhin when he talks about the boredom in his life, his wife and his two young boys – “the rascals. There’s nowhere for them to be taught out here in the steppe; I haven’t the money to send them to school in Novo Tcherkask, and they live here like young wolves. Next thing they will be murdering someone on the highroad.”5
Zhmuhin’s words sound harsh. His philosophical thoughts concerning the nature of marriage, the essence of life and the course of the world typify him as a bothersome, melancholic and somewhat overdramatic person. However, when it comes to his young boys, Zhmuhin doesn’t exaggerate at all. Quite the contrary: here his is amazingly accurate:
“In the yard near a barn Zhmuhin’s sons were standing, one a young lad of nineteen, the other a younger boy, both barefoot and bareheaded. Just at the moment when the trap drove into the yard the younger flung a cackling hen high in the air, which described an arc; the elder shot it with a gun and the hen fell dead to the earth.
“Those are my boys learning to shoot flying birds,” said Zhmuhin.”6
The two youngsters have neither education nor occupation. They are the opposite representation of the cultured, well-mannered attorney7, a vegetarian for ideological reasons. Taking the lives of creatures is against all his convictions. He discusses this viewpoint with Zhmuhin during dinner, thus bringing the old man to contemplate the philosophical possibility that someday all animals will be set free and live naturally in the wild. All animals except one: the pig8. The pig, like two of Zhmuhin’s rebellious sons, is the embodiment of Zhmuhin’s moral thesis about the world. A thesis, which perceives human nature as primarily, depraved and irreparably corrupt. In Zhmuhin’s eyes, even in a million years, the sinful nature of humans will remain impervious and immune to alternation of any kind.
In this state, only one solution is possible: alienation, total and complete alienation of evil. In the absence of any possible improvement, there is no hope for amendment of any kind. This is the belief of the former Cossack officer. A narrow viewpoint that identifies the phenomenon but is incapable of walking the extra mile and actually doing something about it. Zhmuhin reconciles with what he sees. For his part there is not, nor there will ever be another reality. Therefore, all he can do is to acknowledge the truth9.
Zhmuhin presents his arguments relentlessly as a man who fears death and consistently tries to break out from its deadly grip. He envies his guest for his calmness and serenity while he himself is a troubled, anxious person. However, truth must be told: Zhmuhin was a relentless talker from early times. His farm, “among the neighbouring landowners and the peasants… was known as the Petchenyegs’ farm” because, “many years before, a land surveyor, who was passing through the neighbourhood and put up at the farm, spent the whole night talking to Ivan Abramitch… and as he was driving away in the morning said to him grimly: “You are a Petchenyeg, my good sir!” “10
Zhmuhin treats his new guest in the same appalling manner with which he treated the land surveyor, until the polite attorney almost goes out of his mind. Zhmuhin is completely oblivious of his unbearable behavior, as he is utterly unaware of the misery of his poor wife. Zhmuhin is deprived of basic human sensitivity – empathy for other person. He does not even understand the resentment, which is addressed to him – implied11 or explicit12. As someone who believes in the fatalism of the human nature, Zhmuhin does not even bother to educate his two sons. He allows them – not only kill animals, but to kill them in the cruelest way13.
Zhmuhin is not concerned with the here and now – he just likes to talk. He enjoys the sense of superiority that this gives him14. Things do not really agitate him or trouble him. His reflections do not lead to reform: his poor, suffering wife, his two sons who are growing up to be emotionless monsters, his suffocating, impoverished house, the impossible living conditions his family has to deal with – all these things are to talk about, and not to change.
In matters of cruelty and attitude that result from pure evil, there is a genuine need for intervention. Such intervention can be learned from the baobab trees in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s famous story – The Little Prince:
“… there were on the planet where the little prince lived– as on all planets– good plants and bad plants. In consequence, there were good seeds from good plants, and bad seeds from bad plants. But seeds are invisible. They sleep deep in the heart of the earth’s darkness, until someone among them is seized with the desire to awaken. Then this little seed will stretch itself and begin– timidly at first– to push a charming little sprig inoffensively upward toward the sun. If it is only a sprout of radish or the sprig of a rose-bush, one would let it grow wherever it might wish. But when it is a bad plant, one must destroy it as soon as possible, the very first instant that one recognizes it.
Now there were some terrible seeds on the planet that was the home of the little prince; and these were the seeds of the baobab. The soil of that planet was infested with them. A baobab is something you will never, never be able to get rid of if you attend to it too late. It spreads over the entire planet. It bores clear through it with its roots. And if the planet is too small, and the baobabs are too many, they split it in pieces…
“It is a question of discipline,” the little prince said to me later on. “When you’ve finished your own toilet in the morning, then it is time to attend to the toilet of your planet, just so, with the greatest care. You must see to it that you pull up regularly all the baobabs, at the very first moment when they can be distinguished from the rosebushes which they resemble so closely in their earliest youth. It is very tedious work,” the little prince added, “but very easy… Sometimes,” he added, “there is no harm in putting off a piece of work until another day. But when it is a matter of baobabs, that always means a catastrophe…” the danger of the baobabs is so little understood, and such considerable risks would be run by anyone who might get lost on an asteroid, that for once I am breaking through my reserve. “Children,” I say plainly, “watch out for the baobabs!” “15
There are two approaches as to the interpretation of evil’s essence as symbolized in the baobab tress: the “relative approach” that considers the baobab to be a representation for the Nazism and Second World War16 and the “wider approach”, which views the baobab tress as a symbol of badness, wherever it is17.
Through the fable on the unbridled growth of the baobab tress, the narrator wishes to teach his readers the necessary precaution when dealing with such destructive entity: one must stop its development and expansion at all costs. Evil should be eradicated completely until utter annihilation. Not once, not twice – but each and every day.
The most acute problem of the baobab seeds is the inability to detect their malicious intent. At first glance they appear to resemble any other seed. But the danger within the baobab tree is double: the malicious intent is undetectable until it is too late. The delayed recognition does not enable treatment or distraction. Identification only allows acknowledgment.
The differentiation between “good” and “evil” in The Little Prince is not as conclusive as in The Petchenyeg by Anton Chekhov. The attorney’s persona does not pose an obvious and distinctive contrast to Zhmuhin’s character because Zhmuhin is not an evil person, at least, not in a conventional sense.
Zhmuhin’s identifies decay and ruin all around him – but not within himself. Even if his remarks can be construed as righteous, it is undeniable that the source from which they sprout is not worthy or virtuous: Zhmuhin does not wish to understand and improve the world. He wishes to pontificate, leaving no room for beneficiary ways to overcome and subdue evil. Not even when that evil is personified in Zhmuhin’s two sons, who had turned – due to an abominable lack of parental supervision – into two wild animals.
Zhmuhin is aware of the terrible danger in his sons’ actions and conduct, but he distances himself from them, out of uncaring behavior that had earned him the title “Petchenyeg”. An attitude which only sees self, its needs and desires, over any other consideration or of anyone else. Thus, Zhumhin is the literary embodiment of the baobab seed, seemingly innocent at first sight but in truth corrupted and immoral like his sons.