This appeared in: Ulbandus Review 5 (Fall, 1987): 123-59, without the Introduction. Note: minor changes have been made to this version.

PARADOXES OF ORGANIC CRITICISM(LETTERS TO F. M. DOSTOEVSKY)

A. A. Grigor'ev

Introduction, Translation and Notes by Marcus Levitt

Introduction Apollon Aleksandrovich Grigor'ev's "Parodoxes of Organic

Criticism” ranks with the best of Russian nineteenth-century literary criticism and reveals its author as one of the most tragic figures in a tradition fraught with passionate truth-seekers. Grigor’ev’s swan song as a critic, “Paradoxes" is last and perhaps the best of his "programmatic articles" of the last ten years of his life, in which he tried--following Belinsky's example--to reevaluate the entire course of Russian literary development. In the form of two letters to Fedor Dostoevsky, "Paradoxes" appeared in the novelist’s thick journal Epokha in the May and June issues of 1864.1 A few months later, on September 25, 1864, Grigor'ev died, suddenly, after release from debtor's prison, where he had done several short stretches during the last, troubled years of his life. He was 42.

After the demise of M. P. Pogodin's Moskvityanin in the mid-fifties, Grigor'ev had an extremely difficult time as a critic, both in finding a journal for which he could write, and reorienting himself in the literary politics of the Emancipation period. Moskvityanin's so-called "molodaya redaktsiya'" which Grigor'ev headed, had championed the cause of a national literary tradition. They challenged such "natural school" critics as I. I. Panaev who denied the existence and feasibility, indeed the desirability, of a peculiarly "Russian" literature.2 Grigor'ev had made bold to proclaim the young playwright Nikolay Ostrovsky as Russia's "new word," that is, an affirmation and proof of national elements in literature. But it wasn’t hard for even such relatively sympathetic critics as A. V. Druzhinin to call Grigor’ev to task for his extravagant assertion.3

Belinsky once wrote to Gogol that

Now you are the only one we have, and my moral existence and love of creative literature are closely bound up with your fate; if you did not exist I would bid farewell to both the present and future of our country's creative life. I would live only in the past. . . 4

Now, in the last period of his life, Grigor'ev found himself in the very position that Belinsky had so dreaded: a critic without an author. As Grigor’ev himself often insisted, critical theories alone, without the ultimate authority of art to inspire and validate them, are doomed, "a lost cause." Grigor'ev refused to use art as platform or pretext for his own views, a critical modus vivendi for which he bitterly reproached Belinsky’s epigones, the radical social critics. Together with tracing the history of the current malaise in Russian literature and criticism, he took the unhappy alternative Belinsky had suggested: he looked to the past, and, looking back, saw all roads leading to Pushkin, who emerges as the great hero of Russian culture in Grigor'ev's late writings.

As for a place to publish, Grigor'ev did find a niche in collaboration with the Dostoevsky brothers and the young philosopher N. N. Strakhov on Vremya and Epokha. But their new doctrine of "pochvennichestvo," or "a return to the soil" and to national roots, met with little sympathy in the face of the growing polarization within the intelligentsia that characterized the period immediately following the liberation of the serfs.5 Grigor'ev grew more and more despondent, and in "Paradoxes" he paints a rather pessimistic and even self-defeating portrait of himself as "a voice crying out in the wilderness," as an Isaiah, convinced of the truth of his ideas yet tragically unable to make even his closest collaborators - like Dostoevsky - really understand.6

"Paradoxes" represents a valuable document for understanding Dostoevsky’s development in the sixties. As chief critic on Dostoevsky’s journals, Grigor'ev's ideas clearly must have had an impact on the novelist’s own views, even if we concede that Dostoevsky's basic intellectual and aesthetic preferences had been formulated before his return to Petersburg and his collaboration with Grigor'ev in 1859-64. It was precisely this period that saw the emergence of the "new" Dostoevsky, author of the major, ideological novels. That Grigor'ev addressed these open letters to Dostoevsky implies their closeness, yet at the same time the letters also betray Grigor'ev's acute sense of isolation. The most common evidence cited to prove Grigor'ev's influence on Dostoevsky are his outspoken views on Pushkin; Dostoevsky's famous "Pushkin speech" of 1880 may be seen as a reworking and "messianization" of Grigor'ev's ideas.7 Like Grigor'ev, Dostoevsky looked back to Pushkin as proof of the existence of a specifically Russian, national culture. Yet there are many other of Grigor’ev’s ideas from "Paradoxes" that later show up in Dostoevsky's notebooks and in the Diary of a Writer of the seventies, especially after Strakhov

2

published a volume of Grigor'ev's articles (including this one) in 1876.8

But the importance of "Paradoxes" goes far beyond its value either as a supplement to Grigor'ev's biography or as proof of his possible influence on Dostoevsky. As literary criticism it measures up to that of any of his contemporaries. Furthermore, it contradicts the (false) textbook notion of a simple progression from Belinsky to Chernyshevsky-Dobrolyubov-Pisarev; Grigor’ev claims Belinsky for the "organicists."9 The article also helps to place the involved Russian debates over art within the broader--and often ignored--European and American context.

Like many critics of the first half of the nineteenth century, Grigor’ev strove to present an all-embracing philosophy by means of his literary criticism. For the German romantic tradition that culminated in the early Hegel and Schelling, the artist's aesthetic cognition was the only true way to integral truth.9 By the mid 1840s, Belinsky in his "left” Hegelian" phase had begun to reject aesthetics as the primary mode of understanding, subordinating artistic to social and political concerns, and paved the way for the "destruction of aesthetics" of the 60s. Grigor'ev, on the other hand, together with Carlyle, Hugo, Emerson, Coleridge, and others with whom he claimed solidarity, remained loyal to Schelling, whom Grigor'ev unequivocally embraces in "Paradoxes" as his master.10

Grigor'ev just as unequivocally repudiates "right-wing" Hegelianism - a crucial distinction that the radicals, and most later Russian and Soviet commentators, have failed to make, associating Grigor'ev with that ultimate whipping-boy of Russian literary polemics, "art for art's sake." From this perspective, “Paradoxes" represents a significant link in Russian philosophy. It bridges the gap between the early Slavophiles and later idealist thinkers, including Dostoevsky, and is one of the most philosophically coherent repudiations of the self-assured but far less sophisticated social criticism of his day.

Finally, as a striking example of criticism as polemic, "Paradoxes of Organic Criticism" plunges the reader into the turbulent literary waters of the 1860's. Grigor'ev manages to comment on practically every major critic of the day - and many minor ones. But more than that, "Paradoxes" is a unique experiment in self-definition, in which the practical demands of writing and presenting a logically consistent argument contradict the underlying a priori assumptions about the "organic," developing, only semi-conscious (and hence incomplete and imperfect) nature of reality, or at least, of man's perception of that reality. A purely conscious approach, however clear and logically consistent, is doomed by the unconscious, organic complexity of that reality. Grigor'ev admits (p. 125) that he must express himself in "fragments that have no visible, well-structured connection with the whole." These connections exist, but it is beyond us (beyond

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everyone, except perhaps the artist-genius) to see and understand them. The critic "reads" reality as he reads a work of art: by his sympathetic connection with the universe, by his intuitive connection with the whole. Like Nietzsche, Grigor'ev shuns the "seductive clarity" of neat, abstract systems; he rejects the title of "theoretician"; like Nietzsche, he must find alternative ways to express his thoughts; he must use indirect means, strange, invented terms, "paradoxes."

In this lies, no doubt, part of the reason why Grigor'ev's writing repelled many of his contemporaries, yet the "kaleidoscopic" nature of his thought (as he called it) may spell a certain attraction for those stifled by the deadly predictability and self-satisfied seriousness of the social critics. It also spells the main challenge for the translator. He must choose at every turn between preserving Grigor'ev's endless sentences, strung out along a chain of "ands" and semicolons (as confusing in Russian as they would be in English), and cutting the dizzying successions of clauses down into more digestible, albeit less Grigor'evian, chunks. Any translation represents a compromise. I have tried to reproduce, within the limits of comprehensibility, the feel of Grigor'ev's prose, its gangling ungainliness, its flightiness, its discomfort with the limited expressiveness of words themselves (which Grigor'ev opposes to the unlimited, ungraspable expressiveness of reality). Hence, his seemingly pedantic urge to qualify every verb by presenting it in every possible tense (e.g., "the views which I have considered, and still do consider now," and no doubt will continue to consider...!). "Talented books" sounds strange in Russian and in English. These are, says Grigor'ev, "lounging" (khalatnye) articles. One could translate this with the French "deshabille," of which the Russian may have been a calque, but that would miss the homey, unfettered, slightly uncouth, come-as-you-are yet self-conscious air that Grigor’ev maintains throughout. Grigor'ev thus almost insists on our indulgence, and a translator must hope that the reader will extend her or his charity that much further!

The citations from Hugo in the following translation follow Grigor’ev’s Russianized version. The most significant change Grigor'ev made in the French (or, perhaps, as seems more likely, demanded by the censor) was to address Hugo's passionate monologue to "Life" rather than to God. Following each passage from Hugo's William Shakespeare I have noted, in brackets, the part (in upper case Roman numerals), book (in Arabic numerals) and section (in lower case numerals) of Hugo's work.11 The translation follows the text in Sochineniya Apollona Grigor'eva, vol. 1 (of one), N.N. Strakhov, ed., St. Petersburg, 1876), pp. 614-643. Since the original preparation of this manuscript the Russian text of "Paradoxes" has been republished in Apollon Grigor’ev, estetika i kritika, A.I. Zhuravleva, ed., (Moscow: "Isskustvo,” 1980). I am indebted to Zhuraleva for some of the information in my notes.

4

Two pages of "Paradoxes," translated by Ralph Matlaw, appear in the appendix to his critical edition of Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 1969), pp. 230-31; this was not consulted.

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. V.S. Krupitsch maintains that "Paradoxes" "must be considered merely as an introduction o the critic's intended exposition of the theoretical application of organic criticism." See his "Introduction" to Apollon Grigor’ev, Sochineniya (Villanova, Pa.: Villanova Univ. Press, 1970), p.xxxi. V. S. Nechaeva suggests that there may have been a third letter that was never published (Zhurnal M. M. i F. M. Dostoevskikh "Epokha" 1864-5 [Moscow: "Nauka," 1975], pp. 157-8).

The best general study of Grior'ev's criticism is Robert T. Whittaker, Jr.'s "Apollon Aleksandrovič Grigor'ev and the Evolution of 'Organic Criticism,'" Diss. Indiana University 1970. See also: George C. Jerkovich, "Apollon Grigor'ev as a Literary Critic," Diss. Univ. of Kansas 1970; B. F. Egorov, "Apollon Grigor'ev--Kritik," Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo universiteta vyp. 98 (1960), pp. 194-246, and vyp. 104 (1961), pp. 58-83 (a revised version was published as the introduction to A. A. Grigor'ev, Literaturnaya kritika, ed. B. F. Egorov [Moscow:1967]); Jurgen Lehmann, Der Einfluss der Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus in der russischen Literaturkritik des 19. Jahrhunderts: Die "organische Kritik" Apollon A. Grigor'evs (Heidelberg: Winter, 1975); and Wayne Dowler, Dostoevsky, Grigor'ev, and Native Soil conservatism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), which contains a useful bibliography.

2. On Grigor'ev and Moskvityanin see: Wayne Dowler, "The 'Young Editors' of Moskvityanin and the Origins of Intelligentsia Conservatism in Russia," Slavonic and East European Review 55: 3 (July 1977), 310-27; and I.S. Zil'bershtein, "Apollon Grigor'ev i popytka vozrodit' 'Moskvityanin,'" pp. 567-580 in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 86, F. M. Dostoevsky (Moscow: "Nauka," 1973).

