A Herzen Reader

The circle of intellectual activity at that time was outside the government, which was completely backward, and outside the people, who were silent in their estrangement; it was located in the book and the lecture hall, in theoretical argument and the scholar's study. And, actually, it was only in literature and the universities that the government still had to keep things in check; only there did life try to emerge from behind the cramped shores of censorship and surveillance, and only there could resilience still be felt. Literature and educational institutions were the only civically valiant, hon­est spheres of activity in the unyielding Russia of that time.

The Senate and the Synod, the civilian departments and the military au­thorities, the assemblies of the nobility and the beau monde feared not only the opposition, but any originality; they feared that a suspicion of having opinions might fall upon them. Respectable people watched with inner hor­ror the courage of N. S. Mordvinov, who dared to not only have but to voice

opinions. Nicholas was barely able to contain his rage against the imperti­nent old man.¹³

Only literature, only the lecture halls, protested constantly, protested as much as they could, with silence and absences when a word was not possi­ble; with forbidden

verses that passed from person to person, and hints that slipped through the censor's fingers. The current corruption of literature and educational institutions dates from the present reign. Paid-off journal­ists and police-professors, preaching a philosophy of slavery and writing denunciations of entire conferences, are entirely new phenomena.¹⁴ During the entire Nicholaevan era, there was no lecture hall that would have lis­tened with sympathy to the doctrine of blind obedience; conservative youth and fans of the government did not exist at all then. For the development of this kind of moral rickets, which is spreading far and wide, we are very much obliged to the teaching and journalism of recent years.

Thus, we are not the ones who assigned historical importance to the academic-literary quarrel of the thirties in the intellectual development of Russia—that is the way it actually was. We will not enlarge on the quarrel itself, so much has been written about it. We will only remind the reader that one side sought to continue the Petrine coup in a revolutionary sense, acquiring for Russia everything that had been worked out by other nations since i789, bringing to our soil English institutions, French ideas, and Ger­man metaphysics. In rating Western forms of civic life more highly than the hatchet job of Peter and his successors, they were entirely correct, but in accepting them as the sole life-saving human forms, appropriate to every way of life, they fell into the eternal error of the French revolutionaries. Their opponents objected that the forms developed for Western life may have had a universal development, but, along with them, one must also preserve particular national elements. [. . .]

Neither one nor the other came to a clear understanding, but along the way many questions were raised; the February revolution arrived when this argument was in full swing. [. . .]

The persecution against the printed word and academia that began after the revolution of i848 exceeded all limits of what was stupid and vile; it was nasty, ridiculous, and it reduced literature to a gloomy silence, but it did not get it to speak in the tone of Nicholaevan conservatism. The same thing hap­pened in academia; stifled outwardly, it remained true within to its sacred mission of advocacy and humanization. And if professors in the capitals were at times constrained by the tiresome surveillance and denunciations, teaching went on as it had in provincial universities, gymnasia, seminar­ies, military schools, etc. This decentralization of education is extremely important [. . .] it infiltrated more deeply and disappeared at the very limits of literacy. The government's efforts came to nothing.

Pedagogy withstood what was in its own way a chef d'oeuvre—Rostov- tsev's instructions to the teachers of military-training establishments.¹⁵

Who was able to do this?

This was done by a new formation of people, who had risen below and who introduced by degrees their new elements into the intellectual life of Russia. This group assumed more and more rights of citizenship during this time, as Nicholas knocked off the elite and with coarse strokes muti­lated the nervously developed hothouse organizations.