Thus, on the one side, a vague aspiration to throw off the despotic guardian who was paralyzed by the consciousness of alienation from the people. On the other side, there was the repressive specter of the imperial state's enormous power, against which it was possible to lay mines underground, but impossible to even think of fighting face to face.
What sort of protest on behalf of Poland was possible in i83i? Hidden sympathy—that existed, there were verses that burst forth with tears, there was the enthusiastic reception of exiles, and the university youth (at least in Moscow) were for Poland. The journals and literature had no political significance under the censorship of that time. Society, which had fallen into a serious decline, remained indifferent, although there was a minority who had been raised under Western influence and hated Nicholas for the cavalier nature of his despotism. [. . .]
After that followed years of the most prosaic epoch of the reign of Nicholas. The Poland that survived went abroad, telling other nations of savage suppression [. . .] hatred toward Russia became the common sentiment of women, children, aristocrats, and plebeians. The London rabble grumbled aloud during the visit of Nicholas to England, and Lord Dudley Stuart sent him a note in support of the Poles.8 We had a drop of blood on us, and were marked by our victory over the Poles.
At home, the dreary despotism continued. [. . .]
But thoughts that had arisen within reached maturity, and the word that had been forcibly turned back ate away at the chest, undermined the prison walls, and, while the stockade's facade remained the same, within it a great deal had changed.
At first the pain, the loss of our dearest hopes, and the insults were too fresh, and the humiliations irritated us too much. Many energetic, noble natures were broken, and began to wither away physically or morally. Pecherin sought salvation in Catholicism, and Polezhaev in merrymaking and orgies.9
The question of a way out of this hell, out of this purgatory, became such a tormenting question for a man of reason that, finding no solution, some—as we just said—took flight or fell into a decline while others denied the possibility of a way out, like Chaadaev.10 The poison of profound thought went deeper and deeper, as skepticism and irony were the literary signs of an internally devouring flame. The Byronism of Pushkin and Lermontov was not simply imitation; it was as timely and national for Petrine Russia as Gogol's amazing laughter.
The level at which this work was going on was not accessible to the government—a whip doesn't cut that deeply. Nicholas was a completely uneducated and badly surrounded man; his secret police, compiled from card-sharps, broken-down officers, and petty thieves who had been caught stealing government money, floated on the surface. They were afraid of an impertinent word, a velvet beret a la Karl Sand, and cigars smoked outside; they sought classic conspirators with daggers, cloaks, and oaths, who make frightening sounds in the presence of highly strung women. They could not understand a huge, open conspiracy that had penetrated the soul without an oath and that walked the streets without a Calabrian hat; their fingers were too coarse.[1]
Everyone took part in this conspiracy, not only without having made any deals, but without even suspecting anything—that is how buds ripen, independently of each other and under the influence of the very same atmosphere, making up the general character of spring. Who was not its agent? The student who knew Ryleev's and Polezhaev's verse by heart, going off to be a temporary tutor in a manor house, a physician setting off to serve in a remote part of the country,12 a seminary student coming back to his native village for the vacation, a teacher who read literature to military school students, and all universities, lycees, spiritual and military academies, theaters, corps, Westernizers and Slavophiles—Chaadaev and Polevoy, Belin- sky and Gogol, Granovsky and Khomyakov.
Only native—not Petrine—Russia stood outside this movement. It did not know the Rus in which this movement was taking place, and it was not known there. Until this intellectual effort, until this inner protest, until these pangs of remorse, they had no business with it, and that is only natural. The people had not broken with their way of life in order to rise above it, it was not in their midst that there could or should arise doubts about their path; they continued their spontaneous way of life under the heavy yoke of their serf status, bureaucratic theft, and poverty. [. . .]
After the conquest of Poland, Russia settled in for five years of Nicho- laevan ways in gloomy silence. Society declined more and more, literature remained silent or made distant allusions; only within university walls a living word was sometimes heard and an ardent heart was beating. yes, from time to time the mighty song of Pushkin, contradicting everything that was happening, seemed to prophesy that such a young and broad chest could shoulder a great deal.
People saved themselves individually—some with scholarship, some with art, some with imaginary activity. People individually turned away from everything that surrounded them and observed in the unattainable distance the movement of heavenly bodies in the west, but their inner pain and bewilderment could not quiet down, and they had to suffer through it until they reached the truth and found in themselves a means of expression. Chaadaev's letter represents the first tangible point at which two divergent interpretations branched off.
"Look around you. It's as if everything is on the move, as if we are all wanderers. No one has a fixed sphere of existence, there are no good customs, not only no rules but not even any family focus; there is nothing that would win over or awaken your sympathy or your aspirations; there is nothing constant or indispensable; everything passes and flows by without leaving a trace. It is as if we are billeted at home, like strangers in our families, like migrants in cities."
Genuine social development has not yet begun for the people if the conditions of its life have not been made right; our moral world is in chaotic ferment, in the type of cataclysms that preceded the actual formation of the planet."
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!
This negative consciousness could go no further—this nihilism is almost as tragic as the newer kind. What could be done after such an acknowledgment? Sigh, fold one's arms, and meekly bear the cross of one's native land. [. . .]
Chaadaev's gloomy confession met with a strong rebuff, the rebuff of a man who had been buried alive, the rebuff instinctive faith makes to onesided doubt. The once-again departing Russian thought, like tsar Ivan Vasi- levich, afflicted by illness and weak, listened behind the doors as Chaadaev read a prayer for the dying, and, quitting its deathbed, rushed to declare its right to live.
In the name of what? In the name of the people's way of life and pre- Petrine Russia, i.e., proceeding from the same aversion that their opponent had for the empire. "This is a temporary growth," they said, "foreign rags which have adhered to the body, but only to the skin, so they can be ripped off."
[. . .] The boundaries of the tournament were drawn.
Up until 1848 the pulse of a living heart was felt only in this literary battle.
two or three hundred people, of whom half were very young. But this arithmetic weakness—when the rest were not occupied with anything—meant nothing. A minority, with excited thoughts, faith, and doubt, split off from the drowsy and indifferent masses without having any precise direction, becoming by necessity a secular priesthood, i.e., beginning with propaganda and preaching, they often finish with power and lead their flock along the same path.
The circle of intellectual activity at that time was outside the government, which was completely backward, and outside the people, who were silent in their estrangement; it was located in the book and the lecture hall, in theoretical argument and the scholar's study. And, actually, it was only in literature and the universities that the government still had to keep things in check; only there did life try to emerge from behind the cramped shores of censorship and surveillance, and only there could resilience still be felt. Literature and educational institutions were the only civically valiant, honest spheres of activity in the unyielding Russia of that time.