OUR ‘OPPONENTS’
THE SLAVOPHILS AND PANSLAVISM—HOMYAKOV—THE KIREYEVSKYS—K. S. AKSAKOV—P.
Y. TCHAADAYEV
‘_Yes, we were their opponents, but very strange ones. We had
the same love, but not the same way of loving—and like Janus or
the two-headed eagle we looked in opposite directions, though
the heart that beat within us was but one._’—‘_The Bell_,’ p.
90. (_On the death of K. S. Aksakov._)
I
Beside our circle were our opponents, _nos amis les ennemis_, or more
correctly, _les ennemis nos amis_—the Moscow Slavophils.
The conflict between us ended long ago and we have held out our
hands to each other; but in the early ’forties we could not but be
antagonistic—without being so we could not have been true to our
principles. We might not have quarrelled with them over their childish
homage to the childhood of our history; but accepting their orthodoxy
as meant in earnest, seeing their ecclesiastical intolerance on both
sides—in relation to learning and in relation to sectarianism—we were
bound to take up a hostile attitude to them. We saw in their doctrines
fresh oil for anointing the Tsar, new chains laid upon thought, new
subordination of conscience to the slavish Byzantine Church.
The Slavophils are to blame for our having so long failed to understand
the Russian people and its history; their ikon-painter’s ideals and
incense smoke hindered us from seeing the realities of the people’s
existence and the foundations of village life.
The orthodoxy of the Slavophils, their historical patriotism and
over-sensitive, exaggerated feeling of nationality were called forth by
the extremes on the other side. The importance of their outlook, what
was true and essential in it, lay not in orthodoxy, and not in exclusive
nationalism, but in those elements of Russian life which they unearthed
from under the manure of civilisation.
The ides of nationality is in itself a conservative idea—the demarcation
of one’s rights, the opposition of self to another; it includes both the
Judaic conception of superiority of race, and the aristocratic claim to
purity of blood, and right to ascendancy. Nationalism as a standard, as
a war-cry, is only surrounded with the halo of revolution when a people
is fighting for its independence, when it is throwing off a foreign yoke.
That is why national feeling with all its exaggerations is full of poetry
in Italy and in Poland, while it is vulgar in Germany.
For us to display our nationalism would be even more absurd than it is
for the Germans; even those who abuse us do not doubt it; they hate us
from fear, but they do not refuse to recognise us, as Metternich did
Italy. We have had to set up our nationalism against the Germanised
government and its renegades. This domestic struggle could not be raised
to the epic level. The appearance of Slavophilism as a school, and as a
special doctrine, was quite in place; but if the Slavophils had found no
other standard than the banner of the church, no other ideal than the
_Domostroy_,[68] and the very Russian but cumbrously tedious life before
Peter the Great, they would have passed away as an eccentric party of
changelings and cranks belonging to another age. The strength and future
of the Slavophils lay elsewhere. Their treasure may have been hidden in
church vessels of old-fashioned workmanship, but its value lay not in
its form, though at first they did not separate what was precious from
what was external.
To their own historical traditions were added the traditions of all the
Slav peoples. Our Slavophils took sympathy with the western Panslavists
for identity of cause and policy, forgetting that their exclusive
nationalism was at the same time the cry of a people oppressed by a
foreign yoke. Western Panslavism on its first appearance was taken by
the Austrian government itself for a conservative movement. It developed
at the melancholy epoch of the Congress of Vienna. It was a period of
restorations and resurrections of all sorts, a period when every kind
of Lazarus, fresh and decayed, rose up from the dead. Together with
Teutschthum,[69] which looked for the renaissance of the _happy days_ of
Barbarossa and the Hohenstaufens, Czech Panslavism made its appearance.
The governments were pleased with this movement and at first encouraged
the development of international hatreds; the masses rallied again round
the idea of racial kinship, the bond of which was drawn tighter, and
were again turned aside from general demands for the improvement of
their lot. Frontiers became more impassable, ties and sympathies between
peoples were broken. It need hardly be said that only among apathetic and
feeble peoples was nationalism allowed to develop, and only so long as it
confined itself to archaeological and linguistic disputes. In Milan and
in Poland where nationalism was not confined to grammar, a tight rein was
kept upon it.
The Czech Panslavism provoked Slavonic sympathies in Russia.
Slavism, or Russianism, not as a theory, not as a doctrine, but as a
wounded national feeling, as an obscure tradition and a true instinct, as
antagonism to an exclusively foreign influence, has existed ever since
Peter the Great cut off the first Russian beard.
There has never been any interval in the resistance to the Petersburg
forcible imposition of culture; it reappears in the form of the mutinous
Stryeltsi, punished, quartered, hanged on the walls of the Kremlin and
there shot by Menshikov and other favourites of the Tsar, in the form of
the Tsarevitch Alexis poisoned in the dungeon of the Petersburg fortress,
as the party of the Dolgorukys in the reign of Peter II., as the hatred
for the Germans in the time of Biron, as Pugatchov in the time of
Catherine II., as Catherine herself, the Orthodox German in the reign of
the Russian Holsteiner Peter III., as Elizabeth who ascended the throne
through the support of the Slavophils of those days (the people in Moscow
expected all the Germans to be massacred at her coronation.)
All the dissenters are Slavophils.
All the clergy, both white and black, are Slavophils of another sort.
The soldiers who demanded the removal of Barclay de Tolly[70] on account
of his German name were the precursors of Homyakov and his friends. The
war of 1812 greatly developed the national consciousness and love for
the Fatherland. But there was nothing of the Old Believers’ Slavonic
character in the patriotism of 1812 which we see in Karamzin and Pushkin,
and in the Emperor Alexander himself. Practically it was the expression
of that instinct of strength which all powerful nations feel when they
are attacked by others; afterwards it was the triumphant feeling of
victory, the proud sense of successful resistance. But it was weak
on the theoretical side; to show their love of Russian history the
patriots adapted it to European manners; they translated Greek and Roman
patriotism from French into Russian and did not go beyond the line ‘_Pour
un cœur bien né que la patrie est chère!_’ Shishkov[71] was raving even
then, it is true, about the restoration of archaic forms of language, but
his influence was limited. As for the real speech of the people, the only
person who showed a knowledge of it was the Frenchified Count Rostoptchin
in his proclamations and manifestoes.
As the war was forgotten, this patriotism subsided and finally
degenerated on the one hand into the mean cynical flattery of the
_Northern Bee_, on the other into the vulgar patriotism of Zagoskin’s
calling Shuya Manchester, and Shebuev[72] Raphael, and boasting of the
bayonets and the spears from the ices of Torneo to the mountains of the
Crimea.
In the reign of Nicholas patriotism became something associated with
the knout, with the police, especially in Petersburg, where the savage
government ended, in harmony with the cosmopolitan character of the town,
by the invention of a national hymn after Sebastian Bach[73] and in
Prokopy Lyapunov[74]—after Schiller![75]
To cut himself off from Europe, from enlightenment, from the revolution
of which he had been terrified since the Fourteenth of December, Nicholas
on his side raised the banner of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationalism,
remodelled after the fashion of the Prussian standard and supported by
anything that came to hand—the barbaric romances of Zagoskin, barbaric
ikon-painting, barbaric architecture, by Uvarov, by the persecution
of the Uniats[76] and by ‘The Hand of the Most High saved the
Fatherland.’[77]
The existence of the Petersburg Slavophilism of Nicholas was very
unfortunate for the Moscow Slavophils. Nicholas was simply flying to
nationalism and orthodoxy to escape from revolutionary ideas. The
Slavophils had nothing in common with him but words. Their extremes and
absurdities were disinterestedly absurd, and had no connection with the
secret police, or the Committee of Security, which of course did not
prevent their absurdities from being excessively absurd.
Thus, for instance, there was staying in Moscow towards the end of the
’thirties the Panslavist Gaj who afterwards played an ambiguous part as
a Croatian agitator and was at the same time closely connected with the
Ban of Croatia, Jellachich.[78] Moscow people as a rule put implicit
trust in a foreigner; Gaj was more than a foreigner, more than one of
themselves; he was both at once. He had no difficulty in touching the
hearts of our Slavophils with the fate of their suffering and orthodox
brothers in Dalmatia and Croatia; an immense subscription was raised in a
few days, and moreover Gaj was given a banquet in honour of all Serbian
and Ruthenian sympathies. At the banquet one of the mildest (both in
voice and pursuits) of the Slavophils, a man of the _reddest_ orthodoxy,
probably a little elevated by the toasts to the Montenegrin Bishop and
to all sorts of great Bosnians, Czechs and Slovaks, improvised a poem in
which the following not quite Christian expression occurred:
‘I will feast on the blood of the Magyar and German.’
All who were not a little deranged heard this phrase with horror.
Fortunately the witty statistician Androssov rescued the bloodthirsty
poet; he jumped up from his chair, clutched a dessert knife, and said:
‘Excuse me, gentlemen, I’ll leave you for a moment: it occurs to me that
my landlord Dietz, an old piano-tuner, is a German. I’ll just run and cut
his throat and be back directly.’
