By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Chaadayev's negative view of Russia, as shown in the previous part of our investigation, in the end incited the formulation of a new outlook asserting the superiority of Russia over the West. This was known as Slavophilia. At the start of this website we already had an article mentioning Slavophilia in relationship to the Eurasia movement, but will now will need to come back to the former.

According to Walicki's Slavophile Controversy (121), one of its  influential figures was Ivan Kireevski, "the founder of the Slavophile doctrine." Hence we will start this time by taking a look  at Kireevski's 1852 article "On the Nature of European Culture and Its Relation to the Culture of Russia," which according to Walicki was his "clearest and most systematic exposition of Slavophile philosophy" (135).

Here we notice, that if Chaadayev situates himself as an intellectual who cannot feel at home in his own country, then Kireevski situates himself as an intellectual who can no longer feel at home in European culture. He speaks of searching for a new philosophy, to find "complete answers to those very questions of the mind and heart which most perturb a soul disillusioned by the latest results of Western thinking" (207). Both authors perceive that contemporary conditions frustrate their spiritual yearnings, but their reasons for this are quite different.

Kireevski's depiction of the West agrees with that of Chaadayev in many details, yet the West is subject to an opposite valuation. The West is Russia's counter-ideal, according to the Slavophile, the opposite of everything Russia is and should be. Like Chaadaev, Kireevski means by the West the essence of European thought and politics as they have unfolded historically, but unlike Chaadaev, the West for him is driven by a spirit of division rather than by universality and unity: Western philosophies are based on dissolving logic, and Western social relations are based on conflict. Russian culture, he argues, has been informed by the spirit. of unity, even though this original national essence has been hidden from national consciousness until recently. Now that it is revealed, Russian intellectuals must make a choice between adherence to Western or Russian values. The vital question of the day is "the relation of Russian to Western culture." The answer to this question will "determine" not only intellectual life but "the meaning of our private lives, and the nature of our social relationships" (175).

Why does the question of the relation of Russian to Western culture arise at this particular time? Until now, Kireevski answers, it has been assumed that there is only one way of being civilized, that Europe is more civilized than Russia, and that Russia can catch up by imitating her. But, in the mid-nineteenth century, the self-understandings of both "Western European" and "European-Russian" cultures changed so much as to make the previous conception of their relation impossible. ("Western European" and "European-Russian" are terms he does not repeat, using instead the West or Europe, on one side, and Russia, on the other. The West and Europe - whose various nations "form a spiritual whole, into which they all fit as limbs do into a body" [180] - are used as complete synonyms. The opposite of Europe is Russia, and the opposite of the West is either Russia or the East, meaning Greece, Byzantium and Eastern Orthodoxy. There is no mention of Asia or the Orient in this text.) While Chaadayev compares Western and Russian civilizations, Kireevski compares Western and Russian cultures. For Chaadayev, civilization is based on thought: "Human progress is advanced by a small number of philosophers who fonn the "collective intelligence" of a nation ("Letter" 167). As Russia unfortunately lacks her own tradition of collective intelligence, Chaadayev characterizes her "peculiar civilization" by its deficiency. On the other hand, Kireevski conceives of culture located "in the customs, manners, and ways of thinking of the common people" (175), rather than the thinkers. Within the ordinary ways of life, and the continuity of customs, the distinctive culture of ancient Russia has been preserved, penneating "the soul, the turn of mind, the whole inner content, so to say, of any Russian who has not yet been transformed by Western education" (175). By employing the tenn culture, therefore, Kireevski intends to describe the inner spirit of a group as a whole, not simply the accomplishments of its leading figures.

Yet Kireevski is not as much a populist as this statement implies. For him, the Russian people in their folkways have unknowingly preserved the seeds of original Russian theology, and therefore they are the guardians of the resources that intellectuals can use to reconstruct authentic Russian culture. Thus, Kireevski' s conception of what is important in culture, given its emphasis on theology, is not all that different from Chaadayev's. Both authors privilege religious principles, as articulated by the Church Fathers and eventually spread to the rest of the community, as foundations for the spirit of a civilization or culture.

Why does Kireevski believe that the cultures of both the West and Russia changed so significantly in his time that a new awareness of their distinctiveness and a new questioning of their relation was emerging? First, the nature of Western culture has changed its nature insofar as it is nearing its end. Although, admittedly, the intellectual culture of the West has been dynamic and productive, it has no future. Its underlying principles have reached their logical conclusion; they have achieved a "fullness of development" (176), and they can unfold no further. This limitation of European culture is becoming evident to Europeans themselves. Even at its highest point, Western civilization has yielded nothing of substance to Westerners, but rather has left them with a sense of "disconsolate emptiness" because they have discovered its inner nature to be unsatisfyingly one-sided (177). The very abundance of knowledge in the West has only revealed its inadequacy in relation to "man's inner spirit," and the high levels of modern comfort and convenience have only produced a life "drained of its essential meaning." (So, while both Chaadayev and Kireevski describe the contemporary experience as one of meaninglessness and emptiness, for the former, this characterizes the Russian condition, and for the latter, the European.)

The spiritual deprivation of the West is caused by the dominance of rationalism: "Cold analysis, practiced over many centuries, has destroyed the very foundations of European culture, so that the principles in which that culture was rooted, from which it has grown, have become irrelevant, even alien to it, and in contradiction to its end result" (177). In an argument that anticipates Nietzsche, Kireevski claims that Christianity in the West created the tools of its own destruction. Medieval scholasticism laid the foundation for the modem Western mind, characterized as a "self-propelling scalpel of reason," "an abstract syllogism which recognizes only itself and individual experience," an "autonomous intelligence" reduced to a logical faculty which is "divorced from all man's other faculties of cognition" save from mere sense-perception upon which "it erects its ethereal dialectical edifices" (177). Until now, the implications of such "destructive rationality" have not been evident to Western man, because he has been proud of the power of his abstract reason, and of his triumph over tradition. But reason is becoming conscious of its own limitations, as evident in the thought ofHume, Kant, and Hegel. In themselves, these philosophers are not responsible for the change of consciousness; rather, they have Unwittingly registered history's self-consciousness. "Europe's logical reason" is becoming conscious of its inability to access "higher truths" and "living insights."

Now that Western man "has lost his last faith," what is he to do? Either he can try to find satisfaction in a lower mode of life involving sensual satisfaction and economic calculation, or he can try to recover Europe's original Christian belief-system. The problem is that the grounds of conviction have already been dissolved by "the disintegrating action of abstract reason" (178). So Western thinkers face a dilemma in  which they at once distain a lower mode of existence, and their reason will not allow them to accept the possibility of a higher existence. They try to overcome this dilemma by creating a plethora of individual philosophical systems, but all are delusional: "Like so many Columbuses, they all embarked on voyages of discovery within their own minds, seeking new Americas in vast oceans of impossible expectations, individual assumptions, and strict syllogisms."

Kireevski argues that Russian culture in the nineteenth century has changed so as to provide a way out of the spiritual impasses of the West. As Russian thinkers realize the limitations of the of Western philosophy, they can turn away from Western civilization altogether because an alternative is available to them - namely, Russia's unique "cultural principles." These principles, unrecognized by the West and, until recently, obscured at home, persist in Russia in cultural "traces." They have not manifest content like the principles of European culture, because, while Europe underwent a continuous, and now complete, course of development, Russia's history was interrupted by invasions. Now, this fragmentary past is becoming available through historical research. The study of history fills out the meaning of what had only been suggested by cultural remainders, and demonstrates that the characterization of the Russian past as a void is mistaken. The past reveals, for the first time, "the basic principles which went into the making of the particular Russian style of life," and "those vital faculties of the spirit for which Western intellectual development found no place and to which it offered no nourishment" (180). Early on, Russia had "spiritually broken away from Europe," and had developed "an entirely different type of life, flowing from an entirely different fountainhead." Thus, when in modem time the Russian tried to adapt himself to Western civilization, he "had nearly to destroy his national personality."

Like Chaadayev, Kireevski argues that there is an essential difference between the West and Russia, and that this can be explained by the origins of the two cultures. He specifically identifies three "historical circumstances" which "gave the entire development of culture in the West its specific character" (180). First, Christianity developed in the West through the Roman Catholic Church. This is also Chaadayev's View. But for Kireevski, the Eastern Church is universal, because it participates in the Universal Church, while the Roman Church is particular and corrupted by human passions. When the Roman Church broke off from the Universal Church, it no longer saw its particular contribution as part of a larger whole but as absolute. The second historical circumstance is that Europe's ancient heritage was derived from pagan Rome alone. The learning of Greek and Asian civilizations did not influence it until the Renaissance. By  that time, the habits of European intellectual life were set. The third circumstance is that the history of all European nations is a history of violent conflict, whether it be between individuals or between groups.

