old. Their sympathies and antipathies, says Pisarev, are the same;
what they desire is the same thing ... at the bottom of their hearts
the younger generation accept much that they reject in words. It would
be quite easy then to come to terms. But until he is stripped of his
ceremonial trappings Bazarov consistently demands from men who are
crushed under every burden on earth, outraged, tortured, deprived both of
sleep and of all possibility of action when awake, that they should not
speak of their misery; there is a smack of Araktcheyev about it.
What reason is there to deprive Lermontov, for instance, of his bitter
lamentation, his upbraidings of his own generation which sent a shock of
horror through so many? Would the prison-house of Nicholas be really
any better if the gaolers had been as irritably nervous and carping as
Bazarov and had suppressed those voices.
‘But what are they for? What is the use of them?’ ‘Why does a stone make
a sound when it is hit with a hammer?’
‘It cannot help it.’
And why do these gentlemen suppose that men can suffer for whole
generations without speech, complaint, indignation, cursing, protest? If
complaint is not of use for others, it is for those who complain; the
expression of sorrow eases the pain. ‘_Ihm_,’ says Goethe, ‘_gab ein Gott
zu sagen, was er leidet._’
‘But what has it to do with us?’
Nothing to do with you, perhaps, but something to do with others, maybe;
moreover, you must not lose sight of the fact that every generation
lives for itself also. From the point of view of history it leads on to
something else, but in relation to itself it is the goal, and it cannot,
it ought not to endure without a murmur the afflictions that befall it,
especially when it has not even the consolation which Israel had in
the expectation of the Messiah, and has no idea that from the seed of
the Onyegins and the Rudins will be born a Bazarov. In reality, what
drives our young people to fury is that in our generation _our_ craving
for activity, _our_ protest against the existing order of things was
_differently_ expressed from theirs, and that the motive of both was not
always and completely dependent on cold and hunger.
Is not this passion for uniformity another example of the same
irritable spirit which has made of formality and routine the one thing
of consequence and reduced military evolutions to the goose-step?
That side of the Russian character is responsible for the development
of Araktcheyevism, civil and military. Every personal, individual
manifestation or deviation was regarded as disobedience, and excited
persecution and incessant bullying. Bazarov leaves no one in peace; he
provokes every one with his scorn. Every word of his is a reproof from
a superior to a subordinate. There is no future before that. ‘If,’ says
Pisarev, ‘Bazarovism is the malady of our age, it will have to run its
course.’ By all means. This malady is only in place before the end of the
university course; like teething, it is quite unseemly in the full-grown.
The worst service Turgenev did Bazarov was putting him to death by typhus
because he did not know how to get rid of him. That is an _ultima ratio_
which no one can withstand; had Bazarov been saved from typhus, he would
certainly have grown out of Bazarovism, at any rate in science, which he
loved and prized, and which does not change its methods, whether frog or
man, embryology or history, is its subject.
‘Bazarov rejected every sort of convention, and was nevertheless an
extremely uncultured man. He had heard something about poetry, something
about art, and, without troubling himself to think, abruptly passed
sentence on the subject of which he knew nothing. This conceit is
characteristic of us Russians in general; it has its good points, such as
intellectual daring, but at times it leads us into crude errors.’
Science would have saved Bazarov; he would have ceased to look down on
people with deep and unconcealed contempt. Science even more than the
Gospel teaches us humility. She cannot look down on anything, she does
not know what superiority means, she despises nothing, is never false for
the sake of a pose, and conceals nothing to produce an effect. She stops
short at the facts to investigate, sometimes to heal, never to punish,
still less with hostility and irony.
Science—I anyway am not compelled to keep some words hidden in the
silence of the spirit—science is love, as Spinoza said of thought and
vision.
Letter 2
What has been leaves an imprint by means of which science sooner or later
restores the past in its fundamental features. All that is lost is the
particular atmosphere in which it has occurred. Apotheoses and calumnies,
partialities and envies, all fade and are blown away. The faint track
on the sand vanishes; the imprint which has force and persistence
stamps itself on the rock and will be brought to light by the honest
investigator.
