The Origins and the
Ethical Challenges
of a Nation
Helena P.
Blavatsky
Ivan S. Turgenev
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A 2012 Editorial Note:
Helena P.
Blavatsky’s views in the
following article have
significant points in
common with the
philosophical Slavophilism
which permeates some
writings of Fiodor
Dostoievsky and
influences those of Leon Tolstoy.
H.P.B. also shows in
it that the lack of social Ethics
was a central
factor in the origin of Russian nihilism.
The original title
of the article, “The History
of a Book”, is a
reference to the novel “Fathers
and Sons”, by Ivan
S. Turgenev (1818-1883).
The text was first
published by the daily
newspaper “The Pioneer”, in Allahabad, India,
on March 12th,
1880. Editor Boris de Zirkoff writes
in a footnote in “Blavatsky Collected Writings”
(TPH, vol. II, p.
351) that the article appeared “the
day before the
assassination of the Emperor
Alexander II,
which took place March 1st, according
to the so-called
“old-style” or Julian Calendar”. This
circumstance and
the contents of the article seem
to suggest that
such an act of violence did not
come as a complete
surprise to H.P.B.
We reproduce the text
from the volume “A Modern
Panarion”, by H. P. Blavatsky, Theosophy Co., Los
Angeles, 1981 (a facsimile of the 1895 edition), 504
pp.,
pp. 229-236. In order to make the reading easier, we
divided some
longer paragraphs into smaller ones.
(Carlos Cardoso
Aveline)
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As the indications in the press all point towards a
Russian reign of terror, either before or at the death of the Czar - most
probably the former - a bird’s-eye view of the constitution of Russian society
will enable us to better understand events as they transpire.
Three distinct elements compose what is now known as
the Russian aristocracy. These may be broadly said to represent the primitive
Slavonian, the primitive Tartar, and composite Russianized immigrants from
other countries, and subjects of conquered states, such as the Baltic
provinces. The flower of the haute
noblesse, those whose hereditary descent places them beyond challenge in
the very first rank, are the Rurikovitch,
or descendants of the Grand Duke Rurik and [the ruling families of] the
aforetime separate principalities of Novgorod, Pskof, etc., which were welded
together into the Muscovite empire. Such are the Princes Bariatinsky,
Dolgorouki, Shonysky (now extinct, we believe), Tscherbatow, Ouroussov,
Viazemsky, etc.
Moscow has been the centre of the greater part of this
princely class since the days of Catherine the Great; and though, in most
cases, ruined in fortune, they are yet as proud and exclusive as the
blue-blooded French families of the Quartier St. Germain. The names of some of
the highest of these are virtually unknown outside of the limits of the empire,
for, dissatisfied with the reforms of Peter and Catherine, and unable to make
as fine a figure at the court as those whom they delighted to call parvenus, it has been their proud boast
that they have never served in any subordinate capacity, and have not been
brought in contact with Western Europe and its politics. Living only upon their
remembrances, they have made a class apart and dwell on a sort of high social
table-land, whence they look down upon commoner mortals. Many of the old
families are extinct, and many of those that remain entirely reduced to genteel
poverty.
Rurik, as is well known, was not a Slav by birth, but
a Varyago-Roos, though his
nationality, as well as that of his people who came with him to Russia, is very
much questioned unto this day, having been a matter of scientific dispute for
several years between the two well-known professors of St. Petersburg,
Kostomarof and Pogodine -the latter now dead.
Implored by the Slavs to come and reign over their
country, Rurik is reported to have been addressed by the delegates in these
ominous words: “Come with us, great prince ……for vast is our mother land; but
there is little order in it” - words which their descendants might well report
with as much, if not more, propriety now as then.
Accepting the invitation, Rurik came in A.D. 861 to
Novgorod, with his two brothers, and laid the foundation of Russian
nationality. The “Rurikovitch”, then, are the descendants of this prince, his
two brothers and his son, Igor, the line running through a long succession of
princes and chiefs of principalities. The reigning house of Rurik became
extinct at the death of Fredor, the son of Ivan the Terrible. After a period of
anarchy, the Romanoffs, a family of petty nobles, came into power. But, as this
was only in 1613, it was not without reason that the Prince P. Dolgorouki, a
modern historian of Catherine II (a book prohibited in Russia), when smarting under
the sense of a personal wrong, taunted the present Emperor with the remark:
“Alexander II must not forget that it is little more
than two centuries since the Romanoffs held the stirrups of the Princes
Dolgorouki.”
