Chapter 25 (1)

DISSONANCE—A NEW CIRCLE—DESPERATE HEGELIANISM—V. BYELINSKY, M. BAKUNIN, AND OTHERS—A QUARREL WITH BYELINSKY AND RECONCILIATION—ARGUMENT WITH A LADY AT NOVGOROD—STANKEVITCH’S CIRCLE.

At the beginning of 1840 we left Vladimir and the poor, narrow Klyazma. With anxiety and an aching heart I left the little town where we were married. I foresaw that the same simple, deep, spiritual life would not come again, and that we should have to take in our sails.

Our long, solitary walks out of the town, where, lost among the meadows, we felt so keenly the spring in nature and the spring in our hearts, would never come again....

The winter evenings when, sitting side by side, we closed the book and listened to the crunch of sledge-runners and the jingle of bells that reminded us of the 3rd of March 1838 and our journey of the 9th of May would never come again....

They will never come again!

In how many keys and for how many ages men have known and repeated that ‘the May of life blossoms once and never again,’ and yet the June of mature age with its hard work, with its stony roads, catches a man unawares. Youth, all unheeding, floats along in a sort of algebra of ideas, feelings, and yearnings, is little interested in the concrete, little touched by it, and then comes love, the unknown quantity found; all is concentrated on one person, through whom everything passes, in whom the universal becomes precious, in whom the artistic becomes beautiful; then, too, the young are untouched by the external, they are devoted to each other, let the grass grow as it will!

And it does grow, together with the nettles and the thistles, and sooner or later they begin to sting or prick.

We knew that we could not take Vladimir with us, but still we thought that our May was not yet over. I even fancied that in going back to Moscow I was going back to my student days. All the surroundings helped to maintain the illusion. The same house, the same furniture—here was the room where Ogaryov and I, shut in together, used to conspire two paces away from the Senator and my father, and here was my father himself, grown older and more bent, but just as ready to scold me for coming home late. ‘Who is lecturing to-morrow? Where is the class? I am going from the university to Ogaryov’s....’ It was 1833 over again!

Ogaryov was actually there.

He had received permission to go to Moscow a few months before me. Again his house became a centre where friends, old and new, met. And although the old unity was no more, every one was in sympathy with him.

Ogaryov, as I have had occasion to observe already, was endowed with a peculiar magnetism, a feminine quality of attraction. For no apparent reason others are drawn to such people and cling to them; they warm, unite, and soothe them, they are like an open table at which every one sits down, renews his strength, rests, grows calmer and more stout-hearted, and goes away a friend.

His acquaintances swallowed up a great deal of his time; he suffered at times from this, but still kept his doors open, and met every one with his gentle smile. Many people thought it a great weakness. Yes, time was lost and wasted, but the love, not only of intimate friends, but of outsiders, of the weak, was won; that is worth as much as reading and other pursuits.

I never can make out how people like Ogaryov can be accused of idleness. The standards of the factory and the workhouse do not apply in their case. I remember that in our student days Vadim and I were once sitting over a glass of wine when he suddenly became more and more gloomy, and all at once with tears in his eyes repeated the words of Don Carlos (who quoted them from Julius Caesar): ‘Twenty-three and nothing done for eternity!’ This so mortified him that with all his might he brought his open hand down upon the green wine-glass and cut it badly. All that is so, but neither Caesar nor Don Carlos and Posa, nor Vadim and I explained why we must do something for eternity. There is work and it has to be done, and is it to be done for the sake of the work, or for the sake of being remembered by mankind?

All that is somewhat obscure: and what is work?

Work, business.[16] ... Officials recognise as such only civil and legal affairs, the merchant regards nothing but commerce as work, military men call it their work to strut about like cranes armed from head to toe in times of peace. To my thinking, to serve as the link, as the centre of a whole circle of people, is a very great work, especially in a society both disunited and fettered. No one has reproached me for idleness, and many people have liked some of the things I have done; but they do not know how much of all that I have done has been the reflection of our talks, our arguments, the nights we spent idly strolling about the streets and fields, or still more idly sitting over a glass of wine.

But soon a chilly air reminding us that spring was over penetrated even into these surroundings. When the joy of meeting had subsided and festivities were over, when we had said most of what we had to say, and had to go on our way again, we perceived that the careless, happy life which we sought from memories was no longer to be found in our circle, and especially not in Ogaryov’s house. Friends were noisy, arguments were lively, sometimes wine flowed, but it was not light-hearted, not as light-hearted as in old days. Every one had a hidden thought, something unspoken; there was a feeling of strain: Ogaryov looked melancholy and Ketscher raised his eyebrows fiercely. An intrusive note made a jangling discord in our harmony; all the warmth, all the friendliness of Ogaryov could not drown it.

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

Ogaryov had lost his father in 1838, and had married not long before his father’s death. The news of his marriage frightened me, it had all happened so quickly and unexpectedly. The rumours that had reached me about his wife were not altogether favourable to her, yet he wrote with enthusiasm and was happy; I put more faith in him, but still I was uneasy.

