Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/348

322 patriotism was justified in face of the negation of Čaadaev and the radical westernisers. In this sense even Herzen recognised that slavophilism was the reaction of "outraged national sentiment" against exclusively foreign influences—though slavophilism was not so wholly instinctive as Herzen opined. Moreover, what has been said is valid only as regards the philosophic founders of slavophilism, and strictly speaking it is valid only for Kirěevskii. The other slavophils proclaimed as historical reality what to Kirěevskii was no more than ideal, and in their hands philosophic and religious messianism became political imperialism and nationalist chauvinism. To him applies the denotation moskvoběsie (Moscow frenzy) which became current after the Polish rising.

The first slavophils recognised and admitted Russia's errors. In a poem circulated in manuscript throughout Russia (for the censor had refused his imprimatur) Homjakov apostrophised Russia, the chosen of God:

Persist in thy endeavour. To be God's instrument Is hard for earthly beings; Sharp are His judgments with His servants, And, alas, how many fearsome Sins hast thou harboured. Black is thy fate through black falseness, And heavy upon thee presses the yoke of slavery; Filled art thou with godless and devastating lies, With dead and inhmous sloth, And every kind of baseness!

Kirěevskii's criticisms, and still more those of Homjakov, were directed against prepetrine Russia as well as against contemporary Russia, the fruit of Peter's reforms. To Samarin the two crowning errors, the two most disastrous maladies of Russia, were usury and formalism.

Peter's reforms were not rejected in their entirety by all the slavophils. Kirěevskii's judgment of Peter's work was comparatively mild. K. Aksakov, on the other hand, was utterly opposed to Peter's work, whilst his brother Ivan considered that the assassination of Alexander II was a direct issue of Peter's reforms. Whilst Homjakov was inclined simply to value Moscow from the literator's outlook and to prize it as a laboratory of western thought, I. Aksakov's sentiments towards the capital that had been founded by Peter were already quite nationalistic. Well-known is his letter to Strahov