Death Comes to the Archbishop by Norman F. Cantor

Unlike  Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus and William of Occam. Thomas Bradwardine  (c. 1300 – 26 August 1349) was not a Franciscan friar, a member of a religious order. He was an ordinary secular cleric, which gave him great intellectual freedom if at the same time denying him the protection and financial aid the Order of Friars Minor provided its intellectuals. Bradwardine had to make his way as a student, without special group supports. This perhaps drove h his precocity, although William of Occam was similarly an adolescent prodigy who stated teaching at Oxford when he was barely twenty.

Bardwardine was intellectually a free agent. He did not necessarily agree with the Oxford Franciscan tradition in all its doctrines and assumptions. But he was a product of the great Oxford intellectual renaissance of 1240-1380 -  not to be seen at the old English university again until the 19^th century- and worked within the Oxford intellectual tradition as compared to the very different perspective of Thomas Aquinas in Paris.

The Black Death helped make it apparent that Thomism was an intellectual dead end. If failed to perceive the necessary quantification in determining natural processes. It ha no inkling of the crucial importance of experimentation. It was burdened with a strictly observational and rhetorical approach to science and furthermore remained specifically committed to Aristotle’s error-driven physics.

Thomism looked liberal on the outside, a progressive philosophy that imagined a rationally constructed world. But Bradwardine knew the  world was not rational. I was governed by an incomprehensible and awful deity whose actions such as the Black Death, made no sense to humans.

The way forward to modern science and the medicine that finally conquered the plague was to accept emotionally, on faith, a fearsome and unpredictable deity of absolute power, who ruled this and possibly other worlds and spaces. Scientists then progressed through experimentation and quantification to the understanding of immediately complex, natural processes in very small segments.

This was the route advocated by Bradwardine, Occam, and the Oxford school. It led over a longtime to modern biochemically grounded medicine. Thomism, ordained in the 16th century as the official philosophy of the Catholic Church, led to liberal dogmas, happy dispositions, and intellectual nullity.

Thomas Aquinas was as learned and intellectual, as powerful a thinker and writer as existed in the medieval world. One segment of his doctrine, on the philosophy of law, endures today in what is called natural law theory and is still embraced by many liberal-minded professors in the better American law schools.

The intellectual road Thomas pursued – inaugurated by the Jewish thinker Maimonides in the 12th century- seemed attractive and compelling at the time, but it did not lead to modern science. It did all the wrong things if that goal- which in the end distinguished Western European civilization from other cultures – was to be gained. It sought close compatibility between biblical faith and secular learning. It aimed at synthesis (‘summa’) of all important knowledge, while Galileo, Newton, and above all Einstein knew that the truth was in the details, that knowledge of nature was gained by the closest possible scrutiny of very small segments of natural processes.

Instead, Thomas decided that Aristotle was right abut most things, including natural science. But Aristotle was wrong about many scientific things, as became evident in the late 13th and 14th centuries, especially but not exclusively at Oxford University.

Bradwardine and his Oxford colleagues did not quite make the breakthrough to modern science. The quest had to be restarted in the 17th century, when algebra and scientific equipment were much more developed and the cultural ambience and academic reward system more propitious. But the archbishop knew the way to go, as Thomas did not: focus on details, use quantification, do not try to force synthesis between science and theology. If the Black Death had not struck down the new archbishop, would the outcome have been different? Would the history of modern science in England date from the 14th century Oxford rather than from late-17^th –century Cambridge?  The biographies of Sir Isaac Newton an Albert Einstein prove that a single great mind in a position of power and academic leadership can create an intellectual revolution.

Prolegomenon to The Test Drive by Avital Ronell

At this point I choose simply to retain the sense, the mood, the spark of dissipation and reflection within a domain that is not meant to be against or about science. These reflections are offered by – what shall I say?- an admittedly driven yet nonetheless poetic, if often scholarly, sensibility that seeks to understand without appropriation, to grasp without the use of claws.

At one point Nietzsche sees the experiment freeing us from the constraints of referential truth. Science amazes him, though a reactive tendency to reduce itself to calculative efficacy also lands squarely in his repertoire of illusions, dissembling interpretations, and masks. He redirects  science to art, ligaturing an ancient complicity.

