interesting, but less to the point than appears on the surface. Whether
the village commune is racial in origin or the work of the Government,
whether the land belonged in the past to the commune, to the landowners,
or to the princes, whether the institution of serfdom strengthened the
commune or not, all that ought to be investigated; but what is most
important for us is the present position of affairs. The fact, whether
distorted or not, whether right or wrong, forces itself upon us. The
Government and the institution of serfdom have, in their own fashion,
maintained our native commune; the stable, permanent principle left in
it from patriarchal days is not lost. The common ownership of land, the
_mir_, and the village elections form a groundwork upon which a new
social order may easily grow up, a groundwork which, like our black
earth, scarcely exists in Europe.
That is why, dear friend, in the midst of the gloomy, heartrending
requiem, in the midst of the dark night which is falling upon the sick
and weary West, I turn away from the death agony of the mighty warrior
whom I honour, but whom I cannot aid, and look with faith and hope to our
native East, inwardly rejoicing that I am Russian.
The period upon which Russia is now entering is extraordinarily
important; instead of small political reforms for which we are too old,
not in experience, but in intelligence, we are confronted with a vast
economic revolution, the emancipation of the peasants. And that is not
all: our problems are so set that they can be solved by social and
political measures without violent upheavals. We are called to overhaul
the rights of land ownership and the relations of the workman to the
means of production. Is this, perhaps, our solemn entry upon our future
growth? The whole new programme of our historical activity is so simple
that there is no need of genius for it, but merely eyes to see what to
do. It is only the timidity, the clumsiness and bewilderment of the
Government that hinder it from seeing the way, and it is letting the
marvellous chance slip by. Good Lord! What might not be done in this
spring sunshine after the winter of Nicholas! The blood is thawed in the
veins and the oppressed heart beats more freely, and what profit might be
made of it!
Few feelings are more painful and oppressive than the sense that one
might make a dash forward now at once, that everything is in readiness,
and that the only thing lacking is understanding and courage on the part
of the leaders. The machine is stoked up and ready, the fuel is burning
for nothing, energy is being wasted, and all because there is no bold
hand to turn the key without fear of an explosion. Our leaders should
know that nations pardon a great deal—the barbarism of Peter and the
dissoluteness of Catherine; they pardon violence and wickedness, if only
they are aware of strength and boldness of mind. But however good the
heart may be, lack of understanding, colourless vacillation, incapacity
to take hold of circumstances and turn them to account, in a ruler whose
power is unlimited, is never forgiven, either by the people or by history.
My passionate impatience in this case is in no way a contradiction of my
resigned acceptance of the tragic fate of Europe. In Russia I see the
chance at hand. I feel I can touch it; there is no such possibility in
Western Europe, at any rate, at this moment. If I were not a Russian,
I should long ago have gone away to America. You know that I am not a
fatalist, and do not believe in anything ordained beforehand, not even in
the famous ‘Perfectibility of Humanity.’
Nature and history plod along from day to day and from age to age,
stepping aside, making new ways, stumbling upon old ones, amazing us now
by their swiftness, now by their slowness, now by their sense, now by
their folly, pressing in all directions, but advancing only where the
gates are open. When I talk of possible development I am not talking of
its inevitability; what part of all that is possible will be accomplished
I do not know, because very much in the life of nations depends on
persons and will. I feel in my heart and in my mind that history is
knocking at our door; if we have not the strength to open it, and those
who have are unwilling or incapable, progress will find fitter means in
America or in Australia, where political life is being formed on quite a
different basis. Perhaps even Europe herself will be renewed, will rise
up, will take up her bed and walk on her Holy Land, under which so many
martyrs are buried, and on which so much sweat and blood has been spent.
Perhaps!
But is it really possible that after setting one foot on the beaten track
we shall sink back into the swamp, giving the world the spectacle of
immense strength and complete incapacity to use it? Something forbids the
heart to accept that!
