It simply and plainly comes to this, that the fish has become adapted to the conditions of aquatic life and does not a dvance beyond gills, while the duck does. But why the fish's breathing should blow away my view, I do not understand. It seems to me, on the contrary, to explain it. In the genus europaeum there are peoples that have grown old without fully developing a bourgeoisie ( the Celts, some parts of Spain, of Southern Italy and so on), while there are others whom the bourgeois system suits as water suits gills. So why should not there be a nation for whom the bourgeois system will be a transitory and unsatisfactory condition, like gills for a duck?
Why is it a wicked heresy, a defection from my own principles, and from the immutable laws of creation and the rules and doctrines, human and divine, that I do not regard the bourgeois system as the final form of Russian society, the organisation towards which Russia is striving and to attain which she will probably pass through a bourgeois period?
Possibly the European peoples will themselves pass to another order of life, and perhaps Russia will not develop at all; but just because this is possible, there are other possibilities too: the more so that in the order in which problems arise, in the accidents of time and place and development, in the conditions and habits of life and the permanent traits of character, there is a multitude of indications and directions.
The Rus�ian people, extended so widely between Europe and Asia, and standing to the general family of European peoples somev.,·hat in the rl'lationship of <1 cousin, has taken scarcely any part in the family chronicle of Western Europe. Having been combined late and with difficulty, it must either show a complete inc<�p<�city for progress, or must develop something of its own
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under the influence of the past and of borrowings, of its neighbours' examples and of its own angle of reflection.
Up till our day Russia has developed nothing of her own, but has preserved something; like a river, she has reflected things tmly but superficially. The Byzantine influence has perhaps been the deepest; the rest went according to Peter: beards were shaved, heads were cropped, the skirts of caftans were cut off, the people were silent and submissive, the minority changed their dress and went into the Service, and the State, after receiving- the general European outline, grew and grew . . · . . This .is the usual history of childhood. It is finished: that no one doubts, neither the Winter Palace nor Young Russia. It is time to stand on our own feet: why is it absolutely necessary to take to wooden legs because they are of foreign make? Why should we put on a European blouse when we have our own shirt with the collar buttoning on one side?
We a re vexed at the feebleness, at the narrow outlook of the government, which in its sterility tries to improve our life by putting on us the tricolour camisole de force cut on the Parisian pattern, instead of the yellow and black Zwangs;acke, in which we have been herded for a hundred and fifty years. But here we have not the government but the mandarins of literature, the senators of journalism, the university professors preaching to us that such is the immutable law of physiology, that we belong to the genus europaeum, and must therefore cut all the old capers to a new tune, that we must trip like sheep over the same rut, fall into the same gully, and afterwards settle down as an everlasting shopkeeper selling vegetables to other sheep. Away with their physiological law! And \vhy is it that Europe has been more fortunate? No one has made her play the part of Greece and Rome da capo.
There are in life and nature no monopolies, no measures for preventing and suppressing new biological species, nev11 historical destinies and political systems-they are only limited by practical possibility. The future is a variation improvised on a theme of the past. Not only do the phases of development and the forms of life vary but new nations are created, new nationalities whose destinies go different ways. Before our eyes, so to speak, a new breed has been formed, a variety European by free choice and elemental composition. The manners, morals and habits of the Americans have developed a peculiar character of their own; the Anglo-Saxon and the Celtic physical types have so changed beyond the Atlantic that you can nearly always tell an American. If a fresh soil is enough to malre an individual, character-
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istic nation out of old peoples, why should a nation that has developed in its own way under completely different conditions from those of the West European States, with different elements in its life, live through the European past, and that, too, when it knows perfectly well what that past leads to?
Yes, but what do those elements consist of?
I have said what they consist of many times, and not once have I heard a serious objection ; but every time I hear again the same objections, and not from foreigners only, but from Russians .
. . . There is no help for it; we must repeat our arguments again, too.
1 5th January, 1 863
-from Letter 8 of Ends and Beginnings: Letters to I. S. Turgenev
A P P E N D I X :
M A R X V . H E R Z E N
The lengthy note in the recent Soviet edition of Herzen (Volume XI, 1957, pp. 678-BO) on the hostility between Marx and Herzen was omitted by Mr. Higgens from his edition for scholarly reasons-little information, much ideologese-but I think it worth including, with cuts, in this more topically oriented version because of the later historical importance of Marx. Also because the Herzen-Marx antagonism had much deeper rootsin personal style as well as political ideas-than the Soviet scholars seem to realize. The stereotyped Marxistic formulae they use to obscure it merely reveal how unbridgeable is the chasm. I have felt it necessary, and pleasurable, to add some length)' glosses which may throw some light on the political psychology of Marx and his epigones. (D.M.)
For a correct understanding of Herzen's chapter on 'The German Emigrants'-in particular, of how he could arrive at such a gross distortion of the activity and role of Marx-one must consider the reasons for the estrangement, indeed, the hostility, which separated them.
The roots of Herzen's activity were in a social environment sharply different from the one in which Marx, the proletarian
[ sic] revolutionary, functioned. Herzen came from a backward country of serfdom in which capitalism was poorly developed and the revolutionary proletariat had not manifested itself at all.
The spiritual bankruptcy which followed the defeat of the 1 848
revolution ; the profound doubts whether, after the 'June Days,'
the European proletariat could recover new strength for the struggle ; and the 'halt' before historical materialism-all these likewise prevented Herzen's receiving any correct notion of the great revolutionary and scientific role of Marx and Engels.
There was no personal acquaintance between Herzen and the founder of scientific socialism. The persons Herzen met in the late 1840s had already become opponents ( Proudhon, Bakunin) of the founder of scientific socialism or were their ignorant pupils (Sazonov, Moses Hess ) . Information from such sources Herzen can have found only confusing.