CHAPTER II: RUSSIAN SOCIALISM AND NIHILISMI
Although Belinsky was a man of the 'forties and belonged to the generation of the Slavophils and Westernizers, yet he was perhaps the first who gave expression to the type of revolutionary intelligentsia, and at the end of his life he formulated the fundamental principles of its general outlook which were developed later on in the 'sixties and 'seventies. In the first place, Belinsky was not a Russian gentleman like all the Slavophils and Westernizers, like Hertzen and Bakunin. He belonged to a different social class, he was a raznochinets. [6]
There were traits in his spiritual make-up which were typical of the intelligentsia; he was intolerant, fanatical, inclined to sectarianism, passionately devoted to ideas; he was constantly elaborating a view, not such as pure knowledge required, but as a basis for his aspirations towards a better and more righteous social order. Belinsky was a man of remarkable gifts and a notable susceptibility to ideas, but the level of his education was not high. He was almost entirely without knowledge of foreign languages and became acquainted with the ideas to which he was devoted at second hand. He came to know Hertzen principally through what Bakunin told him.
Belinsky passed through all the stages in enthusiasm for ideas usual in Russian cultured circles of that time. He was in turn a disciple of [url=x]Fichte[/url], Schelling and Hegel, and later went over to Feuerbach; he felt the influence of French literature and French socialist thought. He was above all an admirable literary critic; he was the first to value
Pushkin, Gogol, and the early creative work of our great novelists. He himself possessed artistic susceptibility and was capable of aesthetic judgment, and he became the ancestor of that type of literary critic who was destined to play an immense part in the history of the thought of the intelligentsia. In Belinsky there was the characteristically Russian search for an integral outlook which will give an answer to all the questions of life, unite the theoretical and practical reason, and give a philosophical basis to the social ideal. Integrated truth, as later expressed by N. Mikhailovsky, who was also in the line of descent from Belinsky, is both truth in the abstract and that truth which finds expression in justice. The same idea of wholeness will be found in N. Federov in a religious setting, and in Marxist Leninism.
The Russian critical publicists will always preach an integrated outlook, will always connect truth and righteousness, will always be teachers of life. Belinsky was the first specially gifted representative of this type. He already affirms the social side of the work of the literary critic.
Russian social thought was concealed under the form of literary criticism, because under the conditions of censorship it could not otherwise find expression. In the evolution and revolution of ideas through which Belinsky lived, the crisis which Hegelianism reached in his mind is of particular interest and importance. (8) Russian thought passed through two such crises in regard to Hegelianism: one in Khomyakov which was religious, the other in Belinsky which was social. (9)
The fundamental problem which interested Russians in the 'forties who were attracted by Hegel was the problem of their relation to 'actuality'. Hegel's doctrine of the rationality of actual fact, which in Hegel himself was entirely a matter of logic and meant the recognition of the fact that only the rational was authentically real, was in Russia a matter of most tense and painful experience and was falsely interpreted. It is well known that Hegel can be understood in a conservative sense or in a revolutionary sense; he originated a right and a left current of thought. He was the philosopher of the Prussian State, in which he saw the embodiment of absolute spirit, and at the same time through his dialectic he brought a revolutionary dynamic into thought and gave birth to Marx. The Russian Hegelians of the forties at first understood Hegel in the conservative way, and interpreted his thought of the rationality of 'actuality' to mean that one must reconcile oneself to one's actual environment -- the period of Nicholas -- and recognize reason in it. Belinsky and Bakunin, men of revolutionary outlook on life, passed through such a period of conservative Hegelianism. Russian romantic idealists of the 'forties escaped from actual social conditions into the world of thought, imagination, literature, into the reflected world of ideas. They suffered from the ugliness and injustice of their environment, but were powerless to alter it.
Discord with their actual environment made Russians inactive, and produced the type of 'superfluous people'. Hegelianism included a possibility of relation to actual fact which might have a double meaning. The identity of life and thought consists not only in the carrying over of life into thought but also in the carrying over of thought into life.
At the end of the 'forties, in Belinsky's last period, a stormy and passionate relation to actual social conditions did occur, but leading not to reconciliation but to conflict. Conflict presupposes a relation to actual fact, to reality. A dream relation to life makes conflict impossible. But in Belinsky this took the form of a crisis in his Hegelianism. All the left revolutionary Russian thought broke away from Hegelianism until the coming of Marxism, which turned towards Hegel anew, but now interpreted his dialectic in a revolutionary sense. In his latest period Belinsky went over to revolutionary socialism and militant atheism. This found expression in the remarkable letters to Botkin, which could not be printed in the old Russia. The revolt against Hegel is a revolt on behalf of living human personality, and the conflict for living human personality resolved itself into a conflict for a socialist structure of society. Thus was formulated the characteristically Russian type of individualistic socialism.
