Mikhail Epstein
The
people [narod] and "narodnost’[1][people's character] are
probably the most stable concepts in the Russian world view. Take the famous
three-fold symbol of the government creed during the 19th century: autocracy, orthodoxy,
narodnost’. One hundred hears
later, two of the elements have changed to the point of unrecognizability,
while the third has remained the same: class consciousness [klassovost’], party consciousness [partijnost’], narodnost’.
Between
the two triads there is much in common. Having compared class consciousness and
autocracy, it is easy to understand that they signify the form of government
rule: monarchy or dictatorship of the proletariat. Having compared orthodoxy
with party consciousness, it is possible to find a parallel: a type of advanced
organization which summons the faithful to serve with fear and trembling. And
then, having compared narodnost’
with narodnost’, you will only
understand that it is, quite likely, the most important one if it does not
permit any kind of parallel or substitution. Narodnost’ lies on the widest base of the whole pyramid, which
ascends towards the central level of earthly power, governmental-organizational
(class consciousness is autocracy of the workers), and then it flies up to
heavenly power, spiritually enlightening and educating (party consciousness is
the true faith of unbelievers). And although these pyramids grew on opposing
sides under the tsars and the soviets, and where one lived at the gates of
heaven, the other dreamed of hell and the ruin of the soul, but they grew, as
in mirror symmetry, from one, “popular” basis.
What
exactly is “narodnost’”, what is
the “people” itself, from which this phrase crawls out with its persistent
flight, and which has, like an aimless wanderer, entwined itself around the
entire trunk of the new Russian history? “The people”, on the one hand, means
belonging to a certain nation: “The Russian people”, “The Chinese people”. If
it were only this, there would be no special charm or vitality in the word
“people” and it would remain a pure Russian synomym for the international word
“nation” [“natsija”].
But
even for that, Russian words differ from synonymous borrowings in that they
irritate with their unspoken slyness. In the word “people” there is something
which allows one part of a nation, the greater and better part, to be seperated
from another, lesser and worse. The people is not the entire nation, but only
its laboring part, which feeds itself and, moreover, preferably provides for
itself by the simplest physical means. Acording to the definition of the
Academy dictionary, the people is “the basic laboring mass of a country’s
population (in exploitative governments, opressed by the ruling classes[2])”.
The office worker or scientist, police man or factory owner who never the less
works and barely provides for himself, does not belong to the people for he does
not produce his daily bread, but all sorts of ceremonies, ideas, scraps of
paper and fictions.
Thus
the concept “people” is narrowed down to [zauzhivaet] the nodes of a fishing
net which rakes out all of what is most worthy in the nation. But then, the
concept of “narodnost’” expands
these nodes. The title of narodnost’
gives absolution to those
who by birth and occupation do not belong to the
people, but have suffered and earned this right with an entirely politically
conscious life. Pushkin, of course, was by birth far from the people, but he
became a writer genuinely of the people, like Lermontov, Nekrasov, Tolstoj, not
to mention the noblemen-revolutionaries, protectors
burning with popular feeling [gorja narodnoro], who
expressed the interests of the people even better than the people themselves.
It
happens that the expression “the people”, finds a part of a nation’s people
which increases with the expression “narodnost’”, although to a lesser degree. Belinskijs and
Plekhanovs increase, and minister-capitalists turn up, and remain in the
difference between nation and the people. Or, from the opposite, but all the
more popular point of view, Pobedonostsevs and Stolypins turn up, and
revolutionary-bolsheviks fall into the difference. Thus the people always
remain just less than the nation, so that they maintain a certain controlling
principle, from which the nation should take shape, and from which it should
not.
