RUSSIAINTRODUCTIONTHE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF RUSSIAWritten Specially for the Present WorkBy DR. A. S. RAPPOPORTSchool of Oriental Languages, Paris
Written Specially for the Present Work
By DR. A. S. RAPPOPORT
School of Oriental Languages, Paris
“Russia evolves very slowly, like an empire that is not of yesterday and that has ample time before it,” is one of Nietzsche’s remarks before his reason had hopelessly gone adrift in the vast ocean of insanity. This remark of the German poet-philosopher is true enough. What Nietzsche, however, did not know or did not say is that one can hardly speak of any evolution, as far as general civilisation, intellectual culture, and development are concerned, of Russia as a whole. Only a small minority, the so-calledintelligentia, has evolved intellectually, not Russia itself. Here lies the fundamental difference between Russia and the rest of Europe.
There is a vast gulf, ever broadening, between the Russian intelligentia and themuyiks. Thought and culture, nay even civilisation, seem to be limited to a select few. The bulk of the people has not only failed to advance from a state in which it was surprised by Jenghiz Khan, but it has actually retrograded to a more savage condition. Revolutions have passed over their heads without in the least affecting them. “The Russian masses,” says Leroy-Beaulieu (The Empire of the Czars), “have not felt the breath of either the Renaissance, or the Reformation, or the Revolution. All that has been done in Europe or America for the last four centuries, since the time of Columbus and Luther, Washington and Mirabeau, is, as far as Russia is concerned, non-existent.”
The people never think, or at least have not yet left that crude state of barbarism which precedes the dawn of civilisation; the first rays of thought have scarcely tinted with orient hues the dark horizon of ignorance and superstition of the Russian population; the great events have failed to stir its mental inertia. I am, however, far from maintaining that the fault lies with the nature and national character of the people. The rich nature, the subtle spirit of the Slav, his power of adaptation and imitation make him not only accessible to western civilisation and culture but also capable of producing something which bears the impress of the peculiarity of the Slavonic genius. The intelligentia is now giving ample proof corroborating this statement. The Russian intelligentia has passed the phases of growing and changing and doubting and has reached a condition of maturity, asserting its manhood and right. Before examining the intellectual development of the Russian intelligentia and the point it has reached, as compared with western Europe, we must try to find out the causes that first produced that gulf between the few and the many, and the circumstances that were instrumental in widening it.
It is a mistake to imagine that the very first foundations of Russian intellectual development were laid by Peter the Great and that Russia, although behind western Europe in culture and civilisation, is still in her youthful vigour and freshness and will soon overtake the old world. There was a time, at the beginning of the eleventh century, when the Slavonic countries under the rule of the Norman conquerors were on the same level of civilisation as western Europe. The foundations were laid before the Norman invasion and very frequent were the relations between this people in the east and those in the north of Europe. Long before the ninth century, Kiev was known to the inhabitants of Scandinavia. Many a jarl sought refuge there and many a merchant ship found its way to the shores of Russia. On the road along which the commercial connection between the East Sea and Byzantium developed were situated the towns of Smolensk, Tchernigov, Pereiaslavl (cf. V. der Brüggen,Wie Russland Europaisch Wurde, p. 22). When the Norman princes, the warags as they were called by the Slavonic nations, conquered these towns and subdued one tribe after the other, the already existing civilisation developed rapidly under the protection of the new rulers. Forth from Byzantium and Greece, from Italy, Poland, and Germany, with which countries the descendants of Rurik kept up a connection, western influence came to the north. Learned monks came from Byzantium, architects, artisans, and merchants from Greece, Italy and Germany, and were instrumental in spreading the languages, customs and ideas of the west. Not only did thekniazi(princes) of Kiev build churches and edifices after the model of Greek and Italian art, but they established schools to which Vladimir compelled his nobles and boyars to send their children. The commercial relations with the west and the south were very vivid and frequent, and on the market places of Kiev and Novgorod a motley crowd of Normans and Slavs, Hungarians, Greeks, Venetians, Germans, Arabs, and Jews were to be seen.
