Whether the name is appropriate or not does not matter. We are accustomed to it; it is accepted by friend and foe, it has become a police label, it has become a denunciation, an insult with some, a word of praise with others. Of course, if by Nihilism \Ye are to understand destructive creativeness, that is, the turning of facts and thoughts into nothing, into barren scepticism, into haughty folding of the arms, into the despair which leads to inaction. then true Nihilists are the last people to be included in the definition, and one of the greatest Nihilists will be Turgenev, who flung the first stone at them, and another will be perhaps his favourite philosopher, Schopenhauer. When Belinsky, after listening to one of his friends, who explained at length that the spirit attains self-consciousness in man, answered indignantly: 'So, I am not conscious for my O\Yn sake, but for the thing that Pxistcd and dissipa ted eYerything that was a check on reason.
Moreo,·er, this was the time of Feuerbach, der kritischen Kritik.
The Later Years
643
spirit's? . . . Why should I be its fool? I had better not think at all; what do I care for its consciousness? . . .' He was a Nihilist.
When Bakunin convicted the Berlin professors of being afraid of negation, and the Parisian revolutionaries of 1 848 of conservatism, he was a Nihilist in the fullest sense.
All these discriminations and jealous reservations lead as a rule to nothing but violent antagonism.
When the Petrashevsky group were sent to penal servitude for
'trying to overthrow all laws, human and divine, and to destroy the foundations of society,' in the words of their sentence, the terms of which were stolen from the inquisitorial notes of Liprandi, they were Nihilists.
Since then Nihilism has broadened out, has recognised itself more clearly, has to some extent become doctrinaire, has absorbed a great deal from science, and has produced leaders of enormous force and enormous talent. All that is beyond dispute.
But it has brought forth no new principles.
Or if it has, where are they? I await an answer to this question from you, or perhaps from someone else, and then I shall continue.
A Relevant Clzreston1atlt)�
jro111 tlze Later Years
(Selected by the Abridger)
ABRIDGER'S NOTE: Th� above, unlike the other chapter titles, is not Herzen's but mine. I've chosen the following excerpts from the heterogeneous fourth volume partly because I couldn't bear to omit them but lacked space for the long articles in which they occur, partly as specimens of Herzen's mature prose-his style became more flexibly varied in the last decade, sometimes more conversationally open and sometimes more rhetorically dense and allusive-but mostly because they struck me as relevant to some of our own problems today.
ON STYLE: Cf. I, as an epiphany of Herzen's feelings about his people-and their rulers; in II, the formal wit (in the eighteenth-century sense) of a parugraph like "The Peterhof fete is over, the Court masque in fancy dress is played out, the
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
644
lamps are smoking and going out, the fountains have almost run dry-let us go home"; the long footnote 3 on the same page, as an example of his use of historical anecdotes that are both entertaining and profound as metaphors. As for his colloquial style, easy and spontaneous but never trivial, cf. especially V and VI.
ON RELEVANCE: See II, on the difficulties of "raising up the people" from above, du haut en bas, with the best liberal (or radical) intentions. "So long as we take people for clay and ourselves as sculptors, we shall encounter nothing but stubborn resistance or offensively passive obedience. The pedagogic method of our civilising reformers is a bad one. It starts from the fundamental principle that we know everything and the people know nothing . . . . We cannot set them free that way."
III begins with reflections on the importance (and the alienation) of the intelligentsia in a backward country like Tsarist Russia (or Nixonian America) and ends with a long credo of Russian separatism that could be transposed into a black separatist credo in America today. Thus: "The past of you Western European peoples serves us as a lesson and nothing more; we do not regard ourselves as the executors of your historic testament .
. . . Your faith doesn't rouse us . . . . We do not respect what you respect . . . . All our memories are filled with bitterness and resentment. Civili::.ation and learning were held out to us at the end of a knout."
IV explores the problem of the avant-garde artist or intellectual in that massified petty-bourgeois culture that has spread like a fungus over Europe and America since the eighteenth century. He sees the necessity, and justification, for it socially:
'The crou·ds of holiday-makers in the Champs-Elpees or Kensington Gardens depress one with their vulgar faces, their dull expressions, but . . . what is important to them is that their fathers were not in a position to go holiday-making and they are: that their elders sometimes sat on the box of carriages while they drive about in cabs." But he also understands the cost: "The crowd is without ignorance and also without education . . . .
Those who arc in advance live in tiny cliques like secular monasteries."
The last pages of V, on "the monks of knowledge," remind me of our UN sentimentalists like Norman Cousins, our Afarxian bclia·crs. "Pcdantrr and scholasticism prevent men from grasping things u·ith simple, lively enthusiasm more than do superstition and ignorance."
Toward the end of VI there is a curious adumbration of Trotsky's "law of combined development": that new nations
The Later Years
645
don't necessarily have to go through all the evolutionary stages but may sometimes "combine" them-as he and Lenin (always a bold experimenter) did, unfortunately, when they flouted orthodox Marxist theory and aimed their October coup d'etat not at the next stage, bourgeois democracy, but at the one after, a oneparty "dictatorship of the Proletariat" which would immediately begin to "build socialism." It built something even worse than bourgeois democracy. But it's an interesting idea, and it's also interesting that Her::.en, long before Trotsky, was asking whether the Russian people needed to go through a bourgeois period after Tsarism. "Why should we put on a European blouse when we have our own shirt with the collar buttoning on one side?" That the "European blouse," cut on loose Menshevik, Social-Democratic lines, would have fitted the historical neck (and needs) of the Russian people in 1917 better than the Bolshevik straitjacket seems to me hardly worth arguing now, pace Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin-and Her::-en.
I
IN 1 789 the following incident took place. A young man1 of no importance, after supping \Vith his friends in Petersburg, drove to Moscow in a post-chaise. The first station he slept through. At the second, Sofia, he spent a long time trying to get horses, and consequently must have been so thoroughly woken up that when the three fresh horses set off with him, their bells ringing, instead of sleeping he listened to the driver's song in the fresh morning air. Strange though ts came into the head of the young man of no importance. Here are his words: