Sterne on digressions

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, they are the life, the soul of reading.

"A History of Russian Thought" Andrzej Walicki

Off the top of your head, think of five Western philosophers. Now think of five Russian philosophers.

For most general readers in the English speaking world, Russian philosophers are less known than Western ones. Unfairly, Russian philosophy has been largely overlooked by the West. Walicki’s book, first published in Polish in 1973 and now an established classic in the field, is the most comprehensive and detailed one-volume survey of the terrain.

The reasons for the West’s neglect of Russian history are many. First, philosophy as a discipline developed in Russia rather later than it did in the West, due to the anti-dialogic nature of classic Orthodoxy, and Russian culture’s separation from the Greco/Roman traditions of dialectical/juristic thought. Second, Russian philosophy usually concerned itself with issues which were not always regarded as core philosophical issues as such by the West. Consequently, when Russian thought was carried to the West by émigrés, the West often regarded it as outdated or eccentric and turned away its interest. This was to the detriment of the entire development of Western philosophy.

Third, is the relative influence of two philosophers from the West: Plato, and Hegel. Plato’s influence pervades Western thought so much that A.N. Whitehead was able to quip that Western philosophy is just a series of footnotes to Plato. However, (aside from the unwitting Neoplatonism inherent in most Orthodox thinking) the traditional central (Platonic) concerns of classical Western thought: ontology, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, logic etc are usually side issues for Russian thinkers, who are concerned with other things. What Plato is to Western philosophy, Hegel is to Russian. Hegel had a huge influence on the generation of Russian thinkers who really set the terms of the subsequent debate in Russian thought. All the classic Russian questions: Where are we going, Who are we? When will the great day come? are the classic questions of Hegel’s philosophy of history; and Russian thinkers after the 1840s had to define their positions in relation to issues first raised by Hegel.

Fourth, Russian philosophical polemic, lacking a professional platform of its own, was often conducted in close conjunction with other discourses, particularly those of literary criticism, literary fiction, journalism, and open or private letters. Moreover, it is difficult to unequivocally label key Russian thinkers as ‘Philosophers’ the way one can label key Western thinkers as such. Herzen was as much a publicist and journalist, Belinsky as much a literary critic, and Bakunin as much a practical revolutionary as the philosophers they undoubtedly were; and the two giants of Russian literature, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, had as much an impact on subsequent Russian thought as they did on literature. Perhaps the categories ‘philosopher’ and ‘philosophy’ in their Western manifestations are simply too narrow to encompass the activities of these Russian thinkers.

Finally, the Bolshevik Revolution and its official adoption of Marxist/Lenin thought has obscured from our present sight many of the great Russian thinkers of the 19th and 18th centuries. The Soviets appropriated some of these philosophers and distorted their ideas in order to bring them into line with the official state ideology. Those whose views could not be made to fit were simply repressed and excluded from the discourse.

Russian thought may very broadly be described as having four main characteristics: its relationship with church and state authority, its preoccupation with the nature of history, its propensity to synthesize conflicting or opposing points of view, and its emphasis on the subjectivity of the individual.

Throughout Russian history, its philosophy had a vexed relationship with the church and state authorities. Philosophy leads men to contemplate the overthrow of kingdoms, wrote the Old Believer Liubopytny in the early 19th century. After the Pugachev Rebellion of the 1770s and the French Revolution, Catherine The Great, who had formerly encouraged philosophy to the extent of inviting Diderot to Russia, turned against it, and had all the busts of the Enlightenment philosophers removed from the Hermitage, and the key Russian philosophers of the time exiled or imprisoned. During the reign of Nicholas I, philosophy as a professional academic discipline was banned. The ban was only lifted in 1863, and the first academic journal devoted to philosophy was only founded in 1885. While it is true, as Philostratus says, that Despotic governments are the test of philosophers, the relationship between philosophy and autocracy in Russia exercised an ineluctable influence on the development of the discipline.

The relationship with authority consequently gave Russian thought its characteristic historical slant or focus. In contrast to Western philosophy, which can be thought of as having developed in a discrete tradition rather divorced from the real world, with new ideas sprouting off old ones, Russian thought has always concerned itself with the specifics of the hic et nunc of the country’s historical progress. The development of Russian thought was prompted more by the changing economic and politic conditions rather than by growth within the discipline itself. Indeed, a common criticism that Russian philosophers hurled at each other in their polemics was the assertion that their opponent’s ideas were too abstract, and not specific enough, not practical enough. Two things stand out: the creation of systematic, logically consistent historical schemes to a greater or lesser extent influenced by Hegel’s, such as Chaadev’s and Lavrov’s; and the personal investment of philosophers within those schemes. Belinsky in the 1840s and Plekhanov in the 1890s both suffered similar agonies of soul in realising that their commitment to a philosophical idea involved them in a paradoxical abandonment of that idea.

