A VIEW OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE
621
scholar, or the man of action, or the priest. Consequently, because the
function of art was not merely to give pleasure or to create patterns
for their own sakes (or indeed to do anything which could not be
metaphysically justified) theories, ideals and everything connected with
them became of paramount importance. This philosophical preoccupation
with general ideas became the distinguishing mark of the Russian in–
telligentsia; whatever the sociological explanation of this phenomenon,
whether it was due to the influence of the doctrines of the Orthodox
Church; or to the suppression by the government of open political and
social discussion which forced it to seek refuge in what Hcrzen called
the "safe inland lake of aesthetic speculation"; or to the social structur2
of Russia which caused a curious symbiosis between bored aristocratic
dilettanti in search of novelty and literary intellectuals cut adrift from
the bourgeoisie; whatever the reason, the course of Russian literature is
intelligible only if the nature of this pervasive metaphysical preoccupa–
tion-stronger than ever in contemporary Russia, and adopting pro–
gressively more fantastic shapes-is understood and discounted.
Mr. Slonim is well aware of the necessity of providing some such
framework of interpretation-indeed he insists upon it with much em–
phasis-but his performance is somewhat timorous and at times almost
mechanical. His pages on Belinsky, whose influence was probably the
most powerful single factor in causing the astonishing ferment of ideas
which continued for almost a century after his death, are pallid and
conventional; the great critic's relationships to his predecessors are
sketched too cursorily. The astonishingly swift development of literary
and intellectual life from the elegant literary salons of Zhukovsky's
youth, to the Hegelian storms of the late thirties and forties is not ade–
quately told. The names of Schelling, Kant and H egel duly occur, but
without any clear indication of how they came to transform the literary
scene in Petersburg and Moscow. The later scarcely less crucial in–
flu ence of Feuerbach, the French socialists and the German materialists
is conscientiously alluded to, but the reader will seek in vain for their
precise role in the story.
It
may be argued that Mr. Slonim is engaged
upon a history of literature and not of ideas; but if his own thesis of the
interrelation of the two is valid, as it plainly is, a choice must be made
between either, ignoring "impure" non-literary, philosophical, social etc.
factors as far as possible, and concentrating (as Mirsky on the whole
tended to do) on the purely aesthetic aspects of the subject, or else of
acquiring sufficient equipment to enter this none too clear world of
speculative theory without losing all sense of direction; as for example
was done by such eminent literary historians as Gershenzon and Ivanov-
