Chapter 30: Our ‘opponents’ (1)

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!