Belinsky initially followed Hegel in thinking that the historical process was inevitable and that one should become ‘reconciled to reality’ rather than struggle against it, as one struggles against fate. He later, famously, completely reversed his position, unable to bear the torments of knowing where this could ultimately lead. If I should succeed in climbing to the highest rung of the ladder of progress, even then I would ask you to render me an account of all the victims of life and history, all the victims of chance, superstition, the Inquisition, Phillip II and so forth. He added: I don’t want happiness, even as a gift, if I cannot be easy about the fate of all my brethren… Plekhanov initially followed the Populists in abhorring capitalism and in trying to bypass a capitalist stage of development by going straight to the people. However, after his encounter with Marxism, he realised that socialism could only come out of capitalism, and that therefore one should work to achieve capitalism first, the quicker to arrive at socialism. Plekhanov fought bitter battles with the Populists over this, and more than any other philosopher was responsible for bringing Marxism into the mainstream of Russian thought. Also, Tolstoy’s philosophy of history as put forward in the controversial ‘theoretical’ chapters in War and Peace makes much more sense when viewed in the light of the tradition of Russian philosophy’s preoccupation with the historical question, especially when it is set next to Lavrov’s, for example.

Dostoevsky wrote of the Russian character that quite often [it] discovers the point of unity and reconciliation in completely contrary and rival ideas of two different European nations, ideas that, unhappily, they can find no way of reconciling at home. Russian thought is marked by an ability to reconcile conflicting ideas, and to back away from the temptation of establishing (false) dichotomies. For example, Komiakov managed to resolve the freedom/unity dichotomy represented by Catholicism, which emphasizes unity at the expense of freedom, and Protestantism, which emphasizes freedom at the expense of unity, by stressing the freedom within the unity of Orthodoxy. Danilevsky was able to conjoin the anti-statist views of the Slavophiles with the Pan-Slavic calls for a federation of Slavic states by selecting only those elements of Slavophilism that fitted his political goals and rejecting the rest. Chicherin was able to synthesize autocracy with liberalism by drawing attention to Russia’s unique historical circumstances. Even the young Lenin was able to wriggle his way out of the subjectivist-objectivist dichotomy by saying that as the individual was the result of social factors and society was a collective of individuals, the dichotomy was meaningless.

Throughout Russian philosophy there was an emphasis of value on what we can but clumsily call the primacy of holistic individualism over the purely rational schematic. The key figure here is of course Herzen, who movingly and nobly claimed that the purpose of life is for living, the purpose of the singer is the song, and who categorically refuted the notion that present generations should be sacrificed for the happiness of future generations, and who adamantly rejected the religious idea that the immediate and transitory pleasures of life should be curtailed by the promise of an (illusory) eternal hereafter. The ‘struggle for individuality’ of Mikhailovsky and the ‘subjective sociology’ of Lavrov are both manifestations of the primacy of the individual over the schematic. Briefly, Lavrov asserted that objective knowledge in the social sciences was impossible due to the unspoken assumptions and ideologies of the observer; further, that the denial of the individual’s impact on history (as Hegel and Chaadaev had it) was a mistake; and further, that it was the right of individuals to see things from their own perspective and to protest against historical necessity where necessary. Another manifestation of this holistic individualism was the assertion that other forms of thought such as the visionary or the intuitive, the ‘integral personality’ of the Slavophiles, were also just as valid as the purely rational. Logical thinking, when separated from the other cognitive faculties is a natural attribute of the mind that has lost its own wholeness, wrote the Slavophile thinker Kireevsky. Even the anti-humanistic bureaucratism of Pobedonestsov and the cruel Jacobinistic tendencies of Tkachev are largely reactions against and indicative of the strength of subjectivism inherent in most of Russian thought.

Perhaps the full range, breadth and character of Russian thought is best exemplified by looking at two philosophers in more detail, philosophers from opposite ends of the positivist-metaphysicist spectrum: the arch positivist Wyroubov, and the arch mystic Soloviev.