An
economically similar procedure of deduction takes place in the West, where the
number of workers is always somewhat less then the number of those capable of
work – unemployment remains as a reserve for healthy competition. That is how a
portion of the nation, in the ideological sense, is doomed to unemployment so
that healthy
competition, now on behalf of the left, now of the
right, now of the rich, now of the poor, can, with variable success, find the
lucrative “popular” position. Now Lenin is more of the people [narodnee] than anyone, then he is the opposite, more alien [nerodnee] than anyone. True, in this kind of competition, as
opposed to the western kind, lazy or poor people always had more luck then the
hard-working. The people should be based on itself, like a self-acknowledging
cause, and should not try to advance [delat’ kar’eru], or commit the sin of erudition or propriety, or
flit about before the public, which, it cannot be denied, suffers from its
isolation from the people.
But
on the other hand, the concept of the people is not only less than the nation,
but also far greater. As far as it includes the social dimension, all true
toilers and their defender-spokesmen, it extends to different nations,
selecting from among them the “salt of the earth” and thoroughly getting mixed
up in the boiling cauldron of world history. “Forward, forward march, laboring
masses!” “Put an end to the exploitation of the working masses!” “All power to
the people!” The people in these expressions are natural born workers, a
spontaneously self-sufficient beginning of humanity, that reason which should
become the goal, the alpha put at the end of the alphabet. This pure human
nature [priroda], which has not
yet become an aristocratic race [poroda], requires its own laws and wants to rise above the artificially
elevated building sight of civilization with its government and church, with
its classes and parties. That is why any pyramid of earthly or heavenly power
should lean on narodnost’ and
proclaim it, not only with its unshakeable foundation, but with its higher
goal, be it a holy orthodox-autocratic people or a classless comunist society.
For this reason, in both triads, narodnost’ stands in the final place of the rising series of
values.
So
what, then, should be understood by the word “people”? It proves to be
surprisingly capacious and ambiguous, not to mention two-faced, like Janus, the
Roman god of fate and war, whose two faces were turned towards the past and the
future. The people are the beginning and end of everything, a most profound
national source and a most lofty social tendency. In its all-encompasing
rightness and fascinating entegrity, the word “people” is akin to the word
“truth” [pravda], which, to the
delight of devout lovers of truth, straight away takes on two meanings: the
Truth [istina] and justice. As the
populist N. K. Mikhajlovskij wrote, “it appears that only in Russian are Truth
and justice called by one and the same word and somehow blend together into one
great whole[3]”. Exactly in
the same way does the word “people” take on two meanings: the pure Truth of national
belonging and the highter justice of the social world order.
And
just as the word “truth” easily substitutes simple Truth of facts with the
higher justice of generalizations, so the word “people” easily substitutes
national belonging with social superiority, or social justice with national
selectivity. The volatile mixture of the two meanings constantly bounces around
in these words, preparing for an ideological explosion, muffling its sworn
rightness. But the louder they resound, the worse they are heard, lost between
the strength of the drum beat and the weakness of the eardrums.
If
we take into consideration that lovers of truth in Russia, as a rule, turn out
to be lovers of the people as well, then the more understandable that what is
common in “truth” and “people” and why the people in particular are understood
to be bearers of truth. And why it is possible to join to “people” and “truth”
the same exact national-social epithets: “the Russian people” and “Russian
truth”, “working masses” and “working truth”.
Paraphrasing
N. K. Mikhailovskij, ideologist of an undivided love for truth and the people,
it is possible to say that only in Russian are the existence of a nation and
social justice called by the same word
and somehow blend into one great whole. This great whole is the people - the
national community as embodiment of social justice. By itself, belonging to the people is a feature both
deaply national and socially progressive, in the full indivisibility of their
meanings. Narodnost’ is characteristic
of a culture in which is expressed national originality and at the same time
the progressive tendency of the toiling masses.
