[1]Voguié explains this title of "General" to be both in the civil and military order with the qualification of "Excellency." Without living in Russia one can hardly understand the prestige attached to this title, or the facilities it gives everywhere for everything. To attain this dignity is the supreme ambition of all the servants of the State. The common salutation by way of pleasantry among friends is this line from the comedy of Griboiëdof, which has become a proverb: "I wish you health and the tchin of a General."—TR.
[1]Voguié explains this title of "General" to be both in the civil and military order with the qualification of "Excellency." Without living in Russia one can hardly understand the prestige attached to this title, or the facilities it gives everywhere for everything. To attain this dignity is the supreme ambition of all the servants of the State. The common salutation by way of pleasantry among friends is this line from the comedy of Griboiëdof, which has become a proverb: "I wish you health and the tchin of a General."—TR.
Properly speaking, there are no social classes in Russia, a phenomenon which explains to some extent the political life and internal constitution; there is no co-ordinate proportion between the rural and the urban element, and at first sight one sees in this vast empire only the innumerable mass of peasants, just as on the map one sees only a wide and monotonous plain. Although it is true that a rural and commercial aristocracy did arise and flourish in old Moscow in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the era of invasions, yet the passions of the wars that followed gave it the death-blow. The middle classes in the rich and independent republics lost their wealth and influence, and the people, being unable of themselves to reorganize the State, sustained the princes, who soon became autocrats, ready at the first chance to subdue the nobles and unite the disintegrated and war-worn nation. With the sub-division into independent principalities and the institution of democratic municipalities the importance of the cities decreased, and the privileged classes were at an end. The middle class is the least important. In the same districts where formerly it was most powerful it has been dissolved by the continuous infusion of the peasant element, owing to the curious custom of emigration, which is spontaneous with this nomadic and colonizing people. Many farmers, although enrolled in the rural villages, spend a large part of the year in the city, filling some office, and forming a hybrid class between the rural and artisan classes, thus sterilizing the natural instincts of the laboring proletariat by the enervation of city life. The emperors were not blind to the disproportion between the civic and rural elements, and have endeavored to remedy it. The industrial and commercial population fled from the cities to escape the taxes; therefore they promulgated laws prohibiting emigration and the renunciation of civic rights, under severe penalties. Yet with all these the cities have taken but a second place in Russian history. Western annals are full of sieges, defences, and mutinies of cities; in Russia we hear only of the insurrection of wandering tribes or hordes of peasants. Russian cities exist and live only at the mandate or protection of the emperor. Every one knows what extraordinary means were taken by Peter the Great to build St. Petersburg upon the swamps along the Neva; in twenty-three years that remarkable woman called the Semiramis of the North founded no less than two hundred and sixteen cities, determined to create a mesocratic element, to the lack of which she attributed the ignorance and misery of her empire. Whenever we see any rapid advancement in Russia we may be sure it is the work of autocracy, a beneficence of despotism (that word so shocking to our ears). It was despotism which created the modern capital opposite the old Byzantine, legendary, retrogressive town,—the new so different from the old, so full of the revolutionary spirit, its streets undermined by conspirators, its pavements red with the blood of a murdered Czar. These cities, colleges, schools, universities, theatres, founded by imperial and autocratic hands, were the cradle of the political unrest that rebels against their power; were there no cities, there would be no revolutions in Russia. Although they do not harbor crowds of famishing authors like those of London and Paris, who lie in wait for the day of sack and ruin, yet they are full of a strange element composed of people of divers extraction and condition, and of small intellect, but who call themselves emphaticallythe intelligence of Russia.
I have felt compelled to render justice to the good will of the autocrats; and to be equally just I must say that whatever has advanced culture in Russia has proceeded from the nobility, and this without detriment to the fact that the larger energies lie with the masses of the people. The enlightenment and thirst for progress manifested by the nobility is everywhere apparent in Russian history. They are descended from the retinues of the early Muscovite Czars, to whom were given wealth and lands on condition of military service, and they are therefore in their origin unlike any other European nobility; they have known nothing of feudalism, nor the Germanic symbolism of blazons, arms, titles, and privileges, pride of race and notions of caste: these have had no influence over them. The Boyars, who are the remnants of the ancient territorial aristocracy, on losing their sovereign rights, rallied round the Czar in the quality of court councillors, and received gold and treasure in abundance, but never the social importance of the Spanish grandee or the French baron. Hence the Russian aristocracy was an instrument of power, but without class interests, replenished continually by the infusion of elements from other social classes, for no barrier prevented the peasant from becoming a merchant and the merchant from becoming a noble, if the fates were kind. There are legally two classes of aristocracy in Russia,—the transmissible, or hereditary, and the personal, which is not hereditary. If the latter surprise us for a moment, it soon strikes us with favor, since we all acknowledge to an occasional or frequent protest against the idea of hereditary nobility, as when we lament that men of glorious renown are represented by unworthy or insignificant descendants. In Russia, Krilof, the Æsop of Moscow, as he is called, put this protest into words in the fable of the peasant who was leading a flock of geese to the city to sell. The geese complained of the unkindness with which they were treated, adding that they were entitled to respect as being the descendants of the famous birds that saved the Capitol, and to whom Rome had dedicated a feast. "And what great thing haveyoudone?" asked the peasant. "We? Oh, nothing." "Then to the oven!" he replied.
The only title of purely national origin in Russia is that of prince;[1]all others are of recent importation from Europe; in the family of the prince, as in that of the humblestmujik, the sons are equals in rights and honors, and the fortune of the father, as well as his title, descends equally to all. Feudalism, the basis of nobility as a class, never existed in Russia: according to Sclavophiles, because Russia never suffered conquest in those ancient times; according to positivist historians, by reason of geographical structure which did not favor seignorial castles and bounded domains, or any other of those appurtenances of feudalism dear to romance and poetry, and really necessary to its existence,—the moated wall, the mole overhanging some rocky precipice washed by an angry torrent, and below at its foot, like a hen-roost beneath a vulture's nest, the clustered huts of the vassals. But we have seen that the Russian nobility acknowledges no law of superiority; like the people, they hold the idea of divisible and common property. Hence this aristocracy, less haughty than that of Europe, ruled by imperial power, subject until the time of Peter III. to insulting punishment by whip or rod, and which, at the caprice of the Czar, might at any time be degraded to the quality of buffoons for any neglect of a code of honor imposed by the traditions of their race,—never drew apart from the life of the nation, and, on the contrary, was always foremost in intellectual matters. Russian literature proves this, for it is the work of the Russian nobility mainly, and the ardent sympathy for the people displayed in it is another confirmation. Tolstoï, a noble, feels an irrepressible tenderness, a physical attraction toward the peasant; Turguenief, a noble and a rich man, in his early years consecrated himself by a sort of vow to the abolition of servitude.
The same lack of class prejudices has made the Russian nobility a quick soil for the repeated ingrafting of foreign culture according to the fancy of the emperors. Catherine II. found little difficulty in modelling her court after that of Versailles; but the same aristocracy that powdered and perfumed itself at her behest adopted more important reforms to a degree that caused Count Rostopchine to exclaim, "I can understand the French citizen's lending a hand in the revolution to acquire his rights, but I cannot understand the Russian's doing the same to lose his." They are so accustomed to holding the first place in intellectual matters, that no privilege seems comparable to that of standing in the vanguard of advanced thought. They had been urged to frequent the lyceums and debating societies, to take up serious studies and scientific education by the word of rulers who were enlightened, and friends to progress (as were many of them), when all at once sciences and studies, books and the press, began to be suspected, the censorship was established, and the conspiracy of December was the signal for the rupture between authority and the liberal thought of the country. But the nobles who had tasted of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil did not resign themselves easily to the limited horizon offered by the School of Pages or the antechamber of the palace; their hand was upon the helm, and rather than let it go they generously immolated their material interests and social importance. The aristocracy is everywhere else the support of the throne, but in Russia it is a destroying element; and while the people remains attached to the autocrat, the nobles learn in the very schools founded by the emperors to pass judgment upon the supreme authority and to criticise the sovereign. Nicholas I. did not fail to realize that these establishments of learning were focuses of revolutionary ardor, and he systematically reduced the number of students and put limits to scientific education.
