The Idiot

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Now there is the solution! So there must have been something more powerful than stakes and bonfires, more powerful even than the habit of twenty years! There must have been an idea more powerful than all the disasters, crop failures, tortures, plagues, leprosy and all the hell that mankind would not have been able to endure without that one idea that bound and directed the heart and fructified the springs of life! Show me anything resembling such a power in our age of seaminess and railways… what I ought to say is steam engines and railways, but I say seaminess and railways, for I am drunk but tell the truth! Show me an idea that binds the mankind of today with even half the power there was in those centuries. And then you have the effrontery to tell me that the springs of life have not been weakened, been polluted under this “star”, this net that has entangled human beings. And do not try to intimidate me with your prosperity, your wealth, the in-frequency of famine and the swiftness of the paths of communication! The wealth is greater, but the power is less; there is no binding idea left; everything has grown soft, everything has stewed to mush! We have all stewed to mush, all, all of us!…

Lebedev’s slip between “the age of steam and railways” and “the age of crime and railways” is very revealing. It indicates that, contrary to the idea that modernization brings greater peace and prosperity, it in fact might cause an increase in corruption, chaos, and crime.