For my part I am neither averse to nor obsessed by science- options that seem useless. I feel the weight that presses upon our bodies, our embarrassed sense of promise and emptiness and connection to the world, the tests to which I am put and others have to endure –tests by which that being, still tagged as human, nowadays receives definition. One has every right, in  fact it is a duty, to ask of science if it is capable of devoting itself to securing the conditions for thinking joyousness and the affirmation of life. (Those conditions are not to be construed as simplistic or regressive-utopian, as anyone who has been circuited through psychoanalysis realizes.) Or is science really only able in the end to promote the glacialization, the sterilization, the steely calculative grid of the technological dominion, allied as it is with the persistent menace of world loss and money-eating privilege? One does not have to be a withering Marxist, a vegan or eco-militant to see that there are all too few scientific activists in our mist, not enough to carry around its effusions. Yet science amazes me.  .  .

Literary and philosophical studies, art and art criticism, risk getting sucked in by the ruling scientific claims, the alienating authority of what Husserl calls ‘objectivism.’ The attitude that science gives us, this Einstellung, is life-depleting and aura-sapping. It has left a toxic residue of un-interrogated policies, now becoming decisive. The delusion of self-sufficiency, a mark of the self-evisceration of the sciences detached from their reflective ground and forgotten abysses, is dangerous for us all, blocking vision and eclipsing futurity. So Husserl, more or less. Upgraded by historicity. The other one Nietzsche cried: ‘The wasteland grows.’ Still, I am not about doom and gloom but want to heed what Husserl and others, some whose names you do not know, say about “mans now unendurable lack of clarity about his own existence and his infinite tasks.’ This may sound old-fashioned, that is to say, pre-Freudian, ante-Battaillean, post-Enlightenment, and so forth. For who today hungers for clarity as if darkness did not send out its own special light, perhaps a solar storm of another order? And who today would restrict her rhetorical-existential quiver  to ‘man’?

Here is the question that I bring to the table: Why has the test- throughout history, and perhaps most pervasively today- come to define our relations to questions of truth, knowledge, and even reality? It is not a matter of choosing between a science of fact and a science of essence –between an account of why things are actual rather than possible. Nor is it simply a matter of technological self-understanding, as if the scientific reflection on its own procedures and premises could satisfy a philosophical hunger.

The term ‘subject position’ would not cover the calamity of the field that encompasses the will to test. At times my said subject position seems reduced to that of a quivering rabbit, or less glamorously, to that of a rat, prodded and probed, sectionalized and cornered by the technological feeler. As a receptor to the invasive demand my little rabbit ears are shaking – a figure conjured by Heidegger to represent exemplary listening. I do not know if my listening device is exemplary, nor do I insist on sustaining the pathos that propels the images gathered in this place. Like a good Nietzchean, I am attuned to the conflicting valuations, the gains and losses, of the phenomena under consideration. I am not insensitive to the liberating potential of testing one’s ground, which is to say, of recanting one’s certainties, throwing off the security blanket of time and history.  .  .  .

The test drive covers a lot of ground and splits off into different and related semantic fields. There are moments of local or functional reduplication, overlap and support. One side of testing is as assertive in its finding as the other is vulnerable when counting its losses. There is the test which stands its ground, standardized, and equipped with irrefutable results. So it claims and so it stands. There is the other test that crashes against walls, collapses certitude, and lives by failure- lives by dying, or at least by destroying. All sorts of issues come to the fore, including those institutions and acts that deal with norms and establish boundaries and those that rely on expertise, or, in a court of law, on expert witnesses. The one register offers testing results – certitudes – by which to calculate and count  on the other (including the self as other, as tested other). Another register consistently detaches from its rootedness in truth: self-dissolving and ever probing, it depends of boundary-crossing feats and the collapse of horizon . . .the two principal registers do not lead separate lives in the world but imply and breach one another at several critical junctures of thought. . . .

I will focus on the ways in which the test – and in particular the rhetoric of testing –has restructured the field of everyday and psychic life. Whether clearly stated or largely disavowed, models of testing inform diverse types of social organization, legitimating crucial and often irreversible discursive tendencies and mandating critical decisions. In terms of the political implications of testing, one need only consider the way wars are waged on material sites and objects, and the way the state uses drugs in order to take possession of the body. Testing means, among other things, that your pee belongs to the state or to any institution or apparatus that thrives on the new civic readability. It is my duty to bring us back to a more original readability of your urine sample, or, at least, if I am unable to restore your pee to its proper place, to trace the contours of the complicated extravagance of testing. . . .

The act of obtaining knowledge of the real is a light that always somewhere casts shadows. It is never immediate and plain.

