Chapter XI: Letter 8: Be a man, stop and make answer? (1)

‘_Halte-là! Stop!_’ was said to me this time, not by a lunatic, but, quite the contrary, by a very sane gentleman who walked into my room with a number of the _Bell._ in his hand. ‘I have come,’ he said, ‘to have it out with you. Your “Ends and Beginnings” have passed every limit; it is high time to take leave and put an end to them, with regrets for having begun them.’

‘Has it really come to that?’

‘It has. You know I love you, I respect your talent....’

‘Well,’ I thought, ‘it’s a bad look-out; it is clear that he means to abuse me in earnest, or he wouldn’t have attacked me with such a flattering introduction.’

‘Here is my heart,’ I said; ‘strike.’

My resignation, together with the classical allusion, had a happy effect on my irritated friend, and with a more good-natured air he said: ‘Listen to me quietly, laying aside the vanity of the author and the narrow exclusiveness of the exile: with what object are you writing all this?’

‘There are many reasons for it; in the first place, I believe what I write to be the truth, and every man who is not indifferent to the truth has a weakness for spreading it abroad. Secondly ... but I imagine the first reason is sufficient.’

‘No. You ought to know the public whom you are addressing, the stage of development it has reached, and the circumstances in which it is placed. I’ll tell you plainly: you have the most fatal influence on our young people, who are learning from you to despise Europe and her civilisation, and consequently do not care to study it seriously, but are satisfied with a smattering of the newest ideas and think that the breadth of their own nature is enough.’

‘Ough! how elderly you have grown since I saw you last! you abuse the young and want to rear them on falsehoods, like nurses who tell children that the midwife brings the babies, and the difference between the boy and the girl is the cut of their clothes. You had better consider for how many centuries men have been lying shamelessly with a moral object, and morality has been none the better. Why not try speaking the truth? If the truth turns out to be bad, the example would be good. As to my bad influence on the young—I’ve long been resigned to that, remembering how all who have been of any use to the younger generation have invariably been accused of corrupting it, from Socrates to Voltaire, from Voltaire to Shelley and Byelinsky. Besides, I am comforted by the fact that it is very difficult to corrupt our young Russians. Brought up on the estates of slave-owners by Nicholas’ officials and officers, completing their studies in army barracks, government offices, or the houses of the gentry, they are either incapable of being corrupted, or their corruption is already so complete that it would be hard to add to it by any bitter truth about Western Europe.’

‘Truth!... But allow me to ask you whether your truth really is the truth?’

‘I can’t answer for that. You may rely on one thing, that I say conscientiously what I think. If I am mistaken, unaware of it, what can I do? It is more your job to open my eyes.’

‘There’s no convincing you—and you know why; it’s because you are partly right; you are a good dissector, as you say yourself, and a bad accoucheur.’

‘But you know I am not living in a maternity hospital, but in a clinic and an anatomical theatre.’

‘And you are writing for nursery-schools. Children must be taught that they may not snatch each other’s porridge and pull each other’s hair. But you regale them with the subtleties of your pathological anatomy, and keep on telling them besides: Look here, how nasty the entrails of these old Europeans are! What is more, you use two different measures and two different standards. If you do take up the scalpel, you should be fair in your dissection.’

‘What, am I dissecting the living too? How awful! And children too! You do make me out a Herod!’

‘You may joke as you like, you won’t put me off with that. With great insight you diagnose the malady of modern man, but when you have analysed every symptom of chronic disease, you say that it is all due to the patient’s being French or German. And our people at home actually imagine that they have youth and a future. Everything that is precious to us in the traditions, the civilisation, and the history of the Western nations you cut open relentlessly and unsparingly, exposing horrible sores, and in that you are performing your task as a demonstrator. But you are sick of messing about for ever with corpses. And so, abandoning every ideal in the world, you are setting up for yourself a new idol, not a golden calf, but a woolly sheepskin, and you set to bowing down to it and glorifying it as “The Absolute Sheepskin, the Sheepskin of the Future, the Sheepskin of Communism, of Socialism!” You who have made for yourself a duty and a profession of scepticism, expect from a people, which has done nothing so far, a new and original form of society in the future and every other blessing; and, in the excess of your fanatical ecstasy, you stuff up your ears and close your eyes that you may not see that your god is as crude and hideous as any Japanese idol, with its threefold belly and flattened nose and moustaches like the King of Sardinia. Whatever you are told, whatever facts are brought forward, you talk in “ardent ecstasy” of the freshness of spring, of rising crops, of beneficent tempests, of rainbows full of promise! It is no wonder that our young people, after drinking deep of your still fermenting brew of Slavophil socialism, are staggering, drunk and dizzy, till they break their necks or knock their noses against our _real_ reality. Of course, it is as hard to sober them as it is to sober you—history, philology, statistics, incontestable facts, go for nothing with both of you.’

‘But excuse me, I, too, must tell you to call a halt. What are these incontestable facts?’

