Book Reviewed: The Twilight of Europe by Grigory Landau (originally published in May 2024)

A Nobel Prize-winning poet once said there was no such thing as an unrecognized genius. Aside from the obvious provability problem — by definition, an unrecognized genius never comes to anyone’s attention, or else the genius is not unrecognized — the story of the Russian thinker and writer Grigory Landau suggests otherwise. One can debate whether Landau (1877–1941) was actually a genius, but the recognition accorded to him was, and continues to be, wholly incommensurate with his gifts. When The Twilight of Europe, Landau’s thought-provoking and prophetic work concerning the state of Europe in the aftermath of the First World War, was published in Berlin in 1923, only a handful of people bothered to read it. Fyodor Stepun, a Russo-German philosopher who had bothered, could not arrange for a German translation, hard as he tried — and this, by his own admission, at a time when every text under the sun was promptly translated into German. One hundred years on, the situation hasn’t improved. There is not much online information on Landau even in Russian. The Twilight of Europe remains untranslated, and it is something of a miracle that a Russian publishing house brought out the work a few years ago. I suspect that the exceptionally modest posthumous renown that Landau does enjoy would be even more modest if Stepun hadn’t praised his brilliance in his memoir, a ringing endorsement repeated in virtually every biographical note on Landau that I have come across.

Stepun, who had realized early on that Landau was condemned to perpetual neglect, diagnosed the problem as one of irredeemable foreignness. Ideologically speaking, Landau was a stranger wherever he went. If it wasn’t his noetic sovereignty, it was his background. Landau’s innate conservatism scandalized leftist progressives, who thought that a Russian of Jewish origin had to be, if not a socialist, then at least a left-wing democrat. His sympathy with Germany during the First World War put him at odds with the liberal-conservative milieu, which sided with the Entente powers. But he was eventually obliged to part ways with the Germanophiles too, since Russia’s pro-Germany circles in those days consisted of either Bolshevik defeatists, whom Landau could not find congenial as a conservative imperialist, or reactionary anti-Semites, whom Landau could not find congenial as a Jew. Landau’s life, Stepun concludes ruefully in his memoir, demonstrates that conformism is not exclusive to those with a totalitarian bent; the supposedly freedom-loving intelligentsia is just as susceptible to it and will reject anyone who does not kowtow to its imperatives. Landau refused to conform and ultimately paid the price.

Then there was the problem of style. A lawyer by training, Landau also wrote like one, and The Twilight of Europe can be arid and abstruse, like something written by an international policy wonk. When, in the spirit of his times, Landau brings in the natural sciences to explain social issues, even the more persistent readers will find their patience put to the test. The afterword to my edition of the book mentions that Landau preferred a thoughtful audience to a large one, a polite way of saying that Landau was too highbrow for his own good. It doesn’t help that The Twilight of Europe is an unstructured work — more a compendium of articles placed in a haphazard order than an integral text meant to be read from beginning to end. None of this is calculated to win a large readership.

