was opposed to both Nicholaevan bureaucrats and Western entrepreneurs; each sought to borrow Western ideas without Western practices, so that Russia could assume leadership in the revival of European civilization.
The Slavophile view of history was tinged with the dualism of German romanticism. All of history was a contest between spiritual and carnal forces. The poet Tiutchev saw it as a struggle between cosmos, the organic unity of all nature, and chaos, the basic principle of the material world. Russia was, of course, on the side of cosmos; and in his famous verse he warned that
With the mind alone Russia cannot be understood,
No ordinary yardstick spans her greatness: She stands alone, unique-
In Russia one can only believe.47
Tiutchev's fellow poet and Schellingian, Alexis Khomiakov, set forth an even more ingenious dualism in his ambitious but never-finished Sketches of Universal History.4S The opposing forces throughout all history became for Khomiakov the spirit of Kush and of Iran. The former comes from the oppressive Ethiopians in the Old Testament who believed in material force and worshipped either stone (physical construction) or the serpent (sensual desire). The Iranian spirit was one of belief in God, inner freedom, and love of music and speech. The victory of the Roman legions over Greek philosophy had been a triumph of Kush, as was the more recent imposition of Byzantine formalism on happy Slavic spontaneity. The Jews had been the original bearers of the Iranian spirit, which had now passed on to the unspoiled Slavs. The spirit of Iran had penetrated particularly deeply into the life and art of the Russian people, whose strong family sense, communal institutions, and oral folklore had kept alive the principle of harmony and unity. Khomiakov assumes that the Iranian spirit will triumph, thus assuring a glorious future to Russia once it throws off the Kushite shackles of Byzantine formalism and Prussian militarism.
Khomiakov is best understood as a perpetuator of the pietistic ideal of a universal, inner church. He was widely traveled in the West and viewed his Lutheran, Anglican, and Bavarian Catholic friends as allies in the
'Iranian' camp. His two contending principles are reminiscent of Schlegel's 'spirit of Seth' and 'spirit of Cain.'49 But Khomiakov is less romantic in his attitude toward the East than Schlegel and many other Western romantics. He decisively rejects the glorification of Asian ways which Magnitsky had made fashionable. The major Kushite worshippers of 'the stone' were those who built pyramids in Egypt and temples in Asia; the worst followers of 'the serpent' are the Indian disciples of Shiva.
Khomiakov illustrates his theory in two plays of the 1830's, Dmitry the Self-Proclaimed and Ermak. The first play pictures the False Dmitry being first welcomed by the Russian people, then rejected when he is converted to the Latin ideal of earthly power. The later work shows the Cossack conqueror of Siberia struggling with the power- worshiping philosophies of his pagan domain. Ermak refuses to accept the Kushite beliefs of the Siberians and, indeed, renounces power altogether to seek forgiveness for earlier misdeeds from his father and his original home community.50
Quite different from the Slavophile view, with its pietistic glorification of inner regeneration, family harmony, and a new universal church, was the view of the radical Westernizers. They looked to French more than German thought, Catholic more than Protestant sources for ideas.
De Maistre was generally the starting point for Russians who took a more jaded view of the Russian past and Russian institutions. But he was soon supplanted by Lamennais, the real point of transition in French thought between Catholicism and socialism. Beginning as a standard counter-revolutionary Catholic with his famous call for a revival of faith in his Essay on Indifference in 1817, Lamennais had dreamt of a new 'congregation of St. Peter' to replace the Jesuit Order and lead Europe into a glorious new era. Shortly after founding a journal, The Future, in 1830, Lamennais despaired of the Catholic Church and turned to Christian socialism and a passionate belief in the spirituality of the downtrodden masses. His writings, like those of De Maistre, were permeated with a kind of prophetic pessimism. As he wrote to the Savoyard:
. . . Everything in the world is being readied for the great and final catastrophe … all now is extreme, there is no longer any middle position.51
Russian converts to Catholicism during the Nicholaevan era were generally converted a la Lamennais, to a life of mendicant communion with the suffering masses. Pecherin, who served as Catholic chaplain in a Dublin hospital, saw in Lamennais 'the new faith' for our times and felt convinced that the oppressed outer regions of Europe were the only hope for the decaying center. 'Russia together with the United States is beginning a new cycle
in history.'62 Chaadaev was also influenced by Lamennais; and he generally served Russians as a guide in moving from an early infatuation with Catholicism to a later interest in socialism. From a Russian point of view, Catholicism and socialism did not seem as incompatible as they did in the West. Both forces seemed to offer the possibility of introducing social discipline and sense of purpose into a passive and unorganized Russia.
Saint-Simon, whose theory of history eventually became the credo of the young Westernizers, had himself been influenced by De Maistre's deep fear of anarchy and revolution and admired the ordering function which the Catholic Church had fulfilled in medieval society. In his call for a 'new Christianity' that was to be purely ethical and a new hierarchy that was to be purely managerial, Saint-Simon and his disciple Auguste Comte were proponents of what has been called 'Catholicism without Christianity.' Whereas Saint-Simon's theories of industrial organization and class tensions interested his Western followers, it was 'the breadth and grandioseness of his historical- philosophical views' which excited the Russians.53
Saint-Simon's first Russian disciple was the Decembrist Lunin, who actively propagated Saint-Simon's ideas from exile after 1825 and was silenced only by imprisonment in 1841. Paralleling his career as a prophet of socialism was a religious life that brought him eventually into the Roman Catholic fold. A romantic student-soldier during the Napoleonic wars, Lunin felt alienated from his native land after becoming acquainted with Paris and Saint-Simon in 1814-16. Like Saint-Simon, Lunin was neither an advocate of revolution nor an admirer of the West as it actually was. 'In your superficiality,' he told a French friend, 'you need only the light and playful. But we, inhabitants of the north, love all that which moves the soul and forces us to plunge into thought.'54
Saint-Simon made one of his infrequent visits to a fashionable Parisian soiree expressly for the purpose of bidding Lunin farewell in 1816.
Through you, I would like to establish links with a young people not yet withered up with scepticism. The soil is fertile there for the reception of the new teaching. . . .
Superstition considers that the golden age was some time in the distant past, whereas it is still to come. Then again giants will be born; but they will be great not in body but in spirit. Machines will work then in place of people . . . another Napoleon will stand at the head of an army of workers. . . .
If you forget me, do not at least forget the proverb: 'by running for two hares, one catches neither.' From the time of Peter the Great you have been ever widening your borders; do not become lost in endless space. Rome was destroyed by its victories; the teaching of Christ entered
into a soil fertilized with blood. War supports slavery; peaceful work prepares the basis for freedom which is
