“Does Not Allow the Righteous to Remain Careless”: Socialist Revolution in the Conservative- Democratic Discourse of the 19th Century

Abstract

Considering society to be the main subject of nation-building, the Slavophiles and the Pochvenniks acted as a kind of conservative democrats. In this, their views coincided with the views of publicists of an earlier generation, usually ranked among the supporters of the “official nationality”. Their political outlook was based on anticlass pathos, the desire to form a national identity on the basis of a peculiarly understood Orthodox spirituality. The main objects of criticism of the Slavophil publicists were “aristocratic opposition” and “revolutionary conservatism”: those forms of conservative politics and ideology that provoked revolutionary upheavals and were thus their root cause. Left radicalism was considered by Slavophile publicists as one of the varieties of “despotism of theory over life”. Not recognizing the positive content in it, the Slavophiles considered it a symptom of a disease that struck the national organism. The publication on the pages of Aksakov’s “Rus” of the unfinished cycle of K.K. Tolstoy marked the beginning of a number of publications devoted to the problems of nihilism and written by N.N. Gilyarov-Platonov and N.Ya. Danilevsky. Considerations of Gilyarov-Platonov were developed by his nephew — F.A. Gilyarov. However, his book “15 years of sedition” contained sharp attacks on the authorities and the “Katkovsky direction”. The most serious philosophical study of the problems of nihilism was the numerous works of N.N. Strakhov. Over time, the revolutionary ideology changed. “Pure” nihilism was receding into the past as early as the 1870s; the Narodniks and Marxists themselves considered themselves to be the bearers of a positive program. For their part, the conservatives did not recognize this positive element — and, arguing even with the Marxists, they continued to use the polemical arsenal of the former anti-nihilistic discourse. At the same time, there was no unified approach to Marxism in conservative circles. So, for D.I. Ilovaisky, he is a phenomenon alien to Russia. For S.F. Sharapov, Marxism, on the contrary, was a product of Russian life.