Selected Essays

Peter Chaadaev

I.

The trace Chaadaev left on Russian consciousness was so deep and unerasable as to suggest it had been made by diamond on glass. It is all the more remarkable in that Chaadaev was not what you might call a “public figure,” neither a professional writer nor a tribune. By his whole turn of mind, he was a “private” man; what is called a privatier. Yet, as though aware that his personality belonged not to him but to posterity, he regarded it with a certain humility. Whatever he did, it turned out that he “served,” that he performed a sacred task.

All those qualities that Russian life lacked, the existence of which it did not even suspect, joined together as if on purpose in the person of Chaadaev: an enormous inner discipline, a high-minded intellectualism, moral architectonics, and the cold of a mask, of a metal casing with which he encircled himself, aware that by the measure of the ages he was merely a shape, and so he went about preparing ahead of time the specific mold of his immortality.

Still more unusual for Russia was Chaadaev’s dualism, the clear distinction he made between matter and spirit. In an unformed country, a country of half-animated matter and half-dead spirit, that ancient antinomy of the inert clod and the organizing idea was almost unknown. In Chaadaev’s eyes, all of Russia still belonged to the world of the unformed and unorganized. He himself was flesh of the flesh of this Russia, and he regarded himself as raw material. The results achieved were amazing. The Idea organized his personality, not merely his mind, and gave this personality a structure, an architecture, subordinated it entirely to itself, overlooking nothing, and as a reward for this absolute subordination endowed it with absolute freedom.

A deep harmony, the virtual fusion of the moral and intellectual element, gives Chaadaev’s personality its special firmness. It is hard to say where Chaadaev’s intellectual personality leaves off and where his moral personality begins, so close are they to complete fusion. The strongest requirement of intellect was for him at the same time the greatest moral necessity.

I speak of the requirement of unity, which determines the structure of chosen intellects.

“What could we talk about, then?” he asked Pushkin in one of his letters. “I have, you know, just one idea, and if some other ideas should inadvertently pop into my brain, they would certainly get stuck on to that very idea immediately: and would that suit you?”

What then was the nature of this renowned “intellect” of Chaadaev’s, this “proud” intellect, sung deferentially by Pushkin, hissed by the provocative Iazykov, if not a fusion of the moral with the intellectual principle, a fusion so characteristic of Chaadaev, in pursuit of which his personality came to its maturity.

With this deep, ineradicable demand for unity, for a higher historical synthesis, Chaadaev was born in Russia. The native of the plains wanted to breathe the air of Alpine heights, and, as we see, he found them within himself.

II.

In the West there is unity! From the time these words flared up in Chaadaev’s consciousness, he no longer belonged to himself and tore himself away forever from “domesticity.” He had enough manliness to tell Russia to her face the frightening truth—that she was cut off from global unity, severed from history, from “God’s teachers of peoples.”

The thing is that Chaadaev’s understanding of history excludes the possibility of any setting forth on the historical path. According to his understanding, one could be on the historical path only prior to any beginning. History was a Jacob’s ladder by which angels descended to earth. It must be called sacred, because of the continuity of the spirit of grace which lives in it. And so Chaadaev does not even mention “Moscow, the Third Rome.” In this idea he could have seen only the stunted contrivance of the Kievan monks. Neither readiness alone nor good intentions are sufficient to “begin” history. It is unthinkable to begin it at all. Continuity is lacking, and unity. Unity cannot be created or invented or learned. Where there is no unity, at best there is “progress,” but not history; the mechanical movement of a clockhand, but not the sacred linkage and succession of events.

Like a man enchanted, Chaadaev kept staring at the one place where this unity had become flesh, cautiously preserved, inherited from generation to generation. “But the Pope! the Pope! Well, what of it? Isn’t he, too, simply an idea, a pure abstraction? Take a look at this old man, being carried in his palanquin under a canopy, in his triple crown, now just as a thousand years ago, as if nothing in the world had changed: really, where in all this is the man? Isn’t this an all-powerful symbol of time—not of that time which passes, but of that which remains motionless, through which everything else passes, but which itself stands imperturbable and in which and by means of which everything is brought to completion.”

Such was the Catholicism of the snob of Zamoskvorech’e.

III.

And so, in August, 1825, a foreigner made his appearance in a sea-coast village near Brighton, who united in his bearing the solemnity of a bishop with the correctness of a worldly mannequin.

This was Chaadaev, who had fled Russia on the first boat that came along, with such haste, as if some danger threatened him, without any external need, but with the firm intent never to return.

The sickly, hypochondriacal, odd patient of foreign doctors, who had never known any other contact with people except a purely intellectual one, concealing even from those close to him his terrible spiritual upheaval, came to see his West, the realm of history and majesty, native land of the spirit embodied in the church and in architecture.

This strange journey which occupied two years of Chaadaev’s life, about which we know very little, is more like a languishing in the desert than a pilgrimage. And then Moscow, the wooden separate-wing residence, the “Apology of a Madman,” and the long, measured years of preaching in the “Anglish” Club.

Is it that Chaadaev wearied? Is it that his Gothic thought submitted and ceased to raise up to the sky its lancet turrets? No, Chaadaev did not submit, although time’s blunt file scraped his thoughts as well as others.

O precious scraps of the thinker’s heritage! Fragments that break off just where one wishes elaborations above all, grandiose introductions about which one doesn’t know whether they indicate a projected plan or its actual fulfillment. In vain the conscientious researcher sighs over what has been lost, the missing links. They never existed, and they were never lost: the fragmentary form of the Philosophical Letters is inherent in them, as is their essential nature of an extended introduction.