Wyroubov (1843 – 1913) was the main Russian disciple of Comte, and spent most of his life in France where he worked as a doctor and research chemist. He was the first editor of the complete works of Herzen after the latter’s death. For Wyroubov, the role of philosophy was to concern itself with making generalizations based on scientific facts. Questions of epistemology were largely questions of psychology not of philosophy, and philosophical doubt (I think therefore I am) he saw as an empty pastime. As Walicki succinctly puts it, for Wyroubov the problem of the criterion of truth was not a philosophical problem but belonged to the sphere of the natural sciences which had long established such a criterion; philosophy should therefore accept the scientific formula that the yardstick of truth was “the recurrence of a given phenomenon in identical circumstances, expressed in a formula known as a law” usually a mathematical or a chemical law. For Wyroubov, any philosophy worthy of the name must be based on a fundamental axiom that is capable of resisting critical reflection. Only on the firmest of foundations can thought structures be built, and such structures need not be more complex than necessary, in an echo of Occam’s Razor. Such clarity of thought would be useful now in the debates about the nature of truth that are part and parcel of our present argument between the Darwinists and the creationists.

Solvovyov (1853 – 1900) represents the apotheosis of everything that Wyroubov stood against. Not only did his philosophy lack a fundamental axiom that is capable of resisting critical reflection, but worse, it was based on a series of visions that he had of ‘the being of Sophia’. The first of these visions appeared to him in the British Museum, and the second in the desert near the Pyramids in Egypt. Solvovyov's view of history was characterised by a niftily comprehensive but ultimately fantastical symmetry that calls to mind Bertrand Russell’s warning: a philosophy which is not self-consistent cannot be true, but a philosophy which is self-consistent can very well be wholly false. Solvovyov held that (historical) evolution goes through three phases: unity, differentiation, reintegration (Hegel’s influence hardly needs pointing out here). There are three spheres of human activity: creativity, knowledge, social practice. During the period of unity these spheres are subject to religion. Walicki summarises: In the sphere of creativity, technology (the first or material grade) was fused with art (the second or formal grade) and mysticism (the highest or absolute grade) in an undifferentiated and mystical creativity…a ‘theurgy’. In the sphere of knowledge, positive science (the material grade ) was fused with abstract philosophy (the formal grade) and theology (the absolute grade) … a ‘theosophy’. In the realm of social practice, the economic society of producers (the material grade) was fused with the state (formal grade) and the church (the absolute grade) forming a ‘theocratic’ whole. In the second evolutionary phase….and so it goes on in a formal and perfect arrangement of triads until the day when Heaven shall be realised on Earth. It’s easy to imagine that Lenin had Solvovyov's (mad?) theory in mind when he sardonically rejected a belief in triads, in abstract dogmas and schemes that do not have to be proved by facts.

It perhaps says more than anything else can about the nature of Russian philosophy and its relationship with the wider culture and history, that Solvovyov's fantasies had far more of an impact – a huge impact- on subsequent thought, than Wyroubov’s clarity and precision, which was largely ignored, and is usually treated as an obscure offshoot from the main tree.

Walicki starts his survey with the impact of Enlightenment thought during the reign of Catherine the Great, and ends with the early writings of Lenin. His method is to give potted biographies of the main thinkers, briefly outline the salient points of their thought, tracing its development and vicissitudes, identify the main points of contact with other philosophers both inside the Russian tradition and in the Western tradition, and then engage in polemic with them. His especial strength lies in the lucid and sympathetic summaries of the various philosophies, giving the reader an excellent introduction to the important features of each. All credit to Stanford University Press for making this excellent and necessary book continuously available to an English speaking audience through the excellent translation of Hilda Andrews - Rusiecka. However, they need to drastically improve their editing process, as the index is somewhat inadequate, the academic apparatus is rather poor, and the text is marred by misprints, typos and sloppy punctuation on almost every other page.

Correspondence #11

Whatever our literature may be, it has greater significance for us than may appear: in it and it alone, is contained the whole of our intellectual life and all the poetry of our life.

Belinsky 1840s

We obtained literature by our own efforts, it is a product of our own life, and that is why we love it so much and hold it so dear, why we pin our hopes on it.

Dostoevsky 1860s

Zamyatin on truth

The truths of today are the mistakes of tomorrow.