Connections, degrees of kinship, testators and heirs, and their mutual
rights, will all be revealed by the heraldry of science.
Only goddesses are born without predecessors, like Venus from the foam of
the sea. Minerva, more intelligent, sprang from the ready head of Jupiter.
The Decembrists are our noble fathers, the Bazarovs our prodigal sons.
The heritage we received from the Decembrists was the awakened feeling
of human dignity, the striving for independence, the hatred for slavery,
the respect for Western Europe and for the Revolution, the faith in the
possibility of an upheaval in Russia, the passionate desire to take part
in it, the youth and freshness of our energies.
All that has been recast and moulded into new forms, but the foundations
are untouched.
What has our generation bequeathed to the coming one? Nihilism.
Let us recall the position of affairs a little.
Somewhere about 1840 our life began to force its way out more vigorously,
like steam from under a closed lid. A scarcely perceptible change passed
all over Russia, the change by which the doctor discerns before he can
fully account for it that there is a turn for the better, that the
patient’s strength, though very weak, is reviving—there is a different
_tone_. Somewhere inwardly in the moral invisible world there is the
breath of a different air, more stimulating and healthier. Externally
everything was deathlike under the ice of Nicholas’s government, but
something was stirring in the mind and the conscience—a feeling of
uneasiness, of dissatisfaction. The terror had grown weaker, men were
sick of the twilight of the kingdom of darkness.
I saw that change with my own eyes, when I came back from exile, first
in Moscow, afterwards in Petersburg. But I saw it in the literary and
scientific circles.
Another man, whose Baltic antipathy for the Russian movement places
him beyond the suspicion of partiality, described not so long ago how,
returning at that period to the Petersburg aristocracy of the barracks
after an absence of some years, he was puzzled at the decline of
discipline. Aides-de-camp and colonels of the Guards were murmuring, were
criticising the measures taken by the Government, and were displeased
with Nicholas himself. He was so overwhelmed, distressed, and alarmed for
the future of the Autocracy that in the tribulation of his spirit he felt
when dining with the aide-de-camp B., almost in the presence of Dubbelt
himself, that Nihilism had been born between the cheese and the dessert.
He did not recognise the new-born spirit, but the new-born spirit was
there. The machine wound up by Nicholas had begun to give way; he turned
the screw the other way and every one felt it; some spoke, others kept
silent and forbade speech, but all knew that things were really going
wrong, that every one was oppressed, and that this oppression would bring
no good to any one.
Laughter played its part too; laughter, never a good companion for any
religion, and Autocracy is a religion. The vileness and degradation
of the lower ranks of the officials had reached such a pitch that the
Government abandoned them to the satirist. Nicholas, roaring with
laughter in his box at the Mayor and his Derzhimorda,[80] helped the
propaganda, never guessing that after the approval of the Most High the
mockery would soon be promoted to the higher ranks.
It is difficult to apply Pisarev’s rubrics to this period without
modification. Everything in life consists of _nuances_, hesitations,
cross-currents, ebbing and flowing, and not of disconnected fragments. At
what point did the men of will without knowledge cease to be and the men
of knowledge without will begin?
Nature resolutely eludes classification, even classification by age.
Lermontov was in years a contemporary of Byelinsky; he was at the
university when we were, but he died in the hopeless pessimism of the
Petchorin movement, against which the Slavophils and ourselves alike rose
in opposition.
And by the way, I have mentioned the Slavophils. Where are Homyakov
and his brethren to be put? What had they—will without knowledge, or
knowledge without will? Yet the position they filled was no trifling one
in the modern development of Russia, they left a deep imprint on the life
of that time. Or in what levy of recruits shall we put Gogol, and by what
standard? He had not knowledge, whether he had will I don’t know, I doubt
it; but he had genius, and his influence was colossal.