At the beginning of 1839 they had come for a few days to Vladimir. It was our first meeting since the auditor Oransky read us our sentence. We were in no mood to be critical. I only remember that for the first few minutes her voice struck me unpleasantly; but that momentary impression passed in the radiance of our joy. Yes, those were the days of fullness and bliss, when a man all unsuspecting reaches the highest limit, the utmost boundary of personal happiness. There was not a shade of gloomy memory, not the faintest dark foreboding, it was all youth, friendship, love, exuberant strength, energy, health, and an endless road before us. Even the mood of mysticism which had not yet passed quite away gave a festive solemnity to our meeting, like chiming bells, choristers, and burning incense.

There was a small iron crucifix on a table in my room. ‘On your knees!’ said Ogaryov, ‘and let us give thanks that we are all four here together.’ We knelt down beside him and embraced, wiping away our tears.

But one of the four scarcely needed to wipe them away. Ogaryov’s wife looked at the proceedings with some astonishment. I thought at the time that this was _retenue_, but she told me herself afterwards that this scene had struck her as affected and childish. Of course it might strike one so looking on at it as an outsider, but why was she looking on at it as an outsider? Why was she so sober at that moment of intoxication, so middle-aged in the midst of our youthfulness?

Ogaryov went back to his estate, while she went to Petersburg to try and obtain permission for him to return to Moscow.

A month later she passed through Vladimir again, alone. Petersburg and two or three aristocratic drawing-rooms had turned her head. She longed for external splendour, she was allured by wealth. Will she get over it, I wondered. Such opposite tastes may lead to many troubles. But wealth was something new to her and so were drawing-rooms and Petersburg, perhaps it was a momentary infatuation; she was intelligent and she loved Ogaryov—and I hoped.

In Moscow they were more apprehensive that she would not get over it so easily. An artistic and literary circle rather flattered her vanity, but her chief efforts were not turned in that direction. She would have consented to have a place for artists and savants in her aristocratic drawing-room; she forcibly drew Ogaryov into frivolous society in which he was bored to death. His more intimate friends began to notice it, and Ketscher, who had long been scowling over it, angrily proclaimed his _veto_. Hot-tempered, vain, and unused to control herself, she wounded a vanity as sensitive as her own. Her angular, rather frigid manners and sarcasms, uttered in the voice which at our first meeting had so strangely jarred on me, provoked a violent opposition. After carrying on a feud for two months with Ketscher who, though he was right fundamentally, was continually in the wrong formally, and arousing the hostility of several persons who were, perhaps owing to their material position, too ready to take offence, she found herself brought face to face with me.

She was afraid of me. In me she wanted to test herself and to discover once for all which was to take the upper hand, friendship or love, as though one or the other must take the upper hand. There was more in this than the desire to gain the day in a capricious quarrel, there was a consciousness that I opposed her views more strongly than any of them; there was envious jealousy and feminine love of power in it too. With Ketscher she disputed till she shed tears, and every day she quarrelled with him as angry children quarrel, but without exasperation; she could not look at me without turning pale and trembling with hatred. She reproached me for revolting pride, and for destroying her happiness through conceited claims to Ogaryov’s exclusive friendship. I felt this was unjust and became cruel and merciless in my turn. She herself confessed to me five years later that she had had thoughts of poisoning me—so violent was her hatred. She broke off all acquaintance with Natalie because of her love for me and the affection all our friends had for her.

Ogaryov suffered. No one spared him, neither she nor I nor the others. We chose his heart (as he himself expressed it in a letter) ‘for our field of battle,’ and did not consider that whichever gained the day he suffered equally. He swore to reconcile us, he tried to soften the awkwardness of the position and we were reconciled; but wounded vanity cried aloud and smarting resentment flared into warfare at a word. Ogaryov saw with horror that everything he prized was falling to pieces, that his holy things were not sacred to the woman he loved, that she was a stranger—but he could not cease to love her. We were his own people—but he saw with grief that even we did not spare him one drop of the cup of bitterness fate forced upon him. He could not roughly sunder the ties of _Naturgewalt_ that bound him to her, nor the strong ties of sympathy that bound him to us; in any case his heart could not but bleed, and, conscious of that, he tried to keep both her and us—gripped convulsively her hands and ours—while we savagely strained apart, tearing him to pieces like executioners!

Man is cruel and only prolonged suffering softens him; the child is cruel in its ignorance, the young man is cruel in the pride of his purity, the priest is cruel in the pride of his holiness, and the doctrinaire in the pride of his learning—we are all merciless, and most of all merciless when we are in the right. The heart is usually melted and grows soft after severe wounds, after the wings have been burnt, after acknowledged downfalls, after the panic which makes a man cold all over when alone, without witnesses, he begins to suspect what a weak and worthless creature he is. His heart grows softer; as he wipes away the sweat of shame and horror, afraid of an eye-witness, he seeks excuses for _himself_ and finds them for _others_. The part of judge, of executioner, from that moment excites his loathing.

I was far from that stage in those days!

The feud was carried on intermittently. The exasperated woman, pursued by our intolerance, got further and further entangled, could not go forward, struggled, fell—and did not change. Feeling that she could not be victorious, she burned with vexation and _dépit_, with jealousy in which there was no love. Her confused ideas, taken disconnectedly from George Sand’s novels and from our conversations, and never clearly thought out, carried her from one absurdity to another—to eccentricities, which she took for originality and independence, to that form of feminine emancipation in virtue of which women arbitrarily deny all that they dislike in the existing and accepted order, while they obstinately cling to all the rest.