‘There are masses of them.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as the fact that we Russians belong both by race and language to the European family, _genus europaeum_, and consequently by the most inevitable laws of physiology we are bound to follow the same line of development. I have never heard of a duck belonging to the genus of ducks breathing with gills....’

‘Only fancy, I haven’t either.’

I pause at this agreeable moment of complete agreement with my opponent to turn to you again and submit to your judgment such attacks on the honour and virtue of my epistles.

My whole sin lies in avoiding dogmatic statement and perhaps relying too much on my readers; this has led many into temptation and given my _practical_ opponents a weapon against me—not always of the same quality and equal purity. I will try to condense into a series of aphorisms the grounds of the theory on the basis of which I thought myself entitled to draw the conclusions, which I have passed on like apples without mentioning the ladder which I had put up to the tree, nor the pruner with which I picked them. But before I proceed to do this, I want to show you by one example that my stern judges cannot be said to be on very firm ground. The learned friend who came to trouble the peace of my retreat takes it as you see for an incontestable fact, for an invariable physiological law, that if the Russians belong to the European family the same line of development awaits them as that followed by the Latin and Germanic peoples. But there is no such paragraph in the laws of physiology. It reminds me of the typically Moscow invention of all sorts of institutions and regulations in which every one believes, which every one repeats, and which have never existed. One friend of mine and of yours used to call them the laws of the English Club.

The general plan of development admits of endless unforeseen deviations, such as the trunk of the elephant and the hump of the camel. There are any number of variations on the same theme: dogs, wolves, foxes, harriers, wolf-hounds, water-spaniels, and pugs.... A common origin by no means implies a similar biography. Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, were brothers, but what different careers they had! It is the same in all spiritual societies or communities. Every form of Christianity has similarities in the organisation of the family, of the Church, and so on, but it cannot be said that the history of the English Protestants has been very similar to that of the Abyssinian Christians, or that the most Catholic Austrian Army has much in common with the extremely orthodox monks of Mount Athos. That the duck does not breathe through gills is true; it is even truer that quartz does not fly like a humming-bird. You certainly know, however, though my learned friend does not, that there was a moment’s hesitation in the duck’s life when its aorta had not taken its downward turn, but branched out with pretensions to gills; but having a physiological tradition, the habit and possibility of development in the duck did not stop short at the inferior form of breathing, but passed on to lungs.

It only comes to this, that the fish has become adapted to the conditions of aquatic life and does not advance beyond gills, while the duck does. But why the fish’s breathing should blow out my theory, I do not understand. It seems to me, on the contrary, to illustrate it. In the _genus europaeum_ there are peoples that have grown old without fully developing a bourgeoisie (the Celts, some parts of Spain, of Southern Italy, and so on), while there are others whom the bourgeois system suits as water suits gills. So why should not there be a nation for whom the bourgeois system will be a transitory and unsatisfactory condition, like gills for a duck?

Why is it a wicked heresy, a desertion of my own principles, and a contradiction of the absolute laws of creation and rules and doctrines, human and divine, that I do not regard the bourgeois system as the final form of Russian society, the organisation towards which Russia is striving and to attain which she will probably pass through a bourgeois period? Possibly the European peoples will themselves pass to another order of life, perhaps Russia will not develop at all; but just as that is possible, there are other possibilities too. Especially as the order in which problems arise, the accidents of time and place and development, the conditions and habits of life and the permanent traits of character, may give endlessly varied direction to development.

The Russian people, covering such wide spaces between Europe and Asia, and standing to the general family of European peoples somewhat in the relationship of a cousin, has taken scarcely any part in the family history of Western Europe. Developing late and with difficulty, it must either show a complete incapacity for progress, or must produce something of its own under the influence of the past and of its neighbours’ examples and its own point of view.

Hitherto Russia has developed nothing of its own, but has preserved something; like a river, she has reflected things truly but superficially. The Byzantine influence has perhaps been the deepest; all the rest has passed like Peter’s innovations: beards have been shaved, heads have been cropped, the skirts of kaftans have been cut off, the people have been silent and given way, while the minority changed their costumes and went into the Service, while the State, after receiving the general European outline, grew and grew.... It is the usual history of childhood. It is over, that no one doubts, neither the Winter Palace nor Young Russia. It is time to stand on our own feet: why must we take to wooden legs because they are of foreign make? Why should we put on a European blouse, when we have our own shirt with the collar buttoning on one side?