3. Even many years later, in 1859, Dobrolyubov ridiculed Grigor'ev's "new word," in his famous article "Temnoe tsarstvo" (Sovremennik , kn. VII and IX). But as we see from "Paradoxes" itself, Grigor'ev stuck by his guns. Dostoevsky, we should note, came to share Grigor'ev's view of Ostrovsky. He noted in 1861 that "we have already said many times that we believe in his [Ostrovsky's] new word..." F. M. Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: "Nauka," 1978), XVIII, 60. See also Dowler, Dostoevsky, Grigor’ev, pp. 67 and 127. Ralph E. Matlaw, in the introduction to his translation of Grigor'ev's autobiography (My

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Literary and Moral Wanderings [N.Y.: E. P. Dutton, 1962], pp. xxxvii-xxxviii), asserts that Ostrovsky was the "single writer Grigor'ev grossly overestimated."

4. Letter of April 20, 1842. V. G. Belinsky, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: "Khud. Lit.," 1976-82), IX, 515.

5. On Vremya, Epokha and "pochvennichestvo," see, together with the works cited in note one: Ellen Chances, "Literary Criticism and the Ideology of Pochvennichestvo in Dostoevsky's Thick Journals Vremya and Epokha," Russian Review 34: 2 (April 1975), 151-64; V. Kirpotin, Dostoevsky v shestidesyatye gody (Moscow: "Khud lit.," 1966); V. S. Nechaeva, Zhurnal M. M. i F. M. Dostoevskikh "Vremya" 1861-1863 (Moscow: "Nauka," 1975); Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); and V. V. Zenkovsky, A History of Russian Philosophy, trans. George Kline (N. Y.: Columbia Univ. Press, 1953), I, chapter 14.

6. One specific grounds for strife was M. M. Dostoevsky’s dissatisfaction with Grigor'ev's frequent positive references to the Slavophiles in his articles. See Apollon Grigor'ev, Vospominaniya, ed. R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik (Moscow-Leningrad: Academia," 1930). pp. 380 and 441-2. Dostoevsky defended himself and his brother Mikhail (who died on June 10, 1864) against Grigor'ev's complaints in his notes to several of the critic’s letters, printed as part of Strakhov's recollections of him (Epokha no. 9, 1864, pp. 1-55; reprinted in Vospominaniya, pp. 518-27). It is characteristic of Grigor'ev's sense of desperation at this time that he would magnify what was essentially a tactical question (defending the Slavophiles openly, the Dostoevsky brothers feared, would alienate the journal's potential supporters) into one over fundamental values. While Grigor’ev probably made Dostoevsky more aware of the Slavophiles' contribution to Russian thought, they both shared fundamental objections to Slavophilism, in the first place to its disparagement of Russian letters.

7. For an enumeration of Dostoevsky's "borrowings," see Leonid Grossman, "Apollon Grigor'ev (k pyatidesyatiletie smerti)," Russkaya Mysl', 11 (1914), 1-19. Dowler considers that "there can be little doubt that Dostoevsky's ideas about art, which leaned heavily on Schelling's aesthetics, were borrowed from Grigor'ev." (Grigor'ev, Dostoevsky, pp. 116-17.) On Dostoevsky's "Pushkin Speech" and its sources, see my Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), chap. 5.

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8. For example, when Dostoevsky modified his earlier antagonistic position on Belinsky in his June, 1876, issue of Diary of a Writer. There he (mis)quotes Grigor'ev's opinion from "Paradoxes" that "had Belinsky lived longer, he would probably have joined the Slavophiles." Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: "Nauka," 1981), XXIII, 42.

9. As do many Western scholars, like Victor Terras. See his Belinskij and Russian Literary Criticism: The Heritage of Organic Aesthetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974).

10. Victor Terras agrees that, after Belinsky, the greatest direct influence on Grigor'ev was that of Schelling. See "Apollon Grigoriev's Organic Criticism and Its Western Sources," in Anthony M. Mlikotin, ed., Western Philosophical Systems in Russian Literature (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, n. d.), p. 77. Terras considers Carlyle the next greatest influence on Grigor'ev.

11. The best French version is Victor Hugo, Oeuvres completes, ed. J. Massin (Paris: le Club français du livre, 1969), vol. 12. William Shakespeare has also been reprinted as a separate volume (Paris: Flamarrion, 1973). For an English translation, see Works of Victor Hugo (London-N.Y.: The Chesterfield Society, [1910]), vol. 10.

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PARADOXES OF ORGANIC CRITICISM(LETTERS TO F. M. DOSTOEVSKY)

A. A. Grigor'ev

Letter One: The Organic View and its Basic Principle

What's that something about? About everything! - Repetilov (Woe from Wit,

IV, iv)

Recently several - I won't say disagreements, but rather - misunderstandings have arisen between us regarding several questions relating to Russian literature, and therefore to art in general, and consequently - since art is, on the one hand, an organic product of life, and on the other its organic expression - questions relating to life in general.

The grounds for such misunderstandings were those extreme consequences of the organic view of literature in general, and of Russian literature in particular, which I have considered and still do consider essential to express, with all my usual candor and impertinence. Every thought, if it has been born organically rather than by pure logic, must fully complete its own organic cycle, if only so that its very abnormality within the sphere of other organisms will become manifest, and recognized as an organic defect.

As for my opinion of thought produced by pure reason, which carouses in the full freedom of logic and decides with indifference, ad [123]* libitum (that is, both pro and contra), problems like an non spiritus existunt? as circumstances require or simply depending on the personal caprice of the thinker, whom it is quite impossible to call the thought's "parent" - you know my views concerning such always self-controlled and cheaply procured thought well enough. You also know my profound enmity to everything which in the last analysis grows out of a similar purely logical process, my enmity toward theory, with its narrow grasp of life; with its despotism, ready to resort even to

* Page numbers in brackets refer to Ulbandus Review 5 (Fall, 1987): 123-59.

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terror; with its almost anatomical indifference in dissecting living flesh (I am saying this, of course, in the purely literary context); with its Procrustean beds, for whose sake everything not of its measurements is stretched out or cut down to size; and, finally, with its touching self-satisfaction, its delight in the five clever little books . . . (Although now, it seems, they have added a sixth.)1

For the very reason that my view on this kind of thought, in whose "progressions" I do not see an organic process, was clear enough to you, it was bitter for me to hear your reproaches that I myself am a theoretician. It was particularly bitter to hear it from you for many reasons, first of all because the movement of which you were once a leader played an extremely significant role in the moral process under whose influence my opinions on life and literature were formed.

However, despite your intentions, you yourself are partially to blame for a great number of the literary misunderstandings that have arisen between us. You were somewhat of a brake on me in the clarification and development of my view on the course of Russian literary - and, consequently, moral - and, consequently, social, - development. How can this be? you will ask with some surprise. Here's how, my good friend; it's very simple. I write for the journalistic organ with which you yourself have merged flesh and blood, and which has merged flesh and blood with you. I began a series of articles in this journal which combined to form an organic whole, which aimed at explaining my utmost understanding of the relationship between our life and literature since Pushkin (i.e., since that time when Russian literature's actual, true, independent relationship to life began) and down till our own day?. . . I had brought this series of articles precisely to the point where I had written merely a preliminary chapter about the first, so to speak "antediluvian" formations of independent Slavic thought and Slavic emotion, about those forces which have been [124] vividly documented, but either in an overly diffuse way - as with Nadezhdin, or in a denigrating way - as with Senkovsky, or in a fantastically capricious way, as with the highly talented Vel'tman, who lacked a clear consciousness of their essentially broad mission. After that I should have turned right to Gogol, and then, obviously, to his first organic successors - the school of sentimental naturalism.

Well, then, this still-unwritten chapter confuses the entire affair, and has generated a multitude of misunderstandings. My ideas weren't fully clarified or expressed even at their first stage. How then can I think of the second one?

As you must know, there is nowhere I can publish except for the organ connected with you and your name. Either I refuse to work for them, or they won't have me. This is, of course, because I have neither the right nor the inclination to renounce even a

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hundredth - not to mention a tenth - part of that in my thought which I consider to have been worked out organically; and I wouldn't even sacrifice it for that faction with which lie almost all of my basic political and social, religious and moral sympathies, i.e., for Day.2 How could I make such a sacrifice? How could I share Day's indifference to the supreme manifestation of our spiritual forces, to Pushkin, and its still greater (not to say worse) indifference to a phenomenon which for the time being still constitutes for me our new word, that is, to Ostrovsky? And furthermore, how could I convince myself that the whole phase of spiritual development which we underwent after Peter is in essence a mirage and nonsense? Finally, how could I come to appreciate the charm of the butchery of Kirilla Petrov, who tortured Nastas'ya Dmitrova - as has Mrs. Kokhanovskaya, who is so horribly talented, but gets so horribly carried away?3. . . This is all quite impossible - these are alien, oppressive, burdensome strata in my organic world.

Consequently there is no outlet for my ideas - except Epoch. I cast out my fragile Anchor in vain; in the end I preferred simply to give it up.4 But meanwhile the most intolerable urge arises when you have an idea that has been born organically but which has not yet come to its point of expression, or which has been forced to seek fragmentary expression; involuntary repetitions make their way into fragments that have no visible, well-structured connection with the whole; involuntary allusions deprive them of the desired clarity. Of course I also would have liked to write clearly - only not to the point of that “seductive” [125] clarity which our friend Kositsa5 has so successfully stigmatized with this epithet. However humbly I think of myself, I am not capable of supplying intellectual "cud" to a generation afflicted with premature senility. The clarity I desire can only be gained via the organic process of organic thought.

On the other hand, I became fairly well fed up (I frankly admit it to you) with working exclusively in the field from which I have of late dissociated myself, i.e., the field of theatrical criticism, although I do consider it a wholly honorable profession.6

As if a very petty pride and a very narrow moral perspective could be satisfied with raising the dander of some Mr. B*** or other7

(although perhaps if I could become a utilitarian I would be quite content with that modest assignment.) As far as I could judge from the facts, my criticism was not fruitless, at least in a negative way; and I will not give it up for anything, because - the devil knows! - perhaps it will yield some positive results, according to the proverb "Gutta cavat lapidem non vi, sed saepe cadendo" (I hope that at least this old proverb doesn't need to be translated),* if even, for example, they would stage

* “The drop hollows out the stone by frequent dropping, not by force” [M.L.].

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"Ronegda" or "Minin" in a human way, or if Mr. Vasil'ev would give us an original Hamlet, and so on.8 That's all well and good, but I can't rest content with that, and, honest to God, not from false pride. What pride do I have?... The simple need to express myself, that's all...

Anyway, you stated your desire that I write a completely candid article, something of a critical profession de foi; well, here, in these letters to you, I am beginning a series of articles - not so much candid, but rather, though one mayn't call them so, lounging articles - which let it all out. And really, why shouldn't there exist and be written such articles in our age which strives for complete candor - if not in deed then in word? You also wanted me to bring all the ardor of my convictions into this work; well, I'm only afraid that you will begin to reproach me for my fervor. In any case, I can imagine what kind of food for thought I'll be giving to the "satirical mind" of our denouncers with my "candid tone," not to mention the content of my articles! Well, God be with them! As they say, pay no mind - it'll pass with the wind. I was always as indifferent to their judgment as I was to last year's snow, and it seems to me that I have already proven this clearly enough by my stubborn refusal to react to any of their escapades. Hence the problem doesn't lie with them. [126]

All this notwithstanding, the problem arises on only one point, which is, that in the organic development of my view I cannot pass over the so-called school of sentimental naturalism, because it is apparent to me that the life process itself could not manage without this stage.