These three circumstances of the West's origins set the character of its subsequent development. Roman civilization informed all structures of life in early Europe. Thus, it was the source of that which is now distinctive about the West. The Roman mentality, the origin of the "mentality of the West," can be characterized as the preference for form over inner meaning (183). This is evident in Roman language, philosophy, art, religion, and law, all of which were codified. Every Roman individual was connected to others  only by formal relationships and interest rather than by love or spontaneity. Christianity initially worked against Roman pride and desire for dominance. But when Rome left the Universal Church, its "spirit of domination" and its excessive attachment to "abstract rationalism" went uncorrected by other tendencies. The triumph of this one-sided rationalist theology, destroying "harmony and wholeness," "helps to explain the character of Western civilization" as a whole, including the later emergence of Protestantism and modem atheism (185).

The history of the West is one of struggle and violence. The Roman desire for power led the Roman Church to work for papal domination over secular power, at the cost of religion's purity and spirituality. Through the barbarian invasions, politica1life became dominated by relentless struggles among groups and among powers, and formal methods had to be discovered to keep the peace. And, because ''the development of a state is simply the unfolding of the essential principles on which it is founded" (187), European history developed in accordance with its violent origins, culminating in revolutions where the overthrow of the existing order has become an end-in-itself. Now, Europe is being undermined by the very violence that first created it.

Yet, Kireevski admits, European civilization at first advanced rapidly. The separation of faculties, although it "was ultimately to destroy the entire edifice of European medieval civilization," accelerated development, according to the "law" by which "external brilliance is coupled with inner darkness." The history of Islam also shows how one sidedness can result in early advance, for its abstract religion promoted civilization and science. But the limitation of Islam is shown in the failure of Arab philosophy to  influence Byzantine thought, despite its Greek origins. It influenced Europe because it favored Aristotelian philosophy; the latter became the basis of European scholasticism, a style of theology that reduces truth to logical concepts. But "a spontaneous, integral approach to man's inner spiritual life and a spontaneous, unbiased observation of the world of nature were alike excluded from the charmed circle of Western thought" (189).

The sterility of scholasticism caused it to collapse once "the fresh, uncontaminated air of Greek thought poured in from the East," when Byzantium fell to the Turks. But even this could not change the basic habits of Western thinking. Descartes, for example, thought he had thrown off scholasticism, but he merely continued its obsession with logic in a new form (190).

Thus, the differences in cultural origins have led to differences in the very mode of thinking in the West of Europe and the East ofEastem Orthodoxy. The separation and isolation of the faculties in Western thought created a cold and unemotional reason, on one side, and unrestrained passions, on the other (193). Even the moments of supposed inwardness in the Western tradition did not grasp the true meaning of spiritual integration, which was the achievement of a "living union" or "equilibrium" of the inner and outer life (193). Because he did not aim for serenity, Western man has been "eternally restless" (194). The whole "Western school" can be characterized as one-sided in its mode of philosophy and in its effects (191). And the one-sided obsession with analytical reason that has informed the whole history of We stem thought has recently resulted in philosophy analyzing the limits of analysis, and concluding that nothing can be known about reality. So Western philosophy is now at an impasse; it is unable to continue along its traditional road but has no new one in sight.
The Specific characteristics of Western historical development were "entirely alien to old Russia" (182). While the West had a cultural debt to Rome, Russia was indebted to  Greece. While the Roman Church abandoned the fullness of the Universal Church, the Greek Church remained faithful. While Western theology was narrow, the Greek enjoyed the entire heritage of the ancients and thus had "breadth and wholeness" (191). Greek

Christian theology was "profound, alive, elevating the mind from mechanical reasoning"; its goal has been the preservation of the purity of Christian doctrine rather than the divisive desire for innovation. The Eastern Orthodox Church formed "the authentic Russian mind, which is the foundation of the Russian style of life," carried forwards especially by the monasteries. The monasteries radiated "a uniform and harmonious light of faith": the Russian people derived not only a distinctive spirituality from them, but also "ethical, social, and legal concepts" which bore ''the stamp of uniformity" (194). As a result, Russia has considered itself to be "a single living organism" animated by common faith. Learning in early Russia was quite advanced, far surpassing that of medieval Europe, and the profundity of the Church Fathers continues to be "beyond the grasp of many a German professor of philosophy (although none of them is likely to admit this fact)" (195). Russian learning was so extensive, developed, and "deeply rooted in Russian life" that it "has survived almost without a change among the lower classes of the people," "almost unconsciously, as a matter of tradition," despite the fact that the intellectual class abandoned Russia for Europe (195).

Russia's political history also took a different turn from Europe's. While the latter developed through conflict, the former developed "independently and naturally,"-"nurtured" by the Church (197). European Christianity came to prevail only after a series of struggles, but Eastern Christianity was adopted by Russians naturally, for Slavic customs favored its acceptance and pure influence. Christianity then was able to form Russian culture, because the nation was not deformed by violent conquest. Like Pagodin, Kireevsld argues that the Normans were not conquerors but accepted rulers, and under them, Russian society continued to develop -"calmly and naturally" (196). Those who brought violence to Russia through invasion - the Tartars, Poles, Hungarians, Germans,"and other scourges" - never affected its essential culture. They always remained alien, and, at most, arrested Russia's development rather than changing its course (183).

(Kireevski at one point speculates that they may even have served the Providential purpose of ensuring that Russian culture did not become one-sided.) Throughout history, the Russian Church kept itself pure, "like an unattainable, radiant ideal" (196), and, unlike the Roman Church, never grasped for political power. Russian religion influenced the nature of the community only indirectly through its promotion of harmony and integration. Because all elements of society were joined in common spirit, hierarchy was accepted as natural, not leading to class conflict nor egalitarianism. Russian individuals lived in "a natural, simple, and concordant relationship" with each other, and so laws developed organically rather than externally and formally (197). Moreover, because Russian society was governed by sanctity and unanimity, its political life was governed by "conviction," ("it spontaneous awareness of the sum total of social relations'') rather than "opinion" (the "narrow selfishness" of a singular point of view that opposes itself to others through argument [198]).

The nature of Russian social institutions is therefore quite distinct from the Western ones."The entire edifice of the Western social order" (199) is based on private land ownership as an unconditional right, a notion which stems from Roman law. In Russian tradition, land ownership is communal. The land belongs, in one sense, to the village community, to those able to cultivate it. And in another sense, it belongs to the state, which was owed service. "The general trend of Western civilization" towards individuality has worked against strong family ties. Upper-class European women put their social interests above their family involvement, finding their value in "the brilliant salon," which is "the principal and engrossing goal of their artificial life." The "marvelous and enchanting social refinement" of aristocratic Western society is even corrupting the lower classes, causing "moral degeneration." Western corruption will inevitably result in the triumph of ''the notorious doctrine of the complete emancipation of women" (202). In contrast, family life in Russia has developed out of the values of "spiritual integrity" and heroic sacrifice. The family has always reflected the needs of the ''unified whole," not the goals of personal independence, ambition, opinion, or fashion. While the characteristic Russian family is no longer so evident in the Europeanized upper classes, it can be found still in the peasantry, whose members work selflessly for the good of all. Each gives all he earns to the head rather than benefiting himself, and no-one tries to usurp the head's authority or call him to account (201).

While Europe was besotted with striving and luxury, Russian life was informed by simplicity: "Western man sought to relieve the burden of his internal shortcomings by developing material wealth. The Russian endeavored to avoid.the burden of material needs by raising his spirit above them" (202). Even now, when the Western love of  luxury has come to infect Russia, Russians in general are not moved by economic motivations, and they do not aim to maximize wealth. Regarding personal morality, the "Westemer" is smug, always inventing new moralities to excuse his excesses, while the Russian is aware that he is a sinner according to the light of the purity of the original religion. Present "Russian customs" thus retain the traces of ''pure Christian principles" which "the Slavic tribes" so readily and easily accepted in early Russian history.

Given the centrality of the principle of unity in Russian culture, any discord threatens the whole. In the artificial West, there is always change because there are new opinions which overcome old ones; but in a natural society, such as Russia, "every change in direction is an illness, and is fraught with some danger." Upheaval does not lead to improvement, but to dissolution - for change must follow "the law of the natural growth of unified organisms" and thus society "can only develop harmoniously and imperceptibly" (199). In Kireevski's account is no positive valuation of critique in itself, for critique destroys unity. This confirms Raeff's characterization of the Slavophiles: they were "interested primarily in the organic totality of a social or cultural entity" and "recoiled from everything that would lead to the dissection and destruction of its integrity - in particular, logical analysis, individual particularism, the atomization of society" (174). The only critique that Kireevski offers of "Russian man" is that he is too intense, so that, in his "constant striving for the unity of all moral faculties," he exhausts himself.

Western man, who "fragments his life into separate aspirations," is able to work more efficiently and thus he can accomplish more (200). The essence of the West is therefore formality, fragmentation, conflict and restlessness, while the essence of Russia is spontaneity, wholeness, hannony, and serenity (204-5).

