Chatsky could not have lived with his arms folded, neither in capricious peevishness nor in haughty self-deification ; he was not old enough to find satisfaction in grumbling sulkiness, nor young enough to enjoy the self-sufficiency of adolescence. The whole essence of the man lies in this restless ferment, this working yeast. But it is just this aspect that displeases Bazarov, it is H The h"ro of Woe from Wit. ( Tr.)
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that that incenses his proud stotctsm. 'Keep quiet in your comer if you have not the strength to do anything; it is sickening enough as it is without your whining,' he says; 'if you are beaten, well, stay beaten . . . . You have enough to eat; as for your weeping, that's only a thing the masters go in for' . . . and so on.
Pisarev was bound to speak in that way for Bazarov; the part he played required it.
It is hard not to play a part so long as it is liked. Take off Bazarov's uniform, make him forget the jargon he uses, let him be free to utter one word simply, without posing (he so hates affectation ! ) , let him for one minute forget the iron hand of duty, his artificially frigid language, his role of castigator, and within an hour we should understand each other in all the rest.
In their conceptions of good and evil the new generation were like the old. Their sympathies and antipathies, says Pisarev, were the same; what they desired is the same thing . . . at the bottom of their hearts the younger generation accept much that they reject in words. It would be quite easy then to come to terms. But until he is stripped of his ceremonial trappings Bazarov consistently demands from men who are crushed under every burden on earth, outraged, tortured, deprived both of sleep and of all possibility of action when awake, that they shall not speak of their pain; there is more than a smack of Arakcheyev about this.
What reason is there to deprive Lermontov, for instance, of his bitter complaint, his upbraidings of his own generation which sent a shock of horror through so many? Would the prison-house of Nicholas have been really any better if the gaolers had been as irritably nervous and carping as B�zarov and had suppressed those voices?
'But what are they for? What is the use of them?'
'Why does a stone make a sound when it is hit with a hammerJ'
'It cannot help it.'
'And why do these gentlemen suppose that men can suffer for whole generations without speech, complaint, indignation, cursing, protest? If complaint is not necessary for others, it is for those who complain; the expression of sorrow eases the pain.
"lhm," says Goethe, "gab ein Gott zu sagen, was er leidet." '
'But what has it to do with us? '
Nothing t o d o with you, perhaps, but perhaps it has something to do with others; but you must not lose sight of the fact that
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every generation lives for itself also. From the point of view of history it is a transition, but in relation to itself it is the goal, and it cannot, it ought not to endure without a murmur the afflictions that befall it, especially when it has not even the consolation which Israel had in the expectation of the Messiah, and has no idea that from the seed of the Onegins and the Rudins will be born a Bazarov. In reality what drives our young people to fury is that in our generation our demand for activity, our protest against the existing order of things was differently expressed from theirs, and that the motive of both was not ahvays and completely dependent on cold and hunger.
Is not this passion for uniformity another example of the same irritable spirit which has made of formality and routine the one thing of consequence and reduced military evolutions to the goose-step? That side of the Russian character is responsible for the development of Arakcheyevism, civil and military. Every personal, individual manifestation or deviation was regarded as disobedience, and excited persecution and incessant bullying.
Bazarov leaves no one in peace; he galls everyone with his haughtiness. Every word of his is a reprimand from a superior to a subordinate. There is no future for that.
'If,' says Pisarev, 'Bazarovism is the malady of our age, it will have to run its course.'
By all means. This malady is in place only until the end of the university course; like teething, it is quite unseemly in the grown-up.
The worst service Turgenev did Bazarov was in putting him to death by typhus because he did not know how to manage him.
That is an ultima ratio which no one can withstand ; had Bazarov escaped from typhus, he would certainly have developed out of Bazarovism, at any rate into a man of science, which in physiology he loved and prized, and which does not change in methods, whether frog or man, embryology or history, is its subject.
Bazarov drove every sort of prejudice out of his head, and even after that he remained an extremely uncultured man. He had heard something about poetry, something about art and, without troubling himself to think, abruptly passed sentence on a subject of which he knew nothing. This conceit is characteristic of us Russians in general ; it has its good points, such as intellectual daring, but in return for that it leads us at times into crude errors.
Science would have saved Bazarov; he 'vould have ceased to look down on people with profound and unconcealed contempt.
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Science even more than the Gospel teaches us humility. She cannot look down on anything, she does not know what superiority means, she despises nothing, never lies for the sake of a pose, and conceals nothing out of coquetry. She stops before the facts as an investigator, sometimes as a physician, never as an executioner, and still less with hostility and irony.
Science-! anyhow am not bound to keep some \vords hidden in the silence of the spirit-science is love, as Spinoza said of thought and cognisance.
L E T T E R 2
WHAT HAS BEEN leaves in history an imprint by means of which science sooner or later restores the past in its basic features. All that is lost is the accidental illumination, from one or another angle, under which it occurred. Apotheoses and calumnies, partialities and envies, all this is weathered and blown away.
The light footstep on the sand vanishes; the imprint which has force and insistence stamps itself on the rock and will be brought to light by the honest labourer.
Connections, degrf'es of kinship, tf'stators and heirs and their mutual rights, will all be revealed by the heraldry of science.
Only goddesses are born without predecessors, like Venus from the foam of the sea. Minerva, more intelligent, sprang from the ready head of Jupiter.
The Decembrists are our great fathers, the Bazarovs our prodigal sons.
The heritage we received from the Decembrists was the awakened feeling of human dignity, the striving for ind!>pendence, the hatred of slavery, the respect for Western Europe and for the Revolution, the faith in the possibility of an upheaval in Russia, the passionate desire to take part in it, our youth and the integrity of our energies.