732
VISSARION BELINSKY
so obsesses me that I am afraid I will go mad. I am beginning to
love mankind
Ii
la
Marat: to make the least part of it happy I
would be willing to decimate the rest of it with fire and sword.
What right has a man of my type to place himself above humanity,
to divorce himself from it by means of an iron crown and purple
robe which, as Schiller, the Tiberius Gracchus of our era, has said,
are still stained with the blood of the first manslayer? What right
has he to fill me with that awe which is but another fonn of deg–
radation? Why must I bare my head before him? I feel that if I
were a king I would most certainly tum into a tyrant. Only an
omniscient and passionless God can be a Tsar.... Hegel dreamed
of a constitutional monarchy as the ideal State-what a paltry
conception! No, there should be no monarchs, for a monarch can
never be a brother, always he will keep aloof from men even if only
through empty etiquette, and men will always bow down to him if
merely for fonn's sake. Men ought to be brothers and ought not to
humiliate one another even
by
a shade of external and formal
superiority. How gifted of the French to grasp without the help of
German philosophy what German philosophy has still failed to un–
derstand! Damn it, I must study the Saint-Simonists! I look upon
woman through their eyes. Woman is a victim, the slave of modern
society. It is in the body rather than in the soul that public opinion
lodges a woman's honor....
III
St. Petersburg, September 8, 1841
. You know my nature: always it runs to extremes....It
is with difficulty and pain that I part from an old idea, but ·once
I do so I renounce it utterly, attaching myself to the new om; with
the fanaticism of a proselyte. And so, I am now at a new extreme–
it is the idea of
socialism
which has become for me the idea of
ideas, the essence of being, the question of questions, the alpha and
omega of belief and knowledge. It is at once the question and the
answer.
It
has swallowed up for me history and religion and phil–
osophy. Hence I am using it now to explain my existence and yours,
and indeed that of everyone I have encountered on life's path....
Our most cherished (and rational) dream was to bring our lives,
and our mutual relation as well, into some kind of viable contact
