“The reaches opened up before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of drums sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could not tell. The dawns were heralded by the descent of a chill stillness; the woodcutters slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig would make you start. We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us – who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember, because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign – and no memories.

The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there – there you could look at a thing monstrous and free.”

In his epic novel War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy warns young men to “never marry” until they’ve done all there is to do in life. He likens married men to “chained convicts” who have lost “all freedom” and whose lives consist of nothing but “drawing rooms, gossip, balls, vanity, and triviality”. A married man “knows nothing” and is “fit for nothing”, for he must devote himself to satisfying the whims of his wife, who, as a woman, is inherently “selfish, vain, stupid, trivial in everything”. So was Tolstoy also working for the Marxists and writing propaganda aimed at destroying the European family? Of course not. Tolstoy’s impassioned warning only indicates that feminism was the product of “Teutonic-Christian stupidity”, as Schopenhauer eloquently puts it in his treatise On Women, and not some Marxist conspiracy. Yes, the radical feminism which appeared in the 20th century was an exclusively Marxist affair, and the screech of feminism would certainly have never reached such ear-grating highs in the absence of Marxists, but then there wouldn’t have even been a screech at all if it weren’t for the foolishness of European men and their culture of romance, gallantry and woman veneration.

WHILE on his European travels Dostoevsky, at the age of 46, found himself in the neighbourhood of Baden-Baden, the home of the infamous Kurhaus casino. Ill health and hounding creditors had driven him and his wife Anna Grigorievna Snitkina, 25 years his junior, from Russia. Their financial situation was poor and Dostoevsky had already asked his publisher for an advance of 3500 roubles, which had been granted.

It should be noted that by this point in his life, Dostoevsky had already survived a mock execution, served four years hard labour in Siberia followed by another four in the military, and written, among a number of other…