A Herzen Reader

They are kicking us. by the weakness and shape of the hooves it is not dif­ficult to guess what kind of beast is rushing to keep up with police horses of the same color and water-carrying patriotic nags who are frankly convinced that the peasant world will stop eating oats and will lose all the virtues of a stable if they were to remove the fatherland's yoke.¹ Their zeal and their en­terprising and cavalier spirit demonstrate clearly that we are out of favor not only with the Winter Palace, but with the majority of the readers in Russia.

We have become accustomed to disfavor, we were always in the minor­ity, otherwise, we would not have wound up in London. Up till this point it was state power that persecuted us, but now a chorus has joined them.

The alliance against us of police and ideologues, Westernizers and Slavo­philes is a kind of negative affirmation of our "moral citizenship" in Russia. Behind the genuine neighborhood policeman and the fake homespun coat, all that is weak and unsteady, neither one thing nor the other, has pushed away from us—those poor in spirit and weakened in body, hangers-on from literary circles, patients living off crumbs at the tables of ideologues—they have all gone over to the other side and transferred over there the optical illusion of their existence. They represent a false strength: you think those are muscles, but it is really a tumor; that is dangerous during a struggle, which is why they did a good thing by leaving. We candidly admit that we absolutely do not fear being left in the minority, not even in a completely empty room.

Fifteen years ago we were in the same position with European reaction­aries; we did not yield an iota, and, having said all that we thought, we with­drew, conscious that truth is on our side.²

This time we will not withdraw and will not keep silent—in the Russian case the realization that we are right is not enough, we want to participate. It is developing in a misshapen, crazy, criminal fashion, but it is taking its course.

We do not know whether or not Western man will free himself. The process drags on and is far from being finished. In any case the task is a difficult one; the threads are strong, the knots are tangled, and all of it has not only entered the body but has grown into it.

We are not at all in that position; our life has not taken on a definitive form. There is a great deal that is bad in its instability and contradictions, but that is not the point. The point is that we have not joined the conserva­tive era of our existence—for us conservatism is either police resistance, or ideological imitation of the West. [. . .]

The uncertainty and disorder of Russian life, leading it, on the one hand, to ugly extremes and contradictions, to an anxious tracking down of prin­ciples and a foolish grasping at everything in the world, and, on the other hand, our national life's elementary strength and endurance, its indiffer­ence to experimental reforms and improvements—all this demonstrates clearly that our life has not taken on a definitive form, has not run across forms that are appropriate to it, and has not developed them from its own existence. It cannot find itself in other people's homes; it cannot settle down, and lives like a nomad.

The first time that the two ways of life, the two Russias, met in this bor­derland, the first time that the question occupying them was not resolved with a whip, it was resolved not in a Western manner. It is impossible to even pose this question in a Western manner. Since the day when the govern­ment indirectly admitted the peasant's right to land, when literature began to discuss whether the serfs should be freed with or without land, and if with land, then how to own it, collectively or individually, the first serious compromise began between the Russian national way of life and the ideal of Western civilization. That is why the peasant, silent for centuries, began to talk, and began to talk sense.

Now, after this first and maybe most important step, now we need a great deal of coming together, freedom of thought, border posts open on all sides and, most of all, with the beams removed, discarded models whose originals had turned out to be unsuited for the West. And now, at the right time, "traitors" have turned up, who preach a west-east conservatism of Petersburg puppet shows.³

That which a civilizing empire did not accomplish is being attempted by doctrinaire civilizers.