The Icon and the Axe

Of the two new philosophic currents that emerged in the silver age, dialectical materialism and transcendental idealism, one was more radical and one more conservative than constitutional liberalism. Unlike liberalism, these two traditions shared a common resolve to build on the previous experience of the intelligentsia. Each of them sought to fortify Russia through ideology rather than reform it with a political program. Each sought to answer the philosophic concerns of the intelligentsia rather than challenge the relevance of these concerns to Russian problems. Whereas the constitutional liberals tended to be sharp critics of the abstract traditions of the radical intelligentsia, both the new materialists and the new idealists were solidly rooted in these traditions. The materialists claimed to be the heirs to the traditions of the iconoclastic sixties; the idealists claimed to be developing the traditions of Dostoevsky's aesthetic and religious reaction to iconoclasm.

A major reason for the simultaneous appeal of these two ideologies in the nineties was the exasperation of a new student generation with the subjectivism, pessimism, and introspection of the age of small deeds. This new generation no longer hoped to find a positive message among the oppressed Slavs of the Ottoman Empire or the oppressed peasants of the Russian Empire. The new generation felt the need to check the preoccupa-

tion with personal salvation and the self-defeating drift toward an anarchistic rejection of all authority that was characteristic of reformers of the seventies and eighties. Evolutionary populists, such as Mikhailovsky, spoke of history as a "struggle for individuality" against all forms of collective authority and all "books of fate, however learned." Revolutionary populists drifted into the indiscriminate terrorism of the People's Will and its anarchistic "disorganization section."

The passionately anti-authoritarian and semi-anarchistic Proudhon was the most important single teacher of Russian radicals during the populist age. The violent anarchism of Bakunin, the non-violent moralistic anarchism of Tolstoy, and the optimistic evolutionary anarchism of Kropotkin -all represented creative developments of Proudhon's widely studied social teachings.37 Tolstoy probably took the title War and Peace from Proudhon's tract of the same name. The tradition of courtroom oratory by radicals tried under the new jury system first caught the public eye in 1866, with Nicholas Sokolov's impassioned defense of Proudhon's anarchistic socialism as the true Christian answer to the problems of society. Sokolov had talked with Proudhon in Brussels in i860 and, in his book The Heretics, designated Proudhon as "the model heretic" and last in a long line of "true Christian" revolutionaries. Proudhon's insistence on a Christianity of ethics rather than metaphysics and his opposition to all forms of political authority (including that which is "made respectable by having it proceed from the •people") made him the leading prophet of the moralistic anarchism which dominated much of the thinking of the populist era.38 Following Proudhon, Russian populism was a highly emotional and moralistic doctrine that appealed to men through idealistic exhortations, which are difficult to sustain in the face of prolonged adversity. Its passionate plea for simplicity and morality in human relationships seemed inadequate to a generation that was entering the more complex world of industrialized modernity; its philosophic thinness and frequent anti-intellectualism made it repellant to the better-educated and more widely read student generation of the nineties.

Thus, the spirit of protest led the new radicals of both right and left to seek some new philosophic bedrock on which to stand. The lonely anarchistic dreamer was beginning to feel out of place in the busy society of the nineties. The subjective depression, the disjointed memoirs and sketches of the era of small deeds began to give way to the ideologies of two new prophetic figures: the Marxist George Plekhanov and the idealist Vladimir Solov'ev. Subjectivity and a sense of isolation were challenged by these two influential prophets of objective truth. Plekhanov and Solov'ev were both real philosophers rather than publicists or journalists. Each had been active in the agitation of the populist age; each went abroad in the