And so, leaving aside the _lapides crescunt, planta crescunt et vivunt_
... of Pisarev, let us pass on.
There were no secret societies, but the secret agreement of those who
understood was immense. Circles consisting of men who had felt the
bear’s claw of the Government on their own persons, more or less, kept a
vigilant watch on their membership. Every action was impossible, even a
word must be masked, but great was the power of speech, not only of the
printed but even more of the spoken word, less easily detected by the
police.
Two batteries were quickly moved forward. Journalism became propaganda.
At the head of it, in the full flush of his youthful strength, stood
Byelinsky. University lecture-rooms were transformed into pulpits,
lectures into the preaching of humane culture; the personality of
Granovsky, surrounded by young professors, became more and more prominent.
Then all at once another outburst of laughter. Strange laughter, terrible
laughter, the laughter of hysteria, in which were mingled shame and
pangs of conscience, and perhaps not the tears that follow laughter, but
the laughter that follows tears. The absurd, monstrous, narrow world of
_Dead Souls_ could not endure it; it sank and began to disappear. And the
propaganda went on gathering strength ... always unchanged; tears and
laughter and books and speech and Hegel[81] and history—all roused men to
the consciousness of their position, to a feeling of horror for serfdom
and for their own lack of rights, everything pointed them on to science
and culture, to the purging of thought from all the litter of tradition,
to the freeing of conscience and reason. That period saw the first dawn
of Nihilism—that complete freedom from all established conceptions, from
all the inherited obstructions and barriers which hinder the Western
European mind from advancing in its historical fetters, from taking a
step forward.
The silent work of the ’forties was cut short all at once. A time even
blacker and more oppressive than the beginning of Nicholas’s reign
followed upon the revolution of February. Byelinsky died before the
beginning of the persecution. Granovsky envied him and wanted to leave
Russia.
A dark night that lasted seven years fell upon Russia, and in it that
intellectual outlook, that way of thinking that is called Nihilism, took
shape, developed, and gained a firm hold on the Russian mind.
Nihilism (I repeat what I said lately in _The Bell_) is logic without
structure, it is science without dogmas, it is the unconditional
submission to experience and the resigned acceptance of all consequences,
whatever they may be, if they follow from observation, or are required
by reason. Nihilism does not transform something into nothing, but shows
that nothing which has been taken for something is an optical illusion,
and that every truth, however it contradicts our fantastic ideas, is more
wholesome than they are, and is in any case what we are in duty bound
to accept. Whether the name is appropriate or not does not matter. We
are accustomed to it; it is accepted by friend and foe, it has become a
police label, it has become a denunciation, an insult with some, a word
of praise with others. Of course, if by Nihilism we are to understand
destructive creativeness, that is, the turning of facts and thoughts
into nothing, into barren scepticism, into haughty passivity, into the
despair which leads to inaction, then true Nihilists are the last people
to be included in the definition, and one of the greatest Nihilists
will be Turgenev, who flung the first stone at them, and another will
be perhaps his favourite philosopher, Schopenhauer. When Byelinsky,
after listening to one of his friends, who explained at length that the
_spirit_ attains self-consciousness in man, answered indignantly: ‘So, I
am not conscious for my own sake, but for the spirit’s?... Why should I
be taken advantage of? I had better not think at all; what do I care for
its consciousness?...’ he was a Nihilist.
When Bakunin convicted the Berlin professors of being afraid of negation,
and the Parisian revolutionaries of 1848 of conservatism, he was a
Nihilist in the fullest sense.
All these discriminations and jealous reservations lead as a rule to
nothing but artificial antagonism.
When the Petrashevsky group were sent to penal servitude for ‘trying to
uproot all laws, human and divine, and to destroy the foundations of
society,’ in the words of their sentence, the terms of which were stolen
from the inquisitorial notes of Liprandi, they were Nihilists. Since then
Nihilism has broadened out, has to some extent become doctrinaire, has
absorbed a great deal from science, and has produced leaders of immense
force and immense talent. All that is beyond dispute. But it has brought
forth no new principles. Or if it has, where are they? I await an answer
to this question from you, or perhaps from some one else, and then I will
continue.
THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE AND SOCIALISM
_A Letter to J. Michelet_
This letter was first published at Nice in 1851, but only
circulated in Piedmont and Switzerland, as the French police
seized almost the whole edition in Marseilles.
Dear Sir,—You hold so high a position in the esteem of all thinking
men, and every word which comes from your noble pen is received by the
European democracy with such complete and deserved confidence, that I
cannot keep silent in a matter that touches upon my deepest convictions.
I cannot leave unanswered the description of the Russian people which you
have included in your legend of Kosciuszko.[82]
This answer is necessary for another reason also. The time has come to
show Europe that when they speak about Russia they are not speaking of
something absent, defenceless, deaf and dumb.
We who have left Russia, only that free Russian speech may be heard at
last in Europe, we are on the spot and deem it our duty to raise our
voice when a man wielding an immense and deserved authority asserts that
‘Russia does not exist, Russians are not men, they are devoid of moral
significance.’
If by this you mean official Russia, the parade-Tsardom, the
Byzantine-German Government, then you are right. We agree beforehand
with everything that you tell us; it is not for us to play the part of
champion there. The Russian Government has so many agents in the press
that there will never be a lack of eloquent apologies for its doings.
But not official society alone is dealt with in your work; you touch on a
deeper question; you speak of the people itself.
Poor Russian people! There is no one to raise a voice in its defence!
Judge whether I can in duty be silent.
The Russian people, my dear sir, is alive, strong, and not old; on the
contrary, indeed, very young. Men do die even in youth, it does happen,
but it is not the normal thing.
The past of the Russian people is obscure, its present is terrible,
but it has claims on the future. It does not _believe_ in its present
position; it has the temerity to expect the more from time, since it has
received so little hitherto.
The most difficult period for the Russian people is drawing to its close.
A terrible conflict awaits it; its enemies are making ready.
The great question, ‘to be or not to be,’ will soon be decided for
Russia, but it is a sin to despair of success before the fight has begun.
The Russian question is assuming immense and fearful proportions; it is
the object of interest and anxiety to all parties; but I think that too
much attention is paid to Imperial Russia, to official Russia, and too
little to the Russia of the people, to voiceless Russia.
Even looking at Russia solely from the point of view of its Government,
do you not think it would be as well to become more closely acquainted
with this inconvenient neighbour who makes himself felt throughout the
whole of Europe, in one place with bayonets, in another with spies? The
Russian Government extends its influence to the Mediterranean by its
protection of the Ottoman Porte, to the Rhine by its protection of its
German uncles and connections, to the Atlantic by its protection of
_order_ in France.
It would not be amiss, I maintain, to appraise at its true value this
universal protector, to inquire whether this strange realm is destined
to play no other part than the repulsive one assumed by the Petersburg
Government, the part of a barrier continually thrown up on the path of
human progress.
Europe is approaching a terrible cataclysm. The mediaeval world is
falling into ruins. The feudal world is drawing to a close. Political and
religious revolutions are flagging under the burden of their impotence;
they have accomplished great things, but have not carried out their
tasks. They have destroyed faith in the Throne and the Altar, but have
not established freedom; they have kindled in men’s hearts desires which
they are incapable of satisfying. Parliamentarianism, Protestantism,
are only stop-gaps, temporary havens, weak bulwarks against death and
resurrection. Their day is over. Since 1849 it has been grasped that
petrified Roman law, subtle casuistry, thin philosophic deism, and barren
religious rationalism are all equally powerless to hold back the workings
of destiny.
The storm is approaching, it is impossible to avert it. Revolutionaries
and reactionaries are at one about that. All men’s minds are perturbed;
the oppressive, vital question lies heavy on the hearts of all. With
growing uneasiness all men ask themselves whether there is still strength
for recovery in old Europe, that decrepit Proteus, that decaying
organism. The answer to that question is awaited with horror, and the
suspense is terrible.