It
is difficult to, at once, keep an eye on and maintain control over both flanks,
but “narodnost’” turned out to be such
a generous concept that not a single interpretation has denied their rightness
and everything has united and absorbed them, it has become a standard, whose
colors noone argues about, but behind which people advance, dying and
conquering. For this very reason Belinskii tirelelessly underlines in his
articles that narodnost’ ought not
to be confused with the character of simple folk [prostonarodnost’], that is reduce it to a representation of the
national lower classes and the ethnography of their daily life. Another
"revolutionary democratic" critic Dobroliubov, on the contrary,
clearly pointed out that it is impossible to confuse narodnost’ with nationality, but that it should be connected to
the social lower classes and strengthen the “party of the people” in
literature. If Belinskij protested against the social limitations of the
concept of narodnost’ (“muzhiks”),
then Dobroljubov is against the national limitations (“rusichi”). This is the way it should be: not only did all of
these opposing interpretations not clash within the category of narodnost’, but they broadened its place in the Russian
self-consciousness to the extent that they brought together both the national
pride of the Great Russians and the social demands of the opressed working masses at the same time. Thus in the
aftermath of October revolution, the concept of narod with its double meaning inevitably led the people to formation of a socio-national community - a “socialist nation”, a “workers’
motherland”, a “proletarian fatherland”, that is a “new historic community”
where the social and the national form an indivisible identity.
True,
for the sake of this conundrum, the social and the national were required to
fit into each other more tightly, hemmed in, removing the least incongruity
from both sides. It was required to chop off from the nation those surplus
layers which had nothing to do with the concept of social justice, to level
high points along the broad foundation of the people. It was required to chop
off from society even those layers which gravitated to national isolation, to
the formation of little, stuffy ethnographic communities, in order to bring
them together in a new, wide community of the people. Thus were clipped off all
of the extraeneous fringe of social and national minorities, millionaires and
militants, so as to form a united nation-state [natsija-sotsium], a people in the full and all-encompasing meaning of
the word. One can even say that the entire bloody history of Russia in recent
centuries has been the history of one word and its unyielding wish for
incarnation. The “people” with its rounded die was forced through a jumble of
all sorts of social and national, motley events, dense thickets, confusions,
set-backs and admixtures. If it is correct that in the beginning was the word,
that the world was created by the word, then the word which created the Russia
of the twentieth century was the word “people”. As if by magic, the nation
reduced itself down to the social lower classes, and the social lower classes of
various nations joined together in one nation. The word was realized, like a
prophecy.
Such
a triumph of “narodnost’” still
has not occured in history. Even the word itself is difficult to translate into
other languages. For a foreigner, the most mysterious thing about the Russian
people, perhaps, is not the Russian character [russkost’], but precisely “narodnost’”. What is Russian can be placed along the same line
as what is chinese or German, but what can be placed alongside the grand and
unexamined phenomenon of narodnost’?
If we only glance in a Russian-English dictionary, under the word “narodnost’” is given “national character”, “national traits”.
But is that which is of the people really just national? This translates the
great totalitarian idea into the triviality of ordinary nationalism, depriving
it of its second dimension, its mighty social pathos.
Even
Russian nationalists, along with those who, in their meagre dictionary,
over-emphasize the idea, not so much of a nation, but of a people, underline
the fact that not all of their native country and national strata are permeated
with the popular spirit, and that there is a so-called “population”, unworthy
to be called by the holy name of “the people”. In fact, there is little
nationalism for a genuinely ambitious nation, it does not wish to remain simply
a nation, but wants to become a people, a social revelation to the world, an
example of the world-wide organization of people. That is why measuring only by
national origin somehow sickens even thoughtful chauvinists. Even the
Bolsheviks did not judge by social origin alone, permitting into their ranks
converted, and for that reason doubly proletarian, zealous members of the
beourgoisie and gentry. Why not include Georgians and Ethiopians in the world-wide
Russian mission if they demonstrate a genuinely popular spirit and overcome the
narrow-mindedness of their minor nations as Pushkin and Stalin managed to do?
