Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/360

334 already manifest in Danilevskii and Grigor'ev. This formulation is tenable. But the important point is that the slavophil trend and slavophil attempts towards a philosophical view and valuation of Russia and Europe continue to influence thought to-day, and that the vitality of the doctrine is due to the persistence of the conditions under which slavophilism took its rise.

During the forties and the two following decades the westernisers were under slavophil influence. We have seen how Čaadaev in later years drew nearer to the slavophils. Bělinskii and Herzen, Bakunin and the earlier Russian socialists such as Černyševskii, derived their faith in Russia and her social mission from and in conjunction with the slavophils. The radical westernisers, like the slavophils, extolled the mir and the artel as Russian and Slav institutions. Bakunin derived from the slavophil criticism of the state more than one suggestion for his anarchist theories. The narodničestvo is also partly deducible from slavophilism, though more indirectly (by way of Herzen); whilst Russian Marxism was in its inception influenced by the narodničestvo.

But when we are considering the relationships between the westernisers and the slavophils, we must not think only of agreement in certain doctrinal details, however important. Yet more noteworthy, perhaps, is the mutual stimulus which each doctrine exercised on the other during the polemic about their respective philosophical fundamentals. In Bělinskii and still more in Herzen and Ivan Turgenev, we see how slavophilism spurred on the westernisers to opposition.

From the outlook of metaphysical materialism it is comprehensible that Černyševskii should have regarded Kirěevskii as a dreamer merely and not a philosopher, and should have looked upon Pisarev as a Don Quixote, but the judgments are one-sided. Plehanov, in like manner, from his Marxist standpoint, declares that sympathy with the slavophil theory is necessarily treason to the cause of progress, even if the treason be unintentional and unconscious, and he attempts to class the early slavophils with Pogodin. But this is unfair; the opinions and the general mode of thought of Kirěevskii and Homjakov have foundations utterly different from those upon which are established the views of Pogodin.

Though Leont'ev, again, builds upon the slavophils, we must not hold them entirely accountable for Leont'ev's views.