A roar of laughter drowned the indignation.
It was while I was in exile and living in Petersburg and Novgorod that
the Moscow Slavophils formed themselves into this party so bloodthirsty
in its toasts.
Their passionate and polemical character was particularly marked after
the appearance of Byelinsky’s critical articles; though even before that
they had to close their ranks and take a definite stand on the appearance
of Tchaadayev’s letter and the commotion it caused.
That letter was in a sense the last word, the dividing point. It was a
shot that rang out in the dark night; whether it was something perishing
that proclaimed its end, whether it was a signal or a cry for help,
whether it heralded the dawn or foretold that it would never be—anyway,
it forced all to awake.
What, one may wonder, is the significance of two or three pages published
in a monthly review? And yet such is the strength of utterance, such is
the power of the spoken word in a land of silence, unaccustomed to free
speech, that Tchaadayev’s letter shook all thinking Russia. And well it
might. There had been nothing written since _Woe from Wit_ which made so
powerful an impression. Between that play and the letter there had been
ten years of silence, the Fourteenth of December, the gallows, penal
servitude, Nicholas. It was the first break in the national development
since the period of Peter the Great. The empty place left by the strong
men who had been exiled to Siberia was not filled up. Thought languished,
men’s minds were working, but nothing was reached. To speak was
dangerous, and indeed there was nothing to say; all at once a mournful
figure quietly rose and asked for a hearing in order calmly to utter his
_lasciate ogni speranza_.
In the summer of 1836 I was calmly sitting at my writing table in Vyatka
when the postman brought me the latest number of the _Telescope_. One
must have lived in exile and in the wilds to appreciate a new book. I
abandoned everything, of course, and set to work to cut the _Telescope_.
I saw ‘Philosophical Letters Written to a Lady,’ unsigned. In a footnote
it was stated that these letters had been written by a Russian in French,
that is, that it was a translation. This rather put me against them, and
I proceeded to read the criticisms and other matter.
At last the turn came for the letters; from the second or third page
I was struck by the mournfully earnest tone. Every word breathed of
prolonged suffering, by now grown calm, but still bitter. It was written
as only men write who have been thinking for years, who have thought
much and learned much from life and not from theory.... I read further,
the letter grew and developed, it turned into a gloomy denunciation of
Russia, the protest of one who for all he has endured longs to utter some
part of what is accumulated in his heart.
Twice I stopped to take breath and collect my thoughts and feelings, and
then again I read on and on. And this was published in Russian by an
unknown author.... I was afraid I had gone out of my mind. Then I read
the letter to Vitberg, then to S——, a young teacher in the Vyatka High
School, then read it again to myself.
It is very likely that exactly the same thing was happening in all sorts
of provincial and distant towns, in Moscow and Petersburg and in country
gentlemen’s houses. I learned the author’s name a few months later.
Long cut off from the people, part of Russia had been suffering in
silence under the most stupid and prosaic yoke, which gave them nothing
in return. Every one felt the oppression of it, every one had something
weighing on his heart, and yet all were silent; at last a man had come
who in his own way told them what it was. He spoke only of pain, there
was no ray of light in his words, nor indeed in his view. Tchaadayev’s
letter was a merciless cry of reproach and bitterness against Russia; it
deserved the indictment; had it shown pity or mercy to the author or any
one else? Of course such an utterance was bound to call forth opposition,
or Tchaadayev would have been perfectly right in saying that Russia’s
past was empty, its present insufferable, and that there was no future
for it at all, that it was a blank sheet, a terrible lesson given to the
nations of the plight to which a people can be brought by isolation and
slavery. This was both penitence and accusation; to know beforehand the
path of reconciliation is not the task of penitence, nor the task of
protest—or consciousness of guilt becomes a jest, and expiation insincere.
But it did not pass unnoticed; for a minute all, even the drowsy and the
crushed, were roused, alarmed by this menacing voice. All were astounded,
most were offended, a dozen men loudly and warmly applauded its author.
Talk in the drawing-rooms anticipated government measures, provoked them.
The Russian patriot of German origin Vigel (well known from Pushkin’s
unflattering epigram) set them going.
The review was at once prohibited; Boldyrev, the censor, an old man,
and the Rector of the Moscow University, was dismissed; Nadyezhdin the
editor was sent to Ust-Sysolsk; Nicholas ordered Tchaadayev himself to
be declared insane, and made to sign an undertaking to write nothing.
Every Saturday he was visited by the doctor and the police-master; they
interviewed him and made a report, that is, gave out over his signature
fifty-two false statements in accordance with the command of the Most
High—an intelligent and moral proceeding. It was they of course who were
punished. Tchaadayev looked with profound contempt on these tricks of the
truly insane caprice of power. Neither the doctor nor the police-master
ever hinted what they had come for.
I had seen Tchaadayev once before my exile. It was on the very day of
Ogaryov’s arrest. I have mentioned already that on that day there was a
dinner party at M. F. Orlov’s. All the visitors were gathered together
when a man, bowing coldly, walked into the room. His original appearance,
handsome with a striking air of independence, was bound to attract every
one’s attention. Orlov took me by the hand and introduced me, it was
Tchaadayev. I remember little of that first meeting, I had no thoughts
to spare for him; he was as always, cold, grave, clever, and malicious.
After dinner Madame Rayevsky, Orlov’s mother-in-law, said to me: ‘How is
it you are so melancholy? Oh you young people! I don’t know what has come
over you!’ ‘Then you do think,’ said Tchaadayev, ‘that there still are
young people?’—that is all that has remained in my memory.
On my return to Moscow I made friends with him and from that time until I
went away we were on the best of terms.
Tchaadayev’s melancholy and original figure stood out sharply like a
mournful reproach against the faded and dreary background of Moscow ‘high
life.’ I liked looking at him among the tawdry aristocracy, flighty
Senators, grey-headed rascals, and venerable nonentities. However dense
the crowd, the eye found him at once. The years did not mar his graceful
figure; he was very scrupulous in his dress, his pale delicate face was
completely motionless when he was silent, as though made of wax or of
marble,—‘a head like a bare skull,’—his grey-blue eyes were melancholy
and at the same time there was something kindly in them, though his thin
lips smiled ironically. For ten years he stood with folded arms, by some
column, by some tree on the boulevard, in drawing-rooms and theatres, at
the club and, an embodied veto, a living protest, gazed at the vortex of
faces senselessly twisting and turning about him. He became whimsical
and eccentric, held himself aloof from society, yet could not leave it
altogether, then uttered his message, quietly concealing it, just as
in his features he concealed passion under a layer of ice. Then he was
silent again, again showed himself whimsical, dissatisfied, irritated;
again he was an oppressive influence in Moscow society, and again he
could not leave it. Old and young alike were awkward and ill at ease with
him; they, God knows why, were abashed by his immobile face, his direct
glance, his gloomy mockery, his malignant condescension. What compelled
them to invite him ... still more to visit him? It is a very difficult
question.
Tchaadayev was not wealthy, particularly in later years; he was not of
high rank—a retired captain with the iron Kulm cross on his breast. It is
true, as Pushkin writes, that he would
‘In Rome have been a Brutus,
In Athens Pericles,
But here, under the yolk of Tsars,
Was only Captain of Hussars.’
Acquaintance with him could only compromise a man in the eyes of the
police. To what did he owe his influence? Why did the ‘swells’ of the
English Club, and the patricians of the Tversky Boulevard flock on
Mondays to his modest little study in Old Basmanny Street? Why did
fashionable ladies peep into the cell of the morose thinker? Why did
generals who knew nothing about civilian affairs feel obliged to call
upon the old man, to pretend awkwardly to be people of culture, and
brag afterwards, distorting some phrase of Tchaadayev’s, uttered at
their expense? Why did I meet at Tchaadayev’s the savage Tolstoy, ‘the
American,’ and the savage Adjutant-General Shipov who destroyed culture
in Poland?
Tchaadayev not only made no compromise with them, but worried them and
made them feel very clearly the difference between him and them.[79] Of
course these people went to see him and invited him to their gatherings
from vanity, but that is not what matters; what is important is the
involuntary recognition that thought had become a power, that it had
its honoured place in direct opposition to the authority of the Most
High. In so far as the authority of the ‘insane captain’ Tchaadayev was
recognised, the ‘insane’ power of Nicholas was diminished.
Tchaadayev had his eccentricities, his weaknesses, he was embittered and
spoilt. I know no society less indulgent, or more exclusive than that of
Moscow; it is just that which gives it a provincial flavour and reminds
one that its culture is of recent growth. How could a solitary man of
fifty who had been deprived of almost all his friends, who had lost
his property, who lived a great deal in thought, and had suffered many
mortifications, fail to have his whims and habits?
