Popular Science Monthly - Oct, Nov, Dec, 1915 — Volume 86 by Anonymous
page 75 of 485 (15%)
page 75 of 485 (15%)
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Herzen, too, an able pamphleteer in revolutionary things,
preached something similar, crying from his pulpit at home or in exile, that Russia would solve all her problems and lead the human race by the simplicity of the Slavophile ideal. His early and rabid westernism was greatly tempered on contact with the west. Disillusion and disgust overcame him. The mercantilism of the bourgeoisie there drove him into Aksakoff's fold, and he too thereafter found faith alone in the "regenerative power of Russia," and her system of the mir, the central sun of the Slavophilic state, the village commune, self-governing and self-contained. And then from that, this was to ensue: the whole world made of village communes as in Russia, perhaps even their log cabins too, and fresh mud to go with them on their walls! But this did not deter the vision of these evangelists. The commune was to be indefinitely extended; national and international ones were to be organized, all self- governing, and then would follow as the night the day, universal peace wherever these communes were found. This is the Utopia Russia has given to the world to stand beside Plato's, or Sir Thomas More's or Morris's or Bellamy's. This was the dream of pacific Pan-Slavism. Dostoievsky himself is of it, and is luminous not with a mere facet flash of its philosophy but with the whole orb of it. To him the Russians "are more than human, they are pan-human." Count Tolstoi too must be listed with these preachers. He, making his own shoes and cutting his own and the peasants' grain, lived it, showing how he thought the world's work ought |
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