The gulf was becoming impassable, but for a long time yet Ogaryov spared her, for a long time he still tried and hoped to save her. And whenever for a minute some tender feeling was awakened or poetic chord was touched in her, he was ready to forget the past for ever and begin a new life of harmony, peace, and love; but she could not restrain herself, she lost her balance and every time sank lower. Thread by thread their tie was painfully broken, till the last thread snapped without a sound—and they parted for ever.

In all this one question presents itself that is not quite easily answered. How was it that the strong, sympathetic influence that Ogaryov exercised on all around him, which drew outsiders into higher spheres, into general interests, glided over that woman’s heart without leaving any fruitful trace upon it? And yet he loved her passionately and put more soul and effort into saving her than into all the rest; and she herself loved him at first, of that there is no doubt.

I have thought a great deal about this. At first, of course, I put the blame on one side only, but afterwards I began to understand that this strange, monstrous fact has an explanation and that there is really no contradiction in it. To have an influence on a sympathetic circle is far easier than to have an influence on one woman. To preach from the pulpit, to sway men’s minds from the platform, to teach from the lecturer’s desk, is far easier than to educate one child. In the lecture-room, in the church, in the club, similarity of interests and aspirations takes the foremost place; men meet there for the sake of them, and all that is needed is to develop them farther. Ogaryov’s circle consisted of his old comrades of the university, young artists, literary or scientific men; they were united by a common religion, a common language, and still more by a common hatred. Those for whom this religion was not really a living question gradually dropped off, while others came to fill their places, and the circle itself, as well as its thinking, was the stronger for the free play of selection and the community of conviction that bound them together.

Intimacy with a woman is a purely personal matter, based on some secret physiological affinity, unaccountable, resting on passion. We are first intimate, afterwards we become acquainted. Among people whose life is not marked out for them, not dominated by one idea, equilibrium is easily established; everything with them happens casually, he yields half and she half, and if they do not, it does not much matter. On the other hand, a man devoted to his idea discovers with horror that it is strange to the creature he has brought so close to him. He sets to work in haste to awaken her, but as a rule only frightens or muddles her. Torn away from the traditions from which she has not freed herself, and flung across a sort of abyss with nothing to fill it, she believes that she is emancipated—conceitedly, arrogantly rejects the old at random, accepts the new indiscriminately. There is disorder and chaos in her head and in her heart ... the reins are flung down, egoism is unbridled ... while we imagine that we have accomplished something and preach to her as in the lecture-room.

The gift for education, the gift of patient love, of complete, of persevering devotion is more rarely met with than any other. No mother’s passionate love nor dialectical skill can replace it.

Is not this the reason why people torment children and sometimes grown-up people too—that it is so hard to educate them and so easy to flog them? When we punish, are we not revenging ourselves for our own incapacity?

Ogaryov saw that even then; that was why all (and I among them) reproached him for being too gentle.

The circle of young people that gathered round Ogaryov was not our old circle. Only two of his old friends, besides us, were in it. Tone, interests, pursuits, all were changed. Stankevitch’s friends took the lead in it; Bakunin and Byelinsky stood at their head, each with a volume of Hegel’s philosophy in his hand, an each filled with the youthful intolerance inseparable from deep and passionate convictions.

German philosophy had been grafted on the Moscow University by M. G. Pavlov. The Chair of Philosophy had been abolished since 1826. Pavlov gave us an introduction to philosophy by way of physics and agricultural science. It would have been hard to learn physics at his lectures, impossible to learn agricultural science; but they were extremely profitable. Pavlov stood at the door of the section of Physics and Mathematics and stopped the student with the question: ‘You want to acquire knowledge of nature? but what is nature? what is knowledge?’

This was extremely valuable: our young students enter the university entirely without philosophical preparation; only the divinity students had any conception of philosophy, and that an utterly distorted one.

By way of answer to these questions, Pavlov expounded the doctrines of Schelling and of Oken with a conciseness and a clarity such as no teacher of natural philosophy had shown before. If he did not attain complete lucidity in anything it was not his fault, but was due to the cloudiness of Schelling’s philosophy. Pavlov may more justly be blamed for stopping short at this Mahabharata of philosophy instead of passing on to the austere initiation into Hegelian logic. But even he went no farther than the introduction and general outline, or at any rate he led others no farther. Such a halt at the beginning, such incompleteness, houses without roofs, foundations without houses, and splendid vestibules leading to a humble dwelling, are quite in the spirit of the Russian people. Are we not perhaps satisfied with vestibules because our history is still knocking at the gate?

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

Stankevitch, also one of the _idle_ people who accomplish _nothing_, was the first disciple of Hegel in the Moscow circle. He had made a profound study of German philosophy, which appealed to his aesthetic sense: endowed with exceptional abilities, he drew a large circle of friends into his favourite pursuit. This circle was extremely remarkable, from it came a regular legion of savants, writers and professors, amongst whom were Byelinsky, Bakunin and Granovsky.

Before our exile there had been no great sympathy between our circle and Stankevitch’s. They disliked our almost exclusively political tendency, while we disliked their almost exclusively theoretical interests. They considered us _Frondeurs_ and French, we thought them sentimentalists and German. The first man who was acknowledged both by us and by them, who held out the hand of friendship to both and by his warm love for both and his conciliating character removed the last traces of mutual misunderstanding, was Granovsky; but when I arrived in Moscow he was still in Berlin, while poor Stankevitch at the age of twenty-seven was dying on the shore of the Lago di Como.

