Looking at the analytical French novel as the peak of nineteenth-century Western Buddhism, we become convinced of its total literary sterility. It has had no heirs, nor could it really have any—only naïve epigones, of which a large number still remain. Tolstoy’s novels are pure epic and an entirely healthy European form of art. The synthetic novel of Romain Rolland broke sharply with the tradition of the French analytical novel and was related to the synthetic novel of the eighteenth century, mainly to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, with which its basic artistic technique links it.
There exists a special kind of synthetic blindness to manifestations of the individual. Goethe and Romain Rolland depict psychological landscapes, landscapes of characters and spiritual conditions; but the form of the Japano-Flaubertian analytical tanka is alien to them. In the veins of every century there flows a foreign blood, not its own, and the stronger, the more intensive historically the age, the more heavily this foreign blood weighs.
After the eighteenth century, which understood nothing, possessed not the least feeling for the comparative-historical method, like a blind kitten in a basket, left abandoned amidst worlds incomprehensible to it, there arrived the century of omnicomprehension—the century of relativism with its monstrous capacity for reincarnating past ages—the nineteenth. Yet this taste for historical reincarnations and omnicomprehension proved to be not steady but transient, and our own century has begun under the sign of a sublime intolerance, exclusively, and the conscious noncomprehension of other worlds. In the veins of our century there flows the heavy blood of extremely distant monumental cultures, perhaps the Egyptian and Assyrian.
The wind brought us comfort,
And in the azure we sensed
The Assyrian wings of the dragonflies,
Partitions of elbow-jointed darkness.4
In relation to this new age, turned cruel and immense, we appear as colonizers. To Europeanize and humanize the twentieth century, to make it glow with a theological warmth—that is the task facing the survivors of the collapse of the nineteenth century, those who have been cast ashore by the will of the fates on a new historical continent.
And in this work it is easier to find support in the more remote rather than in the more immediate past. The elementary formulas, the general conceptions of the eighteenth century may once again come in handy. “The skeptical assessment of the Encyclopedia,” the legal spirit of the social contract, naive materialism once so arrogantly mocked, schematic intellect, the spirit of expediency may yet serve mankind. Now is not the time to fear rationalism. The irrational root of the oncoming epoch, the gigantic inextirpable double-stranded root, like the stone temple of an alien god, casts its shadow upon us. In days like these, the intellect of the Encyclopedists is the sacred fire of Prometheus.
Note
Note: This translation was originally published in New Literary History 1 (1974–1975): 641–646.
Peter Chaadaev
I.
The trace Chaadaev left on Russian consciousness was so deep and unerasable as to suggest it had been made by diamond on glass. It is all the more remarkable in that Chaadaev was not what you might call a “public figure,” neither a professional writer nor a tribune. By his whole turn of mind, he was a “private” man; what is called a privatier. Yet, as though aware that his personality belonged not to him but to posterity, he regarded it with a certain humility. Whatever he did, it turned out that he “served,” that he performed a sacred task.
All those qualities that Russian life lacked, the existence of which it did not even suspect, joined together as if on purpose in the person of Chaadaev: an enormous inner discipline, a high-minded intellectualism, moral architectonics, and the cold of a mask, of a metal casing with which he encircled himself, aware that by the measure of the ages he was merely a shape, and so he went about preparing ahead of time the specific mold of his immortality.
Still more unusual for Russia was Chaadaev’s dualism, the clear distinction he made between matter and spirit. In an unformed country, a country of half-animated matter and half-dead spirit, that ancient antinomy of the inert clod and the organizing idea was almost unknown. In Chaadaev’s eyes, all of Russia still belonged to the world of the unformed and unorganized. He himself was flesh of the flesh of this Russia, and he regarded himself as raw material. The results achieved were amazing. The Idea organized his personality, not merely his mind, and gave this personality a structure, an architecture, subordinated it entirely to itself, overlooking nothing, and as a reward for this absolute subordination endowed it with absolute freedom.
A deep harmony, the virtual fusion of the moral and intellectual element, gives Chaadaev’s personality its special firmness. It is hard to say where Chaadaev’s intellectual personality leaves off and where his moral personality begins, so close are they to complete fusion. The strongest requirement of intellect was for him at the same time the greatest moral necessity.
I speak of the requirement of unity, which determines the structure of chosen intellects.
“What could we talk about, then?” he asked Pushkin in one of his letters. “I have, you know, just one idea, and if some other ideas should inadvertently pop into my brain, they would certainly get stuck on to that very idea immediately: and would that suit you?”
What then was the nature of this renowned “intellect” of Chaadaev’s, this “proud” intellect, sung deferentially by Pushkin, hissed by the provocative Iazykov, if not a fusion of the moral with the intellectual principle, a fusion so characteristic of Chaadaev, in pursuit of which his personality came to its maturity.
With this deep, ineradicable demand for unity, for a higher historical synthesis, Chaadaev was born in Russia. The native of the plains wanted to breathe the air of Alpine heights, and, as we see, he found them within himself.
II.
In the West there is unity! From the time these words flared up in Chaadaev’s consciousness, he no longer belonged to himself and tore himself away forever from “domesticity.” He had enough manliness to tell Russia to her face the frightening truth—that she was cut off from global unity, severed from history, from “God’s teachers of peoples.”
The thing is that Chaadaev’s understanding of history excludes the possibility of any setting forth on the historical path. According to his understanding, one could be on the historical path only prior to any beginning. History was a Jacob’s ladder by which angels descended to earth. It must be called sacred, because of the continuity of the spirit of grace which lives in it. And so Chaadaev does not even mention “Moscow, the Third Rome.” In this idea he could have seen only the stunted contrivance of the Kievan monks. Neither readiness alone nor good intentions are sufficient to “begin” history. It is unthinkable to begin it at all. Continuity is lacking, and unity. Unity cannot be created or invented or learned. Where there is no unity, at best there is “progress,” but not history; the mechanical movement of a clockhand, but not the sacred linkage and succession of events.
Like a man enchanted, Chaadaev kept staring at the one place where this unity had become flesh, cautiously preserved, inherited from generation to generation. “But the Pope! the Pope! Well, what of it? Isn’t he, too, simply an idea, a pure abstraction? Take a look at this old man, being carried in his palanquin under a canopy, in his triple crown, now just as a thousand years ago, as if nothing in the world had changed: really, where in all this is the man? Isn’t this an all-powerful symbol of time—not of that time which passes, but of that which remains motionless, through which everything else passes, but which itself stands imperturbable and in which and by means of which everything is brought to completion.”