But what can be lovelier and more faultless than us in this sublunar world? He certainly got into hot water over Bazarov,* Bazarov restless and troubled (a sign of great heart) despite all his nihilism. We have even trounced him for his Kukshina,* for that progressive louse which Turgenev had combed out of Russian reality for us to look at, and we accused him of opposing the emancipation of women into the bargain. All this is certainly progress, whatever you say.
Now we stand over the common people with the self-assurance of corporals or sergeant majors of civilization. It is a delight to look at us: arms akimbo and glance defiant, we look really cocky, and we say to the peasant with all the contempt we can muster: “Nationality and national community all boil down to political reaction and the assessment of taxes, so what have you to teach us, you old lout?” For really we cannot be expected to pander to prejudice.
Oh goodness me… Let us assume for a minute, my dear sirs, that my travels are over and I am back in Russia, and let me tell you a story. One day this autumn, as I was reading a newspaper – one of the most progressive ones – I noticed the following news from Moscow. Heading: “More relics of barbarism” (or something like this, very sharply worded. Unfortunately, however, I haven’t got the newspaper in front of me now).
Well anyway, the story as told there was that one morning this autumn an open carriage was espied in the streets of Moscow. A drunken woman – a professional matchmaker by occupation – was sitting in the carriage all beribboned and singing a song. The coachman was also bedecked in some sort of ribbons, was also drunk and was also caterwauling as best he could. Even the horse was adorned with ribbons. I don’t know, though, whether it was drunk.
It probably was. The woman was holding a bundle, the contents of which belonged to a newly married couple who had obviously passed a happy night together. The bundle, of course, contained a certain light garment which, among the lower classes, is usually shown the following day to the bride’s parents. People laughed at the sight of the matchmaker woman and a happy sight it was.
Indignantly, forcefully and contemptuously the newspaper related this unheard-of barbarism “which has survived to this day in spite of the progress of civilization!”
I admit that I burst out laughing. Oh please, do not think that I am trying to defend primitive cannibalism, light garments, veils etc. It is bad, it is unchaste, it is uncivilized, it is Slav. I know all that and I agree; though of course it was not done with evil intent, but merely as part of marriage celebrations and out of natural simplicity and ignorance of anything better, higher, more European. Oh no, I laughed at something else.
I laughed because I suddenly remembered our ladies and our fashionable dress shops. Of course civilized ladies no longer send their light garments to their parents, but when it comes to ordering a dress at a dressmaker’s, how cunningly and efficiently they know how to pad certain parts of their charming European dress with cotton wool. What is the cotton wool for? Naturally for the sake of elegance and aesthetic effect, pour paraître…* Not only that: their daughters too, these innocent, seventeen-year-old young things just out of school, even they know about the cotton wool.
They know everything: the purpose of that cotton wool, and where precisely, in which parts to apply the cotton wool, and they know, too, why – that is, with what end in view – all this is being used… Well now, I chuckled inwardly, all the care and trouble that is being taken, conscious care about these cotton-wool additions, is it really purer, more moral and more chaste than the wretched light garment taken with such naive certainty to the parents; the certainty that that is precisely what is called for, precisely the moral thing to do?
For Heaven’s sake, my friends, do not think I now want to read you a lecture to the effect that civilization is not progress and that latterly in Europe it has on the contrary always threatened all progress with whip and prison. Do not think that I shall try to prove that in our country we barbarously confuse civilization and the laws of normal and true progress, or that civilization has long ago been condemned even in the West, and that its one and only advocate over there is the capitalist (though everyone there is a capitalist or wants to be one), because he wants to save his money.
Do not think that I shall try to prove that the human soul is not a tabula rasa, a piece of wax to be moulded into a pan-homunculus; that the primary need is for nature, then for science, then for independent unrestricted life deeply rooted in the soil, and finally for faith in one’s own national powers.
Do not think I shall pretend to be ignorant of the fact that our progressively minded men (though by no means all of them) are no defenders of cotton wool and, in fact, brand it as they brand light garments.
All I want to say now is that the article had an ulterior motive for censuring and condemning the light garments; it did not state simply that it was barbarism, but was exposing elemental, national, working-class barbarism, in opposition to the European civilization of our aristocratic upper classes. The article swaggered, the article pretended not to know that those who were thus exposing this barbarism were themselves guilty of things perhaps a thousand times worse and filthier, or that all we had done was to exchange one kind of prejudice and nastiness for another, worse kind of prejudice and nastiness. The article pretended not to notice our own prejudice and nastiness.
Why then, why should we look so cocky as we stand over the common people, arms akimbo, breathing contempt… For this faith in infallibility and in the right to make these exposures is absurd, laughably absurd. This faith is either simply swagger to impress the people or else an unreasoning, slavish worship of the European forms of civilization; and this surely is even more absurd.
But what’s the use! Thousands of such facts could be found every day. Forgive me my little story.
However, mea culpa. For I have committed a fault. The reason is that I have jumped too hastily from grandfathers to grandsons. There were other facts in between. Remember Chatsky.* He was neither an artlessly witty grandfather nor a self-satisfied grandson; cocky and sure of himself, Chatsky was quite a special type of our Russian Europe, a pleasant, enthusiastic, suffering type, appealing to Russia and to firm foundations, and yet going back to Europe again when he had to find:
Aplace of refuge for man’s wounded pride…
in fact a type which is useless now, but which was terribly useful in the past. He was a phrase-monger, a chatterbox, but a kind of phrase-monger sincerely sorry for his uselessness. Now in the new generation he is reborn and, we believe, in youthful vigour. We trust that he will appear once again, but this time not suffering from hysteria as at Famusov’s ball, but as a conqueror, proud, mighty, meek and loving. Besides, he will have realized by then that the place of refuge for wounded pride is to be found not in Europe, but perhaps under his very nose, and he will find something to do and will do it.
And do you know what? I, for one, am convinced we haven’t only got sergeants of civilization and European faddists; I am convinced, I insist, that the new man is born already… but more of this later. Now I want to say a bit more about Chatsky. There is one thing I cannot understand. Chatsky was surely a very intelligent man. How is it that such an intelligent man failed to find himself a job of work to do? As a matter of fact none of them had ever found themselves jobs of work to do, they failed to find them for twenty-three
generations running. This is a fact, and it is surely no use arguing against facts, but one may always ask a question out of curiosity. Well now, I cannot understand how an intelligent man can fail, at any time and in any circumstances, to find himself a job of work to do. This, I am told, is arguable, but in my heart of hearts I do not believe it is. We are given intelligence in order to achieve our aims.
If you cannot walk a mile, then walk at least a hundred steps; it would anyway be better than nothing, or at least nearer your object, if you have an object to go to. But if you insist on reaching your object step by step, this is not, in my estimation, intelligence. You could even be called work-shy in that case. We do not like toil, are not used to taking one step at a time and prefer to reach our object or become a second Regulus* in one flying leap. But this is precisely to be work-shy.
However, Chatsky was perfectly right at the time to slip away abroad again; a little delay would have sent him eastwards instead of westwards. People love the West in this country; they love it and when it comes to a certain point they all go there. I am going there too, as you see.
