Chapter 25

DISSONANCE—A NEW CIRCLE—DESPERATE HEGELIANISM—V. BYELINSKY, M. BAKUNIN,

AND OTHERS—A QUARREL WITH BYELINSKY AND RECONCILIATION—ARGUMENT WITH A

LADY AT NOVGOROD—STANKEVITCH’S CIRCLE.

At the beginning of 1840 we left Vladimir and the poor, narrow Klyazma.

With anxiety and an aching heart I left the little town where we were

married. I foresaw that the same simple, deep, spiritual life would not

come again, and that we should have to take in our sails.

Our long, solitary walks out of the town, where, lost among the meadows,

we felt so keenly the spring in nature and the spring in our hearts,

would never come again....

The winter evenings when, sitting side by side, we closed the book and

listened to the crunch of sledge-runners and the jingle of bells that

reminded us of the 3rd of March 1838 and our journey of the 9th of May

would never come again....

They will never come again!

In how many keys and for how many ages men have known and repeated

that ‘the May of life blossoms once and never again,’ and yet the June

of mature age with its hard work, with its stony roads, catches a man

unawares. Youth, all unheeding, floats along in a sort of algebra of

ideas, feelings, and yearnings, is little interested in the concrete,

little touched by it, and then comes love, the unknown quantity found;

all is concentrated on one person, through whom everything passes,

in whom the universal becomes precious, in whom the artistic becomes

beautiful; then, too, the young are untouched by the external, they are

devoted to each other, let the grass grow as it will!

And it does grow, together with the nettles and the thistles, and sooner

or later they begin to sting or prick.

We knew that we could not take Vladimir with us, but still we thought

that our May was not yet over. I even fancied that in going back to

Moscow I was going back to my student days. All the surroundings helped

to maintain the illusion. The same house, the same furniture—here was the

room where Ogaryov and I, shut in together, used to conspire two paces

away from the Senator and my father, and here was my father himself,

grown older and more bent, but just as ready to scold me for coming home

late. ‘Who is lecturing to-morrow? Where is the class? I am going from

the university to Ogaryov’s....’ It was 1833 over again!

Ogaryov was actually there.

He had received permission to go to Moscow a few months before me. Again

his house became a centre where friends, old and new, met. And although

the old unity was no more, every one was in sympathy with him.

Ogaryov, as I have had occasion to observe already, was endowed with a

peculiar magnetism, a feminine quality of attraction. For no apparent

reason others are drawn to such people and cling to them; they warm,

unite, and soothe them, they are like an open table at which every

one sits down, renews his strength, rests, grows calmer and more

stout-hearted, and goes away a friend.

His acquaintances swallowed up a great deal of his time; he suffered at

times from this, but still kept his doors open, and met every one with

his gentle smile. Many people thought it a great weakness. Yes, time

was lost and wasted, but the love, not only of intimate friends, but of

outsiders, of the weak, was won; that is worth as much as reading and

other pursuits.

I never can make out how people like Ogaryov can be accused of idleness.

The standards of the factory and the workhouse do not apply in their

case. I remember that in our student days Vadim and I were once sitting

over a glass of wine when he suddenly became more and more gloomy, and

all at once with tears in his eyes repeated the words of Don Carlos (who

quoted them from Julius Caesar): ‘Twenty-three and nothing done for

eternity!’ This so mortified him that with all his might he brought his

open hand down upon the green wine-glass and cut it badly. All that is

so, but neither Caesar nor Don Carlos and Posa, nor Vadim and I explained

why we must do something for eternity. There is work and it has to be

done, and is it to be done for the sake of the work, or for the sake of

being remembered by mankind?

All that is somewhat obscure: and what is work?

Work, business.[16] ... Officials recognise as such only civil and legal

affairs, the merchant regards nothing but commerce as work, military men

call it their work to strut about like cranes armed from head to toe in

times of peace. To my thinking, to serve as the link, as the centre of

a whole circle of people, is a very great work, especially in a society

both disunited and fettered. No one has reproached me for idleness,

and many people have liked some of the things I have done; but they do

not know how much of all that I have done has been the reflection of

our talks, our arguments, the nights we spent idly strolling about the

streets and fields, or still more idly sitting over a glass of wine.

But soon a chilly air reminding us that spring was over penetrated

even into these surroundings. When the joy of meeting had subsided and

festivities were over, when we had said most of what we had to say, and

had to go on our way again, we perceived that the careless, happy life

which we sought from memories was no longer to be found in our circle,

and especially not in Ogaryov’s house. Friends were noisy, arguments

were lively, sometimes wine flowed, but it was not light-hearted, not as

light-hearted as in old days. Every one had a hidden thought, something

unspoken; there was a feeling of strain: Ogaryov looked melancholy and

Ketscher raised his eyebrows fiercely. An intrusive note made a jangling

discord in our harmony; all the warmth, all the friendliness of Ogaryov

could not drown it.

What I had dreaded a year before had come to pass, and it was even worse

than I had thought.

Ogaryov had lost his father in 1838, and had married not long before

his father’s death. The news of his marriage frightened me, it had all

happened so quickly and unexpectedly. The rumours that had reached me

about his wife were not altogether favourable to her, yet he wrote with

enthusiasm and was happy; I put more faith in him, but still I was uneasy.

At the beginning of 1839 they had come for a few days to Vladimir. It was

our first meeting since the auditor Oransky read us our sentence. We were

in no mood to be critical. I only remember that for the first few minutes

her voice struck me unpleasantly; but that momentary impression passed

in the radiance of our joy. Yes, those were the days of fullness and

bliss, when a man all unsuspecting reaches the highest limit, the utmost

boundary of personal happiness. There was not a shade of gloomy memory,

not the faintest dark foreboding, it was all youth, friendship, love,

exuberant strength, energy, health, and an endless road before us. Even

the mood of mysticism which had not yet passed quite away gave a festive

solemnity to our meeting, like chiming bells, choristers, and burning

incense.

There was a small iron crucifix on a table in my room. ‘On your knees!’

said Ogaryov, ‘and let us give thanks that we are all four here

together.’ We knelt down beside him and embraced, wiping away our tears.

But one of the four scarcely needed to wipe them away. Ogaryov’s wife

looked at the proceedings with some astonishment. I thought at the time

that this was _retenue_, but she told me herself afterwards that this

scene had struck her as affected and childish. Of course it might strike

one so looking on at it as an outsider, but why was she looking on at it

as an outsider? Why was she so sober at that moment of intoxication, so

middle-aged in the midst of our youthfulness?

Ogaryov went back to his estate, while she went to Petersburg to try and

obtain permission for him to return to Moscow.

A month later she passed through Vladimir again, alone. Petersburg and

two or three aristocratic drawing-rooms had turned her head. She longed

for external splendour, she was allured by wealth. Will she get over it,

I wondered. Such opposite tastes may lead to many troubles. But wealth

was something new to her and so were drawing-rooms and Petersburg,

perhaps it was a momentary infatuation; she was intelligent and she loved

Ogaryov—and I hoped.

In Moscow they were more apprehensive that she would not get over it so

easily. An artistic and literary circle rather flattered her vanity,

but her chief efforts were not turned in that direction. She would have

consented to have a place for artists and savants in her aristocratic

drawing-room; she forcibly drew Ogaryov into frivolous society in which

he was bored to death. His more intimate friends began to notice it,

and Ketscher, who had long been scowling over it, angrily proclaimed

his _veto_. Hot-tempered, vain, and unused to control herself, she

wounded a vanity as sensitive as her own. Her angular, rather frigid

manners and sarcasms, uttered in the voice which at our first meeting

had so strangely jarred on me, provoked a violent opposition. After

carrying on a feud for two months with Ketscher who, though he was right

fundamentally, was continually in the wrong formally, and arousing the

hostility of several persons who were, perhaps owing to their material

position, too ready to take offence, she found herself brought face to

face with me.

She was afraid of me. In me she wanted to test herself and to discover

once for all which was to take the upper hand, friendship or love, as

though one or the other must take the upper hand. There was more in this

than the desire to gain the day in a capricious quarrel, there was a

consciousness that I opposed her views more strongly than any of them;

there was envious jealousy and feminine love of power in it too. With

Ketscher she disputed till she shed tears, and every day she quarrelled

with him as angry children quarrel, but without exasperation; she could

not look at me without turning pale and trembling with hatred. She

reproached me for revolting pride, and for destroying her happiness

through conceited claims to Ogaryov’s exclusive friendship. I felt

this was unjust and became cruel and merciless in my turn. She herself

confessed to me five years later that she had had thoughts of poisoning

me—so violent was her hatred. She broke off all acquaintance with Natalie

because of her love for me and the affection all our friends had for her.

Ogaryov suffered. No one spared him, neither she nor I nor the others.

