The Senate and the Synod, the civilian departments and the military authorities, the assemblies of the nobility and the beau monde feared not only the opposition, but any originality; they feared that a suspicion of having opinions might fall upon them. Respectable people watched with inner horror the courage of N. S. Mordvinov, who dared to not only have but to voice opinions. Nicholas was barely able to contain his rage against the impertinent old man.13
Only literature, only the lecture halls, protested constantly, protested as much as they could, with silence and absences when a word was not possible; with forbidden verses that passed from person to person, and hints that slipped through the censor's fingers. The current corruption of literature and educational institutions dates from the present reign. Paid-off journalists and police-professors, preaching a philosophy of slavery and writing denunciations of entire conferences, are entirely new phenomena.14 During the entire Nicholaevan era, there was no lecture hall that would have listened with sympathy to the doctrine of blind obedience; conservative youth and fans of the government did not exist at all then. For the development of this kind of moral rickets, which is spreading far and wide, we are very much obliged to the teaching and journalism of recent years.
Thus, we are not the ones who assigned historical importance to the academic-literary quarrel of the thirties in the intellectual development of Russia—that is the way it actually was. We will not enlarge on the quarrel itself, so much has been written about it. We will only remind the reader that one side sought to continue the Petrine coup in a revolutionary sense, acquiring for Russia everything that had been worked out by other nations since i789, bringing to our soil English institutions, French ideas, and German metaphysics. In rating Western forms of civic life more highly than the hatchet job of Peter and his successors, they were entirely correct, but in accepting them as the sole life-saving human forms, appropriate to every way of life, they fell into the eternal error of the French revolutionaries. Their opponents objected that the forms developed for Western life may have had a universal development, but, along with them, one must also preserve particular national elements. [. . .]
Neither one nor the other came to a clear understanding, but along the way many questions were raised; the February revolution arrived when this argument was in full swing. [. . .]
The persecution against the printed word and academia that began after the revolution of i848 exceeded all limits of what was stupid and vile; it was nasty, ridiculous, and it reduced literature to a gloomy silence, but it did not get it to speak in the tone of Nicholaevan conservatism. The same thing happened in academia; stifled outwardly, it remained true within to its sacred mission of advocacy and humanization. And if professors in the capitals were at times constrained by the tiresome surveillance and denunciations, teaching went on as it had in provincial universities, gymnasia, seminaries, military schools, etc. This decentralization of education is extremely important [. . .] it infiltrated more deeply and disappeared at the very limits of literacy. The government's efforts came to nothing.
Pedagogy withstood what was in its own way a chef d'oeuvre—Rostov- tsev's instructions to the teachers of military-training establishments.15
Who was able to do this?
This was done by a new formation of people, who had risen below and who introduced by degrees their new elements into the intellectual life of Russia. This group assumed more and more rights of citizenship during this time, as Nicholas knocked off the elite and with coarse strokes mutilated the nervously developed hothouse organizations.
The renegades of all social groups, these new people, these moral razno- chintsy, made up not a social class, but a milieu, in which in the foreground were teachers and literary men—working literary men, and not dilettantes— students who had graduated and those who had not finished their course of study, lower-level officials from the universities and from the seminaries, the lower gentry, the children of officers, officers who had graduated from military schools, et al. New people, humble people—they were not as noticeable but just as morally liberated as those who came before them, just as constrained in a material way. Poverty lends its own kind of circumspect strength and structure.
The Rus of gentry manor houses, in which, up till then, intellectual and literary development had been primarily concentrated, was, apart from persecution, in a false position. It could not advance a single idea without crossing over the barrier that protected its class privileges. Connected by its education to the forms of European life, it was connected by serfdom to the Petersburg regime; it had to renounce its exclusive rights or to unwittingly introduce a contradiction into every issue. For it, as a social group, there was only one future—to limit the supreme power of the tsar with an oligarchic Duma, but they did not have the material strength to do this. They lacked the moral strength to leave their class. This type of Anglophile and liberal gentry, stopped on their headlong path to parliamentary freedom by the emancipation of the serfs with land, will remain on the tombstone of Russia's noble gentry like gargoyles, which medieval architects used to decorate the tops of church pillars.
Aristocratic Russia retreated to a supporting role, and its voice began to grow weak; maybe, like Nicholas, it was embarrassed by the events of i848. In order to remain popular in literature, it had to abandon urban life, take up a hunting rifle and slaughter, on the ground and on the wing, the wildfowl of serfdom.16
Another force came to relieve them, another group took the place of the exhausted leaders and soldiers.
The sound of Chaadaev's funeral oration still sounded in people's ears; while stirring much in one's breast, it gave nothing but consolation in the other world, some kind of distant future [. . .] but already in hackneyed journalism, boring in Moscow and dissipated in Petersburg, features were being engraved of a real representative of young Russia, a genuine revolutionary in our literature.
Belinsky was an unusually free person, and nothing inhibited him: neither the prejudices of scholasticism nor the prejudices of his surroundings. He appeared, full of questions and in search of solutions, not playing around with conclusions and not fearing them. He openly made mistakes and sincerely looked for another solution; he had one truth in his sights and nothing except for that. Belinsky came on the stage without a crest, without a banner, without a diploma; he belonged to no church and no social class, he was bound by nothing and had sworn no one an oath. Nothing would be spared by him, but for that reason he could sympathize with everyone. The first moment when, bitten by the serpent of German philosophy, he was attracted by the rationality of all that existed, he fearlessly wrote his Borodino essay.17 What frightening purity must you possess, what an original kind of independence and limitless freedom, to write something on the order of a justification for Nicholas at the beginning of the forties! [. . .]