above all politics, was repulsive but fortunately unimportant. The only
thing that mattered was the ideal life created by the spirit, the great
imaginative constructions by means of which man transcended the
frustrating material environment, freed himself from its squalor, and
identified himself with nature and with God. The history of western
Europe revealed many such sublime achievements, and it was idle
nationalistic cant to pretend that Russia had anything to put beside
this. Russian culture (so Belinsky in the I 8JOS was telling his readers)
was an artificial, imported growth, and till Pushkin arose, could not
be spoken of in the same breath as Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe and
Schiller, or even such great realistic writers as Walter Scott and (of
all writers) Fenimore Cooper. Russian folk-song and hyliny and
popular epics were more contemptible than even the second- and
third-rate imitations of French models which formed the miserable
collection of reproductions dignified under the name of national
Russian literature. As for the Slavophils, their passion for old Russian
ways and manners, for traditional Slav dress and Russian song and
dances, for archaic musical instruments, for the rigidities of Byzantine
Orthodoxy, their contrast of the spiritual depth and wealth of the
Slavs with the decadent and 'rotting' west, corrupted by superstition
and sordid materialism-this was childish vanity and delusion. What
had Byzantium given? Its direct descendants, the southern Slavs,
were among the deadest and dullest of all European nations. If all the
Montenegrins died tomorrow, Belinsky cried in one of his revic:;ws,
the world would be none the poorer. Compared to one noble voice
from the eighteenth century, one Voltaire, one Robespierre, what had
Byzantium and Russia to offer? Only the great Peter, and he belonged
to the west. As for the glorification of the meek and pious peasantthe holy fool touched with grace- Belinsky, who, unlike the Slavophils, was by birth not a nobleman or a gentleman, but the son of a sodden
small-town doctor, looked on agriculture not as romantic and ennobling,
but merely as degrading and stupefying. The Slavophils infuriated him
by talking romantic and reactionary nonsense in their attempt to arrest
scientific progress by appeals to ancient and, as often as not, nonexistent traditions. Nothing was more contemptible than false, twopence-coloured nationalism, archaic clothes, a hatred of foreigners,
and a desire to undo the great heroic work which Peter the Great had
so boldly and magnificently begun. Like the Encyclopedists of the
eighteenth century in France, whose temper his much resembled,
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V I SSARION B E L IN SKY
Belinsky at the beginning of his career (and again towards
the end of his life) believed that only an enlightened despot-by
enforcing education, technical progress, material civilisation-could
rescue the benighted, barbarous Russian nation. In a letter to a friend
written in 1 837 he writes:
Above all you should abandoq politics and guard yourself against
the influence of politics on your ways of thought. Here in Russia,
politics has no meaning, and only empty heads can have anything
to do with it . . . If each of the individuals who compose Russia
could reach perfection by means of love, Russia would be the
happiest country in the world without any politics-education, that
is the road to happiness . . .
and again (in the same letter) :
Peter is clear evidence that Russia will not develop her liberty and
her civil structure out of her own resources, but will obtain it at the
hands of her tsars as so much else. True, we do not as yet possess
rights-we are, if you like, slaves; but that is because we still need
to be slaves. Russia is an infant and needs a nurse in whose breast
there beats a heart full of love for her fledgling, and in whose hand
there is a rod ready to punish it if it is naughty. To give the child
complete liberty is to ruin it. To give Russia in her present state a
constitution is to ruin her. To our people liberty . . . simply means
licence. The liberated Russian nation would not go to a parliament,
but run to the taverns to drink, break glass, and hang the gentry
because they shave their beards and wear European clothes . . . The
hope of Russia is education, not . . . constitutions and revolutions . . .
France has had two revolutions, and as a result of them a constitution. And in this constitutional France there is far less liberty of thought than in autocratic Prussia.
and again:
Our autocracy gives us complete freedom of thought and reflection,
but limits our freedom to raise our voices and interfere in her affairs.
It allows us to import books from abroad which it forbids us to
translate or publish. And this is right and just, because what you
may know the muzhik may not; an idea which might be good for
you, might be fatal to the muzhik, who would naturally misunderstand it . . . Wine is good for adults who know what to do with it, but fatal to children, and politics is wine which in Russia may even
turn into opium . . . And so to the devil with the French. Their
influence has brought us nothing but harm. We imitated their
.,.
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R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
literature, and killed our own . . . Germany-that i s the Jerusalem
of modern humanity.
Even the Russian nationalist school did not go so far. At a time
when even so western a thinker as Herzen, not to speak of mild
liberals such as Granovsky and Kavelin, was prepared to temporise,
and indeed to some degree shared the Slavophils' deep and sincere
feeling for the Russian tradition and older forms of life, Belinsky
would not bend. Western Europe, more particularly enlightened
despotism, was responsible for the major achiev."!ments of mankind.
There and only there were the forces of life and the critical canons
of scientific and philosophical truth, which alone made progress
possible. The Slavophils had turned their backs on this, and however
worthy their motives, they were blind and leaders of the blind, returning to the ancient slough of ignorant barbarism and weakness from which it had taken the great Peter such efforts to lift, or half-lift, his
primitive people; salvation lay in this alone. This doctrine is radical,
individualist, enlightened, and anti-democratic. Soviet authors in
search of texts to justify the progressive role of ruthless governing
elites find much to quote from Belinsky's early writings.
Meanwhile Bakunin had begun to preach Hegel to Belinsky, who
knew no German. Night after night he preached the new objectivism
to him, as he did later in Paris to Proudhon. Finally, after a fearful
inner struggle, Belinsky was converted to the new anti-individualist
faith. He had earlier toyed with the idealism of Fichte and Schelling,
as expounded by Stankevich, the effect of which had been to turn him
away from political issues altogether, as a sordid chaos of the trivial,
empirical world, a delusive curtain concealing the harmonious reality
beyond. This was now finished and done with. He moved to St
Petersburg, and under the influence of his new r�ligion wrote two