And this, despite the marriage of Mary, Princess
Dolgorouki, with Michael Romanoff after he became Czar.
The Tartar princely families descend from the Tartar
Khans and Magnates of the “Zolotaya Orda” (Golden Orda) of Kazan, who so long
held Russia in subjection, but who were made tributary by Ivan III, father of
Ivan the Terrible, in 1523-1530.
Of the families of this blood which survive, the
Princes Dondoukof, whose head was formerly Governor-General of Kiev, and more
recently served in Bulgaria in a similar capacity, may be mentioned. These are,
more or less, looked down upon by the “Rurikovitch”, as well as by old
Lithuanian and Polish princely families, who hate the Russian descendants of
Rurik, as these hate their Roman Catholic rivals. Then comes in the third
element, the old Livonian and Esthonian Barons and Counts, the Kourland nobles
and freiherrs [1] who boast of descending
from the first Crusaders and look down upon the Slav aristocracy; and various
foreign families invited into the country by successive sovereigns, a Western element
engrafted upon the Russian stock. The names of the latter immigrés have been Russianized in some cases beyond recognition;
as, for instance, the English Hamiltons, who have now become the “Khomoutoff!”
We have not the data which would enable us to give the
numerical strength of either of the above classes; but an enumeration, made in
the year 1842, showed a total of 551,970 noblemen of hereditary, and 257,346 of
personal rank. This comprised all in the empire of different degrees of noble
ranks, including the princely families and the understratum of nobility. There
is an untitled nobility, the descendants of the old Boyars of Russia, often
prouder of their family record than those who are known as princes. The
Demidoff family, for instance, and the Narishkine, though frequently offered
the ranks of prince and count, have always haughtily rejected the honour,
maintaining that the Czar could make a prince any day, but never a Demidoff or
a Narishkine.
Peter the Great, having abolished the princely privileges
of the Boyars, and made the offices of the empire accessible to all, created
the Tchin, or a caste of municipal employés and government officials,
divided into fourteen classes, the first eight of which confer hereditary
nobility upon the person holding one of them, and the six latter give but a
personal nobility to the incumbent, and do not transmit gentility to the
children. Office does not increase the nobility of incumbents already noble,
but does lift the ignoble into a higher social rank (Tchinovnik, government employé,
was for years a term of scorn in the mouths of the nobles). It is only since
Alexander came to the throne that an old edict was done away with, which
deprived of noble rank and reduced to the peasantry any family which, for three
successive generations, had not taken service under the government. Those were
called Odnodvortzi, and among them
some of the oldest families found themselves included in 1845, when the Emperor
Nicholas ordered the examination of the titles of nobles. The nice distinctions
among the above fourteen classes are as puzzling to a foreigner as the relative
precedence of the various buttons of Chinese Mandarins, or the tails of the
Pachas.
Besides these conflicting elements of high and low
nobility, the direct descendants of the Boyars of old - the Slavonian peers in the palmy days of Russia,
divided into petty sovereignties, who chose for themselves the prince they
wanted to serve and left him at will, who were vassals, not subjects, had their
own military retinue, and without whose approval no grand-ducal “ukase” could
be of any avail - and the ennobled Tchinovniks,
sons of priests and petty traders, there are yet to be considered 79,000,000 of
other people. These may be divided into the millions of liberated serfs
(22,000,000), of crown peasants (16,000,000), who inhabit cities, preferring
various trades and menial service to agriculture. The rest comprises - 1) the Meshtchanis, or petty bourgeois, one
step higher than the peasant; 2) the enormous body of merchants and traders
divided into three guilds; 3) the hereditary citizens, who have nothing to do
with nobility; 4) the black clergy or the monks and nuns; and the secular
clergy, or married priests - a caste apart and hereditary; and 5) the military
class.
We will not include in our classification the
3,000,000 of Mohammedans, the 2,000,000 of Jews, the 250,000 Buddhists, the
pagan Izors, the Savakots, and the Karels, who seem perfectly well satisfied
with the Russian rule, thoroughly tolerant to their various worships. [2] These, with the exception of the
higher educated Jews and some fanatical Mohammedans, care little as to the hand
that rules them. But we will remind the reader of the fact that there are over
one hundred different nations and tribes, who speak more than forty different
languages, and are scattered over an area of 8,331,884 English square miles [3]; that the population of all Russia,
European and Asiatic, is not above ten to the square mile; that the railroads
are very few and easily controlled, and other means of transport scanty.