We chose his heart (as he himself expressed it in a letter) ‘for our

field of battle,’ and did not consider that whichever gained the day

he suffered equally. He swore to reconcile us, he tried to soften the

awkwardness of the position and we were reconciled; but wounded vanity

cried aloud and smarting resentment flared into warfare at a word.

Ogaryov saw with horror that everything he prized was falling to pieces,

that his holy things were not sacred to the woman he loved, that she was

a stranger—but he could not cease to love her. We were his own people—but

he saw with grief that even we did not spare him one drop of the cup of

bitterness fate forced upon him. He could not roughly sunder the ties

of _Naturgewalt_ that bound him to her, nor the strong ties of sympathy

that bound him to us; in any case his heart could not but bleed, and,

conscious of that, he tried to keep both her and us—gripped convulsively

her hands and ours—while we savagely strained apart, tearing him to

pieces like executioners!

Man is cruel and only prolonged suffering softens him; the child is cruel

in its ignorance, the young man is cruel in the pride of his purity,

the priest is cruel in the pride of his holiness, and the doctrinaire

in the pride of his learning—we are all merciless, and most of all

merciless when we are in the right. The heart is usually melted and

grows soft after severe wounds, after the wings have been burnt, after

acknowledged downfalls, after the panic which makes a man cold all over

when alone, without witnesses, he begins to suspect what a weak and

worthless creature he is. His heart grows softer; as he wipes away the

sweat of shame and horror, afraid of an eye-witness, he seeks excuses for

_himself_ and finds them for _others_. The part of judge, of executioner,

from that moment excites his loathing.

I was far from that stage in those days!

The feud was carried on intermittently. The exasperated woman, pursued

by our intolerance, got further and further entangled, could not go

forward, struggled, fell—and did not change. Feeling that she could not

be victorious, she burned with vexation and _dépit_, with jealousy

in which there was no love. Her confused ideas, taken disconnectedly

from George Sand’s novels and from our conversations, and never clearly

thought out, carried her from one absurdity to another—to eccentricities,

which she took for originality and independence, to that form of feminine

emancipation in virtue of which women arbitrarily deny all that they

dislike in the existing and accepted order, while they obstinately cling

to all the rest.

The gulf was becoming impassable, but for a long time yet Ogaryov spared

her, for a long time he still tried and hoped to save her. And whenever

for a minute some tender feeling was awakened or poetic chord was touched

in her, he was ready to forget the past for ever and begin a new life of

harmony, peace, and love; but she could not restrain herself, she lost

her balance and every time sank lower. Thread by thread their tie was

painfully broken, till the last thread snapped without a sound—and they

parted for ever.

In all this one question presents itself that is not quite easily

answered. How was it that the strong, sympathetic influence that Ogaryov

exercised on all around him, which drew outsiders into higher spheres,

into general interests, glided over that woman’s heart without leaving

any fruitful trace upon it? And yet he loved her passionately and put

more soul and effort into saving her than into all the rest; and she

herself loved him at first, of that there is no doubt.

I have thought a great deal about this. At first, of course, I put the

blame on one side only, but afterwards I began to understand that this

strange, monstrous fact has an explanation and that there is really no

contradiction in it. To have an influence on a sympathetic circle is far

easier than to have an influence on one woman. To preach from the pulpit,

to sway men’s minds from the platform, to teach from the lecturer’s

desk, is far easier than to educate one child. In the lecture-room, in

the church, in the club, similarity of interests and aspirations takes

the foremost place; men meet there for the sake of them, and all that is

needed is to develop them farther. Ogaryov’s circle consisted of his old

comrades of the university, young artists, literary or scientific men;

they were united by a common religion, a common language, and still more

by a common hatred. Those for whom this religion was not really a living

question gradually dropped off, while others came to fill their places,

and the circle itself, as well as its thinking, was the stronger for the

free play of selection and the community of conviction that bound them

together.

Intimacy with a woman is a purely personal matter, based on some secret

physiological affinity, unaccountable, resting on passion. We are first

intimate, afterwards we become acquainted. Among people whose life is not

marked out for them, not dominated by one idea, equilibrium is easily

established; everything with them happens casually, he yields half and

she half, and if they do not, it does not much matter. On the other hand,

a man devoted to his idea discovers with horror that it is strange to

the creature he has brought so close to him. He sets to work in haste

to awaken her, but as a rule only frightens or muddles her. Torn away

from the traditions from which she has not freed herself, and flung

across a sort of abyss with nothing to fill it, she believes that she is

emancipated—conceitedly, arrogantly rejects the old at random, accepts

the new indiscriminately. There is disorder and chaos in her head and in

her heart ... the reins are flung down, egoism is unbridled ... while we

imagine that we have accomplished something and preach to her as in the

lecture-room.

The gift for education, the gift of patient love, of complete, of

persevering devotion is more rarely met with than any other. No mother’s

passionate love nor dialectical skill can replace it.

Is not this the reason why people torment children and sometimes grown-up

people too—that it is so hard to educate them and so easy to flog them?

When we punish, are we not revenging ourselves for our own incapacity?

Ogaryov saw that even then; that was why all (and I among them)

reproached him for being too gentle.

The circle of young people that gathered round Ogaryov was not our old

circle. Only two of his old friends, besides us, were in it. Tone,

interests, pursuits, all were changed. Stankevitch’s friends took the

lead in it; Bakunin and Byelinsky stood at their head, each with a volume

of Hegel’s philosophy in his hand, an each filled with the youthful

intolerance inseparable from deep and passionate convictions.

German philosophy had been grafted on the Moscow University by M. G.

Pavlov. The Chair of Philosophy had been abolished since 1826. Pavlov

gave us an introduction to philosophy by way of physics and agricultural

science. It would have been hard to learn physics at his lectures,

impossible to learn agricultural science; but they were extremely

profitable. Pavlov stood at the door of the section of Physics and

Mathematics and stopped the student with the question: ‘You want to

acquire knowledge of nature? but what is nature? what is knowledge?’

This was extremely valuable: our young students enter the university

entirely without philosophical preparation; only the divinity students

had any conception of philosophy, and that an utterly distorted one.

By way of answer to these questions, Pavlov expounded the doctrines

of Schelling and of Oken with a conciseness and a clarity such as no

teacher of natural philosophy had shown before. If he did not attain

complete lucidity in anything it was not his fault, but was due to the

cloudiness of Schelling’s philosophy. Pavlov may more justly be blamed

for stopping short at this Mahabharata of philosophy instead of passing

on to the austere initiation into Hegelian logic. But even he went no

farther than the introduction and general outline, or at any rate he led

others no farther. Such a halt at the beginning, such incompleteness,

houses without roofs, foundations without houses, and splendid vestibules

leading to a humble dwelling, are quite in the spirit of the Russian

people. Are we not perhaps satisfied with vestibules because our history

is still knocking at the gate?

What Pavlov did not do was done by one of his pupils—Stankevitch.

Stankevitch, also one of the _idle_ people who accomplish _nothing_, was

the first disciple of Hegel in the Moscow circle. He had made a profound

study of German philosophy, which appealed to his aesthetic sense:

endowed with exceptional abilities, he drew a large circle of friends

into his favourite pursuit. This circle was extremely remarkable, from it

came a regular legion of savants, writers and professors, amongst whom

were Byelinsky, Bakunin and Granovsky.

Before our exile there had been no great sympathy between our circle and

Stankevitch’s. They disliked our almost exclusively political tendency,

while we disliked their almost exclusively theoretical interests. They

considered us _Frondeurs_ and French, we thought them sentimentalists

and German. The first man who was acknowledged both by us and by them,

who held out the hand of friendship to both and by his warm love for

both and his conciliating character removed the last traces of mutual

misunderstanding, was Granovsky; but when I arrived in Moscow he was

still in Berlin, while poor Stankevitch at the age of twenty-seven was

dying on the shore of the Lago di Como.

Sickly in constitution and gentle in character, a poet and a dreamer,

Stankevitch was naturally bound to prefer contemplation and abstract

thought to living and purely practical questions; his artistic idealism

suited him, it was ‘the crown of victory’ on his pale, youthful brow

that bore the imprint of death. The others had too much physical vigour

and too little poetical feeling to remain long absorbed in speculative

thought without passing on into life. Exclusive preoccupation with

theory is utterly opposed to the Russian temperament, and we shall soon

see how the Russian spirit transformed Hegel’s philosophy and how the

vitality of our nature asserted itself in spite of all the tonsures of

the philosophic monks. But at the beginning of 1840 the young people

surrounding Ogaryov had as yet no thought of rebelling against the letter

on behalf of the spirit, against the abstract on behalf of life.

My new acquaintances received me as people do receive exiles and old

champions, people who come out of prison or return out of captivity or

banishment, that is, with respectful indulgence, with a readiness to

receive us into their alliance, though at the same time refusing to yield

a single point and hinting at the fact that they are ‘to-day’ and we are

already ‘yesterday,’ and exacting the unconditional acceptance of Hegel’s

phenomenology and logic, and their interpretation of it, too.

