such as the trunk of the elephant and the hump of the camel. There
are any number of variations on the same theme: dogs, wolves, foxes,
harriers, wolf-hounds, water-spaniels, and pugs.... A common origin by
no means implies a similar biography. Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus,
were brothers, but what different careers they had! It is the same in
all spiritual societies or communities. Every form of Christianity has
similarities in the organisation of the family, of the Church, and so on,
but it cannot be said that the history of the English Protestants has
been very similar to that of the Abyssinian Christians, or that the most
Catholic Austrian Army has much in common with the extremely orthodox
monks of Mount Athos. That the duck does not breathe through gills is
true; it is even truer that quartz does not fly like a humming-bird. You
certainly know, however, though my learned friend does not, that there
was a moment’s hesitation in the duck’s life when its aorta had not taken
its downward turn, but branched out with pretensions to gills; but having
a physiological tradition, the habit and possibility of development in
the duck did not stop short at the inferior form of breathing, but passed
on to lungs.
It only comes to this, that the fish has become adapted to the conditions
of aquatic life and does not advance beyond gills, while the duck
does. But why the fish’s breathing should blow out my theory, I do not
understand. It seems to me, on the contrary, to illustrate it. In the
_genus europaeum_ there are peoples that have grown old without fully
developing a bourgeoisie (the Celts, some parts of Spain, of Southern
Italy, and so on), while there are others whom the bourgeois system suits
as water suits gills. So why should not there be a nation for whom the
bourgeois system will be a transitory and unsatisfactory condition, like
gills for a duck?
Why is it a wicked heresy, a desertion of my own principles, and a
contradiction of the absolute laws of creation and rules and doctrines,
human and divine, that I do not regard the bourgeois system as the
final form of Russian society, the organisation towards which Russia is
striving and to attain which she will probably pass through a bourgeois
period? Possibly the European peoples will themselves pass to another
order of life, perhaps Russia will not develop at all; but just as that
is possible, there are other possibilities too. Especially as the order
in which problems arise, the accidents of time and place and development,
the conditions and habits of life and the permanent traits of character,
may give endlessly varied direction to development.
The Russian people, covering such wide spaces between Europe and Asia,
and standing to the general family of European peoples somewhat in the
relationship of a cousin, has taken scarcely any part in the family
history of Western Europe. Developing late and with difficulty, it must
either show a complete incapacity for progress, or must produce something
of its own under the influence of the past and of its neighbours’
examples and its own point of view.
Hitherto Russia has developed nothing of its own, but has preserved
something; like a river, she has reflected things truly but
superficially. The Byzantine influence has perhaps been the deepest; all
the rest has passed like Peter’s innovations: beards have been shaved,
heads have been cropped, the skirts of kaftans have been cut off, the
people have been silent and given way, while the minority changed their
costumes and went into the Service, while the State, after receiving
the general European outline, grew and grew.... It is the usual history
of childhood. It is over, that no one doubts, neither the Winter Palace
nor Young Russia. It is time to stand on our own feet: why must we take
to wooden legs because they are of foreign make? Why should we put on a
European blouse, when we have our own shirt with the collar buttoning on
one side?
We are vexed at the feebleness, at the narrow outlook of the Government,
which in its impotence tries to improve our life by putting on the
tricolor _camisole de force_ cut on the Parisian pattern, instead of
the yellow and black _Zwangsjacke_, which it wore for a hundred and
fifty years. But here we have not the Government, but the mandarins
of literature, the senators of journalism, the university professors
preaching to us that such is the inevitable law of physiology, that
we belong to the _genus europaeum_, and must therefore cut all the
old capers to a new tune, that we must stumble like sheep over the
same ditch, fall into the same pit, and afterwards settle down as an
everlasting shopkeeper selling greens to other sheep. A plague on
their physiological law! And why is it Europe has been luckier, why
has no one made her play the part of Greece and Rome over again? There
are in life and nature no monopolies, no measures for preventing and
suppressing new biological forms, new historical destinies and political
systems—they are only limited by practical possibility. The future is
a variation improvised on a theme of the past. Not only the phases of
development and the forms of life vary, but new nations are created, new
nationalities whose destinies are on other lines. Before our eyes, so to
speak, a new race has been formed, a variety European by free choice and
elemental composition. The manners, morals, and habits of the Americans
have developed a peculiar character of their own; the Anglo-Saxon and the
Celtic physical types have so changed beyond the Atlantic that you can
scarcely ever mistake an American. If a fresh soil is enough to make an
individual characteristic nation out of old peoples, why should a nation
that has developed in its own way under completely different conditions
from those of the West European States, with different elements in its
life, live through the European past, and that, too, when it knows
perfectly well what that past leads to? Yes, but what are those elements?
