An essay in universal history from an Orthodox Christian Point ofView part the age of revolution

62. RUSSIA AND EUROPE: (2) BELINSKY VS. GOGOL

The figure of Peter the Great continued to be a critical point of difference between the Westerners and the Slavophiles. The Westerners admired him (for Chaadaev he was, with Alexander I, almost the only significant Russian): the Slavophiles criticised him as the corrupter of the true Russian tradition. All felt they had to interpret his place in Russian history.
Once again it was Pushkin who began the reappraisal with his famous poem on the statue of Peter, The Bronze Horseman. However, it was the literary critic Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky who made the decisive contribution from the Westerners’ side. And another writer, Nicholas Vasilyevich Gogol, who took the Slavophile argument one step further…
Unlike most of the intellectuals of the time, Belinsky was not a nobleman, but a raznochinets (that is, of undetermined or “sundry” rank, a nobleman by birth who did not occupy himself with a nobleman’s pursuits). Moreover, he was an atheist. In fact, he rejected all the traditional pillars of Russian life. He was one of the first to recognize the greatness of Pushkin. And he was equally perceptive of the talent of Gogol and Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky. And yet these writers, “discovered” by Belinsky, turned decisively against his westernising philosophy…
Belinsky was concerned, writes Walicki, “above all with the role of Peter the Great and the antithesis of pre-and post-reform Russia. In his analysis, he made use of a dialectical scheme current among the Russian Hegelians, although he was the first to apply it to Russian history. Individuals as well as whole nations, he argued, pass through three evolutionary stages: the first is the stage of ‘natural immediacy’; the second is that of the abstract universalism of reason, with its ‘torments of reflection’ and painful cleavage between immediacy and consciousness; the third is that of ‘rational reality’, which is founded on the ‘harmonious reconciliation of the immediate and conscious elements’.
“Belinsky developed this idea in detail as early as 1841, in his long essay on ‘The Deeds of Peter the Great’, in which he wrote: ‘There is a difference between a nation in its natural, immediate and patriarchal state, and this same nation in the rational movement of its historical development’. In the earlier stage, he suggested, a nation cannot really properly be called a nation (natsiia), but only a people (narod). The choice of terms was important to Belinsky: during the reign of Nicholas the word narodnost’, used… by the exponents of Official Nationality [together with the words ‘Orthodoxy’ and ‘Autocracy’ to express the essence of Russian life], had a distinctly conservative flavour; natsional’nost’, on the other hand, thanks to its foreign derivation evoked the French Revolution and echoes of bourgeois democratic national developments.
“Belinsky’s picture of pre-Petrine Russia was surprisingly similar to that presented by the Slavophiles, although his conclusions were quite different from theirs. Before Peter the Russian people (i.e. the nation in the age of immediacy) had been a close-knit community held together by faith and custom – i.e. by the unreflective approval of tradition idealized by the Slavophiles. These very qualities, however, allowed no room for the emergence of rational thought or individuality, and thus prevented dynamic social change.
“Before Russians could be transformed into a nation it was necessary to break up their stagnating society… Belinsky argued that the emergence of every modern nation was accompanied by an apparently contradictory phenomenon – namely the cleavage between the upper and lower strata of society that so disturbed the Slavophiles. He regarded this as confirmation of certain general rules applying to the formation of modern nation-states: ‘In the modern world,’ he wrote, ‘all the elements within society operate in isolation, each one separately and independently… in order to develop all the more fully and perfectly… and to become fused once more into a new and homogeneous whole on a higher level than the original undifferentiated homogeneity’. In his polemics with the Slavophiles, who regarded the cleavage between the cultivated elite and the common people as the prime evil of post-Petrine Russia, Belinsky argued that ‘the gulf between society and the people will disappear in the course of time, with the progress of civilization’. This meant ‘raising the people to the level of society’, he was anxious to stress, and not ‘forcing society back to the level of the people’, which was the Slavophiles’ remedy. The Petrine reforms, which had been responsible for this social gulf, were therefore, in Belinsky’s view, the first and decisive step toward modern Russia. ‘Before Peter the Great, Russia was merely a people [narod]; she became a nation [natsiia] thanks to the changes initiated by the reformer.’”³³³

Berlin writes: “The central question for all Russians concerned about the condition of their country was social, and perhaps the most decisive single influence on the life and work of Belinsky was his social origin. He was born in poverty and bred in the atmosphere, at once bleak and coarse, of an obscure country town in a backward province. Moscow did, to some degree, soften and civilise him, but there remained a core of crudeness, and a self-conscious, rough, sometimes aggressive tone in his writing. This tone now enters Russian literature, never to leave it. Belinsky spoke in this sort of accent because this kind of raised dramatic tone, this harshness, was as natural to him as to Beethoven. Belinsky’s followers adopted his manner because they were the party of the enragés, and this was the traditional accent of anger and revolt, the earnest of violence to come, the rough voice of the insulted and the oppressed peasant masses proclaiming to the entire world the approaching end of their suffering at the hands of the discredited older order.