How bitter are these doubts, how bitter this loss of time and
strength!... When will the scales fall from their eyes? And why are they
afraid to answer the loud summons of the future? ‘A new period has come
for Russia,’ we said, when we heard of the death of Nicholas; now all the
Russian journals are saying it, the Tsar himself is saying it in other
words. Well, then let it be new.
Everything that is being done shows our unhappy passion for prefaces and
introductions at which we love to stop short complacently. As though it
were enough to decide to do something, for the thing to be done.
The Petersburg Government has but few traditions, yet those are like
fetters on the legs of Alexander II. How slowly and indirectly he
advances along the path of reform, of which he has himself said so much!
In what shallow waters the boat of his autocracy floats! At this rate it
will take us over two hundred years to catch up the Prussia of to-day.
And it is all due to the Nicholas tradition, the Nicholas policy, and,
what is perhaps worst of all, the Nicholas men.
It is high time to give up this stupid fear of free speech and daylight
through dread of some phantom revolution, for which there are no elements
ready. It is high time to abandon the futile meddling in every European
squabble, always in support of despotism, of brute force, and of flagrant
injustice. To the devil with this diplomatic influence which makes all
the nations hate us. It is not the Russian, but the Holstein policy of
Nicholas. Nicholas turned the sentimental Holy Alliance into a police
compact. Why does Alexander go on playing the same part? The Russian
Tsardom is not bound up in any way with the fate of the decrepit European
thrones, so why will he needlessly share all their abominations and bring
upon himself all the hatreds gained by them?
With the partition of Poland the attitude of the new Empire to old Europe
was transformed. But the memory of that crime ought not to lead to mere
dread of losing the ill-gotten gains, but to pangs of conscience and to
repentance. What has Alexander II. done to show repentance? All that
remains in our memory is the refrain of the song with which he concluded
his speech at Warsaw—_Pas de rêveries! Pas de rêveries!_
_Pas de rhétorique! Pas de rhétorique!_ we say in our turn. We have
no dreams! Crushed by authority, by injustice, by bribery, by the
suppression of free speech and the contempt for personal freedom, we
want to speak out fearlessly, to exchange ideas with each other and to
unmask the abuses of which even the Government is ashamed and which it
will never check without publicity. We want the peasants to be freed
from the power of the landowners and all subject Russia to be freed
from the stick; of course, that is not _rêverie_, but is something very
practical and extremely little. Yes, it is very little, but it is just
our youthfulness and our strength which makes us need so little in order
to push ahead boldly and rapidly. We ask no help from the Government; all
we ask of it is not to meddle. Western Europe, on the contrary, having so
much, cannot make use of its riches; they have cost it so much that it is
miserly over them; it is conservative, like every property-owner. We have
nothing to preserve. Of course, poverty is not of itself a claim to a
different future, nor are years of slavery a claim to freedom, but here,
starting from the opposite principles to opposite ends, I meet not the
Slavophils but some of their ideas.
I believe in the capacity of the Russian people; I see from the seedling
crop what the harvest may be; I see in their life, poor and oppressed as
it is, an unconscious fitness for the social ideal which European thought
has consciously reached.
So that, dear friend, is why it is that you have found a similar strain
in my views and in those—worse than false—mischievous and dangerous views
of the Moscow literary Old Believers, those orthodox Jesuits who reduce
every one to despondency. And that is why, warmly accepting the new
social religion that is arising on the blood-soaked fields of reformation
and revolution, repeating with throbbing heart the great legends of those
days, I turn away from contemporary Europe and have little sympathy with
the pitiful heirs of mighty fathers.
Do not let us dispute about methods, our aim is the same. Let us devote
all our efforts, each according to his strength at his own post, to throw
down every barrier that hinders the free development of the abilities of
our people and maintains the present worthless _régime_, let us stir the
minds of the people and the Government alike. And so I conclude my long
letter to you with the words: to work, to toil, to toil for the Russian
people, which has toiled enough for us!
LONDON, _February 3, 1857_.