We are vexed at the feebleness, at the narrow outlook of the Government, which in its impotence tries to improve our life by putting on the tricolor _camisole de force_ cut on the Parisian pattern, instead of the yellow and black _Zwangsjacke_, which it wore for a hundred and fifty years. But here we have not the Government, but the mandarins of literature, the senators of journalism, the university professors preaching to us that such is the inevitable law of physiology, that we belong to the _genus europaeum_, and must therefore cut all the old capers to a new tune, that we must stumble like sheep over the same ditch, fall into the same pit, and afterwards settle down as an everlasting shopkeeper selling greens to other sheep. A plague on their physiological law! And why is it Europe has been luckier, why has no one made her play the part of Greece and Rome over again? There are in life and nature no monopolies, no measures for preventing and suppressing new biological forms, new historical destinies and political systems—they are only limited by practical possibility. The future is a variation improvised on a theme of the past. Not only the phases of development and the forms of life vary, but new nations are created, new nationalities whose destinies are on other lines. Before our eyes, so to speak, a new race has been formed, a variety European by free choice and elemental composition. The manners, morals, and habits of the Americans have developed a peculiar character of their own; the Anglo-Saxon and the Celtic physical types have so changed beyond the Atlantic that you can scarcely ever mistake an American. If a fresh soil is enough to make an individual characteristic nation out of old peoples, why should a nation that has developed in its own way under completely different conditions from those of the West European States, with different elements in its life, live through the European past, and that, too, when it knows perfectly well what that past leads to? Yes, but what are those elements?

I have said what they are many times, and not once have I heard a serious objection, but every time I receive again the same answers, and not from foreigners only, but from Russians.... There is no help for it; we must repeat our arguments again, too.

_January 15, 1863._

ANOTHER VARIATION ON AN OLD THEME

_A Letter to X_

No, dear friend, I am not going to keep the promise I made you to write an article in explanation of what I said of Western Europe and what I said of Russia.

After you had gone, under the influence of your criticisms and the criticisms made by our common friends, I looked through part of what I had written and found I had nothing to add. I had said all that was in my heart, what I understood, and how I understood it. If I have not succeeded in making my outlook clear in whole books, in a series of articles, and a series of letters, how can I succeed in doing so in a few pages? Even if my view were really simply morbid, partial, and personal when I wrote ‘From the Other Side’ eight years ago, time has so terribly confirmed it that it has become a more settled conviction, and has merely cooled without being changed in anything essential. I refuse to repeat coldly what I said then with warmth, and I write now rather to show you that I listened to you attentively and took our friends’ criticisms sincerely to heart. The chief points of their censure may be reduced to two: first, that my attitude to Western Europe weakens convictions which are still essential in Russia; secondly, that my attitude to Russia approximates to that of the Slavophils. These criticisms are themselves the proof that your feud with the Moscow Old Believers has not subsided; that is a pity.

Carried away by your polemics, you do not notice how tedious and boring your disputes have become. Your quarrel with the Slavophils has lost all interest, especially since the death of Nicholas. It is high time to apply the manifesto of August 26, 1856, to all these wretched wrangles, and to consign them to oblivion with the other transgressions of Nicholas’ reign.

A new life is unmistakably surging up in Russia; even the Government is carried away by it. Questions, each more pressing than the last, are arising on all sides; hopes crushed to the earth are reviving; one wants to know what is being thought in Russia about the Emancipation of the Serfs, about the abolition of spiritual and corporal punishment—the censorship and the stick—about the restraint of official plundering and the irresponsible tyranny of the police, and one reads instead scholastic controversies about the precedence of races and the nationality of truth. I have never denied that the Slavophils have a true sense of the _living soul_ in the people, that they ‘look for the world to come,’ but unhappily I must repeat that their instinct is clearer than their understanding, clearer, indeed, than their conscience. I have read with horror and repulsion some articles in Slavophil reviews; they stink of the torture chamber, of slit nostrils, penances, and the Solovetsky monastery. If power came into the hands of these gentry, they would be worse than the ‘Third Section,’ and am I supposed to be like these savages in sympathy and opinion and language? Why, then, did one of them not so long ago, under the protection of the irresponsible police, fling at me a handful of patriotic mud with the insolence of a flunkey protected from the stick by his safe perch behind the carriage, diffusing such a national stench of the servants’ hall, and such a flavour of orthodox lenten oil, that for several minutes I fancied myself in one of the remote quarters of Moscow?

But your controversy with them is of no use; leave them alone or beat them on their own ground. They do not know the real Russia, they are changelings and corpses; not one of them will take up your challenge; they have distorted their understanding by a false show of orthodoxy and a pretence of nationalism.

It would be difficult to confute them by holding up Western Europe as an example (here I am answering another criticism) when a single copy of any newspaper you like is enough to show the terrible malady from which Europe is suffering. To ignore her wounds and to preach reverence not only for the ideas which she has worked out and which are inconsistent with her life of to-day, but for her herself, is as impossible as to persuade us that the fanatically crazy lucubrations of the followers of Buddha, or the Carpathian Dissenters, are of more value and significance than all the problems that occupy us.

