It was just this quality of our gatherings that dull pedants and tedious scholars failed to understand. They saw the meat and the bottles, but they saw nothing else. Feasting goes with fullness of life ; ascetic people are usually dry and egoistical. We were not monks: we lived on all sides and, sitting round the table, learnt rather more and did no less than those fasting toilers who grub in the backyards of science.
I will not have anything said against you, my friends, nor against that bright, splendid time; I think of it with more than love: almost with envy. We were not like the emaciated monks of Zurbaran; we did �ot weep over the sins of this world-we only sympathised with its sufferings, and were ready with a smile for anything, and not depressed by a foretaste of our sacrifices to come. Ascetics who are for ever morose have always excited my suspicion; if they are not pretending, either their mind or their stomach is out of order.
Moscow, Petersburg and Novgorod 28 7
Our 'OpponeJlts'
Yes, we were their opponents, but verr strange ones. We had the same love, but not the same war of loving--and like Janus or the two-headed eagle we looked in different directions, though the heart that beat within us was but one.
The Bell, p. go (On the death of K. S. Aksakov) SIDE BY SIDE with our circle were our opponents, nos amis les ennemis, or more correctly, nos ennemis les amis-the Moscow Slavophils.
The conflict between us ended long ago and we have held out our hands to each other; but in the early 'forties we could not but be antagonistic-without being so ,.;e could not have been true to our principles. We might have been able not to quarrel with them over their childish homage to the childhood of our history; but accepting their Orthodoxy as meant in earnest, seeing their ecclesiastical intolerance on both sides-in relation to learning and in relation to sectarianism-we were bound to take up a hostile attitude to them. We saw in their doctrines fresh oil for anointing the Tsar, new chains laid upon thought, new subordination of conscience to the servile Byzantine
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Church.
The Slavophils are to blame for our having so long failed to understand either the Russian people or its history; their ikonpainter's ideals and incense smoke hindered us from seeing the realities of the people's existence and the foundations of village life.
The Orthodoxy of the Slavophils, their historical patriotism and over-sensitive, exaggerated feeling of nationality were called forth by the extremes on the other side. The importance of their outlook, what was true and essential in it, lay not in Orthodoxy, and not in exclusive nationalism, but in those elements of Russian life which they unearthed from under the manure of a n artificial civilisation.
The idea of nationality is in itself a conservative idea-the demarcation of one's rights, the opposition of self to another; it includes both the Judaic conception of superiority of race, and the aristocratic claim to purity of blood and to the right of primo-
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geniture. Nationalism as a standard, as a war-cry, is only surrounded with the halo of revolution when a people is fighting for its independence, when it is trying to throw off a foreign yoke. That is why national feeling with all its exaggerations is full of poetry in Italy and in Poland, while in Germany it is vulgar.
For us to display our nationalism would be even more absurd than it is for the Germans; even those who abuse us do not doubt it; they hate us from fear, but they do not refuse to recognise us, as Metternich did Italy. We have had to set up our nationalism against the Germanised government and our own renegades.
This domestic struggle could not be raised to the epic level. The appearance of the Slavophils as a school, and as a special doctrine, \Vas quite in place; but if the Slavophils had had no other standard than the banner of the Church, no other ideal than the Domostroy1 and the very Russian but extremely tedious life before Peter I, they v\·ould have passed away as an eccentric party of changelings and cranks belonging to another age. The strength and the future of the Slavophils did not lie in that.
Their treasure may have been hidden in the liturgical objects of their Church, with their old-fashioned workmanship ; but its value was to be found neither in vessels nor in forms. They did not distinguish them in the beginning.
To their own historical traditions were added the traditions of all the Slav peoples. Our Slavophils sympathised with the Western Panslavists for identity of cause and policy, forgetting that exclusive nationalism there was at the same time the cry of a people oppressed by a foreign yoke. Western Panslavism on its first appearance was taken by the Austrian government itself for a conservative movement. It developed at the melancholy epoch of the Congress of Vienna. It was a time of restorations and resurrections of all sorts, a period of every possible Lazarus, fresh or stinking. Alongside Teutschthum,2 which looked for the renaissance of the happy da.n of Barbarossa and the Hohenstaufens, Czech Panslavism made its appearance. The governments were pleased with this movement and at first encouraged the development of international hatreds; the masses once I The Domostroy was a sixteenth-century hook of moral precepts and practical advice \\Titten by the priest Sylvester, the a<h·iser of han the Terrible. ( Tr. )
2 Deutschthum was the nationalist mov!'ment in Germany. It was considered more patriotic to spell it Teutschthum. ( Tr.)
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more clung round the idea of racial kinship, the bond of which was drawn tighter, and were again turned aside from the general demands for the improvement of their lot. Frontiers became more impassable, ties and sympathies between peoples were brok�n. It need hardly be said that only among apathetic and feeble peoples was nationalism a llowed to awaken, and only so long as it confined itself to nrchaeological and linguistic disputes. In Milan and in Poland where nntionalism wns by no means confined to grammar, it was held i n with spiked gloves.
Czech Panslavism provoked Slavonic sympathies in Russia.
Slavanism, or Russianism, not as a theory, not ns a doctrine, but as a wounded national feeling, as an obscure memory and a true instinct, as antagonism to an exclusively foreign influence, had existed ever since Peter I cut off the first Russian beard.
There has never been any interval in the resistance to the Petersburg culture terrorism ; it reappears in the form of the mutinous Streltsy, executed, qunrtPred, hanged o!l the crPnellations of the Kremlin and there shot by Menshikov nnd other buffoons of the Tsar; in the form of the Tsarevich Alexey poisoned in the dungeons of the Petersburg fortress; ns the party of the Dolgorukys in the reign of Peter II ; as the hatred for the Germans at the time of Biron; as Pugachev in the time of Catherine I I ; ns Catherine herself, the Orthodox German in the reign of the Prussian Holsteiner, Peter III ; as Elizabeth who ascended the throne through the support of the Slavophils of those days (the people in Moscow expected all the Germans to be massacred at her coronation) .