It follows that the most reactionary class, or the most unstable class in Russia, the class painted in darkest colors by the novelists and used as a target for their shafts by the satirists, is not the noble but the bureaucratic, the office-holders, the members of thetchin(an institution Asiatic in form, comparable perhaps to a Chinese mandarinate). Peter the Great, in his zeal to set everything in order, drew up the famous categories wherein the Russian official microcosm is divided into a double series of fourteen grades each, from ecclesiastical dignitaries to the military. This Asiatic sort of machinery (though conceived by the great imitator of the West) became generally abhorred, and excited a national antipathy, less perhaps for its hollow formalism than on account of the proverbial immorality of the officers catalogued in it. Mercenariness, pride, routine, and indolence are the capital sins of the Russian office-holder, and the first has so strong a hold upon him that the people say, "To make yourself understood by him you must talk of rubles;" adding that in Russia everybody robs but Christ, who cannot because his hands are nailed down. Corruption is general; it mounts upward like a turbid wave from the humblest clerk to the archduke, generalissimo, or admiral. It is a tremendous ulcer, that can only be cured by a cautery of literary satire, the avenging muse of Gogol, and the dictatorial initiative of the Czars. In a country governed by parliamentary institutions it would be still more difficult to apply a remedy.
The contrast is notable between the odium inspired by the bureaucracy and the sympathy that greets the municipal institutions,—not only those of a patriarchal character such as themir, but those too of a more modern origin. Among the latter may be mentioned thezemstvo, or territorial assembly, analogous to our provincial deputations, but of more liberal stripe, and entirely decentralized. In this all classes are represented, and not, as in themir, the peasants merely. The form of this local parliament is extremely democratic; the cities, the peasants, and the property-holders elect separate representatives, and the assembly devotes itself to the consideration of plain but interesting practical questions of hygiene, salubrity, safety, and public instruction. This offers another opportunity to the nobility, for this body engages itself particularly with the well-being and progress of the poorer classes, in providing physicians for the villages in place of the ignorant herb-doctors, in having themujikstaught to read, and in guarding their poor wooden houses from fire.
While the Russian nobility has never slept, the Russian clergy, on the contrary, has been permanently wrapped in lethargy. The rôle accorded to the Greek Church is dull and depressing, a petrified image, fixed and archaic as theicons, or sacred pictures, which still copy the coloring and design of the Byzantine epoch. Ever since it was rent by schism from the parent trunk of Catholicism, life has died in its roots and the sap has frozen in its veins. Since Peter the Great abolished the Patriarchy, the ecclesiastical authority resides in a Synod composed of prelates elected by the government. According to the ecclesiastical statutes, the emperor is Head of the church, supreme spiritual chief; and though there has been promulgated no dogma of his infallibility, it amounts to the same in effect, for he may bind and loose at will. At the Czar's command the church anathematizes, as when for example to-day thepopesare ordered to preach against the growing desire for partition of land, against socialism, and against the political enemies of the government; the priest is given a model sermon after which he must pattern his own; and such is his humiliation that sometimes he is obliged by order of the Synod to send information, obtained through his office as confessor, to the police, thus revealing the secrets of confiding souls. What a loss of self-respect must follow such a proceeding! Is it a marvel that some independent schismatics calledraskolniks, revivalists and followers of ancient rites and truths, should thrive upon the decadence of the official clergy, who are subjected to such insulting servitude and must give to Cæsar what belongs to God?
In view of these facts it is in vain to boast of spiritual independence and say that the Greek church knows no head but Christ. The government makes use of the clergy as of one arm more, which, however, is now almost powerless through corruption. The Oriental church has no conception of the noble devotion which has honored Catholicism in the lives of Saint Thomas of Canterbury and Cardinal Cisneros.
The Russian clergy is divided intoblackandwhite, or regular and secular; the former, powerful and rich, rule in ecclesiastical administration; the latter vegetate in the small villages, ill paid and needy, using their wits to live at the expense of their parishioners, and to wheedle them out of a dozen eggs or a handful of meal. Is it strange that the parishioner respects them but little? Is it strange that thepopelives in gross pride or scandalous immorality, and that we read of his stealing money from under the pillow of a dying man, of one who baptized a dog, of another who was ducked in a frozen pond by hisbarino, or landlord, for the amusement of his guests? It is true that a few occasional facts prove nothing against a class, and that malice will produce from any source hurtful anecdotes and more or less profane details touching sacred things; but to my mind, that which tells most strongly against the Russian clergy is its inanity, its early intellectual death, which shut it out completely from scientific reflection, controversy, and apology, and therefore from all philosophy,—realms in which the Catholic clergy has excelled. Like a stripped and lifeless trunk the Oriental church produces no theologians, thinkers, orsavants. There are none to elaborate, define, and ramify her dogmas; the human mind in her sounds no depths of mystery. If there are no conflicts between religion and science in Russia, it is because the Muscovite church weighs not a shadow with the free-thinkers.
Certainly the adherents and members of the earlier church bear away the palm for culture and spiritual independence. At the close of the seventeenth century, after the struggles with Sweden and Poland, the schismatic church aroused the national conscience, and satisfied, to a certain extent, the moral needs of a race naturally religious by temperament It began to discuss liturgical minutiæ, and persecuted delinquents so fiercely that it infused all dissenters with a spirit of protest against an authority which was disposed to treat them like bandits or wild beasts. Such persecution demonstrates the fact that not only ecclesiastical but secular power is irritated by heterodoxy. In Russia, whose slumbering church is unmoved even by a thunder-bolt, an instinct of orderliness led the less devout of the emperors against the schismatics. To-day there are from twelve to fifteen millions of schismatics and sects; and many among them are given to the coarsest superstitions, practise obscene and cruel rites, worship the Devil, and mutilate themselves in their insane fervors. Probably Russia is the only country in the civilized world to-day where superstition, quietism, and mysticism, without law or limit, grow like poisonous trees; and in my work on Saint Francis of Assisi I have remarked how the communist heresies of the Middle Ages have survived there in the North. Some authors affirm that the clergy shut their eyes and open their hands to receive hush-money for their tolerance of heterodoxy. But let us not be too ready always to believe the worst. Only lately there fell into my hands an article written by that much respected author, Melchior de Voguié, who assures us that he has observed signs of regeneration in many Russian parishes.
From this review of social classes in Russia it may be deduced that the peasant masses are the repository of national energies, while the nobility has until now displayed the most apparent activity. The proof of this is to be found in the consideration of a memorable historical event,—the greatest perhaps that the present century has known,—the emancipation of the serfs.
[1]"The term translated 'prince' perhaps needs some explanation. A Russian prince may be a bootblack or a ferryman. The wordkniazdenotes a descendant of any of the hundreds of petty rulers, who before the time of the unification of Russia held the land. They all claim descent from the semi-mythical Rurik; and as every son of akniazbears the title, it may be easily imagined how numerous they are. The term 'prince,' therefore, is really a too high-sounding title to represent it."—Nathan Haskell Dole.
