Russia under the Old regime

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qualities. It was a 'radical right' movement, characterized by contempt for liberalism and a tendency to assume all-or-nothing positions.17

It began as a critique of the 'nihilist' whose sudden appearance threw Russian society into disarray. Who was this type who negated everything that others cherished, deliberately flaunting all convention, and what was his parentage? This was the central problem of the conservative position. The battle was in large measure over Russia's future national type, in which the radicals' 'new man' was confronted with a no less idealized model of a 'man with roots'.

The most common diagnosis of the malaise responsible for 'nihilism' -the term being defined as a rejection of all values - was the separation of theory and theorists from raw life. The conservatives mistrusted all abstractions and inclined towards philosophical nominalism; if forced to generalize, they gave preference to the vocabulary of biology over that of mechanics. The intellect which they extolled was Khomiakov's 'living knowledge'. Detached from experience, the intellect fell into all kinds of aberrations, including the belief that it could completely alter nature and man. This charge against radicals was not unlike that which Catherine II had levelled a century earlier against Novikov, although Novikov himself, of course, entertained no such delusions. In Russia, according to conservative theorists, the divorce of thought from life assumed tragic dimensions because of the method of education adopted since Peter i. The education was western, whereas native culture, still preserved intact among ordinary people, was Slav and Orthodox. By virtue of its education, Russia's upper class, of which the 'nihilist' was an offshoot, was isolated from the native soil and condemned to spiritual sterility, of which the habit of negation was a natural expression. 'Outside the national soil', wrote Ivan Aksakov, 'there is no firm ground; outside the national, there is nothing real, vital; and every good idea, every institution not rooted in the national historical soil or grown organically from it, turns sterile and becomes an old rag.'18 And Michael Katkov, the editor of Russian Messenger, thus diagnosed the 'nihilist' hero of Fathers and Sons:

Man taken separately does not exist. He is everywhere part of some living connection, or some social organization... Man extracted from the environment is a fiction or an abstraction. His moral and intellectual organization, or, more broadly, his ideas are only then operative in him when he has discovered them first as the organizational forces of the environment in which he happens to live and think.19 The radicals, too, stressed the collective nature of man; but to them, the collective was freely formed by individuals who had broken with that environment in which accident of birth had happened to cast them, whereas to the conservatives it had to be the actual historically formed environment and nothing else. Dostoevsky went so far as to draw a direct line connecting western education with the desire to kill. He called a harmless professor of medieval history and a prominent Westerner, T. Granovskii, and the critic Belinskii 'fathers' of Nechaev, the anarchist who had organized the assassination of an innocent student youth, the story of which provided him with the plot for The Possessed.20 In The Brothers Karamazov, the Western rationalist Ivan bears ultimate responsibility for parricide.

The immediate duty of the intelligentsia was to recover its lost roots. It must 'go to the people', not in the literal sense in which Bakunin and Lavrov advocated it, but in a spiritual one, urged by the Slavophiles. It must submerge itself in the nation and seek to dissolve in it. The intelligentsia was a poison in Russia's body for which 'folkdom' was the only efficacious antidote.

The political philosophy of the conservatives underwent considerable change as the warfare between the radicals and the authorities intensified. Basically, like the Slavophiles, the conservatives desired a government without parliamentary democracy or bureaucratic centralism; a government modelled on a mythical ancient Muscovite order. It was men, not institutions that mattered. The conservatives completely rejected the view of Bazarov, the archetypal 'nihilist' of Fathers and Sons, that 'in a well-constructed society it will be quite irrelevant whether man is stupid or wise, evil or good.' There could be no 'well-constructed society', unless the material was sound; and in any event, there were limits to the perfectibility of any society because man was inherently corrupt and evil. Dostoevsky, whose pessimism went further than that of most Russian conservatives, regarded humans as natural killers, whose instincts were restrained principally by fear of divine retribution after death. Should man lose belief in the immortality of his soul there would be nothing left to keep his murderous inclinations from asserting themselves. Hence, there was need for strong authority.

As the conflict between the left and the regime intensified, most of the conservatives unqualifiedly backed the regime, which in itself tended to exclude them from the ranks of the intelligentsia. They also grew steadily more xenophobic and anti-Semitic. In Pobedonostsev, the power behind the throne of Alexander in, conservatism found its Grand Inquisitor. 'If you please, the Venus of Milo is more indubitable than Russian law or the principles of 1789.'21 This phrase of Turgenev's may appear strange at first sight. But its meaning becomes quite clear when set in the context of a crucial controversy which developed in Russia between the radical intelligentsia on the one hand and writers and artists on the other.