The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  The man who dispelled the euphoria of friendly agreement and romantic fancy from Russian historical thinking was Georg Hegel, the last of the German idealistic philosophers to cast his spell over Russia. More than any other single man, he changed the course of Russian intellectual history during the "remarkable decade" from 1838 to 1848. He offered the Russians a seemingly rational and all-encompassing philosophy of history and led the restless Westernizers-for the first time-to entertain serious thoughts of revolution.

  The introduction of Hegelian thought into Russia followed a pattern that had become virtually institutionalized. The seed was planted in a new philosophic circle formed around a suitably handsome and brooding figure (Stankevich) with some intense younger members (Belinsky and Bakunin) and a new foreign center for pilgrimage and study (Berlin). The new prophet was hailed as "the Columbus of philosophy and humanity" and became identified with a new intellectual generation. Stankevich, Belinsky, Bakunin, and Herzen-unlike Chaadaev, Odoevsky, and Khomiakov-had no memories of the war against Napoleon and the mystical hopes of the Alexandrian era. They were nurtured on the frustrations of Nicholas' reign, and Hegelian philosophy became their weapon of revenge.

  As with the preceding Schellingian generation, the young Hegelians were inspired by a series of new professors: Redkin in law with his constant reminder that "you are priests of truth"; Rul'e in zoology, tracing Hegel's

  dialectic in the animal world; and above all, Granovsky in history. Like earlier circles, Stankevich's followers called one another "brother" and engaged in group readings and group confessions.

  As with previous Western thinkers, Hegel was known as much through Western discussions of his work as through original texts-Stankevich discovering him through a French translation, Herzen through a Polish disciple. But Hegel's basic conviction that history makes sense shone through even the most superficial reading of Hegel and appealed to the young generation. Hegel's famous declaration that "the real is rational and the rational is real" offered reassurance to a generation overcome by a feeling of isolation and subjective depression. Stankevich wrote from Berlin that "there is only one salvation from madness-history."62 Hegel made it possible to find meaning in history-even in the oppressive chapter being written under Nicholas. "Reality, thou art wise and all-wise,"63 Belinsky exclaimed, applying the adjectives of higher order Masonry, mudra i premudra, to the real world. One need no longer run away to find truth in a lodge or circle. Objective truth can be found in the everyday world by the "critically thinking" individual who is informed by Hegelian teachings. "As a result of them," said Belinsky in the condescending tone of the converted Hegelian, "I am able to get along with practical people. In each of them I study with interest the species and type, not the individual…. Every day I notice something… ."64 Coming at a time when depression, wanderings, and even suicide were taking an increasing toll among the romantic idealists, Hegel seemed to say that all purely personal and subjective feelings are irrelevant. Everything depends on objective necessity. "My personal I has been killed for ever," wrote Bakunin after his conversion; "it no longer seeks anything for itself; its life will henceforth be life in the Absolute; but in essence my personal I has gained more than it has lost. … My life is now a truthful life."65

  Whether Slavophile or Westernizer, the older generation found this philosophy repellent. In comparison with Schelling, Hegel stood in the tradition of those who "placed the root of intimate human convictions . . . outside the sphere of aesthetic and moral sense."66

  Many of the Hegelians who contributed to building the modern German state were excited by the Hegelian idea that the state was the supreme expression of the World Spirit in history. In Russia, too, Hegel found some disciples principally concerned with increasing rationality and civic discipline through the state; but they tended to be (like Hegel himself) relatively moderate figures mainly concerned with political reform: the so-called Rechtsstaat liberals like the historian Granovsky and Chicherin, the mayor of Moscow.

  However, Hegel convinced many more Russians that the dialectic

  requires not the apotheosis of the present state but its total destruction. Seemingly impossible changes suddenly became possible by considering the fact that history proceeded through contradictions. Even more than the Hegelian left in Germany, the Russian Hegelians found in his theory of history a call to revolution: to the destruction of "God and the State," "the Knouto-Germanic Empire."67

  Ostensibly, Belinsky turned revolutionary by rejecting Hegel:

  All the talk in Hegel about morality is pure nonsense, for in the kingdom of objective thought there is no morality any more than in objective religion. . . . The fate of the subject, the individual, the personality is more important than the fate of the whole world and the health of the Emperor of China (i.e. the Hegelian AUgemeinheii). . . . All my respects, Igor Fedorovich, I bow before your philosophic nightcap, but . . . even if I should succeed in lifting myself to the highest rung on the ladder of development I should demand an accounting for all the victims of circumstance in life and history … of the inquisition, of Philip II. . . .es

  This passage was often cited by radical reformers (and provided the inspiration for Ivan Karamazov's famous rejection of his "ticket of admission" to heaven). But it did not mark the end of Hegel's influence on Belinsky or on Russian radicalism. Although Belinsky came to look to French socialists for leadership in the coming transformation of European society, he still expected the change to occur in a Hegelian manner. History remained "a necessary and reasonable development of ideas" moving toward a realization of the world spirit on earth, when "Father-Reason shall reign" and the criminal "will pray for his own punishment and none will punish him."69 The final "synthesis" on earth will be a time in which the realm of necessity gives way to the realm of freedom. The present, seemingly victorious, "thesis," the rule of kings and businessmen in Europe, will be destroyed by its radical "antithesis." This "negation of negation" will make room for the new millennium.

