Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/404

378 forms, and ceremonies! "wrote Bělinskii in 1840 to his friend Botkin.

Like significance must be attached to his campaign against the religious slavophils, whom he numbered among the romanticists. There was much that was congenial to him in these opponents. In fighting them he was fighting himself, his own religious past. But, said Bělinskii once, "the man of noble mind does not perish in the light, as bourgeois philosophers hold." We know, too, Bělinskii's utterance concerning strong and creative scepticism.