Herzen Chrestomathy

The mutual interaction of men on books, and books on, men, is a curious thing. A book takes its whole stamp from the society in which it is conceived; it generalizes, it makes it more vivid and sharp, and afterwards it is outdone by reality. The originals caricature their sharply shaded portraits, and actual persons grow into their literary shadows. A the end of the last century all young Germans were a little after the style of Werther, while all their young ladies resembled Charlotte; and the beginning of the present century the university Werthers had begun to change into ‘Robbers,’ not real ones but Schilleresque robbers. The young Russians who have come on the scene since 1862 are almost all derived from Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? With the addition of a few Bazarov features.

The Onegins and Pechorins begot the Rudins and the Beltovs, the Rudins and Beltov’s begot Bazarov. The tired and bored are succeeded by men who strive to act; life rejects them as both worthless and incomplete. ‘It is their lot to suffer, but they never get anything done. Society is deaf and inexorable to them. They are incapable of adapting themselves to its conditions, not one of them has risen so high as a head-clerk of a government office. Some are consoled by becoming professors and working for a future generation. Their negative usefulness is incontestable. They increase the numbers of men incapable of practical activity, in consequence of which practical activity itself, or more precisely the forms in which it usually finds expression now, slowly but steadily sink lower in public esteem.

It seemed after the Crimea War that Rudinism was over, that the period of fruitless ideals and yearning as was being succeeded by a period of seething and useful activity. But the mirage was dissipated. The Rudins did not become practical workers, and a new generation has come forward from behind them and taken up a reproachful and mocking attitude towards its predecessors. “What are you whining about, what are you seeking, what are you asking from life? You want happiness, I suppose? I dare you do! Happiness has to be conquered. If you are strong, take it. If you are weak, hold your tongue; we feel sick enough without your whining!*

I frankly confess this throwing stones at one’s predecessors is very distasteful to me. I repeat what I have already said: I should like to save the younger generation from historical ingratitude, and even from historical error. It is time for the fathers not to devour their children like Saturn, but it is time for the children, too, to cease following the example of those natives of Kamchatka who kill off their old people. Surely it is not right  that only in natural science the phases and degrees of development, the declinations and deviations, even  the avortements, should be studied, accepted, considered sine ira et studio, but as one approaches history the physiological method is abandoned at once, and in its place methods of the criminal court and the police station are adopted.

The worse service Turgenev did Bazarov was putting him to death by typhus because he did not know how to manage him. That is an ultima ratio which no one can withstand; had Bazaarov escaped typhus, he certainly would have developed out of Bazarovism, at any rate into a man of science, which in physiology he loved and prized, and which does not change in methods, whether frog or men, embryology or history, is its subject.

Barazov drove every prejudice out of his head, and even after that he remained an extremely uncultured man. He had heard something about poetry, something about art and, without troubling himself to think, abruptly passed sentence on a subject of which he knew nothing. This conceit is characteristic of us Russians in general; it has its good points, such as intellectual daring, but in return for that it leads us at times into crude errors.

Science would have saved Bazarov; he would have ceased to look down on people with profound and unconcealed contempt. Science even more than the Gospel teaches us humility. She cannot look down at anything, she does not know what superiority means, she despises nothing, she never lies for the sake of a pose, and conceals nothing out of coquetry. She stops before the facts as an investigator, sometimes as a physician, never as an executioner, and still less wit hostility and irony.

Science –I anyhow am not bound to keep some words hidden in the science of the spirit- science is love, as Spinoza said of thought and cognizance.

What has been in history leaves an imprint by means of which science sooner or later  restores the past in its basic features. All that is lost is the accidental illumination, from one or another angle, under which it occurred. Apotheoses and calumnies, partialities and envies, all this is weathered and blown away. The light footstep on the sand vanishes; the imprint which has force and insist\ence stamps itself on the rock and will be brought to light by the honest laborer.

Connections, degrees of kinship, testators and heirs and their mutual rights, will all be revealed by the heraldry of science.

Only goddesses are born without predecessors, like Venus from the foam of the sea. Minerva, more intelligent, sprang from the ready head of Jupiter.

.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

Rough work coarsens the hands, coarsens the manners, coarsens the feelings; the man is toughened, casts off youthful dreaminess and gets rid of tearful sentimentality; there is no possibility of dreaming at work; the hard-working man looks upon idealism as a folly peculiar to the idleness and effeminacy of the well-to do; he reckons moral sufferings as imaginary, moral impulses and exploits as farfetched and absurd. He feels repulsion for high-flown talk.

