They did not show me up in the papers. I was abused in the press much
later, and that was about money too....
These more ferocious ones of whom I have spoken were the extreme
examples, the angular and uncouth representatives of the ‘New
Generation,’ who may be called the Sobakevitches and Nozdryovs of
Nihilism.
However superfluous it may be to make a reservation, yet I will do so,
knowing the logic and the manners of our opponents. I have not the
slightest desire in what I am saying to fling a stone at the younger
generation or at Nihilism. Of the latter I have written many times.
Our Sobakevitches of Nihilism are not its fullest expression, but only
represent its exaggerated extremes.[35]
Who would judge of Christianity from the Flagellants, or of the
Revolution from the September butchers, or the _tricoteuses_ of
Robespierre?
The conceited lads of whom I am speaking are worth studying, because
they are the expression of a temporary type, very definitely marked and
very frequently repeated, a transitional form of the sickness of our
development from our old stagnation.
For the most part, they were lacking in the polish given by breeding,
and the persistence given by scientific studies. In the first heat of
emancipation they were in a hurry to cast off all the conventional forms
and to push away all the rubber buffers which avert rough collisions.
This made the simplest relations with them difficult.
Flinging off everything to the last rag, our _enfants terribles_ proudly
appeared as their mothers bore them, and their mothers had not borne
them well, not as simple comely lads but as heirs of the evil and
unhealthy life of our lower classes in Petersburg. Instead of athletic
muscles and youthful nakedness, they displayed the melancholy traces of
hereditary anaemia, the traces of old scars and fetters and manacles of
all sorts. There were few among them who had come up from the people. The
servants’ hall, the barrack-room, the seminary, the petty proprietor’s
farm survived in their blood and their brains, and lost none of their
characteristic features though twisted in an opposite direction. So far
as I know, this fact has attracted no serious attention.
On the one hand, the reaction against the old narrow oppressive world
was bound to throw the younger generation into antagonism and opposition
to their hostile surroundings; it was useless to expect moderation or
justice in them. On the contrary, everything was done in defiance,
everything was done in resentment. You have been hypocrites, we will be
cynics; you have been moral in words, we will be wicked in words; you
have been polite to your superiors and rude to your inferiors, we will
be rude to every one; you have bowed down to those you did not respect,
we will shove others aside without apologising; your feeling of personal
dignity consisted in nothing but decorum and external honour, we make it
our point of honour to trample on every decorum and to scorn every _point
d’honneur_.
But on the other hand, though disowning all the ordinary forms of
social life, their character was full of its own hereditary failings
and deformities. Casting off, as we have said, all veils, the most
desperate played the dandy in the costume of Gogol’s Pyetuh[36] and did
not preserve the pose of the Venus of Medici. Their nakedness did not
conceal, but revealed, what they were. It revealed that their systematic
roughness, their rude and insolent talk, had nothing in common with
the inoffensive and simple-hearted coarseness of the peasant, but a
great deal in common with the manners of the low-class pettifogger, the
shop-boy and the flunkey. The peasants no more considered such a Nihilist
as one of themselves than they did a Slavophil in a _murmolka_. To the
peasantry these men remain strangers, the lowest class of the enemies’
camp, inferior young masters, scribblers out of a job, Germans among
Russians.
To be completely free, one must forget one’s freedom and that from which
one has been set free, and cast off the habits of the environment one has
outgrown. Until men have done this we cannot help being conscious of the
servants’ hall, the barrack-room, the government-office or the seminary
in every gesture they make and every word they utter.
To hit a man in the face at the first objection he advances—if not with a
fist with a word of abuse—to call Stuart Mill a sneak, forgetting all the
service he has done, is not that the same as the Russian master’s way
of ‘punching old Gavrilo in the face for a crumpled cravat’? In this and
similar rudeness, do we not recognise the policeman, the police officer,
the village constable dragging the peasant by his grey beard? Do we not,
in the insolent arrogance of their manners and answers, clearly recognise
the insolence of the officers of the days of Nicholas? Do we not see
in men who talk haughtily and disdainfully of Shakespeare and Pushkin,
grandsons of Skalozub, reared in the house of their grandsire who wanted
‘to make a Voltaire of his corporal’?
The very curse of bribery has survived in the extortion of money by
violence, by intimidation and threats on the pretext of a common cause,
in the efforts to be kept at the expense of the service and to revenge a
refusal by slanders and libels.
All this will be transformed and come right with time. But there is no
blinking the fact that a strange subsoil has been prepared by the Tsar’s
paternal Government and Imperial civilisation in our kingdom of darkness.
It is a soil on which seedlings that promised much have grown, on the one
hand, into the followers of the Muravyovs and the Katkovs, and, on the
other, into the bullies of Nihilism and the lawless gang of Bazarovs.
Our black earth needs a good deal of drainage!