I have said what they are many times, and not once have I heard a serious
objection, but every time I receive again the same answers, and not from
foreigners only, but from Russians.... There is no help for it; we must
repeat our arguments again, too.
_January 15, 1863._
ANOTHER VARIATION ON AN OLD THEME
_A Letter to X_
No, dear friend, I am not going to keep the promise I made you to write
an article in explanation of what I said of Western Europe and what I
said of Russia.
After you had gone, under the influence of your criticisms and the
criticisms made by our common friends, I looked through part of what
I had written and found I had nothing to add. I had said all that was
in my heart, what I understood, and how I understood it. If I have not
succeeded in making my outlook clear in whole books, in a series of
articles, and a series of letters, how can I succeed in doing so in a few
pages? Even if my view were really simply morbid, partial, and personal
when I wrote ‘From the Other Side’ eight years ago, time has so terribly
confirmed it that it has become a more settled conviction, and has merely
cooled without being changed in anything essential. I refuse to repeat
coldly what I said then with warmth, and I write now rather to show you
that I listened to you attentively and took our friends’ criticisms
sincerely to heart. The chief points of their censure may be reduced to
two: first, that my attitude to Western Europe weakens convictions which
are still essential in Russia; secondly, that my attitude to Russia
approximates to that of the Slavophils. These criticisms are themselves
the proof that your feud with the Moscow Old Believers has not subsided;
that is a pity.
Carried away by your polemics, you do not notice how tedious and boring
your disputes have become. Your quarrel with the Slavophils has lost all
interest, especially since the death of Nicholas. It is high time to
apply the manifesto of August 26, 1856, to all these wretched wrangles,
and to consign them to oblivion with the other transgressions of
Nicholas’ reign.
A new life is unmistakably surging up in Russia; even the Government
is carried away by it. Questions, each more pressing than the last,
are arising on all sides; hopes crushed to the earth are reviving; one
wants to know what is being thought in Russia about the Emancipation of
the Serfs, about the abolition of spiritual and corporal punishment—the
censorship and the stick—about the restraint of official plundering and
the irresponsible tyranny of the police, and one reads instead scholastic
controversies about the precedence of races and the nationality of
truth. I have never denied that the Slavophils have a true sense of the
_living soul_ in the people, that they ‘look for the world to come,’
but unhappily I must repeat that their instinct is clearer than their
understanding, clearer, indeed, than their conscience. I have read with
horror and repulsion some articles in Slavophil reviews; they stink of
the torture chamber, of slit nostrils, penances, and the Solovetsky
monastery. If power came into the hands of these gentry, they would
be worse than the ‘Third Section,’ and am I supposed to be like these
savages in sympathy and opinion and language? Why, then, did one of
them not so long ago, under the protection of the irresponsible police,
fling at me a handful of patriotic mud with the insolence of a flunkey
protected from the stick by his safe perch behind the carriage, diffusing
such a national stench of the servants’ hall, and such a flavour of
orthodox lenten oil, that for several minutes I fancied myself in one of
the remote quarters of Moscow?
But your controversy with them is of no use; leave them alone or beat
them on their own ground. They do not know the real Russia, they are
changelings and corpses; not one of them will take up your challenge;
they have distorted their understanding by a false show of orthodoxy and
a pretence of nationalism.
