INTELLIGENTSIA
587
II
That we are poor with the accumulated poverty of a thousand
years needs no proof. History shook us out of its sleeve into a severe
environment and dispersed us thinly over a vast plain. No one proposed
a different habitation for us ; in the place that bound us we were com–
pelled to put our shoulder to the wheel. The invasions from the Asiatic
East, the ruthless pressure of wealthier Europe from the West and the
state-Leviathan consuming an excessive part of the people's labor - all
of this not only impoverished the working masses but also dried up
the sources sustaining the governing layers. Hence their slow growth and
the barely perceptible accumulation of " cultural" strata over the virgin
soil of social barbarism. The Russian people felt the oppression of the
nobility and the clerical estate no less keenly than the nations of the
West. But we never experienced that complex and rounded-off way of
life - the Gothic lacework of feudalism - which arose in Europe on the
foundations of the medieval class-structure. We suffered from an insuf–
ficiency of material goods necessary for life; we simply lacked the re–
sources, being a poor nation. For a thousand years we lived in a humble
log cabin, the crevices of which were stuffed with moss - to dream of
vaulting arcs and Gothic spires would not have become us!
How pitiful was the lot of our gentry. Where were its castles, tourna–
ments, crusades, shield-bearers, minstrels and pages? Of chivalric love
it knew nothing.. . . Our bureaucracy recruited from the gentry shows
all too plainly the historical meagerness of its class origin. Where are
its great powers and names? At its very heights it produced no better
than third-rate imitations of the Duke of Alba, Colbert, Turgot, Met–
ternich and Bismarck.
Examine all aspects of culture, one after another. Everywhere the
same story. Poor Chaadayev
5
yearned for Catholicism, in which he saw
a refined religious culture able to concentrate within itself enormous
moral and intellectual forces. With the hindsight of history he saw the
highroad of human development in Catholicism and felt himself an
orphan on the country lane of Nikon's reform.
6
Catholic Europe produced
the Reformation, a powerful movement setting the boundary between
5 Peter Chaadayev (1794-1856), an importa nt social and religious thinker,
who was declared insane by Nicholas
I
and for a time confined to an asylum
because of the bold criticism of Russia's history and institutions contained in
his so-called "First Philosophical Letter" that appeared in a Moscow journal
in 1836.
6 Nikon (1605-1681) was a Russian church patriarch who made changes in
the church texts to bring them closer to the Greek originals. The popular
opposition to these changes led to the forming of schismatic groups, known as
Old Believers, faithful to the 1.\ncorrected texts,
