Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/483

Rh realise the full significance of the ideas expressed in The Pale Horse. In a letter to the party review, Ropšin now defended himself against the reproach implied by his literary and philosophical comrades' silence concerning his first book. That work, he said, was merely an attempt to solve a moral problem and was not intended to deal with tactical questions; the figures that moved through its pages were purely imaginative creations and were not descriptions of any definite persons.

Shortly afterwards, in November 1912, the same review published a letter signed by twenty-two of its contributors, a protest against The Tale of What was Not. The novel was stigmatised as a false and biased description of the revolutionary movement, the author's outlook was declared utterly alien to the movement, and it was contended that his work ought never to have been issued by "Zavěty."

The editors of that periodical rejoined that doubtless there was good ground to complain of the accuracy of Ropšin's delineations, but that the columns of the review were open for the presentation of the other side of the case. They protested against any attempt to expel Ropšin from the party.

Simultaneously with the before-mentioned protest appeared a review of The Pale Horse from the pen of Černov; and a little later, in February 1913, Plehanov joined in the discussion. To us, of course, social revolutionary and social democratic criticism of Ropšin's philosophy of revolution is of especial interest and importance.

Černov, with whose "dynamic" philosophy and ethics we have already become acquainted, is found, on close examination, to have nothing new to say about Ropšin's book. Ethical maximalism, he tells us, insists that violence shall be done to no man; a deduction from this, continues Černov, is Tolstoi's doctrine of non-resistance. But ethical minimalism refutes Tolstoi's theory, for the maximum must be realised step by step (see above, p. ).

This amounts to very little, and contributes absolutely nothing to the solution of the problem or of the doubts expressed by Ropšin. That author's question is perfectly definite. Have I the right to kill anyone, be his position high or low, who represents the authoritative order of the existing state? May I do this on my own initiative, or in pursuance of a party decree? In the second novel we are shown very clearly that Ropšin's terrorist longs to sacrifice