The Icon and the Axe

As with previous Western thinkers, Hegel was known as much through Western discussions of his work as through original texts-Stankevich discovering him through a French translation, Herzen through a Polish disciple. But Hegel's basic conviction that history makes sense shone through even the most superficial reading of Hegel and appealed to the young generation. Hegel's famous declaration that "the real is rational and the rational is real" offered reassurance to a generation overcome by a feeling of isolation and subjective depression. Stankevich wrote from Berlin that "there is only one salvation from madness-history."62 Hegel made it possible to find meaning in history-even in the oppressive chapter being written under Nicholas. "Reality, thou art wise and all-wise,"63 Belinsky exclaimed, applying the adjectives of higher order Masonry, mudra i premudra, to the real world. One need no longer run away to find truth in a lodge or circle. Objective truth can be found in the everyday world by the "critically thinking" individual who is informed by Hegelian teachings. "As a result of them," said Belinsky in the condescending tone of the converted Hegelian, "I am able to get along with practical people. In each of them I study with interest the species and type, not the individual…. Every day I notice something… ."64 Coming at a time when depression, wanderings, and even suicide were taking an increasing toll among the romantic idealists, Hegel seemed to say that all purely personal and subjective feelings are irrelevant. Everything depends on objective necessity. "My personal I has been killed for ever," wrote Bakunin after his conversion; "it no longer seeks anything for itself; its life will henceforth be life in the Absolute; but in essence my personal I has gained more than it has lost. … My life is now a truthful life."65

Whether Slavophile or Westernizer, the older generation found this philosophy repellent. In comparison with Schelling, Hegel stood in the tradition of those who "placed the root of intimate human convictions . . . outside the sphere of aesthetic and moral sense."66

Many of the Hegelians who contributed to building the modern German state were excited by the Hegelian idea that the state was the supreme expression of the World Spirit in history. In Russia, too, Hegel found some disciples principally concerned with increasing rationality and civic discipline through the state; but they tended to be (like Hegel himself) relatively moderate figures mainly concerned with political reform: the so-called Rechtsstaat liberals like the historian Granovsky and Chicherin, the mayor of Moscow.

However, Hegel convinced many more Russians that the dialectic

requires not the apotheosis of the present state but its total destruction. Seemingly impossible changes suddenly became possible by considering the fact that history proceeded through contradictions. Even more than the Hegelian left in Germany, the Russian Hegelians found in his theory of history a call to revolution: to the destruction of "God and the State," "the Knouto-Germanic Empire."67

Ostensibly, Belinsky turned revolutionary by rejecting Hegel:

All the talk in Hegel about morality is pure nonsense, for in the kingdom of objective thought there is no morality any more than in objective religion. . . . The fate of the subject, the individual, the personality is more important than the fate of the whole world and the health of the Emperor of China (i.e. the Hegelian AUgemeinheii). . . . All my respects, Igor Fedorovich, I bow before your philosophic nightcap, but . . . even if I should succeed in lifting myself to the highest rung on the ladder of development I should demand an accounting for all the victims of circumstance in life and history … of the inquisition, of Philip II. . . .es

This passage was often cited by radical reformers (and provided the inspiration for Ivan Karamazov's famous rejection of his "ticket of admission" to heaven). But it did not mark the end of Hegel's influence on Belinsky or on Russian radicalism. Although Belinsky came to look to French socialists for leadership in the coming transformation of European society, he still expected the change to occur in a Hegelian manner. History remained "a necessary and reasonable development of ideas" moving toward a realization of the world spirit on earth, when "Father-Reason shall reign" and the criminal "will pray for his own punishment and none will punish him."69 The final "synthesis" on earth will be a time in which the realm of necessity gives way to the realm of freedom. The present, seemingly victorious, "thesis," the rule of kings and businessmen in Europe, will be destroyed by its radical "antithesis." This "negation of negation" will make room for the new millennium.