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The Russian Spirit.—It will easily be admitted that the distinguishing qualities of Russian literature, and of Russian art in general, are simplicity, truthfulness, and complete lack of rhetorical ornament. Whether it be to our credit or to our discredit is not for me to judge, but one thing seems certain: that our simplicity and truthfulness are due to our relatively scanty culture. Whilst European thinkers have for centuries been beating their brains over insoluble problems, we have only just begun to try our powers. We have no failures behind us. The fathers of the profoundest Russian writers were either landowners, dividing their time between extravagant amusement and State service, or peasants whose drudgery left them no time for idle curiosity. Such being the case, how can we know whether human knowledge has any limits? And if we don't know, it seems to us it is only because we haven't tried to find out. Other people's experience is not ours. We are not bound by their conclusions. Indeed, what do we know of the experience of others, save what we gather, very vaguely and fragmentarily and unreliably, from books? It is natural for us to believe the best, till the contrary is proved to us. Any attempt to deprive us of our belief meets with the most energetic resistance.
The most sceptical Russian hides a hope at the bottom of his soul. Hence our fearlessness of the truth, realistic truth which so stunned European critics. Realism was invented in the West, established there as a theory. But in the West, to counteract it, were invented numberless other palliating theories whose business it was to soften down the disconsolate conclusions of Realism. There in Europe they have the l'être suprême, the deus sive natura, Hegel's absolute, Kant's postulates, English utilitarianism, progress, humanitarianism, hundreds of philosophic and sociological theories in which even extreme realists can so cleverly dish up what they call life, that life, or realism, ceases to be life or reality altogether.
The Westerner is self-reliant. He knows that if he doesn't help himself nobody will help him. So he directs all his thoughts to making the best of his opportunities. A limited time is granted him. If he can't get to the end of his song within the time-limit, the song must remain unsung. Fate will not give him one minute's grace for the unbeaten bars. Therefore as an experienced musician he adapts himself superbly. Not a second is wasted. The tempo must not drag for an instant, or he is lost. The tempo is everything, and it exacts facility and quickness of movement. During a few short beats the artist must produce many notes, and produce them so as to leave the impression that he was not hurried, that he had all the time in the world at his disposal. Moreover, each note must be complete, accomplished, have its fulness and its value. Native talent alone will not suffice for this. Experience is necessary, tradition, training, and inherited instinct. Carpe diem—the European has been living up to the motto for two thousand years. But if we Russians are convinced of anything, it is that we have time enough and to spare. To count days, much less hours and minutes—find me the Russian who could demean himself to such a bourgeois occupation. We look round, we stretch ourselves, we rub our eyes, we want first of all to decide what we shall do, and how we shall do it, before we can begin to live in earnest. We don't choose to decide anyhow, nor at second-hand, from fragments of other people's information. It must be from our own experience, with our own brains, that we judge. We admit no traditions. In no literature has there been such a-determined struggle with tradition as in ours. We have wanted to re-examine everything, re-state everything. I won't deny that our courage is drawn from our quite uncultured confidence in our own powers. Byelinsky, a half-baked undergraduate, deriving his knowledge of European philosophy at third hand, began a quarrel with the universe over the long-forgotten victims of Philip II. and the Inquisition. In that quarrel is the sense and essence of all creative Russian literature. Dostoevsky, towards his end, raised the same storm and the same question over the little tear of an unfortunate child.
A Russian believes he can do anything, hence he is afraid of nothing. He paints life in the gloomiest colours—and were you to ask him: How can you accept such a life? how can you reconcile yourself with such horrors of reality as have been described by all your writers, from Poushkin to Tchekhov? he would answer in the words of Dmitri Karamazov: I do not accept life. This answer seems at first sight absurd. Since life is here, impossible not to accept it. But there is a sub-meaning in the reply, a lingering belief in the possibility of a final triumph over "evil." In the strength of this belief the Russian goes forth to meet his enemy—he does not hide from him. Our sectarians immolate themselves. Tolstoyans and votaries of the various sects that crop up so plentifully in Russia go in among the people, they go, God knows to what lengths, destroying their own lives and the lives of others. Writers do not lag behind sectarians. They, too, refuse to be prudent, to count the cost or the hours. Minutes, seconds, time-beats, all this is so insignificant as to be invisible to the naked eye. We wish to draw with a generous hand from fathomless eternity, and all that is limited we leave to European bourgeoisie. With few exceptions Russian writers really despise the pettiness of the West. Even those who have admired Europe most have done so because they failed most completely to understand her. They did not want to understand her. That is why we have always taken over European ideas in such fantastic forms. Take the sixties for example. With its loud ideas of sobriety and modest outlook, it was a most drunken period. Those who awaited the New Messiah and the Second Advent read Darwin and dissected frogs. It is the same to-day. We allow ourselves the greatest luxury that man can dream of—sincerity, truthfulness—as if we were spiritual Croesuses, as if we had plenty of everything, could afford to let everything be seen, ashamed of nothing. But even Croesuses, the greatest sovereigns of the world, did not consider they had the right to tell the truth at all times. Even kings have to pretend—think of diplomacy. Whereas, we think we may speak the truth, and the truth only, that any lie which obscures our true substance is a crime; since our true substance is the world's finest treasure, its finest reality.... Tell this to a European, and it will seem a joke to him, even if he can grasp it at all. A European uses all his powers of intellect and talent, all his knowledge and his art for the purpose of concealing his real self and all that really affects him:—for that the natural is ugly and repulsive, no one in Europe will dispute for a moment. Not only the fine arts, but science and philosophy in Europe tell lies instinctively, by lying they justify their existence. First and last, a European student presents you with a finished theory. Well, and what does all the "finish" and the completeness signify? It merely means that none of our western neighbours will end his speech before the last reassuring word is said; he will never let nature have the last word; so he rounds off his synthesis. With him, ornament and rhetoric is a sine qua non of creative utterance, the only remedy against all ills. In philosophy reigns theodicy, in science, the law of sequence. Even Kant could not avoid declamation, even with him the last word is "moral necessity." Thus there lies before us the choice between the artistic and accomplished lie of old, cultured Europe, a lie which is the outcome of a thousand years of hard and bitter effort, and the artless, sincere simplicity of young, uncultured Russia.