The intellectual culture of the time had not yet, one must admit, penetrated the masses of the Slavonic tribes. Yet the Normans, as the propagators of culture, speedily and easily merged into one with the conquered tribes, much easier perhaps than the Normans who came with William the Conqueror amalgamated with Britons and Saxons in England. Had the Tatar invasion not taken place, it is highly probable that the intellectual development of Russia would have followed the same lines as that of western Europe. The commercial and intellectual relations with the rest of Europe, so eagerly sought after and cultivated by the Norman princes, would have continued and brought the Slav countries in increasingly closer contact with the west and under the influence of all the currents that were destined to traverse Europe later on. The Renaissance and the revival of learning which shed their light upon the dark mediæval age (and only a few rays of which found their way to Russia by way of Poland at a much later period) would have made themselves felt in Russia. This was, however, not to happen. The Mongolian invasion had actually cut off Russia from Europe, and brought it under the Tatar influence. The Norman civilisation, which was in a nascent state, was crushed; the threads connecting Russia with Europe were cut off. The wave of Mongolian invasion had inundated the flat land situated between Europe and Asia, carried away and destroyed every vestige of western influence. Kiev, Moscow, Tver, Riazan, Tchernigov, and Smolensk were conquered by the hordes of the Great Khan, who from his seat somewhere in the heart of China or in the centre of Asia sent down his generals and tax collectors.
Hundreds of thousands of Mongols came to Russia, mixed with the Slavs, and influenced habits, customs, civilisation, social life, administration and even language. The influence was a very far-reaching and deep one; Mongolism has penetrated Russian life to a much higher degree than a Russian would care to admit or western Europeans have realised. Greater and greater became the gulf between the Russian and the Romance and Teutonic worlds. But that gulf might have been bridged over and Russia might have been saved, when the dawn of better and happier days broke in, by another power: the influence of the church. Here again, however, owing to circumstances, this in many respects civilising agent was powerless.
In spite of all the reproaches hurled at the church, it must be admitted that it had all the education in its hands. In Russia, however, the case was different. From the very beginning, ever since Christianity was introduced, ever since Vladimir had accepted baptism in Kiev, the Russian people as Christians were divided into two distinct groups. Whilst the enthusiastic adherents of the new religion endeavoured to introduce the piety of Byzantium, the mass of the people, although nominally Christian, remained heathen in reality and has remained so up to the present. This was due to two reasons. Vladimir had accepted the Greek form of worship with its asceticism. Asceticism and monasticism, a retirement from the world, became the Christian ideal. This ideal was too high, too unattainable and too foreign for reality and for daily life, whilst on the other hand the perfect Christians considered the life of the world as sinful and dangerous. Thus the clergy sought retirement in cloisters and monasteries and the mass, whilst accepting the ceremonies of Byzantium, had learned nothing of its ethical teachings. The gulf thus arising between clergy and people was also due to another reason. The first members of the clergy were Greeks, monks coming from Byzantium, who spoke a language incomprehensible to the Slavs. The Russian bishops, who gradually took the place of the learned eastern monks, and who could communicate with the people, were still too ignorant themselves. And then suddenly the Tatar invasion came. Connection with Byzantium was cut off. The influx of the Greek clergy and Byzantine learning had ceased too early, before the Russians had had time to acquire some amount of knowledge to replace it. Thus whilst the intellectual development of the mass took place very slowly, the intellectual level of the clergy sank rapidly. The consequence was that when the Russian clergy met the people they were both on the same intellectual level, the priests had nothing to teach and had no prestige. This also explains, psychologically, the origin of so many religious sects in Russia. Having no respect and no admiration for the ignorant priest, addicted to drink, the peasant goes his own way when he suddenly feels a craving for religious ideals.