Narodnost’ is that higher criteria which can at once be held up
to a nation, uprooting in it the socially alien elements, and also to society,
uprooting from it the nationally alien elements. That is why in every bolshevik
is a little bit of chauvinist and in every chauvinist is a little bit of
bolshevik, for both of them quickly separate out narodnost’ as a symbol of faith. Even if in one case the higher
form of narodnost’ appears to be
class and party consciousness, and in another national pride and patriotism,
never the less, the higher form of one and the other turns out to be, in the
final analysis, narodnost’ itself,
which contains and, at the requisite strength, blends with the national and
social components. Neither bolshevism, nor chauvinism can manage without narodnost’, and consequently, without each other, as well.
But for all this, the powerful idea of narodnost’ should not be turned into the furtive trifle of
purely national or social traits, and especially should not combine them in
exact proportions, rectifying the first from one side, and the second from the
other, in order to smoothly round out the line of the people’s fate, including,
for example, Blok, but taking away Pasternak, or still better, including the
national part of Pasternak, and taking away the anti-national part. Thus,
squeezed from both sides onto the dagger-like sharpness of the dividing line,
the principle of narodnost’ more
confidently pierces the very core of any event. It includes his later verses
and takes away the earlier ones, or includes “Leutenant Smidt” and takes away
“Doctor Zhivago”, all the way up to the dismemberment of individual poems.
“Yes, the poem ‘On Early Trains’ expresses a sincere upsurge towards a merging
with people, but in it there sounds the small-mindedness and pettiness of the
provincial intelectual.” The wise criteria of narodnost’ acts “more sharply than a double-edged sword,
penetrates to the dividing asunder of the soul from the spirit, the joints from
the marrow, and judges the thoughts and intents of the heart”, and furthermore
it is, in this context, like the creating and judging Word. Even the Apostle
Paul recalls this, not just anywhere, but precisely in his sole epistle to
those who will be “without origin” and “without memory”, as if prophetically
pointing out that the sword of proving division will fall about them most sharply
of all (Hebrews, 4:12).
The
mystery of narodnost’... Has not
“the mysterious fingernail of the mystery” gone up and down the entire eastern
half of western civilization, from the Rhine to the Volga? Is the work of
Pasternak or Babel national? How about Einstein’s theory of relativity,
Mendel’s genetics and Weiner’s cybernetics? Heine’s verse and Charlie Chaplin’s
films? Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis? One phenomenon cuts right down the
middle, another doesn’t cut at all, from a third is taken the tiniest part so
that the people takes form not just from undiluted natural talents, born from
the soil [tsel’nykh pochvennykh samorodkov] (Esenins, Stakhanovs and Matrosovs), but also from fragmented
cultural elements: one half Shostakovich, a third Akhmatova, a fourth
Pasternak, a tenth part Mejerkhol’d and a hundredth part Mandel’shtam. Let
them, divided in passing, dialectically opposed to themselves, “patriots, yet
bourgeois”, “materialists, yet spontaneous”, shrink away out of shame,
impotently drawing behind them “alien” elements - Shostakovich’s “chaos”,
Akmatova’s “drawing-room quality [kamernost’]”, Mandel’shtam’s “aestheticism” - and thus do not
fully reach the prohibited circle. Let the magnetic qualities of attractiveness
and impermeability remain beyond the people. All of them, these “not quites”,
in one way or another reach out for the people, but the people are far from
understanding everything about them.