Above all,
Belinsky, with his usual impetuosity, rebels against an abstract idealism remote from concrete life, which sacrifices the individual to the general, the living human person to the world soul. 'The fate of the subject, the individual, the person,' he writes, 'is more important than the fate of the whole world or the well-being of the Chinese Emperor.' 'I reverence your philosopher's gown,' he observes to Hegel, 'but with all due respect to your philosophical philistinism, I have the honour to inform you that
if it were given me to climb to the highest rung in the ladder of development, even there I would ask to be rendered an account for all the victims of the circumstances of life and history, for all the victims of chance, of superstition, of the Inquisition, of Philip II and so on and so on. Otherwise I would fling myself down headlong from that highest rung. I do not want happiness even as a gift unless I have peace of mind about my brothers by blood, bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh. They say that disharmony is a condition of harmony. Maybe that is very pleasant and consoling for lovers of music, but it is certainly not so for those to whom fate allots the part of expressing disharmony in their experience.' These words are very important to the subsequent Russian problem. In them is posed the problem of evil, the problem of the justification of suffering, which is the fundamental Russian problem and the source of Russian atheism; it is the problem of the cost of progress, which will play a large part in the social thought of the 'seventies.
Belinsky anticipated Dostoyevsky; he had already lived through Ivan Karamazov's problem of the tears of a child; in him was conceived Dostoyevsky's argument in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. It seems sometimes as though in the thoughts of I. Karamazov Dostoyevsky had in mind Belinsky, whom he knew very well personally and with whom he disputed a good deal. Belinsky lived through despair and bitterness after his disillusion in idealism. He became a revolutionary, an atheist and a socialist.
It is an important fact that in Belinsky Russian revolutionary socialism was combined emotionally with atheism. The source of this atheism was sympathy with mankind, the impossibility of reconciling oneself with the idea of God in view of the excessive evil and suffering of life. Such atheism arises from moral feeling, from love of what is good and righteous. Dostoyevsky will reveal this peculiar religious psychology. From sympathy with mankind, from revolt against the general (idea, reason, spirit, God) which has oppressed the living individual man, Belinsky became a socialist. He is an excellent witness to the moral-psychological sources of Russian socialism. Rebellion against the general for the sake of the individual, in him, passes over into a fight for the general in a new sense, for humanity, for its social organization. Belinsky fails to notice that having repudiated all that 'general' which had previously oppressed mankind, he was rapidly subjecting the individual to a new 'general'. And it seemed to him that this new 'general' to which he paid reverence, since a Russian cannot but pay reverence to something or other, he affirmed for the sake of individual personality. The same thing is to happen in the 'nineties. 'A social spirit! -- or death!' cried Belinsky. 'What is it to me that the "general" lives, when the individual suffers! Repudiation is my God!'
In Russia at the end of the 'forties, there already, existed that same process of thought which was formed in Germany in the left wing of Hegelianism, in Feuerbach and in Marx. There is a break with abstract idealism and a transference to actual concrete fact. Belinsky is permeated, in his own words, with a Marat's love of humanity.
'I become terrible', he writes, 'when I get some mystical absurdity or other into my head.' The Russian in general is like that; he often gets some 'mystical absurdity' into his head. These words of Belinsky's are very remarkable.
From his sympathy with mankind, Belinsky was ready to preach tyranny and brutality. Bloodshed was unavoidable. In order to bring happiness to the greater part of mankind you may cut off the heads of hundreds of thousands. Belinsky was the forerunner of bolshevik morals. He says that people are so stupid that you must drag them to happiness by force. He admits that if he were Tsar he would be a tyrant on behalf of justice. He is disposed to dictatorship. He says the time will come when there will be no rich and no poor.
Belinsky started the assertion that the Russians are an atheist people. But he still preserves a love for the Christ of the poor and unhappy. Belinsky writes Gogol a letter full of indignation à propos of his book Correspondence with Friends. This letter, of course, could not be printed and was passed round from hand to hand. He branded Gogol as a traitor and a preacher of slavery. From a religious point of view he was wrong, but from a social point of view he was right.
Belinsky is the central figure in the history of Russian thought and self-consciousness in the nineteenth century. And he, more than any other, must be regarded as an intellectual ancestor of Russian communism and as one of its predecessors; certainly more than Hertzen and others of the 'forties and even of the 'sixties. He comes near to communism not only in his ethical thought but also in his social views. He is not a typical narodnik;
he recognizes a positive importance in industrial development, he is even ready to admit the importance of the bourgeoisie, whom he cannot bear, exactly like the Russian Marxists later on.