The pedagogic method of our civilizing reformers is a bad one. It starts from the fundamental principle that we know everything and the people know nothing: as though we had taught the peasant his right to the land, his communal ownership, his system, the artel and the mir.

It goes without saying tat we can teach the people a great deal ,but there is a great deal that we have to learn from them and to study among them. We have theories, adopted by us and representing the worked-up discoveries of European culture. To determine which suits our national way of living, it is not enough to translate word for word; a lexicon is not enough. One must do with it in the first place what theoretical authorities are trying to do in the West with the way of living of the European peoples- introduce it into their consciousness.

The people cling obstinately to their way of living –for they believe in it; but we, too, cling obstinately to our theories and we believe in them and, what is more, we think that we know them, that the reality is so. Passing on after a fashion in conventional language what we have learned out of books, we see with despair that the people do not understand us, and we complain of the stupidity of the people, juts as a schoolboy blushes for his poor relations, because they do not know where to put ‘i’ and where ‘y,’ but never considers why there should be two different letters for one sound.

Genuinely desirous of the good of the people, seek remedies for their ailments in foreign pharmacopoeias; there the herbs are foreign, but it is easier to look for them in a book than in the fields. We easily and consistently become liberals, constitutionalists, democrats, Jacobins, but not members of the Russian people. All these political nuances one can acquire from books: all this is understood, explained, written, printed, bound . . .But here one must go wholly by oneself . . . The life of Russia is like a forest in which Dante lost his way, and the wild beasts that are in it are even worse than the Florentine ones ,but there is no Virgil to show the way; there are some Moscow Susanins, but even those led to the cemetery shrine instead of to the peasants cottage . . .

Without knowing the people we may oppress the people, we may enslave them, we may conquer them, but we cannot set them free.

Without the help of the people they will be liberated neither by the Tsar with his clerks, nor by the nobility with the Tsar nor by the nobility without the Tsar. . . .

Only the man who, when summoned to action, understands the life of the people, while not losing what science has given him; only the man who voices its aspirations, and founds on them the realization of them his participation in the common cause of the people of the soil, will be the bridegroom of what is to come.

 .   .   .   .   .   .  .   .   .   .  .  .

Pedantry and scholasticism prevent men from grasping things with simple, lively understanding more than do superstition and ignorance. With the latter the instincts are left, hardly realized, but trustworthy; moreover ignorance does not exclude passionate enthusiasm, nor does superstition exclude inconsistency. But pedantry is always true to itself.

At the time of the Italian war a decent, worthy professor lectured on the great triumphs of ‘international law’, describing how the principles once sketched big by Hugo Grotius had developed and entered into the consciousness of nations and governments, how questions which had in old times been decided by  rivers of blood and the miseries of entire provinces, of whole generations, we now settled, like civil disputes between private persons, on the principles of national conscience.

Who, apart from some old professional condottieri, would not agree with the  professor that this is one of the greatest victories of humanity and culture over brute violence? The trouble is not that the lecturer’s judgment is wrong ,but that humanity is very far from having gained this victory.

While the professor in eloquent words was inspiring his young audience to these Weltanschauungen, very different commentaries on international law were taking place on the fields of Magenta and Solferino. It would have been all the harder for any Amophictyonic Councils to avert the Italian war because there was no international cause for it since there was no subject in dispute. Napoleon waged this war as a remedial measure to calm down the French by the gymnastics of liberation and the shocks of victory, What Grotius or Vattel could have solved such a problem. How was it possible to avert a war which was essential for domestic interest? If it has not ben the Austrians the French would have had to beat somebody else. One an only rejoice that it was just the Austrians who incurred it . … The misfortune of the doctrinaires is that they shut their eyes when arguing  so that they may not see their opponent is Nature itself, history itself.

To complete the absurdity we ought not to lose sight of the fact that in abstract logic the professor is right, and that if  not a hundred but a hundred million men grasped the principles of Grotius and Vattel, they would not slaughter each other either for the sake of exercise or for the sake of a bit of land. But the misfortune is that under the present political regime only a hundred and not a hundred million men can understand the principles of of Grotius and Vattel.