But first of all they find fault with me (and it may be, not without some basis) because I continually use the terms life, life process, vital forces, and so on. It is not because they don't understand these terms that they find fault with my assumptions "about the gradual and general development of ignorance and illiteracy in Russian letters."9 I still do not conclude that the people who write are completely lacking in a humanistic education - rather, they find fault precisely because they understand too well what it means, they sense too well what it smells of . . . But I am by no means as big a pessimist as one of my favorite poets who was reduced to the despairing cry:

Not the flesh, but the spirit has been corrupted in our days… .10

and I see no spiritual corruption in so-called nihilism because I sympathize in general with Gamaliel's judgment11 about each new phenomenon of spiritual life, and I am still convinced that, whichever way the world turns, this new phenomenon still belongs to that same spiritual life. At first it serves a negative function, despite its own will or intentions; later, of course, it will serve positively - still bearing witness to the same spiritual life. But in any

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case, the well-known doctrine which has happened at the present moment to be called nihilism, which painstakingly tries to avoid "generalizations" and painstakingly desires to restrict everything to empirical cognition alone ("I dissect frogs," says Bazarov, or "I make soap," as Mr. Ustryalov's childish parody of him expatiates on the stage12); takes up arms against just these terms ("life, life process, vital forces," etc.), pretending - to their greater success, of course - not to understand their meaning. They say they suspect "a lofty and mysterious significance" in these terms. What kind of mysterious essences, they ask, are "life, life process, vital forces"?

I do not mean to flatter that doctrine in any way, that is, I am not about to refuse to recognize or about to renounce my faith in these "mysterious essences" (uralte heilige Wesen, in Goethe's words) as [127] they truly are. . . For me, life really is something mysterious; mysterious, because it is something inexhaustible, "an abyss that swallows up any finite reason," according to an old book of mysticism; it is an unbounded expanse in which the logical conclusion of whatever clever head not infrequently disappears like a wave in the ocean; it is something ironic even, and in its profound irony, full of love at the same time, expending from within itself worlds upon worlds . . .

But this boiling ocean of life leaves remnants of its boiling in the past, bit by bit, and it is there in the past, that is, in these remnants, that we can detect the organic laws of life processes that have been completed. And still more: after we have detected several laws in the remnants of these processes that have been repeated more than once, we have both the opportunity and the right to deduce the possibility that they will be repeated anew — although of course in completely new and unknown forms. Since the remnants can be broken down into known categories, and since each category of life process can be called by a known name, this name — which constitutes the soul of the process, so to speak— is raised for us to the level of a vital force which gives birth to, and governs the process. At the same time, when we look over these varied, strata-like processes which lie before us in remnants, one after another, we cannot fail to see among them a successive, logical connection. In a word, we cannot but arrive at an organic understanding. In order not to arrive at it, we must quite forcibly and en pure perte stop ourselves from thinking. Perhaps the new doctrines won't deprive us of at least the right to think. (Alas! - do you beg to add - this is precisely what they do deprive us of!)

Thinking, until the time when the five (oh, well, six...) clever little books bring the moon down to earth, will always follow one path: the path of generalization. Even so-called nihilism is not sincere when it painstakingly tries to hide from itself the fact that it too, willy-nilly, goes the path of generalization; and that to accept its Kraft und Stoff13 you need no less faith than to accept

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any kind of Brahmin dogma - the only difference being that behind the dogma of the Brahmins once stood a whole huge mythological process that preceded reason, while behind the dogma of Kraft und Stoff, apart from those poor and superficial books (from the point of view of the real specialists in materialism), there is absolutely nothing standing at all.

And so - you have every right to ask - isn't that which I have [128] called the organic view (true, I have attributed in some way, if not its invention, then its first consistent application, to myself) no more nor less than that long familiar historical method which is essentially indistinguishable from the view, say, of Belinsky? . . .

Yes and no. Of course I have no right to demand, or even to desire, that the reading public should remember all of my writings as a critic, which have taken up more or less thick sections of journals and have been consigned with them to the archives. (I have taken you, for the sake of effect, as the average reader, who is not in the least obliged to recall the intellectual pabulum he has "consumed.") I am always obliged to explain my positions anew, to eternally begin from the beginning, and, more than that, without falling into repetitiveness. It is a very difficult task, but I will try, however, to define the difference between the historical and organic views in a new and different way than I once chose in the two sole so-called purely dogmatic articles "On Sincerity in Art" (in Russian Conversation, 1855, bk. Ill) and "On the Significance of Criticism at the Present Time" (Library for Reading, 1858, bk. I).14

Let's take Belinsky as an example, since his great name just comes to mind involuntarily, and since, hopefully, you won't suspect me of a lack of respect for this immortal fighter for an idea (as not long ago you suspected me of a lack of respect for Gogol because I dared deny that his "Marriage" was "a drama of everyday life" and declare that its author was by no means "a painter of everyday life").

No, I don't think that there's the slightest doubt for anyone - still less for you - that the Belinsky of the late forties was completely, radically, not the same Belinsky as the Belinsky of the early forties, just as the Belinsky of the late thirties and the early forties (the critic of the first issues of Notes of the Fatherland and the green-jacketed Observer) was completely and radically not the same Belinsky of Talk [Molva] and the Telescope. What can you say, for instance, about the radical shifts in his critical attitude toward foreign literatures; about the fact that the Belinsky of Talk gets down on his knees before young French literature (in particular before Victor Hugo and Balzac) while the neophyte Hegelian of the green Observer, the Belinsky for whom there is only one ideal of the poet - the

13

Olympian Goethe - tramples it in the dirt, along with Hugo and Balzac; about the fact that the Belinsky of the green Observer and the first issues of Notes of the [129] Fatherland bitterly tears Sand to pieces - that same Sand who, according to the Belinsky of the late forties, constitutes the crown and summit of contemporary art . . . ?

It would be extremely instructive merely to trace Belinsky's changes in attitude toward our own Russian figures. "The great drama," in his words, of Griboedov, about which he speaks with such enthusiasm in "Literary Reveries," has been reduced to the level of satire in an article from the early forties - that's one big example. But it is especially interesting to follow his attitude toward Pushkin's works. In Talk he unequivocally considers Pushkin's latest work a decline in talent; in the Observer he is overcome, and gasps in ecstasy, over the great genius' most recent work. In the middle and late forties comes his series of articles on Pushkin (which didn't always follow in close sequence) in which he is carried away by new theories that take possession of his ardent mind - undaunted as always in piling up contradiction upon contradiction, now in raptures from the influence of his own great aesthetic instinct, then pitifully sacrificing his sensibility to purely cerebral processes. He doesn't arrive at such positions gradually, but in leaps; their direct results are the until recently still "contemporary" theoreticians of Contemporary. Just one more step and, like them, he would have called many of those fragrant creations, whose beauty and importance he himself used to explain, mere "trinkets."15 In any case, he had already come to declare that Pushkin had fallen; in any case, he had already dethroned the maidenly-pure and chaste countenance of Tat'yana - to this day still the fullest outline of the Russian feminine ideal; he still managed to reproach her with dryness and coldness of heart.16 In any case he certainly did not understand Pushkin-Belkin either; the great moral process that gave birth to this character and the poet's conception of it, which begot some of his most supreme creations (“The Captain's Daughter,” “Dubrovsky,” “Chronicle of the Village of Gorokhino”17), and which in addition generated the points of departure for all of our contemporary literature - slipped past him, or, to put it better, was screened from his penetrating sight by a nimbus of theories . . .

For me personally - and probably for you too - there is no doubt at all that had the great critic lived a few years more he would have understood all of this, and would have explained it better than any of us. But the fact of the matter is that death overtook the critic at just [130] this moment and that this last stage of his consciousness froze into a school - not produced by Belinsky himself but precisely by this moment of his spirit. For the adepts of this school, and for many of those who slavishly follow any literary novelty, this last word of his is the single true one.

14

Some have forgotten that former Belinsky, the fiery judge and most subtle connoisseur of artistic beauty; others just do not want to know, thinking in the most naive way that the great and mighty spirit that was Belinsky's expressed itself fully in this strained and somewhat morbid moment of consciousness - which can be completely explained, moreover, by historical circumstances. They assume that he would have been completely exhausted by that which for them has constituted and still constitutes their daily fare, or rather, the cud they pass around from one to another, which has been definitively ruminated by that celebrated critic of our days, Mr. V. Zaitsev... And indeed, the thought that a multitude of the enthusiasms of their teacher have turned out to be insupportable does not trouble them in the least, nor does the fact that much that he renounced in the name of this or that set of principles is still to this day quite alive and well from the artistic point of view, like Hugo, and that Pushkin's “trinkets” are also alive, and will live eternally; indeed, that the healthiest part of our contemporary literature does nothing more than work out the world view of Ivan Petrovich Belkin…

These people - I am talking about the limited ones - see nothing of this and don't want to see anything. In this case, as always, there are talented ones who are valuable because they are the most sincere. Let's take Mr. Pisarev, for example, because he goes straight to the heart of the matter without evading the issue, with all the dauntlessness and naiveté of a man of talent. “It's time,” he says, “for us to get rid of Sillytown,”18 that is, let's leave off from fruitless literary endeavors, let's get rid of literature in general; because, after all, it's all nonsense. Let's take up the natural sciences and other useful things. Well, that's fine! We've come to an understanding, dotted all the “i”'s. Well, go take up the natural sciences, you'll be doing fine, and no one will disturb you; on the contrary, everyone will be exceedingly grateful. So leave Sillytown in peace, give it up, leave it to those who still believe in its real existence. This is good advice, and it would be good to take it. There are no subterfuges or mystifications here. And besides, this is the finish and denouement to all those theories to which [131] the teacher devoted himself, without foreseeing, of course, these extreme logical consequences of his ideas. He gave himself up to them from that very minute when he declared with all his characteristic zeal that "a nail forged by a man's hand is better and more valuable than the best flower in nature"...

We may call the view that led consistently and inevitably to these theories a one-sided historical view, born of one-sided but vigorous left-wing Hegelianism, the wing which alone carried on after the great philosopher, which alone elaborated the rich inheritance left to it; the right wing, due to the remarkable obtuseness and lack of talent of its representatives, only knew

15

how to jurare in verba magistri*, and repeated the empty words of their master, holding to the letter but not the spirit.

The snaky proposition that "all that is - is reasonable" could not, of course, remain undeveloped. It took all of Belinsky's naiveté for him to believe in it literally and to write the celebrated article on “The Anniversary of Borodino,”19 which is nonetheless remarkable in the highest degree as evidence of the merciless logic of the Russian mind, an article capable of distracting anyone for a time because it is itself written with profound, sincere distraction... Then the snaky proposition unfurled its tail before the critic's consciousness and drew him into the service of the eternal spirit, ever-changing its forms and shedding them one after another right down to the most rational one - in a word, drew him into the service of progress, for which art, science, history - are nothing more than forms, husks. At least this is how the left wing understood Hegelian development; whether it is really so, i.e., whether it really derives from the depths of Hegelianism itself, is a question we must ask our friend N. Strakhov, who, significantly, once seemed to Mr. Antonovich to be outdistancing our other, so to speak officially recognized philosopher, Mr. Lavrov, and to be "seducing" the latter with his Hegelian method . . .20 When I read that I could not, by the way, fail to regret that the late Meyerbeer didn't add le tentation par le Hegelian method to those he listed in the third act of Robert: tentation par le jeu, tentation par le vin, tentation par I'amour . . .

