William James in Russian Culture

WILLIAM JAMES IN RUSSIAN CULTURE

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W I L L I A M J A M E S IN RUSSIAN CULTURE

Edited by Joan Delaney Grossman and Ruth Rischin

- Boulder - New York - Oxford

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham

LEXINGTON BOOKS Published in the United States of America by Lexington Books A Member of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 PO Box 317 Oxford OX2 9RU, UK Copyright 0 2003 by Lexington Books AZl rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data William James in Russian culture / edited by Joan Delaney Grossman and Ruth Rischin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7391-0526-4 (alk. paper) - ISBN 0-7391-0527-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Russia-Intellectual life-1801-1917. 2. Russia (Federation)-Intellectual life1991- 3. James,William, 1842-1910-Influence. I. Grossman, Joan Delaney. 11. Rischin, Ruth, 1932DK189.2.W547 2003 1 9 1 d c 21 2002015280 Printed in the United States of America

WMThe paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence Materials,ANSIlNISO 239.48-1992.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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A Note on Transliteration, Translation, and Bibliographies

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Introduction Joan Delaney Grossman and Ruth Rischin William James: The European Connection Linda Simon Adventures in Time and Space: Dostoevsky, William James, and the Perilous Journey to Conversion Robin Feuer Miller What Men Live By: Belief and the Individual in Leo Tolstoy and William James Donna Tussing Orwin “The Moral Equivalent of War”: Violence in the Later Fiction of Leo Tolstoy Andrew Wachtel Philosophers, Decadents, and Mystics: James’s Russian Readers in the 1890s Joan Delaney Grossman James and Viacheslav Ivanov at the “Threshold of Consciousness” Gennady Obatnin

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15 33 59 81 93 113

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Contents

7 William James in the Moscow Psychological Society: Pragmatism, Pluralism, Personalism Randall A. Poole 8 Lev Shestov’s James: “A Knight of Free Creativity” Brian Horowitz 9 James and Konovalov: The Varieties of Religious Experience and Russian Theology between Revolutions Alexander Etkind 10 Gorky and God-Building Barry P Scherr 11 James and Vocabularies of Post-Soviet Russian Spirituality Edith W Clowes

131 159 169 189 21 1

Afterword: William James in Contexts, Plural David Joravsky

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William James Bibliography

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Index

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About the Contributors

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Acknowledgments

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owe many debts of gratitude, accumulated as the work progressed-so many that not all can now be mentioned individually. However, we wish here to express special appreciation to the following: Serena Leigh Krombach, editorial director of Lexington Books, for her ready assistance and guidance in bringing this enterprise to fruition; to Susan Harris, for her generous encouragement and aid in difficult times; to our friends and colleagues Hugh McLean and Robert P. Hughes, who not only graciously translated from Russian the essays by Alexander Etkind and Gennady Obatnin, but gave us steadfast support throughout this whole endeavor; to Linda Simon, the Americanist who brought her tlan and expert knowledge of William James and his world to this volume, as well as offering warm encouragement to Ruth Rischin, who conceptualized the project. Finally, we express profound gratitude to our contributors for their unflagging enthusiasm and cooperation in bringing the project to a satisfactory completion. We thank also the Committee on Research of the University of California, Berkeley, for generously supporting this work. HE EDITORS OF THIS VOLUME

Grateful acknowledgment for permission to cite is made as follows. Passages from The Correspondence of William James,vols. 5-6, are reprinted with permission of the University Press of Virginia. Citations from the diaries of William James appear by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Permission to quote from the poems of Viacheslav Ivanov, Collected Works 1971-1987 was granted by the publisher, Foyer Oriental Chretien. -v11-

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Permission to quote from Selected Letters of Maksim Gorky (eds. Barry P. Scherr and Andrew Barratt) was granted by the editors. Portions of “Adventures in Time and Space: Dostoevsky, William James, and the Perilous Journey to Conversion” by Robin Feuer Miller appeared in American Contributions to the Twelfth International Congress of Slavists (eds. Robert A. Maguire and Alan Timberlake). Copyright belongs to the author. “James and Konovalov: The Varieties of Religious Experience and Russian Theology Between Revolutions” by Alexander Etkind appeared, with modifications, in Russian in Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (No. 31) 1998. For citations from The Works of William James we thank Harvard University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Works of William James: Essays, Comments, and Reviews, Frederick Burkhardt, General Editor, and Fredson Bowers, Textual Editor, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright 0 1987 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College (400 WORDS). Reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Works of William James: Essays in Philosophy, Frederick Burkhardt, General Editor, and Fredson Bowers, Textual Editor, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright 0 1978 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College (100 WORDS). Reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Works of William James: Essays in Psychical Research, Frederick Burkhardt, General Editor, and Fredson Bowers, Textual Editor, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright 0 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College (200 WORDS). Reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Works of William James: Essays in Psychology, Frederick Burkhardt, General Editor, and Fredson Bowers, Textual Editor, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright 0 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College (150 WORDS). Reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Works of William James: Essays in Religion and Morality, Frederick Burkhardt, General Editor, and Fredson Bowers, Textual Editor, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright 0 1982 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College (150 WORDS). Reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Works of William James: The Meaning of Truth, Frederick Burkhardt, General Editor, and Fredson Bowers, Textual Editor, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright 0 1975 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College (50 WORDS). Reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Works of William James: Pragmatism, Frederick Burkhardt, General Editor, and Fredson Bowers, Textual Editor, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright 0 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College (1,200 WORDS).

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Reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Works of William James: Principles of Psychology-Volumes Z-IZZ, Frederick Burkhardt, General Editor, and Fredson Bowers, Textual Editor, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright 0 1981 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College (400 WORDS). Reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Works of William James: Psychology: Briefer Course, Frederick Burkhardt, General Editor, and Fredson Bowers, Textual Editor, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright 0 1984 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College (250 WORDS). Reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Works of William James: A Pluralistic Universe, Frederick Burkhardt, General Editor, and Fredson Bowers, Textual Editor, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright 0 1977 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College (100 WORDS). Reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Works of William James: Talks to Teachers on Psychology-and to Students on Some of Li$e’s Ideals, Frederick Burkhardt, General Editor, and Fredson Bowers, Textual Editor, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright 0 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College (200 WORDS). Reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Works of William James: Varieties of Religious Experience, Frederick Burkhardt, General Editor, and Fredson Bowers, Textual Editor, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright 0 1985 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College (1,000 WORDS). Reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Works of William James: The Will to Believe, Frederick Burkhardt, General Editor, and Fredson Bowers, Textual Editor, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright 0 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College (200 WORDS).

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A Note on Transliteration, Translation, and Bibliographies

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USSIAN NAMES AND OTHER WORDS appear in

anglicized form in the text and notes. In the bibliographies they are given in Library of Congress transliteration. Russian titles are translated into English in text and notes but appear in Russian, with translation, in the bibliographies following each chapter. A bibliography of William James’s works, with standard abbreviations used in references throughout the text, appears on pp. 243-44.

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Introduction Joan Delaney Grossman and Ruth Rischin

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about him,” wrote William James in A Pluralistic Universe(1909).James’s own vision constantly evolved as he wrestled with problems that also profoundly stirred his contemporaries at the turn of the twentieth century. He continues to energize a varied audience now, at the start of the twenty-first. Russian readers, too, from the 1890sto the present day, have found in the work of America’s preeminent philosopher and psychologist much to ponder, admire, and debate. Unquestionably, if the course of Russian affairs has been dynamic and unpredictable since the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, its vision of itself has undergone drastic change. To many observers, the flux of Russia’s’recent spiritual history has proven a fascinating spectacle,punctuated as it has been by energetic efforts to reclaim the cultural and intellectual riches of its pre-Soviet past. In this process, some intriguing Russian-Western connections have come to light, begging to be explored: among them the early Russian attraction to William James. To our retrospective gaze William James stands out among thinkers of his time as a man strikingly at home in our day. “Unlike many other nineteenthcentury intellectuals, buttoned into their stiff white collars, calcified in our collective memory, James strides easily, inquisitively, into our own time, urging us to notice him”: so his biographer Linda Simon pictures him in her recent work Genuine Reality (p. xviii). Yet, as Simon also shows in the opening essay of this volume, James was very much of his own time and place, an American intellectual of the pre-World War I era who brought his ideas and his fresh approach to European contemporaries, eager for exchange but always his own man.

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MAN’S VISION IS THE GREAT thing

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Introduction

James believed that “each part of the world is in some way connected, in some other ways not connected with its other parts” (PU,p. 41). The present work examines the intriguing question: What happens when ideas of a thinker like James, who, despite his originality, was deeply rooted in his own traditions, are refracted through a culture that draws in large part on a heritage profoundly different from his own? It includes studies of reception and interpretation of James’s major writings, along with analyses of their impact on certain Russian writers and thinkers. It also reveals some striking parallels and convergences (and divergences) between his thought and that of Russian writers who, at different times, grappled with similar intellectual and spiritual issues. Aided by a few lucky finds and some determined digging, our authors reached a collective assurance that James and Russian culture have something to say to each other. If this dialogue has often enough been at cross purposes, the confrontation is revealing of both parties and may help us know both of them better. Arising at the turn of the century, Russian interest in James burgeoned in the early 1900s, peaked, and then was largely forced underground with the rise of Stalin. During much of the Soviet period James was unacceptable, denounced in the official press as a mere puppet of American capitalism and lampooned as the “Wall Street Pragmatist.” The Gorbachev years opened new perspectives, and the breakup of the Soviet empire made the change in cultural climate irreversible. Now that Russia is free to explore its past, James emerges as a fresh and penetrating voice that commands attention among thoughtful readers concerned with shaping a new identity for their country and uncovering treasures long hidden from sight. “William James is a figure who simply won’t go away,” remarked Hilary Putnam in his elegant little book Pragmatism (p. 5). The James revival in Russia in the post-Soviet 1990s shows this to be true for Russians as well. The Varieties of Religious Experience, The Will to Believe, and Pragmatism have reappeared, and some shorter pieces have been translated for the first time. After the distorted and disfigured James of Soviet times, readers are rediscovering his “heuristic wealth of ideas” (Pavlova et al., p. 401). Moreover, as Edith Clowes demonstrates in her essay, there are important currents in contemporary Russian spiritual thinking to which James’sideas and insights offer strong support. The reason for his renewed appeal in present circumstances, in Russia and elsewhere, may have been pinpointed by Hilary Putnam: the fact that “for James, as for Socrates, the central philosophical question is how to live” (p. 22). James arrived in Russia originally at a propitious moment. The social and political turmoil of the 1890s and early 1900s was matched by ferment in the country’s intellectual, artistic, and spiritual life. It is hardly news by now that the period 1890-1910 was a time of brilliant cultural productivity there. It was

