Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psychology and Politics of Utopianism 0198272448, 9780198272441

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MIKHAIL BAKUNIN

MIKHAIL BAKUNIN A Study in the Psychology and Politics o f Utopianism

by A ILEEN KELLY

CLARENDO N P R E S S • O X FO RD 1982

Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0X 2 6DP London Glasgow New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associates in Beirut Berlin Ibadan Mexico City Nicosia Published in the United States by Oxford University Press, New York © Aileen Kelly 1982

All rights reserved. No part o f this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission o f Oxford University Press British Library Cataloguing in PublicatiefäBbt1 Kelly, Aileen Mikhail Bakunin. 1. Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovici 2. Utopias I. Title 32V.07 HX806 ISBN 0-19-827244-8 Library o f Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Kelly, Aileen. Mikhail Bakunin: a study in the psychology and politics o f Utopianism. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich, 1814-1876. I. Title. HX915.B3K38 335,.83,0924 [B] 82-6287 ISBN 0-19-827244-8 AACR2

Typeset by Hope Services, Abingdon, Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Oxford by Eric Buckley Printer to the University

To my mother, Mary Kelly

Contents Introduction

1

Chapter I

The Quest for Wholeness

5

Chapter II

The Urge, to Destroy

Chapter III

Anarchism

151

Chapter IV

Absolute Liberty

184

Chapter V

Absolute Dictatorship

227

Chapter VI

No Other Solution: Bakunin and Nechaev

76

257

Conclusion

289

Notes

295

Index

316

Introduction h i s battle against the state and authority in all its forms Bakunin has come to be regarded as one of the greatest champions of the individual in the history of political thought, the enemy of all élites which suppress or stunt men’s faculties by enforcing conformity to narrow systems and ideologies. Few thinkers have been so uncompromising and extreme as Bakunin in their demand for the liberation of men from the bonds and constraints imposed on them by political, religious and philosophical systems. The climax of his defence of liberty was his celebrated confrontation with Marx and his followers : this polemic, waged with the maximum of drama and publicity on the stage of the First International, transformed anarchism from an obscure movement on the socialist fringe into a revolutionary creed which was for a short time a rival to Marxism for control of the international workers’ movement and which continues to offer a libertarian alternative to it. It is above all this last achievement which has led Bakunin to be seen, in the words of £. H. Carr, as ‘one of the completest embodiments in history of the spirit of liberty’.1 But there is a second image of Bakunin, seemingly incom­ patible with the above, yet firmly grounded in historical fact: Bakunin the founder of a network of secret societies, planned as the nucleus of a dictatorship; Bakunin the close confederate of the most cynical and despotic revolutionary of his time— Sergei Nechaev. The difficulty of reconciling these two images has frustrated attempts to define Bakunin’s place in the' modem revolutionary tradition. Many anarchists, among them some historians, have dismissed the evidence of authori­ tarianism in Bakunin’s thinking as the malicious invention of his political enemies. Scholars with a less cavalier attitude to the facts have resorted to psychological explanations of the combination of anarchist and Jacobin strands in his thought.

Through

2

Introduction

The Soviet historians Yu. Steklov and V. Polonsky attribute it to an unresolved conflict between the utopian and the realist in him, arguing that his shrewd revolutionary pragma­ tism made him seek to control and hasten the movement towards revolution through methods which were at odds with his ultimate ideals; while E. H. Carr ascribes the internal contradictions in his thought to the fact that the urge to dominate was as strong in him as the urge to rebel. Bakunin’s apparent unconcern about these contradictions is usually explained by reference to his notorious contempt for intellec­ tuals and their systems. He emerges from Carr’s brilliant biography as a colourful and turbulent eccentric whose career was a bizarre and isolated episode in the revolutionary move­ ment of his time, a man who cannot be fitted into any tradition, whose influence derived not from the force of his ideas, but from ‘that elusive gift called personality’2, in particular from the power of his will and the charm of his tongue. Others have accorded him a significant place in the radical tradition—not as a theorist, but as the enemy of theory, ‘an example of anarchist fervour in action’3, the embodiment of the unreflecting passion for destruction which he proclaimed to be the sole creative force in the contemporary world. But this is not how Bakunin was seen by those who could claim to have known him best—contemporaries such as Aleksandr Herzen and Ivan Turgenev who like him had spent their youth in the philosophical circles of Moscow, engaged in highly abstract discussions on the meaning and purpose of life. To them Bakunin remained all his life the antithesis of a man of action: he was the epitome of the introspective intellectual à la russe —the superfluous man. In their view his cult of spontaneous destruction was not evidence of an unreflective nature: on the contrary, it was an intellectual construction of extreme abstraction. They believed that his fundamental defects as a revolutionary stemmed from excessive rather than insufficient reflection, and accused him of attempting to force reality into a preconceived mould founded not on observation of the external world, but on his own drives and needs, which he had universalized with the aid of the limitless subjectivism of Idealist philosophy.

Introduction

3

Subsequent writing on Bakunin has tended to ignore this interpretation, taking at face value, it seems, Bakunin’s oftenrepeated declaration that after leaving Russia as a young man he had put his introspective past behind him and was bom again as a man of ipstinct and action. The Idealist fantasies of his youth are generally held to have left few traces other than a romantic flavour in his style and a tendency to assume nobility of motive in those who did not possess it. But detailed analysis of these fantasies, as in the first two chapters of this book, leads to a different conclusion: that it was the categories in which they accustomed Bakunin to see reality that determined his subsequent approach to historical events and social processes; that, as Herzen and Turgenev believed, the contradictions in his anarchism stemmed not from a contempt for theoretical consistency, but from excessive attachment to it—he strove with undeviating persistence to interpret and order complex historical events according to the demands of a cmde dialectic to which he was faithful all his life. Its goal was the ancient ideal of wholeness, that eschatological vision of a unified human community which is rooted in man’s sense of an inner split and his nostalgia for a mythical Golden Age of primitive harmony. Bakunin’s conception of the path to its attainment, like Marx’s vision of progress towards the ideal of the unified man, owed much to a radical version of Hegel’s Idealism, but while the millenarian yearning underlying Marx’s vision is concealed beneath impressive layers of historical and economic analysis, in Bakunin’s anarchism it was a personal obsession expressed with a candid and breathless impatience. As an intellectual construction, Bakunin’s political ideology has little merit: its fascination lies in what it reveals of the utopian psychology. Rejection of the possibility of ultimate compromise between their ideal and an imperfect world led both Marx and Bakunin to reconcile themselves with the concept of dictatorship as an essential means to the end of liberty; in Bakunin’s case, the progression from a demand for absolute liberty to a justification of dictatorship can be charted as a psychological as well as a logical process. The way in which he transformed an Idealist recipe for the attainment of personal wholeness into a formula for world revolution provides a rich source of

4

Introduction

illumination on one of the most complex and obscure areas of the sociology of knowledge: the manner in which certain mechanisms of the mind and the emotions generate extreme ideologies, logically flawed, but psychologically coherent and compelling. The ideal of total freedom realized through purifying and regenerating destruction holds a peculiar attraction for intellectuals alienated from static and authoritarian societies, who seek sublimation for their frustrated energies in millenarian dreams of total self-realization, both individual and national. Generated by uncompromising hostility to existing reality, these dreams presuppose the total destruction of that reality. In the polarized vision of the alienated, the elimination of present evils will eo ipso leave the field clear for the advent of the Golden Age, in which all the painful contradictions of present experience will be resolved. As is well known, such a polarized vision of reality dominated the earliest Populist stages of Russian socialism, whose founder, Aleksandr Herzen, had formulated an aristocratic and utopian conception of personal harmony and self-fulfilment as its goal. Bakunin had been formed by the predicament of his and Herzen’s generation of alienated, superfluous men, and for all his denial of his Russian past, he proved to be much more a prisoner of that predicament than the other luminaries of his generation. If the ideology of Herzen and most of the intellectuals who followed him in the pre-revolutionary Russian socialist tradition was focussed on a utopia which was the product of their own, rather than the people’s yearnings and ideals, they nevertheless sought in varying degrees to adapt it to social and historical realities, and to the aspirations of the masses where they perceived a conflict between these and their own. Bakunin rejected any such compromise, and in this he represents an extreme version of a revolutionary type, one which is perhaps more immediately recognizable in our time than it was in his. The aim of this study is to offer a new interpretation of his thought: it will be argued that it illus­ trates with particular sharpness the despotic implications of a cult of spontaneity and personal wholeness whereby intro­ verted, divided and unfulfilled personalities seek (whether consciously or not) to utilize mass movements as vehicles for the realization of their frustrated aspirations.

CHAPTER 1

The Quest for Wholeness To understand and love reality—that is the whole destiny of man. ' Letter from Bakunin to his sisters, March 1838

T he r o o t s of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia1 reach back over two centuries, to the reign of Peter the Great. The modernization of the government and the army entailed by his reforms required the creation of an élite educated along Western lines. This ‘service nobility’ was separated by a gulf from the mass of the people, who remained sunk in a primitive, semi-feudal existence. A second, unforeseen, conse­ quence of the nobility’s cultural westernization was its estrangement from the autocracy, a process which gathered momentum after an edict of 1762 relieved the gentry from the obligatory state service which had hitherto been its raison d'être. By the end of the eighteenth century the more intelli­ gent and morally sensitive members of the gentry were finding it hopelessly difficult to reconcile the values which they had assimilated from the European Enlightenment with life under a primitive despotism. Their malaise intensified after the victory over Napoleon in 1812: the resulting upsurge of national consciousness and national pride produced among the gentry a new awareness of a bond with the people, an interest in its customs and a sense of responsibility for its miserable condition. In 1812 and the campaigns that followed, Russians in the mass were brought into contact with Western Europeans for the first time in modem history. Among the educated this led to a fondness for travel and study abroad, a humiliating awareness of their country’s political and cultural backwardness, a questioning of national institutions, and a growing demand for the personal rights and dignity enjoyed

6

The Quest fo r Wholeness

by their Western counterparts, factors which contributed to the Decembrist rising of 1825. But the suppression of the revolt and the ensuing reaction put an end to any expectations of reform for decades. The new tsar, Nicolas I, installed a brutally repressive regime. In his administration the unreliable gentry were replaced as far as possible by professional bureau­ crats and a new secret police was established to track down and eliminate subversive ideas. These measures greatly in­ creased the sense of estrangement of the more talented mem­ bers of the gentry. Of the two careers open to them the army had as little attraction under the new regime as the bureau­ cracy, and many retired early to their estates and a life of idleness, mitigated for some by an ineffective dabbling in agricultural reform; but the young began increasingly to enter the universities, especially those of Moscow and St. Petersburg, where the more gifted and idealistic found a refuge from the barbarous reality around them in the world of ideas. It soon became their all-absorbing passion. The questions to which this generation addressed them­ selves were far more fundamental than those that had pre­ occupied their fathers. The Decembrists’ vision of the world was rooted in the optimistic rationalism of the Enlightenment (even though the writers and poets among them were strongly influenced by the romantic movement). Believing that there was a general pattern of political evolution, applicable to all peoples, they held that Russia was destined to follow the most advanced countries of the West to some form of consti­ tutional system, and they were confident that, as the most enlightened group in Russia, the gentry would play the leading role in this process. But the catastrophe of 1825 removed all grounds for optimism on this account; instead, the historical destiny of Russia and the question of the national identity of its gentry, bearers of an alien culture, became matters for anxious introspection. The rationalist tradition in which the Decembrists’ generation had been educated was a wholly unsuitable tool to cope with these vast metaphysical problems. It was a factor of the first importance for the subsequent development of Russian thought that the acute disorientation experienced by thinking Russians after 1825 coincided with the penetration of German Idealist philosophy into Russia.

The Quest fo r Wholeness

7

Centred on the problem of the self and its relation to objective reality, it offered Russia’s intellectual élite a suitable concep­ tual framework for the formulation of its predicament, and also the promise of an escape from it. r

The generation which reached adulthood in the early 1830s was prepared for Idealist philosophy by an adolescence nourished on sentimentalist and romantic literature. The birth of Russian romanticism is sometimes traced to the appearance in 1821 o f Pushkin’s first Byronic verse tale The Prisoner o f the Caucasus: but over the preceding two decades Russian educated society had become acquainted with the writings of Rousseau, Schiller, Herder, and other precursors of the romantic movement and, largely through the trans­ lations of V. A. Zhukovsky, with the best of English and German romantic poetry. By 1820 Ossianism, Sturm und Drang, fantasy and the Gothic were, as one critic has remarked, ‘firmly integrated* into Russian culture.2 The influence of romanticism cannot be understood with­ out reference to the social role of literature in nineteenthcentury Russia. In the first two decades of the century factors such as the expansion of the universities and the development of a substantial reading public well acquainted with European literature led to a considerable increase in the number of professional writers and critics. In the absence of political parties or any other public platform for the dis­ cussion of ideas and issues, belles-lettres came to play a unique role in forming and expressing the moral and social consciousness of educated Russians. As the critic Vissarion Belinsky wrote in his famous Letter to Gogol, under Nicolas the ‘tresh forces’ in Russian society could find only one outlet—literature. ‘Only in literature, in spite of our Tartar censorship, is there still life and forward movement.’3 In the first two decades of the century the principal vehicle of this forward movement was romanticism with its dynamic, organicist conception of reality, its revolt against the eighteenth century’s vision of the world as static and knowable through reason, its emphasis on individual qualities of feeling, imagination, inspiration, and creativity. All these aspects of romanticism provided educated Russians with a

8

The Quest fo r Wholeness

new source of ideas and a conceptual framework for the formulation of what had become a dominant concern: the problem of their national and individual identity. The question of national identity—the relation of Russia’s traditional culture and values to those which she had imported from the West—began to be explored in the eighteenth century by writers such as Shcherbatov, Fonvizin and Radishchev, but it was posed with a new urgency after the national experience of 1812. Romanticism, with its stress on the indi­ vidual character of peoples, and the idea of national originality as developed by Herder, Fichte and the Schlegel brothers, gave the Russian cultured élite a new basis for national pride and self-respect. The romantic cult of spontaneous peoples uncorrupted by civilization provided the grounds for a positive interpretation of their country’s embarrassing backwardness. There was a new growth of interest in the Russian national past, in pre-Petrine institutions, popular customs, folklore and language, and with it the beginnings of that idealization of the Russian peasant which was to become a central element in a variety of ideologies. The polemic over the precise social, political, and cultural components of Russian national identity, or narodnosV (the term was coined by P. A. Vyazemsky in 1819) began in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and was waged with unabated energy over two decades.4 Much of it was centred on literature (in the romantic vision literature was a primary expression of a people’s creativity, and all exponents of narodnosV called for the creation of a truly national litera­ ture freed from subservience to Western models), but political issues were also involved. For all their admiration of the most advanced political ideas of the West, the Decembrists tended to idealize the democratic traditions of the ancient indepen­ dent Russian cities; for them and their sympathizers pride in the uniqueness of their country’s past served as an added stimulus to revolt against the iniquities of its present. Such men found a perfect echo of their sentiments in Pushkin’s poem of 1819 The Countryside, an outburst of shame and disgust at the spectacle of Emaciated slaves’ labouring under the monstrous oppression of ‘a savage arrogance, without feeling, without law’. When, the poet asks, will his country

The Quest for Wholeness

9

see the ‘beautiful dawn of enlightened freedom 7 s The explosive political implications of the new national consciousness can be seen both in Pushkin’s early political poems and in the ‘civic poetry’ of the Decembrists with its praise of freedom,, and democracy, its interest in Russian history, and its idealization of the people. Equally subversive was romantic individualism with the importance that it gave to intuition and instinct as instru­ ments in the uncovering of truth, and its cult of the artist, the hero, and the rebel as ‘higher’ individuals, whose striving for self-realization set them at odds with their society. Pushkin and many lesser poets exalted the poet and genius as seer, interpreter to mankind of the ideal essence of reality con­ cealed beneath material appearance. With the cult of the ‘higher’ individual went a contempt for the ‘philistine’ society of courtiers and bureaucrats, and the petty oppressiveness of everyday Russian life, a rebelliousness and escapism which was manifested in the 1820s in a craze for Byronism both as a literary fashion and as a social pose. After December 1825 the concept of the personal heroic feat took on a more concrete meaning. The Decembrist poet Aleksandr Odoevsky is said to have exclaimed on the eve of the rising ‘O, how gloriously we shall die!*;6 and indeed, in their tragic defeat followed by death or exile, the rebels provided their country­ men with a collective ideal of the romantic hero par excellence. The defeat of 1825 removed many of those whose meta­ physical preoccupations threatened the Russian government, and it led to moral compromise on the part of many of their sympathizers. But in the bleak years that followed romanticism provided for the young who were most frustrated and cramped by their intellectual, moral, and political environment a means of sublimating their protest and their thirst for self-expression. They could identify in imagination with the titanic heroes of the German Sturm und Drang, Goethe’s Faust, Werther and Wilhelm Meister—superhuman beings pitted against a hostile and philistine world. Aleksandr Herzen, who was fourteen when the Decembrist leaders were hanged, describes in his memoirs how he and his adolescent cousin Nikolai Ogarev acted out fantasies in which they saw themselves as Schiller’s

10

The Quest for Wholeness

heroes Carlos and Posa, Nicolas I being cast in the role of the tyrant Philip the Second of Spain7. But there was no real political content in their protest, which was as vague and as generalized as that of their romantic models: aesthetic and ethical rather than political, it was directed against the moral ugliness and repressiveness of their immediate surroundings, and inspired by a very vague ideal—the reign of universal happiness, when the personality would be able fully to realize its aspirations to good, truth, and beauty.8 Forced to in­ ternalize its rebellion, the new generation found solace in its inner world and in the ideal of the schöne Seele as preached by Schiller and the romantics—a soul deeply sensitive to beauty in the form of art, religion, friendship and platonic love. An adolescence spent under the aegis of Schiller and romanticism was followed, when these young men entered the universities, by the discovery of German Idealism, which enabled them to integrate their aspirations into a vision of the world far more elaborate and systematic than that of the Russian romantics of the 1820s. By the 1830s Idealism was no novelty in Russia. Schelling’s Naturphilosophie was being popularized in Russia as early as 1805 in lectures and books by D. Kavunnik-Vellansky, who had attended Schelling’s lectures in Germany and subse­ quently became a professor at the Medical Academy in St. Petersburg. In the 1820s Schelling’s ideas had two influential exponents in Moscow University: 1.1. Davydov, who became professor of philosophy in 1826, and M. G. Pavlov, professor of physics, mineralogy and agriculture.9 In 1823 a group of young aristocrats attached to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow founded the first philosophical ‘circle’ in Russia. Headed by Prince V. F. Odoevsky and D. V. Venevitinov, both of whom were poets, philosophers, and critics, the Society of Lovers of Wisdom (obshchestvo lyubomudriya) as it was called, was dedicated to the study and propagation of the ideas of German Idealism, principally those of Schelling. The philosophical essays written by Odoevsky and Venevitinov are one of the sources of Slavophile ideology; two of the future leaders of the Slavophile movement, the Kireevsky brothers, were members of the circle.

The Quest fo r Wholeness

11

Although the society was disbanded after the failure of the Decembrist revolt, its members published the journal The Moscow Herald from 1827 to 1829 with the aim of popular­ izing German Idealism outside their own esoteric circle. But by the end of the decade there was no further need for proselytism: Idealism had acquired a popularity in Russia unparalleled in its country of origin. It was the universities that were responsible for this trans­ formation. At the end of the 1820s a significant number of Russians, nearly all of Whom were preparing for professorships, went to study in Germany. They were encouraged to go by the Russian authorities who saw Germany as a secure bastion of despotism where Russians could assimilate sound civic principles to combat the infection of the French Revolution. They attended the lectures of Schelling and Hegel in Berlin, and disseminated their ideas when they returned as professors to Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Kharkov or Odessa. Most of the new professors were lawyers, a few were historians or philologists, and Idealism began to penetrate the teaching of these faculties; through the efforts of Professor Pavlov it was already established in the natural science faculty of Moscow University. Contemporary accounts suggest that few of these men were inspired teachers; their exposition tended to be excess­ ively formal and dry. However, as D. Chizhevsky has pointed out,10 it was above all their approach to knowledge that attracted students to their leçtùres. They encouraged their audiences to make broad syntheses, to evaluate individual phenomena and concrete questions in the light of general systems. This approach answered a need that was emotional as much as intellectual. We have seen that in the first traumatic years of Nicolas’s reign the most gifted among the young generation were beginning to experience an acute sense of alienation. The great synthesizing systems of Idealism offered them an all-embracing vision of the world which explained their predicament in such a way as to give dignity and trans­ cendent meaning to their lives in the present, and hope for the future. Idealism was itself a product of alienation and acute frustration. It arose in the last decade of the eighteenth century

12

The Quest for Wholeness

(Fichte’s first work, Grundlage der gesamten Wissen­ schaftslehre, appeared in 1794) at a period when Germany, politically backward and impotent, was isolated from the ferment of the rest of Europe. This separation from the world of action was most sharply felt by intellectuals who could find no field for their energies and ambitions in their static and authoritarian society; their desire for personal selfaffirmation and national dignity could find an outlet only in philosophical speculation. In the ironic words of the poet Heine: Franzosen und Russen gehört das Land, Das Meer gehört den Briten, Wir aber besitzen im Luftreich des Traums Die Herrschaft imbestritten.11

In literary and university circles German intellectuals eschewed political and social realities in favour of meta­ physical investigation, concentrating their attention on the problem of the nature of the self in its relation to the universe. This led them beyond what Kant had seen as the boundary of knowledge: the essence of reality, of self, which Kant had held to be unknowable was, they asserted, permeable to mind because to be known at all reality must be of the same nature as mind. The human subject and the objective world of ex­ perience were therefore in their deepest essence a unitary whole, subsumed in Absolute Mind. The self, in which the Absolute, God or Spirit, attained conscious expression was elevated by the new philosophy to the centre of the universe; history was seen as *a single unitary process, the dialectical progression of the Absolute through opposition and struggle towards self-realization in the unity and identity of subject and object, finite and infinite. In its chiliastic promises this vision of reality had an immense psychological appeal for the alienated: an unhappy consciousness, as Hegel called it, was easier to bear when invested with cosmic significance as a necessary stage in the triumphant march of consciousness towards the final apotheosis of the self in absolute self-knowledge. Such was the experience of Russian intellectuals in the 1830s. The classic analysis of the ‘unhappy consciousness’ of that

The Quest fo r Wholeness

13

generation was made by Petr Chaadaev in his famous First Philosophical Letter, published in the Moscow journal The Telescope in 1836. In an attempt to explain their predicament he outlined a philosophy of history which drew on romantic chiliasm, religious mysticism, and the philosophy of Schelling. It identified historical progress with the development of Christianity (whose truths Chaadaev believed were best embodied in Roman Catholicism) towards its ultimate goal, the establishment of a Kingdom of God on earth. Chaadaev saw the tragedy of Russia’s history as her religious separation from the West through the Schism which had condemned her to the spiritual torpor and the national exclusiveness of Orthodoxy; her past presented a gloomy picture of unrelieved barbarism and superstition and her only hope of spiritual and cultural regeneration was to repeat the entire develop­ ment of the West. Although Chaadaev’s variety of historical chiliasm had no following in Russia, his description of the symptoms of alienation had an electrifying effect on his generation. Russians, he argued, belonged to none of the great families of the human race; they possessed the traditions neither of the East nor of the West: ‘somehow divorced from time and space, the universal education of mankind has not touched us’. Cultural and moral principles which formed ‘the very physiology of Western man’ had, it was true, been imported into Russia but, abstracted from the traditions in which they had developed, they lost their creative force. As we take only ready-made ideas, our intellects are not furrowed by that indelible trace etched on the mind by a progressive movement of ideas, and which is the source of their power; we grow but we do not mature, we advance, but in an oblique line, that is to say one which does not lead to the goal. All our knowledge is on the surface of our being.

Lacking continuity in tradition, and even norms for daily life, Russians were still at a stage of ‘chaotic fermentation’, the equivalent on the moral plane to the cosmic revolutions that had preceded the existence of our planet. They passed restlessly from one idea or conviction to another without method or consistency. Even their expressions had something

14

The Quest for Wholeness

‘strangely vague, cold, uncertain in them*, the look of indivi­ duals detached from the species, men who were ‘strangers’ and ‘nomads’ in their own country.12 The impact of Ghaadaev’s Letter lay in his view that his compatriots’ sense of rootlessness and inner disharmony was the result of Russia’s anomalous historical development which had made her citizens the ‘illegitimate children of mankind’. Whatever their individual solutions, his contemporaries accepted his view that the problem of Russia’s destiny was inseparably bound with their personal need to attain inner stability and harmony, to become integrated beings. Chaadaev’s analysis of the personal experience of alienation is corroborated by accounts in letters and memoirs of the period. The early 1830s saw the foundation of the first kruzhkiy circles formed by the most talented and idealistic of the students of the universities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. These were much more than informal groups for the discussion of ideas; they were brotherhoods based on a romantic con­ ception of friendship and united in their sense of isolation and their hostility towards the everyday world around them, a world wholly alien to the romantic idealism which had been the spiritual nourishment of their adolescence. The forma­ tion of these circles marks the birth of an intelligentsia in the Russian sense—a group distinguished by opposition to the existing order and dedication to moral ideals, and with the cohesiveness and sense of calling of a religious sect, adherence to which superseded all class and family loyalties.13 The first circles saw themselves, in the words of Belinsky, as a ‘desert island’,14 a solitary refuge from their society. But their self-sufficiency proved to be an illusion; the more their members immersed themselves in ideas, the more one-sided they felt themselves to be, moving in a world of rarefied abstractions with no concrete existence because they had no organic link with the world outside. This agonizing sense of one-sidedness is vividly conveyed in a letter from Belinsky to Vasilii Botkin, a member of his circle: Do you see: we became friends, quarrelled, made peace, quarrelled again, fought each other, loved each other passionately, lived, fell in love, according to theory, bookishly . . . . Our cherished and constant

The Quest fo r Wholeness

15

dream was to raise all our lives, and consequently our mutual relations, to the level of reality—and what happened? The dream was a dream and will remain a dream; we are phantoms and will die phantoms, but that is not our fault and we have nothing with which to reproach ourselves. . . . the ground of any reality is society. The general without the particu­ lar and the individual is actual only in pure thought, but in living, visible reality it is . . . a dead dream. Man is great in word and deed, but only when he is a Frenchman, a German, an Englishman, a Russian. But are we Russians? No, society sees us as unhealthy growths on its body, and we see society as a pile of dung . . . . Society lives by a certain sum of certain convictions, in which all its members are one, . . . understand one another without saying a word. This is why in France, in England, in Germany people who have never seen one another before . . . can be conscious of their kinship, can embrace and shed tears—some on a square during a rising against despotism for the rights of mankind, others perhaps over the problem of their daily bread, others at the unveiling of a monument to Schiller . . . . We are people without a native land, no, worse . . . we are people whose native land is a phantom: is it a wonder that we ourselves are phantoms? Botkin, you hâve been in love, and nothing came of your love. The same happened with my love as wel l . . . . No, it is not our destiny to love, to be husbands and fathers of families. There are people whose life . . . is devoid of all content—but we are people for the boundless content of whose lives neither our society nor our epoch has readymade forms . . . . Form without content is triviality, . . . content without form is a deformity often striking in its tragic grandeur, like the myths of the ancient Germanic world.1S

The same torturing sense of abstractness and ‘spectralness’ is expressed in the letters of Ivan Turgenev, Aleksandr Herzen and other leaders of that generation. Like Chaadaev they blame the emptiness of the national past, the absence of common traditions, ideals and purposes through which in happier countries the individual was integrated into the mainstream of the nation’s life. The phenomenon of the superfluous man, a nomad in his own country, a prey to excessive introspection and atrophy of the will, was embodied in a series of literary types, notably Evgenii Onegin, Pechorin, and the vacillating heroes of Turgenev’s stories and novels. In a novel with such a hero, Aleksandr Herzen describes the predicament of the edu­ cated Russian as that of a traveller left with no bearings in the middle of the vast and empty steppe: ‘ “go where you like, in any direction—it’s entirely up to you; only you’ll never arrive

