A Herzen Reader

Everyone took part in this conspiracy, not only without having made any deals, but without even suspecting anything—that is how buds ripen, in­dependently of each other and under the influence of the very same atmo­sphere, making up the general character of spring. Who was not its agent? The student who knew Ryleev's and Polezhaev's verse by heart, going off to be a temporary tutor in a manor house, a physician setting off to serve in a remote part of the country,¹² a seminary student coming back to his na­tive village for the vacation, a teacher who read literature to military school students, and all universities, lycees, spiritual and military academies, the­aters, corps, Westernizers and Slavophiles—Chaadaev and Polevoy, Belin- sky and Gogol, Granovsky and Khomyakov.

Only native—not Petrine—Russia stood outside this movement. It did not know the Rus in which this movement was taking place, and it was not known there. Until this intellectual effort, until this inner protest, until these pangs of remorse, they had no business with it, and that is only natu­ral. The people had not broken with their way of life in order to rise above it, it was not in their midst that there could or should arise doubts about their path; they continued their spontaneous way of life under the heavy yoke of their serf status, bureaucratic theft, and poverty. [. . .]

After the conquest of Poland, Russia settled in for five years of Nicho- laevan ways in gloomy silence. Society declined more and more, literature remained silent or made distant allusions; only within university walls a living word was sometimes heard and an ardent heart was beating. yes, from time to time the mighty song of Pushkin, contradicting everything that was happening, seemed to prophesy that such a young and broad chest could shoulder a great deal.

People saved themselves individually—some with scholarship, some with art, some with imaginary activity. People individually turned away from everything that surrounded them and observed in the unattainable distance the movement of heavenly bodies in the west, but their inner pain and bewilderment could not quiet down, and they had to suffer through it until they reached the truth and found in themselves a means of expres­sion. Chaadaev's letter represents the first tangible point at which two di­vergent interpretations branched off.

"Look around you. It's as if everything is on the move, as if we are all wanderers. No one has a fixed sphere of existence, there are no good cus­toms, not only no rules but not even any family focus; there is nothing that would win over or awaken your sympathy or your aspirations; there is noth­ing constant or indispensable; everything passes and flows by without leav­ing a trace. It is as if we are billeted at home, like strangers in our families, like migrants in cities."

Genuine social development has not yet begun for the people if the con­ditions of its life have not been made right; our moral world is in chaotic ferment, in the type of cataclysms that preceded the actual formation of the planet."

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!

This negative consciousness could go no further—this nihilism is almost as tragic as the newer kind. What could be done after such an acknowl­edgment? Sigh, fold one's arms, and meekly bear the cross of one's native land. [. . .]

Chaadaev's gloomy confession met with a strong rebuff, the rebuff of a man who had been buried alive, the rebuff instinctive faith makes to one­sided doubt. The once-again departing Russian thought, like tsar Ivan Vasi- levich, afflicted by illness and weak, listened behind the doors as Chaadaev read a prayer for the dying, and, quitting its deathbed, rushed to declare its right to live.

In the name of what? In the name of the people's way of life and pre- Petrine Russia, i.e., proceeding from the same aversion that their opponent had for the empire. "This is a temporary growth," they said, "foreign rags which have adhered to the body, but only to the skin, so they can be ripped off."

[. . .] The boundaries of the tournament were drawn.

Up until 1848 the pulse of a living heart was felt only in this literary battle.

two or three hundred people, of whom half were very young. But this arith­metic weakness—when the rest were not occupied with anything—meant nothing. A minority, with excited thoughts, faith, and doubt, split off from the drowsy and indifferent masses without having any precise direction, be­coming by necessity a secular priesthood, i.e., beginning with propaganda and preaching, they often finish with power and lead their flock along the same path.