The Icon and the Axe

Schelling's philosophy lent special intensity to the interest in history, with its insistence that the world was in a perpetual state of "becoming" and that peculiar national patterns were part of its ever-unfolding divine plan. As one "lover of wisdom" put it, Schelling provided "consolation" and kept him from being "stupefied by the atmosphere around me" by "summoning up to me my sacred fatherland."31 Schelling was sought out personally by many Russians, and he assured them that "Russia is fated to have a great destiny; never, until now, has it realized the fullness of its strength."32

The man who focused all of this interest of history on the problem of Russia's destiny was Peter Chaadaev. Chaadaev had gone off to fight Napoleon at the impressionable age of eighteen and had subsequently been subjected to most of the disquieting intellectual influences of the second half of Alexander's reign. He had known De Maistre, participated in higher order Masonry, and was a leading intellectual light in the restive Semenovsky regiment. As a specially favored adjutant, he carried news of that regiment's rebellion in 1820 to the Tsar, who was then meeting with the other leaders of the Holy Alliance at Laibach. Shortly thereafter, he resigned his commission and set off for Switzerland to begin a long period of romantic wandering and philosophic introspection, which kept him abroad until after the Decembrist uprising and brought him into contact with Schelling.

Returning for the coronation of Nicholas I in 1826, he began writing eight "philosophical letters" about Russia's historical development, which were largely completed by 1831. Though widely discussed in the early thirties, the first letter was not published until 1836. It echoed "like a pistol shot in the night,"53 bringing the wrath of official Russia on him and his editor, Nadezhdin, but serving to open up the unofficial debate over Russia's destiny that has come to be known as the Slavophile-Westernizer controversy.

Chaadaev's letter stands as a kind of signpost, pointing toward the radical, Westernizing path that was soon to be advocated for Russia. Written in polemic French and calling Moscow "Necropolis" (the city of the dead), Chaadaev insisted that Russia had so far been a part of geography rather than history, totally dependent on ideas and institutions imposed from without.

Chaadaev's extreme rejection of the Russian heritage is partly the result of De Maistre's influence-evident both in his tendency toward bold

statement and in his sympathy for Roman Catholicism. More profoundly, however, Chaadaev's dark portrayal of Russia's past and present serves to dramatize the brightness of the future. He emphasizes that Russia's absence from the stage of history may actually be an advantage for its future development. Chaadaev was, in effect, restating in philosophical terms what had been said by Leibniz to Peter the Great, the Encyclopedists to Catherine the Great, and the Pietists to Alexander the Blessed: that Russia was fortunate in being uncommitted to the follies of Europe and was still capable of serving as the savior of European civilization. Unlike all these predecessors, however, Chaadaev was a Russian speaking to Russians inside Russia. Moreover, at a time when tsarist pretensions were at their highest, he was not addressing himself primarily to the Tsar. To the guardians of "official nationality" there was a faintly subversive quality to his contempt for the cultural barrenness and excessive humility of Orthodoxy and to his blunt assertion that "political Christianity . . . has no more sense in our times," and must "give way to a purely spiritual Christianity [which will] illuminate the world."34

Chaadaev's suggestion that Russia overleap the materialistic West in the interest of all Christian civilization was typical of the Russian Schell-ingians. Odoevsky had written that there would have to be "a Russian conquest of Europe, but a spiritual conquest, because only Russian thought can unify the chaos of European science. . . ,"35 Thus, belief in a special destiny for Russia did not, to the Russian idealists, imply a lack of interest in Western Europe. Just as the autocratic Karamzin had entitled his journal the Herald of Europe, so did the leaders of early Slavophilism, the Kireevsky brothers, entitle their new journal of 1832 The European. Yet interest in the West did not imply sympathy with secularism or rationalism. Chaadaev, for all his sympathy with Catholicism, was hostile to scholastic philosophy and felt that Russian thought had been corrupted with the intrusion of "the categories of Aristotle." His editor, Nadezhdin, entertained the idea throughout the thirties of visiting all of the shrines of the Orthodox East in order to write a great history of the Eastern Church.