Given its manifest superiority, "why, then, did not Russian culture develop more richly than the European before Western learning was imported?" Why did Russia not outstrip Europe and lead mankind intellectually? If all is part of the plan of Providence, what was the purpose of this plan? Kireevski speculates that the Russians held to so pure a Christianity, that they may have mistaken their religious practices for the Christian life as such. This danger was evident in the sixteenth century, when the Russian respect for tradition was becoming attachment to its forms, not its inner spirit (206). The distortions of Russian culture caused religious upheaval, and, as a result, some turned to Europe as the solution.

Until the present, the enlightenment of Russia has depended upon foreign materials, but now it must be derived from the "pure stone" provided by the Church. This will only happen when the intellectual class becomes convinced that Western culture is one-sided and inadequate, and, desiring the whole truth, turns to the "pure fountainhead" of Orthodox spirituality (207). Turning away from ''the yoke of the logical systems" of the West to Eastern theology, the intellectual will discover ''the depths of the special, living, integral philosophy" of the Church; turning to history will show the material out of which "a different culture may be evolved" (207). Russian learning will subsequently be founded upon ''native principles," the arts can grow from "native roots," and culture "will then proceed in a different direction." Kireevski concludes by emphasizing that the spirit of original Russia needs to be rediscovered, not its older forms. Russians should not return to the dead past, but evolve according to living principles. Despite the numerous arguments he advances to prove that the West is essentially foreign to Russia, and that true Russian philosophy will be "incomprehensible to the Western mind" (207),Kireevski seems not to envision a future in which the two are completely isolated from each other. He claims that "after the recent interpenetration of Russia and Europe," what happens in one will always affect the other (180). In other words, the impact of the West on Russia cannot be completely undone. He does not address the apparent contradiction between these positions.

Nicholas Riyasanovsky and other commentators show the extent to which the Slavophile denunciation of Western thought was dependent upon the very categories of Western thought, particularly of German romanticism: "The Slavophile criticism of the German philosophers has often been cited as a proof of their independence from Western thinkers. .. In point of fact, this criticism is itself one of the most striking illustrations of the romantic origins of Slavophile ideology" ("Russia" 170). The criticism that Hegel's philosophy expounded a one-sided rationalism, made by Kireevski and other Slavophiles, was identical to the criticism "already leveled by Fichte against Kant, by Hegel against Fichte, and by Schelling against Hegel," not to mention "by all romantic philosophers against the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century" (170). (An English example would be J.S. Mill's defense of Coleridge's Germanic organic idealism against Bentham's atomistic utilitarianism.) While Hegel, in particular, came to stand for the hyperrationalism of Western thought, his influence on Slavophile thought was substantial (Walicki 12). This can be seen in Kireevski, who criticizes Hegel, but whose argument employs a Hegelian-style theory of stages of consciousness. Likewise, Kireevski' s contrast between the holism and spontaneity of ancient Greece and the one-sidedness of the West repeats Schiller's critique of modernity.

Thus, in the Slavophile ideology, as expounded by Kireevski, we see a process in which the romantic critique of Enlightenment reason becomes a critique of Western reason, and the romantic ideals of "organic society" and "comprehensive knowledge" are attributed to old Russia (Riasanovsky "Russia"l72). Riasanovsky argues that "the Slavophile view of society and history represented a Russian version of the romantic ideology of the age"(174). I would argue that Russian romantic ideology also introduced anti-Occidentalism, which conceives of a distinctive Western civilization characterized by mechanical analytic reason in contrast with some other civilization or culture that is authentic, spontaneous, and organic. Kireevski's view that Descartes, Kant, and Hegel epitomize Western reason, or the West tout court, is familiar today. It is a standard claim of contemporary theory. Through this identification, the tradition as a whole, with all its divisions, is collapsed into a single essential moment: the Enlightenment. Walicki demonstrates the close correspondence of Kireevski's dichotomy between the essence of the West and the essence of Russia, and Ferdinand Tonnies's dichotomy of Gesellschaft and Gemeinshaft, or of formalist society and organic community. Through the latter categories, German sociological thought came to distinguish modern societies as Western, and all others that were pre-modern or traditional as non- Western. The different stages of cultures became different cultures.

Despite its appeal to Russian nationalism against Western influence, Kireevski's work met much the same fate as Chaadayev's at the hands of the censors - the journal in which this article appeared was closed, Kireevski was placed under surveillance, and he was forbidden to publish anything without prior pennission (Raeff 175). The government wanted to promote the centrality of the Russian State and the institutional framework established by Peter that had so increased Russia's power and influence. It was suspicious of Kireevski's appeal to the authority of theology and the customs of the people, and of his criticisms of Peter's reforms. A censor wrote about Kireevski that "in his apparently loyal article he fails to do justice to the immortal services of the Great Russian Reformer and his imperial heirs, who were untiring in their efforts to bring Western civilization to their subjects and only by this means were able to raise the power and glory of our Fatherland to their present splendor" (qtd. in Walicki, Slavophile 147).

The essentially conservative nature of Slavophilism, and its lack of interest in political reform, is evident in Kireevski's emphasis on tradition and spirituality. The argument that politics is a Western phenomenon, alien to the Russian soul, was made explicit in a memorandum to the tsar in 1855 by Konstantin Aksakov, who claimed that the Russian people had no desire to participate in government. This was demonstrated historically by their invitation of foreign nilers such as the Normans to govern and rule over them, and by their disinclination to revolt against the tsar. Westerners might consider the Russians slavish, but they judge them by alien standards: "For Russia to fulfill her destiny, she must follow her own ideas and requirements, and not the theories which are alien to her"(233). The Russians want to retain "their internal communa1life, their customs, their way of life - the peaceful life of the spirit (234). In contrast, "the Western nations, having abandoned the spiritual path, the path of religion, have been lured by vanity into striving for power" (238-39). But in Russia, social harmony is the norm, as long as "the people do not encroach upon the state" or the state the people (242). Russia's problems began with Peter, who breached the traditional unity of state and land, causing the state to dominate the land. The Russian upper-classes were Westernizers, and had.only contempt for Russia itself (243). It was these people who caused political unrest, culminating in the Decembrist uprising. Russia is now full of social conflict and class alienation. The government wrongly suppresses all freedom of expression because it thinks that the people will revolt, but on their own the Russian people have no political ambition. "As soon as the government takes away the people's inner, communal freedom, it forces them to seek external, political freedom" (245).

Like "Westemizer," the tenn "Slavophile" was apparently coined by critics of that outlook. The term attributes to this tendency a greater interest in the Slavs as a people than in Russia as a nation. Yet it is clear that for the Russian Slavophiles, Russia, in particular, was at issue. Kireevski speaks of Slavs only briefly in "European Culture" his concern is for "our present and future Orthodox Russia" (207). Another major figure, Aleskei Stepanovich Khomiakov, likewise, in his essay "On Humboldt," written in 1849, focuses on "Holy Russia." Russian Slavophiles, like the later Pan-Slavists, always maintained that Russia should be the leader of the Slavs, much as the United States is the leader of the free world - not surprisingly, non-Russians protested this, and wanted a real federation of Slavic peoples.

Like Kireevski, Khomiakov's view of Russia's contemporary situation is accompanied by a diagnosis of crisis in the West, whose "underlying spiritual principles have withered" (211). Again, the West is detennined though the Roman origins of Roman  Catholicism, yet he characterizes the essence of Rome differently from Kireevski. It is seen to favor necessity and unity over freedom. The other contributor to Europe, the German tribes, valued liberty, but their historical impact was made through violence. The Protestant Reformation was a reaction against one-sided unity, but it asserted empty, one sided liberty. The spirit of Protestantism, freedom without content, came to dominate Europe as a whole, leading to revolutions (213). Providence, or world history, has led mankind to see the error of the European path, and to see that only Orthodoxy can combine unity and freedom (215). Through the Church, Russia can claim the East: "Orthodoxy is represented by the East, and mainly by the Slavic countries, headed by our Russia" (215).

So Russia has a world-historical mission or destiny. It will fulfill its destiny partly through recovering its past. Early Russia was open to all thought because it sought the universal. But the invasions and oppression by foreigners caused it to turn inward and turn against anything outside. Eventually, in reaction to such narrowness, an outlook Khomiakov calls "Whiggism" - the desire to transcend tradition - came to dominate in Russia. Unlike Whiggism in England, which was an authentic part of the nation's culture,Whiggism in Russia was alien to its spirit and its exponents became anti-Russian, rootless, negative, and enslaved to "the powerful intellectual movement of the West."

Russian intellectuals, inwardly divided between the Russian soul and Western knowledge, could not think originally. But now world history has "irrevocably condemned the one-sided spiritual principles which used to govern Western thought" (218) and called forth Russia to ''take the lead in universal enlightenment" (229), and so Russian thinkers will have to learn how to appreciate Russian principles. Western-based thinking, for example, cannot see the distinctive order and justice that belongs to the Russian village community, the mir. Future legal reforms, if they are to be authentically Russian, must be derived from the communal principles evident in Slavic customs. In other writings, Khomiakov advocates social justice, including the freeing of the serfs, bholds that any reforms to the social order should be based on economic principles other than Western competition, and legal forms other than Western law.

