As with the preceding Schellingian generation, the young Hegelians were inspired by a series of new professors: Redkin in law with his constant reminder that "you are priests of truth"; Rul'e in zoology, tracing Hegel's
dialectic in the animal world; and above all, Granovsky in history. Like earlier circles, Stankevich's followers called one another "brother" and engaged in group readings and group confessions.
As with previous Western thinkers, Hegel was known as much through Western discussions of his work as through original texts-Stankevich discovering him through a French translation, Herzen through a Polish disciple. But Hegel's basic conviction that history makes sense shone through even the most superficial reading of Hegel and appealed to the young generation. Hegel's famous declaration that "the real is rational and the rational is real" offered reassurance to a generation overcome by a feeling of isolation and subjective depression. Stankevich wrote from Berlin that "there is only one salvation from madness-history."62 Hegel made it possible to find meaning in history-even in the oppressive chapter being written under Nicholas. "Reality, thou art wise and all-wise,"63 Belinsky exclaimed, applying the adjectives of higher order Masonry, mudra i premudra, to the real world. One need no longer run away to find truth in a lodge or circle. Objective truth can be found in the everyday world by the "critically thinking" individual who is informed by Hegelian teachings. "As a result of them," said Belinsky in the condescending tone of the converted Hegelian, "I am able to get along with practical people. In each of them I study with interest the species and type, not the individual…. Every day I notice something… ."64 Coming at a time when depression, wanderings, and even suicide were taking an increasing toll among the romantic idealists, Hegel seemed to say that all purely personal and subjective feelings are irrelevant. Everything depends on objective necessity. "My personal I has been killed for ever," wrote Bakunin after his conversion; "it no longer seeks anything for itself; its life will henceforth be life in the Absolute; but in essence my personal I has gained more than it has lost. … My life is now a truthful life."65
Whether Slavophile or Westernizer, the older generation found this philosophy repellent. In comparison with Schelling, Hegel stood in the tradition of those who "placed the root of intimate human convictions . . . outside the sphere of aesthetic and moral sense."66
Many of the Hegelians who contributed to building the modern German state were excited by the Hegelian idea that the state was the supreme expression of the World Spirit in history. In Russia, too, Hegel found some disciples principally concerned with increasing rationality and civic discipline through the state; but they tended to be (like Hegel himself) relatively moderate figures mainly concerned with political reform: the so-called Rechtsstaat liberals like the historian Granovsky and Chicherin, the mayor of Moscow.
However, Hegel convinced many more Russians that the dialectic
requires not the apotheosis of the present state but its total destruction. Seemingly impossible changes suddenly became possible by considering the fact that history proceeded through contradictions. Even more than the Hegelian left in Germany, the Russian Hegelians found in his theory of history a call to revolution: to the destruction of "God and the State," "the Knouto-Germanic Empire."67
Ostensibly, Belinsky turned revolutionary by rejecting Hegeclass="underline"
All the talk in Hegel about morality is pure nonsense, for in the kingdom of objective thought there is no morality any more than in objective religion. . . . The fate of the subject, the individual, the personality is more important than the fate of the whole world and the health of the Emperor of China (i.e. the Hegelian AUgemeinheii). . . . All my respects, Igor Fedorovich, I bow before your philosophic nightcap, but . . . even if I should succeed in lifting myself to the highest rung on the ladder of development I should demand an accounting for all the victims of circumstance in life and history … of the inquisition, of Philip II. . . .es
This passage was often cited by radical reformers (and provided the inspiration for Ivan Karamazov's famous rejection of his "ticket of admission" to heaven). But it did not mark the end of Hegel's influence on Belinsky or on Russian radicalism. Although Belinsky came to look to French socialists for leadership in the coming transformation of European society, he still expected the change to occur in a Hegelian manner. History remained "a necessary and reasonable development of ideas" moving toward a realization of the world spirit on earth, when "Father-Reason shall reign" and the criminal "will pray for his own punishment and none will punish him."69 The final "synthesis" on earth will be a time in which the realm of necessity gives way to the realm of freedom. The present, seemingly victorious, "thesis," the rule of kings and businessmen in Europe, will be destroyed by its radical "antithesis." This "negation of negation" will make room for the new millennium.
Bakunin was the most truly "possessed" and revolutionary of all the Hegelians with his ideological commitment to destruction. He spent almost all of the "remarkable decade" in Western Europe and was a major catalyst in the "revolution of the intellectuals" in 1848. Only the hint of final liberation contained in Schiller's "Ode to Joy" in the choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was to be saved from the coming conflagration. Bakunin's Hegelian conviction that total destruction must precede total freedom had an immense influence on European revolutionary thought- particularly in Southern Europe-and had only just begun to wane at the time of his death in 1876. Even his ideological rival for influence within the populist movement, the evolutionary Peter Lavrov, used Hegelian appeals
in his famous "Historical Letters" of the late sixties by urging men to renounce their purely personal lives in order to be "conscious knowing agents" of the historical process.70
It is perhaps more correct to speak of the vulgarization of Hegelian concepts than the influence of Hegel's ideas in Russia. In either case, the impact was great-and, on the whole, disastrous. The strident presentation of Hegelian philosophy as an antidote to occult mysticism was rather like offering typhoid-infected water to a man thirsty with fever. Koyre provocatively says of Belinsky's rejection of Hegel that it did not represent a real change of philosophy but "the cry of revolt of a sick man whom the Hegelian medicine has not cured."71 One might almost say that the Hegelian medicine turned the Russian taste for all-encompassing philosophic systems into an addiction. Those who managed to recover from the intoxication with Hegel were left with a kind of philosophic hangover. They tended to reject philosophy altogether but were left with a permanent sense of dissatisfaction with moderate positions and tentative compromises. The "ex-Hegelians" Belinsky and Herzen were no less extreme than the permanently intoxicated Bakunin in their hatred of posredstvennost' ("mediocrity"), meshchanstvo ("bourgeois philistinism"), and juste-milieu.
The Hegelian idea that history proceeds through necessary contradictions also lent a new quality of acrimony to the previously mild debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers. Hegelianism seemed to demonstrate the "power of negative thinking." It is difficult to find any positive statement of belief in the late writings of the "furious" Belinsky. Yet, because of the passionate sincerity of his personality, negative thinking was made to appear a virtue and became a kind of tradition in the new literary criticism which he largely introduced into Russia. Herzen too-for all his literacy and concern for individual liberties-was at his best in attacking the attackers of freedom. He became convinced that revolutionary change was coming and left Russia forever in 1847 to greet the coming stage of history in Paris. After the failure of 1848, he decided-along with Bakunin-that revolutionary change was to come from Russia after all. Suddenly in 1849-50 Herzen and Bakunin both turned to the ideal of the peasant commune and a free federation of Slavic peoples72-not primarily because they were morally or spiritually desirable as they had been for the Slavophiles and were soon to be for the populists, but because they represented the "negation of negation": an historical battering ram for upsetting the philistinism of bourgeois Europe.