Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/390

364 especially the intellectual leadership of the intelligentsia, this leadership being exercised by select individualities. He thus rejects (1848) the "mystical faith in the people" characteristic of the slavophils and the socialists.

It is indisputable that from the German and French socialism of his day he took over the principles of the philosophic and political revolution without accepting the economic doctrines, the economic materialism, of the movement. It must, however, not be forgotten that in those days, when the revolution of 1848 was brewing, Marx had not yet clearly formulated his economic materialism, and it must be remembered that he was then revolutionary in sentiment; revolutionary in the political sense of the term.

Bělinskii's closing years (from 1846 onwards) were, therefore, characterised by a more vigorous insistence upon individualism, which found expression in sharp sayings about the French socialists. It never became clear to him that his struggle for the rights of the individual personality must not conflict with socialism. But Bělinskii did not cease to participate actively in the campaign against superstition and mysticism.

He was a born fighter, and in describing his own polemic attitude he says, "I am by nature a Jew." His mission as combatant was to organise progressive Russia against absolutism. A cell was already prepared for him in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, and it was only his premature death which saved him from occupying it.

Bělinskii's philosophical credo secured its climax of expression in his Letter to Gogol. For years Bělinskii had championed Gogol, and in the end was forced to turn against him. In 1847 Gogol published his Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, drawn for the most part from letters written in 1845 and 1846, when Gogol's religibus emotionalism was tragically in the ascendant. In the Correspondence, Gogol unreservedly favours the old order and the established Orthodox religion, having good words even for the abomination of serfdom, his passivist Christianity now leading him to approve the institution. Bělinskii, who was then in Europe and could write without troubling himself about the censorship, incorporated a flaming protest in a Letter to Gogol. This was circulated far and wide throughout Russia in manuscript copies; men of the cultured classes learned it by heart; Dostoevskii