Man taken separately does not exist. He is everywhere part of some living connection, or some social organization... Man extracted from the environment is a fiction or an abstraction. His moral and intellectual organization, or, more broadly, his ideas are only then operative in him when he has discovered them first as the organizational forces of the environment in which he happens to live and think.19 The radicals, too, stressed the collective nature of man; but to them, the collective was freely formed by individuals who had broken with that environment in which accident of birth had happened to cast them, whereas to the conservatives it had to be the actual historically formed environment and nothing else. Dostoevsky went so far as to draw a direct line connecting western education with the desire to kill. He called a harmless professor of medieval history and a prominent Westerner, T. Granovskii, and the critic Belinskii 'fathers' of Nechaev, the anarchist who had organized the assassination of an innocent student youth, the story of which provided him with the plot for The Possessed.20 In The Brothers Karamazov, the Western rationalist Ivan bears ultimate responsibility for parricide.
The immediate duty of the intelligentsia was to recover its lost roots. It must 'go to the people', not in the literal sense in which Bakunin and Lavrov advocated it, but in a spiritual one, urged by the Slavophiles. It must submerge itself in the nation and seek to dissolve in it. The intelligentsia was a poison in Russia's body for which 'folkdom' was the only efficacious antidote.
The political philosophy of the conservatives underwent considerable change as the warfare between the radicals and the authorities intensified. Basically, like the Slavophiles, the conservatives desired a government without parliamentary democracy or bureaucratic centralism; a government modelled on a mythical ancient Muscovite order. It was men, not institutions that mattered. The conservatives completely rejected the view of Bazarov, the archetypal 'nihilist' of Fathers and Sons, that 'in a well-constructed society it will be quite irrelevant whether man is stupid or wise, evil or good.' There could be no 'well-constructed society', unless the material was sound; and in any event, there were limits to the perfectibility of any society because man was inherently corrupt and evil. Dostoevsky, whose pessimism went further than that of most Russian conservatives, regarded humans as natural killers, whose instincts were restrained principally by fear of divine retribution after death. Should man lose belief in the immortality of his soul there would be nothing left to keep his murderous inclinations from asserting themselves. Hence, there was need for strong authority.
As the conflict between the left and the regime intensified, most of the conservatives unqualifiedly backed the regime, which in itself tended to exclude them from the ranks of the intelligentsia. They also grew steadily more xenophobic and anti-Semitic. In Pobedonostsev, the power behind the throne of Alexander in, conservatism found its Grand Inquisitor. 'If you please, the Venus of Milo is more indubitable than Russian law or the principles of 1789.'21 This phrase of Turgenev's may appear strange at first sight. But its meaning becomes quite clear when set in the context of a crucial controversy which developed in Russia between the radical intelligentsia on the one hand and writers and artists on the other.
276
Literature was the first human activity to break away from patrimonial subservience in Russia; and in time it was joined by other spiritual activities, the visual arts, scholarship, science. One may say that by the middle of the nineteenth century, 'culture' and the pursuit of material interest were the only two spheres which the regime allotted to its subjects reasonably free of interference; but since the pursuit of material interest, as pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, tended in Russia to go in hand with complete political subservience, culture alone provided a possible base of opposition. It was natural, therefore, that it should become progressively politicized. One can state categorically that not one great Russian writer, artist, scholar or scientist of the old regime placed his work in the service of politics; the few who did, were without exception untalented third-raters. There is a fundamental incompatibility between politics, which requires discipline, and creativity, which demands freedom, for the two to make at best uneasy allies and most often, to confront one another as deadly enemies. What did happen, however, was that creative persons in Russia found themselves under immense pressure from the intelligentsia left of centre to place themselves and their work at the disposal of society. Poets were under pressure to write novels, and novelists to write social exposes. Painters were asked to use their art to bring vividly to the attention of all, especially illiterates, the suffering of the masses. Scholars and scientists were urged to occupy themselves with problems of immediate social relevance. This utilitarian approach was not unknown in contemporary western Europe, but in Russia its exponents were much more strident because of culture's, and especially literature's, unique function. As the high priest of utilitarian aesthetics, Ghernyshevskii, put it:
In countries, where intellectual and social life has attained a high level of development there exists, if one may say so, a division of labour among the various branches of intellectual activity, of which we know only one - literature. For this reason, no matter how we rate our literature compared to foreign literatures, still in our intellectual movement it plays a much greater role than do French, German or English literatures in the intellectual movement of their countries, and there rests on it heavier responsibility than on any of the others. As things stand, [Russian] literature absorbs virtually the entire intellectual life of the people, and for that reason it bears the duty of occupying itself also with such interests which in other countries, so to say, have come under the special management of other kinds of intellectual activity... In Russia literature has retained a certain encyclopedic importance which has been already lost by the literatures of more enlightened peoples. That which Dickens says in England, is also said, apart from him and the other novelists, by philosophers, jurists, publicists, economists etc., etc. With us, apart from novelists, no one talks about subjects which comprise the subject of their stories. For that reason, even if Dickens need not feel it incum- bent upon him, as a novelist, to bear direct responsibility for serving as spokesman for the strivings of his age, in so far as these can find expression in fields other than belles lettres, in Russia the novelist cannot have recourse to such justification. And if notwithstanding this both Dickens and Thackeray do consider it the direct responsibility of belles lettres to touch on all questions which occupy society, then our novelists and poets ought to feel this responsibility a thousand times more strongly.28 The key word in this passage, repeated four times, is 'responsibility'. The utilitarian school of criticism, which enjoyed in Russia virtual monopoly from i860 to 1890, insisted that all writers, but those of Russia particularly, had a sacred duty to 'act as spokesmen for the strivings of their age', in other words, to put their pen at the disposal of the peoples' social and political aspirations. An extreme theory of utilitarian aesthetics was put forward by the young Dmitry Pisarev. Applying the principle of conservation of energy, he insisted that a backward society could not afford the luxury of a literature that did not serve the purposes of social betterment. Intelligence to him was a form of capital which had to be conserved. 'We are stupid because we are poor, and we are poor because we are stupid', he wrote in an essay called 'Realists', concluding that it was an unpardonable waste of national resources to write (and read) literature whose primary aim was to please.