Tchaadayev had been Vassiltchikov’s adjutant at the time of the
celebrated Semyonovsky affair. The Tsar was at the time, if I remember
right, at Verona or Aachen for a Congress. Vassiltchikov sent Tchaadayev
to him with a report and he was somehow or other an hour behind time, and
arrived later than a courier sent by the Austrian ambassador Lebzeltern.
The Tsar, annoyed at the news, and at that time completely influenced
towards reaction by Metternich, who was delighted at the news of the
Semyonovsky affair, received Tchaadayev very harshly, reprimanded him,
lost his temper, and then recovering himself, directed that he should be
offered the post of an Imperial adjutant; Tchaadayev declined the honour
and asked only one favour—his discharge. Of course this was not liked,
but he received his discharge.
Tchaadayev was in no haste to return to Russia; on relinquishing his gold
lace uniform he devoted himself to study. Alexander died—the Fourteenth
of December came—Tchaadayev’s absence saved him from almost certain
persecution[80]—about 1830 he returned.
In Germany Tchaadayev made friends with Schelling; the acquaintance
probably did a great deal to turn him towards mysticism. In his case it
developed into revolutionary Catholicism to which he remained faithful
all his life. In his letter he attributes half the calamities of Russia
to the Greek Church, to its severance from the all-embracing unity of the
West.
Strange as such a view is to us, we must not forget that Catholicism
has great power of attraction. Lacordaire preached Catholic Socialism
while remaining a Dominican monk; he was supported by Chevé,[81]
while remaining a contributor to the _Voix du Peuple_. In reality
neo-Catholicism is not worse than rhetorical deism, that rationalised
theology of the cultured bourgeois which is neither religion nor science,
but atheism surrounded by the institutions of religion.
If Ronge[82] and the followers of Buchez were still possible after
1848, after Feuerbach and Proudhon and Pius IX. and Lamennais; if one
of the most energetic parties in the movement set a mystic formula on
its banner; if to this day there are men like Mickiewicz,[83] like
Krasinski,[84] who continue Messianists, there is no cause for wonder
in Tchaadayev’s bringing a similar doctrine from the Europe of the
’twenties. We have a little forgotten what it was like: one has but to
recall the affair of Volabella, the Letters of Lady Morgan,[85] the
memoirs of Andryane,[86] of Byron, and of Leopardi, to realise that it
was one of the most oppressive periods in history. The revolution had
turned out a failure, crude monarchy boasted cynically of its power,
while crafty monarchy chastely hid itself behind the parties; at most
and at rare intervals one heard the songs of the Greeks fighting for
their liberty or a vigorous speech from Canning or Royer-Collard.[87]
In Protestant Germany a Catholic party was being formed at that time.
Schlegel[88] and Leo[89] changed their faith at that time, old Jahn[90]
and others were raving of a popular and democratic Catholicism.
People took refuge from the present in the Middle Ages, in mysticism,
read Eckartshausen, studied magnetism and the miracles of Prince
Hohenlohe[91]; Hugo, the enemy of Catholicism, did as much to assist its
revival as did Lamennais at that period, when he was horrified at the
soulless indifference of his time.
On the Russian such Catholicism was bound to have an even stronger
effect. It formally contained all that was lacking in Russian life, left
to itself, oppressed only by the material power, and seeking a way out
by instinct alone. The stern discipline and proud independence of the
Western Church, its finished definiteness, its practical applications,
its unassailable confidence and supposed removal of all contradictions
by its higher unity, its eternal _fata Morgana_, its _urbi et orbi_, its
contempt for the temporal power, might easily dominate an ardent mind
which only began its education after reaching maturity.
When Tchaadayev returned to Russia he found there a different society
and a different tone. Young as I was, I remember how conspicuously
aristocratic society deteriorated and became baser and more servile
with the accession of Nicholas. The brilliance and recklessness of the
officers of the Guards, the aristocratic independence of the reign of
Alexander, had all vanished from 1826 onwards. There were germs of a new
life springing up, young creatures, not yet conscious of themselves,
still wearing a lay-down collar _à l’enfant_, at boarding schools, or in
Lyceums. There were young literary men beginning to try their strength
and their pen, but all that was still hidden, and not in the world in
which Tchaadayev lived.
His friends were in penal servitude; at first he was the only one left in
Moscow, then he was joined by Pushkin, and later on by Orlov too. Often
after the death of both these friends Tchaadayev used to show two small
patches on the wall above the sofa-back where they used to lay their
heads!
It is infinitely sad to set side by side Pushkin’s two epistles to
Tchaadayev, separated not only by their life but by a whole epoch, the
life of a generation, racing hopefully forward and coarsely flung back
again. Pushkin as a youth writes to his friend:
‘Comrade, have faith. That dawn will break
Of deep intoxicating joy;
Russia will spring from out her sleep
And on the fragments of a fallen tyranny
Our names will be recorded,’[92]
but the dawn did not rise; instead Nicholas rose to the throne, and
Pushkin writes:
‘Tchaadayev, dost thou call to mind
How in the past, by youthful ardour prompted,
I dreamt to add that fatal name
Unto the rest of those that lie in ruins?
... But now within my heart by tempests chastened
Silence and lassitude prevail, unchallenged,
And with a glow of tender inspiration
Upon the stone by friendship sanctified
I write our names....’[93]
Nothing in the world could be more opposed to the Slavophils than the
hopeless pessimism which was Tchaadayev’s vengeance on Russian life, the
deliberate curse wrung out of him by suffering, with which he summed up
his melancholy existence through a whole period of Russian history. He
could not but awaken intense opposition in them; with bitterness and
weary malice he insulted all that was precious to them, from Moscow
downwards.
‘In Moscow,’ Tchaadayev used to say, ‘every foreigner is taken to look at
the great cannon and the great bell—the cannon which can never be fired
and the bell which fell down before it was rung. It is a strange town in
which the objects of interest are distinguished by their absurdity; or
perhaps that great bell without a tongue is a hieroglyph symbolic of that
immense dumb land, inhabited by a race calling themselves Slavs[94] as
though surprised at the possession of human speech.’[95]
Tchaadayev and the Slavophils alike stood facing the unsolved Sphinx of
Russian life, the Sphinx sleeping under the overcoat of the soldier and
the watchful eye of the Tsar; they alike were asking: ‘What will come of
it? To live like this is impossible: the oppressiveness and absurdity of
the present position is obvious and unendurable—where is the way out?’
‘There is none,’ answered the man of the Petersburg period of exclusively
Western civilisation, who, in Alexander’s reign, had believed in the
European future of Russia. He mournfully pointed out to what the efforts
of a whole age had led. Culture had only given new methods of oppression,
the church had become a mere shadow under which the police lay hidden;
the people bore all, endured all, the government crushed all, oppressed
all. ‘The history of other nations is the story of their emancipation.
Russian history is the development of serfdom and autocracy.’ Peter
the Great’s upheaval had made us into the worst that men can be made
into—enlightened slaves. We had suffered enough, in this oppressive,
troubled moral state, misunderstood by the people, struck down by the
government—it was time to find rest, time to find peace for the soul,
to find support in something ... this almost meant ‘time to die,’ and
Tchaadayev thought to find in the Catholic Church the peace promised to
all who are weary and heavy-laden.
From the point of view of Western civilisation in the form in which it
found expression at the time of the restoration, from the point of view
of the Russia of the Petersburg period, this attitude was completely
justified.
The Slavophils solved the question in a different way.
Their solution implied a true recognition of the living soul in the
people; their instinct was more penetrating than their reasoning. They
saw that the existing condition of Russia, however oppressive, was
not a moral disease. And while Tchaadayev had a faint glimmer of the
possibility of saving individuals but not the people, the Slavophils
had a clear perception of the ruin of individuals in the grip of the
existing order and faith in the salvation of the people.
‘The way out is with us,’ said the Slavophils, ‘the way out lies in
renouncing the Petersburg period, in going back to the people from whom
we have been cut off by foreign education and foreign government; let us
return to the old ways!’
But history does not turn back; life is rich in materials, it has no
need to remake old clothes. All renaissances, all restorations have been
masqueraders. We have seen two; the Legitimists did not go back to the
days of Louis XIV. nor the Republicans to the 8th of Thermidor. What has
once happened is stronger than anything written; no axe can hew it away.
Moreover, we have nothing to which to go back. The political life of
Russia before Peter the Great was grotesque, poor, savage, yet it was to
this that the Slavophils wanted to return, though they did not admit the
fact; how else are we to explain all their antiquarian revivals, their
worship of the manners and customs of old days, and their attempts to
return, not to the existing (and excellent) dress of the peasants but to
the old-fashioned and clumsy costumes?
In all Russia no one wears the _murmolka_ but the Slavophils. K. S.
Aksakov wore a dress so national that the peasants in the street took him
for a Persian, as Tchaadayev used to tell as a joke.
