VOYAGE
“The point is, the question ‘how to make a clock’ has the same answer for everybody. We can all be clockmakers, or astronomers. But if we all wanted to be Pushkin…if the question is, how do you make a poem by Pushkin?- or, what exactly makes one poem or painting or piece of music greater than another?-or what is beauty? or liberty? or virtue?- if the question is, how should we live?…then reason gives no answer or different answers. So something is wrong. The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist.” - Belinsky
“A poem can’t be written by an act of will. When the rest of us are trying our hardest to be present, a real poet goes absent. We can watch him in the moment of creation, where he sits with the pen in his hand, not moving. When it moves, we’ve missed it. Where did he go in that moment? The meaning of art lies in the answer to that question. To discover it, to understand it, to know the difference between it happening and not happening, this is my whole purpose in life, and it is not a contemptible calling in our country where our liberties cannot be discussed because we have none, and science or policies can’t be discussed for the same reason. A critic does double duty here. If something true can be understood about art, something will be understood about liberty, too, and science and politics and history- because everything in the universe is unfolding together with a purpose of which mine is part…The truth of idealism would be plain to me if I had heard one sentence of Schelling shouted through my window by a man on a galloping horse. When philosophers start talking like architects, get out while you can, chaos is coming. When they start laying down rules for beauty, blood in the streets is from that moment inevitable. When reason and measurement are made authorities for the perfect society, seek sanctuary among the cannibals…because the answer is not out there like America waiting for Columbus, the same answer for everybody forever. The universal idea speaks through humanity itself, and differently through each nation in each stage of history. When the inner life of a nation speaks through the unconscious creative spirit of its artists, for generation after generation- then you have a national literature.” - Belinsky
“Every work of art is the breath of a single eternal idea.” - Belinsky
“‘March here, march there, present arms, where’s your cap?’- you’ve no idea, the whole Army’s obsessed with playing at soldiers…” -Bakunin
“But I’d still like to write a decent poem one day. Tomorrow, for example.” - Turgenev
“Yes…if you can’t write a poem here, there’s no hope. And not much if you can.” -Turgenev
“At Premukhino the eternal, the ideal, seems to be in every breath around you, like a voice telling you how much more sublime is the unattainable, imagined happiness of the inner life, compared with the vulgar happiness of the crowd! And then you’re dead. There’s something missing in this picture. Stankevich was coming round to it, before the end. He said: ‘For happiness, apparently, something of the real world is necessary.’” -Turgenev
“Reform can’t come from above or below, only from within. The material world is nothing but the shadow on the wall of the cave. The convulsions of whole societies, in their frantic adjustment of advantage, are the perturbed, deformed spirit objectified on the wall of the cave.”
-Stankevich
“Let social purpose hang itself unhindered! No- I mean, literature can replace, can actually become… Russia!” -Belinsky
“But reality can’t be thought away- what’s real is rational, and what’s rational is real. I can’t describe to you my feelings when I heard those words. They were my release from my weary guardianship of the human race. I grasped the meaning of the rise and fall of kingdoms, the ebb and flow of history, the pettiness of my miserable anxiety about my life. Reality! I say it every night when I go to bed and every morning when I wake.” -Belinsky
“You’ve got Hegel’s Dialectical Spirit of History upside down and so has he. People don’t storm the Bastille because history proceeds by zigzags. History zigzags because when people have had enough, they storm the Bastille. When you turn him right way up, Hegel is the algebra of revolution.” -Herzen
“You have nothing to learn from me about suffering. But about the Cat…the Cat has no plan, no favourites or resentments, no memory, no mind, no rhyme or reason. It kills without purpose, and spares without purpose, too. So, when it catches your eye, what happens next is not up to the Cat, it’s up to you.” -Herzen
SHIPWRECK
“Oh, a curse on your capital letters! We’re asking people to spill their blood- at least spare them your conceit that they’re acting out the biography of an abstract noun!” -Herzen
“The mistake is to put ideas before action. Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not- well, it’s progress.” -Bakunin
“I can’t fit the pieces together to make it a square- it’s a children’s puzzle, and I can’t do it…”
-Belinsky
“Perhaps it’s a square.” -Turgenev
“I give you a toast! The liberty of each, for the equality of all!” -Bakunin
