destruction of 'God and the State,' 'the Knouto-Germanic Empire.'67
Ostensibly, Belinsky turned revolutionary by rejecting Hegel:
All the talk in Hegel about morality is pure nonsense, for in the kingdom of objective thought there is no morality any more than in objective religion. . . . The fate of the subject, the individual, the personality is more important than the fate of the whole world and the health of the Emperor of China (i.e. the Hegelian AUgemeinheii). . . . All my respects, Igor Fedorovich, I bow before your philosophic nightcap, but . . . even if I should succeed in lifting myself to the highest rung on the ladder of development I should demand an accounting for all the victims of circumstance in life and history … of the inquisition, of Philip II. . . .es
This passage was often cited by radical reformers (and provided the inspiration for Ivan Karamazov's famous rejection of his 'ticket of admission' to heaven). But it did not mark the end of Hegel's influence on Belinsky or on Russian radicalism. Although Belinsky came to look to French socialists for leadership in the coming transformation of European society, he still expected the change to occur in a Hegelian manner. History remained 'a necessary and reasonable development of ideas' moving toward a realization of the world spirit on earth, when 'Father-Reason shall reign' and the criminal 'will pray for his own punishment and none will punish him.'69 The final 'synthesis' on earth will be a time in which the realm of necessity gives way to the realm of freedom. The present, seemingly victorious, 'thesis,' the rule of kings and businessmen in Europe, will be destroyed by its radical 'antithesis.' This 'negation of negation' will make room for the new millennium.
Bakunin was the most truly 'possessed' and revolutionary of all the Hegelians with his ideological commitment to destruction. He spent almost all of the 'remarkable decade' in Western Europe and was a major catalyst in the 'revolution of the intellectuals' in 1848. Only the hint of final liberation contained in Schiller's 'Ode to Joy' in the choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was to be saved from the coming conflagration. Bakunin's Hegelian conviction that total destruction must precede total freedom had an immense influence on European revolutionary thought- particularly in Southern Europe-and had only just begun to wane at the time of his death in 1876. Even his ideological rival for influence within the populist movement, the evolutionary Peter Lavrov, used Hegelian appeals
in his famous 'Historical Letters' of the late sixties by urging men to renounce their purely personal lives in order to be 'conscious knowing agents' of the historical process.70
It is perhaps more correct to speak of the vulgarization of Hegelian concepts than the influence of Hegel's ideas in Russia. In either case, the impact was great-and, on the whole, disastrous. The strident presentation of Hegelian philosophy as an antidote to occult mysticism was rather like offering typhoid-infected water to a man thirsty with fever. Koyre provocatively says of Belinsky's rejection of Hegel that it did not represent a real change of philosophy but 'the cry of revolt of a sick man whom the Hegelian medicine has not cured.'71 One might almost say that the Hegelian medicine turned the Russian taste for all-encompassing philosophic systems into an addiction. Those who managed to recover from the intoxication with Hegel were left with a kind of philosophic hangover. They tended to reject philosophy altogether but were left with a permanent sense of dissatisfaction with moderate positions and tentative compromises. The 'ex-Hegelians' Belinsky and Herzen were no less extreme than the permanently intoxicated Bakunin in their hatred of posredstvennost' ('mediocrity'), meshchanstvo ('bourgeois philistinism'), and juste-milieu.
The Hegelian idea that history proceeds through necessary contradictions also lent a new quality of acrimony to the previously mild debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers. Hegelianism seemed to demonstrate the 'power of negative thinking.' It is difficult to find any positive statement of belief in the late writings of the 'furious' Belinsky. Yet, because of the passionate sincerity of his personality, negative thinking was made to appear a virtue and became a kind of tradition in the new literary criticism which he largely introduced into Russia. Herzen too-for all his literacy and concern for individual liberties-was at his best in attacking the attackers of freedom. He became convinced that revolutionary change was coming and left Russia forever in 1847 to greet the coming stage of history in Paris. After the failure of 1848, he decided-along with Bakunin-that revolutionary change was to come from Russia after all. Suddenly in 1849-50 Herzen and Bakunin both turned to the ideal of the peasant commune and a free federation of Slavic peoples72-not primarily because they were morally or spiritually desirable as they had been for the Slavophiles and were soon to be for the populists, but because they represented the 'negation of negation': an historical battering ram for upsetting the philistinism of bourgeois Europe.
The necessity of a coming final synthesis in history, a revolutionary deliverance from oppression and mediocrity, was a belief common to all Hegelians of the left from Marx to Proudhon, the most influential Western
revolutionaries after 1848. Herzen and Bakunin shared the conviction and sided more with their common friend Proudhon than with Marx in looking for revolution through an heroic elite rather than economic forces. Bakunin embraced the coming revolution unreservedly, Herzen with deep reservations; but both believed it to be inevitable.
Hegel had given them an 'algebra of revolution' without any equivalents for the formula. Thus, the Russian disciples differed widely in their understanding of who was the agent of the absolute at the present stage of history. Bakunin looked by turns to Western urban revolutionaries, East European peasants, Nicholas I, the anarchist movement in Switzerland and Latin Europe, and finally to conspiratorial terrorists in Russia. Herzen looked to Paris, to the Russian countryside, and to Alexander II before losing both his influence and his faith in the 1860's. Although Herzen never participated in revolutionary activity in the Bakunin manner, he was hypnotized by it. 'Better to perish with the revolution than live on in the alms house of reaction,'73 he had advised his son in 1849; ar,d in his late years one detects a certain elegant nostalgia for the days when it was possible to believe in absolute liberation as he wrote his pessimistic 'letters to an old comrade,' Bakunin.74
There were perhaps only two constant elements in the troubled careers of these, the two most interesting figures of the 'remarkable decade.' First was their romantic attachment to the image of a better society probably derived not so much from socialist blueprints as from nostalgic reminiscences of childhood and literary portrayals of fraternal heroism and happiness. Second was their essentially Hegelian conviction that a revolutionary repudiation of the existing order of things was historically inevitable.
The fascination with Hegel led many Russians to believe in a coming liberation without deepening their understanding of liberty. Hegelianism revived in a secular form the prophetic hopes of the Muscovite ideology and provided a philosophy of history that was no less absolute and metaphysical (though considerably less clear). The idea that negation was merely a stage in the preparation for the final realization of the absolute was a kind of depersonalized, philosophical version of the Christian conception that the reign of the Antichrist would precede the second coming of Christ. It is a tribute to the depth of Hegel's influence on Russian thought that even those who subsequently rejected his philosophy still felt the need for a philosophy of history: Comte's positivism, social Darwinism, or Marxist materialism. Hegel encouraged Russian secular thinkers to base their ideas on a prophetic philosophy of history rather than a practical program of reform, to urge action in the name of historical necessity rather than moral imperatives.
The Prophetic Role of Art
If there was any supreme authority for the emancipated men of the 'remarkable decade,' it was not a philosopher or historian but a literary critic like Belinsky or a creative artist like Gogol. The extraordinary prestige of those connected with art followed logically from romantic philosophy. For the creative artist was in many ways the
