Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/91

Rh Pisarev insisted upon realism for the intellectual workers, and these were to lead the manual workers, who could not as yet become realists.

The destiny of the folk, said Pisarev, will be fulfilled in the universities, not in the elementary schools.

Pisarev appeals exclusively to the middle class. Only the middle class, he said as early as 1861, really lives and moves; to the middle class belongs almost everybody capable of writing, reading, thinking, and developing. Though himself of aristocratic birth, Pisarev renounced the higher aristocracy as stagnant, but the people was likewise stagnant. It is true that when Pisarev referred to the middle class, he was thinking of those members of it who would accept his radicalism; to the ordinary bourgeois Pisarev was no less hostile than Herzen, whose socialistic program of brain equality was thus reproduced by Pisarev.

In his account of the realists, Pisarev dealt with the problem of objectivism and subjectivism, and illustrated it by a reference to Goethe. Goethe had had his ego, his subjective fiction, namely, the establishment of a unitary organism, which he ranked higher than the actual drama of social life. Goethe had considered the world of individual experience not as a refuge but as a temple, the most beautiful and the holiest in the world. "To enable him to see in himself a temple of light and in the environing life a squalid market place, to enable him thus to forget the natural solidarity between his own ego and the surrounding stupidities and sorrows of other men, he found it necessary to corrupt his critical understanding systematically, and to lull it to sleep with the beauty of exquisite phrases. Petty thoughts and petty feelings must be transformed into the pearls of creation. Goethe performed this work of art, and down to the present day similar works have been regarded as the greatest achievements of art; such hocus pocus takes place, however, not in the sphere of art alone, but likewise in all the other spheres of human activity."

Pisarev thus opposes extreme subjectivism and individualism in the name of social solidarity. He continues to strive for the independence of the ego, to strive like a titan, for these are the "titanic ideas" of which he speaks; but he considers ludicrous the Goethe auto-apotheosis in Faust. To express the matter in materialistic terminology, no single Rh