London
With the Crimea War, with the death of Nicholas (1855), a new time came out; out of the continuous gloom there emerged a new masses, new horizons; some movement could be sensed: it was hard to see well from a distance –there had to be an eye-witness. One appeared in the person of Vensky, who confirmed that these horizons were no mirage but reality, that the boat had moved and was underway. One had only to look at his glowing face to believe him. There had been no such faces at all in recent times in Russia.
Overwhelmed by a feeling so unusual for a Russian, I called to mind Kant taking off his velvet cap at the news of the proclamation of the republic in 1792 and repeating “Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart.’ Yes, it is good to fall asleep at dawn after a long night of bad weather, fully believing that a marvelous day is coming!
Indeed, the morning was drawing near of the day for which I had been yearning since I was thirteen – a boy in a camel jacket sitting with just such another ‘malefactor in a little room in the ‘old house’, in the lecture-room at the university, surrounded by an eager, lively brotherhood; in prison and exile; in a foreign land, making my way through thee havoc of revolution and reaction; at the summit of domestic happiness, and shattered, lost on the shores of England with my printed monologue. The sun which had set, lighting up Moscow below the Sparrow Hills and carrying with it a boyish vow . . . was rising after a twenty-year-long night. What was the use now of rest and sleep . . .to work! . . .
But seven years of liberalism exhausted the whole reserve of radical aspirations. All that had been amassed and compressed in the mind since 1825 was expended in raptures of joy, in the foretaste of things to come. After the truncated emancipation of the peasants (1861) people with weak nerves thought that Russia had gone too far, going too quickly; others were simply tired by political agitation, they wished for the former repose; they were satiated before a meal which had cost them so much trouble.
At the same time the radical party, young, and for that very reason full of theories, began to announce its intentions more and more impulsively, frightening a society that was already frightened before this. It set forth its ostensible aim in such extreme outcomes, that liberals and the champions of gradual progress crossed themselves and spat, ran away stopping their ears, to hide under the old, filthy but familiar blanket of the police. The headlong haste of the students and the landowners want of practice in listening to other people could not help bringing them to blows.
The force of public opinion, hardly called to life, manifested itself as a savage conservatism. It declared its participation in public affairs by elbowing the government into the debauchery of terror and persecution.
Our position became more and more difficult. We could not stand up for the filth reaction, but our locus standi outside it was lost. Like the knights-errant in the stories who have lost their way, we were hesitating at the crossroads. Go to the right, and you will lose your horse, but you will be safe yourself; go to the left, and your horse will be safe but you will perish; go forward, and everyone will abandon you; go back –that was impossible: for us the road in that direction was over grown with grass. If only a sorcerer or hermit would appear and relieve us of the burden of irresolution . . .
Kelsiev * had hardly passed out of our door when fresh people, driven out by the severe cold of 1863, were knocking at it. These came not from the training-schools of the coming revolution but from the devastated stage on to which they had already acted roles. They were seeking shelter from the storm without and seeking nothing within; what they needed was a temporary haven until the weather improved, until a chance presented itself to return to the fray. These men, while still very young, had finished with ideas, with culture: theoretical questions did not interest them, partly because they had not yet arisen among them, partly because what they were concerned with was their application. Though they had been defeated physically, they had given proofs of their courage. They had furled their flag and their task was to preserve its honor. Hence their dry tone, cassant, raide, abrupt and rather elevated. Hence their martial, impatient aversion for prolonged deliberation, for criticism, their somewhat elaborate contempt for all intellectual luxuries, among which they put Art in the foreground. What need had they of music? What need of poetry? ‘The fatherland is in danger, aux armes, citoyens!’ In certain cases they were theoretically right, but they did not take into account the complex, intricate process of balancing the ideal with the real, and, I need hardly say, they assumed that their views and theories were the views and theories of the whole of Russia. To blame for this our young pilots of the coming storm would be unjust. It is a common characteristic of youth.
A year ago a Frenchman, a follower of Comte, assured me that Catholicism did not exist in France, that it had completement perdu le terrain, and he pointed among others to the medical faculty, to the professors and students who were not merely Catholics but not even Deists.
“Well, but the part of France,’ I observed, ‘which neither gives nor hears medical lectures?’
With the Crimea War, with the death of Nicholas (1855), a new time came out; out of the continuous gloom there emerged a new masses, new horizons; some movement could be sensed: it was hard to see well from a distance –there had to be an eye-witness. One appeared in the person of Vensky, who confirmed that these horizons were no mirage but reality, that the boat had moved and was underway. One had only to look at his glowing face to believe him. There had been no such faces at all in recent times in Russia.
Overwhelmed by a feeling so unusual for a Russian, I called to mind Kant taking off his velvet cap at the news of the proclamation of the republic in 1792 and repeating “Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart.’ Yes, it is good to fall asleep at dawn after a long night of bad weather, fully believing that a marvelous day is coming!