The opposition between the West and the Slavs is more developed in his "Letter to a Foreign Friend on the Eve of the Crimean War," precisely because he sees it as a war of liberation of the Christian Slavs and Greeks against the "Turkish yoke" (109), and against "the arbitrary cruelties of Mohammedans" (111). Russia will fight out of Christian duty, because it "is bound by ties of blood to the Slav peoples" and "it is bound to the Greeks by the ties of faith" (in Kohn, Mind 108), but she is opposed in this holy work by the perfidy of European Christians who uphold the rights of the Ottoman Empire. Yet the very enmity of "the Western powers" to Russia's Christian mission has beneficial consequences unintended by the West - namely, it causes two great principles finally to "enter the great light of history": Whatever happens, Providence has marked out our time to become a decisive era in the destiny of the world. From now on, two great principles are on the rise: The first is the Russian or rather the Slav principle, the principle of the real fraternity of blood and spirit. The second, which is much higher, is that of the [Orthodox] Church - and it is only under its protecting wing that the first principle could preserve itself in the midst of a world of trouble and discord, and only thanks to divine might that it will pass from being almost an instinctive tendency of one race alone to the dignity of a moral law guiding the future steps of mankind.(111)

In his unfinished Sketches of Universal History, Khomiakov interprets world history as the opposition between two principles. The "Kushite" principle of materiality and necessity was expressed in the worship of stone, representing matter, and the serpent, representing desire. The "Iranian" principle of freedom was associated with spirituality and poetry. The Kushites originated in Ethiopia and are associated with Egypt, most of Asia, and Rome. The Iranian spirit of freedom passed to the Jews, much of the white race, and the Slavs especially (Billington 320; Riasanovsky 1972: 10). The Kushite cultures were oriented to the external world. producing monumental architecture; the Iranians were oriented inward. Khomiakov's divisions were suggestive of some racial theories of the time. which held that Aryans were the creative race and Africans were slaves of nature. but in his case. these principles were not based in biology. Instead, each culture had its own history of struggle between the two principles. The Germans, for example, were originally Iranian. yet centuries of Roman Catholicism and Roman law made them increasingly Kushite. culminating in the logical systems of German philosophies which insisted on the necessity of history (Walicki. Slavophile 216).

The Slavophiles thus used the West as a counter-ideal through which to define the Russian soul, and they accused their opponents of being Westernizers who hated themselves and  their nation. Chaadaev's letter certainly offers grounds for such an accusation, but in general, the Westernizers were Russian patriots who thought that the good of Russia could only be accomplished by taking on the universal ideas that had found expression in European thought, and by reforming Russian institutions in their light. While Chaadaev was an exception, the Westernizers did not criticize the Russian spirit in relation to the Western spirit, but only those Russian practices which were oppressive and exploitative.They criticized objectionable aspects of Russia by calling them Eastern, Oriental, or Tartar.

Chaadaev, who set the terms of the debate, was not a typical Westernizer, for he was in many ways a Burkean conservative rather than a true progressive. Belinsky was more typical and widely influential. Like other Westernizers in the mid-nineteenth century, he was in touch with European radical opinion. Prince Mirsky, in his 1926-27 History of Russian Literature, calls Belinsky "the true father of the intelligentsia," "the embodiment of what remained its spirit for more than two generations - of social idealism of the passion for improving the world, of disrespect for all tradition, and of highly strung, disinterested enthusiasm" (qtd. in Kohn, Mind 116-17). Belinsky, unlike Chaadaev, does not affirm the Europe of what would later be called the Western tradition, but rather the

Europe of Enlightenment and progress. He is as critical of Old Regime Europe as he is of autocratic and Orthodox Russia.

Belinsky's famous 1847 "Letter to Gogol," written in protest against what he interpreted as the novelist's turn away from social critique, became the "credo of the progressive circles" (Kohn, Mind 118) even though it could not be published in Russia and was only spread through illegal copies. In this letter, Belinsky writes that "Russia sees her salvation not in mysticism, not in asceticism, not in pietism, but in the achievements of civilization, enlightenment, and humanitarianism" (254). Contra the Slavophiles, the burning issues in Russia are not theological but humanitarian ones. The persistence of serfdom, the use of corporal punishment, the poor treatment of women, "Tatar censorship" (258), and other "Tatar customs" (255), all show a lack of respect for human dignity. Belinsky wrote in the early 1840s: "What care I for the existence of the universal when individuality is suffering? What care 1 if genius on earth lives in heaven when the crowd is wallowing in the dirt?" ("Reform"128) "I am inflamed against all the principles which bind the will of men to a creed! My God is negation! In history my heroes are the destroyers of the old - Luther, Voltaire, the Encyclopedias, the TeITOrists, Byron (Cain), and so on . . . I prefer the blasphemies of Voltaire to acknowledging the authority of religion society, or anything or anybody!" (130); "Woman will not be the slave of society and man . . . There will be neither rich nor poor, neither kings nor subjects. There will only be brethren, there will only be man" (131).

Despite the epithet of "Westernizer," which suggests a desire to make Russia Western, Belinsky is critical of Peter's reforms insofar as they caused the upper-classes to divorce themselves from the Russian people and from Russian customs. Instead of slaves imitating foreigners, he calls for "an enlightenment created by our own efforts, cultivated on our own native soil" ("Russia" 121-22). But "for that we first need the education of a society that would express the character of the great Russian people" (124). So learning from the West is only a stage of immaturity until the point when Russians will "be the  rival and not the imitators of Europe" (125). "We are today the pupils and no longer tzealots of Europeanism; we want to be Russians in the European spirit" ("Miracle" 128).

While Belinsky looks forward to the development of an independent national character, comparable rather than equivalent to the West's, he describes those aspects of Russia that are backwards and evil (encompassing most of Russia's history until Peter in fact) as "Asiatic:' Russia is in "the East of Europe, where the two parts of mankind meet" and it "differs sharply from its Western neighbors" ("Russia" 119) because "Russia was cut off from the West at the very beginning of her existence" ("Miracle" 126). Russia was formed by ''the sword of the Asiatic-Russ" and was given religion by "moribund Byzantium" which taught her the custom of "gouging the eyes of enemies" (126). It was united by "the chains of the Tartar" and "the hand of the Khans" (119), which taught it "slavery in notions and sentiments," "Asiatism in ways oflife;' and "everything that was directly opposed to Europeanism" (126): "How much there was that was Asiatic, barbaric?" Belinsky asks. Once under its own rulers, Russians worshipped the Tsar "as Providence" (119), almost as ifhe were an Oriental despot. In ajudgment utterly opposed to that of the Slavophiles, Belinsky considers Russia's early life primitive and monotonous, "one-sided and isolated" (120). Yet the barbarity of the Russian past was not due so much to native characteristics, but "engrafted on us by the Tartars" and thus can be overcome. In fact, once Peter opened "his nation's door to the light of the world,"Russia responded gratefully and began evolving into something new (127).

Thus, like Chaadaev, Belinsky understands the Slavophiles to believe in the Orient, in "the victory of the East over the West" ("Slavophils" 133-34). He thinks that they are  wrong about Europe's decay, because they cannot understand the West and ''they measure it with an Eastern yardstick" (134). He accuses them of being ''the haters of Europeanism" ("Reform" 132), too easily threatened by foreign ways, too quick to accuse Russians who learn from others of losing their nationality, and too ready to hold up the degraded peasant as the example of the true Russian. Yet he agrees with them that, due to Peter, Russians suffer from an inner duality and thus lack a clear sense of national character. It is easier for a Russian to take on the outlook of a European than to think like a Russian - "Because the Russian to himself is still a riddle, and the significance and destiny of his native land.. .are likewise a riddle to him" ("Slavophils" 135). Like many of the Slavophiles, Belinsky thinks that Russia has a special world-historical mission. The achievement of a strong sense of nationality in Russia, for Belinsky, is not an end in itself but the means to the realization of "a still greater idea of humanity" (131). Now that humanity is beginning to accept the idea of universal brotherhood, in which all nations learns from the others, Russia is in a path of development towards' a future in which "we are destined to give our message and our thought to the world" (135).

Another Westernizer, Alexander Herzen, developed a distinctive Russian form of socialism, called Populism, and his writings influenced European as well as Russian radicalism. He was a Westernizer and a critic of the Slavophiles because he thought they preached submission to power. They "preached the contempt of the West, and yet the West alone could enlighten the dark gulf of Russian life; they glorified the past, instead of emphasizing the need of liberation from this past in favor of a future common to Russia and the West" (163). Autocracy and the suppression ofindividua1liberty would be misfortunes for Russia and dangers to Europe if they continued (162). If Russia is not emancipated, "she will have no future but to throw herself upon Europe, like a semibarbarian and semicorrupted horde devastating the civilized countries."

