THE LAST VISIT TO SOKOLOVO—THE THEORETICAL RUPTURE—A STRAINED
POSITION—DAHIN! DAHIN!
After the reconciliation with Byelinsky in 1840 our little group of
friends went on without any important disagreement: there were shades of
opinion, personal views, but what was of most importance and common to
all was based on the same principles. I do not think it could have gone
on like that for ever. We were bound to reach a line, a limit at which
some would halt while others would pass over it.
Three or four years later I began with profound regret to notice that
though we started from the same first principles we were reaching
different conclusions—and not because we interpreted them differently but
because not all of us _liked_ them. At first these disputes were half in
jest. We used to laugh, for instance, at the Little Russian obstinacy
with which Ryedkin tried to deduce a logical proof of a personal soul. I
remember one of the last jests of dear, kind-hearted Kryukov about it. He
was very ill and Ryedkin and I were sitting by his bedside. It had been a
dull, cloudy day, and all at once there was a flash of lightning followed
by a loud clap of thunder. Ryedkin went to the window and let down the
blind. ‘Will that do any good?’ I asked him. ‘Why,’ Kryukov answered for
him, ‘Ryedkin believes in _die Persönlichkeit des absoluten Geistes_, and
so covers the window that He may not see where to aim if He should think
fit to shoot at us.’
But it may well be imagined that such an essential difference in outlook
would not long remain a jesting matter.
I find in a diary of that period the following sentence written
with evident _arrière-pensée_: ‘Personal relations are very bad for
straightforward thinking. Through respect for the excellent qualities of
individuals we sacrifice the sharp clarity of thought for their sakes. It
needed great strength to weep and yet be able to sign the death-warrant
of Camille Desmoulins.’
The germs of the angry dissensions of 1846 were already latent in this
envy of Robespierre’s strength.
The questions upon which we came in collision were not casual ones;
like fate, there was no escaping them. They are the stumbling-blocks
on the road of knowledge which have been the same in all ages,
terrifying men and alluring them. And just as liberalism carried out
consistently inevitably brings a man face to face with the social
question, so philosophy—if only a man trusts himself to it without
anchorage—inevitably beats him with its waves upon the grey rocks
upon which all who have had the temerity to think—from the seven wise
men of Greece up to Kant and Hegel—have been cast. Instead of simple
explanations almost all have tried to get round them and have only
covered them with fresh layers of symbols and allegories, and that is how
it is that even now they stand as menacingly, while navigators are afraid
to make straight for them and to convince themselves that they are not
rocks at all but only fog seen in a fantastic light.
This step is not easy, but I believed both in the strength and in the
will of our friends; they had not to seek anew the way out as Byelinsky
and I had. He and I had spent weary hours struggling in the squirrel’s
wheel of dialectic repetition and had leapt out of it in the end at our
own risk. They had our example before their eyes and Feuerbach in their
hands. For a long time I could not believe it, but at last I reached
the conviction that though our friends did not share Ryedkin’s method
of proof they were yet in reality more in agreement with him than with
me, and that, for all the independence of their minds, there were
still truths of which they were frightened. I differed from all except
Byelinsky, even from Granovsky and Yevgeny Korsh.
This discovery filled me with deep regret; the limit at which they
hesitated, once recognised in words, could no longer be ignored.
Discussions arose from the inner need to reach the same standard again;
to do so we had, so to speak, to call to each other to find out where
each one stood.
Before we ourselves brought our theoretical split into the light of day
it had been noticed by the younger generation, who stood much nearer to
my standpoint. Not only in the university and the Lyceum but even in
the clerical schools young people were eagerly reading my articles on
‘Dilettantism in Philosophy’ and my letters on the ‘Study of Nature.’
This last fact I learned from Count S. Strogonov to whom Filaret
complained of it, threatening to take precautionary measures against such
pernicious spiritual fare.
About the same time I learned of their success among seminarists from a
different source. This incident gives me so much pleasure that I cannot
pass it over.
The son of a priest of our acquaintance living in the Moscow province,
a young man of seventeen, came several times to me for the _Notes of
the Fatherland_. He was shy, scarcely spoke, blushed, was confused, and
in haste to get away. His open and intelligent face was eloquent in his
favour, and at last I overcame his youthful diffidence and began talking
to him about the _Notes of the Fatherland_. It was the philosophical
articles that he read with great attention and assiduity. He told me how
eagerly the seminary students in the higher course read my historical
exposition of the philosophical systems and how it astonished them after
the philosophic manuals of Burmeister and Wolf.