Introduction

3

also an era of renewed activity in philosophy, when resurgent idealism energetically challenged the positivist cult of scientific facts. The first of James’s works to appear in Russia was Psychology, the shorter, textbook version of The Principles ofpsychology. Aiming as it did to transform the “science of the soul” into an exact science (with loopholes left for metaphysics), James’spsychology went against the grain for some, while others saw its author as the pioneer of a third way between positivism and idealism. And still others-like the poets and mystics treated in the Grossman and Obatnin essays below-found support in James’s text for altogether different lines of thought. For all his European travels, William James, unlike John Dewey, his successor as the veritable embodiment of American thought, never visited Russia in person. However, he did have professional contacts with Russians as his international career was gathering momentum. At the Congress of Physiological Psychology in Paris in August 1889, James was named America’s representative to the group’s permanent Committee of Organization, set up to facilitate contacts between psychologists in different countries engaged in similar research (EPs, pp. 245-246). Among members of the committee he mentions “Grot of Moscow.” Head of the Moscow Psychological Society and editor of its journal Questions ofPhilosophy and Psychology, Nikolai Grot was part of the relatively large Russian delegation at the congress. In their respective reports on the congress he and James each noted the other’s active participation in the proceedings. Returning from Paris, Grot tried to interest Russian colleagues in the American’s work. However, apparently no further contacts between the two developed: James’s exposure to a wider circle of Russian readers took place by other means. The fact that The Principles of Psychology was never translated into Russian may tell something about the contemporary state in Russia of what David Joravsky calls “the ‘problematic science’ of psychology, divided into warring camps from its earliest beginnings” (Joravsky,p. 95). James’scollaboration on what would become the James-Lange theory of emotion was later of great interest to the psychologist and literary historian D. N. Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky in his writings on memory and feelings in the 1890s.’ However, at the time of its first appearance in Russia, Psychology carried a distinctive message to various and diverse audiences. It also established its author in Russia as a voice to be heeded. A few more James writings were translated in the next several years, including The Will to Believe (19041, which engaged the interest of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky. (Meeting James during his American visit in 1906, Gorky described him as “a wonderful old man.”) Barry Scherr’s account of “Gorky and God-Building’’ follows the parallels between the idiosyncratic and individual faith-states recorded and celebrated by James, and

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the “people-power’’ envisioned by Gorky in his novel A Confession and elsewhere as a phase in the communal transformation of society. However, James’s religious philosophy had its real Russian introduction with the 1910 translation of The Varieties of Religious Experience, the appeal of which may have been enhanced by the contemporary revival of religious thought and feeling and the increasingly intense interest in the religious thinking of the novelist Dostoevsky. Robin Feuer Miller’s essay explores the loss of inner faith and the consequent quest for unification that sets Dostoevsky’s heroes and James’s “gnawing, carking, questioning” souls, the narrators of his The Varieties of Religious Experience, on “journeys to conversion.” Along the way, as Miller demonstrates, Dostoevsky’s crisis-ridden heroes test homeopathic medicine and various mind-cures, illuminating a hitherto unexamined affinity between the author of The Brothers Karamazov and the subjects of the case studies compiled by James, himself no stranger to alternative medicine. If James never indicated acquaintance with Dostoevsky‘s writings, the same was not true of the “other” great Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, whom James regarded as the world’s consummate novelist. Tolstoy’s greatest novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, appeared long before The Principles of Psychology. Indeed, Donna Orwin remarks in her essay that James had little to offer Tolstoy about the workings of the human psyche. “James’s wildly appreciative 1896 reaction to these novels as perfectly representative of life-i.e., the dynamics of human psychology-,” she writes, “suggests that he saw in them a prescient imaging of his own ideas.” Moreover, Orwin finds much to probe in their common concern about “what men live by.” Andrew Wachtel in his essay weighs the extent to which Tolstoy attempted to overcome an irrepressible glorification of war that informs his later fiction, most notably Hadji Murat, during the very years when he was writing the impassioned pacifist tracts that align the great novelist with William James. It was in 1910,the year of James’s and Tolstoy’s deaths, that William James’s fame in Russia reached its high point. Not only The Varieties of Religious Experience but Pragmatism appeared in Russian translation that year, initiating intense debate and discussion among intellectuals, religious figures, philosophers, and scientists. Randall Poole’s essay in this volume features the Moscow Psychological Society (of which James was an honorary member) as a forum for these exchanges. Its journal, Questions of Philosophy and Psychology, was a leading vehicle for comment from many perspectives. One of those perspectives proceeded from what could be called the religious “left”for its insistent demand for renewal in Russian Orthodoxy and its sometimes drastic reinterpretation of traditional religious thinking. A major feature of the “Russian religious renaissance” that began after 1905, this movement as-

