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A history of young Russia
431
Book Reviews
The final chapter of the book is devoted to tracing back the indeterminacy of the international legal discourse and the unachievable objectivity of law to the fundamental dilemma of Western metaphysics concerning the relationship between ideas and facts, the lack of a solid epistemological basis. Kosenniemi thinks that the threat of legal nihilism stemming from the deconstruction of prevailing discourse can be overcome by reference to a critical programme which would be based on accepting the conflictual character of social life, extending the range of permissible arguments to economic interests, social progress and in general to elements of material justice. On the basis of an ethic of responsibility, in the framework of a conversant culture, lawyers could actually attempt to solve normative problems with the help ofpractical arrangements, that are always open to revision and which are reflecting ‘what is probably most human in us: our capacity to transgress the boundaries of any existing consciousness, any framework of ideas or institutions which are usually taken as given and immutable’ (p. 489). Boldizsar
Nagy
ELTE University, Hungary
A History of Young Russia, Michael Gershenzon, trans. and ed. James P. Scanlan (Charles Schlacks Jr, Irvine, California, 1986) xxxi + 283 pp., $29.50 P.B. James Scanlan deserves high praise for his superb translation and masterful editing of the second edition (Moscow, 1923) of this study of the Russian intelligentsia during the iron rule of Nicholas I (1825-55), the first of Gershenzon’s major historical works to be translated into English. (Edna Liefs poetry translations also enrich the text.) Very commendable too, is Scanlan’s ‘Introduction’ which treats Gershenzon as historian and philosopher, although I feel it errs on some points. Mikhail Osipovich Gershenzon (1869-1925) was an outstanding Russian-Jewish historian, literary critic, translator, and essayist, probably best known for having organised the collection Vekhi (Signposts) (1909), a critique of the radical intelligentsia tradition which even today stirs controversy among those concerned with Russia’s past and future. Whether Gershenzon is ‘Russia’s greatest unread writer’ (vii), however, is debatable. True, his writings were generally highly regarded by his contemporaries, but many were also severely criticised. His notorious Pushkin’s Wisdom (Moscow, 1917), was a particularly egregious example of flawed and tendentious scholarship. Young Russia (first published in 1908) is comprised of six essays (chiefly psychological portraits of M.F. Orlov, V.S. Pecherin, N.V. Stankevich, T.N. Granovskii, I.P. Galakhov, and N.P. Ogarev). It was originally intended as part of a two-volume ‘history of Russian self-consciousness’ in the 1830s and ‘4Os, i.e., of that intellectual movement considered by Gershenzon to have been ‘the cradle of Russian idealism’ (xi) and named ‘Young Russia’ by him. Studies of Chaadaev and Herzen were to have been included in it but, as it turned out, the Chaadaev biography was published separately, also in 1908. The study of the Decembrist Orlov, which deals with the Alexandrine period, was intended by Gershenzon as introductory, while the lengthy biography of Pecherin, who left Russia forever in 1836 and would become a Catholic priest in Ireland, represents the transitional era that led to the full blossoming of ‘Young Russia’. In his author’s ‘Foreword’, Gershenzon berated previous intellectual ‘histories’ of modern Russia, such as the accounts of Pypin, Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, IvanovRazumnik, et al., for sundry conceptual and methodological shortcomings. Hissummary
432
Book Reviews
critique was in fact apt. But Gershenzon’s claim that his Young Russia was a coherent history of an entire intellectual movement, of the Russian Sturm undDrang, and not just an arbitrary assemblage of biographies, has been almost universally rejected. Typical was the observation by M. Ol’minskii, one of the reviewers in 1908: ‘Despite all the author’s assurances, one nonetheless gets the impression that in his choice of persons for characterisation Mr Gershenzon was guided not by a conception of the entirety of the picture, but by the presence in his possession of unpublished or little known historicoliterary materials’. Specifically, many chided Gershenzon for omitting, among others, Belinskii from his account. In short, the highly subjective approach and methodology employed in Young Russia elicit valid criticism, as do the earlier, would-be ‘histories’. And, to be sure, Scanlan takes sufficient note of