Looking Opposite Ways

The words were insults before they were schools. Slavophile, Westernizer: nicknames thrown across Moscow rooms in the 1840s, then kept because they were useful. The people who wore them were a few dozen nobles, professors, and critics who had read German philosophy under Nicholas I’s silence and could not agree what Russia was for. The encyclopaedia definitions are fair and too clean. Friends dined together, then stopped. A man could love a peasant commune and still want Europe’s law. What they shared, Alexander Herzen later wrote, was a love. What they did not share was the way of loving.

Yes, we were their opponents, but very strange ones. We had the same love, but not the same way of loving — and like Janus or the two-headed eagle we looked in opposite directions, though the heart that beat within us was but one.

That sentence is the honest weather of the quarrel, and why slogans so often falsify it. The Slavophiles were not village simpletons, though Aksakov wore a murmolka so “national,” Herzen says, that peasants took him for a Persian. The Westernizers were not men who wished Russia to vanish into France. Both sides were answering the same wound: Peter had cut a window, Nicholas had shut a mouth, and an educated generation had to decide whether the country they loved was a lagging Europe or a different kind of world.

A shot in a monthly review

Pyotr Chaadaev (1794–1856) had been an army officer and a liberal. In the 1820s he turned toward a mystical Christianity with leanings toward Rome, and wrote, in French, his Lettres philosophiques. The first letter’s publication in Teleskop in 1836 was a bombshell: the review was banned, and Chaadaev was declared insane and placed under medical supervision. He went on living in Moscow, where young Westernizers venerated him. Britannica’s caution is the one a visitor needs: he had affinities with both camps. A Western path divided him from the Slavophiles; a religio-historical vision separated him from the Westernizers. He is the quarrel’s spark, not its membership card.

Herzen read the letter in exile, in Vyatka, when the post brought the latest Telescope. In a land of silence, he later wrote, two or three pages were enough to shake all thinking Russia. Between Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit and this letter there had been ten years of quiet, the Fourteenth of December, the gallows, Nicholas.

It was a shot that rang out in the dark night; whether it was something perishing that proclaimed its end, whether it was a signal or a cry for help, whether it heralded the dawn or foretold that it would never be — anyway, it forced all to awake.

What did the letter actually say? Tomáš Masaryk, in The Spirit of Russia, paraphrases without cartoon. Russia, Chaadaev told his correspondent, has neither history nor tradition, because it has no guiding ideal. He dated the essays from “Necropolis.” Russians, in his account, do not belong cleanly to East or West; they grow, but they do not ripen. Ideas arrive ready-made from Europe, and a ready-made idea is not a living one. The Orthodox Church, as he then saw it, had isolated Russia from the Catholic unity in which Europe had organised a civilisation. Herzen, who loved the man, still called the letter a merciless cry of reproach, and added that such an utterance was bound to call forth opposition, or Chaadaev would have been perfectly right. The Slavophiles were that opposition, thought through.

Chaadaev was startled by the vogue. In the Apology of a Madman he softened the first letter without cancelling it: Peter found a blank scroll and wrote “Europe” on it; Russia’s task was to choose what is best, not to imitate blindly. Love of country, Masaryk’s translation has him say, is a great thing; there is a greater love still, the love of truth. He went on living in Moscow, officially mad by Saturday visits of a doctor and a police-master who, Herzen says, signed fifty-two false reports a year. He used to say that in Moscow every foreigner is taken to look at the great cannon and the great bell — the cannon which can never be fired and the bell which fell down before it was rung. The Slavophiles heard a curse on what they held sacred. They were not wrong to hear it so, and not wrong to answer with a Russia that was not a silent bell.

I have never learned to love my fatherland with lowered eyelids, bowed head, and closed lips. In my view those only who see their country with clear vision can be helpful to their country.

Makhaev’s Neva, engraved in 1753, is the other hieroglyph. Peter had moved the capital to a Baltic plan; Moscow kept the churches and the feeling of a native centre. Britannica’s Slavophiles were centred in Moscow, formed in circles that had been reading Schelling. The Westernizers were more mixed, often tied to the university and to Petersburg journals, though Herzen’s 1840s circle was a Moscow circle too. The two cities were not two parties. They were two climates in which the same people had to think.