[1]"The term translated 'prince' perhaps needs some explanation. A Russian prince may be a bootblack or a ferryman. The wordkniazdenotes a descendant of any of the hundreds of petty rulers, who before the time of the unification of Russia held the land. They all claim descent from the semi-mythical Rurik; and as every son of akniazbears the title, it may be easily imagined how numerous they are. The term 'prince,' therefore, is really a too high-sounding title to represent it."—Nathan Haskell Dole.
Russia boasts of never having known that black stain upon ancient civilizations, slavery; but the pretension, notwithstanding many allegations thereto in her own chronicles, is refuted by Herodotus, who speaks of the inhuman treatment inflicted by the Scythians on their slaves, even putting out their eyes that they might better perform certain tasks; and the same historian refers to the treachery of the slaves to their masters in raping the women while they were at war with the Medes, and to the insurrection of these slaves which was put down by the Scythians by means of the whip alone,—the whip being in truth a characteristic weapon of a country accustomed to servitude. Herodotus does say in another place that "among the Scythians the king's servants are free youths well-born, for it is not the custom in Scythia to buy slaves;" from which it may be inferred that the slaves were prisoners of war. Howbeit, Russian authors insist that in their country serfs were never slaves, and serfdom was rather an abuse of the power of the nobility and the government than an historic natural result.
To my mind this is not so; and I must say that I think servitude had an actual beginning, and that there was a cause for it. The Muscovite empire was but sparsely populated, and the population was by temperament adventurous, nomadic, restless, and expansive. We have observed that the limitless plains of Russia offer no climatic antagonisms, for the reason that there are no climatic boundaries; but it was not merely the love of native province that was lacking in the Russian, but the attachment to the paternal roof and to the home village. It is said that the origin of this sentiment is embedded in rock; where dwellings are built of wood and burn every seven years on an average, there is no such thing as the paternal roof, there is no such thing as home. With his hatchet in his belt the Russian peasant will build another house wherever a new horizon allures him. But if the scanty rural population scatters itself over the steppes, it will be lost in it as the sand drinks in the rain, and the earth will remain unploughed and waste; there will be nothing to tax, and nobody to do military service. Therefore, about the end of the sixteenth century, when all the rest of Europe was beginning to feel the stirrings of political liberty and the breath of the Renaissance, the Regent, Boris Godonof, riveted the chains of slavery upon the wrists of many millions of human beings in Russia. It is very true that Russian servitude does not mean the subjection of man to man, but to the soil; for the decree of Godonof converted the peasant into a slave merely by abrogating the traditional right of the "black man" to change his living-place on Saint George's day. The peasant perceived no other change in his condition than that of finding himself fastened, chained, bound to the soil. The Russian word which we translate "serf" means "consolidated," "adherent."
It is easy to see the historical transition from the free state to that of servitude. The military and political organization of the Russian State in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries hedged in the peasant's liberty of action, and his situation began to resemble that of the Romancolonus, or husbandman, who was neither "bond nor free." When the nation was constituted upon firmer bases, it seemed indispensable to fix every man's limitation, to range the population in classes, and to lay upon them obligations consistent with the needs of the empire. These bonds were imposed just as the other peoples of Europe were breaking away from theirs.
Servitude, or serfdom, did not succeed throughout the empire, however. Siberia and the independent Cossacks of the South rejected it; only passive consent could sanction a condition that was not the fruit of conquest nor had as an excuse the right of the strongest. Even in the rest of Russia the peasant never was entirely submissive, never willingly bent his neck to the yoke, and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed bitter and sanguinary uprisings of the serfs, who were prompt to follow the first impostor who pronounced words of promise; and, strange to say, what was most galling was his entail upon the land rather than the deprivation of his own liberty. He imagined that the lord of the whole earth was the Czar, that by his favor it was temporarily in possession of the nobles, but that in truth and justice it belonged to him who tilled it. Pugatchef, the pretender to the title of Peter III., in order to rally to his standard an innumerable host of peasants, called himself the rural emperor, and declared that no sooner should he gain the throne of his ancestors than he would shower treasure upon the nobles and restore the land to the tillers of it.
Those who forged the fetters of serfdom had little faith in the stability of it, however. And although the abuses arising out of it were screened and tacitly consented to,—and never more so than during the reign of the humane philosopher, friend, and correspondent of Voltaire, the Empress Catherine II.,—yet law and custom forever refused to sanction them. Russian serfdom assumed rather a patriarchal character, and this softened its harshness. It was considered iniquitous to alienate the serfs, and it was only lawful in case of parting with the land whereon those serfs labored; in this way was preserved the thin line of demarcation between agrarian servitude and slavery.
There were, however, serfs in worse condition, true helots, namely, the domestic servants, who were at the mercy of the master's caprice, like the fowls in his poultry-yard. Each proprietor maintained a numerous household below stairs, useless and idle as a rule, whose children he brought up and had instructed in certain ways in order to hire them out or sell them by and by. The players in the theatres were generally recruited from this class, and until Alexander I. prohibited such shameless traffic, it was not uncommon to see announced in the papers the sale of a coachman beside that of a Holstein cow. But like every other institution which violates and offends human conscience, Russian serfdom could not exist forever, in spite of some political and social advantages to the empire.
Certain Russian writers affirm that the assassination of masters and proprietors was of frequent occurrence in the days of serfdom, and that even now the peasant is disposed to quarrels and acts of violence against the nobles. Yet, on the whole, I gather from my reading on the subject that the relations in general between the serf and the master were, on the one side, humble, reverent, and filial; on the other, kind, gentle, and protecting. The important question for the peasant is that of the practical ownership of the land. It is not his freedom but his agrarian rights that have been restored to him; and this must be borne in mind in order to understand why the recent emancipation has not succeeded in pacifying the public mind and bringing about a new and happy Russia.
Given the same problem to the peasant and the man of mind, it will be safe to say that they will solve it in very different ways, if not in ways diametrically opposed. The peasant will be guided by the positive and concrete aspect of the matter; the man of mind by the speculative and ideal. The peasant calculates the influence of atmospheric phenomena upon his crops, while the other observes the beauty of the sunset or the tranquillity of the night. In social questions the peasant demands immediate utility, no matter how small it may be, while the other demands the application of principles and the triumph of ideas. Under the care of a master the Russian serf enjoyed a certain material welfare, and if he fell to the lot of a good master—and Russian masters have the reputation of being in general excellent—his situation was not only tolerable but advantageous. On the other hand, the intelligent could not put up with the monstrous and iniquitous fact of human liberty being submitted to the arbitrary rule of a master who could apply the lash at will, sell men like cattle, and dispose as he would of bodies and souls. Where this exists, since Christ came into the world, either there is no knowledge, or the ignominy must be stamped out.
We all know that celebrated story of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," the famous Abolitionist novel by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. There were also novelists in Russia who set themselves to plead for the emancipation of the serfs. But there is a difference between them and the North American authoress, in that the Russians, in order to achieve their object, had no need to exaggerate the reality, to paint sensitive slaves and children that die of pity, but, with an artistic instinct, they appealed to æsthetic truth to obtain human justice. "Dead Souls," by Gogol, or one of the poetical and earnestbrochuresof Turguenief, awakens a more stirring and permanent indignation than the sentimental allegory of Mrs. Stowe; and neither Gogol nor Turguenief misrepresented the serf or defamed the master, but rather they present to us both as they were in life, scorning recourse to bad taste for the sake of capturing tender hearts. The noblest sentiments of the soul, divine compassion, equity, righteous vengeance, the generous pity that moves to sacrifice, rise to the inspired voice of great writers; we see the abuse, we feel it, it hurts us, it oppresses us, and by a spontaneous impulse we desire the good and abhor the evil. This enviable privilege has been granted to the Russian novelists; had they no greater glory, this would suffice to save them from oblivion.
