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CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE

Portraits of early Russian liberals

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE

General editor HENRY GIFFORD

In the same series

Novy Mir:
A case study in the politics of literature i952-1958
EDITH ROGOVIN FRANKEL

The Enigma of Gogol:

An examination of the writings ofN.V. Gogol
and their place in the Russian literary tradition
RICHARD PEACE

Three Russian writers and the irrational:

Zamyatin, PH'nyak, and Bulgakov
T. R. N. EDWARDS

Word and music in the novels ofAndrey Bely

ADA STEINBERG

The Russian revolutionary novel:

Turgenev to Pasternak
RICHARD FREEBORN

Poets of modern Russia

PETER FRANCE

Andrey Bely
JOHN ELSWORTH
 Portraits of early Russian liberals

A study of the thought of T. N. Granovsky,

V. P. Botkin, P. V. Annenkov, A. V. Druzhinin
and K. D. Ravelin

DEREK OFFORD
LECTURER IN THE DEPARTMENT OF RUSSIAN,
UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL

The right of the

University of Cambridge
to print and sell
all manner of books
was granted by
Henry VIII in 1534.
The University has printed
and published continuously
since 1584.

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE
LONDON NEW YORK NEW ROCHELLE
MELBOURNE SYDNEY
 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521111812

© Cambridge University Press 1985

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 1985

This digitally printed version 2009

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 84-29211

ISBN 978-0-521-30550-1 hardback

ISBN 978-0-521-11181-2 paperback
For Dorinda
 Contents

Foreword xi
Note on dates, transliteration and use of Russian terms xix

1 Russian intellectual life in the 1840s and 1850s 1

Nicolaevan Russia; the growth of Russian literature;
Chaadayev's 'Philosophical Letter' 1
Slavophilism 5
'Westernisers' and some Western influences on their
thought 9
Belinsky 15
Herzen's thought after his emigration in 1847 26
Russia after 1848 and the reinvigoration of intellectual
life in the mid 1850s 28
Chernyshevsky 33
Russia after the emancipation of the serfs 41

2 Timofey Nikolayevich Granovsky (1813-1855) 44

Granovsky's status and the reasons for his neglect 44
Formative influences on the young historian 47
Granovsky as professor at Moscow University 51
Granovsky's Westernism 54
The spirit of chivalry 62
Granovsky's moderation: sources of friction with
Belinsky, Herzen and Ogaryov 65
The role of the individual in history 71
Last years and legacy 75

3 Vasiliy Petrovich Botkin (1811-1869) 79

Botkin's position in the Russian intelligentsia 79
vii
viii Contents
Botkin's relationship with Belinsky 82
Botkin, Belinsky and Hegelianism 85
Botkin's Westernism 89
Botkin's moderation in the late 1840s and early 1850s 94
Botkin's objections to radical thought in the second half
of the 1850s 97
Botkin's conservatism in his final years 104

4 Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov (1813-1887) 106

Annenkov's contribution to Russian intellectual life 106
Letters from Abroad 108
Annenkov and Marx 114
Annenkov's Parisian Letters and his relations with
Belinsky in 1847-8 119
Annenkov's creative writing and his views in the 1850s
as expressed in his correspondence with Turgenev 124
Annenkov's literary criticism 131
Annenkov's edition of Pushkin and his works on
Stankevich and Gogol 136
Fear of socialism and retreat 140

5 Aleksandr Vasilyevich Druzhinin (1824-1864) 144

Judgements of Druzhinin by Soviet scholars and by his
contemporaries 144
The novella Polinka Saks 149
On the eve of controversy with the radicals 155
'Pure' and 'didactic' art; the 'Gogol school' of Russian
literature 158
Druzhinin on Pushkin and 'poetry' 162
Druzhinin as a literary critic 166
Druzhinin's last years and his loss of influence 172

6 Konstantin Dmitriyevich Kavelin (1818-1885) 175

Kavelin's life, character and work 175
'A Brief Survey of the Juridical Way of Life of Ancient
Russia' (1847) 178
 Contents ix
Kavelin's relationships within the intelligentsia in the
late 1840s and 1850s 186
Kavelin's 'Memorandum on the Emancipation of the
Peasants in Russia' (1855) 190
Relations with Herzen and Chicherin, 1855-8 199
Kavelin's essay of 1859 on the peasant commune 203
Towards defence of the status quo 208

Conclusion 214
Key to abbreviations used in the notes 230
Notes 231
Selected bibliography 265
Index 275
 Foreword

'Despotism or socialism - there is no other choice', wrote

Alexander Herzen early in the 1850s.1 To the twentieth-century
reader Herzen's words inevitably have a prophetic ring. The
Russian autocracy, after all, took on an increasingly reactionary
character from the middle of the 1860s. At the same period there
began to develop vigorous revolutionary groups dedicated to the
transformation of the old society and, from the late 1870s, to the
destruction of the autocracy. Political middle ground was difficult to
occupy, especially since Russia lacked a coherent bourgeoisie which
might have had a vested interest in defending such ground against
the supporters of the established order, on the one hand, and the
vociferous champions of the masses, on the other. That is not to say
that the majority of Herzen's contemporaries perceived their poli-
tical options in such stark terms as Herzen himself. On the contrary,
many of them, and in particular the thinkers who are the subjects of
this study, did seek a middle course in the 1840s and 1850s. They
desired a freer and more just society than that which they saw
around them in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, but not a society in
which social and moral distinctions would be more or less com-
pletely obliterated. And yet the choice of which Herzen spoke could
not easily be avoided in a country lacking any tradition of free
political discussion or any history of gradual reform. Thus in the
1840s Granovsky, Botkin, Annenkov, Druzhinin and Kavelin had
all found themselves in opposition to the autocracy - although they
were not rebellious by nature - by virtue of the fact that they
contributed, in varying ways, to the great intellectual awakening of
that decade and thereby implicitly challenged the official obscuran-
tism. But in the 1850s, when the pace of economic, social and
intellectual change quickened, all these thinkers declined to give
unqualified support to the forces of opposition which they them-
selves had helped to unleash. And, whenfinallyforced at the end of
the 1850s to clarify their position on the political spectrum, those
XI
xii Foreword

who remained (Granovsky was by now dead) had little alternative

but to accept the status quo. Their desire to preserve what they
loved best in the old order of things proved stronger than their
enthusiasm for a brave new world in which so much - including, it
must be said, their own status - would be irretrievably lost.
My use of the term 'liberal' to describe the thinkers who tried to
hold to this middle course stands in need of some qualification. The
term is not one which Granovsky, Botkin, Annenkov or Druzhinin
customarily applied to themselves. In any case political terminology
tended to be loosely used in the period with which I am chiefly
concerned - that is, roughly the years 1838-61 - for the Russian
political consciousness, as opposed to the literary and moral
consciousness, was as yet poorly developed. Moreover, when they
did use the term 'liberal' these thinkers did not necessarily use it in
the sense intended in the present study. An entry in Kavelin's diary
is illuminating in this connection. In August 1857 he recorded an
interview he had had with the empress who had asked him why he
had the reputation of 'the most desperate liberal, qui veut leprogres
quand meme\ Kavelin had replied that in his student days, in the
early 1840s, and subsequently when he had been a professor at
Moscow University, in the middle of that decade, he had been a
'great liberal' and that 'the most extreme theories' had entered his
head. He had not, he told the empress, 'gone into political liberal-
ism', but had been a 'sincere' fervent socialist ...'. It had been
correct to call him an extreme liberal in that 'all the liberals',
Granovsky, Belinsky, Herzen and others, had been his friends.2
Clearly the term 'liberal' as it is used here by Kavelin denotes
nothing more precise than a person who deplores the spirit of the
Russian regime, one of the idealistic and 'critically thinking'
members of the burgeoning intelligentsia. The term certainly does
not imply adherence to any specific political beliefs; indeed,
Kavelin adroitly removes its political dimension.
A much more exact meaning is given to the term, however, in a
series of articles written by Chernyshevsky in 1858 and 1859 on the
subject of French political history.3 Chernyshevsky understands by
'liberalism' a certain set of values, attitudes and predictable
responses to social and political questions which, taken together,
make up a distinctive political outlook. His classification is one
which both Marxists and non-Marxists might now be able to accept
in its broad outline (though they would disagree profoundly, of
 Foreword xiii
course, about the wisdom and value of the tenets Chernyshevsky
describes). The fundamental characteristics of liberalism, as
Chernyshevsky perceives it, provide a useful starting-point for a
description of the outlook of the thinkers examined in the present
study. The liberal desires gradual reform, from above. He values
social and political stability. He hopes to solve problems by concili-
ation and compromise. He greatly fears sudden radical change and
particularly socialist revolution. To these characteristics we may
add others for which Chernyshevsky has even less sympathy and to
which he devotes little attention, namely: toleration of opinions
different from his own; emphasis on the dignity of the individual;
and a belief in the power of the enlightened individual, a noble in
the spiritual as well as the social sense, to exercise some influence on
the development of his society. Together with these characteristics
goes a tendency to uphold absolute values, immutable standards of
truth, goodness and beauty. It is this broad set of characteristics that
is implied when the term 'liberal' is used in the present work. Most
or all of these characteristics are to be found in the thought of each
of the individuals I have examined and they lay at the heart of these
individuals' disagreements with the early Russian socialists.
A few words should be added on the form my study of these
'liberals' has taken. It seemed best to give portraits of the indi-
viduals rather than to provide a chronological survey of their
combined oeuvre during the 1840s and 1850s. For these thinkers
never made a concerted attempt to put forward the liberal outlook,
even in the 1850s when their views began to harden in response to
the challenge from the more radical wing of the intelligentsia. Still
less did they contemplate the formation of a political party intent on
undertaking some joint practical activity. On the contrary, they
were dilettanti who happened as a result of their common back-
ground and shared cultural interests and experience to respond in
similar ways to the major historical events and intellectual and
cultural developments of their day. Their individual paths crossed
at many points and their careers followed a remarkably similar
course. But in the final analysis they remain above all individuals,
each of whom made a distinctive contribution to Russian intel-
lectual life - Granovsky in historical scholarship, Botkin and
Annenkov in travelogues and literary criticism (and, we should add,
in conversation), Druzhinin in fiction and literary criticism, and
Kavelin in juridical and socio-political writings. Because I have
xiv Foreword

