celebrated articles in I 839-40, one reviewing a poem and a work of
prose on an anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, the other a criticism
of an attack by a German Hegelian on Goethe. 'The real is the
rational,' the new doctrine had said. It was childish and shallow and
short-sighted to attack or seek to alter reality. What is, is, because it
must be. To understand it is to understand the beauty and the harmony
of everything as it falls into its own appointed time and place in
accordance with intelligible and necessary laws. Everything has its
place in the vast scheme of nature unrolling its pattern like a great
carpet of history. To criticise is only to show that you are not adjusted
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to reality and that you do not sufficiently understand it. There were
no half-measures for Belinsky. Henen tells us that once Belinsky
finally adopted a view,
he did not quail before any consequences. He would not stop at
anything, neither considerations of moral propriety, nor the opinion
of others, which tends to frighten weaker and less elemental natures.
He knew no fear, because he was strong and sincere; his conscience
was clear.
His (or Bakunin's) interpretation oi Hegel's doctrine had convinced
him that contemplation and understanding was an attitude spiritually
superior to that of active fighting: consequently he threw himself
into 'acceptance of reality' with the same frenzy of passion as that
with which only two years later he was to attack the quietists and
demand active resistance to Nicholas l's abominations.
In 1 839-40 Belinsky proclaimed that might was right; that history
itself-the march of the inevitable forces-sanctified the actual; that
autocracy was, coming when it did, sacred ; that Russia was as it was
as part of a divine scheme marching towards an ideal goal; that the
government-the representative of power and coercion-was wiser than
its citizens; that protests against it were frivolous, wicked, and vain.
Resistance to cosmic forces is always suicidal.
Reality is a monster (he wrote to Bakunin ], armed with iron talons,
a huge mouth and huge jaws. Sooner or later she will devour everyone who resists her, who cannot live at peace with her. To be free-and instead of a terrible monster to see in her the source of
happiness-there is only one means-to know her.
And again:
I look upon reality, which I used to hold in such contempt, and
tremble with mystic joy, recognising its rationality, realising that
nothing of it may be rejected, nothing in it may be condemned or
spurned.
And in the same vein:
Schiller was . . . my personal enemy, and it was only with great
effort that I was able to prevent my hatred of him from going
beyond the bounds of such decency as I was capable of. Why this
hatred?
Because, he goes on to say, Schiller's works Die Rauber, Kabalt und
Liebe and Fiesco 'induced in me a wild hatred of the social order, in
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the name of an abstract ideal of society, cut o ff from the geographical
and historical conditions of development, built in mid-air.' This echoes,
but in a politically far more sinister form, the relatively harmless
maxims of earlier, Fichtean Idealism, when he would declare that
society is always more right than the individual, or 'The individual is
real and not a phantom only to the degree to which he is an individual
expression of the universal.'
His friends were stupefied into silence. This was nothing less than
a major betrayal by the most single-minded and most fearless of all
the radical leaders . .The shock was so painful that in Moscow it could
scarcely be discussed at all. Belinsky knew precisely what effect his
secession would cause, and said so in his letters; nevertheless he saw
no way out. He had reached his conclusion by a rational process, and
if the choice was between betraying the truth and betraying his friends,
he must be man enough to betray his friends. Indeed the thought of
the appalling pain that this would cause him somehow merely underlined the inescapable necessity of this great sacrifice to principle. This acceptance of 'the iron laws' of social development and the march of
history as being not merely inevitable but just, rational, morally
liberating, was nevenheless marked, both then and later, by a profound
disgust with the conditions of Russian society in general and of his
own society in panicular.
Our life (he wrote to Konstantin Aksakov in I 840 ], what
sort of life is it to be? Where is it and what is it about? We are
so many individuals outside a society, because Russia is not a
society. We possess neither a political nor a religious nor a scientific
nor a literary life. Boredom, apathy, frustration, fruitless effortsthat is our life . . . China is a disgusting state, but more disgusting is a state which possessed rich materials for life but which is held in
an iron frame like a rickety child.
And the remedy? Conformity to the powers that be: adjustment
to 'reality'. Like many a communist of a later date Belinsky gloried
in the very weight of the chains with which he had chosen to bind
his limbs, in the very narrowness and darkness which he had willed
to suffer; the sl.ock and disgust of his friends was itself evidence of the
vastness, and therefore of the grandeur and the moral necessity, of the
sacrifice. There is no ecstasy to compare to that of self-immolation.
This condition lasted for a year, and then he could bear it no longer.
Herzen paid a visit to him in St Petersburg; it had begun in a frigid
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and awkward manner, and then in a great burst of emotion Belinsky
broke down, and admitted that the Hegelian year, with its wilful
'acceptance' and glorification of the black reaction of the regime, was
a heavy nightmare, an offering upon the altar not of truth but of an
insane logical consistency. What he cared about, what he had never
ceased to care about, was not the historical process or the condition
of the universe or the solemn march of the Hegelian God through
the world, but the lives and liberties and aspirations of individual men
and women whose sufferings no sublime universal harmony could
explain away or redeem. From that moment he never looked back.
The relief was immense:
I abominate [he wrote to Botkin] my contemptible desire to reconcile myself with a contemptible reality ! Long live the great Schiller, noble advocate of humanity, bright star of salvation, the emancipator of society from the blood-stained prejudices of tradition ! 'Long live reason, and may the darkness perish' as great Pushkin used to
exclaim ! The human personality is now above history, above society,
above humanity for me . . . good Lord, it frightens me to think of
what must have been happening to me-fever, madness- I feel like
a convalescent now . . . I will not make my peace or adjust myself
to vile realities. I look for happiness only in the world of fancy,