They discussed these subjects incessantly, there was not a paragraph

in the three parts of the _Logic_, in the two of the _Aesthetic_, the

_Encyclopaedia_, and so on, which had not been the subject of furious

battles for several nights together. People who loved each other were

parted for weeks at a time because they disagreed about the definition

of ‘all-embracing spirit,’ or had taken as a personal insult an opinion

on ‘the absolute personality and its existence in itself.’ Every

insignificant treatise published in Berlin or other provincial or

district towns of German philosophy was ordered and read into tatters,

so that the leaves fell out in a few days, if only there were a mention

of Hegel in it. Just as Francœur in Paris wept with delight when he

heard that in Russia he was taken for a great mathematician and that

all the youthful generation made use of the same letters as he did when

they solved equations of various degrees, tears of delight might have

been shed by all those forgotten Werders, Marheinekes, Michelets, Ottos,

Vatkes, Schallers, Rosenkrantzes, and even Arnold Ruge,[17] whom Heine

so wonderfully well dubbed ‘the gate-keeper of the Hegelian philosophy,’

if they had known what pitched battles they were exciting in Moscow, how

they were being read, and how they were being bought.

Pavlov’s great value lay in the extraordinary clarity of his exposition,

a clarity in which none of the depth of German thought was lost; the

young philosophers, on the contrary, adopted a conventional language;

they did not translate philosophical terms into Russian, but transferred

them whole, even, to make things easier, leaving all the Latin words _in

crudo_, giving them orthodox terminations and the endings of the Russian

declensions.

I have the right to say this because, carried away by the current of the

time, I wrote myself exactly in the same way, and was actually surprised

when Perevoshtchekov, the well-known astronomer, described my language as

the ‘twittering of birds.’ No one in those days would have hesitated to

write a phrase like this: ‘The concretion of abstract ideas in the sphere

of plastics presents that phase of the self-seeking spirit in which,

defining itself for itself, it passes from the potentiality of natural

immanence into the harmonious sphere of pictorial consciousness in

beauty.’ It is remarkable that here Russian words, as in the celebrated

dinner of the generals of which Yermolov spoke, sound even more foreign

than Latin ones.

German learning—and it is its chief defect—has become accustomed to an

artificial, heavy, scholastic language, just because it has lived in

academies, that is, in the monasteries of idealism. It is the language of

the priests of learning, a language for the faithful, and no one of the

uninitiated understood it. A key was needed for it, as for a cryptograph

letter. The key is now no mystery; when they understood it, people were

surprised that very sensible and very simple things were said in this

strange jargon. Feuerbach was the first to begin using a more human

language.

The mechanical copying of the German learned jargon was the more

unpardonable as the leading characteristic of our language is the extreme

ease with which everything is expressed in it—abstract ideas, the lyrical

sensations of the heart, ‘life’s mouse-like flitting,’ the cry of

indignation, sparkling mischief, and overwhelming passion.

Another mistake, far graver, went hand in hand with this distortion of

language. Our young philosophers distorted not merely their phrases

but their understanding; their attitude to life, to reality, became

scholastic, bookish; it was that learned conception of simple things at

which Goethe mocks with such genius in the conversation of Mephistopheles

with the student. Everything in reality direct, every simple feeling, was

lifted into abstract categories and came back from them without a drop of

living blood, a pale, algebraic shadow. In all this there was a naïveté

of a sort, because it was all perfectly sincere. The man who went for a

walk in Sokolniky went in order to give himself up to the pantheistic

feeling of his unity with the cosmos; and if on the way he happened upon

a drunken soldier or a peasant woman who got into conversation with him,

the philosopher did not simply talk to them, but defined the essential

substance of the people in its immediate and phenomenal manifestation.

The very tear glistening on the eyelash was strictly referred to its

proper classification, to _Gemüth_ or ‘to the tragic in the heart.’

It was the same thing in art. A knowledge of Goethe, especially of the

second part of _Faust_ (either because it was inferior to the first or

because it was more difficult), was as obligatory as the wearing of

clothes. The philosophy of music took a foremost position. Of course,

no one ever spoke of Rossini; to Mozart they were indulgent, though

they did think him childish and poor. On the other hand, they made

philosophical investigations into every chord of Beethoven and greatly

respected Schubert, not so much, I think, for his superb melodies as for

the fact that he chose philosophical themes for them, such as ‘the divine

omnipotence’ and ‘Atlas.’ French literature, everything French in fact,

and, incidentally, everything political also, shared the interdict laid

on Italian music.

From the above, it is easy to see on what field we were bound to meet

and do battle. So long as we were arguing on the theme that Goethe was

objective but that his objectivity was subjective, while Schiller as a

poet was subjective but that his subjectivity was objective, and _vice

versa_, everything went peaceably. Questions that aroused more passion

were not slow to make their appearance.

While Hegel was Professor in Berlin, partly from old age, but far

more from satisfaction with his position and the respect he enjoyed,

he purposely screwed his philosophy up above the earthly level and

kept himself in an environment from which all contemporary interests

and passions became somewhat indistinct, like buildings and villages

seen from a balloon; he did not like to be entangled in these accursed

practical questions with which it is difficult to deal and which must

receive a positive answer. How revolting this artificial and disingenuous

dualism was in a doctrine which set out from the elimination of dualism

can readily be understood. The real Hegel was the modest Professor at

Jena, the friend of Hoelderlin, who hid his _Phenomenology_ under his

coat when Napoleon entered the town; then his philosophy did not lead

to Indian quietism nor to the justification of the existing forms of

society, nor to Prussian Christianity; then he had not read his lectures

on the Philosophy of Religion, but had written things of genius such

as the article on the executioner and the death penalty, printed in

Rosenkrantz’s biography.

Hegel confined himself to the sphere of abstractions in order to avoid

the necessity of touching upon empirical deductions and practical

applications; the one domain which he, very adroitly, selected for the

practical application of his theories was the calm, untroubled ocean

of aesthetics. He rarely ventured into the light of day, and but for a

minute, wrapped up like an invalid, and even then left behind in the

dialectic maze just those questions most interesting to the modern

man. The extremely feeble intellects (Gantz is the only exception) who

surrounded him accepted the letter for the thing itself and were pleased

by the empty play of dialectics. Probably the old man felt at times

sore and ashamed at the sight of the limited outlook of his excessively

complacent pupils. If the dialectic method is not the development of the

reality itself, the lifting of it, so to speak, into thought, it becomes

a purely external means of driving all sorts of things through a series

of categories, an exercise in logical gymnastics, as it was with the

Greek Sophists and the mediaeval scholastics after Abelard.

The philosophical phrase which did the greatest harm, and in virtue

of which the German conservatives strove to reconcile philosophy with

the political régime of Germany—‘all that is real is rational’—was the

principle of sufficient reason and of the correspondence of logic and

fact expressed in other words. Hegel’s phrase, wrongly understood, became

what the words of the Christian Girondist Paul were at one time: ‘There

is no power but from God.’ But if all powers are from God, and if the

existing social order is justified by reason, the struggle against it,

since it exists, is also justified. These two sentences accepted in their

formal meaning are pure tautology; but whether tautology or not, Hegel’s

phrase led straight to the recognition of the existing authorities, led

to a man’s sitting with folded hands, and that was just what the Berlin

Buddhists wanted. Though such a view is diametrically opposed to the

Russian spirit, our Moscow Hegelians were genuinely misled and accepted

it.

Byelinsky, the most active, impulsive, and dialectically passionate,

fighting nature, was at that time preaching an Indian stillness of

contemplation and theoretical study instead of conflict. He believed in

that theory and did not flinch before any of its consequences, nor was he

held back by considerations of moral propriety nor the opinion of others,

which has such terrors for the weak and those who lack independence. He

was free from timidity for he was strong and sincere; his conscience was

clear.

‘Do you know that from your standpoint,’ I said to him, thinking to

impress him with my revolutionary ultimatum, ‘you can prove that the

monstrous tyranny under which we live is rational and ought to exist?’

‘There is no doubt about it,’ answered Byelinsky, and proceeded to recite

to us Pushkin’s ‘Anniversary of Borodino.’

That was more than I could stand and a desperate battle raged between

us. Our feud reacted upon the others, the circle fell apart into two

groups. Bakunin tried to reconcile, to explain, to persuade, but there

was no real peace. Byelinsky, irritated and dissatisfied, went off to

Petersburg, and from there fired off his last furious shot at us in an

article which he called ‘The Anniversary of Borodino.’