That why neither lectures nor sermons have any effect; that is why neither the learned fathers nor the spiritual fathers can bring us any relief; the monks of knowledge, like the monks of ignorance, know nothing outside the walls of the monasteries and do not test their theories or their deductions by events, and while mean are perishing  from the eruption of the volcano they are blissfully beating time, listening to the music of the heavenly spheres and marveling at its harmony.

The Superfluous and the Jaundiced by Alexander Herzen

1860

These two classes of superfluous men [ The Onegins and the Perchorins], between whom Nature herself raised up a mountain chain of Oblomovs, and History marking out its boundaries, dug a frontier ditch – the very one in which Nicholas is buried- are continually mixed up. And therefore we want, with a partiality like that of Cato for the cause of the vanquished, to champion the older generation. Superfluous men were in those days as essential as it is essential now that there should be none.

Nothing is more lamentable than, in the midst of the growing activity, as yet unorganized and awkward but full of enterprise and initiative, to meet those gaping, unnerved lads whose lose their heads before the toughness of practical work, and expect a gratuitous solution of their difficulties and answers to problems which they have never been able to state clearly.

We will lay aside these volunteers who have appointed themselves superfluous men an, just as the French only recognize as real grenadiers les vieux de la vieille [the old of the old], so we will recognize as honorable and truly superfluous men only those of the reign of Nicholas. We ourselves belong to that unhappy generation and, grasping may years ago that we were superfluous on the banks of the Neva, we very practically made off as soon as the rope was untied.

There is no need for us to defend ourselves, but we are very sorry for our former comrades and want to protect them from the batch of sick that followed them after being discharged from Nicholas’s infirmary.

One cannot but share the healthy, realistic attitude of one of the best Russian reviews in attacking the flimsy moral point of view which in the French style seeks personal responsibility for public events. Historical strata can no more be judged by the criminal court than geological ones. And men who say that one ought not to bring down one’s thunder and lightning on bribe-takers and embezzlers of government funds, but on the environment which takes bribes a zoological characteristic of a whole tribe, of the beardless Russians, for instance, are perfectly right. All we desire is that the superfluous men of Nicholas’ reign should have the rights of bribe-takers and enjoy the privileges granted to the embezzlers of public funds. They are the more deserving of this in that they are not only superfluous but almost dead; and the bribe-takers and embezzlers are alive, and not only prosperous but historically justified.

With whom are we going to fight here? Whom have we to ridicule? On the one hand, men who have fallen from exhaustion; on the other, men crushed by the machine; to blame them for it is as ungenerous as to blame the scrofulous and lymphatic children for the poorness of their parents blood.

There can only be one serious question; were these morbid phenomena really due to the conditions of their environment, to their circumstances?

I think it can be hardly doubted.

There is no need to repeat how cramped, how panful, was the development of Russia. We were kept in ignorance by the knout and the Tartars: we were civilized by the axe and by Germans: but in both cases our nostrils were slit and we were branded with irons. Peter I drove civilization into us it such a wedge that Russia could not stand it and split into to layers. We are hardly beginning now, after a hundred and fifty years, to understand how this split diverged. There was nothing in common between the two parts; on the one side there was robbery and contempt; on the other side, suffering and mistrust; on the one side, the liveried lackey, proud of his social position and haughtily displaying it; on the other, the plundering peasant, hating him and concealing his hatred. Never did Turk, slaughtering men and carrying off women to his harem, oppress so systematically, nor disdain the Frank and the Greek so insolently, as did the Russia of the nobility despise the Russia of the peasant,. There is no other instance in history of a caste of the  same race getting the upper hand so thoroughly and becoming so completely alien as our class of upper government servants.

The renegade always goes to the extreme, to the absurd and the revolting, to the point at last of clapping a man in prison because, being a writer, he wears a Russian dress, refusing to let him enter an eating house because he is wearing a caftan and is girt with a sash. This is colossal  and reminds one of Indian Asia.

On the borders of these savagely opposed worlds strange phenomena developed, whose very distortion points to latent forces, ill at ease and seeking something different. The Raskolniki and the Decembrists stand foremost among them, and they are followed by all the Westerners and Easterners, the Onegins and the Lenskys, the superfluous and the jaundiced. All of them, like Old Testament prophets, were at once and protest and a hope. By them Russia was exerting itself to escape from the Petrine period, or to digest it to her real body and her healthy flesh. These pathological formations called forth by the conditions the life of the period pass away without fail when the conditions are changed, just as now superfluous men have already passed away; but it does not follow that they deserve judgment and condemnation unless from their younger comrades in the Service. And this is on the same principle on which one of the inmates of Bedlam pointed with indignation at a patient who called himself the Apostle Paul, while he, who was Christ himself, knew for certain that the other was not the Apostle Paul but simply a shopkeeper from Fleet Street.

