Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/391

Rh and the Petraševcy had to atone in Siberia for reading it in public; and it became the living program of progressive Russia. "Russia does not need Orthodox mysticism," exclaims Bělinskii; "she needs rights and laws in harmony with the healthy understanding and in conformity with justice. At an epoch when and in a country where men sell men like cattle, Gogol wishes to soothe our minds with empty sermons."

The Letter to Gogol throws light upon Bělinskii's general outlook as well as upon his personal character.

Feuerbachian atheism and materialism take the form of a socialistic struggle against the old order of the Russian theocracy. Feuerbach's socialistic sentiments are elucidated and fortified by those of the French. Bělinskii now feels towards the French the sympathy which Saltykov declared characteristic of himself and the younger generation. This is not to say that Bělinskii turned from Feuerbach to Stirner, and indeed Annenkov tells us that Bělinskii rejected Stirner's teaching most emphatically. He did not, however, entirely reject egoism; he clung to Feuerbach's ego and alter ego. But egoism was valid solely upon a moral basis, and this moral basis was social and socialistic altruism. Not even Homjakov was more vigorous in his refutation of Stirner. Bělinskii's fighting spirit enabled him to sense the passive bourgeois in the ostensibly radical anarchist.

Nor, on the other hand, did Bělinskii fall into the error of Marx. Marx and Engels, passing beyond Feuerbach in their opposition to the idealist subjectivism of German philosophy, arrived at a no less extreme objectivism, not merely throwing Stirner overboard, but sacrificing the individual to the mass. From Feuerbach, Bělinskii learned a moderate objectivism, and contended that the individual, as a strong personality, should carry on the struggle against society. In this matter Bělinskii thought and felt as a Russian. In the Russia of that day the masses were composed of the peasantry, they were illiterate serfs, and it was impossible therefore for Bělinskii to subordinate (as did Engels) the "paltry" individual to such a mass. Nor could Bělinskii see in the Russian masses those who would carry on the tradition of German idealistic philosophy, as for Lassalle and Engels the German working classes seemed predestined to carry it on. Bělinskii read Marx's essays in the "Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher," and recognised their radicalism, but Bělinskii remained