Before our exile there had been no great sympathy between our circle and Stankevich's. They disliked our almost exclusively political tendency, while we disliked their almost exclusively speculative interests. They considered us to be 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 \vas still in Berlin. and poor Stankevich 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, Stankevich 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' set on the pale, youthful brow that bore the imprint of
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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. An exclusively speculative tendency is utterly opposed to the Russian temperament, and we shall soon see how the Russian spirit transformed Hegel's teaching and how the vitality of our nature asserted itself in spite of all those who took the tonsure of philosophical monasticism. But at the beginning of 1 840 the young people surrounding Ogarev 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 from captivity or banishment, that is, with respectful indulgence, \Vith 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 an unconditional acceptance of Hegel's Phenomenology and Logic, and their interpretation of them, 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 desperate disputes for several nights together. People who loved each other avoided each other 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 pamphlet published in Berlin or other provincial or district towns of German philosophy \vas ordered and read to tatters and smudges, and the leaves fell out in a fe\v days, if only there was a mention of Hegel in it. Just as Francoeur in Paris wept with emotion when he heard that in Russia he was taken for a great mathematician and that all the younger generation made use of the same letters as he did when they solved equations of various powers, tears might have been shed by all those forgotten vVerders, Marheinekes, Michelets, Ottos, Watkes, Schallers, Rosenkranzes, and even Arnold Ruge himsel£,5 whom Heine so wonderfully well dubbed 'the gate-keeper of Hegelian philos-5 Arnold Huge ( 1 802-80) began his political carePr with six years' imprisonment in connection with the Burschrrzschaft mov!'ment, founded the Drutsche Jahrbiicher, the journal of the Young Hegelian School. and some ten years later Die Reform, a more definitely political paper. From 1 849 he Ji,·ed in England, advocated a universal democratic state, and wrote many books, of which his autobiography is now of most interest.
( Tr.)
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ophy,' if they had known wha t bloodshed, what declarations they were exciting in Moscow between the Maroseyka and the Mokhovaya,6 how they were being read, and how they were being bought.
The young philosophers 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 seven Russian cases.
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 Perevoshchikov, the well known astronomer, described this language as the 'twittering of birds.'
No one in those days would have hesitated to write a phrase l ike 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 of its own, 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 none of the catechumens understood it. A key was needed for it_ as for a letter in cypher. The key is now no mystery; when they understood it, people \Vere 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 ecclesiastico-scientific jargon was the more unpardonable' sinn· the leading characteristic of our language is thP extraord inarY pase with which eVf'rything is expressPd in it-abstract idPas, the lvrical emotions of the heart, 'lifp's momP-like fl itting,'' thP cry of indignation, sparkling mischiPf. and shaking passion.
6 V. P. Botkin liYcd in thP Maroseyka, and GranoYsky, Belinsky and Bakunin stayed with him there at Yarious times. :Moscow Uniwrsity is in the MokhoYaya. (A.S.)
7 From A. S. Pushkin: Verses IVrillen during a Night of S!ecplt•ssncss.
(A.S.)
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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 schoolboyish and literary; it was that learned conception of simple things at which Goethe mocks with such genius in the conversation of Mephistopheles with the student. Everything that in reality was direct, every simple feeling, was exalted into abstract categories and came back from them without a drop of living blood, a pale, algebraic shadow. In all this there was a naivete 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 fortuitous manifestation. The very tear that started to the eye was strictly referred to its proper classification, to Gemuth or 'the tragic in the heart.'