It would be difficult to confute them by holding up Western Europe as an
example (here I am answering another criticism) when a single copy of
any newspaper you like is enough to show the terrible malady from which
Europe is suffering. To ignore her wounds and to preach reverence not
only for the ideas which she has worked out and which are inconsistent
with her life of to-day, but for her herself, is as impossible as to
persuade us that the fanatically crazy lucubrations of the followers of
Buddha, or the Carpathian Dissenters, are of more value and significance
than all the problems that occupy us.
You love European ideas—I love them too; they are the ideas of all
history, they are the monument on which is inscribed what has been
bequeathed not only by the men of yesterday, but by Egypt and India,
Greece and Rome, Catholicism and Protestantism, the Latin peoples and
the Germanic peoples. Without them we should sink into Asiatic quietism
or African blankness of mind. With those ideas, and only with them, can
Russia be brought into possession of that great part of the heritage
which comes to her share. About that we are completely in agreement. But
you are unwilling to recognise that contemporary life in Europe is not
in harmony with her ideas. You are alarmed for them; ideas which fail
to find their realisation at home seem to you unrealisable anywhere.
Historical embryology scarcely warrants such a conclusion. From the fact
that the new social ideas are not applied in the contemporary life of the
European peoples (even if this were completely proved) you cannot deduce
that they are impossible of realisation, that they cannot be applied in
practice anywhere. Has not the European ideal in one form, to wit, the
Anglo-Saxon, found complete expression on the other side of the Atlantic
Ocean?
The ways of development are very hard, and far from simple in nature
and in history; they make use of a terrible number of forces and forms.
That is not very obvious to us, because we are always confronted with
the complete result, with what has been accomplished and successful.
Numbers of unsuccessful forms were evolved by the way, did not attain
a full life (in comparison with those that follow), and were replaced
by others of which we know nothing. They were not sacrificed, for they
lived for themselves, but when they passed away they handed on their
heritage not to their own offspring, but to strangers, the mammoths and
ichthyosaurians to the elephants and crocodiles, Egypt and India to
Greece and Rome. It may very well be that the whole creative ability of
the Western European peoples has been spent and is exhausted in evolving
their social ideal, their science, in striving towards it, and in
realising separate partial phases of it with all the passion and fervour
of the struggle, in which men are ready to die because at every step they
fancy they are attaining the whole of their ideal.
Will the down-trodden masses wrest out of the hands of the monopolists
the powers evolved by science, and all the accumulation of technical
improvements, and make of them the common weal? Or will the propertied
classes, resting on the force of government and the ignorance of people,
keep the masses down? In either case the ideas are saved, and that is
what is of first importance for you. Science, independent of political
systems and nationality, remains as the grand achievement of European
life, ready to transform men’s hard existence of the past everywhere
where it meets a suitable soil, understanding and, together with
understanding, strength and freedom. The question of the future of Europe
I do not regard as finally settled; but, looking at it conscientiously
with the humble desire to see the truth and with prejudices rather in
favour of Western Europe than opposed to it, studying it for ten years,
not in theories and books, but in clubs and in market-places, in the
centre of its political and social life, I am bound to say that I see
neither a speedy nor a happy solution. Looking on the one hand at the
feverish, one-sided development of industry, at the concentration of all
riches, moral and material, in the hands of the minority of the middle
class, at the way in which that minority has taken hold of the Church and
the Government, the machines and the schools, at the fact that the army
obeys it, that the judges interpret the law in its favour, and, looking
on the other hand at the undeveloped state of the masses, the immaturity
and instability of the revolutionary party, I cannot predict the speedy
downfall of the bourgeoisie and the reform of the old political order
without a most terrible and bloody struggle.
It is of no use to dream now of the ordinary revolutions of the past,
made half in jest, with a song of Béranger and a cigar in the mouth; now
there is no Charles X. ready to flee at the sight of danger, no Louis
Philippe who would not bombard Paris; now there is no silly Austrian
Emperor who would give a Constitution at the first musket-shot. Though
the Prussian King is the same, he would not now take the cap off his
drunken head at the sight of murdered revolutionaries; even Pius IX. has
grown wiser. The June days of 1848 and Cavaignac have shown the world
what massacres of St. Bartholomew, what September days, await the future
conflict. Whether Europe will emerge rejuvenated from this ordeal, or
be drowned like Seneca in her own blood, I do not know; but I fancy
neither you nor I will live to see the day. Your hair is grey, while I am
forty-four.