Sickly in constitution and gentle in character, a poet and a dreamer, Stankevitch was naturally bound to prefer contemplation and abstract thought to living and purely practical questions; his artistic idealism suited him, it was ‘the crown of victory’ on his pale, youthful brow that bore the imprint of death. The others had too much physical vigour and too little poetical feeling to remain long absorbed in speculative thought without passing on into life. Exclusive preoccupation with theory is utterly opposed to the Russian temperament, and we shall soon see how the Russian spirit transformed Hegel’s philosophy and how the vitality of our nature asserted itself in spite of all the tonsures of the philosophic monks. But at the beginning of 1840 the young people surrounding Ogaryov had as yet no thought of rebelling against the letter on behalf of the spirit, against the abstract on behalf of life.

My new acquaintances received me as people do receive exiles and old champions, people who come out of prison or return out of captivity or banishment, that is, with respectful indulgence, with a readiness to receive us into their alliance, though at the same time refusing to yield a single point and hinting at the fact that they are ‘to-day’ and we are already ‘yesterday,’ and exacting the unconditional acceptance of Hegel’s phenomenology and logic, and their interpretation of it, too.

They discussed these subjects incessantly, there was not a paragraph in the three parts of the _Logic_, in the two of the _Aesthetic_, the _Encyclopaedia_, and so on, which had not been the subject of furious battles for several nights together. People who loved each other were parted for weeks at a time because they disagreed about the definition of ‘all-embracing spirit,’ or had taken as a personal insult an opinion on ‘the absolute personality and its existence in itself.’ Every insignificant treatise published in Berlin or other provincial or district towns of German philosophy was ordered and read into tatters, so that the leaves fell out in a few days, if only there were a mention of Hegel in it. Just as Francœur in Paris wept with delight when he heard that in Russia he was taken for a great mathematician and that all the youthful generation made use of the same letters as he did when they solved equations of various degrees, tears of delight might have been shed by all those forgotten Werders, Marheinekes, Michelets, Ottos, Vatkes, Schallers, Rosenkrantzes, and even Arnold Ruge,[17] whom Heine so wonderfully well dubbed ‘the gate-keeper of the Hegelian philosophy,’ if they had known what pitched battles they were exciting in Moscow, how they were being read, and how they were being bought.

Pavlov’s great value lay in the extraordinary clarity of his exposition, a clarity in which none of the depth of German thought was lost; the young philosophers, on the contrary, adopted a conventional language; they did not translate philosophical terms into Russian, but transferred them whole, even, to make things easier, leaving all the Latin words _in crudo_, giving them orthodox terminations and the endings of the Russian declensions.

I have the right to say this because, carried away by the current of the time, I wrote myself exactly in the same way, and was actually surprised when Perevoshtchekov, the well-known astronomer, described my language as the ‘twittering of birds.’ No one in those days would have hesitated to write a phrase like this: ‘The concretion of abstract ideas in the sphere of plastics presents that phase of the self-seeking spirit in which, defining itself for itself, it passes from the potentiality of natural immanence into the harmonious sphere of pictorial consciousness in beauty.’ It is remarkable that here Russian words, as in the celebrated dinner of the generals of which Yermolov spoke, sound even more foreign than Latin ones.

German learning—and it is its chief defect—has become accustomed to an artificial, heavy, scholastic language, just because it has lived in academies, that is, in the monasteries of idealism. It is the language of the priests of learning, a language for the faithful, and no one of the uninitiated understood it. A key was needed for it, as for a cryptograph letter. The key is now no mystery; when they understood it, people were surprised that very sensible and very simple things were said in this strange jargon. Feuerbach was the first to begin using a more human language.

The mechanical copying of the German learned jargon was the more unpardonable as the leading characteristic of our language is the extreme ease with which everything is expressed in it—abstract ideas, the lyrical sensations of the heart, ‘life’s mouse-like flitting,’ the cry of indignation, sparkling mischief, and overwhelming passion.

Another mistake, far graver, went hand in hand with this distortion of language. Our young philosophers distorted not merely their phrases but their understanding; their attitude to life, to reality, became scholastic, bookish; it was that learned conception of simple things at which Goethe mocks with such genius in the conversation of Mephistopheles with the student. Everything in reality direct, every simple feeling, was lifted into abstract categories and came back from them without a drop of living blood, a pale, algebraic shadow. In all this there was a naïveté of a sort, because it was all perfectly sincere. The man who went for a walk in Sokolniky went in order to give himself up to the pantheistic feeling of his unity with the cosmos; and if on the way he happened upon a drunken soldier or a peasant woman who got into conversation with him, the philosopher did not simply talk to them, but defined the essential substance of the people in its immediate and phenomenal manifestation. The very tear glistening on the eyelash was strictly referred to its proper classification, to _Gemüth_ or ‘to the tragic in the heart.’

It was the same thing in art. A knowledge of Goethe, especially of the second part of _Faust_ (either because it was inferior to the first or because it was more difficult), was as obligatory as the wearing of clothes. The philosophy of music took a foremost position. Of course, no one ever spoke of Rossini; to Mozart they were indulgent, though they did think him childish and poor. On the other hand, they made philosophical investigations into every chord of Beethoven and greatly respected Schubert, not so much, I think, for his superb melodies as for the fact that he chose philosophical themes for them, such as ‘the divine omnipotence’ and ‘Atlas.’ French literature, everything French in fact, and, incidentally, everything political also, shared the interdict laid on Italian music.