Introduction

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sured a receptive readership for Varieties. One of the group’s leaders, the philosopher and “God-seeker” Nikolai Berdyayev, greeted it exuberantly: “Reading James’s book, one feels that a stream of fresh air is entering the stuffy atmosphere of rationalist culture. . . . The unconscious ‘I,’ the life of will and feeling, experience, widened into the mystical and religious sphere-there lie the riches released from under the yoke of rationalist experience” (“On the Broadening of Experience,” p. 381). Semyon Frank, another prominent thinker whose intellectual and spiritual path took him from marxism to “Godseeking,” took a similarly enthusiastic view. For Frank the appearance of The Varieties of Religious Experience marked an epoch, embodying as it did “the deep need being felt everywhere for the renewal of religious life.’’ Moreover, its author was “a scholar of world renown [who] openly and categorically gave scientific sanction to this need” (“James’sPhilosophy of Religion,” pp. 155-156). Among James’s more restrained admirers was the religious philosopher Lev Shestov, who sought in James, as Brian Horowitz points out, “a knight of free creativity,”but found instead a thinker unable to overcome rationalism. That conservative churchmen took a radically divergent view from any of these philosophers is borne out in Alexander Etkind’s account of a dramatic theological clash that involved James’s psychological theories as well. When it appeared in Russia, Pragmatism elicited a particularly heated response from critics and commentators who offered widely varying interpretations. Among them was a group of thinkers identified in these years with neopositivist orientations in philosophy and eclectic marxism in political theory. Their thought had been prepared in the early 1900s, first, by concepts from Einsteinian physics that called into question all philosophical systems relying on absolute certainties, and, second, by the epistemologies of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius. Mach and Avenarius held that knowledge of the world comes through immediate experience consisting of “neutral elements,”and that science therefore does not deal with the uncovering of abstract truths, but with the construction of hypotheses that are accessible to continuous refinement. The response to James on the part of a Russian thinker little known in the West, Pave1 Yushkevich (1872-1945), is of particular interest. Yushkevich‘s theory of empirio-symbolism won him, as did James’s Pragmatism itself, the damnation of Lenin, for whom all eclectic theories of truth, from Berkeley to Kant to Mach and company, opened the door to the idiosyncratic and the religious. Among all of James’s Russian interpreters, it was Yushkevich who came closest to exposing the performative or skaz element in the Pragmatism text as, more than a mediation between schools of thought, an outright game with the reader. One of the chief serious journals, Russian Thought, devoted a large part of its May 1910 issue to an article by Semyon Frank, “Pragmatism as a Philosophical Doctrine,” followed by “A Debate about Pragmatism,” the transcript

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of an extended discussion of Frank‘s article in a prestigious Moscow philosophical circle. Most of the speakers, who represented a significant range of positions, found fault with Frank‘s severely critical analysis. Nor did James go unchallenged, though most spoke in highly respectful tones of him as a thinker. Some, however, urged the importance of considering James’s pragmatism in the total context of his work. The acquaintance with James’s work and with modern Western thought shown by many participants in the pragmatism debate points up an important fact. Interest in James developed at a moment of special openness among Russia’s educated classes to Western cultural trends and ideas. More generally, this was a time of redefinition on many levels-a process where encounter with outside forces and ideas tended to generate lively, even acrimonious, debate or worse. (A cold front advancing against a pool of warm stationary air may produce a similar turbulence.) Russia had been through this before. Arising simultaneously with these periodic spasms has been one of the perennial “vexed questions” of Russian history: her position vis-a-vis the West, or, put otherwise, Russian identity. First raised long before the reign of Peter the Great, that question crystallized in the mid-nineteenth century in the debate, at first gentlemanly, later less so, between Slavophiles and Westernizers. Early in the twentieth century the discussion centered around notions framed in the expression “the Russian idea.” A term with an illustrious genealogy going back to a lecture so titled by the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov in 1888 (published in 191I), it was the subject of an important 1909 essay by poet and thinker Vyacheslav Ivanov, “On the Russian Idea.” Much later, Nikolai Berdyayev elaborated the notion in his book The Russian Idea, the goal of which, he told his readers, is, through meditation on Russia’s history, to arrive at “the thought of the Creator about Russia” (p. 1). Once again, since 1991 and the fall of Communism, the process of redefinition proceeds apace on all levels of society, with the question of Russia’s relation to the West playing a prominent role. Among serious-minded readers efforts to pick up threads of past thought has led to reexamination and revival of the long-standing Slavophile-Westernizer debate. Not surprising in this context is the appearance of a book entitled The Rebirth of the Russian Idea (1991). This volume advances what James Scanlan, a leading specialist on Russian philosophy, called “an ill-concealed conviction of, not simply the value and uniqueness, but the superiority of ‘Holy Russia’ over Western society and culture” (“Slavophilism,”p. 45). Commenting on this revival of national self-examination, the British historian Aileen Kelly recently formulated the “Russian idea” as follows: “This is the belief, first promoted by the czarist state in collaboration with Orthodox theologians, that Russia’s distinctive religion and culture leave it destined to follow a path separate from the materialistic West and spiritually superior to it” ( N Y T p. 11). However, in

