I think that a country and a people have already justified themselves, if they have created even one completely free man who wanted and knew how to use his freedom.
When Boris Godunov, anticipating Peter’s idea, sent young Russians abroad, not one of them returned. They did not return for the simple reason that there was no way back from being to nonbeing, that in stuffy Moscow they would have been stifled, who had partaken of the immortal spring of undying Rome.
But then, neither did the first doves return to the dovecote.
Chaadaev was the first Russian who, in actual fact, ideologically, had lived in the West and found the road back. His contemporaries felt this instinctively and valued terribly Chaadaev’s presence among them.
They could point to him with superstitious awe, as once to Dante: “He was there, he saw—and came back.”
And how many of us have spiritually emigrated to the West! And how many among us who live in unconscious duplicity, whose bodies are here, but whose spirits have remained there!
Chaadaev signifies a new deepened understanding of nationality as the highest flowering of personality and of Russia as the source of absolute moral freedom.
Having allotted us inner freedom, Russia presents us with a choice, and those who have made this choice are genuine Russian people, wherever they may attach themselves. But woe unto those who, after having circled about close to their home-nest, faintheartedly return!
Notes about Chénier
The eighteenth century is like a dried-up lake: with neither depth nor moisture, every underwater thing found itself on the surface. To people themselves, it was frightening, due to the transparency and emptiness of the concepts. La Vérité, la Liberté, la Nature, la Déité, especially la Vertu; they call forth an almost dizzying head-whirl of thought, like transparent, evaporated ponds. This century, which had been forced to walk along the ocean bottom as on a parquet floor, turned out to be preeminently a century of moralizing. People were astonished by the most trivial moral truths as if by rare sea shells. Human thought was suffocating from a cornucopia of false truths and yet could find no rest. Because, obviously, these all turned out to be insufficiently effective, it followed that they had to be endlessly repeated.
The Great Principles of the eighteenth century were always in motion, in a kind of mechanical flurry, like a Buddhist prayer wheel. Here is an example: the thought of antiquity had understood the Good as bounty or well-being; nothing here, as yet, of that inner emptiness of hedonism. The Good, well-being, health merged in a single representation, as a fully weighted, single-natured golden globe. Inside this concept there was no vacuum. And so this seamless nature of antique moralizing, by no means imperative, and by no means hedonistic, permits one even to doubt the moral nature of this consciousness: isn’t it rather just a kind of hygiene; that is, a prophylaxis of spiritual health?
The eighteenth century lost a direct link with the moral consciousness of the ancient world. The seamless golden globe no longer made any music of its own. Cunning devices were used to draw sounds from it, considerations of the usefulness of the pleasant and the pleasure of the useful. This divested consciousness simply could not bear the idea of duty, and it made its appearance in the image “Roman Virtue,” more suitable for supporting the equilibrium of bad tragedies than for administering the spiritual life of man. Yes, the link with authentic antiquity was lost for the eighteenth century; much more powerful was the link with the rigidified forms of scholastic casuistry, so that the Age of Reason appears as the direct heir of scholasticism, with its rationalism, allegorical thinking, personifications of ideas, quite in the manner of the Old French poetics. The Middle Ages had its own soul and an authentic knowledge of antiquity; and, not only in the matter of writing, but also in the loving reproduction of the Classical world, it left the Age of Enlightenment far behind. The muses had no fun around Intellect, and they were bored with it, though they only reluctantly acknowledged this. Everything living and healthy went into knickknacks and trivia, because there was less surveillance over these, while a child with seven nurses (Tragedy) degenerated into a luxuriant sterile flower, precisely because the Great Principles had spent so much time bending over her cradle and nursing her along. Younger forms of poetry that fortunately escaped this deadly tutelage would outlive the old that had withered under its hand.
Chenier’s1 poetic path was a departure, almost a flight, from the Great Principles to the living water of poetry, by no means to antiquity, but to a completely contemporary understanding of the world.
In Chénier’s poetry one seems to see a religious and perhaps a childishly naïve presentiment of the nineteenth century.
The Alexandrine verse goes back to antiphony; that is, to a roll-call exchange of the chorus, divided into two halves, which have the same amount of time at their disposal for the expression of their will. However, this equality of right is violated when one voice relinquishes part of the time belonging to it to the other. Time is the pure and unvarnished substance of the Alexandrine. The distribution of time along the runnels of verb, subject, and predicate composes the autonomous inner life of the Alexandrine verse, regulates its breathing, its tension, and its degree of saturation. Amidst all this there takes place as it were a “struggle for time” among the elements of the verse, during which each of them, like a sponge, tries to absorb into itself as large a quantity of time as possible, while encountering in this effort the claims of the others. The triad of subject, verb, and predicate, is not, in an Alexandrine verse, something invariable, because these keep absorbing an alien content, and often the verb appears with the significance and weight of the subject, the predicate with the significance of action, that is, of the verb, and so forth.
Thus we have a fluidity of the relationships of the separate parts of speech, their fusibility, their capacity for chemical transmutation while retaining the absolute clarity and transparency of syntax that is extremely characteristic of Chénier’s style. The strictest hierarchy of predicate, verb, and subject on the monotonous canvas of the Alexandrine verse pattern traces the line of the image, communicates a prominence to the alternation of the paired lines.
Chénier belongs to a generation of French poets for whom syntax was a golden cage, from which they never dreamed of springing out. This golden cage was definitively constructed by Racine and furnished as a magnificent palace. The syntactical freedom of the medieval poets—Villon, Rabelais, the whole Old French syntax—remained behind, while the romantic uproar of Chateaubriand and Lamartine had not yet begun. A mean parrot guarded the golden cage—Boileau. Chénier faced the problem of creating an absolute plenitude of poetic freedom within the limits of the narrowest canon, and he solved this problem. The sense of the separate line as a living, indivisible organism and the sense of verbal hierarchy within the confines of this integral line are unusually characteristic of French poetry.
Chénier loved and sensed the separate, wandering line: he took a liking to the “Verse from the Epithalamion of Bion,” and he preserved it.
It is in the nature of the new French line, founded by Clément Marot, father of the Alexandrine,2 to weigh a word before it is uttered. Romantic poetics, however, assumes an outburst, unexpectedness, seeks after effect, unanticipated acoustics, and never knows what the song itself is costing it. From the powerful harmonic wave of Lamartine’s “Lake” to the ironical little songs of Verlaine, Romantic poetry affirms the poetics of the unexpected. The laws of poetry sleep in the larynx, and all of Romantic poetry, like a necklace of dead nightingales, will not transmit, will not relinquish its secrets, knows no testament. A dead nightingale teaches nobody how to sing. Chénier ingeniously found a middle way between the Classical and the Romantic manner.