PARTISAN REVIEW
fires devastated the face of the earth, but following these destructive
convulsions of the earth the people in the lands settled by the Hellenes
were reborn "without Muses and written characters" in order to
begin again their transient upbuilding- while the sacred Nile was
saving immobile Egypt, which preserved on her age-old tablets the
ancient memory of the forefathers forgotten by the Hellenes, of the
great and glorious race of men who had thrown off the yoke of the
immemorial Atlantis.
My dear fellow-seeker! Like that Egyptian and his Greek dis–
ciple, and Plato himself, I piously light my incense on the altar of
Memory, mother of the Muses,
1
celebrate her as the "bond of im–
mortality, the crown of consciousness," and I am convinced that
not a single upward step is possible on the ladder of spiritual ascent
without a step downward toward the underground sources of the
spirit- the higher the branches, the deeper the roots.
And if you answer that you have neither the right nor the in–
tention to predetermine the future intellectual outlook of the people
born of the new culture, that you are merely yielding, for yourself
and your descendants, to your present need to go out from these
stifling vaults into free space, without knowing or wishing to know
what awaits you beyond the bars of the abandoned prison, you will
thereby express both your fatalistic indifference to the cause of car–
ving out the path of freedom and your ultimate despair in your own
liberation. Let it not be so!
v.
I.
VI.
To V.
I.
Ivanov:
Dearest neighbor and friend, in vain do you lure me by tender
admonitions to leave my corner and move into yours. Your corner
is also enclosed-there is no freedom in it. You say: Let the man of
culture give himself to faith, he is already essentially free.
1
answer:
burdened as he is with the cultural heritage, he is unable to soar to the
absolute, and even if faith is inherent in him, this faith shares the
lot of all his spiritual states-it is falsified by reflection, distorted and
powerless. I repeat what I wrote you the last time: our conscious–
ness cannot transcend culture, or only perhaps in rare, exceptional
instances. See how our friend Shestov is struggling in the snare.
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