Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/198

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IHAILOVSKII'S interest was to a high degree concentrated upon the signs of the period of transition, and he endeavoured to find meanings in the chaos of the transition. He was especially struck, as one of the signs of the times, with the increasing frequency of suicide, characteristic of Russia no less than of western Europe, and he was able to show that suicide and melancholia were assuming positively epidemic proportions.

He touched on the question in 1875, in connection with his first formulation of the religious problem, referring to the great number of suicides in Russia, and asking the momentous question as to the cause. He recognised that the corpses of the unfortunates harmonised in tint with the corpselike lividity of background in the general social structure, but this was to see a picture, not to give an explanation. He knew that at least half of those who had taken their own lives could not have explained a moment before the act why they were about to do so, whilst in the case of the other half the suicide had been determined by the pressure of the question, Why am I in this picture at all? Finding no answer, they deliberately sought death. Thus Mihailovskii's .answer to the sinister "Why," was that a life without meaning or aim was intolerable,

On this first occasion, Mihailovskii did not dwell on the topic. It merely occurred to him that the frequency of suicide and the associated cry for "bread and circuses" gave our time a similarity to the decadent epoch of Rome. Though the thought was not followed up, it led Mihailovskii to recall the early Christian martyrs and their opponents, and it was in this connection that he formulated his definition of religion. From the definition and from the connection in which it is given, the conclusion may be drawn that the lack of religion is the answer to the question asked by the sociologist and by the suicide who falls victim to his era. A life without meaning and aim is intolerable.

Mihailovskii returned to the problem of suicide in a study of Eduard von Hartmann and of modern pessimism with its characteristic torment of the soul and its ultimate expedient, suicide. He took Goethe's Faust as spokesman of the day, and explained why Faust could find neither happiness nor