Stepan Trofimovitch laughed a great deal.
"My friends," he instructed us, "if our nationalism has 'dawned' as they keep repeating in the papers—it's still at school, at some German 'Peterschule,' sitting over a German book and repeating its everlasting German lesson, and its German teacher will make it go down on its knees when he thinks fit.
I think highly of the German teacher. But nothing has happened and nothing of the kind has dawned and everything is going on in the old way, that is, as ordained by God.
To my thinking that should be enough for Russia, pour notre Sainte Russie.
Besides, all this Slavism and nationalism is too old to be new.
Nationalism, if you like, has never existed among us except as a distraction for gentlemen's clubs, and Moscow ones at that.
I'm not talking of the days of Igor, of course.
And besides it all comes of idleness.
Everything in Russia comes of idleness, everything good and fine even.
It all springs from the charming, cultured, whimsical idleness of our gentry!
I'm ready to repeat it for thirty thousand years.
We don't know how to live by our own labour.
And as for the fuss they're making now about the 'dawn' of some sort of public opinion, has it so suddenly dropped from heaven without any warning?
How is it they don't understand that before we can have an opinion of our own we must have work, our own work, our own initiative in things, our own experience.
Nothing is to be gained for nothing.
If we work we shall have an opinion of our own.
But as we never shall work, our opinions will be formed for us by those who have hitherto done the work instead of us, that is, as always, Europe, the everlasting Germans—our teachers for the last two centuries.
Moreover, Russia is too big a tangle for us to unravel alone without the Germans, and without hard work.
For the last twenty years I've been sounding the alarm, and the summons to work.
I've given up my life to that appeal, and, in my folly I put faith in it.
Now I have lost faith in it, but I sound the alarm still, and shall sound it to the tomb. I will pull at the bell-ropes until they toll for my own requiem!"
"Alas! We could do nothing but assent.
We applauded our teacher and with what warmth, indeed!
And, after all, my friends, don't we still hear to-day, every hour, at every step, the same "charming," "clever," "liberal," old Russian nonsense?
Our teacher believed in God.
"I can't understand why they make me out an infidel here," he used to say sometimes. "I believe in God, mais distinguons, I believe in Him as a Being who is conscious of Himself in me only.
I cannot believe as my Nastasya (the servant) or like some country gentleman who believes 'to be on the safe side,' or like our dear Shatov—but no, Shatov doesn't come into it. Shatov believes 'on principle,' like a Moscow Slavophil.
As for Christianity, for all my genuine respect for it, I'm not a Christian.
I am more of an antique pagan, like the great Goethe, or like an ancient Greek.
The very fact that Christianity has failed to understand woman is enough, as George Sand has so splendidly shown in one of her great novels.
As for the bowings, fasting and all the rest of it, I don't understand what they have to do with me.
However busy the informers may be here, I don't care to become a Jesuit.
In the year 1847 Byelinsky, who was abroad, sent his famous letter to Gogol, and warmly reproached him for believing in some sort of God.
Entre nous soit dit, I can imagine nothing more comic than the moment when Gogol (the Gogol of that period!) read that phrase, and... the whole letter!
But dismissing the humorous aspect, and, as I am fundamentally in agreement, I point to them and say—these were men!
They knew how to love their people, they knew how to suffer for them, they knew how to sacrifice everything for them, yet they knew how to differ from them when they ought, and did not filch certain ideas from them.
Could Byelinsky have sought salvation in Lenten oil, or peas with radish!..."
But at this point Shatov interposed.
"Those men of yours never loved the people, they didn't suffer for them, and didn't sacrifice anything for them, though they may have amused themselves by imagining it!" he growled sullenly, looking down, and moving impatiently in his chair.
"They didn't love the people!" yelled Stepan Trofimovitch.
"Oh, how they loved Russia!"
"Neither Russia nor the people!" Shatov yelled too, with flashing eyes.
"You can't love what you don't know and they had no conception of the Russian people.
All of them peered at the Russian people through their fingers, and you do too; Byelinsky especially: from that very letter to Gogol one can see it.
Byelinsky, like the Inquisitive Man in Krylov's fable, did not notice the elephant in the museum of curiosities, but concentrated his whole attention on the French Socialist beetles; he did not get beyond them.
And yet perhaps he was cleverer than any of you.
You've not only overlooked the people, you've taken up an attitude of disgusting contempt for them, if only because you could not imagine any but the French people, the Parisians indeed, and were ashamed that the Russians were not like them.
That's the naked truth.
And he who has no people has no God.
You may be sure that all who cease to understand their own people and lose their connection with them at once lose to the same extent the faith of their fathers, and become atheistic or indifferent.