Then I broke off all relations with him. Though Bakunin argued hotly, he

began to reconsider things, his revolutionary tact drove him in another

direction. Byelinsky reproached him for weakness, for concessions, and

went to such exaggerated extremes that he scared his own friends and

followers. The chorus was on Byelinsky’s side, and looked down upon us,

haughtily shrugged their shoulders and considered us behind the times.

In the midst of this feud I saw the necessity _ex ipso fonte bibere_

and began studying Hegel in earnest. I even think that a man who has

not _lived through_ Hegel’s phenomenology and Proudhon’s contradictions

of political economy, who has not passed through that furnace and been

tempered by it, is not complete, not modern.

When I had grown used to Hegel’s language and mastered his method, I

began to perceive that Hegel was much nearer to our standpoint than

to the standpoint of his followers; he was so in his early works, he

was so everywhere where his genius had got out of hand and had dashed

forward forgetting the gates of Brandenburg. The philosophy of Hegel is

the algebra of revolution, it emancipates a man in an extraordinary way

and leaves not a stone standing of the Christian world, of the world of

outlived tradition. But, perhaps with intention, it is badly formulated.

Just as in mathematics—only there with more justification—men do not

go back to the definition of space, movement, force, but continue the

dialectical development of their laws and qualities, so in the formal

understanding of philosophy, after once becoming accustomed to the first

principles, men go on merely drawing deductions. Any one new to the

subject who has not stupefied himself by the method being turned into

a habit is pulled up just by these traditions, by these dogmas which

have been accepted as thoughts. To people who have long been studying

the subject and are consequently not free from preconceptions, it seems

astonishing that others should not understand things that are ‘perfectly

clear.’ How can any one fail to understand such a simple idea as, for

instance, ‘that the soul is immortal and that what perishes is only the

personality,’ a thought so successfully developed by the Michelet of

Berlin; or the still more simple truth that the absolute spirit is a

personality, conscious of itself through the world, and at the same time

having its own self-consciousness?

All these things seemed so easy to our friends, they smiled so

condescendingly at ‘French’ objections, that I was for some time crushed

by them and worked and worked to reach an exact understanding of their

philosophic jargon.

Fortunately scholasticism is as little natural to me as mysticism, and I

stretched its bow until the string snapped and the scales dropped from my

eyes. Strange to say, it was an argument with a lady that brought me to

it.

I had the year before at Novgorod become acquainted with a general. I

made his acquaintance just because no one could have been less like a

general.

There was a painful feeling in his house, there were tears in the air, it

was obvious that death had passed through it. His hair was prematurely

grey and his kindly, mournful smile was, even more than his wrinkles,

expressive of suffering. He was about fifty. The traces of a fate that

had cut off living branches was still more clearly imprinted on the pale,

thin face of his wife. It was too quiet in their house. The general

studied mechanics, while his wife spent her mornings giving French

lessons to some poor children; when they had gone she took up a book,

and the only things that suggested a different, bright, fragrant life

were the flowers, of which there were many, and the playthings in a

cupboard—but no one ever played with them.

They had had three children: two years before I knew them an

exceptionally gifted boy of nine had died; a few months later another

child died of scarlet fever; the mother hastened into the country to save

the last child by change of air and came back a few days later with a

little coffin in the carriage with her.

Their life had lost its meaning, it was ended, and continued without

object, without need. Their existence was maintained by the compassion

of each for the other; the one comfort left them was the deep conviction

that each was essential to enable the other to bear the cross. I have

seen few more harmonious marriages, though, indeed, it was hardly a

marriage, for it was not love that bound them together but a deep

comradeship in misfortune; their fate held them tight and kept them

together with the little cold hands of those three, and the hopeless

emptiness around them and before them.

The bereaved mother was completely given up to mysticism; she found

relief from her misery in the world of mysterious reconciliations,

she was deceived by the flattery that religion pays the human heart.

For her, mysticism was no light thing, it was no mere dream, it meant

having her children again, and she was defending them when she defended

her religion. But, as she had an extremely active intelligence, she

challenged discussion and knew her strength. I have met, both before and

since, many mystics of various kinds, from Vitberg and the followers of

Tovjanski,[18] who acknowledged Napoleon as the military incarnation

of God and took off their caps when they passed the Vendôme Column, to

the now-forgotten ‘Ma-Pa,’[19] who told me himself of his interview with

God which took place on the high-road between Montmorency and Paris.

They were all hysterical people who worked on the nerves, impressed the

fancy, or the heart, mixed up philosophical conceptions with an arbitrary

symbolism, and did not care to come out into the open field of logic.

But it was upon that field L—— D—— took a firm and fearless stand.

Where and how she had succeeded in obtaining such artistic skill in

argument I do not know. Altogether women’s development is a mystery;

there is nothing: just dress and dances, mischievous back-biting and

novel reading, making eyes and shedding tears—and all at once titanic

will, mature thought, colossal intelligence make their appearance. The

young girl carried away by her passions vanishes, and before you stands

Théroigne de Méricourt,[20] the beauty of the tribune, swaying multitudes

of the people, or a Princess Dashkov, sword in hand, on horseback, at

eighteen, in the midst of a turbulent crowd of soldiers.

In L—— D—— everything was complete, she had no doubts, no wavering, no

theoretical weakness; even the Jesuits or the Calvinists can hardly have

been so harmoniously consistent in their doctrine as she.

Deprived of her little ones, she had come, instead of hating death, to

hating life. That is just what is needed for Christianity, that complete

apotheosis of death: the contempt for earth, the contempt of the body has

no other meaning. Hence the attack upon everything living and realistic,

enjoyment, health, gaiety, the free joy of existence. And L—— D—— had

reached the point of disliking both Goethe and Pushkin.

Her attacks on my philosophy were original. She used ironically to

declare that all our dialectical subtleties and elaborate constructions

were just the beating of the drum, the noise with which cowards try to

drown the terrors of their conscience.

‘You will never,’ she used to say, ‘get to a personal god, nor to the

immortality of the soul, by any philosophy, and none of you have the

courage to be atheists and reject the life beyond the grave. You are

too human not to be horrified by those conclusions, so you invent your

logical miracles to throw dust in the eyes and to arrive at what is given

by religion in a simple and childlike way.’

I objected, I argued, but I was inwardly conscious that I had no complete

proofs and that she had a firmer footing on her ground than I on mine.

To complete my discomfiture, the inspector of the Medical Board must

needs turn up to support me; he was good-natured man, but one of the most

ridiculous Germans I have ever met. A devoted worshipper of Oken and

Carus,[21] he argued by means of quotations, had a ready-made answer for

everything, never had doubts about anything, and imagined that he was

completely in accord with me.

The doctor lost his temper, grew furious the more readily as he could

not hold his own by other means, looked upon L—— D——’s views as feminine

caprice, took refuge in Schelling’s lectures on the academic doctrine,

and read extracts from Burdach’s _Physiology_ to prove that there is an

eternal and spiritual element in man, and that some personal _Geist_ is

hidden in nature.

L—— D——, who had long ago passed through these ‘back premises’ of

pantheism, confuted him, and, smiling, glanced from him to me. She was,

of course, more in the right than he, and I was vexed and conscientiously

racking my brains, while the good doctor was laughing triumphantly. These

arguments interested me so much that I set to work upon Hegel with new

zest. The worry of my uncertainty did not last long, the truth flashed

before my eyes and began to grow clearer and clearer; I inclined to my

opponent’s side, but not in the way she wished.

‘You are perfectly right,’ I said to her, ‘and I am ashamed of having

argued against you; of course there is no personal spirit, nor

immortality of the soul, and that is why it has been so hard to prove

that there is. See how simple and natural it all becomes without those

gratuitous assumptions.’

She was troubled by my words but quickly recovered herself and said:

‘I am sorry for you, but perhaps it is for the best, you will not long

remain in that position, it is too empty and depressing, while,’ she

added, smiling, ‘our doctor is incurable, he has no fears, he is in such

a fog that he does not see one step before him.’

Her face was paler than usual, however.

Two or three months later, Ogaryov passed through Novgorod. He brought me

Feuerbach’s _Wesen des Christenthums_; after reading the first pages I

leapt up with joy. Away with the trappings of masquerade, no more muddle

and equivocations! We are free men and not the slaves of Xanthos, there

is no need for us to wrap the truth in myth.

In the heat of my philosophic ardour I began my series of articles on

‘Dilettantism in Science,’ in which, among other things, I paid the

doctor out.

Now let us go back to Byelinsky.