How far it would be possible to effect a complete
revolution throughout the Russian Empire, may well be a subject of conjecture.
With so little to bind the many nationalities into one movement, it would seem
to a foreigner an undertaking so hopeless as to discourage even an
Internationalist or a Nihilist. Add to this the unquestionable devotion of the
liberated serfs and peasantry to the Czar, in whom they see alike the
benefactor of the oppressed, the vicegerent of God, and the head of their
Church, and the case seems yet more problematical. At the same time, we must
not forget the lessons of history, which has more than once shown us how the
very vastness of an empire and the lack of a common unity among its subjects
have proved at some supreme crisis the most potent elements of its downfall.
St. Petersburg is, in reality, the aristocratic Parc aux Cerfs, a place of shameless
profligacy and riotous excesses, with so little that is national in it that its
very name is German. It is the natural port of entry for all the continental
vices, as well as for the loose ideas about morality, religion and social duty,
which are becoming so widely prevalent. The corrupting influence that Paris has
upon France, St. Petersburg has upon Russia. An influential Russian magazine, Rousskeye Ryetch, gave us only the other
day the following picture of St. Petersburg society:
“Russian society slumbers, or rather it feels heavy and somnolent. It
lazily nods, only now and then opening its lifeless eyes, as might one who,
after a heavy dinner, forced to sit in an unnatural position, cannot resist a
lethargic drowsiness, and feels that he must either unbutton his uniform and
draw a full breath, or - suffocate. But the dinner is an official one, and his
body pinched in a state uniform too tight for him. The man is overcome with an
irresistible somnolence; he feels the blood rushing to his head, his legs
tremble and his hand mechanically fumbles the button of the uniform to get one
gasp of breath that would interrupt the unendurable torture. Such is the
present condition of our society.”
“But while it is nodding under its threatened apoplexy, from a surfeit
of indigestible food, those carnivorous jackals, who are always ready to eat
and drink, and can digest whatever they pick up, do not sleep. The violation of
the seventh commandment, intellectually as well as physically, having debased
body, mind and soul, is nestling in the very heart of the public. Adulterers of
body, adulterers of thought, adulterers of knowledge and science, adulterers of
labour - reign in our midst, are creeping out from every side as the
representatives of society and the public, boasting of their brazen hardihood,
successful wherever they go, having flung away all shame, cast aside every
concern to at least conceal the nakedness of their deeds, even from the eyes of
those from whom they squeeze all that can be squeezed only from such a fool as
- man. Government and treasury pilferers; embezzlers of public and private properties;
blacklegs and swindlers subsidized by numberless bubble companies, by stock
companies and fraudulent enterprises; thimble-riggers and violators of women
and children whom they debauch and ruin; contractors, money-lenders, bribed
judges and venal counsel, bucket-shop keepers and sharpers of all
nationalities, every religion, every social class. This is our modern social
force. Like beasts of prey, hunting in packs, this force, gloating over its
quarry, satiating itself, noisily crunching its restless, tireless jaws,
imposing itself upon everyone, dares to offer itself as the patron of
everything - science, literature, arts, and even thought itself. There it is,
the kingdom of this world, flesh of the flesh, blood of the blood, made in the
image of the animal from which the first germ of man evolved.”
Such are the social ethics of our contemporary Russia,
on Russian testimony. If so, then it must have reached that culminating point
from which it must either fall into the mire of dissolution, like old Rome, or
gravitate towards regeneration through all the horrors and chaos of a “Reign of
Terror”.
The press teems with guarded complaints of “prostration
of forces” among its representatives, the chronic signs of fast-impending
social dissolution, and the profound apathy into which the whole Russian people
seem to have fallen. The only beings full of life and activity, amid this
lethargy of satiety, seem to be the omnipresent and ever-invisible Nihilists.
Clearly there must be a change.
From all this social rottenness, the black fungus of
Nihilism has sprung. Its hot-bed has been preparing for years, by the gradual
sapping of moral tone and self-respect and the debauchery of the higher class,
who always give the impulse to those below them for good or evil. All that
lacked was the occasion and the man. Under the passport system of Nicholas, the
chances for becoming polluted by Paris life were confined to a mere handful of
rich nobles, whom the caprice of the Czar allowed to travel. Even they, the
privileged of favour and fortune, had to apply for permission six months in
advance, and pay a thousand roubles for their passport, with a heavy fine for
each day in excess of the time granted, and the prospect of confiscation of
their entire property should their foreign stay exceed three years. But under
Alexander everything was changed; the emancipation of the serfs was followed by
numberless reforms - the unmuzzling of the press, trial by jury, equalizing the
rights of citizenship, free passports, etc.