You love European ideas—I love them too; they are the ideas of all history, they are the monument on which is inscribed what has been bequeathed not only by the men of yesterday, but by Egypt and India, Greece and Rome, Catholicism and Protestantism, the Latin peoples and the Germanic peoples. Without them we should sink into Asiatic quietism or African blankness of mind. With those ideas, and only with them, can Russia be brought into possession of that great part of the heritage which comes to her share. About that we are completely in agreement. But you are unwilling to recognise that contemporary life in Europe is not in harmony with her ideas. You are alarmed for them; ideas which fail to find their realisation at home seem to you unrealisable anywhere. Historical embryology scarcely warrants such a conclusion. From the fact that the new social ideas are not applied in the contemporary life of the European peoples (even if this were completely proved) you cannot deduce that they are impossible of realisation, that they cannot be applied in practice anywhere. Has not the European ideal in one form, to wit, the Anglo-Saxon, found complete expression on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean?

The ways of development are very hard, and far from simple in nature and in history; they make use of a terrible number of forces and forms. That is not very obvious to us, because we are always confronted with the complete result, with what has been accomplished and successful. Numbers of unsuccessful forms were evolved by the way, did not attain a full life (in comparison with those that follow), and were replaced by others of which we know nothing. They were not sacrificed, for they lived for themselves, but when they passed away they handed on their heritage not to their own offspring, but to strangers, the mammoths and ichthyosaurians to the elephants and crocodiles, Egypt and India to Greece and Rome. It may very well be that the whole creative ability of the Western European peoples has been spent and is exhausted in evolving their social ideal, their science, in striving towards it, and in realising separate partial phases of it with all the passion and fervour of the struggle, in which men are ready to die because at every step they fancy they are attaining the whole of their ideal.

Will the down-trodden masses wrest out of the hands of the monopolists the powers evolved by science, and all the accumulation of technical improvements, and make of them the common weal? Or will the propertied classes, resting on the force of government and the ignorance of people, keep the masses down? In either case the ideas are saved, and that is what is of first importance for you. Science, independent of political systems and nationality, remains as the grand achievement of European life, ready to transform men’s hard existence of the past everywhere where it meets a suitable soil, understanding and, together with understanding, strength and freedom. The question of the future of Europe I do not regard as finally settled; but, looking at it conscientiously with the humble desire to see the truth and with prejudices rather in favour of Western Europe than opposed to it, studying it for ten years, not in theories and books, but in clubs and in market-places, in the centre of its political and social life, I am bound to say that I see neither a speedy nor a happy solution. Looking on the one hand at the feverish, one-sided development of industry, at the concentration of all riches, moral and material, in the hands of the minority of the middle class, at the way in which that minority has taken hold of the Church and the Government, the machines and the schools, at the fact that the army obeys it, that the judges interpret the law in its favour, and, looking on the other hand at the undeveloped state of the masses, the immaturity and instability of the revolutionary party, I cannot predict the speedy downfall of the bourgeoisie and the reform of the old political order without a most terrible and bloody struggle.

It is of no use to dream now of the ordinary revolutions of the past, made half in jest, with a song of Béranger and a cigar in the mouth; now there is no Charles X. ready to flee at the sight of danger, no Louis Philippe who would not bombard Paris; now there is no silly Austrian Emperor who would give a Constitution at the first musket-shot. Though the Prussian King is the same, he would not now take the cap off his drunken head at the sight of murdered revolutionaries; even Pius IX. has grown wiser. The June days of 1848 and Cavaignac have shown the world what massacres of St. Bartholomew, what September days, await the future conflict. Whether Europe will emerge rejuvenated from this ordeal, or be drowned like Seneca in her own blood, I do not know; but I fancy neither you nor I will live to see the day. Your hair is grey, while I am forty-four.

Is it not natural under these circumstances for an enlightened man to enlarge his horizon, to look about him, to enquire how other lands, not drawn into the death-struggle of Europe, stand in regard to the future, what can be expected from them, whither they are tending, and whether there is no inconspicuous preliminary work being done there. But outside Europe there are only two progressive countries, America and Russia, with possibly Australia just beginning. All the rest lie in unbroken slumber or struggle in convulsions which are alien to us and outside our comprehension, like the Chinese rebellion, with its piles of corpses and revolting butchery.

America is Europe colonised, the same race (predominantly Anglo-Saxon), but living under different conditions. Wave after wave carries the overflow to her shores further and further. Just as in Cromwell’s days England sailed across the ocean and was scattered over the northern plains and forests, so now crowds of European fugitives sail thither to escape from hunger, from the stifling atmosphere, from persecution, ‘from the future,’ foreseeing troubles at home. It is the continuation of the age-long movements to the West. Three millions of Irishmen have settled there since the days of Robert Peel; the German monarchs who, in the eighteenth century, traded in herds of their subjects for making war against independence, for settling Pennsylvania, and so on, pause when they see how the population is flowing away. The movement goes on in America itself: the newcomers make their way through the settled population, sometimes draw it with them, and keep pressing, crowding, and hurrying to the South; to-day to the equator, where there will be a new meeting and a new combination of the Anglo-Saxon element with the Latin-Spanish.