However that may be, the fact of the matter is that having recognized the progress of naked reason, Belinsky logically had to come to the position that "a nail forged" and so on, and then to go into [132] ecstasies over the social tendencies of the “Parisian secrets,” next to declare that Pushkin had declined, and so on, and so forth. I repeat: I concede the possibility that he would very likely have even come to the "trinket" theory, but along with that I have no doubt that life -to which he was so terribly sensitive and responsive (for he had, in truth, the nature of a genius), and particularly responsive when that life and its features began to speak in the living voices of literary talent — that life, I say, would have forced him to turn sharply from that path.22 Indeed he would not have turned sour like a later-day Westernizer such as Mrs. Evgeniya Tur, for example, or the other moribund or completely obsolete writers of our day, and he would not have had such a lack of aesthetic feeling - so lavishly evidenced (that is, not the feeling but the lack of feeling) by our theoreticians - that he would have maintained his enmity towards “trinkets” for long. His nature was much too alive, too responsive to life and too broad in understanding,

* “Judge in the master’s words,” i.e., be credulous, follow implicitly [M.L.].

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ready, with all the pride characteristic of gifted natures, to sacrifice that pride to the point of full self-renunciation . . .

But as I have already said, the misfortune (if there is actually, however, any misfortune in this) is that the school, generated by this last moment of Belinsky's critical consciousness, doesn't want to know the integral, full Belinsky, and that to this day it merely chews his old husks over and over again, but still can't digest them fully. Indeed someone made the rather successful witticism about the adepts of this school that Dobrolyubov, for example, wrote on the basis of Belinsky and the five clever little books, Mr. Antonovich - on the basis of Dobrolyubov alone, and Mr. Zaitsev on the basis of Antonovich alone, and that others will come who will write on Zaitsev's basis alone. Why shouldn't they come - let them come! - let them speak their minds right down to the last word, dotting the “i”'s, down to the essentials. Anyway, whatever they are like, they are still more alive than those, it is true, few who vainly tried to make themselves heard in the late Atheneum and Russian Speech, who would have liked to restrain both their own range of interests and those of others, including that of Belinsky, to pure Westernism, and whom we should let, like the dead, "bury the dead." Of course, those who see and want to see in Belinsky only a socialist are nevertheless closer to the present problem than those who would like to see him as an unadorned Westerner.

I have dwelled for so long on Belinsky and on the various changes [133] in his critical consciousness on purpose, of course. This critical consciousness is as much our consciousness as our art is Pushkin's. But since art, the result of the work of spontaneous and fully vital forces, is incomparably wider in scope than any particular consciousness, it is no wonder that our critical consciousness, in the person of Belinsky, who passed through various stages, faltered precisely in interpreting this art. Consciousness can elucidate only the past; art casts forth its own, so to speak clairvoyant views into the future, often extremely far, and projects outlines that only our subsequent development will color in.

The most substantial difference between that view which I call organic and the one-sided historical view is that the first, i.e., the organic view, recognizes creative, spontaneous, inborn, vital forces as its point of departure - in other words, not reason alone, with its logical demands and the theories which these demands necessarily engender, but reason and its logical demands plus life and its organic manifestations.

Unfailingly, the logical demands of naked reason reach their (at the present moment extreme) limits one way or another, and therefore unfailingly keep within known forms and known theories. Applied to fast-flowing life, these forms turn out to

17

be insolvent at almost the very moment of their birth, because in essence they are nothing but the results of conscious, i.e., past life; the profound line from Tyutchev's profound poem “Silentium” couldn't apply to them any better:

A thought once uttered is a lie . . .

But even so, don't you know that at times I would have given dearly for the theoreticians' naive faith in the infallibility of the logical computations of naked reason? It's so much more peaceful to live with theories, it's even easier to think (or, if you will, more routine, but still much easier) within the limits, of course, of that fence which every theory sets up. What are life and its manifestations for a theoretician? If it fits your theory - wonderful; if not - slice or stretch it, “beat-chop” as my old friends the gypsies say when they hobble a horse or make its old teeth like new with a chisel. A well-known vital phenomenon - well, let's take Ostrovsky and his work as a contemporary example - is too large, so that it is impossible to avoid. Just use your little Dobrolyubovian billy club, i.e., grab onto that side of the vital [134] phenomenon which will fit your theory - and presto! In this case, for example, the formula “the kingdom of darkness” completely reconciled the theory with Ostrovsky, and, unfortunately, even reconciled Ostrovsky himself with the theoreticians' camp - if only in a superficial way, so that his “Minin” appeared in the theoretician's journal - to the great surprise of readers who think at all.23 But what of it? Indeed in your own presence there was a discussion about Minin about a year and a half ago in which one of the adepts of the school (true, one of its biggest dolts) found its style deficient and discovered an element of satire in the well-known legendary happenings which Minin relates, and found almost the same thing in Marfa Borisovna's ascetic lyricism!24 A gentleman turned up (one of the “daring ones” of the late Contemporary Word) who abused Lev Krasnov with great zeal for being a representative of “the kingdom of darkness,” and another gentleman wrote a whole discourse about the emancipation of women (replete, for no good reason, with excerpts from all but Molleschott) in regard to the cultured Tat'yana Danilova's revel with the frivolous son of a nobleman, and endowed his amazingly foolish article with the most impressive title “Love and Nihilism.”25 In general, the exploits of the theoreticians over the past two years would have finally forced Kupidosh Bruskov to exclaim

I'll astound the criminal world, And the dear deceased'll give thanks in their

graves

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That they died. . .26

if even the most talented of them - or to tell the truth, the only talented one among them, Mr. Pisarev - hasn't been able to solve this problem (as I mentioned above).

Now the whole matter has become absolutely clear. The problem is not in Pushkin's “trinkets” or in the “banality” of some of his verses (like “Hero” for example), and has nothing to do with "the kingdom of darkness" (as if Ostrovsky had always depicted it only satirically!) but the heart of the matter is that:

1) Art - is nonsense, suited only to rouse dormant human energy for something more substantive and important, and to be swept aside immediately after some positive results or other have been achieved.

2) Nationalities, i.e., known folk organisms - are also nonsense, obliged to disappear into an amalgamation, the result of which should be a world where the moon will unite with the earth.

3) History (this was already stated quite clearly about two years [135] ago) — is nonsense, a senseless fabric of absurd delusions, shameful blindness, and the most ludicrous enthusiasms.

4) Science - apart from its exact and positive side, which is expressed in the fields of mathematics and the natural sciences - is the nonsense to end all nonsense, a delirium that fruitlessly stupefies human brains.

5) Thinking - is a completely unnecessary, nonsensical process, quite conveniently replaced by the good teaching of the five - whoops! - six clever little books.

“But yet it turns!” Every person used to the pernicious process of thinking will instinctively repeat Galileo's words. Indeed, even these results, which in the last analysis negate the significance of thinking, are nonetheless the results of thinking; whatever it may be, it is still thinking, and not a mere digestive process. (And perhaps a digestive process as well? you will again request to insert a comment.)

The well-known “generalizations” to which our adepts of nihilism are so disinclined, which they fear and avoid like the devil avoids laudanum, nonetheless assisted in the birth of their theories. Even in order to say “I dissect frogs” or “I make soap,” the well-known generalization (albeit a negative one) that elevates the distrust of any kind of non-empirical cognition into a principle is still necessary. These very words are insincere from Bazarov, and childishly vulgar in Ustryalov's parody. On Bazarov's lips they simply conceal a certain intellectual despair - the despairing consciousness of a man who's burnt his fingers several times and, in consequence, dreads fire, of a man who's lost his grip and fallen

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back on several insolvent systems which strive - though grandiosely, still not very successfully - to embrace the whole of earthly life in a single principle. Such a moment of consciousness as represented by the ideal Bazarov and his ideal nihilism is perfectly understandable, and has a perfectly lawful place in the general process of human consciousness; this is why, while I may have a hearty laugh at the facts (i.e., at this or that doltish representative of so-called nihilism), I cannot in any way permit myself to mock at its spirit itself, at the drift itself which, appropriately or not, is christened with this sobriquet, and still less am I capable of denying the organic, historical necessity of this newly formed eructation of materialism. But that this organically necessary eructation is no more than a stage, no dreams of white Arabs can dissuade me.27 [136]

Thought, science, art, nationality, history - are not stages of some kind of progress, not husks to be swept aside by the human spirit after it has achieved some sort of “positive results,” but rather the endless, organic functioning of eternal forces inherent in the human spirit as an organism. The matter, it seems, is really very simple and clear - but nowadays we are obliged to explain it as if it were something completely new. . . and really, it seems that this completely simple and clear matter is so simple and clear that the organic view itself which directly follows from it is nothing more than a simple, non-theoretical view of life's expression or manifestation in the science, art and history of a people.

Indeed, if we allow for progress in the sense that those thinkers purposefully - and the doltish adepts of the school so very naively - allow for it, it turns out that when it is applied to art, it isn't worthwhile or proper to read Homer after Shakespeare, Shakespeare after - let’s say, Hugo, Hugo after Pomyalovsky, and so on, i.e., down to the infinitely small, like the poetaster who contrived to make a citizen weep at the proper places.28 When it is applied to thought, it emerges, for example, that nothing is worth reading except Buchner, until such time as something a bit bolder will appear - that Mr. Zaitsev far outdid Belinsky, and so on. Yes, I am fully convinced that the naive, i.e., the doltish, adepts don't even fear such results at all, while the elder, smarter ones (riant dans leur barbe*, of course) don't dare to try and curb their zeal; and if they do dare, they receive a dressing-down from the most talented of the young ones similar to the one which the head of our “Denoun-sirs,” Shchedrin, recently received from Mr. Pisarev.29 And that's how it should be: Mr. Pisarev was right: “in for a penny,” one might say to Mr. Shchedrin, “in for a pound,” or: “don't wag your tail,”# to use his own favorite expression. However amusing the results, he who is responsible for them should either submit to them . . . or turn away from that path,

* “Laughing in their beards,” i.e., to themselves [M.L.].# Be evasive or prevaricate [M.L.].

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which is harder for one's pride.To apply the idea of progress as the school understands it

to history, to cite another example, will also give the most curious results. It is only unfortunate that in essence they present very little that is new, but only repeat La philosophie de I'histoire of Abbé Bazin (one of the thousand pseudonyms of the old man from Ferney [Voltaire]) and his Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit de nations - only [137] without the wit that to this day gushes forth from these dreadfully talented books.

But I repeat: however amusing the results, they were achieved in the same way as they were once achieved by unadorned Westernism, with its servility before 1) the Germano-Romanic tribe, and 2) centralization - a servility which logically led the late Atheneum to its sweet apotheosis of the Austrian gendarme as the enlightener of the “wild” Slavic tribes, and which had - alas! - earlier led the enthusiastic Belinsky to prefer the Turks, as an organized state, to the riff-raff, our unfortunate brothers whom the Turks were oppressing in both their religious and daily lives.30 Without doubt, Belinsky's enthusiasm would soon have given way to another just as fiery one; the late Atheneum thought it could turn back the clock,

. . . strained itself, grew faint,

(in the words of the single poem that appeared in it — perhaps as its own confession?) and died a most noiseless death. Its heir, Russian Speech, “the organ of the woman's mind,” vainly kept chewing over Atheneum's undigested cud with its senile teeth; even “the great Feoktistov”31 couldn't save it from its fall. . . Both the “Denoun-sirs” and the theoreticians laughed at it and at its fall, laughed quite naively, not suspecting at all that they were laughing at their own future selves; in their Pythian excitement, they completely failed to see that they share the very same premises with the old outmoded movement. In essence, the very same ideals stood before them; they were simply an outgrowth - even a necessary logical consequence - of that outmoded Westernism.