From the above, it is easy to see on what field we were bound to meet and do battle. So long as we were arguing on the theme that Goethe was objective but that his objectivity was subjective, while Schiller as a poet was subjective but that his subjectivity was objective, and _vice versa_, everything went peaceably. Questions that aroused more passion were not slow to make their appearance.

While Hegel was Professor in Berlin, partly from old age, but far more from satisfaction with his position and the respect he enjoyed, he purposely screwed his philosophy up above the earthly level and kept himself in an environment from which all contemporary interests and passions became somewhat indistinct, like buildings and villages seen from a balloon; he did not like to be entangled in these accursed practical questions with which it is difficult to deal and which must receive a positive answer. How revolting this artificial and disingenuous dualism was in a doctrine which set out from the elimination of dualism can readily be understood. The real Hegel was the modest Professor at Jena, the friend of Hoelderlin, who hid his _Phenomenology_ under his coat when Napoleon entered the town; then his philosophy did not lead to Indian quietism nor to the justification of the existing forms of society, nor to Prussian Christianity; then he had not read his lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, but had written things of genius such as the article on the executioner and the death penalty, printed in Rosenkrantz’s biography.

Hegel confined himself to the sphere of abstractions in order to avoid the necessity of touching upon empirical deductions and practical applications; the one domain which he, very adroitly, selected for the practical application of his theories was the calm, untroubled ocean of aesthetics. He rarely ventured into the light of day, and but for a minute, wrapped up like an invalid, and even then left behind in the dialectic maze just those questions most interesting to the modern man. The extremely feeble intellects (Gantz is the only exception) who surrounded him accepted the letter for the thing itself and were pleased by the empty play of dialectics. Probably the old man felt at times sore and ashamed at the sight of the limited outlook of his excessively complacent pupils. If the dialectic method is not the development of the reality itself, the lifting of it, so to speak, into thought, it becomes a purely external means of driving all sorts of things through a series of categories, an exercise in logical gymnastics, as it was with the Greek Sophists and the mediaeval scholastics after Abelard.

The philosophical phrase which did the greatest harm, and in virtue of which the German conservatives strove to reconcile philosophy with the political régime of Germany—‘all that is real is rational’—was the principle of sufficient reason and of the correspondence of logic and fact expressed in other words. Hegel’s phrase, wrongly understood, became what the words of the Christian Girondist Paul were at one time: ‘There is no power but from God.’ But if all powers are from God, and if the existing social order is justified by reason, the struggle against it, since it exists, is also justified. These two sentences accepted in their formal meaning are pure tautology; but whether tautology or not, Hegel’s phrase led straight to the recognition of the existing authorities, led to a man’s sitting with folded hands, and that was just what the Berlin Buddhists wanted. Though such a view is diametrically opposed to the Russian spirit, our Moscow Hegelians were genuinely misled and accepted it.

Byelinsky, the most active, impulsive, and dialectically passionate, fighting nature, was at that time preaching an Indian stillness of contemplation and theoretical study instead of conflict. He believed in that theory and did not flinch before any of its consequences, nor was he held back by considerations of moral propriety nor the opinion of others, which has such terrors for the weak and those who lack independence. He was free from timidity for he was strong and sincere; his conscience was clear.

‘Do you know that from your standpoint,’ I said to him, thinking to impress him with my revolutionary ultimatum, ‘you can prove that the monstrous tyranny under which we live is rational and ought to exist?’

‘There is no doubt about it,’ answered Byelinsky, and proceeded to recite to us Pushkin’s ‘Anniversary of Borodino.’

That was more than I could stand and a desperate battle raged between us. Our feud reacted upon the others, the circle fell apart into two groups. Bakunin tried to reconcile, to explain, to persuade, but there was no real peace. Byelinsky, irritated and dissatisfied, went off to Petersburg, and from there fired off his last furious shot at us in an article which he called ‘The Anniversary of Borodino.’

Then I broke off all relations with him. Though Bakunin argued hotly, he began to reconsider things, his revolutionary tact drove him in another direction. Byelinsky reproached him for weakness, for concessions, and went to such exaggerated extremes that he scared his own friends and followers. The chorus was on Byelinsky’s side, and looked down upon us, haughtily shrugged their shoulders and considered us behind the times.

In the midst of this feud I saw the necessity _ex ipso fonte bibere_ and began studying Hegel in earnest. I even think that a man who has not _lived through_ Hegel’s phenomenology and Proudhon’s contradictions of political economy, who has not passed through that furnace and been tempered by it, is not complete, not modern.