Indeed, the morning was drawing near of the day for which I had been yearning since I was thirteen – a boy in a camel jacket sitting with just such another ‘malefactor in a little room in the ‘old house’, in the lecture-room at the university, surrounded by an eager, lively brotherhood; in prison and exile; in a foreign land, making my way through thee havoc of revolution and reaction; at the summit of domestic happiness, and shattered, lost on the shores of England with my printed monologue. The sun which had set, lighting up Moscow below the Sparrow Hills and carrying with it a boyish vow . . . was rising after a twenty-year-long night. What was the use now of rest and sleep . . .to work! . . .
But seven years of liberalism exhausted the whole reserve of radical aspirations. All that had been amassed and compressed in the mind since 1825 was expended in raptures of joy, in the foretaste of things to come. After the truncated emancipation of the peasants (1861) people with weak nerves thought that Russia had gone too far, going too quickly; others were simply tired by political agitation, they wished for the former repose; they were satiated before a meal which had cost them so much trouble.
At the same time the radical party, young, and for that very reason full of theories, began to announce its intentions more and more impulsively, frightening a society that was already frightened before this. It set forth its ostensible aim in such extreme outcomes, that liberals and the champions of gradual progress crossed themselves and spat, ran away stopping their ears, to hide under the old, filthy but familiar blanket of the police. The headlong haste of the students and the landowners want of practice in listening to other people could not help bringing them to blows.
The force of public opinion, hardly called to life, manifested itself as a savage conservatism. It declared its participation in public affairs by elbowing the government into the debauchery of terror and persecution.
Our position became more and more difficult. We could not stand up for the filth reaction, but our locus standi outside it was lost. Like the knights-errant in the stories who have lost their way, we were hesitating at the crossroads. Go to the right, and you will lose your horse, but you will be safe yourself; go to the left, and your horse will be safe but you will perish; go forward, and everyone will abandon you; go back –that was impossible: for us the road in that direction was over grown with grass. If only a sorcerer or hermit would appear and relieve us of the burden of irresolution . . .
Kelsiev * had hardly passed out of our door when fresh people, driven out by the severe cold of 1863, were knocking at it. These came not from the training-schools of the coming revolution but from the devastated stage on to which they had already acted roles. They were seeking shelter from the storm without and seeking nothing within; what they needed was a temporary haven until the weather improved, until a chance presented itself to return to the fray. These men, while still very young, had finished with ideas, with culture: theoretical questions did not interest them, partly because they had not yet arisen among them, partly because what they were concerned with was their application. Though they had been defeated physically, they had given proofs of their courage. They had furled their flag and their task was to preserve its honor. Hence their dry tone, cassant, raide, abrupt and rather elevated. Hence their martial, impatient aversion for prolonged deliberation, for criticism, their somewhat elaborate contempt for all intellectual luxuries, among which they put Art in the foreground. What need had they of music? What need of poetry? ‘The fatherland is in danger, aux armes, citoyens!’ In certain cases they were theoretically right, but they did not take into account the complex, intricate process of balancing the ideal with the real, and, I need hardly say, they assumed that their views and theories were the views and theories of the whole of Russia. To blame for this our young pilots of the coming storm would be unjust. It is a common characteristic of youth.
A year ago a Frenchman, a follower of Comte, assured me that Catholicism did not exist in France, that it had completement perdu le terrain, and he pointed among others to the medical faculty, to the professors and students who were not merely Catholics but not even Deists.
“Well, but the part of France,’ I observed, ‘which neither gives nor hears medical lectures?’
‘It, of course, keeps to religion and its rites –
but more from habit and ignorance.’
‘I am very well believe it, but what will you do with it?’
“What did they do in 1792?”
‘Not much: at first the Revolution closed the churches, but afterwards they opened tem again. Do you remember Augereau’s answer to Napoleon when they were celebrating the Concordat? ‘Do you like the ceremony? The consul asked as they came out of Notre Dame. The Jacobin general answered: “Very much. I am only sorry that the two hundred thousand men are not present who went to their graves to abolish such ceremonies!”’
‘Ah bah! We have grown wiser, and we shall not open the church doors – or rather we shall not close them at all, but shall turn the temples of superstition into schools.’
’L’infame sera ecrasse’ , I wound up, laughing.
‘I am very well believe it, but what will you do with it?’
“What did they do in 1792?”
‘Not much: at first the Revolution closed the churches, but afterwards they opened tem again. Do you remember Augereau’s answer to Napoleon when they were celebrating the Concordat? ‘Do you like the ceremony? The consul asked as they came out of Notre Dame. The Jacobin general answered: “Very much. I am only sorry that the two hundred thousand men are not present who went to their graves to abolish such ceremonies!”’
‘Ah bah! We have grown wiser, and we shall not open the church doors – or rather we shall not close them at all, but shall turn the temples of superstition into schools.’
’L’infame sera ecrasse’ , I wound up, laughing.
“Yes, no doubt of it; that is certain!
‘But that you and I
will not see it – that is even more certain.’It is to this looking at the surrounding world through a prism colored by personal sympathies that half the revolutionary failures are due. The life of young people, remote from the everyday, wholesale struggle for personal interests, though it clearly grasps general truths, nearly always come to grief through a false understanding of their application to the needs of the day. . .
