Andrey Madison. Mikhail Bakunin and the problem of the absolute in politics

Mikhail Bakunin and the problem of the absolute in politics
Part 1

Andrei Madison

Publication date: November 1, 2000

Before you speak
about the religious meaning of the Russian revolution...

"From the Depths", 1918

Recently I happened to visit a regional center near Moscow named Vera . This is a rather ancient (14th century) city a hundred kilometers southwest of Moscow, founded, as it is said in a local history book, “with the main and, perhaps, only goal - to stand to the last and die for the capital of Rus'.” He stood and died: the abundance of monuments in the city to the heroes of all Patriotic Wars is direct evidence of this.

Now the city, despite repeated pleas in the same book addressed to the “capital of Rus'” to help it at least with attention, is breathing its last. In the literal sense of the word: the only building in Vereya that shines with the brilliance of newness is the renovated Orthodox church. Moreover, there is a chapel erected in honor of the 650th anniversary of the city. Everything else bears the stamp of decay and ruin.

The day of my arrival was Saturday, traditionally a bathhouse in Russia. Vereya's old men and women, shabby, bent and furrowed by life, silently trudged to the city's washing establishment, which stood on the most picturesque bank of the Protva, and whose appearance most closely resembled an abandoned barracks somewhere in the polar zone. It was physically embarrassing to look into their eyes.

For your information: for the six and a half thousand population of Vereya, there are two thousand such old men and women. Fifty people are born in the city every year, and more than twice as many die. And so on.

Vereya, of course, is not unique; there are hundreds, if not thousands, like her (a typical example is here ). And while they exist - like this, and while nothing - neither really nor ideally - is being done to make them become different, the phrase that, they say, “Russia has exhausted its limit on revolutions” is nothing more than a good breakfast at the ever-present possibility of a bad dinner. For nothing can exclude (because it is natural, not social) the phenomenon of a person who will look at this not with an indifferent, well-fed gaze (or even with a sympathetic, but flabby one), but who, when looking at the consistent humiliation of human dignity, will have a knock in his heart. -an irrational feeling (for example, conscience) - and he will begin to look and find his own way, different from that commanded by the state, how to help these people. Or use them - if it is a completely different irrational feeling.

I repeat, no political technology will provide guarantees against such an outcome. It is possible - if guided by the objective ideal of the prosperity of a nation - to reduce the ability of influence of people who are catalysts of cataclysms to a minimum: the fewer cracks in a society, the more difficult it is to find a fulcrum in it in order to turn it over. On the eve of the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution and at the same time the end of the century, the most important event of which it was probably, it would be nice to think about this - as, say, some kind of reporting and re-election meditation.

Bakunin-papa

“The apple does not fall far from the tree, but man falls far from man ,” - this newly-minted proverb could not more successfully characterize the not very successful relationship between father and son Bakunin. We are, naturally, talking about the famous son Mikhail Alexandrovich and his much less noticeable father Alexander Mikhailovich.

Meanwhile, he was also a very remarkable person - well, at least for the fact that he was born in 1768, that is, in the very year that turned out to be a famine for both Russia and France. Apparently, this is precisely why, or, simply put, due to the general atmosphere of malnutrition, he turned out to be a weak child, and because of this weakness, his parents were simply forced to send him to Italy to recover.

There, the young man gradually recovered from his illnesses and illnesses and went to study at the University of Padua at the Faculty of Science (that is, philosophy), from which he graduated, receiving the title of Doctor of Philosophy for his dissertation on worms in Latin. This extraordinary combination alone makes him a unique and unprecedented character in Russian history. However, there was absolutely nothing comedic about Alexander Mikhailovich. And not only because he never returned to studying worms in Latin in his life.

Firstly, despite his then stay abroad, immediately after graduating from university he began to work for the good of his homeland. And none other than the “actuary,” that is, interpreting everything from the same Latin, was in charge of the distribution of food to the army. Then he witnessed a revolution either in Paris or in Naples, and the spectacle did not arouse his enthusiasm, which he recounted many years later in poetry:

I saw it all in reality
In the land of pugnacious roosters
And from then on I hated it
Music of tigers and donkeys.

Tigers, donkeys and roosters - in the language of the simplest allegory, of course, revolutionaries, carbonari, insurgents. The elder Bakunin did not feel any kindness towards them, which, however, does not mean that he was an inveterate obscurantist, an obscurantist and a serf-owning beast.

