When the Abyss Became the Daily News
Russian writer Leonid Andreyev (1871-1919) knew how to horrify respectable society. His 1902 story The Abyss (Bezdna) produced a literary scandal in Russia sufficiently intense that more than a century later scholars still write about the controversy surrounding it. Readers were appalled, critics attacked Andreyev, and even Leo Tolstoy reportedly reacted with disgust. Yet there is something strange about reading The Abyss today. What once seemed almost unbearably dark now resembles the sort of material that arrives in our email news links before breakfast.
Andreyev, often associated with the darker, pessimistic and nihilistic currents of late Imperial Russian literature, constructed the story almost like a descent through successive layers of civilisation. A young student, Nemovetsky, is walking in the countryside with Zina, the seventeen-year-old girl he loves. Daylight disappears, the familiar world becomes threatening, and eventually the couple encounter men who attack them. Nemovetsky is beaten unconscious. Zina is pursued and raped. The apparently civilized landscape has become a wilderness in which physical strength and appetite replace morality, as Nemovetsky also descends into savagery.
That proposition was explosive in 1902. The Abyss generated fierce public controversy, and Tolstoy himself was reported as recoiling from its ugliness. Andreyev nevertheless defended the story. Scholarship on the controversy has identified its central issue as Andreyev's insistence upon confronting the irrational and animal-like elements of human psychology that civilisation attempts to restrain. The story therefore belonged to the fin-de-siècle argument over whether civilisation had genuinely transformed human nature or merely covered something much older with a thin cultural skin.
The remarkable thing is how much harder Andreyev would have to work to shock us now. Open almost any large news aggregator each morning and begin clicking. There are murders committed for trivial reasons, children tortured by adults who were supposed to protect them, sexual assaults of extraordinary brutality, random attacks on strangers, gang violence, mutilations, home invasions and crimes whose details would once have been considered unsuitable for publication. Some stories are so grotesque that one initially assumes the headline must be exaggerating. Often it is not.
The difference is not necessarily that humanity has suddenly become worse. Human beings were perfectly capable of extraordinary cruelty in Andreyev's Russia, as they were in ancient Rome and medieval Europe. What has changed dramatically is our exposure to it. Andreyev's Russian reader encountered The Abyss as a carefully constructed literary confrontation with something normally kept outside polite consciousness. We encounter hundreds of real abysses through a screen.
The telegraph and mass newspaper had already begun that transformation in Andreyev's lifetime, but the internet completed it. A murder in Adelaide, an assault in London, a massacre in Africa and a grotesque crime in an American suburb can all appear beside each other on the same screen within minutes of occurring. Human consciousness was never designed to absorb the collected horrors of a planet every morning. For most of history, people knew a great deal about the tragedies of their village and comparatively little about tragedies occurring ten thousand kilometres away. We now carry the world's police blotter in our pockets.
That produces a peculiar moral inflation. What once required a daring writer deliberately violating literary conventions can now struggle to hold our attention for thirty seconds. We read the headline, feel the momentary shock and scroll onwards. Another atrocity replaces it. Then another. The extraordinary becomes ordinary through repetition.
There is consequently a disturbing possibility that Andreyev's story has acquired a significance different from the one it possessed in 1902. His contemporaries worried that The Abyss revealed too much. Our problem may be that we have seen too much.
The constant presentation of extreme violence can produce not enlightenment but numbness. The first horrifying story disturbs us. The tenth disturbs us less. After years of reading such material, another murder or assault becomes merely another item in the feed unless some especially bizarre feature distinguishes it from the previous hundred cases. The machinery of modern information therefore performs an unintended psychological experiment in habituation.
Andreyev at least demanded that his reader remain with the horror. Literature slows experience down. We walk beside Nemovetsky and Zina, watch the daylight disappear and experience the destruction of the assumptions with which the story began. A modern news feed does the opposite. Horror is compressed into a headline, a photograph and several paragraphs before an advertisement or another story pushes us onward.
That may make The Abyss more relevant rather than less. Andreyev's question was not simply whether terrible people exist. Everyone already knew that. His more disturbing question concerned the strength of the restraints separating civilised conduct from brutality. Education, romantic sentiment, social status and intellectual sophistication are comforting things, but Andreyev asks whether they actually transform the underlying creature or merely discipline it.
More than a century later, we might add another question. What happens to a civilisation when representations of the abyss become routine? We should resist the easy conclusion that constant reporting proves that crime is universally worse than it was in 1902. Crime rates vary enormously across places and periods, and modern communications expose us to events that earlier generations would never have heard about. The significant change is therefore partly informational. We know about horrors that once remained local knowledge. A person sitting safely at a computer can consume more reports of murder, rape and cruelty in one year than many ancestors encountered in an entire lifetime.
That knowledge has consequences. It can produce justified vigilance, but it can also produce fear, cynicism and the belief that depravity is everywhere. At the opposite extreme, saturation can trivialise precisely what ought to horrify us. Neither reaction is especially healthy. One sees an abyss beneath every footstep; the other learns to scroll casually past it.
Andreyev shocked Russia because he forced respectable readers to look down. Our difficulty is almost the reverse. We are looking down every day. Perhaps the greatest distance between 1902 and 2026 can therefore be measured not by technology, wealth or political institutions, but by the quantity of horror required to shock an ordinary reader. The Abyss once provoked a national literary controversy. Place its basic events among today's email news links and many readers would grimace, click, read for two minutes and move to the next story.
Andreyev feared that beneath the civilised human being there remained an abyss. Our age has added a darker possibility: the abyss can become so familiar that eventually we scarcely notice that we are looking into it:
https://spectator.com/article/in-america-murder-has-become-mainstream/