chosen to examine these thinkers individually, however, I have had

to provide a substantial introductory chapter in which the major
currents and landmarks in Russian thought in the 1840s and 1850s
have been briefly surveyed. It is against the background sketched in
this introductory chapter that the intellectual biography of Granov-
sky, Botkin, Annenkov, Druzhinin and Kavelin must be seen.
By comparison with their radical contemporaries these thinkers
have received very little attention in twentieth-century scholarship.
Early in the Soviet period Belchikov made a brief study of the
criticism of Annenkov and Druzhinin, and there are passages on the
historical scholarship of Granovsky and Kavelin in Rubinshteyn's
survey of Russian historiography, published in 1941.4 But it was not
until the post-Stalinist period that Soviet scholars began to examine
the mid-nineteenth-century Russian liberals in any detail. Tsago-
lov, in his book of 1956 on economic thought in Russia in the last
years of serfdom, includes a substantial chapter on the views of
Kavelin (who, as a leading contributor to the discussion of the
abolition of serfdom, has interested Soviet scholars more than the
other subjects of this study). Rozental laid important foundations
for the study of the emergent liberal faction in the intelligentsia of
the 1850s, and of Kavelin in particular, in her series of articles which
appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and Kitayev, in a
monograph of 1972, made a more exhaustive study of the thought of
Kavelin, together with that of Chicherin and Katkov. Levin too has
a useful section on Kavelin in an unfinished work on Russian social
thought in the period of reforms which was published after his death
in 1974. Those thinkers whose main contribution was to aesthetic
and literary rather than to socio-economic debate have been most
fully examined by Yegorov, who in the mid 1960s published three
articles on Botkin and one on the literary criticism of Annenkov and
who has also incorporated useful passages on Druzhinin in his book,
published in 1982, on the 'struggle of aesthetic ideas' in the 1850s.
There are also, of course, brief surveys of Botkin, Annenkov, and
Druzhinin in the major histories of Russian literary criticism.5 And
yet even if the outlook of the Russian liberals of the mid nineteenth
century has now come to be regarded by Soviet scholars as an
important intellectual and political phenomenon worthy of serious
study, it is still treated as having no intrinsic merit, as Kitayev makes
clear on the first page of his monograph.6 To the Soviet scholar
liberals such as Kavelin are 'faithful defenders of the interests of a
 Foreword xv
gentry drawn into bourgeois reform', 7 irritating antagonists whom
Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov had to overcome in their struggle
to lay the foundations for socialism in Russia and whom later gener-
ations of Russian revolutionaries, particularly Marxists, have
scorned or spurned as more or less cynical class enemies. Lenin's
own vitriolic denunciations of liberalism, and of Kavelin in par-
ticular, have combined with the constraints of Marxist methodology
to make a less clearly predetermined appraisal of these thinkers
impossible in the Soviet Union. Even the views of Botkin, Annen-
kov and Druzhinin on imaginative literature are presented typically
not only as an obstacle in the path of the advocates of utilitarian
aesthetics (which they were) but also as a will-o'-the wisp which
major writers such as Turgenev and Tolstoy, who were briefly lured
by them, eventually resolved much more decisively than was in fact
the case not to pursue.
The major work published in the West on Russian liberalism is
Leontovich's book, which first appeared in German in 1957; but
Leontovich is interested primarily not in the liberal members of the
independent intelligentsia but in reforming bureaucrats, to whose
role in history he attributes great importance. There is also a lucid
account of the development of Russian liberalism from the 1860s by
George Fischer, but the thinkers examined in the present study do
not belong to the period in which Fischer is interested and are not
mentioned by him. Nor has any other work in English, as far as I am
aware, dealt at all comprehensively with more than one of the five
thinkers on whom I concentrate, although the names of most or all
of them are bound to occur in any account of mid-nineteenth-
century Russian thought or indeed in any biography of the major
imaginative writers of that period. Granovsky has perhaps fared
better than the rest (the monograph on his historical scholarship by
Priscilla Roosevelt is particularly searching and coherent), though
Kavelin's contribution to Russian liberalism in the second half of
the 1850s has also been helpfully surveyed by Daniel Field. Even
Andrzej Walicki, in his excellent history of Russian thought,
recently translated into English, has only five pages in all on the
roles of Granovsky, Botkin and Kavelin in the intellectual life of the
1840s and 1850s and makes but a few passing references to Annen-
kov and Druzhinin. Thus it is a large lacuna in our knowledge of
Russian intellectual life in the mid nineteenth century that the
present study is intended to fill, and the lacuna is an important one
xvi Foreword

for several reasons. For, in the first place, these liberals do indeed
exemplify, as Soviet scholars contend, a certain mode of thinking
and a particular political tendency, albeit one which was destined to
be eclipsed by the vigorous development of a socialist movement in
Russia. In the second place, they have a value in themselves as, in
Isaiah Berlin's words, 'morally sensitive, honest, and intellectually
responsible men' who lived in an age of 'acute polarisation of
opinion' (and whose dilemma has since their own time grown 'acute
and world-wide').8 In the third place, they are leading representa-
tives of that broad current in Russian thought which it is customary
to describe as 'Westernism' but which, being more amorphous than
Slavophilism, has been much less clearly defined. In the fourth
place, they were on the closest terms with major imaginative writers
such as Turgenev, Grigorovich, Nekrasov, Goncharov and Lev
Tolstoy during the very period in which Russian literature was
coming into full bloom and have therefore more than a passing
importance for the historian of classical Russian literature. An
acquaintance with their thought, moreover, helps us to place in
clearer perspective the now better known individuals and groups -
Belinsky, Herzen, the Slavophiles, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyub-
ov - whose views often found their clearest expression in endorse-
ments or, more frequently, criticisms of positions that Granovsky,
Botkin, Annenkov, Druzhinin or Kavelin at one time or another
adopted.
A word should be added about the readership at which the
present study is aimed. It is, of course, hoped that the specialist in
Russian thought willfindsomething of interest here, but the work is
not intended for the specialist alone; it is designed also to throw
light on areas which to Western undergraduates studying Russian
history, literature and politics and to the general reader with an
interest in Russian culture remain comparatively obscure. I have
not therefore taken it for granted that the reader will be familiar
with certain works such as Herzen's Letters from the Avenue
Marigny and Chernyshevsky's 'Anthropological Principle in Phil-
osophy' which will be known to most specialists in the field, and
consequently I beg the specialist's indulgence in those instances
where some account of such works has seemed necessary in order to
render entirely comprehensible the thought of the individuals on
whom I have concentrated.
Finally, it is a pleasure to acknowledge my debt to those people
 Foreword xvii
whose help and encouragement have enabled me at last to complete
my study. Warmest thanks are due to Henry Gifford, for his interest
in my project since its conception some five years ago, for his
willingness to read my work despite other more pressing obli-
gations, for his helpful suggestions and for sharing with me his great
erudition. This is also the place fondly to record my gratitude to two
of my teachers, the late Nikolay Andreyev and the late Leonard
Schapiro; it was their interest in Russian thought and history that
kindled my own and their scholarly example that in large measure
accounts for whatever merits my study may have (though responsi-
bility for its mistakes and failings is, of course, entirely my own). I
should like to thank too Professor Anthony Cross, for confirming
for me a detail in the biography of Kavelin, and Professor Hans
Reiss, for providing me with information on Goethe and Rotscher;
the staff of the libraries of the University of Bristol and of the School
of Slavonic and East European Studies in London and the staff of
the British Library, who have given me much help over the last four
years while I have been carrying out the research for my study; the
editorial board of Oxford Slavonic Papers for permission to repro-
duce, as Chapter 3 of the present work, an article printed in that
journal in 1983; and Iain White for his painstaking work on my
typescript. I am also most grateful to Mrs Anne Merriman for her
meticulous typing of my final, still disorderly manuscript and to Mrs
Barbara Case for her typing of the papers and articles on which
three chapters of this book were originally based.9 Lastly, but most
of all, I thank my wife, whose encouragement and moral support
while I have been completing my work have been invaluable and
whose perception of the issues I have examined is far sharper than
my own.
 Note on dates, transliteration and use of
Russian terms

Dates
Unless otherwise indicated, dates given in the text are in the Old
Style; that is, according to the Julian calendar which was used in
Russia until February 1918 and which in the nineteenth century was
12 days behind the Gregorian calendar used then, as now, in
Western Europe. (New Style dates are indicated by the abbre-
viation NS.)

Transliteration
The method used in the text, notes and bibliography is that of the
Slavonic and East European Review. The name Gertsen and the
place name Kiyev, however, are rendered in the commonly
accepted forms Herzen and Kiev respectively, and for the sake of
simplicity no indication is given of soft signs in Russian names
(hence Gogol instead of Gogol') when they are used in the text. In
the notes and bibliography soft signs are everywhere transliterated.

Use of Russian terms

Titles of Russian journals are left in their transliterated Russian
form, but a translation of the title is given when the journal is
mentioned for the first time in the text. All other titles are translated
in the text. Whenever a Russian term occurs in the text it is
explained if its meaning is not already clear.

xix
 Russian intellectual life in the 1840s
and 1850s

Nicolaevan Russia; the growth of Russian literature;

