“It is completely unimportant that Chernyshevski understood less about questions of poetry than a young esthete of today. It is completely unimportant that in his philosophical conceptions Chernyshevski kept aloof from those transcendental subtleties which please Mr. Godunov-Cherdyntsev. What is important is that, whatever Chernyshevski’s views may have been on art and science, they represented the Weltanschauung of the most progressive men of his era, and were moreover indissolubly linked with the development of social ideas, with their ardent, beneficial, activating force. It is in this aspect, in this sole true light, that Chernyshevski’s system of thought acquires a significance which far transcends the sense of those groundless arguments—unconnected in any way with the epoch of the sixties—which Mr. Godunov- Cherdyntsev uses in venomously ridiculing his hero.
“But he makes fun, not only of his hero: he also makes fun of his reader. How else can one qualify the fact that among the well-known authorities on Chernyshevski a nonexistent authority is cited, to whom the author pretends to appeal? In a certain sense it would be possible if not to forgive then at least to understand scientifically the scoffing at Chernyshevski, if Mr. Godunov-Cherdyntsev were a heated supporter of those whom Chernyshevski attacked. It would at least be a point of view, and reading the book the reader would make a constant adjustment for the author’s partisan approach, in that way arriving at the truth. But the pity is that with Mr. Godunov- Cherdyntsev there is nothing to adjust to and the point of view is ‘everywhere and nowhere’; not only that, but as soon as the reader, as he descends the course of a sentence, thinks he has at last sailed into a quiet backwater, into a realm of ideas which may be contrary to those of Chernyshevski but are apparently shared by the author—and therefore can serve as a basis for the reader’s judgment and guidance—the author gives him an unexpected fillip and knocks the imaginary prop from under him, so that he is once more unaware as to whose side Mr. Godunov- Cherdyntsev is on in his campaign against Chernyshevski—whether he is on the side of the advocates of art for art’s sake, or of the government, or of some other of Chernyshevski’s enemies whom the reader does not know. As far as jeering at the hero himself is concerned, here the author passes all bounds. There is no detail too repulsive for him to disdain. He will probably reply that all these details are to be found in the ‘Diary’ of the young Chernyshevski; but there they are in their place, in their proper environment, in the correct order and perspective, among many other thoughts and feelings which are much more valuable. But the author has fished out and put together precisely these, as if someone had tried to restore the image of a person by making an elaborate collection of his combings, fingernail parings, and bodily excretions.
“In other words the author is sneering throughout the whole of his book at the personality of one of the purest and most valorous sons of liberal Russia—not to speak of the passing kicks with which he rewards other progressive Russian thinkers, a respect for whom is in our consciousness an immanent part of their historical essence. In his book, which lies absolutely outside the humanitarian tradition of Russian literature and therefore outside literature in general, there are no factual untruths (if one does not count the fictitious ‘Strannolyubski’ already mentioned, two or three doubtful details, and a few slips of the pen), but that ‘truth’ which it contains is worse than the most prejudiced lie, for such a truth goes in direct contradiction to that noble and chaste truth (an absence of which deprives history of what the great Greek called ‘tropotos’) which is one of the inalienable treasures of Russian social thought. In our day, thank God, books are not burned by bonfire, but I must confess that if such a custom were still in existence, Mr. Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s book could justifiably be considered the first candidate for fueling a public square.”
After that Koncheyev had his say in the literary annual The Tower. He began by drawing a picture of flight during an invasion or an earthquake, when the escapers carry away with them everything that they can lay hands on, someone being sure to burden himself with a large, framed portrait of some long- forgotten relative. “Just such a portrait [wrote Koncheyev] is for the Russian intelligentsia the image of Chernyshevski, which was spontaneously but accidentally carried away abroad by the emigres, together with other, more useful things,” and this is how Koncheyev explained the stupefaction occasioned by the appearance of Fyodor Konstantinovich’s book: “Somebody suddenly confiscated the portrait.” Further on, having finished once and for all with considerations of an ideological nature and embarked upon an examination of the book as a work of art, Koncheyev began to praise it in such a way that as he read the review Fyodor felt a burning radiance forming around his face and quicksilver racing through his veins. The article ended with the following: “Alas! Among the emigration one will hardly scrape up a dozen people capable of appreciating the fire and fascination of this fabulously witty composition; and I would maintain that in today’s Russia you could not find even one to appreciate it, if I had not happened to know of the existence of two such people, one living on the north bank of the Neva and the other—somewhere in distant Siberian exile.”