Gershenzon’s defects as a historian as manifested in Young Russia. Interestingly, P.S. Kogan, the author of the unsigned preface to the second edition (published by Gosizdat, i.e. at state expense) was more favorably disposed toward Young Russia than were most, mainly non-Marxist reviewers in 1908. Like Plekhanov before him, Kogan paid tribute to the wealth of new data Gershenzon had brought to light. ‘The facts are compelling, the splendid literary form is absorbing, the psychological analysis. is subtle, at times penetrating’. (Believing in the integrity of any given text, my only significant nit-pick with this translated edition, therefore, is its omission of Kogan’s preface, apparently on the grounds that it is Marxist, although Scanlan cites it as evidence of the book’s many merits. Puzzling too, is Scanlan’s obvious error in stating that this second edition of Young Russia was Gershenzon’s last work to be published in the Soviet Union when on the very same page (!) he notes that an anthology of Gershenzon’s articles on Pushkin appeared in Moscow in 1926.) One of Gershenzon’s main conclusions in Young Russia is that prior to the l83Os, in Russia ‘inwardly no one sought, no one strove, no one ached with questions of world cognition’ and that ‘not once in the.. eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth centuries do we encounter in our leading social figures an urgent moral quest or a tragedy of spirit’. This is, I submit, palpable nonsense, belied, to begin with, by the lives of Novikov and Radishchev-a point left unmentioned by Scanlan. More importantly, Scanlan sometimes misinterprets, or at least simplifies, some of Gershenzon’s basic ideas. E.g., he asserts that Gershenzon felt that the intelligentsia should turn away from its preoccupation with social reform and revolution and embrace individual moral and spiritual development, ‘set inner growth above outer change’. (x) More accurately, Gershenzon believed that effective, enduring outer change and inner growth were inextricably tied together, the latter being a precondition for the former. (And with respect to tsarist Russia, Gershenzon supported thorough reform and in the end probably radical revolution, as Scanlan admits.) Furthermore, Scanlan stresses that, for Gershenzon, the idealists of the ’30s and ’40s were historically very relevant to those years, after 1905, when the intelligentsia was once again apparently re-evaluating its former obsession with politics and moving toward greater spirituality. This is certainly true, but in Young Russia Gershenzon emphasised as well the relevance of that earlier period for the succeeding era of the Great Reforms, how it helped prepare the way for that active and progressive period-a point also neglected by Scanlan. And with respect to Gershenzon as literary critic, Scanlan portrays him as a ‘strong opponent of the “civic” or social utilitarian school’, as an admirer of formalism and aestheticism. (xi) Here Scanlan is off track. While keen on modernism Gershenzon actually was full square in the ‘civic’ tradition and one of its staunchest practitioners, as, e.g. his Pushkin’s Wisdom makes abundantly clear. Simply to quote from Young Russia: ‘Art has no other subject than world harmony and the aspiration toward it’. (169) In sum, for Gershenzon art was theurgy and the authentic artist a theurgist. Like Belinskii, the founder of the ‘civic’ school, Gershenzon felt that literature could most effectively
Book Reviews
433
advance morally good ideas only when it was artfully composed, when it was technically proficient. Mastery of form, then, was but a means to an end-the moving of the reader, making him receptive to the positive messages being offered. ‘Art for art’s sake’ was anathema to Gershenzon. Typical is this comment of his: ‘The ethical element is the soul of art; the entire past of Russian belles-lettres is a guarantee that in future too, it will follow the path of Gogol and Tolstoi, and not that [formalism] of Auslender and [M.A.] Kuzmin’.’ The particular and special message, cherished and freely offered by Gershenzon, was his concept of ‘cosmic consciousness’, a spiritual awareness of one’s own link to the cosmos, which he expounded in Young Russia most plainly when dealing with Stankevich (174-6)-as well as in many of his other publications. This aufondirrational and mystical concept was, moreover, unjustifiedly ascribed by Gershenzon to some of his historical subjects who thus became vehicles for the exposition of his own ideas. This tendency, as well as his overt moralising and philosophising generally, marred much of Gershenzon’s historical work, as Scanlan correctly observes. Also to his credit, Scanlan provides a lucid general outline of Gershenzon’s philosophical outlook, although he could have placed it in some larger context, related it to the various schools of thought attracting interest in early twentieth-century Russia, such as neo-Platonism, pantheism, theosophy, anthroposophy and the like. Also, while heartily agreeing with Scanlan that Gershenzon’s principal postulate of ‘cosmic consciousness’ is indeed irrational and mystical, interestingly enough Gershenzon sought scientific ‘proof for it, primarily in the then nascent field of clinical psychology, just as William James was attempting to demonstrate a scientific basis for religious experience, a point overlooked by Scanlan who, all the same, is well aware of the many contradictions, inconsistencies and ambiguities in Gershenzon’s thought. Still, it needs to be boldly stated that Gershenzon was by no means an obscurantist. Finally, one relatively small point. Scanlan asserts that Gershenzon sought to instill in the reader an appreciation of Russia’s intellectual heritage, and that this was an important educative aim of his. (xiv) To be sure, by definition, historians study and write about the past. Yet Gershenzon was no antiquarian, although he could appear as such (as, e.g. in Griboedov’s Moscow [I9141 a beautifully etched, sympathetic evocation of pre-Reform gentry life, and one of his best works). Indeed, once encountering the jibe that he was the ‘last Slavophile’, Gershenzon testily replied that he couldn’t be a Slavophile since he was a Jew! No more than with respect to art was Gershenzon interested in history for its own sake. Nor was he a conservative. He did not reverence the past, Russia’s heritage as such, but rather was eager to discover in it evidence for his own beliefs, especially those fundamental ones concerning man and his place in the universe. Still, Gershenzon never became a historical cynic who would disown the past tout court, as charged by Florovsky. Scanlan rightly emphasises that Gershenzon the historian cannot really be separated from Gershenzon the philosopher. For better and for worse, Gershenzon’s work is highly subjective, and as well, in my view at least, almost invariably uplifting morally and spiritually-wherein lies its primary value for posterity. Arthur University of Calgary, Canada
NOTES 1. Vestnik Evropy (1908), no. 7, pp. 340-42.
A. Levin
Book Reviews
The final chapter of the book is devoted to tracing back the indeterminacy of the international legal discourse and the unachievable objectivity of law to the fundamental dilemma of Western metaphysics concerning the relationship between ideas and facts, the lack of a solid epistemological basis. Kosenniemi thinks that the threat of legal nihilism stemming from the deconstruction of prevailing discourse can be overcome by reference to a critical programme which would be based on accepting the conflictual character of social life, extending the range of permissible arguments to economic interests, social progress and in general to elements of material justice. On the basis of an ethic of responsibility, in the framework of a conversant culture, lawyers could actually attempt to solve normative problems with the help ofpractical arrangements, that are always open to revision and which are reflecting ‘what is probably most human in us: our capacity to transgress the boundaries of any existing consciousness, any framework of ideas or institutions which are usually taken as given and immutable’ (p. 489). Boldizsar
Nagy
ELTE University, Hungary
A History of Young Russia, Michael Gershenzon, trans. and ed. James P. Scanlan (Charles Schlacks Jr, Irvine, California, 1986) xxxi + 283 pp., $29.50 P.B. James Scanlan deserves high praise for his superb translation and masterful editing of the second edition (Moscow, 1923) of this study of the Russian intelligentsia during the iron rule of Nicholas I (1825-55), the first of Gershenzon’s major historical works to be translated into English. (Edna Liefs poetry translations also enrich the text.) Very commendable too, is Scanlan’s ‘Introduction’ which treats Gershenzon as historian and philosopher, although I feel it errs on some points. Mikhail Osipovich Gershenzon (1869-1925) was an outstanding Russian-Jewish historian, literary critic, translator, and essayist, probably best known for having organised the collection Vekhi (Signposts) (1909), a critique of the radical intelligentsia tradition which even today stirs controversy among those concerned with Russia’s past and future. Whether Gershenzon is ‘Russia’s greatest unread writer’ (vii), however, is debatable. True, his writings were generally highly regarded by his