Chaadayev's 'Philosophical Letter'
' "Despotism still exists in Russia: it is the essence of my govern-
ment, but it accords with the genius of the nation'", Nicholas I told
the French Marquis de Custine, who travelled extensively in Russia
in 1839. Custine's own observations abundantly confirmed the
emperor's judgement. He found a regime under which everyone
and everything depended upon the favour of one man. Deprived of
liberty, the Russians had developed a 'taste for servitude'; 'great
and small' alike were 'drunk with slavery'. Everywhere the traveller
could find 'compulsory manifestations of submission'; he was
among a 'nation of mutes', sixty million automata awaiting the
'wand of another enchanter' before they could again enjoy life.
Existence would become 'insupportably dull to the individual who
should allow himself to reflect', for to converse was to conspire, to
think was to revolt and thought was not merely a crime but also a
misfortune. The Russians had pretensions to 'good manners' and
Western education, to be sure, for they were an 'imitative people'
with a 'general passion for novelties' and were 'incessantly occupied
with the desire of mimicking other nations', which they did 'after
the true manner of monkeys'. Nevertheless Russia remained 'more
nearly allied to Asia than to Europe', a 'monstrous compound of the
petty refinements of Byzantium, and the ferocity of the desert
horde'. She was a nation of 'enrolled and drilled Tartars', 'a
barbarism plastered over, and nothing more'.1
Custine's observations on the nature of the Russian regime must
have been unexceptionable to its critics. Nicholas was by all
accounts every inch a king, but he visualised the state, as one
historian has put it, as a 'well drilled army unit, that is, a polity
embodying the principles of hierarchical subordination, close deli-
mitation of the duties of each member, and the unchallengeable
2 Portraits of early Russian liberals

authority of the anointed leader'.2 His manifesto of July 1826

promised a gradual amelioration of national institutions by reform
from above, but in practice his autocratic power was never checked
and the bureaucracy by which the Empire was administered
remained cumbersome, inefficient, arbitrary and corrupt. Indeed,
the means of repression at the disposal of the emperor were signifi-
cantly strengthened in Nicholas' reign. The voluminous laws of
June 1826 gave wide powers to censors and although in 1828 a more
liberal law was devised it was applied in a draconian spirit and
stiffened by further provisions after the French 'revolution' of July
1830. A special gendarmerie - the notorious Third Section of the
emperor's own Chancery - was set up in June 1826, placed under
the control of Count Benkendorf and given responsibility for the
detection and punishment of all citizens whose activities or ideas
seemed harmful to the state. The gravity of the problem of serfdom
- to which Radishchev had so strikingly drawn attention in his
Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow as far back as 1790 - was
appreciated, it is true. There is no doubt that serfdom, in its present
form, is aflagrantevil', Nicholas admitted in 1842. But to attempt to
remedy the problem now, Nicholas continued, would be an 'evil
even more disastrous'.3 Measures taken to mitigate the position of
the serfs between 1833 and 1848 dealt only with peripheral aspects
of the problem or specific abuses. Nor did Nicolaevan Russia have
any coherent bourgeoisie which might have fought vigorously in its
own interests for the abolition of serfdom and for political freedom.
The 'tradespeople', as Custine observed, were 'too few in number
to possess any influence in the state' and were besides 'almost all
foreigners'4; a secular professional class, consisting of lawyers,
doctors, academics, had barely begun to appear because the edu-
cational system was undeveloped; and the upper bureaucracy was
drawn mainly from the ranks of the aristocracy and owed its
allegiance to the Crown. The Russian social order of the 1840s
therefore had a superficial appearance of immutability which was
sustained by the theory of 'Official Nationality' (veneration of the
'truly Russian conservative principles of Orthodoxy, autocracy and
nationality')5 expounded by Count Uvarov, Minister of Education
from 1833 to 1849. Benkendorf succinctly gave expression to the
official complacency when he wrote: 'Russia's past is admirable; her
present more than magnificent; as to her future, it is beyond the
grasp of the most daring imagination.'6
 Russian intellectual life in the 1840s and 1850s 3

And yet if Custine's impressions of the nature of the Russian

regime were more or less accurate, nevertheless he failed altogether
to perceive the beginnings of a cultural and intellectual life which
would shortly rival that of his native France. (He rashly asserted, for
example, that 'under such an order of things, real life is too serious
an affair to allow of a grave and thoughtful literature'; art would
'never be a hardy plant' in Russia.)7 In fact an intelligentsia was
coming into being which, with its spirit of independence, was
altogether at odds with officialdom. Two immense and, as we shall
see, interrelated tasks, above all others, preoccupied that intelli-
gentsia, in the 'marvellous decade' of its development, between
1838 and 1848, during which Custine had visited Russia: the
creation of an original and humane literature, and the solution of
the question as to Russia's historical relationship with Western
Europe.
The rich literature which had begun to blossom in Russia in the
1820s and 1830s with the appearance of the poetry and prose of
Pushkin and Lermontov and the stories of Gogol soon acquired an
importance with which imaginative literature was not endowed in
societies where independent educated opinion found freer expres-
sion. Literature did not explicitly put social problems, let alone
offer solutions to them, but it did obliquely raise them in fictional
form. It was demanded, as Mirsky has put it, that 'every time a
novelist gave his work to the world, it should contain things worth
meditating on and worth analysing from the point of view of the
social issues of the day', and the demand was one which the
novelists could never ignore.8 (As this topical dimension to Russian
literature developed, so writers quickly turned from poetry to
prose, from subjective lyricism to examinations of reality which
purported to be more or less objective, and, once prose had
established itself, from the short sketch to the novel in which the
fate of the individual could be examined against a larger and
sometimes panoramic social backcloth.) Not only did literature stir
thought and feelings, however, it even seemed to a beleaguered
intelligentsia to sustain civilised life itself: it would shake minds out
of what Polevoy called their 'banal vegetable inertness'.9 It had an
'organic' quality, a vitality quite out of keeping with the social
reality of Nicolaevan Russia, which by contrast was described by the
intelligentsia as dormant, stagnant or moribund. Imaginative litera-
ture was a solitary source of light in the 'kingdom of darkness'.10
4 Portraits of early Russian liberals

The literature which thus began to flourish in the reign of

Nicholas I was itself a product of the introduction into Russia of
Western European culture and values. Peter the Great had pre-
pared the ground for this westernisation of Russian culture by his
far-reaching reforms and innovations at the beginning of the
eighteenth century. But it was only after the Napoleonic wars, in
which Russia had played an important role, that it became neces-
sary for educated Russians to think deeply about the relationship of
their nation to Western Europe. They had to ask themselves, in
view of their country's new prominence in European affairs,
whether Russia was simply a backward nation aping Western forms
and dependent upon the West for any progress she might make; or,
to put the question another way, whether Russia had an individual
identity of her own which entitled her to play an international role
commensurate with her political prestige among the European
nations after 1815. Chaadayev, in the gloomy atmosphere that
prevailed in Russia after the failure of the Decembrist revolt in
1825, gave the most pessimistic answers to these questions in his first
Philosophical Letter, which was published in 1836. Writing from
'Necropolis', the 'city of the dead' - by which he meant Moscow -
Chaadayev compared Russia to the West in the most unfavourable
terms. The Catholic form of Christianity, together with the 'ideas of
duty, justice, law, and order' had endowed Western European
civilisation with a coherence and a continuity, an organic unity,
altogether lacking in Russia, whose history was merely a series of
unconnected jolts. The fate of the members of the educated mino-
rity in Russian society could be compared to that of the nation as a
whole (the analogy between an individual and his people was a
popular one at this period). They lived a groundless and aimless
existence. In their homes they were 'like campers', in their families
'like strangers' and in their cities 'more nomadic than the herdsmen'
who grazed their animals on the Russian steppes. They lived 'only
in the most narrow kind of present without a past and without a
future in the midst of a shallow calm'. In order to 'take up a position
similar to that of other civilised people' they would have in a certain
sense to 'repeat the whole education of mankind'.11 They were in
fact 'superfluous men', like Pushkin's Onegin and Lermontov's
Pechorin, paralysed by introspective self-analysis, incapable of
sound moral choices and living out their lives without useful
purpose.
 Russian intellectual life in the 1840s and 1850s 5

Slavophilism
Chaadayev's highly unflattering answer to the question as to
Russia's relationship with Western Europe was soon to be chal-
lenged by the so-called Slavophiles, whose doctrines arguably
constituted the steadiest intellectual landmark in Russia in the
1840s. That is not to say that the small number of thinkers -
Khomyakov, I. Kireyevsky, P. Kireyevsky, K. Aksakov, I. Aksa-
kov and Samarin - who were chiefly responsible for the formulation
of the body of thought that came to be known as Slavophilism
reached unanimous agreement on the main questions of interest to
them, still less that they formed any political grouping. Many of the
major essays in which their views were most clearly expressed,
moreover, were not written until the 1850s, so that there is some
justification for the view that even as late as 1844-5 Slavophilism
was 'more a premonition that a doctrine'.12 Nevertheless the views
of the Slavophiles on the civilisation of Western Europe, on the one
hand, and on Russian Orthodoxy and the Russian people and their
institutions, on the other, did already in the mid 1840s have a
greater coherence than those of their opponents.
It must be said that the Slavophiles were themselves steeped in
Western learning and much influenced by notions derived from
Western thinkers, such as the concept of Volkstum, or national
distinctiveness, which had been advanced by Herder and intro-
duced into Russia through the philosophy of Schelling.13 Neverthe-
less Slavophilism is imbued with a deep hostility to Western Euro-
pean civilisation, which the Slavophiles tended to view - despite
some acknowledgement of national variations - as a monolithic
edifice built on the foundation of rationalism. An early but very
characteristic statement of this view was contained in
I. Kireyevsky's essay, 'In Reply to A. S. Khomyakov', published in
1839. Kireyevsky posits three elements which he believes lie at the
root of Western civilisation: the Roman form of Christianity; the
heritage of the Barbarians who destroyed the Roman Empire; and
the classical heritage of pagan antiquity. This classical heritage,
which was lacking in Russia, seemed to Kireyevsky to represent in
essence the triumph of man's 'formal reason over everything else
within him and outside him'. The Roman Church, when it became
separated from the Eastern, Orthodox Church, had suffered a
similar fate: 'rationalism' had triumphed over 'inner spiritual
6 Portraits of early Russian liberals

reason' in its teachings, which had as a consequence been corrup-

ted. The Pope had become first the head of the Church in place of
Christ and then, finally, an infallible secular ruler. The 'totality of
faith' had come to rest on 'syllogistic scholasticism'. Even the
emergence of the institution of knighthood - which Kireyevsky
viewed most unfavourably; he described knights errant as brigands
serving the Church by slaughtering the innocents in return for a
promise of expiation - was attributable to the pernicious influence
of a Church prepared to sell its purity for temporal advantage. This
supposed ascendancy of formal reason over faith and tradition
seemed to Kireyevsky to explain the 'entire present fate of Europe',
its philosophy, its conception of 'industrialism as the mainspring of
social life', its 'ideal of soulless calculation', the grasping ethos of
the July monarchy in France, the veneration of 'external formal
relations' and private property and the individual's sense of isola-
tion (we should now say 'alienation'). All the best minds of Europe,
Kireyevsky claimed, were currently complaining of the 'condition
of moral apathy, of the lack of convictions, of the universal egoism'
which he attributed to the ruinous influence of a Church that had
lost the true spirit of Christ's teaching.14
The loss of firm spiritual foundations afflicted Russia too inas-
much as the Russian educated class had been a prey, since the
reforms of Peter the Great, the 'destroyer' of what was Russian,15
to the same maladies as the West. This theme was developed by
Khomyakov in his essay on 'The Opinions of Foreigners about
Russia', published in 1845 in Moskvityanin (The Muscovite), which
was the main organ for the expression of Slavophilism at this period.
For one hundred andfiftyyears, Khomyakov complained, Russians
had placidly accepted any new system of fashion, the fruits of the
labours of German philosophers and French tailors, without ever
questioning their truth or quality. Russians took it on trust, for
example, that political economy - a discipline much despised by
the Slavophiles, a 'science of wealth', as Kireyevsky once called it16
- could have validity without making any reference to man's moral
motivations; or, again, that jurisprudence was entitled to the status
of a science even though it took no account of conceptions of moral
law which alone could give human law some binding force. This
tendency to Europeanise Russian culture inevitably bore certain
'fruits', notably a proud disdain for all that was native. Thus a
profound rift developed between the spiritual and intellectual
 Russian intellectual life in the 1840s and 1850s 7