Yet, at the same time, Herzen is disappointed in Europe and European republicanism. He writes, in his periodical The Bell in 1867, that the effect of the vote in Europe has been to arouse nationalist aggression rather than freedom ("Sobriety" 186). In his 1851 autobiography, he acknowledges that he does not believe the future necessarily belongs to Europe: "We do not predict anything, but neither do we believe that the destiny of mankind is tied up with Western Europe. If Europe does not succeed in recovering through social transformation, other countries will transform themselves" ("Development" 159). One place where humanity might advance, he thinks, is the United States, a republic that is "strong, rugged, energetic, persistent, without ruins of the past to encumber her present journey" ("Sobriety" 186). Another place of the future is Russia, because in important ways it is also, like the United States, a new country. Herzen believes that Russia is entering a stage of new possibilities after the Crimean War. This is not well understood, however, because of "the standards which a study of Western civilization has set up in our minds." These cannot grasp "the peculiar and individual properties of Russia's national life" ("Evolution" 169). Only Russians who have not been cowed by a sense of the greatness of the West, by European socialists, or by North Americans can understand the Russian people. The West, by focusing exclusively on the history of states, has disregarded or scorned the achievements and potential of Russia, because the resemblance between Russian and Western institutional forms has obscured the Russian reality (172). Russia is maligned by the very Europeans she saved from Napoleon, and everything to her credit is turned against her. England is admired for  exploring and colonizing new worlds, but Russia's tremendous exploit in colonizing Siberia is ignored - "history has hardly taken notice" (170). It is no surprise that Europeans should hate the Russian government and foreign policy, but they have turned their hatred unjustly against the Russian people (170). Europe has no reason to feel superior: "Up to her knees in blood," Europe is faced with class conflict on a scale that must lead to class war. In Russia, on the other hand, a tradition of "communistic landholding" remains that might be the solutio~ to European dilemmas (171). The Russia of the future is the one whose call is "Liberation of the Peasants with their Land" (173).

Russia might learn from European mistakes and point out a new path because it is neither Eastern nor Western. In 1860, Herzen wrote, in his newspaper The Bell, that Russian aspirations bear "no resemblance whatever to the quietistic self-deification of Eastern peoples" because they are directed towards the future ("Future" 183). Russia is also freer than the "old Western nations," who live equally in the present and the past, always trying to continue their traditions: "They hold their inheritance on condition that they transmit it safely" (183). Russia, in contrast, is "as independent of time as of space. We have no ties of remembrance, we are not bound by legacies... our history lies ahead." The very condition that caused Chaadaev to despair is a sign of hope for Herzen. Under Nicholas I, Russians were "insulted in our human dignity, we were foreigners in our own home; feeling our strength, we were forced to concentrate all our activity within our hearts and minds - and our minds grew bold and intrepid" ("Freedom" 179). The forces of liberation are gathering strength, and the Russian state is weakening. "Now think of the result when this sixth part of the globe with its social instincts, bound no longer by its  German chains and stripped of memories and heritage, can shout across to the Western workers, and they will realize that their cause is the same" ("Future" 184).

Despite his hopes for Russia, Herzen was no nationalist. He even offended many progressive Russians by denying Russian hegemony over the other Slavs. In 1859, he proposed a federation of Slavs on the basis ''that federations of related peoples make for an incomparably more ample political life than does the splitting of one ethnic group into its separate parts," but made it clear that "Russia has no right to Poland" ("Federal Union" 174). Yet in the following year, still advocating federation, he also claims that Russia is not just Slavic, and that the Russian people, due to their humble condition, are in no condition to look down upon others "from the heights of Western civilization."

They have recognized the equality of ''the Jew, the Finn, the Tartar, and the Kalmuk" ("Freedom" 179). "We have nothing - we are the beggars of this world - nothing except aspirations, nothing but faith in ourselves.. ..Is it not easier for such a people to shove its boat off the old shores?" The goal is not national or ethnic self-realization, but human emancipation.

Although he called for a new world of freedom, after 1848 Herzen had become adverse to violent revolution ("Sobriety" 187). The Russian people might end by taking violence into their own hands, which would be tragic, but Russian revolutionaries in exile should not summon them to violence (190). Violence will speed nothing, for communism will simply be inverted despotism.

Pan-Slavism

Herzen and the other progressive Westernizers such as Belinsky were more truly universalizers than Westernizers, and therefore the question of how to establish social justice in Russia took priority, for them, over the relation of Russia to the West. But, as Kohn observes, for conservative nationalists such as Nicholai Danilevsky, "the debate over Russia's relation with Europe determined their entire outlook" (Mind 191). While the earlier Slavophiles, despite their name, were concerned primarily with discerning the essential national spirit of Russia, Danilevsky was an advocate of Pan-Slavism, a political program to unite Slavs politically under Russian leadership to counter Western imperial powers. In general, the Slavophiles had belonged to what the Russians called the "generation of the '40s," their outlook formed by an idealist Romanticism looking for national spirit through the study of the past. Pan-Slavism was an ideology of the "generation of the '60s," whose outlook was more "scientific" and practical, attuned to the geopolitical struggles of the imperialist Great Powers of the later nineteenth century.Nevertheless, the ideas of the two groups overlapped.

In his Russia and Europe, An Inquiry Into the Cultural and Political Relations of the Slav World and of the Germano-Latin World, " published in 1869, Danilevsky asks a question familiar to contemporary Americans: "Why do they hate us?" In this case, the question is: why do European countries always band together to work against Russia? His answer is that Europe and Russia are fundamentally opposed, for they belonged to distinct and competing civilizations. Europe belongs to the "Germano-Roman" civilization of the West, and Russia belongs to the "Slavic" civilization in the East. The source of European hostility thus "lies in the deep gulf separating the world of the Slavs and the GermanoRoman world - a gulf which reaches down to the very origins of the general stream of universal history" (qtd. in Kohn, Mind 195). Europe especially hates Russia because she fears that Western civilization is declining and Slavic civilization is rising to dominate the world in its place.

Unlike the Russian Westemizers, Danilevsky does not believe that Western truths are universal truths, or that history will find its end in the achievements of Western civilization. Rather, all civilizations are individual organisms subject to the laws of growth and decay. The Germano-Roman civilization reached its peak in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it is now in degenerating. For the West has an inherent weakness in that it came into being through Roman domination and violence, and its

capitalist economic-social order continues to be oppressive. Russia and the West will inevitably collide, first over the "Eastern question" (i.e. the fate of the Ottoman empire), and then over the leadership of the world. Through the "healthy dynamism" of this struggle, Russia will be cured of her spiritual malaise, caused by Westernization, which has acted like a diseaSe upon her "social body," and she will unite all Slav peoples to create Slavic civilization (196). This new spiritual civilization will bring about world peace.

Danilevky's theory that different civilizations are based on incommensurable principles, stemming from their divergent religious origins, is uncannily close to Huntington's theory of the clash of civilizations. What follows from both arguments is that the principles of Western civilization are not, and cannot be, universal. For Danilevsky, to  think that the West is a universal civilization is to buy into a false ideology of "Westemism," one which would turn Russians and their brother Slavs into mere imitators of the West, depriving them of "cultural significance" and "a great historical future" (195). But a proper understanding of "the real principles of the systematization of scientific-natural phenomena" shows that every civilization is an independent organism that coheres according to its own unique principles.

Yet, despite his theory about the separate nature of civilizations, Danilevsky believes that they have ''pan-human'' significance and that they playa role in world history's advance towards peace and unity. Unlike later conceptions of civilizations in Darwinian competition, his theory has stages in which each world-historical civilization succeeds a previous one on the way to greater perfection. Human fulfillment has four dimensions: religious, political, artistic-cultural and socio-economic. The Jewish cultural-historical type was "exclusively religious" (197), the Hellenic was "primarily artistic-cultural," and the Roman primarily political (197-8). After these three one-sided "cultural-historical types," one needed to develop the fourth side, the socio-economic, and then integrate all types into a culture favoring "many-sidedness" (199). Through Christianity, Europeans seem to have achieved a many-sided culture, but they have done so in an incomplete way, due to ''the violence of their character" (199). The institutions of old Europe - Church, feudalism, and scholasticism - were all despotic, and they have resulted in the three anarchies of the modem age: Protestantism, materialism, and a society rent by the contradiction between economic servitude and political freedom (200). These are all indications of civilizational decay. Although the West has made "staggering" achievements politically through the global reach of its power and the idea of political  freedom, these have not made Western society successful, because they have not solved the problems in "the socio-economic order," namely economic oppression. The attributes of modem Western civilization therefore cannot "be considered a viable investment in the treasury of mankind." (Nineteenth-century Russian thinkers on all sides declined to see free-market capitalism as the great achievement of socio-economic life.)