We see that all this is but the clearing of the ground, the marking out of the arena, and that no power can prevent the North Americans with their overflowing strength, plasticity, and untiring energy from reaching Central America and Cuba. While in Europe Venice is falling into ruins, Rome is reduced to beggary, the little towns of Italy and Spain are declining from lack of capital and labour, from indolence and lack of energy, in California, in Honduras and Nicaragua, deserts are in a few years being transformed into cultivated fields and clearings into towns, the plains are lined with railways, capital is abundant, and the restless vigour of the Republic absorbs more and more. What is growing is young.

The growth of Russia has been vigorous too, and it can hardly be over yet, it can hardly have reached its natural limits; that is evident, not only from its geographical physiology, but also from the unceasing aggression of the Government, from the perpetual striving to get hold of every morsel of land. But Russia is extending by a different law from America; because in its present state it is not a colony, not an overflow, not a migration, but an independent world advancing in all directions, yet sitting tight on its own soil. The United States, like an avalanche torn away from its mountain, carries everything before it; every step gained by it is a step lost by the American Indians. Russia saturates all about it like water, surrounds races on all sides, then covers them with the uniform layer of the ice of autocracy—and under it makes of the worshippers of the Grand Llama defenders of orthodoxy, of Germans uncompromising Russian patriots. There is the same youthful plasticity here. Why did Joseph II. laugh at laying the foundation of Ekaterinoslavl, saying that the Empress had laid the first stone of the city, and he the last? It was not a city that was founded then, but a State. The Novorossisk region is the best proof of the plastic power of Russia. And all Siberia? And the settlements on the banks of the Amur, where to-morrow the Stars and Stripes of the American Republics will be fluttering? And indeed the Eastern Provinces of European Russia themselves.

Reading the chronicle of the Bagrov family,[42] I was struck by the resemblance of the old man who migrated into the Province of Ufa to the settlers who migrate from New York to Wisconsin or Illinois. It is a completely new clearing of uninhabited places, and the turning of them to agriculture and civilised life. When Bagrov summons the people from all parts to dig the dam for the mill, when the neighbours come singing and bring the earth, and he triumphantly crosses the conquered river at their head, one fancies one is reading Fenimore Cooper or Washington Irving. And all that happened only a hundred years ago; it was the same thing in the Saratov province and in Perm. In Vyatka, in my day, it was hard to keep the peasants from migrating into the forests and there making new clearings; the land was still in their eyes common property, the _res nullius_ to which every man has a right.

America presents no new elements; it is a further development of Protestant Europe, set free from its historic past, and put under different conditions of life. The grand idea developed by the Northern States is purely Anglo-Saxon, the idea of self-government, that is of a strong people with a weak government, the home rule of every tract of land without centralisation, without bureaucracy, held together by an inner moral unity. What attitude America will take up to socialism is hard to say; the spirit of comradeship, of association, of enterprise in common is highly developed in her, but it has not common ownership nor our _artel_, nor the village community; the individual combines with others only for a definite task, apart from which he jealously guards his complete independence.

Russia, on the contrary, is a quite special world, with her own natural habit of life, with her own physiological character—not European, not Asiatic, but Slav. She takes her share in the destinies of Europe, though she has not its historical traditions and is free from its obligations to the past. ‘What good fortune for a Russian lawgiver,’ said Bentham to Alexander I., when the latter was in London after the Napoleonic Wars, ‘that he has not to contend with Roman law at every step!’ And we add, nor with feudalism, nor with Catholicism, nor with Protestantism. The Book of Church Law and the Civil Code do not cover every aspect of life, do not govern every action; other institutions have been introduced by force and are maintained by force. We have nowhere those hard-and-fast prejudices which, like a paralysis, deprive the Western European of the use of half his limbs. The village commune lies at the basis of our national life with the re-division of fields, with the common ownership of land, with an elective control, with the equality of duties laid on each workman (the _tyagla_). All this is in an oppressed, distorted state, but it is all living, and has outlived its worst period.

If there is any truth in all this, one need not be a Russian to turn special attention to Russia in these black days for Europe. And, as a matter of fact, many vigorous minds are occupied with Russia. I have myself chanced to speak of Russia with serious men like Proudhon and Mazzini ... and I assure you that the attitude of hatred and fear, fully deserved by the thirty years’ reign of Nicholas, is being replaced by hesitation and a desire to gain a closer knowledge of this newcomer, whose rights and power for the future they are neither able nor willing to deny.