Both they and the Westernizers have had their thinking adepts and their doltish ones, ready to beat their heads against a wall with their eyes wide open. I remember one conversation I had with one of them about fifteen years ago, a conversation just as edifying as that which I cited above about “Minin”'s deficient style. Aksakov's drama “The Liberation of Moscow” had just appeared; a young, extremely dim-witted adept (who was, on the other hand, extremely obedient to his elders, for which they named him "the little knave") could not understand at all what interested me in it, and held forth in the most naive way about the backwardness, coarseness and savagery of the ancient way of life, and when I began to question him, asking what, for example, he thought of

21

such consequential people as Lyapunov and [138] Minin, he answered with the most naive fervor: but what kind of people could have existed in an age that lived on its stomach?

Such conversations as this and the one cited previously about Minin are precious, and we must and should not forget them. The objection that it is only the fibbing dolts who make such naive utterances does not hold water, because what would those who weren't dolts, the smarter ones, say if led to the extreme logical conclusions of their ideas? … Certainly they would have to say the same thing, or... turn away from that path.

But here is just one more conversation that comes to mind, which present as a kind of middle ground - a conversation which I had not with one of the dolts, but with one of the elders, concerning a certain fact - just as outstanding in its sphere as “Minin” is significant (a least, for me) in the artistic sphere, and Aksakov's chronicle in the purely historical one. A book you probably noticed came out in 1854 it seems, which underwent three editions in one year and spread all over simple, healthy, healthily-reading Rus', a profoundly sincere book, full of strength and irresistible charm - a book to which I will repeatedly refer in these letters - I mean The Wanderings and Journeyings of the Monk Parfeny.32 The whole of Rus' serious reading public, large and small, read this brilliantly talented yet simple book, an unpretentious, completely unoffending testimony to a pro-found inner life which may well have accomplished many moral revolutions, well, in any case, no few moral shock waves. It exerted almost the same irresistible charm on those people who, while they cannot be suspected of ascetic inclinations still haven't narrowed their moral and aesthetic perceptions to please certain theories - people who prefer, rather, to remain dilettantes in the face of the imperfection of their faith like the late Druzhinin and B. P. Botkin; these people, at least from the artistic point of view, appreciated it "accurately," to a nicety, as Druzhinin stated in his article on the book in the Library [for Reading].33 Its appearance coincided with that of The Family Chronicle, and they really were kindred phenomena in their sincerity; only the book by the humble monk and tonsurite of Mt. Athos was, to tell the truth, both broader and deeper in scope, and even more original. For the magnificent epic of Stepan Bagrov, despite its great merits, is nevertheless no more nor less than a direct sequel to the chronicle of the Grinev family, only a sketching-in of the colors and details of the outline left to us as [139] an inheritance by our supreme artist, Pushkin-Belkin. One must search farther into the past to find the roots of Father Parfeny's book, back to the wanderings of Barsky or Trifon Korobeinikov, or still farther, back to the wanderings of the Hegumen Daniil, the twelfth-century pilgrim34; more talented and stronger than all these forerunners I have enumerated, the book was nevertheless their latest link, and struck, possibly for

22

the last time, but powerfully, one of the most profound I strings of the Russian heart, that same ascetic string which sounded that wonderfully poetic appeal to "the mother of the desert," that wonderfully poetic cosmic contemplation in religious verse. The book by the humble monk and tonsurite of Mt. Athos plucked just such a heart string. Highly talented, uniquely talented, it was something wholly of the people as well. Having come from the schismatics, Parfeny, despite the fact that he left them, preserved that which is of value in our schism, that which, perhaps, forces us at times to value it even more highly than it is really worth; that is, Parfeny preserved the so to speak "vegetable," root connection with the old principles of daily life. It is as if monk Parfeny had preserved something of the vital, energetic speech of Protopop Avvakum, or, to put it better, Parfeny's distinctive speech, like his talent itself, evidenced a certain kind of strange, and if you please motley but charmingly naive and vital mixture of the bookish language (albeit an ignorantly bookish one) and the living tongue of the people… For the most part, this hugely popular book serves as a most graphic testimony to the continuity of the organic life of the people from the twelfth century through the middle of the nineteenth, to its integrity, to the inviolability of its spiritual origins - precisely because it was not something made, but something vegetable, like a legend, a hymn, or a song.

This fact should have been eminently clear to every thinking person; in the normal course of events it would have forced them to think things over thoroughly, and have served as a point of departure for further contemplations about, or representation of, the people and the people's way of life… But is it really so? What do you think? Well, in point of fact, it didn't quite turn out that way with "the wise of this world."35 You understand, I was completely carried away by this surprising book and made a big fuss over it, “like a hen with her egg,” as they say, and Druzhinin and Botkin were obliged to me for their acquaintance with it. For a time I was even seized with an ascetic inclination - at which you, knowing my, well, at least cerebral if not [140] heartfelt responsiveness, won't be surprised at all. . . In such a humor I happened to arrive at our northern Palmyra36 from Moscow, and, at one of the literary evenings at which most of the time was spent before dinner in listening to the scandalous gossip of the late P-v (which everybody had long since heard), and the time after dinner spent in mocking the silver-curled starets Andrei,37 I happened to get into a conversation about Father Parfeny's book with a person whom I, judging by his activities, could have considered a competent judge concerning things to do with the people and their way of life.38 He not only related guberniya gossip, but also at times expressed a strong sympathy for the people, and even portrayed the schismatics with some

23

knowledge, and indeed, even did it honestly (without using foul language, like a certain expert on them we know39). . . In answer to my queries, this competent gentleman expressed only misgivings about such books as Parfeny's, which, he said, might encourage too ascetic a state of mind. Lord, my God! In what normally constructed human head - especially the head of such an intelligent man as my interlocutor - would the misgiving arise that after reading the monk Parfeny's book everyone would become keen on living in the desert! That's the sort of idea you have to forcibly produce in your own head. Indeed, even the strictest religious viewpoint does not consider asceticism an indispensable requirement. Indeed, according to the most severe religious idealism, asceticism and living in the desert are not demanded, but only exist as a proof that the ideal can be attained . . .

At that point I was ready to say to my interlocutor (though I didn't): “Do not fear for humanity, that people will run off to deserts and untamed forests. Be afraid when the deserts and forests are empty, when the ascetic string in the human organism snaps, and the unquenchable thirst for the ideal, for that which is higher, for God, for that which at times draws men into the deserts and forests, dies out . . .”

Now I would no longer say this, because I am too firmly convinced that the stream will not run dry, that the great thirst will not be quenched; but in the way of a moral to be extracted from the conversation presented above, I do say that we, the thinkers, should not try to teach life to be lived the way we want, but to learn about organic phenomena from life; it is precisely this which in the last analysis comprises the basic principle of the organic view.

With this I end my first letter to you. If you like it, let's proceed further; if not - give it up. [141]

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Letter Two

Have you read it? There's this book…. - Repetilov (Woe from Wit, IV, iv)

Yes! I begin my second letter to you precisely with this question: “Have you read it? There's this book . . .” Of course the question will seem strange to you, especially when I name the book I have in mind - perhaps you won't understand why I chose this book specifically. The book is no more or less than Victor Hugo's book on Shakespeare, which they missed or forgot during the Shakespeare jubilee40 (not the Russians, but the English, who couldn't see the noses in front of their faces) - by that same author who provided one of the most powerful stimuli to modern literature, whose word in the name of those whom nature and life insulted was expressed at first in the great artistic type of Quasimodo, and perfected in that thoughtful and fiery, yet reflective creation, Valjean; by that same poet who loved and loves to try and get at the eternal, sacred places in the human heart, primarily in moral deformity (Lucrece, Mashen'ka [Marion] de Lorme), physical deformity (Quasimodo, Triboulet), or in degrading social settings (Ruy Bias) - in order to celebrate lyrically their wholeness and inviolability, their victory over human bestiality; by that same Hugo, devoured by his hunger for an ideal - albeit an ideal he does not carry before himself - to whom the literary mob has ascribed, among other absurdities, the two ridiculous formulas “le beau c'est le laid” and “l'art pour 1'art.”

All right, you'll say, all that is so, but “why all the fire and brimstone?”41 - why, you ask, have you brought up Hugo's book and Hugo himself when you were preparing to use your paradoxical principles of organic criticism to analyze the history of our moral and intellectual development as expressed in a succession of varied literary movements?

But in fact there is no action without a cause, at least, that's what everyone thought (apart from Stuart Mill, who suggested the possibil- [142] ity of worlds where actions are not tied to causes42) and what (despite Stuart Mill) the greater proportion of human brains still thinks. Not having reason to suppose that you have special sympathy for the logic of that nevertheless extremely remarkable English thinker, I hope that you will presuppose that I

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do have some reason for beginning my article this way.Well, be comforted . . . There are two whole reasons. One - is

the book itself; the other - is the impression that the book should make on our very own - and no one else's - homegrown thinkers, according to the laws of human thought.

The book itself is an abnormality of genius. You can hardly find two printer's sheets worth on Shakespeare himself in it; the book is monstrously constructed, and deceives the reader at every step - a book where you may search in vain for the usual scholarship and find instead the most colossal, most incredible falsehood where you'd least expect it, a book where, as one of our young friends justly observed in his first article on Shakespeare,43

you'll find unconscious omissions of whole phases of the Shakespearean oeuvre, conditioned by Hugo's national prejudices (for example, in the world of his historical dramas); a book in which you'll find the most profound insights about issues which have already been hashed and rehashed by other thinkers. Such places are, for example, his analysis of Hamlet's character and the many levels that are compounded in it, one upon the other; his explanation of Hamlet's meditation on life seen from the point of view of the supernatural events that have stunned him, causing him to experience a kind of half-drunken, half-clairvoyant state. There are such insights, I say, that if you sat twenty five German professors down and gave them twenty five years they couldn't invent such profundity. Take for example his profound historical explanation of duality of action as a general characteristic of the art of the Restoration period, one side basic and strong, the other a bit weaker and as if reflecting back upon the first (e.g., Lear and Gloucester). Or take his not only quite charming, but most brilliantly accurate and profound comparison of the immense construction of Lear's tragedy, a pedestal for the radiant image of Cordelia that hovers over it, with the construction of a cathedral in Seville whose immensity serves in essence as a base for the angle that hovers over it.44 These lightning flashes of genius into places that have long been hashed over by hundreds of philistines are [143] especially remarkable in this strange book in relation to Shakespeare although, on the other hand, they are not really surprising at all to those of us who see in Hugo the greatest exponent of contemporary Western humanity. With one word Hugo erases that frayed, overdone “weak-willed hero” notion of Hamlet created by the Germans, and rehabilitates Shakespeare's splenetic English image full of somber poetry; somehow, with a phrase like “Romeo — ce Hamlet de 1'amour,” he erases that kind of half-womanish image created to meet the needs of Italian composers and provide entertainment for the philistines, and makes it so completely comprehensible that even that towering phenomenon of a man, Mecredie, or that clumsy

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muzhik Mochalov can play the part of Romeo (and how well they do!); he returns that sinister light to the Shakespearean hero which usually envelopes him from the tragedy's third act on . . . I pick these things out almost at random, just to show you - but how many such curious items can one find in this extremely curious, abnormal book!

And I repeat: while it may be an abnormality, it is still a work of the greatest genius.

But most important, this book is so dreadfully curious for being, like Carlyle's books, imbued with faith, with a thirst, and is full of a fiery though unavailing quest for an ideal.