The Abolitionist propaganda subtly and surely spread through the intelligent classes, created an opinion, communicated itself naturally to the press in as far as the censor permitted, and little by little the murmur grew in volume, like that raised against the administrative corruption after the Crimean War. And it is but just to add that the Czars were never behind in this national movement. Had it not been for their omnipotent initiative, who knows if even now slavery would not stain the face of Europe? There is reason to believe it when one sees the obstacles that hinder other reforms in Russia in which the autocrat takes no part. Doubtless the mind of the emperor was influenced by the words of Alexander II., in 1856, to the Muscovite nobles: "It is better to abolish serfdom by decrees from above than to wait for it to be destroyed by an impulse from below." A purely human motive; yet in every generous act there may be a little egotistical leaven. Let us not judge the unfortunate Emancipator too severely.
The Crimean War and its grave internal consequences aided to undermine the infamous institution of serfdom, at the same time that it disclosed the hidden cancer of the administration, the misgovernment and ruin of the nation. With the ill success of the campaign, Russia clearly saw the need for self-examination and reorganization. Among the many and pressing questions presented to her, the most urgent was that of the serfs, and the impossibility of re-forming a prosperous State, modern and healthy, while this taint existed within her. Alexander II., whose variability and weakness are no bar to his claim of the honored title of the Liberator, exhorted the aristocracy to consummate this great work, and (a self-abnegation worthy of all praise, and which only a blind political passion can deny them) the nobles coincided and co-operated with him with perfect good faith, and even with the electrical enthusiasm characteristic of the Sclavic race. One cannot cease to extol this noble act, which, taken as a whole, is sublime, although, being the work of large numbers, it may be overloaded with details and incidents in which the interest flags. It may be easy to preach a reform whose aims do not hurt our pride, shatter our fortunes, alter our way of living, or conflict with the ideas inculcated upon us in childhood by our parents; but to do this to one's own detriment deserves especial recognition. The nobility on this occasion only put into practice certain theories which had stirred in their hearts of old. The first great Russian poet, Prince Kantemire, wrote in 1738, in his satires, that Adam did not beget nobles, nor did Noah save in the ark any but his equals,—humble husbandmen, famous only for their virtues. To my mind the best praise to the Russian nobility is for having offered less hindrance to the emancipation of the serfs than the North American democracy to the liberation of the slaves; and I solicit especial applause for this self-sacrificing, redeeming aristocracy.
The fruits of the emancipation were not what desire promised. The peasants, from their positivist point of view, set little value on liberty itself, and scarcely understood it. "We are yours," they were accustomed to say to their masters; "but the soil is ours." When it became known that they must go on paying even for the goods of the community, they rebelled; they declared that emancipation was a farce, a lie, and that true emancipation ought to abolish rent and distribute the land in equal parts. Did not the proclamation of the Czar read that they were free? Well, freedom, in their language, meant emancipation from labor, and the possession of the land. Onemireven sent a deputation to the governor, announcing that as he had been a good master he would still be allowed the use and profit of his house and farm. The peasant believed himself free from all obligation, and even refused to work until the government forced him to do so; and the result was that the lash and the rod were never so frequently laid across Russian shoulders as in the first three years of emancipation and liberty.
What cared they—"the little black men"—for the dignity of the freeman or the rights of citizenship? That which laid strongest hold of their primitive imagination was the desire to possess the whole land,—the old dream of what they called theblack partition, the national Utopia. One Russian revolutionary journal adopted the name of "Land and Liberty," a magic motto to a peasant country, giving the former the first place, or at least making the two synonymous. The Russian people ask no political rights, but rather the land which is watered by the sweat of their brow; and if some day the anarchists—the agitators who go from village to village propagating their sanguinary doctrines—succeed in awakening and stirring this Colossus to action, it will be by touching this tender spot and alluring by the promise of this traditional dream. The old serf lives in hopes of a Messiah, be he emperor or conspirator, who shall deliver the earth into his hands; and at times the vehemence of this insatiable desire brings forth popular prophets, who announce that the millennium is at hand, and that by the will of Heaven the land is to be divided among the cultivators thereof. From his great love to the autocrat the peasant believes thathealso desires this distribution, but being hampered by his counsellors and menaced by his courtiers, he cannot authorize it yet. "For," says the peasant, "the land never belonged to the lords, but first to the sovereign and then to themir." The idea of individual proprietorship is so repugnant to this people that they say that even death is beautiful shared in common.
All the schismatic sects in Russia preach community of possessions. Some among them live better than the orthodox Greeks; some are voluntarily consecrated to absolute poverty, such as characterized the early orders of mendicants, and literally give their cloak to him who asks; but both the more temperate and the fanatics agree in the faith of the general and indisputable right of man to possess the land he cultivates.
With society as with the individual, after great effort comes prostration, after a sudden change, inevitable uneasiness. So with Russian emancipation. Although in some localities the condition of the peasants was ameliorated, in others their misery and retrogression seemed only to increase, and led them to pine for the old bonds. The abuse, arbitrariness, and cruelty which are cited, and which shock the nerves of Westerners, caused no alarm to the Russian peasant, who was well used to baring his back in payment for any delinquency. The worst extent to which the master allowed his anger to spend itself was an unlimited number of stripes; and this very punishment, which to-day no master would inflict, and which the law expressly forbids, is still frequently imposed by the peasant tribunals of thevolostorcanton; their confidence in its efficacy is well grounded, and it is well authorized by custom and experience. What the peasant fears and hates most is not the rod or the whip, but the rent-collector, the tax-gatherer, the burden of the taxes themselves, and hunger.
What must be the æsthetic and political determination of this race, which prefers the possession of the soil to the liberty of the individual? In literature, toward a plain and candid realism; in form of government, a communist absolutism. The abstract constitutional idea, which, in spite of its Anglo-Saxon origin, meets perfectly the ideal entertained by Latin minds, has no charm for the Sclav. Yet at the same time the Russian combines, with his practical and concrete notions of life and his preponderating sense of realism, a dreamy and childlike imagination, which acts upon him like a dangerous dose of opium.
In the next essay I propose to show how there has grown up within this patient and submissive rural people, and has finally burst forth, that most terrible of revolutionary volcanoes, nihilism.
I have scarcely realized until now the difficulties in the way of the subject I am treating. To talk of nihilism is an audacious undertaking, and in spite of all my endeavors to hold the balance true, and to consider calmly the social phenomena and the literature into which it has infiltrated, I shall perhaps not be able to avoid a note of partiality or emotion. To some I shall seem too indulgent with the Russian revolutionaries, and they may say of me, as of M. Leroy-Beaulieu, that my opinions are imbibed from official sources and my words taken from the mouth of reactionaries.
The first stumbling-block is the word "nihilism." In Tikomirov's work on Russia seven or eight pages are devoted to the severe condemnation of the use of the expressions "nihilism" and "nihilist," Nevertheless, at the risk of offending my friend the author, I must make use of them, since, as he himself allows, they are employed universally, and all the world understands what is meant by them in an approximate and relative way. I do not reject the term proposed by Tikomirov, who would call nihilism "the militant intelligence;" but this is much too long and obscure, and before accepting it, it behooves one to understand what is meant byRussian intelligence. The nihilists call themselves by a variety of names,—democrats, socialists, propagandists,new men, or sometimes by the title of some organ of their clandestine press. This war of names seems puerile, and I prefer to face the fury of Tikomirov against those who not only use the objectionable term but dedicate a chapter to what it represents, and study nihilism as a doctrine or tendency distinct among all that have arisen until now. I cannot agree to the idea that nihilism is merely a Russian intellectual movement, nor do I think that all Europe is mistaken in judging that the nihilist explosions are characteristic of the great Sclav empire. On the contrary, I believe that if Russia were to-morrow blotted from the map, and her history and every trace of her national individuality obliterated, only a few pages of her romances and a few fragments of her revolutionary literature being left to us, a philosopher or a critic could reconstruct, without other data, the spirit of the race in all its integrity and completeness.
