Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/462

436 Russian society to repentance, had issued to the Russians a summons on behalf of faith, work, and knowledge, had exhorted them to unite with the people and to enter into the heritage of Dostoevskii and the slavophils. Antonii reminded his readers of Saltykov's street arab, who had called after the German bourgeois, "You have sold your soul to the devil for a groschen!" But we Russians, said the archbishop, have let him have our soul for nothing, so we can demand its return. Reading the book in sleepless nights, the hierarch had regained faith in Russian society, and had acquired the conviction that Russia was not lost to Christ.

The archbishop's rejoicing over the repentant prodigal is not difficult to understand, for nearly all the authors of Signposts had been Marxists, and some even had been members of the Social Democratic Party.

Struve answered the archbishop. His rejoinder was an adroit parry to Antonii's cheerful adulation, the adulation that came from a man who, if I mistake not, had by one of the essayists been described as the most interesting figure in the black hundred group. Struve reminded the prince of the church of what Dostoevskii had said, that, since the time of Peter the Great, the church had been suffering from palsy; and Struve declared that he and his friends were filled with concern because the Orthodox church was so utterly subordinated to the state and to the aims of state policy.

Shortly afterwards, Berdjaev issued an open letter to the archbishop, declaring himself a penitent son of the church, but at the same time putting such awkward questions as to the spiritual poverty of the church, as to its violence, its condonation of capital punishment, and the like, that the reader was forced to wonder how the questioner could possibly have "come once more to recognise the church" as his "spiritual mother."

Signposts contained little more than a recantation of Marxism and social democracy. The docket "from Marxism to idealism" was tantamount to a condemnation of the revolution and even of political activity. The revolution of 1905–1906 and the subsequent events had been the test of the intellectual foundations of the intelligentsia, and these foundations, the values that had been esteemed by the intelligentsia for more than half a century, had been proved essentially unstable and fallacious.