And how Hugo believes in art! Today it must simply seem - from the point of view of our very own and no one else's homespun thinkers - just laughable! On several pages Hugo uses the most awful scholarship and the wittiest of juxtapositions to prove that art is eternal and indispensable, and that (I fear to say it out loud) science has always been unstable and changeable . . . And how he rails against the needs of the stomach, or simply the belly, which is so important to our very own and no one else's homegrown thinkers . . . No . . . I won't hold back, I'll excerpt his marvelous tirade on the belly apropos of Rabelais:

“Every genius has his invention or discovery. Rabelais also discovered something: the belly. There is a serpent in man, the stomach. It tempts, betrays and punishes. Man, a being unified as a spirit and complex as a person, received three centers for his earthly mission — the brain, the heart, the stomach. Each of these centers is sacred according to the one great function characteristic to it: the brain has thought, the heart love, the belly paternity and maternity. Feri [144] ventrem,* says Agrippina. Catherine Sforza, when threatened with the death of her children who were being held hostage by the enemy, presented her belly to the army from the battlements of the citadel of Rimini and told the enemy: “From this others will come.” In one of the epic convulsions of Paris a woman of the people, standing on a barricade, showed the army her naked belly and cried, “Kill your mothers.” The soldiers perforated her belly with bullets. The belly has its heroism; but it is from this that corruption flows in life, and in art, comedy. The breast, where the heart is, has the head for its summit; the belly has the phallus. The belly, being the center of matter, is at the same time our gratification and our danger; it contains appetite, satiety, and putrefaction. The devotion and tenderness which seize hold of us there are subject to death: egoism replaces them. Inner feel-ings become intestines extremely easily. But it is a sad business when a hymn gets vulgarized and a stanza is deformed into a

* “Strike with the belly” [M.L.].

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couplet. That comes from the beast that is in man. The belly is in essence this beast. Degradation seems to be its law: that which begins at the top with the Song of Songs, ends down below with something abominable. The belly is a beast, it is a swine. One of those repulsive Ptolemies was called the Belly, Physcon. The belly is a terrible burden for humanity; at every moment it destroys the equilibrium between body and soul. It besmirches history. It is respon-sible for almost all crimes. It is the repository of vice. It is the belly which points Tarquin to Lucretia's bed, and ends by making the senate which had waited for Brennus and dazzled Jugurtha deliberate on the proper sauce for a turbot. It is the belly which counsels the ruined libertine Caesar to cross the Rubicon. Cross the Rubicon - how well that will settle all your debts! Cross the Rubicon - how many women will be yours! and what good dinners afterward! And the Roman soldiers enter Rome with the cry. Urban!, claudite uxores; moechum calvum addudmus (Citizens, lock up your wives! ...) The appetite debauches the intellect. Carnal desire replaces will. At the beginning, as always, there is some nobility. This is the revel. There is a shade of difference between heavy drinking and swilling. Then revel degenerates into a tavern debauch. In the place where Solomon was, Ramponneau appeared. Man becomes a shtof of vodka; an inner torrent of dark notions drowns thought; drowning conscience cannot warn the drunkard-soul. Beastliness has been consummated. It is no longer even cynicism, just emptiness and bestiality. [145] Diogenes has disappeared; only his barrel remains. It begins with Alcibiades but ends with Trimalchio. It is complete. Nothing is left, neither dignity, nor shame, nor honor, nor virtue, nor reason - just plain animal gratification, pure filth. Thought disintegrates into stupefaction, carnal consumption absorbs everything, nothing remains of the great and sovereign creation inhabited by the soul; excuse the saying, but the belly has eaten the man.

“Such is the final state of all societies where the ideal is eclipsed. It passes for prosperity and is called fulfillment. Sometimes even philosophers thoughtlessly aid in this degradation by inserting the materialism that lives in their consciences into their doctrines. This reduction of man to the level of a human beast is a great calamity. Its first fruit is the baseness apparent everywhere, even at the summit of each profession - in the venal judge, the simoniacal priest, the soldier for hire. Laws, rights and beliefs are a dung heap. Totus homo fit excrementum.

“In the sixteenth century all of the institutions of the past came to such a state; Rabelais lays hold of the situation, testifies to it, takes note of the belly that is the world. Civilization is nothing but a mass; science is matter; religion has gotten fat; feudalism's stomach can't digest; royalty is short-winded. Rome is a fat old city - is this health or sickness?

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Perhaps it is simply obesity or perhaps dropsy; a good question. Rabelais, doctor and priest, takes the pulse of the papacy. He shakes his head and bursts out laughing. Is it because he's found life? No, it's because he senses death; it is almost dying. While Luther reforms, Rabelais gives a belly laugh. Which attains the mark faster? Rabelais has a good laugh over the monk, the cardinal, the pope; laughter sounds together with a death rattle. The fool's bell sounds the tocsin. Well, what of it? Let's laugh. Death is at the table. The last drop is drunk with a last sigh. Agony at a banquet - indeed it's superb. The old world feasts and bursts. And Rabelais enthrones a dynasty of bellies: Grandgousier, Pantagruel, and Gargantua. Rabelais is the Aes-chylus of voraciousness, and this is grand if you consider that eating is devouring - the slop hole has become an abyss. Eat then, my dear masters, and drink, and come to an end. Life is a song, death its refrain. Others may dig fearful subterranean dungeons for the depraved human race; as far as the underground goes, the great Rabelais has his own opinion and is content with the wine cellar. The universe which Dante [146] exiled to hell, Rabelais locks in the kitchen. In this is the whole book. Alighieri's seven circles can hardly contain this prodigious wine barrel. Look within and you'll see them there, in the guise of the seven deadly sins. The papacy dies of indigestion - Rabelais makes a farce of it, the farce of a Titan. Pantagruelian joy is no less grandiose than Jupiter's mirth. Jaw against jaw, the feudal and sacerdotal jaw gorges while Rabelais' jaw laughs. Whoever has read Rabelais always sees this striking visual opposition: the mask of comedy staring sternly, fixedly at the mask of theocracy.” [I, 2, xii]

I hope that you, with your characteristic sensitivity, will again understand my intention and purpose for presenting this long excerpt, for translating so carefully this gloomy, unadorned, yet uniquely colored picture, so elevated in thought yet cynical to a point characteristic of geniuses.

When I read this section for the first time, I thought, here is a fine target for satire by our own prophets of the belly. Isn't it really funny, though - a person who takes up arms against his belly! But that's not all - the man makes it a principle that art should try to change the human focus from the belly to the heart and brain. He believes in the most naive and impudent way, and even preaches, on the basis of this extreme faith, that for the masses the “bread of life,” proffered by heaven in the form of that striving for an ideal which is expressed in art - is almost more important than the bread on the table. . . “It is very important to say at the present time,” says Hugo else-where in the book, “that the human soul needs the ideal even more than the real.

“By the real, we merely live; it is by the ideal that we exist.

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Now do you wish to understand the difference? Animals live, but men exist. "To exist means to understand. To exist means to smile at the present, to look beyond the walls to the future. To exist is to have a balance within yourself on which you can weigh good and evil. To exist is to have justice, truth, reason, loyalty, honesty, sincerity, common sense, right and duty rooted in your heart. To exist is to know what you are worth, what you can do, and what you should do. Existence - is conscience. Cato would not rise before Pompey. Cato existed.

“Literature is initiated into the secrets of civilization, poetry into the secrets of the ideal. That is why literature is a necessity for all societies. That is why the soul thirsts for poetry. [147]

“That is why poets are the foremost educators of the people.

“That is why we must translate, explain, publish, print, reprint, lithograph, stereotype, distribute, shout in public squares, interpret, recite, disseminate, give to everyone, sell cheap, sell at cost or for nothing at all, all poets, all philosophers, all thinkers, all those who express the grandeur of the soul.” [II, 5, ii]

The book of this great Western poet will probably be taken as an anachronistic, ludicrous, even harmful phenomenon (and therefore deserving of censure and even persecution) by the materialists, if they really take their views seriously and don't merely add the mysterious and hideously ugly phrase “when new economic relations arise.”

Of course, first and foremost, the question is: can we take their point of view seriously - do they themselves take it seriously? If we do take seriously - even if only in abstracto or for a moment as a joke - the premises of that strange fermentation which could, if you like, be christened with Gogol's well-known expressions “fiddle-faddle, balderdash on wheels, soft-boiled boots,”45 i.e., if we take Mr. Varfolomei Zaitsev's literary terrorism, the talented Mr. Pisarev's renunciation of literature and art ("as from Satan and all his works"), Mr. Sokolov's incredible economic balderdash and Mr. Antonovich's soft-boiled boots - if we take it all seriously, as something established and dogmatic, then, on the basis of all this, books like Hugo's should be shamefully denounced, persecuted, ridiculed, even defamed.

So, this is why I first began with Repetilov's question:

Have you read it? There's this book . . .

You would likely answer me with Chatskii's retort:

And did you read it? That's a trick!

because all of you — you, and S., and A., and D.46 — often

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reproach me for reading so few contemporary things, for following the “signs of the times” so little. Well, I must confess, I have not read very much that Mr. Chernyshevsky, Mr. Antonovich, or even the late Mr. Dobrolyubov wrote, and there's quite a lot I don't know; but I decidedly do not think that I have missed out, because I have read with pleasure Messrs. Zaitsev and Shelgunov, Mr. Sokolov's fiddle-faddle, as well as the clamorous balderdash of Mr. G-fov, author of that most amazing article “Love and Nihilism,”47 and I have read those who have written on the basis of the aforesaid thinkers, those who (again, if we take the premises of the balderdashed doctrine seriously) have gone incompara- [148] bly further Because the newer you are the more correct you'll be - and then there's the future, as Mr. Pisarev recently put it. That is, if you go even further, the future itself has still further futures, and so on usque ad infinitum.

It is obvious that I am provoking all of our very own and no one else's homegrown thinkers to mock at the great poet's book, and if they take their own premises seriously, they should. They should denigrate everything in it, - its basic idea, its admission that art has supreme and most consequential significance in the life of humanity, and its faith in man's soul, and its all-consuming thirst for an ideal, and its mystically pantheistic formulae; they should mock at that which [Hugo says] reigns in the Book of Job, at that “frightful Arabian sun” above Job's head, that “breeder of monsters, magnifier of calamities, which changes cat to tiger, lizard to crocodile, pig to rhinoceros, snake to boa, nettle to cactus, wind to simoom, miasma into plague” [I, 2, ii], mock at the new types [Hugo discovers], the “new Adams,”48 and finally, they should make fun of his burning faith in the boundlessness of life and its creations.

“No,” the poet addresses life, “you are not finished. There are no barriers, boundaries or limits for you; you have no finality — as the summer has winter, the birds lassitude, the waterfall a chasm, the ocean its poles, and man a grave. You have no end. You can't be told ‘you'll go no further’; but you yourself may say so. No, you are never exhausted. No, your quantity never decreases and your depth never shallows; your creativity is unstoppable. No, it is not true that some transparence can be detected in your immensity, presaging your end, that something shows through you that isn't you. Something - but what? An obstacle. An obstacle to what? An obstacle to creativity! An obstacle to the immanent! An obstacle to that which exists in and of itself? Nonsense!

“You may hear people say: 'Life can only go so far. Don't demand too much of it. It starts here and ends there. It gave you all it had in Homer, Aristotle, Newton. Now leave it in peace. It's all run out. It can't start over. It could act once, but not twice. It was all spent on such people.' When you heard them say such things you would smile in your dreadful depths if you were a

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person like them; but you do not exist in dreadful depths; you are love itself, you have no smile.

“As if you were struck with coldness! As if you ceased! As if you [149] were interrupted. As if you said, Stop! You! . . . As if you had to take a rest! No! Whatever a person created by you may be, you are life. If this pale crowd of living beings has something to fear or to be astonished at before the face of the unknown, it is not the fear and astonishment that we will see the creative force run dry, the eternal generative capacity go barren - rather it is the fear and amazement we feel before I the astounding phenomena of life, eternally rushing forth one after another. A hurricane of miracles blows without end. Day and night, phenomenal things spring up in alarm on all sides, and, no less of a miracle, they do not disturb the majestic peace of Supreme existence. This alarm - is harmony itself.

