Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/380

354 drama which had closed for him the portals of the university, coming to terms even with the reality of serfdom. He gives utterance to the proposition, "Might is right, and right is might." But Bělinskil did not shut his eyes to the fact that Russia was culturally weak. "We suffer from the weight of Chinesedorn," he said in 1839, and four years later he again expressed his horror of Russian Chinesedom. To the same period belong Bělinskii's essays upon the battle of Borodino and upon Wolfgang Menzel which are regarded by critics as the climax of this phase of development.

Liberal historians of literature, affected by a kind of shame and unwilling to put weapons into the hands of their opponents, are apt to refrain from a close analysis of these essays. As a rule Sketches of the Battle of Borodino is dismissed with a casual mention, the reader being told that in this article, with the aid of Hegel's proposition "The rational is real and the real is rational," Bělinskii had reconciled himself to Russia and to the state of Nicholas, and that Herzen quarrelled with Bělinskii on account of the article—Herzen refused to shake hands with Bělinskii, and even the gentle Granovskii considered Belinskii's article "vulgar."

Tolstoi considered the battle of Borodino unmeaning; Napoleon declared it a struggle of titans; to Bělinskii it seemed "the manifestation of the eternal spirit of life," for thus was he influenced by Glinka's book, worthless from the literary and scientific outlook, but penned in an access of mystical ecstasy. To Bělinskii this revelation is simultaneously the revelation of the folk-spirit, and he seizes the opportunity to deliver himself concerning the folk-spirit—a subject about which at that time much was being written in Germany.

To Bělinskii the Russian folk, the nation, is identical with the state, folk and state being a historically given and full-grown organism. The state, continues Bělinskii, is the work