Illusions were impossible: the people were indifferent spectators on the 14th of December. Every clear-thinking person saw the terrible result of the complete rupture between national Russia and Europeanized Russia. Every living link had been broken between these two parties and they had to be renewed, but how? That was the great question. Some thought that nothing would be achieved by allowing Russia to be pulled along by Europe; they placed their hopes not on the future, but on a return to the past. Others saw in the future only unhappiness and ruin. They cursed the mongrelized civilization and its apathetic people. A great sadness came over the hearts of all thinking people.
Only Pushkin's resonant and broad song echoed across a landscape of slavery and anguish; this song preserved the past epoch, filled the present with its manly sounds, and sent its voice far into the future. Pushkin's poetry was a pledge and a comfort. Amidst poets who live in times of despair and decadence you don't find these types of songs, which do not go well with burials.
Pushkin's inspiration did not deceive him. The blood that had rushed to a heart struck by terror could not stop there; it soon began to make itself known.
Already a journalist had courageously raised his voice to rally the timid.4 This man, who had spent all his youth in his Siberian homeland, took up trade, which quickly bored him; he then devoted himself to reading. Without any formal education, he learned French and German on his own, and went to live in Moscow. There, without colleagues, without acquaintances, and without a name in literature, he came up with the idea of editing a monthly journal. He soon astonished his readers with the encyclopedic variety of his articles. He wrote boldly of jurisprudence and music, of medicine and Sanskrit. Russian history was one of his specialties, which did not prevent him from writing stories, novels and, finally, reviews, in which he achieved great success.
In Polevoy's writing one would look in vain for great erudition, for philosophical depth, but with each question he was able to discern its humanitarian side; his sympathies were liberal. His journal The Moscow Telegraph enjoyed great influence, and we must acknowledge the service he rendered by publishing in such a dismal age. What could be written the day after the uprising, or on the eve of the executions? Polevoy's position was very difficult. He was saved from persecution by his very obscurity. One wrote very little in that epoch; half of the literary world was in exile, and the other half kept silent. A small number of renegades, like the siamese twins Grech and Bulgarin,5 allied themselves with the government, having smoothed over their part on the 14th December with denunciations against their friends and by suppressing the person who had set type for revolutionary proclamations on Grech's printing press. They alone dominated journalism in
Petersburg, but it was in their role as police agents, not as literary figures. Polevoy was able to hold out against all reactionary forces without betraying his cause until 1834; we must not forget this.
Polevoy began to democratize Russian literature, bringing it down from its aristocratic heights, making it more popular, or at least more bourgeois. His greatest enemies were literary authorities whom he attacked with pitiless irony. He was completely correct in thinking that any destruction of authority was a revolutionary act, and that a man who was able to free himself from the oppression of great names and pedants could not fully remain either a religious or civil slave. Before Polevoy, critics occasionally dared, amidst allusions and excuses, to make some slight observations about Der- zhavin, Karamzin, or Dmitriev,6 all the while acknowledging that their greatness was incontestable. From the very first day, Polevoy stood on an equal footing and began to take on these great masters, who were so serious and dogmatic. Old Dmitriev, poet and former Minister of Justice, spoke with sadness and horror at the literary anarchy introduced by Polevoy, with his lack of respect for people whose services were acknowledged by the entire nation.
Polevoy not only attacked literary authorities, but also scholars; he dared to challenge their research, he, the minor Siberian merchant who had never pursued formal studies. Scholars ex officio allied themselves with gray-haired literary eminences to begin a proper war against the insurgent journalist.
Polevoy, knowing the public's taste, destroyed his enemies with biting articles.
He replied in a joking manner to the scholars' observations, treating their tedious judgments with an impertinence that made people laugh out loud. It is hard to describe the curiosity with which the public followed the course of this polemic. They seemed to understand that in attacking literary authorities, Polevoy had in mind other authorities. He made use of every occasion to touch on delicate political questions, and did this with admirable skill. He said almost everything, without ever leaving himself open to attack. It must be said that censorship really helped the development of style and the art of mastering one's own speech. A man who is irritated by an obstacle he finds offensive wishes to vanquish it and almost always succeeds. Circumlocution carries in it traces of emotion, of battle; it is more impassioned than a simple utterance. An implied word is stronger under its veil, always transparent for one who wishes to understand. Constrained speech has a more concentrated meaning, it is sharp; to speak in a way that the thought is clear, but the words seem to come from the reader himself, that is the best way to be convincing. Implications increase the force of the expression, while nakedness constrains the imagination. The reader who knows the extent to which the writer must be careful will read attentively; a secret bond is established between him and the author: the one conceals what he writes, the other what he understands. The censorship is a spider web that catches small flies but is torn by the large ones. Characters and allusions may perish under red ink; energetic thoughts and genuine poetry pass with disdain through this cloakroom, having allowed themselves, at most, to be brushed a bit.7
With The Telegraph, journals began to dominate Russian literature. They absorbed all intellectual movement. Few books were bought, while the best poetry and stories saw the light of day in journals, and something had to be out of the ordinary—a poem by Pushkin or a novel by Gogol—to otherwise attract the attention of a public as scattered as were the readers of Russia. In no country other than England was the influence of journals so great. This was in fact the best means of spreading enlightenment over such a great expanse. The Telegraph, The Messenger of Moscow, The Telescope, The Library for Reading, Fatherland Notes, and their illegitimate son The Contemporary, in spite of different tendencies, have spread a great deal of information and many concepts and ideas over the past twenty-five years. They gave the inhabitants of the Omsk and Tobolsk provinces the possibility of reading novels by Dickens and George Sand two months after they had appeared in London or Paris. Even the fact that they appeared as installments was useful, stimulating lazy readers.
Polevoy managed to keep The Telegraph going until 1834. However, the persecution of ideas was redoubled after the rebellion in Poland. Victorious absolutism lost all false modesty, all shame. Schoolboy pranks were punished like armed uprisings, and children of 15-16 were exiled or sent away as soldiers for life. A student of Moscow University, Polezhaev,8 already known for his verse, composed several liberal poems. Without having him tried, Nicholas sent for the young man, ordered him to read the verses aloud, kissed him, and sent him away as a simple soldier; the idea of such an absurd punishment could only arise in the mind of a government that had lost its senses, and that saw the Russian army as a reformatory or a prison. Eight years later, the soldier Polezhaev died in a military hospital. A year after that, the Kritsky brothers, also Moscow students, were sent to prison because—if I am not mistaken—they broke a bust of the emperor. Since that time, no one has heard anything about them. In 1832, on the pretext that it was a secret society, a dozen students were arrested and immediately sent to the Orenburg garrison, soon to be joined by a Lutheran pastor's son, Jules Kolreif, who was not a Russian citizen, had only occupied his time with music, but who dared to say that he did not consider it his duty to denounce his friends. In 1834 my friends and I were thrown into prison and, after eight months, sent away as clerks in the chancelleries of distant provinces. We were accused of intending to form a secret society and wishing to spread Saint-Simon's ideas; as a bad joke, we were read a death sentence, and then were told that the emperor, with the unpardonable benevolence so typical of him, had only sentenced us to a corrective term in exile. That punishment lasted more than five years.