excessively difficult. One can but heartily rejoice at the fact. The
Russian peasant has no morality except what naturally, instinctively
flows from his communism; this morality is deeply rooted in the people;
the little they know of the Gospel supports it; the flagrant injustice of
the landowner binds the peasant still more closely to his principles and
to the communal system.[85]
The commune has saved the Russian people from Mongol barbarism and
Imperial civilisation, from the Europeanised landlords and from the
German bureaucracy. The communal system, though it has suffered violent
shocks, has stood firm against the interference of the authorities; it
has successfully survived _up to the development of socialism in Europe_.
This circumstance is of infinite consequence for Russia.
The Russian Autocracy is entering upon a new phase. Having grown out
of an anti-national revolution,[86] it has accomplished its destined
task. It has created an immense empire, a formidable army, a centralised
government. Without real roots, without tradition, it was doomed to
ineffectiveness; it is true that it undertook a new task—to bring Western
civilisation into Russia; and it was to some extent successful in doing
that while it still played the part of an enlightened government.
That part it has now abandoned.
The Government, which severed itself from the people in the name of
civilisation, has lost no time in cutting itself off from culture in the
name of autocracy.
It renounced civilisation as soon as the tri-coloured phantom of
liberalism began to be visible through its tendencies; it tried to
turn to nationalism, to the people. That was impossible—the people and
the Government had nothing in common; the former had grown away from
the latter, while the Government discerned deep in the masses a new
phantom, the still more terrible phantom of the Red Cock.[87] Of course,
liberalism was less dangerous than the new Pugatchovism, but the terror
and dislike of new ideas had grown so strong that the Government was no
longer capable of making its peace with civilisation.
Since then the sole aim of Tsarism has been Tsarism. It rules in order to
rule, its immense powers are employed for their mutual destruction, for
the preservation of an artificial peace. But autocracy for the sake of
autocracy in the end becomes impossible; it is too absurd, too barren.
It has felt this and has begun to look for work to do in Europe. The
activity of Russian diplomacy is inexhaustible; notes, threats, promises,
councils are scattered on all sides, its spies and agents scurry to and
fro in all directions.
The Russian Emperor regards himself as the natural protector of the
German Princes; he meddles in all the petty intrigues of the petty German
courts; he settles all their disputes, scolding one, rewarding another
with the hand of a Grand Duchess. But this is not a sufficient outlet for
his energy. He undertakes the duty of chief gendarme of the universe; he
is the mainstay of every reaction, every persecution. He plays the part
of the representative of the monarchical principle in Europe, assumes the
airs and graces of the aristocracy, as though he were a Bourbon, or a
Plantagenet, as though his courtiers were Gloucesters or Montmorencys.
Unhappily there is nothing in common between feudal monarchism with its
definite basis, its past, and its social and religious ideas, and the
Napoleonic despotism of the Petersburg Tsar with no moral principle
behind it, nothing but a deplorable historic necessity, a transitory
usefulness.
And the Winter Palace, like a mountain top toward the end of autumn,
is more and more thickly covered with snow and ice. The vital sap
artificially raised to these governmental heights is gradually being
frozen; nothing is left but mere material power, and the hardness of the
rock which still resists the onslaught of the waves of revolution.
Nicholas, surrounded by his generals, his ministers, and his bureaucrats,
tries to forget his isolation, but grows hour by hour gloomier, more
morose, more uneasy. He sees that he is not loved; he discerns the deadly
silence that reigns about him through the distant murmur of the far-away
tempest, which seems to be coming nearer. The Tsar seeks to forget, he
proclaims aloud that his aim is the aggrandisement of the Imperial power.
That avowal is nothing new; for the last twenty years he has
unwearyingly, unrestingly laboured for that sole object; for the sake of
it he has spared neither the tears nor the blood of his subjects.
He has succeeded in everything: he has crushed Polish nationalism; in
Russia he has suppressed liberalism.
What more does he want, indeed? Why is he so gloomy?