“The vast, concentric waters of universal life have no shores.” [I, 5, ii]

I cite these ecstatic hymns to life with special pleasure, although of course I well know their weak side. Their weakness is not, however, in their profound inner content, but in their external, excessively strained and passionate form of expression. But such is Western man, such are his representatives in thought and feeling. Such is Schelling, the most illuminating thinker of the West, despite the mathematical exactness of the formulas in his initial system; such is the phenomenon exactly parallel to him in the field of art, called Victor Hugo; such is the radiant reflection of the rays of Schelling's genius on Anglo-Saxon soil, called Carlyle. There is something elemental, at times unconscious like the elements, at times dark as the abyss, in these parallel, harmonious reflections of the great light that began to shine through the idea of naturphilosophie at the start of the century. It is still far from completing its colossal mission - which is and has been served unconsciously both by the naked dialectic of Hegelianism's logical thinking (which leads to the "everything-nothing," to "the absolute nothing") and by the blind materialism which rages in our day. Not without reason, of course, do our truly profound minds — at least the late Khomyakov and his school, and perspicacious, also somewhat elemental author of a book which caused much ado (but not about nothing), A. Bukharev49 - see in its extreme manifestations not only a matter of darkness (as does Mr. Askochensky50), but an unconscious service to the light as well . . .

The “elementality” to which I have referred as a characteristic trait of those supreme carriers of the real "signs of the times" does not [150] harm them in the least. It is that same vital quality as Schelling had, Schelling, who derived all of nature from the absolute (in his Naturphilosophie), on the one hand, and on the other, equated nature and the absolute (in his system of transcendental idealism). But this vital element wouldn't let him rest content - as Hegel was content - with a handsome logical construction, but made him go further. . . And this man, who did away with the skepticism Kant's

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severe criticism of the power of human reason created by means of the most simple proposition that a knife cannot determine whether it itself is sharp or dull, this same man, who constructed nature on the basis of reason and its logic, equating reason with nature (that is, in other words, he derived reason from nature) - in the final formulation of his uniquely world-embracing system, this very man halted in mute reverence before the limitless abyss of life. He did away with logical Hegelianism, also by means of a simple proposition - that the potential contained within the bounds of a human skull is, of course, of the same substance as that with which the infinite overflows, but is not identical to it in its manifestations (off by a verst, as Khomyakov would have said) — because deductions about potential, correct in themselves, undergo completely unexpected alterations when they collide with the currents of eternal life, and are subject to the loving irony of that infinite life... In my first letter, I particularly emphasized the boundlessness and inexhaustibility of life and its irony-in-love; now I arrive at the same point again.

The mission of this mysterious force, so dreadful yet at the same time so full of love (if the word "mission" can be applied to something which determines its own task) is, so to speak, artistic in the broadest and deepest sense: to nonplus us, astound us, turn our intellectual reckonings inside out, to try to prove to us at every minute of every hour precisely that even if the logic within our skulls may be the same as that with which the infinite overflows, the ultimate reckonings are made en grande, by the logic of life in its immensely broad expanses. Yes, life would not only be murderously boring, but rather paltry, if everything in it happened according to cerebral calculation. All this is rubbish - isn't it? - and malignant rubbish, if we proceed from the premises of our very own and no one else's homegrown thinkers. They are still digesting the results of Hegelianism (its left wing, of course - as I said in my first letter, we are not concerned here [151] with the right), that is, its all-devouring notion of progress, its celebration of the extreme limits of logical thinking, and its mechanically convenient ordering of the world and life; but with Schellingianism - if you'll excuse my preference for it - you may even reach, if you i please, faith in art, and from there it's not so far to that abyss “which I swallows up all finite reason”! But indeed this abyss... but I'll amuse them one last time by letting the crazy Titan tell them about the abyss:

“Whoever gazes for long into this awful holy of holies feels infinity pounding in his head. What would a hook thrown into this mystery retrieve? What do you see? Conjectures quiver, doctrines quake, hypotheses falter: all of human philosophy flickers with a dull light in the face of this orifice . . .

“In some way you hold the expanse of the possible under your own eyes. A reverie taking place within you yourself is suddenly out there before you, outside you. Nothing is discernible.

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Some sort of confused white forms are moving. Aren't they souls? You grab your head in your hands, try to see and understand. You stand at the window of the unknown. From all sides dense crowds of actions and causes, heaped upon each other, twist round you like a fog. The man who does not meditate lives in blindness; the one who does lives in darkness. We can only choose between one of these two obscurities. Experience gropes, observation lies in wait, proposition replaces proposition in this obscurity which to this day comprises all our science. If you gaze often, you become a seer. Vast religious contemplation takes possession of you. "Every man has his own Patmos within. It is his own will to go or not to go onto that frightful promontory of thought from which the dark is visible. If he goes not, he remains in the common life, the common consciousness, the common virtue or the common doubts - and that is fine. For inward tranquility that is, of course, better. If he goes, of course, he'll be caught. Deep waves of the mysterious have appeared before his eyes. No one has seen this ocean with impunity!”' [I, V, i]

The movement of thought I call “organic criticism” has few books which it may by rights call its own, and those which it can call its own, it does not do so totally, but only in part. There are many more books that could serve as its textbook (the book by Buckle,51 for example, or Lewes' book on Goethe,52 and others), we have no few such - the works of all of the Slavophiles, for example; the works of the late S. P. [152] Shevyrev, whose honest and talented works are still appreciated only by a precious few; the works of the late Belinsky (until the second half of the forties); the works of the late [Yu. I.] Venelin; the late Nadezhdin (if anyone would bother to publish them!); and so on. Dig a little and you will find even more... But you can count on your fingers the books that properly belong to organic criticism, - not including, of course, Schelling's works from all phases of his development, - its basic, tremendous mother lode. These are: Carlyle's book, in toto; Emerson's book, in part (although it is left far behind by Carlyle's genius); several etudes by Ernest Renan, and, if you please, several places (but not many) in his extremely superficial though especially notorious book; the works of our own Khomyakov.53 In him alone among the Slavophiles the thirst for an ideal coincided in a most surprising way with faith in the boundlessness of life, therefore he wasn't satisfied with petty ideals; in him organic modes are something inborn; whatever he talks about, even venery, he connects the subject at hand with the most profound tasks of life, and deduces it all from the very depths of nature and history, because of all the Slavophiles, he alone is a true, born poet, a seer, a vates, and because, despite his lucid and critical intellect, and the broad scope of his vision, he sometimes, and not too rarely, lapses into something elemental, into something of the

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kind that, having been expressed, is not exhausted but reveals vast perspectives for further elaboration; for this he is more valuable than the valuable (but strictly speaking, negative) Kireevsky, and more valuable than the honest but often very narrow K. Aksakov.

Hugo's book belongs to this small number, and, moreover, in toto - despite its deformities, blunders, great omissions, excesses in many places, despite the contradictions of his thirst for an ideal which consumes the whole work. That's why I have filled my second letter to you with it.

It finishes the propylaea to the building that I propose to construct.

Because everything up to this point is but a preamble; the tale is still to come.

FOOTNOTES TO LETTER ONE

1. Grigor'ev refers to the four articles he published in Vremya in 1861, numbers 2 through 5: “Narodnost’ i literature,” “Zapad-nichestvo v russkoi literature,” “Belinskii i otritsatel'nyi vzglyad v literature,” and “Oppozitsiya zastoya: cherty iz istorii mrakobesiya” (grouped together in the Strakhov edition of 1876 under the title “Razvitie idei narodnosti v nashei literature so smerti Pushkina”).

2. The Moscow weekly newspaper published and edited by I. S. Aksakov from 1861-65.

3. Pseudonym of N. S. Kokhanovskaya (1825-84), whose novel Kirilla Petrov i Nastas'ya Dmitrova appeared in Den' in 1862.

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4. Yakor', F. T. Stellovsky’s weekly Petersburg journal which Grigor'ev edited in 1863-64, and to which he contributed mainly theatrical reviews.

5. The pseudonym which Strakhov used for some of his most controversial anti-radical articles, "Kositsa" means either a small lock of hair (dim, of "kosa") or pigtail.

6. On Grigor'ev as a theatrical critic, see B. F. Egorov's article, "A. A. Grigor'ev" in A. Ya. Al'tshuller, ed., Ocherki istorii russkoi teatral'noi krit/ki, vtoraya polovina XIX veka (Leningrad, 1976), pp, 40-67.

7. Probably a reference to F. A. Burdin (1824-87), an actor in the imperial theatres whose style Grigor'ev attacked. Burdin was best known for his interpretations of Ostrovsky's comic heroes Lev Krasnov and Liubim Tortsov (see below). Grigor’ev condemned “burdinizm” as “Everything learned by rote, belabored, squeezed out of oneself with the help of the stage lights but without heart...” Yakor', no. 2, 1864; quoted in Zhuravleva, p. 475, n. 17. See also Egorov, pp. 63-5 and index.

8. Pavel V, Vasil'ev (1832-79) was an outstanding comic, one of Grigor'ev's favorite actors, and famous for playing in Ostrovsky's works. See Egorov, pp. 61-4.

“Ronegda” was an opera by composer and music critic A. N. Serov (1820-71). It was staged in 1866, after Grigor'ev's death.

Ostrovsky's “Koz'ma Zakhar'ich Minin, Sukhoruk,” published in Sovremennik no. 1, 1862 (and separately, St. Petersburg 1862), could only be staged in 1866 in a substantially changed version because of the censor.

9. Grigor'ev published an article entitled “O bystrom i povse-mestnom rasprostranenii nevezhestva i bezgramotnosti v rossiiskoi slovesnosti (iz zapisok [154] nenuzhnogo cheloveka)” in Vremya, no. 3, 1861, and signed it “Odin iz mnogikh nenuzhnykh lyudei.”

10. The first line of F. I. Tyuchev's “Nash vek” (1851).

11. In Acts 5: 38-9 (“if this plan or this undertaking is of men, it will fail; I but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them, You might even be found opposing God!”).

12. F. N. Ustryalov (1836-85), journalist, dramatist and

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translator. The reference here is to his play “Slovo i delo” (St. Petersburg, 1863).

13. Title of a book by the German physiologist-materialist Friedrich Karl (sometimes: Ludwig) Buchner (1824-99), first published in 1855, and translated into Russian in 1860. Buchner held that consciousness is merely the product or reflection of matter. His book was very popular among Russian radical youth.

14. “O pravde i iskrennosti v iskusstve” actually appeared in Russkaya beseda, no. 3, in 1856. The full title of the second article is “Kriticheskii vzglyad na osnovy, znachenie i priemy sovremennoi kritiki iskusstva.” Both are reprinted in the Strakhov edition.

15. In his review “Stikhotvoreniya Ivana Nikitina” (Sovremennik, no. 4, 1860), Dobrolyubov labelled Pushkin's poems “Ya vas lyubil, lyubov' eshche byt' mozhet…” and “Net, net, net, ne dolzhen ya, ne smeyu, ne mogu…” “al'bomnye pobryakushki.”

16. In the ninth of his eleven articles entitled “Sochineniya Aleksandra Pushkina” (Otechestvennye zapiski, no. 3, 1845; Sob. soch., vol. VI, pp. 399-426).

17. “Istoriya sela Goryukhina” was published only after Pushkin's death. It appeared in Sovremennik, no. 7, 1837, as “Letopis' sela Gorokhina,” and it was known by this name throughout the nineteenth century. The censors evidently demanded the name change (“Goryukhino” derives from “gore,” grief). Belinsky considered Pushkin's stories a sign of the decline of his talent.