“What does that mean? It doesn’t mean anything.” -Herzen
“I am not free unless you, too, are free!” -Bakunin
“That’s nonsense. You were free when I was locked up.” -Herzen
“Freedom is a state of mind.” -Bakunin
“No, it’s a state of not being locked up…of having a passport…you’ve made yourself a European reputation by a kind of revolutionary word music from which it is impossible to extract an ounce of meaning, let alone a political idea, let alone a course of action. What freedom means is being allowed to sing in my bath as loudly as will not interfere with my neighbour’s freedom to sing a different tune in his. But above all, let my neighbour and I be free to join or not to join the revolutionary opera, the state orchestra, the Committee of Public Harmony…” -Herzen
“What do you want? Bread? I’m afraid bread got left out of the theory. We are bookish people, with bookish solutions. Prose is our strong point, prose and abstraction. But everything is going beautifully. Last time- in 1789- there was a misunderstanding. We thought we had discovered that social progress was a science like everything else. The First Republic was to have been the embodiment of morality and justice as a rational enterprise. The result was, admittedly, a bitter blow. But now there’s a completely new idea. History itself is the main character of the drama, and also its author. We are all in the story, which ends with universal bliss. Perhaps not for you. Perhaps not for your children. But universal bliss, you can put your shirt on it, which, I see, you have. Your personal sacrifice, the sacrifice of countless others on History’s slaughter-bench, all the apparent crimes and lunacies of the hour, which to you may seem irrational, are part of a much much bigger story which you probably aren’t in the mood for- let’s just say that this time, as luck would have it, you’re the zig and they’re the zag.” -Herzen
“The whole point of the serving class is that the rest of us, the fortunate minority, can concentrate on our higher destinies. Intellectuals must be allowed to think, poets to dream, landowners to own land, dandies to perfect their cravats. It’s a kind of cannibalism. The uninvited are necessary to the feast. I’m not a sentimental moralist. Nature, too, is merciless, So long as a man thinks it’s the natural order of things for him to be eaten and for another to eat, then who should regret the death of the old order if not we who write our stories or go to the opera while others do our laundry? But once people realize the arrangement is completely artificial, the game is up. I take comfort in this catastrophe. The dead have exposed the republican lie. It’s government by slogan for the sake of power, and if anyone objects, there’s always the police. The police are the realists in a pseudo-democracy. From one regime to the next, power passes down the system until it puts its thumbprint on every policeman’s forehead like the dab of holy oil at an emperor’s coronation….Well, now we know what the reactionaries have always known: liberty, equality, and fraternity are like three rotten apples in the barrel of privilege, even a pip could prove fatal. -Herzen
“I’m sick of utopias. I’m tired of hearing about them. I’d trade the lot for one practical difference that owes nothing to anybody’s ideal society, one commonsensical action that puts right an injury to one person.” -Belinsky
“Apathy isn’t passive, it’s the freedom that comes from recognising new borders, a new country called Necessity…it comes from accepting that things are what they are, and not some other thing, and can’t for the moment be altered…which people find quite difficult. We’ve had a terrible shock. We discovered that history has no respect for intellectuals. History is more like the weather. You never know what it’s going to do. God, we were busy!- bustling about under the sky, shouting directions to the winds, remonstrating with the clouds in German, Russian, French…and hailing every sunbeam as proof of the power of words, some of which rhymed and scanned. Well…would you like to share my umbrella? It’s not too bad under here. Political freedom is a rather banal ambition, after all…all that can’t-sit-still about voting and assembling and controlling the means of production. Stoical freedom is nothing but not wasting your time berating the weather when it’s bucketing down on your picnic.” -George
“He’s a free man because he gives away freely. I’m beginning to understand the trick of freedom. Freedom can’t be a residue of what was unfreely given up, divided up like a fought-over loaf. Every giving up has to be self-willed, freely chosen, unenforceable. Each of us must forgo only what we choose to forgo, balancing our personal freedom of action against our need for the cooperation of other people- who are each making the same balance for themselves. What is the largest number of individuals who can pull this trick off? I would say it’s smaller than a nation, smaller than the ideal communities of Cabet or Fourier. I would say the largest number is smaller than three. Two is possible, if there is love, but two is not a guarantee.”