A few months after his departure to Petersburg in 1840 we too arrived

there. I did not go to see him. Ogaryov took my quarrel with Byelinsky

very much to heart; he knew that Byelinsky’s absurd theory was a passing

malady, and, indeed, I knew it too. But Ogaryov was kinder. At last by

his letters he brought about a meeting. Our interview was at first cold,

unpleasant, and strained, but neither Byelinsky nor I was very diplomatic

and in the course of trivial conversation I mentioned the article on ‘The

Anniversary of Borodino.’ Byelinsky jumped up from his seat and, flushing

crimson, said with great simplicity, ‘Well, thank God, we’ve come to it

at last. I am so stupid I did not know how to begin.... You’ve won the

day; three or four months in Petersburg have done more to convince me

than all the arguments. Let us forget that nonsense. It is enough to say

that the other day I was dining at a friend’s and there was an officer

of the Engineers there; my friend asked him if he would like to make my

acquaintance. “Is that the author of the article on ‘The Anniversary of

Borodino’?” the officer asked him in his ear. “Yes.” “No, thank you very

much,” he answered dryly. I heard it all and could not restrain myself. I

pressed the officer’s hand warmly and said to him: “You’re an honourable

man, I respect you....” What more would you have?’

From that moment up to Byelinsky’s death we went hand in hand.

Byelinsky, as was to be expected, fell upon his former theory with all

the stinging vehemence of his language and all his furious energy. The

position of many of his friends was not very much to be envied. _Plus

royalistes que le roi_, with the courage of misfortune they tried

to defend their theories, while not averse to an honourable truce.

All those who had enough sense and vitality went over to Byelinsky’s

side; only the obstinate formalists and pedants were left far behind.

Some of them reached such a point of German suicide through dead

and scholastic learning that they lost all living interest and were

themselves lost, leaving no trace. Others became orthodox Slavophils.

Strange as the combination of Hegel and Stefan Yavorsky[22] may appear,

it is more possible than might be supposed; the Byzantine theology is

just such a superficial casuistry and play with logical formulas as

Hegel’s dialectics, formally understood. Some of the articles in the

_Moskvityanin_ are a magnificent instance of the extremes to which, with

talent, the unnatural union of philosophy and religion can be brought.

Byelinsky by no means abandoned Hegel’s philosophy when he renounced

his one-sided interpretation of it. Quite the contrary, it is from

this point that his living, apt, original combination of philosophical

with revolutionary ideas begins. I regard Byelinsky as one of the most

remarkable figures of the period of Nicholas. After the liberalism

which had somehow survived 1825 in Polevoy, after the gloomy article of

Tchaadayev, Byelinsky appears on the scene with his caustic scepticism,

won by suffering, and his passionate interest in every question. In a

series of critical articles he touches in season and out of season upon

everything, everywhere true to his hatred of authority and often rising

to poetic inspiration. The book he reviewed usually served him as a

starting-point, but he abandoned it half-way and threw himself into some

question. The line ‘That’s what kindred are’ in _Onyegin_ is enough for

him to summon family life before the judgment seat and to pick family

relations to pieces down to the last shred. Who does not remember

his articles on ‘The Tarantass,’[23] on ‘Turgenev’s Parasha,’[24] on

‘Derzhavin,’ on ‘Motchalov,’[25] and ‘Hamlet’? What fidelity there is to

his principles, what fearless consistency, what adroitness in navigating

between the sandbanks of the censorship, what boldness in his attacks on

the aristocracy of literature, on the writers of the first three grades,

on the high officials of literature who are always ready to defeat an

opponent if not by fair means by foul, if not by criticism then by

information to the police. Byelinsky scourged them mercilessly, goading

the petty vanity of the frigid mediocre writers of eclogues, lovers of

culture, benevolence, and sentimentality; he turned into derision their

precious ideas, the poetical dreams fostered by their elderly brains,

their naïveté, hidden under an Anna ribbon.

How they hated him for it!

The Slavophils on their side began their official existence with the war

upon Byelinsky; he drove them by his taunts to the _murmolka_ and the

_zipun_[26]; one need only recall that Byelinsky had formerly written in

_Notes of the Fatherland_, while Kireyevsky called his excellent journal

_The European_; no better proof than these titles could be found to show

that at first the difference was only between shades of opinion and not

between parties.

Byelinsky’s articles were awaited with feverish expectation in Petersburg

and Moscow from the 25th of every month. Half a dozen times the students

would call in at the coffee-houses to ask whether the _Notes of the

Fatherland_ had been received; the heavy volume was snatched from hand to

hand. ‘Is there an article of Byelinsky’s?’ ‘Yes,’ and it was devoured

with feverish interest, with laughter, with argument ... and three or

four cherished convictions and reputations were no more.

Sokobelev, the governor of the Peter-Paul fortress, might well say in

jest to Byelinsky when he met him on the Nevsky Prospect: ‘When are you

coming to us? I have a nice warm little cell all ready that I am keeping

for you.’

I have spoken in another book of Byelinsky’s development and of his

literary activity, here I will only say a few words about himself.

Byelinsky was very shy and quite lost his head in an unfamiliar or very

numerous company; he knew this and did the most absurd things in trying

to conceal it. Ketscher persuaded him to go to visit a lady; as they

approached her house Byelinsky became more and more depressed, kept

asking whether they could not go another day, and talked of having a

headache. Ketscher, who knew him, would accept no excuse. When they

arrived Byelinsky set off running as soon as they got out of the sledge,

but Ketscher caught him by the overcoat and led him to be introduced to

the lady.

He sometimes put in an appearance at Prince Odoevsky’s literary

diplomatic evenings. At these there were crowds of people who had nothing

in common except a certain apprehension of and aversion for each other:

clerks from the Embassies and Saharov[27] the archaeologist, painters

and A. Meiendorf,[28] several councillors of the cultured sort, Ioakinth

Bitchurin[29] from Pekin, people who were half gendarmes and half

literary men, others who were wholly gendarmes and not at all literary

men. A—— K—— was so much in evidence there that generals took him for an

authority. The hostess looked with inner grief upon her husband’s vulgar

tastes, and gave way to them much as Louis-Philippe at the beginning of

his reign indulged the tastes of his electors by inviting to the balls

at the Tuileries whole _rez-de-chaussées_ of brace-makers, grocers,

shopkeepers, shoemakers, and other worthy citizens.

Byelinsky was utterly lost at these evenings, between some Saxon

ambassador who did not understand a word of Russian and some officer of

the secret police who understood even words that were not uttered. He was

usually ailing for two or three days afterwards and cursed the man who

had persuaded him to go.

One Saturday, as it was New Year’s Eve, Odoevsky took it into his head

to mix punch _en petit comité_ when the principal guests had dispersed.

Byelinsky would certainly have gone away, but he was prevented by a

barricade of furniture; he was somehow stuck in a corner and a little

table was set before him with wine and glasses on it; Zhukovsky in the

white trousers of his uniform, with gold braid on them, was sitting

sideways opposite him. Byelinsky bore it in patience a long time, but,

seeing no chance of his lot improving, he began moving the table a

little; the table yielded at first, then lurched over and fell with a

bang on the floor, while the bottle of Bordeaux very deliberately began

to empty itself over Zhukovsky. He jumped up while the red wine began to

trickle down his trousers; there was a great fuss and to-do, one servant

rushed up with a napkin to rub the wine into the other parts of the

trousers, and another picked up the broken wine-glasses ... while this

bustle was going on Byelinsky disappeared and, though it was not long

before his end, ran home on foot.

Dear Byelinsky! how angry and upset he was by such incidents long

afterwards, with what horror he used to recall them, walking up and down

the room and shaking his head without the trace of a smile.

But in that shy man, that frail body, there dwelt a mighty spirit, the

spirit of a gladiator! Yes, he was a powerful fighter! he could not

preach or lecture, what he needed was disputation. If he met with no

objection, if he was not stirred to irritation, he did not speak well,

but when he felt stung, when his cherished convictions were touched upon,

when the muscles of his cheeks began to quiver and his voice broke,

then he was worth seeing; he pounced upon his opponent like a panther,

he tore him to pieces, made him ridiculous, made him a piteous object,

and incidentally developed his own thought, with extraordinary force,

with extraordinary poetry. The discussion would often end in blood which

flowed from the sick man’s throat; pale, gasping, with his eyes fixed

on the man with whom he was speaking, he would lift his handkerchief to

his mouth with shaking hand and stop, deeply mortified, crushed by his

physical weakness. How I loved and how I pitied him at those moments!

Worried by the financial sharks of literature, morally fettered by the

censorship, surrounded in Petersburg by people little sympathetic to

him, and consumed by a disease to which the Baltic climate was fatal,

he became more and more irritable. He shunned outsiders, was savagely

shy, and sometimes spent weeks together in gloomy inactivity. Then the

publishers sent note after note demanding copy, and the enslaved writer,

grinding his teeth, took up his pen and wrote the venomous articles

quivering with indignation, the indictments which so impressed their

readers.

Often, utterly exhausted, he would come to us to rest, and lie on the

floor with our two-year-old child; he would play with him for hours

together. While we were only the three of us things went swimmingly, but

if there came a ring at the bell, a spasmodic grimace passed over his

face and he would look about him uneasily, trying to find his hat; though

with Slav weakness he often remained. Then a word, an observation uttered

not to his liking would lead to the most original scenes and disputes....