In Belinsky may be studied the inward motives giving birth to the general outlook on life of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia, which remained dominant for a long while and finally produced Russian communism, though in a different historical setting. These motives must be seen above all in a passionate indignant protest against the evil, violence and suffering of life, in sympathy with the unhappy, the destitute and the downtrodden. But as a result of pity, sympathy and the impossibility of bearing suffering, Russians became atheists. They became atheists because they could not accept a Creator Who made an evil, incomplete world full of suffering. They themselves desired to make a better world in which there should be no such wickedness and suffering. In Russian atheism there were thoughts akin to Marcion. But Marcion thought that the Creator of the world was an evil God, while the Russians, in a different intellectual age, thought that there was no God at all, or if He did exist that He would be an evil God. This is in Belinsky. Bakunin gives the impression of a fighter against God from motives akin to Marcionism. In Lenin this reaches its culmination. In the earliest origins of Russian atheism there lay a lofty human feeling which reaches exaltation. But in the final result, in militant godlessness when it came into power, Russian communism replaced the human feeling by its opposite. This was foreseen by Dostoyevsky.
Two lines of thought may be recognized in Belinsky.
In the first place he turns his attention to the living human individual, to the suffering he is undergoing, and desires above all to assert that he is worthy of and has a right to life in its fulness. He rebels against the 'general', against the world spirit, against idealism, on behalf of this living human person. But the direction of his attention very quickly changes, and the person is swallowed up in the social whole. It is society, the new society which can be established only by way of revolution, that can rescue the human individual person from the intolerable suffering and subjection. The larger part of society, constituting 'the people', endures this unjust suffering and subjection. But the focussing of the attention upon society and the necessity of changing it leads him to forget that very same human individual person, the fulness of his life, and his right to the spiritual content of life. The problem of society finally replaces the problem of man. Revolution overthrows the 'general' which had oppressed the human individual person, but makes him subject to a new 'general', to a society which demands for itself the complete submission of man. Such is the fateful development of religious-socialist and atheistic thought. Russian atheism, which was linked with socialism, is a religious phenomenon. In its foundations there lay a love of justice. Belinsky was already permeated with the sectarian spirit which is so characteristic of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia.
One cannot call Belinsky a narodnik in the strict sense of the word. He did not share the characteristic narodnik belief in 'the people'. But in him were already formulated two principles which lay at the base of narodnik socialism -- the principle of the supremacy of human personality and the principle of the communal socialist organization of human society. Personality and people -- these were two fundamental ideas of Russian narodnik socialism. Hertzen was much more characteristic of narodnik socialism. He was better known in the West than Belinsky; he lived abroad; he edited The Bell in London; he was connected with the Western socialist movement and his books were translated into foreign languages. He was much more individualistic and humanist than Belinsky, But, as was said above, he was disillusioned in the West, and looked for salvation in the Russian muzhik, whom Belinsky certainly did not idealize. In Belinsky the potential Marxist already existed. The amazing thing is that in the Russian peasantry, living as they were in conditions of serfdom and devoid of the most elementary enlightenment, Hertzen saw a greater expression of the principle of personality than in the European who had become a bourgeois. In the Russian people the principle of personality was combined with the principle of community. Living in a foreign country Hertzen became the founder of narodnik socialism, which reached its highest development in the 'seventies. Hertzen believed that socialism could be brought into being more easily and better in Russia than in the West, and that it would not be bourgeois. Like many narodniks he was opposed to a political revolution which might drive Russia into the bourgeois path of development.
To be a socialist in those days meant to demand economic reforms, to despise liberalism, and to regard the development of capitalist industry as the chief evil, because it destroyed the conception of the peasant order of life as the highest type of society. Frequently this meant a sympathy with dictatorship, even with monarchy. The narodnik socialists were ready to support the monarchy in Russia if it would stand for the defence of the people against the nobility and the growing bourgeoisie. During his life abroad Hertzen, in the pages of The Bell, congratulated Alexander II on his action in liberating the peasants. But Hertzen, in spite of all his revolutionary socialist ideas, in spite of his situation as an emigrant, seemed alien to the generation of the 'sixties. He was a man of the 'forties, a cultured Russian barin, a humanist and a sceptic, but not a nihilist. He was not typical of the revolutionary intelligentsia, much less typical than Belinsky. Chernishevsky, who developed ideas of narodnik socialism akin to Hertzen, speaks of him with contempt, as a barin of the 'forties, who always goes on thinking that he is arguing with Khomyakov in the drawingrooms of Moscow.