The Emperor feels that Poland is not yet dead. In place of the liberalism
which he has persecuted with a savagery quite superfluous, for that
exotic flower cannot take root in Russian soil, another movement menacing
as a storm-cloud is arising.
The peasantry is beginning to murmur under the yoke of the landowners;
local insurrections are continually breaking out; you yourself quote a
terrible instance of this.
The party of progress demands the emancipation of the peasants; it is
ready to sacrifice its own privileges. The Tsar hesitates and holds it
back; he desires emancipation and puts hindrances in its way. He sees
that freeing the peasants involves freeing the land; that this in its
turn is the beginning of a social revolution, the proclamation of rural
communism. To escape the question of emancipation is impossible, to
defer its solution to the next reign is, of course, easier, but it is a
cowardly resource, and only amounts to the respite of a few hours wasted
at a wretched posting-station in waiting for horses....
From all this you see how fortunate it is for Russia that the village
commune has not perished, that personal ownership has not split up the
property of the commune; how fortunate it is for the Russian people
that it has remained outside all political movements, outside European
civilisation, which would undoubtedly have undermined the commune, and
which has to-day reached in socialism the negation of itself.
Europe, as I have said in another place, has not solved the problem of
the rival claims of the individual and the State, but has set herself the
task of solving it. Russia has not found the solution either. It is in
this problem that our equality begins.
At the first step towards the social revolution Europe is confronted
with the people which presents it with a system, half-savage and
unorganised, but still a system, that of perpetual re-division of land
among its cultivators. And observe that this great example is given us
not by educated Russia, but by the people itself, by its actual life. We
Russians who have passed through European civilisation are no more than a
means, a leaven, mediators between the Russian people and revolutionary
Europe. The man of the future in Russia is the peasant, just as in
France it is the workman.
But, if this is so, have not the Russian peasantry some claim on your
indulgence, sir?
Poor peasant! Every possible injustice is hurled at him: the Emperor
oppresses him with levies of recruits, the landowner steals his labour,
the official takes his last rouble. The peasant endures in silence but
does not despair, he still has the commune. If a member is torn from it,
the commune draws its ranks closer. One would have thought the peasant’s
fate deserved compassion, yet it touches no one. Instead of defending,
men upbraid him.
You do not leave him even the last refuge, in which he still feels
himself a man, in which he loves and is not afraid; you say: ‘His commune
is not a commune, his family is not a family, his wife is not a wife;
before she is his, she is the property of the landowner; his children are
not his children—who knows who is their father?’
So you expose this luckless people not to scientific analysis but to the
contempt of other nations, who receive your legends with confidence.
I regard it as a duty to say a few words on this subject.
Family life among all the Slavs is very highly developed; it may be the
one conservative element of their character, the point at which their
destructive criticism stops.
The peasants are very reluctant to split up the family; not uncommonly
three or four generations go on living under one roof around the
grandfather, who enjoys a patriarchal authority. The woman, commonly
oppressed, as is always the case in the agricultural class, is treated
with respect and consideration when she is the widow of the eldest son.
Not uncommonly the whole family is ruled by a grey-haired grandmother....
Can it be said that the family does not exist in Russia?
Let us pass to the landowner’s relation to the family of his serf. For
the sake of clearness, we will distinguish the rule from its abuses, what
is lawful from what is criminal.
_Jus primae noctis_ has never existed in Russia.
The landowner cannot legally demand a breach of conjugal fidelity. If the
law were carried out in Russia, the violation of a serf-woman would be
punished exactly as though she were free, namely by penal servitude or
exile to Siberia, with deprivation of all civil rights. Such is the law,
let us turn to the facts.
I do not pretend to deny that with the power given by the Government
to the landowners, it is very easy for them to violate the wives and
daughters of their serfs. By privation and punishment the landowner can
always bring his serfs to a pass in which some will offer him their
wives and daughters, just like that worthy French nobleman who, in the
eighteenth century, asked as a special favour that his daughter should be
installed in the Parc-aux-Cerfs.