The young man took to coming to see me sometimes, and I had ample
opportunity for gauging his ability and capacity for work.
‘What do you intend doing when you have finished your studies?’ I asked
on one occasion.
‘Enter the priesthood,’ he answered, blushing.
‘Have you thought seriously of the life that awaits you if you go into
the priesthood?’
‘I have no choice, my father definitely objects to my taking up any
secular calling. I shall have leisure enough for my studies.’
‘You must not be angry with me,’ I replied, ‘but I cannot help telling
you my opinion openly. Your conversation, your way of thinking, which you
have not concealed from me, and the liking you have for my work—all that,
and besides the sincere interest I take in your future together with my
age, gives me the right to speak. Think again a hundred times before
you put on the cassock. It will be far more difficult to take it off
afterwards, and perhaps it will be hard for you to breathe in it. I will
ask you one very simple question: Tell me, is there in your soul faith in
any one dogma of the theology you are being taught?’
The young man, dropping his eyes, said after a pause: ‘I am not going to
lie to you—no!’
‘I knew that. Only think now of your future position. You will have every
day for the whole of your life to lie aloud in the face of the people,
to be false to truth; why, that is the sin against the Holy Spirit,
conscious, premeditated sin. Will you be able to face such duplicity?
Your whole social position will be a falsehood. How will you look into
the eyes of one who is praying in earnest; how will you comfort the dying
with heaven and eternal life; how will you absolve men’s sins. And you
will be forced to convert heretics too, and to condemn them for their
heresy.’
‘That is awful! awful!’ said the young man, and he went away perturbed
and agitated.
He came back the next evening.
‘I have come to tell you,’ said he, ‘that I have thought a great deal
about what you said. You are perfectly right, the priestly calling is
out of the question for me and I assure you that I would sooner go for a
soldier than allow myself to be made a priest.’
I pressed his hand warmly and promised that when the time came I would do
my utmost to persuade his father to agree to his wishes.
So I in my time have saved a soul alive or have at least assisted in its
salvation.
I was able to get a nearer view of the bent of the students for
philosophy. Through the whole academic year of 1845 I attended the
lectures on comparative anatomy. In the lecture-room and the dissecting
theatre I became acquainted with a new generation of young people. Their
prevailing tendency was absolutely realistic, _i.e._, that of positive
science. It is remarkable that this was the tendency of almost all the
students who came from the Tsarskoe-Syelo Lyceum. The Lyceum, turned by
the suspicious and petrifying despotism of Nicholas out of its beautiful
park, was still the same great nursery of talent; Pushkin’s bequest, the
poet’s blessing, survives the coarse blows of ignorant force.[128]
With joy I welcomed a new, vigorous generation in these Moscow students
from the Lyceum.
Well, it was these young university students, devoted with all the
impatience and fire of youth, with all the flush of health, to the world
of realism that was opening before them, who discerned, as I have said,
the point of difference between us and Granovsky. Passionately as they
loved him, they were beginning to revolt against his ‘romanticism.’ They
urgently desired that I should bring him over to our side, regarding
Byelinsky and me as the representatives of their philosophical opinions.
This was the position in 1846. Granovsky was beginning a new course
of public lectures. Again all Moscow gathered round his platform,
again his plastic, dreamy eloquence set all hearts quivering; but the
completeness, the enthusiasm there had been in his first course was
lacking, as though he were tired or as though some idea with which he
could not cope were absorbing and hindering him. That was just how it
was, as we shall see later.
At one of these lectures in March one of our common acquaintances ran in
headlong to tell us that Ogaryov and S—— had arrived from foreign parts.
We had not met for several years and very rarely corresponded.... What
would they be like?... How would they stand?... With beating hearts
Granovsky and I dashed off to Yar’s where they were staying. And here
they were at last—and how changed, and what a beard—and we had not seen
each other for some years; we fell to looking at trifles and talking of
trifles though we felt that we wanted to talk of something else.
At last our little circle was almost all assembled—now we would have a
life!
We had spent the summer of 1845 at a villa in Sokolovo. It is a beautiful
corner of the Moscow district, some fifteen miles from the town on the
Tver road. There we took a little country house standing almost in the
park which sloped away downhill to a little river. On the one side
stretched our Great Russian ocean of cornfields; on the other there was a
wide view into the distance, for which reason the owner of the house had
not failed to call the arbour placed there ‘Belle Vue.’
