Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/48

22 to attain to a purely empirical and materialistic psychology, are at work.

According to Dobroljubov (and Černyševskii), the critic's task as propagandist mainly consists in a kind of reperception of artistic truth, and this led Dobroljubov to prize above all those works of art wherein the artist has revealed himself. It is continually urged against Dobroljubov that he was unjust to Puškin, but on the other side we must point out that he took delight in Gončarov. He admires Gončarov, not merely on account of the latter's creation of the Oblomov type, but he praises this writer's repose and objectivity and his superiority to the passions and influences of the moment. The desire to be swept along by the current "is Oblomovist, and arises from the wish always to have a leader even in matters of sentiment." As propagandist, Dobroljubov exhorts us to judge poets by their theories of life.

Dobroljubov is severe in his criticism of Turgenev, whose characters Rudin and Lavreckii have too much of the Oblomov in them; but the critic admires Inzarov, being perhaps here somewhat inconsistent with the theory above expounded. Personally Dobroljubov did not get on with Turgenev, finding him a dull companion, as Dobroljubov said openly to Turgenev. Turgenev, on his side, in Fathers and Children, inveighed against realists of the Dobroljubov type; but we cannot admit that Bazarov is a direct portrait of Dobroljubov, as was then maintained in literary circles. Subsequently, in Virgin Soil, Turgenev recognised the imaginative force of Dobroljubov's work, but spoke of the young critic's relentless onslaughts upon recognised authorities as "the attacks of a cobra." Marx compared Dobroljubov with Lessing and Diderot.

Following Černyševskii, Dobroljubov shows how the individual's merits and defects derive from the social environment. In his hands, aesthetic criticism becomes an analysis of the family, of classes (mercantile and aristocratic), and of social institutions in general. He condemns Russian patriarchalism, which enslaves the family and above all enslaves woman; and he endeavours in Katerina's suicide to discover a manifestation of the folk-soul unbemused by official morality. To selfish merchants and nobles he holds up the mužik, the folk, as models. In the political field he condemns as Oblomovism, not aristocracy alone, but liberalism as well, with its un-