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PARTISAN REVIEW
we going? What is our role, our mission in History? What ails us?
What should we be? What can we become? These are the famous
"accursed questions" in Russia: In what direction must we, can we,
should we go? Will we ever become like the West? Should we seek to
become so? Have we not something of supreme value that they have
not? Are we not spiritually superior and should we not preserve this?
Should we not insulate ourselves, as the Slavophiles are saying,
against these wicked Western secular influences? Or, on the contrary,
as the "Westerners" are saying: Is the truth to be found in science,
enlightenment, material progress, organization, liberty, democratic
ideas, John Stuart Mill? Is this what we lack and should seek? And if
so, by what means? What should Russia do? What is our proper
path? All this is typical of Russian thinkers and writers. Jane Austen,
Dickens, did not ask, Whither England? Stendhal, Balzac, even
Victor Hugo, did not say, What is the mission of France? Kant and
Goethe did not ask, What is the path that Germany should tread?
They spoke in universal terms: of human beings as such. But Russian
literature is preoccupied with itself, with the future of Russia, in an
almost narcissistic way.
This may hold in general for all backward countries, for Mrican
and Asian countries today, and perhaps for some Latin American
countries as well, where there is a sense of backwardness, which some
try to make a virtue while others feel ashamed of it. The way in which
the Russians tried to take courage was by faith in progress, in the
objective stages of history, by saying: We are taught-by Herder or
Hegel, or Comte and other foreign masters-that history proceeds in
a certain direction. There is a ladder of progress for all men. Where
are we on this universal ladder that all nations must ascend? They
spoke like men who ask: Are we on step thirty-two of the ladder of
History, or only on step seventeen? And if we are only on step seven–
teen and wish to be on step thirty-two-like England, like
Germany-how long will it take us to get there? Can we ever reach it?
Can we leap over several steps at a time?
Historicism became an obsession in Russia. Professors of history
used to lecture about this, particularly the "Westerners," who tried to
explain how progress occurred in the West, how it occurred in pro–
gressive stages, and how Russia, despite all appearances, was ulti–
mately on the same universal ladder. This gave the Russians a certain
reason for optimism: We shall not forever remain in this position of
squalor and oppression and poverty and lack of humarl rights. One