  Bakunin was the most truly "possessed" and revolutionary of all the Hegelians with his ideological commitment to destruction. He spent almost all of the "remarkable decade" in Western Europe and was a major catalyst in the "revolution of the intellectuals" in 1848. Only the hint of final liberation contained in Schiller's "Ode to Joy" in the choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was to be saved from the coming conflagration. Bakunin's Hegelian conviction that total destruction must precede total freedom had an immense influence on European revolutionary thought- particularly in Southern Europe-and had only just begun to wane at the time of his death in 1876. Even his ideological rival for influence within the populist movement, the evolutionary Peter Lavrov, used Hegelian appeals

  in his famous "Historical Letters" of the late sixties by urging men to renounce their purely personal lives in order to be "conscious knowing agents" of the historical process.70

  It is perhaps more correct to speak of the vulgarization of Hegelian concepts than the influence of Hegel's ideas in Russia. In either case, the impact was great-and, on the whole, disastrous. The strident presentation of Hegelian philosophy as an antidote to occult mysticism was rather like offering typhoid-infected water to a man thirsty with fever. Koyre provocatively says of Belinsky's rejection of Hegel that it did not represent a real change of philosophy but "the cry of revolt of a sick man whom the Hegelian medicine has not cured."71 One might almost say that the Hegelian medicine turned the Russian taste for all-encompassing philosophic systems into an addiction. Those who managed to recover from the intoxication with Hegel were left with a kind of philosophic hangover. They tended to reject philosophy altogether but were left with a permanent sense of dissatisfaction with moderate positions and tentative compromises. The "ex-Hegelians" Belinsky and Herzen were no less extreme than the permanently intoxicated Bakunin in their hatred of posredstvennost' ("mediocrity"), meshchanstvo ("bourgeois philistinism"), and juste-milieu.

  The Hegelian idea that history proceeds through n
ecessary contradictions also lent a new quality of acrimony to the previously mild debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers. Hegelianism seemed to demonstrate the "power of negative thinking." It is difficult to find any positive statement of belief in the late writings of the "furious" Belinsky. Yet, because of the passionate sincerity of his personality, negative thinking was made to appear a virtue and became a kind of tradition in the new literary criticism which he largely introduced into Russia. Herzen too-for all his literacy and concern for individual liberties-was at his best in attacking the attackers of freedom. He became convinced that revolutionary change was coming and left Russia forever in 1847 to greet the coming stage of history in Paris. After the failure of 1848, he decided-along with Bakunin-that revolutionary change was to come from Russia after all. Suddenly in 1849-50 Herzen and Bakunin both turned to the ideal of the peasant commune and a free federation of Slavic peoples72-not primarily because they were morally or spiritually desirable as they had been for the Slavophiles and were soon to be for the populists, but because they represented the "negation of negation": an historical battering ram for upsetting the philistinism of bourgeois Europe.

  The necessity of a coming final synthesis in history, a revolutionary deliverance from oppression and mediocrity, was a belief common to all Hegelians of the left from Marx to Proudhon, the most influential Western

  revolutionaries after 1848. Herzen and Bakunin shared the conviction and sided more with their common friend Proudhon than with Marx in looking for revolution through an heroic elite rather than economic forces. Bakunin embraced the coming revolution unreservedly, Herzen with deep reservations; but both believed it to be inevitable.

  Hegel had given them an "algebra of revolution" without any equivalents for the formula. Thus, the Russian disciples differed widely in their understanding of who was the agent of the absolute at the present stage of history. Bakunin looked by turns to Western urban revolutionaries, East European peasants, Nicholas I, the anarchist movement in Switzerland and Latin Europe, and finally to conspiratorial terrorists in Russia. Herzen looked to Paris, to the Russian countryside, and to Alexander II before losing both his influence and his faith in the 1860's. Although Herzen never participated in revolutionary activity in the Bakunin manner, he was hypnotized by it. "Better to perish with the revolution than live on in the alms house of reaction,"73 he had advised his son in 1849; ar,d in his late years one detects a certain elegant nostalgia for the days when it was possible to believe in absolute liberation as he wrote his pessimistic "letters to an old comrade," Bakunin.74

  There were perhaps only two constant elements in the troubled careers of these, the two most interesting figures of the "remarkable decade." First was their romantic attachment to the image of a better society probably derived not so much from socialist blueprints as from nostalgic reminiscences of childhood and literary portrayals of fraternal heroism and happiness. Second was their essentially Hegelian conviction that a revolutionary repudiation of the existing order of things was historically inevitable.

