Will it be an emperor who, renouncing the Petrine tradition, combines in himself Tsar and Stenka Razin? Will it be a new Pestel?13 Or another Yemelyan Pugachev, Cossack, Tsar and schismatic? Or will it be a prophet and a peasant, like Antony Bezdninsky?
It is hard to telclass="underline" these are des details, as the French say.
Whoever it may be, it is our task to go to meet him with bread and salt!
-from The Emperor Alexander I and V. N. Karazin ( 1 862) I I I
NEXT To THE coMMUNISM of the peasants nothing is more characteristic of Russia, nothing is such an earnest of her future, as her literary movement.
Between the peasantry and literature there looms the monster of official Russia, of 'Russia the lie,' or 'Russia the cholera,' as you call her. This Russia extends from the Emperor and passes from soldier to soldier, from petty clerk to petty clerk, down to the smallest assistant to a commissary of police in the remotest corner of the Empire. So it unfolds and so, at every step of the ladder, as in Dante's Malebolge, it gains a new power for evil, a new degree of corruption and tyranny. This living pyramid of crimes, abuses and extortions, of the batons of policemen, of heartless German administrators everlastingly famished, igno-exile in Siberia. It was the first important liberal-humanitarian protest in Russian history. (D.M.)
10 A social reformer encouraged by Alexander I when he was young and idealistic. "In my early youth I saw Karazin two or three times,"
Herzen writes. "I remember my father used to tell of his letter to Alexander I, of his close associa tion with the Tsar, and of his rapid fall."
( D.M.)
11 On Speransky, see p. 1 86, fn. 1 . ( D.M. ) 12 The small group of liberal army officers whose unsuccessful conspiracy to prevent Nicholas I from succeeding to the throne he punished by execution or banishment to Siberia. (D.M.) t 3 One of the five "Decembrists" executed oy Nicholas I in 1 826. (D.M. )
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rant judges everlastingly drunk and aristocrats eYerlastingly servile ; all this is soldered together by complicity, by the sharing of the plunder and gain, and supported at its base on six hundred thousand animated machines with bayonets. The peasant is never defiled by contact with this world of governing cynicism; he endures it-that is the only way in which he is an accessory.
The camp opposed to official Russia consists of a handful of men who are ready to face anything, who protest against it, fight it, expose and undermine it. From time to time these i solated champions are thrown into dungeons, tortured, relegated to Siberia, but their place does not long remain empty, for fresh combatants come forward; it is our tradition, the inheritance entailed upon us.
The terrible consequences of human speech in Russia necessarily give it added power. The voice of a free man is welcomed with sympathy and reverence, because with us to lift it up one absolutely must have something to say. One does not so lightly decide to publish one's thoughts when at the end of every page one sees looming a gendarme, a troika, a kibitka and, in prospect, Tobolsk or Irkutsk.
The Russian people do not read. You know, Monsieur,14 that it
\vas not the country-folk, either, who read the Voltaires and Diderots: it was the nobility and part of the Third Estate. In Russia the enlightened part of the Third Estate belongs to the nobility and gentry, which consists of all that has ceased to be the peasantry. There is even a proletariat of the nobility which partly merges into the peasantry, and another, an emancipated proletariat, mounts on high and is ennobled. This fluctuation, this continual exchange, stamps the Russian nobility with a character which you will not find in the privileged classes in the rest of Europe. In a word the whole history of Russia, since the time of Peter I, is only the history of the nobility and gentry and of the influence on them of European civilisation. I shall add here that the Russian nobility and gentry equal in numbers at least half the electorate of France established by the law of 3 1 st May, 1 850.
During the eighteenth century the nco-Russian literature contimwd to ela borate the rich, sonorous, magnificent language that we write to-day: a supple, powerful language capable of 14 Herzen characteristically wrote this major essay, The Russian People and Socialism, as a letter to the French historian J ules Michelet. (D.M.)
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expressing the most abstract ideas of German metaphysics and the light sparkling wit of French conversation. This literature, which flowered under the inspiration of the genius of Peter I, bore, it is true, the impress of the government-but in those days
'government' meant reform, almost revolution.
Till the moment of the great Revolution of 1 789 the Imperial throne complacently draped itself in the finest vestments of European civilisation and philosophy. Catherine II deserved to be shown cardboard villages and palaces of boards freshly distempered; no one knew better than she did the art of stageeffect.15 In the Hermitage there was continual talk about Voltaire, Montesquieu and Beccaria. You, Monsieur, know the medal's reverse.
Yet the triumphal concert of the Pindaric apologiae of the Court began to be disturbed by a strange, unexpected note. This was a sound vibrant with irony and sarcasm, with a strong tendency towards criticism and scepticism, and this sound, I say, was the only one susceptible of vitality, of external development.
The rest, the temporary and exotic, had necessarily to perish.
The true character of Russian thought, poetical or speculative, develops in its full force after the accession of Nicholas to the throne. Its distinguishing feature is a tragic emancipation of conscience, an implacable negation, a bitter irony, a painful selfanalysis. Sometimes this all breaks into insane laughter, but there is no gaiety in that laughter.
Cast into oppressive surroundings and endowed with great sagacity and a fatal logic, the Russian frees himself abruptly from the religion and morals of his fathers. The emancipated Russian is the most independent man in Europe. What could stop him? Respect for his past? . . . But what serves as a starting point of the modern history of Russia if not an absolute denial of nationalism and tradition?
Could it be that other 'past indefinite,' the Petersburg period perhaps? That tradition lays no obligation on us; on the contrary, that 'fifth act of the bloody drama staged in a brothel'1 5
sets us free, but it imposes on us no belief.
On the other hand, 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 doubts we accept, but your faith does not rouse us. For us I a Herzen refers to the "Potemkin Villages" her minister and lover.
Count Potemkin, rigged up to impress her with the prosperity of her subjects. This hoax, by now proverbial, nas kept the count's memory green-with an assist from Eisenstein's movie. (D.M.)
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you are too religious. We share your hatreds, but we do not understand your devotion to what your forefathers have bequeathed to you: we are too downtrodden, too wretched, to be satisfied with a half-freedom. You are restrained by scruples, and held back by reservations. VVe have neither reservations nor scruples; all �ve lack at the moment is strength . . . .