Let us recall how superfluous men were evolved..

The executions of 13^th July, 1826, at the Kronverk wall could not at once check or change the current ideas of the time, and as  fact the traditions of the reign of Alexander and the Decembrists persisted through the first half of Nicholas’s thirty year reign, though disappearing from sight and turning inward. Children caught in schools dared to hold their heads erect, for they did not yet know they were the prisoners of education.

They were the same when they left school.

These were far different from the serene, self-confident, enthusiastic ads, open to every impression, that Pushkin and Pushkin appear to us to have been when they were leaving the Lycee. They have neither the proud, unbending, overwhelming daring of a Lunin, nor the dissolute profligacy of a Polezhayev, nor the melancholy serenity of Venevitinov. But yet they kept the faith inherited from their fathers, and elder brothers, the faith that ‘It will rise – the dawn of enchanting happiness, the faith in Western liberalism in which all then believed- Lafayette, Godefroy Cavaignac, Borne and Heine. Frightened and disconsolate, they dreamed of escaping from their false and unhappy situation. This was that last hope which every one of us has felt before the death of one we love. Only doctrinaires (red or parti-colored- it makes no difference) readily accept the most terrible conclusions because properly speaking they accept them in effigie, on paper.

Meanwhile every event, every year, confirmed for them the frightful truth that not only the government was against them, with gallows and spies, with the iron hoop with which the hangman compressed Pestel’s head, and with Nicholas putting this hoop on all Russia, but that the people too, were not with tem, or at least were completely strangers to them. If the people were discontent, the objects of their discontent were different. Together with this crushing recognition they suffered, on the other hand, from growing doubt of the most fundamental, unshakeable principles of West European opinion. The ground was giving way under their feet;  and in this perplexity they were forced actually to enter the Service or to fold their arms and become superfluous, idle. We venture to assert that this is one of the most tragic situations in the world. Now these superfluous men are an anachronism, but of course Royer-Collard or Benjamin Constant would also be an anachronism now. However, one must not cast a stone at them for that.

While mean’s minds were kept in distress and painful irresolution, not knowing where to find an escape or in what direction to move, Nicholas went his way with dull, elemental obstinacy, trampling down the cornfields and every sign of growth. A maser at his craft, he began from the year 1831 to make war on the children; he grasped that he must erode everything human in the years of childhood in order to make faithful subjects in his own image and after his likeness. The upbringing of which he dreamed was organized. A simple word, a simple gesture was reckoned as much  an insolence and a crime as an open neck or an unbuttoned collar. And this massacre of the souls of innocents went on for thirty years!

Nicholas –reflected in every inspector, every school director, every tutor and guardian- confronted the boy at school, in the street, in church, even to some extent in the parental home, stood and gazed at him with pewtery, unloving eyes, and the child’s heart ached and grew faint with fear that those eyes might detect some budding of free thought, some human feeling.

And who knows what chemical change in the composition of a child’s blood and nervous system is caused by intimidation, by the checking or dissimulation of speech, by the repression of feeling?

The terrified parents helped Nicholas in his task; to save their children by ignorance, they concealed from them their one noble memory. The younger generation grew up without traditions, without a future, except a career in the Service. The government office and the barracks little by little conquered the drawing room and society; aristocrats turned gendarmes. Kleinmikhelas turned aristocrats; the narrow minded personality of Nicholas was gradually imprinted on everything, vulgarizing everything and giving everything an official, governmental aspect.

Of course, in all this unhappiness, not everything perished. No one plague, not-even the Thirty Years War, exterminated everyone. Man is a tough creature. The demand for human progress, the striving for independent initiative, survived, and most of all in the two Macedonian  phalanxes of our civilization. Moscow University and the Tsarskoye Selo Lycee. On their youthful shoulders they carried across the whole kingdom of dead souls the Ark in which lay the Russia of the future; they carried her living thought, her living faith in what was to come.

History will not forget them.