“Belinsky was the first and most powerful of the ‘new men’, the radicals and revolutionaries who shook and in the end destroyed the classical aristocratic tradition in Russian literature. The literary élite, the friends of Pushkin, despite radical ideas obtained abroad after the Napoleonic wards, despite Decembrist tendencies, was on the whole conservative, if not in conviction, yet in social habits and temper, connected with the court and the army, and deeply patriotic. Belinsky, to whom this seemed a retrograde outlook, was convinced that Russia had more to learn from the West than to teach it, that the Slavophile movement was romantic illusion, at times blind nationalistic megalomania, that Western scientific progress offered the only hope of lifting Russia from her backward state. And yet this same prophet of material civilisation, who intellectually was so ardent a Westerner, was emotionally more deeply and unhappily Russian than any of his contemporaries, spoke no foreign language, could not breathe freely in any environment save that of Russia, and felt miserable and persecution-ridden abroad. He found Western habits worthy of respect and emulation, but to him personally quite insufferable. When abroad he began to sigh most bitterly for home and after a month away was almost insane with nostalgia. In this sense he represents in his person the uncompromising elements of a Slav temperament and way of life to a far sharper degree than any of his contemporaries, even Dostoyevsky.
“This deep inner clash between intellectual conviction and emotional – sometimes almost physical – predilection is a very characteristically Russian disease. As the nineteenth century developed, and as the struggle between social classes became sharper and more articulate, this psychological conflict which tormented Belinsky emerges more clearly: the revolutionaries, whether they are social democrats, or social revolutionaries, or communists, unless they are noblemen or university professors – that is, almost professionally members of an international society – may make their bow with great conviction and sincerity to the West in the sense that they believe in its civilisation, above all its sciences, its techniques, its political thought and practice, but when they are forced to emigrate they find life abroad more agonising than other exiles…
“To some degree this peculiar amalgam of love and hate is intrinsic to contemporary Russian feeling about Europe: on the one hand intellectual respect, envy, admiration, desire to emulate and excel; on the other emotional hostility and suspicion and contempt, a sense of being clumsy, de trop, of being outsiders; leading as a result to an alternation between excessive self-prostration before, and aggressive flouting of, Western values. No recent visitor to the Soviet Union can have failed to remark this phenomenon: a combination of intellectual inadequacy and emotional superiority, a sense of the West as enviably self-restrained, clever, efficient and successful; also cramped, cold, mean, calculating and fenced in, incapable of large views or generous emotion, incapable of feeling which at times rises too high and overflows its banks, unable to abandon everything and sacrifice itself in response to some unique historical challenge; incapable of ever attaining a rich flowering of life. This attitude is the most constant element in Belinsky’s most personal and characteristic writings: if it is not the most valuable element in him, it is the most Russian: Russian history past and present is not intelligible without it, today more palpably than ever…”³³⁴
The Slavophiles were free of this neurotic attitude to the West that Belinsky typified among the westerners; they were both more critical of the West, and calmer in relation to it. The reason was that they, unlike the Westerners, had discovered the heart of Russia, her Orthodox Christianity. For them, the critical event in European history was not the Catholic-Protestant schism, but the schism between Eastern and Western Christianity in the middle of the eleventh century. In thus tracing the origins of the difference between East and West to the religious schism between the Orthodox and the Roman Catholics of the eleventh century, as opposed to later events such as the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century or the reforms of Peter the Great in the eighteenth century, the Slavophiles made a very important step towards the reintegration of Russian historical thought with the traditional outlook on history of Orthodox Christianity. This wider and deeper historical perspective enabled them to see that, after the schisms of the West from the unity of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of the East for so many centuries, it was inevitable that a new kind of man, homo occidentalis, with a new psychology, new aims and new forms of social and political organization, should have been created in the West, from where it penetrated into the Orthodox East.
One of the first to see this clearly was Gogol. Having made his name by satirical and fantastical works such as Notes of a Madman, The Greatcoat, The Government Inspector and, above all, Dead Souls, he suddenly and quite unexpectedly turned to Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationhood. This change of heart was clearly proclaimed in Correspondence with Friends.