Narodnost’ is only etymologically derived from the word “nation”
[narod]; historically the “nation”
itself derives from “narodnost’”,
that controlling idea which forms it according to the principle of
inclusion-exclusion in the proper proportion of national purity and social
unity. That is why all national-social or socio-national movements inescapably
fall into orbit around the words “narodnost’”, with either a correlation or an indispensable
harmony of the two components. But in the final analysis, it is precisely the
ideal of narodnost’ which will
bring the people to failure, reduce it to a barbaric condition, to that lower
integrity which on a higher level is always divided into social and national
originality, constantly abolishing from ideology the very concept of “the
people”. Like the an “idiological idea” [“ideologema]”, narodnost’ is nothing else but a speculative attempt at the revival of the
“clan”, the archaic community which preceded the division of national and
social, familial and private, natural and cultural. From there, from the depths
of primevil magic, is decended that vague link of “Truth” and “justice”,
“family” and “community”, which later bewitched us with the words “truth” and
“the people”. “The people” is everything that developed from the clan over long
centuries of history, “degenerated”, grew more complicated and was stratified
into personality and associations, and for that reason attempted in the name of
“narodnost’” to roll back up into
a certain wholeness of a secondary concept-myth. If “clan”, “tribe” and
“nation” are the primary realities of the socio-ethical order, then “the
people” is an artificial product of the beginning of the Romantic imagination,
and then of the ideological cupidity which distracts the “surplus value” from
the concept: that longed for unity of the national and the social, which allows
to exist the ideal of a most cruel centralization and unbounded supremacy.
And
now, when the nation-state, which awoke the “human clan” from extreme antiquity
with the Internationale, lies in
ruins, when the majority of the nation breaks away from the Soviet super-state,
and the Soviet super-nation has broken into a multitude of states (groups,
layers), the very concept of “the people” is deprived of its foundation of
meaning. The national and the social are no longer the same thing. There is no
Soviet people, but rather various nations in the Eurasian fellowship and
various social layers within each nation. Obviously, even the expression “the
people” will likely loose its ring with time, be reduced to nothing, find
itself in quotation marks, as has happened with the word “truth”.
Despite
the appeals to “the people” and “narodnost’” which can still be heard, through the voice of
populism the grave silence of “the people” itself can be heard even more
strongly. The fact that this word appears in great numbers in the names of all
the new parties and associated newspapers, such as “Mister People” [“Gospodin
Narod”], is a witness that its
primary meaning is fading and is beginning to be understood in quotation marks,
like a citation from a dubious source. The people is what people mostly loudly
swear by, but which by itself always remains silent, like the finale of
Pushkin’s tragedy. The deeper the silence, the more the oaths are heard. But
the louder the oaths, the more the silence is heard.
Of
course, the mystery remains - the wearisome, sweet feeling of a mystery which
does not wish to be figured out. Let “the people” remain in the realm of secret
presentiments, like a certain collection of souls which is predestined to
become the people of God and, having forgotten about the nation and the state,
to unite in eternity around His throne. But let us not confuse this
other-worldy people without clan or tribe with that “narodnost’”
which appeals to the perished spirits of the “clan” and attempts to reconstruct
from them a new historic community, united around an idea or leader.
It
is difficult to part with “narodnost’”,
that word-phantom, which has gone into all dictionaries, encyclopedias,
textbooks, and has inspired the humanist works of dreamy Russian erudition. But
still harder is not parting with it, having appreciated the blood of several
generations which was absorbed and shed by it. Such is the quality of great
incorporeal ideas: that is why they do not have possesion of their own flesh
which is fed by what is alien and what is real.
May
1992
Transl. Thomas Dolack
[1] [Translator’s note] Narodnost’ presents a particular difficulty for English, as Epstein discusses below. It encompasses “spirit of the people,” “national character” and “folk wisdom” and is an important concept in Russian intellectual history where it usually refers to the inherent qualities of the narod, or the people as opposed to the intelligentsia and westernized upper classes, a distinction which dates back to Peter the Great’s reforms. Given the imposibility of translating it consistently into English, and its importance in the essay I have elected to leave the word transliterated.
[2] Slovar’ russkogo jazyka v 4 tomakh.[Dictionary of the Russian Language in 4 Volumes] Akademija nauk SSSR. Institut russkogo jazyka. Izd. 2., pod red. A.P. Evgen’evoj. M., “Russkij jazyk, 1982, t.2, s. 389.
[3] For a more detailed discussion about the idea of “truth” see the essay “From Truth to the Truth” [“Ot pravdy k istine”].