149

p Russian Critics. Literary Essays^^40^^

p Mr. Volynsky lias written a book entitled Russian Critics, What sort of book is it?

p It’s the dress that attracts but the mind that holds, as the saying goes. In real life it is very bad to be attracted to people by their dress, but in the "republic of the written word" it is not only permissible, but quite inevitable. The literary appearance of any given work is the first thing that catches the eye, and on the basis of this “dress” one can form a fairly accurate idea of the author. Le style c’est l’homme.   [149•* 

p The literary appearance of Mr. Volynsky’s book not only shouts loudly but, to put it bluntly, positively howls against him.

p Famusov ^^41^^ was pleased that Moscow damsels never uttered a single word simply, but always with a grimace. Mr. Volynsky has for some unknown reason decided to imitate these Moscow damsels. He never says anything at all without a grimace, and a noisy, hysterical grimace at that. If he is talking about Pushkin, Mr. Volynsky rolls his eyes and cries: "His pathos does not lie where Belinsky sees it. His bright genius is broad and sad, like the Russian countryside. Vast spaces, expanses that the eye cannot encompass, endless forests rippling with a mysterious murmur, and in all this the languor of an inexpressible anguish and melancholy. An upsurge, a wild outburst of passion, and then, a few moments later, the thought of death, the wail of dissatisfied feeling, a mood of incoherent and, because of their incoherence, painful questions that arise in the mist. Such is the genius of Russian life. Such is the Russian soul”, etc., etc. If he is speaking of Gogol’s satire, Mr. Volynsky again lifts up his sorry eyes and pontificates: "Everywhere (in Gogol) one senses the suppressed laughter through tears, the fanatical hatred of vice, the desire to escape from this earthly life which leaves nothing but despair in the soul, the passionate straining towards heaven with eyes, wide open in horror, that seek refuge and salvation for the tormented heart."  [149•**  Dobrolyubov, Mr. Volynsky assures us, knew "no sweeping passions with a tumult of all emotions”; yet the articles of Belinsky are "bathed in the light of an inner fire".  [149•***  150 In short, whatever page you may open in the book Russian Critics, you will be sure to encounter "the breath of eternal ideals”, or "inspiration from above”, or "the man who conceived eternity" (this is Hegel), or "the impetuous habit of struggle in the popular spirit" (kindly note that Belinsky’s nature was marked by such a “habit”), or, finally, some other high-flown rubbish.

_p Reading Mr. Volynsky’s book we frequently felt like exclaiming as Bazarov did: "Oh, my friend, Arkady Nikolayovich! One thing I ask of you—don’t speak pretty."^^42^^ However, we immediately realised that we were being unjust to Kirsanov. He was, it must be owned, a most verbose speaker, yet his verbosity was the fruit of an almost childlike naivete; whereas Mr. Volynsky’s verbosity has nothing to do with naivete. It reminds one for some reason of the “pathos” of Uteshitelny about whom Shvokhnev remarks: "he is unusually fervent: one can understand the first two words of what he says, and then nothing more".^^43^^ Mr. Volynsky has attired his thoughts very, very badly!

p But what exactly are these thoughts? What is the “mind” of his book?

p In publishing his book Mr. Volynsky "wished to offer the reader a more or less complete work on the history of Russian criticism in its main aspects".  [150•*  From this “work” it emerges that until now we have not had any "true criticism" and that if Mr. Volynsky does not come to our aid we cannot expect anything worthwhile in the future either.

p “True criticism" is “philosophical”, namely, idealist criticism. As such it should, of course, rest on some idealist system. Mr. Volynsky’s account does not make it quite clear to exactly which philosophical system he adheres. But it would seem that "the man who conceived eternity”, i.e., Hegel, is most to his liking. We assume so because, in speaking of this splendid man, Mr. Volynsky makes incomparably more grimaces than when he happens to touch upon other great idealists. If our assumption is correct, our author is an extremely interesting if not unique phenomenon: Hegelians are so rare nowadays.

