Dostoevsky (146 page)

These words produced an electrifying effect on a whole generation of Russian youth, who were dispiritedly groping for a positive moral ideal. N. S. Rusanov, later an important publicist, experienced their galvanizing shock as a young student:

Such was the self-sacrificing mood in which the educated youth “went to the people” in the early 1870s, and what they expected to find in the Russian villages was not only absolution from the sin of their privileges but also a morally superior form of life, a primitive Socialist Arcadia far preferable to the supposedly more advanced countries of the West.

If Lavrov had inspired the educated youth with a sense of guilt about their own advantages, another Populist thinker, Nikolay Mikhailovsky, persuaded them that the Russian village and the Russian peasant harbored unsuspected treasures that should not be lightly surrendered to the march of “progress.” Mikhailovsky, who enjoyed enormous prestige in the 1870s, was a member of the editorial board and a regular contributor to
Notes of the Fatherland
, and his monthly column was eagerly devoured. His credentials with the new generation had been established by a small book,
What Is Progress?
, which appeared shortly
after Lavrov’s
Letters
. These reflections are a product of that widespread disillusionment with the West, particularly France, produced among Russian progressives by the failure of the revolutions of 1848, the assumption of power by Napoleon III, and the ferocious suppression of the Paris Commune in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. Taking up a refrain to which Herzen had first given voice after 1848, and which Dostoevsky had echoed in his
Winter Notes on Summer Impressions
in 1863, Mikhailovsky argued that a decadent Western civilization could no longer serve as a lodestar to the left-leaning Russians eagerly seeking the way toward a more just social-economic order.

Such disenchantment found eloquent expression in Mikhailovsky’s notable critique of “progress” as this concept was understood in Europe. Employing the ideas of Charles Darwin and the then-famous Herbert Spencer, but turning them to his own purposes, Mikhailovsky maintained that progress should be measured in terms of the richness and diversity of human life that it furthered, not solely by the accumulating production of material goods. Understood only in this latter sense, as was the case in Europe, progress could well destroy the integrity of all individual life still preserved in less developed social forms (that is, the Russian village). The so-called “objective” scientific laws governing society—the laws worked out in Western social thought—offer no help in choosing between these two notions of progress, and Mikhailovsky argued that a “subjective” (moral) criterion must be introduced in favor of the protection of the individual personality.

Thus Lavrov and Mikhailovsky rejected the worship of “science”—so typical of the Nihilism of the 1860s—as the ultimate basis of human values; they firmly broke with ideas that left no independent room (at least in theory) for the human personality and hence for morality. For these thinkers, as much earlier for Kant, science determines the laws of the physical world but not of human desires and ideals. Lavrov made a direct appeal to the moral sensibility of the intelligentsia as the basis for his radicalism; and Mikhailovsky too, in his Slavophil-tinged critique of progress, used “subjective” moral criteria as the justification for his distaste of its Western avatar. Such aspects of Populist thought were much closer to Dostoevsky’s own views than anything he had encountered previously among radical ideologues.

One of the dogmas of radical ideology in the 1860s, expounded most intransigently by Chernyshevsky, was a monistic materialism—supposedly the last word in “scientific” thought—that excluded the possibility of any such entity as “free will.” For Dostoevsky, it was a moral-psychological
necessity
of the human personality to experience itself as free, and he now found in the key Populist texts a decisive affirmation of precisely what he had maintained all along—and what Nihilism had declared to be nonexistent. “I take as my point of departure,” affirmed Lavrov, “the fact of the consciousness of freedom, and on the
foundation of these facts I construct a coherent system of moral process.”
⁶
Similarly, Mikhailovsky wrote that “society obeys certain laws in its development; but no less unquestionable is man’s inherent consciousness of a free choice of action. At the moment of action I am aware that I give myself a goal freely, completely independent of the influence of historical conditions.”
⁷

Like Dostoevsky ten years earlier, the generation of the 1870s now explicitly rejected the incongruous attempt to extract a morality of obligation out of “rational egoism,” and no one attacked it more incisively than Mikhailovsky. “Clinging to this formula,” Mikhailovsky argued, “we lost sight of the fact that, in the first place, the extension of our personal ego to the point of self-sacrifice, to the possibility of identification with an alien life—is just as real as the crudest egoism. And that, in the second place, the formula that sacrifice is sheer nonsense does not at all cover our own psychic situation, for more than ever before we are ready to make the most extreme sacrifices.”
⁸
After such a passage, it is no surprise to learn that the critic had read
Crime and Punishment
with great admiration.

This revival among the Populists of a sensitivity to the ethics of self-sacrifice, so movingly dramatized in that work, went hand in hand with a renewed respect for Christianity itself. In a speech given in 1872, Mikhailovsky explained that “the ancient world knew nothing of the idea of personality. Man as something beyond fixed castes, layers, and nationalities meant nothing to antiquity. . . . Christianity gave a completely new characteristic to history. It brought forth the thought of the absolute worth of man and human personality . . . henceforth, for all people, in spite of delays, mistakes, and wanderings, there is but one goal: the absolute recognition of man, of human personality, and of its many-sided development.”
⁹
Such a positive view of Christianity by a spokesman for the radicals would have been inconceivable in the 1860s, but now he identifies his own social-cultural ideal—a Populist Socialism based on the supreme value of the human personality—with the emergence of Christianity as a world religion.