essences of the nation, between its autochthonous life and the alien
culture which had been grafted on to it.17
The key to the resolution of this duality was to be found, the
Slavophiles believed, in Christianity as it had been preserved in
Russia, that was to say Orthodoxy. Unlike the Catholic Church, the
Orthodox Church had not been compromised over the centuries -
or so the Slavophiles contended - by association with secular power,
nor had it given rise to a tradition of rationalistic philosophical
speculation, or to a materialistic legal system sanctifying private
property-ownership. It had therefore remained true, as its desig-
nation 'Orthodox' implied, to the pure Christian doctrines as they
had been established at the early ecumenical councils between the
fourth and seventh centuries. It also gave its members a sense of
true brotherhood, of conciliarism {sobornost') or community within
the Christian fold, a concept to which Khomyakov in particular
devoted much attention in his ecclesiological writings. These
Orthodox principles - belief in the primacy of faith over reason, of
spiritual over rational wisdom, emphasis on 'inner freedom' as
opposed to submission to external authority and on Christian
brotherhood rather than republican 'fraternite' - the Slavophiles
fondly believed would provide a firm basis for the future develop-
ment of Russian society. Indeed, they even hoped, as Kireyevsky
intimated in a celebrated 'Review of the Contemporary Condition
of Literature' (1845), that their Orthodox Christianity would serve
as a 'necessary supplement' to the culture of Western Europe and a
source of renewal for a dying civilisation, the distinctive contri-
bution to history of a tribe which had not hitherto had a universal
significance.18
The moral principles embodied in Orthodoxy were preserved,
the Slavophiles believed, among the Russian people, the mass of
the peasantry who had been relatively untouched by Westernisation
and were therefore unaffected by the formalism, rationalism and
individualism that were supposed to pervade Catholic cultures. The
Russian people kept alive a sense of real justice, 'not merely that
dead justice which the legalist-formalist will justify, but the living
justice to which human conscience conforms and to which it
submits'. Khomyakov describes the function of the arbitrator (po-
srednik) in order to illustrate the point. The arbitrator carries no
formal authority but by virtue of his impartiality and 'conciliatory
benevolence' enjoys a moral authority to which the Russian will
8 Portraits of early Russian liberals

readily submit. Russian peasant society, therefore, was still bound

together by 'bonds of true brotherhood, not conditional agree-
ment'. The different attitudes of the people towards their late
sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century rulers, Boris Godunov
and Mikhail Romanov, again demonstrated their observance of
'purely moral principles' which were quite alien to the Western
world. They had regarded Godunov as a man who had insinuated
himself into power, having pushed aside his rivals, and the legality
of his election as their ruler was merely external, apparent rather
than real. Mikhail, on the other hand, they regarded as a man whom
they had elected themselves and therefore gladly entrusted their
fate to him. Their ability to make this distinction again showed their
understanding of the difference between formal and true legality.19
Above all, the unspoiled, truly Christian character of the Russian
people was expressed in the obshchina, or peasant commune. By
their practice of periodically repartitioning the land available to
them in accordance with the changing needs of the families in the
village community, by their communal use of resources such as
woodland, pastures and fishing grounds and by their discussion of
their corporate affairs at an assembly at which all had a voice, the
Russian peasants seemed to the Slavophiles to reveal a spirit of
collectivism analogous to the brotherly ethos of the Orthodox
Church and antithetical to the individualism regnant in Western
society. The commune was therefore a 'moral choir', as K. Aksakov
once described it, an active social expression of the concept of
conciliarism.20 It is worth noting that this view derived some
support from the Prussian aristocrat, vonHaxthausen, who travel-
led in Russia in 1843 a n d whom some of the Slavophiles met
personally. Haxthausen described the commune as 'one of the most
remarkable and interesting political institutions in existence'.
Drawing attention to the peasants' practice of dividing the land
equally among the commune's members, he suggested that the
institution reflected the feeling of the Russian peasant that the land
was a common heritage to be shared among all the members of the
great 'national family'. He also anticipated that the commune
would protect Russia both from the 'pauperism and proletarianism'
of the modern West and from the 'doctrines of communism and
socialism' to which bourgeois society was inevitably giving rise.21
It is useful, finally, to bear in mind the quite precise and under-
standable causes that may be postulated for the emergence of
 Russian intellectual life in the 1840s and 1850s 9

Slavophilism. On one level it may be interpreted as a riposte to the

scathing criticisms to which Russian culture had been subjected
since the mid 1830s, notably by Chaadayev and Custine. (Khomya-
kov's 'article on foreigners' opinions of Russia begins with a com-
plaint about the mixture of 'fear and contempt' in foreigners'
accounts of their travels in Russia and bemoans their abuse of
Russian hospitality.)22 But on another level Slavophilism may
legitimately be seen as the expression of a desire to cling to an
economic and social order that was by the 1840s being threatened.
The leading Slavophiles were all from wealthy families with large
landed estates and their values were those of the pious nobleman
gravitating towards an idyllic rural community of which he was the
unchallenged paternalistic head. This order would not long survive
the further decay of the gentry, the economic and social ascendancy
of more plebeian elements and the further penetration into Russia
of poisonous Western doctrines, based on rationalism and egoism,
and of European capitalism, which the Slavophiles found repellent.

'Westernisers' and some Western influences on their thought

Understandable as Slavophilism may have been as an expression of
wounded national pride, it was by the mid 1840s already taken quite
literally by a large section of the intelligentsia as a provocative
defence of outmoded values and of a social and political order that
supposedly derived strength from them. As such, Slavophilism
came to serve as a sort of landmark by which thinkers who were not
Slavophiles and who aspired to a way of life more civilised than that
of Nicolaevan Russia could plot their own intellectual position and
from which they attempted to distance themselves. Thus it helped in
a negative, as well as a positive, way to shape the intellectual life of
the 1840s, by stimulating the discussion of values diametrically
opposed to it. That is not to say that the main opponents of the
Slavophiles - whom it is customary to designate 'Westernisers'23
and who included Belinsky, Bakunin, Herzen, Granovsky, Botkin,
Annenkov and Kavelin - loved Russia any less dearly than the
Slavophiles themselves. We have only to recall Herzen's famous
image of two-faced Janus or the two-headed eagle, which looked in
different directions, East and West, but in whose breast there beat
the same heart,24 to underline the fact that a sense of patriotic
commitment was not the exclusive property of the Slavophiles. But
io Portraits of early Russian liberals

it is arguable that the Slavophiles' juxtaposition of a moribund West

and a vital Russia, of rationalism and spiritual truth, of the rights of
the individual and the supremacy of the collective, of juridical and
moral law, and the adverse comparison of the former with the latter
term in each pair, greatly helped the 'Westernisers' to clarify their
own views of the Western values and institutions which were being
decried.
It has to be said, however, that once a common antipathy to
Slavophilism has been taken into acount the 'Westernisers' appear
even less united as a group than their opponents. It is therefore
perhaps best to consider them as the products of common Western
intellectual influences rather than as the exponents of specific ideas
to which all subscribed. And of all these influences thefirstand most
important was the philosophy of Hegel, which all the 'Westernisers'
imbibed in one form or another in the late 1830s (and which the
Slavophiles saw as the last stone in the edifice of Western rational-
ism, the stone in fact thatfinallybrought the whole edifice crashing
down). Granovsky, Bakunin and Botkin all belonged, and Herzen
was close, to the circle of the saintly Nikolay Stankevich, who
played such an important role in the introduction of German
philosophy, particularly that of Hegel, into Russia. Together they
plunged 'headlong into the "German sea'", to use Turgenev's
expression.25 They discussed Hegel 'incessantly', Herzen recalled:
there was not a paragraph in the three parts of the Logic, in the two of the
Aesthetic, the Encyclopaedia, and so on, which had not been the subject of
desperate disputes for several nights together. People who loved each other
avoided each other for weeks at a time because they disagreed about the
definition of 'all-embracing spirit', or had taken as a personal insult an
opinion on 'the absolute personality and its existence in itself. Every
insignificant pamphlet published in Berlin or other provincial or district
towns of German philosophy was ordered and read to tatters and smudges,
and the leaves fell out in a few days, if only there was a mention of Hegel in
it.26
Philosophy in general was an attractive subject for noble minds
denied other pabulum, but Hegelianism had particular merits for
the Russian intelligentsia. It was not only the latest but also among
the most intellectually demanding, stimulating and comprehensive
of systems. Moreover, Hegel's examination of the relationship
between the finite and the infinite, the individual and the Absolute
had an almost religious significance that was appealing to intel-
 Russian intellectual life in the 1840s and 1850s 11

lectuals who had lost faith in Christianity in its official, Orthodox

form. Hegelianism encouraged them to seek the infinite in them-
selves and others and to look on love as a means of communing with
the Absolute of which each individual was a partial expression.
Furthermore, this belief that the individual, indeed every manifes-
tation of everyday reality, was an aspect or moment in the universal
and eternal process of the self-realisation of the Absolute gave
enlightened individuals, however anonymous they might seem in
tsarist society, some larger significance than they had hitherto
discerned. Again, Hegel's view of philosophy as a means of over-
coming or resolving antagonisms - division is the 'source of the need
of philosophy', he once wrote27 - offered comfort to 'superfluous
men' suffering from a sense of spiritual fragmentation and disharm-
ony. His dialectical method, which could be applied - and indeed
was applied by his contemporaries and successors - to numerous
areas of knowledge, was attractive too. For the notion that history,
human societies and cultures moved inexorably through various
stages of development, thesis and antithesis, towards a higher
synthesis of the preceding forms was reassuring to intellectuals in a
society which seemed static and far from perfectible. Not that the
dialectical method could be fully understood by the logical under-
standing, what Hegel called Verstand, which is brought into play by
the exact sciences; the method also required Vernunft, a form of
reason capable of perceiving not rigid and static concepts but the
concept of identity-in-difference, the passing of one thing into its
opposite. And this perception, which Hegel required of his disciple,
itself gave his system an esoteric and revelationary quality that was
not displeasing. We might add that the general obscurity in which
Hegel's system is shrouded may well have enhanced its appeal too;
at any rate many of the Russian thinkers who fell strongly under
Hegel's influence in their youth never properly extricated them-
selves from the linguistic thickets into which Hegel and his German
disciples had led them.
In particularfieldsof knowledge as well as in the realm of general
principles Hegel laid important foundations for Russian thinkers.
His view of the state as an expression of the Spirit at a given stage of
its development seemed to furnish grounds for an attitude of
resignation on the part of the individual towards political orders like
the Russian that were apparently immovable. If the unfolding of
history was ineluctable, it was also legitimate. (The political quie-
12 Portraits of early Russian liberals

