Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/279

Rh Kirěevskii asked himself whether the love of peace peculiar to the Russian was a congenital or an acquired characteristic. This critical problem and a number of similar ones are propounded, and some of them will require further consideration when we pass to the study of Kirěevskii's successors. It is evident that Kirěevskii had accepted the humanitarian ideal of the German enlightenment and had translated it into Russian.

Another observation may be permitted upon Kirěevskii's character as manifested in his literary fragments. For the very reason that we have no more than fragmentary works from his pen, we get a good picture of the man's literary isolation. The censorship and the repressive measures of the reign of Nicholas robbed him of the joys of creation and made him a literary hermit. Retiring into himself, Kirěevskii, in conformity with his own theory, devoted himself to contemplation, for he lacked inclination and courage for the struggle against oppression. In 1848, for example, when even Pogodin was urging that an address should be sent to the tsar wherein literary men should make a joint complaint against the censorship, Kirěevskii advised against this course, lest suspicion be aroused that he and his friends were not loyal supporters of the government. To preserve Russia from internal disorders and to obviate a war in which Russia might help the Germans against the Slavs, well-disposed persons should be willing to sacrifice literature for two or three years. In the social question, too, and above all in the great Russian problem concerning the liberation of the serfs, Kirěevskii's views were extremely conservative.

Kirěevskii's outlook tended towards quietism. He was here more strongly influenced by Russian conditions than by German philosophy. By Kant and Fichte, but also by Schelling, his attention had been directed to the consideration that the will has an importance side by side with the intelligence. In the treatise translated by Kirěevskii's stepfather Elagin, Schelling pointed to the will as the source of self-consciousness, whilst in the later and entirely mystical writings of the German philosopher, the will was spoken of as the real being (das Ursein). Kirěevskii, too, pondered the problem of the will, and it was characteristic of his mentality that this should lead him to quietism. In a letter to Homjakov he complained that the present differed from antiquity in its failure to understand