16

The Quest fo r Wholeness

anywhere.” Hence our many-sided inactivity, our busy idleness.’16 What concerned these men in their philosophical circles was, as Turgenev wrote, ‘everything except pure thought’.17 It is at this period that two concepts first become current in Russian intellectual discourse: that of the integral or unitary world-view (tseVnoe mirovozzrenie) and that of the integral or ‘whole’ personality (tseVnaya lichnost*). The first was seen as a prerequisite for the attainment of the second, which was held to be the supreme goal of philosophical investigation. The ‘men of the forties’ as they came to be called (somewhat misleadingly, as the preoccupation with German Idealism which characterized this generation lasted from the mickhirties to the mid-forties) thirsted for a total vision of existence, a transcendent meaning in the world which would integrate fact and value. They believed that only through such an integral world view, giving dignity and direction to their isolated and impotent lives, could they attain inner harmony. They found what they sought in Idealism. The philosophers who dominated Russian thought in the mid-1830s were Fichte and Schelling; they were superseded by Hegel only towards the end of the decade.18 The colossal egocentrism of Idealism found its most extreme expression in the voluntarism of Fichte. The theory of knowledge which Fichte expounded in suc­ cessive versions of his Wissenschaftslehre was based on a definition of Spirit, the Ego, or the Absolute, as infinite activity. According to Fichte, the unlimited Ego strives towards consciousness of its own freedom, or moral selfrealization. To attain this it must manifest itself by producing or ‘positing’ within itself an objective field, a world, in which to act. To this non-ego, the world of nature, it opposes a finite ego (the plurality of individual selves). From this cleavage of subject and object which reciprocally limit and determine each other, consciousness arises. The overcoming of this split and the restoration of the unity of the infinite Ego is achieved through the moral will. In moral activity the Ego overcomes the resistance of nature, moulding it into a manifestation of Spirit. Fichte’s philosophy was a dynamic voluntarism which set

The Quest fo r Wholeness

17

the task of human consciousness as the realization of the Absolute, the fundamental ground of its being, through the infinity of its particular determinations. Strongly influenced by Kant’s moral theory and his definition of a categorical imperative, Fichte saw philosophy not as a set of theoretical propositions, but as a practical dialectic directed to the reunifi­ cation of what consciousness had artificially separated— subject and object. The Absolute presents itself to man’s consciousness in the form of a categorical imperative, an order to triumph over'the resistance of the object (matter, the world), and actualize by the effort of his will the infinite liberty that is his essence. This imperative is set by the ethical will; through duty the Spirit appropriates for itself the material world, as the instrument of its realization, striving towards a final state in which subject and object will be synthesized, a state of absolute liberty. It is true that Fichte emphasized that although this must be man’s goal, he could never realize it in its fullness, Spirit in its infinity being inaccessible to consciousness which only begins with the opposition of subject and object. But by rejecting the dualism between liberty and nature posited by previous philosophers and asserting that Spirit is realized through and by the world, Fichte’s philosophy opened the way to voluntaristic fantasies of absolute liberty as an earthly ideal to be achieved through the effort of the human will. He was often accused of an inadequate recognition of nature and the world of the senses, and indeed in his philosophy they have no real existence. They are merely called into being by the Ego as a field for its operations: according to Fichte, man creates his own universe. A more pervasive influence than Fichte’s on the ‘men of the forties’ was that of Schelling, whose aesthetic Idealism was particularly suited to those who were dedicated to the ideal of the beautiful soul. Schelling’s philosophy went through several stages; those works which had most influence in Russia in the twenties and thirties (his writings on his philosophy of identity, his Naturphilosophie, and his System des transzendentalen Idealismus) were written around the turn of the century. He taught that Spirit and nature, the real and the ideal, were

18

The Quest fo r Wholeness

originally one, but that reflection had introduced a break between them. The alienation of the finite from the infinite is at its most extreme in the finite Ego in whose conscious self-assertion the apparent independence of the phenomenal world reaches its climax. But the Ego is one in essence with Absolute Reason, and it is through human consciousness, which alone is capable of seeing the infinite in the finite, that nature pursues its ultimate goal of a return to the Absolute, the resolution of the division between the real and the ideal. Schelling differed from Fichte in asserting that the world of nature was not a mere construction of the consciousness; as ‘the world’s holy, creating, primal energy’,19 the immediate, objective manifestation of die Absolute, nature was as real and important as the Ego itself. The natural sciences, to which he prescribed an intuitive, organicist approach, were for him the corner-stone of all knowledge. In a series of works on the philosophy of nature he developed a view of nature as the self-unfolding of the Absolute, a dynamic, teleological system moving upwards to the emergence of consciousness in man: through consciousness, or philosophical reflection, man arrives at knowledge of himself. Schelling taught that the urge to create which characterized the universe as an organic whole found its highest expression in man, for whom creativity was a conscious act. All great acts of self-fulfilment—noble deeds, sublime friendship, and ideal love—were forms of the self-realization of the Absolute in the world, but at the peak of the creative pyramid was the artist or genius: Schelling’s philosophy of art (oudined in the third part of his System des transzendentalen Idealismus and in a series of lectures given in 1802-3), was central to his system. He argues that the Absolute, as the unity of the real and the ideal, can be known not by the methods of empirical science, but by aesthetic intuition. Hence the immense meta­ physical significance of the work of art as the finite manifes­ tation of the Absolute, revealing in concrete form the identity of the real and the ideal. Religion and philosophy are forms of the mind’s knowledge of itself, but art is higher than these as in it alone the secret of being is unfolded. In all the other activities of man, the self is dominated either by the theoretical

The Quest fo r Wholeness

19

or the practical intelligence; only in the activity of the artistic genius is the antithesis between the two resolved. A synthesis between conscious and unconscious reason is achieved and reason is realized in its infinite nature. In beholding a work of art man is taken back to ‘the original unity of the essence of nature with the essence of the soul*; he experiences ‘the certainty that all antithesis is only apparent, and that love is the tie between all beings and pure goodness the fundament and content of the whole of creation.’20 In his antirational­ ism, his organicism, his pantheistic attitude to nature, and his exaltation of the artist as the herald of eternal harmony, Schelling had a close affinity with the German romantic movement, and these were the aspects of his philosophy that made most impression on his Russian followers. The historical dimension of both Fichte’s and Schelling’s philosophy was only very faintly sketched. In works such as Der geschlossne Handelsstaat (1800) and Die Gründzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters (1806) Fichte developed the social implications of his ethics, tracing the progress of the influence of reason over instinct through successive historical epochs, arguing that the moral imperative demanded of man that he limit the expression of his freedom so as to allow the ex­ pression of the freedom of others, and proposing a kind of state socialism in which the state would regulate social relations in order to assure the conditions for self-fulfilment to alL But although such democratic utterances shocked many of his contemporaries, this aspect of his philosophy was framed in the vaguest of terms ; his concern was with the moral life rather than with political questions, and his ultimate social ideal was the effacement of all individual differences in a kind of communion of saints in an identical affirmation of the Absolute. Schelling’s vision of history was even more faintly outlined. He taught that history was the gradual self-revelation of the Absolute through progression towards the rational state characterized by the rule of law, which he held to be essential for the realization of freedom. His ultimate ideal was a federation of states in which the laws and rights of each would be respected and the moral law, defined as the revelation of the divine in man, would be actualized in political society.

20

The Quest for Wholeness

The Russian followers of Fichte and Schelling in the 1830s showed no interest in the historical dimension of their philosophies. Absorbed as they were in their inner lives, what concerned them was the apotheosis of the Ego promised by both philosophers. To men forced by circumstances to occupy themselves almost exclusively with the world of ideas, it was deeply satisfying to be assured that this in fact was the only ‘real’ world. Idealism provided the conceptual framework for formulating what were to them the most pressing problems of existence. It assured them through the paradoxes of the dialectic that their sense of impotence and insignificance was a phenomenon of cosmic importance, the necessary premiss for thç^ ultimate unity of the finite and the infinite. More important, in its compensating fantasies, it offered them a foretaste of this ultimate wholeness. The intelligentsia’s sense of alienation sprang from the extreme frustration of two universal and primal human urges, rooted in man’s dual sense of the self as both individual and species—the urge for self-affirmation through the subjection of objective reality to the will, and the urge for self-surrender, the merging of con­ sciousness and will with a transcendent whole, whether this be God, the tribe, the nation or the state, identification with whose purposes confers universal and absolute significance on the isolated and vulnerable individual. The tension between these urges, between a quest for the absolute and flight from it, between fear of oneself and fear of losing oneself in the very principle in which sustenance is hoped for’,21 is the source of chronic conflict in all realms of culture; but when both tendencies are deprived of expression in the dynamics of social relations the reaction of those so deprived is one of acute frustration and a crisis of identity. The Russian intelligentsia was singularly frustrated in this sense. Its character as a product of two cultures and its superfluous position between a hostile autocracy and the uncomprehending masses deprived it of a sense of national identity and roots, while the same predicament effectively closed to it all paths to self-affirmation through purposeful activity. But in the fantastic visions of Idealism and through its dialectic, the urges for self-assertion and self-surrender could at least be sublimated. Having posited the personality

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21

as at once identical to and different from the Absolute, the Idealist could, according to the emphasis he chose, surrender his individuality in passive communion with the Absolute or worship his own ego as the incarnation of absolute Will. In the philosophy of Fichte, where the distinction between the Absolute and the individual ego was tenuous in the extreme, these two types of fantasy were scarcely distinguishable one from the other; and both were harmoniously combined in the concept of a ‘mission* whereby the ‘higher* individual, the hero or artist, or \vhole nations, accomplish the designs of the Absolute through some sublime feat of self-fulfilment. But this self-realization was only a shadowy prefiguring of the ultimate goal of Idealism—the final overcoming of all alienation, all conflict and duality through a dialectical Aufhebung, to use Hegel’s term, a transcending of the opposition between subject and object, being and conscious­ ness, matter and will. The secular eschatology of Idealism, with its vision of total liberty as the outcome of a dialectical triad of development from unity through division to a higher unity, was a variation of the triadic schemes of historical development which reach back at least as far as Joachim of Fiore, and an echo of the ancient myth of the Golden Age: man’s sense of a split in his nature is seen as the result of a degeneration, a falling away from a state of harmony, when man was whole and at one with nature, a condition which he will again achieve, in a higher and more perfect form, in a future age when all conflicts between the whole and its parts will be finally resolved. This millenarian vision of liberty is an extraordinarily abstract one: the ideal of wholeness as the resolution of all duality and conflict, the identity of the individual and the social, is a totally intransigent negation of all existing reality, a form of mystical .anarchism. Nevertheless, this ideal, as developed by the most radical members of the generation formed in the 1830s, gave rise to a revolutionary movement in Russia. The fact that the origins of social protest in nineteenth-century Russia lay not, as in the West, in the material interests of groups or classes, but in an aristocratic urge for self-fulfilment, has been shown to be a crucial factor in the formation of the Populist revolutionary tradition.22 Of

22

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course, when translated into political terms, its abstract purity was much watered down by the demands of political and social realities—with one striking exception: the political ideology of Mikhail Bakunin. The nature of Bakunin’s anarchism, with its legendary intransigence and the fascination which it held and continues to hold for déclassé intellectuals like himself, can be understood only if one appreciates the peculiar intensity of the young Bakunin’s dedication to the millenarian ideal of wholeness. Mikhail Bakunin was bom in 1814, the son of a wealthy landowner in the province of Tver. As one of his biographers, E. H. Garr, has pointed out, his innate urge to dominate was encouraged by his position in his family: he was the third of ten children, with two elder and two younger sisters, followed by five brothers; his sisters he dominated by virtue of his sex, his brothers by seniority.23 Despite differences of tempera­ ment and opinion between parents and children, the family seems to have been exceptionally affectionate and harmonious, and Bakunin later recalled with nostalgia his idyllic childhood on the family estate at Pryamukhino, about 150 miles north­ west of Moscow. (The hatred which Bakunin as an adult expressed for a mother whom he described as harsh and un­ loving towards her children seems to have been the product of later family crises.)24 His father, Aleksandr Bakunin, had completed his education in Italy, at the university of Padua, and had subsequently travelled widely in Europe before settling down on his estate. He was a cultivated and humane, but conservative, landowner; the influence of the liberal and humanist traditions of eighteenth-century Europe was combined in his outlook with an orthodox Russian patriot­ ism. In matters of education he seems to have been an admirer of Rousseau; he supervised his children’s education, which included languages, history, geography, physics, and the natural sciences. The young Bakunins were well acquainted with the great works of European literature in the original, and devoted much of their leisure time to painting, music, and poetry. Bakunin later wrote of their childhood years that, educated in the Western European rather than in the Russian spirit, ‘we lived, so to speak, outside Russian reality,

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23

in a world filled with feeling and imagination’.25 In their cult of sensibility the adolescent Bakunins were typical of their generation and milieu, which was already infected by the fever of romanticism. In one of the Bakunin girls, Varvara, ‘feeling and imagination’ produced an intense religious exaltation'which led in adolescence to a serious breakdown.26 In 1828, at the age of fourteen, Bakunin was sent to St. Petersburg to prepare for entry into the Artillery Cadet School in the following year (as the eldest son, he was destined for the army)„and his letters to his family, written in French, as was customary among the nobility, are highly sentimental in tone, abounding in exalted expressions of filial and fraternal devotion. His intellectual development was slow; at the School he distinguished himself only by lavish spending, incurring substantial debts which then, as through­ out his life, he was not scrupulous in repaying. His first acquaintance with philosophy took place in 1831, through a sixteen-volume history of literature and philosophy by L. F. de la Harpe, published in 1818: Lycée ou cours de littérature ancienne et moderne. The last two volumes of the work dealt with eighteenth-century English and French philosophy and took the form of an attack on the French Revolution and its intellectual antecedents—materialism and the encyclo­ pédistes. In April 1832 in a letter to his parents, Bakunin notes that he is copying extracts from the work.27 His reading in literature at the same period seems to have been mainly confined to the popular historical novels and stories of the contemporary writers Zagoskin, Bulgarin and Massalsky, with their patriotic idealization of Russian history.28 In January 1833 Bakunin graduated and was gazetted an ensign. The next six months were spent in enjoyment of the pleasures of St. Petersburg society and the raptures of romantic passion. The object of the latter was a cousin, Marya Voeykova. In his letters he kept his sisters closely informed of the progress of the relationship. A fervent adherent of the cult of romantic love, he luxuriated in misty and delicate sentiment, communicating his emotions to ‘the divine Marya’ through the most subtle of hints, and, more audaciously, in earnest discussions on such subjects as ‘the definition of love, exaltation, feeling and sensibility, which we were extremely

24

The Quest fo r Wholeness

good at distinguishing from sugary sentimentality and a myriad of other things.*29 His state of exaltation was heightened by the ‘bewitching charm* of music, which was to affect him profoundly through­ out his life. A performance of Mozart made him ‘breathless’ with delight; but his most ecstatic comments were reserved for Beethoven. In a letter of March 1833 he innocently records a curious observation made by his cousin: watching him listen to a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony she told him that ‘she was frightened by the expression on my face . . . . It seemed that I was ready to destroy the entire world.’30 TBfe spiritual energies discerned by Mikhail’s young cousin became seriously engaged and focused for the first time three months later, with his initiation into philosophy. In June 1833 at a summer camp with his regiment, he discovered the work of the Schellingist poet and critic D. V. Venevitinov. He describes this experience in a letter written to his father four years later: I will never forget one night that I spent in the camp. Everyone around me was asleep, everything was calm, the moon irradiated all the distant expanse covered by the camp: with one of my comrades with whom I shared a tent, I began to read the poetry of the dead Venevitinov and his letters to some countess or other: that marvellous night, that sky, covered with stars, the quivering and mysterious brightness of the moon and the verses of that lofty, noble poet shook me profoundly: it all filled me with a sort of sad, languorous beatitude. O, I was pure and holy at that moment, I was penetrated through and through with a feeling of infinity and love, a fiery and mighty love of the whole beautiful divine world, of all people and especially of you, my dear father, my mother and my sisters . . . . O, father, I was infinitely blessed at that moment, I felt within myself omnipotent forces for living, for being worthy to bear the great title of a man.31

The poet who so inspired Bakunin was one of the most influential Schellingists of the 1820s. A founder, as we have seen, of the Society of Lovers of Wisdom, he was only 22 when he died in 1827. His literary output was slight—about fifty poems and half a dozen critical articles; but he had a significant influence on the development of Russian Idealism. Influenced by Schelling’s philosophy of art, he devoted his

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25

poetry to a romantic idealization of friendship and love, and to the theme of the poet as philosopher, prophet, and priest, whose ‘sacred dreams’ revealed the secrets of a higher world. The ‘daring pupil of Byron’ as he calls himself in one of his poems, Venevitinov saw the poet as ‘an unsubmissive mind, nurtured on freedom’, contemptuous of the ugly and crass reality around him.32 The poem The Motherland, attributed to him, is a bitter satire on ‘Holy Russia’, a realm of mud, evil-smelling filth and cockroaches, ruled by the whip.33 He sympathized with the ideals of the Decembrists, and one of his poems, idealizing the democratic institutions of old Novgorod, echoes the ‘civic’ tradition of Decembrist poetry.34 In several critical and philosophical essays Venevitinov explored the relations between literature and philosophy. He argued that the aim of the universe, and the main stimulus of man's urge for knowledge and action, is ‘self-cognition’. National and individual culture, all intellectual and moral forces, the development of the arts and the sciences are directed to this goal, and the degree of enlightenment of each nation is the measure of its progress towards the universal aim. His most influential essay, published in 1827, is on a theme central to the debate about narodnost’: the relation between national originality and a national literature. He urged Russian writers to cease their servile imitation of the literature of the West and to address themselves to the study of philosophy. By tracing the development of the human mind through history they must build themselves a worldpicture in which they could discern their own national destiny. This exercise was the precondition of the development of an original national culture, which in turn was the necessary premiss of moral freedom.35 In an imaginary dialogue between Plato and Anaxagoras Venevitinov sketches his ideal of a future Golden Age: ‘moral freedom will be the common lot: all human knowledge will coalesce in one ideal of man; all branches of science will coalesce in one science of selfknowledge’.36 The work which had so profoundly moved Bakunin was Venevitinov’s Letter to the Countess N N (Princess A. N. Trubetskaya). This was an exposition in popular form of his view of the guiding role of philosophy in the self-perfecting

26

The Quest fo r Wholeness

of mankind; as ‘the science of sciences’ its task was to unify the data of all branches of human knowledge in the light of mankind’s transcendent goal, namely, self-cognition, through which the knower and the known, mind and nature, would attain perfect unity.37 This emphasis on man’s exalted destiny, so frequently echoed in Venevitinov’s poetry, had a highly intoxicating effect on Bakunin. Romantic sentimentalism had developed in him a sense of belonging to a spiritual élite which com­ muned with the infinite through beauty and love; his own existence now began to appear to him as part of a cosmic plan, the key to which was philosophy. His letter to his father shows that, tenuous though his first contact with Idealism was, he was already seduced by tHat paradox which was to be its charm for the men of the forties: his ‘beatitude’ consisted in a combination of the ‘languor’ of total surrender to the infinite with a sense of his own ‘omnipotent’ forces. Reflection on these themes led to what, in a letter to his sisters of January 1834, he describes as an ‘intellectual revolution’. During the past month, he writes, he has examined his feelings and inclinations and reached a radical decision to change his mode of life. The letter records the final evapor­ ation of his passion for Marya Voeykova, whose attractions he now coolly dismisses. The amusements of society are also rejected on the grounds that ‘external happiness’, based on the satisfaction of sensual needs, is empty and ephemeral. True happiness, he maintains, lies in the development of the inner life through study, directed to the penetration of the secrets of nature—this is the paradise promised in the New Testament.38 From Venevitinov Bakunin had absorbed a vague Schellingist mysticism, according to which the life of nature and the inner life of man were united in the aspiration to the divine. Whether by coincidence or design—there is no evidence that he had read the essay in which Venevitinov exhorted his countrymen to study world history—it is with a general study of history that he begins his intellectual pilgrimage: some of his notes and summaries of works still survive. But he sees this as merely preparatory to his central project—the study of Russian history: T o write and speak Russian, to know the

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27

history of one’s fatherland, to know, in a word, Holy Russia, is essential for a Russian.’39 Very shortly after his inner revolution, early in 1834, Bakunin was dismissed from the Artillery School before the end of his course, apparently for inattention to his studies.40 He was posted to an artillery brigade at a remote point on the Polish frontier in the province of Minsk. After a short stay in Vilna at the end of the summer the brigade moved to winter quarters in the province of Grodno. In its tedium, its harsh and mindless discipline; garrison life was a microcosm of the regime of Nicolas I, and worlds away, it must have seemed, from the cultured charm of the Bakunin family nest. The young man, who had already begun to share the ideal aspir­ ations and vague yearnings of the more talented of his con­ temporaries, now also began to experience their disorientation and acute frustration. The previous year, distressed by a temporary rift with his Moscow cousins, he had written to his sisters describing his former friendship as an ‘illusion’ and asking ‘Where then is reality? . . . Surely we do not exist on earth merely to be deceived and to suffer endlessly? A pitiful goal that would be!*41 Such rhetoric was typical of the epistolary style of the time. For Bakunin and his contemporaries the stock sentiments of romantic Weltschmerz were the common currency of social intercourse. But as we have seen, in Russia in the 1830s they were far more than a mere literary conceit; they expressed an acute need for a unitary vision which would give meaning and purpose to contingent existence, transforming phantoms into integrated personalities. In the writings of this generation the word ‘reality’, used in this metaphysical sense, occurs with the frequency of an incantation. It was, as Belinsky remarked, the ‘slogan’ of the age.42 Of all these seekers after reality, Bakunin was destined to be the most dedicated and persistent. From the moment when, far from the security and haimony of his patriarchal family nest, he began his garrison exile, the question ‘where then is reality?’ became of all-consuming importance to him. It was to dominate his thinking all his life. In his period of provincial exile, Bakunin gave himself up

28

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to bitter introspection, acknowledging the lack of purpose in his past life and declaring, in a letter to his parents, his desire to be useful to his society and not to be ‘an empty, meaning­ less link in the chain of mankind’.43 He reports that his leisure time is spent in the study of physics, mathematics, history and Polish, and the reading of philosophy. An account of his life in that summer and winter which, he said, ‘overturned the whole system of my inner being’ is given in a letter written to one of his cousins, S. N. Muravev, in January 1835. He describes how his sense of isolation and his melancholy were intensified by the crassness of his comrades, in whom there was no trace of ‘those higher moral forces which lead man to the supreme goal of self-perfection’. Engrossed in the pursuit of the pleasures of the senses, they knew little and cared less about the principles of honour, love of the tsar and service to one’s country (the conventional patriotism and conservatism expressed in this comment were to survive all Bakunin’s philosophical upheavals while he remained in Russia). In this situation he was able to assume what would always be for him the most congenial of roles—that of moral guide and preacher. He related to his cousin how he encouraged one officer to study Lithuanian history, and saved a second from the ‘abyss’ of drunkenness by proving to him ‘that for an Idealist who lives a life of the spirit it is shameful to seek material consolation, and that firmness of character is the best support in the most difficult misfortunes.’ His own situation was alleviated by the presence in the camp near Vilna of an army doctor who was a former student of Moscow University, a follower of German philosophy and a correspon­ dent of Kavunnik-Vellansky, the earliest Russian popularizer of Schelling. They spent their leisure time together reading the works of Vellansky, A. I. Galich (another Russian Schellingist who had written a history of philosophy) and Schelling’s disciple Oken. After leaving Vilna Bakunin remained in correspondence with the doctor and his two converts, united with them in an ascetic abstention from the pleasures of cards and vodka and a determination ‘to work for the good of our country and of ourselves’.44 By the end of 1834, however, his loneliness and the absence of intellectual stimulation had become intolerable. He wrote to his parents:

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29

Everything in me demands activity, movement . . . my strong spiritual urges, in their vain fight against the cold and insuperable obstacles of the .physical world, sometimes reduce me to exhaustion, induce a state of melancholy. . . .

