PUSHKIN is an extraordinary phenomenon, and, perhaps, the unique phenomenon of the Russian spirit, said Gogol. I will add, “and a prophetic phenomenon”. Yes, his arrival on the scene contained for all us Russians, something incontestably prophetic. Pushkin appeared exactly at the beginning of our true self-consciousness, which was in its earliest beginnings a whole century after Peter’s reforms . Pushkin’s came to us as a new guiding light, a brilliant illumination of our dark way. In this sense Pushkin is a presage and a prophecy.

I divide the activity of our great poet into three periods. I speak now not as a literary critic. I dwell on Pushkin’s creative activity only to illustrate my conception of his prophetic significance to us and to give meaning to my word prophecy. I would, however, observe in passing that the periods of Pushkin’s activity do not seem to me to be marked off from each other by firm boundaries. The beginning of Evgenyi Onegin, for instance, in my opinion belongs still to the first period even though Onegin ends in the second period, when Pushkin had already found his ideals in his native land, had taken them to his heart and cherished them in his loving and clairvoyant soul. It is said that in his first period Pushkin imitated European poets, Parny and André Chénier, and, above all, Byron. Without doubt the poets of Europe had a great influence upon the development of his genius, and they maintained their influence all through his life.

Nevertheless, even the very earliest poems of Pushkin were not mere imitations, and in them the extraordinary independence of his genius was expressed. In an imitation there never appears such individual suffering and such depths of self-consciousness as Pushkin displayed, for instance, in The Gypsies, a poem which I ascribe in its entirety to his first period; not to mention the creative force and impetuosity which would never have been so evident had his work been only imitation. Already the character Aleko, the hero of The Gypsies, exhibits a powerful, profound, and purely Russian idea. Later that idea would be expressed to harmonious perfection in Onegin. There almost that same Aleko appears not in a fantastic light but as tangible, real and comprehensible.

In Aleko Pushkin had already discovered, and portrayed with genius, the unhappy drifter in his native land, the Russian sufferer of history. The unhappy drifter, uprooted from the people, was a historic necessity in our society. The type is true and perfectly rendered, it is an eternal type, long since settled in our Russian land.

These homeless Russian drifters are wandering still, and the time will be long before they disappear. If in our day they no longer go to gypsy camps to seek their universal ideals in the wild life of the gypsies, if they no longer seek escape from the confused and pointless life of our Russian intellectuals and consolation in the bosom of nature, they launch into Socialism, which did not exist in Aleko’s day. They march with a new faith into another field, and they work there zealously, believing, like Aleko, that they will by their fantastic endeavors reach their goal and find happiness, not for themselves alone but for all mankind. Indeed, the Russian drifter can find his own peace only in the happiness of all men. He will not be satisfied by anything less valuable than Socialism, at least while it is still a matter of theory. It is the same Russian man appearing now at a different time. This man, I repeat, was born just at the beginning of the second century after Peter’s great reforms, in an intellectual society, uprooted from the people. Oh, the vast majority of intellectual Russians in Pushkin’s time were serving then as they are serving now, as civil servants, in government appointments, in railways or in banks, or earning money in whatever way they can, or they are engaged in the sciences, delivering lectures -- all this in a regular, leisurely, peaceful manner, receiving salaries, playing whist, without any longing to escape into gypsy camps or other places more in accordance with our modern times. They go only so far as to play the liberal, ‘with a tinge of European Socialism’, to which Socialism is given a certain benign Russian character -- but it is only a matter of time. What happens if one has not yet begun to be disturbed, while another has already come up against a bolted door and violently beaten his head against it? The same fate awaits all men in their turn unless they walk in the saving road of humble communion with the people. But suppose that this fate does not await them all. Let ‘the chosen’ suffice, let only a tenth part be disturbed lest the vast majority remaining should find no rest through them.

Aleko, of course, is still unable to express his anguish rightly. With him everything is still somehow abstract. He has only a yearning after nature, a grudge against high society, aspirations for all men, lamentations for a truth that someone has lost somewhere, and he can by no means find it. Of course, he cannot say where this truth is, where and in what way it might reappear, and when exactly it was lost, but he suffers sincerely.