Thus the Mongolian invasion had cut off Russia from Europe and whilst the latter was passing through the phases of transition, approaching slowly but gradually the times of light and learning, Russia stood still. The Europe of the Renaissance was not acreatio ex nihilo. It was the result of a slow process of development. The barbarians who had built their realms on the ruins of the ancient worlds, Hellas and Rome, had taken over the classical heritage left to them after the disappearance of the Roman Empire. Rude and barbarous, however, these new conquerors had no understanding for the value of the heritage and destroyed many of its richest treasures. Worlds of intellectual culture were lost. But slowly the age of understanding dawned and the former barbarians brought forth many of the treasures which they had relegated to the lumber-room, added many of their own, and blendedthem into one whole. The result was the Græco-Roman, Romance, and Teutonic civilisation. Crusades, Arabian civilisation passing by way of Spain, scholasticism, Reformation, Renaissance, revival of learning, the discovery of new worlds, the spread of commerce, scientific inventions and discoveries, stimulating the desire for learning and creating impulses in every new direction—all these new and stirring events were so many phases through which European society and European life passed before they reached the state of modern development. Many were the streams and cross-currents that traversed Europe separately before they united and continued the more rapid advance of a new life and civilisation. All this was lacking in Russia. Russia missed during its Mongolian period, the time of general transition. None of the forces which, although invisibly, were steadily furrowing the European soil and preparing it for the influx of fresh air and new light, were at work in Russia. The phase of transition had not yet commenced. That period of constant change, of mingled decadence and spiritual growth, that ceaseless blending of the old and the new, unnoticed at the time but clearly distinguished from the distance of later ages, was lacking in Russia. There was no pope, no powerful church, and consequently no Reformation and no spirit of individualism—no feudalism, no knights, no Crusades and no acquaintance with foreign lands, no spread of commerce, and no widening of the mental horizon of the people. There were no learned monks copying Greek and Latin manuscripts, paving the way for scholasticism and modern thought. There was even no language in which the treasures of the ancient world could be communicated to the Slavs. Few people could write, few even count properly.
There were no schools and the attempts to establish some such institutions during the seventeenth century failed. A school was founded at Moscow under Alexis, but here only a foreign language or two were taught. Its aim was to train translators for the government. There was no art, nor technical science. There were no medical men. The two or three foreign practitioners were considered as sorcerers.
Towards the end of the seventeenth century therefore Russia had absolutely no culture of her own. All that the Normans had established had been wiped out. The Byzantine influence had no effect. And when after a struggle extending over three centuries the czardom of Moscow had thrown off the shackles of the Great Khan, liberated itself from thraldom and laid the foundations of the great empire of Russia, it had only established, on the ruins of the old Mongolian, a new state which was Mongolian and Tatar in its essence and spirit, in its customs and institutions, and had little or nothing in common with the rest of Europe.
Moscow was the inheritor of Mongolism, the Czar was spiritually, and even physically, a descendant of Mongol princes. Ivan IV married a Mongolian princess, his son married a sister of the Mongol Godunov. They had actually taken over the inheritance of the khans of Kiptchak. It was in this barren soil that Peter sowed the seed of European culture. What happened?
Peter was undoubtedly great and deserves this title. He was one of the great makers of history. But though great in his plans, great in what he wished to accomplish, he was not great in what he really attained. He only saw the superficiality of European civilisation. He introduced it like some foreign product, like some fashionable article, like some exotic plant, without first asking whether the national soil was propitious for its cultivation. He, at the utmost, created a hot-house atmosphere where his plants could vegetate, and they remained what they originally were: exotic. He failed to seethat civilisation is the product of a long process of evolution, the natural product of the social and national conditions, drawing its life and sap from the inner forces of the people. Instead of making use of these inner forces of his people, he endeavoured to introduce civilisation by his power of will. He only had an eye for the effects but not for the causes that were working as the hidden springs.