"Family Happiness" Lev Tolstoy

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

A young woman, brought up in the country, falls in love with her neighbour, a former friend of her deceased father, a man somewhat older than her. They are married and she leaves her home to live in his with his old mother. At first, they are blissfully happy and united. However, she begins to experience boredom and he takes her to St Petersburg to bring her out in Society. He warns her about the dangers of doing so, but she ignores him and becomes sucked into a whirl of social life, including trips to Europe and longer and longer stays in Petersburg and Moscow. They begin to drift apart. Finally, one day, on an excursion in Baden, an Italian adventurer tries unsuccessfully to seduce her, and she desires to return to Russia to recapture the lost happiness of her early married life with her husband. She returns to his estate, and in a final climactic scene, begs for his forgiveness, which he grants, equivocally. She reaches a new understanding of her life and of love and of the acceptance of the passing of youth.

In addition to its thematic and plot similarities with Anna Karenina, this 1859 tale foreshadows many of the concerns of Tolstoy’s later period, and gives the lie to those critics who see a radical split between his early work, and the work after 1879.
The depiction of marriage in this tale is fully in line with Tolstoy’s later moralising. The man is fully in control, a master, mentor, guide and teacher of the woman, who remains subservient to her spouse. The man has full knowledge of his wife’s soul, more, in fact , than she herself does: at that time you had not yet got near the end of that charming nonsense which I admired in you. So I let you go through it alone, feeling that I had no right to put pressure on you...., while he has areas of his life and being which are forever closed to her: there was a special department of his mind into which he was unwilling to admit me. However, the gap between them is as much a generation gap as a gender gap, in which innocence is guided by experience. Goncharov in Oblomov and Turgenev in his tale Faust fuse the gender gap and the generation gap in the same way. Concomitant to this depiction of marriage is the powerful feeling of repressed sexuality, especially in the seduction scene, which is also a characteristic of Tolstoy’s later period. Tolstoy was a fierce sensualist, and much of his puritanism comes from his dislike of this side of himself.

The privileging of the country over the city is another later Tolstoyan trope that finds expression here. The later Tolstoy regarded the cities of Russia, especially Petersburg, as representative of everything that had gone wrong with Russia under the influence of the West, as it was in the cities where Westernising influence was of course strongest. The descriptions of the Russian countryside are detailed and loving here, while the descriptions of cities are sketchy and not visualised at all. In fact, this is one of the key differences between Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s work generally: the former is the poet of the Russian countryside, while the later is the poet of the city. Linked to this is the importance of Russia as a salvation for the soul. When Masha has her crisis abroad it is to Russia that she instinctively turns, and to the Russia of the country estate, not Petersburg. The European countryside is ‘cold’ compared to the Russian.

The chief delight for the reader lies in the early part of the tale, which describes the protagonist’s youth and courtship. This is Tolstoy at his most Turgenevian, with limpid, sparse, haunting descriptions of the country estate, and psychologically detailed descriptions of the relationships between the protagonists, and of their inner states. The tale then increases in intensity as the boredom of country life seeps into the protagonist’s soul. The climatic scene which takes place on the veranda during a spring shower is blisteringly intense and electrifying, with writing of great concentration and power. Even the weather contributes to the meaning of the scene and the depiction of their marriage: The sun had set, it was growing dark, and the little spring rain cloud hung over the house and garden and only behind the trees the horizon was clear, with the fading glow of twilight, in which one star had just begin to twinkle.

The great weakness of the tale, however, is the choice of narrative voice. The first person narrative is not entirely convincing for two reasons. First, there is an uneasy conflation of Tolstoy’s voice with Masha’s. Indeed it is something of a shock to discover towards the end of the first paragraph that the narrator is a woman and not a man. Masha has no real independence of her own as a voice apart from how she is intended to operate as a didactic symbol for Tolstoy. This is not a problem that one finds in Esther’s narrative in Bleak House for example, or in Jane Eyre, to name two influential female 19th century bildungromans. Secondly, questions of narrative provenance are unsatisfactorily left unanswered, and Tolstoy seems to be unaware of or just simply uninterested in the problems inherent in first person narratives, problems such as how the narrator withholds vital evidence from the reader and how this information is released, the problems in other words of the bildungsroman. Tolstoy’s privileging of morality, of didacticism over questions of narrative provenance fatally weakens the verisimilitude of the tale. He was to learn from this and tell roughly the same story again, with roughly the same aims in mind, but with much greater effect, 20 years later in Anna Karenina, but this time from an external viewpoint with a 3rd person, omniscient narrator.

