All that has been recast and moulded into new forms, but the foundations are untouched.
\Vhat has our generation bequeathed to the coming one?
Nihilism.
Let us recall the course of affairs a little.
About the 1 840s our life began to force its way out more violently, like steam from under tightly shut valves. A scarcely perceptible change passed all over Russia, the change by which the doctor discerns, before he can fully account for it, that the malady has taken a turn for tht better, that the patient's
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
640
strength, though very weak, is reviving-there is a different tone. Somewhere within, in the morally microscopic world, there is the breath of a different air, more irritant, but healthier.
Outwardly everything was death-like under the ice of Nicholas's government, but something was stirring in the consciousness and the conscience-a feeling of uneasiness, of dissatisfaction. The horror had lost its edge, and men were sick of the twilight of that dark reign.
I saw that change with my own eyes when I came back from banishment, first in Moscow and afterwards in Petersburg. But I saw it in the literary and learned circles. Another man,9 whose Baltic antipathy for the Russian movement places him beyond the suspicion of partiality, told not so long ago how, returning i n the 'forties t o the Petersburg aristocracy of the barracks after an absence of some years, he was puzzled a t the weakening of discipline. Aides-de-camp of the Tsar and colonels of the Guards were murmuring, were criticising the measures taken by the government, and were dissatisfied with Nicholas himself. He was so stupefied, distressed and alarmed for the future of the autocracy that in perplexity of spirit he felt, when dining with the aide-de-camp B., almost in the presence of Dubelt himself, tha t Nihilism had been born between the cheese and the pears.
He did not recognise the new-born baby, but the new-born baby was there. The machine screwed down by Nicholas had begun to give way; he gave the screw another turn and everyone felt it; some spoke, others kept silent, speech was forbidden ; but everyone understood that things were really going \\Tong, that everyone was distressed, and that this distress \Vould bring no good to anyone.
Laughter intervened in the affair; laughter, which is a bad companion for any religion, and autocracy is a religion. The abomination and desolation of the lower ranks of the officials had reached such a pitch that the government left them to be insulted. Nicholas, roaring with laughter10 in his box at the Mayor and his Derzhimorda, helped the propaganda, not guessing that after the approval of His Majesty the mockery would quickly go higher up the Table of Ranks.
It is difficult to apply Pisare\·'s rubrics to this period in all their sharpness. Everything in life consists of nuances, fluctuations, cross-currents, ebbing and flowing, and not of disconnected 9 H. here refers to a book by D. K. Schedo-Ferrotti (Baron F. I . Firks) : Etudes sur l'avenir de Ia Russie. Nihilisme en Russie ( Berlin and Brus·
sels, 1 86 7 ) , Chapter 2. ( A .S.)
I O Two contemporary diaries record that Nicholas was pleased with the play, Gogol's The Government Inspector. (R.)
The Later Years
641
fragments. At what point did the men of will without knowledge cease to be and the men of knowledge without will begin?
Nature resolutely eludes classification, even classification by age. Lermontov was in years a contemporary of Belinsky; he was at the university when we were, but he died in the hopeless pessimism of the Pechorin tendency, against which the Slavophils and ourselves had already risen in opposition.
And by the way I have mentioned the Slavophils. Where are Khomyakov and his 'brethren' to be put) What had they-will without knowledge, or knowledge without will? Yet the position they filled was no trifling one in the modern development of Russia, and their thought left a deep imprint on the current of life of that time. Or in what levy of recruits shall we put Gogol, and by what standard? He had not knowledge ; whether he had will I don't know, but I doubt it; but he had genius, and his influence was colossal.
And so, leaving aside the lapides crescunt, plantae crescunt et vivunt . . . of Pisarev, let us pass on.
There were no secret societies, but the secret agreement of those who understood was very extensive. Circles consisting of men who had, more or less, felt the bear's claw of the government on their own persons kept a vigilant watch on their membership. Any action was impossible, even a word must be masked, but, to make up for this, great was the power of speech, not only of the printed but even more of the spoken word, less easily detected by the police.
Two batteries were quickly moved forward. Journalism became propaganda. At the head of it, in the full flush of his youthful powers, stood Belinsky. University chairs were transformed into pulpits, lectures into the preaching of humanisation; the personality of Granovsky, surrounded by young instructors, became more and more prominent.
Then suddenly another outburst of laughter. Strange laughter, frightening laughter, the laughter of hysteria, in which were mingled shame and pangs of conscience, and perhaps not the tears that follow laughter but the laughter that follows tears.
The absurd, monstrous, narrow world of Dead Souls could not endure it; it subsided and began to withdraw. And the preaching went on gathering strength . . . always the same preaching ; tears and laughter and books and speech and Hegel1 1 and history-all roused men to the consciousness of their condition, to a feeling of horror for serfdom and for their own lack of rights, 11 Hegel's dialectic is a fearful battering-ram in spite of its doublefacedness and its badge of Prussian Protestantism; it vaporised every-
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
642
everything pointed them on to science and culture, to the purging of thought from all the litter of tradition, to the liberty of conscience and reason.
This period saw the first dawn of Nihilism-that most perfect freedom from all ready-made conceptions, from all the inherited obstructions and barriers which hinder the Western European mind from going forward, with the cannon-ball of history chained to its legs.
The silent work of the 'forties was cut short all at once. A time even blacker and more oppressive than the beginning of Nicholas's reign followed upon the Revolution of February.
Belinsky died before the beginning of the persecution. Granovsky envied him and wanted to leave Russia.
A dark, seven-years-long night fell upon Russia, and in it that cast of thought, the manner of reflecting that was called Nihilism, took shape, developed and gained a firm hold on the Russian mind.
Nihilism (I repeat what I said lately in The Bell) is logic without structure, it is science without dogmas, it is the unconditional submission to experience and the resigned acceptance of all consequences, whatever they may be, if they follow from observation, or are required by reason. Nihilism does not transform something into nothing, but shows that a nothing which has been taken for a something is an optical illusion, and that every truth, however it contradicts our fantastic imaginings, is more wholesome than they are, and is in any case what we are in duty bound to accept.