scence encouraged by this view for a while seemed to some Russian

thinkers to derive support from Hegel's axiom that the 'real is
rational', which was taken to mean that existing regimes, by virtue
of the very fact that they existed, were legitimate.) At the same time
Hegel stressed the importance of 'world-historical individuals' {die
weltgeschichtlichen Individuen), figures such as Alexander the
Great, who might be seen as the instruments of the will of the
developing Spirit and who were to exercise a fascination for several
Russian thinkers even after the initial reverence of those thinkers
for Hegel had diminished. Hegel also elaborated a view of art - as a
vehicle for the perception of the Absolute, in the form of a beauty
higher than that to be found in everyday reality - which remained
influential in Russian aesthetics at least until the 1860s.28
Enthralling as Hegelianism was for the Westernisers and durable
as some aspects of the system were to prove among them, however,
it could not for long dominate the thinking of an intelligentsia
instinctively critical of the tsarist regime and contemporary Russian
society. The leading Westernisers therefore soon began to search
for a philosophy less conservative than Hegelianism in its political
implications (though even their rejection of Hegel often presented
itself to them in Hegelian terms, as a sort of negation of his
philosophy). Thus Bakunin repudiated his own reconciliation with
reality by laying particular emphasis on the principle of antithesis in
Hegel's triad and in his famous essay, 'The Reaction in Germany',
published in Leipzig in 1842, celebrated negation for its own sake:
the 'passion for destruction', Bakunin declared, 'is a creative
passion'.29 The Westernisers were assisted in their attempts to cast
off the influence of Hegel by the so-called 'left-wing' or 'young'
Hegelians, who in the late 1830s and early 1840s were seeking to
return to philosophy the political dimension it had possessed in
eighteenth-century France, and in particular by Feuerbach, whose
major work, The Essence ofChristianity, wasfirstpublished in 1841.
Following David Strauss, who in his work, The Life of Jesus
(1835-6), had interpreted Christ's life and teachings in a historical
perspective, Feuerbach set out to demonstrate that man's God was
not a perfect being with an objective existence of His own but rather
a subjective creation of man's consciousness, a 'mirrored image of
man' arising out of man's need to give some substance to his
idealistic strivings. 'Man's being conscious of God', Feuerbach
asserted, was 'man's being conscious of himself. God was the
 Russian intellectual life in the 1840s and 1850s 13

'manifested inward nature, the expressed self of man', religion the

'solemn unveiling of man's hidden treasures, the revelation of his
most intimate thoughts', the 'open confession' of what he secretly
loved. Religion had traditionally presented God and man as anti-
theses: God was the infinite, man thefinitebeing; God was perfect,
eternal, holy and omnipotent, man imperfect, temporal, sinful and
impotent. Thus religion had alienated man from himself by oppos-
ing him to his own objectified latent nature. Feuerbach, on the
other hand, by presenting God as inalienable from man's own
consciousness, sought to restore unity to man's being and thereby to
give man a new status. That which ranked first in religion, namely
God, should in fact rank second, since it was 'merely the projected
essence of Man'. And if it were the 'nature of Man' that was 'man's
Highest Being', then 'man's love for Man' was bound in practice to
become man's first and highest law. 'Homo homini Deus est\
Feuerbach concluded, Man's God was Man himself.30
Feuerbach had provided the basis for a new humanist view of a
self-confident man responsible to no higher authority. At the same
time he had destroyed - if his arguments were accepted - one of the
bases of political quiescence. These implications of Feuerbach's
work - which were to be re-emphasised by Chernyshevsky in the
1850s - were immediately perceived in the 1840s by the Russian
Westernisers. Annenkov tells us that The Essence of Christianity
was 'in everybody's hands' and suggests that nowhere did it make
'such a tremendous impression' as in the Westernisers' circle and
'nowhere did it so rapidly obliterate the vestiges of all preceding
outlooks'. Herzen in particular was a 'fervent exponent of its
propositions and conclusions' and with his usual acuity connected
the 'revolution it revealed in the realm of metaphysical ideas with
the political revolution heralded by the socialists'31. In his own
essays of the early 1840s-particularly 'Buddhism in Science', which
completed the cycle 'Dilettantism in Science', and the 'Letters on
the Study of Nature'32 - Herzen eloquently argued the case of man
against great impersonal forces and rigid intellectual and, by infer-
ence, political systems. Thus the Westernisers' rejection of Hege-
lianism, facilitated by acquaintance with Feuerbach, was tanta-
mount, as Walicki has observed, to a 'struggle for the rights of the
individual and for the vindication of active participation in
history'.33 It signalled a shift from introspective contemplation to
practical examination of reality.
14 Portraits of early Russian liberals

As the new rebellious and pragmatic mood gained ground in

Russia in the early 1840s, so the hold of German thought on Russian
intellectual life, notwithstanding the popularity of Feuerbach's
work, was weakened. Attention turned again to France, a country
which suffered more than any other land, in the opinion of the
conservative aristocrat, Custine, from the contemporary disease of
a 'hatred of authority'34 and in which republican sentiments were
again brewing in the early 1840s. Educated Russians now voracious-
ly read the romans-feuilletons of Eugene Sue, who had described
the wretched life of the lower classes in the modern city, and the
novels of George Sand, who herself had been much influenced by
the socialist teachings of Pierre Leroux. The work of contemporary
French historians on the revolution of 1789 was also in harmony
with the current mood in Russia. Thus even the moderate Turgenev
lavishly praised the tenth volume of Michelet's The French Revo-
lution, a 'masterpiece' which came 'from the heart' and had 'blood
and warmth'.35 The Russian intelligentsia became acquainted too at
this period with the socialist doctrines which were being dissemi-
nated in France. They studied the ideas of Leroux, a disciple of
Saint-Simon who had preached the need to organise society not for
the benefit of the nobility but in the interests of 'la classe la plus
nombreuse et la plus pauvre\36 In the teachings of Fourier they
found plans for 'phalansteries', ideal communities in which man's
natural passions would be regulated and subordinated to the prin-
ciple of social harmony. (Fourier had devoted followers in Russia,
notably the eccentric nobleman, Petrashevsky.) They could study
further Utopian schemes in Cabet's Voyage to Icaria (1840) in which
the author envisaged an egalitarian society collectively operating
the means of production and a broad system of social services. And
in Louis Blanc's Organisation of Labour (1839) they could examine
the case for a democratic form of socialism under which all would
have the right to work and a guaranteed minimum wage and the
governing principle of which was expressed in the slogan 'From
each according to his capacities: to each according to his needs'.37
That these socialist teachings enjoyed great popularity among the
Westernisers there can be no doubt. Annenkov, returning to St
Petersburg from France in the autumn of 1843, found that the works
of Proudhon, Cabet, Fourier and Leroux were now being pas-
sionately debated in Russia and that all sorts of expectations were
being based on them.38 It cannot be too strongly emphasised,
 Another Random Document on
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 XXVIII
A NOIVA ARRAIANA

Veio de Almeida ésta xácara; e de nenhuma outra parte do reino

me chegou outra licção d’ella, nem vestigio. Bem antiga me parece.
O fronteiro que mandou ao mar a armada do cavalleiro ausente, faz
pensar que isto seja coisa do tempo das nossas emprezas de Africa.
O logar da scena é inquestionavelmente na raia—e bem pôsto está
ao romance o titulo de ‘Noiva arraiana’. Mas aqui ha mar, e armadas
que vão ao mar: não póde pois ser outra a raia senão a do Algarve.
O stylo da cantiga é ingenuo e purissimo; os costumes que descreve
primitivos e patriarchaes; ha um sabor homerico n’este narrar e
n’este fallar, que ninguem póde confundir com o dizer estudado de
trovadores mais modernos. Poetas de civilisação mais adeantada não
sabem ou não podem chegar tanto a rés da natureza.
O facto é simples e mil vezes visto. Outra edição da Lucia de
Lamermoor, outro cavalleiro de Ravenswood que apparece de
repente no meio da voda de sua debil e mal constante namorada,
quando ella, ja desposada com outro, menos esperava tornar a ver o
primeiro amante—o seu, o que ella unicamente quer. Quem não
lembra de Walter-Scott, e de Donizetti tambem, e do que vibram na
alma as palavras de um, as notas do outro, inspiradas por ésta
situação altamente dramatica; sublime de angústia e desesperação?
O nosso trovador arraiano tomou as coisas com mais tento e
socêgo; não indoudeceu nem mattou a sua Lucia; e nem d’ella nem
do seu Ravenswood nos diz que mattassem a mais ninguem. O
cavalleiro portuguez faz justiça por outro modo nos que o tinham
atraiçoado. Levou-lhes a noiva, e deixou-lhes ficar a voda e o jantar.

A NOIVA ARRAIANA
—‘Deus vos salve, minha tia,
Na vossa roca a fiar!’
—‘Venha embora o cavalleiro
Tam cortez no seu fallar!’
—‘Má hora se elle foi, tia,
—‘Má hora torna a voltar!
Que ja ninguem o conhece
De mudado que hade estar.
Por lá o mattassem moiros,
Se assim tinha de tornar!’
—‘Ai sobrinho de minha alma,
Que es tu pelo teu fallar!
Não ves estes olhos, filho,
Que cegaram de chorar?’
—‘E meu pae e minha mãe,
Tia, que os quero abraçar?’
—‘Teu pae é morto, sobrinho,
Tua mãe foi a interrar.’
—‘Qu’é da minha armada, tia,
Que eu aqui mandei estar?’
—‘A tua armada, sobrinho,
Mandou-a o fronteiro ao mar.’
—‘Qu’é do meu cavallo, tia,
Que eu aqui deixei ficar?’
—‘O teu cavallo, sobrinho,
Elrei o mandou tomar.’
—‘Qu’é de minha dama, tia,
Que aqui ficou a chorar?’
—‘Tua dama faz hoje a voda,
Ámanhan se vai casar.’
—‘Dizei-me onde é, minha tia,
Que me quero lá chegar.’
—‘Sobrinho, não digo, não,
Que te podem lá mattar.’
—‘Não me mattam, minha tia;
Cortezia eu sei usar:
E onde faltar cortezia,
Ésta espada hade chegar.’

