2 - Virtue and vice in an age of Enlightenment

Summary

I can only say that Cato is of course greater than the convict who chooses to suffer and live, and that I am free to throw off the burden [of life] even if I can't pick it up again, especially as we are destined to drop it sooner or later anyway.

Mikhail Sushkov, Suicide Note, 1792

This is the consequence of unbelief and debauchery! This is the fruit of the lack of restraint [neobuzdannost'] and of delusion!

I. Zavalishin, Letter to the Publishers of New Monthly Compositions, 1794

When Mikhail Sushkov killed himself in the summer of 1792, he authored his death as a public statement: “My position has burdened me already for a long time,” he wrote, “but it has burdened me as a philosopher.” His act built upon three primary models. He acknowledged Goethe's notorious hero but denied too close a resemblance: “Perhaps even Werther helped me in part, but for God's sake, don't consider me an ape of Werther, still less insane.” He then cited a verse from his (then unpublished) epistolary tale, The Russian Werther, thereby linking himself to his own fictional hero. His second model was a materialist credo: even Voltaire, he ironically noted, had been unable to convince him of the immortality of the soul. Finally, because he did not have reason beyond the principle itself, Sushkov constructed his suicide as a rational and, as such, heroic act.