In the very jaw of the monster these children stand out unlike other children ; they grow, develop, and begin to live an utterly different life. Weak, insignificant, unsupported-nay, on the contrary, persecuted by all, they may easily perish, leaving not the smallest trace, but they survive, or, if they die half-way, not 15 Og-arev. having- left Russia for ever, came to H. in London on 9th April, 1 856. (A.S. )
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
246
everything dies \vith them. They are the rudimentary germs, the embryos of history, barely perceptible, barely existing, like all embryos in general.
Little by little groups of them are formed. What is more nearly akin to them gathers round their centre-points; then the groups repel one another. This dismemberment gives them width and many-sidedness for their development; after developing to the end, that is to the extreme, the branches unite again by whatever names they may be called-Stankevich's circle, the Slavophils, or our little coterie.
The leading characteristic of them all is a profound feeling of alienation from official Russia, from their environment, and at the same time an impulse to get out of it-and in some a vehement desire to get rid of it.
The objection that these circles, unnoticed both from above and from below. form an exceptional, an extraneous, an unconnected phenomenon. that the education of the majority of these young people was pxotic, strang!', and that they sooner express a translation into Russian of French and German ideas than anything of their own, seems to us quite groundless.
Possibly at the Pnd of th!' last century and the beginning of this there was in the aristocracy a fringe of Russian foreigners who had sundPred all ti!'s with the national J ifp ; but they had neither living int!'rPsts. nor coteries based on convictions, nor a literaturP of th!'ir own. ThPy wer!' sterile and became extinct.
Victims of PPter's brPak with the people, they remained eccentric and whimsical, they were not merely superfluous but undeserving of pity. The war of 1 81 2 sPt a tPrm to them-the older gPnt'ration were living out their time, and none of the younger dev!'lopt>d in tha t dirPction. To includ!' among them men of the stamp of P. Ya. Chaadaypv would be a most fearful mistake.
Protest, r!'jt>ction, hatrt>d of one's country if you will, has a completely different significanc!' from indifferent aloofness.
Bvron, lashing at English life, fiPeing from England as if from the plaguP, remained a typical Englishman. Ht>ine, trying, from anger at th!' abominahlt> political condition of G!'rmany, to turn FrPnchman. rpmainPd a g<>nnint> German. The highest protest aga inst Judaisw-Christianity-is lill!'d with the spirit of Judaism . ThP rupturp of thP sta ll'S of North America with England could lead to war and hatrt>d, hut it could not make the North Americans un-English.
As a rule it is with great difficulty that men abandon their physiological IIIPIIIories and the mould in which they are cast by
Moscow, Petersburg and Novgorod 247
heredity; to do so a man must be either peculiarly unpassioned and featureless or absorbed in abstract pursuits. The impersonality of mathematics and the unhuman objectivity of nature do not call forth those sides of the soul and do not awaken them ; but as soon as we touch upon questions of life, of art, of morals, in which a man is not only an observer and investigator but at the same time himself a participant, then we find a physiological limit-which it is very hard to cross with one's old blood and brains unless one can erase from them all traces of the songs of the cradle, of the fields and the hills of home, of the customs and whole setting of the past.
The poet or the artist in his truest work always belongs to the people. Whatever he does, whatever aim and thought he may have in his work, he expresses, \vhether he will or not, some elements of the popular character and expresses them more profoundly and more clearly than the very history of the people.
Even whf'n renouncing !'verything national, the artist does not lose the chief features from which it can be recognised to what people he belongs. Both in the Greek lphigcnia and in the Oriental Divan Goethe was a German. Poets really are, as the Romans called thf'm, proph!'ts; only they utter not what is not and what will be by chance, but what is unrecognised, what exists in the dim consciousness of the masses, what is already slumbering in it.
Everything that has !'xisted from time immemorial in the soul of the Anglo-Saxon p!'oplP is held together, as if by a ring, by personality alone; and every fibre, every hint, every attempt, which has slovdy come down from generation to generation, unconscious of itself, has taken on form and language.
Probably no one supposes that the England of the time of Elizabeth-particularly the majority of the people-had a precise understanding of Shakespeare; they have no precise understanding of him even now-but then they have no precise understanding of themselvPs either. But when an Englishman goes to the theatre he understands Shakespeare instinctively, through sympathy, of that I have no doubt. At the moment when he is listening to thf' play, something becomes clearer and more familiar to him. One would have thought tha t a people so capable of rapid comprehension as the French might have understood Shakespeare too. The character of Hamlet, for instance, is so universally human, especially in the stage of doubts and irresolution, in the consciousness of some black d!'eds being perpetrated round about tllf'm, some betrayal of the great in
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
248
favour of the mean and trivial, that it is hard to imagine that he should not be understood; but in spite of every trial and effort, Hamlet remains alien to the Frenchman.
If the aristocrats of the last century, who systematically despised everything Russian, remained in reality incredibly more Russian than the house-serfs remained peasants, it is even more impossible that the younger generation could have lost their Russian character because they studied science and philosophy from French and German books. A section of the Slavs at Moscow, with Hegel in their hands, attained the heights of ultra
Slavism.
The very appearance of the circles of which I am speaking was a natural response to a profound, inward need in the Russian life of that time.
We have spoken many times of the stagnation that followed the crisis of 1 825. The moral level of society sank, development was interrupted, everything progressive and energetic was struck out of life. Those who remained-frightened, weak and bewildered-were petty and insignificant; the trash of the generation of Alexander occupied the foremost place ; little by little they changed into cringing officials, lost the savage poetry of junketing and lordliness together with any shadow of independent dignity; they served tenaciously, they served until they reached high positions, but they never became great personages. Their day was over.
Below this grPat world of society, the great world of the people maintained an indifferent silence; nothing was changed for them: their plight was bad, but no worse than before, the new blows fell not on their brui�ecl backs. Their time had not yet come. Between this roof and this foundation the first to raise their heads \Vere children, perhaps because they did not suspect how dangerous it was ; but, let that be as it might, with these children Russia, stunned and stupefied, began to come to herself.