They took the going back to the people in a very crude sense too, as the
majority of Western democrats did also, accepting the people as something
complete and finished. They imagined that to share the superstitions
of the people meant being at one with them, that it was a great act of
humility to sacrifice one’s reason instead of developing reason in the
people. This led to an affectation of devoutness, the observance of rites
which are touching when there is a naïve faith in them and insulting
where an ulterior motive can be discerned. The best proof of the lack
of reality in the Slavophils’ return to the people lies in the fact that
they did not arouse the slightest sympathy in the people. Neither the
Byzantine Church nor the Granovitaya Palata[96] will do anything more for
the future development of the Slav world. To go back to the village, to
the workmen’s guild, to the meeting of the mir, to the Cossack system is
a different matter; but we must return to them not in order to strengthen
them in immovable Asiatic crystallisations but to develop and set free
the elements on which they were founded, to purify them from all that
is extraneous and distorting, from the rank growths with which they are
overgrown—that, of course, is what we are called to do. But we must make
no mistake, all this lies outside the sphere of the State: the Moscow
period is of as little use here as the Petersburg, indeed it was at no
time better. The Novgorod[97] bell which used to call the citizens to
their ancient mote was merely melted into a cannon by Peter, but had
been taken down from the belfry by Ivan III.; serfdom was only confirmed
by the census under Peter but was introduced by Boris Godunov; in the
_Ulozhenie_[98] there is no mention of sworn witnesses, and the knout,
the rods, and the lash made their appearance long before the day of
_Spitzruten_ and _Fuchteln_.
The mistake of the Slavophils lies in their imagining that Russia once
had an individual culture, obscured by various events and finally by
the Petersburg period. Russia never had this culture, never could have
had it. That which is only now reaching our consciousness, that of which
we are beginning to have a presentiment, a glimmer in our thoughts, that
which existed unconsciously in the peasants’ hut and in the open country,
is only now beginning to grow in the fields of history, enriched by the
blood, the tears, the sweat of twenty generations.
The foundations of our life are not memories, they are the living
elements, existing not in chronicles but in the actual present; but
they have merely survived under the hard historical process of building
up a single state and under the yoke of the state they have only been
preserved not developed. I doubt, indeed, whether the inner strength for
their development would have been found without the Petersburg period,
without the period of European culture.
The primitive foundations of our life are insufficient. In India there
has existed for ages and exists to this day a village commune very like
our own and founded on a division of fields; yet the people of India have
not gone very far, even with it.
Only the mighty thought of the West to which all its long history has
led up is able to fertilise the seeds slumbering in the patriarchal
mode of life of the Slavs. The workmen’s guild and the village commune,
the sharing of profits and the division of fields, the mir meeting
and the union of villages into self-governing _volosts_, are all the
corner-stones on which the temple of our future, freely communal
existence will be built. But these corner-stones are only stones ... and
without the thought of the West our future cathedral will not rise above
its foundations.
This is what happens with everything truly _social_, it inevitably draws
the nations into mutual interdependence.... Holding themselves aloof,
cutting themselves off, some remain at the barbaric stage of the commune,
others get no further than the abstract idea of communism, which, like
the Christian soul, hovers over the decaying body.
The receptive character of the Slavs, their femininity, their lack of
initiative, and their great capacity for assimilation and adaptation,
make them pre-eminently a people that stands in need of the other
peoples; they are not fully self-sufficing. Left to themselves the
Slavs readily ‘lull themselves to sleep with their own songs’ as a
Byzantine chronicler observed. Awakened by others they go to the furthest
consequences; there is no people which could more deeply and completely
absorb the thoughts of other peoples while remaining true to itself. The
persistent misunderstanding which exists to-day, as it has for a thousand
years, between the Germanic and the French peoples does not exist between
them and the Slavs. The craving to give itself up and be carried away is
innate in their sympathetic, readily assimilative, receptive nature.
To be formed into a princedom, Russia needed the Varangians[99]; to be
formed into a kingdom, the Mongols.
Contact with Europe developed the kingdom of Muscovy into the colossal
empire ruled from Petersburg.
‘But for all their receptiveness, have not the Slavs shown everywhere
a complete incapacity for developing a modern European political order
without continually falling into the most absolute despotism, or hopeless
disorganisation?’
This incapacity and this incompleteness are great _talents_ in our eyes.
All Europe has now reached the inevitability of despotism in order to
preserve the existing political order against the pressure of social
ideas striving to create a new order, towards which Western Europe, for
all its terror and resistance, is being carried with incredible force.
There was a time when the half-free West looked proudly at Russia crushed
under the throne of the Tsars, and cultivated Russia, sighing, gazed at
the happiness of its elder brothers. That time has passed. The equality
of slavery prevails.
We are present now at an amazing spectacle; even those lands in which
free institutions have survived are striving for despotism. Humanity
has seen nothing like it since the days of Constantine when free Romans
sought to become slaves to escape civic burdens.
Despotism or socialism—there is no other alternative. Meanwhile, Europe
has shown a surprising incapacity for social revolution.
We believe that Russia is not so incapable of it, and in this we are at
one with the Slavophils. On this our faith in its future is founded, it
is the faith which I have been preaching since the end of 1848.
Europe has chosen despotism, has preferred Imperialism. Despotism
means military discipline, Empires mean war, the Emperor is the
commander-in-chief. Every one is under arms, there will be war, but where
is the real enemy? At home—down below in the depths—and yonder beyond the
Niemen.
The war now beginning[100] may have intervals of truce but will not end
before the beginning of the general revolution which will shuffle all
the cards and begin a new game. It is impossible that the two great
historical powers, the two veteran champions of all West European
history, representatives of two worlds, two traditions, two principles—of
state and of personal freedom—should not crush the third, which, dumb,
nameless, and bannerless, comes forward so opportunely with the rope of
slavery on its neck and rudely knocks at the doors of Europe and the
doors of history, with an insolent claim to Constantinople, with one foot
on Germany and the other on the Pacific Ocean.
Whether these three will try their strength and crush each other in
the trying; whether Russia breaks up into pieces or Europe, enfeebled,
sinks into Byzantine decay; whether they are reconciled and go hand
in hand forward into a new life or slaughter each other endlessly—one
thing we have discovered for certain and it will not be rooted out of
the consciousness of the coming generations; that is: that the _free and
rational development of Russian national existence is at one with the
ideas of Western Socialism_.
II
On my return from Novgorod to Moscow I found both parties at the barrier.
The Slavophils were in full fighting formation, with their light cavalry
under the leadership of Homyakov and extremely heavy infantry under that
of Shevyryov[101] and Pogodin, with their sharpshooters, chasseurs,
ultra-Jacobins who renounced everything later than the Kieff period, and
moderate Girondists who renounced nothing but the Petersburg period;
they had their chairs in the university and their monthly review, which
was always two months late in appearing but still did appear. The main
body was reinforced by orthodox Hegelians, Byzantine theologians, mystic
poets, a great number of women, and so on.
Our warfare greatly interested the literary drawing-rooms of Moscow,
which was at that time just entering the period of enthusiasm over
intellectual subjects when, political questions being impossible,
literary ones become the problems of life. The appearance of a remarkable
book, for instance, _Dead Souls_, was an event. Criticisms favourable
and unfavourable were read and commented upon with the attention with
which parliamentary debates used to be followed in England or France. The
suppression of all other spheres of human activity threw the cultured
section of society into the world of books, and only in it was heard in
muffled undertones the protest against the yoke of Nicholas, the protest
which we heard more loudly and openly the day after his death.
In the person of Granovsky Moscow society welcomed Western thought
breaking its way to freedom, the idea of intellectual independence and
struggle for it. In the persons of the Slavophils it protested against
the outrage done to its feelings of nationalism by the Biron-like
arrogance of the Petersburg government.
Here I must make a digression.
I knew two circles in Moscow, the two opposite poles of its social life,
and can only speak of them. At first I was lost in the society of old
people, officers of the Guards of the time of Catherine, comrades of
my father, and other old gentlemen who had found a quiet haven in that
almshouse, the Senate, comrades of his brother. Afterwards I knew only
the young literary and social Moscow and I speak only of it. I knew
nothing and cared to know nothing of what lived or vegetated between the
veterans of the pen and the sword who were awaiting their funerals in
order of rank, and their sons and grandsons who sought no rank and cared
only for books and ideas. That world that stood between them, the real
Russia of Nicholas, was colourless and vulgar, without the originality of
the times of Catherine, without the dash and daring of the men of 1812,
without our strivings and interests. It was a pitiful, crushed generation
in which a few martyrs struggled, were suffocated, and perished. When I
speak of the Moscow drawing-rooms and dining-rooms, I speak of those
in which Pushkin once reigned supreme; in which up to our own day the
Decembrists set the tone; in which Griboyedov laughed; in which M. F.