Sokolovo belonged at one time to the Rumyantsovs. The wealthy landowners
and aristocrats of the eighteenth century with all their faults were
possessed of a breadth of taste which they have not transmitted to their
heirs. The old-fashioned villages and homesteads on the banks of the
river Moskva are exceptionally fine, especially those in which the last
two generations have made no reforms and no changes.
We had spent our time happily there. No serious cloud darkened the
summer sky; we lived in our park, working hard and going for long walks.
Ketscher grumbled less, though he did sometimes lift his eyebrows very
high and utter weighty sayings with vivid mimicry. Granovsky and E——
used to come for the night almost every Saturday and sometimes used
to stay till Monday. Shtchepkin had taken another villa a little way
off. He often walked over, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a white coat
like Napoleon at Longwood, with a basket of gathered mushrooms; he made
jokes, sang Little Russian songs, and was almost the death of us with
his stories, which I do believe would have made Ioann the Sorrowful,
who spent his life weeping over the sins of this world, shed tears of
laughter....
Sitting in a friendly group in a corner of the park under a big lime
tree, we used to regret nothing but Ogaryov’s absence. Well, here he was,
and in 1846 we went again to Sokolovo and he with us; Granovsky took
a little lodge for the whole summer, and Ogaryov was installed in the
entresol over the steward, a naval officer who had lost one ear.
And for all that, two or three weeks later an undefined feeling was
whispering to me that our _villeggiatura_ would not be a success and that
there was no help for it. Who has not had the experience of preparing
some festivity, rejoicing at the coming gaiety of his friends, and
when they arrive everything goes well, there is nothing amiss, yet the
expected gaiety does not come off. Life only passes well and briskly when
one does not feel the blood circulating in one’s veins and does not think
how the lungs rise and fall. If every shock is felt, you may be sure
there will be pain, a disharmony which one cannot always overcome.
The first days after our friends’ arrival were spent in the enthusiasm
and cordiality of festivities; before they were over my father was taken
ill. His death and all the worries and business that followed distracted
us from theoretical questions. In the peace of our life at Sokolovo our
divergencies were bound to come to the surface.
Ogaryov, who had not seen me for four years, was absolutely of the same
tendency as I was. We had moved over the same ground by different paths
and found ourselves together. Natalie, too, was with us. Our serious and
at first sight overwhelming deductions did not alarm her; she gave a
special poetical turn to them.
Arguments became more frequent and came back in a thousand variations.
One day we were dining in the garden. Granovsky was reading in the _Notes
of the Fatherland_ one of my letters on the study of nature (it was the
one on the Encyclopaedists, I remember) and was delighted with it.
‘But what is it you like?’ I asked him. ‘Can it be only the method of
exposition? You cannot possibly agree with the underlying implications of
it.’
‘Your opinions,’ answered Granovsky, ‘are just as much an historical
moment in the study of thought as the writings of the Encyclopaedists
themselves. I like in your articles just what I like in Voltaire or
Diderot; they stir vividly and sharply questions which rouse a man and
urge him forward, and as for the one-sidedness of your views I don’t want
to go into that. Does any one talk of Voltaire’s theories nowadays?’
‘Do you mean to say that there is no standard of truth and that we rouse
men only to talk nonsense to them?’
The conversation continued for some time on these lines. At last I
observed that the development of science, its contemporary condition,
_obliges us_ to accept certain truths apart from whether we like them
or not; that, once recognised, they cease to be historical problems and
become simply irrefutable facts of knowledge like the theories of Euclid,
like the laws of Kepler, like the connection of cause and effect and the
indivisibility of spirit and matter.
‘All that is so far from being obligatory,’ answered Granovsky with a
slight change in his face, ‘that I never shall accept your dry, cold
idea of the unity of soul and body; with it the immortality of the soul
disappears. You may not need it, but I have buried too much to give up
that belief. Personal immortality is essential for me.’
‘Life would be a splendid affair,’ I said, ‘if anything any one wants
were always true at once as in fairy tales.’
‘Only think, Granovsky,’ added Ogaryov, ‘why, it’s a sort of running away
from unhappiness.’
‘Listen,’ answered Granovsky, turning pale and assuming the air of a
disinterested outsider, ‘you will greatly oblige me if you will never
speak to me again on these subjects; there are plenty of interesting
things of which we can talk with far more profit and pleasure.’