In the 'sixties new social groups, and especially seminarists, came to the fore among the intelligentsia; the nobility ceased to dominate, and a sterner, more ascetic, spiritual type made its appearance, more realist and active. Those idealists who really belonged to the 'forties, but appeared in the 'sixties as the 'superfluous people', now seemed men of a bygone age. The nihilists came on the scene.Nihilism is a characteristically Russian phenomenon; in its Russian form it is unknown in Western Europe. In the narrower sense of the word, nihilism is the intellectual liberation movement of the 'sixties, and Pisarev is recognized as its chief exponent. The Russian nihilist was sketched by Turgeniev in Bazarov. But in actual fact nihilism is a much wider thing than that for which Pisarev stands. It is to be found in the subsoil of Russian social movements, although nihilism in itself is not a social movement. There is a nihilist basis in Lenin, although he lives in another epoch. 'We are all nihilists,' says Dostoyevsky.
Russian nihilism denied God, the soul, the spirit, ideas, standards and the highest values. And none the less nihilism must be recognized as a religious phenomenon. It grew up on the spiritual soil of Orthodoxy; it could appear only in a soul which was cast in an Orthodox mould. It is Orthodox asceticism turned inside out, and asceticism without Grace.
At the base of Russian nihilism, when grasped in its purity and depth, lies the Orthodox rejection of the world, its sense of the truth that 'the whole world lieth in wickedness', [7] the acknowledgement of the sinfulness of all riches and luxury, of all creative profusion in art and in thought. Like Orthodox asceticism, nihilism was an individualist movement, but it was also directed against the fulness and richness of life. Nihilism considers as sinful luxury not only art, metaphysics and spiritual values, but religion also.
All its strength must be devoted to the emancipation of earthly man, the emancipation of the labouring people from their excessive suffering, to establishing conditions of happy life, to the destruction of superstition and prejudice, conventional standards and lofty ideas, which enslave man and hinder his happiness. That is the one thing needful, all else is of the Devil. In the intellectual sphere, one must find an ascetic satisfaction in the natural sciences, which destroy the old beliefs, and overthrow prejudices, and in political economy which inculcates the organization of a more righteous social order.
Nihilism is the negative of Russian apocalyptic. It is a revolt against the injustices of history, against false civilization; it is a demand that history shall come to an end, and a new life, outside or above history, begin. Nihilism is a demand for nakedness, for the stripping from oneself of all the trappings of culture, for the annihilation of all historical traditions, for the setting free of the natural man, upon whom there will no longer be fetters of any sort. The intellectual asceticism of nihilism found expression in materialism; any more subtle philosophy was proclaimed a sin.
The Russian nihilists of the 'sixties -- and I have in mind not only Pisarev but also Chernishevsky, Dobrolyubov and others -- were Russian prophets of enlightenment.
They declared war against all historical traditions; they opposed 'reason', the existence of which as materialists they could not recognize, to all the beliefs and prejudices of the past. But the Russian prophets of enlightenment, in accord with the maximalist character of the Russian people, always became nihilists. Voltaire and Diderot were not nihilists. In Russia, materialism assumed an entirely different character from its Western form. Materialism was turned into a peculiar sort of dogmatic theology. This is a striking fact about the materialism of the communists.
But already in the 'sixties materialism had assumed this theological tinge; it became a dogma of moral obligation and behind it was concealed a distinctive nihilist asceticism. A materialist catechism was framed, and was adopted by the fanatical circles of the left Russian intelligentsia. Not to be a materialist was to be taken as a moral suspect.
If you were not a materialist, then you were in favour of the enslavement of man both intellectually and politically. The attitude of the Russian nihilists to science was idolatrous.
Science, by which was to be understood principally the natural sciences, which at that time were presented in materialist colours, became an object of faith; it was turned into an idol. There were admirable scholars in Russia at that date who in themselves constituted a special phenomenon. But the nihilist prophets of enlightenment were not men of science. They were men of belief -- and dogmatic belief. The methodical doubt of Descartes suits the nihilists, and indeed the Russian nature in general, but little. The typical Russian cannot go on doubting for very long; his inclination is to make a dogma for himself fairly quickly, and to surrender himself to that dogma whole-heartedly and entirely. A Russian sceptic is a Western type in Russia. There was nothing sceptical in Russian materialism; it was a faith.