In the meantime the fantastic and impatient person seeks for salvation above all in external phenomena, and so it should be. Truth is, as it were, somewhere beyond this person, perhaps in some other European land with firm historical political institutions and an established social and civic life. Such a person will never understand that the truth is first of all within himself. How could he understand this? For a whole century he has not been able to be himself in his own land. He has forgotten how to work. He has no culture. He has grown up like a convent schoolgirl within closed walls. He has fulfilled strange and unaccountable duties in accordance with his rank, his position on the fourteen rungs [of the Table of Ranks, the backbone of official Russian social/service hierarchies] according to which educated Russian society is partitioned.

For the time being he is only a blade of grass torn up by his roots and blown through the air. And he feels it, and suffers for it, suffers often acutely! Well, what if he perhaps belonged by birth to the nobility and [in an earlier time (ID)] perhaps possessed serfs. He could then [like Aleko] have allowed himself a nobleman’s liberty, the pleasant fancy of being charmed by people who live ‘without laws’, and began to serve as trainer of a performing bear in a gypsy camp?

[NB! -- Dostoevsky here employs a painful metaphor to describe the condition of Russian elite social formations, “grass torn up by its roots”. He here puts an exclamation point to the widely felt “superfluous”, deracinated condition of the Russian “nobility” (Dostoevsky was himself a very lowly member of that social estate and lived, from that point of view, the life of an uprooted “drifter”). Nobles occupied the second position, after “clergy”, in the traditional hierarchy of semi-feudal Russian social estates (ID). Nobles were ostensibly the “well-born” flesh on the backbone of official Russian social/service hierarchies. Clearly those hierarchies were breaking down. Blades of grass were swirling in the air. And Pushkin caught the deep truth of all this and bequeathed that truth to Russian culture.]

Of course a woman, ‘a wild woman’, as a certain poet says, would be most likely to give him hope of a way out of his anguish. With an easy-going but passionate belief, he throws himself into the arms of Zemphira. “Here is my way of escape. Here I can find happiness, here in the bosom of nature far from the world, here with people who have neither civilization nor law.” And what happens? He cannot endure his first collision with conditions in this wild nature, and his hands are stained with blood. The wretched dreamer was not only unfit for universal harmony but also for gypsies, and they drive him away—without vengeance, without malice, with simple dignity.

Leave us, proud man,
We are wild and without law,
We torture not, neither do we punish.

This is, of course, all fantastic, but the proud man is real, his image sharply caught. Pushkin was the first to seize the type, and we should remember this. Should anything happen that is not to his liking in the least degree, he is ready to apply cruel torment and punishment for the wrong done to him, or, more comfortable still, he will remember that he belongs on one of the fourteen rungs and will himself call down -- this has happened often -- torture and punishment sanctioned by law.

The Russian solution of the question -- “the accursed question” -- has already been whispered in accordance with the faith and justice of the people. “Humble yourself, proud man, and first of all break down your pride. Humble yourself, idle man, and first of all labor on your native land.” That is the solution according to the wisdom and justice of the people. “Truth is not outside thee, but in thyself. Find thyself in thyself, subdue thyself to thyself, be master of thyself and thou wilt see the truth. Not in things is this truth, not outside thee or abroad, but first of all in thine own labor upon thyself. If thou conquer and subdue thyself, then thou wilt be freer than thou hast ever dreamed, and thou wilt begin a great work and make others free, and thou wilt see happiness, for thy life will be fulfilled and thou wilt at the last understand thy people and its sacred truth. Not with the Gypsies nor elsewhere else is universal harmony to be found so long as thou thyself art first unworthy of truth, malicious and proud, and thou dost demand life as a gift, not even thinking, that man must pay for truth.”

This solution of the question is strongly foreshadowed in Pushkin’s poem [“Gypsies”]. Still more dearly is it expressed in Evgenyi Onegin. It is not a fantasy, but a tangible and realistic poem, in which real Russian life is embodied with a creative power and a perfection such as had not been achieved before Pushkin and perhaps never after him.

Onegin comes from Petersburg, of course from Petersburg. This is beyond all doubt necessary to the poem, and Pushkin could not omit that all-important realistic trait in the life of his hero. I repeat, he is the same Aleko, particularly when later on in the poem he cries in anguish:

Why am I not, like the assessor of Tula, Stricken with palsy?

