Russia and Europe
Russia and Europe: Gregor Alexinsky. 1917. (T. Fisher Unwin.) 10s. 6d. net.
Russland und Europa. Studien über die Geistigen Strömungen in Russland. 2 vols. 1913. (Jena: Diederichs). 28 mk.
“Russia is what Europe was.” In these words Professor Masaryk sums up, in his monumental work on Russian philosophy and political thought, the truth which lies at the root of modern Russian history. It has sometimes been claimed that Moscow, the third Rome, is through Byzantium the true heir of Hellenism, and the bulwark of Christianity in its pristine form against the corruptions of the “rotten” West. In reality that strange blend of theocracy and reaction which has come to be known as “Tsardom” can only lay claim to such ancestry as a debased palimpsest can claim to have preserved the priceless text which it has obscured for so many centuries. It is to the vital and transforming genius of Italy that we owe the revival of Hellenic ideas, not to the stagnation of Orthodox Monasticism.
To the West, Russia is a perpetual source of mystery and of fascination, and this is above all because we see in her development a tremendous conflict between opposing ideas—in the words of Soloviev, between “two ideals which embrace the entire economy of the human species.” The process which first became noticeable under Peter the Great has reached its crisis to-day, and upon its outcome depends the fate not merely of Russia herself, but of the Western world as well. It is thus little short of a disaster that Russian thought and Russian political philosophy should still remain a closed book to English readers, and that while the novels of Tolstoi and Dostojevski have been read by thousands, their true moral and political significance should have remained incomprehensible because the milieu which produced them and made them a necessity is absolutely unknown. The two rival currents in Russian thought are represented by the “Slavophils” and the “Westerners,” but the lines of division between them have for the most part been false and arbitrary, and Dostojevski himself described their conflict as “merely the result of a gigantic misunderstanding.” In all the greatest Russians there has been a trait of universality, and it is perhaps something of an accident that Tolstoi should have been credited with a monopoly of such ideas. Pushkin, the most national of Russian poets, was always a convinced Westerner, and Mr. Alexinsky brings overwhelming proof of the influence exercised by western ideas upon almost every Russian writer and political thinker of the last two centuries. Perhaps the most extraordinary feature in the whole conflict of ideas is the fact that the strongest opposition to western ideas came from elements which were themselves alien in origin. Absolutist and reactionary ideas in Russia were positively strengthened by the so-called process of Europeanization—and this not merely under Elizabeth and Catherine, but later under Nicholas I. and his successors. The extremists who in their frenzied devotion to Orthodoxy
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