The monarchist organ The Throne devoted to The Life of Chernyshevski a few lines in which it pointed out that any sense or value in the unmasking of “one of the ideological mentors of Bolshevism” was completely undermined by “the cheap liberalizing of the author, who goes wholly over to the side of his sorry, but pernicious hero as soon as the long-suffering Russian Tsar finally has him safely tucked away…. And in general,” added the reviewer, Pyotr Levchenko, “it is high time one ceased writing about so-called cruelties of ‘the tsarist regime’ with regard to ‘pure souls’ who are of no interest to anybody. The Red Freemasonry will only rejoice over Count Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s work. It is lamentable that the bearer of such a name should engage in hymning ‘social ideals’ which have long since turned into cheap idols.”
The pro-Communist Russian-language daily in Berlin, Up! (this was the one which Vasiliev’s Gazeta invariably termed “the reptile”), had an article devoted to the celebration of the centenary of Chernyshevski’s birth, and concluded thus: “They have also bestirred themselves in our blessed emigration: a certain Godunov-Cherdyntsev with swashbuckling brashness has hurried to concoct a booklet—for which he has dragged in material from all over the place—and has given out his vile slander as The Life of Chernyshevski. Some Prague professor or other has hastened to find this work ‘talented and conscientious’ and everyone chummily joined in. It is dashingly written and in no way differs in its internal style from Vasiliev’s leaders about ‘The imminent end of Bolshevism.’ ” The last dig was particularly amusing in view of the fact that in his Gazeta Vasiliev resolutely opposed the slightest reference to Fyodor’s book, telling him honestly (although the other had not asked) that had he not been on such friendly terms with him he would have printed a devastating review—“not even a damp spot would have remained” of the author of The Life of Chernyshevski. In short, the book found itself surrounded by a good, thundery atmosphere of scandal which helped sales; and at the same time, in spite of the attacks, the name of Godunov-Cherdyntsev immediately came to the fore, rising over the motley storm of critical opinion, in full view of everyone, vividly and firmly. But there was one man whose opinion Fyodor was no longer able to ascertain. Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski had died not long before the book appeared.
When the French thinker Delalande was asked at somebody’s funeral why he did not uncover himself (ne se decouvre pas), he replied: “I am waiting for death to do it first” (qu’elle se decouvre la premiere). There is a lack of metaphysical gallantry in this, but death deserves no more. Fear gives birth to sacred awe, sacred awe erects a sacrificial altar, its smoke ascends to the sky, there assumes the shape of wings, and bowing fear addresses a prayer to it. Religion has the same relation to man’s heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location. I know that death in itself is in no way connected with the topography of the hereafter, for a door is merely the exit from the house and not a part of its surroundings, like a tree or a hill. One has to get out somehow, “but I refuse to see in a door more than a hole, and a carpenter’s job” (Delalande, Discours sur les ombres, p. 45). And then again: the unfortunate image of a “road” to which the human mind has become accustomed (life as a kind of journey) is a stupid illusion: we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home. The other world surrounds us always and is not at all at the end of some pilgrimage. In our earthly house, windows are replaced by mirrors; the door, until a given time, is closed; but air comes in through the cracks. “For our stay-at-home senses the most accessible image of our future comprehension of those surroundings which are due to be revealed to us with the disintegration of the body is the liberation of the soul from the eye-sockets of the flesh and our transformation into one complete and free eye, which can simultaneously see in all directions, or to put it differently: a supersensory insight into the world accompanied by our inner participation.” (Ibid. p. 64). But all this is only symbols—symbols which become a burden to the mind as soon as it takes a close look at them….
Is it not possible to understand more simply, in a way more satisfying to the spirit without the aid of this elegant atheist and equally without the aid of popular faiths? For religion subsumes a suspicious facility of general access that destroys the value of its revelations. If the poor in spirit enter the heavenly kingdom I can imagine how