Once he went in Passion Week to dine with a literary man and Lenten

dishes were served. ‘Is it long,’ he asked, ‘since you became so devout?’

‘We eat Lenten fare,’ answered the literary gentleman, ‘simply for the

sake of the servants.’ ‘For the sake of the servants,’ said Byelinsky,

and he turned pale. ‘For the sake of the servants,’ he repeated, and

flung down his dinner napkin. ‘Where are your servants? I’ll tell them

that they are deceived, any open vice is more humane than this contempt

for the weak and uneducated, this hypocrisy in support of ignorance. And

do you imagine that you are free people? You are in the same boat with

all the tsars and priests and slaveowners. Good-bye, I don’t eat Lenten

fare for the edification of others, I have no servants!’

Among the Russians who might be classified as inveterate Germans, there

was one graduate of our university who had lately arrived from Berlin;

he was a good-natured man in blue spectacles, stiff and decorous; he had

come to a standstill for ever after upsetting and enfeebling his brains

with philosophy and philology. A doctrinaire and to some extent a pedant,

he was fond of holding forth in edifying style. On one occasion at a

literary evening in the house of the novelist who kept the fasts for the

sake of his servants, this gentleman was preaching some sort of _honnéte

et modéré_ twaddle. Byelinsky was lying on a couch in the corner and as

I passed him he took me by the lapel of my coat and said: ‘Do you hear

the rubbish that monster is talking? My tongue has been itching to answer

him, but my chest hurts and there are a lot of people. Be a father to me,

make a fool of him somehow, squash him, crush him with mockery, you can

do it better—come, comfort me.’

I laughed and told Byelinsky that he was setting me on like a bulldog at

a rat. I scarcely knew the man and had hardly heard what he said.

Towards the end of the evening, the gentleman in blue spectacles, after

abusing Koltsov for having abandoned the national costume, suddenly began

talking of Tchaadayev’s famous letter and concluded his commonplace

remarks, uttered in that didactic tone which of itself provokes derision,

with the following words: ‘Be that as it may, I consider his action

contemptible and revolting: I have no respect for such a man.’

There was in the room only one man closely associated with Tchaadayev,

and that was I. I shall have a great deal to say about Tchaadayev later

on, I always liked and respected him and was liked by him; I thought it

was unseemly to let this absurd remark pass. I asked him dryly whether he

supposed that Tchaadayev had written his letter disingenuously or from

interested motives.

‘Not at all,’ answered the gentleman.

An unpleasant conversation followed; I mentioned that the epithets

‘revolting and contemptible’ were themselves revolting and contemptible

when applied to a man who had boldly expressed his opinion and had

suffered for it. He talked to me of the people making up one whole, of

the unity of the fatherland, of the crime of disturbing that unity, of

sacred things that must not be touched.

All at once Byelinsky cut short my words, he leapt up from his sofa,

came up to me as white as a sheet and, slapping me on the shoulder,

said: ‘Here you have them, they have spoken out—the inquisitors, the

censors—keeping thought in leading-strings ...’ and so he went on and

on. With savage inspiration he spoke, interspersing grave words with

deadly sarcasms: ‘We are strangely sensitive: men are flogged and we

don’t resent it, sent to Siberia and we don’t resent it, but here

Tchaadayev, you see, has picked holes in the national honour, he mustn’t

dare to speak; to talk is impudence, a flunkey must never speak! Why

is it that in more civilised countries where one would expect national

susceptibilities to be more developed than in Kostroma and Kaluga words

are not resented?’

‘In civilised countries,’ replied the gentleman in blue spectacles with

inimitable self-complacency, ‘there are prisons in which they confine the

senseless creatures who insult what the whole people respect ... and a

good thing too.’

Byelinsky seemed to tower above us, he was terrible, great at that

moment. Folding his arms over his sick chest, and looking straight at his

opponent, he answered in a hollow voice: ‘And in still more civilised

countries there is a guillotine for those who think that a good thing.’

Saying this, he sank exhausted in an easy-chair and ceased speaking. At

the word guillotine our host turned pale, the guests were uneasy and a

pause followed. The blue-spectacled gentleman was annihilated, but it is

just at such moments that human vanity gets out of hand. Turgenev advises

that, when one has gone such lengths in argument that one begins to feel

frightened, one should move one’s tongue ten times round the inside of

one’s mouth before uttering a word.

Our opponent, unaware of this homely advice, continued uttering feeble

trivialities, addressing himself rather to the rest of the company than

to Byelinsky. ‘In spite of your intolerance,’ he said at last, ‘I am

certain that you would agree with me....’

‘No,’ answered Byelinsky, ‘whatever you might say I shouldn’t agree with

anything!’

Every one laughed and went in to supper. The gentleman in blue spectacles

picked up his hat and went away.

Suffering and privation soon completely undermined Byelinsky’s sickly

constitution. His face, particularly the muscles about his lips, and the

gloomily fixed look in his eyes testified equally to the intense workings

of his spirit and the rapid dissolution of his body.

I saw him for the last time in Paris in the autumn of 1847; he was in

a very bad way, afraid of speaking aloud, and only at moments his old

energy revived and its ebbing fires glowed brightly. It was at such a

moment that he wrote his letter[30] to Gogol.

The news of the revolution of February found him still alive; he died

taking its glow for the flush of the rising dawn.

* * * * *

So this chapter ended in 1854; since that time much has changed. I have

been brought much closer to that period, nearer to the more remote past,

through persons who are here, through the arrival of Ogaryov and two

books, Annenkov’s _Biography of Stankevitch_ and the two first parts of

Byelinsky’s complete works. From the windows suddenly thrown open the

fresh air of the fields, the young breath of spring has been wafted into

the hospital wards....

Stankevitch’s correspondence was unnoticed when it came out. It appeared

at the wrong moment. At the end of 1857 Russia had not yet come to

herself after the funeral of Nicholas, she was expectant and hopeful;

that is the worst mood for receiving reminiscences ... but the book is

not lost. It will remain one of the rare monuments from which any man

who can read can find what was buried without a word in the wretched

graveyard of those days. The dead years, from 1825 to 1855, will soon

be utterly lost; the human tracks, swept away by the police, will

have vanished, and future generations will come to a standstill in

bewilderment before the smooth level waste, seeking the lost channels of

thought which were really never interrupted. The current was apparently

checked, Nicholas tied up the main artery—but the blood flowed along

side-channels. And it is just these capillaries which have left their

trace in the works of Byelinsky and the correspondence of Stankevitch.

Thirty years ago, the Russia of the future existed exclusively among

a few boys, hardly more than children, so insignificant and unnoticed

that there was room for them under the heels of the great boots of the

autocracy—and in them was the heritage of the 14th of December, the

heritage of a purely national Russia, as well as of the learning of all

humanity. This new life struggled on like the grass that tries to grow at

the mouth of the still smouldering crater.

In the very jaws of the monster these children stand out unlike other

children; they grow, develop, and begin to live a different life. Weak,

insignificant, unsupported, on the contrary persecuted by all, they might

easily have perished, leaving no trace, but they survive, or, if they die

on their way, all does not die with them. They are the rudimentary germs,

the embryos of history, barely perceptible, barely existing, like embryos

in general.

Little by little, groups of them are formed. What is more nearly akin to

them gathers round their centres; then the groups repel one another. This

splitting up gives them width and many-sidedness in their development;

after developing to the end, that is to the extreme, the branches unite

again by whatever names they may be called—Stankevitch’s circle, the

Slavophils, or our little circle.

The leading characteristic of them all is a profound feeling of aversion

for official Russia, for their environment, and at the same time the

impulse to get out of it—and in some a vehement desire to get rid of it.

The objection that these circles, unnoticed both from above and from

below, form an exceptional, a casual, a disconnected phenomenon, that the

education of the young people was for the most part exotic, alien, and

that they rather express the translation of French and German ideas into

Russian than anything of their own, seems to us quite groundless.

Possibly at the end of last and the beginning of this century there was

in the aristocracy a sprinkling of Russian foreigners who had sundered

all ties with the national life; but they had neither living interests,

nor circles based on convictions, nor a literature of their own. They

died out without leaving fruit. Victims of the divorce from the people

brought about by Peter the Great, they remained eccentric and whimsical,

they were men not merely superfluous but undeserving of pity. The war

of 1812 put an end to them—the old generation lived on, but none of the

younger developed in that direction. To include among them men of the

stamp of Tchaadayev would be the greatest mistake.

Protest, denunciation, hatred for one’s country if you will has a

completely different significance from indifferent aloofness. Byron,

lashing at English life, fleeing from England as from the plague,

remained a typical Englishman. Heine, trying through exasperation at the

loathsome political state of Germany to turn French, remained a genuine

German. The highest protest against Judaism—Christianity—is filled with

the spirit of Judaism. The separation of the states of North America

from England could lead to war and hatred, but it could not make the

Americans un-English.