While Belinsky looked forward to the rationalism of Tolstoy, Gogol’s views on the Westernizer-Slavophile controversy both looked back to Pushkin and forward to Dostoyevsky’s Pushkin Speech. “All these Slavists and Europeans,” he wrote, “or old believers and new believers, or easterners and westerners, they are all speaking about two different sides of one and the same subject, without in any way divining that they are not contradicting or going against each other.” The quarrel was “a big misunderstanding”. And yet “there is more truth on the side of the Slavists and easterners”, since their teaching is more right “on the whole”, while the westerners are more right “in the details”.³³⁵
“The main theme of the book,” writes I.M. Andreev, “was God and the Church. And when Gogol was reproached for this, he replied, simply and with conviction: ‘How can one be silent, when the stones are ready to cry out about God.’
“Like Khomiakov and Ivan Kireyevsky, Gogol summoned all ‘to life in the Church’.
“The pages devoted to the Orthodox Church are the best pages of the book! No Russian writer had expressed as did Gogol such sincere, filial love for the Mother Church, such reverence and veneration for Her, such a profound and penetrating understanding both of Orthodoxy as a whole and of the smallest details of the whole of the Church’s rites.
“’We possess a treasure for which there is no price,’ is how he characterizes the Church, and he continued: ‘This Church which, as a chaste virgin, has alone been preserved from the time of the Apostles in her original undefiled purity, this Church, which in her totality with her profound dogmas and smallest external rites has been as it were brought right down from heaven for the Russian people, which alone has the power to resolve all our perplexing knots and questions… And this Church, which was created for life, we have to this day not introduced into our life’…
“The religio-political significance of Correspondence was huge. This book appeared at a time when in the invisible depths of historical life the destiny of Russia and Russian Orthodox culture was being decided. Would Russia hold out in Orthodoxy, or be seduced by atheism and materialism? Would the Russian Orthodox autocracy be preserved in Russia, or would socialism and communism triumph? These questions were linked with other, still more profound ones, that touched on the destinies of the whole world. What was to come? The flourishing and progress of irreligious humanistic culture, or the beginning of the pre-apocalyptic period of world history?
“Gogol loudly and with conviction proclaimed that the Truth was in Orthodoxy and in the Russian Orthodox Autocracy, and that the historical ‘to be or not to be’ of Russian Orthodox culture, on the preservation of which there also depended the destiny of the whole world in the nearest future, was now being decided. The world was on the edge of death, and we have entered the pre-apocalyptic period of world history.
“Correspondence came out in 1847. Pletnev published it at Gogol’s behest.
“This book, in its hidden essence, was not understood by its contemporaries and was subjected to criticism not only on the part of enemies, but also of friends (of course, the former and the latter proceeded from completely different premises).
“The enemies were particularly disturbed and annoyed by Gogol’s sincere and convinced approval of the foundations of those social-political ordered which to so-called ‘enlightened’ people seemed completely unsustainable.”³³⁶
Belinksy was furious. “Russia expects from her writers salvation from Orthodox, Nationhood and Autocracy,” he wrote in his Letter to Gogol in 1847. And he now called Gogol a “preacher of the knout, apostle of ignorance, champion of superstition and obscurantism”. Russia, he thundered, “does not need sermons (she has had her fill of them!), nor prayers (she knows them by heart), but the awakening in people of the feeling of human dignity, for so many centuries buried in mud and dung; she needs laws and rights compatible not with the doctrines of the church, but with justice and common sense.”³³⁷
Gogol’s friends, continues Andreyev, “criticized Correspondence for other reasons… The most serious and in many respects just criticism belonged to the Rzhev Protopriest Fr. Matthew Konstantinovsky, to whom Gogol, who did not yet know him personally, sent his book for review. Fr. Matthew condemned many places, especially the chapter on the theatre, and wrote to Gogol that he ‘would give an account for it to God’. Gogol objected, pointing out that his intention had been good. But Fr. Matthew advised him not to justify himself before his critics, but to ‘obey the spirit living in us, and not our earthly corporeality’ and ‘to turn to the interior life’.
“The failure of the book had an exceptionally powerful effect on Gogol. After some resistance and attempts to clarify ‘the whirlwind of misunderstandings’, without rejecting his principled convictions, Gogol humbled himself and acknowledged his guilt in the fact that he had dared to be a prophet and preacher of the Truth when he personally was not worthy of serving it. Even to the sharp and cruel letter of Belinsky Gogol replied meekly and humbly: ‘God knows, perhaps there is an element of truth in your words.’”³³⁸