Such a revaluation of Christianity was typical of the mood of the entire generation for whom Mikhailovsky had become a spokesman. D. N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, the great turn-of-the-century historian of the Russian intelligentsia, accordingly stressed that what distinguished the Populists of the 1870s from the previous generation was, above all, their “psychological religiosity.” “In place of the one-sided attraction for the physical sciences appeared a lively interest in social, economic, and historical questions—in particular, for the history of the movements of the people, in the
Raskol
[the religious dissenters] and the sects.
The indifferentism and skepticism in religion, which so sharply marked the ‘Pisarevist’ tendency, notably declined. Unconcerned with dogmatic religion, with official religion, the new generation displayed an unmistakable interest in the Gospels, in Christian ethics, and in Christ the man.”
¹⁰

Mikhailovsky helped to infuse the Populist mentality with Proudhonian ideas, which translate the messianic hopes of the Christian faith into modern, secularized terms. N. V. Sokolov, a friend of Mikhailovsky’s who was arrested and tried in the mid-1860s for a book called
The Heretics
, declared in open court that “the entire guilt of the heretic Socialists consists in the fact that they seek the Kingdom of God not in the clouds but on earth.” “Silence me,” he told his judges, “if you find in my words any perversion of the commandment of Christian love of neighbor. I know only that none of you loves Christ more than I.”
¹¹
Dostoevsky had accepted a similar view of Socialism in the 1840s, and a copy of Proudhon’s
La célébration du dimanche
was found in his room at the time of his arrest in 1849. Whether or not he had read statements like those of Sokolov, the spirit they conveyed was familiar from his own past and was omnipresent in the Russian culture of the 1870s.

Narodnichestvo
could thus hardly have failed to evoke a sympathetic response from Dostoevsky, who joined here with the Slavophils as well as the Populists. All were alarmed at the growth of capitalism in the country, and regarded the existing social-economic institutions of the peasantry (and hence the way of life and the ethos from which they sprang) as uniquely valuable and precious
in themselves and in their present form
. The most essential task of the Populists, particularly in face of the increasing pace of industrialization, was to protect peasant life from the forces leading to the disintegration of the commune. “In Russia,” Mikhailovsky had declared in 1872, reversing the earlier thrust of Russian radicalism, “only the
preservation
of the means of labor in the hands of the workers is required, a guarantee to the present proprietors [the peasants] of their property.”
¹²
As far back as 1850, Dostoevsky had agreed with the Slavophils that European conceptions of a workers’ revolution had no relevance to Russian social conditions, and Mikhailovsky was now presumably agreeing with such views, in effect renouncing social-political revolution in favor of safeguarding the economic interests of the peasantry.

Even though the Populists now accepted the Christian virtue of self-sacrifice, which for Dostoevsky lay at the root of the peasant
obshchina
in a socially
modified form, they preferred to cast their ideas in more contemporary terms. Mikhailovsky thus worked out his own “sociological” variant of the pervasive myth that peasant life was valuable in its own right. The criterion of progress, he argued, should be the achievement in human life of the most harmonious and well-rounded personality. From this point of view, although Europe had reached a higher “stage” of social development than Russia, the Russian peasant represented a “higher type” of humanity than his counterpart, the European industrial worker. The Russian peasant, in accomplishing his daily tasks, employed all of his diverse physical and mental capacities and thus remained an integral individual; the European industrial worker, ever more splintered by the refinements of the division of labor, had been literally reduced to a dehumanized cog. In his still privately cherished ideology of
pochvennnichestvo
, Dostoevsky had looked forward to the Europeanized intelligentsia returning to the values embodied in their native soil to create a new and richer synthesis, and the aim of Populism was to safeguard the unique worth embodied in the superior type of life of the Russian peasant, raising it to a higher “stage” without destroying its irreplaceable virtues.

Even though
pochvennichestvo
and
narodnichestvo
cannot simply be equated, the similarity in overall perspective—particularly the quasi-Slavophil disaffection with European civilization—is nonetheless evident. Mikhailovsky had been appalled by Marx’s depiction of “primitive accumulation,” the process by which the English yeomen had been forced from the land in order to create an industrial proletariat dependent on wage labor. “Reason and moral feeling did not influence the economic development of Europe,” he had indignantly declared to advocates of Russia’s industrial expansion along European lines.
¹³
To exorcise the monstrous image of evil displayed in the Crystal Palace of the London World’s Fair, Dostoevsky had likewise appealed to the moral values still preserved at the roots of Russian life. Mikhailovsky now wrote that “we not only do not scorn Russia, but we see in its past, and still in its present, much on which we can rely to ward off the falsities of European civilization.”
¹⁴