The pattern of Russian political behavior which emerges from the novel is filled with more violence, more misery, more oppression than that of any other national group. The dying Stepan Verhovensky described Russia in _The Possessed_ as a “great invalid” inhabited by devils and plagued with impurities, sores, and foul contagions. This Czarist Russia is a land in which “harmless ... higher liberalism” is possible, but it is also a country in which serfs live in incredible poverty and aristocrats live in oriental splendor. Within this social structure, whose opposite ends are separated by an even greater distance than the rich and poor of Italy, the forces of destruction are already at work. The basic situation reveals opposed characteristics: authoritarianism on the ruling level, immense capacity for dumb suffering in the submerged masses, and an intense drive toward a reorientation of the social structure on the part of the militant intellectuals. These factors, on a smaller scale, are to be found in other literatures. But Dostoyevsky also portrays a conflict peculiar to Russia. It is the struggle between those culturally oriented toward the West and the Slavophiles who reject its influence. A Slavophile himself, Dostoyevsky seems to speak through Shatov, who says that the Russians are “the only ‘god-bearing’ people on earth, destined to regenerate and save the world in the name of a new God, and to whom are given the keys of life and of the new world....” This extreme national consciousness pervades these novels, whether it is expressed in terms of a messianic mission or a deep sympathy for a people with a tragic history. Conrad, in _Under Western Eyes_, made a definite effort to assess the Russian character. He felt, though, that this was an extremely difficult task in which the language barrier was the least of the obstacles which stood in the way of understanding. He describes Russians as great players with words, manipulators of abstract ideas. He feels that in other areas their behavior, like that of Nathalia Haldin, is sometimes almost incomprehensible. His narrator says: I knew her well enough to have discovered her scorn for all the practical forms of political liberty known to the Western world. I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a terrible, corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naïve and hopeless cynicism. I think sometimes that the psychological secret of the profound difference of that people consists in this that they detest life, the irremediable life of the earth as it is, whereas we Westerners cherish it with perhaps an equal exaggeration of its sentimental value.