Though good in themselves, these reforms came with
such a rush upon a people unaccustomed to the least of these privileges, as to
throw them into a high fever. The patient, escaping from his straitjacket, ran
wildly about the streets. Then came the Polish Revolution of 1863, in which a
number of Russian students participated. Reaction followed and repressive measures were
readopted one by one; but it was too late. The caged animal had tasted liberty,
though ever so brief, and thenceforth could not be docile as before. Where
there had been one Russian traveller to Paris, Vienna and Berlin under the old
reign, now there were thousands and tens of thousands; and just so many more
agencies were at work to import fashionable vice and scientific scepticism.
The names of John Stuart Mill, Darwin, and Büchner,
were upon the lip of every beardless boy and heedless girl at the universities
and colleges. The former were preaching Nihilism, the latter Women’s Rights and
Free Love. The one let their hair grow like moujiks,
and donned the red national shirt and kaftan
of the peasantry; the other clipped their hair short and affected blue
spectacles. Trades Unions, infected with the notions of the International,
sprang up like mushrooms; and demagogues ranted to social clubs upon the
conflict between labour and capital. The cauldron began to seethe. At last the
man came.
The history of Nihilism can be summed up in two words.
For their name they are indebted to the great novelist Turgenev, who created
Bazarof, and stamped the type with the name of Nihilist. Little did the famous author of “Fathers and Sons”
imagine at that time into what national degeneration his hero would lead the
Russian people twenty-five years later. Only “Bazarof” - in whom the novelist
painted with satirical fidelity the characteristics of certain “Bohemian”
negationists, then just glimmering on the horizon of student life - had little
in common, except the name and materialistic tendency, with the masked
Revolutionists and Terrorists of to-day.
Shallow, bilious, and nervous, this studiosus medicinæ is simply an unquiet
spirit of sweeping negation; of that sad, yet scientific scepticism reigning
now supreme in the ranks of the highest intellect; a spirit of Materialism,
sincerely believed in, and as honestly preached; the outcome of long
reflections over the rotten remnants of man and frog in the dissecting room,
where the dead man suggested to his
mind no more than the dead frog.
Outside of animal life everything to him is nihil; “a thistle”, growing out of
a lump of mud, is all that man can look forward to after death. And thus this
type - Bazarof - was caught up as their highest ideal by the university
students. The “Sons” began destroying what the “Fathers” had built. . . . And
now Turgenev is forced to taste of the bitter fruits of the tree of his
planting. Like the creator of Frankenstein, who could not control the
mechanical monster that his ingenuity had constructed out of the putrefactions
of the churchyard, he now finds his “type” - which was from the first hateful
and terrible to him - grown into the ranting spectre of the Nihilist delirium,
the red-handed Socialist. The press, at the initiative of the Moskovskye Vyedomosty - a centenarian
paper - takes up the question and openly accuses the most brilliant literary
talent of Russia, one whose sympathies are, and always have been, on the side
of the “Fathers”, with having been the first to plant the poisonous weed.
Owing to the peculiar transitional state of Russian
society between 1850 and 1860, the name was hailed and adopted, and the
Nihilists began springing up at every side. They captured the national
literature, and their new doctrines were fast disseminated throughout the whole
empire. And now Nihilism has grown
into a power - an imperium in imperio.
It is no more with Nihilism with which Russia struggles, but with the terrible
consequences of the ideas of 1850. “Fathers and Sons” must henceforth occupy a
prominent place, not only in literature, as quite above the ordinary level of
authorship, but also as the creator of a new page in Russian political history,
the end of which no man can foretell.
NOTES:
[1] Note From the Editor: “Freiherr” is a term broadly equivalent to “baron” in German language.
(CCA)
[2] Note by
H.P. Blavatsky: “By the last statistics, the Mohammedans have 4,189
mosques and 7,940 muftis and mulahs in the Empire of Russia; the Buddhists 389
places of worship and 4,400 priests; the Jews 445 synagogues and 4,935, etc.”
[3] Note by
H.P. Blavatsky: “According to the calculation made in 1856 by G.
Schweitzer, Director of the Observatory of Moscow.”
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In September 2016, after a careful analysis of the state of the
esoteric movement worldwide, a group of students decided to form the Independent Lodge of Theosophists,
whose priorities include the building of a better future in the different
dimensions of life.
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