darkness, chains and the knout'.
In 1 847 Gogo!, whose genius Belinsky had acclaimed, published a
violently anti-liberal and anti-western tract, calling for a return to
ancient patriarchal ways, a spiritually regenerated land of serfs, landlords, the tsar. The cup brimmed over. In a letter written from abroad Belinsky, in the last stages of his wasting disease, accused Gogo!
of betraying the light:
. . . one cannot be silent when, under cover of religion, backed by
the whip, falsehood and immorality are preached as truth and virtue.
Yes, I loved you, with all the passion with which a man tied by ties
of blood to his country loves its hope, its glory, its pride, one of its
great leaders along the path of consciousness, development and
progress . . . Russia sees her salvation not in mysticism, or aestheticism, or piety, but in the achievements of education, civilisation, and humane culture. She has no need of sermons (she has heard too
many), nor of prayers (she has mumbled them too often), but of
the awakening in the people of a feeling of human dignity, lost for
so many ages in mud and filth. It needs laws and rights in accordance
not with the teachings of the church, but with those of common
sense and justice . . . Instead of which she offers the terrible
spectacle of a land where men buy and sell other men without even
the cant of the Americans, who say that negroes are not men . . . a
country where there are no guarantees of personal libeny or honour
or property; not even a police state, only huge corporations of
official thieves and robbers . . . The government . . . knows well
what the landlords do to their peasants, and how many landlords
are massacred by their serfs every year . . . Preacher of the whip,
apostle of ignorance, champion of obscurantism and black reaction,
1 72.
V I S SA R I ON B E L I N SK Y
defender of a Tartar way of life-what are you doing? Look at the
ground beneath your feet. You are standing on the edge of an abyss.
You found your teachings upon the Orthodox Church, and that I
understand, for the Church has always favoured whips and prisons,
it has always grovelled to despotism. But what has this to do with
Christ? . . . Of course a Voltaire whose ridicule put out the flames
of fanaticism and illiteracy in Europe is far more a son of Christ,
flesh of His flesh, and bone of His bone, than all your parsons,
bishops, patriarchs, metropolitans . . . [Our country priests] are the
heroes of rude, popular tales . . . the priest is always the glutton, the
miser, the sycophant, the man lost to all sense of shame . . . Most
of our clergy are . . . either pedantic schoolmen, or else appallingly
ignorant and blind. Only our literature, in spite of a barbarous
censorship, shows signs of life and forward movement. That is why
the calling of the writer is so honoured among us, why even a
small literary gift makes for success; that is why the profession of
letters has thrown into the shade the glitter of epaulettes and gaudy
uniforms; that is why a liberal writer, even one whose capacity is
poor, excites general attention, while great poets who . . . sell their
gifts to serve the Orthodox Church, autocracy and nationalism,
quickly lose their popularity . . . The Russian people is right. It
sees in writers of Russia its only leaders, defenders, and saviours
from the darkness of Russian autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationalism.
It can forgive a bad book but not a harmful one.
He read this letter to his friends in Paris. 'This is a work of genius,'
Herun said in a low voice to Annenkov, who records the scene, 'and
I think his last will and testament. • This celebrated document became
the bible of Russian revolutionaries. Indeed it is for reading it to an
illicit discussion circle that Dostoevsky was condemned to death, then
sent to Siberia.
Belinsky in his final phase was a humanist, an enemy of theology
and metaphysics, and a radical democrat, and by the extreme force
and vehemence of his convictions turned purely literary disputes into
the beginnings of social and political movements. Turgenev said of
him that there are tWo types of writer: a writer may be brilliantly
imaginative and creative, but remain on the periphery of the collective
experience of the society to which he belongs. Or he may live at the
centre of his society, being connected 'organically' with the emotions
and state of mind of his community. Belinsky knew, as only true
social critics do, where the centre of moral gravity of a book, an
opinion, an author, a movement, an entire society, could be found.
,,
1 73
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
The central issue o f Russian society was not political but social and
moral. The intelligent and awakened Russian wanted above all to be
told what to do, how to live as an individual, as a private person.
Turgenev testifies that never were people more interested in the
problems of life, and never less in those of pure aesthetic theory, than
in the 1 84os and 50s. The mounting repression made literature the
only medium within which any degree of free discussion of social
questions could take place. I ndeed the great controversy between
Slavophils and 'Westerners', between the view of Russia as a still
uncorrupted spiritual and social organism, bound by impalpable links
of common love, natural piety, and reverence for authority, to which
the application of artificial, 'soulless' western forms and institutions
had done, and would do, fearful damage; and, on the other hand, the
view of it held by the 'Westerners' as a retarded semi-Asiatic despotism
lacking even the rudiments of social justice and individual liberty-this
crucial debate, which split educated Russians in the nineteenth century,
was c.arried on principally in the semi-disguise of literary and philosophical argument. The authorities viewed neither side with favour, and, with some j ustice, regarded public discussion of any serious issue
as in itself a menace to the regime. Nevertheless the effective techniques of suppression, as we know them now, had not as yet been i nvented; and the half-clandestine controversy continued, sharpened
and rendered more personal by the acute consciousness of their own
social origins which infected the opinions and quality of feeling of the
principal adversaries themselves.
Russia in Belinsky's day, in the I 8JOS and the 1 840s, was still, in
the main, a feudal society. It was pre-industrial and, in certain parts
of it, semi-colonial. The state was based on sharply drawn divisions
which separated the peasantry from the merchants and from the lower
clergy, and there was a still wider gap which divided the gentry from
the nobility. It was not altogether impossible, although it was very
difficult and very uncommon, to rise from a lower to a higher stratum.
But in order to do this a man had to have not merely exceptional
energy, exceptional ambition and talent, but also a certain willingness
and capacity to jettison his past and to identify himself morally,