Russian thinkers are often introduced as the equivalents of some Western luminaries. This annoying habit — a function of certain insecurities arising from Russia’s place in Western civilization and its complicated relationship with it — is supposed to inflate the beneficiary’s cachet and impress the reader, but ends up denying Russian thought any autochthony. Landau has not been spared, and he often gets to be a “Russian Spengler.” In his case, this is doubly ironic. Not only did “The Twilight of Europe,” Landau’s 1914 article that later inspired the book by the same name, predate Spengler’s The Decline of the West, Landau also rejected Spengler’s conception of civilization as a living organism beholden to a set of cycles, and the determinism that was associated with it. In fact, the “Russian Spengler” was not at all the cultural pessimist the title of his work might suggest. Landau did not believe there was anything preordained about the twilight of Europe or that prewar Europe was afflicted with malaise. On the contrary, he thought that modern European civilization — meaning Western Europe on the eve of the First World War — had all the marks of youth and was brimming with vitality, its creative powers as yet untapped. Landau dismissed the idea that Western Europe was somehow less spiritual or more materialistic than it had been during its earlier periods of glory, and insisted that, if anything, it was actually a more morally elevated civilization. Technological advances had raised the burden of individual responsibility. The lives of the passengers on a train or a ship, for example, were entrusted to the care of one individual or a handful at most. This called for unprecedented levels of cohesion, solidarity, and therefore, morality if accidents were to be prevented. This doesn’t mean that individual agents were somehow less immoral than in the past, but the watermark of morality at the societal level had moved higher; modern society would not have been able to function otherwise. The train driver or the captain of a ship could be a scoundrel, but he had to exhibit a certain level of competence to ensure the passengers got to their destination safely. Part of a civilization that was more globalized and interconnected than ever before, Europeans traveled all over the continent, exchanging ideas and tourist dollars. Theirs was a complex civilization that contained contradictions, but those were no objection against the civilization. In short, pre-1914 Western Europe had everything going for it. The war — and the twilight that came with it — was not ineluctable.

That it did take place all the same had to do with the ascendant political system in Western Europe. Landau has conflicted feelings about democracy. On the one hand, he is happy to credit the democratization of European society with the general increase in living standards and in Europe’s prewar vitality. On the other hand, he is critical of the penetration of modern European civilization by the “mass-man.” Landau does not use that term, but this is exactly what he has in mind, and — for those looking for parallels between the thought of Russian thinkers and their West European colleagues — aspects of The Twilight of Europe overlap with those of The Revolt of the Masses, though I hasten to add Ortega y Gasset’s famous book was published after The Twilight of Europe. Due to the plurality of opinions and desires that it must encompass, democracy is constantly in danger of atomization. A weak leadership is not an option in a democratic regime; if a democratic system is to survive, it must have very strong governors. But the reliance of even the strongest governors on the support of the masses can lead to demagoguery and, eventually, to catastrophe. Such is the dialectic of democracy. The trouble with democracy is not that the masses get to elect their leaders, but that they elect themselves; the shepherd comes from the flock. In Landau’s view, it would be preferable for a democratic system to be run by leaders who themselves are not of a democratic constitution, spiritually speaking.

As with Ortega y Gasset’s mass-man, Landau’s democratized masses are immature, and, also as with Ortega y Gasset’s mass-man, one of the surest signs of their immaturity is the refusal to accept limits. By 1914 the extraordinary development of modern European civilization had created the sense of endless possibilities; man was capable of anything. This kind of hubris can be an asset when it is confined to elites, but once it intoxicates the masses, destabilization is bound to occur. Absolutes — extremes — are no longer seen as unattainable, let alone undesirable; utopian dreams appear to be within reach. The pursuit of absolute goals — I cannot think of an English equivalent of the Russian term Landau employs (“maximalism”), but the French call it jusqu’au-boutisme (literally, “going all the way to the end”) — becomes part of the national agenda. During the First World War, the Entente powers adopted it as their military policy, pursuing unlimited destruction to bring about a permanent peace, though of course the policy wasn’t free of certain less-than-altruistic geopolitical interests. It is this pursuit of absolutes that made the war so catastrophic.

(Curiously, Eric Hobsbawm, an historian markedly different from Landau in background, age, and political views, makes similar points in his analysis of the genesis of the First World War in The Age of Empire. Hobsbawm argues that it was the “tacit equation of unlimited growth and political power, which came to be unconsciously accepted” that made the international situation so dangerous. Hobsbawm mentions that there were no longer any theoretical limits to claims that nation-states could make, which is exactly the pursuit of absolutes that Landau talks about, and that after 1905 the political mechanisms for stable management by governments began to collapse, a result of the transformation of subjects into citizens — in other words, democratization. Of course, Hobsbawm approaches the question from a Marxist perspective — his view of jusqu’au-boutisme is that it is derived from the nature of capitalism, which recognizes no limits in the accumulation of capital.)