It is no matter for wonder that honourable fathers and husbands find no
redress against the landowners, thanks to the excellent judicial system
of Russia. For the most part, they find themselves in the position of
Monsieur Tiercelin, whose daughter of eleven was stolen by Berruyer, at
the instigation of Louis XV. All these filthy abuses are possible; one
has but to think of the coarse and depraved manners of a section of the
Russian nobility to be certain of it. But as far as the peasants are
concerned they are far indeed from enduring their masters’ viciousness
with indifference.
Allow me to bring forward a proof of it.
Half of the landowners murdered by their serfs (the statistics give
their number as sixty to seventy a year) perish in consequence of their
misdeeds in this line. Legal proceedings on such grounds are rare; the
peasant knows that the judges show little respect for his complaints;
but he has an axe; he is a master of the use of it, and knows that he is.
I will say no more about the peasants, but beg you to listen to a few
more words about educated Russia.
Your view of the intellectual movement in Russia is no more indulgent
than your opinion of the popular character; with one stroke of the pen
you strike off all the work hitherto done by our fettered hands!
One of Shakespeare’s characters, not knowing how to show his contempt for
a despised opponent, says to him: ‘I even doubt of your existence!’ You
have gone further, for it is not a matter of doubt to you that Russian
literature does not exist. I quote from your own words:
‘We are not going to attach importance to the attempts of those few
clever people who have thought fit to exercise themselves in the Russian
language and cheat Europe with a pale phantom of Russian literature.
If it were not for my deep respect for Mickiewicz and his saintly
aberrations, I should really censure him for the indulgence, one might
even say charity, with which he speaks of this trifling.’[88]
I search in vain, sir, for the grounds for the contempt with which
you greet the first frail cry of a people that has awakened in its
prison-house, the groan suppressed by its gaoler.
Why are you unwilling to listen to the shuddering notes of our mournful
poetry, to our chants through which a sob can be heard? What has
concealed from your eyes our hysterical laughter, the perpetual irony
behind which the deeply tortured heart seeks refuge, in which our
fatal helplessness is confessed? Oh, how I long to make you a worthy
translation of some poems of Pushkin and Lermontov, some songs of
Koltsov! Then you would hold out to us a friendly hand at once, you would
be the first to beg us to forget what you have said!
Next to the communism of the peasants, nothing is so deeply
characteristic of Russia, nothing is such an earnest of her great future,
as her literary movement.
Between the peasantry and literature there looms the monster of official
Russia. ‘Russia the deception, Russia the pestilence,’ as you call
her. This Russia extends from the Emperor, passing from gendarme to
gendarme, from official to official, down to the lowest policeman in the
remotest corner of the Empire. Every step of the ladder, as in Dante,
gains a new power for evil, a new degree of corruption and cruelty. This
living pyramid of crimes, abuses, and bribery, built up of policemen,
scoundrels, heartless German officials everlastingly greedy, ignorant
judges everlastingly drunk, aristocrats everlastingly base: all this
is held together by a community of interest in plunder and gain, and
supported on six hundred thousand animated machines with bayonets.
The peasant is never defiled by contact with this governing world of
aggression; he endures its existence—only in that is he to blame.
The body hostile to official Russia consists of a handful of men who are
ready to face anything, who protest against it, fight with it, denounce
and undermine it. These isolated champions are from time to time thrown
into dungeons, tortured, sent to Siberia, but their place does not
long remain empty, fresh champions come forward; it is our tradition,
our inalienable task. The terrible consequences of speech in Russia
inevitably give it a peculiar force. A free utterance is listened to with
love and reverence, because among us it is only uttered by those who have
something to say. One does not so easily put one’s thoughts into print
when at the end of every page one has a vision of a gendarme, a troika,
and, on the far horizon, Tobolsk or Irkutsk.
In my last pamphlet[89] I have said enough about Russian literature. Here
I will confine myself to a few general observations.
Melancholy, scepticism, irony, those are the three chief strings of the
Russian lyre.
When Pushkin begins one of his finest poems with these terrible words:
‘All say—there is no justice upon earth....