As a rule, it is with great difficulty that men abandon their

physiological memories and the mould in which they are cast by heredity;

to do so a man must either be peculiarly passionless and lacking in

individual characteristics or must be absorbed in abstract pursuits. The

impersonality of mathematics, the unhuman objectivity of nature do not

call forth those sides of the soul and do not awaken them; but as soon

as we touch upon questions of life, of art, of morals, in which a man is

not only an observer and investigator, but at the same time himself an

interested party, then we find a physiological limit—which it is very

hard to cross with old blood and brains unless one could erase from them

all traces of the songs of the cradle, of the fields and the hills of

home, of the customs and whole setting of the past.

The poet or the artist in his truest work is always national. Whatever he

does, whatever aim and thought he may have in his work, he consciously

or unconsciously expresses some elements of the national character and

expresses them more deeply and more clearly than the very history of the

people. Even when renouncing everything national, the artist does not

lose the chief characteristics from which it can be recognised to what

people he belongs. Both in the Greek ‘Iphigenia’ and in the Oriental

‘Divan’ Goethe was a German. Poets really are, as the Romans called

them, prophets; only they do not foretell what is not and will be by

chance, but put into words what is unrecognised, what exists in the dim

consciousness of the masses, what is already slumbering in them.

Everything that has existed from time immemorial in the soul of the

Anglo-Saxon peoples is drawn together as in a ring by one personality;

and every fibre, every hint, every attempt, fermenting from generation

to generation, unconscious of itself, has taken form and language.

Probably no one supposes that the England of the Elizabethan times—the

majority of the people anyway—had a clear understanding of Shakespeare;

they have no distinct understanding of him even now—but then they have

no distinct understanding of themselves either. But I do not doubt

that when an Englishman goes to the theatre he understands Shakespeare

instinctively, through sympathy. At the moment when he is listening

to the play, something becomes clearer and more familiar to him. One

would have thought that a people so capable of rapid comprehension as

the French might have understood Shakespeare too. The character of

Hamlet, for instance, is so universally human, especially in the stage

of doubts and hesitation, in the consciousness of some black deeds being

perpetrated about him, some betrayal of what is great for the sake of

something that is mean and trivial, that it is hard to imagine that any

people could fail to understand him, but in spite of every trial and

effort, Hamlet remains alien to the Frenchman.

If the aristocrats of the past century, who systematically despised

everything Russian, remained in reality incredibly more Russian than

the house-serfs remained peasants, it is even more impossible that the

younger generation could have lost their Russian character because they

studied science and philosophy and French and German books. A section

of the Slavs at Moscow reached the point of ultra-Slavism with Hegel in

their hands.

The very circles of which I am speaking came into existence in natural

response to a deep inner need of the Russian life of that period.

We have spoken many times of the stagnation that followed the catastrophe

of 1825. The moral level of society sank, development was interrupted,

everything progressive and energetic was struck out of life. Those who

remained—frightened, weak, distracted—were petty and insignificant;

the worthless creatures of the generation of Alexander occupied the

foremost place; little by little they changed into cringing officials,

lost the savage poetry of revelry and of the audacity of the privileged

class together with every shadow of independent dignity; they served

persistently, they served until they reached high positions, but they

never became great personages. Their day was over.

Under this great world of society, the great world of the people

maintained an indifferent silence; nothing was changed for them—their

plight was bad, but no worse than before, the new blows fell not on their

scourged backs. Their time had not yet come. Between this roof and this

foundation children were the first to raise their heads, perhaps because

they did not suspect how dangerous it was; but, be that as it may, with

these children Russia, stunned and stupefied, began to come to life again.

What impressed them was the complete contradiction of the words they were

taught with the facts of life around them. Their teachers, their books,

their university spoke one language and that language was intelligible

to heart and mind. Their father and mother, their relations, and all

their surroundings spoke another with which neither mind nor heart was

in agreement—but with which the dominant authorities and financial

interests were in accord. This contradiction between education and

ordinary life nowhere reached such proportions as among the nobility of

Russia. The shaggy German student with his round cap covering a seventh

part of his head, with his world-shaking sallies, is far nearer to the

German _Spitzburger_ than is supposed, while the French _collégien_, thin

with vanity and emulation, is already _en herbe l’homme raisonnable qui

exploite sa position_.

The number of educated people amongst us has always been extremely

small; but those who were educated have always received an education, not

perhaps very thorough, but fairly general and humane: it made men of all

with whom it succeeded. But a man was just what was not wanted either

for the hierarchical pyramid or for the successful maintenance of the

landowning régime. The young man had either to dehumanise himself—and

the greater number did so—or to stop short and ask himself: ‘But is it

absolutely essential to go into the service? Is it really a good thing

to be a landowner?’ After that for some, the weaker and more impatient,

there followed the idle existence of a cornet on the retired list, the

sloth of the country, the dressing-gown, eccentricities, cards, wine; for

others a time of trial and inner travail. They could not live in complete

moral disharmony, nor could they be satisfied with a negative attitude of

withdrawal; awakened thought demanded an outlet. The various solutions

of these questions, all equally harassing for the young generation,

determined their distribution into various circles.

Thus, for instance, our little circle was formed in the university and

found Sungurov’s circle there already. His, like ours, was concerned

rather with politics than with learning. Stankevitch’s circle, which came

into existence at the same time, was equally near both and equally remote

from both. He went by another path, his interests were purely theoretical.

Between 1830 and 1840 our convictions were too youthful, too ardent

and passionate, not to be exclusive. We could feel a cold respect for

Stankevitch’s circle, but we could not be intimate with its members. They

traced philosophical systems, were absorbed in self-analysis, and found

peace in a luxurious pantheism from which Christianity was not excluded.

We were dreaming how to get up a new league in Russia on the pattern of

the Decembrists and looked upon knowledge itself as merely a means. The

government did its best to strengthen us in our revolutionary tendencies.

In 1834 all Sungurov’s circle was sent into exile and—vanished.

In 1835 we were exiled. Five years later we came back, hardened by our

experience. The dreams of youth had become the irrevocable determination

of maturity. This was the most brilliant period of Stankevitch’s circle.

Stankevitch himself I did not find in Moscow—he was in Germany; but it

was just at that moment that Byelinsky’s articles were beginning to

attract the attention of every one.

On our return we measured our strength with them. The battle was an

unequal one; basis, weapons, and language—all were different. After

fruitless skirmishes we saw that it was our turn now to undertake serious

study and we too set to work upon Hegel and the German philosophy. When

we had sufficiently assimilated that, it became evident that there was no

ground for dispute between us and Stankevitch’s circle.

The latter was inevitably bound to break up. It had done its work—and had

done it most brilliantly; its influence on the whole of literature and

academic teaching was immense—one need but recall the names of Byelinsky

and Granovsky; Koltsov was formed in it, Botkin, Katkov, and others

belonged to it. But it could not remain an exclusive circle without

passing into German formalism—men who are alive and Russian are not

capable of that.

Besides Stankevitch’s circle, there was another circle, formed during

our exile and in the same relation with them as we; its members were

afterwards called Slavophils. The Slavophils approached from the opposite

side the vital questions which occupied us, and were far more absorbed in

living work and real conflict than Stankevitch’s circle.

It was natural that Stankevitch’s society should split up between them

and us. The Aksakovs and Samarin joined the Slavophils, that is, Homyakov

and the Kireyevskys. Byelinsky and Bakunin joined us. The closest

friend of Stankevitch, the most nearly akin to him in his whole nature,

Granovsky, was one of us from the day he came back from Germany.

If Stankevitch had lived, his circle would still have broken up. He would

himself have gone over to Homyakov or to us.

By 1842 the sifting in accordance with natural affinity had long been

complete, and our camp stood in battle array face to face with the

Slavophils. Of that conflict we will speak in another place.

In conclusion I will add a few words concerning the elements of which

Stankevitch’s circle was composed; that will throw a light on the strange

underground currents which were silently undermining the strong crust of

the Russo-German régime.

Stankevitch was the son of a wealthy landowner of the province of

Voronezh, and was at first brought up in all the ease and freedom of a

landowner’s life in the country; then he was sent to the Ostrogozhsk

school (and that was something quite original). For fine natures a

wealthy and even aristocratic education is very good. Comfort gives

unfettered freedom and space for growth and development of every sort,

it saves the young mind from premature anxiety and apprehension of the

future, and provides complete freedom to pursue the subjects to which it

is drawn.

