only fantasies make me happy. As for reality- reality is an executioner . . .
I am tormented by the thought of the pleasures I have let go
because of the contemptible idealism and feebleness of my character.
God knows what vile, revolting nonsense I have talked in print,
with all the sincerity and fanaticism of deep, wild conviction . . •
What horrible zigzags my path towards truth seems to involve;
what a terrible price I have had to pay, what fearful blunders I
have had to commit for the sake of truth, and what a bitter truth it
is-how vile the world is, especially in our neighbourhood.
And in the same year:
And oh the mad nonsense which I have poured out . . . against the
French, that energetic and noble nation, shedding its blood for the
most sacred rights of mankind . . . I have awoken and recollect my
dreams with horror . . .
And apropos the inexorable march of the Spirit (Herzen records) :
So it is not for myself that I create, but for the Spirit . . . Really what
kind of an idiot does it take me for? I'd rather not think at allwhat do I care about Its consciousness?
R U SS IAN T H INKERS
And in his letters there are passages in which such sacred metaphysical
entities as Universality- Cosmic Consciousness-the Spirit-the rational
State etc. are denounced as a Moloch of abstraction devouring living
human beings.
A year later he finally settled accounts with the master himself:
All Hegel's talk about morality is utter nonsense, since in the
objective realm of thought there is no morality . . . Even if I
attained to the actual top of the ladder of human development, I
should at that point still have to ask [Hegel] to account for all the
victims of life and of history, all the victims of accident and superstition, of the Inquisition and Philip II, and so on and so forth; otherwise I will throw myself off head-downwards . . . I am told
that disharmony is a condition of harmony. This may be found
agreeable . . . by musical persons, but is not quite so satisfactory
from the point of view of those whose fate it is to express in their
lives the element of disharmony.
And in the same year he tries to explain the aberration:
. . . because we understood that for us there is no life in real life, and
because our nature was such that without life we could not live, we
ran away into the world of books, and began to live and to love
according to books, and made life and love a kind of occupation, a
kind of work, an anxious labour . . . In the end we bored and
irritated and maddened each other . . .
Be social or die ! That is my slogan. What is it to me that something universal lives, so long as the individual suffers, that solitary genius should live in heaven, while the common herd rolls in the
mud? What is it to me if I do apprehend . . . the essence of art or
religion or history, if I cannot share this with all those who should
be my human brothers, my brethren in Christ, but are in fact
strangers and enemies because of their ignorance? . . . I cannot bear
the sight of barefoot boys playing . . . in the gutter, poor men in
tatters, the drunken cab-driver, the soldier coming off duty, the
official padding along with a portfolio under his arm, the selfsatisfied army officer, the haughty nobleman. When I give a penny to a soldier or a beggar I almost cry, I run from him as if I had done
something terrible, as if I did not wish to hear the sound of my own
steps . . . Has a man the right to forget himself in art or science,
while this goes on?
He read the materialist Feuerbach and became a revolutionary
democrat, denouncing tyranny, ignorance, and the bestial lives of his
fellow countrymen with ever-increasing ferocity. After his escape
1 70
V I SSARION B E L I N S K Y
from the spell of a half-understood German metaphysics he felt a
sense of extreme liberation. As always the reaction took an external
form and poured itself out i n passionate paeans to individualism. In a
letter to his friend Botkin he denounced his intellectual milieu for its
lack of seriousness and personal dignity:
. . . we are the unhappy Anarcharsises of the new Scythia. Why do
we all gape, yawn, bustle, and hurry and take an interest in everything and stick to nothing, and consume everything and remain hungry? We love one another, we love warmly and deeply, and how
have we shown our friendship? We used to be tremendously excited
about one another, enthusiastic, ecstatic, we hated one another, we
wondered about each other, we despised one another . . . When
separated from each other for long we pined and wept salt tears at
the mere thought of meeting, we were sick with love and affection :
when we met, our meetings were cold and oppressive, and we would
separate without regret. That is how it was, and it is time that we
stopped deceiving ourselves . . . Our learned professors are pedants,
a mass of social corruption . . . We are orphans, men without a
country . . . The ancient world is enchanting . . . its life contains
the seed of everything that is great, noble, valiant, because the
foundation of its life is personal pride; the dignity and sanctity of
the individual.
There follows an ecstatic comparison of Schiller to Tiberi us Gracchus
and of himself to Marat.
The human personality has become the point on which I fear I will
go off my head. I am beginning to love mankind a Ia Marat: to
make the smallest ponion of it happy I am ready, I do believe, to
destroy the rest by lire and sword.
He loves only the Jacobins-only they are effective: 'The two-edged
sword of word and deed-the Robespierres and the St Justs . . . not . . .
the sugary and ecstatic turns of phrase, the pretty idealism of the
Gironde', and this leads to socialism-of that pre-Marxist, 'Utopian'
kind, which Belinsky embraced before he understood it, because of
its promise of equality:
• . . socialism . . . idea of ideas, essence of essences . . • the alpha and
omega of faith and science. The day will come when nobody will
be burnt alive, nobody will have his head chopped off . . . There
will be no rich, no poor, no kings and subjects . . . [men] will be
brothers • . .
..
1 7 1
R U S·SIAN T H I N K E R S
I t i s this mystical vision that Dostoevsky had i n mind when a
good many years after Belinsky's death he said: 'He believed . . . that
socialism not only does not destroy the freedom of the individual
personality but, on the contrary, restores it to unheard-of splendour,
on new and this time adamantine foundations.' Belinsky was the first
man to tell Dostoevsky, then still young and obscure, that in his Poor
Folk he had done in one stroke what the critics vainly tried to do in
lengthy essays-he had revealed the life of the grey, humiliated,
Russian minor official as nobody had even done before; but he disliked
Dostoevsky personally and detested his Christian convictions, and
deliberately scandalised him by violent atheistic and blasphemous
tirades. His attitude to religion was that of Holbach or Diderot, and
for the same reasons: 'in the words God and rtligion I see only black