Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/386

360 happiness in any other terms, and I must be tranquillised concerning the fate, of every one of my blood brothers." Such were the sentiments animating Bělinskii in 1841, and more and more he tended towards the conviction that "every man is an end for himself," and that universal harmony is too dearly bought at the cost of individual disharmonies, disharmonies in individual lives.

Bělinskii readily came to understand that the idealisation of the all, the idealisation of history (this to include Russian history, and Russian history to include Nicholas), was too gross an imposition. He could not fail to say to himself that just as little as Napoleon and the "respectworthy" president of the United States, was Nicholas a truly real reality. In a word, the basing of the political theory of legitimacy upon Hegelian pantheism had to Bělinskii become suspect through and through. It is true that Bělinskii might have transferred to Bakunin's shoulders some of the responsibility for the Borodino essay, but Bělinskii was not the man to attempt to shuffle off responsibilities in this way. Besides, Bakunin too had perceived his error, and had come to the same way of thinking as Bělinskii.

A light had broken in on the latter with the recognition that the Hegelian metaphysic, that Hegelian pantheism, could be used to demonstrate that the illegitimist rulers as well as the legitimist, that Robespierre and Napoleon as well as Louis XVI and Nicholas, were "an expression of the universal and the infiinite." Both are historically given, and if we hold fast to history we pass from Hegel to revolution. Herzen, as we know, found in Hegel "the algebra of revolution," nor was it difficult to Herzen and Ogarev to induce Bělinskii to share the new outlook. "The executioner exists, and his existence is rational, but he is none the less repulsive," wrote Bělinskii at the close of the year 1840.

Herzen and Ogarev brought about Bělinskii's movement from Hegel to the Hegelian left and to Feuerbach. From Feuerbach it was but a step to Young Germany and to Heine. It would be inaccurate to say that Bělinskii abandoned Hegel and went over to Feuerbach and the socialists. Nor did Bělinskii himself throw his Borodino essay altogether overboard, for all that he would admit was that he had drawn false conclusions from correct principles. The man harassed by Fichte's subjectivism had accepted the Hegelian reality