  The fascination with Hegel led many Russians to believe in a coming liberation without deepening their understanding of liberty. Hegelianism revived in a secular form the prophetic hopes of the Muscovite ideology and provided a philosophy of history that was no less absolute and metaphysical (though considerably less clear). The idea that negation was merely a stage in the preparation for the final realization of the absolute was a kind of depersonalized, philosophical version of the Christian conception that the reign of the Antichrist would precede the second coming of Christ. It is a tribute to the depth of Hegel's influence on Russian thought that even those who subsequently rejected his philosophy still felt the need for a philosophy of history: Comte's positivism, social Darwinism, or Marxist materialism. Hegel encouraged Russian secular thinkers to base their ideas on a prophetic philosophy of history rather than a practical program of reform, to urge action in the name of historical necessity rather than moral imperatives.

  The Prophetic Role of Art

  If there was any supreme authority for the emancipated men of the "remarkable decade," it was not a philosopher or historian but a literary critic like Belinsky or a creative artist like Gogol. The extraordinary prestige of those connected with art followed logically from romantic philosophy. For the creative artist was in many ways the prophet; and the critic, the priest, of romanticism.

  The Enlightenment had found truth in objective laws, physical and moral, which were assumed to be uniformly valid throughout the natural world. They could be discovered by study and explained rationally by the natural philosopher. In romantic thought, however, truth was organic and aesthetic; its hidden meaning was best perceived intuitively and communicated poetically. Since different cultures were an important expression of the variety and hidden patterns of history, the romantic artist bore a special responsibility to find the meaning of national identity.

  The contrast between pure and propagandistic art, which became so important to a subsequent generation, did not concern the idealistic romantics of Nicholaevan Russia. All art was pure in the sense that it expressed little direct concern over social and political problems, yet strongly propagandistic in the sense that it conceived of artistic ideas as a force capable of transforming the world. It was called "??????!.' by Khomia-kov;75 Saint-Martin, "the unknown philosopher" of the anti-Enlightenment, spoke of it as "prophetic." It was indeed infused with prophecy in the Biblical sense of purporting to represent the word of God to man. It can also be characterized with the less familiar Greek term theurgic used by Saint-Martin to describe the spiritualist's act of establishing contact with other worlds, and by Berdiaev to suggest that art was viewed as divine work and not merely divine words.76

  The idea that artjwas_diyine activity was particularly rooted for Russians in Schelling's philosophy. He defined philosophy as "higher poetry" and sought to relate philosophic speculation to artistic rather than scientific pursuits. Inspired by Schelling, the Russians were quick to conclude that new progress in philosophy required the development of new art forms. The Schellingian Nadezhdin accordingly drew up the first of many calls for new prophetic art beyond either classicism or romanticism in his writings and lectures as professor of art and archeology at Moscow. As early as 1818 he defined the poet's calling:

  To teach people the good is the duty of the poet. He is the true herald, the dread teacher of the world, His task is to strike down and unmask vice, To teach and guide people onto the true path. A Christian poet is the organ of eternal truths.77

  Belinsky served his journalistic apprenticeship under Nadezhdin in the thirties, and, for all his philosophic convolutions, remained faithful to his teacher's belief in the high calling of the artist: "Art is the direct intuition of Jrjjth, i.e. thought in the form of images."78 These images of truth had-for the awakening imagination of Nicholaevan Russia-a uniquely national configuration. As Glinka was reputed to have said, "nations create music, composers only arrange it." The artist thus became "the nerve end of the great people," who "like a priest or judge should not belong to any party" and must never substitute "earthly reason for the heavenly mind."79 Literary criticism became a kind of exegesis of sacred texts, the chief critic of any major "thick journal" a high priest, and his desk "the altar on which he performs his holy rites."80 Through Kireevsky, Nadezhdin, and Belinsky literary criticism became the major medium for discussing philosophical and social questions. Far from being mere reviewers, the critics of this period acquired a key place in the development of intellectual life. Belinsky, in particular, acquired a unique moral authority through his uncompromising moral fanaticism. His mantle was passed on in a kind of apostolic succession to Chernyshevsky in the sixties and Mikhailovsky in the seventies. Problems and ideas raised in his writings found their way back into the literary milieu from which they had come and reached a new level of intensity in the ideological novels of Dostoevsky.

  The first proclamation of the new exalted conception of the artist w
as made by the Schellingian Prince Odoevsky in a new journal he founded in 1824 (with the Decembrist poet Kiichelbecker) to help create "a truly Russian poetry." Enjoying the collaboration of Pushkin and many of the leading poets of the age, the journal was appropriately called Mnemosyne (the mother of the muses). "Sculpture, Painting, and Music," a story by the young poet Venevitinov, illustrates the general feeling that the arts were all divinely inspired. The three arts are depicted as three celestial virgins with a common mother, Poetry, of whom the whole world is an expressive creation. In a similar vein stands Odoevsky's idea that "poetry is the number, music the measure and painting the weight" of a common truth.81 Similarly, the story "Three Artists" by Stankevich, the philosopher-artist who dominated the philosophical life of the thirties as much as Odoevsky had the twenties, told of three brothers trying to capture "the eternal beauty of mother nature" in different media, each inspiring the other until at last