But now at the beginning of the poem he is still half a coxcomb and a man of the world. He had lived too little to be utterly disappointed in life. But he is already visited and disturbed by

The demon lord of hidden weariness.

In a remote place, in the heart of his mother country, Onegin is of course an exile in a foreign land. He does not know what to do and is somehow conscious of his own quest. Afterwards, wandering over his native country and over foreign lands, he is beyond doubt clever and sincere but feels himself among strangers, still more a stranger to himself. True, he loves his native land, but he does not trust it. Of course he has heard of national ideals, but he does not believe in them. He only believes in the utter impossibility of any work whatsoever in his native land. He looks upon those who believe in this possibility -- then, as now, only a few do -- with sorrowful derision. He kills Lenskii out of spleen, perhaps from spleen born of yearning for the universal ideal -- that is quite like us, quite probable.

Tatyana is different. She is a strong character, strongly standing on her own ground. She is deeper than Onegin and certainly wiser than he. With a noble instinct she divines where and what is truth, and her thought finds expression in the finale of the poem. Perhaps Pushkin would even have done better to call his poem Tatyana, and not Onegin, for she is indubitably the chief character. She is positive and not negative, a type of positive beauty, the apotheosis of the Russian woman, and the poet destined her to express the idea of his poem in the famous scene of the final meeting of Tatyana with Onegin. One may even say that so beautiful or positive a type of the Russian woman has never been created since in our literature, save perhaps the figure of Liza in Turgenev’s A Nest of Gentlefolk.

But because of his way of looking down upon people, Onegin did not even understand Tatyana when he met her for the first time, in a remote place, under the modest guise of a pure, innocent girl, who was at first so shy of him. He could not see the completeness and perfection of the poor girl, and perhaps he really took her for a ‘moral embryo’. She, the embryo! She, after her letter to Onegin! If there is a moral embryo in the poem, it is he himself, Onegin, beyond all debate. And he could not comprehend her. Does he know the human soul? He has been an abstract person, a restless dreamer, all his life long. Nor does he comprehend her later in Petersburg, as a grand lady, when in the words of his own letter to her “he in his soul understood all her perfections”. But these are only words. She passed through his life unrecognized by him and unappreciated: therein is the tragedy of their love.

But if, at his first meeting with her in the village, Childe Harold had arrived from England, or even, by a miracle, Lord Byron himself, and if he had noticed her timid, modest beauty and pointed her out to Onegin, oh, he would have been instantly struck with admiration, for in these universal sufferers there is sometimes so much spiritual servility! But this did not happen, and the seeker after universal harmony, having read her a sermon, and having done very honestly by her, set off with his universal anguish and the blood of his friend spilt in foolish anger and on his hands, to wander over his mother country, blind to her. Bubbling over with health and strength, he exclaims with an oath:

I am yet young and life is strong in me, Yet what awaits me?—anguish, anguish, anguish.

This Tatyana understood. In the immortal lines of the romance the poet represented her coming to see the house of the man who is so wonderful and still so incomprehensible to her. I do not speak of the unattainable artistic beauty and profundity of the lines. She is in his study. She looks at his books and possessions. She tries through them to understand his soul, to solve her enigma. This “moral embryo” at last pauses thoughtfully, with a foreboding that her riddle is solved, and gently whispers:

Perhaps he is only a parody?

Yes, she had to whisper this. She had had figured him out. Later, long afterwards in Petersburg, when they meet again, she knows him perfectly.

By the way, who was it that said that the life of the court and society had affected her soul for the worse, and that her new position as a lady of fashion and her new ideas were in part the reason for her refusing Onegin? This is not true. No, she is the same Tanya, the same country Tanya as before! She is not spoiled. On the contrary, she is tormented by the splendid life of Petersburg. She is worn down by it and suffers. She hates her position as a lady of society, and whoever thinks otherwise of her, has no understanding of what Pushkin wanted to say.

Now she says firmly to Onegin:

Now am I to another given: To him I will be faithful unto death.