Although only in its early stages, Slavic civilization promises to embody a many sidedness that is complete. Orthodox religion is vital and true, Slavic political capacity is demonstrated by the strength and vastness of the Russian state, which has not spread through violent colonization but by peaceful absorption, and Russia has no landless masses, so its socio-economic life is not based on mass misery (206). Thus Russia is inherently stable, unlike Europe which depends upon exploitation. Only in the artistic cultural realm is Russia behind, because so much of history has been absorbed necessarily in fighting invaders (207). But once there is strong foundation, including "consciousness of Slav racial unity," an independent culture will follow - free of "servile attitude towards the West" which has infected the Russian soul: "the struggle against the Germano-Roman world (without which Slav independence is impossible) will help to eradicate the cancer of imitativeness and the servile attitude towards the West, which through unfavorable conditions has eaten its way into the Slav body and soul" (210).

 

The Question of Nihilism

The link between Nihilism and the Westernizers can be seen in Belinsky's statement: "My God is negation." The term "nihilism" was probably coined by Joseph de Maistre, a  refugee from the French Revolution who ended up in the Russian Court. He had tremendous influence on Russian thinkers, especially Chaadaev. Writing in the first decade of the nineteenth centwy, he argued that the French Revolution resulted from ''the insurrection against God'" ("theophobia"), and nihilism ("rienisme") (Billington 272). The first Russian to use the term was N. I. Nadezhdin, who used it to describe the materialism that opposed his Schellingian idealism (Billington 312). Those who were self-avowed nihilists were radical Westernizers, negating all tradition - yet they believed in progress and science.

Russian nihilism was an extreme form of Westernism. The term was used to indicate a loss of belief in everything except science. According to Herzen: Nihilism...is logic without restraint; it is science without dogmas; it is unconditional submission to experience and acceptance without a murmur of all consequences, whatever they may be, if they flow from observation and are demanded by reason. Nihilism does not turn something into nothing, but reveals that nothing, which has been taken for something, is an optical illusion. (qtd. In Treadgold I: 185)

The anarchist Peter Kropotkin writes, in his Memoirs of a Revolutionist, that nihilism in Russia has been caused by the disappointment with the results of the emancipation of the serfs, which only revealed that servitude is such a deeply rooted social habit of Russians that it can only be overcome by thorough-going revolt against all traditions and convention (123). Kropotkin goes on to say that Europeans have wrongly associated nihilism, which was a way of life, with terrorism. While the terrorists of the 1870s did come out of the populist, rather than nihilist, movement, nevertheless one could argue that there is a conceptual link between terrorism and nihilism. The nihilist Dmitry Pisarev wrote in 1860 that '''what can be smashed must be smashed'" (qtd. in Kohn, Mind 140).

Yet the ideas of nihilism themselves could result in destructive violence, as Dostoyevsky perceived. He wrote about this in his novel The Devils (also translated as The Possessed), which is an indictment of Russia's Europeanized educated classes. Dostoyevsky's political views are understandably less discernable in his novels than in his journalism, particularly in his Diary of a Writer, a series of commentaries on politics, social life and art which he published intermittently from 1873 to 1881. In many of his reflections, Dostoyevsky expresses views typical of Pan-Slavism, but complicates them with a sense of indebtedness to the West. Not only does he hold a position within the debates over the question of the relation of Europe to Russia, but he also offers an interesting analysis of the debates.

Like Danilevsky, Dostoyevsky observes that Europeans have a fundamental distrust of Russia no matter how it acts. He believes that this is because they believe that Russians are at bottom not truly civilized Europeans but Asiatic barbarians, Tartars and Huns bent on destruction for its own sake. Why cannot Europe recognize that all Russia has wanted is to serve her? Dostoyevsky answers: "The main reason is that they are altogether unable to recognize us as theirs. . . consider us alien to their civilization; they regard us as strangers and impostors. . . Turks and Semites are spiritually closer to them than we, Aryans. All,this has a very important reason: we carry to mankind an altogether different  idea than they" (1046). This, despite the efforts ofWesternizers to convince Europeans that Russians are incapable of having any ideas of their own and are content to imitate  Europeans. While Europeans are wrong in their perception of what moves Russians, they are right in their sense that it is something completely alien to Europe, and thus they agree unwittingly with the Slavophiles. Even the most extreme Westernizers, the socialists and liberals, who are in exile in Europe, show their essential Russian soul by their implacable negation of all European traditions, and hence of all European civilization (352). While Europeans think that the Russian radicals who negate all their traditions display an uncomprehending barbarism, they are in reality displaying an uncomprehending adherence to the Russian idea - they are, despite themselves, "full blooded and good Russians" (357). What is essentially Russian is its preservation of the true word of Christ through the Orthodox Church. Its world-historical mission is to spread that word - hence its interest in the Eastern question, namely the reclaiming of lands inhabited by Slavs and Greeks, and its taking of Constantinople. Constantinople will be the new spiritual capital from which Russia will rule the East - meaning the .Christian East. She has the moral right to rule because she is "a leader of Orthodoxy, as its protectress and guardian." Russia will not take Constantinople out of ambition or violence: ''No, this would be a genuine exaltation of Christ's truth, preserved in the East, a new exaltation of Christ's Cross and the final word of Orthodoxy, which is headed by Russia" (365). But the European nations do not appreciate the loftiness of Russia's motivations and they work to stop her. Writing in 1881, Dostoyevsky counseled Russia to bide her time, given the forces that can oppose her, and appear not to want to "meddle with European affairs." The Europeans will stop being concerned with Russia and begin fighting among themselves, and at ''the opportune moment," Russia can act (1052).

Russia is also destined to rule Asia. Instead of embroiling herself in European affairs, in which she is always an inferior, Russia should turn her attention to colonizing Asiatic Russia, where she will experience the joy of rule: "In Europe we were hangers-on and slaves, whereas we shall go to Asia as masters. In Europe we were Asiatics, whereas in Asia we, too, are Europeans. Our civilizing mission in Asia will bribe our spirit and drive us thither" (1048). Russians have been too leery of paying attention to their Asiatic territories, for they fear the charge by Europeans that they are Asiatic: "We must banish the slavish fear that Europe will call us Asiatic barbarians, and that it will be said that we are more Asiatics than Europeans. This fear that Europe might regard us as Asiatics has been haunting us for almost two centuries" (1044). There is little that Russia can do to convince Europeans of the contrary; despite the fact that Russia saved European nations from Napoleon, they immediately "began to look on us with most obvious malevolence and the bitterest suspicion" (1045). In retrospect, Russia should have sided with Napoleon, who would have been happy to give her the East ifhe could have the West.

Now there is evidence that Germany, who wants to rule the West, supplanting the power of the Latin peoples, would be happy to let Russia rule the East without interference (912). And this will "regenerate" Russia: "Asia is our future outlet" (1050). Through settling Asia by building railroads, Russia will have land for all in the future, while overcrowded Europe declines into an "inevitable and humiliating communism." (And, once Russia has such a clear goal, Europe will ''respect us" and invest! [1051].)

Dostoyevsky shares the sense of the Slavophiles that Europe is decaying, and that she will once again turn to Russia for help: "She is going to tell us that we too are Europe;  that, consequently, we have exactly the same 'order of things' as she; that not in vain have we imitated her during two hundred years, boasting that we were Europeans, and that by saving her, we are thereby saving ourselves... then, perhaps, for the first time, all of us would grasp at once to what extent all the while we did not resemble Europe, despite our two-hundred year craving for, and dreams about becoming Europe – dreams which used to reach the proportions of passionate fits" (258-9).

Dostoyevsky is not always consistent in his discussion of the relation between Russia and the West. Sometimes, he stresses the differences between the two civilizations: "under no circumstances can a Russian be converted into a real European as long as he remains the least bit Russian. And, if this be so, it means that Russia is something independent and peculiar, not resembling Europe at all, but important by itself' (357). Yet, despite the clear separation of the destinies of East and West, he thinks Russians should be grateful to Europeans. If Peter had not "opened a window on Europe," Russia would have remained insular, keeping its Orthodox truth to itself. Starting with Peter's communion with Europe, ''we have done nothing but live through a communion with all human civilization" (360). Russia has learned to be universal in her outlook, in a way suited to her world-historical mission, which is the realization of Christian principles through the disinterested "universal service of mankind" (361). While all other nations have a particular character, the Russian character has universal import. It aims to bring about "general pacification," meaning world peace, beginning with the unification of the Slavs and ending in ''the ultimate unity of mankind" (362). For the sake of this goal Russia must have Constantinople. But, until now, she was not able to accomplish this. Peter brought her into contact with "the coarse Germans," who played such an important role to the detriment of the Russian government. How much more damage would have been

done if Peter or other earlier rulers had adopted to conquer Constantinople before Russia was ready - Russia would have fallen into the hands of the "subtle" Greeks who would "have dragged her along some new Asiatic path," involving cultural exclusivity (363).