His scattered reading in philosophy had strengthened his adherence to the dominant faith of his time—the belief that every individual and every people had their place in some cosmic pattern of progress. Acknowledging that ‘we all act and move according to the laws of Providence*, he plaintively asserts: ‘I would only'like to know what is the aim of my existence, and what place I have been predestined to occupy in the. universal infinite machine.*45 In March 1835 he embarked on the first step towards discovering the answer. After obtaining (through family influence) his dismissal from the army, he went to Moscow, where he was soon drawn into the circle of students headed by Nikolai Stankevich, which was then engaged with passionate intensity in the study of German philosophy. The son of a rich landowner, Stankevich was one of the intellectual luminaries of his generation; but it was his moral character as much as his intellect that accounted for the enormous influence of this gentle and unassuming man over his fellow students at Moscow University. According to his contemporary, the diarist P. V. Annenkov, he was the living embodiment of those ideals of truth and honour which perennially attract the young.46 By the time of Bakunin’s arrival in Moscow, Stankevich *s circle had established itself as one of the two leading philosophical circles of the decade; the second, founded by Herzen and Ogarev, had become engrossed in the thought of the French utopian socialists, but Stankevich’s circle resolutely turned its gaze away from the disorder and contradictions of the ‘contingent’ world, to concentrate on the only ‘true* reality—the inner world of the Spirit. K. S. Aksakov, a member of the circle in his youth, recalled that it was characterized by ‘independence in opinions, freedom from all authorities*,47 qualities which were, however, exercised exclusively in the realm of abstract thought. Its members applied themselves to the ideas of Kant, Schelling,and Fichte in an effort to discern beneath appearance

30

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the ultimate harmony of being and the sublime destiny of man—a destiny achieved, they believed, through communion with the Absolute in religious and aesthetic contemplation and ideal love. It was his total faith in the profound unity of man, nature and God that gave Stankevich’s personality its extraordinary harmony and serenity—qualities that the other members of the circle strove to emulate with only very limited success.48 Bakunin met Stankevich in March 1835, shortly after his arrival in Moscow, through two sisters, Aleksandra and Natalie Beyer, who were friends of the Bakunin family. In the pre­ vious ^year Stankevich had attempted to form with Natalie the ideal friendship of two souls who commune in the Absolute—an attempt which failed when Natalie’s fits of jealousy revealed the presence in her of a less ethereal passion. The two sisters remained members of the circle, and, intro­ duced into its rarefied atmosphere, Bakunin realized at once that he had found his milieu. In a letter to the sisters written in May 1835 he affirms that the life of man is ‘an eternal striving of the part to the whole’. Reality lies not .in the con­ tingent facts and circumstances of life, but in ‘the Idea that they express’. Love of mankind, the striving towards per­ fection and towards the ‘whole’ are all expressions of the one eternal Idea—God. Mankind is ‘God imprisoned in m atter’; it is through mankind’s self-perfecting, acted out in historical progress* that God attains his final victory over matter. In this process Bakunin foresees a lofty destiny for himself: ‘God’s hand has written in my heart “he shall not live for himself’”. His vocation was to lead others to the truth by unfolding the mysteries of nature to them. To be worthy of this calling he must surrender the happiness offered by such ‘egotistical’ passions as sexual love (a hint to Natalie, who had begun to transfer her frustrated affections to him): henceforth he must find fulfilment in fraternal friendship and love of mankind.49 Bakunin’s rejection of what he called the ‘animal’ instinct of sensuality may not have been wholly a matter of choice (he seems to have been sexually impotent);50 but this asceticism was appropriate in one who counted himself among the elect of the Spirit. Reflections on his vocation were his

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main preoccupation in 1835, both in Moscow and at Pryamukhino, where he spent several months. His earlier instinctive refusal to accept the sterility of the life around him as ‘reality’ was now conceptualized as the need to penetrate beyond -the contingent to the ‘Idea’ which was the unifying principle of existence: everywhere there is form without life, and the form is old and decrepit . . . . What is a man with any capacity for thought and feeling to do in this lifeless chaos? This is the question which I have often asked myself, and on its answer depends the fate of all those of us who have risen a little above matter, who have some inkling of the sacred truth.51

In the light of the sacred truth of Idealism Bakunin reflects on the Hamletism of his generation. To A. P. Efremov, a member of Stankevich’s circle, he writes that they are all ‘a strange mixture of scepticism and inspiration’. By scepticism he meant the legacy of the EnUghtenment whose cult of analytical, dissecting reason had, he felt, contributed to the debilitating introspection of his generation. They were capable only of wishing, not of willing, and the essence of man was wilL This unhealthy state would be remedied by ‘inspiration’: the heady visions of German Idealism which, ‘like a holy Annunciation, promises us a better world, a fuller, more harmonious life’.52 A few months later he writes again to Efremov on the question of will. *We are all weak, all Hamlets . . . shallow people, incapable of even the slightest effort’. They must cure this moral illness by performing spiritual feats; he is ready to lead the way: [My path] is written in my soul, written by Providence. You say that Man kann n ich t im m er was Man w ill. Rubbish, Man kann alles, was man nur genug K raft hat zu w ollen. Strength of will, my friend, is every­

thing . . . . it is the strength of his will which determines the individual’s value and his degree of perfection.. . ,53

Bakunin’s personal philosophy was beginning to assume a shape: a year after he had exulted simultaneously in the ‘languorous beatitude’ of self-surrender and in the rapt con­ templation of his ‘omnipotent forces’ he had achieved a satisfactory synthesis of these two categories of fantasy in

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the concept of a mission, whereby through a titanic feat of will he would achieve self-fulfilment as a higher nature and would simultaneously lose himself in the Absolute by serving as the instrument of its eternal purposes. Like all Idealist sublimations of real frustrations, the concept of an exalted calling had no precise content—indeed its very vagueness, its aura of cosmic mystery, was the source of its seduction. In his fantasies the alienated intellectual could indulge, like the rebels of romantic literature, in orgies of self-assertion while simultaneously experiencing the joys of being securely rooted in a higher reality. The concept of a mission was extremely popular among the Russian Idealists, but none was to hold it so dear as Bakunin. It was to be one of the constants in his changing vision of the world. Bakunin’s reflections on his vocation led him to take a decision which caused a crisis in his family. Early in 1836, in defiance of his father’s wish that he should take up a career in the civil service, he settled in Moscow, declaring his intention to study philosophy and earn his living as a teacher of mathematics.54 His teaching was desultory—he lived, as he was to do all his life, mainly at his friends’ expense—but he fulfilled his first resolve. As he later wrote: T threw myself avidly into the study of German philosophy, from which I sought light and salvation.’55 Towards the end of the previous year, as a preliminary to the study of Schelling, he had begun to read Kant under the supervision of Stankevich, with whom he was in correspondence. In Moscow the two resumed their philosophical studies together and Bakunin also immersed himself in Goethe, Schiller, and the German romantics J.-P. Richter and E. T. A. Hoffmann.56 He had given very little time to Schelling before he was overwhelmed by the discovery of Fichte. He began with two short popular works—Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben (1806) and five lectures entitled Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten (1794), four of which he translated for the Moscow Telescope in that year. Apart from these works, his knowledge of Fichte seems to have been drawn entirely from secondary sources; there is no evidence that he subsequently read Fichte’s main work, the Wissenschaftslehre. This is not surprising;Bakunin’s approach to philosophy was practical rather than scholarly:

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he took from it what he needed to satisfy his personal needs and the two works which he chose admirably served this purpose. Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben consists of a series of popular lectures on,the philosophy of religion. Fichte saw his teaching on religion as the crowning achievement of his philo­ sophical system and the lectures were in part an attempt to refute the charge of atheism that was frequently levelled against him. He argues that love, defined as the urge to be united with the eternal, is the root of all existence. All life is a striving to beatitude: the union of the finite being with the image of his True Being within him. The path to the oneness of being and existence which Fichte now defines as union with God is through the ‘Higher Morality’. Man reaches this by passing beyond two inferior stages of understanding of the world. The first of these recognizes as real only external objects perceived by the senses and seeks happiness in satis­ faction of material demands. It is attached to ‘apparent life’, in other words, nothingness. The second (here Fichte has in mind Kantian ethics) sees the underlying reality of the world as a rational law, expressed in man as a categorical imperative to which he must submit his will. Fichte opposes this ‘dogmatic’ formal morality on the grounds that by positing duty as in conflict with inclination and will, it precludes man from performing free acts. He counterposes to it a third stage, the ‘Higher Morality’, which sees the divine order as not given objectively once and for all but eternally creating itself, always in act, striving to make mankind what it was created to be: ‘the exact image, copy, and manifestation of the inward Divine Essence.’57 Fichte presents two other modes of understanding of the world as being closely connected with the Higher Morality: the fourth, the religious, he sees expressed in the Gospel of St. John, according to which the consciousness of the ‘absolute unity’ of human and divine existence had first appeared in the world in the person of Christ, after whom all men had become potential participants in it. Religion perceived this unity through faith. The fifth mode of understanding, the ‘scientific’ or philosophical, transforms faith into knowledge by demonstrating the genesis of the unity of the human and

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the divine: ‘this Knowledge is the divine Existence itself, pure and immediate, and insofar as we are Knowledge, we ourselves, in the deepest root of our being, are the Divine Existence.*58 Fichte emphasizes that the path to knowledge is not the construction of concepts; it is inspiration, issuing from love: *Not Reflection, which by virtue of its very nature is divided within itself and is thereby at variance with itself; no, Love is the source of all certainty, all truth, and all reality.* He continues, ‘Insofar as man is Love (and this he is always in the root of his life . ..) he remains forever one, true, and immortal as God himself, and he is God himself’ (this is Fichte’s interpretation of the passage from the Gospel of St. John: ‘he who dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him*). The love whereby man lays hold of his proper being (from which reflection has estranged him) is expressed only in action: to the question Svhat is God?* Fichte replies: ‘he is that which he who is devoted to him and inspired by him does9. Without action there can be no union with God; man is ‘separated from the domain of reality and banished once again to that of empty, shadowy conception.*59 All actions must be directed to man’s higher vocation: the attainment of liberty through the development of that form which the Divine Nature has assumed in him. In a typical Fichtean paradox, man arrives at perfect liberty through total renunciation of his sensual being: ‘As soon as man by an act of the highest Freedom, surrenders and sheds his personal freedom and independence he becomes a partaker of the only True Being, the Divine*. Only then does he attain a sense of his higher vocation, which is to realize the will of God acting through him; he is truly free, for he desires to be nothing whatever but that which he, and only he, can be, that which he, and only he, by virtue of his higher Nature . . . ought to be; in short he desires nothing whatever but that which he in fact fundamentally wills . . . will to be . . . what you ought to be, what you can be, and what you therefore will be—this is the fundamental law of the Higher Morality as well as of the Blessed Life.60

The will’s field of action must be man’s inner life, the world of ‘suprasensual things’. Man must act for action’s sake, not for the sake of a result in the world of sense. It is only in

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such self-activity (Selbsttätigkeit) that the Ego expresses its freedom, being determined by itself rather than subject to the external world. However, (another Fichtean paradox), such a man will nevertheless desire that the divine be manifest also in all outward, appearance. The ‘community of saints’ which is the goal of the Christian religion is Fichte’s ideal of human society. He sees men as moral agents acting in a social and institutional context: by manifesting in their conduct the divine root of their being they overcome their individual distinctions and limitations. Man’s striving for freedom is thus for Fichte at one and the same time a longing to com­ mune with all other individual consciousnesses in an identical affirmation of the Absolute. The attainment of blessedness in a social milieu is the theme of Über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten. Here Fichte defines man’s goal as the achievement of total harmony with himself, in other words, complete self-determination, a state in which the moral law is identical with the precepts of his own will. The path to this goal is through the development of culture, which Fichte defines as that historical process whereby man eliminates inclinations which are in contradiction with his reason and acquires the ability to modify the objects of the external world in accordance with the demands of his will. ‘To subjugate to himself all that is deprived of reason, to dominate it freely and according to his own law, that is man’s final goal’. Though it is unattainable (to reach it man would have to become God) his vocation is to strive ceaselessly towards it. This he can do only through society, which Fichte emphasizes is not to be confused with the empirically conditioned society known as the state. The latter is only under certain conditions the means of establishing a perfect society; its goal must be to render itself superfluous as a coercive instrument for the protection of rights. When man’s moral nature is fully developed (that is, when he becomes conscious of his freedom), he will desire that all others should enjoy equal freedom through the fullest possible development of their faculties. The aim of society is that each man, en­ joying complete equality with others in his autonomous activity, should be able to see himself as a necessary link in the great chain of progress stretching onward to eternity. The

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role of the scholar is both to survey from above the progress of mankind, and to further it by helping men to become conscious of their real needs and of the means of satisfying them. He must therefore be at the pinnacle of the moral development of humanity in his time, a ‘priest of the truth*, prepared to endure any suffering in the name of his vocation. Above all, he ‘must never cease to act, and in consequence never cease to be.*61 The social dimension of Fichte’s philosophy is only hinted at in these lectures. It is doubtful whether Bakunin was acquainted with it; in any case, at this stage in his development it would have had very little meaning for him. Like the other members of Stankevich’s circle he was concerned only with spiritual activity, and he took from Fichte only what answered his personal need for inner harmony. The two popular works served his purpose because they encapsulated in striking form those Idealist themes which were most attractive to the alienated intellectual. In the paradoxes of his thought Fichte went further than any other Idealist philosopher towards simultaneously satisfying those two urges which we have seen expressed with equal intensity in Bakunin’s letters of 1835—the yearning for self-affirmation and the urge for self-surrender. As we have seen, according to Fichte, through ‘self-annihilation’ man attains unity with the divine; for all Fichte’s denials that the finite could ever attain the infinite, the logic of his monistic philosophy seemed to contradict this. By rejecting the concept of God as a transcendent being and making the sensible world the condition for the realization of the Absolute, he seemed to deny God an independent existence. Fichte’s God appears to be the creation of the human will, realized in the course of history through moral activity. The selfconsciousness of the Absolute must take the finite form of the consciousness of men; the self-realization of the infinite will could take place only through the self-realization of finite wills. This formulation must have been extraordinarily attractive to Bakunin who, even before his acquaintance with Fichte, had defined mankind as ‘God imprisoned in m atter’ and in renouncing the world of sense set himself up as a priest of

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the truth in Fichte’s sense. Fichte strengthened him in that sense of mission whereby he could reconcile his voluntarism with his desire to merge with the Absolute. In Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben Fichte warned that to seek to be anything other than that to f which one was called was the highest immorality’.62 Bakunin took this injunction to heart, insist­ ently assuring his friends that he would never desert his vocation. Fichte’s two works have been treated here at some length because Bakunin found in them a formula for the resolution of his inner conflicts and the attainment of his ‘reality’ which was to survive his interest in Idealism. In a modified but still recognizable form it was to become the basis of his political ideology. Bakunin’s triumph in self-discovery was immediately conveyed to his circle. As he wrote to his sisters in February 1836: I have become conscious that outside the world of the Spirit there is no true life, that the soul must be its own aim . . . . A path which is cheerless perhaps, but for all that, worthy of a man! . . . Thus, for the world I am an insignificant creature, nothing, a teacher of mathematics, but for myself, for the friends who understand me, I have risen much higher than before, I have stifled within myself the petty egoism of self-preservation, I have shaken off the yoke of prejudice. I am am an!63

The main themes of Bakunin’s letters in the year after his discovery of Fichte are all to be found in a letter written to his sisters in February 1837, which represents a distillation of all the philosophical wisdom that he had acquired to date.64 Bakunin argues here that the external world, far from being the source of man’s happiness or misery, is ‘merely a reflection of the state of our soul’. Man’s happiness is entirely dependent on his attainment of inner harmony. There are in fact two external worlds; the first, the ‘animal’ or finite world, is the product of the soul before it reaches the stage of self-consciousness; ruled by the laws of nature, it stifles the development of man’s spirit. The soul must throw off its yoke by creating another external world according to the laws of divine reason. The ground of the first world is animal egoism, that of the second, divine world is absolute love. The ultimate unity of the external and the internal, nature and

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the divine is achieved through man, in whom nature reaches self-consciousness (an echo of Schelling) and through whom absolute love strives to return to its original unity. Man can realize this love in himself only by renouncing his ‘animal individuality’ and uniting with others in the common pursuit of self-perfection through ideal friendship and love, creativity in science and art, and through religion (in which all other forms of communion with the Absolute are subsumed). It is this mystical community that is the second, divine external world, ‘the community of saints . . . in which man must live in order to be a man’. There is no contradiction in Bakunin’s aspirations that cannot be resolved by Fichte’s dialectic, which he summarizes in this letter as follows: ‘the more [man] dissolves himself in [the divine world] the more he becomes man; the more he identifies his will with the will of God the more he becomes free.’ His correspondence in 1836 and early 1837 shows him blissfully alternating between fantasies of self-glorification and dreams of self-surrender. He speaks repeatedly of his desire to ‘destroy’ his personality by ‘dissolving into the Absolute’,65 and writes to his sister Varvara that there is only one path to salvation: one must wholly annihilate one’s personal ego, annihilate everything that forms its life, its hopes and its personal beliefs. One must live and breathe only for the Absolute, through the Absolute . . . happiness . . . is possible only through total self-oblivion, total self-denial.66

On the other hand, he believes that by renouncing his material ego (his love of finite, sensual existence), he has attained ‘true’ egoism, total immersion in his self as the representative of all other selves: this is ‘the only possible religion’. T love only reality and reality is contained in me and my relationships, which depend not at all on circum­ stances, but only on myself’. Sweeping aside the puny obstacles set in its way by the external world, his ‘proud and unshakeable will' is advancing to its divine destiny: *1 am a man and I will be God!’67 Bakunin’s distinction between two selves preserves his dreams of self-assertion against the shocks of failure and frustration: as he informs his sisters:

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I have in me the encouraging and consoling conviction that all that is my will, God's will, is to be accomplished; it is merely the will of my own weak individuality that is to be destroyed.68

It could even bç demonstrated that despair, discourage­ ment and a sense of impotence were proof of the future realization of one’s glorious destiny. Fichte had praised suffering as the ‘salutary spur that . . . sooner or later will drive us to union with the object of our love’.69 Bakunin followed him in interpreting the mystery of the Passion as the affirmation of Christ’s divinity through the dissolution of his material ego, an example which he urged the members of his circle to emulate.70 Some were profoundly affected by this challenge: Bakunin recounted to Annenkov how, after an evening spent discoursing on the value of suffering, he was awakened by one of his young listeners who had remained to stay the night. ‘With a candle in his hand and with all the signs of despair on his face’, the young man demanded his help: ‘Teach me what to do . . . . I am a lost creature for, try as I may, I cannot feel in myself any aptitude for suffering.’71 In the role of teacher Bakunin was happily confirmed in his sense of belonging to a spiritual élite. In the summer of 1836 he acquired a devoted disciple in the person of Belinsky, whose initial deference to Bakunin sprang (as he later admit­ ted) from his low estimation of himself.72 Unlike the others in Stankevich’s circle he was of humble origins, poor, and sketchily educated. Dazzled by Bakunin’s verbal brilliance and self-assurance, he was equally dazzled, on a long visit to Pryamukhino, by the Bakunin girls, who henceforth epitom­ ized for him the romantic ideal of womanhood. In a sub­ sequent letter he informed Bakunin that, thanks to the instruction that the latter had given him in Fichte’s thought and to the harmony of the young Bakunins’ lives which he had witnessed during his stay, he had become convinced for the first time ‘that it is in fact ideal life that is real, positive, concrete life, while so-called real life is negation, a phantom, insignificant, empty.’73 Belinsky’s relief was intense: doctrines which justify a retreat from external reality are especially attractive in the bleaker periods of a country’s history; and while the belief

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that the only true reality was the inner world of man was shared by all Stankevich’s circle, none could preach it with a sense of personal infallibility comparable to Bakunin’s. His most submissive disciples continued to be his sisters and the Beyer women;in the words of his sister Lyubov, by explaining to them the aim of their existence he had given them a ‘new life’. Under his tutelage they enthused over the ‘beautiful, divine thoughts of Fichte’. This philosophical diet was later supplemented by a strong dose of German romantic literature: Bettina von Amim’s Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (this model of romantic sentiment was a particular favourite of Bakunin’s), and the novels of Novalis and Richter (JeanPaul). Bakunin’s eager pupils were ‘entirely possessed’ by the ‘divine’ Jean-Paul and luxuriated, as their letters to their mentor show, in all the modulations of romantic emotion and ideal love.74 This symphony was sternly orchestrated by Bakunin. The cult of refined emotion with which the Bakunin and Beyer sisters had long been familiar must now be directed to a lofty philosophical goal. To the Beyer sisters he announced T am called to be the priest [of absolute love], its instrument before you’; he urged them, ‘the sisters of my soul, of that infinite being that is striving to absolute infinity’, to confide the most secret movements of their hearts to him.75 Under his direction these women analysed the state of their psyche in exhaustive detail and in letters of inordinate length, sub­ jecting the most intimate emotions and attachments to merciless scrutiny, and engaging in lengthy treatises on the nature of true friendship and ideal love. However, despite obvious similarities, this correspondence was not a delicious sentimental causerie of the kind in which Bakunin had indulged with Marya Voeykova. Inward-looking though it was, Bakunin’s moral voluntarism contained a strong element of revolt which caused severe perturbations in his immediate circle. In accordance with Fichte’s religious philosophy he denounced the life of the senses, by which he meant in particular the society life pursued by his sisters with his parents’ encouragement. This angered his father, who accused him of seeking to exercise moral tyranny over his family.76 Much more subversive of parental authority,

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however, was Bakunin’s contempt for what Fichte had called ‘formalist’ morality—rules and dogmas regulating moral life, everyday observances which in Bakunin’s view humiliated man and paralysed his will. To this conventional ‘store of cut-price practical, morality’77 which trivialized what was beautiful and noble, Bakunin, like Fichte, counterposed the free act which springs from love of the divine. Thus he writes to his sisters: the aim of life, the object, of real love is God. Not that God to whom they pray in churches, not the one whom men think to please by abasing themselves before him; not the one who, remote from the world, judges the living and the dead, but the one who lives in mankind; the one who is raised up when man is raised up .. . the one who speaks in the poet.78

Man’s destiny, he asserts, is not to suffer passively in order to earn a mythical heaven; it consists rather ‘in bringing the heaven, the God which he bears in himself, down to our earth, . . . in raising the earth to the sky’. The ‘pitiful phantoms’ of conventional morality to which men subjugate themselves must be destroyed: T have no aim other than to be a man, and I destroy everything that stands in the way of my progress towards it.’ He will make no more compromises: ‘The truth, as it is, and not as adapted to particular circum­ stances—that is my m otto.’ He offers a stirring slogan to those ‘divine and free creatures’, his disciples: ‘Absolute freedom and absolute love, that is our aim; the liberation of mankind and the whole world—that is our destiny.’79 But this was no call to revolution—for Bakunin the path to absolute freedom lay exclusively in the cultivation of the inner life, and his revolt was directed only against impedi­ ments to the free expression of religious love in his immediate milieu. Thus, he encouraged the Beyer sisters to assert their independence against a dominating mother who sought to remove them from his influence j80 but over a period of more than three years the main form taken by his drive for moral freedom was rebellion against his parents, in what the young Bakunins referred to as the battle for the liberation of his sister Varvara.81 This was not his first serious revolt against parental

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authority: in 1833 his sister Lyubov, in order to please her father, had become engaged to a man with whom, as Bakunin discovered, she was not in love. On a visit to Pryamukhino he had organized his brothers and sisters in concerted opposition to the marriage, and after a painful scene with his father had returned to St. Petersburg where he bombarded his parent with indignant letters until he achieved his goal: in December 1833 Lyubov was released from her engagement.82 Bakunin’s opposition to a loveless marriage had been based on the cult of romantic passion which he had shared with Mary a Voeykova; in his next contest with his parents his weapons were drawn from the arsenal of Idealist rhetoric. Varvara Bakunin had married a well-intentioned but philosophically undeveloped man who had little sympathy for the religious exaltation which was her native element. Her disillusionment with him was intensified by the efforts of her brother who, to the fury of their parents, exercised un­ remitting pressure on her to separate from her husband, as a precondition of fulfilling her ‘high mission’. He mercilessly bullied his vacillating sister, reminding her that ‘man lives only for and by love’, and that to live in ‘absolute love’ with her prosaic husband was an impossible goal: ‘No, Varvara, he stands outside the Absolute: he and the Absolute are two extremes that will never meet.’83 Varvara finally left her husband, and Bakunin’s part in what he saw as the ‘holy act’ of his sister’s liberation almost destroyed his relations with his parents, who had already experienced the disastrous influence of German Idealism on their family; at the end of 1836 Bakunin’s three youngest brothers had asked their father for permission to leave the Tver Gymnasium where they were studying, in order to go to Moscow where Bakunin would supervise their intellectual development. Permission was refused and the boys, converts to the higher reality, attempted unsuccessfully to flee from the despised world of the school curriculum. Their parents held their eldest son entirely to blame for this escapade.84 Despite the comparative success of these efforts to vanquish the world of phantoms, Bakunin had signally failed to trans­ form his little circle into a ‘community of saints’. The animal

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world intruded all too often in the form of petty and undigni­ fied feuds, squabbles and jealousies, of which not the least cause was his own domineering nature, his need, frankly expressed in a letter to Natalie Beyer, for people ‘who feel confident under my direction’.85 His sister Varvara’s oc­ casional rebellion against his direction of her emotional life made him suspect, if only fleetingly, that their union might be ‘a mirage, an empty phantom*;?6 a more serious rift in the small circle was caused by his possessive affection for his sister Tatyana which went beyond the bounds of brotherly love. This sister whom he loved ‘more than anything else on earth*87 conceived an interest in Belinsky when he came to stay at Pryamukhino in the summer of 1836 at Bakunin’s invitation. Devoted friendship changed instantly to venomous jealousy ; Bakunin subjected the innocently uncomprehending Belinsky to a skilful campaign of insult and humiliation, which succeeded in driving him away. Although this quarrel was patched up, the rift between the two was to deepen, as we shall see, when Belinsky began to assert his intellectual independence. Bakunin was often the victim of the jealousies that he inspired in others. He bound the Beyer sisters to him by com­ paring their philosophical abilities very favourably with those of his own sisters; but Aleksandra Beyer was once tactless enough to convey this to the female Bakunins, treating them with a condescension which provoked so bitter a resentment that relations between brother and sisters were nearly broken off.88 In the spring of 1836 Natalie Beyer (who seems to have been of all Bakunin’s circle the least suited to the cult of ideal love), conceived an attachment of the ‘animal’ variety for him. In order to ward off her importunities he sternly lectured his circle on the difference between ‘holy’ friendship and earthly attachments, asserting that ‘a man who is capable of ideal love will never lower himself to the state of being in love’; and he warned Natalie of the danger of being distracted by phantoms which were not grounded in ‘true’ life.89 However, by early 1837 it was disrupting spectres such as these, rather than the misty ‘reality’ of absolute love, that dominated Bakunin’s life. Nothing less than a new formula

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for inner harmony could bring order into his spiritual chaos. It was at this point that he discovered Hegel. Bakunin’s spiritual restlessness was representative of a general mood among the members of the Moscow circles at that period. Their inner world had been a refuge from the bleakness of their surroundings; but they were coming increasingly to feel that their spiritual self-sufficiency was an illusion, that, as Belinsky asserted, the individual could never have more than a spectral existence if he were not integrated with reality in the form of his social environment. Those who were drawn to national tradition found a solution to this problem in the doctrines of Slavophilism, with its idealization of the Russian past and the religious outlook of the Russian peasant. Others less mystically inclined, who looked to the culture of the West for inspiration, made their transition to reality through Hegel. From Hegel they learned that to turn their attention to the external world was not to surrender their cherished faith in the exalted purpose of their lives: on the contrary, it would be enriched with the added dimension of world history.90 It is true that Fichte and Schelling saw the Absolute’s striving to self-realization as a process taking place in history, but the historical dimension of their philosophy was very faintly sketched; for Fichte the external world was a pro­ jection of the self, and Schelling’s main attention was concen­ trated on the self-revelation of the Absolute through nature and man’s inner world as expressed in art and religion. This ‘subjective’ Idealism, as it was later called, was criticized by Hegel’s school for taking insufficient account of the im­ portance of the external world and the obstacles which it opposed to man’s subjective wishes. Though like his prede­ cessors he subsumed the external world in Absolute Mind, Hegel heralded the movement away from Idealism through his emphasis on the objective reality of the world of phenomena. Through a systematic analysis of world history he undertook to show how the logic of the development of Spirit was expressed in the evolution of human societies towards ever higher and more rational forms, leading to the incarnation in history of Absolute Reason, which he saw as

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a perfected version of the modem state (the Prussian Rechtsstaat was his model), where the individual will would be integrated with the objective will of the community. It was above all Hegel’s dialectic which attracted those who were eager to~pass from shadow to substance. His vast and detailed historical documentation of the path of Reason through history gave his doctrines a concreteness and a satisfyingly ‘objective’ appearance which were all too lacking in the shadowy constmctions of Fichte and Schelling. In a highly complex argument he explored the central Idealist problem of self-estrangement on temporal and non-temporal planes alike—depicting the alienated or ‘unhappy’ conscious­ ness, the finite self out of harmony with its own ideal, both as a moment of inner development and as a stage in history. In his dialectic Russian intellectuals found the reassurance that earlier Idealist philosophers had failed satisfactorily to provide: namely, that their impotence, their alienation and inner contradictions were not a chance and meaningless accident, but, in Hegel’s sense, ‘rational’ and necessary. Hegel argued that every nation, every society and individual, derives its truth and reality from being a moment in the progression of Reason through the dialectical interplay between historical forms which are passing away and those which are coming into being; though each form is destined to give way to higher forms of the Ideal, it remains (inasmuch as the latter are logically impossible without it) ‘aufgehoben’, both tran­ scended and preserved in successive incarnations of Reason. An ‘unhappy consciousness’ was easier to bear if seen as an essential prerequisite for the future unity of the finite and infinite. As M. Malia has pointed out, the principal attraction of Hegel’s philosophy for the divided personalities of Russia’s ‘superfluous men’ lay in the fact that his dialectic made struggle, division, and negation the fundamental law of the universe, the essential precondition for ultimate wholeness.91 The paradoxes of the dialectic everywhere transformed loss into gain, deficiency into asset: the incompleteness and insignificance of the individual in the present was the pre­ condition of his ultimate completeness, and his impotence and frustration the guarantee of change. Hegel’s philosophy seemed to provide firm ground beneath

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the feet of men who had come painfully to feel that mystical self-absorption was a shabby substitute for an understanding of the world in which they had to live. Individual intuition and feeling were discredited as ‘subjectivism’: Reason and the ‘general’ or ‘universal’ (Hegel’s Allgemeinheit) were the slogans of this new stage in the intelligentsia’s struggle for self-understanding. Their longing to identify with a collectivity which transcended the self could now be satisfied through achieving an understanding of the destiny of their nation which, despite all appearances to the contrary, was engaged together with all other nations in the realization of the Absolute in the world. The elation which they felt at this latest transition from ‘illusion’ to ‘reality’ is reflected in a letter written by Aleksandr Herzen on first reading the Phénoménologie des Geistes: it is as though one were entering a sea—limpid and deep—one is borne along on the breath of the Spirit—laschiati ogni speranza—th e shores disappear, one's sole salvation is within one's breast, but suddenly the cry is heard: *Quid timeas, Caesarem veh is '; fear vanishes, there is the shore, the beautiful leaves of fantasy are gone, but the succulent fruits of reality are there. The Undines have disappeared, but a full-breasted maiden awaits . . . . I read to the end with a beating heart, with a sort of solemnity.92