She said this as a Russian woman, indeed, and herein is her apotheosis. She expresses the truths of the poem. I shall not say a word of her religious convictions, her views on the sacrament of marriage -- no, I shall not touch upon that. But then, did she refuse to follow him although she herself had said to him “I love you”? Did she refuse because she, “as a Russian woman” (and not a Southern or a French woman), is incapable of a bold step or has not the power to sacrifice the fascination of honors, riches, position in society, the conventions of virtue? No, a Russian woman is brave. A Russian woman will boldly follow what she believes, and she has proved it. But she “is to another given: To him she will be faithful unto death”.

To whom, to what will she be true? To what obligations be faithful? Is it to that old General whom she cannot possibly love, whom she married only because “with tears and adjurations her mother did beseech her”, and in her wronged and wounded soul was there then only despair and neither hope nor ray of light at all? Yes, she is true to that General, to her husband, to an honest man who loves her, respects her, and is proud of her. Her mother “did beseech her” but it was she and she alone who consented, she herself swore an oath to be his faithful wife. She married him out of despair. But now he is her husband, and her perfidy [should she succumb to Onegin] would cover him with disgrace and shame and kill him. Can anyone build his happiness on the unhappiness of another? Happiness is not in the delights of love alone, but also in the spirit’s highest harmony. How could the spirit be appeased if behind it stood a dishonorable, merciless, inhuman action? Should she run away merely because her happiness lay therein? What kind of happiness would that be, based on the unhappiness of another?

Imagine that you yourself are building a palace of human destiny for the final end of making all men happy and giving them peace and rest at last. And imagine also that for that purpose it is necessary and inevitable to torture to death one single human being, and him not a great soul, but even in someone’s eyes a ridiculous being, not a Shakespeare but simply an honest old man, the husband of a young wife in whom he believes blindly. He is proud of her and respects her, although he does not know her heart at all. He is happy and at rest. Your palace can be built only if he is disgraced, dishonored, and tortured. On his dishonored suffering, your palace can be built! Would you consent to be the architect on this condition? That is the question. Can you for one moment admit the thought that those for whom the building had been built would agree to receive that happiness from you if its source was suffering. It could perhaps be thought of as the suffering of an insignificant being, but a being who had been cruelly and unjustly put to death. Would they agree even if when they attained that happiness they would be happy forever? Could Tatyana’s great soul, which had so deeply suffered, have chosen otherwise?

No, a pure, Russian soul decides thus: Let me, let me alone be deprived of happiness, even if my happiness be infinitely greater than the unhappiness of this old man. Finally, let no one, not even this old man, know and appreciate my sacrifice: I will not be happy through having ruined another.

Here is a tragedy ??in fact, the line cannot be passed, and Tatyana sends Onegin away. The following may be said: But Onegin too is unhappy. She has saved one [the General], and ruined the other [Onegin]. But that is another question, perhaps the most important in the poem.

By the way, the question about why Tatyana did not go away with Onegin has with us, in our literature at least, a very characteristic history, and therefore I allow myself to dwell upon it. The most characteristic thing is that the moral solution of the question should have been so long subject to doubt. I think that even if Tatyana had been free and her old husband had died and she become a widow, even then she would not have gone away with Onegin. But one must understand the essential substance of the character. She sees what he is. The eternal drifter has suddenly seen the woman whom he had previously scorned in a new and unattainable setting. In this setting is perhaps the essence of the matter. The girl whom he almost despised is now adored by all society -- society, the awful authority over Onegin, despite his universal aspirations. That is why he throws himself dazzled at her feet. Here is my ideal, he cries, here is my salvation, here is the escape from my anguish. I did not see her then, when ‘happiness was so possible, so near’. And as before Aleko turned to Zemphira, so does Onegin turn to Tatyana, seeking in his new, capricious fancy the solution of all his questions. But does not Tatyana see this in him, had she not seen it long ago? She knows beyond a doubt that at bottom he loves his new caprice, and not her, the humble Tatyana as of old. She knows that he takes her for something else, and not for what she is, that it is not her whom he loves, that perhaps he does not love any one, is incapable of loving any one, although he suffers so acutely. He loves a caprice, but he himself is a caprice. If she were to follow him, then tomorrow he would be disillusioned and look with mockery upon his infatuation.

He is not rooted in any soil at all. He is a blade of grass, borne on the wind. She is not like that. Even in her despair, in the painful consciousness that her life has been ruined, she still has something solid and unshakable on which she can fix her soul. These are the memories of her childhood, the reminiscences of her country, her remote village, in which her pure and humble life began.