What the Slavophiles were actually saying

Britannica’s list of leaders is the one to keep: Aleksey Khomyakov, the brothers Konstantin and Ivan Aksakov, the brothers Ivan and Pyotr Kireyevsky, and Yury Samarin. Their conclusion was that Russia should not use western Europe as a model, but should follow a course determined by its own character and history. They were not a hymn to the secret police. Herzen, who fought them, separated Moscow Slavophilism from Nicholas’s official “nationality,” a police banner raised to escape the memory of December. The Slavophils, he wrote, had nothing in common with the emperor but words. Official church and state, Masaryk records, found their theocracy unflattering and placed them on the same index as the revolutionary Westernizers.

Khomyakov (1804–1860) is the name Britannica prints as founder: poet, landlord, lay theologian, retired cavalry captain who died of cholera caught from peasants he was treating. He knew the West and did not hate it as a landscape. He wanted the best of both traditions, and refused the West’s individualism as a basis for a social order. Capitalism and socialism, he thought, were children of the same outlook. The root trouble was Western Christianity’s failure to hold authority and freedom together. Orthodoxy, he believed, still possessed a more balanced teaching. His key word was sobornost’: a fellowship united by faith and love, in which a person matures without becoming a crowd or a contract. He idealised the peasants’ humility and brotherhood. You may find the idealisation naïve. You will not have understood him if you hear only a boast. He was describing a hope, and criticising a Europe he knew from the inside.

Rome kept unity at the expense of freedom. Protestants had freedom but lost unity.

Masaryk, harder on the school than Zernov, gives the philosophic founding not to Khomyakov but to Ivan Kireyevsky (1806–1856). In 1832 his review The European praised Peter and condemned a Chinese wall; the ministry closed it. After Optina hermitage and the Greek fathers, his essays of 1852 and 1856 reversed the signs. Russia, he now held, differs from Europe in its intimate nature: faith against a knowledge inimical to faith; a state grown from the commune against a state grown from conquest. European rationalism, in his story, split the human spirit; the Russian, at his best, remained whole. Masaryk calls the dualism a romantic artifact, and still insists that the panegyric of Old Russia was a severe criticism of Nicholas’s Russia. Faith, for Kireyevsky, was an inner devotion. An authoritarian state church could not love that definition even when it came dressed as Orthodoxy.

Venetsianov’s reapers are not a tract. They belong here because the commune was the social fact both camps circled. Slavophiles saw in the mir an organic cell the West had lost. They favoured emancipation of the serfs; they also favoured autocracy and opposed a Western parliament. Columbia’s pairing is blunt: they supported the throne and wanted speech and press freer than Nicholas allowed. They were discontented with serfdom, bureaucracy, and a church made into a government department. They were not discontented with the idea of a tsar. Konstantin Aksakov gave the people the land and inner life, and the state the business of power. They were trying to imagine a freedom that was not a franchise and a unity that was not a police file.

Aksakov is the movement’s costume and its pathos. Herzen, after his death, still calls the Slavophils “our opponents,” nos amis les ennemis. He blames them for incense that hid village realities, then grants what he came to share: they unearthed elements of Russian life from under the manure of civilisation. Their error, if it is an error, was to treat a living village and a remembered liturgy as a complete future. Their truth, if it is a truth, was that a people is not only a lag to be closed. Both claims survived the costumes. The Persian murmolka did not.

What the Westernizers were actually saying

Britannica’s Westernizer emphasised Russia’s common historic destiny with the West. Columbia adds temperament: rationalistic, often agnostic; some liberals, others radicals. The names it prints are Chaadaev, Herzen, and Belinsky. Herzen’s table also held Botkin, Granovsky, Korsh — and, across the room, the Slavophils. They did not share one programme. Sarah J. Young, following Andrzej Walicki, warns a beginner not to imagine a fan club for Paris. What the camp shared was a refusal to let autocracy, serfdom, and the Church as an institution of power speak as if they were the whole of Russia. They wanted a person who was not only a soul in a commune, a law that was not only a custom, and, in a country of silence, the right to say so.

