Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/382

356 distinction between the state and the nation, and in the case of Russia alone are state and nation identical. In a more detailed exposition of Bělinskii's views due weight would have to be given to these and to many other considerations. The essay upon Wolfgang Menzel, which is in the form of a review of a translation of Menzel's German Literature, likewise betrays the composite factors of Bělinskii's views. He condemns Menzel, clings to Goethe and Hegel, but energetically opposes the ethics of George Sand, and so on. It is impossible here to undertake a precise analysis of all these works, nor is such an analysis within the scope of the present sketch, which aims merely at a reference to the philosophical and metaphysical problem which busied and disquieted Bělinskii in his essay on Borodino, namely (to use the phraseology of the schools) the fundamental problem of the relationship between subject and object, between I and not-I. Fichte continued to disturb Bělinskii's mind; but Hegel's rational reality of history was in the end to overthrow Fichte's extreme individualism and subjectivism.

ĚLINSKII, too, plunged into Turgenev's "German sea," but he did not wish to drown in it, nor was there any reason why he should, seeing that in Germany itself Fichte and his successors refused to perish there.

Bělinskii accepted objectively given history, and above all the objectively given state, just as Hegel and also Schelling and Fichte accepted them—the two last-named in so far as they sought objective standing-ground upon historic data.

Bělinskii was fully aware that his historism was directed against subjectivism. In Hegel's sense he endeavoured to avoid a cleavage between the subject, as individual and as chance product, and the object, the world-all, as universal and necessary, in this way, that the subject was to give itself up to the object so that the individual and chance-given might raise itself to the level of the universal and necessary, and become justified thereby. The universal and necessary is discerned in history, and properly speaking in historically developing society; society is identified with the state; but never for a moment does Bělinskii forget himself, the subject, continually enquiring, What must this ego, the subject, do to