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.
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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.
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.
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