Not only has the encounter with European culture been useful to Russia, but Dostoyevsky judges as well that it has made Russians such as himself partly European: He writes that "under no circumstances can we renounce Europe. Europe is our second fatherland, and I am the first ardently to profess this; I have always professed this" (581). "Europe, even as Russia, is our mother, our second mother. We have taken much from her; we shall again take, and we shall not wish to be ungrateful to her" (1048). European civilization has been internalized, and cannot, or should not, be excised. The sense of psychological "split" is one of the great themes in Dostoyevsky's novels. Despite the suffering it involves, Dostoyevsky does not renounce the self-consciousness it entails, which has become the condition of his own art.

 

Vladimir Solovev

An influential mystic and philosopher in Russia at the time, Vladimir Solovev  began writing as a Slavophile, but became an ardent Westernizer. He remained a Christian, however, unlike most radical Westernizers who were materialists. Solovev wants both the unity of the whole Christian Church, and political liberalization as well, for he holds that Christ called believers to "'champion freedom and social justice'" (qtd. in Kohn, Mind 214). He advocates trying to unite Russia with the West, fearing the threat to civilization from Asia he calls "Pan-Mongolism."

In his 1888 critique of Danilevsky, Solovev questions that thinker's answer to the question: Why don't they love us? Danilevsky had answered that the West knows Russia will replace it in importance. The truer answer is that "Europe views Russia with hostility and anxiety, for she recognizes the dark and enigmatic elemental forces alive in the Russian people, and, together with Russia's spiritual and cultural poverty, that country's vast and well defined ambition" ("Slavophils" 219-20). While Russia is strong, she is "morally crippled" and bent on expansion without any indication that such expansion will yield any benefit to others (220). For there is no real evidence that Russians or Slavs constitute a distinctive civilization that has made meaningful cultural contributions independent of the West. This does not invalidate them, but merely shows that Russia is part of European culture. Even the Slavophiles have received their ideas from European philosophy. On its own. Russian intellectual life moves between an "extreme skepticism," which is so negative as to "destroy the idea of truth itself," and a mysticism which leads.to complete submission to higher entity, even "suicidal fanaticism" - thus, no real philosophy emerges. Admittedly, Russian novels have distinctive character, but only in the way that European arts manifest national character (219).

In a similar critique of Dostoyevsky, written in 1891, Solovev notes a contradiction in the novelist between his vision of the ideal of mankind, united by the loving acceptance of others, and his many expressions of hatred towards Jews, Poles, Germans, the French,  Europe, and non-Orthodox Christianity (and, one could add, America) (221). True Christian ideals are to be found in universality, not in the exaltation of a national outlook at the expense of others. Like Chaadaev, Solovev argues for a Christianity that is broader in scope than nationalist Orthodoxy, and believes that the source of Russia's universalist aspirations is the West. He finds Dostoyevsky caught between two tendencies; the author therefore should not be taken as a guide to political action.

Leo Tolsto

It is Leo Tolstoy's analysis of the meaning of West and East that departs most significantly from the terms of the discourse discussed so far, in directions that are recognizably contemporary. This is no accident, for Tolstoy's thought had tremendous influence on social critique allover the world, beginning in the late nineteenth century.

The thought of Gandhi and Martin Luther King are only the two best-known examples of his influence, according to Steven G. Marks' How Russia Shaped the Modern World. In Tolstoy, West and East largely lose their identification with the Occident and Orient as civilizations, and become much closer to what we now would call the developed and undeveloped worlds.

Tolstoy's view of the relation between Russia and the West can be seen in his 1906 article "The Meaning of the Russian Revolution." The article concerned the first Russian Revolution of 1905, after which the tsar was forced to introduce a representative assembly. This move suggested that Russia was on the way towards liberal democracy, and Tolstoy asks whether this is a desirable goal. All government, he argues, has the same nature, based not on contract but violence. A small group forces others into  economic production, and they submit because they want peaceful lives and need to support their families (325). Governments are changed by popular revolution when the powerful, who live off the work of others, become depraved, or when those who are ruled, becoming more educated, come to see their submission as wrong. This has happened in "Western nations" in the past; it is happening in Russia at present; and it has not yet happened in the Eastern nations (Le. Turkey, Persia, India, and China) (327). In non-Western societies, the educated classes want to throw off the existing order and establish what they see in the West: ''the industrial, commercial, and technical improvements, and that external glitter to which the Western nations have attained under their altered governments" (327). But are they right?

Tolstoy answers no, arguing that representative systems are no less oppressive than despotic ones (328). Democracies still are based on violence - apparent in their wars unjust systems of taxation, the appropriation of common property into private hands, and colonization. The more people participate in government, the more they became depraved. While democracies are more economically and militarily effective than other systems, and the lifestyles of their "leisured classes" are more expansive, do most of their citizens really enjoy lives that are "more secure, freer, or above all, more reasonable and moral?" (329). In despotism, corruption is centered on the ruler and his followers; in democracy, every person who votes is corruptible because bribable. In despotism, a few monopolize wealth; in democracy, a much larger class has leisure and security, and because it is so large, it needs to be supplied with constant objects of consumption. To produce these, ever more workers must leave the land and become dependent upon  wages, and their condition grows steadily worse. Consumers enjoy the "comforts and pleasures" provided by others and becoming willing to employ violence to keep them; thus, one fmds "the spread of a lying and inflammatory press" and the promotion of national animosities. Now that people do not live by the fruit of their own labors, that is,by engaging in agriculture, they must get goods from other lands; they do this by engaging in international trade that corrupts others, such as the arms trade. Or they oppress others by violence, as can be seen in the robbery of the people of Asia and Africa. The struggle of all against all becomes so "habitual" that it structures knowledge; science "has decided that the struggle and enmity of all against all is a necessary, unavoidable, and beneficent condition of human life" (331). Western nations deceive themselves by calling all of this "civilization" (333), and they hold that civilization is good and necessary and must be spread everywhere. (In "Western nations," Tolstoy includes "Germany, Austria, Italy, France, the United States, and especially Great Britain" (332) - the United States is included now in the West, in a new way, different from in works previously considered.) And now, in the liberal revolution of 1905, Russia is invited to join civilization, and "travel this path of destruction."

Tolstoy prophesies an impending, ''unavoidable collision between the Western and the Eastern nations" as the Western nations assert power and. spread corruption, and the Eastern nations submit temporarily to that power because their governments have taught them to submit (334-5). Westernization, for Tolstoy, is a practical fact, not a spiritual principle - the modernization of Japan shows that an Eastern nation can also become part of Western "civilization." Russia is at a crossroads, faced with the choice between  submission and corruption. Neither choice is good: the Russian government has lost legitimacy and Russians can no longer submit to it, but the failure of Western ways is now evident. And Russia would lose itself if its productive life was no longer based on the land. What is to be done?

Tolstoy believes that Russians should take another path entirely, one that involves neither submission to the Russian government nor imitation of the West. Russian peasants are self-sufficient and used to working without government interference. Already some village communes set themselves in remote areas in order to live independently. All they need to do is "cease to obey" and ''refuse to participate" and the whole basis of the state will be undermined (337): "It is evident that a great majority of men can be enslaved by a small minority only if the enslaved themselves take part in their own enslavement" (340).

The simplest way to bring about change is not to allow oneself to be enslaved.Yet people who suffer from violence turn to it, and therefore act against their own interest. They yield to power out of "suggestion" or hypnotism (343). This is especially true when religious consciousness is weak. If God were primary, no one would submit to human powers, but instead of submitting to God, people yield to their passions and go the direction of the herd. Russians, because of their spiritual nature, have the potential to seek the different way, and yet they might fail to liberate people from human power "and leave to some other happier Eastern race the leadership in the great work" (343). There are signs of a global change in consciousness which promise that people will understand soon what really is freedom.

A common objection to such "anarchist" views, is that the return to the land would involve a retreat from civilization. But Tolstoy argues, civilization is a fallacy, a statement of an ideal rather than a description of reality (346-47). Supporters of "civilization," including ,Socialists, justify present imperfections by the promise that they will lead to future perfection - as if those individuals who are competing today will love one another tomorrow, or as if the machines which belong to the system of capital and the state will continue just as they are after the latter is abolished. But we cannot imagine the future, and those who think they do, and who are willing to sacrifice the present for the sake of future happiness, wrongly think they know what is the happiness of others.

The "superstition of civilization" prevents people from working for a "free and reasonable life." To those not superstitious about civilization, "civilization" is obviously merely the vanity of the governing classes. A return to agriculture will not stop people from being inventive; but they will invent things that are useful to them. It seems impossible that people will be able to change how they think of themselves so radically, but history shows the possibility of such transformation. It is reasonable to hope that a new spirit of brotherhood will arise, and that the present hostility of the nations is nearing its end (353).