‘Certainly, I shall be delighted,’ I said, feeling a cold chill on my
face. Ogaryov said nothing, we all glanced at one another and that glance
was quite enough; we all loved one another too much not to gauge to the
full what had happened. Not a word more was said. The discussion was not
resumed. Natalie tried to cover up the incident and set things right. We
came to her help. Children, who always come to the rescue in such cases,
served as a subject of conversation, and the dinner ended so peacefully
that no outsider coming in would have noticed anything wrong....
After dinner Ogaryov jumped on his horse Kortik while I mounted the
gendarme’s discarded nag and we rode out into the open country. We
were as sad as though some one near and dear were dead; for till then
Ogaryov and I had expected that we should come to an agreement, that our
friendship would blow away our differences like dust, but the tone and
meaning of Granovsky’s last words had revealed a distance between us such
as we had never imagined. So here was the boundary line, the limit, and
with it the censorship. Neither he nor I spoke all the way. As we came
home, we shook our heads sadly and both said with one voice: ‘And so it
seems we are alone again.’
Ogaryov took a chaise and three horses and drove to Moscow; on the way he
composed a little poem from which I extract the following lines:
‘... For neither grief nor tedium can exhaust me,
The truth I’ve spoken fearlessly in gatherings of my friends,
And friends have fled from me in childish terror.
He too has gone, whom like a brother
Or like a sister, haply, I fondly loved and cherished....
...
Once more we will set out alone upon our cheerless journey,
Speaking of truth, unwearied and undaunted,
And let the dreams and people pass us by.’[129]
I met Granovsky the next day as though nothing had happened, a bad sign
on both sides. The pain was still so keen that it could find no words;
and dumb pain that has no outlet like a mouse in the stillness gnaws away
thread after thread....
Two days later I was in Moscow. Ogaryov and I went to see Korsh. He was
as solicitously gracious and mournfully sweet with us as though he were
sorry for us, but, hang it all, had we committed some crime? I asked
Korsh straight out, had he heard of our discussion. He had; he said that
we had all been too hot over abstract subjects; pointed out that the
perfect identity between people and between opinions of which we dreamed
did not exist, that people’s sympathies, like chemical affinity, have
their limit of saturation which could not be exceeded without stumbling
upon aspects on which men were strangers again. He jested at our being
so young when over thirty, and he said all this with friendliness and
delicacy, one could see that he did not find it easy.
We parted peacefully. Blushing a little I thought of my ‘naïveté,’ and
afterwards when I was left alone I felt as I lay in bed that another bit
of my heart had been torn away—skilfully, painlessly, but it was gone!
Nothing further happened ... only everything seemed clouded over with
something dark and colourless; the freedom from constraint, the complete
_abandon_ had vanished from our circle. We became more careful, we edged
round certain questions, that is, we really did retire at ‘the limit of
chemical affinity’—and all this gave us the more pain and bitterness
because we had great and genuine love for one another.
I may have been too intolerant, may have argued conceitedly and answered
sarcastically ... perhaps so ... but in reality I am convinced even now
that for really intimate relations it is essential to have the same
religion, to be at one in the theoretical convictions that really matter.
Of course theoretical agreement alone is not enough for intimacy between
men; I was nearer in sympathy, for instance, to Ivan Kireyevsky than to
many of my own set. What is more, one may be a good and faithful ally
agreeing in some definite cause and differing in opinions. I was on such
terms with men for whom I had the greatest respect, though I differed
from them on many subjects—for instance, with Mazzini and with Worcell.
I did not try to convince them nor they me, we had enough in common to
go the same way together without quarrelling. But between us brothers of
one family, who had been so near and had lived one life together, it was
impossible to differ so deeply.
If only we had had some inevitable work which would have absorbed us
completely; but as it was, all our activity lay precisely in the sphere
of thought and the propaganda of our convictions ... how was compromise
possible in that realm?...
The little rift in one of the walls of our temple of friendship grew
wider, as is always the case, through trifles, misunderstandings,
unnecessary openness where it would have been better to be silent and
harmful silence where it was essential to speak; these things are decided
only by the tact of the heart, there are no rules to guide one.
Soon afterwards everything was at sixes and sevens among the ladies
too....
There was no help for it at the moment.
To go away, far away, for years, only to go! But it was not easy to go.
The fetters of police supervision were on my legs, and without permission
from Nicholas a foreign passport could not be got.