In nihilism still another trait of the Russian Orthodox type was reflected in a distorted view, the lack of a solution of the problem of culture due to the Orthodox background of Russian mentality. Ascetic Orthodoxy was doubtful about the justifiability of culture; it was inclined to see sinfulness in cultural creativeness. This found expression in the painful doubt felt by the great Russian writers about the justifiability of their own literary work. Religious, moral and social doubt of the justification of culture is a most characteristically Russian theme. Doubt has been constantly expressed among us as to whether philosophical and artistic creativeness is justifiable. The problem of the cost at which culture is purchased will be dominant in the social thought of the 'seventies. Russian nihilism was a withdrawal from a world which 'lieth in wickedness', a break with the family and with all settled and established life. Russians accepted this break more easily than Western peoples.
They considered the State, law and traditional morals sinful, for these things had been used to justify the enslavement of man.More remarkable than anything is the fact that Russians, when nihilism had shaped them, readily sacrificed themselves and went to penal servitude and the gallows. They were striving after a future, but for themselves they had no hope whatever, either in this earthly life or in the life everlasting which they denied. They did not understand the Mystery of the Cross, but they were in the highest degree capable of sacrifice and renunciation. In this respect they compared favourably with the Christians of their day, who displayed very little capacity for sacrifice, and so repelled men from Christianity.
Chernishevsky, who was a genuine ascetic in life, said that he preached liberty, but for himself he would never avail himself of any sort of liberty whatever, lest it should be thought that he defended liberty with a selfish purpose. (10) The wonderful capacity for sacrifice in men of a materialist view of life is evidence of the fact that nihilism was a distinctively religious phenomenon.
It was not by chance that
seminarists, children of priests and those who passed through the Orthodox school played a great part in Russian nihilism. Dobrolyubov and Chernishevsky were sons of arch-priests and had studied in a seminary. The ranks of the 'left' intelligentsia among us were filled to a large extent by members of the clerical class. The significance of this fact is twofold. In the theological school the seminarist acquired a certain configuration of spirit in which ascetic denial of the world played a large part. At the same time, among the seminarists of the second half of the 'fifties and the beginning of the 'sixties, a violent protest against the decadent Orthodoxy of the nineteenth century was coming to a head, against the unseemliness of the lives of the clergy, and against the obscurantist atmosphere of the clerical schools. Seminarists were beginning to be permeated by the emancipating ideas of education, but permeated after the Russian fashion, that is to say, in an extremist, nihilist manner. No small part in this was played by the ressentiment of the seminarists to the culture of the nobility. At the same time a thirst for social justice was awakening in the young, and for them it meant the birth of Christianity in a new form.
The seminarists and raznochinsti [8] brought with them a new build of character, sterner, ethical, exacting and exclusive, formed by a severer and more painful school of life than that in which the cultured members of the nobility had grown up. This new young generation changed the type of Russian culture. The type of culture in the men of the 'sixties, Dobrolyubov, Chernishevsky, the nihilists, the growing revolutionary intelligentsia, was somewhat low in comparison with that of the cultured nobility of the 'thirties and 'forties, the culture of Chaadaev, Iv. Kireevsky, Khomyakov, Granovsky and Hertzen. Culture always develops and reaches more finished forms in aristocratic circles. When it becomes democratic and is diffused among other classes of society, its standard is lowered, and only later, as the human material is worked over, can culture rise higher again. That same process went on in Russia on a small scale among the intelligentsia of the 'sixties, and on a wide, national scale it took place at the Russian revolution. The change in the type of culture was expressed primarily in the different objects towards which it was directed. This had already been anticipated by Belinsky in the latest period of his development. The 'idealists' of the 'forties were interested mainly in the humane sciences, philosophy, art, literature. The nihilists of the 'sixties were chiefly interested in the natural sciences and political economy, and thus these became the interests also of the communist generation of the Russian revolution.
In the understanding of the genesis of Russian nihilism in the wide sense of the word and the Russian revolutionary spirit of the 'sixties, the figure of Dobrolyubov is of great interest. In him is seen the sort of soul in which revolutionary and nihilist ideas were born. It was the kind of soul from which saints are made. That may be said of Dobrolyubov and of Chernishevsky alike. Dobrolyubov left behind him a Diary in which he describes his childhood and youth. He had a purely Orthodox religious upbringing. In his childhood and even in early youth he was very religious. The cast of his soul was ascetic. He had a strong sense of sin and was disposed to frequent confession. The most insignificant sins caused him pain. He could not forgive himself if he ate too much jam, slept too long and so on. He was very devout. He loved his parents tenderly, especially his mother, and he could not become reconciled to her death. Dobrolyubov was a pure, stern, serious man, without any of that lightness of touch which gave such a charm to the cultured nobility. And then this devout, ascetic soul, serious to the degree of harshness, lost his faith, appalled by the evil, the injustice, and the suffering of life. He could not reconcile himself to the fact that with so evil a world, full of injustice and suffering, there exists an all-good and all-powerful Creator. Here is the destructive Marcion theme at work. Dobrolyubov is stunned by the fact that his beloved mother dies.
