Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/81

Rh The strong emphasis upon evolution and renovation led Pisarev, before Nietzsche, to the same conclusions. For the creation of the new, for the creation of the new men, the old must be relentlessly destroyed: "What can be struck down, must be struck down unceasingly; whatever resists the onslaught, is fit for existence; whatever flies to pieces, is fit for the rubbish heap. Hew your way vigorously, for you can do no harm." In Pisarev's view there are no great men. As a materialist, his outlook upon the historical evolutionary process is decisively determinist, and he explains great men as the sport of circumstance. He does not recognise that he has a false conception of determinism and of the historical process.

Pisarev approves Turgenev's Bazarov, and would make Bazarov his model. In his essay on Bazarov, he compares with that character Pečorin and Rudin, Bazarov's predecessors in the imaginary world of literature, and comes to the following conclusion. In its views upon good and evil the older generation was merely giving itself unnecesary torment to find nothing and do nothing in the end. Rudin had knowledge without will; Pečorin had will without knowledge; Bazarov has both will and knowledge, he knows his weaknesses but knows also his strength, he understands the situation in which he is placed and adapts himself to it practically. His condition is "one of calm despair, which culminates in absolute indifferentism, but leads to a personal development which is the extremity of steadfastness and independence. Since men cannot act, they begin to think and to investigate. Since they find it impossible to transform life, their anger at their own impotence makes itself felt in the sphere of thought, where the destructive work of criticism proceeds unceasingly. Superstitious ideas and authorities are shivered to a thousand fragments, and the outlook becomes absolutely freed from every variety of spookish concept."

Such is Pisarev's psychological description of the realistic process of disillusionment, and his terminology, with the reference to spooks, recalls Feuerbach and Stirner.

It is not difficult to understand why Pisarev should have thus inclined to make too much of realism in his struggle against absolutism. A young fellow of twenty-two, who had been forced for mere nothings to spend nearly five years of his life in a fortress prison, could hardly be expected to write