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p Let us consider yet another "special feature" which we shall take this time from the) essay Trivia from Remembered Journeys

p Gl. Uspensky was returning from his voyages round the Caspian when, to his amazement, he felt a strange, inexplicable sadness. The ship on which he was sailing kept encountering fishing boats with their recent catch. "What sort of fish is that?" he asked. "It’s roach nowadays,” they answered him.... "Nothingbut roach nowadays.... See that great pile of it there! Masses of roach nowadays.” This word “masses” cast what was for the author an unexpected light on his spiritual state. "Yes,” he thought, "this is what’s makiriglme sad.... Now there’ll be ’masses of everything’. There are masses of sheat-fish, thousands of them, whole hordes of them, so that it is impossible to drive them away, and millions of roach too ’each one like the next’, and there will be masses of people too ’each one like the next’ up to Archangel, and from Archangel to ‘Adesta’,  [57•*  arid from ’Adesta’ to Kamchatka, and from Kamchatka to Vladikavkaz and further, to the Persian, to the Turkish border.... Up to Kamchatka, Adesta, St. Petersburg, Lenkoran,—there will be masses of everything, all identical, from one mould: the fields, the ears of corn, the land, the sky, the men and women, each one like the next, with the same colours, thoughts, dress, the same songs.... Masses of everything,—nature, philislines, morality, truth, poetry, in a word—an homogeneous hundred-million-strong tribe that lives a mass life, thinks collectively and can be understood only in the form of a mass. To separate from, this million-strong mass an individual, our village elder Semyon Nikitich, say, and try to understand him is an impossible task.... Semyon Nikitich can be understood only in the heap of other Semyon Nikitiches. A single roach by itself costs a mere farthing, but a million roach is capital, and a million Semyon Nikitiches is also a most interesting creature, an organism, hut on his own, with his own thoughts, he is incomprehensible and cannot be studied.... He has just uttered the proverb: if a man doesn’t trade in a thing, he won’t steal it. Did he invent that himself? No, it was invented by the human ocean in which he lives, just as the Caspian invented roach, and the Black Sea plaice. Semyon Nikitich himself will never invent anything to be remembered by. ’Don’t go in for that sort of thing—don’t have the education,’ he says, when you ask him about anything. But again this Semyon Nikitich, who is full of all manner of rubbish when it comes to his personal opinion, becomes extraordinarily intelligent as soon as he begins to 58 present the opinions, proverbs and didactic stories created by goodness-know-whom, the ocean of Semyon Nikitiches, the mass mind of millions. Here there is fact, poetry, humour, and intellect.... Yes, it is terrible, awful, to live in this human ocean.... Millions are living ’like the others’, and each one of these others feels and realises that ’in all senses’ he is worth a mere farthing, like a roach, and that he means something only in a heap: ’It was terrible to realise this’...."

p Here again we find inaccuracies. There is no "homogeneous hundred-million-strong tribe" in Russia. And yet all this, taken in the right proportions, is indisputably, perfectly and amazingly correct. The Russian people really is living a “mass” life, created by nothing but the "conditions of agricultural labour”. But a "mass life" is not yet human life in the true sense of the word. It characterises the childhood of mankind; all peoples have had to pass through it, with the sole difference that a fortunate combination of circumstances has helped some of them to grow out of it earlier. And only those peoples who succeeded in doing so have become truly civilised. Where there is no inner development of the individual, where mind and morality have not yet lost their “mass” character, there is, properly speaking, no mind, no morality, no science, no art, no even remotely conscious social life yet. There human thought lies in a deep sleep, and in its place operates the objective logic of facts and of production relations, relations of agricultural or other labour, imposed upon man by nature itself. This unconscious logic often creates extremely “harmonious” social organisations. But do not be misled by their harmony, and in particular do not ascribe it to people, who are not responsible for it at all. Gl. Uspensky himself vouches for this. In the sketch Against His Will he makes a certain Pigasov express some very intelligent ideas on the subject, which are unfortunately occasionally mixed up with some rather strange views on the West. "I think,” reasons Pigasov (who, incidentally, directs a most telling criticism at Uspensky’s theory), "that our peasant, our people lives without its own will, without its own thought, lives only by subjecting itself to the will of its own labour.... It carries out only those obligations which this labour places upon it. And since this labour depends entirely on the harmonious laws of nature, its life is also harmonious and full, but without any effort on its part, without any thought of its own..." "If you catch a jackdaw and examine its organisation, you will be amazed at how remarkably cleverly it is constructed, how much intellect has been put into its organisation, how well-balanced everything is, how beautifully it all fits together, without a single superfluous feather or angle anywhere, or a line that is unnecessary, unharmonious and not strictly thought out....” "But whose mind has been at work here? Whose will? Surely you will not ascribe all this to the jack- 59 daw? For then all jackdaws would be brilliant creatures with unbounded minds?...” "To boast about our commune and artel is the same as to ascribe to oneself and to one’s own mind the brilliant organisation of one’s own body, one’s nervous and circulatory system, the same as to ascribe a remarkably successful intellectual development to the jackdaw, because it has organised itself so well and does not only fly where and when it likes, but leven knows that five versts away a peasant has spilt oats and that it must fly there...."

p Does Gl. Uspensky know that everything he has said about mass life is a brilliant artistic illustration of the work of a certain German philosopher whom our educated raznochinets has long since proclaimed to be an obsolete metaphysician? We are referring to Hegel. Open his Philosophy of History and read the passages there dealiug with Lhe East. You will see that Hegel says exactly the same thing about the "mass life" of the Eastern peoples as that which Uspensky says about the life of the Russian people. In Hegel’s opinion, "mass thought”, "mass morality" and mass life in general is a characteristic feature of the East in general and China in particular. Of course, Hegel uses different terminology. In his words, the principle of individuality is lacking in the East, and therefore both morality and mind are something external for the individual, something that has developed and exists without his participation: "Weil der Geist die Innerlichkeit noch nicht erlangt hat, so zeigt or sich iiberhaupt nur als natiirliche Geistigkeit.” In China, as in Russia (i.e., as it appears to our Narodniks), there are no classes and no class struggle. China is a country of absolute equality, and all the differences that we liud there owe their existence to the mechanism of state administration. One person can be superior to another only because he occupies a higher place in this mechanism.

p “Since equality reigns in China, there is no freedom there,” Hegel remarks, "and despotism is the necessary form of government there.... The Chinese government does not recognise the legitimacy of private interests, and the government of the country is concentrated in the hands of the emperor, who rules through a whole army of officials or mandarins....” Because of the total lack of development of individuality the sense of personal self-respect is completely undeveloped in the people. "It thinks that it exists only in order to carry the chariot of His Imperial Majesty. It regards the burden which bends it to the ground as its inevitable fate...."^^13^^ The selfsame Hegel understands perfectly that the history of China is primarily the history of an agricultural country.

The similarity to China is not, of course, very flattering for our national pride and would not soem to bode well for Russian progress. Fortunately, Gl. Uspensky himself tells us that our 60 “mass” life has not much longer "to go”. Below we shall see how history is leading us to completely different, European forms of life.