Bakunin began studying Hegel early in 1837. In May of that year he wrote to his sisters: ‘Hegel is giving me an entirely new life. I am completely absorbed in him.’93 By the summer he was launched on an intensive study of Hegel, making detailed synopses of his reading. He began with the Phéno­ ménologie des Geistes, but soon set this aside to begin the Encyclopaedia, of which he read only the Introduction, at the same time as he began reading Hegel’s philosophy of religion. In the autumn he returned to the Phenomenology and the Encyclopaedia; by March 1838 he had progressed to the third volume. The following month he began Hegel’s Logic, which he continued to study throughout the summer. According to Belinsky he leafed through Hegel’s philosophy of law at the same time.94 He was very soon convinced that he had at last mastered the secret of inner wholeness. In the summer of 1837 he

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writes that after a year of terrible storms ‘I have come to know true harmony, that full and integral harmony of reality which I can never lose again’. He frequently remarks on his new sense of tranquillity and inner strength: ‘No longer are there two sides to me ; I am an indissoluble unity. There are no more contradictions in me, no more battles.’ Having exorcised the spectral side of his personality, he finds that his philosophical studies are progressing more smoothly: he is gradually ceasing to ‘live and act in fits’, and feels that he is on the point of becomihg a ‘real man*.95 The source of this optimism was his new understanding of reality, based on Hegel’s famous dictum in the Introduction to the Philosophy o f Right: ‘the real is the rational and the rational is real’. By this Hegel had meant essentially no more than that there is a logical order in the development of all things, in which all historical forms and institutions have their necessary place as successive expressions of the dialectical development of Absolute Reason. However, his more ortho­ dox followers, and Hegel himself in his later years, tended to deduce from this the necessity of accepting the status quo (in the case of Germany—absolute monarchy) as rational and just, inasmuch as it was the highest expression of Reason in history. This static interpretation was rejected by the Hegelian left, who emphasized the dynamic nature of Hegel’s con­ ception of dialectical progress; but it was in their conservative interpretation that Hegel’s doctrines made their first impact in Russia, where historical circumstances gave orthodox Hegelianism a particularly strong appeal. For Russians the charm of ‘reconciliation with reality’, as it was called, was that it made a virtue out of necessity. They had found no refuge against the repugnant world around them, but their passivity in that world could now be construed not as cowardice, apathy or impotence, but as a heroic feat of selfabnegation, the overcoming of alienation through the surrender of ‘subjective’ illusions and submission to the objective and necessary laws of the historical process. Bakunin, of all his generation the most desperate and tenacious in the pursuit of his own reality, was not surprisingly the first to espouse reconciliation with reality, and in a form more extreme than any of Hegel’s German followers. Only Belinsky

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was to follow him in this. Stankevich, who began to read Hegel shortly before Bakunin, held a much more moderate position. Bakunin examined the significance of Hegel for himself and his contemporaries in an article which can be described as the first manifesto of Russian Hegelianism, an introduction to a translation of Hegel’s Gymnasial Speeches. His first printed work, it appeared in April 1838 in the Moscow Observer, a journal of which Belinsky had just become editor.96 Here he characterized his generation as ‘abstract, spectral, alien to all reality’. Their philosophy had led them either to reject^ reality in favour of ‘fantastic, arbitrary, imaginary worlds’, or to revolt with their ‘spectral forces’ against the real world. They failed to see that the source of their suffering was their own abstract selves, not reality, which being the will of God, was rational: in it ‘all is beautiful, all is bliss’. Bakunin argued that modem philosophy had hitherto been a destructive rather than a life-giving force. The reason lay in the Reformation which, by destroying the spiritual unity of Europe, had led to the fragmentation of knowledge, a split between the ‘empirical sciences’ (concerned exclusively with the finite world) and philosophy which, having cut its ties with religious faith, sought in the individual ego the ground of all knowledge. The metaphysics whose foundations were laid by Kant represented in Bakunin’s view the ‘second fall’ of man. Having lost his sense of the infinite, man was thrown back on contemplation of his ego which, when abstracted from ‘infinite reality’, was a mere phantom. This resulted in the ‘subjective systems’ of Kant and Fichte, and the cult of the beautiful soul connected with them. Schönseeligheit (the Russian term was prekrasnodushie) was now for Bakunin the greatest of delusions, epitomized by the heroes of Schiller’s dramas, with what he saw as their futile and misconceived revolt against reality in the shape of the social order. Bakunin argued that the materialism of the eighteenth century, the second product of the artificial division of knowledge effected by the Reformation, could interpret reality no more adequately than Idealism. Based on the study of the finite world, it was incapable of penetrating the mystery

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of life and dismissed all that it could not explain. The Spiritual corruption’ contained in materialism had led inescapably to revolution, for without religion as its essence no state or legal order could survive. The thinkers of the French Enlighten­ ment had transmitted* their disease of inner emptiness to the nineteenth century: such tortured figures as Byron were signs of the painful beginnings of convalescence. Through the influence of French culture in Russia, the ‘French disease’ had spread among Bakunin’s generation: their one-sided education, often at the hands of French tutors, had left them bereft of religious feeling, encouraging instead self-admiration and the cult of subjective sensations. Instead of leading useful lives as ‘strong and real Russians, devoted to tsar and country’, they wasted their time in empty chatter. Even Russia’s greatest genius, Pushkin, had been like his hero Onegin, a superfluous man of this kind until, as his later poetry showed, he had become reconciled to reality (a reference to Pushkin’s patriotic poems, written after he had made his peace with the tsar). Bakunin concludes that to revolt against reality is ‘to kill in oneself every living source of life’. He expresses the pious hope that the next generation, renouncing the empty preten­ sions to genius which characterized his own, would accept the discipline imposed by knowledge, attaining their reality through submission to ‘our beautiful Russian life’. ‘Reconcili­ ation with reality in all regards and in all spheres of life is the great task of our time.’ Bakunin wrote two other articles on Hegelian philosophy. The first, published in the journal Notes o f the Fatherland in 1840, followed Hegel's Encyclopaedia in emphasizing the ‘one-sidedness' of previous philosophical systems and the need for philosophy to grasp the ‘inseparable and rational unity of the general and the particular, the infinite and the finite, the one and the various’;97 the second, a lengthy exposé of Hegel’s Phenomenology, was not published, probably because it was too obscurely formulated to have any wide appeal.98 Bakunin’s main instrument for transmitting the new gospel was his voluminous correspondence with his circle. Here he expounded the virtues of Hegel’s dialectic as a signpost

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pointing the way to the recovery of man’s lost unity with God. The predicament of his generation and the prospect of its solution seemed convincingly represented by Hegel’s scheme, according to which two incomplete stages of individual and social consciousness (the first too exclusively practical, the second too theoretical), are ultimately unified in Absolute Consciousness. Bakunin presents his circle with his own summary of Hegel’s Phenomenology : in the first moment of individual development (and in the primitive age of mankind) man is in instinctive harmony with truth, but because this harmony is unconscious, truth is not actualized in him. In the second period instinctive harmony is broken: analytical or finite reason (rassudok, Hegel’s Verstand), which separates, abstracts and divides, cannot grasp truth in its wholeness, and presents men with lifeless abstractions, spectres which they mistake for reality. (The ‘subjective’ Idealism of Fichte and Schelling is now in this category for Bakunin). Only through Absolute Reason (Hegel’s Vernunft) are the ‘two opposing elements’ in man, finite reason and revelation (Hegel’s theoretical and practical consciousness) synthesized, and man regains his lost unity in a new, higher form in absolute love: ‘instinctive harmony . . . is restored in harmony of thought’.99 Bakunin believes that mankind has already reached this final stage; it is only because his friends are still lagging behind at the second stage (that of Schönseeligheit) that they are unable to see reality in its harmonious wholeness. They are still wrestling with the spectre of evil in the shape of man’s apparent dependence on contingent forces; but 'evil exists only for those with finite eyes, who cannot see the unity of things’; in ‘real life’ there is no contingency: ‘all is holy inevitability’.100 With characteristic energy Bakunin set about converting his circle to the new religion. Stankevich departed to Germany in the late summer of 1837, one of the main aims of his journey being to study Hegel at source in Berlin, and in the absence of the man with whose moral authority he was never able to compete the field was clear for Bakunin; he set about persuading or bullying not only his female admirers but all

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Stankevich’s circle into accepting his authority as the high priest of Hegelian ‘reality’. What success he had in this attempt was attributed by one member of the circle, P. V. Annenkov, to the confidence with which he used his dialec­ tical ability to dispose of all his listeners’ doubts as to the absolute truth of any theory which he was currently ex­ pounding. He presented Hegel’s ideas as a universal revelation, only recently uncovered by man, as an obli­ gatory law for human thought, which they explained fully . . . without the possibility of any addition or modification of any kind at all. Hence one had either to submit to them absolutely or turn one Vback to them, thereby rejecting light and reason.101

However, for most of Stankevich’s circle the attractions of total reconciliation with reality were outweighed by the difficulty of reconciling faith in the perfection of their sur­ roundings with the evidence of their eyes. The only dis­ tinguished member of his generation to submit entirely to Bakunin’s intellectual despotism was Belinsky, who knew no German and relied entirely on Bakunin for exegesis of Hegel. Bakunin’s interpretation of ‘the real is the rational’ presented itself to him as a series of propositions of horrible but iron logic: all contemporary social forms were sacred as manifes­ tations of Eternal Reason; the regime of Nicolas I was thus one of the supreme manifestations of Spirit in the contem­ porary world. What might appear on the surface to be barbaric or cruel was, to all those who could see it in the light of eternal truth, rational, necessary and harmonious. One must therefore submit to this reality with its ‘iron jaws and iron claws’;102 rebellion against it was senseless and futile. This position caused Belinsky much moral torment, until in 1840 he could tolerate it no longer and denounced ‘my contemptible desire to be reconciled with contemptible reality’:103 no talk of the inexorable march of Spirit through the world could explain or justify the sufferings of individual men. The grotesque consistency of Belinsky’s philosophy was the product of a longing for wholeness as intense as Bakunin’s, and it would seem entirely consonant with the unreserved praise of ‘our beautiful Russian life’ in Bakunin’s Introduction to Hegel’s Gymnasial Speeches. But Bakunin’s rhetoric was misleading; his ‘reality’ was not Belinsky’s. The latter was

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striving to overcome his alienation by a genuine attempt to come to terms with the external world, but Bakunin remained fundamentally as indifferent to that world as he had been when his idol was Fichte. His letters and writings of the period of his ‘reconciliation with reality* are remarkable for the absence of reference in them to any of the political or social institutions or issues of his time—one finds no defence of autocracy, serfdom or reactionary nationalism. True, in a letter to his sister Varvara (assuring her that the courts will support her in her divorce suit) he declares: ‘our government is too truly fatherly, too humane and too enlightened not to take^the side of the weak when their cause is just’,104 but this sentiment, like the expressions of pious patriotism and political conservatism in his Introduction to Hegel’s speeches, is a stock generality of a type that we have already seen in his correspon­ dence at the time when he was a cadet; his attitude to politics in the years before he left Russia was, as E. H. Carr has pointed out, no more than the conventional conservatism of indif­ ference.105 His interests and passions were directed as before to his inner world. This is clear from letters written after the publication of his Introduction, where he expresses irritation at Belinsky’s literal-minded interpretation of ‘reality’. As he explained to his sisters: T do not mean . . . what is usually understood by the word reality—chair, table, dog, Varvara Dmitrievna, Aleksandra Ivanovna [two elderly hangers-on at Pryamukhino] —all that is all dead, illusory, not living, true reality.’ And in the second of his two articles on philosophy he explains: ‘only that being is real in which there abides all the fullness of Reason, the Idea, Truth’.106 In fact, Bakunin was no more interested in the finite manifestations of the Idea than he had been at the height of his enthusiasm for Fichte. ‘Reconciliation with reality* was not in his case a genuine orientation towards the external world; it was an incantation whose magical power restored to him that sense of the Absolute without which he believed he was a mere phantom. In the previous year this sense had proved too vague and subjective, too dependent on transitory moods, and it had foundered on the rock of petty jealousies and feuds. In consequence his fantasies of self-assertion, which depended on a sense of unity with the purposes of the

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Absolute, had been pale and unconvincing: his ego had not devoured the world but had remained divorced from it, in the empty solitude of boundless subjectivism. The personal need which Hegel seemed to answer is expressed most suc­ cinctly in a letter to Stankevich in 1839 where Bakunin recalls the failure of their little group, having cut themselves off from Russian reality, to construct the ‘ideal inner world’ which could shelter them from the constant blows of that alien reality. He attributes this to a lack of the religious feeling which would have given them a sense of their link with the eternal, and asserts: T feel a vital urge to break out of the narrow bounds of my individual personality, to enter into a living relationship with universal life’; to be its vessel, he declares, is his ideal of happiness. A year later, he puts this even more forcefully when he defines the fundamental characteristic of his life as a ‘striving towards the universal’.107 His lyrical praise of the implacable Hegelian Reality can only be explained by the peculiar intensity in him of that yearning, characteristic of the alienated, which he had once described as the ‘striving of the part to the whole’. Hegel’s all-devouring Allgemeinheit y with the insuperable obstacles that it opposed to human subjectivity, corresponded far more closely to his experience of the trials of alienation than the insubstantial constructions of Fichte or Schelling. By attempt­ ing to ignore those obstacles he had deepened his alienation (his criticism of his generation in the Introduction to Hegel’s speeches applied first and foremost to himself); and he now asserts that the ‘perfect’reconciliation with reality represented by Hegel’s philosophy is ‘essential’ for the eradication of the spectral and empty side of his personality.108 In the summer of 1837 he describes his elation at feeling his whole being unified in the worship of the divine source of life: ‘I feel that I am truly living, that I understand life in all its infinity, in all its infinite richness.’ He is now a master, no longer a slave: •no longer am I forced, as before, to suffocate in the comer that is my ego . . . . I have found myself fully in Absolute Being’.109 Bakunin could find support in Hegel’s dialectic for his discovery that submission to reality had ended his enslave­ ment to it. Through the dialectic Hegel opposed the external

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world to the Ego in order that the latter might ultimately reappropriate it the more securely. In Hegel’s philosophy the objective world, for all its transitory independence, was no less the creation of thought than it was for the ‘subjective’ Idealists who preceded him, and it was precisely this paradox that was the secret of his irresistible charm for Bakunin, for whom a ‘living relationship’ with the Absolute was one which could accommodate opposing impulses in dynamic harmony. In Hegel’s philosophy those two categories of fantasy which had originally attracted Bakunin to Idealism seemed bound together with a logic far more impressively ‘objective’ than they^were in Fichte’s religious philosophy. Fichte presented his doctrine of self-realization through self-annihilation as a mystical intuition; the right-wing interpretation of Hegel seemed to demonstrate that a very similar paradox was an objective law of history and progress. In the dialectical movement in which the path to affirmation was through negation, the more humbly Bakunin abased himself before ‘reality’ the more immediate became the prospect of an apotheosis of the self in which all divisions were transcended. He triumphantly records this discovery in a letter to the Beyer sisters in May 1838: * Do you know, since I recognized the reality of circumstances they have lost all power over me and have become wholly unreal? Everything external, everything alien, has a kind of black, impenetrable, terrible aspect. And while I abstracted myself from circumstances and despised them 1was not wholly their master, and was often their unconcious slave. But now I have become intimately linked with them, I have turned my attention on them and continue to do so, directly on them, and everything that was contradictory in them, hostile to the course of my life, has disappeared, has turned, into an illusion.

By harmonizing his aspirations with external circumstances, he declares, he has gained infinite power over the latter. ‘They must take that form, that direction, which I give them.’110 This passage reads like a parody of Hegel’s dialectic, with its ability to demonstrate that all things contain, in some sense, their own opposites. In his eagerness to reach the goal of wholeness Bakunin had stripped the dialectic of its historical dimension, in which Spirit gradually appropriates the external world through the advance of rationality in institutions, and

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had telescoped it into the present as a process taking place within his own personality. He needed his reward for abject submission to the general not in some indefinite future, but in the present, with minimal delay. And as before, the impulses of humility and self-aggrandizement are synthesized in his personality through his sense of mission. As he insistently assures his correspondents, ‘something immense’ is happening in his life; in his new role as expositor of the ‘holy truth’ of Hegelian philosophy, he is more calmly secure than ever before in his awareness o f the ‘divine force’ withiii him.111 Thus, the bow which he makes to objective reality in his Introduction to Hegel’s speeches is very perfunctory (as his criticism of Belinsky suggests, ‘reality’ and ‘appearance’ are as in the past what Bakunin finds it convenient to define them to be). But by recognizing a reality independent of his ego, however vague and undefined, he gave his consequent domination over it more conviction in his own eyes than Fichte’s subjection of a world which was never more than the creation of man. But this subjection of reality continued to be restricted to the domain of spiritual activity. Hegel’s function had been merely to provide a much-needed reinforcement of Bakunin’s sense of the infinite, thereby satisfying that ‘religious striving’ which, as he asserted at this period, was his dominant charac­ teristic.112 It is significant that works by the mystics Eckartshausen and Saint-Martin figure in a list of books which Bakunin arranged to be sent to him from Pryamukhino in May 1839.113 His vocation remained shrouded in mystical obscurity. Hegelian ‘realism’ helped him to establish its credentials more securely by transforming it, in his eyes at least, from an intuitive personal conviction into an objective fact, the truth of which was binding on all; but he continued to reflect on its content in the discourse which was still the most congenial to him—that of the religious philosophy of Fichte, who remained the dominant influence on his thought. It is in the terms of Fichte’s ethics that he reconciles his voluntarism with the extreme determinism expressed in his Hegelian articles. He defines truth as a ‘duty, sanctified and preordained by God’, and inveighs against the ‘dull, soulless inevitability’ submitted to by those who had lost ‘the divine

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spark’.114 The Kingdom of God exists for those whose will coincides with the will of God;115 but submission to God’s will does not mean that man must sit with his arms folded: ‘no, he must act’. However, this action must not be directed to results in the external world; it must be action for its own sake, the free expression of truth (Fichte’s Selbsttätigkeit): ‘in that unity of divine grace and human action is the fullness of truth’.116 The formula is familiar: it is Bakunin’s ideal of wholeness as the simultaneous satisfaction of his urge for selfassertion and his ‘striving towards the universal’. By action Bakunin continues to mean the assertion of the independence of the spirit against the empty conventions of the world of sense. When the mother of the Beyer sisters seeks to prevent them from contact with him, he urges them to assert their ‘infinite freedom’ against obligations which are ‘the pitiful product of common sense and unbelief’.117 He is fond of quoting Goethe’s Faust: Das ist der Weisheit letzter Schluss: Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben Der täglich sie erobern muss.118

Like Fichte, Bakunin is very vague as to the relationship of internal and external freedom; although moral action must not be undertaken for the sake of its external results, he assures the Beyers that external liberty is the ‘natural conse­ quence’ of inner freedom. Once the human will has identified itself with the will of God, it ‘must inevitably be realized’.119 In his exaltation of a very abstract freedom Bakunin is far closer to the Fichtean divinization of man than he is to Hegel. In one of his versions of the dialectic he asserts that man had had to lose his original ‘involuntary’ union with God in order to return to him as an independent being who out of his own ‘boundless liberty’ apprehended God as his ‘own truth’. For Bakunin as for Fichte, truth is ‘absolute love’: ‘the only true . . . real world is the mutual love of men in their absolute love of God and the presence of God in [their] mutual love’.120 A similar emphasis on love is to be found in Hegel only in his early theological writings: in his later works the emphasis is on philosophy (which, he believed, expressed the truths of religion in rational form), as the highest form of knowledge. Nevertheless, Bakunin- declares the concept of a ‘community

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of saints’ or a ‘community of the Holy Spirit’ to be the ‘result’ of Hegel’s philosophy.121 This Fichtean ideal is a leitmotif of his correspondence in 1837. The Beyers in particular are repeatedly urged to bind themselves to him in this mystical union: ‘remember tbe words of the Saviour: “what is bound on earth shall be bound in heaven . . . ” \ 122 Explaining Hegel’s axiom ‘the real is the rational’, he uses a favourite phrase, taken from the first lecture of Die Anweisung zum seligen Lehen : ‘life is bliss’,123 and his inter­ pretation of the dialectical struggle leading to this apprehen­ sion of reality is thoroughly Fichtean: he represents it in mystical terms as a transition, by means of redemptive suffering, from a view of life bounded by the senses to a yearning for eternal truth. The value of suffering as a ‘cleansing flame’ which prepares the soul for unity with God is a constant theme in his letters.124 He points out to his circle that they all went through this fire when they renounced their ‘phantom existence’ as ‘subjective’ Idealists. In this experience there was a terrible moment, the moment of the destruction of all illusory hopes and beliefs . . . of total and infinite emptiness . . . this immersion in the ego abstracted from the world, from Absolute Life, is hell.12S

Bakunin continues to illustrate the concept of self-realization through self-annihilation with reference to the Passion through which, he asserts, Christ actualized his divinity. To the Beyer sisters he declares that fullness of life is given only to those who ‘destroy’ their individual ego by experiencing ‘all the negations of the Passion . . . . “Take up your cross and follow Me”.’126 Bakunin seems to have been unaware of the transformation that Hegel had undergone in his hands. In the first flush of his enthusiasm for Hegel he had castigated Fichte for his ‘subjectivism’,127 and subsequently there are few explicit references to Fichte in his letters until in 1840 he reads a biography of Fichte by his son, I. G. Fichte. The continued resemblance of his own thought to Fichte’s seems to come as a revelation to him; a letter to Aleksandra Beyer shows him to be profoundly moved by his reading: ‘the whole life of Fichte is the life of a hero of . . . the Spirit’. This stimulus provokes an interesting passage of self-revelation:

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Here is the real hero of the new age. I have always loved him deeply and envied his amazing strength, his ability to abstract himself from all alien and external circumstances and from the common opinion, in order to go straight and tirelessly to the aim he had set himself, an aim . . . blessed by God. There is something of the same in me too, but I have still to form my strength, my ability to rely calmly on myself and to act independently and in defiance of all that is external. . . . Wait a little while . . . a good man will be made of me yet; just give me a little time to work on myself.128

This extraordinary passage, written three years after Bakunin had denounced the ‘subjectivism’ of pre-Hegelian Idealism, is revealing on the nature of that voluntarism which some critics, following Aleksandr Herzen, have seen as marking the beginning of his transition to political radical­ ism.129 Bakunin’s defiance of the external world was amove back to consoling fantasy rather than forward to a critical examination of reality. His letters to his circle show that as late as the first months of 1840 his gaze was still resolutely fixed on the inner life. To Natalie Beyer he writes: How I love the lenten [bells] ; that mournful peal seems to call everyone away from the bustle of the external world to the inner depths of the world of the Spirit, the world of repentance for those who have long been outside it, and, for those who know it and live in it, the world of love and calm, intense bliss.

Experience has taught them all, he asserts, that it is fruitless to look for miracles in the external world; the only real miracles are those of the inner life.130 In a letter to his sisters he asserts that to be truly happy one must turn one’s back on the triviality of one’s external surroundings and build within oneself ‘a temple for God and for all that is holy, true and beautiful, an eternal temple, . . . independent of all the external and insignificant circumstances of life.’Alternatively, he advises anyone ‘who does not wish to lose himself in the infinite variety of external life’ to build ‘a strong, high, unassailable wall’ around the fundamental principles of his spiritual existence and to retreat behind it from the storms of the external world.131 The only kind of knowledge that interested Bakunin was self-knowledge. He saw human existence as ‘an endless pro-

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cess of liberation from unreality’.132 In a letter of December 1837 he announced to his sisters that the external world should be viewed merely as data in which one could find oneself. Two years later he informed them that life was nothing but the search for oneself, the striving to separate the real core of the personality from those superfluous accretions which hindered its self-realization.133 In his less self-confident moments he was acutely aware that he still had far to go in his task of self-construction. As he wrote in the spring of 1838: ‘how little reality I have as yet, how little content’. That summer he sent his portrait to the Beyer sisters with the comment: ‘What I find in it that most resembles me is . . . a sort of diffuseness and lack of definition: it is unfinished, as I myself am unfinished.’134 The need to ‘possess oneself’, to ‘become oneself’, to unify one’s personality, to shed its ‘unreal’ aspects, to resolve its contradictions—this is the central theme of his correspondence in the late 1830s.135 The intensity of his self-absorption struck his contemporaries. Belinsky, comparing the arduous struggles of Bakunin’s spirit to the effort of childbirth, declared that what was innate in ‘full’ and unreflecting natures, he had to acquire through intellectual battles: no wonder that ‘at present he has absolutely no time for others, only for himself.’136 There is therefore no mystery about Bakunin’s renewed profession of allegiance to Fichte, who was of all Idealist philosophers the most absorbed with the problem of the self, the most abstracted from ‘all external circumstances’. By 1840 Bakunin seems to have forgotten his denunciation of the ‘subjectivism’ of Fichte and Schelling, made in the first flush of his excitement over Hegel: his temperamental affinity with Fichte was stronger than the demands of Hegelian orthodoxy. We have seen that the main result of Bakunin’s first encounter with Hegel was to give an illusion of objectivity to his Fichtean fantasies; in this regard it made a permanent impression on his outlook in two ways. Firstly, his interpretation of Hegelian ‘reality’ gave a more secure foundation to his already colossal egocentrism, drawing as it did all planes of reality, even the most intractible, into the orbit of his all-devouring ego. His pronounced incapacity in his later political activity, to draw a boundary between

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fact and fantasy, the world as it was and the world as he wished it to be, can be traced at least in part to his belief as a right Hegelian that he had submitted to, and thereby conquered, ‘reality*. Secondly, Bakunin’s early Hegelianism left a permanent mark on his outlook in a profound optimism resulting from the ability to demonstrate when necessary that things were the opposite of what they seemed. The dialectic had trans­ formed his interpretation of his inner conflicts and divisions. In the past these had often caused him despair, but now they could be a source of triumph. By means of the dialectic the two conflicting elements of his personality could be integrated, if oïriy on the plane of abstract logic: through his restless will he would realize his need for harmony. Thus he announces triumphantly early in 1838: T have a long and difficult path ahead before I reach my reality, but this I do not fear—the more the negations, the fiercer the struggle, the deeper will be the harmony and reconciliation.’137 His letters are rich in variations on this theme: he assures his circle that without discords there can be no full harmony, that the strength of a man’s mission, of his right to life and happiness is pro­ portional to the force of his negation.138 Here are the origins of that paradox whose boundless optimism would be the inspiration of his political career: ‘the urge for destruction is a creative urge’. Bakunin’s acclamation of Fichte, with his defiance of the external world, as the hero of the new age was a symptom of the onset of a second period of spiritual restlessness, characterized by a need for reassurance as to his moral strength and self-sufficiency. As before, his relations with others in his circle were a main contributing factor in this mood, which reached the proportions of a crisis by the beginning of 1840. The deterioration of relationships within Bakunin’s circle reveals the extent of the discrepancy between his idealized vision of his personality and the facts. His turbulent will expressed itself not in feats of moral grandeur but in the exercise of petty despotism over others and in intolerable interference in their lives. His desire for action found ex­ pression in the fomenting of divisive passions, the spreading

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of gossip and the forming of alliances and factions which set one group of friends against another, while strengthening the authority of Bakunin himself as orchestrator of this symphony of dissonances. ‘Divide and rule* was to be in later years his favourite political taçtic; in his Moscow days it was not yet a conscious policy, rather the instinctive resort of a personality with an insatiable thirst for authority, but without the moral ascendancy necessary for his authority to be freely accepted by others. Even within his small/ group of female admirers allegiance was not always freely given. His sisters occasionally rebelled against his determination to liberate them from their parents; only the Beyer sisters gave him the unquestioning obedience which he required, but their devotion was not without its serious drawbacks. In the spring of 1838 Aleksandra followed her sister’s example in expressing the desire for a more earthly relationship with Bakunin. With strained jocularity he replied that his ‘jealous wife’—philosophy—had the sole right to his love.139 In fact he was then engaged in a mild flirtation with a cousin, Sofya Muraveva—the first since his involvement with Marya Voeykova. He confided this fact to his sisters, urging them to keep it secret from the Beyers, who would be sure to cause trouble (he emphasized that although his infatu­ ation was the source of Very pleasant fantasies’ he would not allow it to impede the paramount task of ‘refashioning’ him­ self into a vessel of eternal truth).140 Aleksandra Beyer, however, discovered the secret after the episode was over, and he answered her reproaches with the assurance that henceforth there would be place in his heart only for the ‘nobler’ feelings of ideal friendship.141 Within his intimate circle Bakunin applied the principle of ‘divide and rule’ with considerable success. He kept jealousy on the boil within the circle by making the Beyers and his sisters alternately the recipients of his confidences and by frankly discussing the defects of each group with the other. Although he assured his sisters that they were united by ‘holy bonds’ he complained to the Beyers of a lack of sympathy and understanding on the part of the female Bakunins and intimated that they, the Beyers, were much more capable than his sisters of uniting their souls with his in absolute love.