Returning from abroad and settling at the request of his mother on his estate Premukhine, which will be discussed further, Alexander Mikhailovich began by composing a constitution for the peasants under his jurisdiction, which he tried to put into practice. Its content remained unknown to posterity, but they knew the fact that the peasants did not accept the constitution and even rebelled against it as, apparently, against an innovation that invaded the reserved area of ​​their traditional way of life. As a result, the enlightened innovator had to abandon the reform he had undertaken and let his flock live the old fashioned way. Which he later also did not fail to respond to in verse:

Divide the days in half
Semi-free peasant
Giving three days to the master,
The other three are their master.

On this unshakable basis
Holy Rus' rests.
And in the hateful word of slavery
Mutual lies in the union.

(From which today’s zealots, weepers and intercessors for Holy Rus', if they were simple children, would definitely have to draw the conclusion, having given it wide publicity, that without the revival of correct serfdom this very Holy Rus' would not exist. They may already have they did it - however, with the markings of chipboard.)

Alexander Mikhailovich, for his part, was strongly convinced of this, which he spoke about not only in poetry, but also in prose. By the way, he told me about a very remarkable occasion - when he received the manuscript of the charter of the Union of Salvation from Mikhail Muravyov for review. The review was very definite, and since it is of interest not only in itself, but also as a kind of exclamation point for counting down the views of the rebellious son, it is worth looking back at it more closely.

So, as the biographer of another Muravyov, Sergei, writes: “Being quite familiar with the needs of Russia, Bakunin, in his political views, was a strict conservative and monarchist, who experienced the bloody inconveniences of the transfer of supreme power into the hands of people who do not have other qualities other than free-thinking. <...> Condemning the hobbies of the young people of that time, who were raving about constitutions, on this occasion he expressed to Muravyov that the need to change the way of government exists only in the imagination of a very small circle of young people who did not take the trouble to weigh all the disastrous consequences that, in his opinion, will inevitably occur from the slightest weakening of the supreme power in a country spread over an immense space and which, apart from autocracy, has no organic connection between its parts . "

That is, realizing some of the fundamental inconveniences and shortcomings of Russia as a single state organism, the elder Bakunin believed that there not be any idea that would unite its disparate parts, other than the idea of ​​a “strong hand.” could It is impossible not to notice that his substantiation of this opinion contains a lot of curious and entertaining things, including from the point of view of today, when the problem he interprets again cannot be classified as a purely noise abstraction.

Personally, Alexander Mikhailovich described it this way: “In countries that are warm, rich and densely populated, abounding with many educated and idle people, limited monarchies can still exist without much inconvenience; but given our spaces, harsh climate and in view of the tireless European hostility, we cannot tolerate the attributes supreme power into the hands of another class, which is not only not prepared for political life, but, due to its infancy, has not yet learned respect for laws, unless the law is supported by mechanical force. Therefore, autocracy seems to us not so much necessary or necessary for the interests of dynastic , as much as the need for the people and state security . "

And finally, the final chord of senior Bakunin’s political credo, a kind of fanfares for a common man: “For every honest and enlightened person ,” he insisted, “ there is one way - the feasible maintenance of power and existing laws. No matter how bad the times may be.” this power, but to the last drop of blood we must stand and die for it. Not through anarchy (the word has been said! - A.M.) , violence and conspiracies against the government, we can achieve prosperity, but by spreading among the people the love of work, sobriety, order , cleanliness and honesty; by introducing him to the crafts and arts and developing education, we will have the opportunity to lift him out of poverty and at the same time create expensive institutions that exist in the West due to the enormous preponderance of social wealth . "

Thus, Bakunin’s father was none other than a statist, a statist, an absolute monarchist, a supporter of leisurely enlightenment, a good-willed projector and, in the end, a decent and very intelligent person. So his son Mikhail not only had someone to build on, but also someone to gain wisdom from. An ideal platform for launching reactive consciousness.

Premukhino is beautiful and wise

The Bakunins' estate Premukhino was located in the Novotorzhsky district of the Tver province on the banks of the Osuga River. The places there are easy for the eye, just the kind that good bars like - this is what Alexander Mikhailovich innocently recorded in his epic poem with the hydromorphic title “Osuga”, from the views of the river of the same name, and he drew inspirational illustrations for his political views:

Show off, quiet Osuga,
The soul of Premukhinsky fields
And a constant friend,
Nurse of my children!