Vissarion Belinsky is the temperature. Herzen calls him one of the most remarkable figures of Nicholas’s period: criticism that used a book as a starting-point and then threw itself into the question. The Slavophils, he says, began their official existence with the war upon him; he drove them by his taunts into the murmolka. In July 1847, from Salzbrunn, already dying of consumption, Belinsky answered Gogol’s Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. Gogol had preached obedience and the people’s piety. Belinsky had loved him as Russia’s hope.

Herzen printed the letter in The Polar Star in 1855. Ivan Aksakov, a Slavophile, told his father that thinking youth in the gubernia towns knew it by heart. Dostoevsky would later be arrested in a circle that had read it aloud. A Slavophile hears a man who has never knelt in a village church. A Westernizer hears a man who has looked at serfdom and refused to call it a sacrament. The letter’s force is that it will not let culture be a consolation prize for unfreedom.

Russia sees her salvation not in mysticism or asceticism or pietism, but in the successes of civilization, enlightenment, and humanity. What she needs is not sermons (she has heard enough of them!) or prayers (she has repeated them too often!), but the awakening in the people of a sense of their human dignity.

Timofey Granovsky is the other temperature: not a letter that burns, a lecture that fills. Herzen remembered leaving a packed Moscow hall with Chaadaev, who said the lectures were of historical significance. Europe, in Granovsky’s method, was a past that can be taught, not a fashion to put on. The camp was already splitting: moderate liberals wanted reform and a university; radicals wanted a deed.

Herzen’s strange middle

Aleksandr Herzen (1812–1870) is Britannica’s originator of peasant populism. Arrested in 1834, he came back to Moscow in 1842 a Left-Hegelian Westernizer, then left Russia for good in 1847. 1848 in Paris disabused him. Loss of faith in the West provoked, Britannica says, a spiritual return: he borrowed the peasant commune from his old foes and imagined it as the basis of a socialism that would not copy Manchester. His memoir keeps him a Westernizer even there: to go back to the mir is the task, but not as a costume of Old Russia.

Only the mighty thought of the West to which all its long history has led up is able to fertilise the seeds slumbering in the patriarchal mode of life of the Slavs. … these corner-stones are only stones … and without the thought of the West our future cathedral will not rise above its foundations.

In 1853, in London, he founded the Free Russian Press. After Nicholas’s death he launched, with Ogarev in 1857, Kolokol — The Bell. Britannica’s account needs no inflation: it was smuggled home and read by ministers and by the opposition. For a time Herzen even hailed the tsar as a conquering Galilean. Then the ambiguity cost him both sides. Moderates, Turgenev among them, attacked him for utopian recklessness; Chernyshevsky’s younger radicals seemed to him dangerous to reform. When emancipation came in 1861, he denounced it as a betrayal. He backed the Polish revolt of 1863 and immediately regretted it. In 1867 the paper ceased. The original quarrel had become a harder question: what kind of Europe, on what kind of soil?

After the serfs were named free

The emancipation of 19 February 1861, 3 March New Style, changed the floor under the argument. Britannica’s narrative is a compromise: persons freed, land to be redeemed, terms unfavourable in many places, the Slavophile Yury Samarin among the few owners pulling toward the peasant. The obshchina became the state’s tax collector as well as a redistributor of strips. In 1877 about four-fifths of the land due to former serfs was in their possession — about half the arable in fifty provinces of European Russia, with a further third still noble. For a Slavophile who had wanted a Christian commune, the statute was a half-recognised child. For a Westernizer who had wanted a citizen, it was a person still bound as a payer.

The original circles thinned by death — Belinsky in 1848, Granovsky in 1855, Kireyevsky and Chaadaev in 1856, Khomyakov and Konstantin Aksakov in 1860. Ivan Aksakov carried a later Slavophilism toward the Slavic committees and the press. Pan-Slavism, which Masaryk distinguishes from the first religious school, grew louder after Crimea. Nikolay Danilevsky’s Russia and Europe (1869) treated Russia as another civilisation, not a lagging West. That book is a descendant, not a continuation. The 1840s Slavophiles had been theologians of a commune; the 1870s publicists were often strategists of a Slavic world. A visitor who uses “Slavophile” for every later nationalist has lost the Moscow room.

