Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/379

Rh no fantasy, and he would not allow his reason to instil critical doubts during the intoxicating minutes of faith. These are moods and opinions which manifest his agreement with the slavophils in leading points. Bělinskii himself speaks of this first phase of the thirties as his epoch of "abstract heroism," and he analyses it psychologically by saying that he then lived in the sphere of feeling alone, giving feeling precedence over understanding, whereas at a later date, he tells us, he came to recognise that feeling and understanding are identical. Thus did Bělinskii write at the end of 1837.

In this state of inward disintegration he endeavoured (1836) to find relief in "sensuality," seeking "to tranquillise desperation by dissipation," fruitlessly, it need hardly be said. About this he wrote to his friends quite openly and with a certain repressed wrath. In the same year appeared Čaadaev's protest against Russia, but for the time being Bělinskii would pay no heed to him. In philosophical and political matters he had for a short time been taken captive by Fichte, but now shook himself free with Hegel's aid. At this period he wrote an extremely weak play entitled The Fifty Year Old Uncle and hoping to earn money he compiled a grammar for which no purchaser could be found.

Despite these internal and external troubles, Bělinskii for a brief period now became reconciled with reality. Pogodin would have had more reason than the slavophils to rejoice over the Bělinskii of the years 1837 to 1839. He was opposed to politics, which might alter the real; he was opposed to the French to politicians to philosophers (Voltaire!), and to poets; poets were too political for him, and therefore he clung to Goethe. "To the devil with politics. Long live science! German philosophy is a development and exposition clear and distinct as mathematics, a development and exposition of the Christian doctrine founded on love and on the idea of raising man towards the divine." Hegel notwithstanding, his view of civic freedom resembles that of the slavophils, for he says that it can derive only from the inner freedom of the individual. He rejects European constitutions and French politics, with their insistence on experience and history. But he praises Germany, and even Prussia, appealing to the pure understanding and to idealist and apriorist philosophy. Germany is to him "the Jerusalem of the new humanity." In this phase Bělinskii goes so far as to forget the youthful Rh