The Gift

shoddiness has a tang of madness about it, Chernyshevski unwittingly parodies Nekrasov’s device and carries it to absurdity by cramming into the depressions two-syllable words normally accented not on the first syllable (as “Volga”) but on the second, and doing it thrice in one line—surely a record: “Remote hills, remote palms, surprised girl of the north” (verses to his wife, 1875). Let us repeat: all this leaning toward a line created in the image and likeness of definite socio-economic gods was unconscious on Chernyshevski’s part, but it is only by making this tendency clear that one can understand the true background of his strange theory. With all this he had no understanding of the real, violinic essence of the anapaest; neither did he understand the iamb, the most flexible of all measures when it comes to transforming stresses into scuds, into those rhythmical deviations from the meter which according to his memories from the seminary seemed to Chernyshevski unlawful; finally he did not understand the rhythm of Russian prose; it is only natural, therefore, that the very method he applied to prove his theory had its revenge on him: in the passages of prose he quoted he divided the number of syllables by the number of stresses and got the result of three, not the two he would have got, he said, had the binary meter been more becoming to the Russian language; but he did not take into account the main thing: the paeons! For in the very passages he quotes, whole pieces of sentences follow the scudded rhythm of blank verse, the most blue-blooded of all meters; i.e., precisely the iamb!

I am afraid that the cobbler who visited Apelles’ studio and criticized what he did not understand was a mediocre cobbler. Is all really well from the mathematical point of view in those learned economic works of his, whose analysis demands an almost superhuman curiosity on the part of the investigator? Are they really deep, those commentaries of his on Mill (in which he strove to reconstruct certain theories “in keeping with the new plebeian element in thought and life”)? Do all the boots he made really fit? Or is it merely an old man’s coquetry which prompts him twenty years later to recall complacently the errors in his logarithmic calculations concerning the effect of certain agricultural improvements on the grain harvest? Sad, all of this, very sad. Our overall impression is that materialists of this type fell into a fatal error: neglecting the nature of the thing itself, they kept applying their most materialistic method merely to the relations between objects, to the void between objects and not to the objects themselves; i.e., they were the naivest of metaphysicians precisely at that point where they most wanted to be standing on the ground.

Once in his youth there had been an unfortunate morning: he was called on by a book peddler he knew, old, long-nosed Vasiliy Trofimovich, bent like a babajaga beneath the weight of a huge canvas sack full of prohibited and semiprohibited books. Not knowing foreign languages, hardly able to spell out Roman letters and weirdly pronouncing the titles in a thick peasant way, he guessed instinctively the degree of seditiousness of this or that German. That morning he sold Nikolay Gavrilovich (both of them squatting on their haunches beside a pile of books) a still uncut volume of Feuerbach.

In those days Andrey Ivanovich Feuerbach was preferred to Egor Fyodorovich Hegel. Homo feuerbachi is a cogitating muscle. Andrey Ivanovich found that man differs from the ape only in his point of view; he could hardly, however, have studied the apes. A half-century after him Lenin refuted the theory that “the earth is the sum of human sensations” with “the earth existed before man did”; and to his trade announcement: “We now turn Kant’s unknowable ‘thing in itself,’ into a ‘thing for us,’ by means of organic chemistry,” he added quite seriously that “since alizarin has existed in coal without our knowledge, then things must exist independently of our cognition.” Similarly, Chernyshevski explained: “We see a tree; another man looks at the same object. We see by the reflection in his eyes that his image of the tree looks exactly the same as our tree. Thus we all see objects as they really exist.” All this wild rubbish has its own private hilarious twist: the “materialists’ ” constant appeal to trees is especially amusing because they are all so badly acquainted with nature, particularly with trees. That tangible object which according to Chernyshevski “acts much more strongly than the abstract concept of it” (the Anthropological Principle in Philosophy) is simply beyond their ken. Look what a terrible abstraction resulted, in the final analysis, from “materialism”! Chernyshevski did not know the difference between a plow and the wooden soha; he confused beer with Madeira; he was unable to name a single wild flower except the wild rose; and it is characteristic that this deficiency of botanical knowledge was immediately made up by a “generalization” when he maintained with the conviction of an ignoramus that “they [the flowers of the Siberian taiga] are all just the same as those which bloom all over Russia!” There lurks a secret retribution in the fact that he who had constructed his philosophy on a basis of knowing the world was now placed, naked and alone, amidst the bewitched, strangely luxuriant, and still incompletely described nature of northeast Siberia: an elemental, mythological punishment which had not been taken into account by his human judges.

Only a few years earlier the smell of Gogol’s Petrushka had been explained away by the fact that everything existing was rational. But the time for hearty Russian Hegelianism was now past. The molders of opinion were incapable of understanding Hegel’s vital truth: a truth that was not stagnant, like shallow water, but flowed like blood, through the very process of cognition. The simpleton Feuerbach was much more to Chernyshevski’s taste. There is always a danger, however, that one letter will fall out of the cosmic, and this danger was not evaded by Chernyshevski in his article “Communal Ownership,” when he began to operate with Hegel’s tempting triad, giving such examples as: the gasiformity of the world is the thesis, while the softness of the brain is the synthesis; or, even stupider: a cudgel turning into a carbine. “There lies concealed in the triad,” says Strannolyubski, “a vague image of the circumference controlling all life of the mind, and the mind is confined inescapably within it. This is truth’s merry-go-round, for truth is always round; consequently, in the development of life’s forms a certain pardonable curvature is possible: the hump of truth; but no more.”

Chernyshevski’s “philosophy” goes back through Feuerbach, to the Encyclopedists. On the other hand, applied Hegelianism, working gradually left, went through that same Feuerbach to join Marx, who in his Holy Family expresses himself thus:

…no great intelligence
Is needed to distinguish a connection
Between the teaching of materialism
Regarding inborn tendency to good;
Equality of man’s capacities—
Capacities that generally are
Termed mental; the great influence
Exterior circumstances have on man;
Omnipotent experience; sway of habit
And of upbringing; the extreme importance
Of industry; the moral right to pleasure,
And communism.

I have put it into blank verse so it would be less boring.

Steklov is of the opinion that with all his genius, Chernyshevski cannot rank with Marx, in relation to whom he stands as the Barnaul craftsman Polzunov stands to Watt. Marx himself (“that petty bourgeois to the marrow of his bones” according to the testimony of Bakunin, who could not stand Germans) referred once or twice to the “remarkable” writings of Chernyshevski, but he left more than one contemptuous note in the margins of the chief work on economics “des grossen russischen Gelehrten” (Marx in general disliked Russians). Chernyshevski repaid him in like coin. Already in the seventies he was treating everything new with negligence, with malevolence. He was particularly fed up with economics, which had ceased to be a weapon for him and by this token took on in his mind the aspect of an empty toy, of “pure science.” Lyatski is quite wrong when— with a passion for navigational analogies common to many—he compares the exiled Chernyshevski to a man “watching from a deserted shore the passage of a gigantic ship (Marx’s ship) on its way to discover new lands”; the expression is especially unfortunate in view of the fact that Chernyshevski himself, as if anticipating the analogy and wishing to refute it in advance, said of Das Kapital (sent to him in 1872): “I glanced through but didn’t read it; I tore off the pages one by one and made them into little ships [my italics], and launched them on the Vilyui.”

Lenin considered Chernyshevski to be “the one truly great writer who managed to remain on a level of unbroken philosophical materialism from the fifties right up until 1888” (he knocked one year off). Once, on a windy