But there is no justice—up above us either!
To me that is as clear as A B C,’
does it not grip your heart, do you not through the show of composure
divine the broken life of a man grown used to suffering? Lermontov, in
his profound repulsion for the society surrounding him, turns in 1830 to
his contemporaries with his terrible
‘With mournful heart I watch our generation,
Tragic or trivial must its future be.’
I only know one contemporary poet who touches the gloomy strings of
man’s soul with the same power. He, too, was a poet born in slavery and
dying before the rebirth of his Fatherland; that is the singer of death,
Leopardi, to whom the world seems a vast league of criminals ruthlessly
persecuting a handful of righteous madmen.
Russia has only one painter who has won general recognition, Bryullov.
What is the subject of his finest work which won him fame in Italy?
Glance at this strange painting.[90] On an immense canvas groups of
terrified figures are crowded in confusion, seeking in vain for safety.
They are perishing from an earthquake, a volcanic eruption in the midst
of a perfect tempest of cataclysms. They are overwhelmed by savage,
senseless, ruthless force, to which any resistance is impossible. Such
are the conceptions inspired by the Petersburg atmosphere. The Russian
novel is occupied exclusively in the sphere of pathological anatomy. In
it there is a perpetual reference to the evil consuming us, perpetual,
pitiless, peculiar to us. Here you do not hear voices from heaven,
promising Faust forgiveness for sinful Gretchen—here the only voices
raised are those of doubt and damnation. Yet if there is salvation for
Russia, she will be saved only by this profound recognition of our
position, by the truthfulness with which she lays bare before all her
plight. He who boldly recognises his failings feels that there is in
him something that has been kept safe in the midst of downfalls and
backslidings; he knows that he can expiate his past, and not only lift up
his head, but turn from ‘Sardanapalus the profligate to Sardanapalus the
hero.’
The Russian peasantry do not read. You know that Voltaire and Dante, too,
were not read by villagers, but by the nobility and a section of the
middle class. In Russia the educated section of the middle class forms
part of the nobility, which consists of all that has ceased to be the
peasantry. There is even a proletariat of the nobility which merges into
the peasantry, and a proletariat of the peasantry which rises up into the
nobility. This fluctuation, this continual renewal, gives the Russian
nobility a character which you do not find in the privileged classes of
the backward countries of Europe. In brief, the whole history of Russia,
from the time of Peter the Great, is only the history of the nobility and
of the influence of enlightenment upon it. I will add that the Russian
nobility equals in numbers the electorate of France established by the
laws of the 31st of May.
In the course of the eighteenth century, the new Russian literature
fashioned that rich, sonorous language which we possess now: a supple
and powerful language capable of expressing both the most abstract ideas
of German metaphysics and the light sparkling play of French wit. This
literature, called into being by the genius of Peter the Great, bore, it
is true, the impress of the Government—but in those days the banner of
the Government was progress, almost revolution.
Till 1789 the Imperial throne complacently draped itself in the majestic
vestments of enlightenment and philosophy. Catherine II. deserved to be
deceived with cardboard villages and palaces of painted boards.... No one
could dazzle spectators by a gorgeous stage effect as she could. In the
Hermitage there was continual talk about Voltaire, Montesquieu, Beccaria.
You, sir, know the reverse of the medal.
Yet in the midst of the triumphal chorus of the courtiers’ songs of
praise, a strange unexpected note was already sounding. That was the
sceptical, fiercely satirical strain, before which all the other
artificial chants were soon to be reduced to silence.
The true character of Russian thought, poetical and speculative, develops
in its full force on the accession of Nicholas to the throne. Its
distinguishing feature is a tragic emancipation of conscience, a pitiless
negation, a bitter irony, an agonising self-analysis. Sometimes this all
breaks into insane laughter, but there is no gaiety in that laughter.
Cast into oppressive surroundings, and armed with a clear eye and
incorruptible logic, the Russian quickly frees himself from the faith and
morals of his fathers. The thinking Russian is the most independent man
in the world. What is there to curb him? Respect for the past?... But
what serves as a starting-point of the modern history of Russia, if not
the denial of nationalism and tradition?
