Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/402

376 and his three epochs, that of blind destiny and that of mechanical determination by natural law being succeeded and superseded by the stage of providential workings. Kalinin represents the first two stages, Surskii the third stage, wherein the history of the world assumes the aspect of a pre-established harmony. But the newer German philosophy and literature may have acted jointly with the work of Schelling to lead Bělinskii to deal with the problem of freedom and necessity.

However this may be, Bělinskii at nineteen years of age formulated the problem of freedom and responsibility. This is not to say that he solved it, for the problem is one which continued to vex the maturer man until the close of his career.

Dmitri Kalinin is poor as a work of art. It is the program of an immature mind in revolt against the Nicolaitan social order. Bělinskii's Kalinin preaches the right and duty of revolution. If laws conflict with the rights of nature and humanity, with the rights of the understanding, man must disregard the laws. Kalinin rails against the "snakes, crocodiles, and tigers which live on the bones and flesh of their nearest, drinking blood like water; he introduces us to several types of slave-holders; he struggles against the bonds of marriage, sanctioned by the church but fundamentally immoral, setting up against marriage the ideal of free love. Nor is Bělinskii content with levelling complaints against society and its official props. In blasphemous pride he calls God to account, for this lying and miserable world is God's work—or is it after all the work of Satan?

We can understand why this play led the professors to threaten Bělinskii with Siberia, and we can understand, too, how his literary misadventure, in conjunction with these threats, threw the youthful revolutionary into a fever.

Now that we are acquainted with the vicissitudes of Bělinskii's philosophical development we shall be able to understand his continued vacillation between the philosophy of Kalinin and that of Surskii. He first endeavoured to find peace in Schelling, next in Fichte and subsequently in Hegel, Feuerbach and the socialists in turn, ever searching, moving ever to and fro between faith and doubt.

Again and again we read in his letters of metaphysical struggles concerning God.

At the time when he clung to reality as to a god he declared (1838): "I am God's soldier, and I march at His word of