Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/335

Rh ment I may mention the historian Pogodin (1800–1875) and the historian of literature Ševyrev (1806–1864).

In youth Pogodin had at times been dominated by romanticist notions of liberty, but in due time he became conservative and reactionary in accordance with the program of Uvarov's official nationalism. In 1835 Uvarov appointed him professor of history at Moscow, to defend "historical Orthodoxy."

Ševyrev was professor of the history of literature at Moscow university. He was a hard worker, but a pedant and a poor thinker, one well fitted to bring Schelling's philosophy and the teaching of the German romanticists into harmony with Uvarov's program. He advised Gogol to devote his literary talents to descriptions of the upper classes; whilst Pogodin as an editor treated his collaborators as the Russian great landowner treated his peasants. To Ševyrev we owe the oft-quoted formula, "The west is putrescent!" To him western civilisation was poisonous, and the west was a predestined corpse whose deathlike odour already tainted the air.

If such men as these had panslavist inclinations, their panslavism was properly speaking panrussism. As a rule they thought only of a union of the Orthodox Slavs, whilst the Catholic Slavs were left to the west. Pogodin visited Prague in 1835, and made the acquaintance of Palacký, Šafařík, and Hanka, but these relationships were restricted to the scientific field.

Even if Pogodin and Ševyrev termed themselves slavophils, and if after their manner they rough-hewed the doctrine of Kirěevskii and Homjakov, these reactionary chauvinists must be distinguished all the more sharply from the first slavophils precisely because the two doctrines are so often labelled with the same name. This name, as I have shown, properly attaches to the early slavophils, the founders of the doctrine, for its subsequent exponents strayed into the paths of Pogodin.

The slavophils were far too much inclined to base Russia's civilisation upon religion for it to be possible for them to be nationalist and political panslavists. "Without Orthodoxy our nationality becomes fudge," said Košelev, and this expression, rough though it be, sums up exceedingly well the fundamental outlook of the slavophils. The difference between slavophilism and political panslavism is well shown in Samarin's polemic (1875) against the reactionary political views of General Faděev,