—‘Salve Deus, ó lá da voda,

Em bem seja o seu folgar!’
—‘Venha embora o cavalleiro,
E que se chegue ao jantar!’
—‘Eu não pretendo da voda
Nem tam pouco do jantar;
Pretendo fallar á noiva,
Que é minha prima carnal.’

Vindo ella lá de dentro

Toda lavada em chorar,
Mal que viu o cavalleiro,
Quiz morrer, quiz desmaiar.
—‘Se tu choras por me veres,
Ja me quero retirar;
Se é os teus gastos que choras,
Aqui estou para os pagar.’
—‘Pagar devia co’a vida
Quem me queria inganar,
Quando te deram por morto
N’essas terras d’além-mar.
Mas que fiquem com a voda
E bem lhes preste o jantar,
Que os meus primeiros amores
Ninguem m’os hade quitar.’

—‘Venha juiz de Castella,

Alcaide de Portugal;
Que, se aqui não ha justiça,
Co’ésta espada a heide tomar.’
 XXIX
GUIMAR

Dona Guimar—ou Dona Agueda—de Mexia, como lhe chama a

licção do Alemtejo, é um interessante romancinho que apparece na
tradição d’aquella provincia e na de Extremadura. Por ambas se
apurou o texto que aqui dou.
Nem por outras provincias nossas, nem pelas collecções
castelhanas ha outro vestigio d’elle, que eu saiba.
Não é muito antigo o stylo. Mas o facto celebrado é o de uma
morte apparente com a qual parece se julgou dissolvido o
matrimonio: e d’isto houve exemplos em tempos remotos em que
tinham por certa a morte, e por verdadeira resurreição o tornar a si
o supposto defuncto.
Seja porêm qual for a data d’esta composição, ha coplas d’ella que
vão de par com o mais bello e original da poesia mais primitiva.
Notarei especialmente a volta de Dom João á sua terra n’aquella
manhan de maio, que os passarinhos cantavam, os sinos tangiam e
o rir da natureza se misturava com o chorar dos homens. Tambem
não creio que haja nada mais bello que estoutros versos quanto a
morta vai tornando a si e pondo olhos no amante:

Volta a vida que se fôra

Com todo o amor que não se ia.

GUIMAR
Era a menina mais linda[92]
Que n’aquella terra havia;
Tam formosa e tam discreta
De outra egual se não sabia.
Muito lhe quer Dom João,
Muito demais lhe queria:
Seus amores, seus requebros
Não cessam de noite e dia.
Por fidalgo e gentil moço
Ninguem tanto a merecia;
Senão que o pae da donzella[93]
Outro conselho seguia:
Casá-la quer muito ricca
Com um mercador que ahi havia,
Sem fazer caso de amores,
Sem lhe importar fidalguia.
Dom João, quando isto soube[94],
Por pouco se não morria:
Foi-se d’alli muito longe
Sem dizer para onde ia.
Tres mezes por lá andou,
Tres mezes n’essa agonia;
A vida que lhe pesava
Soffrê-la ja não podia.
Mandou sellar seu cavallo
Sem cuidar no que fazia;
Deitou por esses caminhos
Sem saber adonde ia.
O cavallo é quem mandava,
Cavalleiro obedecia.
Passou por terras e terras,
Nenhuma não conhecia.
Á sua tinha chegado,
Onde estava não sabia.
Era por manhan de maio
Era por manhan de maio,
Todo o campo florecia,
Os passarinhos cantavam,
O prado verde surria;
Lá de dentro da cidade
Um triste clamor se ouvia
Eram sinos a dobrar,
E era toda a clerezia,
Eram nobres, era povo
Que da egreja sahia...
Entrou de portas a dentro,
De rua em rua seguia,
Chegou á de sua dama[95],
Essa sim que a conhecia.
As casas onde morava,
Janellas aonde a via,
Tudo é cuberto de preto,
Mais preto que ser podia[96].
Mandou chamar uma dona[97]
Que ella comsigo trazia:
—‘Dizei-me por Deus, senhora,
Dizei-me por cortezia,
Esse lutto tam pesado
Por quem trazeis, que seria?’
—‘Trago-o por minha senhora,
Dona Guimar de Mexia[98],
Que é com Deus a sua alma,
Seu corpo na terra fria.
E por vós foi, Dom João,
Por vosso amor que morria[99].’
Dom João quando isto ouviu[100]
Por morto em terra cahia,
Mas a dor era tammanha[101]
Que á fôrça d’ella vivia.
Os seus olhos não choravam,
bô ã b
Sua bôcca não se abria.
Mirava a gente em redor
Para ver o que faria.
Vestiu-se todo de preto,
Mais preto que ser podia[102],
Foi-se direito á egreja
Onde sua dama jazia[103]:
—‘Eu te rogo, sacristão,
Por Deus e Sancta Maria,
Eu te rogo que me ajudes[104]
A erguer ésta campa fria.’
Alli a viu tam formosa
Tal como d’antes, a via;
Alli, morta, sepultada,
Inda outra egual não havia,
Pôs os joelhos em terra,
Os braços ao ceo erguia,
Jurou a Deus e á sua alma
Que mais a não deixaria.
Puchou de seu punhal de oiro[105],
Que na cintura trazia,
Para a accompanhar na morte
Ja que em vida não podia.
Mas não quiz a Virgem sancta[106],
A Virgem Sancta Maria,
Que assim se perdesse uma alma
Que só de amor se perdia.
Por juizo alto de Deus
Um milagre se fazia:
A defuncta a mão direita
Ao seu amante extendia,
Seus lindos olhos se abriram,
A sua bôcca sorria;
Volta a vida que se fôra,
Com todo o amor que não se ia.
S f b
Seu pae, o foram buscar,
Que ja estava na agonia;
Véem amigos, véem parentes,
Todos em grande alegria.
Dão graças á Sancta Virgem,
Cujo milagre seria;
E a Dom João dão a espôsa,
Que tam bem a merecia.
 XXX
DOM DUARDOS

O último conhecido dos nossos poetas populares antigos, o

verdadeiro fundador do theatro d’Hespanha, Gil-Vicente, não era só
poeta comico, segundo vulgarmente se crê ás cegas, porque poucos
abrem os olhos para o ler com attenção, para estudar n’elle, como
todos deviam, lingua, costumes, stylo, côr e tom nacional da
epocha: nenhum outro escriptor portuguez os teve tam verdadeiros,
tam characterizados e sinceros.
O romance heroico ou epico, isto é, o que celebrava grandes feitos
e successos nacionaes, ou interessantes aventuras de guerras e de
amores—que d’elle tomaram depois o appellido de romanescas, ou
porque não romancescas? hoje mais inglezadamente romanticas—
este que tambem rhymou muitas vezes devotas legendas de sanctos
e de milagres, os passos da historia sagrada de ambos os
Testamentos, e até os proprios mysterios do dogma; o romance
epico em toda a sua primitiva simpleza foi tambem cultivado por Gil-
Vicente.
Com elle e com Bernardim-Ribeiro creio que morreu,
litterariamente fallando, nos fins do seculo xv, principios do xvi, para
resuscitar depois, á primeira trombeta do seiscentismo, como todos
os generos populares que por essa reacção resurgiram; mas
rebicado e contrafeito, secante de metaphoras, pesado de conceitos,
escripto emfim com a penna d’aza da ‘Phenix-renascida.’
Quanto elle fôra estimado e cultivado entre nós em tempos de Gil-
Vicente, vê-se de muitos logares de seus dramas. E ahi se vê
tambem que promiscuamente compunham os nossos trovadores ja
no dialecto de Castella, ja no de Portugal, e ainda o mesmo romance
ou soláo ora se cantava em uma, ora n’outra linguagem.
 Para exemplo e próva, leia-se com attenção o dialogo do feiticeiro
com a ama de Cismena na scena ii de Rubena[107]. Ahi véem citados
como portuguezes e em portuguez, apar de outras cantigas
castelhanas, muitos romances que alguns passam hoje por legitimos
filhos de Castella e em suas collecções se incontram; de outros nem
por ellas ha memorias. Tal é o que começa:

‘Eu me sam Dona Giralda’;

de que não achei outro vestigio nem nos romanceiros castelhanos,

nem na nossa tradição oral. Tal é est’outro:

‘Em Paris está Donalda’;

que vem nos citados romanceiros, pôsto que differentemente

escripto.
Tambem no auto dos Quatro tempos cantam estes ‘até chegar ao
presepio,’ manda a rubrica[108], uma cantiga franceza que diz:

‘Ai de la noble
Villa de Paris!

É claro que este é um romance; e romance conhecido, e que não

era castelhano nem portuguez, mas francez. E d’aqui se deprehende
tambem uma coisa que muitas vezes tenho julgado intrever, e de
que tenho quasi uma consciencia íntima, sem ousar dá-la por certa,
porque não ha ainda todas as próvas documentaes que se precisam
para uma asserção que hade parecer atrevida: e é—que os
romances primitivos quasi que eram communs ás linguas romanas, e
que nenhuma os vindicava exclusivamente; porque o trovador
catalão ou provençal, portuguez, normando ou castelhano pertencia
mais á republica litteraria e artistica de sua profissão, do que a
nenhum reino ou nação, ou divisão politica do paiz. Cantava-se o
romance para lá do Ebro? davam-se ás palavras desinencias mais
curtas e contrahidas; dizia-se para cá d’elle? produziam-se mais
arredondadas. Entre Portugal e Castella menos era preciso ainda,
porque as linguas, ja tam similhantes, ainda o eram mais então, e
no especial dialecto do romance dobradamente.
Apponto isto aqui somente como ementa, para mais devagar se
reflectir e estudar no que indico. Ha grande verdade na indicação;
mas até onde ella chega, não sei dizer porora, nem saberei talvez
nunca, porque me não sobra tempo nem paciencia para dar
professadamente a estas coisas. Vou escrevendo o que me occorre
como curioso. A sciencia fará o seu officio com o tempo. Eu não
pretendo a litterato nem a crítico, e n’estas coisas menos que em
nenhuma. Occupo as minhas horas vagas com estes divertimentos
innocentes; não faço mais nada.
Tornando ao nosso Gil-Vicente, na segunda scena—acto, jornada,
ou parte ii—da Rubena, canta a Cismena em portuguez outro
princípio de romance mui notavel pelo metro pouco usado na nossa
lingua:

‘Grandes bandos andam na côrte,

Traga-me Deus meu bonamore.’