...through p'ni, through decks,
Through the bosom of hummocks and dams
The stream of freedom finds its way
And its banks are blooming.

Native children of Russian flora
Cheremha, rosan lesovoy
In colored ligatures and patterns
Intertwined over the water;

Along the slope lily of the valley and lyubitsa
And the nightingales are here in the spring,
And in the summer the red maidens
They sing in the thick raspberry forest.

Why the red maidens sang in the raspberry field is known in general terms, but the rest, of course, was idyll, bucolic and the goodness of the air. Including in family relationships. As Mikhail Bakunin later wrote to his father: “You were something great for us, going beyond the ranks of ordinary people... You rarely scolded and, it seems, never punished us... (to the question of the unflogged generation! - A. M.) I remember with what love, with what condescension and with what ardent attention you listened to our children's chatter... Finally, I remember these winter evenings in which you always read "Robinson Crusoe", and it was like that for us great, such unlimited pleasure. Then came Lent, and we fasted together with you, and Holy Week had something inexplicably solemn for us... You, mamma, sisters, we were all in the same room; there was no one else here , no one destroyed this holy harmony with their inappropriate presence... Oh, all this merged, inextricably merged with our lives!”

Responsible for the formation of a whole galaxy of wonderful Russian boys, including Mikhail Bakunin himself, the early-faded Nikolai Stankevich summed up his impression of Premukhin this way: “The Bakunin family is the ideal of a family... We need to go there to improve . ”

(The motif of the “lost paradise” and the “golden age”, by the way, is a very likely underlying motive of Bakunin Jr., in whose actions and reactions subsequently there was a lot of childish, direct, spontaneous - including childish whims and childish unreflected cruelty. In addition, this after all, the “big project” is exactly the kind that could only inspire the maximalist Bakunin: after all, if there are pragmatic politicians, professionals and managers, then there must be romantic politicians, amateurs and catalysts - and the first would not get the job , if there were no second ones. Synthetic politicians-thinkers - like V.I. Lenin - are exclusively unique phenomena.)

It is worth adding that the “ideal of the family” was rich not only in skill, but also in number: there were eleven children in total, of which six were daughters and five sons, and there were no mediocrities among them. That is why to linger on them means to linger for a long time, but our interest is concentrated around only one of the sons, ultimately striving for an even narrower (aka boundless) goal - to say at least a few intelligible words on the problem of the absolute in (including, and near-modern) politics.

Therefore, we will have to part with both the idyll and the bucolic and hurry after the young, more precisely fourteen-year-old, Mikhail to St. Petersburg, where, by the way, his father took him in November 1828 for training at the artillery school. This is a fundamental, threshold moment in Bakunin’s biography. For at the school, in his own words, he saw the dirty and vile side of life: he learned to lie, throw money around, begging for it under all sorts of pretexts, and even signed a couple of bills. “If I did not fall into vices, ” he wrote to his father several years later, “ of which I was a frequent witness, then at least I got used to them to such an extent that they not only did not disgust me, but did not even surprise me.” .

So, there was paradise, and paradise was lost. Hence, there is an even greater temptation to interpret the rest of Bakunin’s life as an attempt to find him again, as a desire to prove to his inner father: “And I am capable! And I can! I just stamp my foot and the gates will open...”

First riot

Bakunin’s search for the way back to heaven looks at first like a search for “true happiness,” different from that “external” and “accidental”, examples of which he observed many times when he found himself in the army environment after the artillery school. “Yes, dear friends, ” he wrote in January 1834, “ there is true happiness on earth. This is not external happiness, a product of circumstances and depending on the first person you meet, no, this is internal happiness, based on the purity and innocence of the heart, based on complete devotion to the happiness of those one loves, based, finally, on the exercise of one's intellectual powers to delve into the secrets of nature in order to direct one's aspirations to the sublime goal that is before us . "

Meanwhile, the army reality of Nikolaev Russia could only contribute to the development of hypochondria. The unit where Bakunin was assigned was quartered in the Grodno province, in some remote hole with the only name that adorned it - Kartuz-Berezka. Dressing up in his usual exaltation, Bakunin poured out from there to his wonderful sisters: “I am here alone, completely alone! Eternal silence, eternal sadness, eternal melancholy - these are the companions of my solitude. And if the delight of pure joy flashes and instantly illuminates the darkness that reigns in the soul mine, I must suppress it in my chest. No one will hear me! I am alone! And exclamations die in space, and joy turns into grief. I learned from experience that the charm of perfect solitude, so eloquently preached by the Genevan philosopher (J.-J. .Rousseau. - A.M.) , there is the most absurd sophism: man is born for society . "

Bakunin is doing everything possible to replace the hated sophistry with a truism dear to the heart (although world experience shows that the temptation of loneliness in one form or another - even solitary confinement - is a necessary component of the biographies of, so to speak, people of the absolute ). And he simply escapes, in the end, to Premukhino, where, as a life-saving aid, he received a certificate of illness: Bakunin was allowed to resign.

