Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/57

Rh in the political, nay in the revolutionary, force of the broad masses of the people; but on the whole he was far removed from Dobroljubov's Rousseauism. In his essay on Thierry he writes in an almost elegiac strain when he represents the crowd as incompetent to understand and to esteem work done on its behalf. He consequently recommends the great men whom he admires to seek the justification for their activities in these activities themselves, untroubled by the question whether the crowd (he constantly employs the word tolpa, which contemptuously denotes the unintelligent mob) can follow them; and he writes, "to close one's career in bitter solitude of the understanding and of the heart, this is worthy of undying respect and admiration." The hero of a novel written by Černyševskii in 1889, after his return from Siberia and shortly before his death, says, "I love the people of my own nation, but I find myself out of touch with them."

In this mood, Černyševskii acclaimed the accounts of folk-life we owe to N. V. Uspenskii (not to be confounded with his nephew Glěb Uspenskii), for this writer scourged the misery and ignorance of the mužik. Uspenskii himself died poor and unknown.

Černyševskii's political activities began in the days when the liberation of the peasantry was being vigorously advocated. He energetically demanded that the peasants should be given land, and after the liberation he favoured the reforms necessitated by that step. His insistence that the peasant must have land was a logical deduction from his thesis that everyone must work for himself, on his own behalf. If the peasant were to be enabled to do this, he must own a plot of land. In this demand, says Černyševskii, are comprised all those contained in the so-called utopias, and the phrase shows how far Černyševskii himself was a utopian; he was content, at any rate, with the formulation of this modest aim.

Such was Černyševskii's language before the liberation. At that time (1858) he dissented from the view of Haxthausen and the latter's Russian adherents, that in Russia a system of agriculture based upon the workers alone was an impossibility.

In conformity with Russian conditions, he conceived of classes rather as estates, or at times as (political) parties. He did not recognise the class struggle in the Marxist sense.

His leading demand was for a harmonious distribution of the product of labour. He thought here, above all, of Malthus