590
LEON TROTSKY
tence of their fathers, they have become puffed up with ideological
arrogance. However, this arrogance merely reflects the obverse side of
their social weakness.
Culture binds people together and sets limits and restraints. Culture
is conservative, and the richer it is the more conservative it must be.
Each great new idea cutting its way through the solid body of an old
culture was met in Europe by the deadening resistance of the old, out–
worn ideology as well as by the strong rebuff of organized interests. In
struggling against this opposition, the new idea generated its own con–
siderable powers, spreading to ever wider circles, and at long last scored
a victory when adopted as the banner of new classes and groupings
seeking to establish their own place in the sun. And these new classes
bound and delimited the new idea in the very process of adapting and
subordinating it to their own purposes, thus depriving it of an absolute
meaning. Yet it is by means of this very delimitation of the idea that
general social development took a giant step forward. The new idea
acquired all the more social stability by developing organically; and its
definitive victory turned it of course into a conservative force in its
own right.
The new idea appeared to us from the West as a product already
prepared by foreign ideological evolution, as a finished formula -like
corals slowly formed in the ocean by the power of some natural process
but which women receive ready-made as necklaces for personal adorn–
ment. ... There is no reason to speak of the first periods of borrowing
in our history. Peudo-classicism, romanticism and sentimentalism, which
in the West stood for whole epochs and classes, profound historical
reshufflings and experiences, were perverted by the aristocratic salons
of Moscow and Petersburg into purely formal stages of literary evolu–
tion. Later on, however, the ideas ceased being mere coral adornments;
instead they became the intelligentsia's sources of action, sometimes of
an heroically sacrificial character. But in that more mature epoch our
historical poverty served to create an enormous discrepancy between
the ideological premises and the social results achieved through the
intelligentsia's efforts. Thus it became the historical calling of the Rus–
sian intelligentsia to use watches for hammering nails into walls.
In order not to become a drunken sot spending his time playing
cards in the gross and inebriated atmosphere of the "dead souls," an
educated Russian had to acquire some great ideological concern, at–
tracting, like a magnet, all the significant moral forces and concentrating
them at a consistently high level of intensity. In order not to take
bribes and stay away from the company of promoters and grafters,
he needed a set of principles
separatin~
him from hi$ milieu and