When I had grown used to Hegel’s language and mastered his method, I began to perceive that Hegel was much nearer to our standpoint than to the standpoint of his followers; he was so in his early works, he was so everywhere where his genius had got out of hand and had dashed forward forgetting the gates of Brandenburg. The philosophy of Hegel is the algebra of revolution, it emancipates a man in an extraordinary way and leaves not a stone standing of the Christian world, of the world of outlived tradition. But, perhaps with intention, it is badly formulated. Just as in mathematics—only there with more justification—men do not go back to the definition of space, movement, force, but continue the dialectical development of their laws and qualities, so in the formal understanding of philosophy, after once becoming accustomed to the first principles, men go on merely drawing deductions. Any one new to the subject who has not stupefied himself by the method being turned into a habit is pulled up just by these traditions, by these dogmas which have been accepted as thoughts. To people who have long been studying the subject and are consequently not free from preconceptions, it seems astonishing that others should not understand things that are ‘perfectly clear.’ How can any one fail to understand such a simple idea as, for instance, ‘that the soul is immortal and that what perishes is only the personality,’ a thought so successfully developed by the Michelet of Berlin; or the still more simple truth that the absolute spirit is a personality, conscious of itself through the world, and at the same time having its own self-consciousness?

All these things seemed so easy to our friends, they smiled so condescendingly at ‘French’ objections, that I was for some time crushed by them and worked and worked to reach an exact understanding of their philosophic jargon.

Fortunately scholasticism is as little natural to me as mysticism, and I stretched its bow until the string snapped and the scales dropped from my eyes. Strange to say, it was an argument with a lady that brought me to it.

I had the year before at Novgorod become acquainted with a general. I made his acquaintance just because no one could have been less like a general.

There was a painful feeling in his house, there were tears in the air, it was obvious that death had passed through it. His hair was prematurely grey and his kindly, mournful smile was, even more than his wrinkles, expressive of suffering. He was about fifty. The traces of a fate that had cut off living branches was still more clearly imprinted on the pale, thin face of his wife. It was too quiet in their house. The general studied mechanics, while his wife spent her mornings giving French lessons to some poor children; when they had gone she took up a book, and the only things that suggested a different, bright, fragrant life were the flowers, of which there were many, and the playthings in a cupboard—but no one ever played with them.

They had had three children: two years before I knew them an exceptionally gifted boy of nine had died; a few months later another child died of scarlet fever; the mother hastened into the country to save the last child by change of air and came back a few days later with a little coffin in the carriage with her.

Their life had lost its meaning, it was ended, and continued without object, without need. Their existence was maintained by the compassion of each for the other; the one comfort left them was the deep conviction that each was essential to enable the other to bear the cross. I have seen few more harmonious marriages, though, indeed, it was hardly a marriage, for it was not love that bound them together but a deep comradeship in misfortune; their fate held them tight and kept them together with the little cold hands of those three, and the hopeless emptiness around them and before them.

The bereaved mother was completely given up to mysticism; she found relief from her misery in the world of mysterious reconciliations, she was deceived by the flattery that religion pays the human heart. For her, mysticism was no light thing, it was no mere dream, it meant having her children again, and she was defending them when she defended her religion. But, as she had an extremely active intelligence, she challenged discussion and knew her strength. I have met, both before and since, many mystics of various kinds, from Vitberg and the followers of Tovjanski,[18] who acknowledged Napoleon as the military incarnation of God and took off their caps when they passed the Vendôme Column, to the now-forgotten ‘Ma-Pa,’[19] who told me himself of his interview with God which took place on the high-road between Montmorency and Paris. They were all hysterical people who worked on the nerves, impressed the fancy, or the heart, mixed up philosophical conceptions with an arbitrary symbolism, and did not care to come out into the open field of logic.

But it was upon that field L—— D—— took a firm and fearless stand. Where and how she had succeeded in obtaining such artistic skill in argument I do not know. Altogether women’s development is a mystery; there is nothing: just dress and dances, mischievous back-biting and novel reading, making eyes and shedding tears—and all at once titanic will, mature thought, colossal intelligence make their appearance. The young girl carried away by her passions vanishes, and before you stands Théroigne de Méricourt,[20] the beauty of the tribune, swaying multitudes of the people, or a Princess Dashkov, sword in hand, on horseback, at eighteen, in the midst of a turbulent crowd of soldiers.

In L—— D—— everything was complete, she had no doubts, no wavering, no theoretical weakness; even the Jesuits or the Calvinists can hardly have been so harmoniously consistent in their doctrine as she.

Deprived of her little ones, she had come, instead of hating death, to hating life. That is just what is needed for Christianity, that complete apotheosis of death: the contempt for earth, the contempt of the body has no other meaning. Hence the attack upon everything living and realistic, enjoyment, health, gaiety, the free joy of existence. And L—— D—— had reached the point of disliking both Goethe and Pushkin.

Her attacks on my philosophy were original. She used ironically to declare that all our dialectical subtleties and elaborate constructions were just the beating of the drum, the noise with which cowards try to drown the terrors of their conscience.

‘You will never,’ she used to say, ‘get to a personal god, nor to the immortality of the soul, by any philosophy, and none of you have the courage to be atheists and reject the life beyond the grave. You are too human not to be horrified by those conclusions, so you invent your logical miracles to throw dust in the eyes and to arrive at what is given by religion in a simple and childlike way.’

I objected, I argued, but I was inwardly conscious that I had no complete proofs and that she had a firmer footing on her ground than I on mine.

To complete my discomfiture, the inspector of the Medical Board must needs turn up to support me; he was good-natured man, but one of the most ridiculous Germans I have ever met. A devoted worshipper of Oken and Carus,[21] he argued by means of quotations, had a ready-made answer for everything, never had doubts about anything, and imagined that he was completely in accord with me.