THE SUPERFLUOUS AND THE EMBITTERED
_The Onyegins[43] and the Petchorins[44] were perfectly true
to life, they expressed the real misery and dislocation of
the Russian life of the period. The melancholy type of the
superfluous man, lost merely because he had developed into
a man, was to be seen in those days not only in poems and
novels but in the streets and the villages, in the hotels and
the towns.... But the days of the Onyegins and the Petchorins
are over. There are no superfluous men now in Russia: on the
contrary, now there are not hands enough to till the vast
fields that need ploughing. One who does not find work now has
no one else to blame for it. He must be really a frivolous
person, a wastrel or a sluggard._—‘The Bell,’ 1859, p. 44.
These two classes of superfluous men, between whom Nature herself raised
up a high mound of Oblomovs,[45] and History, marking out its boundaries,
dug out a ditch—the one in which Nicholas is buried—are continually
confounded. And so we want, with a partiality like that of Cato for the
cause of the vanquished, to champion the elder generation. Superfluous
men were in those days as essential, as it is now essential that there
should be none.
Nothing is more lamentable than, in the midst of the growing activity
as yet unorganised and awkward, but full of enterprise and initiative,
to meet the flustered, nervously overwrought lads who lose their heads
before the toughness of practical work, and hope and expect to arrive
without effort at a solution of difficulties, and to find answers to
problems, which they can never state clearly.
We will lay aside these voluntary superfluous men, and just as the French
only recognise as real grenadiers _les vieux de la vieille_, so we will
recognise as honourably and truly superfluous men only these of the
reign of Nicholas. We ourselves belong to that unhappy generation, and,
grasping very many years ago that we were superfluous on the banks of
the Neva, very practically took our departure as soon as the rope was
loosened.
There is no need for us to defend ourselves, but we are sorry for our
former comrades and want to distinguish them from the batch of invalids
that followed them from the hospital of Nicholas.
One cannot but share the healthy realistic attitude of one of the best
Russian magazines, in attacking the effete moral point of view which
in the French style seeks personal responsibility for public events.
Historical formations can no more be judged by a criminal court than
geological ones. And men who say that one ought not to direct one’s
thunders and lightnings against bribe-takers and embezzlers of Government
funds, but at the environment which makes bribes a characteristic symptom
of a whole tribe, such as the whole race of _beardless_ Russians for
instance, are perfectly right. All we desire is that the superfluous men
of Nicholas’s reign should have the rights of bribe-takers and enjoy the
privileges granted to the embezzlers of public funds. They deserve it the
more, since they are not only superfluous, but almost all dead; while
the bribe-takers and embezzlers are alive, and not only prosperous, but
historically justified.
Whom have we here to attack, whom have we here to ridicule? On the one
hand, men who have fallen from exhaustion; on the other, men crushed by
the machine; to blame them for it is as ungenerous as to blame scrofulous
and lymphatic children for the poorness of their parents’ blood.
There can be but one serious question about them: were these morbid
phenomena really due to the conditions of their environment, to their
circumstances?...
I think it can hardly be doubted.
There is no need to repeat how cramped, how painful, was the development
of Russia.
We were kept in ignorance by the knout and the Tatars: we were civilised
by the axe and by Germans: and in both cases our nostrils were slit and
we were branded with irons. Peter the Great drove civilisation into us
with such a wedge that Russia could not stand the shock and split into
two layers. We are only just beginning now, after a hundred and fifty
years, to understand how this split was made: there was nothing in common
between the two parts; on the one hand, robbery and contempt; on the
other, suffering and mistrust: on the one hand, the liveried lackey,
proud of his social position and haughtily displaying it; on the other,
the plundered peasant, hating him and concealing his hatred. Never did
Turk, slaughtering men and carrying off women to his harem, oppress so
systematically, nor disdain the Frank and the Greek so insolently, as did
the Russia of the privileged class despise the Russia of the peasant.
There is no instance in history of a caste of the same race getting the
upper hand so thoroughly and becoming so completely alien as our military
nobility.