Nevertheless - and this is historically natural - the return to paradise did not take place, including in fact. His practical parent now wanted to send him to the civilian field - to serve as an official on special assignments under the Tver governor. This prospect led Bakunin to the thought of suicide - at that moment he was striving for knowledge, and not for ranks. But knowing that his father could not be convinced, he did not care about filial obedience and secretly went to Moscow.

Alexander Mikhailovich, not without reason, had certain hopes for his son, although he was struck in the most unpleasant way for himself, still found the strength to send his son a clear and sensible admonition. “I received a letter from Moscow ,” he wrote reluctantly, “ and I see that the same fever in your head continues, but your heart is silent. Your departure did not so much surprise as it upset me . ” And he moved on to the conceptual part of his message: “True philosophy lies not so much in dreamy theories, but in the fulfillment of the family, social and civil duties of our life, and you, carried away by chimeras, neglect them and talk about some kind of inner life, which is all "replaces you: and meanwhile, you yourself don’t know where to get away from yourself. This blues that weighs you down is a necessary consequence of offended pride, an idle life and a restless conscience . "

The exemplary Christian Alexander Mikhailovich, of course, did not care that he could reproach the founder of Christianity with exactly the same words, and therefore he, without any hesitation, invited the rebellious Michel to come to his senses and again become a “kind and obedient son.” To which Michel objected by saying that, firstly, he does not have the full trust of his parents, and secondly, he cannot be the soul of the family and act positively in its favor, but die spiritually and limit himself to receiving guests, shuffling in living rooms and seeing off his sisters he can’t go to balls.

The father again had to take up the pen - and his answer was very, very cruel: “You didn’t have our trust, because you never tried to earn it ,” he objected. “ What does it mean to be the soul of the family and act positively in its favor? I’ll translate This is in Russian for you: to be a soul means to dominate, and you are offended that they did not agree to enter into your citizenship, but you could have acted positively in favor of the family, fulfilling our will, and not your own. “Honor your father and mother and good "You will." But you believed this badly, and I will not waste words in vain . "

So, we have: on the one hand, a Freudian dispute between father and son for power, which will then be projected by Bakunin onto the state and personally onto the Russian emperor; on the other hand, there is an insoluble contradiction between a representative of a sedentary lifestyle and a nomad. His result: in response to his father’s admonitions, Bakunin only spurred his horse harder. Which is not surprising: the real founders , starting from the Axial Age, were all restless people. Office knowledge is transmitted only from seat to seat.

Make subjective that which is substantial

Having separated from his father theoretically, Bakunin is full of desire to free himself from him practically. In other words, to gain material independence. He based his freedom-loving calculations on his, as he believed, good knowledge of mathematics. And therefore, upon arrival in Moscow, he immediately ordered business cards, which, being supplied with the appropriate proposal, were just as immediately sent out to Moscow aristocratic families.

However, the lessons gave Bakunin noticeably less income than was required by his addiction to both delicacies and wine and tobacco, of which he consumed huge quantities. And Bakunin began to get into debt, the repayment of which he was not particularly eager to pay off. This was immediately noted by my father: “You don’t save money and easily borrow money, not knowing how and when you will pay . ” The same trait (like “to whom I owe, I forgive everyone”) was noticed by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev in Bakunin: “There was almost no person from whom, after a quarter of an hour of acquaintance, he would not borrow money, which, however, he did not give back . ”

A much harsher response on the same topic came from Bakunin’s closest friend at the time, Vissarion (“Hanging”) Belinsky, who got his money through hard, exhausting labor and who, because few people knew its value. This is what he said with the usual merciless frankness: “...I work and work like an ox, with selflessness, with contempt for my own benefits, and yet I suffer completely undeservedly, everyone knows this ,” he wrote to Bakunin. “ You, on the contrary, you didn’t lift a finger to earn money for yourself: your works are unknown to society - you only trumpeted and proclaimed them . ”