Ay, of that burial ground so quiet
Where my poor nurse reposes now
Beneath her cross and shadowing bough

Oh, these memories and the pictures of the past are most precious to her now; these alone are left to her, but they do save her soul from final despair. And this is not a little, but rather much, for there is here a whole foundation, unshakable and indestructible. Here is contact with her own land, with her own people, and with their sanctities. And he -- what has he and what is he? Nothing, that she should follow him out of compassion, to amuse him, to give him a moment’s gift of a mirage of happiness out of the infinite pity of her love, knowing well beforehand that tomorrow he would look on his happiness with mockery. No, these are deep, firm souls, which cannot deliberately give their sanctities to dishonor, even from infinite compassion. No, Tatyana could not follow Onegin.

Thus in Onegin, that immortal and unequalled poem, Pushkin was revealed as a great national writer, unlike any before him. In one stroke, with the extreme of exactness and insight, he defined the very inmost essence of our high-ranking society, standing above the level of the people. He defined the past and present type of Russian drifter. He was the first to identify him with the flair of genius, to identify his historical destiny and his enormous significance in our future. Side by side he placed a type of positive and indubitable beauty in the person of a Russian woman.

Besides that, of course, in his other works of that period, Pushkin was the first Russian writer to show us a whole gallery of positively beautiful Russian types found among the Russian people. The paramount beauty of these lies in their truth, their tangible and indubitable truth. It is impossible to deny them, they stand as though sculptured. I would remind you again. I speak not as a literary critic, and therefore do not intend to elucidate my idea by a particular and detailed literary discussion of these works of the poet’s genius. Concerning the type of the Russian monkish chronicler, for instance, a whole book might be written to show the importance and meaning for us of this lofty Russian figure, discovered by Pushkin in the Russian land, portrayed and sculptured by him, and now eternally set before us in its humble, exalted, indubitable spiritual beauty. It is evidence of that mighty spirit of national life which can send forth from itself figures of such certain loveliness. This type is now given to us. He exists. He cannot be disputed. It cannot be said that he is only the poet’s fancy and ideal. You yourself see and agree: Yes, he exists, therefore the spirit of the nation which created him exists also. Therefore the vital power of this spirit exists and is mighty and vast. Throughout Pushkin sounds a belief in the Russian character, in its spiritual might. And if there is belief, there is hope also, the great hope for the man of Russia.

With hope for all the good and glory,
I look ahead, devoid of fear,

said the poet himself on another occasion. Those words may be applied directly to the whole of his national, creative activity. And yet no single Russian writer, before or after him, did ever associate himself so intimately and fraternally with his people as Pushkin. Oh, we have a multitude of experts on the people among our writers. They have written about the people with talent and knowledge and love. Yet, if we compare them with Pushkin, then, with one or at most two exceptions among his latest followers [?? who does Dst have in mind?], they will be found actually to be only “gentlemen” writing about the masses. Even in the most gifted of them, even in the two exceptions I have just mentioned, sometimes appears a sudden flash of something haughty, something from another life and world, something which desires to raise the people up to the writer, and in that way to make them happy. But in Pushkin there is something allied indeed to the people, which in him rises on occasion to some of the most naive emotions. Take his story The Bear, and how a peasant killed the bear’s mate. Or remember the verses, “Kinsman John, when we start drinking”, and you will understand what I mean.

All these treasures of art and artistic insight are left by our great poet as it were a landmark for the writers who should come after him, for future laborers in the same field. One may say positively that if Pushkin had not existed, there would not have been the gifted writers who came after him. At least they would not have displayed themselves with such power and clarity, in spite of the great gifts with which they have succeeded in expressing themselves in our day. But not in poetry alone, not in artistic creation alone. If Pushkin had not existed, there would not have been expressed with the irresistible force with which it appeared after him (not in all writers, but in a chosen few), our belief in our Russian individuality, our now conscious faith in the people’s powers, and finally the belief in our future individual destiny among the family of European nations. This achievement of Pushkin’s is particularly displayed if one examines what I call the third period of his activity.