Russia could not really be understood by Western Europeans so long as the latter had faith in themselves, and were advancing; but they are convinced of the impossibility of progressing by way of revolutions, having lost at one blow all the fruits of them, except the lesson of failure. ‘The equality of slavery’ has let them look more closely at each other, and this is why it is in England that there is least understanding of Russia; the English have not taken an equal share in the Continental revolutions, nor in the general downfall that has followed. Free after their own fashion, they look with indifference at the land of slavery and despotism. But other nations in their fetters feel instinctively that, though a temporary necessity may yesterday have forced the discipline of the barracks on a peaceful agricultural people and turned all Russia into military settlements, another necessity may to-morrow do away with all that, just as Alexander II. has done away with Araktcheyev’s settlements; the period of military despotism will pass, leaving behind a political unity indissolubly welded together and forces hardened in a harsh and bitter school. The stumbling-blocks over which Europe has tripped scarcely exist for us. In the natural simplicity of our peasant life, in our uncertain and unsettled economic and judicial conceptions, in our vague sense of property, in our lack of a strong middle class, and in our extraordinary capacity for assimilating foreign ideas, we have an advantage over nations that are fully organised and exhausted. The Russian State has been firmly established by terrible means; by slavery, the knout, and executions, the Russian people have been driven into making a vast empire, through torture they have moved to the achievement of their destinies. It is idle to waste anger on the past; it is the task of the living to take advantage of all forces alike, whether they have been won by good means or ill, by bloodshed or by the ways of peace. The military settlements, as I have said, are passing away, but the villages remain. In our shifting primitive soil there is nothing conservative but the village commune; that is, nothing but what ought to be preserved.

I have read your discussions about the commune; they are very interesting, but less to the point than appears on the surface. Whether the village commune is racial in origin or the work of the Government, whether the land belonged in the past to the commune, to the landowners, or to the princes, whether the institution of serfdom strengthened the commune or not, all that ought to be investigated; but what is most important for us is the present position of affairs. The fact, whether distorted or not, whether right or wrong, forces itself upon us. The Government and the institution of serfdom have, in their own fashion, maintained our native commune; the stable, permanent principle left in it from patriarchal days is not lost. The common ownership of land, the _mir_, and the village elections form a groundwork upon which a new social order may easily grow up, a groundwork which, like our black earth, scarcely exists in Europe.

That is why, dear friend, in the midst of the gloomy, heartrending requiem, in the midst of the dark night which is falling upon the sick and weary West, I turn away from the death agony of the mighty warrior whom I honour, but whom I cannot aid, and look with faith and hope to our native East, inwardly rejoicing that I am Russian.

The period upon which Russia is now entering is extraordinarily important; instead of small political reforms for which we are too old, not in experience, but in intelligence, we are confronted with a vast economic revolution, the emancipation of the peasants. And that is not all: our problems are so set that they can be solved by social and political measures without violent upheavals. We are called to overhaul the rights of land ownership and the relations of the workman to the means of production. Is this, perhaps, our solemn entry upon our future growth? The whole new programme of our historical activity is so simple that there is no need of genius for it, but merely eyes to see what to do. It is only the timidity, the clumsiness and bewilderment of the Government that hinder it from seeing the way, and it is letting the marvellous chance slip by. Good Lord! What might not be done in this spring sunshine after the winter of Nicholas! The blood is thawed in the veins and the oppressed heart beats more freely, and what profit might be made of it!

Few feelings are more painful and oppressive than the sense that one might make a dash forward now at once, that everything is in readiness, and that the only thing lacking is understanding and courage on the part of the leaders. The machine is stoked up and ready, the fuel is burning for nothing, energy is being wasted, and all because there is no bold hand to turn the key without fear of an explosion. Our leaders should know that nations pardon a great deal—the barbarism of Peter and the dissoluteness of Catherine; they pardon violence and wickedness, if only they are aware of strength and boldness of mind. But however good the heart may be, lack of understanding, colourless vacillation, incapacity to take hold of circumstances and turn them to account, in a ruler whose power is unlimited, is never forgiven, either by the people or by history.

My passionate impatience in this case is in no way a contradiction of my resigned acceptance of the tragic fate of Europe. In Russia I see the chance at hand. I feel I can touch it; there is no such possibility in Western Europe, at any rate, at this moment. If I were not a Russian, I should long ago have gone away to America. You know that I am not a fatalist, and do not believe in anything ordained beforehand, not even in the famous ‘Perfectibility of Humanity.’

Nature and history plod along from day to day and from age to age, stepping aside, making new ways, stumbling upon old ones, amazing us now by their swiftness, now by their slowness, now by their sense, now by their folly, pressing in all directions, but advancing only where the gates are open. When I talk of possible development I am not talking of its inevitability; what part of all that is possible will be accomplished I do not know, because very much in the life of nations depends on persons and will. I feel in my heart and in my mind that history is knocking at our door; if we have not the strength to open it, and those who have are unwilling or incapable, progress will find fitter means in America or in Australia, where political life is being formed on quite a different basis. Perhaps even Europe herself will be renewed, will rise up, will take up her bed and walk on her Holy Land, under which so many martyrs are buried, and on which so much sweat and blood has been spent. Perhaps!

But is it really possible that after setting one foot on the beaten track we shall sink back into the swamp, giving the world the spectacle of immense strength and complete incapacity to use it? Something forbids the heart to accept that!

How bitter are these doubts, how bitter this loss of time and strength!... When will the scales fall from their eyes? And why are they afraid to answer the loud summons of the future? ‘A new period has come for Russia,’ we said, when we heard of the death of Nicholas; now all the Russian journals are saying it, the Tsar himself is saying it in other words. Well, then let it be new.

