Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Under Western Eyes (35 cents)


It is St. Petersburg, 1911. You are living in the last decade of the Romanov dynasty. But of course you don't know that. You just know that the monarchy is in trouble, and the country is filled with revolutionary thought (and occasionally revolutionary activity). People are imprisoned for no reason whatsoever.

You are a young man, a student. You are very worried, because you do not know what the future will bring.

You are determined to ignore the political and social unrest. You study. You want to be an engineer. You go to class, you stay in your room. You have no friends.

A minister is killed in a well planned ambush. There is a knock on your door. A fellow student. He is sweating. He tells you he is the assassin. That a new Russia is just around the corner. You are panicked.

Why has he come to you? Because you are the last person the authorities would suspect.

What do you do? Do you help your fellow student? Do you turn him in?

Mazurov tries the former, and winds up doing the latter. That's when the trouble starts.

The assassin is captured and killed. Mazurov convinces the authorities that he has never been a rebel. But the revolutionaries learn that their cohort went to Mazurov for help and that therefore he must be one of them. And a very important one.

So the authorities decide that Mazurov is to be a spy. No choice. And they send him into the heart of the Russian revolutionary community in Switzerland, where he meets, among others, the mother and sister of the murdered murderer.

This is the basis of the plot of Under Western Eyes, by Joseph Conrad. A wordy book, sometimes hard to get through. But with an intriguing central character, who is caught in web after web, simply because he tried to stay neutral.

There is a lesson here. Maybe.

No comments: