No abstract
f |^H E name of Peter Tkachev is virtually unknown outside of Russia.Even in Russia his importance in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement received but belated recognition. During his lifetime, he met with strong opposition on the part of the majority of Russian revolutionaries. A hostile attitude towards his personality and his ideas remained predominant in revolutionary circles for a long time after his death (1886). It was only after the revolution that he began to attract more sympathetic attention. 1 And yet he deserves a serious study from two points of view. First, in connection with the evolution of the revolutionary movement in Russia in the 1870's. Tkachev was among the first to advance the program of a direct assault upon the government by an organized revolutionary minority, in preference to attempts at socialist propaganda among the masses or reliance on a general peasant uprising to be provoked by "agitation". He maintained this position in the face of a strong and widespread negative attitude, and towards the end of his career he was able to state with satisfaction that the main principles of his program had been accepted by the most active group among the Russian revolutionaries even if they did not admit it themselves. 2The other point of view from which Tkachev appears as a significant and interesting figure is that of his historical relationship with Lenin. As I see it, some of his fundamental concepts in the field of revolutionary strategy and tactics anticipate, in a striking fashion, Lenin's design for a revolution in Russia. It is this latter problem that I propose to discuss in the present article. 1 See in particular B. Kozmin's P. N. Tkachev i revoliutsonnoe dvizhenie 1860-lfh godov. (Moscow, 1922) and M. Pokrovsky's Oc/ier^i po istorii revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia V Rossit 19 i 20 ve£ov (Moscow 1924). Under Mr. Kozmin's editorship, six volumes of Tkachev's selected writings (Jzbrannye sochmeniia, subsequently cited as Soch.) were published in 1932-37. 2 Tkachev had in view the members of the People's Will party. Substantially, the validity of Tkachev's claim has been recognized by both Lenin (Soc/iiiieniia, 3d ed., IV, p. 494) and Plekhanov (Sochmeniia, II, pp. 147-48). 336
The name of Vladimir Soloviev, insofar as it is familiar to the Western world, is known as that of a philosopher and religious thinker. 1 This was, of course, the field in which he was particularly prominent. Russia can boast only a few formal philosophers (as distinguished from philosophizing novelists, poets or historians), and among those Soloviev is probably the most outstanding. Moreover, in the history of modern Russian religious thought, he occupies a central position, serving as a connecting link between the mid-nineteenth century Slavophils and such contemporary writers as Berdiaev and Bulgakov.But Soloviev's was a versatile and many-sided nature, and many other aspects of his life and activity deserve attention and study. He wrote interpretive essays on Russian poetry, some of which were landmarks in Russian literary criticism, and he was a poet himself-not a great poet, perhaps, but one with a strongly marked individual character. His poetry as well as his unusual personality exercised a strong influence upon the Russian symbolists of the early twentieth century. He was a mystic and had apocalyptic visions of the impending coming of the Antichrist, and yet he was deeply concerned with various political and social problems of his age, including such "earthly" subjects as the progressive deforestation of European Russia.There was a period in his life when he seemed even to be primarily concerned with the "evil of the day." This was during the reign of Alexander III (1881-1894). Two problems of Russian life engaged Soloviev's attention at that time. One was the revolutionary movement in the country, particularly in its radical terrorist phase (Soloviev was deeply shocked by the assassination of Alexander II in March of 1881), and the other was the growth of nationalism in Russian public 1 The following general works on Soloviev are available in Western languages: Michel d'Herbigny, Un Nertman russe: Vladimir Soloviev (Paris, 1911); Georg Sacke, W. S. SolomjeTDS Ceschichtsphilosophie (Berlin, 1929); D . Stremooukhoff, Vladimir Soloviev ef son oeuvre messianique (Paris, 1935); Nicholas Zernov, Three Russian Prophets: Khomialiov, Dostoevj^ij, Soloviev (London, 1944); Peter P. Zouboff, Vladimir Solovyev on Codmanhood (New York, 1944). None of these deals specifically with the subject of the present article.183
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