Just as in mathematics-only there with more justificationmen do not go back to the definition of space, movement, force, but continue the dialectical development of their laws and qualities; so also in the formal understanding of philosophy, after once becoming accustomed to the first principles, men go on merely drawing deductions. Anyone new to the subject, who has not stupefied himself by the method's being turned into a habit, grasps at just these traditions, these dogmas which have been accepted as thoughts. To people who have long been studying the subject, and are consequently not free from predilections, it seems astonishing that others should not understand things that are 'perfectly clear.'
How can anyone fail to understand such a simple idea as, for instance, 'that the soul is immortal and that what perishes is only the personality,' a thought so successfully developed in his book by the Berlin Michelet; or the still simpler truth that the absolute spirit is a personality, conscious of itself through the world, and at the same time having its own self-consciousness?
All these things seemed so easy to our friends, they smiled so condescendingly at 'French' objections, that for some time I was stifled by them and worked and worked to reach a precise understanding of their philosophic jargon.
Fortunately scholasticism is as little natural to me as mysticism, and I stretched its bow until the string snapped and the blindfold dropped from my eyes.
Two or three months later, Ogarev passed through Novgorod. He brought me Feuerbach's Wesen des Christenthums; after reading the first pages I leapt up with joy. Down with the trapping of masquerade; away with the stammering allegory! We are free men and not the slaves of Xanthos;8 there is no need for us to wrap the truth in myth.
In the heat of my philosophic ardour I began my series of R Aesop is said to have been the slave of Xanthos, a philosopher of Samos.
(R.)
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articles on 'Dilettantism in Science,' in which, among other things, I paid the doctor out.
Now let us go back to Belinsky.
A few months after his departure to Petersburg in 1 840 we arrived there too. I did not go to see him. Ogarev took my quarrel with Belinsky very much to heart; he knew that Belinsky's absurd opinion was a passing malady, and indeed I knew it too, but Ogarcv was kinder. At last by his letters he almost forced a meeting on us. Our interview was at first cold, unpleasant and strained, but neither Belinsky nor I was very diplomatic and in the course of trivial conversation I mentioned the article on 'The Anniversary of Borodino.' Belinsky jumped up from his seat and, flushing crimson, said with great simplicity,
'Well, thank God, we've come to it at last. Otherwise I am so stupid I should not have known how to begin . . . . You've won ; three or four months in Petersburg have done more to convince me than all the arguments. Let us forget this nonsense. It is enough to tell you that the other day I was dining at a friend's and there was an officer of the Engineers there ; my friend asked him if he would like to make my acquaintance. "Is that the author of the article on The Anniversary of Borodino' "? the officer asked him in his ear. "Yes." "No, thank you very much,"
he answered dryly. I heard it all and could not restrain myself. I pressed the officer's hand warmly and said to him: "You're an honourable man, I respect you . . . .
" What more would you
have?'
From that moment up to Belinsky's death we went hand in hand.
Belinsky, as was to be expected, fell upon his former opinion with all the stinging \'('hemence of his language and all his furious energy. The position of many of his friends was not very much to be envied. Plus royalistcs que lc roi, with the courage of misfortune they triPd to defend their theories, while not averse to an honourable truce. All those with sense and vitality went over to Belinsky's sidP; only the obstinate formalists and pedants held a loof. Some of thPm reached such a point of German suicide through dead, scholastic learning that they lost all living interest and were themsPlves lost without a trace. Others became orthodox Slavophils. Strange as the combination of Hegel and Stefan Yavorsky9 may appear, it is more possible than might be
!I S tefan Ya\'orsky was a famous monk and theologian of the eighteenth century. (Tr.)
Moscow, Petersburg and Novgorod 239
supposed; Byzantine theology is just such a superficial casuistry and play with logical formulas as Hegel's dialectics, formally accepted. Some of the articles in the Moskvityanin are a triumphant demonstration of the extremes to which, with talent, the sodomitical union of philosophy and religion can go.
Belinsky by no means abandoned Hegel's philosophy when he renounced his one-sided interpretation of it. Quite the contrary, it is from this point that there begins his living, apt, original combination of philosophical with revolutionary ideas. I regard Belinsky as one of the most remarkable figures of the period of Nicholas. After the libt>ralism which had somehow survived 182510 in Polevoy, after the gloomy article of Chaadayev,1 1 Belinsky appears on the scene with his caustic scepticism, won by suffering, and his passionate interest in every question. I n a series of critical articles he touches in season and out of season upon everything, true everpvhere to his hatred of authority and often rising to poetic inspiration. The book he was reviewing usually served him as a starting-point, but he a bandoned it half-way and plunged i nto some other question. The line 'That's what kindred are' in Onegin is enough for him to summon family life before the judgment seat and to pick blood relationships to pieces down to the last thread. What fidelity there is to his principles, what dauntless consistency, what adroitness in navigating between the shoals of the censorship, what boldness in his attacks on the literary aristocracy, on the writers of the first three grades, on the secretaries of state of literature who were always ready to defeat an opponent by foul means if not by fair, if not by criticism then by delation? Belinsky scourged them mercilessly, tearing to pieces the petty vanity of the conceited, limited writers of eclogues, lovers of culture, benevolence and tenderness; he turned into derision their dear, their heartfelt notions, the poetical dreams flO\vering under their grey locks, their naivete, hidden under an Anna ribbon.
How they hated him for it!
The Slavophils on their sidf' began their official existence with the war upon Belinsky; he drove them by his taunts to the murmolka and the zipum. 1 2 It is worth rcmf'mlwring that Belinsky had formerly written in Notes of the Fatherland, while 10 The accession of Nicholas I and execution of the Decembrists. ( D.J1.1. ) 11 His first 'Philosophical Letter,' published in the Telescope in 1 836.
( A .S.)
I :? Jl,furmolka, a peasant cap, and dpum, a long homespun peasant coat.
( Tr.)