A Herzen Reader

The renegades of all social groups, these new people, these moral razno- chintsy, made up not a social class, but a milieu, in which in the foreground were teachers and literary men—working literary men, and not dilettantes— students who had graduated and those who had not finished their course of study, lower-level officials from the universities and from the seminaries, the lower gentry, the children of officers, officers who had graduated from military schools, et al. New people, humble people—they were not as no­ticeable but just as morally liberated as those who came before them, just as constrained in a material way. Poverty lends its own kind of circumspect strength and structure.

The Rus of gentry manor houses, in which, up till then, intellectual and literary development had been primarily concentrated, was, apart from persecution, in a false position. It could not advance a single idea without crossing over the barrier that protected its class privileges. Connected by its education to the forms of European life, it was connected by serfdom to the Petersburg regime; it had to renounce its exclusive rights or to unwittingly introduce a contradiction into every issue. For it, as a social group, there was only one future—to limit the supreme power of the tsar with an oli­garchic Duma, but they did not have the material strength to do this. They lacked the moral strength to leave their class. This type of Anglophile and liberal gentry, stopped on their headlong path to parliamentary freedom by the emancipation of the serfs with land, will remain on the tombstone of Russia's noble gentry like gargoyles, which medieval architects used to decorate the tops of church pillars.

Aristocratic Russia retreated to a supporting role, and its voice began to grow weak; maybe, like Nicholas, it was embarrassed by the events of i848. In order to remain popular in literature, it had to abandon urban life, take up a hunting rifle and slaughter, on the ground and on the wing, the wild­fowl of serfdom.¹⁶

Another force came to relieve them, another group took the place of the exhausted leaders and soldiers.

The sound of Chaadaev's funeral oration still sounded in people's ears; while stirring much in one's breast, it gave nothing but consolation in the other world, some kind of distant future [. . .] but already in hackneyed journalism, boring in Moscow and dissipated in Petersburg, features were being engraved of a real representative of young Russia, a genuine revolu­tionary in our literature.

Belinsky was an unusually free person, and nothing inhibited him: nei­ther the prejudices of scholasticism nor the prejudices of his surround­ings. He appeared, full of questions and in search of solutions, not playing around with conclusions and not fearing them. He openly made mistakes and sincerely looked for another solution; he had one truth in his sights and nothing except for that. Belinsky came on the stage without a crest, without a banner, without a diploma; he belonged to no church and no social class, he was bound by nothing and had sworn no one an oath. Nothing would be spared by him, but for that reason he could sympathize with everyone. The first moment when, bitten by the serpent of German philosophy, he was attracted by the rationality of all that existed, he fearlessly wrote his Borodino essay.¹⁷ What frightening purity must you possess, what an original kind of independence and limitless freedom, to write something on the order of a justification for Nicholas at the beginning of the forties! [. . .]

In Belinsky we encountered that impressive aloofness from the latest ideas and authorities, which is the distinguishing feature and strength of Russian genius, something that Chaadaev vaguely foresaw, and about which we have said a great deal.

Maybe this aloofness, this inner freedom in the presence of outward slavery, deprived our life of many warm moments, many attachments, maybe it introduced an aching that manifested itself in the predominance of irony. But it gave us a terrible feeling of independence. Like children who knew neither father nor mother, we were poorer, but more free; our mother and our father were ideals, and therefore did not hinder us, and we infused them with our own purified image and likeness.

Belinsky's ideal, and our ideal, our church and parental home, in which our first thoughts and sympathies were nurtured, was the Western world with its scholarship and its revolution, with its respect for the individual, with its political freedom, with its artistic treasures and its unshakeable hope.