Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/262

236 of slavophil suspects, Čaadaev was included. Fun has been made of this police catalogue of men of letters, but as far as Čaadaev was concerned it did not err.

He was, however, distinguished from the slavophils by his unreserved admiration for Peter, and for the same reason he was esteemed by the westernisers, above all by Herzen. In the sphere of abstract politics he never abandoned the ideals of the decabrists, although he detested their method, the method of revolution. At bottom, indeed, Čaadaev too desired a revolution, but it was to be on the European model. In the west, writes Čaadaev in his first essay, all political revolutions were in reality spiritual revolutions; interests followed ideas instead of leading them.

Čaadaev shared with the westernisers an unsparing criticism of Russian conditions. He shared their aversion to national chauvinism, which since the Napoleonic campaigns had grown to constitute the official nationalism of Uvarov, and which Čaadaev regarded as national nihilism. We learn this from Jazykov, the slavophil poet, who fiercely censured Čaadaev for his antipatriotism.

Although Čaadaev's conceptions had a theocratic basis, the westernisers discovered in this writer an essential scepticism upon religious questions, and therefore felt at unison with him.

Čaadaev exercised powerful inﬂuence over his contemporaries and successors. We see this not only in Herzen, but also in Puškin, N. Turgenev, and even Dostoevskii. The influence is in part explicable through Caadaev's remarkable duplex position, a position recognised by Puškin in his criticism of this man whom he termed a "curer of souls." In Rome, said Puškin, he would have been a Brutus, but in Athens a Pericles.