Orlov and A. P. Yermolov met a friendly welcome because they were under
the ban; in which Homyakov argued from nine in the evening until four
o’clock in the morning; in which K. S. Aksakov[102] with a _murmolka_
in his hand fiercely defended Moscow though no one had attacked it, and
never took a glass of champagne in his hand without secretly repeating
a prayer and a toast which every one knew; in which Ryedkin logically
deduced a personal God _ad majorem gloriam Hegelii_; in which Granovsky
appeared with his firm and gentle speech; in which every one remembered
Bakunin and Stankevitch; in which Tchaadayev with his delicate wax-like
face, scrupulously dressed, enraged the nonplussed aristocrats and
orthodox Slavophils by biting sarcasms, always cast in original form
and carefully iced; in which A. I. Turgenev,[103] young in spite of
his age, gossiped charmingly about all the celebrities of Europe, from
Chateaubriand and Récamier to Schelling and Rahel Varnhagen; in which
Botkin and Kryukov _pantheistically_ enjoyed M. S. Shtchepkin’s stories;
and into which Byelinsky sometimes fell like Congreve’s rocket, setting
fire to everything he touched.
Life in Moscow is more like life in the country than in the town, the
only difference is that the houses are nearer each other. Everything in
it is not on the same pattern, but specimens of different ages, cultures,
social strata, of the length and breadth of Russia, live after their own
fashion. In it the Larins[104] and the Famussovs calmly live out their
days; and not only they but Vladimir Lensky and our eccentric Tchatsky,
and indeed there are even too many Onyegins. With little to do they all
live without haste, without special anxieties, without pulling up their
sleeves. The easy-going ways of the Russian country gentleman are, we
must own, dear to our hearts; there is a breadth about them which we do
not find in the petty-bourgeois life of the West. The servile dependence
on the rich and powerful, of which Miss Wilmot speaks in the _Memoirs
of Princess Dashkhov_, and which I myself remember, did not exist in
the circles of which I am speaking. The rank and file of this society
was composed of landowners not in the service, or serving not on their
own account but to pacify their relations, of young literary men and
professors. This society had the freedom and fluidity of relations and
habits that had not been reduced to a rigid tradition, a freedom which
is not found in the old European life, and at the same time it retained
the traditions of Western politeness instilled into us by education
and now vanishing in the West; this courtesy, blended with the Slav
_laisser aller_, and at times with riotous merriment, made up the special
Russian character of Moscow society, to its great regret, because it was
desperately anxious to be Parisian and probably still is so.
We still only know of Europe as it was in the past; we are still haunted
by the days when Voltaire reigned supreme over the Parisian salons and
people were invited to hear Diderot arguing, as to partake of a sturgeon;
when the arrival of David Hume in Paris was an epoch and all the
countesses and viscountesses hung about him and flirted with him till
another spoilt darling, Grimm, sulked and thought it quite out of place.
We still think of the soirées of Baron d’Holbach[105] and the first
performance of _Figaro_, when all the aristocracy of Paris stood in a
queue for whole days, and fashionable ladies missed their dinner and ate
dry buns to get a seat and see the revolutionary play, which was to be
performed a month later at Versailles with the Count de Provence, _i.e._,
the future Louis XVIII., in the part of Figaro and Marie Antoinette in
the part of Suzanne!
_Tempi passati_ ... past are not only the salons of the eighteenth
century, those marvellous salons in which under powder and lace
aristocrats dandled and fed on aristocratic milk the young lion from whom
sprang a titanic revolution. There are not even such salons as those, for
instance, of Madame de Staël or Récamier, in which all the celebrities of
aristocracy, literature, and politics gathered. Literature is feared, and
indeed there is none, while the parties have drifted so far apart that
people of different shades of opinion cannot meet with civility under the
same roof.
One of the last attempts at a salon, in the old sense of the word, failed
and flickered out together with its hostess. Delphine Gay[106] exhausted
all her talents and brilliant intelligence in the attempt to preserve a
decorous peace between guests who suspected and hated each other. Can
there be any pleasure in a strained, uneasy state of truce, in which the
host as soon as he is alone throws himself exhausted on the sofa and
thanks heaven that the evening has passed off without unpleasantness?
Indeed, Western Europe (and particularly France) has no thought to
spare for literary gossip, for _bon ton_ and elegant manners. Covering
the terrible gulf with the bee-embroidered Imperial mantle, bourgeois
generals, bourgeois bankers, bourgeois ministers are carousing,
piling up millions, losing millions, while they await the Nemesis of
liquidation.... They need not light _causerie_ but heavy orgies and
colourless wealth, in which, as in the first Empire, art is driven out by
gold, the lady by the _lorette_, the literary man by the stock-exchange
gambler.
This dissolution of society was not confined to Paris. George Sand was
the living centre of all her neighbourhood at Nohant. Acquaintances of
all sorts visited her with no great ceremony whenever they liked, and
spent the evening extremely elegantly. There would be music, reading, and
dramatic improvisations, and above all there was George Sand herself.
From the year 1852 the tone began to change, the good-natured neighbours
no longer came to rest and laugh, but with malice in their eyes, brimming
over with spite, attacked one another openly and secretly; some displayed
their new livery, while others dreaded being denounced to the government;
the lack of restraint which had made jest and gaiety light and charming
had vanished. The continual effort to appease, to soften and to part the
combatants, so harassed and wearied George Sand that she made up her mind
to give up her evenings at Nohant and reduced her circle to two or three
old friends....
They say that Moscow—young Moscow—has grown old, has not survived
Nicholas, that even the university has become petty, and that the
landowning temper has come out in too strong relief in face of the
question of emancipation; that its English club has become less
English than ever, that in it Sobakevitches[107] are clamouring
against emancipation and Nozdryovs noisily maintaining the natural and
inalienable rights of the nobility. Perhaps!... But the Moscow of the
’forties was not like that, and it was that Moscow that took active sides
for and against the _murmolka_; girls and ladies read very boring essays,
listened to very long arguments, and argued themselves in defence of K.
S. Aksakov or Granovsky, only regretting that Aksakov was too Slavophil
and Granovsky not sufficiently patriotic.
The arguments were renewed at every literary and non-literary evening
at which we met, and that was two or three times a week. On Monday we
assembled at Tchaadayev’s, on Tuesday at Sverbeyev’s, on Sundays at
Madame A. P. Yelagin’s.... Besides those who took part in the arguments,
besides the people who had opinions, men and even women would come to
these evenings and sit until two o’clock in the morning to see which of
the matadors would dispatch the other, and how he would be dispatched
himself; they came as in old days people used to go to prize fights, and
to the amphitheatre behind the Rogozhsky Gate.
The champion who impressed all on the side of orthodoxy and Slavophilism
was Alexey Stepanovitch Homyakov, ‘Gorgias the immemorial questioner of
the world,’ to use the expression of the half-crazy Moroshkin. Gifted
with a powerful and mobile intelligence, a good memory, and power of
rapid reflection, rich in resources and indiscriminate in the use of
them, he spent his whole life in heated and inexhaustible argument. An
unwearying and unresting fighter, he dealt blows and thrusts, attacked
and pursued, pelted with witticisms and quotations, terrified and drove
into a maze from which there was no escape without prayer—in short, if he
attacked a conviction the conviction was lost, if he attacked a man’s
logic his logic was gone.
Homyakov really was a dangerous opponent; a hardened old duellist
of dialectics, he took advantage of the slightest inadvertence, the
slightest concession. An extraordinarily gifted man, with formidable
stores of erudition at his disposal, he was like the mediaeval knights
who guarded the Madonna and slept fully armed. At any hour of the day or
the night he was ready for the most intricate argument, and to secure
the triumph of his Slavophil views turned everything in the world to
use, from the casuistry of Byzantine theologians to the subtleties of a
tricky lawyer. His refutations, often only apparent, always dazzled and
confounded his opponent.
Homyakov was very well aware of his strength, and played with it; he
pelted people with words, intimidated them by his learning, mocked
everything, made a man laugh at his own theories and convictions, leaving
him in doubt whether he really had anything left which was sacred. In
masterly fashion he caught those who had halted half-way and roasted
them on the dialectical grid-iron, terrified the timid, reduced the
dilettante to despair, and, with all that, laughed, _as it seemed_,
simply and candidly. I say ‘as it seemed,’ because there was in his
somewhat Oriental features a look as of something concealed and a sort of
simple-hearted Asiatic cunning together with the Russian canniness. As a
rule he rather confused his opponent than convinced him.
His philosophical contentions rested on rejecting the possibility of
attaining truth by reason; he attributed to reason a formal faculty
only, the faculty of developing rudiments received in other ways and
relatively complete (_i.e._, imparted by revelation or accepted through
faith). If reason is left to itself, then, wandering in empty space, and
building category after category, it may throw light on its own laws,
but will never reach the conception of the spirit, nor the conception
of immortality—and so on. On this basis Homyakov confuted people who
halted between religion and science. However they struggled in the
fetters of the Hegelian method, whatever deductions they made, Homyakov
went with them step by step and in the end blew down the house of cards
built of logical formulas or gave them a kick and sent them falling into
‘materialism’ which they shamefacedly renounced, or into ‘atheism’ of
which they were simply afraid. Homyakov triumphed!
