'\Yell, I don't S('e any necessity for that.' anS\H'red Chaadaye\'.
2! A ref('rence to the mutiny of the Semiinovsky Regiment of Guards in 1 820. I. V. Vasildnkov at that time COi!Hnanded the Corps of Guards.
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absence saved him from almost certain persecution22-about 1 830
he returned.
In Germany Chaadayev made friends with Schelling; the acquaintance probably did a great deal to turn him towards mysticism. In his case it developed into revolutionary Catholicism to which he remained faithful all his life. In his Letter he attributes half the calamities of Russia to the Greek Church, to its severance from the all-embracing unity of the West.
On a Russian, such Catholicism was bound to have an even stronger effect. It formally contained all that was lacking in Russian life which \vas left to itself and oppressed only by the material power, and was seeking a way out by its own instinct alone. The strict ritual and proud independence of the Western Church, its consummate limitedness, its practical applications, its irreversible assurance and supposed removal of all contradictions by its higher unity, by its eternal fata Morgana, and its urbi ct orbi, by its contempt for the temporal power, must easily have dominated an ardent mind which began its education in earnest only after reaching maturity.
When Chaadayev returned to Russia he found there a different society and a different tone. Young as I was, I remember how conspicuously aristocratic society deteriorated and became nastier and more servile after the accession of Nicholas. The dash of the officers of the Guards, the aristocratic independence of the reign of Alexander. had all vanished from 1 826 onwards.
There were germs of a new life springing up, young creatures, not yet fully conscious of themselves, still wearing an open collar a l' enfant, or studying at boarding schools or in lycees. There were young literary men beginning to try their strength and their pen, but all that was still hidden, and did not exist in the world in which Chaadayev lived.
His friends were in penal servitude; at first he was left quite alone in Moscow, then he was joined by Pushkin, and there were two of them and later on Orlov made three. After the death of both these friends Chaadayev often used to point out hvo small patches on the wall above the sofa-back where they used to lean their heads!
22 \\'e now know for certain from Yakushkin's Diarr that Chaadayev was a member of the Decembrist society.
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It is infinitely sad to set side by side Pushkin's two epistles to Chaadayev, separated not only by their life but by a whole epoch, the life of a whole generation, racing hopefully forward and rudely flung back again. Pushkin as a youth writes to his friend:
Comrade, have faith. That dawn will break
Of deep intoxicating joy;
Russia will spring from out her sleep
And on the fragments of a fallen tyranny
Our names will be recorded,23
but the dawn did not rise; instead Nicholas rose to the throne, and Pushkin writes:
Chaadarev, dost thou call to mind
How in the past, by youthful ardour prompted,
I dreamt to add that fatal name
Unto the rest of those that lie in ruins?
. . . But now within my heart by tempests chastened Silence and lassitude prevail, unchallenged,
And with a glow of tender inspiration
Upon the stone by friendship sanctified
l write our names . . _24
Nothing in the world was more opposed to the Slavophils than the hopeless pessimism "vhich was Chaadayev's vengeance on Russian life, the deliberate curse wrung out of him by suffering, with which he summed up his melancholy existence and the existence of a whole period of Russian history. He was bound to awaken violent opposition in them ; with bitterness and dismal malice he offended all that was dear to them, from Moscow downwards.
'In Moscow,' Chaadayev used to say, 'every foreigner is taken to look at the great cannon and the great bell-the cannon which cannot be fired and the bell which fell down before it was rung. It is an amazing town in which the objects of interest are distinguished by their absurdity; or perhaps that great bell without a tongue is a hieroglyph symbolic of this huge, dumb 23 Translated by Juliet Soskice. (R.)
�4 Translated by Juliet Soskice. (R.) These and the preceding verses are quotations. not always exact. from two of A. S. Pushkin's poems To Chaadayev ( 1 8 1 8 and 1 824) . H. attributes a wrong date to the second poem. (A.S.)
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land, inhabited by a race calling themselves Slavs as though wondering at the possession of human speech.'25
Chaadayev and the Slavoph ils alike stood facing the unsolved Sphinx of Russian life, the Sphinx sleeping under the overcoat of the soldier and the watchful eye of the Tsa r; they alike were asking: 'What will come of this? To live like this is impossible: the oppressiveness and absurdity of the present situation 1s obvious and unendurable-where is the way out?'
'There is none,' answered the man of the Petrine epoch of exclusively "'estern civilisation, who in Alexander's reign had believed in th!' European future of Russia. He sadly pointed to what the efforts of a whole age had led to. Culture had only gi,·en new methods of oppression, the church had become a mere shadow undl'r which the police lay hidden ; the people still tolerated and endured, the government still crushed and oppressed.
The history of other nations is the story of their emancipation.
Russian history is the development of serfdom and autocracy.'
Peter's uplll'aval made us into the worst that men can be made into-l'nlightcrzed slaves. \Ve have suffered enough, in this oppressiw, troubled moral condition, misunderstood by the p!'ople, struck down by the gowrnment-it is time to find rest, time to bring peace to one's soul, to find something to lean on . . . this almost meant 'time to die,' and Chaadayev thought to find in the Catholic Church the rest promised to all that labour anu arc heavy laden.
From the point of view of "'estern civilisation in the form in which it found expression at the time of restorations, from the point of view of Petrine Russia, this atti tude was completely j ustifieu. The Sla vophils solved the question in a different way.
Their solution impl ied a true consciousness of the living soul in the pPople ; their instinct was more penetrating than their reasoning. Thcv saw that the existing condition of Russia, however oppr<'ssive. was not a fatal disease. And while Chaadayev had a faint glimmer of the possibility of saving individuals, but not the people. the Slavophils had a clear perception of the ruin of individuals in the grip of that epoch, and faith in the salvation of the people.
'The way out is with 11s.' said thP Slavophils, 'the way out lies in renouncing tlH• PPtPrslnu·g period, in going back to the people from whom wp h avp hPen sPparated by foreign education and fon•ign go\·Prnment; let us return to the old ways ' '