Now, to begin, how did this much-discussed word originate? It was a novelist who first baptized the party who called themselves at that timenew men. It was Ivan Turguenief, who by the mouth of one of the characters in his celebrated novel, "Fathers and Sons," gave the young generation the name of nihilists. But it was not of his coinage; Royer-Collard first stamped it; Victor Hugo had already said that the negation of the infinite led directly to nihilism, and Joseph Lemaistre had spoken of the nihilism, more or less sincere, of the contemporary generations; but it was reserved for the author of "Virgin Soil" to bring to light and make famous this word, which after making a great stir in his own country attracted the attention of the whole world.
The reign of Nicholas I. was an epoch of hard oppression. When he ascended the throne, the conspiracy of the Decembrists broke out, and this sudden revelation of the revolutionary spirit steeled the already inflexible soul of the Czar. Nicholas, although fond of letters and an assiduous reader of Homer, was disposed to throttle his enemies, and would not have hesitated to pluck out the brains of Russia; he was very near suppressing all the universities and schools, and inaugurating a voluntary retrocession to Asiatic barbarism. He did mutilate and reduce the instruction, he suppressed the chair of European political laws, and after the events of 1848 in France he seriously considered the idea of closing his frontiers with a cordon of troops to beat back foreign liberalism like the cholera or the plague. Those who have had a near view of this Iron Czar have described him to me as tall, straight, stiff, always in uniform, a slave to his duties as sovereign, the living personification of the autocrat, and called, not without reason, the Quixote of absolutism. At the close of a life devoted to the fanatical inculcation of his convictions, this inflexible emperor, who believed himself to be guided by the Divine hand, saw only the dilapidation and ruin of his country, which then started up dismayed and raised a cry of reprobation, a chorus of malediction against the emperor and the order of things established by him. Satire cried out in strident and indignant tones, and spit in the face of the Czar with terrible anathemas. "Oh, Emperor," it said to him, "Russia confided the supreme power to you; you were as a god upon the earth. What have you done? Blinded by ignorance and selfishness, you longed for power and forgot Russia; you spent your life in reviewing troops, in changing uniforms, in signing decrees. You created the vile race of press-censors, so that you might sleep in peace, that you might ignore the needs of the people, and turn a deaf ear to their cries; and the truth you buried deep, and rolled a great stone over the door of the sepulchre, and put a guard over it, so that you might think in your proud heart that it would never rise again. But the light of the third day is breaking, and truth will come forth from among the dead." And so the great autocrat heard the crash of the walls that he had built with callous hands and cemented with the blood and tears of two millions of human beings whom he had exiled to Siberia. Perhaps the inflexible principles, the mainspring of his hard soul, gave way then; but it was indeed too late to give the lie to his whole life, and according to well-authenticated reports he sought a sure and speedy death by wilful exposure to the rigors of the terrible climate. "I cannot go back," were the dying words of this upright and consistent man, who, notwithstanding his hardness, was yet not a tyrant.
However, it was under his sceptre, under his systematic suppression, that, by confession of the great revolutionary statesman Herzen, Russian thought developed as never before; that the emancipation of the intelligence, which this very statesman calls a tragic event, was accomplished, and a national literature was brought to light and began to flourish. When Alexander II. succeeded to the throne, when the bonds of despotism were loosened and the blockade with which Nicholas vainly tried to isolate his empire was raised, the field was ready for the intellectual and political strife.
Russia is prone to violent extremes in everything. No social changes are brought about in her with the slow gradations which make transitions easy and avoid shocks and collisions. In the rest of Europe modern scientific progress was due to numerous coincident causes, such as the Renaissance, the art of printing, the discovery of America; but in Russia the will of the autocrat was the motor, and the country was forced and surprised into it. And when this drowsy land one day shakes off its lethargy and takes note of the latent political effervescence within itself, it will be with the same fiery earnestness, the same exaggeration, the same logical directness, straight to the end, even though that end culminate in absurdity.
Before explaining how nihilism is the outcome of intelligence, we must understand what is meant by intelligence in Russia. It means a class composed of all those, of whatever profession or estate, who have at heart the advancement of intellectual life, and contribute in every way toward it. It may be said, indeed, that such a class is to be found in every country; but there is this difference,—in other countries the class is not a unit; there are factions, or a large number of its members shun political and social discussion in order to enjoy the serene atmosphere of the world of art, while in Russiathe intelligencemeans a common cause, a homogeneous spirit, subversive and revolutionary withal. To write a history of modern literature, particularly of the novel, in Russia, is equivalent to writing the history of the revolution.
The subversive, dissolvent character of this intelligence—working now tacitly, now openly, and with a candor surprising in a country subjected to such suspicious censorship—explains why the czars, once the protectors of the arts, have become since the middle of this century so out of humor with authors, books, and the press. We have heard of one emperor—the cleverest of them all—who in the interest of his reforms had his own son whipped to death. Russian art, also son of the czars, figuratively speaking, received scarcely better treatment when it signified a desire to stand on its own feet.
Long and painful is the list of persecutions directed against the growth of Thought, in prose and verse, and above all against illustrious men. But we must make a distinction, so as not to be unjust. Herzen, exiled and deprived of all his possessions, and the famous martyr Tchernichewsky, confined twenty and odd years in a Siberian prison or fortress, do not arouse our astonishment, for they suffered the common fate of the political agitator; but it seems a pity that such artists as Dostoiëwsky and Turguenief should suffer any such infliction at all. All Russian literature is charged with a revolutionary spirit; but there is the same difference between those authors whose aim is political and those who merely speak of Russia's wounds when occasion offers, that there is between those who are licentious and those who are simply open and candid. And by this I do not mean to compare the nihilist writers with licentious ones, nor to convey any stigma by my words. I merely say that when literature deliberately attacks established society, the instinct of self-preservation obliges the latter to defend itself even to persecuting its adversary.
Whence came the revolutionary element in Russia? From the Occident, from France, from the negative, materialist, sensualist philosophy of the Encyclopædia imported into Russia by Catherine II. and later from Germany, from Kantism and Hegelianism, imbibed by Russian youth at the German universities, and which they diffused throughout their own country with characteristic Sclav impetuosity. By "Pure Reason" and transcendental idealism, Herzen and Bakunine, the first apostles of nihilism, were inspired. But the ideas brought from Europe to Russia soon allied themselves with an indigenous or possibly an Oriental element; namely, a sort of quietist fatalism, which leads to the darkest and most despairing pessimism. On the whole, nihilism is rather a philosophical conception of the sum of life than a purely democratic and revolutionary movement. Since the beginning of this century Europe has seen mobs and revolutions, dynasties wrecked and governments overturned; but these were political disturbances, and not the result of mind diseased or anguish of soul.