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This procedure was not without its hazards, as the Beyers found it hard to resist communicating Bakunin’s opinion to his sisters: there had been painful scenes on at least one occasion, and Bakunin had to warn Aleksandra not to go too far in her criticism of his sisters.142 In the wider context of Stankevich’s circle, however, Bakunin’s methods of domination backfired with disastrous results. The episode which sheds most light on his approach to personal relations is his association with Belinsky and their famous quarrel—a story too well-known to need more than a brief mention here.143 Belinsky was a rare windfall for Bakunin: a figure both intellectually and morally outstanding, who was at first flatteringly eager to submit to his authority. As we have seen, the first rift in the relationship was caused by Bakunin’s jealous reaction to the favourable impression made by Belinsky on his sister Tatyana. Belinsky was much too lacking in confidence to protest against the cruel humiliation inflicted on him by Bakunin, but the arrogantly condescending tone of Bakunin’s subsequent correspondence finally goaded him into retaliation: in the summer of 1837 he pointed out to his mentor some shortcomings which were incompatible with his role as prophet of the sublime truth, one of which was his unscrupulousness over matters of money (he had prevailed not only on his friends, but also on their families, to lend him money which he showed no signs of repaying). In his reply Bakunin accorded this defect little significance, but unex­ pectedly confessed the true reason for his intolerable treat­ ment of Belinsky the preceding summer.144 (As we shall see, such confessional moods were an integral part of that self­ dramatization which accompanied Bakunin’s search for wholeness.) Belinsky was deeply touched by this confidence, and good relations were restored, with the result that in the first months of 1838 Bakunin established a total ascendancy over Belinsky in the role of his instructor in the mysteries of Hegel. But soon the final break occurred when Belinsky took over the editorship of the Moscow Observer in March 1838. Although Bakunin contributed his article on Hegel to the journal, he was not pleased by Belinsky’s new elevation, which made him a figure of more consequence in their milieu

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than Bakunin himself. He wrote to Belinsky that he lacked the philosophical and personal qualifications necessary in the editor of a journal and that he must give up the project. He expected instant obedience, but Belinsky, as he later wrote, had in the preceding month undergone an internal revolution that had made him ‘aware of my own strength, independence, and reality*.145 In a dignified reply he informed Bakunin that he intended henceforth to develop in his own way. Bakunin’s reaction was venomous scorn and hatred. He attempted, in Belinsky’s words, ‘to undermine my essential being, declaring it finite’—an intolerable insult to an Idealist! He organized a ‘coalition’146 against Belinsky and his journal and applied all his eloquence to the vilification of his former disciple, both in public and in their private correspondence where, cruellest taunt of all, he represented Belinsky’s interest in his sisters as impertinent and unwelcome. Belinsky retaliated with a remarkable analysis (of which more will be said below) of Bakunin’s domineering nature and its effects on his milieu, wounding him in the most sensitive area of his self-esteem—his pretensions to spiritual authority. He had, Belinsky declared, poisoned his sisters’ lives by making them substitute philos­ ophy for feeling. Although the quarrel was briefly patched up in the autumn of 1839, relations between the two remained cool. Bakunin’s efforts to stir up passions would have met with less success had not the closed atmosphere of the Moscow circles encouraged rivalries and personal animosities: a very thin line divided fraternal interest in the intellectual and moral progress of others from gossip tinged with malice. But there was far less of the latter than might have been expected: the members of the circles took their moral ideals and their romantic conception of brotherhood far too seriously for that, and they came to share Belinsky’s view that Bakunin’s conduct showed a lack of respect for the personalities of others, and an irresponsibility (especially in financial questions) that were not compatible with their common ideals. Even the saintly and serene Stankevich was irritated by Bakunin’s interference in a delicate attachment which he formed at the end of 1836 with Bakunin’s sister Lyubov. Against Stankevich’s wishes Bakunin read aloud to his little

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circle the correspondence of the pair, and wrote to Stankevich that after discussing the latter’s contributions he and Belinsky had been unable to decide whether Stankevich’s love was genuine or had been stifled by the falseness, uncertainty, and Schönseeligheit [prekrasnodushie]’ from which, in Bakimin’s opinion, he then suffered.147 The relationship withered, largely thanks to Bakunin’s interference, before Lyubov died in August 1838. Although public discussion of private emotions was part of the romantic code, Bakunin’s excessive lack of delicacy with regard to the feelings of others led to his increasing isolation. After Belinsky’s defection he succeeded in finding a docile disciple in Vassilii Botkin, a man of mediocre intelli­ gence and passive temperament, the son of a tea merchant and a fringe member of Stankevich’s circle. What he lacked in brilliance he made up for in an agreeable deference and an abundance of funds, on which Bakunin drew freely after moving into his apartment. But this relationship came to an end after a year when Botkin fell in love with Bakunin’s sister Aleksandra. Her parents were opposed to the affair, and Bakunin was as usual free with advice to all parties. Botkin, rightly or wrongly, was convinced that he was to blame when the affair petered out early in 1840. Shortly after this an unpleasant scandal served as a focus for the considerable hostility towards Bakunin which now existed in Moscow. In the winter of 1839-40 Bakunin discovered a liaison between a member of Stankevich’s circle, Mikhail Katkov, and the wife of Herzen’s friend Ogarev. He hastened to spread the news of this, but the ensuing scandal rebounded against him. The injured husband accepted Katkov’s apology and the whole circle united in moral condemnation of Bakunin. When Bakunin, about to leave for Europe, paid a visit to Belinsky, Katkov lay in wait for him and accused him of ruining his reputation with his malicious gossip. The two men came to blows, at which point Katkov uttered the insult ‘eunuch’ which, according to Belinsky, made Bakunin quiver as if from an electric shock. In a letter which, in Belinsky’s ironic version of the affair, said in two pages what could have been said in two words, Bakunin challenged Katkov to a duel,148 Katkov accepted, but the duel, postponed to an

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undetermined date abroad, never took place. All of Moscow took Katkov’s side in the affair and when Bakunin left Russia in June, 1840, not one of his former friends bade him farewell. He was accompanied to the steamer by Aleksandr Herzen, who, having been in ejcile for almost the whole of the previous seven years, was a new acquaintance, and a new source of funds—Bakunin ‘borrowed’ a thousand roubles from him before his departure. In his first letters to his sisters and the Beyers after his departure he expressed lofty contempt for his former friends ‘with >their petty self-esteem, praising each other to the skies’. He made an exception only for Stankevich, the only one of his Moscow friends whom he had not alien­ ated.149 Stankevich bore no grudges and never quarrelled with anyone (moreover, he had by that time been abroad for three years). This, then, together with the continuing unpleasantness with his parents over the ‘liberation’ of Varvara, was the back­ ground to the note of anxiety which crept into Bakunin’s Hegelian optimism in 1838. There is an increasing number of references in his correspondence over the next two years to the meanness and pettiness of the life around him;he expresses the fear that he will be submerged in the ‘trivial world of trivial reality’ and lose sight of ‘the sacred aim of my life’. 150 He was once again menaced by the fate of being, in Fichte’s words, banished from the domain of reality to that of shadowy conception. In February 1840 he wrote to the Beyer sisters: T am sick of general and empty discussions about the lofty, the beautiful, the eternal Spirit.. .. what I need now is positive, definite knowledge.’ He senses that he will fulfil his old yearning to ‘sink totally into universal life’ only by cutting his links with the past.151 As on previous occasions the most sincere and thoughtful expression of his spiritual state is to be found in a letter to Stankevich, who was the only person of his acquaintance whom he had never been able to dominate or dazzle, and the only one whom he admired: all m y life and all my worth has consisted in some sort of abstract force of spirit, and even that has been smashed by the sordid trivialities of my everyday family life, by the empty internecine wars of family and friends, and perhaps, by my own insignificance. As of old there remains in me a strong demand which dominates all others, for living knowledge;

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but it is a thirst that nothing has satisfied, in spite of all my poor and painful efforts . . . . I know nothing: this awareness is essential as a transition, as the beginning of true knowledge, but that is a very poor consolation . . . . Until now I have believed implicitly in the words of the Saviour: ‘And you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free', but I begin to doubt my ability to know.

There was only one solution: to go abroad, to Berlin, as Stankevich had done, and there to study Idealism at its source. This, he confidently expects, will bring about his rebirth, his baptism of water and the Spirit’.152 In the same month he writes to Aleksandra Beyer that the golden period of his life will come when he breaks out of ‘the narrow bounds of our reality’ and plunges into ‘the living atmosphere of European life, in which everything is infused with divine thoughtscience, religion, art, nature, people.’153 There was one serious obstacle to this project—the necessity of obtaining finance for it from his father: Bakunin’s bitterness about the sordid trivialities of family life owed much to the fact that he was at that time engaged in the delicate and protracted task of persuading an estranged parent (through the mediation of his brothers and sisters) to part with a considerable sum in order to subsidize studies which had already destroyed the harmony of his family. Faced with this task, even Bakunin’s optimism wavered, and the letter to Stankevich quoted above contains a reflection on his future of a kind which he would never have made to his circle of disciples. If he does not succeed, he writes, he is indifferent as to what career he will eventually take up : whether I finish my life as an ensign in the artillery or a state councillor is a matter of total indifference to me; I w on't be the first or the last of those who have come to grief in their striving towards the ideal, which is often no more and no less than the fermenting of young blood. I am the same decent and absurd fellow as 1 was when you knew me, with the sole difference that then I had more faith in life than I have now, and that then I was twenty-three years old, and now I am twenty-six. 1 5 4

Bakunin made his last effort to persuade his father in a letter which, as E. H. Carr has remarked, foreshadowed his famous Confession to the tsar of eleven years later: ‘a cunningly

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woven tissue of humility and independence, of sincerity and ingenuity*.155 He pointed out that a doctor’s degree from Berlin would qualify him for a professor’s chair in Moscow, a position of which his father would approve, and begged for an annual allowance Jo carry out this programme. In midApril 1840 he received a letter from his father giving his consent to this; meanwhile he had extracted a loan from Herzen,156 and after a farewell visit to Pryamukhino he travelled to St. Petersburg where on 29 June 1840 he caught the ship which was to take him to Lübeck and a new reality. Bakunin’s highly abstract disquisitions on the subject of his ‘reality’ exemplify the vicious circle in which all the Russian Hamlets of the 1830s were trapped through their longing to lead purposeful lives. But even among that generation of superfluous men the ‘abstract force* of his character, which in a rare mood of humility he had described as his only valuable quality, set him apart. It enabled him to dominate his contemporaries, but ultimately it repelled and alienated them. They saw in him a caricature of their own weaknesses, an extreme case of that distortion of the personality which was the result of their historical predicament. One of them, P. V. Annenkov, encapsulated this aspect of Bakunin in his brilliant chronicle of the circles of the 1830s, A Remarkable Decade. He emphasized the exceptional talent which secured Bakunin the leading position in Stankevich’s circle: although he was an amateur in philosophy, his gift for exposition established him as an authority on the exegesis of Idealist texts. All problems of interpretation were brought to him, and instantly resolved in a brilliant flow of eloquence. But his powers of abstract reasoning were too often applied to areas where they were inappropriate: The whole of life presented itself to him through the prism of abstrac­ tion, and he spoke of it with striking enthusiasm only when it was translated into idea. He was much less able to grasp its contingent, fleeting, original aspects. Although through the exercise of a wideranging, truly unusual mind he succeeded in raising the transitory, poetic characteristics of life to a conceptual level and thereby mastering them, they nevertheless lost a great deal in the process, including on occasion their very essence as individual phenomena.157

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This attenuated sense of the individuality of phenomena was especially evident in Bakunin’s attitude to others in his circle. This man who was later to be renowned for his defence of individuals against the tyranny of abstractions had, accord­ ing to the unanimous testimony of his contemporaries, a remarkable lack of insight into the feelings of others, and was incapable of forming real affective ties. The historian T. Granovsky, in a letter to Stankevich, asserted: ‘for [Bakunin] there are no subjects, only objects . . . . It is impossible to feel warm, affection for him, although he excites amazement, admiration, sympathy.’158 Belinsky, who knew Bakunin more intimately than anyone else in their circle, wrote to hinT'at the time of their most serious quarrel that much that had puzzled him in the course of their stormy relationship had become clear when he had realized that ‘ideas are dearer to you than men9. For Bakunin individual men were ‘transitory shadows’, the playthings of an all-generating, all-devouring deity: It is because of this that it has always been so easy for you to say . . . ‘if we must part, we must’, or ‘if it can’t be helped, so be it’, and so on . . . don’t think that I am denying that you are capable of love—no, I know that in the secret depths of your soul there is concealed an inexhaustible source of love;but as yet this love is directed only towards the Absolute . . . not towards concrete phenomena. Your blood is hot and seething, but, if you’ll pardon the expression, it flows not in your veins but in your spirit.1S9

Belinsky showed a uniquely sensitive appreciation of the contradictions in Bakunin’s nature. Renowned himself for the passionate intensity with which he adopted and rejected ideas, he was aware that Bakunin’s inner life was not only more cerebral, but also more vital and intense than that of any of their contemporaries. In his voluminous correspondence with Bakunin and other members of their circle, he strove to explain the strange mixture of attraction and revulsion which he felt for the man who had been so dominant an influence on their intellectual development. His longest ‘dis­ sertations’ on this subject, as Bakunin called them, were written in response to extravagant criticism of his own personality. But Belinsky, as he put it, refused to answer

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invective with invective: ‘not wounded self-love, but love of the truth’160 inspired his criticism of Bakunin. His claim is justifiai by the quality of his analysis: with his singular honesty and integrity he strove to eliminate all personal rancour and bitterness from his vision in order to render as accurately as possible the light as well as the dark sides of a personality whom he believed to be of great significance for his time. He explained to Bakunin that he saw in him ‘two distinct beings’. The first had a spirit which was ‘beautiful and noble, powerful and profound’, was seething with life and move­ ment, tireless in the pursuit of truth, generous to his friends, whom he supported morally and even materially on the rare occasions when he was in funds (although Belinsky points out that the funds were invariably borrowed). The second Bakunin was a ‘logical skeleton’, devoid of life and movement, possessed by a monstrous egoism, unscrupulous, petty and irresponsible in his relations with others, with an itch to dominate and subjugate, a passion for frankness on the subject of the defects of others, and an aversion to hearing the truth about himself.161 The first Bakunin had won from Belinsky a respect which, because of his naivety and sense of inferiority, had developed into hero-worship. The second Bakunin had accepted worship as his due and had bitterly resented every sign of independent thought on the part of his disciple. In these bewildering alternations of darkness and light Belinsky saw the ‘chaotic fermentation’ of a powerful and remarkably gifted personality struggling to achieve self­ definition. In such an individual egoism and moral passion could sometimes be indistinguishable: Belinsky was at times inclined to justify Bakunin’s self-absorption by his need to create a coherent self out of an unusually rich combination of elements. Hence the energy which amazed his contem­ poraries: the scale of the enterprise was such that Bakunin could not be content with the philosophical reflection through which the other members of the Moscow circles sought to resolve their inner conflicts. ‘Storms and battles’ were essential to him as instruments of self-definition. In Bakunin’s inter­ ventions in the lives of those around him, Belinsky discerned a pattern dictated by his lack of inner equilibrium: an

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oscillation between ‘devilish * egoism and self-hatred, the first expressed in his urge to dominate, the second in his restless itch for change and movement, his preoccupation with^listant goals (interpreted by Belinsky as an urge to escape both from the present and from his present self). In Belinsky’s view, it was these impulses, rather than his professed aim of promoting the triumph of Reason in the world, which dictated his choice of methods in the battles in which he engaged. People and circumstances were for him merely props on the stage on which he acted out his dramas of self-assertion and self-escape. Belinsky believed that it was the desire to pose as a hero, rather than concern for his sisters’ happiness that had dictated Bakunin’s tactics in his fight for their emancipation. Add to this the fact that he could scarcely take a step in the real world without stumbling, and the outcome could have been predicted: ‘where things could be done quietly, he made a commotion; where they could be done simply, he made a show, most frequently creating much ado about nothing’—the net result of which was the permanent embittering of relations in a once harmonious family. Bakunin’s tendency to identify the triumph of the Absolute with his personal domination over his circle was a constant source of disaster in his relations with others: his demands were so extravagant and ridiculous that they had alienated even the most long-suffering of his friends. Those who bore the yoke of his friendship were required ‘to share the same view of the weather and even the same taste for porridge—a conditio sine qua non.’162 According to Belinsky, Bakunin’s attitude to philosophy exhibited the same tendency to confuse the pursuit of truth with the fulfilment of his need for self-expression. At the end of 1839, on hearing of Bakunin’s desperate efforts to get to Berlin, he called into question the genuineness of his muchpublicized calling to philosophy. ‘What has he done for science? . . . Nothing: he has leafed through books and shouted about them, created a commotion about philosophy and himself, himself and philosophy.’ No wonder, Belinsky commented to Stankevich, that only the credulous Botkin retained his faith in a ‘calling’ which was now more suspect than ever: Belinsky had in mind the last-minute nature of Bakunin’s attempts, after a life of irresponsible extravagance,

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to raise money for studies which he declared to be essential to his existence: Love of science, like any other love . . . demands self-denial, sacrifice. What has he done? In these five years he could have accumulated funds by giving lessons, he could have passed the candidate’s and master’s examinations and, like Granovsky, gone [to Berlin] at the government’s expense. No, he is deceiving himself: a man who has done nothing for science in Russia won’t do anything in Berlin; a man who, when he has no money in St. Petersburg, spends the money of others on Rhenish wine won’t stint himself in Berlin.

There was, in Belinsky’s opinion, a strong element of selfhatred in Bakunin’s frantic urge to get to Berlin: ‘he is going there not to find philosophy but to escape from himself.’163 Belinsky subsequently felt that he had been unfair to Bakunin, that the light as well as the dark side of his character could be seen in his dedication to philosophy. Writing to him in 1840 shortly before his departure for Berlin, he assured him that he now believed that his project was not ‘the empty dream of idle vanity’, but sprang from a genuine spiritual need. He was careful, too, to give Bakunin credit for his occasional frankness about his setbacks in the pursuit of selfperfection; but he never changed his opinion about the fundamental flaw in Bakunin’s nature. This ‘unhappy man, bom to give grief to himself and others’ could not distinguish between service to the objective truth and satisfaction of his own subjective and conflicting urges: consequently, he strove to bend people and circumstances to. his inner needs with a ruthless energy whose destructive effects, insensitive as he was to the world outside himself, he could neither restrain or direct. If at times Belinsky saw Bakunin as a comic poseur, there were other times when he shuddered before a vision of him as a ‘fallen angel’, or a vampire. Adapting a poem by Pushkin, he compared the effect of Bakunin’s ‘disordered passions’ on the gatherings of his more sedate contemporaries to that of a lawless comet’, sweeping through the ‘ordered motion of the stars’.164 Others would later describe Bakunin’s revolutionary career in similar terms. Belinsky’s analysis, made at a period when Bakunin’s fight for freedom was con­ fined to testing the limits of an aged parent’s tolerance, shows

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a prescient understanding of the energies and strivings which distinguished this ‘superfluous man’ from the others of his time. fe The only comparable analysis of Bakunin’s personality on the part of a contemporary was made many years after the dust raised in Moscow by the young Bakunin had settled. It is to be found in Ivan Turgenev’s novel Rudin. Published in 1856 with an Epilogue added in 1860, Rudin is an exploration, through the eponymous hero, of the psy­ chology and outlook of the first generation of the intelli­ gentsia, to which Turgenev himself belonged. Rudin was modelled on the young Bakunin: although Turgenev first met Bakunin when they were both students in Berlin in 1840, he had known him by reputation through Stankevich and other mutual acquaintances in Moscow. At the time of the main action of the novel, Rudin is approaching middle age, and it is through the account of a former friend, Lezhnev, that we see him as a young man, a member of a circle of students devoted to the study of Idealist philosophy and presided over by a man of exceptional moral purity and nobility, Pokorsky (who was clearly modelled on Stankevich). But it was Rudin who, though shallow in com­ parison with Pokorsky, dominated the circle through his eloquence and dialectical skill. Though he had not read very much philosophy, he had read more than the others, and, being less intellectually scrupulous than Pokorsky, he was more able to give these fervent seekers after truth what they most longed for—‘formulae, . . . conclusions, even incorrect ones, but conclusions!’ Talking ‘splendidly, like a young Demosthenes declaiming to the roaring sea’, he would unfold in simple and striking terms all the truths which mankind had hitherto struggled vainly to discover. He would outline to them the ‘universal world law’ by which ‘philosophy, art, science, life itself’ could be explained, so that for the first time they felt firm ground beneath their feet. Doubts were swept away, to be replaced by a secure conviction of the rational necessity of all phenomena, a sense of the mysterious purpose of the universe, and of their own exalted mission as the vehicles

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through which eternal truth revealed itself to the world. A decade later, in the mid 1840s, Rudin had changed very little. He had failed to fulfil his brilliant promise; he had dabbled in numerous enterprises, including agriculture and educational theory, always active, constantly consumed by new enthusiasms, but finishing nothing and achieving nothing. However, failure had not diminished his idealism or his marvellous eloquence. These ensured him subsistence at the expense of a provincial landowner, at whose estate he arrived on a visit, and remained, captivating his hostess and her guests by his inspired discourses on elevated subjects: *He spoke authoritatively and fascinatingly, but not entirely lucidly, . . . yet this very vagueness lent a particular charm to his speech.* His themes were those of his youth: honour, genius, science, enlightenment, the mysterious harmony underlying all phenomena, the higher purpose which gives significance to nature and the life of man, the need for man to understand his predestined ‘mission’: ‘there should be no greater joy for man than to sense himself the instrument of higher forces.’ He is obsessed with discovering his own mission: ‘my duty is to act, I must not hide my talents, if I have them, must not waste my strength on words alone’.165 But this Hamlet who yearns to become a Don Quixote is caught in a vicious circle: he spends his time reasoning about the enervating effect of time spent in reasoning, dedicating his idleness to reflections on the virtue of energy and determination. He believes that only through spontaneous, unreflecting action will he achieve the harmony he lacks; he does not understand that what for him is the goal of such action is in fact its precondition. Because his ideal of action is an abstraction unconnected with real, specific goals, his frantic activity is singularly unproductive. As Lezhnev points out, although he seems to be full of heroic fire and vitality, his innermost being is cold. He reasons when he should feel; through analysis of emotions he destroys them. He expatiates at length to the heroine, an idealistic young girl, on the nature of love, but finally admits that he is incapable of real love, issuing from the heart, not the intellect and imagination. His enthusiasm is cerebral; in the heroic rhetoric of his exhortations there is a false note,

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something self-conscious, self-admiring. Faced with the necessity of decisive action when his involvement with the heroine is discovered, he ignobly withdraws from the scene, confessing in a letter to her that he is incapable of resolving the split between his intellect and his will: My fate is strange, almost comic—I am ready to surrender myself wholly and entirely, I thirst to do so—but I cannot. I will end by sacrificing myself for some rubbish in which I won’t even believe . . . . My God, to be still trying to get round to doing something at thirty-five years of age! . . . Alas! If only I could really . . . overcome my laziness . . . but no! I will remain the same unfinished creature as I have been until n o w .. . . 166

In an epilogue added to the novel four years later, Rudin is shown as having at last found expression both for his idealism and his thirst for action. During his aimless wanderings through Europe, he finds himself in Paris at the time of the 1848 revolution. He joins the insurgents and dies on the barricades. But even here he does not achieve the sublime self-realization for which he longed. The irony of his death epitomizes the tragic delusions of a man who saw the real world through the distorting prism of ideal abstractions: the man whose life was dedicated to the search for his sublime mission sacrifices himself uselessly for a cause with which he has no real connection, his death unnoticed except by two casual observers who take him to be a Pole. Turgenev was to maintain in the early 1860s that Rudin was a ‘fairly faithful’ portrait of Bakunin as he then was, with seven years of revolutionary activity and a decade of prison and exile behind him;167 but his view was not shared by the Russian Left. The radical journalist Chemyshevsky asserted that Rudin was ‘not even a caricature* of Bakunin, but the portrait of somebody totally different, with a few labels, such as ‘orator* and ‘sponger’, attached to identify him as Bakunin;168 and Aleksandr Herzen asserted in his memoirs that the vacillating Rudin had much more in common with the liberal Turgenev than with the revolutionary Bakunin: Turgenev . . . created Rudin in his own image and likeness;

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Rudin is Turgenev the Second, saturated with the young Bakunin’s philosophical jargon.’169 Later critics, while con­ ceding that Rudin captured some of the traits of Bakunin’s romantic youth,170 have tended to agree with Herzen that Turgenev did not really understand his subject. In the words of Bakunin’s Russian biographer Yu. Steklov, the defects portrayed in Rudin ‘did not play such a determining role in [Bakunin’s] life’ as Turgenev would have us believe: the young philosopher was to become a thoroughly ‘practical’ revolutionary, notorious for his impatience with intellectuals and their abstractions.171 But Turgenev was a more subtle psychologist than his critics perceived him to be. His concern in the novel was not to present Rudin as an intellectual incapable of decisive action (the subsequent addition of the epilogue was doubtless intended to stress this point), but rather to explore the psylogical roots of his hero’s obsession with the need to act. Rudin, like Bakunin, conceived of action not as an end in itself, but only as the means to the attainment of an inner equilibrium; the key to his personality lies in his assertion that the greatest of human joys is the sense of being the instrument of ‘higher forces’. Turgenev made Rudin’s domi­ nant characteristic that yearning which, channelled into the concept of a mission, directed all Bakunin’s philosophical searching: the urge for self-fulfilment through a feat of will which would be at one and the same time a total identifi­ cation with a universal purpose. In 1835, at the height of his enthusiasm for Fichte, Bakunin wrote to his friend Efremov: ‘Only when we can say “ce que je veux, Dieu le veut”, will. . . our suffering be at an end’.172 This is a classic Idealist vision of liberty as the resolution of all duality, the reconciliation of subject and object, freedom and inevitability. It was to become the guiding inspiration of Bakunin’s revolutionary ideology, in particular of the cult of spontaneous destruction which was to be his distinctive contribution to the modem revolutionary tradition.

CHAPTER II

The Urge to Destroy . . . blindness is the basic characteristic of all that is positive; only the negative is endowed with insight. Die R eaktion in D eutschland

By t h e end of the 1830s, as we have seen, Bakunin was convinced that only by travelling to the source of Hegelian philosophy, Berlin, could he attain ‘living knowledge’, that full and harmonious apprehension of reality which would transform him from a shadowy, abstract being into a whole man. In May 1839 he wrote to Stankevich that this was ‘a question of life or death’ for him, and the following year, desperately trying to raise money to finance the journey, he wrote to him: T am making my final efforts to get somehow to Berlin, from which I expect a rebirth, a baptism of water and the Spirit’.1 On 25 July 1840 he arrived in Berlin, where he heard of Stankevich’s death in Italy the previous month. He soon made the acquaintance of Karl Werder, a young professor of philosophy at the university of Berlin, where philosophy was still synonymous with Hegel’s system. Werder had been an intimate friend of Stankevich, who was one of a small group of Russian students at the university at the end of the 1830s. Werder had given them private lessons and, through his passion for literature and the theatre, had been for them a living link with the German romantics who had played so great a role in their development. Stankevich had particularly admired him for a serene quality which some less flatteringly described as smugness.2 Bakunin’s description of this relatively undistinguished man reveals a trait which would henceforth.be as marked as his striving to dominate lesser natures: a tendency to idolize those who seemed to possess the qualities which he most lacked himself. Werder’s bland serenity seemed to him to

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epitomize that wholeness for which he yearned. To Herzen he rhapsodized that ‘Spirit, knowledge, has become flesh’ in his new friend; that the source of Werder’s amiability (Gemütlichkeit) was ‘aliving. . . unity of knowledge and life’, achieved through a ‘religious’ feat of will.3 In letters to his circle in Russia, Bakunin outlined his plans for study, to begin with the autumn term. He would attend Werder’s lectures on logic and the history of philosophy, the lectures of Gabler (Hegel’s successor in the chair of philosophy) on phenomenology and physics, and would follow a course on theology. Whether he fulfilled this plan is not known, but he did ultimately obtain a diploma from the xiniversity. He began work in a mood of high confidence: ‘Here everything can be known and I shall come to know everything’, ani­ mated as he was, not by the ‘cold, pedantic’ desire to accumu­ late facts, but by ‘the profound religious striving of my whole being to truth.’4 For all this dedication to study Bakunin needed the society and the admiration of others. His sister Varvara, who had been with Stankevich in his last days, came with her child to share lodging? with him in Berlin, and soon after his arrival he acquired an admiring audience in Ivan Turgenev, four years younger than himself. Turgenev had worshipped Stankevich, who had initiated him into philosophy when the two had met abroad two years previously. His travels having brought him to Berlin, he extended his devotion to Stankevich’s friend and Bakunin soon, by his own account, become more intimate with him than he had been with anyone except Stankevich and his female acolytes.5 They moved into an apartment which they shared until Turgenev’s return to Russia in the autumn of 1841. Bakunin supervised his philosophical studies and also availed himself of a new source of funds in the form of loans which he never repaid: Turgenev was the only son of a rich widow. As his forty-year long relationship with the singer Pauline Viardot was to prove, Turgenev’s was a yielding nature that invited domination. He was none the less capable of a remarkably detached obser­ vation of the psychological mechanisms of such relationships, as evidenced by the ultimate fruit of his year’s intimacy with Bakunin—Rudin.

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Of Bakunin’s other acquaintances in Berlin some were Russians, mainly remnants of Stankevich’s circle, who were visitors like him. Apart from Werder, his closest German acquaintances were Hermann Müller-Strübing and KarlAugust Vamhagen von Ense. The former had in his youth spent five years in prison for revolutionary activity; he was now a bohemian and rather comic figure, a journalist and critic of the arts with a taste for the company of Russians whom, in return for hospitality, he served as a cultural guide to Berlin. Vamhagen was a more distinguished figure: a retired diplomat and patron of the arts, widower of Rahel Levin whose salon in Berlin had been a focus of the German romantic movement, he had begun to learn Russian in order to acquaint himself with the new Russian writing which had begun with Pushkin. Vamhagen introduced Bakunin to Bettina von Amim, whose semi-apocryphal correspondence with Goethe had been for the Pryamukhino circle the model of romantic feeling, and to the singer Henrietta Solmar who presided over a fashionable salon. In the evenings, often after a concert of Beethoven’s symphonies (admired by Berlin society as the supreme musical expression of German romantic Idealism), Bakunin and Turgenev would gather at Varvara’s apartment where they were frequently joined by these and other acquaintances such as a Mile Froman, a friend of Werder who had known Goethe. Varvara’s letters home describe these evenings, spent in discussions of philosophy and art and in literary readings; on one occasion Byron’s Cain was read in German translation.6 Bakunin took up riding, fencing and gymnastics and, never short of edifying explanations of his conduct, pointed out to his parents that one must cultivate society in order to avoid the defects of awkwardness and timidity;7 but he seems in retrospect to have been aware of a discrepancy between the self-abnegating pursuit of reality which was his declared aim, and the role of young romantic exalté with which he impressed the hostesses of the Berlin salons. Two years later, in an unusually self-mocking letter, he asks his sisters to remind Turgenev of these early months in Berlin:

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Remind him of our common fantasies, forebodings, hopes: remind him also of how, conscious that our life, for all its fullness, was still abstract, ideal, we decided to throw ourselves into the real world, in order to live and to act, and how, as a result of that decision we set off the next day to Mile Solmar, he in a green velvet ‘Don Juan’ waistcoat, I in a lilac one, also velvet.8

There is considerable exaggeration in Bakunin’s subsequent description of himself in his first year in Berlin, as having been immersed in German metaphysics ‘exclusively, almost to the point of madness; seeing nothing day and night except the categories of Hegel.’9 But Hegel remained for him the key to the secret of inner harmony; it is therefore surprising to find the excitement of philosophical discovery totally absent from his correspondence at this period. If study at the source of Idealism stimulated fresh insights, these are not recorded. It is true that the moderate conservatism and political quietism of the orthodox Hegelian school which reigned in the university was no novelty to him, but in livelier intellectual circles in Berlin this interpretation had been superseded by the left Hegelian theories which were closely linked with the political ferment in Prussia at the time. In the year of Bakunin’s arrival in Berlin Friedrich Wilhelm IV came to the throne. The liberal bourgeoisie expected him to grant the popular representation promised by his father, but the new ruler soon showed himself to be an enemy of the ideas of the Enlightenment and a dedicated upholder of tradition. The most frustrated German intellectuals found an outlet for their energies, as on past occasions, in philosophical audacity: the orthodox interpretation of Hegel’s political philosophy, with its worship of the state and its aloofness from the struggles of the time, was rejected in favour of a radical interpretation of the dialectical progress of Reason as one of headlong movement towards a final catastrophe which would inaugurate a new era of history. But there is no reference in Bakunin’s correspondence during his first year in Berlin to these radical developments in German philosophy. This astonishing lack of response to the intellectual stimuli of his surroundings shows the degree to which his own intellectual interests were dictated by his emotional needs: these still tied him to the web of relationships

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that he had created in his small circle in Pryamukhino. True, his desire to escape from the more unpleasant aspects of these relationships had been a dominant reason for his move to Berlin, but he was still totally immersed in his inner world: new impressions and acquaintances could not as yet compete with the satisfaction of communion with disciples who remained passionately interested in his emotions and deeply dependent on him for moral guidance. There was still much emotional mileage to be had from the themes of the past, and Bakunin’s correspondence with his circle, which continued to be voluminous, shows him still engrossed in the Fichtean paradox according to which self-annihilation is the way to divinity and suffering the guarantee of bliss. He reminds his flock that love is ‘the movement of immortal Spirit, striving towards its source’, and frequently exhorts them to welcome the fact that they have been ‘chosen’ for suffering, which is the vitalizing principle of existence: only through constant ‘negation’ of his finite and individual nature does man actualize the divine principle within himself, so that ‘God becomes man in him’.10 It was to this doctrine, which corresponded so satisfyingly to his own contradictory impulses, that Bakunin resorted to explain the disaster of Stankevich’s death. He wrote to Herzen that this event had convinced him of personal immortality (an issue on which Hegelians were divided),11 and to his sisters he explained that the very contradictions contained in the con­ cept of immortality were for him a guarantee of its validity: Self-negation is the universal and supreme law of all spiritual life. In contrast to material life, which possesses only what it appropriates, Spirit possesses only what it surrenders. And death, that total des­ truction of individuality, is the supreme fulfilment of this mystery and is therefore the supreme fulfilment of the personality . . . . Man must continually die in order continually to live, continually surrender himself without any exception, any reflection, in order continually to possess him self. . . ,12

This was no mere sentimental epitaph for a friend: we will see that this interpretation of the mystery of personality answered a need so fundamental that it would survive Bakunin’s rejection of religious belief, to become the foundation of his political philosophy.

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He continued to hold that renunciation of the ‘finite* was accomplished through acts of moral revolt against the triviality of everyday life, epitomized in his view by the conventional morality to which his parents wished their children to conform. But here, as before, the style of his rebellion was cramped by the fact that he was dependent on his parents for funds; when Turgenev was eventually unable to extract from his mother the sums necessary to subsidize his friend, Bakunin’s requests for money from his parents became increasingly urgent; direct confrontation with them was thus out of the question, and Bakunin emphasized to his brothers and sisters the need for tact in the pursuit of their freedom. The most urgent case was Varvara, whom their parents wished to be reconciled with her husband. Once again Bakunin took his hesitating sister in hand. She submitted to him for approval a letter to her husband: he found its tone too conciliatory and dictated a substitute, ordering her not to return to Pryamukhino until her husband guaranteed not to contact her.13 Much of Bakunin’s energy was devoted to the task of rescuing Tatyana and Pavel, the brother and sister who were most influenced by his preaching and most out of sympathy with their surroundings. Tatyana was in a state of depression, induced by the discrepancy between an indolent life on her parents’ estate and the vague dreams of beatitude with which Bakunin had left her, while Pavel, a student of law at Moscow University, had caught the philosophical infection from his brother and was exhibiting characteristic symptoms. Absorbed in the study of Hegel, he wrote to Aleksandra Beyer that he felt himself and those around him to be phantoms: ‘my knowledge gives me no reality.’14 Bakunin enlisted the help of his remaining brothers and sisters to persuade his parents to allow the pair to come to Berlin, investing his campaign with a lofty philosophical significance. He spurred them on with an aphorism that could have come directly from the pages of Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben: ‘only love that acts is real’. In a letter to Pavel he reaffirms the moral voluntarism of his Moscow days : it is only because they have all submitted to ‘trivial reality’ so much in the past that their present enterprise seems impossible. But given the urgency

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of PavePs and Tatyana’s spiritual demands, they could not fold their arms and allow themselves to be swamped by the ‘destructive movement of everyday life’. It is the feelings rooted in the depths of their souls that give them all the right to call ourselves by the holy name of man: but when the time comes for [these feelings] to clash with everyday life, then we call them phantoms, empty fantasies . . . . No, it is not they, but everyday existence that is a phantom, the most terrible of phantoms, which binds us with paltry, but none the less strong and invisible fetters. Through strength of faith and strength of will, the eternal companion of faith, we must cast these fetters off.15

The language is familiar; and as before, Bakunin’s challenge to the finite world in the name of the higher reality of his spirit was the defiance of weakness: the feats of will which he prescribes are the means whereby he hopes to attain the still distant goal of wholeness. The ideal of the integral man is a recurring theme in his letters of 1841. In passages redolent of Fichtean mysticism he affirms that man’s highest calling is to ‘become a man’, to make the divine element which is latent in his personality the conscious content of his life. Man’s belief that he can overcome the obstacles presented by the external world is eo ipso an act, whereby he ‘creates himself’ as an immortal being. Only a man who acts in this way truly exists.16 Clearly, Bakunin’s long-awaited study of Hegelian philos­ ophy at source had done nothing to eradicate beliefs which from the standpoint of Hegelian ‘realism’ were rank heresy: the refusal to recognize a reality outside the will of the Ego was, in the parlance of the Moscow Hegelians,prekrasnodushte 9 narcissistic self-indulgence which, being based on illusion, condemned the *beautiful soul’ to futility. But we have seen that in his last months in Moscow, Bakunin reaffirmed an earlier allegiance when he declared his intention to act ‘in defiance of all that is external’, denying significance to all but the inner world of the Spirit. The affinity with Fichte which he had recognized at that time is strongly evident in his letters from Berlin. It is important to stress the continuity between the themes of these letters and the preoccupations of Bakunin’s Moscow days because his calls to ‘action’ at this time have been

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commonly interpreted as representing a radically new turn in his thought, the first sign of a new Bakunin who would emerge in the following year stripped of all his former philosophical baggage and transformed by the cleansing fire of left Hegelian criticism.17 The myth„that Bakunin the revolutionary was the embodiment of a spontaneous destructive force is rooted in this conception of the magical effect of the left Hegelian ‘philosophy of the act’in transforming a divided, introspective being into an integrated, unhesitating man of action. There was no such transformation. After 1842 as before, the needs of the alienated intellectual continued to determine Bakunin’s vision of the world and his goals. The difference was that the ‘philosophy of the act* convinced him that revolution was the sole means to his ends. The reality of his conversion to revolution was a psychological drama no less compelling than the myth, each new development being the hybrid product of his passionate yearning for truth and his infinite capacity for self-deception, his craving for movement and his inability to extend his horizons. The remainder of the present chapter is an outline of this tortuous process. The movement which was the revolutionary nursery of both Bakunin and his future opponent Marx began in the late 1830s as an attempt on the part of Hegel’s more radical followers (mostly students or teachers of philosophy at the university of Berlin) to develop the critical elements of his philosophy.18 The split within the Hegelian school began over religion and its role in man’s ultimate self-realization—a question on which there was considerable ambiguity in Hegel’s works. According to Hegel, there was no higher form of knowledge than philosophy, which at the pinnacle of its development was the self-knowledge of the Absolute, whose nature way thought: but though philosophy expressed in fully rational terms the truths apprehended in the images of religion it did not supersede religion, for man’s ultimate reconciliation with the Absolute took place not only in the domain of rational thought but also in that of heart and feeling, where it was expressed through religious devotion to God. Thus Christianity

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in its highest form (which Hegel believed to be Lutheran protestantism) had a necessary role in the rational state. Hegel accepted the main Christian dogmas, such as the Fall, the Incarnation and the death of Christ, as historical events in the dialectical movement of Spirit, in which separation and loss were the preconditions for the ultimate reconciliation of the finite with the infinite. In his lectures on religion and elsewhere Hegel attempted to demonstrate that Christianity, itself a higher synthesis of the principles of the Jewish and Greek religions, having gone through two stages (exaggerated opposition to the world, followed by an attempt to dominate it), had with the Reformation reached a final stage in which the World would become freely reconciled with religious faith in a rational state, the institutional realization of the Kingdom of God on earth. Hegel believed that philosophy, by expressing the truths of religion in rational form, would reconcile religion with the Enlightenment which had gone too far in defending the autonomy of reason, and had failed to recognize that human reason was the vehicle of Spirit. But Hegel’s reconciliation was illusory. It has long been appreciated that his conception of the relationship of God and man aß governed by rational necessity denies God that absolute freedom which is essential to Christianity. According to Hegel ‘Ohne Welt ist Gott nicht G ott’:19 Spirit cannot reach its ultimate goal of self-consciousness without man as vehicle of its self-knowledge. Though man remains the part and God the whole, in Hegel’s religion it is man who seems to be most often at the centre of the cosmic stage. Salvation is not a gift from God, but a necessary process of affirmation of man’s identity with the cosmos; in contemplating the self­ revelation of God, mankind is marvelling at its own history. The submission of faith before the unknowable is replaced by the confidence that the final mysteries are wholly permeable to reason. If Hegel’s religion was unorthodox, his exaltation of man seems no more daring than that of Fichte, which had not posed any real threat to the political or religious status quo. Neither Hegel nor the Prussian state could have had any premonition of the dangerous and potent brew which would result when some of the implications of his philosophy of

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religion were pursued to their logical extreme. Nor at first did those who were responsible for this exercise. It began as a scholarly debate over such questions as Hegers conception of the personality of God, on which the opponents of the marriage of reason and religion found the master a fertile source of ideas. The debate began with the publication in 1835 of a book by D. F. Strauss, entitled Das Leben Jesu, which denied the possibility of the incarnation of God in an individual and argued that in Jesus the collective consciousness had produced a mythological symbol of the future incarnation of God in the whole of mankind; the Gospels, too, were the product of this messianic expectation as expressed by the early Christians. The development of the left, or young Hegelian movement was greatly influenced by Bruno Bauer who, in works pub­ lished between 1840 and 1842, used Hegel’s concept of the unhappy consciousness to demonstrate that Christianity was merely a historical stage in the development of universal self-consciousness. According to Hegel, at undeveloped periods of history man experiences a painful sense of inner division between the self as an ideal immutable being and as particular and contingent, dependent on an external, alien reality; he projects his lost unity onto a transcendent Spirit to which he subordinates himself (Hegel had in mind medieval Christianity and all religions in which men saw the universal as outside them). Hegel believed that this division was over­ come in the third stage of religion when men recognized that they were united through their own thought with the ration­ ality that determined all things. However, Bauer saw such a reconciliation as incompatible with Hegel’s historical critique of religion which led inescapably to the conclusion that all religion was the product of man’s self-alienation. To gain his autonomy man must recognize that all powers which appeared to be separate from his ‘infinite self-consciousness’ were merely its objectified phases. A more general and widely influential critique of religion was made by Feuerbach in Das Wesen des Christentums (1841). He argued that ‘the secret of theology is . . . anthropology’.20 The perfections which men attributed to God were the idealized projections of their own qualities.

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The time had come for man to reappropriate his alienated attributes and recognize that he was the measure of all values, the sole criterion of truth, and thereby (Feuerbach at this stage did not regard himself as an atheist) regain his original unity with God. In two later writings—Vorläufige Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie and Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (both 1843)—Feuerbach developed the humanism which had a profound influence on Marx. Pointing out that Bauer’s ‘infinite self-consciousness’ was as much of a universal abstraction as the Absolute, he substituted ‘man’, by which he meant men in their social relations, and in the Thesen extended his criticism of religion to all speculative philosophy (HegePs in particular) which he saw as theology expressed in rational form. Like religion it set man’s essence as an abstraction over him, turning him into a predicate of universal substance. To reclaim his essence man must reverse this relationship of subject and predicate. Real, finite, thinking and feeling man with his particular needs and desires, in his relation to other men and to nature, was the subject of philosophy; the universal was merely an attribute of individual being. ‘Whereas the old philosophy said: only what is rational is true and realy the new philosophy says on the contrary: only what is human is true and real, for only what is human is rational: man is the measure o f reason.'21 Solely on this basis, Feuerbach declared, could philosophy meet the needs of mankind. It was only at the beginning of the 1840s that the left Hegelians began to turn their attention to the political dimension of these needs. At first they had seen the irration­ ality of established religion as the main obstacle to man’s selfrealization, believing that their ideals would be achieved with the help of the, monarch and within the framework of the Prussian state which, together with Hegel, they saw as the closest historical approximation to the ideal rational state. But with the accession of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, attacks on religion came to be seen as attacks on the state, and the universities were gradually closed to the left Hegelians. From 1840 they began to take on the character of a political opposition. The theoretical support for their revolt was the ‘philosophy of the act’. This was first formulated by August von

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Cieszkowski, a Pole who had studied in Berlin, in a book entitled Prolegomena zur Historiosophie, published in 1838. Cieszkowski argued that by representing the present age as the final stage of history, Hegel had fallen into a conservatism incompatible with the principles of conflict and negation inherent in his dialectic. In place of Hegel’s three periods of history (the Oriental, the Graeco-Roman and the GermanoChristian), Cieszkowski substituted a scheme in which three periods correspond to three moments of consciousness. The first two periods—those of instinctive perception of the world (Classical Antiquity), and of rational thought, culminating in the rational philosophy of Hegel (from the fall of Rome until the nineteenth century), are seen as a preparation for a third, future age, in which the divisions of consciousness will be resolved not in thought but in action, through the agency of the will. The philosophy of the new age would be a philosophy of praxis (a term first used by Cieszkowski to denote the synthesis of thought and action): its role would be to shape the society of the future, which Cieszkowski envisaged somewhat vaguely as a state of universal harmony based on the ideals of the French utopian socialists. Cieszkowski laid the groundwork for the transformation of Hegel’s dialectic into what Aleksandr Herzen called ‘an algebra of revolution*.22 The left Hegelians believed that in doing this they were merely spelling out the ultimate consequences of Hegel’s thinking; it was he, in Bruno Bauer’s words, who had taught the left Hegelians ‘atheism, revolution, and republicanism’.23 However, they ignored the element of compromise essential to Hegel’s conception of the dialectic, in which lower forms of the Idea were simultaneously tran­ scended and preserved (aufgehoben) in the higher. In in­ creasingly radical terms, as the political situation deteriorated, the left Hegelians insisted that there could be no compromise between past and incoming forms of Truth: all traditions, institutions and dogmas which had outlived their time must be negated, swept away in the headlong progress of Reason. As applied to the contemporary situation, this precluded the possibility of compromise between themselves, as the harbin­ gers of progress, and the government: one of the two must triumph, the other perish. Castigating the liberal bourgeoisie

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for its conciliatory attitude to the government, Edgar Bauer (the brother of Bruno), wrote in 1843: only extremism can assume and carry through a principle in its purity; only extremism has the power to create. A principle never mediates; it only destroys, and its inner strength is proportionate to its destructive power . . . .24

Theirs was an apocalyptic vision: the forcing of divisions to their extremes would produce a final catastrophe, followed by the dawn of a new age of harmony. In its intransigent opposition to external reality the philosophy of the act seems to eçho the ‘subjective* Idealism of Fichte; but although in the early 1840s the left Hegelians seemed to move in Heine’s ‘airy kingdom of dreams’, they had an interest in and a respect for the external world and history which was absent in preHegelian Idealism. An exception was Max Stimer, the most extreme member of the group, whose views, expressed in his book Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844), bordered on solipsism. Stimer believed that no-one had gone far enough in liberating the individual from the universal abstractions which tyrannized over him. In his view Feuerbach’s ‘man’ and the ideal state of liberals or radicals were merely new deities to which the individual ego and its particular interests would be sacrificed. Only in a free union ‘existing for and through the Ego’25—a concept that he does not trouble to elucidate—would the self be genuinely autonomous. Although the left Hegelians are sometimes described as the first political party in Germany, their political ideas were very disparate, ranging from Arnold Ruge’s vague ideal of a ‘democracy’ to be achieved through propaganda, to the theories of Moses Hess, whom Engels described as the first of the group to come to communism through philosophy.26 Hess argued that man’s self-alienation was social and economic as well as religious and political, and could be overcome only by a revolution which would bring into being a communist state. By the mid-1840s left Hegelianism had ceased to exist as a movement, due less to the government’s suppression of its publications than to its own inner contradictions. It had been held together above all by faith in the power of thought to change history; as Hegel had put it: ‘once the kingdom of

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ideas is revolutionized, reality cannot hold out’.27 But after an initial flurry of interest and enthusiasm, reality in the shape of German society proved remarkably indifferent to the small group of intellectuals on its fringe. Their attack on universal abstraction« was expressed in terms far too abstract and doctrinaire to attract allies among the liberal bourgeoisie, whose sympathies were alienated by the increasing radicalism of the movement’s publications. There were also internal dissensions, such as the split between the Berlin left Hegelians and those grouped around Arnold Ruge who edited the journal Deutsche Jahrbücher in Dresden from 1841 until its suppression in 1843. Marx and Engels frequently criticized the Berlin group for their doctrinaire and utopian approach. By the time they published their long polemic with the latter (Die heilige Familie) in 1844, the movement was almost extinct. But in 1840, when Bakunin arrived in Germany, it was approaching the peak of its influence. Bakunin seems first to have heard of the left Hegelian move­ ment in 1839, when he read Strauss’s book, which he treated condescendingly as the work of a man groping in the darkness of scepticism, for the light of rational reality.28 The letters which have been preserved from the period before he left Russia contain no further reference to the movement, though it is unlikely that he did not hear more about it from Herzen, who had read Cieszkowski’s book early in 1839 and had been astonished to find that the author’s view of history coincided with his own.29 In May 1840, in a letter from Berlin, Stankevich drew Bakunin’s attention to the movement; commenting on his own reading of Feuerbach (whom he describes as a ‘powerful nature’, though too extreme in his criticism), he urged Bakunin to follow the new developments in philosophy as closely as possible. Referring to Cieszkowski’s periodization of history, he asserted: the idea that science must pass into act, must disappear into it, is correct. One can see at present this general demand to link the scattered categories [of science] more closely to the life of the heart,. . . so that science may be not in the head, but in the blood, in the body, in the whole being.30

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Although Stankevich, then very close to death, seems to have been moving towards a mysticism of his own, rather than towards the philosophy of the act,31 he seems nevertheless to have been more in touch with the spirit of the times than his self-absorbed friend. Bakunin does not seem to have taken his advice in his first year in Berlin. There is no reference in his letters of that time to left Hegelianism nor to the political developments with which it was connected. It is unlikely that the former diplomat Vamhagen von Ense or the former political prisoner Müller-Strübing did not discuss politics during their evenings with Bakunin, and he does refer in his letters to his habit of reading the daily papers in the Berlin coffeehouses;32 but it is the spiritual adventures of his little ‘community of saints’ that are the sole concern of his letters. Later, in his Confession to the tsar, he stated that during his year in Berlin he had had no time at all for politics, which he had viewed with contempt from the heights of ‘philo­ sophical abstraction’:33 this was probably not much of an exaggeration. The intellectual excitement aroused by the new theories on the relation of philosophy to politics seems at last to have infected Bakunin in the summer of 1841; this we may infer from a remark that that summer he had discussions with his brother Pavel (who had finally been allowed to join him in Germany) on questions of ‘knowledge and life, religion and politics’.34 Shortly after this, in October 1841, his first en­ counter with the left Hegelians took place. In the course of an excursion to western Germany with Varvara and Pavel he visited Dresden, where he met Arnold Ruge, then editor of the Deutsche Jahrbücher. Bakunin’s impression of Ruge, conveyed in a letter to his family, was mixed: the rationalism on which the left Hegelians prided themselves was clearly unappealing to him. He describes Ruge as a remarkable man, but not overendowed with speculative powers, extremely hostile to all forms of mysticism and hence prone to ‘great one­ sidedness in all that concerns religion, art, and philosophy’. However, he notes that in Germany one-sidedness could serve a positive function, by shaking the Germans out of that ‘rotten and stagnant golden mean in which they have been wallowing for so long’.35

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In a letter to Herzen written shortly after his arrival in Berlin Bakunin had described the Germans as ‘terrible philistines,36 whose achievements in philosophy had failed to affect their lives. This was a conventional observation: following the tradition begun by the Slavophiles in the 1830s, Russian travellers seldom failed to remark on the spiritual defects of the European bourgeoisie and in particular the dullness of the Germans. But Bakunin’s new criticism of the Germans reflects a development in his thought which seems to have taken place ill that summer, when he discussed ‘religion and politics’ with his brother. The direction which his thoughts were taking is revealed in his reaction to a book which he read in the train in his journey back to Berlin from Dresden : Po litique à I 'usage du peuple. Its author, Félicité de Lamennais, was one of the most curious of the French radicals of the time. A Breton priest, he had argued in his early writings that the disorder of con­ temporary society stemmed from the irréligion of the French Revolution whose rejection of the divine source of political power had led to the domination of physical force, the dis­ integration of society and the misery of the masses. He called for a revolution which would re-establish the primacy of the spiritual power, embodied in the Roman Church, over the temporal authority of the state. Rome, embarrassed by his zeal, condemned his doctrines, from which he concluded that the spiritual principle which would regenerate mankind did not reside in the Established Church. Instead, he found it in the masses;he saw in their needs and aspirations the essence of Christianity which, in common with the utopian socialists and neo-Catholic writers such as Chateaubriand, he saw as a religion of earthly regeneration leading through historical progress to the brotherhood of man. He had no detailed pro­ gramme: he believed that society must be governed by a *law of liberty’ subordinated to a ‘law of unity’ emanating from a revitalized Christian faith whose guardians would no longer be the Established Church. The God of Lamennais’undogmatic and unorthodox Christianity would reveal himself through the collective consciousness of the community. How individual liberty was to be reconciled with unity he did not attempt to show. The charm of his ideal lay in its apocalyptic mystery.

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In true romantic fashion he saw the artist and the poet as the chief prophets of the mysterious future ‘dont les horizons se dilatent, sans fin, sans repos, au sein de l’immensité et de l’éternité. *37 Politique a l*usage du peuple, a collection of articles first published in 1837, was one of several works in which Lamennais had expounded his new philosophy after his break with the Church. The basic premiss of his argument was also the most fundamental of Bakunin’s beliefs: ‘les êtres indi­ viduels n ’ont . . . d’existence possible que dans ce tout et par ce tout au sein duquel ils sont plongés, et ou ils puisent perpétuellement leur portion . . . de la vie une et universelle.’38 On this belief Lamennais based his argument that human society was moving inexorably from selfish interests and divisive privilege to unity and brotherhood. Attempts on the part of individuals or governing élites to direct or resist this progress were futile in the face of the powerful and prescient instinct through which Divine Providence guided the masses: faith and submission were the sole source of wisdom and strength. Through acceptance of the inevitable, participation in an all-conquering destiny was guaranteed: here was a formula for self-fulfilment that Bakunin could not resist. What was novel for him was the conception of the conquer­ ing ‘whole’ as the popular masses, with their earthly aspir­ ations : in language much more congenial to Bakunin than Ruge’s, Lamennais offered the same breath-taking prospect of a world-historical stage on which to enact the drama of self-realization. There are no reserves in Bakunin’s ecstatic praise (in a letter to Varvara and Pavel) of this writer inspired by ‘love and faith . . . in mankind’s future*; he recommends his book to all those who wish to understand the questions of the time ‘in a living manner’. The truth being ‘in its essence already act*, Lamennais’ exposure of the contradictions of the present time was a guarantee of their imminent resolution, when the religious problem of man’s destiny would be solved by a new revelation taking place in the realm not of theory but of life. Bakunin feels that he can ‘see the future’; the time has come, he concludes, when ‘politics is religion and religion politics.’39 This is a statement of intent. Henceforth Bakunin’s energies

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would be directed towards integrating a new dimension—the political—into his vision of man’s spiritual destiny, his cult of the act. He began by dedicating the coming winter to a study of history and politics. There is no record of what he read in those months, but if is clear that, his reading of Lamennais having reassured him that mysticism and politics were com­ patible, he saw the ideas of Ruge and his group with new eyes. In April 1842 the first fruit of his studies, the famous article Die Reaktion in Deutschland, appeared in Rüge’s journal, and it bore the signs of an acquaintance with the main ideas of the left Hegelian movement. ^ Written under the pseudonym Jules Ely sard, the article began with the announcement that the realization of liberty was now in the first place on the agenda of history.40 The interpretation of Hegel’s dialectic that followed was not the classical expression of left Hegelianism that it has sometimes been seen to be,41 but it was close enough for Bakunin to be welcomed into the left Hegelian camp. He argued that at the existing stage of the ‘free, but simultaneously inevitable development of free Spirit’ the reactionary party (the sup­ porters of the existing order) represented the ‘positive principle’. The democratic party (all those who sought the ‘unconditional freedom of the Spirit’) as yet existed only as negation: its adherents were too concerned with specific reforms and lacked an ‘affirmative consciousness’ of their true historical role, which was to effect a universal transform­ ation of human existence without precedent in history. In the coming conflict the party of negation would perish in its present form along with the positive order, to be reborn as ‘living wholeness . . . a new living and revitalizing revelation, a new heaven and a new earth, a young and beautiful world in which all the discords of our time will be resolved in harmonious unity’. Bakunin argues that the dialectic refutes both those whose ideal is in the past (primitive wholeness, as the dialectical source of the divisions of the present, can never be regained), and those who seek a middle way between extremes. No compromise is possible: ‘the whole essence, content, and vitality of the negative consists in destruction of the positive’: only thereby can divisions be resolved in a ‘new, affirmative,

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organic reality*. In attempting to force reality into new theoretical structures, the compromisers were wasting their time: Hegel’s philosophy, the summit of theoretical under­ standing of reality, had pointed the way to the new world of practical action, the kingdom of freedom. Its coming was imminent, as the historical opposition of freedom and slavery had reached its extreme limits. All German literature and thought was saturated with the spirit of negation which the French Revolution had ushered onto the historical stage. The works of Strauss, Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer were in everyone’s hands. In France and England there was a growing Religious’ expectation. Conscious of its high destiny, mankind thirsted for a universal principle which would embrace all aspirations of the spirit; this it could not find in existing institutions, religious or political, which were tom by contra­ dictions. The compromisers had only to examine themselves : Are not you all without exception a sad and impoverished phenomenon of our time? Are you not full of contradictions? Can you say that you are whole people? Do you believe sincerely in anything? Do you know what you desire, and are you in fact capable of desire at all? Has contemporary reflection, that plague of our time, left even one living place in you, and are you not penetrated through and through with it, are you not paralysed, not broken by it? In fact, gentlemen, you must admit that our time is a sad time, and we are all its even sadder children!

Bakunin exhorts his audience to open their spiritual eyes and hearts to the ‘trembling expectation’ of mankind, and he predicts for the first time an upheaval in his own country: Even in Russia, in that boundless snow-covered kingdom, of which we know so little . . . even in Russia gloomy, portentous storm clouds are gathering. O, the air is stifling, it is fraught with storms ! Hence we call to our erring brothers: repent! The Kingdom of God is at hand! . . . Let us trust to the Eternal Spirit which only . . . destroys because it is the inexhaustible and eternally creating source of all life. The urge to destroy is also a creative urge!

Thus, with a famous sentence, ends the article which launched Bakunin on a European revolutionary career. In its total unexpectedness (the only warning signs being the references to Ruge and Lamennais in his correspondence), it was a coup de théâtre which continues to mystify his biographers, all of whom have speculated on the nature of

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the crisis beginning in the autumn of 1841 which led Bakunin from the Hegelian right to its left, and from preaching absolute love to the inhabitants of a remote Russian country estate to preaching revolution on a European stage. Most studies of Bakunin have seen the key to this ‘trans­ formation of the man and his destiny*,42 as Benôit Hepner has called it, in a passage from Bakunin’s Confession to the tsar: There was always a basic defect in my nature: a love for the fantastic, for unusual, unheard-of adventures, for undertakings that open up a boundless horizon and whose end no-one can foresee. I would feel suffocated and nauseated in ordinary peaceful surroundings . . . [tranquillity] . . . always drove me to despair; my soul would be in unremitting agitation, demanding action, movement, and life. I should have been bora somewhere in the forests of America, among the western colonists, where civilization has scarcely dawned and where all life is a ceaseless struggle against wild men, against wild nature, and not in an ordered civil society. Also, had fate wished to make me a sailor from my youth, 1 would even now probably be a very respectable man; I would not have thought of politics and would have sought no adventures and storms other than those of the sea. But fate did not will either the one or the other, and my need for movement and activity remained unsatisfied. This need, subsequently combined with democratic exaltation, was almost my only motive force.43

Here is the popular image of Bakunin—the ipan of action, of primitive, uncomplicated energy, impatient with excesses of reflection. It is the image which his contemporaries counterposed to Turgenev’s depiction of him in Rudin, and it has invariably been used by those who have sought to explain the ‘crisis’ of 1841-2. Typical is Hepner’s version: Bakunin bore in himself ‘the seed of colossal activity’ (the phrase is Herzen’s): once he was released from the environment which had condemned him to a life of philosophical speculation totally contrary to his true nature, the inevitable moment of self-revelation came: he recognized his real vocation in political action, discarding his philosophical past without a backward glance.44 Another autobiographical passage, from a letter written in 1849, is often quoted to illustrate the revelation which came to him in 1842 and the resulting transformation:

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For a few years in succession I had no aim except science, my head was filled with the most empty abstractions, and if you had met me then you would doubtless have laughed at my foolish pretensions and my incomprehensible declamations: I thought only about the Absolute and could not say a word without the most abstract expressions: subject, object, self-becoming of the Idea, and so on . . . . There was even a moment of madness when it seemed to me that I knew and understood something: but having soon returned to reason and life I finally became convinced that life, love and action can be understood only through life, love and action. Then I finally rejected transcendental knowledge, denn grau ist alle T heorie , and threw myself headlong into practical life.45 X

This picture of a complete break with a philosophical past has been generally accepted in studies of Bakunin. As D. Chizhevsky puts it, the change from right to left Hegelianism represented a ‘total reconstruction’ of Bakunin’s inner world; previously he had seen the basic principle of life as reconcili­ ation; subsequently, he saw it as negation.46 In the words of Hepner, at that period ‘action’ replaced ‘beatitude’ as Bakunin’s slogan, signalling the beginning of an unremitting hostility to theory and the concerns of the inner life.47 The inference regarding Bakunin’s later political thought is clear: interesting though the development of Bakunin the Moscow philosopher was, it can tell us little of real significance about Bakunin the political activist—the two were almost different people. But while the theory of the clean break accords perfectly with Bakunin’s own retrospective view of his development, it is contradicted by the internal evidence of his writings. As we have seen, ‘action’ and ‘negation’ never ceased to be his slogans even in his right Hegelian period; and the assertion that in 1842 these and other key words, such as ‘reality’, acquired a fundamentally different meaning for him does not withstand scrutiny. Comparison of his writings before and after his conversion to left Hegelianism will elucidate most of the mystery that surrounds that event. There is little evidence of a crisis because there was no crisis, no break between two opposing Visions of reality, no decisive turn from the inner to the outer world, or from philosophy to action. The philo­ sophical ‘abstractness* which had seemed excessive even to

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the Moscow ‘superfluous men’ was not a temporary distortion of personality curable by a change of political scene: on the contrary, the tendency to see life through the prism of abstraction which Annenkov had remarked in Bakunin would remain his most distinctive quality, determining his approach to his new world. The change which took place in the winter of 1841-2 was not a turn from theory to action but the elaboration of a new theory of the act. It was a process with which we are already familiar: an eclectic philosophical borrowing with the aim of strengthening that sense of a ‘living link with the universal’ which seemed to Bakunin the only guarantee of his future wholeness. Over this period as in previous philosophical ‘crises’, the consistency in Bakunin’s thought was much more striking than the change. After 1842 as before, the key to all his activity would be his own need to achieve self-realization as a real or integrated personality. Just as right Hegelian ‘reality’ had come to his aid when he began to have doubts about a programme of self-fulfilment which ignored the obstacles set by the external world, so also, when the political ferment around him finally impinged on his consciousness, individual moral action must have seemed very inadequate as a means to his goal beside the messianism of the left Hegelians which promised an integration of the inner and the outer, the real and the ideal, that surpassed in its comprehensiveness all his previous formulations of whole­ ness. We will see that a mystically conceived personal wholeness remained for him the ultimate ‘reality’, and that as before he would seek to accomplish it through the concept of a mission: a sublimation at one and the same time of his need for self-assertion and of his longing to identify with a meaningful collective entity. As before, generalizing from his own needs, he saw his goal as the goal of all humanity. The difference was that henceforth he would seek to realize his fantasy through the transformation of the external world. His urge for self-assertion would find expression in an idealiz­ ation of the act of revolution and of the will of the revol­ utionary leader, while his longing to merge with the Absolute would be channelled into a worship of the instinctive forces of the masses, a cult of spontaneity rooted in Idealist abstraction.

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We will now follow the stages in which, in the years leading to the 1848 revolution, Bakunin’s Idealist fantasies were transformed from a surrogate for action into a programme for revolution in the real world. Despite its revolutionary rhetoric and its references to the dialectic, Die Reaktion in Deutschland represents a painless accommodation of Bakunin’s new philosophical allegiances to the old. In the process, the rationalist approach common to the left Hegelians is dispensed with in favour of a cloudy religious tone akin to that of Lamennais, and a Fichtean unconcern with the phenomena of the finite world. The article contains no reference to specific social or institutional results expected from the future revolution; indeed, Bakunin criticizes ‘the party of negation’ for concentrating on such matters when they should be exclusively concerned with the ‘religious principle’ which they represented. He himself eagerly awaited a new revelation of ‘unconditional freedom’ and ‘living wholeness’.48 He had deprecated the absence of a mystical strain in Ruge’s thinking and believed that the left Hegelians went too far in their criticism of religion: ‘criticism by its nature is inevitably in contradiction with free and speculative thought’.49 That he was rejecting a central element in the left Hegelian version of the dialectic seems not to have perturbed him. After his visit to Ruge he declared his intention to study Fichte and Schelling as well as Hegel’s logic, and a few days later reported to Pavel and Varvara that some ideas of his about the origins of philosophy, which should ‘regener­ ate’ Hegel’s system, had been enthusiastically received by Werder.50 There is no record of these speculations, but from the nature of Bakunin’s criticism of the Hegelian left at that period and the content of Die Reaktion in Deutschland, one may assume that they concerned a religious ‘revelation’. It is significant that in the summer of 1841 Bakunin had by his own account read a great deal of Schelling, who was then in his most mystical period, seeking to trace the evolution of the divine principle in the world through the development of religions.51 In February 1841 he had been called to Berlin by the King of Prussia in order to counteract the influence of

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the left Hegelians, and in November of that year he gave the inaugural lecture of his course on his new Philosophy of Revelation. Bakunin met him in the autumn of 1841 and wrote to his family that he was looking forward to his lectures with impatience, having found in his writings ‘such im­ measurable depths of life, of creative thought, that I am sure that now as before he will reveal to us much that is pro­ found/52 He must have been disappointed, as he makes no further reference to the lectures, and by the time his article was published he had given up his philosophical studies in Berlin. But a year later, in a letter written during a short holiday, he mentions that he has been translating Schelling.53 Bakunin’s new political orientation did result in a break with his beloved Pryamukhino circle, but this was not abrupt and was not due to his initiative. The fate of the circle merits a short digression. During the developments in his thinking in the winter of 1841-2 Bakunin continued to stress his devotion to the disciples who spoke what was still very much his language. In November 1841 he wrote to his brothers and sisters: ‘we will always be together, inseparable; after all, our mutual love is not a shadow, not a dream—it is the most holy and real tru th ,. . . our guardian angel, the sole source of our faith, our love, of all that is holy and vital in us.’54 In a letter written the following month he asserts that only in the world created by their friendship can they be ‘complete people’.55 His philosophical preoccupations in that winter find an echo in Varvara’s and Pavel’s letters home. Varvara, due to return soon to Russia, promised her sisters that they would dedicate themselves to the ‘reality’ of work for the future of mankind: ‘all our words will be action. This is the sole salvation, my friends’.56 Similar outpourings from Pavel drew an unsympathetic reply from his brother Aleksei: What do you mean when you say that man can and should live only through action? . . . You say: die That ist die einfachste Sache in der Welt, but meanwhile your letters are totally obscure on the subject of what you yourself intend to become. Why don’t you state this clearly and simply?57

The new exhortations from abroad had little effect on the remnants of the circle at Pryamukhino. The language of

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Idealism continued to serve them as a mode of expression for their sentimental attachments and their jealousies. The meta­ physical gloom which pervaded Tatyana’s letters from the autumn of 1841 was due to unrequited love for Turgenev, who had become acquainted with the family on his return to Russia. More philosophical upheavals were caused by an involvement between Pavel and Aleksandra Beyer. In spite of Bakunin’s assurances that he approved of their ‘holy love’, Aleksandra was permanently embittered against him by reports that he thought her too old for Pavel, and attributed the end of the relationship to him.58 In^October 1842 Bakunin communicated to his family a decision which was the logical consequence of the hopes expressed in Die Reaktion in Deutschland: he would not return to Russia, where there was now no place for him; his cause demanded that he live and act in Europe, and he asked his brother Nikolai to arrange that the part of the family estate due to him by inheritance should be sold and the proceeds sent to him59 (though this was never done, Bakunin succeeded for many years in keeping creditors at bay with promises of the imminent arrival of his inheritance). By this time his influence on the distant circle had almost vanished. When Varvara had returned to Pryamukhino in June 1842 her resentment at Bakunin’s bullying of her was shared by her sisters: in a long and bitter reply to their criticism Bakunin denied that ‘the subjection of others always was and is the only aim of my actions’,60 and expressed doubts that he had done them any good at all. This was not, as it would once have been, the signal for a tense exchange culminating in a tender reconciliation: with the turbulent Mikhail at a distance the Pryamukhino group had begun to settle down to the traditional concerns of their class. They began to found families; Varvara was reconciled with her husband, Pavel became a teacher in a provincial gymnasium, Natalie Beyer followed her sister in scandalizing the Bakunin family by an entanglement with one of the youngest brothers.61 By the middle of 1843 even the most faithful of Bakunin's acolytes, Tatyana, had ceased to write to him. This indifference was not reciprocated by Bakunin. In November 1842, in a tender and sad letter written on the

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departure of Pavel and Turgenev for Russia, he bids farewell to Pryamukhino, Russia and his past; now a ‘solitary orphan’, he recalls bright and happy days spent together, and confesses to Tatyana that, had she not been his sister, he would have been in love with her. Soon, he writes again to assure the circle of the permanence of his devotion to the ‘dear, holy world of Pryamukhino . . . the source of my life, the origin of all that is living and best in me.’ The following year he is still insisting that the circle is an integral part of his inner world: ‘When I say /, I arfi saying We; I do not exist separately from you.’ He is bitter at the ensuing two yeaxs of silence from them, but in a letter of May 1845, attempting to elicit a response, he declares that the memory of their ‘holy rapture’ has bound him to them for ever;he changes his mind, however, on hearing shortly afterwards of Varvara’s reconciliation with her husband. Disgusted at this evidence of harmony between parents and children, he writes to Tatyana acknowledging that he has been forgotten by the circle which, as he must then have realized, had needed him much less than he had needed them.62 Bakunin’s tenacious attachment to the Pryamukhino circle was due to much more than sentimental loyalty to the past: nowhere else could he find an audience so much attuned to the language in which he continued after 1842 to formulate his ideal of wholeness. Other left Hegelians might not have suspected that the subject of the following outpouring (in a letter of 1843 to Pavel) was the philosophy of the act: My dear friend, there is much in life that we do not understand because, in defiance of all rationalists and all ready-made truths, there is hidden in life an immeasurable secret force leading all who really thirst for life to their goal. One must take into account all the external conditions of life, try to look at them clearly but never lose faith in this beneficent, miraculous force which performs the unexpected. It cannot be appre­ hended with the help of abstract theory or dispassionate calculation because it is more than theory, it is supreme act, the free raging of holy passion: this force is love. And you know of course that action is under­ stood only through action, freedom only through freedom and love only through love. To know truth is not only to think but to live; and life is more than the process of thought: life is the miraculous realization of thought.63

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A strange mixture of Fichtean voluntarism and the left Hegelian dialectic; as we shall see, only such a combination could sustain the sense of unity with universal existence through which Bakunin sought to affirm his own ‘reality*. In the winter and spring following the publication of Die Reaktion in Deutschland Bakunin consolidated the new advances in his perception of the world with the help of a new acquaintance, the German poet Georg Herwegh. Herwegh belonged to the group of writers known as Junges Deutschland, who preached social and political commitment; their abstract and impractical radical rhetoric combined the romantics’ vision of the poet as spiritual leader of his people with the French utopian socialists’ expectation of anew era öf universal brotherhood.64 Bakunin met him in Dresden in October 1842 and they immediately became close friends. When three months later Herwegh was expelled from Prussia by Friedrich Wilhelm and left for Switzerland, Bakunin decided to join him. He arrived in Zürich in January 1843; he was to remain in Switzerland for a year. During this time he gave himself up to a leisurely contem­ plation of a grandiose and mysterious future. He and Herwegh rowed on the Zürich lake, spending their time, as he informed Pavel, in ‘dreams, laughter and melancholy’.65 From his lodgings on the shore of the lake he wrote: Sometimes I lie for whole hours on my divan and look at the lake, at the mountains, which are especially beautiful at sunset: I watch the small changes in this picture, and these changes are continuous—and I think, 1 think about everything; I feel sad and happy, I feel like laughing, and everything before me is covered with mist.66

His reading did nothing to dispel the mist. Starting to acquaint himself with socialist literature, he soon found a new rich source for the visions which had attracted him so much in Lamennais’ work. In Dresden he came across a work recently published by a German academic, Lorenz von Stein, Sozialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreichs, the first work to acquaint the German public with the theories of the French utopian socialists. As he asserts in his Confession, this account opened up for him

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a new world, into which I threw myself with all the ardour of one who hungers and thirsts. It seemed to me that 1 was hearing a new Annunciation, the revelation of a new religion of the sublimity, the dignity, the happiness and the liberation of the whole human race. . . .67

A decade earlier, in Russia, the doctrines of Saint-Simon and Fourier had aroused a similar enthusiastic response in Herzen and his friend Ogarev, and for similar reasons. The influence of these precursors of socialism on Russia’s first generation of socialists is a striking instance of the Russian intelligentsia’s relentlessly utilitarian approach to Western doctrines and systems, their single-minded concentration on those aspects most directly relevant to their own moral and emotional needs. The main influence of Saint-Simon and Fourier on Western thought derived from their economic ideas. Fourier’s phalanstery represents an early attempt to confront the prob­ lem of the tedium and extreme specialization of industrial labour, while Saint-Simon anticipated aspects both of capitalist and Marxist ideologies. He provided an ethical justification for capitalism in his vision of a scientific industrial society in which each fulfilled the function suited to his capacities and where the élite of rank and privilege was replaced by one of talent and expertise. He was also a forerunner of Marxism in his recognition of the importance of economic factors in determining social relations and his belief that a scientifically organized economy and social control of the means of production would eliminate the need for the state in the traditional sense. As has often been pointed out, this aspect of Saint-Simon’s and Fourier’s thought aroused remarkably little interest in the most radical of the Russian ‘men of the forties’. To an intelligentsia with no experience of the class conflicts of industrialized societies, accustomed to view social questions in moral and aesthetic rather than economic terms, the attraction of early French socialism lay in its most utopian, extravagant, and poetic aspect—its romantic ideal of the personality.68 This aspect of utopian socialism was the fruit of the frus­ trations of intellectuals stifled by the survival after the French Revolution of political and religious vestiges of the

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old regime. They felt that the theories of the Enlightenment, for all their value in subverting the old order, had created no positive ideals or common purpose to replace it. The striving for equality, based on the belief that all men had the same rational nature, had become the competition of selfish interests; a more complex vision of man’s nature was needed. Saint-Simon and Fourier were developing ‘their ideas in the first decade of the century, but their disciples formed schools only in the 1820s and the movements reached their height after 1830 when the dreams of the French Revolution received a shattering reversal. Intellectuals lost faith in political revol­ utions and constitutional change as methods of improving society, and, in common with the romantic movement and conservative thinkers like Burke and de Maistre, the utopian socialists believed the cause of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of their society to be its fragmentation, the lack of organic ties between men. Saint-Simon’s followers took as their bible his last work Le Nouveau christianisme, in which, like the romantics and Junges Deutschland, he assigned poets and artists a leading role in the moral guidance of society. Together with scientists, they were to be priests of a new ‘church’ of socialism which would succeed where the Christian churches had failed in fulfilling the eternally valid command­ ment of Christ: Love thy neighbour. In the preaching of his followers the rationalist core of Saint-Simon’s doctrines all but vanished. In a sweeping denunciation of the institutions and conventions of their society, ranging from the exploitation of workers to the status of women in marriage, they at­ tempted to expose the corruption of human relations through coercive mechanisms masquerading as morality or reason, and preached regeneration through the ‘rehabilitation of the flesh’, the fulfilment of the emotional and instinctive side of man, in particular the instinct of love, whose future reign they described in mystical and apocalyptic terms, attempting, to the scandal of French society, to embody their vision in their own communal way of life. To the Fourierists, however, the Saint-Simonian ideal of hierarchical unity was, like all abstract and universal systems, a denial of man’s need for spontaneous self-expression. The phalanstery was an attempt to provide a highly flexible structure of occupations and relationships in

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which all men’s basic drives (twelve in number according to Fourier’s highly idiosyncratic table of passions) would be allowed absolutely free expression. Whatever their disagreements about means, the utopian socialists pursued thç common goal of the total self-realization of the personality, the full flowering of all faculties in perfect harmony. They all shared Saint-Simon’s romantic faith that the Golden Age of the human species was in the future. From the intensity of modem man’s sense of inner division they concluded, with an optimism as determined as that of the Idealist philosophers, that its resolution was just around the comer. There is an echo of Idealist millenarianism in the tripartite scheme sketched out by Saint-Simon and developed by his followers, which divided history since the establishment of Christianity into two eras: the organic, extending to the Reformation, and the critical, reaching the nineteenth century, to be followed by a final period which would combine the advantages of both. Although the primary beneficiaries of their utopia were to be, in Saint-Simon’s words, ‘la classe la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre’, their ideal of the personality sprang from the moral and aesthetic outlook of a highly cultured élite and bore little relation to the immediate material demands of the emerging proletariat, among whom it had no following. Whether their economic doctrines can be called socialist at all is an open question. Fourier defended private property and it has been pointed out that Saint-Simon’s concept of an administrative hierarchy headed by industrialists implied a managerial rather than a socialist revolution.69 Both thinkers believed that the new structures would benefit the rich as much as the poor, and envisaged a non-violent trans­ ition to the new world with the co-operation of any govern­ ment in power. But, whatever their place in the history of socialism, the ideals of Saint-Simon and Fourier, like those of Lamennais, have a much wider significance: as Frank Manuel has pointed out in his history of utopian thought, they help us to under­ stand the sense of a total merging of identities, of a blurring of the boundaries between the ego and the outside world experienced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the most ardent participants in nationalist, socialist and

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communist movements.70 Their main effect on Russian thought was to consolidate this millenarianism as a motive force in the Populist ideology first formulated by Herzen, of which Bakunin’s anarchism was to be an internationalist offshoot. In his joyful reception of the ‘revelation’ furnished by the French Utopians, Bakunin makes no distinction between the two warring groups. Herzen and Ogarev, too, had considered themselves to be equally disciples of SaintSimon and Fourier.71 For all three what mattered was not the economic details of the future transformation, but the elimination of boundaries between the part and the whole, the loving fusion of the isolated intellectual with the whole of humanity. However, although the influence of the French utopian socialists undoubtedly strengthened an abstract strain in the socialism of Herzen and later Russian Populists, in comparison with Bakunin’s their theories would be down-to-earth in the extreme. The height of Herzen’s interest in the doctrines of the utopian socialists, in 1833, coincided with the aftermath of the famous trial of Saint-Simon’s followers which marked the peak of their influence in France, and was followed by the rapid disintegration of the religious cult with all its extravagances. Under the leadership of Pierre Leroux, SaintSimonism was transformed into a political movement in active opposition to the government, as was Fourierism under Victor Considérant after Fourier’s death in 1837. As evidenced by the theories of Louis Blanc and Proudhon, by the beginning of the 1840s French socialism had moved away from abstract metaphysical questions to specific problems of the day, such as the organization of labour and the question of social revolution. Herzen in Russia kept abreast of these developments; by 1843 he was engrossed in the new currents.72 At the same time, Bakunin, so much closer to the ferment of new ideas in France, was immersing himself with the fervour of a proselyte in the vague and sentimental humanism of the previous decade. Left Hegelian criticism, which had played a major role in Herzen’s move away from romantic humanism, had no such effect on Bakunin. Food for fantasy was what he sought and the utopian socialists, like Lamennais, were a rich source for new variations on old

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themes. In his gratitude he lavished greater praise on them than on any other thinkers. This is the more remarkable in view of the fact that he does not appear to have read any of their works. The splendid sweep of his vision had no need of practical details to enhance it, and it was to literary invention that he turned for further inspiration. Immediately after reading Stein he immersed himself, with Herwegh’s encourage­ ment, in the ‘social’ novels of Georges Sand, whose poetic and noble heroes and heroines preached the Saint-Simonian ideals of universal love and the liberation of women. In . February 1843 he informed his family that he never parted from her works; his reading of them had become ‘a cult, a kind of prayer’. No other writer, he felt, expressed his thoughts, feelings and spiritual needs so well as this ‘truly apostolic figure’. The idol displaced an old one—Bettina von Amim, whose acquaintance Bakunin had hastened to make in Berlin; now, compared to the ‘practical’ humanism of Sand, the cult of generalized sentiment which Bettina represented seemed to him divorced from reality: Thank heaven, the time of theory is past: everyone . . . feels this to be so; the dawn of a new world is already upon us. Let us be worthy of renewal, let the thought that all our sufferings are not in vain support us . . . the great mysteries of humanity, which have been revealed to us by Christianity, . . . all these simple and profound mysteries of eternal life will henceforth be a tangible, real and present truth. And all who suffer should bless their suffering, for only suffering can make us worthy of that world which we can foresee within ourselves.73

Bakunin had not so much rejected the romantic cult of feeling as given it a new dramatic significance: his beloved themes of suffering and renewal were now linked with the rebirth of the external world. His apocalyptic mood was intensified by his reading of a new work by Wilhelm Weitling, Garantien der Harmonie und der Freiheit. A German utopian communist who had been on the fringes of the left Hegelian movement, Weitling, like the French utopian socialists, idealized primitive Christianity, and he predicted the coming of a new Messiah who would establish a communistic Kingdom of God on earth. Bakunin, writing to Ruge about this ‘really remarkable book’, quotes from it: ‘The perfect society has no government, but only an administration, no laws, but

