Novikov is nevertheless classified as a political conservative because of his determination to work 'within the system', as one would put it today. A freemason and follower of Saint-Martin, he thought all evil stemmed from man's corruption, not from the institutions under which he lived. He mercilessly exposed 'vice' and promoted with such enthusiasm useful knowledge because of the conviction that only by improving man could one improve mankind. He never questioned the autocratic form of government or even serfdom. This stress on man rather than the environment became a hallmark of Russian conservatism.
Alexander Radishchev, the pioneer Russian liberal-radical, was a figure of far lesser import although thanks to the tireless and well-financed efforts of Soviet propaganda institutes he is the better known of the two. His fame rests on one book, The Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow (p. 149) in which, using the then popular device of a fictional travel account, he exposed the seamier sides of Russian provincial life. The writing is execrable and on literary merits alone the book would hardly deserve mention. The ideology is so confused that critics are still in fundamental disagreement about what the author intended: to advocate violent change or merely to warn that unless reforms were made in good time violence would inevitably break out. Unlike Novikov, whose intellectual roots were in freemasonry and Anglo-German sentimental-ism (he abhorred Voltaire), Radishchev drank deeply at the source of French Enlightenment, showing a marked preference for its more extreme materialist wing (Helvetius and d'Holbach). In one of his last writings, completed before his death by suicide, he dealt with the question of the immortality of the soul; and although he came out on the affirmative side of the argument, the negative side clearly was written with greater conviction. In a last message before his suicide he wrote -anticipating Dostoevsky's Kirillov-that only he who took his life was his own master.
A man holding such ideas was not likely to accept the old regime at face value or agree to work within its framework. His proposals, as has been said, were extremely vague, and yet because of his philosophic position and indubitable opposition to serfdom he has been acknowledged by liberals and radicals as their forerunner. Pushkin's instinct told him that Radishchev was an impudent fool, and it is apparently no accident that the figure of Evgenii in the 'Bronze Horseman' bears resemblance to Radishchev.8 Both Novikov and Radishchev were arrested during the panic which
258
seized St Petersburg after the outbreak of the French Revolution and sentenced to lifelong exile. They were pardoned and released on the death of Catherine by her contrary son, Paul 1.
The Decembrist movement, to which allusion has been made earlier (p. 188), was for sheer drama and the number and eminence of persons involved not equalled until the socialist-revolutionary turmoil of the 1870s. Yet it is difficult to make a case that it was a Russian movement properly speaking because its inspiration, ideals, and even forms of organization came directly from western Europe. They were all derived from the experience of post-Napoleonic France and Germany where many Russian dvoriane spent two or three years during the campaigns of 1812-13 and the occupation which ensued. It was testimony to the cosmopolitanism of young Russian aristocrats that they felt so completely at home in the political ferment of the Restoration era they thought it possible to transplant to their native land the political programmes of a Benjamin Constant, Destutt de Tracy, or the American constitution. Once the conspiracy failed, these ideas evaporated, and the next generation of intellectuals turned to an entirely different source. That source was German Idealism. Not that Russian intellectuals understood the intricate and often exceedingly abstruse doctrines of the Idealist schooclass="underline" for few of them had the requisite philosophic training and some (e.g. the critic Belinskii) lacked knowledge of German and had to rely on secondhand accounts. But as is always the case with intellectual history - in contrast to history or philosophy - the important fact is not the exact meaning but the public reception of a man's ideas. Russian intellectuals of the 1820S-40S turned with such enthusiasm to the theories of Schelling and Hegel because they rightly sensed that they would find in them ideas capable of justifying what they felt and yearned for; and indeed they extracted from them only what they needed.
In Russia, as elsewhere, the principal consequence of Idealism was greatly to enhance the creative role of the human mind. Kant's critique of empirical theories had this inadvertent result that it transformed the mind from a mere recipient of sensory impressions into an active participant in the process of cognition. The manner in which intelligence, through its inbuilt categories, perceived reality was in itself an essential attribute of that reality. With this argument, the Idealist school which sprung up to overshadow Empiricism, gave a weapon to all those interested in promoting the human mind as the supreme creative force - that is, in the first place, the intellectuals. It was now possible to argue that ideas were every bit as 'real' as physical facts, if not more so. 'Thought' broadly defined to include feelings, sensations, and, above all, creative artistic impulses was raised to a status of equality with 'Nature'
259
Everything fitted together; nothing was accidentaclass="underline" intelligence merely had to grasp how phenomena related to ideas. 'I owe to Schelling the habit I now have of generalizing the least events and the most insignificant phenomena which I encounter', wrote V.F.Odoevskii, a leading Schel-lingian of the 1820s.' In the late 1830s when Russian intellectuals became drunk on Hegel, the addiction acquired extreme forms. Alexander Herzen, having returned from exile, found his Moscow friends in a kind of collective delirium:
Nobody at this time would have disowned such a sentence as this: 'The concrescence of abstract ideas in the sphere of the plastic represents that phase of the self-questing spirit in which it, defining itself for itself, is poten-tialized from natural immanence into the harmonious sphere of formal consciousness in beauty'... Everything that in fact is most immediate, all the simplest feelings were erected into abstract categories and returned from thence as pale, algebraic ghosts, without a drop of living blood... A man who went for a walk... went not just for a walk, but in order to give himself over to the pantheistic feelings of his identification with the cosmos. If, on the way, he met a tipsy soldier or a peasant woman who tried to strike up a conversation, the philosopher did not simply talk with them, he determined the substantiality of the popular element, both in its immediate and its accidental manifestations. The very tear which might rise to his eye was strictly referred to its proper category: to Gemiith or the 'tragic element in the heart'.10
Secondly, and only slightly less importantly, Idealism injected into philosophy a dynamic element. It conceived reality, both in its spiritual and physical aspects, as undergoing constant evolution, as 'becoming' rather than 'being'. The entire cosmos was evolving, the process leading towards a vaguely defined goal of a perfectly free and rational existence. This 'historicist' element, present in all Idealist doctrines, has become ever since an indispensable ingredient of all 'ideologies'. It gave and continues to give the intelligentsia the assurance that the reality with which they happen to be surrounded and in varying degrees repudiate is by the very nature of things transitory, a stepping stone to something superior. Furthermore, it allows them to argue that whatever discrepancy there might exist between their ideas and reality is due to the fact that reality, as it were, has not yet caught up with their ideas. Failure is always temporary for ideologues, as success is always seen by them to be illusory for the powers that be.