To understand the form and spirit of the Philosophical Letters, one needs to imagine that Russia serves them as an immense and awesome foundation. The yawning emptiness among the well-known written fragments is the thought of Russia that absents itself from them.

It is best not to touch on the “Apology.” Certainly, it is not here that Chaadaev said what he thought about Russia.

And, like a hopeless flat plain, the last unfinished period of the “Apology” stretches on, this dreary, broadly prophetic beginning which at the same time promises nothing, after so much has already been said: “There is a certain fact which rules authoritatively over our historical movement, which passes like a red thread through our entire history, which contains within itself, so to speak, all its philosophy, which manifests itself in all the epochs of our social life and determines their character . . . And this is the fact of geography . . .”

From the Philosophical Letters one can learn only that Russia was the mainspring of Chaadaev’s thought. What he thought about Russia remains a mystery. Having inscribed the excellent words, “Truth is more precious than country,” Chaadaev did not reveal their prophetic meaning. Yet is it not an amazing sight, this “truth,” surrounded on all sides as by some sort of chaos, by this alien and strange “native land”?

Let us try to develop the Philosophical Letters as if they were a photographic negative. Perhaps those places that become light will turn out to be precisely about Russia.

IV.

There is a great Slavic dream of the end of history in the Western sense of the word, as Chaadaev understood it. It is a dream of universal spiritual disarmament, after which a certain condition will arrive, called “peace.” The dream of spiritual disarmament has taken such a hold on our domestic horizon that the rank-and-file member of the Russian intelligentsia cannot imagine the final goal of progress other than in terms of this unhistorical “peace.” Not very long ago Tolstoy himself addressed mankind with the summons to bring to an end the false and unnecessary comedy of history and to begin “simply” to live. It is this simplicity that makes the idea of “peace” so irresistible:

Pathetic man . . .

What does he want? . . . The sky is clear,

Beneath the sky, much room for all.

Earthly and heavenly hierarchies are forever being abolished for their uselessness. Church, state, law disappear from consciousness like stupid chimeras, with which man, to while away the time, through stupidity, populated the “simple,” “God-made” world, and finally there remain, tête-à-tête, without tiresome intermediaries, a pair—man and the universe:

With the sky opposite, on the earth,

An old man lived in a certain village.¹

Chaadaev’s thought is constructed as a strict perpendicular to traditional Russian thinking. He fled this formless paradise as from the plague.

Certain historians have seen in colonization, in striving to settle as freely as possible in expanses as vast as possible, the dominant tendency in Russian history.

In the powerful striving to populate the external world with ideas, with values, and with images, in the striving which has already for so many centuries formed the agony and the ecstasy of the West and hurled its peoples into the labyrinth of history where they wander to this day—one can perceive a parallel to this external colonization.

There, in the forest of the social church where the Gothic pine needle admits no other light than the light of the idea, Chaadaev’s main thought took shelter and ripened, his mute thought about Russia.

Chaadaev’s West did not at all resemble the cleared paths of civilization. In the full meaning of the word, he discovered his own West. Verily, into these thickets of culture the foot of man had not yet entered.

V.

Chaadaev’s thought, national in its sources, is national even where it joins with Rome. Only a Russian man could have discovered this West, which is denser, more concrete, than the historical West itself. Chaadaev, precisely by this right of being a Russian, entered upon the sacred soil of a tradition to which he was not bound by inheritance. There, where all is necessity, where each stone, covered by the cobweb of time, dreams, immured in its arch, Chaadaev carried moral freedom, the gift of the Russian land, its best flower. This freedom is worthy of the majesty congealed in architectural forms, it is as valuable as everything the West created in the realm of material culture, and I see how the Pope, “this old man, being carried in his palanquin under a canopy, in his triple crown,” raised himself up that he might greet it.

It would be best to characterize Chaadaev’s thought as national-synthetic. A synthetic nationality does not bow its head before the fact of national self-consciousness but rises above it in sovereign personality, characterized by its own way of life and therefore national.

Contemporaries were astonished at Chaadaev’s pride; and he believed himself in his chosenness. In him there slumbered a hieratic solemnity, and even children felt the significance of his presence, although he did not in any way depart from common good manners. He felt himself chosen, the vessel of true nationality; yet the nation was no longer a fitting judge!

What a striking contrast to nationalism, to that beggary of the spirit which appeals incessantly to the monstrous tribunal of the crowd!

For Chaadaev, there was only one gift that Russia had: moral freedom, the freedom of choice. Never in the West had it been realized in such majesty, in such purity and fullness, Chaadaev took it up like a sacred staff and went to Rome.

I think that a country and a people have already justified themselves, if they have created even one completely free man who wanted and knew how to use his freedom.

When Boris Godunov, anticipating Peter’s idea, sent young Russians abroad, not one of them returned. They did not return for the simple reason that there was no way back from being to nonbeing, that in stuffy Moscow they would have been stifled, who had partaken of the immortal spring of undying Rome.

But then, neither did the first doves return to the dovecote.

Chaadaev was the first Russian who, in actual fact, ideologically, had lived in the West and found the road back. His contemporaries felt this instinctively and valued terribly Chaadaev’s presence among them.

They could point to him with superstitious awe, as once to Dante: “He was there, he saw—and came back.”

And how many of us have spiritually emigrated to the West! And how many among us who live in unconscious duplicity, whose bodies are here, but whose spirits have remained there!

Chaadaev signifies a new deepened understanding of nationality as the highest flowering of personality and of Russia as the source of absolute moral freedom.

Having allotted us inner freedom, Russia presents us with a choice, and those who have made this choice are genuine Russian people, wherever they may attach themselves. But woe unto those who, after having circled about close to their home-nest, faintheartedly return!