As I had several times been present while he was arguing, I noticed
this device, and the first time that it was my lot to try my strength
with him I myself drew him to these deductions. Homyakov screwed up his
slanting eyes, shook his pitch-black curls, and smiled in anticipation.
‘Do you know,’ he said suddenly, as though surprised by a new idea,
‘it is not merely impossible by reason alone to arrive at a rational
spirit developing nature, but by reason alone you can reach no other
interpretation of nature than that of a simple, uninterrupted ferment
which has no aim and may either go on or come to a stop? And if that is
so, you cannot even prove that history will not be cut short to-morrow,
will not perish together with the human race, together with the planet.’
‘I didn’t say,’ I answered, ‘that I undertook to prove it. I know very
well that it is impossible.’
‘What?’ said Homyakov, somewhat surprised, ‘you can accept these terrible
results of the theory of immanence pushed to this ferocious extreme and
nothing in your soul is revolted?’
‘I can, because the deductions of reason are independent of whether I
desire them or not.’
‘Well, you at any rate are consistent. But what violence a man must do to
his soul to resign himself to these gloomy deductions of your science,
and to accustom himself to them.’
‘Prove that your non-science is more true, and I will accept it as
frankly and fearlessly, whatever it may lead me to, even to the Iversky
Madonna.’
‘For that you must have faith.’
‘But, Alexey Stepanovitch, you know the saying: “If you haven’t got a
thing, it’s not your fault.”’
Many people thought—indeed I sometimes did myself—that Homyakov argued
from an artistic pleasure in argument, that he had no deep convictions;
and his manner, his everlasting laugh, and the superficiality of his
critics were responsible for that idea. I don’t think that any one of the
Slavophils did more to gain acceptance for their theories than Homyakov.
His whole life—and he was a very wealthy man and not in the service—was
devoted to propaganda. Whether he laughed or wept was a question of his
nerves, of the cast of his mind, of the way he had been formed by his
environment and had reflected it; it had nothing to do with depth of
conviction.
Perhaps in continual preoccupation with the trivial activity of
discussion and the busy idleness of polemic Homyakov stifled the feeling
of emptiness which, on the other hand, stifled everything joyous in his
comrades and nearest friends, the Kireyevskys.
That these people were crushed and crippled by the age of Nicholas was
unmistakable. In the heat of argument one might sometimes forget it—to do
so now would be weak and pitiful.
The two Kireyevsky brothers stand like melancholy shades at the dividing
line of the national renaissance; not recognised by the living, not
sharing their interests, they never dropped the shroud.
The prematurely aged face of Ivan Kireyevsky bore unmistakable traces of
the suffering and conflict which had been followed by the gloomy calm of
the sea rippling above a foundered ship. His life was a failure. He threw
himself with ardour—in 1833, if I remember right—into a monthly review,
_The European_. The two numbers that appeared were excellent, but on the
publication of the second _The European_ was prohibited. He inserted an
article upon Novikov[108] in the _Dennitsa_. The _Dennitsa_ was seized
and the censor, Glinka, was put under arrest. Kireyevsky, who had lost a
great deal of his fortune over _The European_, retired despondently into
the wilderness of Moscow life: there was nothing for him to do there; he
could not endure it, and went away to the country, burying in his heart
profound unhappiness and a painful yearning for activity. This man, too,
firm and true as steel, was consumed by the rust of that terrible period.
Ten years later he went back to Moscow from his seclusion, a mystic and a
believer in the church.
His position in Moscow was a hard one. He found no complete intimacy or
sympathy either in his friends or in us. Between him and us stood the
barrier of the church. A worshipper of liberty and of the great age of
the French Revolution, he could not share the disdain of the new ‘Old
Believers’ for everything European. He once said with intense sadness to
Granovsky: ‘In heart I am closer to you, but I do not share many of your
convictions; I am nearer in belief to our party, but just as far from
them on the other side.’ And he really was fading out of life, lonely in
his own family.[109] Beside him stood his brother and friend, Pyotr. Both
the brothers took part in conversations sadly, as though their tears were
not yet dried, as though misfortune had visited them the day before. I
looked at Ivan Kireyevsky as at a widow, as at a mother who had lost her
son; life had cheated him, all was emptiness in the future and the only
consolation:
‘Wait a little,
Thou too shalt rest!’[110]
One was sorry to disturb his mysticism. I used to feel the same scruple
in the old days with Vitberg. The mysticism of both was aesthetic; it
was as though the truth had not disappeared altogether behind it, but
was hidden in fantastic outlines and monastic cassocks. One only feels a
ruthless desire to shake a man out of his theories when his madness takes
a polemical form or when he is so near one that any dissonance rends the
heart and gives one no peace.
And what argument could one use to a man who said things like this: ‘I
once stood at a shrine and gazed at a wonder-working ikon of the Mother
of God, thinking of the childlike faith of the people praying before
it; some women and infirm old men knelt, crossing themselves and bowing
down to the earth. With ardent hope I gazed at the holy features, and
little by little the secret of their marvellous power began to grow clear
to me. Yes, this was not simply a painted board ... for whole ages it
had absorbed these streams of passionate aspiration, the prayers of the
afflicted and unhappy; it must have been filled with power which emanates
from it, is reflected from it, upon the believing. It had become a living
organism, a meeting-place between the Creator and men. Thinking of this,
I looked once more at the old men, at the women and children prostrate
in the dust, and at the holy ikon—then I myself saw the features of the
Mother of God suffused with life, she looked with love and mercy at
these simple folk ... and I sank on my knees and meekly prayed to her.’
Pyotr Kireyevsky was even more incorrigible and went to even greater
lengths in orthodox Slavophilism; his was perhaps a less gifted nature,
but he was single-minded and strictly consistent. He did not, like his
brother Ivan or the Slavophil Hegelians, try to reconcile religion with
science, and the Western civilisation with nationalism; on the contrary
he rejected all compromises. Firmly and independently he stood his
ground, neither seeking arguments nor avoiding them. He had nothing to
fear: he was so entirely devoted to his idea and so bound up with it in
sorrowful sympathy for the Russia of his day that his position was easy.
It was as impossible to agree with him as with his brother; but it was
easier to understand him, as it is easier to understand every ruthless
extreme. He had discerned (and this I only realised long afterwards) some
part of the bitter, crushing truths concerning the social condition of
Western Europe which we only came to see after the upheavals of 1848. He
perceived them with melancholy clear-sightedness, divined them through
hatred and resentment for the evil wrought by Peter the Great in the
name of Western civilisation. That is why Pyotr Kireyevsky had not, as
his brother had, together with his orthodoxy and Slavophilism, yearnings
towards some humane and religious philosophy in which his lack of faith
in the present would be resolved. No, his austere nationalism involved
complete, final estrangement from all that was Western.
It was their common misfortune that they had been born either too early
or too late; the Fourteenth of December found us children, but them young
men. That made a great difference. At that time we were at our lessons,
knowing nothing at all of what was really being done in the practical
world. We were full of theoretical dreams, we were Gracchi and Rienzi
in the nursery; afterwards confined to a small circle we spent our
academic years together; as we passed out of the gates of the university
we entered the gates of prison. Prison and exile in youth, in the grey
and stifling days of persecution, are extremely beneficial; they are a
hardening process; only feeble organisms are subdued by prison, those in
whom resistance was the passing impulse of youth and not a talent, not
a spiritual necessity. To be the object of open persecution strengthens
the desire for resistance, increased danger trains to endurance and
moulds conduct. All this provides an interest, a distraction, and excites
irritation and anger; with the prisoner or the exile moments of fury are
more frequent than the exhausting hours of listless, impotent despair of
men in freedom but helpless in vulgar and oppressive surroundings.
When we came back from exile a new spirit was already stirring in the
university, in literature, in society itself. Those were the days of
Gogol and Lermontov, of Byelinsky’s articles, the lectures of Granovsky
and the young professors.
It was very different with our predecessors; they were coming of age when
the bell tolled for the execution of Pestel and pealed for the coronation
of Nicholas; they were too young to take part in the conspiracy of
December the Fourteenth, and not young enough to be at school after it.
They were faced with the ten years which ended in Tchaadayev’s gloomy
letter. Of course they could not grow old in those ten years, but
they were crushed and stifled, surrounded by a society with no living
interests, paltry, cowardly, cringing. And those were the first ten
years of manhood! Inevitably a man was driven, like Onyegin, to envy
the paralysis of the Tula assessor, to go to Persia like Lermontov’s
Petchorin, to become a Catholic like the real Petchorin, or to throw
himself into desperate orthodoxy or violent Slavophilism, if he had no
desire to get drunk, to flog peasants, or to play cards.
When first Homyakov was conscious of this emptiness he went for a tour
in Europe, during the dull and sluggish reign of Charles X.; after
finishing in Paris his forgotten tragedy, _Yermak_, and talking to
various Czechs and Dalmatians on the way home, he returned. Everything
was dull! Fortunately the Turkish war broke out; he, quite superfluously,
quite aimlessly, joined a regiment and went to Turkey. The war ended, and
another forgotten tragedy, _Dmitri the Pretender_, was finished. Dullness
again!
