There is something like that Cossack principle in organic development generally (which our doctrinaires are very fond of taking as an example ) . One side of an organism can under certain circumstances develop especially, and get the upper hand. always to the detriment of the rest.
In itself this organ may be well developed, but in the organism it constitutes a deformity, which one cannot get rid of in the organism by artificially developing the remaining parts to the point of grotesqueness.
• The Fourteenth was the iowest rank in the Table of Ranks. ( Tr.) I In Russia a 'hereditary nobleman' was not one who had inherited his rank but one whose heirs would inherit it. ( Tr.)
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general, every people has a strongly defined physiological character which even foreign conquests rarely alter. So long as we take the people for clay and ourselves for sculptors, and from our sublime height mould it into a statue a !'antique, in the French style, in the English manner, or on a German last, we shall encounter nothing in the people except stubborn indifference 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: as though we had taught the peasant his right to the land, his communal ownership, his system, the artel6 and the mir.7
It goes without saying that we can teach the people a great deal, but there is a great deal that ,..,.e have to learn from them and to study among them. We have theories, adopted by us and representing the worked-up discoveries of European culture. To determine which suits our national way of living, it is not enough to translate word for word; a lexicon is not enough. One must do with it in the first place what theoretical authorities are trying to do in the West with the way of living of the European peoples-introduce it into their consciousness.
The people cling obstinately to their way of living-for they believe in it; but we, too, cling obstinately to our theories and we believe in them and, what is more, we think that we know them, that the reality is so. Passing on after a fashion in conventional language what we have learnt out of books, we see with despair that the people do not understand us, and we complain of the stupidity of the people, just as a schoolboy blushes for his poor relations, because they do not know where to put 'i' and This reminds me of a remarkable case from the religio-surgical practice of Prince Hohenlohe, who was one of the last mortals endowed with miraculous powers. This was in that blessed epoch in our century when everything feudal and clerical was rising again with power and incense on the ruins of the French Revolution. The Prince was summoned to a patient, one of whose legs was too short ; his relations had not realised that properly speaking the other leg was too long. The miracle-working Prince betook himself to his prayers . . . the leg grew longer, but the Prince was not sufficiently careful and prayed very immoderately: the short leg got overgrown-vexatious. He began praying for the other and then that outgrew the former: back to the former . . . and it ended in the Prince's leaving his patient still with legs of unequal lengths and both of them as long as live stilts.
6 An association, for a longer or shorte1 time, of a group of men for communal work. (R.) 7 The village community in
ry times. (R.)
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where 'y,' but never considers why there should be two different letters for one sound.
Genuinely desirous of the good of the people, we seek remedies for their ailments in foreign pharmacopoeias; there the herbs are foreign, but it is easier to look for them in a book than in the fields. We easily and consistently become liberals, constitutionalists, democrats, Jacobins, but not members of the Russian people.
All these political nuances one can acquire from books: all this is understood, explained, written, printed, bound . . . . But here one must go wholly by oneself . . . . The life of Russia is l ike the forest in which Dante lost his way, and the wild beasts that are in it are even worse than the Florentine ones, but there is no Vergil to show the way; there were some Moscow Susanins,8 but even those led one to the cemetery shrine instead of to the peasants' cottage. . . .
'Without knowing the people we may oppress the people, we may enslave them, we may conquer them, but we cannot set them free.
Without the help of the people they will be liberated neither by the Tsar with his clerks, nor by the nobility with the Tsar nor by the nobility without the Tsar.
What is now happening in Russia ought to open the eyes of the blind. The people endured the frightful burden of serfdom without ever admitting the legality of it; seeing the force opposed to them they remained silent. But as soon as others wished to set them free in their O\vn way, they passed from murmuring, from passive resistance, almost to open revolt. And y et they are obviously better off now. What new signs do the reformers expect?
Only the man who, when summoned to action, understands the life of the people, \vhile not losing what science has given him; only the man who voices its aspirations, and founds on the realisation of them his participation in the common cause of the people of the soil, will be the bridegroom that is to come.
This lesson is repeated to us alike by the mournful figure of Alexander with his crown; by Radishche\·9 with his glass of R Ivan Susanin. a peasant .. saYed the elected Tsilr Mikhail Romanov from the Poles. who sought to assassinilte him. Susilnin undertook to lead them to the monastPry in which the Tsa r was conCPilled, but led them instead into the forPst, where they killed him but were themseh·es frozen to death. It is the subject of Glinka's opPra, A Lifl' for thl' Tsar. ( Tr.) H f.e., his Journl')' from St. Petasburg to !lfoscow, cited by Herzen above, which slipped pilst the cPnsors in 1 790 and so Pnrag!'d CathPrine the Great that she condemned him to death, later relenting to ten years'
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poison; by Karazin10 darting through the Winter Palace like a burning meteor; by Speransky11 who shone for years together with a glimmer like moonshine, with no warmth, no colour; and by our holy martyrs of the Fourteenth of December.12
Who will be the destined man?