Bazaro v 011ce !\!fore (1 868)
L E T T E H. 1 1
INSTEAD oF A LETTER, dear friend,2 I am sending you a dissertation, and an unfinished one too. After our conversa tion I read over again Pisarev's article on Bazarov, which I had quite forgotten, and I am very glad I did-that is, not that I had forgot-I Published in The Pole Star, 1 868. (A.S. ) 2 ;\I, P. Ogarev. (A.S.)
The Later Years
629
ten it, but that I read it again. The article confirms my point of view. In its one-sidedness it is more true and more remarkable than its opponents have supposed. Whether Pisarev has correctly grasped the character of Bazarov as Turgenev meant it, does not concern me. What does matter is that he has recognised himself and his comrades in Bazarov, and has added to the portrait what was lacking in the book. The less Pisarev has kept to the stocks into which the exasperated father has tried to thrust the obstinate son, the more freely has he been able to treat him as the expression of his ideal.3
'But what interest can Mr Pisarev's ideal have for us? Pisarev is a smart critic, he has written a great deal, he has written about everything, sometimes about subjects of which he had knowledge, but all that does not give his ideal any claim on the attention of the public.'
The point is that it is not his own personal ideal but the ideal which both before and since the appearance of Turgenev's Bazarov has haunted the younger generation, has been embodied 3 Dmitry hanovich Pisarev ( 1 840-68) was one of those tough-minded young Russian radicals who despised the aging Herzen (the feeling was mutual) as liberal, or "soft," politically, and conservative, or "bourgeois,"
culturally-accusations that were true enough, in their terms. ( Herzen's friend, Turgenev, in Fathers and Sons had given them a name that stuck,
"Nihilists." and a personality type in the anti-hero, Bazarov.) In this essay disguised as a letter to Ogarev-always a personal writer, Herzen felt freer in such informal dress-Pisarev is taken as the type of revolutionary youth who were then modeling themselves on Bazarov with a perversity that must have distressed his inventor: "living persons who have tried to take Bazarovism as the basis of their words and actions."
Herzen's life-imitates-art point would have been stronger a year or so later: like Bazarov, Pisarev died young, at twenty-eight.
The similarities of our "New Left" to the nineteenth-century Russian Nihilists-and, in its more benign aspect, to the later "Narodniki," or
"Back-to-the-People," idealists-have often been remarked on, usually with more heat than light, by elderly (i.e., over thirty) critics of the American radical youth movement in the sixties. As a "critical sup·
porter" of the quondam New Left, who was, like Herzen a century earlier, uneasily divided between hope and skepticism, I wish certain undivided elderly Cassandras, most of them younger than me, had read his last volume before they made their deadly historical parallels ( the other was with Hitler's youth mm·ement) . His cool treatment of the painful subject of the Nihilists (see also "The Superfluous and Jaundiced"
in this volume ) , which was unsparing and yet infused with comradely sympathy, might haYe been useful to them. Nor would his humor have come amiss: it brought his sternest philippics down to human scale. But, as noted in my Preface, Americans don't seem to have read him much.
(D.M.)
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
630
not only in various heroes in novels and stories but in living persons who have tried to take Bazarovism as the basis of their words and actions. What Pisarev says I have seen and heard myself a dozen times; in the simplicity of his heart, he has let out the cherished thought of a whole circle and, focusing the scattered rays on one centre, has shed a light on the typical Bazarov.
To Turgenev, Bazarov is more than alien; to Pisarev, more than a comrade. To study the type, of course, one must take the view which sees in Bazarov the desideratum.
Pisarev's opponents were frightened by his lack of caution; while renouncing Turgenev's Bazarov as a caricature, they repudiated even more violently his transfigured double; they were displeased at Pisarev's having put his foot in it, but it does not follow from this that he was wrong in his interpretation.
Pisarev knows the heart of his Bazarov through and through ; he makes a confession for his hero. 'Perhaps,' he says, 'at the bottom of his heart Bazarov does accept a great deal of what he denies in words, and perhaps it is just what is accepted and concealed that saves him from moral decline and from moral nothingness.'
We regard this indiscreet utterance, which looks so deeply into another's soul, as very important.
Farther on Pisarev describes his hero's character thus:
'Bazarov is extremely proud, but his pride is not noticeable'
[ clearly this is not Turgenev's Bazarov] 'just because it is so great. Nothing would satisfy Bazarov but an eternity of everwidening activity and ever-increasing en;oyment.'4
Bazarov acts everywhere and in everything only as he wishes, or as he thinks advantageous and convenient; he is guided only by his personal desire or personal calculation. He acknowledges no Mentor above him, without himself or within himself. Before him is no lofty aim, in his mind is no lofty notion, and with all this his powers are enormous. If Bazarovism is a malady, it is a malady of our time, and will have to be suffered to the end in spite of any amputations or palliatives.
Bazarov looks down on people, and even rarely gives himself the trouble to conceal his half-contemptuous and half-patronising attitude to those who hate and to those who obey him. He loves no one. He thinks it quite superfluous to put any constraint 4 Youth is fond of expressing itself in all sorts of incomrnensurables and striking the imagination by images of infinite magnitude. The last sentence reminds me vividly of Karl Moor, Ferdinand and Don Carlos.
The Later Years
631
on himself whatever. There are two sides to his cynicism, an internal and an external, the cynicism of thought and feeling and the cynicism of manner and expression. The essence of his inner cynicism lies in an ironical attitude to emotion of every sort, to dreaminess, to poetical enthusiasm. The crude expression of this irony, the causeless and aimless roughness of manner, are part of his external cynicism. Bazarov is not merely an empiricist; he is also an unkempt Bursch. Among the admirers of Bazarov there will doubtless be some who will be delighted with his boorish manners, the vestiges left by his rough student life, and will imitate those manners, which are in any case a defect and not a merit.5 Such people are most often evolved in the grey environment of laborious work: rough work coarsens the hands, coarsens the manners, coarsens the feelings; the man is toughened, casts off youthful dreaminess and gets rid of tearful sentimentality; there is no possibility of dreaming at work ; the hard-working man looks upon idealism as a folly peculiar to the idleness and effeminacy of the well-to-do; he reckons moral sufferings as imaginary, moral impulses and exploits as farfetched and absurd. He feels a repulsion for high-flown talk.