Everything that is being done shows our unhappy passion for prefaces and introductions at which we love to stop short complacently. As though it were enough to decide to do something, for the thing to be done.

The Petersburg Government has but few traditions, yet those are like fetters on the legs of Alexander II. How slowly and indirectly he advances along the path of reform, of which he has himself said so much! In what shallow waters the boat of his autocracy floats! At this rate it will take us over two hundred years to catch up the Prussia of to-day. And it is all due to the Nicholas tradition, the Nicholas policy, and, what is perhaps worst of all, the Nicholas men.

It is high time to give up this stupid fear of free speech and daylight through dread of some phantom revolution, for which there are no elements ready. It is high time to abandon the futile meddling in every European squabble, always in support of despotism, of brute force, and of flagrant injustice. To the devil with this diplomatic influence which makes all the nations hate us. It is not the Russian, but the Holstein policy of Nicholas. Nicholas turned the sentimental Holy Alliance into a police compact. Why does Alexander go on playing the same part? The Russian Tsardom is not bound up in any way with the fate of the decrepit European thrones, so why will he needlessly share all their abominations and bring upon himself all the hatreds gained by them?

With the partition of Poland the attitude of the new Empire to old Europe was transformed. But the memory of that crime ought not to lead to mere dread of losing the ill-gotten gains, but to pangs of conscience and to repentance. What has Alexander II. done to show repentance? All that remains in our memory is the refrain of the song with which he concluded his speech at Warsaw—_Pas de rêveries! Pas de rêveries!_

_Pas de rhétorique! Pas de rhétorique!_ we say in our turn. We have no dreams! Crushed by authority, by injustice, by bribery, by the suppression of free speech and the contempt for personal freedom, we want to speak out fearlessly, to exchange ideas with each other and to unmask the abuses of which even the Government is ashamed and which it will never check without publicity. We want the peasants to be freed from the power of the landowners and all subject Russia to be freed from the stick; of course, that is not _rêverie_, but is something very practical and extremely little. Yes, it is very little, but it is just our youthfulness and our strength which makes us need so little in order to push ahead boldly and rapidly. We ask no help from the Government; all we ask of it is not to meddle. Western Europe, on the contrary, having so much, cannot make use of its riches; they have cost it so much that it is miserly over them; it is conservative, like every property-owner. We have nothing to preserve. Of course, poverty is not of itself a claim to a different future, nor are years of slavery a claim to freedom, but here, starting from the opposite principles to opposite ends, I meet not the Slavophils but some of their ideas.

I believe in the capacity of the Russian people; I see from the seedling crop what the harvest may be; I see in their life, poor and oppressed as it is, an unconscious fitness for the social ideal which European thought has consciously reached.

So that, dear friend, is why it is that you have found a similar strain in my views and in those—worse than false—mischievous and dangerous views of the Moscow literary Old Believers, those orthodox Jesuits who reduce every one to despondency. And that is why, warmly accepting the new social religion that is arising on the blood-soaked fields of reformation and revolution, repeating with throbbing heart the great legends of those days, I turn away from contemporary Europe and have little sympathy with the pitiful heirs of mighty fathers.

Do not let us dispute about methods, our aim is the same. Let us devote all our efforts, each according to his strength at his own post, to throw down every barrier that hinders the free development of the abilities of our people and maintains the present worthless _régime_, let us stir the minds of the people and the Government alike. And so I conclude my long letter to you with the words: to work, to toil, to toil for the Russian people, which has toiled enough for us!

LONDON, _February 3, 1857_.

THE SUPERFLUOUS AND THE EMBITTERED

_The Onyegins[43] and the Petchorins[44] were perfectly true
to life, they expressed the real misery and dislocation of
the Russian life of the period. The melancholy type of the
superfluous man, lost merely because he had developed into
a man, was to be seen in those days not only in poems and
novels but in the streets and the villages, in the hotels and
the towns.... But the days of the Onyegins and the Petchorins
are over. There are no superfluous men now in Russia: on the
contrary, now there are not hands enough to till the vast
fields that need ploughing. One who does not find work now has
no one else to blame for it. He must be really a frivolous
person, a wastrel or a sluggard._—‘The Bell,’ 1859, p. 44.

These two classes of superfluous men, between whom Nature herself raised up a high mound of Oblomovs,[45] and History, marking out its boundaries, dug out a ditch—the one in which Nicholas is buried—are continually confounded. And so we want, with a partiality like that of Cato for the cause of the vanquished, to champion the elder generation. Superfluous men were in those days as essential, as it is now essential that there should be none.

Nothing is more lamentable than, in the midst of the growing activity as yet unorganised and awkward, but full of enterprise and initiative, to meet the flustered, nervously overwrought lads who lose their heads before the toughness of practical work, and hope and expect to arrive without effort at a solution of difficulties, and to find answers to problems, which they can never state clearly.