Is it not natural under these circumstances for an enlightened man to
enlarge his horizon, to look about him, to enquire how other lands, not
drawn into the death-struggle of Europe, stand in regard to the future,
what can be expected from them, whither they are tending, and whether
there is no inconspicuous preliminary work being done there. But outside
Europe there are only two progressive countries, America and Russia,
with possibly Australia just beginning. All the rest lie in unbroken
slumber or struggle in convulsions which are alien to us and outside our
comprehension, like the Chinese rebellion, with its piles of corpses and
revolting butchery.
America is Europe colonised, the same race (predominantly Anglo-Saxon),
but living under different conditions. Wave after wave carries the
overflow to her shores further and further. Just as in Cromwell’s days
England sailed across the ocean and was scattered over the northern
plains and forests, so now crowds of European fugitives sail thither
to escape from hunger, from the stifling atmosphere, from persecution,
‘from the future,’ foreseeing troubles at home. It is the continuation
of the age-long movements to the West. Three millions of Irishmen have
settled there since the days of Robert Peel; the German monarchs who,
in the eighteenth century, traded in herds of their subjects for making
war against independence, for settling Pennsylvania, and so on, pause
when they see how the population is flowing away. The movement goes on
in America itself: the newcomers make their way through the settled
population, sometimes draw it with them, and keep pressing, crowding,
and hurrying to the South; to-day to the equator, where there will be a
new meeting and a new combination of the Anglo-Saxon element with the
Latin-Spanish.
We see that all this is but the clearing of the ground, the marking out
of the arena, and that no power can prevent the North Americans with
their overflowing strength, plasticity, and untiring energy from reaching
Central America and Cuba. While in Europe Venice is falling into ruins,
Rome is reduced to beggary, the little towns of Italy and Spain are
declining from lack of capital and labour, from indolence and lack of
energy, in California, in Honduras and Nicaragua, deserts are in a few
years being transformed into cultivated fields and clearings into towns,
the plains are lined with railways, capital is abundant, and the restless
vigour of the Republic absorbs more and more. What is growing is young.
The growth of Russia has been vigorous too, and it can hardly be over
yet, it can hardly have reached its natural limits; that is evident,
not only from its geographical physiology, but also from the unceasing
aggression of the Government, from the perpetual striving to get hold
of every morsel of land. But Russia is extending by a different law
from America; because in its present state it is not a colony, not an
overflow, not a migration, but an independent world advancing in all
directions, yet sitting tight on its own soil. The United States, like
an avalanche torn away from its mountain, carries everything before it;
every step gained by it is a step lost by the American Indians. Russia
saturates all about it like water, surrounds races on all sides, then
covers them with the uniform layer of the ice of autocracy—and under
it makes of the worshippers of the Grand Llama defenders of orthodoxy,
of Germans uncompromising Russian patriots. There is the same youthful
plasticity here. Why did Joseph II. laugh at laying the foundation of
Ekaterinoslavl, saying that the Empress had laid the first stone of the
city, and he the last? It was not a city that was founded then, but a
State. The Novorossisk region is the best proof of the plastic power
of Russia. And all Siberia? And the settlements on the banks of the
Amur, where to-morrow the Stars and Stripes of the American Republics
will be fluttering? And indeed the Eastern Provinces of European Russia
themselves.
Reading the chronicle of the Bagrov family,[42] I was struck by the
resemblance of the old man who migrated into the Province of Ufa to the
settlers who migrate from New York to Wisconsin or Illinois. It is a
completely new clearing of uninhabited places, and the turning of them to
agriculture and civilised life. When Bagrov summons the people from all
parts to dig the dam for the mill, when the neighbours come singing and
bring the earth, and he triumphantly crosses the conquered river at their
head, one fancies one is reading Fenimore Cooper or Washington Irving.