A renegade always goes to the extreme, to the absurd and the revolting,
to the point at last of clapping a literary man in prison for wearing
the Russian dress, refusing to let him enter a restaurant because he is
wearing a kaftan and has a sash tied round his waist. It is colossal, and
reminds one of Indian Asia.
On the margins of these savagely opposed worlds strange figures appeared,
whose very distortion points to latent forces, cramped and seeking
something different. The Raskolniks and Decembrists stand foremost among
them, and they are followed by all the Westerners and Easterners, the
Onyegins and the Lenskys, superfluous and disillusioned people. All of
them, like Old Testament prophets, were at once a protest and a hope.
By them Russia was striving to escape from the Petersburg period, or to
transform it to her real body and her healthy flesh. These pathological
formations called forth by the conditions of the life of the period
invariably pass away when the conditions are changed, just as superfluous
people have passed away now; but it does not follow that they deserved
judgment and condemnation unless from their younger comrades in the
Service. And this is on the same principle on which one of the inmates of
Bedlam pointed with indignation at another inmate who called himself the
Apostle Paul, while he who was Christ himself knew that the other was not
the Apostle Paul, but simply a shopkeeper from Fleet Street.
Let us recall how superfluous people were evolved.
The hangings of the 13th of July 1826 on the Kronverg Courtyard could not
at once check the current of ideas, and as a fact the traditions of the
reign of Alexander and the Decembrists persisted through the first half
of Nicholas’s reign, though disappearing from sight and turning inwards.
Children still at school dared to hold their heads erect, they did not
yet know that they were the prisoners of education.
They were the same when they left school.
These were far different from the serene, self-confident, enthusiastic
lads, open to every impression, that Pushkin and Pushtchin[46] were when
they were leaving the Lyceum. They have neither the proud, unbending,
overwhelming daring of a Lunin,[47] nor the dissipated recklessness of
a Polezhaev,[48] nor the melancholy serenity of Venevitinov.[49] But
yet they preserved the faith inherited from their fathers and elder
brothers, the faith that ‘It is coming—the dawn of radiant happiness,’
the faith in Western liberalism in which all—Lafayette, Godefroi
Cavaignac, Börne, and Heine—believed. Frightened and disconsolate, they
dreamed of escaping from their false and unhappy position. This was
like that last hope which every one of us has felt before the death of
one we love. Only doctrinaires (whether red or parti-coloured, makes no
difference) readily accept the most terrible deductions, because they
really accept them _in effigy_, on paper.
Meanwhile every event, every year, confirmed for them the dreadful truth
that not only the Government was against them, with gallows and spies,
with the irons with which the torturer compressed Pestel’s head, and with
Nicholas putting those irons on all Russia, but that the people, too,
were not with them, or at least were completely alien. If the people
were discontented, the objects of their discontent were different.
Together with this crushing recognition they suffered, on the other hand,
from growing doubt of the most fundamental principles of the Western
European outlook. The ground was giving way under their feet; and in this
perplexity they were forced either to enter the Service or to fold their
hands and become superfluous, idle. We venture to assert that this is one
of the most tragic positions in the world. Now these superfluous people
are an anachronism, but, of course, Royer Collard or Benjamin Constant
would be an anachronism now, too. But they cannot be blamed for that.
While men’s minds were kept in misery and painful hesitation, not knowing
where to find an outlet, how to move, Nicholas went his way with dull
elemental obstinacy, trampling down the tilled fields and every sign of
growth. A master in his work, he began from the year 1831 his war upon
children; he grasped that he must beat out everything human in the years
of childhood, in order to make faithful subjects in his own image and
semblance. The training of which he dreamed was organised. A simple word,
a simple gesture was reckoned as much an insolence and a crime as an open
neck, as an unbuttoned collar. And this torture of the souls of children
went on for thirty years!
Nicholas—reflected in every inspector, every school director, every
tutor—confronted the boy at school, in the street, in church, even to
some extent in the parental home, stood and stared at him with pewtery
unloving eyes, and the child’s heart ached and grew faint with fear that
those eyes might detect some budding of free thought, some human feeling.