We will lay aside these voluntary superfluous men, and just as the French only recognise as real grenadiers _les vieux de la vieille_, so we will recognise as honourably and truly superfluous men only these of the reign of Nicholas. We ourselves belong to that unhappy generation, and, grasping very many years ago that we were superfluous on the banks of the Neva, very practically took our departure as soon as the rope was loosened.

There is no need for us to defend ourselves, but we are sorry for our former comrades and want to distinguish them from the batch of invalids that followed them from the hospital of Nicholas.

One cannot but share the healthy realistic attitude of one of the best Russian magazines, in attacking the effete moral point of view which in the French style seeks personal responsibility for public events. Historical formations can no more be judged by a criminal court than geological ones. And men who say that one ought not to direct one’s thunders and lightnings against bribe-takers and embezzlers of Government funds, but at the environment which makes bribes a characteristic symptom of a whole tribe, such as the whole race of _beardless_ Russians for instance, are perfectly right. All we desire is that the superfluous men of Nicholas’s reign should have the rights of bribe-takers and enjoy the privileges granted to the embezzlers of public funds. They deserve it the more, since they are not only superfluous, but almost all dead; while the bribe-takers and embezzlers are alive, and not only prosperous, but historically justified.

Whom have we here to attack, whom have we here 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 scrofulous and lymphatic children for the poorness of their parents’ blood.

There can be but one serious question about them: were these morbid phenomena really due to the conditions of their environment, to their circumstances?...

I think it can hardly be doubted.

There is no need to repeat how cramped, how painful, was the development of Russia.

We were kept in ignorance by the knout and the Tatars: we were civilised by the axe and by Germans: and in both cases our nostrils were slit and we were branded with irons. Peter the Great drove civilisation into us with such a wedge that Russia could not stand the shock and split into two layers. We are only just beginning now, after a hundred and fifty years, to understand how this split was made: there was nothing in common between the two parts; on the one hand, robbery and contempt; on the other, suffering and mistrust: on the one hand, the liveried lackey, proud of his social position and haughtily displaying it; on the other, the plundered 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 privileged class despise the Russia of the peasant. There is no instance in history of a caste of the same race getting the upper hand so thoroughly and becoming so completely alien as our military nobility.

A renegade always goes to the extreme, to the absurd and the revolting, to the point at last of clapping a literary man in prison for wearing the Russian dress, refusing to let him enter a restaurant because he is wearing a kaftan and has a sash tied round his waist. It is colossal, and reminds one of Indian Asia.

On the margins of these savagely opposed worlds strange figures appeared, whose very distortion points to latent forces, cramped and seeking something different. The Raskolniks and Decembrists stand foremost among them, and they are followed by all the Westerners and Easterners, the Onyegins and the Lenskys, superfluous and disillusioned people. All of them, like Old Testament prophets, were at once a protest and a hope. By them Russia was striving to escape from the Petersburg period, or to transform it to her real body and her healthy flesh. These pathological formations called forth by the conditions of the life of the period invariably pass away when the conditions are changed, just as superfluous people have passed away now; but it does not follow that they deserved 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 another inmate who called himself the Apostle Paul, while he who was Christ himself knew that the other was not the Apostle Paul, but simply a shopkeeper from Fleet Street.

Let us recall how superfluous people were evolved.

The hangings of the 13th of July 1826 on the Kronverg Courtyard could not at once check the current of ideas, and as a fact the traditions of the reign of Alexander and the Decembrists persisted through the first half of Nicholas’s reign, though disappearing from sight and turning inwards. Children still at school dared to hold their heads erect, they did not yet know that they were the prisoners of education.

They were the same when they left school.

These were far different from the serene, self-confident, enthusiastic lads, open to every impression, that Pushkin and Pushtchin[46] were when they were leaving the Lyceum. They have neither the proud, unbending, overwhelming daring of a Lunin,[47] nor the dissipated recklessness of a Polezhaev,[48] nor the melancholy serenity of Venevitinov.[49] But yet they preserved the faith inherited from their fathers and elder brothers, the faith that ‘It is coming—the dawn of radiant happiness,’ the faith in Western liberalism in which all—Lafayette, Godefroi Cavaignac, Börne, and Heine—believed. Frightened and disconsolate, they dreamed of escaping from their false and unhappy position. This was like that last hope which every one of us has felt before the death of one we love. Only doctrinaires (whether red or parti-coloured, makes no difference) readily accept the most terrible deductions, because they really accept them _in effigy_, on paper.

Meanwhile every event, every year, confirmed for them the dreadful truth that not only the Government was against them, with gallows and spies, with the irons with which the torturer compressed Pestel’s head, and with Nicholas putting those irons on all Russia, but that the people, too, were not with them, or at least were completely alien. If the people were discontented, 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 principles of the Western European outlook. The ground was giving way under their feet; and in this perplexity they were forced either to enter the Service or to fold their hands and become superfluous, idle. We venture to assert that this is one of the most tragic positions in the world. Now these superfluous people are an anachronism, but, of course, Royer Collard or Benjamin Constant would be an anachronism now, too. But they cannot be blamed for that.