But in this conflict they too lost, for the most part, the youthfulness of their early years: they were overstrained, grew over-ripe too soon. Old age was on them before their legal coming of age. These were no idle, not superfluous men; these were exasperated men, sick in body and soul, men wasted by the affronts they had endured, who looked everything askance, and were unable to rid themselves of the bile and venom accumulated more than five years before. They offer a manifest step forward, but still it is a sickly step; this is no longer a heavy, chronic lethargy, but an acute suffering which must be followed by recovery or the grave.

The superfluous men have left the stage, and the jaundiced, who are more angry with the superfluous than any, will follow them. Indeed, they will be gone very soon. They are too morose, and they get too much on one’s nerves, to stand their ground for long. The world, in spite of eighteen centuries of Christian contrition, is in a very heathen fashion devoted to epicureanism and a la longue cannot put up with the depressing face of  the Daniels of the Neva, who gloomily reproach men for dining without gnashing their teeth, and for enjoying pictures or music without remembering the misfortunes of this world.

Their relief is on the way; already we see men of quite a different stamp, with untried powers and stalwart muscles, appearing from remote universities, from the sturdy in Ukraine, from the sturdy north-east, and perhaps we old folks may yet have the luck to hold out a hand across the sickly generation to the fresh stock, who will briefly bid us farewell and go on their broad road.

We have studied the type of jaundiced men, not on the spot, and not from books: we have studied it in specimens who have crossed the Neman and sometimes the Rhine since 1850.

The first thing that struck us in them was the ease with which they despaired of everything, the vindictive pleasure of their renunciation, their terrible ruthlessness. After the events of 1848 they were at once set on a eight from which they saw the defeat of the republic and the revolution, thee regression of civilization, and the insulting of banners – and they could feel no compassion for the unknown fighters. Where the likes of us stopped short, tried to restore animation, and looked to see if there was no spark in life, the went farther through the desert of logical deduction and easily arrived at those final, abrupt conclusions which are alarming in their radical audacity but which, like spirits of the dead, are but the essence gone out of life, not life itself. In these conclusions the Russian on the whole enjoys terrific advantage over the European; he has in this no tradition, no habit, nothing germane to him to lose. The man who has no property of his own or of others passes most safely along dangerous roads.

The emancipation from everything traditional fell to the lot not of healthy, youthful characters but of men whose heart and soul had been stained in every in every fiber. After 1848 there was no living in Petersburg. The autocracy had reached the Hercules’s Pillars of absurdity; they had reached the instructions issued to teachers at the military academies, Buturlins scheme for closing the universities and the signature of the censor Yelagin on patterns for stencils. Can one wonder that the young men who broke out of this catacomb were crazy and sick?

Then they faded before their summer, knowing no free scope, nothing of frank speech. They bore on their countenances deep traces of soul roughly handled and wounded. Every one of them had some tic, and apart from that personal tic they all had one in common, a devouring, irritable and distorted vanity. The denial of every personal right, the insults, the humiliations they had endured evolved a secret claim to admiration; these underdeveloped prodigies, these unsuccessful geniuses, concealed themselves under a mask of of humility and modesty. All of them were hypochondriacs and physically ill, did not drink wine, and were afraid of open windows; all looked with studied despair at the present; they reminded one of monks who from love of their neighbor came to hating all humanity and cursed everything in the world from the desire to bless something.

One half of them were constantly repenting, the other half constantly chastising.

Yes, deep scars had been left on their souls. The world of Petersburg in which they had lived was reflected in themselves; it was thence they took their restless tone, their language – saccade, yet suddenly deliquescing into bureaucratic twaddle- their shuffling meekness and haughty fault-finding, their intentional aridity and readiness on any occasion to blackguard one, their offensive acceptance of accusations in front of everyone, and the uneasy intolerance of the director of a department.

This knack of administering a reprimand in the style of a director, utter contemptuously with eyes screwed up, is more repugnant to us than the husky shout of a general, which is like the deep bark of a steady old dog, who growls in deference to his social position rather than from spite.

Tone is not a matter of no importance.

Das was innen- das its drauussen!

Extremely kind at heart and noble in tendency, they, I mean our jaundiced men – might be their tone drive an angel to fighting and a saint to cursing. Moreover, they exaggerate everything in the world with such aplomb – and not to amuse but to mortify – that there simply no bearing it. Every time anyone mentions a mole-hill they will start talking darkly about mountain.

‘Why do you defend these sluggards’ (a jaundiced friend, sehr ausgeziechnet in seine Fache, said to us lately), ‘parasites, drones, white-handed spongers a la Oneghine? . . .They were formed differently, please observe, and the world surrounding them is too dirty for them, not polished enough; they will dirty their hands, they will dirty their feet. It was was much nicer to go on moaning over their happy situation and at the same time eat and drink in comfort.’