Muitas outras próvas achará alli o leitor curioso de que este

genero era o mais popular então entre nós. Como tal o cultivou Gil-
Vicente; e assim o mostra o romance dos Padres no Limbo no auto
da ‘Historia de Deus’, o da Barca dos Anjos no auto do ‘Purgatorio’, o
da Infanta no auto das ‘Côrtes de Jupiter’, e muitos outros dispersos
por suas obras dramaticas, alêm dos dois bem conhecidos que
expressamente compôs, um á morte d’elrei Dom Manuel, outro á
acclamação de Dom João III.
 Este primeiro que aqui ponho é o de Dom Duardos que vem ao
fim da tragicomedia (aliás drama cavalheiresco) do mesmo titulo. Em
castelhano foi escripta a tragicomedia, e em castelhano alli vem o
romance; na collecção, que por vezes tenho citado, do cavalheiro de
Oliveira, apparece em portuguez com declaração de se incontrar
assim n’um antigo manuscripto do seculo xvi que visivelmente era
contemporaneo do poeta. Eu dou-o em ambas as linguas. E pôsto
que os nossos vizinhos o codificassem em seus romanceiros como
proprio, fica assim evidente o ser elle de fábrica portugueza e do
nosso Gil-Vicente, quer primitivamente o composesse elle na nossa
lingua, quer na d’elles.
Eisaqui o que, no fim da tragicomedia, diz Artada, antes de cantar
o romance:

‘Por memoria de tal trance

Y tam terrible partida
Venturosa,
Cantemos nuevo romance
A la nueva despedida
Peligrosa.’

Acabado de cantar e findo o auto, diz o patrão, virando-se para elrei

—não o rei da comedia, mas o rei portuguez Dom João III em cuja
côrte e presença ella se representava:

‘Lo mismo iremos cantando

Por esa mar adelante,
Á las sirenas rogando
Y Vuestra Alteza mandando:
Que en la mar siempre se cante.’
Era pois novo o romance, por seu o dava Gil-Vicente, que não
precisava nem usava de brilhar com o alheio, e a elrei seu amo e seu
protector, como tal o endereçava. Não posso deixar de o crer e
acceitar como seu.
A licção portugueza de Oliveira differe algum tanto da castelhana
de Gil-Vicente; e ésta não pouco da que vem no romanceiro geral de
Duran e no tesoro de Ochoa.
Juntam-se aqui todas tres, para que as confrontem os curiosos, e
se illustre assim a questão que, tórno a dizer, suscito, não resolvo.

DOM DUARDOS[109]
Era pelo mez de Abril,
De Maio antes um dia,
Quando lyrios e rosas
Mostram mais sua alegria;
Era a noite mais serena
Que fazer no ceo podia,
Quando a formosa infanta,
Flérida ja se partia;
E na horta de seu padre
Entre as árvores dizia:
—‘Com Deus vos ficade, flores,
Que ereis a minha alegria!
Vou-me a terras extrangeiras
Pois lá ventura me guia;
E se meu pae me buscare,
Pae que tanto me queria
Digam-lhe, que amor me leva,
Que eu por vontade não ia;
Mas tanto atimou commigo
Que me venceu co’a porfia.
Triste, não sei onde vou,
E ninguem não m’o dizía!...’
Alli falla Dom Duardos:
—‘Não choreis, minha alegria,
Que nos reinos de Inglaterra
Mais claras aguas havia,
E mais formosos jardins,
E flores de mais valia.
Tereis trezentas donzellas
De alta genealogia;
De prata são os palacios
Para vossa senhoria;
De esmeraldas e jacynthos
E oiro fino de Turquia,
Com lettreiros esmaltados,
 Que a minha vida se lia,
Contando das vivas dores
Que me déstes n’esse dia
Quando com Primalião
Fortemente combatia:
Mattastes-me vós, senhora,
Que eu a elle o não temia...’
Suas lagrymas inchugava
Flérida que isto ouvia.
Ja se foram ás galeras
Que Dom Duardos havia.
Cinquenta eram por conta,
Todas vão em companhia.
Ao som do doce remar
A princeza adormecia
Nos braços de Dom Duardos,
Que tam bem a merecia.

Saibam quantos são nascidos

Sentença que não varia:
Contra a morte e contra amor
Que ninguem não tem valia.

I
VERSÃO CASTELHANA DE GIL-VICENTE[110]
En el mes era de Abril,
De Mayo antes un dia,
Cuando lirios y rosas
Muestran mas su alegria,
En la noche mas serena
Quel el cielo hacer podia,
Cuando la hermosa infanta
Flérida ya se partia:
En la huerta de su padre
A los árboles decia:
—‘Quedaos adios, mis flores,
Mi gloria que ser solia;
Voyme á tierras estrangeras
Pues ventura alla me guia.
Si mi padre me buscare
Que grande bien me queria
Digan que amor me lleba
Que no fué la culpa mia:
Tal tema tomó conmigo
Que me venció su porfia.
Triste nó se adó vó,
Ni nadie me lo decia.’
Alli habla Don Duardos:
—‘No lloreis mi alegria,
Que en los reinos de Inglaterra
Mas claras aguas habia,
Y mas hermosos jardines
Y vuesos, señora mia.
Terneis trecientas doncellas
De alta genealogia;
De plata son los palacios
Para vuesa señoria,
De esmeraldas y jacintos,
De oro fino de Turquia
Con lettreros esmaltados
 Que cuentan la vida mia,
Cuentan los vivos dolores
Que me distes aquel dia
Cuando com Primaleon
Fuertemente combatia:
Señora vos me matastes,
Que yo a el no lo temia.
Sus lagrimas consolaba
Flérida qu’esto oia;
Fueron-se a las galeras
Que Don Duardos tenia.
Cincuenta eran por cuenta,
Todas van en compañia.
Al son de sus dulces remos
La princesa se adormia
En brazos de Don Duardos
Que bien le pertenecia.
Sepan cuantos son nacidos
Aquesta sentencia mia:
Que contra la muerte y amor
Nadie no tiene valia.

II
VERSÃO CASTELHANA DE DURAN[111]
En el mes era de Abril,
De Mayo antes un dia,
Cuando los lirios y rosas
Muestran mas sua alegria,
En la noche mas serena,
Qu’el cielo hacer podria,
Cuando la hermosa infanta
Flérida ya se partia;
En la huerta de su padre
A los árboles decia:
—‘Jamas en cuanto viviere
Os veré tan solo un dia,
Ni cantar los ruiseñores
En los ramos melodia.
Quédate á Dios, agua clara,
Quédate á Dios, agua fria,
Y quedad con Dios, mis flores,
Mi gloria que ser solia.
Voime á las tierras estrañas,
Pues ventura allá me guia.
Si mi padre me buscáre,
Que grande bien me queria,
Digan que el amor me lleva,
Que no fué la culpa mia.
Tal tema tomó conmigo,
Que me forzó su porfia.
Triste nó sé donde voy:
Ni nadie me lo decia.’
Alli habló Don Duardos:
—‘No lloreis mas, mi alegria,
Que en los reinos de Inglaterra
Mas claras aguas habia,
Y mas hermosos jardines,
Y vuestros, señora mia.
Terneis trescientas doncellas
í
De alta genealogía;
De plata son los palacios
Para vuestra señoria;
D’esmeraldas y jacintos
Toda la tapeçaría;
Las camaras ladrilladas
D’oro fino de Turquia,
Com letreros esmaltados
Que cuentan la vida mia,
Contando vivos dolores
Que me diéstedes un dia
Cuando com Premaleon
Fuertemente combatia.
Señora, vós me matastes,
Que yo a el no lo temia.’
Sus lagrimas consolaba
Flérida qu’esto oia,
Y fueron-se á las galeras,
Que Don Duardos habia:
Cincuenta eran por todas,
Todas van en compañia.
Al son de sus dulces remos
La infanta se adormecia
En brazos de Don Duardos,
Que bien le pertenecia.
Sepan cuantos son nacidos
Aquesta sentencia mia:
Que contra muerte y amor
Nadie no tiene valía.
 XXXI
A AMA

Bernardim-Ribeiro foi natural da villa do Torrão no Alemtejo, vivia

por fins do xiv, principios do xv seculo; era moço fidalgo d’elrei Dom
Manuel e servia no paço, onde a belleza e perfeições da infanta
Dona Beatriz lhe inspiraram uma paixão de verdadeiro ‘Macias
namorado.’ Ainda não estava tam longe o tempo em que princezas e
rainhas ouviam sem infado e acceitavam sem desaire as
homenagens dos trovadores. Bernardim era moço, talvez bem
parecido, discreto decerto: ha toda a razão de crer que foi ouvido
com sympathia e indulgencia. Toda a sua felicidade ficou por aqui,
segundo elle diz:

‘Que para mais esperar

Nunca me deram logar.’

