A CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN TWO CORNERS
In culture, too, there is a hidden movement that carries us toward
the primal sources of life. There will be an epoch of great, joyous, and
all-attaining return. Then cool springs will break forth from between the
old slabs, and rose bushes will bud from the gray tombs. But to hasten
that day, we must go farther and farther, and not turn backward: a
retreat would only show up the closing of the ring of eternity.
However, the majority of us Russians have always been run-aways.
We itch to run, to run without looking back. I am absolutely averse to
solving any difficulty by running away. I said before that the cultural
"Egypt" was alien to you, like Nietzsche's
elan vital.
Almost to all our
intelligentsia, taken in the exact and circumscribed meaning of a socio–
historical category, Egypt is alien, and culture is slavery. And you, of
course, are flesh of the flesh and bone of the bone of our intelligentsia,
however much you may rebel against it. I myself am hardly so; rather I
am half a son of the Russian land, but exiled from it, and half a stranger,
one of the disciples of Sais, where race and tribe are forgotten.
Opros–
titsia,
to become simple, that is the magic word for our intelligentsia;
in this longing is expressed all its uprootedness.
It
imagines that "to
become simple" means to touch bottom, to strike roots in the earth.
Such was Leo Tolstoy, who should logically attract you. Of a different
stripe was Dostoevsky, who logically repels you. He did not want to
"become simple"; yet what he wrote about gardens as the panacea of
communal living, and about the education of children in the great
garden of the future, and about the factory itself in the garden, is a
program of social action spiritually right and historically correct, not a
dream.
To become simple is treason, oblivion, flight, a cowardly and tired
reaction. The idea of becoming simple is just as untenable in cultural
life as in mathematics, which admits . only "simplification." The latter
is the reduction of a multiple complexity into a more perfect form of
simplicity. Simplicity in the sense of a supreme crowning achievement is
the overcoming of incompletion by definitive completion, of imperfec–
tion by perfection. The way to this yearned for and lovable simplicity
leads through complexity. It is conquered not by flight from a given
milieu or country, but by ascent. At every place, I repeat and testify
again-Bethel and Jacob's ladder-at every center of any horizon. This
is the way of genuine and creatively active freedom; but empty is the
freedom stolen through oblivion. And those who remember not their kin
are runaway slaves or freemen, not freeborn. Culture is the cult of
ancestors, and of course-this is obscurely realized even today-the resur–
rection of the fathers. The way of mankind is an increasingly sharper
1045
