M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
634
work. Perhaps his wrath would have been changed to loving kindness, and he would have given up treating us with 'reproach and mockery.'
I frankly confess this throwing of stones at one's predecessors is very distasteful to me. I repeat what I have said already: 'I should like to save the younger generation from historical ingratitude, and even from historical error. It is time for the fathers not to devour their children like Saturn, but it is time for the children, too, to cease following the example of those natives of Kamchatka who kill off their old people.' Surely it is not right that only in natural science the phases and degrees of development, the declinations and deviations, even the avortements, should be studied, accepted, considered sine ira et studio, but as soon as one approaches history the physiological method is abandoned at once, and in its place methods of the criminal court and the police station are adopted.
The Onegins and Pechorins have passed away.
The Rudins and the Beltovs are passing.
The Bazarovs will pass . . . and very quickly, as a matter of fact. It is a too far-fetched, bookish, over-strained type to persist for long.
A type has already tried to thrust himself forward to replace him, one rotten in the spring of his days, the type of the Orthodox student, the Conservative patriot educated at govemment expense in whom everything loathsome in Imperial Russia vvas regurgitated, though even he felt embarrassed after serenading the Iversky Madonna and singing a thanksgiving service to Katkov.7
All the types that arise will pass, and all, in virtue of the law of the conservation of energy which we have learnt to recognise in the physical world, will persist and will spring up in different forms in the future progress of Russia and in its future organisation.
And so would it not be more interesting, instead of pitting Bazarov against Rudin, to analyse what constitutes the 'red threads' connecting them, and the reasons of their appearing and their transformation? Why have precisely these forms of development been called forth by our life, and \vhy have they passed one into the other in this way? Their dissimilarity is obvious, but in some respects they are alike.
Typical characters readily seize on distinctions, exaggerate the 7 H. is referring to the public thanksgiving for the PSC<�pe of Alt:>xander II from the attempt of D. V. Karakozov to assassinate him in 1 866. (A.S.)
The Later Years
635
angles and prominent features for the sake of emphasising them, paint the barriers in vivid colours and tear apart the bonds. The play of colours is lost and unity is left far away, hidden in mist, like the plain that joins the foot of the mountains, whose tops, far apart from each other, are brightly lighted up. Moreover, we load on the shoulders of these types more than they can bear and ascribe to them in life a significance that they have not had, or had only in a limited sense. To take Onegin as the positive type of the intellectual life of the 1 820s, as the integral of all the aspirations and activities of the class then awakening, would be quite mistaken, although he does represent one of the aspects of the life of that time.
The type of that time, one of the most splendid types of modern history, was the Decembrist and not Onegin. He could not be dealt with by Russian literature for all of forty years, but he is not the less for that.
How is it that the younger generation had not the clearness of vision, the judgment or the heart to grasp all the grandeur, all the vigour of those brilliant young men who emerged from the ranks of the Guards, those spoilt darlings of wealth and eminence who left their drawing-rooms and their piles of gold to demand the rights of man, to protest, to make a statement for which-and they knew it-the hangman's rope and penal servitude awaited them? It is a melancholy and puzzling question.
To resent the fact that these men appeared in the one class in which there was some degree of culture, of leisure and of security, is senseless. If these 'princes, boyars, voyevodas,' these Secretaries of State and colonels, had not been the first to wake up from moral hunger but had waited to be aroused by bodily hunger, there would have been no whining and restless Rudins nor Bazarovs resting on their 'unity of will and knowledge': there would have been a regimental doctor who would have done the soldiers to death, robbing them of their rations and medicines, and have sold a certificate of natural death to a Kirsanov's bailiff when he had flogged peasants to death; or there would have been a court clerk taking bribes, for ever drunk, fleecing the peasants of their qunrter-roubles and handing overcoat and galoshes to his Excellency, a Kirsanov and governor of the province; and what is more, serfdom would not have received its death-blow, nor would there have been any of that underground activity beneath the heavy crust of authority, gnawing away the imperial ermine and the quilted dressinggown of the landowners.
It was fortunate that, side by side with men who found their
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
636
gentlemanly pastimes in the kennels and the serfs' quarters, in violating and flogging at home and in cringing servility in Petersburg, there were some whose 'pastime' it was to tear the rod out of their hands and fight for liberty, not for licence in some remote field but for liberty of mind, for human life.
Whether this pastime of theirs was their serious business, their passion, they proved on the gallows and in prison . . . they proved it, too, when they came back after thirty years in Siberia .
If the type of the Decembrist has been reflected at all in literature, it is-faintly but with kindred features-in Chatsky.8
In his exasperated, jaundiced thoughts, his youthful indignation, one can detect a healthy impulse to action ; he feels what it is he is dissatisfied with, he beats his head against the stone wall of social prejudices and tests whether the prison bars are strong.
Chatsky was on the straight road for penal servitude, and if he survived the 14th December he certainly did not turn into a passively suffering or proudly contemptuous person. He would have been more likely to rush into some indignant extreme to become a Catholic, like Chaadayev, a Slav-hater or a Slavophil, but he would not in any case have abandoned his propaganda, which he did not abandon either in the drawing-room of Famusov or in his entrance-hall, and he \vould not have confronted himself with the thought that 'his hour had not yet come.' He had that restless turbulence which cannot endure to be out of harmony with what surrounds it, and must either break it or be broken. This is the ferment which makes stagnation in history impossible and clears away the scum on its flowing but dilatory wave.
If Chatsky had survived the generation that followed the 14th December in fear and trembling and grew up flattened out by terror, humiliated and crushed, he would have stretched across it a warm hand of greeting to us. With us Chatsky would have come back to his own soil. These rimes croisees across the generations arc not uncommon even in zoology. And it is my profound conviction that we shall meet Bazarov's children with sympathy and they us 'without exasperation and mockery.'