Nihilism had no political color about it at the beginning. During the decade between 1860 and 1870 the youth of Russia was seized with a sort of fever for negation, a fierce antipathy toward everything that was,—authorities, institutions, customary ideas, and old-fashioned dogmas. In Turguenief's novel, "Fathers and Sons," we meet with Bazarof, a froward, ill-mannered, intolerable fellow, who represents this type. After 1871 the echo of the Paris Commune and emissaries of the Internationals crossed the frontier, and the nihilists began to bestir themselves, to meet together clandestinely, and to send out propaganda. Seven years later they organized an era of terror, assassination, and explosions. Thus three phases have followed upon one another,—thought, word, and deed,—along that road which is never so long as it looks, the road that leads from the word to the act, from Utopia to crime.
And yet nihilism never became a political party as we understand the term. It has no defined creed or official programme. The fulness of its despair embraces all negatives and all acute revolutionary forms. Anarchists, federalists, cantonalists, covenanters, terrorists, all who are unanimous in a desire to sweep away the present order, are grouped under the ensign ofnihil.
The frenzy which thus moves a whole people to tear their hair and rend their garments has at bottom an element of passionate melancholy born of just and noble aspirations crushed by fatal circumstances. We have seen what Nature and history have made of Russia,—a nation civilized by violence, whose natural and harmonious development was checked, and which was isolated from Europe as soon as the ruling powers perceived the dangers likely to ensue from communication therewith. The impulse of youth toward the unknown and the new, toward vague dreams and abstractions, was thus exasperated; and from out the seminaries, universities, and schools, from the ranks of the nobility and from the bosom of the literature, there arose a host composed of women hungering for the ideal, and young students, poor in pocket and position, who gave themselves up to a Bohemian sort of life well calculated to set at nought society and the world in general. A Russian friend once told me that seeing amujiklooking very dejected and melancholy he asked what was the matter, and received answer, "Sir, we are a sick people." His reply defines the whole race; and of all the explanations of nihilism, that which describes it as a pathological condition of the nation is perhaps the most accurate.
One must be prudent, however, in calling an intellectual phenomenon based upon historical reasons a sickness or dementia; and above all one must not confound the mental exaltation of the enthusiast with the vagaries of the unsound mind. We do not allow ourselves to call him a fool who does not think as we do, nor even him who leaves the beaten common track for dizzy heights above our ken. No reformer or other great man, however, has escaped the insinuation of foolishness, not even Saint Francis of Assisi, who openly professed idiocy. But we have a kind of sympathy for madness of a speculative character,—the sort of lunacy which makes mankind dream sometimes that material good does not entirely satisfy, that makes it yearn anxiously for something that it may never obtain on this earth.
To begin with, is nihilism pure negation? No. Pure negation conceives nothing further, and whatever it denies it affirms at the same time. Nihilism, or to use their own term, Russianintelligence, contains the germs of social renovation; and before referring to its political history I will explain some of its strange and curious doctrines.
Among the most important of the nihilist doctrines is that which refers to the condition of woman and the constitution of the family; and the attempt radically to modify things so guarded and so sacred presupposes an extraordinary power in the moving principle. The state of woman in Russia has been far more bitter and humiliating than in the rest of Europe; she wore her face covered with the Oriental veil until an empress dared to cast it aside,—to the great horror of the court; among the peasants she was a beast of burden; among the nobles an odalisque; in the most enlightened classes of society the whip hung at the head of the bed as a symbol of the husband's authority. The law did not keep her perpetually a minor, as with us, but allowed her to administer her property freely; yet the invisible and unwritten bonds of custom made this freedom illusory. The new ideas have changed all this, however, and to-day the Russian woman is more nearly equal to the man in condition, more free, intelligent, and respected than elsewhere in Europe. Even the peasants, accustomed to bestow a daily allowance of the lash upon their women, are beginning to treat them with more gentleness and regard, for they realize, tardily though certainly, the worth of the ideas of justice deduced from the Gospels, which once planted can never be rooted out. Their conquests are final. A few years hence the conjugal relation in Russia will be based on ideas of equality, fraternity, and mutual respect. I have never gone about preaching emancipation or demanding rights, but I am nevertheless quite capable of appreciating everything that savors of equity.
The great Russian romantic poet, Lermontof, lamented the moral inferiority of the women of his country. "Man," said this Russian Byron, "should not be satisfied with the submission of his slave or the devotion of his dog; he needs the love of a human being who will repay insight for insight, soul for soul." This noble aspiration, derived from the profound Platonic allegory of the two soul-halves that seek each other and thereby find completion, the Russian intelligence desired to realize, and as a step toward it procured participation for woman in intellectual and political life; she, on her part, proved her worth by bringing to nihilism a passionate devotion, absolute faith, and initiative energy. When the early Christians rehabilitated the pagan woman, somewhat the same thing happened, and a tender gratitude toward the gentle Nazarene led virgins and matrons to vie with strong men in the heroism displayed in the amphitheatre.
But in our times the systematic efforts toward female emancipation have a tendency to stumble into absurdities. To show to what an extent conjugal equality has been carried in certain Russian families of humble position, I was told that the wife cooks one day and the husband the next! At the beginning of the reign of Alexander II. the longing for feminine independence was expressed in the wearing of short hair, blue spectacles, and extraordinary dress; in smoking, in scorn of neatness, and the assumption of viragoish and disgusting manners. The serious side of the movement led them on the other hand to study, to throw themselves into every career open to them, to show a brave front in the hospitals of typhus and the plague, to win honors in the clinics, and to practise medicine in the small villages with noble self-abnegation, seriousness, and sagacity.
It is worthy of note, in examining Russian revolutionary tendencies, that political rights are a secondary consideration, and that they go down to the root of the matter, and seek first to reclaim natural rights. In countries that are under parliamentary regimen, half of the human race is judicially and civilly the servant of the other half; while in the classic land of absolutism all parts are equal before the law, especially among the reformatory class, the nobility.
There is one fact in this connection which, though rather dubious on the face of it, is yet so original and typical that it ought not to be omitted. Owing to these modifications in the social condition of women, and also to political circumstances, we are told that one frequently hears in Russia—among theintelligentclass particularly—of a sort of free unions, having no other bond than the mutual willingness of the contracting parties, and marked by singular characteristics. Some of these unions may be compared to the espousals of Saint Cecilia and her husband, Saint Valerian, or to the nuptials of the legendary hero separated by a naked sword from the bride. The Russians call this a fictitious marriage. It sometimes happens that a young girl, bold, determined, and full of a longing for life,—in the social sense of the word,—leaves the paternal roof and takes up her abode under that of another man. Having obtained the liberty and individuality enjoyed by the married woman, the protector and theprotégéemaintain a fraternal friendship mutually and willingly agreed to. In Turguenief's novel, "Virgin Soil," a young lady runs away from her uncle's house with the tutor, a young nihilist poet, with whom she believes herself to be deeply in love; but she finds out that what she really loved and craved was liberty, and the chance to practise her politico-social principles; and as these two runaways live in chastity, the heroine finally, and without any conscientious scruples, marries another poet, also a nihilist, but more practical and intelligent, who has really succeeded in interesting her heart.
Is such a voluntary restriction the result of a hyperæsthesia of the fancy, natural to an age of persecution, in which those who fight for and defend an idea are ready at any moment to go to the gallows for its sake? Is it mere woman's pride demanding for her sex liberty and franchises which she scorns to make use of? Is it a manifestation of an idealist sentiment which is always present in revolutionary outbursts? Is it a consequence of the theory which Schopenhauer preached, but did not practise? Is it Malthusian pessimism which would refuse to provide any more subjects for despotism? Is it a result of the natural coldness of the Scythian? There seems to be no doubt, according to the statement of trustworthy authors, that there are nihilist virgins living promiscuously with students, helping them like sisters, united by this strange understanding. Solovief, who made a criminal attempt on the life of Alexander II., was thusmarried, as was shown at his trial.
