Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/93

Rh and the parasites had no claim to indulgence. As yet, he contended, Russia had no such poets. Griboedov, Krylov, Puškin, and Gogol, did not suffice him; whilst Russia could boast a Fet as against Shakespeare, Dante, Byron, Goethe, and Heine! Pisarev admired Dickens, Thackeray, George Sand, and Victor Hugo, who had awakened men from their slumbers and had done practical work. He could even admire metaphysicians like Pierre Leroux, for Leroux, despite his impossible doctrine of metempsychosis, had supported mankind in the great struggle, just as had Proudhon and others.

Nor must we forget that Tolstoi displayed similar feelings towards art, towards his own art. Many parallel thoughts can be discovered in the writings of Pisarev and Tolstoi. Students of aesthetics have become accustomed in the case of Tolstoi to his repudiation of art and to his realistic definition of art as absolute truth; but just as Tolstoi continually returned to art, so likewise did Pisarev no less than Dobroljubov and Černyševskii again and again immerse himself in works of art. This is what counts, not the "annihilation of aesthetics," not the campaign against Puškin, Schiller, etc. Besides, aesthetics is one thing, art another!

In studying Pisarev, we must always take into account this writer's tendency to polemic overstatement. In the very essay of 1862 in which he coquetted with the idea of crime, the essay on Bazarov, we read the following involuntary confessions of the Bazarovian realist: "In the depths of his soul he approves much which in words he denies, and perchance it is this, this element that he hides, which preserves him from moral decay and moral nullity." Moreover, as we have seen, the essay of 1862 concludes, like Herzen's similar writing, with love. We are told by Pisarev's biographers that he was very strictly brought up by his mother, and that while at the university he continued to be guided by the teachings of his youth. The dedication of The Realists confirms this statement, and shows us in Pisarev the very dualism of theory and practice which, as a theorist, he attacks.

The "titanic ideas" announced by Pisarev were not notably distinguished for incisiveness, momentum, or originality; the main secrets of Pisarev's influence were the fire of his enthusiasm, and his relentlessness. The hum of battle sounded in his essays; their aggressive negation, their revolutionary mood, won the heart of