The doctor lost his temper, grew furious the more readily as he could not hold his own by other means, looked upon L—— D——’s views as feminine caprice, took refuge in Schelling’s lectures on the academic doctrine, and read extracts from Burdach’s _Physiology_ to prove that there is an eternal and spiritual element in man, and that some personal _Geist_ is hidden in nature.

L—— D——, who had long ago passed through these ‘back premises’ of pantheism, confuted him, and, smiling, glanced from him to me. She was, of course, more in the right than he, and I was vexed and conscientiously racking my brains, while the good doctor was laughing triumphantly. These arguments interested me so much that I set to work upon Hegel with new zest. The worry of my uncertainty did not last long, the truth flashed before my eyes and began to grow clearer and clearer; I inclined to my opponent’s side, but not in the way she wished.

‘You are perfectly right,’ I said to her, ‘and I am ashamed of having argued against you; of course there is no personal spirit, nor immortality of the soul, and that is why it has been so hard to prove that there is. See how simple and natural it all becomes without those gratuitous assumptions.’

She was troubled by my words but quickly recovered herself and said: ‘I am sorry for you, but perhaps it is for the best, you will not long remain in that position, it is too empty and depressing, while,’ she added, smiling, ‘our doctor is incurable, he has no fears, he is in such a fog that he does not see one step before him.’

Her face was paler than usual, however.

Two or three months later, Ogaryov passed through Novgorod. He brought me Feuerbach’s _Wesen des Christenthums_; after reading the first pages I leapt up with joy. Away with the trappings of masquerade, no more muddle and equivocations! We are free men and not the slaves of Xanthos, there is no need for us to wrap the truth in myth.

In the heat of my philosophic ardour I began my series of articles on ‘Dilettantism in Science,’ in which, among other things, I paid the doctor out.

Now let us go back to Byelinsky.

A few months after his departure to Petersburg in 1840 we too arrived there. I did not go to see him. Ogaryov took my quarrel with Byelinsky very much to heart; he knew that Byelinsky’s absurd theory was a passing malady, and, indeed, I knew it too. But Ogaryov was kinder. At last by his letters he brought about a meeting. Our interview was at first cold, unpleasant, and strained, but neither Byelinsky nor I was very diplomatic and in the course of trivial conversation I mentioned the article on ‘The Anniversary of Borodino.’ Byelinsky jumped up from his seat and, flushing crimson, said with great simplicity, ‘Well, thank God, we’ve come to it at last. I am so stupid I did not know how to begin.... You’ve won the day; three or four months in Petersburg have done more to convince me than all the arguments. Let us forget that nonsense. It is enough to say that the other day I was dining at a friend’s and there was an officer of the Engineers there; my friend asked him if he would like to make my acquaintance. “Is that the author of the article on ‘The Anniversary of Borodino’?” the officer asked him in his ear. “Yes.” “No, thank you very much,” he answered dryly. I heard it all and could not restrain myself. I pressed the officer’s hand warmly and said to him: “You’re an honourable man, I respect you....” What more would you have?’

From that moment up to Byelinsky’s death we went hand in hand. Byelinsky, as was to be expected, fell upon his former theory with all the stinging vehemence of his language and all his furious energy. The position of many of his friends was not very much to be envied. _Plus royalistes que le roi_, with the courage of misfortune they tried to defend their theories, while not averse to an honourable truce. All those who had enough sense and vitality went over to Byelinsky’s side; only the obstinate formalists and pedants were left far behind. Some of them reached such a point of German suicide through dead and scholastic learning that they lost all living interest and were themselves lost, leaving no trace. Others became orthodox Slavophils. Strange as the combination of Hegel and Stefan Yavorsky[22] may appear, it is more possible than might be supposed; the Byzantine theology is just such a superficial casuistry and play with logical formulas as Hegel’s dialectics, formally understood. Some of the articles in the _Moskvityanin_ are a magnificent instance of the extremes to which, with talent, the unnatural union of philosophy and religion can be brought.

Byelinsky by no means abandoned Hegel’s philosophy when he renounced his one-sided interpretation of it. Quite the contrary, it is from this point that his living, apt, original combination of philosophical with revolutionary ideas begins. I regard Byelinsky as one of the most remarkable figures of the period of Nicholas. After the liberalism which had somehow survived 1825 in Polevoy, after the gloomy article of Tchaadayev, Byelinsky appears on the scene with his caustic scepticism, won by suffering, and his passionate interest in every question. In a series of critical articles he touches in season and out of season upon everything, everywhere true to his hatred of authority and often rising to poetic inspiration. The book he reviewed usually served him as a starting-point, but he abandoned it half-way and threw himself into some question. The line ‘That’s what kindred are’ in _Onyegin_ is enough for him to summon family life before the judgment seat and to pick family relations to pieces down to the last shred. Who does not remember his articles on ‘The Tarantass,’[23] on ‘Turgenev’s Parasha,’[24] on ‘Derzhavin,’ on ‘Motchalov,’[25] and ‘Hamlet’? What fidelity there is to his principles, what fearless consistency, what adroitness in navigating between the sandbanks of the censorship, what boldness in his attacks on the aristocracy of literature, on the writers of the first three grades, on the high officials of literature who are always ready to defeat an opponent if not by fair means by foul, if not by criticism then by information to the police. Byelinsky scourged them mercilessly, goading the petty vanity of the frigid mediocre writers of eclogues, lovers of culture, benevolence, and sentimentality; he turned into derision their precious ideas, the poetical dreams fostered by their elderly brains, their naïveté, hidden under an Anna ribbon.