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only obligations, no punishments, but means of correction.’74 It has been suggested that Weitling was a seminal influence on Bakunin’s later anarchism; but at this period he was very little interested in practical details of social organization. What attracted him to Weitling’s book was its visionary tone— its promise of a third, golden age, when man would, regain his lost harmony. He is equally enthusiastic about a more classical treatment of the same theme: the ‘immortal Rousseau’ is dramatically invoked in an open letter to Ruge, written in May 1843 and published in March of the following year in the first and only number of the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher, a periodical edited in Paris by Marx and Ruge. Written from St. Peter’s Island on the lake of Bienne where Rousseau had once been exiled, the letter was a response to the pessimism expressed by Ruge as to the chances of revol­ ution in Germany. Bakunin declared that he shared Rousseau’s faith in the future victory of mankind over priests and tyrants. In their understanding of freedom Rousseau and the French humanists of his time had been nearly a century ahead of the rest of Europe. But their ideas had been resurrected in the newest German philosophy; once again, as in 1789, philosophy would herald the irresistible force of revolution: our cause is so strong that weya handful of people scattered everywhere with bound hands, will reduce our myriad enemies to horror and despair with our battle-cry alone. And I, a Scythian, will rend your chains, O you Germans who seek to be Greeks. Send me your works! I will have them printed on Rousseau's island and in letters of fire I will write once again on the brow of history: Death to the Persians!75

When Bakunin wrote these stirring lines he was enjoying a holiday on St. Peter’s Island through the hospitality of two chance acquaintances, an Italian singer and his wife.76 His presentation of himself as a barbarian from the East, destined to liberate the oppressed Germans single-handed, was a flight of fantasy for which there were no grounds in reality: he had not yet embarked on any practical revolutionary action. During the previous winter, however, his contemplation of the misty future had strengthened the belief that had already sustained him for a decade: that he was destined to accomplish a mission conceived in the most grandiose of terms and

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without reference to the constricting circumstances of everyday reality. This all-absorbing faitii is responsible for the highly personal interpretation of the philosophy of the act which emerges progressively from his letters during the 1840s. The relation of Bakunin’s revolutionary activism to his earlier thinking is revealed in a programmatic statement in a letter to Varvara of June 1842: ‘Of our former idealism we intend to surrender nothing: on the contrary we wish to strengthen and broaderf it by the miracle of living action.’77 What he means by this is clarified in a letter of May 1845, where he proudly asserts that he is the same as he has always been; his faith and will are unbroken: I have not bowed before the so-called inevitabilities of the real world and I wage war with them as before, and as before I hope to conquer them. My . . . unconditional faith in the proud greatness of man, in his holy purpose, in freedom as the sole source and sole aim of his life, has remained unshaken, has not only not diminished but has grown, strengthened . . . in battle. ‘All or nothing’—this is my slogan, my warcry, and I will never retreat a single step from my demands.78

As he had done after his conversion to the Hegelian right, Bakunin intended to have the best of both the Fichtean and Hegelian worlds: revolutionary action would transform Fichtean fantasy into historical reality. The only major left Hegelian to come as close to solipsism as Bakunin was Max Stimer, with his ideal of the absolute sovereignty of the Ego. Bakunin’s primary goal, revealed from time to time in his letters, is, as it had always been, to achieve an integrated personality. In 1842 he wrote to his family: Yes, my premonitions can’t deceive me; if I succeed in realizing only the smallest part of those strivings which fill my breast, I will desire no more! 1 do not want happiness . . . . I want a cause, a cause, a cause that is broad and holy . . . . Man muss thun, im m erwährend thun , um Mensch zu sein , um das wirkliche Selbstgefühl , das Gefühl der m enschliche Würde in sich zu haben.19

Liberty for Bakunin is first and foremost the attainment of inner harmony; it is the power ‘to be oneself’,80 as he puts

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it in a letter of 1845—a phrase which he had repeated so often in the 1830s. It is interesting to compare the famous concluding sentence of Die Reaktion in Deutschland with a characterization of Bakunin made by Belinsky in 1838: Your ego is striving to develop but as it is fated to do so on an enormous scale, it is natural that you find this cultivation a painful process: destruction is taking place for creation’s sake, decay for the sake of new productivity.81

A perceptive assessment; but Belinsky could not have predicted the grandeur of the scale on which Bakunin began four years later to resolve his inner chaos. To someone as absorbed as he was in the drama of his inner life the irresistible attraction of all messianic socialism was that it invested the inner dialectic of the personality with apocalyptic signifi­ cance. Bakunin’s struggle to resolve his inner contradictions could now be seen as part of a cosmic process of unceasing revolution. Writing to Efremov in the early 1830s he had described his divided personality as an instance of the malaise of his generation in Russia. In Die Reaktion in Deutschland, through the image of the sad children of the age, paralysed by reflection, he represented his own predicament as part of a phenomenon of world-historical significance: the divisions within man had had to reach their present painful extreme before the ‘living wholeness’ of the first age of mankind could be regained in a new, higher form.82 The left Hegelian version of the myth of a Golden Age enabled Bakunin to project onto the plane of history the dialectical process which in the 1830s he had seen as taking place within man—the recovery of a lost harmony through the negation of the phantoms created by reason operating in isolation from man’s other powers. He believed that he had at last identified the enemy of abstraction; not merely false philosophy, but all metaphysical speculation, including the doctrines of the established religions, were ‘sheer deceit’;83 his favourite expression at this period is ‘grau ist alle Theorie’,84 and his favourite left Hegelian Feuerbach, who had treated the problem of self-alienation so comprehensively. In varying degrees Lamennais, the utopian socialists, and the left Hegelians had moved away from the concept of a

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transcendent God towards a divinization of man, and Bakunin takes up this theme as the basis of a mystical theory of selfrealization through revolutionary action. A typical outpouring on this subject occurs in a letter of 1842 to Tatyana where he asserts that God, being freedom, can be known ‘only through the free act, which is bom in the primary depths of the personal spirit . . . for God himself is nothing other than miraculous self-creation.’85 Bakunin had rejected theory only to construct a theory of the revolutionary act wholly Idealist in its obscurity and its paradoxes. In letters to his family and friends he forces his message home in a barrage of aphorisms: ‘life can be under­ stood only through life and action through action*; ‘to know truth is not merely to think, but to live’; ‘life is not theory but fact’.86 He had a strong predilection for aphorisms of this sort, which were later to form the substance of his political philosophy. A mixture of the trite, the pretentious and the obscure, they are examples of Idealist discourse at its worst; yet Bakunin fully believed that his tirades against theory and the God of religious dogma had exorcized the last of the ghosts which he had mistaken for reality in his years of ‘reflection’. God, the ultimate reality, was now to be found ‘in men, in their freedom and in . . . revolution’.87 Revolution was for Bakunin the miraculous moment in which the divine was actualized in man; above all it was the moment in which the alienated intellectual would finally emerge from the false world of abstraction into the wholeness of reality. His letters and autobiographical fragments in the 1840s are full of this theme. Writing to his brother Pavel and Turgenev at the end of 1842 he describes a discussion with Ruge, who was pessimistic regarding the chances of revolution in Germany: I encouraged him, . . . 1 told him that now was precisely the time when he must prove to him self. . . that his faith and his calling were real. . . . I demonstrated to him that the transition from the false and deceptive world of theory must inevitably be accompanied by pain and suffering. I reminded him of a phrase from his article: the party of negation must make the transition from the nebulous sphere of dreams into reality, in which it must live, suffer and eventually conquer . . . . We talked a great deal about how we must learn anew and begin the reform with

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ourselves; how we must liberate ourselves and begin a new life, in order to liberate others and pour new life into them.88

Here are all the themes of Bakunin’s introspection of the previous decade—self-liberation seen as the rejection of fantasy for ‘reality’, through an inner process of ‘destruction’ and ‘creation’ whose necessary concomitant is suffering, and whose precondition is faith in one’s ‘calling’; although now he sees this liberation as not merely experienced in thought but realized in revolutionary action. On the eve of the 1848 upheaval, Bakunin’s expectations were firm. In September 1847 he wrote to Herwegh and his wife: ‘I await my . . . fiancée, revolution. We will be really happy—that is, we will become ourselves, only when the whole world is engulfed in fire.’89 This intensely personal, ecstatic insistence on the revol­ utionary act as the moment when man becomes himself, his inner duality resolved, can be found in the writing of only one other left Hegelian—Aleksandr Herzen, for whom as for Bakunin the predicament of the Russian intelligentsia was the most immediate and keenly felt of contemporary disasters.90 In his left Hegelian articles of 1842-3 Herzen depicts the revolutionary act in lyrical terms as the actualiz­ ation of the entire potential of the personality. But Herzen relinquished this semi-mystical view of revolution when he turned from philosophy to politics, whereas Bakunin would continue all his life to conceive of the act of revolution as a salvationary process of self-affirmation whereby man regains his lost unity. The boundless self-assertion of the living act’ was simultaneously a total self-surrender: both of Bakunin’s cherished fantasies of the previous decade were integrated into his concept of the act of revolution, in which the paradox central to his earlier thought was preserved whole and entire. As he explained to Tatyana, this act would be the expression of man’s ‘supreme humility’ as well as his ‘supreme pride’ before the God immanent in mankind.91 By the mid-1840s Bakunin had found the historical incarnation of this God in the peasant masses, on whom thereafter he concentrated all his fantasies of self-surrender.

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It is striking that while Bakunin was still in Russia his personal frustrations never led him to reflections on the acute distress of the vast majority of his countrymen—the serfs who were deprived of the most fundamental human rights. As he was to explain in his Confession to the tsar, he had been much too preoccupied with German philosophy to notice his surround­ ings. In the letters which he wrote in Russia there are no references to the predicament of the peasants whose labours provided the comfortable surroundings for his introspection at Pryamukhino. On the contrary, his few references to the regime under which he lived reflect the conventional patriotic sentiments of his class. But the Moscow circles' had read Rousseau, and by the end of the 1830s the romantic cult of primitive peoples was flourishing in Russia in the form of the Slavophiles’ idealization of the peasant. Bakunin knewthe Slavophiles, whom he had met in the Moscow salons (Konstantin Aksakov had been for a time a member of Stankevich’s circle). Though there is no evidence that they had any decisive influence on him, his preoccupation with the problem of the divided consciousness led him naturally to idealize that section of the population which, in a romantic vision of the world, could be said to possess a primitive wholeness. Thus in a moment of depression he contrasted his generation, ‘abstract, spectral, alien to all reality* in its preoccupation with metaphysics, with the ‘wise, real’ Russian people who would never be deceived by the verbal fireworks with which he and his contemporaries sought to disguise the poverty of their thought.92 This isolated comment is not evidence of any serious interest in the peasantry; there are no other references to it in his writings at the time. But the romantic cult of primitive peoples was soon to give new content to that opposition between ‘illusion’ and ‘life’ which was the leitmotif of Bakunin’s thought. The opposition between intelligentsia theorizing and popular instinct would become the core of his political ideology. His movement in this direction was undoubtedly accelerated by his reading of Lamennais, who held that the instincts of the masses were the supreme expression of divine wisdom in the world. A second important influence was Wilhelm Weitling

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whom Bakunin met, after reading his book, in May 1843. Entirely self-taught (he was a tailor by trade), Weitling came from a very humble background. Bakunin’s meeting with him appears to have been his first real contact with any represen­ tative of the common people whom he had eulogized in his letters to his Russian friends. He was greatly attracted by Weitling’s personality; his impressions of him seemed to accord perfectly with his preconceptions about the superiority of popular instinct over the cerebration of intellectuals. As he later wrote in his Confession, Weitling (‘a fresh, simple, uneducated, but energetic man, filled with faith’) was an exciting contrast to the German intellectuals, ‘professors and writers’, with whom he had hitherto been exclusively associated.93 Faith in the instincts of the people, in particular the proletariat, was central to Weitling’s own political philosophy. He believed that socialism would emerge from the spon­ taneous rebellion of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie; and it was under the direct influence of Weitling’s ideas that Bakunin’s onslaughts on ‘abstract theorists’ became coupled with a cult of the revolutionary instincts of the common people. In his public letter to Arnold Ruge written from St. Peter’s Island, Bakunin emphasized that if there were to be a revolution in Germany, they, the revolutionary intellectuals, must ‘whip the metaphysical arrogance out of ourselves’, must break totally with their philosophical past: even if the obstacles placed in the way of the strivings of thinkers and poets were put there by mere brute force, this brute force would itself have been impossible if we had not led an isolated life in the heavens of scientific theory, and if the people had been on our side. We did not defend the people’s cause in the presence of the people itself.

He calls on German radicals to follow the example of their French counterparts, whose ideas have penetrated into every level of society only because ‘the force of the whole people can be felt in [their] every living word*.94 The following month he develops this theme in an unfin­ ished article, Communism,95 in which he presents communism as the goal of the Hegelian march of history. He argues that if

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one accepts that ‘The life and the continuing development of mankind are not a random collection of chance events but the inevitable and . . . rationally organized progression of a single Spirit’, one must conclude that while left Hegelianism, which liberates men "from prejudice and falsehood, is the theoretical revelation of Spirit at the present stage of history, communism is its practical embodiment in social life. It is as yet imperfect and one-sided in its concern with material aims; but it is the necessary precursor of ‘true communism’ in which theory and practice, philosophy and life will be synthesized in a new religion of democracy which will be the brilliant successor of Christianity. Its roots are in ‘the holy spirit of freedom and equality’ which revealed itself in the French Revolution. Bakunin stresses, however, that commu­ nism did not issue from the French Enlightenment, whose ‘cosmopolitanism’ was a ‘lifeless and sterile abstraction, a theoretical construction devoid of the slightest spark of productive, creative fire’: [Communism] has issued from the people, and the people can never give birth to a spectre. The people—and by the people I understand the majority, the broadest masses, of the poor and oppressed . . . has always been the only creative ground from which alone have sprung all the great acts of history, all liberating revolutions. All the actions of those who are alien to the people are blighted in advance. One can create, really create, only through a real electric contact with the people. Christ and Luther came from the sim ple people, and if the heroes of the French Revolution . . . laid the first foundation of the future temple of freedom and equality, they succeeded in doing so only because they were reborn in the stormy ocean of popular life . . . . Communism derives not from theory, but from practical instinct, from popular instinct, and the latter is never mistaken.

This article contains, the core of Bakunin’s future political philosophy. In the people he had found the supreme incar­ nation of the Absolute in the world. The rebirth which he had hoped to achieve through study of Hegel in Berlin, he now sought through communion with popular instinct (seen as the sole creative force in history), and through a conception of revolution which was a direct projection of his earlier Idealist fantasies onto the historical process: by a titanic act of rebellion, which was at one and the same time a total

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identification with the infallible instinct of the people, the revolutionary intellectual would liberate himself and all mankind from enslavement to illusion, and would inaugurate a new age of ideal harmony. The remainder of this chapter will examine the way in which his contacts and conflicts with political theories and movements in Europe up to the revolution of 1848 helped him further to define and develop this extraordinarily abstract and egocentric conception of revolution. In 1842, when Die Reaktion in Deutschland appeared, the frustration and discontent soon to erupt into revolutions all over Europe was being expressed in a profusion of socialist theories with widespread adherents among the bourgeois intelligentsia and the working class, concentrated mainly in Paris, Brussels and the major German cities. Bakunin’s article gave him an entrée into the radical camp, and after his uneventful year in Switzerland (during which time the only socialist thinker of note whom he met was Weitling), he moved in February 1844 to Brussels, where he came to know some Polish émigrés, and thence in July to Paris, then the centre of radical ferment in Europe. In Paris, where he was to remain for the next three and a half years, he was intro­ duced through his connections with the German radicals to all the most advanced thinkers of the time: Louis Blanc, Pierre Leroux, Marx, Cabet, Proudhon, and the two writers who had influenced him most—Lamennais and Georges Sand. Of the thinkers who were new to him, he was attracted only to Proudhon, whose anarchism was inspired by the same intransigent negation of the existing world as Bakunin’s own outlook. Moreover, Proudhon was impressed by Bakunin’s eloquence: and the latter indulged his passion for intellectual domination by instructing the Frenchman in Hegel’s dialectic. In an incident quoted in Herzen’s memoirs, a German acquaintance of Bakunin’s, bored one evening by an endless discussion between Bakunin and Proudhon on Hegel’s Pheno­ menology, went home to bed; when he returned the next morning, the two were still sitting in the same places in Bakunin’s study, continuing the argument.96 Though Bakunin much later acknowledged Proudhon’s influence on his anarchism,97 in the 1840s it was the negative

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aspect of Proudhon’s thought, his intransigent opposition to existing values and institutions, which most appealed to him as closely akin to his own urge for destruction. However, by far the most important factor in the shaping of Bakunin’s political ideology was -his dislike of the communism of Marx. Bakunin’s enthusiasm for Weitling’s communism had not been without strong reservations—he had begun to perceive that the messianic fervour which for him was the main charm of Weitling’s doctrines was for Weitling himself only the means to a much moré prosaic end. In Communism he describes Weitling’s ideal society as *not a truly living associ­ ation of free people, but intolerable compulsion, a flock of animals united by force, pursuing exclusively material goals and knowing nothing about the spiritual side of life and the lofty pleasures it affords.’98 Weitling and his group of communists were mainly small craftsmen and artisans for whom communism was first and foremost economic justice, an equitable redistribution of wealth: for the aristocratic Bakunin, socialism was concerned above all with spiritual regeneration, and Weitling’s concern with problems of organization and distribution must indeed have seemed lacking in nobility and poetic charm. Even more prosaic from Bakunin’s romantic point of view was the seientific socialism of Marx, whom he first met in March 1844. Marx, though four years younger than Bakunin, had behind him a thorough and systematic study of economics and history, and was already laying the foundations of his system. In a much later description of their first meeting Bakunin asserts that although he himself at that time had ‘no concep­ tion of political economy’, his socialism being ‘purely instinctive’, it was their temperamental incompatibility which prevented any intimacy between them: Marx saw Bakunin as a ‘sentimental idealist’, while Bakunin was alienated by Marx’s vanity, moroseness, and duplicity.99 This characterization of Marx was coloured by Bakunin’s enmity towards him at the time of writing; and it is not surprising that Bakunin does not mention an important ingredient in his attitude to Marx in the 1840s—jealousy. Accustomed as he had been to playing the role of prophet and teacher in his own small circle, it must have been galling to realize that one of the most

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prominent of the European socialists found him a very unimpressive figure; and the resentment which this aroused in him (together with a genuine temperamental antagonism) was soon manifested in his relations with the German communists grouped around Marx. While they could not take his misty socialism seriously, he affected to despise their emphasis on discipline and organization, accusing them, in his Confession, of ‘hating’ him because he ‘did not wish to be a compulsory visitor to their .. . meetings’,100 and he eagerly collected scraps of gossip about them, true to his old habits of blackening the characters of those with whom he fell out. The ^antagonism between them was aggravated by national prejudice. Bakunin showed early evidence of the Germanophobia characteristic of Russian romantic nationalism, which attributed many of Russia’s ills to a bureaucracy based on German cameralist principles and to the influence of German thinking on government and law. The German communists on the other hand, like most European socialists, suspected Russian radicals of sharing the imperialist aims of their government. This suspicion must have been in part responsible for a rumour circulating in radical circles in Paris in the mid1840s to the effect that Bakunin was a Russian government agent. In July 1848 it appeared in print in Marx’s Neue Rheinische Zeitung in the form of an assertion by the paper’s Paris correspondent that Georges Sand had in her possession documents showing Bakunin to be a Russian agent. At Bakunin’s request Georges Sand sent a denial to the paper, which was printed together with a denial by Bakunin himself. The incident ended there, and there are no grounds for attributing it to malice on Marx’s part, but it fuelled Bakunin’s antagonism towards the German communists, which played a central role in determining the ideological content both of his revolutionary voluntarism and of his cult of spontaneity. By 1845 Bakunin was beginning to focus his attention on a cause supremely suited to his yearning for a heroic and glorious mission—the liberation of the Slavs. In Brussels in 1844 he met a group of Polish émigres, including Lelewel, the democrat and historian who had played

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an important role in the Polish rising of 1830;101 but Bakunin as yet showed no great interest in the Poles’ battle for liber­ ation from Russia. In Die Reaktion in Deutschland he had predicted revolution in Russia, and in a letter written the following year he remarked that he was ‘ever more deeply convinced’ that Russia was destined to play a great role in the future of European democracy;102 but his active interest in the Russian revolutionary cause seems to have been stimu­ lated by measures taken against him by the Russian govern­ ment, which had been informed of his revolutionary connections. He ignored an official summons tp return home at the beginning of 1844 and at the end of the year the Russian senate (in a sentence published in the Paris press) condemned him in his absence, on the grounds of his revolutionary connections, to deprivation of his rights and hard labour in Siberia. Another émigré, similarly sentenced, had protested, claiming rights accorded by Catherine II in a charter to the nobility.. Bakunin was stung into a reply, printed in Louis Blanc’s paper La Réforme in January 1845, where for the first time he attacked the Russian autocracy in print, denying the existence of any charters limiting the Russian emperor’s power, and asserting that the absence of the rule of law made slaves of all his subjects. He welcomed the growing signs of opposition among the nobility, and their desire to draw nearer to the people, and asserted that salvation not only for Russia, but also for the Poles oppressed by Russia, lay solely in democracy: The Russian people . . . in spite of the terrible slavery which is crushing it, in spite of the executioner's blows raining on it from all sides, has perfectly democratic instincts and customs. It is not corrupted, it is only unhappy. In its half-barbaric nature there is such energy and breadth, such an abundance of passion and intelligence, that it is impossible for those who know it not to be convinced that it has yet to accomplish a great mission in the world. All the future of Russia is contained in it, in this countless and impressive mass of people, which speaks one language and which, as I hope, will soon be tilled with one thought, one passion.103

Bakunin saw the guarantee of this future in the increasingly frequent rebellions of peasants against their landlords, the prelude, he believed, to a revôlution which the government could forestall only by freeing the peasants.

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Although this article attracted the attention of the Polish democrats whom Bakunin had already met in Paris, he made no attempt to follow up the resulting contacts with them. His interest in Eastern Europe appeared to subside until the following year, when a rising occurred in Cracow. This explosion at a time of political lethargy in Europe produced, as he writes in his Confession, an unbelievable effect in Paris . . . . This sudden awakening, this universal movement of passions and minds, engulfed me also . . . . I awoke, as it were, and 1 decided, whatever happened, to drag myself out of my inertia and take an active part in the events that were maturing.104

Bored and repelled by the prosaic organizational work of the communist groups in Paris, Bakiinin was inspired by the news from Cracow with visions of the heroic feats which were for him the essence and the charm of revolution. He was roused to writing an open letter, printed in the liberal Paris paper Le Constitutionnel of 17 March 1846, where he expressed the hope that the Polish and the Russian peoples would both soon be liberated from their common oppressor. Nearly two years passed before he made another public pronouncement on this theme: in November 1847, at the invitation of the Poles, he made a speech at a banquet honouring the seven­ teenth anniversary of the Polish rising of 1830. In the tense atmosphere of the eve of revolution the speech caused a sensation and resulted in his expulsion from France at the request of the Russian ambassador. In it he emphasized the importance of the solidarity of Polish nationalism and Russian democracy in their common battle against the Russian autocracy, and returned to a theme of his article of 1845: The character of [the Russian] people is only superficially corrupted. This strong, powerful, and youthful nation has only to break down the obstacles with which [its rulers] have dared to surround it, to display itself in all its virginal beauty, to open up all its unheard-of treasures, to show at last to the world that it is not in the name of brute force, as is usually thought, but in the name of all that is most noble and most holy in the life of a nation, in the name of love of mankind, in the name of liberty, that the Russian people demands for itself the right to existence.

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In this speech he touched for the first time on what was to be a central theme of his later writings, suggesting that the battle between the forces of liberty and reaction in Eastern Europe was a conflict between Germans and Slavs. He emphasized the gulf between the aims of the Russian govern­ ment and the aspirations of the Russian people. The latter, like the Poles, were governed by a foreign hand: the tsar, a German by descent, was incapable of understanding the needs or character of his people. His government, ‘an original combination of Mongol* cruelty with Prussian pedantry*, had nothing Russian in it. ‘Thus, deprived of all political rights, we do not enjoy even that natural, so to say, patriarchal liberty, which the least civilized peoples enjoy, and which at least allows a man to rest his heart in his native environment and surrender himself wholly to the instinctive inclinations of his race.*105 This contrast between Slav spontaneity and Prussian pedantry gave a new political content to the opposition between theory and life which continued to dominate Bakunin’s thought. It provided him with a scheme into which he could neatly integrate both his revolt against German metaphysics and his antagonism towards the Marxists. The Berlin philosophers whom he had once revered as the high priests of ‘reality’ were now dismissed as Prussian pedants. As he wrote in his Confession, reflecting on his recovery from the disease of metaphysics: who can be narrower, more pitiful, more absurd than . . . a German? Whoever comes to know German life more closely, cannot conceive a love for German science; German philosophy is a pure product of German life, and occupies among real sciences the same place as the Germans themselves occupy among living peoples.106

Bakunin’s antipathy towards Marx could now be represented as a logical consequence of his own identification with the force of ‘life’; Marx and his associates, both by nationality and by philosophical descent, were ‘abstract theorists’ of the most unregenerate sort. Writing to Herwegh at the end of 1847 Bakunin characterizes the milieu of the German communists as follows:

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Vanity, malevolence, squabbling, theoretical arrogance and faint­ heartedness in practical matters, reflections about life, activity and simplicity,—and a complete absence of life, activity and simplicity, wordy littérateurs and hacks, repulsively flirting with [categories] : ‘Feuerbach is a bourgeois’—the word *bourgeois’ has become an epithet, repeated until one is sick of it—while they themselves are provincial bourgeois from head to toe, through and through.107

Bakunin later asserted that the society of these ‘communist littérateurs’ had corrupted Weitling’s native freshness and energy; and in a letter written from Brussels in 1847 he described Marx as being engaged there in corrupting the workers, ‘making raisonneurs out of them*.108 As indicated by this lofty contempt for the ‘German theorists’, by 1848 Bakunin felt assured that he had totally liberated himself from his ‘abstract’ Idealist past, and no longer saw reality through the distorting prism of theory. In fact he remained as much as before the Moscow Rudin, trapped in a vicious circle; the popular instinct which he worshipped was a pure romantic abstraction, a projection onto an idealized entity of the qualities whose absence he felt most acutely in himself. We have seen the origins of Bakunin’s cult of popular instincts in romantic fantasy (strengthened, when he turned his attention to Russia, by an equally romantic nationalism which attributed Russia’s decline from a golden age of innocence to alien German influence); from a number of accounts (including his own) of his activities in the years leading up to 1848 it seems clear that he con­ sistently ignored the opportunities presented to him of testing these preconceptions through contact with popular movements. During his stay in Brussels Bakunin was invited to meetings of a number of secret societies and radical groups other than those of the German socialists, some almost completely working-class in composition; but he remained aloof from them all. In his Confession he gives high-minded but very vague reasons for this: ‘their manner and tone did not please me, their demands were insufferable’.109 He does not elaborate on the nature of these demands, nor on the reasons for his dislike of them; but his activities show that the independence which he was defending was that of the aristocratic dilettante,

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subject neither to the discipline of an organized battle for precise goals, nor to the rigours of testing his ideas in informed debate. He employed his time in Brussels, as he had done in Berlin, Dresden, and Paris, in a lifestyle which was a pleasant continuation of his Moscow youth: endless conversations in cafés on vague but elevated themes, enlivened by quarrels, recriminations, reconciliations, and spiced by malicious gossip, directed in particular against his German enemies. We have seen that he showed a curious lack of interest in following up contacts made among the Polish democrats as a result of his article of 1845. In his Confession he asserted that this was because he had not yet decided what his position as a patriotic Russian, albeit a democrat, should be vis-