We put in a word for our classification of the superfluous men into those of the Old Disposition and those of the New. But our Daniel would not hear of a distinction: he would have nothing to say to the Oblomovs nor to the fact that Nicholas cast in bronze had been gathered to his fathers, and just for that reason had been cast in bronze. On the contrary, he attacked us for our defense and, shrugging his shoulders, said he looked upon us as on a fine skeleton of a mammoth, as at an interesting bone that had been dug up and belonged to a world with a different sun and different trees.

‘Allow me on that ground and in the character of a Homo Benckendorfi testis to defend my fellow fossil. Surely you do not really think that these men did nothing, or did something absurd, of their own choice?’

‘Without any doubt; they were romantics and aristocrats; they hated work, they would have thought themselves degraded if they had taken up an axe or an awl, and it is true they would not have known how to use them.’

‘In that case I will quote names: for instance, Chaadayev. He did not know how to use an axe but he knew how to write an article which jolted the whole of Russia, and was a turning point in our understanding of ourselves. That article was a first step in the literary career. You know what came of it. A German, Wiegel, took offense on behalf of Russia, the Protestant and future Catholic Benckendorf took offense on behalf of Orthodoxy, and by the lie of the Most High, Chaadayev was declared mad and forced to sign an undertaking not to write. Nadezhdin, who published the article in the Telescope, was banished to Ust-Sysolsk; Boldyrev, the old rector, was dismissed: Chaadayev became an idle man. I grant that Ivan Kireyevsky could not make boots, yet he could published magazine; he published two numbers and the magazine was forbidden; he contributed an article to the Dennitsa, and the censor, Glinka, was put in custody: Kireyevsky became a superfluous man. N. Polevoy can not, of course, be charged with idleness; he was a resourceful man, and yet the wings of the Telegraph were clipped, and, I confess my feebleness, when I read how Polevoy told Panayev that he, as a married man, handicapped by a family, was afraid of the police, I did not laugh but almost cried.’

‘But Belinsky could write and Granovsky could give lectures; they did not sit idle.’

‘If there were men of such energy that they could write or give lectures within the sight of the police-troika and the fortress, is it not clear that there were many others of less strength who were paralyzed and suffered deeply from it?’

“Why did they not actually take to making boots or splitting logs? It would have been better than doing nothing.’

“Probably because they had enough money not to be obliged to do such dull work; I have never heard of anyone taking to cobbling for pleasure. Louis XVI is the only example of a king by trade and a locksmith for the love of it. However, you are not the first to observe this lack of practical labor in superfluous men: in order to correct it, our watchful government sent tem to hard labor.”

‘ My fossil friend, I see you still look down upon work.’

‘As on a far from gay necessity.’

Why should they have not shared in the general necessity?’

‘No doubt they should, but in the first place they were born not in North America but in Russia, and unluckily were not brought up to it.’

‘Why were they not brought up to it?’

‘Because they were not born in the tax-paying classes of Russia but in the gentry; perhaps that really is reprehensible, but being at that period in the inexperienced condition of cecaria they cannot, owing to their tender years, be responsible for their conduct. And having once made this mistake in the choice of their parents, they were bound to submit to the education of the tide. By the way, what right have you to demand of men that they should do one thing or another? This is some new compulsory organization of labor; something in the style of socialism transferred to the methods of the Ministry of State Property.’

‘ I don’t compel anyone to work; I simply state the fact that they were idle, futile aristocrats who led an easy and comfortable life, and I see no reason for sympathizing with them.’

‘Whether they deserve sympathy or not let each person decide for himself. All human suffering, especially if it is inevitable, awakens our sympathy, and there is no sort of suffering to which one could refuse it. The martyrs of the early centuries of Christendom believed in redemption and in a future life.  The Roman  Mukhanovs, Timashevs and Luzhins tried to compel the Christians to bow down in the dust before the august image of the Caesar; the Christians would not make this trivial concession and they were hunted down by beasts. They were mad; the Romans were half-witted, and there is no placed here for sympathy or surprise . . . But then farewell, not only to Thermopylae and Golgatha but also to Sophocles and Shakespeare, and incidentally to the whole long, endless epic poem which is continually ending in frenzied tragedies and continually going on again under the title of history.’