592
LEON TROTSKY
sheet. From this arose the subjective radicalism of our repentant noble–
men and rebellious seminary students, and this too is the source of their
delusions of grandeur.
In the novel
A Raw Youth ,
Dostoevsky's Versilov looks at Europe,
as Herzen did, with an anguish not unmixed with contempt. "There,"
he says, "the conservative is only struggling to protect his living, and
the store-clerk pours ou t his kerosene only to earn his daily morsel of
bread. Russia alone lives
not for itself but for the sake of an idea.
. . .
It is now nearly a century since Russi a [that is, Russia's intelligentsia]
has been living without any thought for itself but for Europe alone."
The same Versilov says, "Europe created the noble images of the French–
man, the Englishman, and the German ; but it still knows almost nothing
of the nature of the future man. It would seem, however, that Europe
still does not care to know. This is understandable,
as they are n ot free,
whereas we are fr ee.
In all of Europe, I, with my Russian anguish, was
the only free man...." Versilov cannot see that, unlike the European
conservative or the clerk in the kerosene-store, he had freed himself not
only from the fetters of his class traditions but also from the possibility
of social creativity. The same faceless environment which had given him
his subjective freedom also loomed before him as an objective barrier.
In Europe, with its cultural order and defined intellectual capital,
you walk on the pavement as you had been taught to walk. You will
not find absolute freedom there. In their basic outline, the activities of
European political parties and their leaders are determined by the
nature of the objective situation.
It
is hardly the same with us, where
the intelligentsia is not bound by anything, least of all by anything
within its own mind. "They," in Europe, are bound by plans, conven–
tions, textbooks, programmatic definitions of class interests, while I am
absolutely free amidst my social steppes. But a remarkable thing hap–
pened: the absolutely free Russian
intelligent
walked three steps and
got lost, in the most shameful fashion, among three pines. So he returns
to learn from Europe, taking its latest ideas and words and then again
rebelling against their stipulated, limited, "Western" meaning. He assi–
milates them to his absolute "freedom"; in other words, he empties them
of meaning and turns back to the starting-point, having described a circle
of 80,000 versts
S
around himself. Another way of saying the same thing:
"He repeats all the old saws and lies enough for two men."
"You deny me," says our barbarian society to the aristocratic
intelligent
who has ascended into the realm of "freedom" or to the
8
Verst:
a unit of distance equal to .66 miles.