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her 1999 book Viewsfrorn the Other Shore, Kelly finds the post-Soviet intelligentsia deeply split on the question of “self-image and values,” with debate centering on “the past and future role of the messianic tendency commonly known as the Russian Idea” (p. 217). The reception of William James throughout the entire Soviet period was closely linked with tectonic shifts in Soviet cultural politics. Thus, in the early 1920%in the relative freedom of cultural expression that characterized the years of the New Economic Policy, some of Russia’s most searching thinkers and writers hearkened to the promise and optimism of James’s writings. Among them was the literary critic L. V. Pumpiansky (1891-1940), author of Dostoevsky and Antiquity (1922), who in 1924-1925, during his association with the Nevel-Vitebsk group around his good friend Mikhail Bakhtin, brought into their conversations his earnest commentaries on the American philosopher.* Within a few years that openness was stifled. In the making was what might be called a “revisionist”version of the “Russian idea.” Elimination of the religious element from this idea+r the substitution of dialectical materialism and the Communist regime-produced a curious parody, with emphasis on Western-specifically American-moral inferiority. Interestingly, here again William James played a role. The first major article on James after the 1917 Revolution appeared before the ideological tightening that marked Stalin’s consolidation of power. The July-August 1927 number of the authoritative journal Under the Banner of Marxism carried an article by V. F. Asmus entitled “The Alogism of William James.” Linking him closely with Bergson, Asmus took James to task at length for “anti-intellectualism,” irrationalism, and the general prizing of intuition over logic. Valentin Asmus was a prominent professor of philosophy at Moscow State Uni~ersity.~ His arguments here are those of a professional philosopher, defending the intellectualist position attacked by James and Bergson; some of these arguments resemble criticisms by James’s contemporaries. Then, taking up a more distinctive stance, Asmus drew a straight line from Schopenhauer, “first in the parade of philosophical decadents,” to James (along with Bergson, the names of Maeterlinck and Rudolf Steiner occur) (pp. 78, 81-82). However, in his view James exceeded any of these by putting philosophy directly at the service of religion. Here, while writing from the Marxist standpoint, Asmus found himself in the paradoxical position of contrasting favorably the medieval scholastics constructing rational arguments for the existence of God with the anti-intellectualist bourgeois thinkers James and Bergson. Medieval clerics, standing at the feudal stage of development, showed that “they understood far better than James the meaning of proof” (p. 83). Asmus concluded “James’sphilosophy will long stand as a sad memorial of the decline of bourgeois theoretical thought” (p. 84).

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After the late twenties, any sign of intellectual argument disappeared from treatments of James (as of many others), and propaganda took over. During most of the Soviet period, as we know, names of past or present writers construed as incompatible with Marxism-Leninism were often expunged from the public record, and their works became generally inaccessible. Even John Dewey, who, in his “Impressions of Russia” (1928), extolled what he perceived as a native spirituality sustaining the Soviet educators whom he met during his visit, was subsequently subjected to the standard anti-American cant.4 Some foreign writers were targeted as examples of decadent bourgeois culture, their works sequestered, their ideas and their careers shamelessly distorted. Both Dewey and James fell into this category. Since politically correct information often reached the general public through publications like the multitome Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the GSE in its successive editions served as official barometer of James’s fortunes in the Soviet Union. The first edition (1926-1947) contained unsigned articles on “William James,” (vol. 21,1931) and “Pragmatism” (vol. 46, 1940). The James article, while not totally negative, is critical. The article on “Pragmatism,” in a volume published nine years later, is much cruder and shorter. By 1940 portrayal of pragmatism simply as antiscientific and pro-religion was standard. When D. Kvitko’s Sketches of ContemporaryAnglo-American Philosophy appeared in 1936, the Stalinist party line was firmly in place and anti-American sentiment in full flower. From the time of its first publication Pragmatism was seen by many in Europe and America as a peculiarly American philosophy. If James’s personal “Americanism” was a neutral, or even a positive, feature for Asmus, America’s bourgeois stage of development obviously was not. Now, in this work in the 1930s, the standard Marxist interpretation of pragmatism is on its way to the formulaic phrases of subsequent writers. Incidentally, Kvitko’s fourteen-year residence in the United States ( 1913-1927) presumably gave him authority based on firsthand experience. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia’s second edition, spanning the 1950s,bristled with anti-American Cold War fervor. The article on William James, capped by a quotation from Lenin, is a masterful collation of the abusive clichts routinely applied to thinkers from capitalist countries, especially the United States. “American reactionary philosopher and psychologist, ideologue of the imperialist bourgeoisie, one of the founders of the anti-scientific philosophy pragmatism, defender of religion. . . . James fully justified the expansionist plans of the American bourgeoisie, its fight against Socialism and the workers’ movement” (14: 219). Throughout the Stalin and Cold War years James routinely served as an exemplar of negative Western values, his works known to Soviet readers only second- and thirdhand, if at all, from encyclopedia articles and philosophy

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handbooks. The question occurs: why were his name and ideas not simply “repressed,”as were those of many others? The answer surely lies in the inviting target he made. The quintessential American reactionary capitalist bourgeois ideologue with a fondness for religion: Once the template was fashioned, James’s alleged popularity and influence in his native land served to characterize the decadence of American character and values. Two books issuing from the Department of Philosophy at Moscow State University in 1957 and 1964, respectively, show James as he appeared in the days when, the Khrushchev thaw notwithstanding, the old stereotypes still served. The first, American Pragmatism, was originally a course of lectures by philosophy professor Yuri K. Melvil. The chapter on James opens with a question showing a strikingly personalized approach: “What was the social persona of James, the ideologue of early American imperialism?” Citing cardinal points on which Jamesian notions clashed with Soviet orthodoxy, the author freely misquotes, quotes out of context, and otherwise misconstrues (the text being unavailable to the general readership). The resultant “James”was easily linked to Nietzsche, and from there it was only a step to making him (in Soviet terms) the favorite of Nazism and fascism. Lest the point be missed, the author summarizes: “Such are several views held by James, marking him as a racist and convinced enemy of the human masses. Such is the man who advances the philosophy of pragmatism” (p. 30). More nuanced, less vehement, but still carrying the obligatory ideological baggage was A. S. Bogomolov’s Anglo-American Bourgeois Philosophy in the Epoch of Imperialism ( 1964). Again one reads of James’s“defense of the religious world view, and, through it, of the social structure that uses religion as its ideological weapon” (p. 125). The third edition of the GSE (1969-1981) carried a signed article on James (vol. 8, 1972). Thoroughly revised in style and tone, it yet repeats the chief “objectionable” points found in the American philosopher: tendency toward individualism, mysticism, defense of religion from the standpoint of pragmatism. Reading through the books and articles on James and pragmatism published in the Soviet Union from the thirties through the seventies and even into the eighties is a dreary task, yet no surprise to anyone acquainted with the history of that time. Post-Soviet accounts throw light on a dark time, deploring especially “the monstrous dearth of theory and information” of that era (Sadovsky, p. 62). Meanwhile, as we then suspected and now know, cracks developed after Stalin, in philosophy as in many other areas. The atmosphere lightened perceptibly between 1960 and 1970 as successive volumes of the five-volume Philosophical Encyclopedia appeared. Finally, a change in the political climate and a 1988 Communist Party Politburo decision led to a full-scale effort to reclaim the Russian philosophical tradition. Volume followed volume as hitherto proscribed