Among the young generation of nihilists this sort of union was really an affiliation in devotion to their party. The bride's dower went into the party treasury, her body was consecrated to the worship of the unknown God; and being but slightly bound to his or her nominal spouse, each one went his or her way, sometimes to distant provinces, to propagate and disseminate the good news.
Tikomirov (from whose interesting book I have taken most of my information concerning the constitution of the Russian revolutionary family) seems to think that French authors have not done full justice to the austerity and purity of nihilist customs, and he depicts a charming scene in the home of intelligence, whose members are united and affectionate, where moral and intellectual equality produce solid friendship, precluding tyranny on the one hand and treason on the other; adding that in Russia everybody is convinced of the superiority of this sort of family, and only foreigners think that nihilism undermines the foundations of conjugal union. Is this really true? In any case it seems possible that such a beautiful ideal might be attained to in our Latin societies, given the elevated conception of the Catholic marriage, which makes it a sacrament, were there only a little more equity, toward which it is evident, however, that laws and customs are ever tending.
In speaking of nihilist marriages, it is well to add that in general the Russian revolutionary movement has a pronounced flavor of mysticism, although at first sight it seems an explosion of free-thinking and blasphemy. It is true that nihilist youth laughs at the supernatural, and has been steeped in the crudities of German materialism and in the pliant philosophies of the clinic and the laboratory; but at the same time, whether because of the religious character of the race, or because of a certain exaltation which may be the fruit of a period of stress, the nihilist young people are mystics in their own way, and talk about the martyrs to the cause with an inspired voice and with the unction of a devotee invoking the saints. In proof of this I will give here a nihilist madrigal dedicated to the young heroine in a political trial, Lydia Figuier, who had studied medicine in Zurich and Paris.
"Deep is the impression, O maiden, left by thy enchanting beauty; but more powerful than the charm of thy face is the purity of thy soul. Full of pity is the image of the Saviour, and his divine features are full of compassion; but in the unfathomable depths of thine eyes there is still more love and suffering."
"Deep is the impression, O maiden, left by thy enchanting beauty; but more powerful than the charm of thy face is the purity of thy soul. Full of pity is the image of the Saviour, and his divine features are full of compassion; but in the unfathomable depths of thine eyes there is still more love and suffering."
The extremes of this rare sort of fanaticism are still better shown in a famous novel of Tchernichewsky, the hero of which outdoes the Hindu fakirs and Christian anchorites in point of macerations, penances, and austerities. He is offered several kinds of fruit, but he will taste only the apple, which is what the people eat; he fasts in grief and anguish, and one day, in order to accustom himself to bear any sort of trial, he lays himself down upon a cloth thickly studded with nails an inch long, points upward, and there he remains until his blood saturates the ground. Not content with mortifying the flesh in this way, he disposes of all his worldly goods among the poor, and vows never to touch a drop of wine or the lips of woman. This is only the hero of a story-book; yes, but this story endeavors to present a type, an ideal pattern, to which thenew men, or nihilists, try to conform themselves.
It must be understood that when I say mysticism, I use the word in a generic and not in a theological sense. It seems contradictory to say that an atheist can do and feel like the most fervent believer; but a man may pass a whole lifetime in parrying logic, and yet sometimes what his reason refuses his imagination accepts. There is something in nihilism that recalls the transcendental contradictions of the Hindu philosophies and religions, especially Buddhism; and in Russian brains there is a fermentation of heterodox illumination which is manifested among the common people by sects of tremblers, jumpers, and others, and among the more learned classes by revolutionary mysticism, amorphism, anarchy, and a gloomy and rebellious pessimism. The prophets of the ignorant sects among the people preach many of the revolutionary dogmas, teaching disobedience to all authority, community of goods, social liquidation and free love, yet without political intention; and better educated nihilists, even reactionary minds like Dostoiëwsky, feel the pulse of mystic enthusiasm which runs in the blood. The people are so predisposed to color the language of the political devotee that they were quite satisfied with the answer given by the propagandist Rogatchef to the peasants who asked what he sought among them. He replied, "The true faith."
To the honor of humanity be it said that the most profound emotions it has experienced have been produced by its own thirst for the ideal, and caused by the need of belief, and of feeling in one form or another a religious excitement. It is this element which conquers our sympathy for nihilism; this shows us a young and enthusiastic people given to visions and sublime ardors. To put it more explicitly, I am not passing judgment upon the only revolutionaries just now extant in the world. I have very little liking for political upheavals; but, to the egotistical indifference that afflicts some nations, I believe that I prefer the passionate extremes of nihilism. In politics as in art we want the living.
It will be seen therefore that the people were not irrelevant in confounding nihilism with a religions sect. As far as our rationalist age will admit, the nihilist dissenter resembles the great heretics of the Middle Ages; he has traces of the Millenarian, of Sakya Muni, and of the German pantheists; and he has the blind faith, the hazy transports, the dogmatical and absolute affirmation of the persecuted religious sects, and of esoteric and subterranean beliefs. He adores a divinity without feelings, deaf and primitive, and this adoration is the corner-stone of the nihilist temple. Themujiksublimated by Russian literature is the god of nihilism.
Here is a passage from Tikomirov's book to illustrate this aspect of Russian revolution:—
"Where is there any sociological theory that can explain the crusade taken up in 1873 by thousands of young men and women determined togo to the people? The word crusade is appropriate. Our youths left the bosom of their families; our maidens abandoned the worldly pleasures of life. Nobody thought of his own welfare; the great cause absorbed all attention, and the nervous tension was such that many were able to endure, without injury to health, unusual and dreadful privations. They gave up their past life and all their property, and if any vacillated in offering his fortune to the cause, he was looked upon with pity and contempt. Some renounced official positions and gave all their means, even to thousands of rubles; others, like Prince Krapotkine, from beingsavants, diplomats and opulent, became humble artisans. The prince took to painting doors and windows. Rich heiresses sought occupation as factory operatives, even some who had reigned as belles in aristocratic salons. It was as though, exiled from other classes of society, they found, in turning to the people, their souls' true country."
"Where is there any sociological theory that can explain the crusade taken up in 1873 by thousands of young men and women determined togo to the people? The word crusade is appropriate. Our youths left the bosom of their families; our maidens abandoned the worldly pleasures of life. Nobody thought of his own welfare; the great cause absorbed all attention, and the nervous tension was such that many were able to endure, without injury to health, unusual and dreadful privations. They gave up their past life and all their property, and if any vacillated in offering his fortune to the cause, he was looked upon with pity and contempt. Some renounced official positions and gave all their means, even to thousands of rubles; others, like Prince Krapotkine, from beingsavants, diplomats and opulent, became humble artisans. The prince took to painting doors and windows. Rich heiresses sought occupation as factory operatives, even some who had reigned as belles in aristocratic salons. It was as though, exiled from other classes of society, they found, in turning to the people, their souls' true country."
Do not these words almost seem to describe the beginnings of Christianity in Rome?
The idol takes no notice of his fanatical adorers, nor perhaps does he understand them any better than the peasant-woman of Toboso understood the amorous suit with which Don Quixote wooed her malformed and dishevelled person. The Russian peasant cannot make anything of theories and apotheoses evolved from an intellectual condition amounting to rapturous frenzy. "Oh that I might die," exclaims a devout nihilist, "and that my blood like a drop of hot lead could burn and arouse the people!" This thirst for martyrdom is common, but above all is the anxiety to be amalgamated with the people, to know them, and if possible to infuse them with the enthusiasm they feel themselves.