This apart, there is much wisdom and beauty in the tale. The depiction of how love changes throughout the long years of a marriage are very true, and there is much wisdom too in reflecting on the whole of the relationship when it is in trouble, and not just on the period which is causing the trouble.

Each time of life has its own kind of love. I weep for that past love which can never return. Love remains, but not the old love.

Tolstoy on accepting old age

Don't let us try to repeat life. Don't let us make pretences to ourselves. Let us be thankful that there is an end of the old emotions and excitements. The excitement of searching is over for us; our quest is done, and happiness enough has fallen to our lot.

"A History of Russian Literature from its Beginnings to 1900" D.S. Mirsky

First published in 1926 in English, Mirsky’s book is rightly a classic in its field. It gives a complete survey of Russian literature from the earliest monastic chronicles up to and including Chekhov. Prince Mirsky (he renounced his title in his youth) was a Professor of Russian Literature at London University during the Twenties and his book developed out of the courses he gave there. More than any of the other emigres who fled the Revolution, Mirsky worked to provide a better understanding of Russian literature in English, and English literature in Russian. He published (his own) translations of contemporary English poetry into Russian, a history of Russia in English, and a history of the English intelligentsia in Russian. He retuned to Russia just as Stalin was purging the intellectuals in the early 30s, and predictably, perished in the gulag.

One of the great difficulties of Russian literature is that the genre boundaries between fiction, philosophy, political/religious polemic, and social and literary criticism are not so clear cut as they are in English. Mirsky in his survey sticks to fiction, poetry and drama, but there are sections on Belinsky, whose influence on post 1840 literature was incalculable, the journalists of the 1840s, and the great Russian sages, Herzen, Mikhaylovsky, Lavrov and Leontiev.

Mirsky’s method is to mention in passing the names, biographies and chief works with comments of those many minor or now forgotten writers who form the stream of Russian literature, and then to discuss in detail and at length the boulders that stand out above the waters of literary history: Dostoevsky, Toltosy, Chekhov, Leskov, Pushkin, Lermontov. He also looks in passing at the underlying intellectual and political currents that might have informed the biographies and interests of each writer, as well as the changing tastes of the Russian reader. Mirsky is devoid of any theoretical axe to grind, and his observations are trenchant, witty and wise; and if perhaps from the perspective of modern literary studies they are a touch naïve, they make up for this in abundant common sense and an obvious passion for and deep reading of the entire field. He is always alert to the problems of translation, and does his best to explain to the English reader the special characteristics of each writer’s Russian.

Here he is on Dostoevsky:
The deeper, the essential Dostoevsky is one of the most significant and ominous figures in the whole history of the human mind, one of the boldest and most disastrous adventures in the sphere of the ultimate spiritual quest. The superficial Dostoevsky is a man of his time, comparable – and not always favourably comparable – to many other Russian novelists and publicists of the age of Alexander II, a mind that had many rivals and which cannot in any way be placed apart from, or above, Herzen, Grigoriev, or Leontiev.

And on Tolstoy: he seems to have been given to the world for the special purpose of being contrasted with Dostoevsky.

And on Chekhov: It is left to the future to show… whether the advanced elite of the Western world has definitely reached a stage of mental senility that can be satisfied only by the autumnal genius of Chekhov.

And on Garshin: He is hardly a great writer. His manner is too much that of the degenerate age. His technique is insufficient, and … there are irritating lapses into the inadequate….

Reading this survey, one is left, as an English reader, with an intense yearning for more, a burning curiosity to read some of those works mentioned in passing and which, for a multitude of reasons, have either never been translated, or have fallen out of print, or have simply never reached the attention of an international audience. Works such as Pushkin’s letters, Years of Childhood by Aksakov, Radishchev’s Journey from Petersburg to Moscow, Leskov’s Hare Park, the poetry of Fet and Baratynsky, and the journals of Marie Bashkirtseva, to name just a few of the long- buried riches of Russian literature revealed in this super book.

(Pushkin’s poem King Saltan) has high seriousness, for what can be more highly serious than the creation of a world of perfect beauty and freedom open to all?

Spurious Quotation # 19

The trouble with most feminists today is that although they insist on total equality for women, they still want the men to do all the heavy lifting.
Simone De Beauvoir