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works by Russian thinkers were reissued. James Scanlan observes:“What seemed moribund had in fact merely been dormant, or in a state of suspended animation, and given the opportunity Russians returned to their philosophical heritage with alacrity” (“Overview,”p. 6). How did all this affect James? The name of an American thinker, subject of controversy among prerevolutionary Russian intellectuals and of obloquy in Stalinist times, might pique the curiosity of independent thinkers, but it would hardly lay first claim to attention under those difficult circumstances. Yet James’s name and ideas obviously were diffused by one means and another through several generations of actual or potential Russian readers. As the debates over pragmatism that roiled the intellectual and religious scenes in 1910 and beyond resurface in the writings of Berdyaev,,Frank, Peter Struve, Pave1 Yushkevich, and others, James has again becbme a presence to reckon with. Significantly, as James Scanlan reminds us, the early-twentieth-century thinkers being so enthusiastically welcomed by present-day Russian readers were in large part “of a religious, Russian Orthodox cast of mind, and as such they have found a sympathetic audience in a society that is not only newly freed of restraints on religion but positively drawn toward it” (“Overview,” p. 8). Nonetheless, in 1910 James’s unconventional approach to religion attracted Frank and Berdyaev by its freshness and openness to all human experience. The same qualities may contribute to its attraction today. The first James work to be republished in toto in post-Soviet times was The Varieties of Religious Experience, which appeared in several formats in 1992 and 1993. This event came, Edith Clowes writes, ,as “a welcome relief after decades of singleminded (Soviet) scientific thinkiog.” Moreover, in the current interest in mysticism Clowes sees “a continuing theme among leading Russian thinkers and writers concerned with questions of spirituality in a secular, scientific world.” This concern has led to intense-and highly justifiedinterest in Russia’s own religious-philosophical heritage, particularly from the turn of the last century. Some voices have urged an even more inclusive view. In his afterword to the 1993 republication of Varieties, P. S. Gurevich hailed Russians’ re-exposure to William James’s thought as a chance for them to reconnect with world mystical experience after decades of cultural isolation. Four years later, in 1997, a volume edited by Gurevich offered The Will to Believe and Pragmatism (originally published in Russian in, respectively, 1904 and 1910).5In addition, it includes four articles, three of which appear in Russian translation for the first time: “The Energies of Men,” “The Pragmatic Account of Truth and Its Misunderstanders,” and “A World of Pure Experience.” (The fourth, “Does Consciousness Exist?’’ first appeared in Russian in 1913.) As has been seen, of all James’s works the one most continuously linked with

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his name in Russia is Pragmatism. And the aspect of that work most consistently singled out for attention, though to different effect in different eras, has been pragmatism’s connection with religion. The earlier (1993) reprinting of the chapter “What Pragmatism Means” in a serial publication of Moscow University’s Department of Philosophy was apparently intended to rehabilitate and redefine a term that for decades appeared only as a term of contempt.6 As may be remembered, the last third of that chapter deals with pragmatism’s potential “usefulness”in the area of religion. As James sums it up, “In short, she widens the field of search for God” (p. 44). The cover and title page of the 1997 volume where Pragmatism appears mention only The Will to Believe. However, the afterword is entitled “The Good News (Blagovestie) of Pragmatism”-a title that bears, in Russian even more than in English, the distinct suggestion of “religious message.” Given the sinister alliance of pragmatism with religion stressed throughout the Soviet era, this is a deliberately bold reversal of values. James held no brief for formal religion, any more than he did for academic philosophy. Yet he wanted to bring philosophy close to living experience, which included religious faith. And he was concerned with the possibility of faith and religion coexisting in a world that has relegated them to a sphere apart from everyday affairs. As the afterword’s authors note: “[In] the debate over the existence of God pragmatism advances no readymade credo; it merely makes clear what is the practical sense of believing in God” (p. 404). Finally they conclude: “The pragmatic point of view, which orients the individual toward achieving life success and purposeful behavior, paradoxically leads to the recognition of mystical experience which, in [James’s] opinion, focuses the grumblings of the soul and assures the vitality (zhiznestoikost’) of religion itself” (p. 408). These authors are careful to point out one particularly significant historical allusion that might otherwise pass unnoticed by many readers: the 1910 “Debate over Pragmatism.” As they shrewdly observe, that debate showed that pragmatism “touched a tender spot in the tradition of Russian thought” (p. 394). Moreover, they are at some pains also to underline parallels between the time when pragmatism emerged, which they characterize as a period of transition and clash of ideas, and the present. Invoking the names of modern Western pragmatists (“R. Rorty and others”), they assert that “pragmatism has caught an essential philosophical tendency that will surely strengthen with time-namely, the tendency to break with stereotypes, absolutes, ‘the spirit of solemnity’ and unbending righteousness” (p. 399). A major part of the message James’s pragmatism brought to Russian thinkers in 1910 and, by implication, to their present-day heirs, is a message about philosophy itself. “James saw the chief fault of philosophy as it hitherto

