Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/92

66 organism possesses the value of the massed organisms that constitute society.

In his first essay upon Bazarov, Pisarev found it the especial merit of Bazarov that he had refused to recognise any regulator, any moral law, any principle, whether above, external to, or within himself; but two years later, Pisarev's Bazarov has come to recognise a regulator and a moral law. We read that life must be built up upon an idea, and this idea is the general solidarity of mankind. Within a brief space, the realist à la Stirner has been transformed into the thoughtful realist.

At first he had endeavoured subjectivistically and egoistically to justify crime, but later, when he became a "thoughtful realist," he condemned bloodshed of any kind (see his account of Dostoevskii's Crime and Punishment, 1867–1868).

Pisarev's dissatisfaction with radical individualism toward the close of his career is further proved by the information recently made public that he desired to popularise the first volume of Capital (1867), for he had been charmed by the Marxist theory. But we must not forget that Pisarev's conception of socialism differed from that of Marx. In 1864 he had assigned to the individual a secondary role in the social and historical process, but in 1865 he exclaimed, "I, too, am a phenomenon."

Strong expressions are used in the essay entitled The Annihilation of Aesthetics, which appeared in 1865. Every man of artistic sensibilities must find it disagreeable to read that Dussiaux, a celebrated St. Petersburg chef, was worth just as much as Raphael; but when we go on to read that Pisarev would himself rather be a Russian cobbler or baker than a Russian Raphael or Grimm, it is not difficult to understand that this is the author's way of telling us that practical economic work is the greatest need of contemporary Russia. Doubtless Pisarev erred in looking upon Puškin's Oněgin as an apotheosis of the status quo, and in considering Puškin himself a colossal rudiment. Moreover, it was thoroughly unrealistic to dictate to Saltykov and Dobroljubov whether they should write verses or study natural science. All this was distorted and overstrained, but it did not signify that Pisarev rejected art in good earnest. In fact, he approved none but the genuine poets, the thought champions sans peur et sans reproche, the "knights of the spirit." The pygmies