596
LEON TROTSKY
How did the best of them manage to survive? By means of terrible
moral exertions, concentrated asceticism, long-lasting estrangement from
their society. With no social ground to stand on, moral stability could
be achieved only at the cost of fanaticism in the world of ideas, relent–
less self-limitation, an opinionated and suspicious attitude, and unflag–
ging surveillance of one's own purity. '"The small hare jumps into the
fire but does not betray his faith," said Archpriest Avvakum.
It
is not
in the special convolutions of the Slavic brain that you must search for
the roots of the fanaticism which possessed the Old Believers. It is the
social conditions of Old Russia that explain their jealous watching over
the letter in disregard of the spirit. This characteristic is still frequently
to be observed among the more extreme groups of our intelligentsia.
It
is also well known that when it comes to the consistency of the intel–
ligentsia's faith, its refusal to swallow gnats scarcely prevents it from
gulping down two-humped camels.
"I am a Yid, and I don't sit down at the same table with philistines,"
wrote BelinskyY None the less, for all the moral coherence of his per–
sonality, Belinsky was forced to change his opinions repeatedly and
radically. Ideological implacability, a noble trait in any fighter, is too
weak a guarantee of tenacity if it fails to find continuous support in
the objectively irreconcilable character of social relations. It is very
common for members of our intelligentsia to change their views time and
again - and not only those who turn into Customs Inspectors after the
age of thirty. This phenomenon is rather a necessary concomittant to
Versilov's kind of absolute freedom, the freedom "to wander about
without any work to do."
These changes of outlook can have a subjectively tragic quality, as
in the case of Belinsky, a comically banal quality, as in Struve, a seman–
tically superficial quality, as in Minsky and Balmont, a renegade quality,
as in Katkov and Tikhomirov
13
-
still their historically determined
12 Belinsky, the famous radical critic, was not J ewish, and Trotsky savors
the irony.
13 Peter Struve (1870-1944), a "legal Marxist" in the eighteen nineties,
abandoned Marxism in later years, joining the bourgeois-liberal party known
as Cadets. Minsky (pseudonym of N. M. Vilenkin, 1855-1937), poet and critic
of the modernist so-called decadent school. Constantine Balmont (1867-1943),
a prominent poet of the modernist school sharply criticized by the radicals for
his "uncivic" attitude. N . M. Katkov (1818-1887), journalist and editor famous
in his time, renounced radicalism and turned into a supporter of the autocracy.
L. A. Tikhomirov (1852-1923), a leader of the radical People's Will party,
denounced the revolutionary movement and, like Katkov, became a supporter
of the Tsarist regime.