Or can it be the tradition of the Petersburg period? That tradition lays
no obligation on us; on the contrary, that ‘fifth act of the bloody drama
staged in a brothel’[91] sets us completely free from every obligation.
On the other hand, the past of the Western European peoples serves us as
a lesson and nothing more; we do not regard ourselves as the executors of
their historic testaments.
We share your doubts, but your faith does not cheer us. We share your
hatred, but we do not understand your devotion to what your forefathers
have bequeathed you; we are too down-trodden, too unhappy, to be
satisfied with half-freedom. You are restrained by scruples, you are held
back by second thoughts. We have neither second thoughts nor scruples;
all we lack is strength. This is where we get the irony, the anguish
which gnaws us, which brings us to frenzy, which drives us on till we
reach Siberia, torture, exile, premature death. We sacrifice ourselves
with no hope, from spite, from boredom.... There is, indeed, something
irrational in our lives, but there is nothing vulgar, nothing stagnant,
nothing bourgeois.
Do not accuse us of immorality because we do not respect what you
respect. Can you reproach a foundling for not respecting his parents?
We are independent because we are starting life from the beginning. We
have no law but our nature, our national character; it is our being, our
flesh and blood, but by no means a binding authority. We are independent
because we possess nothing. We have hardly anything to love. All our
memories are filled with bitterness and resentment. Education, learning,
were given us with the whip.
What have we to do with your sacred duties, we younger brothers robbed
of our heritage? And can we be honestly contented with your threadbare
morality, unchristian and inhuman, existing only in rhetorical exercises
and speeches for the prosecution? What respect can be inspired in us by
your Roman-barbaric system of law, that hollow clumsy edifice, without
light or air, repaired in the Middle Ages, whitewashed by the newly
enfranchised petty bourgeois? I admit that the daily brigandage in the
Russian law-courts is even worse, but it does not follow from that that
you have justice in your laws or your courts.
The distinction between your laws and our Imperial decrees is confined
to the formula with which they begin. Our Imperial decrees begin with a
crushing truth: ‘The Tsar has been pleased to command’; your laws begin
with a revolting falsehood, the ironical abuse of the name of the French
people, and the words Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. The code of
Nicholas is drawn up for the benefit of the Autocracy to the detriment
of its subjects. The Napoleonic code has absolutely the same character.
We are held in too many chains already to fasten fresh ones about us of
our own free will. In this respect we stand precisely on a level with
our peasants. We submit to brute force. We are slaves because we have no
possibility of being free; but we accept nothing from our foes.
Russia will never be Protestant, Russia will never be _juste-milieu_.
Russia will never make a revolution with the object of getting rid
of the Tsar Nicholas, and replacing him by other Tsars—parliamentary
representatives, judges, and police officials. We perhaps ask for too
much and shall get nothing. That may be so, but yet we do not despair;
before the year 1848 Russia could not, and should not, have entered on
a career of revolution, she had to learn her lesson—now she has learnt
it. The Tsar himself observes it, and is ferociously brutal in his
opposition to universities, to ideas, to knowledge; he is trying to cut
Russia off from Europe, to destroy culture. He is doing his job.
Will he succeed in it? As I have said before, we must not have blind
faith in the future; every seed has its claim to development, but not
every one develops. The future of Russia does not depend on her alone, it
is bound up with the future of Europe. Who can foretell the fate of the
Slav world, if reaction and absolutism finally vanquish the revolution in
Europe?
Perhaps it will perish.
But in that case Europe too will perish....
And progress will pass to America.
* * * * *
After writing the above I received the last two instalments of your
legend. My first impulse on reading them was to throw what I had written
in the fire. Your warm and generous heart has not waited for some one
else to raise a voice on behalf of the despised Russian people. Your
heart was too tender for you to play the part you had undertaken of the
_relentless_ judge, the avenger of the outraged Polish people. You have
been drawn into inconsistency, but it is the inconsistency of a noble
mind.