Indeed, it is a fearful question! Will old Europe have the power to
infuse new blood into its veins and fling itself into the boundless
future to which it is drawn by an invincible force, to which it is
being borne headlong, the path to which is perhaps over the ruins of
its ancestral home, over the fragments of past civilisations, over the
trampled riches of modern culture?
On both sides the full gravity of the moment has been understood; Europe
is plunged in dim, stifling gloom, on the eve of the momentous conflict.
It is not life, but an oppressive, agitating suspense. There is no regard
for law, no justice, no personal freedom even; everywhere the sway of the
secular inquisition is supreme; instead of order upheld by law, there is
a state of siege, all are governed by a single feeling—fear, and there
is plenty of it. Every question is thrown into the background before the
all-devouring interests of the reaction. Governments, apparently most
hostile, are united into a single world-wide police. The Russian Emperor,
without concealing his hatred for the French, rewards the Prefect of the
Parisian police; the King of Naples bestows a decoration on the President
of the Republic. The Prussian King, donning the Russian uniform, hastens
to Warsaw to embrace his foe, the Emperor of Austria, in the gracious
presence of Nicholas; while the latter, the schismatic of the one Church
of salvation, proffers his aid to the Pope of Rome. In the midst of these
Saturnalia, in the midst of this Sabbath of the reaction, nothing is left
to safeguard freedom from the caprices of tyranny. Even the guarantees
which exist in undeveloped societies, in China, in Persia, are no longer
respected in the capitals of the so-called civilised world.
One can hardly believe one’s eyes. Can this be the Europe which once we
knew and loved?
Indeed, if it were not for free and haughty England, ‘that jewel set in
a silver sea,’ as Shakespeare calls it, if Switzerland were, like Peter,
in fear of Caesar, to renounce its principles, if Piedmont, that branch
still left of Italy, that last refuge of freedom, which has been hunted
beyond the Alps, and cannot cross the Apennines, were led astray by the
example of her neighbours, if those three countries were infected by the
spirit of death that breathes from Paris and Vienna, it might be thought
that the Conservatives had succeeded already in bringing the old world
to its final dissolution, that the days of barbarism had already returned
in France and Germany.
In the midst of this chaos, in the midst of these pangs of death and
agonies of birth, in the midst of a world falling into dust about the
cradle of the future, men’s eyes involuntarily turn to the East.
There a hostile, menacing empire is seen standing out behind the mists,
like a dark mountain; at times it seems as though it is falling upon
Europe like an avalanche, that like an impatient heir it is ready to
hasten her tardy death.
This empire, absolutely unknown two hundred years ago, has suddenly made
its appearance, and with no right to do so, with no invitation, has
loudly and bluntly raised its voice in the council of European Powers,
demanding a share in the booty, won without its assistance.
No one has dared to oppose its pretensions to interfere in the affairs
of Europe. Charles XII. tried to do so, but his sword, till then
invincible, was broken; Frederick II. attempted to resist the claims of
the Petersburg Court; Königsberg and Berlin became the prey of the foe
from the North. Napoleon, with half a million men, penetrated to the very
heart of the giant, and stole away alone in the first peasant sledge
he came upon. Europe gazed with astonishment at Napoleon’s flight, at
the crowds of Cossacks racing in pursuit of him, at the Russian troops
marching to Paris, and giving the Germans their national independence
by way of alms on the road. Since then Russia has lain like a vampire
over the fate of Europe, watching the mistakes of rulers and peoples.
Yesterday she almost crushed Austria, assisting her against Hungary;
to-morrow she will proclaim Brandenburg a Russian province to appease the
Prussian King.
Is it credible that on the very eve of conflict nothing is known of this
combatant? Yet he stands already menacing, fully armed, prepared to cross
the frontier at the first summons of reaction. And meanwhile men scarcely
know his weapons, or the colour of his flag, and are satisfied with his
official speeches and the vague, incongruous tales that are told of him.