Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/403

Rh command." But in 1840, when he learned of the death of Stankevič, he pondered much over life and death. "To what end," he asks, “ are we in the world? We die and rot, men and nations perish, the world itself will perish, Shakespeare and Hegel will be as if they had never been." A year later Bělinskii declares that negation is his god. A year later still he writes to Bakunin: “!What is man without God? A cold corpse. Man's life is in God; he dies and he prospers, he suffers and he rejoices, in God."

We have seen that Bělinskii desires faith, seeks faith. "Without faith," he writes in 1842, "I cannot live." When he found faith in socialism he said: "I can live more easily In my soul there is now that without which I cannot live, the faith that furnishes answers to all questions. But this is not faith merely, nor is it knowledge, but it is religious knowledge and conscious religion."

By the analysis of these and many other of Bělinskii's sayings it might be possible to secure a more precise definition of the concepts faith and religion, but it is enough for our purpose to know that the problem occupied his mind. His demand for "a conscious religion" and for "religious knowledge" is significant, and we learn from his letter to Gogol that in his opinion official religion offers nothing of the kind. In 1846 he had declared that for him the terms God and religion signified darkness, ignorance, chains, and the knout.

In the analysis of Lermontov (1840) he discerns in The Hero of our own Time "the lapse of the spirit into tormenting reflection, the disintegration of feeling and self-consciousness." Bělinskii exposed here the secret of his own searching and struggling soul.

For in Bělinskii, also, there dwelt two souls. From the æsthetic outlook he embodied the contrast between romanticism and realism, even though for Bělinskii himself this was a contrast between two utterly divergent outlooks on the universe. Romanticism was for him the inner mystical world of mankind, and by mysticism he practically meant the same thing as religion. The struggle with and concerning romanticism was therefore the struggle with and concerning religion. On one side was the yearning for faith, the faith that can move mountains; on the other side were reason and negation. "Long live reason and negation! To the devil with tradition,