Stankevitch’s development was broad and harmonious; his artistic,

musical, and at the same time reflective and contemplative nature showed

itself from the very beginning of his university career. Stankevitch’s

special faculty, not only for deeply and warmly understanding, but also

for reconciling, or as the Germans say ‘removing’ contradictions, was

due to his artistic temperament. The craving for harmony, proportion, and

enjoyment makes such people indulgent as to the means; to avoid seeing

the well they cover it over with canvas. The canvas will not stand a

push, but the yawning gulf does not vex the eye. In this way the Germans

reached pantheistic quietism and slumbered tranquilly upon it; but such a

gifted Russian as Stankevitch could not remain ‘tranquil’ for long.

This is evident from the first question which involuntarily troubled

Stankevitch immediately after he left the university.

His university studies were finished, he was left to himself, he was no

longer led by others, _but he did not know what he was to do_. There was

nothing to go on with, there was no one and nothing around that appealed

to a living man. A youth, taking stock of his surroundings and having had

time to look about him after school, found himself in the Russia of those

days in the position of a traveller awakening in the steppe; one might

go where one would—there were traces, there were bones of those who had

perished, there were wild beasts and the empty desert on all sides with

its dull menace of danger, in which it is easy to perish and impossible

to struggle. The one thing which could be pursued was study.

And so Stankevitch persevered in the pursuit of learning. He imagined

that it was his vocation to be an historian, and began studying

Herodotus; it could be foreseen that nothing could come of that pursuit.

He would have liked to be in Petersburg in which there was such a rush of

activity of a sort and to which he was attracted by the theatre and by

nearness to Europe; he would have liked to be an honorary superintendent

of the school at Ostrogozhsk. He determined to be of use in that ‘modest

career’—that was even less successful than Herodotus. He was in reality

drawn to Moscow, to Germany, to his own university circle, to his own

interests. He could not exist without intimate friends (another proof

that there were at hand no interests very near to his heart). The craving

for sympathy was so strong in Stankevitch that he sometimes invented

intellectual sympathy and talents and saw and admired in people qualities

which were completely non-existent in them.[31]

But—and in this lay his personal power—he did not often need to have

recourse to such fictions, at every step he met wonderful people, he

had the faculty of meeting them, and every one to whom he opened his

heart remained his passionate friend for life; and to every such friend

Stankevitch’s influence was either an immense benefit or an alleviation

of his burden.

In Voronezh Stankevitch used sometimes to go to the one local library

for books. There he met a poor young man of humble station, modest and

melancholy. It turned out that he was the son of a cattle-dealer who had

business with Stankevitch’s father over sales. Stankevitch befriended

the young man; the cattle-dealer’s son was a great reader and fond of

talking of books. Stankevitch got to know him well. Shyly and timidly

the youth confessed that he had himself tried his hand at writing verses

and, blushing, ventured to show them. Stankevitch was amazed at the

immense talent not conscious nor confident of itself. From that minute

he did not let him go until all Russia was reading Koltsov’s songs with

enthusiasm. It is quite likely that the poor cattle-dealer, oppressed by

his relations, unwarmed by sympathy or recognition, might have wasted his

songs on the empty steppe beyond the Volga over which he drove his herds,

and Russia would never have heard those exquisite, truly national songs,

if Stankevitch had not crossed his path.

When Bakunin finished his studies at the school of artillery, he received

a commission as an officer in the Guards. It is said that his father was

angry with him and himself asked that he should be transferred into the

regular army. Cast away in some God-forsaken village of White Russia

with his battery, he grew morose and unsociable, left off performing

his duties, and would lie for whole days together on his bed wrapped in

a sheepskin. The commander of his battery was sorry for him; he had,

however, no alternative but to remind him that he must either do his

duties or go on the retired list. Bakunin had no suspicion that he had

a right to take the latter course and at once asked to be relieved of

his commission. On receiving his discharge he came to Moscow, and from

that date (about 1836) life began in earnest for him. He had studied

nothing before, had read nothing, and scarcely knew German. With great

dialectical abilities, with a gift for obstinate, persistent thinking,

he had strayed without map or compass in a world of fantastic projects

and efforts at self-education. Stankevitch perceived his talents and set

him down to philosophy. Bakunin learnt German on Kant and Fichte and then

set to work upon Hegel, whose method and logic he mastered to perfection,

and to whom did he not preach it afterwards? To us and to Byelinsky, to

ladies and to Proudhon.

But Byelinsky drew as much from the same source; Stankevitch’s views on

art, on poetry and its relation to life, grew in Byelinsky’s articles

into that powerful modern criticism, into that new outlook upon the

world and upon life which impressed all thinking Russia and made all

the pedants and doctrinaires draw back from Byelinsky with horror. It

was Stankevitch’s lot to initiate Byelinsky into the mysteries; but the

passionate, merciless, fiercely intolerant talent that carried Byelinsky

beyond all bounds wounded the aesthetically harmonious temperament of

Stankevitch.

And at the same time it was Stankevitch who encouraged the gentle,

loving, dreamy, and at that time melancholy Granovsky. Stankevitch was a

support and an elder brother to him. His letters to Granovsky are full of

charm and beauty—and how Granovsky loved him!

‘I have not yet recovered from the first shock,’ wrote Granovsky soon

after Stankevitch’s death, ‘real grief has not touched me yet; I am

afraid of it in the future. Now I am still unable to believe that my loss

is possible—only at times there is a stab at my heart. He has taken with

him something essential to my life. To no one in the world was I so much

indebted. His influence over us was always unbounded and always fruitful

of good.’

And how many could say that! Perhaps have said it!

In Stankevitch’s circle only he and Botkin[32] were well-to-do and

completely free from financial anxieties. The others made up a very

mixed proletariat. Bakunin’s relations gave him nothing; Byelinsky, the

son of a petty official of Tchembary, expelled from Moscow University

for ‘lack of ability,’ lived on the scanty pay he got for his articles.

Krassov,[33] on taking his degree, went to a situation at a landowner’s

in some province, but life with this patriarchal slaveowner so terrified

him that he came back on foot to Moscow with a wallet on his back, in

the winter, together with some peasants in charge of a train of wagons.

Probably a father or mother of each one of them when giving them their

blessing had said—and who dare reproach them for it—‘Come, mind you work

hard at your studies; and when you have taken your degree you must make

your own way, there is nobody to leave you anything, we’ve nothing to

give you either; you must make a career for yourself and think about us

too.’ On the other hand, Stankevitch had probably been told that he could

take a prominent position in society, that he was called by wealth and

birth to play a great part—while in Botkin’s household every one, from

his old father down to the clerks, urged upon him by word and example the

necessity of making money, of piling up more and more.

What was it touched these men? what inspiration re-created them? They

had no thought, no care for their social position, for their personal

advantage, for their security; their whole life, all their efforts were

bent on the public good regardless of all personal interests; some forgot

their wealth, others their poverty, and went forward, without looking

back, to the solution of theoretical questions. The interests of truth,

the interests of learning, the interests of art, _humanitas_, swallowed

up everything.

And note that the renunciation of this world was not confined to the

time at the university and two or three years of youth. The best men of

Stankevitch’s circle are dead; the others have remained what they were to

this day. Byelinsky, worn out by work and suffering, fell a fighter and a

beggar. Granovsky, delivering his message of learning and humanity, died

as he mounted his platform. Botkin did not, in fact, become a merchant

... not one of them ‘distinguished themselves’ in the government service.

It was just the same in the two other circles, the Slavophils and ours.

Where, in what corner of the Western world of to-day, do you find such

groups of devotees of thought, of zealots of learning, of fanatics of

conviction—whose hair turns grey but whose enthusiasms are for ever young?

Where? Point to them. I boldly throw down the challenge—and I only except

for the moment one country, Italy—and measure the paces for the conflict,

_i.e._, I will not let my opponent escape from statistics into history.

We know how great was the interest in theory and the passion for truth

and religion in the days of such martyrs for science and reason as

Bruno, Galileo, and the rest; we know, too, what the France of the

Encyclopaedists was in the second half of the eighteenth century; but

later? Later _sta viator_!

In the Europe of to-day there is no youth and there are no young men.

The most brilliant representative of the France of the last years of

the Restoration and of the July dynasty, Victor Hugo, has protested

against my saying this. He speaks especially of the young France of the

’twenties, and I am ready to admit that I have been too sweeping[34]—but

beyond that I will not yield one step even to him. I have their own

admissions. Take _Les Mémoires d’un Enfant du Siècle_, and the poems of

Alfred de Musset, recall the France depicted in George Sand’s letters, in

the contemporary drama and novels, and in the cases in the law courts.

But what does all that prove? A very great deal; and in the first place

that the Chinese shoes of German manufacture in which Russia has hobbled

for a hundred and fifty years, though they have caused many painful

corns, have evidently not crippled her bones, since whenever she has

had a chance of stretching her limbs, such fresh young energies have

been apparent. That does not guarantee the future, but it does make it

extremely _possible_.