p But, as we know, much time has passed since Hegel’s system appeared. Philosophical thought has not stood still. Within the Hegelian school a most important division has taken place. Some of the philosophers who belonged to it have gone over to materialism. And, on the other hand, the natural and social sciences have been enriched by such important discoveries that no seriousminded person can declare himself to be a follower of Hegel without some very, very substantial reservations. There are no such reservations in Mr. Volynsky’s book. Mr. Volynsky does not 151 criticise Hegel. In place of criticism we find a scholastic and extremely uninteresting account of certain paragraphs of Hegelian logic and some loud-mouthed yet at the same time empty tirades such as the following:

p “The point is not whether this system is right in its individual particulars, whether it is consistent in all its details. To conceive (!) the whole world in its ideal foundations, to try to understand the laws of its unceasing motion, to understand the living God in his general and concrete expressions, to give a vital impulse to the abstract and to inspire the concrete with a thirst for the infinite, this is the eternal task of philosophy which does not wish to confine itself merely to scholastic, formal constructions. Certain mistakes, which will disappear in the stream of future philosophical progress, are inevitable here. Individual errors of logic are inevitable here. But the essence of the task, understood in this way, placed on this real, historical (sic!) ground, and bound by inner ties to the interests of human existence, will remain unchanged for all times and epochs" (Russian Critics, pp. 59-60).

p That Mr. Volynsky is "unusually fervent" is beyond the slightest doubt. But the same must be said of him as he says of Belinsky: "He does not reveal any original philosophical talent." And not only original philosophical talent! Mr. Volynsky is even incapable of understanding other people’s philosophical ideas. For example, he attacks materialism with the arguments of Yurkevich who had criticised the author of the famous article "The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy"^^44^^ in the Proceedings of the Kiev Theological Academy. Inter alia, he also cites the following harsh verdict of the Kiev thinker: "Materialism, with its categorical assertion that physical forces produce psychic life, does not have the right to regard itself as either a science or a philosophy suitable for modern man. It is also metaphysics, but crude, dogmaticallyprimitive metaphysics which does not understand that only in connection with consciousness is matter that which it appears in practice" (p. 284).

p Let us assume that the materialists’ view of the relationship of physical forces to psychic life is correctly propounded here. And let us assume also that it follows from this that materialism is crude, dogmatically-primitive metaphysics. But would not idealism, so dear to Mr. Volynsky’s heart, also suffer from this assumption of ours?

p Mr. Volynsky says rightly that "Hegel put the concept of the spirit at the basis of his whole system" (p. 57). On what grounds did Hegel do this? Would this not appear to be crude, dogmatically-primitive metaphysics to the very same people who regard the above-quoted argument against materialism as incontrovertible? Does Mr. Volynsky know what Hegel himself thought of the philosophical doctrine, from the arsenal of which this argu- 152 ment was borrowed? It was all the same to Yurkevich, of course: he was only interested in belittling the materialists. But why on earth did our Hegelian take it into his head to praise Yurkevich’s arguments? Surely he does not think it possible to lump absolute idealism together with “critical” philosophy?

p But let us now return to the materialists’ view of the relationship between physical forces and psychic life.

p Matter "as it appears to us in practice" is not a thing-in-itself (Ding an sich), a noumenon; it is a phenomenon.  This is indisputable; it is a simple tautology. But it is also indisputable that consciousness, as it appears to us in our inner experience, is also a phenomenon, and not a thing-in-itself. We have no grounds whatever for equating one of these phenomena with the other or for reducing one to the other in any way, for example, by declaring matter to be the "other being of the spirit”, as Hegel did, or the spirit the other being of matter, as the materialists do, according to Yurkevich, Volynsky and other clever people (their name is legion) who do not know the history of materialism. But we have all essential and sufficient grounds for recognising the existence of a certain connection between the phenomena in question.

Experience shows that psychic phenomena are produced by certain physico-chemical (physiological) phenomena in the nervous tissue. "Surely no one who is cognisant of the facts of the case, nowadays, doubts that the roots of psychology lie in the physiology of the nervous system,” says Huxley. "What we call the operations of the mind are functions of the brain, and the materials of consciousness are products of cerebral activity."  [152•*  Thus, if we were to say with Spinoza that thought and matter are two different attributes of one and the same substance, we would have to admit at the same time that the first of these attributes is revealed only thanks to the second. This would surely in no way contradict the deductions of present-day science, but would actually amount to the view of "psychic life" to which Yurkevich took such exception.