In France, in England, in Germany, in all western Europe, civilisation, the moral and intellectual evolution, was a natural phenomenon, the effect of previous causes. In Russia, civilisation was the outcome of a sudden revolution, the slavish, reluctant and half-hearted compliance with the commands of an individual will. The former was natural, the latter artificial. An evolution is a slow change, an unconscious and imperceptible process, finding a state prepared for innovation, a soil, furrowed and fertile, ready to receive the seed and to bring forth fruit. A revolution, on the other hand, is a radical, sudden change which seldom succeeds and, in most cases, calls forth reactions. In Western Europe there was, as we have see above, a time of transition from the barbarous to the civilised state. The morning of the Renaissance had dawned upon mediæval Europe and tinted with orient colours the sombre sky. The first rays appeared on the horizon of the Italian poets, dissipating the darkness here and there. The sun gradually rose higher and higher, penetrated the houses of the people and woke them (who had been lulled to sleep by the mysterious whisperings of superstition) from their prolonged slumbers. They awoke, opened their windows and allowed the light of the morning to penetrate into their dark abodes. Not so in Russia. There the people were suddenly awakened, dragged out from the utter darkness, without any transition, into the broad midday of an artificial light. They opened their eyes, but the light was too strong, too glaring; so they shut them again. Peter wanted to jump over three centuries and catch up with Europe. He established a fleet without Russian sailors, an administration with foreign administrators, an academy of science in a land without elementary schools. He began a race with Europe but his people could not follow him. He borrowed everything from Europe and instead of giving his people a chance to develop naturally and freely, he crushed the spirit of independence and introduced a knout civilisation. Everything had to be done by order. He forced his people to swallow Europeanism. The bulk of his subjects, however, could not digest it. The consequence was that they could not follow the few, and remained far behind them. The gulf therefore between the few, who form the present intelligentia, and the great mass—a gulf which was but narrow towards the end of the sixteenth century when by way of Poland and Livonia a glimpse of the western sun penetrated into Russia—suddenly widened considerably. Thus the origin of the striking phenomenon which Russia offers in her intellectually high developed intelligentia and her uneducated, ignorant masses is to be sought in Russia’s past, in the absence of a period of transition, and in Peter’s misunderstanding the process of European civilisation, in his admiration for the effects, but utter ignorance of the causes that brought about these effects.
There is, however, yet another factor—a factor which, whilst accounting for the existence of an intelligentia, or a coterie of intellectuals, and of an utterly ignorant mass, will also throw some light upon the intellectual development of this very intelligentia and explain the reasons which compelled it to choose certain channels by which it sends forth the currents of its thoughts. This factor is the despotic government of the czars. If Russia’s unhappy past and Peter’s good intentions but great blunders produced the presentstate of intellectual development in that country, the government of the Reformer’s successors has done its very best to preserve this condition.
The continuous policy of the Russian government to civilise by means of the knout has on the one hand brought about the result that not Russia but only a few Russians evolved intellectually and, on the other, it has given a certain direction to the thought and intellectual productions of these few. Even during the reign of Peter I or Catherine II, when the spirit of civilisation began to move its wings, independent thought has had to sustain a fierce struggle against authority. In the most civilised countries of western Europe ever and anon a cross-current of reaction traverses the stream of intellectual evolution: narrow-minded zealots, hypocritical bigots, false patriots, literary Gibeonites, gossiping old women arrayed in the mantles of philosophers, do their best to put fetters on the independent thought of man, to nip the free and natural intellectual development in the very bud by forcing it under the iron grip of tradition and authority. These reactionary tendencies of the lovers of darkness are only exceptions, and will lead thought for a while into a side channel, but cannot stop the triumphant march onwards. Not so in Russia.
