Fantasy Football Challenge - Football Fanatics Library

Fantasy Football Challenge - Library of Books for Football Fanatics

Fantasy Football Challenge presents
Popular Science Monthly

19 of 119

feeling of the east would appease the discord of the west, diluting its discipline and its logic with true religious intuition and humility, and eventually the idealized relationship of autocracy for the Czar and self-government for the people--the old system so rudely strained by Peter the Great--would permeate the ruled and rulers of the world. Here then is Slavophilism! And pacific Russia--the heart and soul of her, claiming this to be the true ethical and spiritual ideal for her people, and censoring her upper class, with its foreign culture, materialism, and infidelity, as being the only real traitor to this saving morality of the ancient regime. Among the prominent advocates of this philosophy might be mentioned, first, Constantine Aksakoff, Russia's Rousseau, who in the middle of the nineteenth century, was a virtuous propagandist of the doctrine. He earnestly, even religiously, preached the return of Russia from the allurements of western Europe, unto her own theory of national salvation, declaring that "the social order of the west is on a false foundation" and that Slavophilism would offset its degeneracy, if only Russia would free herself from the false class leadership for whose origin the Great Peter stands the convicted sponsor! Thus Slavophilism, under the leadership of Aksakoff, instead of leading forward with the great liberal movement that came after the Crimean War, resulting finally in the emancipation of the serfs, would lead backward to the stagnant hours of medieval Russia. Then there were no German words to disfigure the Russian language! Then there were no German divisions of rank among the officials to strangle life by their formality. No, none of these, nor the disturbing importations of Peter; in Aksakoff's variation of the gospel, the Russians are the "beyond men" and need them not. Thus before Peter's reign all was Slavophilic!--a religion of the simple Christian gospel, a church considering itself the only true ecclesia, a government of the Czar's will, a life of passive humility; creating freedom of conscience and speech for the peasants, and freedom of activity and legislation for the rulers, unknown in modern corrupted Russia! And thus was old peaceable-hearted Muscovy of the past centuries pictured as the metropolis of true political and individual morality. Herzen, too, an able pamphleteer in revolutionary things, preached something similar, crying from his pulpit at home or in exile, that Russia would solve all her problems and lead the human race by the simplicity of the Slavophile ideal. His early and rabid westernism was greatly tempered on contact with the west. Disillusion and disgust overcame him. The mercantilism of the bourgeoisie there drove him into Aksakoff's fold, and he too thereafter found faith alone in the "regenerative power of Russia," and her system of the mir, the central sun of the Slavophilic state, the village commune, self-governing and self-contained. And then from that, this was to ensue: the whole world made of village communes as in Russia, perhaps even their log cabins too, and fresh mud to go with them on their walls! But this did not deter the vision of these evangelists. The commune was to be indefinitely extended; national and international ones were to be organized, all self- governing, and then would follow as the night the day, universal peace wherever these communes were found. This is the Utopia Russia has given to the world to stand beside Plato's, or Sir Thomas More's or Morris's or Bellamy's. This was the dream of pacific Pan-Slavism. Dostoievsky himself is of it, and is luminous not with a mere facet flash of its philosophy but with the whole orb of it. To him the Russians "are more than human, they are pan-human." Count Tolstoi too must be listed with these preachers. He, making his own shoes and cutting his own and the peasants' grain, lived it, showing how he thought the world's work ought to be done. What were factories or the culture of the west to him in later years--Shakespeare or no Shakespeare? Destructive ideals of life. Competition, money and land greed, self-assertion--all things that are the anthitheses of Slavophilism--he shunned; mocking the palsied heart and poisoned ideals of the west, and indeed of the "upper class" section of his own land as no other Slavophile did. And following its teaching, he journeyed through self-renunciation to freedom and communal life, after repentance for his wanderings, expiation and regeneration. Dostoievsky, on the other hand, reached this philosophy largely by being born to it among the humble people who lived it. Melancholy-minded by nature--a sort of a Russian Dante but living in actual infernos and purgatorios, Siberia and prison cells, he came at last to worship his fellow countrymen and their ideals as almost nothing else in heaven or earth, and bowed down before them "as the only remnant left of Christian humility, destined by Providence to regenerate the world." Here is Slavophilism in a fervid extreme. "The Down-trodden and Offended," "Memoirs of a Dead House," "Crime and Punishment," "Poor People,"--these, the titles of his novels, show the predilections of his own soul. He died in the mystic frenzy of this enthusiasm. Here then, in this philosophy and in the lives of these men, is something of the soul of Russia, beautiful in its humility, yet not so humble that it is not ambitious to embrace the world in the folding arms of its peace, its communal government and its morality. Pan-Slavism of this nature is the only kind that in truth can ever come from Russia. Pan-Slavism of the military sort, with musketry, bribery and all other diabolic black arts, miscalled government, rests on such a slim foundation that it need be but little apprehended. It was this brotherly humble soul of Russia that greatly helped to put an end to the Russo-Japanese war: not merely failing finances and lack of transportation. The feeling of a kindly people for their own and a neighboring race caused widespread mismanagement, opposition and wholesale desertions from the army, among both the officers and the men. The Romanoff family and official Russia caused the conflict, but human Russia, humble and poor, was a great factor in its conclusion. There is no doubt, however, that a certain number of

19 of 119 pages. Go to page:

Go to this Book's Directory Page