contemporaries, but many were also severely criticised. His notorious Pushkin’s Wisdom (Moscow, 1917), was a particularly egregious example of flawed and tendentious scholarship. Young Russia (first published in 1908) is comprised of six essays (chiefly psychological portraits of M.F. Orlov, V.S. Pecherin, N.V. Stankevich, T.N. Granovskii, I.P. Galakhov, and N.P. Ogarev). It was originally intended as part of a two-volume ‘history of Russian self-consciousness’ in the 1830s and ‘4Os, i.e., of that intellectual movement considered by Gershenzon to have been ‘the cradle of Russian idealism’ (xi) and named ‘Young Russia’ by him. Studies of Chaadaev and Herzen were to have been included in it but, as it turned out, the Chaadaev biography was published separately, also in 1908. The study of the Decembrist Orlov, which deals with the Alexandrine period, was intended by Gershenzon as introductory, while the lengthy biography of Pecherin, who left Russia forever in 1836 and would become a Catholic priest in Ireland, represents the transitional era that led to the full blossoming of ‘Young Russia’. In his author’s ‘Foreword’, Gershenzon berated previous intellectual ‘histories’ of modern Russia, such as the accounts of Pypin, Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, IvanovRazumnik, et al., for sundry conceptual and methodological shortcomings. Hissummary
432
Book Reviews
critique was in fact apt. But Gershenzon’s claim that his Young Russia was a coherent history of an entire intellectual movement, of the Russian Sturm undDrang, and not just an arbitrary assemblage of biographies, has been almost universally rejected. Typical was the observation by M. Ol’minskii, one of the reviewers in 1908: ‘Despite all the author’s assurances, one nonetheless gets the impression that in his choice of persons for characterisation Mr Gershenzon was guided not by a conception of the entirety of the picture, but by the presence in his possession of unpublished or little known historicoliterary materials’. Specifically, many chided Gershenzon for omitting, among others, Belinskii from his account. In short, the highly subjective approach and methodology employed in Young Russia elicit valid criticism, as do the earlier, would-be ‘histories’. And, to be sure, Scanlan takes sufficient note of Gershenzon’s defects as a historian as manifested in Young Russia. Interestingly, P.S. Kogan, the author of the unsigned preface to the second edition (published by Gosizdat, i.e. at state expense) was more favorably disposed toward Young Russia than were most, mainly non-Marxist reviewers in 1908. Like Plekhanov before him, Kogan paid tribute to the wealth of new data Gershenzon had brought to light. ‘The facts are compelling, the splendid literary form is absorbing, the psychological analysis. is subtle, at times penetrating’. (Believing in the integrity of any given text, my only significant nit-pick with this translated edition, therefore, is its omission of Kogan’s preface, apparently on the grounds that it is Marxist, although Scanlan cites it as evidence of the book’s many merits. Puzzling too, is Scanlan’s obvious error in stating that this second edition of Young Russia was Gershenzon’s last work to be published in the Soviet Union when on the very same page (!) he notes that an anthology of Gershenzon’s articles on Pushkin appeared in Moscow in 1926.) One of Gershenzon’s main conclusions in Young Russia is that prior to the l83Os, in Russia ‘inwardly no one sought, no one strove, no one ached with questions of world cognition’ and that ‘not once in the.. eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth centuries do we encounter in our leading social figures an urgent moral quest or a tragedy of spirit’. This is, I submit, palpable nonsense, belied, to begin with, by the lives of Novikov and Radishchev-a point left unmentioned by Scanlan. More importantly, Scanlan sometimes misinterprets, or at least simplifies, some of Gershenzon’s basic ideas. E.g., he asserts that Gershenzon felt that the intelligentsia should turn away from its preoccupation with social reform and revolution and embrace individual moral and spiritual development, ‘set inner growth above outer change’. (x) More accurately, Gershenzon believed that effective, enduring outer change and inner growth were inextricably tied together, the latter being a precondition for the former. (And with respect to tsarist Russia, Gershenzon supported thorough reform and in the end probably radical revolution, as Scanlan admits.) Furthermore, Scanlan stresses that, for Gershenzon, the idealists of the ’30s and ’40s were historically very relevant to those years, after 1905, when the