Given that the West is now equivalent to liberal democracy, industrialism, and capitalism, and the East to what has more recently been called the "underdeveloped World," through Russia's agrarian economy, she now has become part of the East, according to Tolstoy. The Western, or industrial, world fmds it harder to participate in the new humanitarian spirit of the times, because it has followed the false path for so long.

But "the majority of the Eastern peoples, including the Russian nation, will not have to alter their lives at all . . . We of the Eastern nations should be thankful for fate for placing us in a position in which we can benefit by the example of the Western nations," and we should take "a different path, one easier, more joyful, and more natural than the one the Western nations have traveled" (357).

Tolstoy's critique of civilization returns to the older notion of civilization as a universal condition. Like Rousseau, he values this notion negatively. Yet Tolstoy still specifies what he is critiquing as the West, because of his context in Russian social thought, even though such identification does not belong to the structure of his argument in the way that it did for the Slavophiles. Given his enormous influence in formulating anti-Western discourse, both on the part of "Western" and "non-Western" progressive intellectuals,

Tolstoy may well be most responsible for the tendency of twentieth -century social and cultural criticism to name the object of its critique "the West," rather than capitalism, commercialism, modernity, industrialization, etc. The significance of equating the West with industrialization or modernization, however, is that it begins to dislodge the West from its formerly inseparable double, the East, especially as the two refer to distinct cultures. In the twentieth century, many of the dominant meanings of the West do not depend upon an Other with a determinate content, be it the East, Asia, or the Orient. Rather, they depend on an absence: the non-West, the undeveloped world, the Rest. None of these require the West to be grounded by any relative location.

The general European view- however, was that Russia was Oriental and autocratic, ready to unleash barbarian hordes upon the civilized world. This view had been encouraged by radical exiles in the nineteenth century especially, whose polemics regarding the autocracy of their homeland encouraged the Russophobia of others. (At the same time, Dostoyevsky believed that Russian socialists in exile, through their condemnation of the, institutions of Europe, negated the West as thoroughly as any Slavophile.) Some of the greatest critics of Russia were socialists, alarmed the expansionist tendencies being displayed by the chief power of Reaction. Marx warned in 1853, for example- that Russia intended a series of conquests to both its west and east "'to the ultimate realization of the Slavonic Empire which certain fanatical Pan-Slavistic philosophers dreamed of" (qtd. In Kohn, Pan-Slavism 107).

This dual role of socialism, as both a form of radical Westernism and as a radical critique of the existing West, is evident in Marxist discourse. Marxism has been one of the primary sources for the characterization of the West as capitalist and imperialist. And the strongest meaning of the West for much of the second half of the twentieth century was derived trom the Cold War division between the communist block as East and NATO as West. Yet, as Alastair Bonnett makes clear in his chapter "Communists Like Us: The Idea of the West in the Soviet Union": "The rejection of the West, and the associated rise of Russian nationalism, from the late 1920' s onwards, has tended to overshadow the intensity and complexity of the Westernising spirit of earlier Bolshevik" (48).

It might be true to say that the late nineteenth-century Russian Marxists rejected the distinction between Russia and the West altogether, as being unimportant in relation to the fundamental categories of capitalist and proletariat. George Plekhanov, the ''father of Russian Marxism," critiqued the Russian populists in an article entitled "Our Differences" for their belief that socialism could be realized in the Russian peasant commune; the mir, without going through capitalism. Tellingly, in this article Plakanov

puts scare quotes around the "West" and "Western Europe," thereby implicitly questioning their validity as meaningful categories of analysis (157). Lenin's writings also do not employ the concept of the West.

Finally, "Eurasianism," a completely new idea of Russia's relation to the West, emerged around the time of the Russian Revolution, of 1917. It fell victim to Stalinism, and was continued by Russian emigres. "Eurasianism" held that Russia was essentially neither European nor Slavic but had its own national character made up of many elements, including Asiatic ones. While the older sense of Russian nationality had been based on Russia's opposition to the Asiatic "hordes," and nineteenth-century nationalists had taken the "Western" attitude that Russians, as Slavs, were white Europeans who needed to civilize the Asians within and without their country, the Eurasians wanted to acknowledge that the Finns, Tartars, Mongols and Scythians were also truly Russian. At the turn of the century, the historical scholarship that brought to light the contributions of the "Asiatic" peoples to Russian history fed the imagination of artists, who started to express the "Asiatic within" through the introduction of folkloric themes in music, dance and other arts (Riasanovsky Asia 19-29). An admiror of V. Splovjev, Alexander Blok used this new cultural identification in his poem "Scythians," written in 1918 to protest the Europeans war against communist Russia:

You are millions. We are hordes and hordes and hordes.
Try and take us on!
Yes, we are Scythians! Y
es, we are Asians.With slanted and greedy eyes!

For you, the ages, for us a single hour.
We,like obedient slaves,
Held up a shield between two enemy races
The Tatars and Europe!

For ages and ages your old furnace raged
And drowned out the roar of avalanches,
And Lisbon and Messina's fall T
o
you was but a monstrous fairy tale!

For hundreds of years you gazed at the East,
Storing up and melting -own our jewels,
And, jeering. you merely counted the days
Until your cannons you couId point at us!

The time is come. Trouble beats its wings -
And every day our grudges grow,
And the day will come when every trace
Of your Paestums may vanish!

O, old world! While you still survive,
While you still suffer your sweet torture,
Come to a halt, sage as Oedipus,
Before the ancient riddle of the Sphinx!

Russia is a Sphinx. Rejoicing, grieving,
And drenched in black blood,
It gazes, gazes, gazes at you,
With hatred and with love!

It has been ages since you've loved
As our blood still loves!
You have forgotten that there is a love
That can destroy and burn!

We love ail - the heat of cold numbers,
The gift of divine visions,
We understand all- sharp Gallic sense
And gloomy Teutonic genius...

We remember ail- the hell of Parisian streets,
And Venetian chills,
The distant aroma of lemon groves,
And the smoky towers of Cologne...

We love the flesh - its flavor and its color,
And the stifling, mortal scent of flesh...
Is it our fault if your skeleton cracks,
In our heavy, tender paws?

When pulling back on the reins
Of playful, high-spirited horses,
is our custom to break their heavy backs
And tame the stubborn slave girls...

Come to us! Leave the horrors of war,
And come to our peaceful embrace!
Before it's too late - sheathe your old sword,
Comrades! We shaIl be brothers!

But if not - we have nothing to lose,
And we are not above treachery!
For ages and ages you will be cursed
By your sickly, belated offspring!

Throughout the woods and thickets
In front of pretty Europe
We will spread out! We'll turn to you
With our Asian muzzles.

Come everyone, come to the Urals!
We're clearing a battlefield there
Between steel machines breathing integrals
And the wild Tatar Horde!

But we are no longer your shield,
Henceforth we'll not do battle!
As mortal battles rages we'll watch
With our narrow eyes!

We will not lift a finger when the cruel
Huns Rummage the pockets of corpses,
Burn cities, drive cattle into churches,
And roast the meat of our white brothers!...

Come to your senses for the last time, old world!
Our barbaric lyre is calling you
One fmal time, to a joyous brotherly feast
To a brotherly feast oflabor and of peace!

Here Blok plays upon the fearful fantasies of Europeans concerning the Russians as Asiatic hordes- to some extent in mockery and to some extent as a claim of identity.

Reminiscent of earlier complaints about European ingratitude- the poem argues that the Russians- the Scythians- have protected Europe despite Europe's greed and lust for war.

Now that the new Russia is under attack from old Europe- it is willing to unleash what Europe has always feared - but the better possibility is peace and brotherhood. The poem expresses the duality between Russia's love and understanding of Europe- on one side, and its hatred and resentment, on the other. It also represents of a moment when some artists and scholars were formulating ideas of national identity that rejected the notion of the authentic Russian in favor of a Russia formed by many strands, in a way that anticipates aspects of contemporary multiculturalism.

Thus as we have seen above, the West was transformed from merely a  political-geographic term to a political and social concept as well, through the theorizing of Russian intellectuals about the relation of their country to Europe. As a concept – that is, as a mode of generalization and explanation - the West was used as a counter-ideal, or ideal other, of Russia. As such, it mimicked other dichotomies of nineteenth –century thought: between civilization and culture, the mechanistic and organic, the French and the German, the traditional and the modern. The West however became typed as a unity with certain historical characteristics - as dynamic or as violent, as a tradition or as modernity - and the range of Russian claims about its characteristics later were repeated elsewhere. Anti-colonial political ideologies took up the Russian framework in the twentieth century: for example, Gustave Von Grunebaum, in his 1965 Modern Islam: The Search for Cultural Identity, claims that Arab and other third-world nationalists are ''taking the road the Russians took little more than a century ago" (18).

 

Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, Multiculturalism

Finding the West P.2

Finding the West P.3

Finding the West P.4

Finding the West P.6

Bibliography and Works Cited



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