They are nearer the end, we are nearer the beginning. And which is nearer the truth? And can there be a question of voluntary, free choice? Probably neither the old age of Europe nor the youth of Russia can give us the truth we seek. But does such a thing as ultimate truth exist? Is not the very conception of truth, the very assumption of the possibility of truth, merely an outcome of our limited experience, a fruit of limitation? We decide a priori that one thing must be possible, another impossible, and from our arbitrary assumptions we proceed to deduce the body of truth. Each one judges in his own way, according to his powers and the conditions of his existence. The timid, scared man worries after order, that will give him a day of peace and quiet, youth dreams of beauty and brilliance, old age doesn't want to think of anything, having lost the faculty for hope. And so it goes on, ad infinitum. And this is called truth, truths! Every man thinks that his own experience covers the whole range of life. And, therefore, the only men who turn out to be at all in the right are empiricists and positivists. There can be no question of truth once we tear ourselves away from the actual conditions of life.
Our confident truthfulness, like European rhetoric, turns out to be "beyond truth and falsehood." The young East and the old West alike suffer from the restrictions imposed by truth—but the former ignores the restrictions, whilst the latter adapts itself to them. After all, it comes to pretty much the same in the end. Is not clever rhetoric as delightful as truthfulness? Each is equally life. Only we find unendurable a rhetoric which poses as truth, and a truthfulness which would appear cultured. Such a masquerade would try to make us believe that truth, which is only limitedness, has a real objective existence. Which is offensive. Until the contrary is proved, we need to think that only one assertion has or can have any objective reality: that nothing on earth is impossible. Every time somebody wants to force us to admit that there are other, more limited and limiting truths, we must resist with every means we can lay hands on. We do not hesitate even to make use of morality and logic, both of which we have abused so often. But why not use them!
When a man is at his last resources, he does not care what weapons he picks up.
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Nur für Schwindelfreie.—To be proper, I ought to finish with a moral. I ought to say to the reader that in spite of all I have said, or perhaps because of all I have said—for in conclusions, as you are aware, "in spite of" is always interchangeable with "because of," particularly if the conclusion be drawn from many scattered data—well then, because of all I have said, hope is not lost. Every destruction leads to construction, sweet rest follows labour, dawn follows the darkest hour, and so on and so on and so on—all the banalities with which a writer reconciles his reader. But it is never too late for reconciliation, and it is often too early. So why not postpone the moral for a few years—even a few dozen years, God granting us the length of life? Why make the inevitable "conclusion" at the end of every book? I am almost certain that sooner or later I can promise the reader all his heart desires. But not yet. He may, of course, dispense with my consolations. What do promises matter, anyhow? especially when neither reader nor writer can fulfil them. But if there is no escape, if a writer is finally obliged to admit in everybody's hearing that the secret desires of poor mankind may yet be realised, let "us at least give the wretched writer a respite, let him postpone his confession till old age—usque ad infinitum,... Meanwhile our motto "Nur für Schwindelfreie." There are in the Alps narrow, precipitous paths where only mountaineers may go, who feel no giddiness. Giddy-free! "Only for the giddy-free," it says on the notice-board. He who is subject to giddiness takes a broad, safe road, or sits away below and admires the snowy summits. Is it inevitably necessary to mount up? Beyond the snow-line are no fat pastures nor goldfields. They say that up there is to be found the clue to the eternal mystery—but they say so many things. We can't believe everything. He who is tired of the valleys, loves climbing, and is not afraid to look down a precipice, and, most of all, has nothing left in life but the "metaphysical craving," he will certainly climb to the summits without asking what awaits him there. He does not fear, he longs for giddiness. But he will hardly call people after him: he doesn't want just anybody for a companion. In such a case companions are not wanted at all, much less those tender-footed ones who are used to every convenience, roads, street lamps, guide-posts, careful maps which mark every change in the road ahead. They will not help, only hinder. They will prove superfluous, heavy ballast, which may not be thrown overboard. Fuss over them, console them, promise them! Who would be bothered? Is it not better to go one's way alone, and not only to refrain from enticing others to follow, but frighten them off as much as possible, exaggerate every danger and difficulty? In order that conscience may not prick too hard—we who love high altitudes love a quiet conscience—let us find a justification for their inactivity. Let us tell them they are the best, the worthiest of people, really the salt of the earth. Let us pay them every possible mark of respect. But since they are subject to giddiness, they had better stay down. The upper Alpine ways, as any guide will tell you, are nur für Schwindelfreie.