The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

In the war between Peter the Great and Charles the Twelfth, the stakes were small: if you lose, you stop playing. But when it’s the entire nation that’s waging war, it has to wager everything and up the ante over and over again, until total bankruptcy. And that’s the problem. If we don’t take Moscow, we won’t be able to stop and negotiate a reasonable peace. So we’ll have to continue. But do you want to know what I really think? For us, this war is a gamble. A gigantic gamble, which involves the entire nation, the whole Volk, but a gamble all the same. And a gamble is something you either win or lose. The Russians don’t have that luxury. For them it’s not a gamble, it’s a catastrophe that’s come crashing down on their country, a plague. And you can lose a gamble, but you can’t lose when you’re faced with a plague, you have to surmount it, you don’t have any choice.”