And all that happened only a hundred years ago; it was the same thing in
the Saratov province and in Perm. In Vyatka, in my day, it was hard to
keep the peasants from migrating into the forests and there making new
clearings; the land was still in their eyes common property, the _res
nullius_ to which every man has a right.
America presents no new elements; it is a further development of
Protestant Europe, set free from its historic past, and put under
different conditions of life. The grand idea developed by the Northern
States is purely Anglo-Saxon, the idea of self-government, that is of a
strong people with a weak government, the home rule of every tract of
land without centralisation, without bureaucracy, held together by an
inner moral unity. What attitude America will take up to socialism is
hard to say; the spirit of comradeship, of association, of enterprise
in common is highly developed in her, but it has not common ownership
nor our _artel_, nor the village community; the individual combines with
others only for a definite task, apart from which he jealously guards his
complete independence.
Russia, on the contrary, is a quite special world, with her own natural
habit of life, with her own physiological character—not European, not
Asiatic, but Slav. She takes her share in the destinies of Europe, though
she has not its historical traditions and is free from its obligations
to the past. ‘What good fortune for a Russian lawgiver,’ said Bentham to
Alexander I., when the latter was in London after the Napoleonic Wars,
‘that he has not to contend with Roman law at every step!’ And we add,
nor with feudalism, nor with Catholicism, nor with Protestantism. The
Book of Church Law and the Civil Code do not cover every aspect of life,
do not govern every action; other institutions have been introduced by
force and are maintained by force. We have nowhere those hard-and-fast
prejudices which, like a paralysis, deprive the Western European of the
use of half his limbs. The village commune lies at the basis of our
national life with the re-division of fields, with the common ownership
of land, with an elective control, with the equality of duties laid on
each workman (the _tyagla_). All this is in an oppressed, distorted
state, but it is all living, and has outlived its worst period.
If there is any truth in all this, one need not be a Russian to turn
special attention to Russia in these black days for Europe. And, as a
matter of fact, many vigorous minds are occupied with Russia. I have
myself chanced to speak of Russia with serious men like Proudhon and
Mazzini ... and I assure you that the attitude of hatred and fear, fully
deserved by the thirty years’ reign of Nicholas, is being replaced by
hesitation and a desire to gain a closer knowledge of this newcomer,
whose rights and power for the future they are neither able nor willing
to deny.
Russia could not really be understood by Western Europeans so long as
the latter had faith in themselves, and were advancing; but they are
convinced of the impossibility of progressing by way of revolutions,
having lost at one blow all the fruits of them, except the lesson of
failure. ‘The equality of slavery’ has let them look more closely at each
other, and this is why it is in England that there is least understanding
of Russia; the English have not taken an equal share in the Continental
revolutions, nor in the general downfall that has followed. Free after
their own fashion, they look with indifference at the land of slavery and
despotism. But other nations in their fetters feel instinctively that,
though a temporary necessity may yesterday have forced the discipline
of the barracks on a peaceful agricultural people and turned all Russia
into military settlements, another necessity may to-morrow do away
with all that, just as Alexander II. has done away with Araktcheyev’s
settlements; the period of military despotism will pass, leaving behind
a political unity indissolubly welded together and forces hardened in
a harsh and bitter school. The stumbling-blocks over which Europe has
tripped scarcely exist for us. In the natural simplicity of our peasant
life, in our uncertain and unsettled economic and judicial conceptions,
in our vague sense of property, in our lack of a strong middle class, and
in our extraordinary capacity for assimilating foreign ideas, we have
an advantage over nations that are fully organised and exhausted. The
Russian State has been firmly established by terrible means; by slavery,
the knout, and executions, the Russian people have been driven into
making a vast empire, through torture they have moved to the achievement
of their destinies. It is idle to waste anger on the past; it is the task
of the living to take advantage of all forces alike, whether they have
been won by good means or ill, by bloodshed or by the ways of peace. The
military settlements, as I have said, are passing away, but the villages
remain. In our shifting primitive soil there is nothing conservative but
the village commune; that is, nothing but what ought to be preserved.