How they hated him for it!

The Slavophils on their side began their official existence with the war upon Byelinsky; he drove them by his taunts to the _murmolka_ and the _zipun_[26]; one need only recall that Byelinsky had formerly written in _Notes of the Fatherland_, while Kireyevsky called his excellent journal _The European_; no better proof than these titles could be found to show that at first the difference was only between shades of opinion and not between parties.

Byelinsky’s articles were awaited with feverish expectation in Petersburg and Moscow from the 25th of every month. Half a dozen times the students would call in at the coffee-houses to ask whether the _Notes of the Fatherland_ had been received; the heavy volume was snatched from hand to hand. ‘Is there an article of Byelinsky’s?’ ‘Yes,’ and it was devoured with feverish interest, with laughter, with argument ... and three or four cherished convictions and reputations were no more.

Sokobelev, the governor of the Peter-Paul fortress, might well say in jest to Byelinsky when he met him on the Nevsky Prospect: ‘When are you coming to us? I have a nice warm little cell all ready that I am keeping for you.’

I have spoken in another book of Byelinsky’s development and of his literary activity, here I will only say a few words about himself.

Byelinsky was very shy and quite lost his head in an unfamiliar or very numerous company; he knew this and did the most absurd things in trying to conceal it. Ketscher persuaded him to go to visit a lady; as they approached her house Byelinsky became more and more depressed, kept asking whether they could not go another day, and talked of having a headache. Ketscher, who knew him, would accept no excuse. When they arrived Byelinsky set off running as soon as they got out of the sledge, but Ketscher caught him by the overcoat and led him to be introduced to the lady.

He sometimes put in an appearance at Prince Odoevsky’s literary diplomatic evenings. At these there were crowds of people who had nothing in common except a certain apprehension of and aversion for each other: clerks from the Embassies and Saharov[27] the archaeologist, painters and A. Meiendorf,[28] several councillors of the cultured sort, Ioakinth Bitchurin[29] from Pekin, people who were half gendarmes and half literary men, others who were wholly gendarmes and not at all literary men. A—— K—— was so much in evidence there that generals took him for an authority. The hostess looked with inner grief upon her husband’s vulgar tastes, and gave way to them much as Louis-Philippe at the beginning of his reign indulged the tastes of his electors by inviting to the balls at the Tuileries whole _rez-de-chaussées_ of brace-makers, grocers, shopkeepers, shoemakers, and other worthy citizens.

Byelinsky was utterly lost at these evenings, between some Saxon ambassador who did not understand a word of Russian and some officer of the secret police who understood even words that were not uttered. He was usually ailing for two or three days afterwards and cursed the man who had persuaded him to go.

One Saturday, as it was New Year’s Eve, Odoevsky took it into his head to mix punch _en petit comité_ when the principal guests had dispersed. Byelinsky would certainly have gone away, but he was prevented by a barricade of furniture; he was somehow stuck in a corner and a little table was set before him with wine and glasses on it; Zhukovsky in the white trousers of his uniform, with gold braid on them, was sitting sideways opposite him. Byelinsky bore it in patience a long time, but, seeing no chance of his lot improving, he began moving the table a little; the table yielded at first, then lurched over and fell with a bang on the floor, while the bottle of Bordeaux very deliberately began to empty itself over Zhukovsky. He jumped up while the red wine began to trickle down his trousers; there was a great fuss and to-do, one servant rushed up with a napkin to rub the wine into the other parts of the trousers, and another picked up the broken wine-glasses ... while this bustle was going on Byelinsky disappeared and, though it was not long before his end, ran home on foot.

Dear Byelinsky! how angry and upset he was by such incidents long afterwards, with what horror he used to recall them, walking up and down the room and shaking his head without the trace of a smile.

But in that shy man, that frail body, there dwelt a mighty spirit, the spirit of a gladiator! Yes, he was a powerful fighter! he could not preach or lecture, what he needed was disputation. If he met with no objection, if he was not stirred to irritation, he did not speak well, but when he felt stung, when his cherished convictions were touched upon, when the muscles of his cheeks began to quiver and his voice broke, then he was worth seeing; he pounced upon his opponent like a panther, he tore him to pieces, made him ridiculous, made him a piteous object, and incidentally developed his own thought, with extraordinary force, with extraordinary poetry. The discussion would often end in blood which flowed from the sick man’s throat; pale, gasping, with his eyes fixed on the man with whom he was speaking, he would lift his handkerchief to his mouth with shaking hand and stop, deeply mortified, crushed by his physical weakness. How I loved and how I pitied him at those moments!

Worried by the financial sharks of literature, morally fettered by the censorship, surrounded in Petersburg by people little sympathetic to him, and consumed by a disease to which the Baltic climate was fatal, he became more and more irritable. He shunned outsiders, was savagely shy, and sometimes spent weeks together in gloomy inactivity. Then the publishers sent note after note demanding copy, and the enslaved writer, grinding his teeth, took up his pen and wrote the venomous articles quivering with indignation, the indictments which so impressed their readers.