And who knows what chemical change in the composition of a child’s blood
and nervous system is caused by intimidation, by the checking of speech,
by the concealment of thought, by the repression of feeling?
The terrified parents helped Nicholas in his task; to save their children
by ignorance, they concealed from them their one noble memory. The
younger generation grew up without traditions, without a future, except a
career in the Service. The Government office and the barracks gradually
conquered the drawing-room and society, aristocrats turned gendarmes,
Kleinmihels turned aristocrats; the stupid character of Nicholas was
gradually imprinted on everything, vulgarising everything and giving
everything a formal red-tape aspect.
Of course, in all this misery, not everything perished. No plague, not
even the Thirty Years’ War, exterminated every one. Man is a tough
creature. The craving for humane culture, the striving for independent
initiative, survived, and most of all in the two Macedonian phalanxes
of our culture, the Moscow University and the Tsarskoe Syelo Lyceum. On
their youthful shoulders they carried across the whole kingdom of dead
souls the Ark in which lay the Russia of the future, her living thought,
her living faith in what was to come.
History will not forget them.
But in this conflict they lost, for the most part, the youthfulness of
their early years: they were overstrained, grew up prematurely. Old age
reached them before their legal coming of age. These were not idle, not
superfluous people; these were embittered people, sick in body and soul,
people who had been wrecked by the insults they had endured, who looked
at everything askance, and were unable to shake off the bitterness and
venom accumulated more than five years before. They unmistakably stand
for a step in advance, but still it is a morbid step; it is no longer a
heavy, chronic lethargy, but an acute suffering which must be followed by
recovery or death.
The superfluous people have made their exit from the stage, and the
embittered, who are more angry with the superfluous than any, will follow
them. Indeed, they will be gone very soon. They are too forbidding, and
they get too much on one’s nerves to last long. The world, in spite
of eighteen centuries of Christian austerities, is in a very heathen
fashion devoted to epicureanism and _à la longue_ cannot put up with the
depressing faces of Nevsky Daniels, who gloomily reproach them for dining
without gnashing their teeth, and for enjoying pictures or music without
remembering the troubles of this life.
Others are coming to take their place; already we see men of quite a
different stamp, with untried powers and stalwart muscles, coming from
remote universities, from the sturdy Ukraine, from the sturdy North-east,
and perhaps we old folks may yet have the luck to hold out a hand across
a sickly generation to the newcomers, who will briefly bid us farewell
and go on their wide road.
We have studied the type of embittered people, not on the spot, and not
from books, we have studied it from specimens who have crossed the
Nieman and sometimes even the Rhine since 1850.
The first thing that struck us in them was the ease with which they
despaired of everything, the vindictive pleasure of their denial, and
their terrible ruthlessness. After the events of 1848 they saw themselves
at once in a superior position, from which they looked down on the defeat
of the Republic and the Revolution, on the decay of civilisation, on the
defilement of banners, and could feel no compassion for those who still
struggled on. Where we stopped short, tried to restore animation, and
looked to see if there were no spark of life, they went further into the
desert of logical deduction, and easily arrived at those final, violent,
abrupt conclusions, which are alarming in their radical audacity, but
which, like the spirits of the dead, are but the essence gone out of
life, not life itself. In these deductions the Russian enjoys a terrible
advantage over the European; he has no traditions, no habits, nothing
akin to him to lose. The man who has no wealth of his own or of others
goes most safely along dangerous roads.
This emancipation from everything traditional fell to the lot not of
healthy youthful characters, but of men whose heart and soul had been
strained in every fibre. After 1848 there was no living in Petersburg.
The autocracy had reached the Hercules’ Pillars of absurdity; they had
reached the instructions issued to teachers at the military academies,
Buterlin’s scheme for closing universities, the signature of the censor
Yelagin on patterns for stencils. Can one wonder that the young men who
broke out of this dungeon were nervous wrecks and invalids?