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existed in its separation from life, in its failure to understand human beings” (p. 395). He wished to bring philosophy back to its human context. Or as one prominent participant in the 1910 debate Lev Lopatin put it: “Pragmatism returned thought to its proper channel. . . ,proposing an extremely simple attitude toward the eternal questions about the meaning of life, the moral order, and others” (quoted, “Good News,” p. 397). Now, at a time when, after long years of Communism, freedom of thought and belief has become an actuality, rediscovering the heritage of Russian thought, particularly the religious philosophers of the beginning of the twentieth century, has become a major enterprise. Moreover, the long-closed gates to Western ideas and modes of thinking are open, and the East-West relationship is again being energetically debated in Russia. In this context, William James speaks with particular poignancy to the post-atheist society of the former Soviet Union, to the culturologist Mikhail Epstein’s “poor believers,” whose “‘minimal belief’. . .appears to be as indivisible as spirit itself” (p. 363). We may ask is philosophical thought itself destined to receive a new lease on life? Is contact with the “other,” that well-known definer of positions, to function actively in this new environment? Some commentators would say that William James is at his active best in such situations. As Richard J. Bernstein writes in the introduction to A Pluralistic Universe: “James has the rare gift of transcending local restrictions of time and place and speaking directly and intimately to our own present philosophic situation” (p. xiii). The test of course comes when he addresses readers in a philosophic ambience and tradition very different from his own. David Joravsky in this volume’s concluding chapter calls attention to “the paradoxes that animate James’s writing, keeping it alive with different meanings for different audiences during a century of intellectual fragmentation, of frustration for seekers of coherent vision.” Clifford Geertz may be speaking for all James readers, Russian and others, when he says: “We need the sort of inquiry he pioneered, the sort of talents he possessed, and the sort of openness to the foreign and unfamiliar . . . he displayed” (p. 12). Notes 1. “Scientists have argued greatly as to whether or not there is such a thing as the memory of a feeling,” he wrote, in “The Psychology of Thought and Feeling” (1909), in D. N. Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, Literaturno-kriticheskie raboty v 2-x tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1989), p. 37. 2. Information to Ruth Rischin from Caryl Emerson, 2 September 1999. See also M. M. Bakhtin kakfilosof; ed. L. A. Gogotshivili and P. S. Gurevich (Moscow: Nauka, 1992); Caryl Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (Princeton, N.J.:

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Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 234; Besedy K D. Duvakina s M. M. Bakhtinym (Moscow: Izdatel’skaia gruppa, Progress, 1996), p. 284. 3. Asmus is remembered variously. For a positive view, see N. V. Motroshilova, “In Memory of a Professor,” Soviet Studies in Philosophy, 28, no. 2 (fall 1989): 59-65. Another writer notes that “even one of the best professors” (i. e., Asmus) became tainted by the regime under which he worked (Sadovsky, p. 69). 4. Addressing a meeting of the Transnational Institute in Moscow in March 1993, Caryl Emerson perceptively analyzed the reception of American pragmatism in Russia. In her paper Emerson wrote: “In good American fashion, Dewey treats his impressions as well as his projections as empirical-and the Russian people themselves as inspired pragmatists” (“American Philosophers, Bakhtinian Perspectives: William James, George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, and Mikhail Bakhtin on a Philosophy of the Act,” unpublished paper, p. 8, n. 2). 5. The Will to Believe was published in 1904 in the translation of S. I. Tsereteli, and Pragmatism in 1910 in that of P. S. Yushkevich. 6. Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta, Series 7 (Philosophy), 1993, No. 3, pp. 82-9 1.

Works Cited Asmus, V. “Alogizm U. Dzhemsa (W. James’s Alogism).” Pod znamenem marksizma nos. 7-8 (July-August, 1927): 53-84. Berdiaev, Nikolai. “0rasshirenii opyta (On the Widening of Experience).” Voprosy filosofii ipsikhologii 103 (1910): 380-383. . (Berdyaev). The Russian Idea. New York: Macmillan, 1948. Bernstein, Richard J. “Introduction.” In A Pluralistic Universe,by William James. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977, pp. xi-nix. Bogomolov, A. S. Anglo-amerikanskaia burzhuaznaia filosofiia epokhi imperializma (Anglo-American Bourgeois Philosophy of the Epokh of Imperialism). Moscow: “Mysl,” 1964. Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (Great Soviet Encyclopedia), 1st ed. Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 2d ed. Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 3d ed. Epstein, Mikhail N. “Response: ‘Post’ and ‘Beyond.”’ Slavic and East European Journal 39, no. 3 (1995): 357-366. Frank, Semen. “Filosofiia religii V. Dzhemsa” (W. James’s Philosophy of Religion). Russkaia mysl’2 (1910): 155-164. . “Pragmatizm kak filosofskoe uchenie” (Pragmatism as a Philsophical Doctrine). Russkaia mysI’ 5 (1910): 90-120. Frank, Semen et al. “Spor o pragmatizme” (Debate about Pragmatism). Russkaia mysl’ 5 (1910): 121-156. Geertz, Clifford. “‘The Pinch of Destiny’: Religion as Experience, Meaning, Identity, Power.” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 27, no. 4 (1998): 7-12. Gurevich, P. S. “Roptanie dushi i misticheskii opyt: Fenomenologiia religii U. Dzheimsa” (Grumblings of the Soul and Mystical Experience). In Mnogoobrazie

