The Thinking Reed

Nevertheless, Yanov contrived to answer Kozhanov’s provocative questions by referring to Lenin, who considered the 1917 Revolution not at all a manifestation of Russian ‘originality’ but rather a product of very distinctive capitalist development, a retarded and uneven Europeanization. ‘Lenin was right,’ said Yanov categorically, and this time it was his opponents who had to refrain from comment. In the pages of Voprosy Literatury, at any rate…

On the whole, it must be said that despite Yanov’s subsequent complaints, the neo-Slavophils of 1969 were as yet too weak and too few to give battle to the left-wing intellectuals in the pages of Voprosy Liter atury, and there is no reason to consider that Yanov suffered defeat. But the ‘originalists’ did not lay down their arms, and the social situation favoured them. At the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties neo-Slavophil ideas were being proclaimed by that same Kozhanov even more openly than during the discussion in 1969.

It is, in general, very easy to rethink the history of our literature so as to make it correspond better to ‘the Russian idea’. All that is needed is ‘slightly’ to disregard obvious facts. Thus the pessimist Chaadaev, with his revolt against Russia’s history, becomes for Kozhanov a crier of the ‘supreme superiority of Russian culture over all [!] others’.105 Arbitrarily plucked-out quotations, assembled without any respect for Chaadaev’s spiritual path and ideological striving, are summoned to support this ‘stunning’ discovery. But the repainting of Chaadaev as a Slavophil is, so to speak, a private hobby of Kozhanov’s. Much more interesting are his general theoretical statements. The Russian people — and here Kozhanov refers to Metropolitan Illarion — is the bearer not of ‘law’ but of ‘grace’. Law, Kozhanov explains, means ‘spiritual slavery’, whereas grace ‘is the embodiment of spiritual freedom’.106 Here we see displayed the superiority of the Russians — free in the ‘highest’ sense — over the ‘limited’ Western Europeans. Lest any doubt remain, Kozhanov explains that ‘it is not so much a question of Christian as of Russian consciousness.’ Further: ‘Illarion expressed not a strictly Christian idea, but a Russian one.’107 He who possesses grace has, in essence, no need of law, so that there is nothing bad about the fact that Russian history is for the most part a history of lawlessness (Kozhanov says nothing about the fact that it is also a history of self-sacrificing struggle for law).

Kozhanov’s arguments were not original. The idea that Russia has no need of laws because it possesses a higher freedom was familiar to the old Slavophils — to K. Aksakov, for instance. In this connection Berdyaev wrote that such a theory ‘is blatantly incompatible with historical reality and reveals the unhistorical character of the fundamental ideas of the Slavophils about Russia and the West.’108 True, this sort of contempt for law was propagated in Russia for centuries and entered into the ideology of official Orthodoxy and the Muscovite autocracy. Thus, for Ivan the Terrible legality was something base and secondary, and lawlessness was not to be reckoned among the worst of sins: ‘For if my transgressions are more numerous than the sand of the sea, yet I trust in the grace of God’s mercy: he can drown my transgressions with the depths of his mercy.’109 Instead, revolt, dissidence, variance from the ideology of the Russian state was unpardonable and unjustifiable, and ‘the dread Tsar’, who believed in the impunity of his transgressions, warned Prince Kurbsky that in denouncing his sovereign’s lawlessness he had surely ‘destroyed [his] soul’ and even ‘risen against God’.110 A similar contempt for law as something beneath consideration is characteristic also of Stalinism.

It has to be admitted that law-consciousness was not able to develop to the Western level in the Russian people, either. But it was precisely against this anti-humanist, anti-law thinking, implanted by the ruling class, that modern Russian democratic culture fought unremittingly. Kozhanov not only presents that barbarism to us as a model, but even depicts it as the overcoming of the ‘narrowness’ of Western humanism.