I repeat, there are no fixed divisions between the periods. Some of the works of even the third period might have been written at the very beginning of the poet’s artistic activity, for Pushkin was always a complete whole, as it were a perfect organism carrying within itself at once every one of its principles, not receiving them from beyond. The beyond only awakened in him that which was already in the depths of his soul. But this organism developed and the phases of this development could really be marked and defined, each of them by its peculiar character and the regular generation of one phase from another. Thus to the third period can be assigned those of his works in which universal ideas were pre-eminently reflected, in which the poetic conceptions of other nations were mirrored and their genius reincarnated.

Some of these appeared after Pushkin’s death. And in this period the poet reveals something almost miraculous, never seen or heard at any time or in any nation before. There had been in the literatures of Europe men of colossal artistic genius -- a Shakespeare, a Cervantes, a Schiller. But show me one of these great geniuses who possessed such a capacity for universal sympathy as our Pushkin. This capacity, the pre-eminent capacity of our nation, he shares with our nation, and by that above all he is our national poet. The greatest of European poets could never so powerfully embody in themselves the genius of a foreign, even a neighboring, people, its spirit in all its hidden depth, and all its yearning after its appointed end, as Pushkin could. On the contrary, when they turned to foreign nations European poets most often made them one with their own people, and understood them after their own fashion. Even Shakespeare’s Italians, for instance, are almost always Englishmen. Pushkin alone of all world poets possessed the capacity of fully identifying himself with an alien nationality. Take his Scenes from Faust, take The Miserly Knight, take the ballad Once there Lived a Poor Young Knight. Read his Don Juan again. Had Pushkin not signed them, you would never know that they were not written by a Spaniard. How profound and fantastic is the imagination in the poem A Feast in Time of Plague. But in this fantastic imagination is the genius of England; and in the hero’s wonderful song about the plague, and in Mary’s song,

Our children’s cheerful voices
In the noisy school were heard...

These are English songs. This is the yearning of the British genius, its lament, its painful presentiment of its future. Remember the strange lines:

While wandering once in a valley wild....

It is almost a literal transposition of the first three pages of a strange mystical book, written in prose by an old English sectarian -- but is it only a transposition? In the sad and rapturous music of these verses is the very soul of Northern Protestantism, of the English heresiarch, of the illimitable mystic with his dull, somber, invincible aspiration, and the impetuous power of his mystical dreaming. As you read these strange verses, you seem to hear the spirit of the times, of the Reformation. You understand the warlike fire of early Protestantism, and finally history herself. You do this not merely intellectually but as one who passes through the armed sectarian camp, sings psalms with them, weeps with them in their religious ecstasies, and believes with them in their belief.

Then set religious verses from the Koran or Imitations from the Koran beside Pushkin’s Protestant religious mysticism. Is he not here a Mohammedan? Has he not captured the very spirit of the Koran and its sword, the naive grandeur of faith and her terrible, bloody power?

And here is the ancient world. Here are Egyptian Nights. Here sit the gods of earth. They sit on the backs of their people and despise the genius of the people and their aspirations. They no longer believed in that genius. They became gods in isolation and went mad in their isolation, in the anguish of their weariness unto death. They diverted themselves with fanatic brutalities, with the voluptuousness of creeping things or of a she-spider devouring her male.

No, I will say deliberately, there had never been a poet with a universal sympathy like Pushkin’s. And it is not his sympathy alone, but his amazing profundity, the reincarnation of his spirit in the spirit of foreign nations. It is a reincarnation almost perfect and therefore also miraculous, because the phenomenon has never been repeated in any poet in all the world. It is only in Pushkin. And by this, I repeat, he is a phenomenon never seen and never heard of before, and in my opinion, a prophetic phenomenon, because ... because herein was expressed the national spirit of his poetry, the national spirit in its future development, the national spirit of our future, which is already implicit in the present, and it was expressed prophetically. For what is the power of the spirit of Russian nationality if not its aspiration after the final goal of universality and pan-humanity [vsechelovechestvo]? No sooner had he become a completely national poet, no sooner had he come into contact with the national power, than he already anticipated the great future of that power. In this he was a Seer, in this a Prophet.

For what is the reform of Peter the Great to us, not merely for the future but in the past and already in full view? What did that reform mean to us? Surely it was not only the adoption of European clothes, customs, inventions and science. Let us examine how it was, let us look more steadily. Surely, it was not a simple adoption by us of European dress, habits, inventions and science. We need to scrutinize the matter, to examine it more closely.