Nor can he reconcile himself to the low level of life among the Russian clergy, its lack of spirituality, its obscurantism, its absence of any application of Christianity to life. He feels himself surrounded by 'the kingdom of darkness'. His principal essay, written à propos of Ostrovsky, is entitled A Ray of Light in the Kingdom of Darkness. Man must himself bring light into the kingdom of darkness. What is needed is enlightenment, a revolutionary change in the whole order of life. Dobrolyubov was a critic; he wrote about literature. He did not go to such extremes as Pisarev in the repudiation of æsthetics, but even for him æsthetics were a luxury, and on ascetic grounds he rejected the superfluous luxury of æsthetics. He desired earthly happiness for man, and after he lost his faith he knew no other purpose in life. But he himself knew no happiness, his life was joyless, and he died of consumption almost in his youth. One can imagine Russian nihilism only as a youth movement; nihilism in the elderly has a repulsive character.
N. Chernishevsky dominated the thought not only of the radical intelligentsia of the 'sixties, but also of succeeding generations. The halo which surrounded his name in penal servitude contributed very greatly to his popularity. Chernishevsky was charged with drawing up proclamations to the peasantry, the charge against him being supported by forgery and false evidence. He was condemned to seven years' penal servitude, and after that spent twelve years in Eastern Siberia under extremely severe conditions. He bore Siberia and penal servitude as a genuine ascetic. Chernishevsky was a very gentle person; he had a Christian soul and there were marks of saintliness in his character. (11) This harrying of Chernishevsky was one of the most shameful actions of the Russian government of the old régime. Chernishevsky, like Dobrolyubov, was the son of an arch-priest. His earliest education was theological, and he was brought up in a seminary. He was a very learned person, a veritable encyclopædist; he knew both theology and philosophy down to the philosophy of Hegel; he knew history and the natural sciences; but he was chiefly an economist. As an economist Marx ranked him very high. He had gifts which might have made him a specialist, and if they did not actually do so, it was simply because he was attracted by the conflict in the field of social ideas. But all the same he was a bookish man, and gave no impression of having a passionate nature. He wrote novels with a moral purpose, but he possessed no special talent for literature. Notwithstanding the breadth of his learning, Chernishevsky was not a man of high culture. His standard of culture was rather low compared with that of the people of the 'forties. There was a lack of taste in it, due to the influence of the seminarists and raznochintsi.
Chernishevsky was a rationalist, a disciple of Feuerbach and at the same time one who idealized the soil, like Dobrolyubov and like all the best representatives of the revolutionary and nihilist intelligentsia. He had a strong ascetic side to him also. It was a result of his asceticism that he professed his extreme materialism, which was, philosophically speaking, naïve and pitiful; and it was due to his moral sense and love of the good that he affirmed a utilitarian ethic of rational egoism. The ethical motive was always very strong among the nihilists, though theoretically they repudiated all morals. Idealism, spiritual metaphysics, and religion were connected in their minds with practical materialism and social injustice. Christianity provided sufficient grounds for this.
Those who professed to have an idealistic and spiritual outlook too often concealed the basest self-interest behind the expression of lofty ideas. And, therefore, on behalf of a vital idealism, for the sake of the realization of social justice, they began to assert a crude materialism and utilitarianism, and to reject all lofty ideas and rhetoric.Chernishevsky wrote a utopian novel called What is to be done? which became a sort of catechism of Russian nihilism, a text-book of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia. From an artistic point of view the novel was sufficiently weak and tasteless, but it is very interesting from the point of view of the history of the Russian intelligentsia. The attacks upon it on moral grounds from the right wing were monstrously unjust and libellously false. The notable Russian theologian, Bukharev, who recognized its Christian character, was right. What is to be done? is an ascetic book, a sort of manual of the devout life for Russian nihilists.