-Herzen
“Genius isn’t a matter of matching art to nature better than he can do it, it’s nature itself- revealing itself through the exalted feeling of the artist, because the world isn’t a collection of different things, mountains and rain and people, which have somehow landed up together, it’s all one thing, like the ultimate work of art trying to reach its perfection through us, its most conscious part, and we fall short most of the time. We can’t all be artists, of course, so the rest of us do the best we can at what’s our consolation, we fall short at love.” -Natalie
“No, no, not at all! His life was what it was. Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don’t value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it’s been sung? The dance when it’s been danced? It’s only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with this picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature’s highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and willfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we’re expected! But there is no such place, that’s why it’s called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can’t arrange our own happiness, it’s a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.” -Herzen
“The names for things don’t come first, words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.” -Turgenev
“How can you say that- you, a poet?” -Natalie
“That’s how we know.” -Ogarev
SALVAGE
“I put into your hand this occasionally impudent protest against ideas which are obsolete and fraudulent, against absurd idols that belong to another age. Don’t look for solutions in this book. There are none. Anything which is solved is over and done with. The coming revolution is the only religion I pass on to you, and it’s a religion without a paradise on the other shore. But do not remain on this shore. Better to perish.” - Herzen
“Oh Michael…I want her back so that I can take her for granted again and be busy and full of sap putting idiots in their place. I’m surrounded by them.” -Herzen
“You always were.” -Bakunin
“To be freedom, freedom must be freedom for all- for the equality of each!” -Bakunin
“Stop…stop…” -Herzen
“It’s within our grasp, Herzen, if we can only remove the fetters from humanity.” -Bakunin
“I think you’re saying we’d all be free if humanity were given its liberty.” -Herzen
“Yes!” -Bakunin
“I was afraid of that.” -Herzen
“Left to themselves, people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they’d create a completely new kind of society if only people weren’t so blind, stupid and selfish.” -Bakunin
“Is that the same people or different people?” -Herzen
“The same people.” -Bakunin
“I don’t see how the well-being of society is going to be achieved if everybody is sacrificing themselves and nobody’s enjoying themselves.” -Herzen
“Are we ridding the people of their yoke so that they can live under a dictatorship of the intellectuals?” -Herzen
“To value what is relative to your circumstances, and let others value what’s relative to theirs- you agree with me. That’s why despite everything we’re on the same side.” -Turgenev
“But I fought my way here with loss of blood, because it matters to me and you’re in my ditch, reposing with your hat over your face, because nothing matters to you very much- which is why despite everything we’ll never be on the same side.” -Herzen
“But history has no culmination! There is always as much in front as behind. There is no libretto. History knocks at a thousand gates at every moment, and the gatekeeper is chance. We shout into the mist for this one or that one to be opened for us, but through every gate there are a thousand more. We need wit and courage to make our way while our way is making us. But that is our dignity as human beings, and we rob ourselves if we pardon us by the absolution of historical necessity. What kind of beast is it, this Ginger Cat with its insatiable appetite for human sacrifice? This Moloch who promises that everything will be beautiful after we’re dead? A distant end is not an end but a trap. The end we work for must be closer, the labourer’s wage, the pleasure in the work done, the summer lightning of personal happiness…” -Herzen
