Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/313

Rh Samarin's anticatholicism acquired a political trend through the Polish rising of 1863, Catholicism taking a concrete form for the Russians in Polish nationalist propaganda and in Jesuitism. Samarin considered that the Poles presented a living verification of the slavophil philosophy of religion and phiIosophy of history. Upon the basis of Catholicism, the oles had become untrue to their country and to themselves, and had therefore entered the path of destruction. The Polish question was insoluble without a rebirth of the Poles. Samarin referred to the Czechs, saying that a nation with such memories as those of the Hussite movement could never die out. During the revolt of 1863 Samarin was willing to concede linguistic and administrative autonomy to the Poles, and he declared that the complete surrender of the kingdom of Poland was not "per se" impossible, and would not absoIutely conﬂict with Russian interests.

Samarin was likewise alive to the political importance of the Baltic provinces. Warmly, too warmly, did he commend to the Russians the Esthonian and Lettish rural population as natural allies against the dominant German aristocracy.

Despite his ardent slavophil convictions, Samarin remained an advocate of western culture, and he was on terms of intimate friendship with Kavelin the westerniser. He worked conscientiously in favour of the liberation of the peasantry, and after the liberation he continued to labour in the same spirit. Like K. Aksakov he esteemed the mir constitution of the communes very highly, regarding, it as a primitive Russian institution.

HE younger Aksakov (1823–1886) likewise belonged to the earlier generation of slavophils.

At first Ivan Aksakov was extremely critical towards historically extant Russia. We have undeniable proof of this in his letters to his friend Herzen (down to the year 1861). Subsequently he took more conservative views, but continued to make a difference between official Russia and the Russia which, as he contended, developed out of healthy popular energies. Not until 1881 did he draw closer to the reaction, but even then this reactionary trend was not persistent. His was a thoroughly virile character, as we see from his frank