Rakhmetov, the hero, sleeps on nails in order to harden his character and train himself to endure pain and suffering. The preaching of free love did not mean the preaching of dissoluteness, a thing which flourished precisely among the conservative governing classes, the guards officers and so on, but not among the nihilists, who were men of ideas. It meant a demand for sincerity in emotion, a liberation from all conventions, lies and oppression. Chernishevsky's ethics, of course, stood a great deal higher than the slave morality of 'Domostroi'. Vera Pavlovna's dream in the novel pictures a socialist Utopia in which cooperative workshops are organized. Chernishevsky's socialism, more than any other, still bore a partly narodnik and partly utopian character, but was already one of the predecessors of the Communism of the 'sixties. Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism, recognizes this in his book on Chernishevsky. (12) Not without reason did Marx study Russian in order to read Chernishevsky.
It was as an economist that the latter was most independent. He was not, like many other narodniks, an opponent of industrial development. But he poses the traditional problem for Russian nineteenth century thought: Can Russia escape capitalist development? and answers it by saying that Russia can shorten the capitalist period to nothing, and go straight on from the lower forms of economy to socialist economy. The communists, in spite of their Marxism, are trying to do just this very thing.
Chernishevsky sets national wealth and popular well-being in opposition to each other, which was characteristic of narodnik socialism. In capitalist countries, national wealth increases and the people's welfare diminishes. Chernishevsky is a defender of the peasant Commune. He asserts that the third and highest socialist period of development will resemble the first and lowest. Chernishevsky, like Hertzen and later Mikhailovsky, identifies the interests of the people with the interests of human personality in general. Of all those who wrote books that the law allowed to be published, Chernishevsky was the most clearly expressed socialist, and this marks his significance for the Russian intelligentsia, which in its moral consciousness was most wholly socialist in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nihilism of the Pisarev type was a weakening of the socialist theme, but this was a temporary phenomenon. Chernishevsky's philosophical position was specially weak. Although he derived it from so admirable a thinker as Feuerbach, yet his materialism was vulgar, and coloured by the popular natural science books of that day, much more vulgar than the dialectic materialism of the Marxists.
Chernishevsky wrote on æsthetic questions too, and was a typical representative of Russian journalistic criticism. He defended the thesis that reality is higher than art and desired to construct a realist æsthetic.
There was a strong ascetic motive in Chernishevsky's anti-æstheticism. He was already seeking that type of culture which triumphed in communism -- frequently in caricature -- the dominance of the natural and economic sciences, the rejection of religion and metaphysics, the subservience of literature and art to social aims, an ethic of social utilitarianism, the subjection of the internal life of the individual to the interests and requirements of society. Chernishevsky's asceticism and the practical Christian virtues of this 'materialist' provided an immense endowment of moral capital on which the communists are living, although they themselves do not possess those virtues.
In contrast with Chernishevsky and Dobrolyubov, Pisarev, the principal exponent of Russian nihilism in the proper sense, was a scion of the nobility. He was an elegant and smart young man with gentle, by no means nihilist, manners. This 'destroyer of æsthetics' had æsthetic taste. As a writer he was more gifted than Chernishevsky and Dobrolyubov. His fate was typically Russian. He was arrested on some trivial ground and spent four years in prison in solitary confinement, where he wrote most of his essays. Pisarev died soon after he was set free, and when he was quite a young man, being drowned as a result of an unfortunate accident. Coming from a generation of prophets of enlightenment in the 'sixties, he was very much of an individualist, and the social theme was weaker in him than in Chernishevsky.
Pisarev was mainly interested in the emancipation of the individual person, in its liberation from superstition and prejudice, from the ties of family, from traditional morals, and the conventions of life. Intellectual freedom held a central position for him, and he hoped to attain it by popularizing natural science. He preached materialism, which he was naïvely convinced sets personality free, although at the same time materialism denies personality. If personality is entirely produced by environment, then it cannot possess freedom and independence of any sort.
Pisarev wanted to produce a new type of human being; this interested him more than the organization of society. This new human type he called 'the thinking realist'. The realist generation of 'sons' is sharply opposed to the idealist generation of 'fathers'. In his type of 'thinking realist' Pisarev anticipated to a large extent the type produced by Russian communism. A number of the traits of this 'thinking realist' were sketched by Turgeniev in Bozarov (Fathers and Sons), though not with any particular success.
Among the Russian intelligentsia, before the appearance of nihilism, the human type predominated which was known as the 'idealist of the 'forties'. It was the continuation of the type which belonged to the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, and was connected with mystical masonry. It was the outcome of the working over by Russian thought of German romanticism and idealism. It grew up on the soil provided by cultured Russian gentry. This type of man, a very honourable type, was prone to the highest aspirations, to appreciation of taste and beauty. As later on Dostoyevsky loved to observe with irony, it was given to much day dreaming and had but a feeble capacity for action and putting into practice; there was no little of the Russian laziness to which the gentry were liable. From this type the 'superfluous people' came. The type of 'thinking realist' preached by Pisarev produces completely different traits, which are often engendered in reaction against the idealist type.
