The Thinking Reed

The socialist and Westernizer Herzen and the anti-socialist ‘back-to-the-soil’ thinker Dostoevsky were united on one point: Russia will bring renewal to Europe. Here their thinking coincides; but here, too, begins the sharp conflict between them. For Dostoevsky this renewal must be linked with a return to the roots, to Orthodoxy, to traditions, to Russia’s originality. For Herzen, in order to renew Europe Russia herself must be renewed. Another coincidence of attitudes should be mentioned: Gogol and Dostoevsky are no less anti-bourgeois than Belinsky and Herzen — even more so. Only for them, ‘bourgeois-ness’ is not a social concept but a geographical, national one. For the later Gogol and for Dostoevsky Russia had become too European, and consequently too embourgeoisé. On this point the neo-Slavophils are wholly in agreement with them: for example M. Lobanov, the author of a book about Ostrovsky. He ‘hints that “modern times”, the rule of the moneybag, is an un-Russian phenomenon, imposed on Russia by certain “dark-haired persons” who consider that, for 100 per cent, “one could even adopt the Orthodox religion”.’116 Here, as A. Anastas'ev indicated transparently enough in discussing books on Russian classical authors written by neo-Slavophils, anti-Europeanism comes very close to anti-Semitism:

Here this ‘dark-haired’, ‘swarthy’ young man with a bald patch and gold-rimmed pince-nez was talking in a railway compartment with ‘a sturdy old man with a broad, thick beard, wearing a close-fitting jacket made of blue silk’. This ‘swarthy’ fellow turned up again in the book. It was he who appeared to Ostrovsky in a bad dream, in the form of a producer who advocated biomechanics.117

As the reader will have perceived, Meyerhold is meant. But even that is not the heart of the matter. The blow is struck at the entire Europeanized intelligentsia. The ‘Jew’, the ‘swarthy’ person, appears here as a symbol — as an element not only culturally but also ethnically ‘alien’. He is the incarnation of something we do not need, brought in from the West. We have already seen where this logic leads.

Karyakin once aptly remarked that for Dostoevsky the socialists, by virtue of their pro-Western cultural orientation, were an example of ‘bourgeois-ness’. The neo-Slavophils see the cause of the development of the consumer society and the flourishing of ‘bourgeois-ness’ in — Marxism. The ideal social structure for Russia they find somewhere in pre-Petrine times, in the Orthodox monarchy, linked with the traditions of Byzantine Eastern Christianity. This is the essence of what Batkin called their ‘nostalgia for the East’.

The tradition in Russian thought that runs from Belinsky and Herzen posed the same questions as the Slavophils, but answered them differently. The idea that Russia has a special role to play in the world was by no means a fantastic Slavophil notion. The largest state in Europe and the whole world cannot but play a special role in the history of the continent and of mankind. Russian society was always developed enough to be able to catch up with the West. Moreover, the one who has to catch up undoubtedly enjoys some advantages. He can see the road traversed by his predecessors, learn from their experience, and traverse that same road more quickly. But these positive potentialities of Russian society were never fully realized. The country’s despotic government was the obstacle. Consequently, as Belinsky and Herzen saw it, Europeanization of Russian life, leading to the emancipation of the people, would make possible a historical leap forward. To overcome ‘bourgeois-ness’ it was necessary to advance still further along the road of the democratization of society, the road of freedom.