Yes, it is very probable that at the outset Peter began his reform in this narrowly utilitarian sense. But in the course of time, as his idea developed, Peter undoubtedly obeyed some hidden instinct which oriented him and his work toward future purposes undoubtedly grander than narrow utilitarianism. In the same way, the Russian people did not accept the reform in the utilitarian spirit alone. A distant and incomparably higher goal was undoubtedly revealed to them and instantly warned them against mere utilitarianism. I repeat, the people felt that purpose unconsciously, but the feeling was direct and very vital. Indeed, we then impetuously applied ourselves to the most vital universal pan-humanist fellowship! Not in a spirit of enmity (as one might have expected) but in friendliness and perfect love, we received into our soul the genius of foreign nations, all equally, without preference of race, able by instinct from almost the very first step to discern, to discount distinctions, to excuse and reconcile them. Therein we already showed what had only just become manifest to us -- our readiness and inclination for a common and universal union with all the races of the great Aryan family.

Yes, beyond all doubt, the destiny of a Russian is pan-European and universal. To become a true Russian, to become fully Russian (and you should remember this), means only to become the brother of all men, to become, if you will, a universal man. Oh, all our Slavophilism and Westernism [ID] is only a great misunderstanding, even though historically necessary. To a true Russian, Europe and the destiny of all the mighty ??Aryan race is as dear as Russia herself, as dear as the destiny of his own native country. This is so because our destiny is universality, won not by the sword, but by the strength of brotherhood and our fraternal aspiration to reunite mankind.

If you go deep into our history since Peter’s reform, you will already find traces and indications of this idea, of this fantasy [??dream] of mine, if you will, in the character of our intercourse with European nations, even in the policy of the state. For what has Russian policy been doing for these two centuries if not serving Europe, perhaps, far more than she has served herself. I do not believe this came to pass through the inability of our statesmen.

Oh, the nations of Europe know how dear they are to us. And in course of time I believe that we -- not we, of course, but our children to come -- will all without exception understand that to be a true Russian does indeed mean to aspire finally to reconcile the contradictions of Europe, to find resolution of European yearning in our pan-human and all-uniting Russian soul, to include within our soul by brotherly love all our brethren. At last it may be that Russia pronounces the final Word of the great general harmony, of the final brotherly communion of all nations in accordance with the law of the gospel of Christ!

I know, I know too well, that my words may appear ecstatic, exaggerated and fantastic. Let them be so, I do not repent having uttered them. They ought to be uttered, above all now, at the moment that we honor our great genius who by his artistic power embodied this idea. The idea has been expressed many times before. I say nothing new. But chiefly it will appear presumptuous. “Is this our destiny, the destiny of our poor, brutal land? Are we predestined among mankind to utter the new word?”

Do I speak of economic glory, of the glory of the sword or of science? I speak only of the brotherhood of man. I say that the heart of Russia, perhaps more than that of all other nations, is chiefly predestined for this universal, pan-human union. I see its traces in our history, our men of genius, in the artistic genius of Pushkin. Let our country be poor, but this poor land “Christ traversed with blessing, in the garb of a serf”. Why then should we not contain His final word? Was not He Himself born in a manger?

I say again, we at least can already point to Pushkin, to the universality and pan-humanity of his genius. He surely could contain the genius of foreign lands in his soul as his own. In art at least, in artistic creation, he undeniably revealed this universality of the aspiration of the Russian spirit, and therein is a great promise. If our thought is a dream, then in Pushkin at least this dream has solid foundation. Had he lived longer, he would perhaps have revealed great and immortal embodiments of the Russian soul, which would then have been intelligible to our European brethren. He would have attracted them much more and closer than they are attracted now. Perhaps he would have succeeded in explaining to them all the truth of our aspirations. And they would understand us more than they do now. They would have begun to have insight into us, and would have ceased to look at us so suspiciously and presumptuously as they still do. Had Pushkin lived longer, then among us too there would perhaps be fewer misunderstandings and quarrels than we see now. But God saw otherwise. Pushkin died in the full maturity of his powers, and undeniably bore away with him a great secret into the grave. And now we, without him, are seeking to divine his secret.