as good an artist as one could be. The attitude which I attribute to
the Russians is a specifically moral attitude; their attitude to life and
to art is identical, and it is ultimately a moral attitude. This is something not to be confused with the notion of art with a utilitarian purpose, in which, of course, some of them believed. Certainly, the
men of whom I propose to speak-the men of the 30s and early 40Sdid not believe that the business of novels and the business of poetry was to teach men to be better. The ascendancy of utilitarianism came
much later, and it was propagated by men of far duller and cruder
minds than those with whom I am here concerned.
The most characteristic Russian writers believed that writers are,
in the first place, men; and that they are directly and continually
responsible for all their utterances, whether made in novels or in
private letters, in public speeches or in conversation. This view, in
turn, affected western conceptions of art and life to a marked degree,
and is one of the arresting contributions to thought of the Russian
intelligentsia. Whether for good or ill, it made a very violent impact
upon the European conscience.
V I I I
A t the time o f which I speak, Hegel and Hegelianism dominated
the thought of young Russia. With all the moral ardour of which
they were capable, the emancipated young men believed in the
necessity of total immersion in his philosophy. Hegel ·Nas the great
new liberator; therefore it was a duty-a categorical duty-to express
in every act of your life, whether as a private individual or as a writer,
truths which you had absorbed from him. This allegiance-later
transferred to Darwin, to Spencer, to Marx-is difficult to understand
for those who have not read the fervid literature, above all, the
literary correspondence of the period. To illustrate it, let me quote
some ironical passages from Herzen, the great Russian publicist, who
lived the latter part of his life abroad, written when, looking back, he
described the atmosphere of his youth. It is, as so often with this
incomparable satirist, a somewhat exaggerated picture-in places a
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R U S S I A N T H I N K E R S
caricature-but nevertheless it successfully conveys the mood of the
time.
After saying that an exclusively contemplative attitude is
wholly opposed to the Russian character, he goes on to talk about
the fate of the Hegelian philosophy when it was brought over to
Russia:
. . . there is no paragraph in all the three parts of the Logic,
two parts of the Aesthetic, of the Encyclopedia . . . which was not
captured after the most desperate debates lasting several nights.
People who adored each other became estranged for entire weeks
because they could not agree on a definition of 'transcendental
spirit', were personally offended by opinions about 'absolute personality' and 'being in itself'. The most worthless tracts of German philosophy that came out of Berlin and other [German] provincial
towns and villages, in which there was any mention of Hegel, were
written for and read to shreds- till they came out in yellow stains, till
pages dropped out after a few days. Thus, just as Professor Francoeur
was moved to tears in Paris when he heard that he was regarded as a
great mathematician in Russia, that hisalgebraical symbolism was used
for differential equations by our younger generation, so might they
all have wept for joy-all these forgotten Werders, Marheineckes,
Michelets, Ottos, Vatkes, Schallers, Rosenkranzes, and Arnold Ruge
himself . . . -if they had known what duels, what battles they had
started in Moscow between the Maros�ika and Mokhovaya (the
names of two streets in Moscow], how they were read, how they
were bought . . .
I have a right to say_ this because, carried away by the torrents
of those days, I myself wrote just like this, and was, in fact, startled
when our famous astronomer, Perevoshchikov, referred to it all as
'bird talk'. Nobody at this time would have disowned a sentence like
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 potentialised from natural immanence into the
harmonious sphere of formal consciousness in beauty.'
He continues:
A man who went ior a walk in Sokolniki [a suburb of Moscow],
went there not just for a walk, but in order to surrender himself
to the pantheistic feeling of his identification with the cosmos. If,
on the way, he met a tipsy soldier or a peasant woman who said
something to him, the philosopher did not simply talk with them,
but determined the substantiality of the popular element, both in
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its immediate and its accidental presentation. The very tear which
might rise to his eye was strictly classified and referred to its proper
category-Gemuth, or 'the tragic element in the heart'.
Herzen's ironical sentences need not be taken too literally. But
they show vividly the kind of exaltl intellectual mood in which his
friends had lived.
Let me now offer you a passage from Annenkov- from the excellent
essay called 'A Remarkable Decade', to which I referred at the outset.
It gives a different picture of these same people at the same period, and
it is worth quoting if only to correct Herzen's amusing sketch, which
may, quite unjustly, suggest that all this intellectual activity was so
much worthless gibberish on the part of a ridiculous collection of overexcited young intellectuals. Annenkov describes life in a country house, in the village of Sokolovo in 1 84 5, that had been taken for the summer
by three friends-Granovsky, who was a professor of history in the
University of Moscow, Ketcher, who was an eminent translator, and
Herzen himself, who was a rich young man of no very fixed profession,
then still vaguely in government service. They took the house for the
purpose of entertaining their friends and enjoying intellectual conversation in the evenings .
. . . only one thing was not allowed, and that was to be a philistine.
Not that what was expected were flights of eloquence or flashes of
brilliant wit-on the contrary, students absorbed in their own special
fields were respected deeply. But what was demanded was a certain
intellectual level and certain qualities of character . . . They protected themselves against contacts with anything that seemed corrupt
. . . and were worried by its intrusion, however casual and unimportant. They did not cut themselves off from the world, but stood aloof from it, and attracted attention for that very reason; and
because of this they developed a special sensitiveness to everything
artificial and spurious. Any sign of a morally doubtful sentiment,
evasive talk, dishonest ambiguity, empty rhetoric, insincerity, was
detected at once, and . . . provoked immediate storms of ironical