In the empire of the czar thought is almost a crime and every means is employed to keep it within the boundaries prescribed by the governing power. To overstep these boundaries, to develop itself freely, and I might say naturally, is to declare war against authority, to revolt. The history of evolution of thought in Russia is therefore almost identical with the revolutionary movement. If whilst working on the construction of the temple with the right hand, the left has to wield the sword against a sudden attack of the enemy, the edifice can rise only very slowly. Renan says (in hisFuture of Science) that the great creations of thought appear in troublous times and that neither material ease nor even liberty contributes much to the originality and the energy of intellectual development. On the contrary the work of mind would only be seriously threatened if humanity came to be too much at its ease. Thank God! exclaims the Breton philosopher, that day is still far distant. The customary state of Athens, he continues, was one of terror; the security of the individual was threatened at every moment, to-day an exile, to-morrow he was sold as a slave. And yet in such a state Phidias produced the Propylæa statues, Plato his dialogues and Aristophanes his satires. Dante would never have composed his cantos in an atmosphere of studious ease. The sacking of Rome did not disturb the brush of Michael Angelo. In a word, the most beautiful things are born amid tears and it is in the midst of struggle, in the atmosphere of sorrow and suffering that humanity develops itself, that the human mind displays the most energy and activity in all directions. Renan was an individualist, and aristocratic in his teachings, and seems only to have in view the individual, nay the genius. Suffering and oppression, physical, intellectual and moral, are schools where the strong gather more strength and come forth triumphant, but where the weaker are destroyed. What is true for theélite, for the very limited number of the chosen few, does not hold good for humanity at large, which is not strong enough to think when it is hungry, to fight against opposing forces and to hurl down the barriers erected against the advance of thought. Few indeed are those who can carry on the struggle to a successful issue. The Russian government, with its Mongolian traditions of autocracy, threw the great nation, which remained behind Peter’s forward march, back into complete indifference and apathy, into a state of submissive contentment, where, like a child, it kisses the rod that punishes it, sometimes cries like a child, andis lulled to sleep by the whisperings of mystic superstition and the vapours ofvodki.
Has not the populace a terrifying example in the martyrs of Russian thought? A terrible destiny awaits him who dares to step beyond the line traced by the hand of the government, who ventures to look over the wall erected by imperial ukase. “The history of Russian thinkers,” says Alexander Herzen (Russland’s Sociale Zustände, page 136), “is a long list of martyrs and a register of convicts.” Those whom the hand of the imperial government has spared died in the prime of youth, before they had time to develop, like blossoms hurrying to quit life before they could bear fruit. A Pushkin and a Lermontov fell in the prime of youth, one thirty-eight and the other twenty-seven years old, victims of the unnatural state of society. Russia’s Beaumarchais, Griboiedov, found a premature end in Persia in his thirty-fifth year; Kolzov, the Russian Burns, Bielinski, the Russian Lessing, died in misery, the latter at the age of thirty-eight. Czerncevski was torn from his literary activity and sent to Siberia. Dobrolubov sang his swan-song in his twenty-fifth year. Chaadaev, the friend of Schelling, was declared mad by order of the government. If such measures have kept the people in a state of ignorance and still lowered the already low level of civilisation, the autocratic rule has further, as it was unable to crush it, caused the intelligentia to turn its thoughts into a certain direction.
If we follow the development of the Russian intelligentia we notice at once that all the currents of its intellectual life are, at the present time at least, converging into one centre, swelling the stream, that is already running high, to a vast and mighty ocean, which is sending its waters, through many channels, all over Europe. This centre is literature. Since the foundation of the Academy of Science by Peter the Great Russian achievements in the domains of science, technical education, art, sculpture, music, painting, history and philosophy have been very small.
In science and art the Russians have produced nothing of importance, nothing original. Mendeleev, Lobatshevski, Pirogov, Botkin, Soloviev are a few scientific names of some eminence but they are few as compared with Europe and America. Many others, who are known to the western world as Russians, are in reality Germans or Armenians. The great historian, Karamzin, was of Tatar extraction. In the domain of art Vereshchagin is a Russian but Ainasowski is an Armenian, Brulov a Prussian and Antokolski a Jew (cf. Brüggen,Das heutige Russland, p. 182).