Far from a pacifist, Landau believes that war is justified in a situation where the belligerent has narrowly defined objectives that respond to urgent national interests; the Entente powers had no such objectives. Their position was purely legalistic and consequently hypocritical. Landau uses the spat between Germany and Britain over the question of Belgian neutrality, which drew Britain into the war, as an example. It is true, he writes, that the German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg showed disdain towards an international treaty, while Britain upheld it. But the Entente obsession with international treaties was a self-serving attempt to extend civil law to international affairs, where it didn’t belong. Civil law governs relations between different parties within a state and, in case of disagreements, employs the judiciary as a disinterested arbiter. In the international sphere, disinterested arbiters do not exist. The supreme arbiter is the hegemon; the history of international treaties is a story of coercion and force. A state with narrowly defined objectives that serve its urgent national interests has more moral leverage than a state that seeks to enforce existing international agreements. Landau sees the application of civil law at the international level as contamination of international politics by petty bourgeois concerns. How one is to define urgent national interests, and what would happen in the event every powerful state decided its national interests justified the violation of international law, Landau does not say.

If Landau stops short of blaming the Entente powers for starting the war, he believes that they should have lost it. The difference between the Entente powers and Germany was that the former were conservative and the latter revolutionary. The Entente powers (read: Britain and France) sought to preserve the status quo. Britain’s objectives were to keep its vast colonies and ensure that no European state became powerful enough to interfere with its trade. France was governed by lawyers, deputies, and industrialists with a rentier mentality, and had no need to change the status quo either. Conversely, Germany strove to upend the existing international order. This is what made the German position revolutionary. A revolutionary force can be destructive, writes Landau, but it can also be creative. Germany’s revolutionary impulses were creative. For Landau, there is no question that, in the decades preceding the war, Germany had become the most fecund European power. The flowering of the German nation had been long in making. It had probably begun with the Reformation, and was followed by extraordinary achievements in music and philosophy in the 18th and 19th centuries. The soil had been made fertile for a great expansion of the German state. By the 20th century, the existing international order could no longer satisfy Germany’s creative thrust. It stands to reason — according to Landau’s reasoning, that is — that Germany would move to violate international law in order to adjust world order so that it better suited Germany’s new place in the balance of power. This sounds cynical, but Landau believes that creative impulses should never be thwarted. Defensive militarism — the militarism of the Entente powers — aims to prevent and preempt what may not even exist; it consequently sins not only against the present but also the future. Expansionary militarism, however, channels and marshals the creative powers of the state. The total defeat of Germany by the Entente powers during the First World War was the defeat of Europe’s vitality and creative forces by torpor, the defeat of growth by stasis, the defeat of Europe’s future by its past.

The postwar peace was as bad as the war it followed — essentially, a continuation of the war by other means. For peace to triumph, Germany had to be destroyed completely — and its creative powers with it. But while Germany lay vanquished, as Landau clearly saw then — and as subsequent events would bear out over the next two decades — the First World War had no winners. A mood of dissatisfaction was evident among the victors. The war had ended; the policy of jusqu’au-boutisme — the search for, and pursuit of, absolutes — had not (though this is to completely gloss over the fact that the Treaty of Versailles, however onerous, was less onerous than the Brest-Litovsk Treaty which Germany, in its own jusqu’au-boutisme, had imposed on Russia). Plans for the creation of a League of Nations, a perfect example of an absolute, were just as utopian as the idea of a universal church and only exposed the immaturity of the democratized masses. In any such international organization, either the powerful states would dominate the weak or, if corrective measures were taken, the weak would dominate the powerful. Landau does not see the oppression of the powerful by the weak as an improvement — domination is domination, regardless of the agent doing it.