It requires more courage to do what Russians callgoing to the people, than to bear exile or the gallows. In our society, which boasts of its democracy, the very equalization of classes has strengthened the individual instinct of difference, and especially the aristocrats of mind, the writers and thinkers, have become terribly nervous, finicky, and inimical to the plebeian smell, to the extent that even novels which describe the common people with sincerity and truth displease the public taste. Yet the nihilists, a select company from the point of view of intellectual culture, go, like apostles, in search of the poor in spirit, the ignorant and the humble. The sons of families belonging to the highest classes, alumni of universities, leave fine clothes and books, dress like peasants, and mix with factory hands, so as to know them and to teach them; young ladies of fine education return from a foreign tour and accept with the utmost contentment situations as cooks in manufacturers' houses, so as to be able to study the labor question in their workshops. We find very curious instances of this in Turguenief's novel "Virgin Soil." The heroine, Mariana, a nihilist, in order to learn how the people live, and tosimplify herself(this is a sacramental term), helps a poor peasant-woman in her domestic duties. Here we have the way of the world reversed: the educated learns of the ignorant, and in all that the peasant-woman does or says the young lady finds a crumb of grace and wisdom. "We do not wish to teach the people," she explains, "we wish to serve them." "To serve them?" replies the woman, with hard practicality. "Well, the best way to serve them is to teach them." Equally fruitless are the efforts of Mariana'sfictitious husband, orhusband by free grace, as the peasant-woman calls him,—the poet and dreamer Nedjanof, who thinks himself a nihilist, but in the bottom of his soul has the aristocratic instincts of the artist. Here is the passage where he presents himself to Mariana dressed in workman's clothes:—
"Mariana uttered an exclamation of surprise. At first she did not know him. He wore an old caftan of yellowish drill, short-waisted, and buttoned with small buttons; his hair was combed in the Russian style, with the part in the middle; a blue kerchief was tied around his neck; he held in his hand an old cap with a torn visor, and his feet were shod with undressed calfskin."
"Mariana uttered an exclamation of surprise. At first she did not know him. He wore an old caftan of yellowish drill, short-waisted, and buttoned with small buttons; his hair was combed in the Russian style, with the part in the middle; a blue kerchief was tied around his neck; he held in his hand an old cap with a torn visor, and his feet were shod with undressed calfskin."
Mariana's first act on seeing him in this guise is to tell him that he is indeed ugly, after which disagreeable piece of information, and a shudder of repugnance at the smell of his greasy cap and dirty sleeves, they provide themselves with pamphlets and socialist proclamations and start out on their Odyssey among the people, hoping to meet with ineffable sufferings. He would be no less glad than she of a heroic sacrifice, but he is not content with a grotesque farce; and the girl is indignant when Solomine, her professor in nihilism, tells her that her duty actually compels her to wash the children of the poor, to teach them the alphabet, and to give medicine to the sick. "That is for Sisters of Charity," she exclaims, inadvertently recognizing a truth; the Catholic faith contains all ways of loving one's neighbor, and none can ever be invented that it has not foreseen. But the human type of the novel is Nedjanof, although the nihilists have sought to deny it. There is one very sad and real scene in which he returns drunk from one of his propagandist excursions, because the peasants whom he was haranguing compelled him to drink as much as they. The poor fellow drinks and drinks, but he might as well have thrown himself upon a file of bayonets. He comes home befuddled withwodka, or perhaps more so with the disgust and nausea which the brutish and mal-odorous people produced in him. He had never fully believed in the work to which he had consecrated himself: now it is no longer scepticism, it is invincible disgust that takes hold upon his soul, urging him to despair and suicide. The lament of his lost revolutionary faith is contained in the little poem entitled "Dreaming," which I give literally, as follows:—
"It was long since I had seen my birthplace, but I found it not at all changed. The deathlike sleep, intellectual inertia, roofless houses, ruined walls, mire and stench, scarcity and misery, the insolent looks of the oppressed peasants,—all the same! Only in sleeping, we have outstripped Europe, Asia, and the whole world. Never did my dear compatriots sleep a sleep so terrible!"Everything sleeps: wherever I turn, in the fields, in the cities, in carnages, in sleighs, day and night, sitting or walking; the merchant and the functionary, and the watchman in the tower, all sleep in the cold or in the heat! The accused snores and the judge dozes; the peasants sleep the sleep of death; asleep they sow and reap and grind the corn; father, mother, and children sleep! The oppressed and the oppressor sleep equally well!"Only the gin-shop is awake, with eyes ever open! And hugging to her breast a jug of fire-water, her face to the pole, her feet to the Caucasus, thus sleeps and dreams on forever our Mother, Holy Russia!"
"It was long since I had seen my birthplace, but I found it not at all changed. The deathlike sleep, intellectual inertia, roofless houses, ruined walls, mire and stench, scarcity and misery, the insolent looks of the oppressed peasants,—all the same! Only in sleeping, we have outstripped Europe, Asia, and the whole world. Never did my dear compatriots sleep a sleep so terrible!
"Everything sleeps: wherever I turn, in the fields, in the cities, in carnages, in sleighs, day and night, sitting or walking; the merchant and the functionary, and the watchman in the tower, all sleep in the cold or in the heat! The accused snores and the judge dozes; the peasants sleep the sleep of death; asleep they sow and reap and grind the corn; father, mother, and children sleep! The oppressed and the oppressor sleep equally well!
"Only the gin-shop is awake, with eyes ever open! And hugging to her breast a jug of fire-water, her face to the pole, her feet to the Caucasus, thus sleeps and dreams on forever our Mother, Holy Russia!"
To all nihilist intents and purposes, particularly to those of a political character, the masses are apparently asleep. Many eloquent anecdotes refer to their indifference. A young lady propagandist, who served as cook on a farm, confesses that the peasants spitefully accused her of taking bread from the poor. In order to get them to take their pamphlets and leaflets, the nihilists present them as religious tracts, adorning the covers with texts of Scripture and pious mottoes and signs. Only by making good use of the antiquated idea of distribution (of goods) have they any chance of success; it is of no use to talk of autonomous federations, or to attack the emperor, who has the people on his side.
The active nihilists are always young people, and this is reason enough why they are not completely discouraged by the sterility of their efforts. Old age abhors fruitless endeavors, and better appreciating the value of life, will not waste it in tiresome experiments. And this contrast between the ages, like that between the seasons, is nowhere so sharp as in Russia; nowhere else is the difference of opinions and feelings between two generations so marked. Some one has called nihilism a disease of childhood, like measles or diphtheria; perhaps this is not altogether erroneous, not only as regards individuals but also as regards society, for vehemence and furious radicalism are the fruit of historical inexperience, of the political youth of a nation. The precursor of nihilism, Herzen, said, with his brilliant imagery and vigor of expression, that the Russia of the future lay with a few insignificant and obscure young folks who could easily hide between the earth and the soles of the autocrat's boots; and the poet Mikailof, who was sentenced to hard labor in 1861, and subsequently died under the lash, exclaimed to the students, "Even in the darkness of the dungeon I shall preserve sacredly in my heart of hearts the incomparable faith that I have ingrafted upon the new generation."
It is sad to see youth decrepit and weary from birth, without enthusiasm or ambition for anything. It is more natural that the sap should overflow, that a longing for strife and sacrifice, even though foolish and vain, should arise in its heart. This truth cannot be too often repeated: to be enthusiastic, to be full of life, is not ridiculous; but our pusillanimous doctrine of disapproval is ridiculous indeed, especially in life's early years,—as ridiculous as baldness at twenty, or wrinkles and palsy at thirty. Besides, we must recognize something more than youthful ardor in nihilism, and that is, sympathetic disinterestedness. The path of nihilism does not lead to brilliant position or destiny: it may lead to Siberia or to the gibbet.