The novel took the quarrel indoors. Turgenev’s Fathers and Children (1862) seated a man who will not bow to any principle on faith across from an uncle who cannot take a step without one. Revolutionaries heard a libel, reactionaries a glorification. The 1840s argument had changed coats: nihilism, frogs, nature as temple or workshop. A later Slavophile note moved into the pochvenniki — Dostoevsky, Apollon Grigoryev, Nikolay Strakhov — who wanted a rootedness that was not a masquerade of 1640 and not a copy of 1848.

Dostoevsky’s path is a novel, not a membership. He had been a Westernizing radical, had heard Belinsky’s letter read aloud, had faced a mock execution. He came back a Christian who would not make peace with a crystal palace of rational happiness, and a writer who still needed Europe as an interlocutor. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions looks at the West with a disgust Slavophiles could recognise; Demons looks at Russian radicalism with a fear Westernizers could not dismiss as incense. To call him a Slavophile is to flatten a man who had been through a firing squad. To call him a Westernizer is to ignore A Writer’s Diary. He is what the quarrel did when it entered a conscience.

Paint, music, and the long echo

Culture did not wait for the philosophers to adjourn. The Wanderers painted peasants without Khomyakov’s theology in the frame. The Mighty Handful hunted a Russian sound that was not a German conservatory. Viktor Vasnetsov, who began in the Wanderers’ pity and turned to bylinas, told Stasov he had loved peasant songs on the stove, not as a narodnik loves a cause. The Bogatyrs, finished in 1898, is a public dream of a Russia older than Peter. A Westernizer may find it a beautiful evasion; a Slavophile descendant, a liturgy in oil. The canvas holds both complaints.

The 1897 census finally numbered the floor. Slavic Review’s reading of the tables puts illiteracy at about four-fifths of the empire; in European Russia still about three-quarters. The Presidential Library gives 125,640,021 inhabitants, only about 13.4 percent of them urban. The 1840s quarrel had been conducted by a thin literate layer over a country of speech, strips of land, and parish ritual. That is why both camps talked so much about “the people,” and why the people so rarely answered in the same vocabulary.

The last pre-war chapter is not a reunion. Vladimir Solovyov, formed on Slavophile questions, turned against later nationalist uses of the school. In 1909 Vekhi (Landmarks) accused the radical intelligentsia of spiritual thinness — a late echo of Slavophile charges, written by men who were not wearing murmolki. In the summer of 1914 the empire entered a European war neither Chaadaev’s blank sheet nor Khomyakov’s symphony had described. The war did not refute the quarrel. It ended the room in which a man could still believe the choice was a path to be chosen in a Moscow house.

How to hold both sides

A visitor who wants a winner will not have read the sources. The Slavophiles saw that a culture is more than a catching-up, that liturgy and village are not backwardness merely because they are not French, that a person might need a communion as well as a right. They also idealised a past that had included serfdom and a church under the state. The Westernizers saw that serfdom was a traffic in persons, that isolation is not holiness, that law and a dignity independent of a master’s mood are not contaminants. They also, at their thinnest, spoke as if a lecture-hall were already a people. Herzen is still the best usher. Same love. Opposite ways of looking.

Chaadaev’s bell without a tongue and Polenov’s courtyard with a church dome are the same city in two weathers. Read Khomyakov’s sobornost’ as a serious attempt to name a freedom that is not loneliness, and Belinsky’s letter as a serious attempt to name a dignity that is not a sermon. If you want the quarrel in a form that does not vote, read Fathers and Children, or The Brothers Karamazov. The movements named themselves in Moscow in the 1840s. They did not finish. The First World War finished the world in which they could still imagine finishing. What remains is not a score. It is a pair of questions a culture asked itself out loud, once it had learned — from a letter declared insane — that silence was also an answer.