Landau attacks the balkanization of Central and Eastern Europe that emerged as part of the postwar peace. Promoted by Woodrow Wilson, of whom Landau is particularly scathing (in Landau’s analysis, Wilson is little more than a provincial ignoramus completely out of his element on the world stage), the policy of national self-determination was a clear sign of regress. When I mentioned earlier that Landau was an imperialist, I did not impute to the term the pejorative connotation it has acquired in our own times. Landau believes that human progress, “the progressive progress of humanity,” lies in the integration of smaller parts into a bigger whole. (Ortega y Gasset, again, shared this view; he thought that the only logical destiny for Europe, if it were to flourish, would be European integration.) Historically, by embodying the integration of different peoples into a single political unit, empires represented progress. Sidestepping the question of what happens to a society that has reached its maximum size — territorial growth and expansion cannot be infinite by default — Landau argues that any attempt towards nationalism and tribalism in a globalized world means regression. In an ethnically heterogeneous place such as Europe, states that are formed along ethnic lines are bound to have minorities that will inevitably be oppressed and persecuted by the ethnic majority. Empires preclude this kind of discrimination — their existence is contingent on cohesion between its constituent groups. Landau judiciously points out the hypocrisy behind the championship of the right of ethnic minorities within states to national self-determination. A state is by definition a legal concept. If it is acceptable to violate it in order to accommodate the rights of a certain minority group within it, on what basis should states be denied the right to violate international law to serve their ethnic majorities?

The most interesting part of the text is “The Twilight of Europe,” Landau’s 1914 essay. Striking in its far-sightedness, it is a veritable cri de coeur. He makes it clear the fate of Europe is a personal matter: “Allow those of us who felt themselves to be European and who found in Europe their spiritual homeland to mourn its fateful twilight.” Whether Russia is part of Europe has been one of the accursed questions ever since Peter the Great dragged Russia to Europe (or forced Europe upon Russia). For men like Landau and Stepun, the question of Russia’s Europeanness was not much of a question. Stepun wrote in one of his articles that Russia was a peculiar, sui generis kind of Eastern Europe. While he was discussing Kievan Rus’ and Muscovy, there is little doubt he felt the same way about Russia, and as a Russian thinker who did not have a drop of Russian blood in his veins (Stepun was of mostly Germanic ancestry), he exemplified the Europeanness of Russia. Even Dostoevsky, despite his highly mixed feelings about European civilization, wrote in A Writer’s Diary that Europe was every Russian’s second homeland. While a Russian proverb does say that scratching a Russian will get you a Tatar, it is worth remembering that Thomas Mann wrote that Germany was not part of Western Europe (see Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man), Witold Gombrowicz claimed that Poland was neither Europe nor Asia (see his Diary), and that Metternich once opined that Hungary belonged to the “Orient,” which began with the Vienna highway that led to Budapest. Listening to a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony the other night, right on the heels of a Beethoven piano concerto, I thought the symphony trumped everything that Nikolai Danilevsky & Co. could have written on the subject of Russia’s cultural identity. But because Russia’s Europeanness has so vigorously been contested, outside of Russia and certainly within it, it has always been fragile, and European Russians have clung to it tenaciously. The cultured prewar Russian can be said to have been more European than Western Europeans. Born in Saint Petersburg, the city that symbolized European Russia, Landau could not help but take the destruction of Europe personally. Hence the dark, elegiac “and-so-does-twilight-fall-on-Europe” intonations interspersed throughout the essay.

Landau recognized that the war was a turning point for modern European civilization, the beginning of its end. He was not the only one — the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler, for instance, recorded his disbelief and horror at learning of the outbreak of the war. But this appears to be a minority view among Europe’s cultural elites. While Landau was writing about Europe’s twilight, Vasily Rozanov, one of the most colorful thinkers of Russia’s Silver Age, published a series of articles that appeared collectively as The War of 1914 and the Russian Revival — the title says it all. Later, of course, great minds would single out the First World War as the defining event of the 20th century. The Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili said in one of his lectures that, in a way, all of our (i.e., European) modern culture and philosophy is an attempt to make sense of the First World War. But that lecture was given in the late 1970s; Landau penned the essay in the fall of 1914. Among the cannonades, he’d clearly heard the cry of the banshee.