18. Pisarev attacked “Sillytown” [(gorod) Glupov] - subject of Saltykov-Shchedrin's satirical novel Istoriya odnogo goroda - in his article “Tsvety nevinnogo yumora” (Russkoe slovo, no. 2, 1864; Sochineniya, M., 1955-56, vol. II, p. 365), which Grigor'ev quotes here. Pisarev denied the utility of Shchedrin's writing and labeled him a practitioner of “art for art's sake.” Dostoevsky ironized over the fight between Pisarev and Shchedrin in his article “Gospodin Shchednn, ili raskol v nigilistakh” (Epokha, no. 5, 1864; Pol. sob. soch., vol. CX, pp. 102-20), See Z. S. Borshchevsky, Shchedrin i Dostoevskii: istoriya ikh ideinoi bor'by (Moscow, 1956), chap. 3 and “Prilozhenie.”

19. Belinsky's article “Borodinskaya godovshchina”

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appeared in Otechestvrennye zapiski, no. 9, 1839 (Sob. soch., vol. II, pp, 109-118) on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of the Napoleonic wars. It reflected his “reconciliation with reality” and praised the might of the tsars. [155]

20. A reference to M. A. Antonovich's article “Dva tipa

sovremennykh filosofov” (Sovremennik, no. 4, 1861) concerning the polemic between Strakhov and Lavrov over the latter's Ocherki voprosov prakticheskoi filosofii (St, Petersburg, I860). On this polemic, see Linda Gerstein, Nikolai Strakhov (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ., 1971), pp, 30-32.

21. “Robert le Diable” (1831), an opera by the German composer Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864).

22. Dostoevsky took this to mean that Belinsky would have "joined the Slavophiles" if he had lived longer. See note 7 to the Introduction.

23. See note 8 above. Dobrolyubov's famous article “Temnoe tsarstvo” appeared in Sovremennik in 1859, no. 7 and 9. In his introduction, Dobrolyubov ridicules Grigor'ev's criticism of Ostrovsky as the carrier of a “new word.”

24. Marfa Borisovna is a character in “Minin.”

25. Lev Krasnov and Tat'yana Danilovna are the heroes in Ostrovsky's “Grekh da beda na kogo ne zhivet,” first published in Vremya, no. 1, 1863, On the Petersburg daily Sovremennoe slovo, see P. S. Reifman, “Obsuzhdenie novykh postanovlenii o pechati v russkoi zhurnalistike 1862g. i gazeta 'Sovremennoe slovo,’” Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo gos. universiteta, vyp. 104 (1961), pp. 105-129, The article “Lyubov' i nigilizm” was written by A. S. Gieroglifov (1824?- 1900) and appeared in Russkoe slovo, no. 1, 1863.

26. These lines are quoted “tragically” by Kapiton Titych Bruskov in act II, scene 3 of Ostrovsky's comedy “V chuzhom piru pokhmel'e,” published in Russkii vestnik, no. 2, 1856. They are evidently taken from an old potboiler, and are being parodied. Grigor'ev cites the lines inexactly.

27. Zhuravleva notes that references to “white Arabs”

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(Belaya Arapiya) occur in Ostrovsky's plays “Prazdnichnyi son – do obeda” (act II, scene 3) and “Tyazhelye dni” (act I, scene 1). This translation is only a guess; I have not been able to find the phrase in any dictionary. It was common to refer to serfs as “white Negroes” (belye negry), as Belinsky did in his famous letter to Gogol' (Sob. soch., vol, VIII, p. 282).

28. The reference here, and the sense of the Russian, is obscure (“vrode poetika, kotoryi ukhitrilsya zastavit' spat' sily grazhdanina v kakoi-to doline”).

29. See note 18.

30. A reference to Belinsky's review “Dennitsa novo-bolgar-skogo obrazovaniya. Sochineniya Vasiliya Aprilova,” which appeared in Otechestvennye zapiski, no. 9, 1842 (Sob. soch., vol. V, pp. 295-6). Grigor'ev quotes this article in its entiretyin his article “Belinsky i otritsatel'nyi vzglyad v literature” (Vremya, no. 4, 1861).

31. E. M. Feoktistov (1828-98), eminent bureaucrat, censor, establishment editor and butt of many jokes. Cf. Turgenev's quip to M. M. Stasyulevich (letter [156] of Jan. 1, 1883) upon Feoktistov's appointment as head censor: “Novyi 1883 god nachinaetsya neveselo: smert' Gambetty, zhizn' Feoktistova. . .” The poem-parody Grigor'ev cites is Boris Almazov's “Pokhorony 'Russkoi rechi.'” See E. M. Feoktistov's “Glava iz vospominanii,” Atenei [sbornik], kn. 3 (Leningrad, 1926).

32.The actual title of the book is: Skazanie o stranstvii i puteshestvii po Rossii, Moldavii, Turtsii i svyatoi zemle, and was published in Moscow in 1855 (not 1854), second edition, 1856. Dostoevsky refers to this book very positively in his notebooks, in terms very similar to those Grigor'ev uses here (see Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 83, Neizdannyi Dostoevsky, Moscow, 1971, p. 675). He had a copy of it in his own library (L. P. Grossman, Seminarii po Dostoevskomu, 1922, rpt. The Hague: Mouton, 1972, p. 44), and the book had a definite influence on the writing of The Brothers Karamazov. On this, see F. M. Dostoevsky, Pis'ma, ed. A. S. Dolinin (Moscow-Leningrad, 1928), vol. I, p. 32 and vol. II, pp. 264 and 476.

33. No such article appeared. Grigor'ev apparently promised Druzhinin, then the editor of Biblioteka dlya chteniya, that he himself would write the article; after six months passed, Druzhinin probably gave the assignment to Shchedrin;, who began but never finished it. See: Grigor'ev's letters to Druzhinin

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in Apollon Aleksandrovich Grigor'ev, Materialy dlya biografii, ed. V. Knyazhnin (Petrograd, 1917), pp. 154-64, 385-86; Turgenev i krug 'Sovremennika' (Moscow, 1930), pp. 217 and 330; Pis'ma k A. V. Druzhininu, in the series Letopisi Gos. literat. muzei, kn. 9 (Moscow, 1948), p. 101; and M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Sob. soch. (Moscow, 1966), vol. V, pp. 33-68, 473-500, and 533-35. See also Zhuravleva, pp. 449-50, n. 42.

The book received considerable attention, and was reviewed by N. G. Chernyshevsky (Sovremennik, no. 10. 1855, unsigned review); S. M. Solov'ev (Russkii vestnik, no. 5, kn. 1, 1855); and N. P. Gilyarov-Platonov (Russkaya beseda, kn. III, 1856, signed "N. G.").

34. Barsky: Vasily Kievsky (Grigorovich-Barsky, 1701-47), a famous pilgrim whose travel notes were immensely popular, and underwent six printings between 1778-1819, published also in 1885-87 in Petersburg as Stranstvovaniya V. G. Barskogo po sv. mestam Vostoka s 1723 po 1744 gg., ed. N. P. Barsukov.

Trifon Korobeinikov: a Muscovite merchant who served as a diplomat for Ivan the Terrible. His Khozdenie of the late sixteenth century, mostly a compilation of older travel notes, continued to be so popular that it underwent more than forty editions in the early nineteenth century alone. See Dmitrii Chizhevskii, History of Russian Literature (S-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1962), p. 263.

Hegumen Daniil (or Daniil Palomnik): hegumen (father superior) of a monastery in Chernigov and author of Khozhdeniya palomnika Daniila about his trip to Palestine in 1106-08. This is the oldest surviving work of Russian travel literature, and one of the most popular works of old Russian literature. Chizhevskii, pp. 60-64.

35.Paraphrase of 1 Cor. 3: 19 (“For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness”).

36.An “in” joke: “the northern Palmyra” was F. V. Bulgarin's pet name for Petersburg. [157]

37. “The late P-v”: evidently I. I. Panaev (1812-62), journalist, editor, belletrist, literary opponent of Grigor'ev's, and a well-known gossip.

“Starets Andrei”: probably A. A. Kraevsky, editor of Otechestvennye zapiski.

38.Grigor'ev is most likely referring to Saltykov-Shchedrin and his “Gubernskie ocherki.” Shchedrin began but never published an article on Parfeny's book. See his Sob. soch. (Moscow, 1966), vol. V, pp. 33-68 and 476-500, and note 32

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above.

39.Probably a reference to the novelist P. I. Mel'nikov (pseud. Pechersky, 1818-83), who worked on ways to “eliminate” the schism, first as a “chinovnik osobykh poruchenii” for the Nizhegorodsky governor-general (1847-50), and then (1850-66) for the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

FOOTNOTES TO LETTER TWO

40. Victor Hugo wrote his William Shakespeare in England, where he spent much of his twenty-year exile from France. It began as a preface to his son François Victor's translation of Shakespeare, and evolved into a book. It was first published in 1864 for the Shakespeare tercentenary.

On the Shakespeare jubilee of 1864 in Russia, see M. P. Alekseev, ed., Shekspir i russkaya kul'tura (Moscow-Leningrad, 1965), pp. 410-13.

41.I have been unable to identify the source of this biblical-sounding phrase (“k chemu zhe gibel' siya byst'”).

41.Grigor'ev is referring to Mill's System of Logic (1843).

43. D. V. Averkiev, “Vil'yam Shekspir. Stat'ya I,” Epokha, no. 5, 1864.

44.Hugo refers to “de formidables tours de cathedrales, comme, par exemple, la giralda de Seville,” the famous tower of the Seville cathedral. Grigor'ev here refers to “Sevil'skogo sobora kakogo-nibud'.”

45. From Mertvye dushi, I, ix: “Kakie zhe prichiny v mertvykh dushakh dazhe i prichiny net. Eto, vykhodit, prosto: Androny edut, chepukha, beliberda, sapogi vsmyatku! eto prosto chert proberi! …” [158]

46. Evidently Strakhov, D. V. Averkiev, and I. G. Dolgomost'ev, Grigor'ev's colleagues on Epokha.

47. See note 25.

48. “New Adams”: Hugo refers to two sorts of “Adams,” the poet-geniuses created by God, and the immoral characters (the new Adams) which they create. See Hugo, II, 2, ii.

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49. A reference to A. M. Bukharev (Archimandrit Fedor, 1822-71) and his book O pravosiavii v otnoshenii k sovremennosti (St. Petersburg, 1860). Bukharev argued that secular culture should not be excluded from Orthodoxy, and that that culture (e.g., Russian literature) reflects Orthodox values. Bukharev's polemics with V. I. Askochensky (see the following note) led to Bukharev's persecution by the church authorities, and to his renunciation of his church offices in 1863. See A. Bukhareva, “Aleksandr Matveevich Bukharev. Iz materialov dlya bio-grafii,” in Svobodnaya sovest', Literaturno-filosofskii sbornik, kn. 1 (Moscow, 1906).

50. V. I. Askochensky (pseud. Kochka-Sokhrana, 1813-1879): writer, publicist, editor and publisher of the radically conservative “neo-Slavo-phile” weekly Petersburg paper Domashnyaya beseda from 1858-77.

51. Henry Thomas Buckle's The History of Civilization in England (1857-61), which had as its aim to make history “a science.” Later, curiously, Buckle's name came to serve in the Russian tradition as a code word for the positivist, mechanist view of history.

52.George Henry Lewes' internationally acclaimed Life of Goethe (1855).

53. Evidently references to: Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes and Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1840); R. W. Emerson's “Essays on Representative Men” (1849); Ernest Renan's “Études d'histoire religieuse” (1857), “Essais de morale et de critique” (1859), and his famous Vie de Jésus (1863), the first volume of his trilogy on the origins of Christianity. [159]

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