intelligentsia was once again apparently re-evaluating its former obsession with politics and moving toward greater spirituality. This is certainly true, but in Young Russia Gershenzon emphasised as well the relevance of that earlier period for the succeeding era of the Great Reforms, how it helped prepare the way for that active and progressive period-a point also neglected by Scanlan. And with respect to Gershenzon as literary critic, Scanlan portrays him as a ‘strong opponent of the “civic” or social utilitarian school’, as an admirer of formalism and aestheticism. (xi) Here Scanlan is off track. While keen on modernism Gershenzon actually was full square in the ‘civic’ tradition and one of its staunchest practitioners, as, e.g. his Pushkin’s Wisdom makes abundantly clear. Simply to quote from Young Russia: ‘Art has no other subject than world harmony and the aspiration toward it’. (169) In sum, for Gershenzon art was theurgy and the authentic artist a theurgist. Like Belinskii, the founder of the ‘civic’ school, Gershenzon felt that literature could most effectively
Book Reviews
433
advance morally good ideas only when it was artfully composed, when it was technically proficient. Mastery of form, then, was but a means to an end-the moving of the reader, making him receptive to the positive messages being offered. ‘Art for art’s sake’ was anathema to Gershenzon. Typical is this comment of his: ‘The ethical element is the soul of art; the entire past of Russian belles-lettres is a guarantee that in future too, it will follow the path of Gogol and Tolstoi, and not that [formalism] of Auslender and [M.A.] Kuzmin’.’ The particular and special message, cherished and freely offered by Gershenzon, was his concept of ‘cosmic consciousness’, a spiritual awareness of one’s own link to the cosmos, which he expounded in Young Russia most plainly when dealing with Stankevich (174-6)-as well as in many of his other publications. This aufondirrational and mystical concept was, moreover, unjustifiedly ascribed by Gershenzon to some of his historical subjects who thus became vehicles for the exposition of his own ideas. This tendency, as well as his overt moralising and philosophising generally, marred much of Gershenzon’s historical work, as Scanlan correctly observes. Also to his credit, Scanlan provides a lucid general outline of Gershenzon’s philosophical outlook, although he could have placed it in some larger context, related it to the various schools of thought attracting interest in early twentieth-century Russia, such as neo-Platonism, pantheism, theosophy, anthroposophy and the like. Also, while heartily agreeing with Scanlan that Gershenzon’s principal postulate of ‘cosmic consciousness’ is indeed irrational and mystical, interestingly enough Gershenzon sought scientific ‘proof for it, primarily in the then nascent field of clinical psychology, just as William James was attempting to demonstrate a scientific basis for religious experience, a point overlooked by Scanlan who, all the same, is well aware of the many contradictions, inconsistencies and ambiguities in Gershenzon’s thought. Still, it needs to be boldly stated that Gershenzon was by no means an obscurantist. Finally, one relatively small point. Scanlan asserts that Gershenzon sought to instill in the reader an appreciation of Russia’s intellectual heritage, and that this was an important educative aim of his. (xiv) To be sure, by definition, historians study and write about the past. Yet Gershenzon was no antiquarian, although he could appear as such (as, e.g. in Griboedov’s Moscow [I9141 a beautifully etched, sympathetic evocation of pre-Reform gentry life, and one of his best works). Indeed, once encountering the jibe that he was the ‘last Slavophile’, Gershenzon testily replied that he couldn’t be a Slavophile since he was a Jew! No more than with respect to art was Gershenzon interested in history for its own sake. Nor was he a conservative. He did not reverence the past, Russia’s heritage as such, but rather was eager to discover in it evidence for his own beliefs, especially those fundamental ones concerning man and his place in the universe. Still, Gershenzon never became a historical cynic who would disown the past tout court, as charged by Florovsky. Scanlan rightly emphasises that Gershenzon the historian cannot really be separated from Gershenzon the philosopher. For better and for worse, Gershenzon’s work is highly subjective, and as well, in my view at least, almost invariably uplifting morally and spiritually-wherein lies its primary value for posterity. Arthur University of Calgary, Canada
NOTES 1. Vestnik Evropy (1908), no. 7, pp. 340-42.
A. Levin