Russia has had no Spinoza and no Kant, no Newton and no Spencer. Since the foundation of the University of Moscow in 1755, some semblance of Russian philosophy has appeared but a Soloviev and a Grote, a Troitski and a Preobrajenski have only introduced the philosophy of Germany, France, and England into Russia, but not worked out their own philosophical systems. Thus, whilst Russian scientists, technicians, artists and even musicians have to go abroad to complete their education, Russian philosophers borrow from Hegel or Descartes, from Locke or Comte. This is, however, not the case with Russian literature. Russia has quickened her development in the realm of literature. Her decades were centuries. Rapidly she has lived through phases of growth and evolution, of achievement and reflection which have filled long periods in other people’s lives. The peaks of Russian creative power in this domain, the productions of Pushkin and Turgeniev, of Lermontov, Dostoievski and Tolstoi proudly face the heights of literary western Europe.
Whilst, however, the Russian genius of the intelligentia centred its forcein literature, this literature bears the unmistakable trait, that distinguishes it from European literature, of having a tendency to teach and of taking a moral aspect. Russian literature on the whole has not entered the sphere of artistic interest, it has always been a pulpit whence the word of instruction came forth. With very few exceptions, like Merejkovski and Andreiev, the Russian author is not practising art for art’s sake (l’art pour l’art) but is pursuing a goal, is accomplishing a task.
The Russian literature is a long cry of revolt, a continuous sigh or an admonition. Taine says, somewhere, when speaking of Stendhal and Balzac: “They love art more than men—they are not writing out of sympathy for the poor, but out of love for the beautiful.” This is just what the Russian modern author is not doing. The intellectual and instructive moments predominate over the emotional and artistic.
This state of the intellectual development is explained by what has been stated above. It is due to the sudden introduction of western ceremonies and superficial civilisation, followed by a powerful foreign influence on the one hand, and the general social and political state of the country. When Peter had suddenly launched Russia—which was floating like some big hulk between Asia and Europe—towards the west, the few who helped him in this endeavour came under the complete influence of western thought and manners. St. Petersburg soon became a Versailles in miniature. Voltaire, Diderot, and the encyclopædists governed and shaped Russian thought and Russian society. But not only France—Germany too, and England, Byron and his individualism, had gained great sway in Russia. The independence of Russian thought and its intellectual development only dates from about 1840. When it awoke at that time, when it became conscious of itself, it felt that it had a great work, a great mission to fulfil. Surrounded on one side by a people that was ignorant, ready to sink lower and lower; opposed, on the other, by a government that did its best to check individualism and independence in every possible way—the Russian intelligentia felt its great responsibility.
Surrounded by a population whose mental development was on a very low level, the atmosphere was and still is not propitious for the cultivation of art or science, whilst the Russian author had no time simply to admire the beautiful in nature but was compelled to look round and try what good he could do. Thus Russian genius concentrated itself in literature as the best vehicle to expose the state of Russian society. The Russian writer became an apostle. He is not anxious to be artistic, to shape his style and to be fascinating, but to give as true a picture of Russian life as he possibly can, to show the evil and to suggest the remedy.
Such, in broad lines, is the present state which the few, whom we termed the Russian intelligentia, have reached in their intellectual development. In a moment of strength the Russian genius has attained itself, with self-asserting individuality. Its task is great, its obstacles are manifold, but it fights valiantly and moves on steadily. This only applies to the few. When the day of political freedom will dawn for Russia, then and then only the great evolution and the intellectual development of Russia itself, of the Russian people as a whole, will begin. On the day when civil and religious despotism, that everywhere crushes individuality, will cease, then the genius of the Russian people will spread its pinions, and the masses will awake from their inertia to new life, like the gradual unfolding of spring into summer.