E ésta deve de ser a verdade; ou elle, de fino amante, no’la

occultou: em qualquer dos casos devemos crê-lo sôbre sua palavra.
A infanta casou por procuração com o duque Carlos de Saboia, em
Lisboa nos paços da Ribeira, a 7 de Abril de 1520[112]; e em Agosto
seguinte partiu para Italia. As ‘Saudades’[113] do seu amante ficaram
eternizadas no mysterioso livro que com esse titulo compôs. D’elle
se extrahiu este romance, propriamente soláo. Tudo aqui é contado
e ditto por um modo de enigmas e allegorias inteiramente
inexplicaveis para quem ignorasse os mysteriosos amores do
trovador e da princeza. Tam sincero—e amiude grosseiro a podêr de
sincero—é o modo de dizer dos antigos menestreis, quanto este é
delicado por demais, e á força de o ser, obscuro.
 O argumento simplissimo diz-se em poucas palavras. Beatriz está
retirada em sua camera. Sua paixão por Bernardim é segredo para a
boa ama que a criou e que tanto lhe quer. Canta-lhe ésta um ‘cantar’
a modo de ‘soláo’ em que tristemente conta e lamenta a má ventura
que desde a nascença tem perseguido a sua querida menina, e que
maiores desgraças lhe faz temer no futuro.
O stylo tem toda a ingenuidade dos antigos cantares, todo aquelle
perfume de bonina selvagem que só se incontra pelas devezas
incultas da poesia primitiva. E todavia, se ainda são as flores
singelas do monte, ja se conhece arte no formar do ramalhete. Ja
não são as notas desgarradas, e asperas por vezes, do primeiro
trovar asturiano ou leonez que tiniam á dureza de ferro dos
descendentes de Pelayo. Ja por aqui andam modos de trovador
proençal. A melodia porêm ainda é puramente romantica; as
harmonias é que presentem fórmas mais classicas. Vê-se o antigo
toante do romance peninsular cedendo á difficil e dura lei das
complicadas rhymas proençaes. Ha mais ainda; ha uma perfeição no
número dos rhytmos que adivinha ja as doçuras italianas. É o
trovador do seculo xv dando a mão ao poeta do seculo xvi. O que
predomina todavia é o modo provençal; e este é, repitto, um
legitimo soláo.

A AMA
Pençando-vos[114] estou, filha,
Vossa mãe me está lembrando;
Enchem-se-me os olhos d’agua,
N’ella vos estou lavando.

Nascestes, filha, entre mágoa;

Pera bem inda vos seja!
Pois em vosso nascimento
Fortuna vos houve inveja.

Morto era o contentamento

Nenhuma alegria ouvistes;
Vossa mãe era finada,
Nós outros eramos tristes.

Nada[115] em dor, em dor criada,

Não sei onde isto hade ir ter:
Vejo-vos, filha, fermosa,
Com olhos verdes crescer.

Não era ésta graça vossa

Pera nascer em destêrro:
Mal haja a desaventura
Que pôs mais n’isto que o êrro!

Tinha aqui sua sepultura

Vossa mãe, e a mágoa a nós!
Não éreis vós, filha, não,
Pera morrerem por vós.

Não ouvem fados razão,

Nem se consentem rogar;
De vosso pae hei mor dó,
Que de si se ha de queixar.

Eu vos ouvi a vós só

Primeiro que outrem ninguem;
Não foreis vós se eu não fôra:
Não sei se fiz mal se bem.

Mas não póde ser, senhora,

Pera mal nenhum nascerdes,
Com esse riso gracioso
Que tendes sob olhos verdes.

Confôrto, mas duvidoso,

Me é este que tómo assi!
Deus vos dê melhor ventura
Do que tivestes téaqui.

A Dita e a Fermosura,
Dizem patranhas antigas,
Que pelejaram um dia,
Sendo d’antes muito amigas.

Muitos hão[116] que é phantesia:

Eu, que vi tempos e annos,
Nenhuma coisa duvido
Como ella é azo de damnos[117].

Nem nenhum mal não é crido,

O bem so é esperado:
E na crença e na esperança,
Em ambas ha hi cuidado,
Em ambas ha hi mudança.
 XXXII
AVALOR

Este, que é verdadeiro romance na fórma assim como no stylo,

parece ter sido feito á partida da infanta para Saboia, ou talvez por
occasião da viagem que Bernardim-Ribeiro alli fez para a ver.
Fôsse como ou quando fôsse, elle é admiravel. Ha menos artificio
metrico, não menos belleza de poesia que nos outros, não menos
sentimento. O stylo é mais desleixado, mais vago, mais de romance.
Em todas as vastissimas collecções castelhanas não ha nada tam
bello de elegante simplicidade. Ja se vê que não faço a comparação
no genero heroico ou historico; digo-o dos romances de amor e
aventura.

AVALOR
Pela ribeira de um rio
Que leva as aguas ao mar,
Vai o triste de Avalor,
Não sabe se hade tornar.
As aguas levam seu bem,
Elle leva o seu pesar;
E so vai, sem companhia,
Que os seus fôra elle leixar;[118]
Ca quem não leva descanço
Descança em so caminhar.
Descontra d’onde ia a barca,
Se ia o sol a baixar;
Indo-se abaixando o sol,
Escurecia-se o ar;
Tudo se fazia triste
Quanto havia de ficar.
Da barca levantam remos,
E ao som do remar
Começaram os remeiros
Da barca este cantar:
—‘Que frias eram as aguas!
Quem as haverá de passar?’
Dos outros barcos respondem:
—‘Quem as haverá de passar?’
Frias são as aguas, frias,
Ninguem n’as póde passar;
Senão quem pôs a vontade
Donde a não póde tirar.[119]
Tra’la barca lhe vão olhos
Quanto o dia dá logar:
Não durou muito, que o bem
Não póde muito durar.
Vendo o sol pôsto contr’elle[120],
Não teve mais que pensar;
Soltou redeas ao cavallo
Soltou redeas ao cavallo
Á beira do rio a andar.
A noite era callada
Pera mais o magoar,
Que ao compasso dos remos
Era o seu suspirar.
Querer contar suas mágoas
Seria areias contar;
Quanto mais ia alongando,
Se ia alongando o soar.
Dos seus ouvidos aos olhos
A tristeza foi egualar;
Assi como ia a cavallo
Foi pela agua dentro entrar.
E dando um longo suspiro
Ouvia longe fallar:
Onde mágoas levam olhos,
Vão tambem corpo levar.
Mas indo assi por acêrto,
Foi c’um barco n’agua dar
Que estava amarrado á terra,
E seu dono era a folgar.
Saltou assi como ia, dentro,
E foi a amarra cortar:
A corrente e a maré
Acertaram-n’o a ajudar.
Não sabem mais que foi d’elle,
Nem novas se podem achar:
Suspeitaram que foi morto,
Mas não é pera affirmar:
Que o imbarcou ventura,
Pera so isso aguardar.
Mas mais são as mágoas do mar
Do que se podem curar.
 XXXIII
CUIDADO E DESEJO

Todo este soláo—e creio que propriamente este é tambem um

verdadeiro soláo—todo elle é alegorico dos mysteriosos amores do
‘poeta das saudades.’
Bernardim-Ribeiro vaga triste e solitario pelas margens de um rio
escuro e cuberto de arvoredo. Apparece-lhe o seu Cuidado na figura
de um velho incannecido que lhe mostra o seu fatal Desejo todo
cuberto de dó; chorando e pensativo declara-lhe que em má hora o
viu porque nunca mais o hade esquecer. Some-se a visão; e elle
caminha rio abaixo, até dar ‘antre uns medonhos penedos’ (se será
Cintra?) onde a Phantasia lhe apresenta sua triste Lembrança na
figura de uma bella mulher de ‘loiros cabellos e olhos verdes,’
cuberta de um negro manto. É Beatriz que elle ama, que o adora e
que não póde ser sua! Escura noite lhe esconde a visão
bemaventurada; e de um ‘alto oiteiro’ lhe bradam (porque não dos
Alpes, do Piemonte onde lh’a tinham levado?)—‘Bernardim-Ribeiro,
olha onde estás.’
Da demasiada altura onde subiram, seus atrevidos pensamentos
lhe fazem recordar quam baixo o tinha pôsto a sorte para se atrever
a tanto.—O namorado trovador cerra os olhos para nunca mais os
abrir. Que lhe resta a elle que ver o mundo?
Este romance seria feito ao ordenar-se o casamento da infanta
com o duque de Saboia? Não vem inserto nas saudades, como o
antecedente, da Ama, e o subsequente de Avalor: por isso aqui pôs
claro o seu nome de Bernardim-Ribeiro, que no mysterioso livro de
cavallarias, ora se disfarça em anagrammas de suas proprias lettras,
ora sob as de outros se desfigura, para confundir e inredar a todo o
que não tivesse a chave do querido segredo. O nome porêm da
infanta nem aqui, nem em parte nenhuma o expôs a ser deciphrado
pela mais remota inducção. N’este romance não ha nomes
femininos; os que se incontram em tudo quanto escreveu, assim
podem ser Maria, Antonia, como Joanna, etc. Em nenhum ha lettras
ou sons que se pareçam com os de Beatriz.
Nada digo do stylo, é o mesmo da peça precedente. As bellezas
são infinitas; nenhum poeta portuguez escreveu tanto com o sangue
de seu coração.

CUIDADO E DESEJO
Ao longo de uma ribeira
Que vai pelo pé da serra,
Aonde me a mi fez a guerra
Muito tempo o grande amor,
Me levou a minha dor:
Ja era tarde do dia,
E a agua d’ella corria
Por antre um alto arvoredo,
Onde ás vezes ia quedo
O rio, e ás vezes não.

Entrada era do verão,

Quando começam as aves
Com seus cantares suaves
Fazer tudo gracioso.
Ao ruido saudoso
Das aguas cantavam ellas:
Todalas minhas querellas
Se me puseram deante;
Alli morrer quizera ante
Que ver por onde passei.
Mas eu que digo—passei!
Antes inda heide passar,
Em quanto hi houver pezar,
Que sempre o hi hade haver.

As aguas, que de correr

Não cessavam um momento,
Me trouxera’ ao pensamento
Que assim eram minhas mágoas,
D’onde sempre correm aguas
Por estes olhos mesquinhos,
Que têem abertos caminhos
Pelo meio do meu rosto.
E ja não tenho outro gôsto
Na grande desdita minha
Na grande desdita minha.
O que eu cuidava que tinha
Foi-se-me assim não sei como,
D’onde eu certa crença tómo
Que, para me leixar, veio.

Mas, tendo-me assi alheio

De mi o que alli cuidava,
Da banda d’onde agua estava
Vi um homem todo cam[121],
Que lhe dava pelo cham
A barba e o cabello.
Ficando eu pasmado d’ello,
Olhando elle para mi,
Fallou-me e disse-me assi:
—Tambem vai ésta agua ao Tejo.’

N’isto olhei, vi meu Desejo

Estar de trás triste e só,
Todo cuberto de dó,
Chorando sem dizer nada,
A cara em sangue lavada,
Na bôcca posta ũa mão,
Como que a grande paixão,
Sua falla lhe tolhia.

E o velho que tudo via,

Vendo-me tambem chorar
Começou a assi fallar:
—‘Eu mesmo são[122] teu Cuidado
Que n’outra terra criado,
N’esta primeiro nasci.
E ess’outro que está aqui
É o teu Desejo triste;
Que má hora o tu viste
Pois nunca te esquecerá!
A terra e mar passará