In this boredom, in this depression, in the midst of terrible environment
and terrible emptiness a new thought flashed upon him: it was greeted
with derision as soon as it was uttered; that only made Homyakov fly the
more furiously to defend it, and made it enter the more deeply into the
very flesh and blood of the Kireyevskys.
The seed was scattered; their energies all went into the sowing and the
guarding of the young crops. Men were needed of another generation,
not warped and distorted, by whom their thought could be accepted and
inherited, not come to by suffering and sickness as they themselves had
reached it. Young men responded to their summons, men of Stankevitch’s
circle joined them, and among them were such powerful personalities as K.
Aksakov and Yury Samarin.
Konstantin Aksakov did not laugh like Homyakov and was not engrossed in
hopeless grieving like the Kireyevskys. He threw himself with energy into
the work, as a youth on the threshold of manhood. There was no uncertain
testing of his ground, no melancholy sense of being a voice crying in the
wilderness, no gloomy sighing, no faint hope about him, but a fanatical
faith, intolerant, narrow, one-sided, that faith which paves the way to
victory. Aksakov was one-sided like every fighter; a calmly balanced
eclecticism is no equipment for battle. He was surrounded by hostile
elements, powerful elements, that had great advantages over him, he had
to fight his way through a succession of all sorts of enemies, and to
hoist his flag. How could he be tolerant!
His whole life was an uncompromising protest against the Russia
of officialdom, against the Petersburg period, in the name of the
unrecognised, oppressed Russian people. His dialectical powers were
inferior to those of Homyakov, and he was not a poet and thinker like
Ivan Kireyevsky, but he was ready to go out into the market-place for
his faith; he would have gone to the stake, and when that is felt behind
a man’s words they become terribly convincing. Early in the ’forties he
was preaching the village commune, the mir, and the workmen’s guild. He
taught Haxthausen[111] to understand them, and, consistent to the point
of childishness, was the first to put his trousers inside his high boots,
and to wear a shirt with a collar fastened at the side. ‘Moscow is the
capital of the Russian people,’ he used to say, ‘while Petersburg is
only the residence of the Emperor.’ ‘And observe,’ I answered, ‘to what
lengths the distinction goes—in Moscow they invariably put you in the
lock-up, while in Petersburg they take you to the _Hauptwacht_.’
To the end of his days Aksakov remained an everlastingly enthusiastic and
boundlessly generous youth; he carried away and was carried away, but was
always perfectly single-hearted. In 1844 when our differences had reached
such a point that neither the Slavophils nor we cared to go on meeting, I
was walking along the street when I saw K. Aksakov in a sledge. I bowed
to him in a friendly way. He was on the point of driving by, but he
suddenly stopped the coachman, got out of his sledge, and came towards
me. ‘It hurts me too much,’ he said, ‘to pass you and not say good-bye.
You understand that after all that has happened between your friends and
mine I am not coming to see you; I am sorry, very sorry, but there is no
help for it.’ He went rapidly towards his sledge, but suddenly turned
round. I was standing still; I was sad; he rushed up to me, threw his
arms round me and kissed me warmly. I had tears in my eyes. How I loved
him at that moment of strife!
The quarrel in question was the result of the discussions of which I have
spoken.
Granovsky and I still managed to get on with them somehow, without giving
up our principles; we did not make a personal question of our difference
of opinion. Byelinsky, passionate in his intolerance, went further and
bitterly reproached us. ‘I am a Jew by nature,’ he wrote to me from
Petersburg, ‘and cannot eat at the same table with the Philistines....
Granovsky wants to know whether I have read his article in the
_Moskvityanin_. No, and I am not going to read it; tell him I am not fond
of meeting my friends in improper places, and I don’t make appointments
with them there.’
On the other hand, the Slavophils were ruthless in their treatment of
him. The _Moskvityanin_, irritated by Byelinsky, by the success of the
_Notes of the Fatherland_ and of Granovsky’s lectures, used any weapon
that came to hand in self-defence, and spared Byelinsky least of all,
speaking of him in so many words as a dangerous man who thirsted for
destruction and rejoiced at the sight of the conflagration.
The _Moskvityanin_, however, was pre-eminently the organ of the
university doctrinaire section of the Slavophils. This section might
be described not merely as the university, but to some extent as the
government party. That such a party should find expression was a great
novelty in Russian literature. Among us servility either keeps quiet,
takes bribes, and can barely read or write, or, disdainful of prose,
strikes chords on the lyre of loyalty and patriotism.
Bulgarin and Gretch[112] are in no way typical, no one was deceived by
them, no one mistook the cockade of their livery for the badge of any
shade of opinion.
Pogodin and Shevyryov, the editors of the _Moskvityanin_, were on the
contrary conscientiously servile: Pogodin from hatred of the aristocracy,
Shevyryov I do not know why, possibly influenced by the example of his
ancestor, who, in the midst of the tortures and agonies of the reign of
Ivan the Terrible, sang psalms and almost prayed for the ferocious old
man’s days to be prolonged.
There are periods at which thinkers are on the side of authority, but
that is only when authority is progressive, as in the days of Peter the
Great, is defending the country as in 1812, or is healing its wounds and
letting it rest as in the reign of Henry IV. of France and perhaps of
Alexander ii. But to select the most arid and narrow epoch of Russian
autocracy and, leaning upon the Little Father the Tsar, take up arms
against the individual misdeeds of the aristocracy, which is developed
and supported by the power of that same Tsar, is absurd and harmful.
I shall be told that under the aegis of devotion to the Imperial power
the truth can be spoken more boldly. Why then did they not speak it?
Pogodin was a useful professor who appeared, with energy that was new and
a Guerin that was not, on the débris of Russian history, which had been
whittled away and turned to smoke and ashes by Katchenovsky.[113] But as
a writer he was of little importance in spite of the fact that he wrote
everything, even _Götz von Berlichingen_, in Russian. His unswept and
unpolished style, coarse manner of throwing out gnawed and ragged remarks
and undigested thoughts, inspired me in old days, and I wrote a parody
of him, a little fragment of _Vedrin’s Notes of Travel_. Strogonov (the
Director of Moscow University), after reading it, said: ‘Pogodin will
certainly imagine that he wrote it himself.’
It is doubtful whether Shevyryov did anything at all as a professor. As
for his literary articles, I do not remember a single original idea or
a single independent opinion in anything he wrote. His style was quite
the opposite of Pogodin’s, being windy, spongy, rather like too limp a
blancmange in which the almond flavouring has been forgotten, although
under his treacle a vast amount of jaundiced, conceited irritability
was masked. As one reads Pogodin one feels as though he were swearing
and looking round to see whether there are ladies in the room. Reading
Shevyryov one slumbers and keeps dreaming of something quite different.
Speaking of the style of these Siamese twins of Moscow journalism
inevitably reminds one of George Foster the celebrated companion of
Captain Cook in the Sandwich Islands and of Robespierre in the Convention
of the one and indivisible Republic. Being professor of botany in Vilna
and listening to Polish so rich in consonants, he remembered his friends
in Otaheite who spoke almost entirely in vowel sounds and observed: ‘If
those two languages were mixed what a smooth and sonorous tongue it would
make!’
However, badly as they wrote, the co-editors of the _Moskvityanin_ began
attacking not only Byelinsky but also Granovsky for his lectures, and
always with the same unhappy lack of tact which set all decent people
against them. They accused Granovsky of partiality for Western culture,
for a certain ‘order of ideas’ for which Nicholas from ‘an idea of order’
clapped men in fetters and sent them to Nertchinsk.
Granovsky took up their challenge, and his bold and noble reply put them
to shame. He asked his accusers publicly from the lecturer’s platform why
he ought to hate Western Europe, and if he did hate Western culture what
inducement would he have to lecture on its history.
‘I am accused,’ said Granovsky, ‘of using history merely as a means of
expressing my own views. That is partly true; I have convictions and I
bring them forward in my lectures. If I had none I should not appear
before you in public simply in order, more or less interestingly, to
describe a succession of events.’
Granovsky’s answers were so simple and manly, and his lectures so
attractive, that the Slavophil doctrinaires subsided, while the young
people applauded no less than we. At the end of the course an effort was
even made at reconciliation. We gave Granovsky a dinner after his final
lecture. The Slavophils wanted to join us in it, and Yury Samarin was
chosen by them (as I was by our side) as steward.
The banquet was a success; at the end of it, after many toasts, not only
unanimous but drunk with zest, we embraced the Slavophils and kissed
them in the Russian style. Ivan Kireyevsky only begged me one thing,
that I would alter the spelling of my name, and by changing the _e_ into
a Slavonic vowel make it more Russian to the ear. But Shevyryov did not
even insist on that, on the contrary as he embraced me he repeated in
his soprano: ‘He is a good man even with an _e_, he is a Russian even
with an _e_.’ On both sides the reconciliation was genuine and without
reservations, which, of course, did not prevent us from disagreeing more
than ever a week later.
