On the other hand the justification, the redemption of the flesh, rehabilitation de Ia chair!
Grand words, involving a whole world of new relations between human beings; a world of health, a world of spirit, a 8 This is the earliPst record of Russian history. It heg-ins with the Deluge and continues in leisurely fashion up to the year 1 1 1 0. Nestor, of whom nothing is really known, is assumed to have been a monk of the twelfth century. ( Tr.)
9 B. P. Enfantin ( 1 796-1 864), a French engineer, was one of the founders of Saint-Simonism. (Tr.)
IO The Saint-Simonists were tried in 1 832, under Article 291 of the Criminal Code, brought into effect in 1 8 1 1 , for an offence against public morals. Herzen is thinking- of the philistinism and hypocrisy of this bourgeois Criminal Code. and also of the Civil Code of 1 804, which was re-namPd in 1 807 the 'Code Napoleon_'
II Herzen's i rony. The period of the July (Orleans) Monarchy was marked hy the extreme moral dissolu teness of the governing finnncial aristocracy. Moreover the July authorities accused the Saint-Simonists, who WPre preaching- a 'new religion' and the equality of the sexes, of immorality and of advocating the 'community of women_'
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world of beauty, the world of natural morality, and therefore of moral purity. Many scoffed at the emancipated woman and at the recognition of the rights of the flesh, giving to those words a filthy and vulgar meaning; our monastically depraved imagination fears the flesh, fears woman. Sensible people grasped that the purifying baptism of the flesh is the death-knell of Christianity; the religion of life had come to replace the religion of death, the religion of beauty to replace the religion of flagellation and mortification by prayer and fasting. The crucified body had risen again in its turn and was no longer ashamed of itself; man attained a harmonious unity and divined that he was a whole being and not made up like a pendulum of two different metals restraining each other, that the enemy that had been welded to him had disappeared.
What courage was needed in France to proclaim in the hearing of all those words of deliverance from the spirituality which is so strong in the notions of the French and so completely absent from their conduct!
The old world, ridiculed by Voltaire, undermined by the Revolution, but strengthened, patched up and made secure by the petit bourgeois for their own personal convenience, had never experienced this before. It wanted to judge the apostates on the basis of its secret conspiracy of hypocrisy, but these young men unmasked it. They were accused of being backsliders from Christianity, and they pointed above their judge's head to the holy picture that had been veiled after the Revolution of 1830.
They were charged with justifying sensuality, and they asked their judge, was his life chaste?
The new world was pushing at the door, and our hearts and souls opened wide to meet it. Saint-Sirponism lay at the foundation of our convictions and remained so in its essentials unalterably.
Impressionable, genuinely youthful, we were easily caught up in its mighty current and passed early over that boundary at which whole crowds of people remain standing with their arms folded, go back or look to the side for a ford-to cross the ocean!
But not everyone ventured with us. Socialism and realism remain to this day the touchstones flung on the paths of revolution and science. Groups of swimmers, tossed up against these rocks by the current of events or by process of reasoning, immediately divide and make two everlasting parties which, in various disguises, cut across the whole of history, across all
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upheavals, across innumerable political parties and even circles of no more than a dozen youths. One stands for logic, the other for history; one for dialectics, the other for embryogeny. One i s more correct, the other more practical.
There can be no talk of choice; it is harder to bridle thought than any passion, it leads one on involunta rily; anyone who can check it by emotion, by a dream, by fear of consequences, will check it, but not all can. If thought gets the upper hand in any one. he does not inquire about its applicability, or whether it will make things easier or harder; he seeks the truth, and inexorably, impartially sets out his principles, as the Saint
Simonists did at om• time, as Proudhon does to this day.
Our circle drew in still closer. Even then, in 1 833, the Liberals looked at us a skance, as having strayed from the true path. Just before we went to prison Saint-Simonism set up a barrier between N. A. Polevoy and me. Polevoy was a man of an unusually ingenious and actin mind, which readily assimilated every kind of nutriment; he was born to be a journalist, a chronicler of successes, of discoveries, of political and learned controversies.
I made his acquaintance at the end of my time at the university-and was sometimes in his house and at his brother Ksenofont's. This was the time when his reputation was at its highest, the period just before the prohibition of the Telegraph.
This man who lived in the most recent discovery, in the question of the hour. in the latest novelty in theories and in events, and who changed like a chameleon, could not, for all the liveliness of his mind, understand Saint-Simonism. For us Saint
Simonism was a revelation, for him it was insanity, a vain Utopia, hindering social development. To all my rhetoric, my expositions and arguments, Polevoy was deaf; he lost his temper and grew splenetic. Opposition from a student was particularly annoying to him, for he greatly prized his influence on the young, and saw in this dispute that it was slipping away from him.
On one occasion, affronted by the absurdity of his objections, I observed that he was just as old-fashioned a Conservative as those against whom he had been fighting all his life. Polevoy was deeply offended by my \vords and, shaking his head, said to me:
'The time 'viii come wlwn you will be rewarded for a whole life-time of toil and effort by some young man's saying with a smile, "Be off, you are behind the times." '
I fel t sorry for him and ashamed of having hurt his feelings, but at the same time I felt that his sentence could be heard in
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his melancholy words. They were no longer those of a mighty champion, but of a superannuated gladiator who has served his time. I realised then that he would not advance, and would be incapable of standing still at the same point with a mind so active and on such unstable footing.
You know what happened to him afterwards: he set to work upon his Parasha, the Siberian.12
What luck a timely death is for a man \vho can neither leave the stage at the right moment nor move forward. I have thought that looking at Polevoy, looking at Pius IX, and at many others!
Appendix :
A. Polezlzct r
l/
et ,
To coMPLETE the gloomy record of that period, I ought to add a few details about A. Polezhayev.
As a student, Polezhayev was renowned for his excellent verses. Amongst other things he \\Tote a humorous parody of Onegin called Sashka in which, regardless of proprieties, he tilted at many things in a jesting tone, in very pleasant wrses.