However, Belinsky would be a zoil, and not a great interpreter, if he only condemned and criticized, but did not understand and therefore accepted. The ease with which Bakunin treated money reflected “ ideal generosity ,” and not selfish calculation. Belinsky understood this and, like no one else, was able to explain: “I understand your very frivolity and ease in begging, ” he continued, “ their source is your ideal good-heartedness. For you, asking someone else “if you have money” is the same as asking "Have you got any chips?" with the exception of half a ruble for a quarter of tobacco or two kopecks for a cab driver... This is not enough: having money, you didn’t even wait for me to ask you, but asked: “Viesyasha, do you need money?” And you gave those that took from others, and those that I received from lessons" .

Bakunin practiced the same position in relation to society - there were least selfish and career considerations in it. Obsession with a goal, placing it in a synonymous pair with the absolute, is by no means the same thing as what is angrily condemned by conventional morality: “the end justifies the means.” In a letter to one of his sisters, on whom he had a decisive spiritualizing influence, Bakunin spoke of society in the following way: ” “What do I care about its existence? Let it fall, I will not take a single step to support it . And then he explained the essential reasons for the rejection of social institutions: “There are no rights, no duties - there is only absolute love, and when there is love, there are no duties. Obligation excludes love, and everything that excludes love is criminal, dishonorable. <...> Truth is unconditional, and not applied to one or another circumstance - that is my motto " .

Such principles can be used in practice only in a constantly altered state of consciousness, not even elevation, but exaltation, sublimation of the spirit. And Bakunin managed to stay in it not only himself, but he infected his sisters with an equally intense and abstract worldview, about whom those who happened to know and appreciate them composed hymns - as Stankevich did, for example: “You disinterestedly admire these girls , like God’s beautiful creatures, you look, listen, you want to grab and hold these angelic faces with you forever, so that you can look at them when your soul is heavy..."

What made Premukha’s young ladies stand out from the multitude of others who could speak French well, play the piano well, and were generally not bad-looking? And what made them stand out - I believe this word will be the only appropriate one - was their luminosity in the search for Truth, Goodness, Self-Denial, which did not appear by itself, but was a reflection of the powerful verbal intensity of their unlucky brother. This is what he wrote to one of them, Tatyana, while addressing everyone else: “My friends, the earth is no longer our fatherland, our happiness is heavenly; our life is heavenly; the movements of our souls do not seek the earth, do not seek its pleasures. <...> Absolute freedom and absolute love - this is our goal; the liberation of humanity and the whole world - this is our purpose " .

Finding himself in a constant and therefore chaotic search for levers that could radically change the fate of humanity or “simply” shake it up so that it could no longer return to its previous state, Bakunin turned first to Christ, then to Fichte, then to Hegel, in faith into which he casually converts Belinsky and addresses the sisters with the same sermon. To truly appreciate the level of their spiritual message, one must remember that Bakunin was 23 years old at the time, and the sisters even younger. And this is what and how he wrote to them at that time: “You talk too much about yourself and scold yourself. This is not good, this is a sign of good-heartedness. Remember that two “I” live in you. One, unconsciously true, infinite, is your substance, and the other, your conscious, finite self, is your subjective definition. All life consists in making subjective that which is substantial in you, that is, raising your subjectivity to your substantiality and making it infinite. You nice girls, infinity lies within you, and therefore do not be afraid for yourself, but believe, love, think and move forward boldly." .

And the girls not only listened, but also understood, and not only understood, but also obeyed him. True, this is where the non-substantive problems began for them.

If you love, you're crazy

So, love, according to Bakunin, must be absolute, all-consuming, and if it does not achieve perfection, it must be uncompromisingly abandoned.

To this end, this episode: Stankevich meets the eldest of Bakunin’s sisters, Lyubinka. A love correspondence begins between them. Which, naturally, in a philosophically abstract way, is discussed by all members of Stankevich’s circle. In the end, Stankevich makes a formal proposal to Lyubinka - and at the same time writes to her: “You know, there are moments in which it is strange for me to imagine us together in simple, close, human relations. You seemed so holy to me, so inaccessible. "I am a visible Providence, a visible deity. I did not think that fate could ever unite us - and together I nurtured a superstitious hope for her mercies. And if we had not learned that we needed each other, my life would still have passed under the shadow Your image; everything holy and beautiful would have been inspired by you. And now, when we face an eternal, indissoluble union, you all remain just as holy to me; with such a gratifying feeling of reverence I recognize all your superiority over me, with such rapture I am ready to bow before you - the soul needs this visible deity, it needs to see in a living image peace and love, which are darkened in the universe . "