Reconciliations as a rule are only possible when they are unnecessary,
_i.e._ when personal exasperation is over, or when opinions have
approximated and when people see themselves that they have nothing to
quarrel about. Otherwise every reconciliation involves weakening on
both sides, they both fade, that is, lose their distinctive colouring.
The efforts of our peace conference very soon turned out to be
impracticable, and the conflict raged with fresh exasperation. On our
side it was impossible to rope in Byelinsky; he sent us threatening
letters from Petersburg, excommunicated and anathematised us, and wrote
more angrily than ever in the _Notes of the Fatherland_. At last he
pointed a triumphant finger at the ‘dodges’ of Slavophilism and repeated
reproachfully, ‘there you have them,’ while we hung our heads in
contrition. Byelinsky was right!
A poet,[114] at one time a favourite, who became a Slavophil through
family connections and a sanctimonious bigot through illness, tried
with his dying hand to have a lash at us; but unluckily the police whip
was again the means chosen for the purpose. In a play entitled _Our
Opponents_, he called Tchaadayev a renegade from orthodoxy, Granovsky a
false teacher corrupting the young, me a footman wearing the gorgeous
livery of Western culture, and all three of us traitors to our country.
Of course, he did not mention our names; those were put in by the readers
who enthusiastically carried this spy’s report in verse from drawing-room
to drawing-room. K. Aksakov indignantly answered him also in verse,
branding with emphatic disapproval his spiteful attacks, and saying that
their real opponents were the Slavophils who played the gendarmes in the
name of Christ.
This incident added much bitterness to our relations. The poet’s name,
the name of the man who recited the poem, the circle in which he lived,
the circle which was enthusiastic over it—all helped to increase the
irritation caused by it.
Our dissensions very nearly led to a terrible calamity, to the ruin of
the two purest and best representatives of the two parties. All the
efforts of their friends were needed to patch up the quarrel between
Granovsky and Pyotr Kireyevsky which very nearly came to a duel.
In the midst of these circumstances Shevyryov, who could never resign
himself to the colossal success of Granovsky’s lectures, had the happy
thought of trying to beat him in his own field, and announced a course
of public lectures. He lectured on Dante, on Nationalism in Art, on
Orthodoxy and Culture, and so on; his audience was numerous, but it
remained cold. He displayed boldness at times and this was very much
appreciated, but the general effect was negligible. One lecture has
remained in my memory, the one in which he talked of Michelet’s _Le
Peuple_ and George Sand’s story _La Mare au Diable_, because in it he
touched vividly on a living and contemporary interest. It was difficult
to arouse sympathy when talking of the charms of the ecclesiastical
writers of the Eastern Church and lauding the Greco-Russian Church. Only
Fyodor Glinka[115] and his wife Yevdokia, who wrote of ‘the milk of the
Holy Virgin,’ usually sat side by side in the front row, modestly casting
down their eyes when Shevyryov was immoderate in his praises of the
Orthodox Church.
Shevyryov spoilt his lectures, just as he spoilt his articles, by sallies
against ideas, books, and persons, whom one could hardly have defended
without being clapped in prison.
Meanwhile, ‘in spite of all the devices invented to make a success’ of
the _Moskvityanin_, it was definitely a failure. To make a polemical
journal living one must have the instinct of modernity, one must have
that delicate sensitiveness of the nerves which is at once stimulated
by all that stimulates society. The editors of the _Moskvityanin_ were
entirely destitute of this intuitive vision and, however they turned
and twisted poor Nestor and poor Dante, they were at last themselves
convinced that in our depraved age you could have no success, either
with the roughly chopped phrases of Pogodin or the sing-song suavity
of Shevyryov’s eloquence. After much consideration they determined to
offer the editorship to Ivan Kireyevsky. The choice of Kireyevsky was a
particularly happy one, not only because of his intelligence and talents,
but also on the financial side. There is no one in the world with whom I
should so much like to transact business as with Kireyevsky.
To give an idea of his commercial philosophy I will relate the following
anecdote. He had a stud-farm from which horses were brought to Moscow,
valued, and sold. On one occasion a young officer came to buy a horse
to which he had taken a great fancy; the coachman, seeing this, put up
the price. After some bargaining the officer agreed to his terms and
went to Kireyevsky. The latter after receiving the money looked in the
list and observed to the officer that the horse was priced at eight
hundred roubles, not at a thousand, and that the coachman must have made
a mistake. This so dumbfoundered the officer that he asked permission
to look at the horse again, and after examining it refused to buy it,
saying: ‘It must be a nice sort of horse, if the owner is ashamed to take
the price agreed on for it....’ Where could one find a better editor?
He set to work zealously, wasted a great deal of time and moved to
Moscow on account of it, but for all his talent he could do nothing with
the magazine. The _Moskvityanin_ did not respond to any living widely
diffused demand, and therefore could not have any circulation except in
its own coterie. Its failure must have been a great disappointment to
Kireyevsky.
The _Moskvityanin_ did not recover after its second breakdown, and the
Slavophils themselves perceived that they could not make much headway on
that boat. They began to think of another magazine.
This time it was not they who came off victorious. Public opinion
clamorously decided in our favour. In the dark night when the
_Moskvityanin_ was sinking and the _Lighthouse_ was no longer lighting it
up from Petersburg, Byelinsky, who had fed the _Notes of the Fatherland_
with his own blood, set their illegitimate offspring on its feet and
gave them both such a shove that they were able for some years to keep
on their way with no staff but proof-correctors, printers, and the
publicans and sinners of literature. Byelinsky’s name was enough to make
the fortune of two shops and to concentrate all that was best in Russian
literature in the publications in which he took part, while Kireyevsky’s
talent and Homyakov’s contributions could bring neither circulation nor
readers to the _Moskvityanin_.
Such was the field of battle when I left it and went away from Russia.
Both sides expressed themselves fully once more,[116] and all the
questions have been thrown into a new light by the great events of 1848.
Nicholas is dead; a new life has drawn the Slavophils and us beyond the
limits of our feud. We have stretched out our hands to them, but where
are they? Gone! And K. Aksakov is gone, and those ‘opponents’ who were
dearer to us than many of our own side are no more.
It was a hard life that burnt men away like a candle set in the wind of
autumn.
They were all living when I wrote this chapter the first time. This time
let it end with the following lines spoken on the death of Aksakov:
‘The Kireyevskys, Homyakov, and Aksakov have done their work; whether
their lives were short or long, they could, as they closed their eyes,
say to themselves with full conviction that they had done what they meant
to do, and, though they could not stop the express troika which Peter the
Great had sent flying on its way and in which Biron sat urging the driver
with blows to drive over cornfields and crush the people, they did bring
public opinion to a halt and made all earnest people reconsider their
position.
‘With them a new era of Russian thought begins and, when we say that, it
seems impossible to suspect us of partiality.
‘Yes, we were their opponents, but very strange ones. We had the same
love, but not the same way of loving.
‘Both they and we had been from earliest years possessed by one
unaccountable, physiological, passionate feeling, which they took as
memory and we as prophecy—a feeling of boundless, absorbing love for the
Russian people, Russian manner of life, Russian mode of thought. And like
Janus, or the two-headed eagle, we looked in different directions while
one heart throbbed within us.
‘They laid all their love, all their tenderness at the feet of their
oppressed mother. In us, brought up away from home, the tie was weaker.
We had been in the charge of a French governess, and only learned later
on that not she was our mother but a downtrodden peasant woman, and we
ourselves divined it from the likeness in our features and because her
songs were dearer to us than the vaudevilles. We loved her dearly, but
her life was too narrow. We were stifled in her narrow dwelling with
everywhere tarnished faces behind the silver setting, where she lived
terrified by priests and church servitors, and bullied by soldiers and
clerks. Even her everlasting wailing for her lost happiness rent our
hearts, we knew she had no bright memories, we knew something else too,
that her happiness lay in the future, that the new life was stirring
under her heart, our younger brother, to whom without the mess of pottage
we would yield our heritage. And meanwhile:
“Mutter, Mutter, lass mich gehen
Shweifen auf die wilden Höhen!”
‘Such were our family dissensions fifteen years ago. Much water has
flowed away since then, and we have met the _mountain spirit_ that has
checked our flight, while they have stumbled out of a world of relics
on to living Russian problems. It would be strange for us to adjust
accounts, we have no monopoly of understanding; time, history, and
experience have brought us nearer, not because we have drawn them to us,
nor they us to them, but because both they and we are nearer to a true
outlook now than we were then, when we attacked each other unsparingly
in magazine articles, though even then I do not remember that we ever
doubted the warmth of their love for Russia, nor they ours.
‘This faith in one another, this common love gives us, too, the right to
do homage at their tombs and to throw our handful of earth upon their
dead, in the sacred hope that on their graves and ours, young Russia may
blossom into light and power.’