Landau recognizes that the destructive forces that triggered the war preceded it. But without the war, they would have not have destroyed Europe; European civilization would have absorbed new forms and gradually spread to new foci. The war put an end to that. It interrupted cultural continuity, sowed chaos, and bequeathed ruins to Landau’s generation. By sending millions of its able-bodied to their deaths, Europe drained itself of its most vital elements — not only of men of genius, who were doubtlessly among those lost to the killing fields, but also Europe’s clerks, engineers, teachers, and many others integral to the machinery of European society. Relying on mass destruction and noxious homegrown propaganda, the war corroded the moral fabric of Europe and permanently poisoned relations between European peoples — and even within European peoples. Landau pinpoints wartime propaganda as a kind of toxin that, far from damaging its target, poisoned those who consumed it. The European man such as he had existed before the war now belonged to Zweig’s “world of yesterday” and, postwar, Western Europe would lose its ascendancy and cultural primacy. American tourists, Landau writes, will continue to visit European capitals; what they won’t be visiting is Europe. He is lucid enough to see that the war will spawn certain benefits: on the tombs of European men, he writes, the temple of women’s rights and gender equality will be built, and that is exactly what has happened. Europe will continue to exist, but its cultural hegemony will come to an end. Doubtless, new loci of power will be formed in the future, and perhaps Europe, made fragmentary by the war, will be integrated into these loci, but its destiny is that of provincialism. Culturally the erstwhile center of the world will become its periphery.

There is no need to belabor the accuracy of Landau’s analysis; it is self-evident. “The great epoch of a united modern European culture is drawing to an end. From the nexus of the world, Western Europe will become one of its provinces, an edifying monument and cemetery, an enlarged Venice, a place of study for enlightening expeditions, an Acropolis spread out over a number of countries” — is this not a trenchant description of modern Europe? The existence of the European Union is no argument against this analysis — the UK has pulled out of the EU and, with Eurosceptic parties making considerable inroads on the continent, the EU seems to be on notice. Modern Europe has little to offer besides its legacy and is living off dividends paid by its glorious past. Whereas it once decided the history of the world, now it can only tempt tourists with its postcard views. Important decisions are made elsewhere. Politically and culturally, Europe seems all but spent, and its demographic situation indicates that its powers of vitality have been lost. In the main, Landau has been proven right.

What did he get wrong? Aside from the objections I have inserted casually, Landau puts too much weight on the war and not enough on the forces that caused it. It is simply inconceivable that a civilization in such rude health could have so easily turned to self-destruction; there must have been some rot in its core. In the lecture mentioned earlier, Mamardashvili also said that something significant must have occurred in fin-de-siècle Europe, something of which the First World War was only a symptom. Landau never asks what that something was. But the most important objection to Landau’s work, if it is an objection at all, is biographical. Landau’s “imperialist” views were doubtlessly shaped by his personal background — as a Jew, he understood the dangers of national self-determination and of a Europe whose borders were determined by ethnic considerations. Could he, a brilliant analyst of his times, have so misjudged the situation as to remain in Nazi Germany, where he had settled after the Bolshevik Revolution? In his memoir, Stepun recounts meeting Landau for one final time, after the Nuremberg Race Laws had been passed. It is a heart-wrenching description of a man who had become a pale shadow of himself. The country he had held in such high esteem and whose victory in the First World War he had desired on account of its creative powers — that country had declared him to be an Untermensch. But it was the country of his birth that would murder him. Landau managed to relocate to Latvia in 1938, where he was arrested two years later by Soviet authorities as an enemy of the people and sent to perish in a Soviet camp in Perm Krai — geographically on the outskirts of Europe, a stone’s throw away from Asia. For this brilliant, unknown European intellectual, surely a fate laced with a bitterly tragic irony.