Despite the formal proposal and formal agreement, the consciousness of Lyubinka’s superiority and the feeling of admiration for her take over - Stankevich begins to feel that he does not live up to the height of the love he himself has set. The situation was awkward. But friends said: since love is not absolute, it means it is not real. In addition, as if to benefit the situation, Stankevich’s health deteriorated. He needed to go abroad for treatment - and he leaves. Poor Lyubinka is wasting away before her eyes and until her last day she continues to write loving letters to Stankevich...

And at the same time, another story is happening - with another sister of Bakunin, Varvara, an ascetic by nature, endlessly exhausting herself with doubts, falling into ecstatic states, then falling into despondency. She marries the neighboring landowner Nikolai Dyakov, a respectable but ordinary man, not obsessed with an idea . This was immediately noticed by Bakunin, who began to demand that his sister leave her husband and take her son. “The perfect man is God, ” Michel wrote to her, “ and you are called to develop in your son a man who, perhaps, will be one of the greatest manifestations of the Absolute . ” “Tell me, have you found that your husband lives in the Absolute?” - he pestered his sister.

And Varvara, as best she could, tried to instill in her husband a craving for the absolute. But it didn’t work out. And then she left him, taking her son. Bakunin recommends that she take refuge from her husband’s attacks abroad. Varvara follows his advice and, already in Italy, finds out that Stankevich is dying there, in Italy. Then she realizes that she has loved this man all her life, leaves the child in Naples in the arms of a nanny, and she rushes to Rome. Seeing her, Stankevich experiences an extraordinary surge of vitality: he, it turns out, is loved, moreover, he himself loves and is ready to love in the future. But his days were numbered, he died in Varvara’s arms.

Any next station √ Absolute

There were other novels, and other equally fiery stories, but - the song is still not entirely about them - let's return to Bakunin. The frozen idea of ​​him as an anarchist, and of anarchism as an extravagance and foolishness, has no serious relation to reality. Bakunin underwent a steep evolution in his life, which would be more accurately called a series of revolutions. He constantly burned what he worshiped, and was much less willing to worship what he burned - and he always did so only under the pressure of inevitable circumstances.

Having arrived at the end of his life's journey to atheism and identifying state oppression with religious oppression, in his youth he was ardent with piety and zealously attended church. Having already seen in the 40s the root of all Russia’s troubles in the autocracy and personally in Nicholas I, in 1833 he responded to Pushkin’s “Slanderers of Russia”: “These poems are charming, aren’t they, dear parents? They are full of fire and true patriotism , this is what the feelings of a Russian should be! <...> Russians are not French, they love their fatherland and adore their sovereign, his will is law for them, and among them there is not a single one who would hesitate to sacrifice their most dear interests and even life for one’s own good and for the good of the homeland . "

These youthful outpourings (comparable with the first publication of Demyan Bedny, still under the natural surname of Pridvorov: “Rattle, my lyre, // I compose a song // to the Apostle of Peace // Tsar Nicholas!” ) are quite consistent with Bakunin’s later passion for Hegel, who in Prussian ( the difference is a letter!) the state saw the embodiment of the absolute spirit. His fascination with Hegel, or rather, his incessant mental restlessness, led Bakunin to decide to leave Moscow and go to Germany for more in-depth studies of German philosophy. No political or, what is more, revolutionary passions then, apparently, had yet governed him. He was an exemplary quietist and conservative, and it is no coincidence that from Hegel he first of all derived the justification of reality, with which he infected Belinsky to the point of obsession.

On the eve of his departure abroad, which, as usual for him, was accompanied by tedious financial worries, Bakunin thought in the following terms: “In life, everything is fair, everything is good, and ... the very suffering in it is necessary, as a purification of the spirit, as its transition from darkness to light, to enlightenment . "

Bakunin, as befits a man with the psychology of a prophet, perceived such transitions when they happened to himself very keenly, which, in turn, was addressed by Belinsky in a letter to him: “Transitioning to a new moment, you demanded that we too moved into it, and hated us, seeing that we were in our moment, and not in yours . "

It cannot be otherwise if a person, being disappointed in one absolute, immediately falls head over heels in love with another.

The ending follows.