The 'thinking realist' was alien from all day dreaming and romanticism; he was the foe of all lofty ideas which had no relation whatever to action and were not put into practice. He was inclined to be cynical when it came to unmasking illusions, whether religious, metaphysical or æsthetic. His cult was a cult of work and labour. He recognized only the natural sciences, and despised the humanities. He preached the ethic of reasoned egoism, not because he was more egoistic than the idealist type (on the contrary, the reverse was the case), but because he desired the merciless exposure of fraudulent lofty ideas which were made to subserve the basest interests.
But the level of philosophical culture of the 'thinking realists' was low, much lower than that of the 'idealist' of the 'forties'. Buchner and Moleshott -- exponents of the most vulgar materialism based on the popularization of the natural science of the day -- were taken to be notable philosophers and became teachers. This was a terrible fall from Feuerbach, not to speak of Hegel. The 'thinking realists' set out to find the solution of the mystery of life and of existence in the dissection of a frog. It was precisely from the "thinking realists' of the 'sixties that there came that absurd argument, which became so popular among the radical Russian intelligentsia, that the dissection of a corpse did not reveal the existence of a soul in man. The reverse bearing of this argument escaped their notice; if they had brought the soul to light by the dissecting of a corpse, this would have been evidence on the side of materialism. There was a great contrast between the seriousness and significance of the human crisis which took place in the 'thinking realists', and the pitifulness of their philosophy, their crude and vulgar materialism and utilitarianism.
The 'thinking realist' was, of course, a foe of æsthetics, and denied the independent significance of art. In that respect he demanded a stern asceticism. Pisarev perpetrated a positive pogrom of æsthetics; he rejected the perfect achievement of Pushkin, and proposed that the Russian novelists should write popular tracts on natural science. In this respect the cultural programme of the communists is more reasonable; it proposes the study of Pushkin, and assigns some meaning to art. Dialectic materialism is less vulgar than the materialism of Buchner and Moleshott. But among the communists technical knowledge plays the same part as natural science, and especially the biological sciences, played in the 'sixties.
Pisarev's nihilism announced that 'boots are above Shakespeare'. The idea of the subservience of art and literature to social aims was asserted in Pisarev's system in an even more extreme form than in communism. If the programme of Russian nihilism were actually realised to the full in Russian communism, the results for culture would have been more destructive than those we actually see in Soviet culture. The appearance of the 'thinking realist' meant the appearance of a harsher type than the 'idealist of the 'forties', and at the same time a more active type. But in the nihilism of Pisarev there was a healthy reaction against fruitless, romantic day dreaming, idleness and egoistic self-absorption; it was a wholesome summons to labour and knowledge, although a one-sided knowledge. There was a simple and active liberating force in nihilism. The movement had an immense and a positive significance for the emancipation of women. An analogous process recurred among us Russians in the change from the type of person who created the cultural renaissance of the beginning of the twentieth century -- the 'idealist' movement of that day -- to the Russian communist.
The exponents of nihilism did not observe the radical contradiction which lay at the roots of their aspirations. They sought the liberation of personality; they proclaimed a revolt against all beliefs, all abstract ideas, for the sake of that liberation.
On behalf of the liberation of personality, they emptied it of its qualitative content, devastated its inner life, and denied it its right to creativeness and spiritual enrichment. The principle of utilitarianism is in the highest degree unfavourable to the principle of personality; it subjects personality to utility, which holds sway tyrannically over personality. In its thought and creative activity nihilism displayed a violent asceticism intruded from without. Materialism was such an intruded asceticism and poverty of thought. The principle of personality can in no way stand and develop on the soil of materialism. Personality, as they conceived it, is found to be deprived of the right to creative fulness of life. If the talented Pisarev had lived to more mature years, he would perhaps have observed this fundamental contradiction; perhaps he would have understood that one cannot fight for personality on the ground of one's belief 'in the frog'.
The tendencies of the 'seventies rubbed off the corners of the nihilism of the 'sixties. The chief influence on the thought of the radical intelligentsia of the 'seventies was not that of Buchner and Moleshott, but of Comte and Herbert Spencer. A change-over took place from materialism to positivism, a reaction against the predominance of natural science. To some extent the rights of æsthetics were upheld, and art was not repudiated. But the idea of the subservience of art to social aims continued to dominate the minds of the intelligentsia.