There were more ferocious ones than those of whom I have spoken: the clumsy and uncouth representatives of the “New Generation,’ who may be called the Sobakeviches and Nozdrev’s ** of Nihilism.
However superfluous it may be to make a reservation, yet I shall do so, knowing the logic and the manners of our opponents I have not the slightest desire in what I am saying to fling a stone at the younger generation or at Nihilism. Of the latter I have written many times. Our Sobakeviches of Nihilism do not constitute its most powerful expression, but only represents its exaggerated extremes. Who would judge of Christianity from the Flagellants of Origin or of the Revolution from the September butchers and the tricoteuses of Robespierre?
The arrogant lads of whom I speak are worth studying, because they are the expression of a temporary type, very definitely marked and very frequently marked and very frequently repeated, a transitional form of the sickness of our development from our former stagnation.
For the most part they were lacking in the deportment which is given by breeding, and the staying power which is given by scientific by studies. In the first fervor of emancipation they were in a hurry to cast off all the conventional forms and to push away all the rubber fenders which prevent rough collisions. This made difficult the simplest relations with them.
Removing everything to the last rag, our enfants terribles proudly appeared as their mothers bore them, and their mothers had not borne them well, not as simple, rather too plump lads but as inheritors of the evil, unhealthy life of our lower classes in Petersburg. Instead of athletic muscles and youthful nakedness, they displayed the melancholy traces of hereditary anaemia, the traces of old sores and of various fetters and collars. There were few of them who had come up from the people. The hall, the barrack-room, the seminary, the petty proprietor’s farm survived in their blood and their brains, and lost none of their characteristic features though twisted in an opposite direction. So far as I know, this fact has attracted no serious attention.
On the hand, the reaction against the narrow, oppressive world was bound to throw the younger generation into antagonism and negation of their hostile surrounding; it was useless to expect moderation or justice in them. On the contrary, everything was done in defiance, everything was done in resentment. ‘You are hypocrites, we shall be cynics; you have been moral in words, we will be wicked in words; you have been polite to your superiors and rude to your inferiors, we shall be rude to everyone; you bow down to those whom you do not respect, we will jostle people without apologizing; your feeling of personal dignity consistently in nothing but decorum and external honor, we make it our point of honor to flout every decorum and to scorn every point d’honneur.’
But on the other hand, though disowning all the ordinary forms of social life, their character was full of its own hereditary aliments and deformity. Casting off, as we have said, all veils, the most desperate played the dandy in the costume of Gogol’s Petukh and did not preserve the pose of the Medici Venus. Their nakedness did not conceal but revealed what they were. It revealed that their systematic uncouthness, their rude and insolent talk had nothing in common with the inoffensive and simple-hearted coarseness of the peasant, but a great deal in common with thhe manner of the low-class pettifogger, the shop-boy and the flunky. The people no more considered them as one of themselves than they did a Slavophil in a murmolka. To the people these men remained alien, the lowest stratum of the enemies camp, skinny young masters, scribblers out of a job, Russians turned Germans.
To be completely free, one must forget one’s liberation and that from which one has been liberated, and cast off the habits of the environment out of which one has grown. Until this has been done we cannot help being conscious of the servant’s hall, the barrack-room, the government office or the seminary in every gesture they make and every word they utter.
To hit a man in the phiz at the first objection he advances – if not with a fist then with a word of abuse – to call Stuart Mill a rascal, forgetting all the service he has done, is not that the same as the Russian master’s way of ‘punching old Gavrilo in the snout for a crumpled cravat’? In this and similar pranks do you not recognize the policeman, the district officer, the village constable dragging a bailiff by his gray beard? Do you not, in the insolent arrogance of their manners and answers, clearly recognize the insolence of the officers of the days of Nicholas? Do you not see, in men who talk haughtily and disdainfully of Shakespeare and Pushkin, the grandson’s of Shaklozub, reared in the house of their grandshire who wanted ‘to make a Voltaire of his corporal?
The very leprosy of bribery has survived in high-handed importunity for money, by bias and threats under the pretext of common causes, in the feeble impulse towards being fed at the expense of the service and towards avenging a refusal by slander and libel.
All this will be transformed and thrashed out in time. But there is no blinking the fact that a strange soil has been prepared by the Tsar’s paternal government and imperial civilization in our ‘kingdom of darkness’ It is a soil on which seedlings of great promise have grown, on the one hand, into the worshippers of the Muravev’s and the Katkovs [ reactionaries] and, on the other, into the bullies of Nihilism and the imprudent Bazarov free-lances.
Our black earth needs a good deal of drainage!
* V.I. Keliev was temporarily a member of the circle of revolutionary emigrants and became one of the first renegades of the Russian liberation movement. The preceding chapter devoted to his tragi-comic story; I regret space didn’t permit including it, for it is a Chekhovian tales that displays Herzen’s novelistic talents and his humanity (D.M.)
** Two characters in Gogol’s Dead Souls
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