Chalmaev on Inevitability
Viktor Chalmaev, Inevitability. 1968
Original Source: "Neizbezhnost'", Molodaia gvardiia No. 9 (1968).
In the seventeenth century, a most intelligent and inquisitive man, Iurii Krizhanich, a Croat by nationality, was brought into our country by one of the many winds blowing into Russia from East and from West. He settled in Moscow and later in Tobolsk, where he lived for fifteen years. Observing Russia and its people during the tumultuous reign of Aleksei Mikhailovich, he produced a monumental work entitled Thoughts on Politics or Conversations about Sovereignty (i.e., politics).
The dramatic and sagacious thought of this wandering defender of the Slavic tribe is astonishing! Having arrived in Muscovy with a firm conviction that the Slavs, and Russia in particular, "stand closest in succession to be creators of the world's wisdom, a task carried out in time by successor nations" (the same idea was later affirmed by all "pochvenniki" and Slavophiles), he suddenly discovered that this mighty land suffered from a serious defect: "chuzhebesie"--an insane passion for everything foreign, as the author himself explains it. He was also troubled by a tendency which the historian Kliuchevskii describes in the following way: "We do not know how to be moderate, how to keep on a middle course, but instead constantly fall into extremes and wander close to the abyss. " ...
And yet neither "madness for everything foreign" nor that disastrous evil, vodka, which, by Ivan the Terrible's order, replaced beer, the ancient Russian beverage (vodka was first adopted for the oprichniki!), could extinguish his faith in Russia. Yes, cruel is the fountain of raw brandy which flows in a stream of pure gold into the hands of parasitic merchants. A Russian philosopher would later say: "Drunkenness is a national vice which takes history away from a people. The good merchant who drinks might have produced a Kutuzov in the fifth generation; instead he gives birth only to a brave captain ... But there are also mighty principles in the Russian national character: the sense of national justice, patriotism, courage, a yearning for truth, and a strong sense of conscience all of these have overcome both "madness for things foreign" and "foreign domination" [chuzhevladstvo] ...
It was not from many Golgothas that the diffident Russian soul made known its existence over the course of centuries ... Constant labor on the land; the monastery; the crown tavern, and once or twice in every century--the ice of Lake Chud, the wild grass of the fields of Kulikovo, Poltava, or Borodino ... That is why our history seems so destitute when compared to colorful European chronicles overflowing with a multitude of entertaining events. [In Russia] we find no wealth of debates, no early parliamentarianism, no flowery oratory on eternal values ... "An eternal silence reigns in the heart of Russia," said Nekrasov. Once in every century, the coarse-grained, oft-flogged Russian peasant, weighed down by many burdens, would set out for the Kulikovo Field at hand and, projecting one hundred years into the one night before the battle, he would think about his homeland, about good and evil, and about the world in which he lived ... And in this wordless, silent brooding, fused with great deeds, he was able to attain spiritual heights which no mechanical orator could ever hope to reach ... And who can tell what complex thoughts may have lived in the hearts and bold heads of those Cossacks-fugitives and runaways-who accompanied Ermak, Khabarov, and Dezhnev through the wilds of the Siberian taiga so that Russia, which was harsh toward them, which threatened them with prison, might freely breathe the open spaces of the Great [Pacific] Ocean to which her soul has such a close affinity? And what of the monastic cells of desert-dwelling patriots such as Sergii of Radonezh, who inspired Dmitrii Donskoi to fight a decisive battle, or the patriot Patriarch Germogen, who during the Time of Troubles sent appeals to every part of the country urging unity? No, our sacred history is not a wilderness; perhaps it has simply not been "explored" as thoroughly as it should be...
Although the Russian people took part in a Battle of Poltava or a Stalingrad only once every hundred years, they were being prepared for this throughout the centuries. One's relationship to the homeland cannot be taken lightly, for a soul devastated by lack of faith cannot become a Donskoi, a Bagration, or a Matrosov overnight. Even the religious energy of the Russian was not always, but often, in the past transformed into military exploits, into creative inspiration, i.e., it was directed toward goals which were not all religious...
Money, which as everyone knows has neither odor nor country, will not tolerate a sense of the homeland in those who fall under its sphere of influence. Such a feeling is a kind of "redundancy" which complicates financial transactions. Capital mercilessly transforms a people from a spiritual organism into a mathematical sum consisting of standardized individuals, into a mass of separate units concerned only with common, everyday needs. The bourgeois crowd is always coarsely and vulgarly materialistic; its goals are easily "measured," calculated, and satisfied; it has no spiritual yearning straining far beyond the horizon of antlike humdrum concerns. A man's worth is measured according to his ability as a "businessman." In real life this has led to the one-sided development in bourgeois man of an exclusively voracious system, similar to that of termites...
Debates in the press about national self-consciousness, patriotism, and the place of village prose in our criticism of this, unquestionably, is an indirect reflection of the worldwide struggle around the concepts "crowd," "public, " and "people," around the problem of how to achieve a reasonable balance between "needs" and "ideals." Unable or unwilling to find a truthful answer to these questions, certain critics turn to a tried "method" of approach.
"Why sigh over the village! " they exclaim. "Over our debt to it for the past! Let's build the peasants new houses with slate roofs, with city furniture, plumbing, and fashionable wallpaper! That's all we owe for the 'feats' of the past! " Such are more or less the sentiments of those who in the name of " progress" protest against the "idealization" of the peasant, against celebrating springs and primal sources. They regard the fate of Lake Baikal and of the Russian forests in precisely the same way: "Let us have our way for another twenty years, and we'll dig you a new and better Baikal, wherever you want! And our debt will be paid!" ...
At times these "bookkeepers," citing the arguments of scholarship, warn that the village will cease to exist altogether by the year 2000. At other times they suddenly reproach all admirers Of nature, rivers, and the earth for being out of touch with the "people"-"Here you are," they say, "sighing over all this, while the people are longing for television and plumbing, for Cognac, a popular 'touristy' ditty, and the 'casual manner' of contemporary culture ... " And if a poet should have thoughts of "stars in the field," then he is accused of "wearing bast shoes" and of being an "antinational" idealist to boot ... Maybe they are right, to hell with the Baikal. Can't they dig up as many as they want and build concrete banks all around them ...
In the modern world, there is no neutral ground on moral and social questions. "Hearts that we do not possess will be immediately conquered by the enemy," Vasilii Fedorov once said. Each new generation entering into the world with a thirst for creativity and a desire to increase beauty must inevitably face a choice of ideational and aesthetic orientation and of development of ideals which can become the spiritual axis of one's whole life. Art is simultaneously a festival of ideas and a battlefield of ideas. For this reason, one cannot in our time afford to be a dilettante in this struggle...
The most sacred concept from which all sorts of "demons" are trying to distract us ... is the people, with its primordial sense of beauty, its innate feeling of historic stability and balance. Happy is the man whose spiritual outlook allows him to understand the movement of the people, to adopt its points of reference and very structure of soul! ...
Source: John Dunlop, The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 281-287.