bored them, or turned them into fanatical zealots for some wildly
Utopian scheme. Bakt• nin was a born agitator with sufficient scepticism
in his system not to be taken in himself by his own torrential eloquence.
To dominate individuals and sway assemblies was his mltin-: he
belonged to that odd, fortunately not very numerous, class of persons
who contrive to hypnotise others into throwing themselves into causes
-if need be killing and dying for them-while themselves remaining
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coldly, dearly, and ironically aware o f the effect o f the spells which
they cast. When his bluff was called, as occasionally it was, for example,
by Herzen, Bakunin would laugh with the greatest good nature, admit
everything freely, and continue to cause havoc, if anything with greater
unconcern than before. His path was strewn with victims, casualties,
and faithful, idealistic converts; he himself remained a gay, easygoing, mendacious, irresistibly agreeable, calmly and coldly destructive, fascinating, generous, undisciplined, eccentric Russian landowner to the end.
He played with ideas with adroitness and boyish delight. They came
from many sources: from Saint-Simon, from Holbach, from Hegel,
from Proudhon, from Feuerbach, from the Young Hegelians, from
Weitling. He would imbibe these doctrines during periods of short
but intensive application, and then he would expound them with a
degree of fervour and personal magnetism which was, perhaps,
unique even in that century of great popular tribunes. During the
decade which Annenkov describes, he was a fanatically orthodox
Hegelian, and preached the paradoxical principles of the new metaphysics to his friends night after night with lucidity and stubborn passion. He proclaimed the existence of iron and inexorable laws of
history, and indeed of everything else. Hegel-and Stankevich-were
right. It was idle to rebel against them, or to protest against the
cruelties and injustices which they seemed to entail; to do so was
simply a sign of immaturity, of not understanding the necessity and
beauty of the rationally organised cosmos-to fail to grasp the divine
goal in which the sufferings and disharmonies of individual lives
must, if you understood them properly, inevitably culminate and be
resolved.
Hegel taught that the spirit evolved not continuously, but by a
'dialectical' struggle of 'opposites' which (somewhat, it seems, like a
diesel engine) moved by a series of sharp explosions. This notion
suited Bakunin's temperament well, since, as he himself was fond· of
saying, he detested nothing more than peace, order, bourgeois contentment. Mere bohemianism, disorganised rebellion have been discredited too often. Hegelianism presented its tragic and violent view of life beneath the guise of an eternal rational system, an objective
'science', with all the logical paraphernalia of reasoned judgement. First
to justify the need to submit to a brutal government and a stupid
bureaucracy in the name of eternal Reason, then to justify rebellion
with the selfsame arguments, was a paradoxical task that delighted
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R U S S I AN T H I N K E R S
Bakunin. In Moscow h e enjoyed his power o f turning peaceful
students into dervishes, ecstatic seekers after some aesthetic or metaphysical goal. In later life he applied these talents on a wider scale, and stirred some exceedingly unpromising human material-Swiss
watchmakers and German peasants-into unbelievable frenzies of
enthusiasm, which no one ever induced in them before or after.
During the period of which I am speaking, he concentrated these
sinister talents upon the relatively humble task of expounding Hegel's
Encydopedia, paragraph by paragraph, to his admiring friends. Among
these friends was another intimate of Stankevich, Nicholay Granovsky,
a gentle and high-minded historian who had studied in Germany and
there became a moderate Hegelian, and came back to lecture on
western medieval history in Moscow. Granovsky succeeded in making
his apparently remote subject into a means of inducing in his audiences
respect for the western tradition. He dwelt in particular on the
civilising effect of the Roman Church, of Roman law, and of the
institutions of feudalism, developing his theses in the fac-e of the
growing chauvinism-with its emphasis on the· Byzantine roots of
Russian culture-which was at this time encouraged by the Russian
Government as an antidote to the dangerous ideas of the west.
Granovsky combined erudition with a very balanced intellect, and
was not carried away by extravagant theories. Nevertheless he was
Hegelian enough to believe that the universe must have a pattern and
a goal; that this goal was slowly being approached, that humanity
was marching towards freedom, although the path was by no means
smooth or straight: obstacles occurred-relapses were frequent and
difficult to avert. Unless a sufficient number of human beings with
personal courage, strength, and a sense of dedication emerged, humanity
tended to subside into long nights of reaction, swamps from which it
extricated itself at terrible cost. Nevertheless, slowly and painfully,
but inexorably, humanity was moving towards an ideal state of
happiness, justice, truth, and beauty. Granovsky's lectures in Moscow
University in the early I 84os on the apparently recondite subject of
the late Merovingian and early Carolingian kings attracted a very
large and distinguished audience. These lectures were treated both by
the 'Westerners' and their nationalist Slavophil opponents as a quasipolitical demonstration of pro-western, liberal and rationalist sentiment: above all of faith in the transforming power of enlightened ideas, against mystical nationalism and ecclesiasticism.
I quote the example of Granovsky's famous lectures-passionately
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acclaimed by his friends, and attacked by the conservatives-as an
illustration of the peculiar disguises which in Russia (as to a lesser
extent in Germany) social and political liberalism had to adopt if it
was to find voice at all. The censorship was at once a heavy fetter
and a goad-it brought into being a peculiar brand of cryptorevolutionary writing, made more tortuous and more intense by repression, which in the end turned the whole of Russian literature
into what Henen described as 'one vast bill of indictment' against
Russian life.
The censor was the ofticial enemy, but unlike his modern successor,
he was almost wholly negative. The tsarist censorship imposed
silence but it did not directly tell professors what to teach; it did not
dictate to authors what to say and how to say it; and it did not command
composers to induce this or that mood in their audiences. It was
merely designed to prevent the expression of a certain number of
selected 'dangerous ideas'. It was an obstacle, at rimes a maddening
one. But because it was, like so much in old Russia, inefficient,
corrupt, indolent, often stupid, or deliberately lenient-and because