The Icon and the Axe

Bakunin was the most truly "possessed" and revolutionary of all the Hegelians with his ideological commitment to destruction. He spent almost all of the "remarkable decade" in Western Europe and was a major catalyst in the "revolution of the intellectuals" in 1848. Only the hint of final liberation contained in Schiller's "Ode to Joy" in the choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was to be saved from the coming conflagration. Bakunin's Hegelian conviction that total destruction must precede total freedom had an immense influence on European revolutionary thought- particularly in Southern Europe-and had only just begun to wane at the time of his death in 1876. Even his ideological rival for influence within the populist movement, the evolutionary Peter Lavrov, used Hegelian appeals

in his famous "Historical Letters" of the late sixties by urging men to renounce their purely personal lives in order to be "conscious knowing agents" of the historical process.70

It is perhaps more correct to speak of the vulgarization of Hegelian concepts than the influence of Hegel's ideas in Russia. In either case, the impact was great-and, on the whole, disastrous. The strident presentation of Hegelian philosophy as an antidote to occult mysticism was rather like offering typhoid-infected water to a man thirsty with fever. Koyre provocatively says of Belinsky's rejection of Hegel that it did not represent a real change of philosophy but "the cry of revolt of a sick man whom the Hegelian medicine has not cured."71 One might almost say that the Hegelian medicine turned the Russian taste for all-encompassing philosophic systems into an addiction. Those who managed to recover from the intoxication with Hegel were left with a kind of philosophic hangover. They tended to reject philosophy altogether but were left with a permanent sense of dissatisfaction with moderate positions and tentative compromises. The "ex-Hegelians" Belinsky and Herzen were no less extreme than the permanently intoxicated Bakunin in their hatred of posredstvennost' ("mediocrity"), meshchanstvo ("bourgeois philistinism"), and juste-milieu.

The Hegelian idea that history proceeds through necessary contradictions also lent a new quality of acrimony to the previously mild debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers. Hegelianism seemed to demonstrate the "power of negative thinking." It is difficult to find any positive statement of belief in the late writings of the "furious" Belinsky. Yet, because of the passionate sincerity of his personality, negative thinking was made to appear a virtue and became a kind of tradition in the new literary criticism which he largely introduced into Russia. Herzen too-for all his literacy and concern for individual liberties-was at his best in attacking the attackers of freedom. He became convinced that revolutionary change was coming and left Russia forever in 1847 to greet the coming stage of history in Paris. After the failure of 1848, he decided-along with Bakunin-that revolutionary change was to come from Russia after all. Suddenly in 1849-50 Herzen and Bakunin both turned to the ideal of the peasant commune and a free federation of Slavic peoples72-not primarily because they were morally or spiritually desirable as they had been for the Slavophiles and were soon to be for the populists, but because they represented the "negation of negation": an historical battering ram for upsetting the philistinism of bourgeois Europe.

The necessity of a coming final synthesis in history, a revolutionary deliverance from oppression and mediocrity, was a belief common to all Hegelians of the left from Marx to Proudhon, the most influential Western

revolutionaries after 1848. Herzen and Bakunin shared the conviction and sided more with their common friend Proudhon than with Marx in looking for revolution through an heroic elite rather than economic forces. Bakunin embraced the coming revolution unreservedly, Herzen with deep reservations; but both believed it to be inevitable.