Chapter 30: Our ‘opponents’ (2)

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.’