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religioznogo opyta (Varieties of Religious Experience), by William James, pp. 41 1 4 2 4 .

Joravsky, David. Russian Psychology: A Critical History. Cambridge, U.K.: Blackwell, 1989.

Kelly, Aileen. “When Russians Look Inward.” New York Times, Sept. 6, 1998, p. E l 1. . Viewsfrom the Other Shore. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Kvitko, D. Iu. Ocherki sovremennoi anglo-amerikanskoi filosofii (Essays in Contemporary Anglo-American Philosophy). Moscow-Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe izdanie, 1936 Lenin, V. V. Win. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Critical Comment on a Reactionary Philosophy. Trans. A Fineberg, London, 1949. Mel’vil’, Iu. K. Amerikanskii prugmatizm (American Pragmatism). Moscow: Izd. Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1957. Pavlova, L. E., P. S. Gurevich, and M. L. Khor’kov. “Filosofskoe blagovestie pragmatizma” (The Philosophical Good News of Pragmatism). In Volia k vere i drugie ocherki populiarnoi filosofii (The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy), by William James. Putnam, Hilary. Pragmatism. Cambridge, U.K.: Blackwell, 1995. Sadovskii,V. N. “Philosophy in Moscow in the Fifties and Sixties,” Soviet Studies in Philosophy 33, no. 2 (fall 1994): 46-72 Scanlan, James P. “Interpretations and Uses of Slavophilism in Recent Russian Thought” and “Overview” (pp. 31-61, 3-10). In James P. Scanlan, ed., Russian Thought after Communism. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994. Simon, Linda. Genuine Reality: A Life of William James. New York Harcourt Brace, 1998.

.“Spor o pragmatizme” (A Debate about Pragmatism). Russkaia Mysl’ 5 (1910):

12 1-156.

1 William James: The European Connection Linda Simon

0

5, 1880, William James boarded the Britannic, bound for Liverpool, where he embarked upon a stay of nearly three months in Europe. At the age of thirty-eight, James was a veteran of European sojourns, but this trip was different: his purpose was not, as it usually was, to restore his physical and mental health, but to find intellectual affirmation and camaraderie. An assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard, where he had taught since 1872, James had just begun to publish professional articles and therefore to come to the attention of European philosophers. He wanted to meet some of these men, to widen his professional circle beyond Cambridge, Massachusetts, and, most important, to position himself intellectually among them. The trip in 1880 was the first of many: he traveled in Europe again in 1882-1883, attended an important conference on psychology in 1889, spent a sabbatical year abroad in 1892-1893, delivered the Gifford lectures in Edinburgh in 1901 (this trip, from 1899 to 1901, was prolonged because of his ill health), completed the Gifford lectures in 1902,vacationed in Europe in 1905, delivered the Hibbert lectures at Oxford University in 1908, and made his last trip in 1910. During each of these trips, James established new relationships, solidified some friendships, discussed his work with colleagues and discovered their responses to his ideas more directly than he could through publications or correspondence. By focusing.on a few of James’s more significant trips, we can map the trajectory of his reputation among European philosophers and consider their interest in and responses to his psychological and philosophical assertions. N JUNE

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First Principles: 1880 By 1880, James had made considerable progress in shaping his identity as a philosopher. Without the European training shared by many of his colleagues, James had created for himself a personal curriculum in philosophy that can be seen as a reaction, in part, to the philosophical context in which he was raised: that is, to the teachings of his father, Henry James Sr., and the questions of authority and free will inherent in those teachings. Henry himself was self-taught, undergoing brief training at the Princeton Theological Seminary, and then, rejecting the intellectual narrowness that he found there, setting out on his own to find thinkers who could help liberate him from the Calvinism of his upbringing and from a deep conviction of his own worthlessness. For a while, he was infatuated with the Scottish theologian Robert Sandeman, a fierce protester against clerical authority; then, with the French social reformer Charles Fourier, who envisioned communities where an individual’s work, rather than merely serving the marketplace, would reflect his or her true nature. Yet these thinkers failed to provide Henry with the intellectual sustenance that he needed to affirm his own sense of authority and identity. After suffering a nervous breakdown in 1844, he finally found that thinker, Emanuel Swedenborg, who offered what he so fervently desired-an image of a personal and approving God, validation of his authority to understand and interpret biblical texts, and proof of his essential goodness. All men were good, Swedenborg asserted, because a divine spirit permeated them and shone through them. In a monistic universe, guided by a benign Creator, it became one’s duty and obligation to give oneself up to that divine spirit, to refuse to celebrate one’s individuality and assert one’s own identity. Extinction of egotism became Henry’s vocational goal, and he recommended it to, in fact demanded it from, his children as well. Selfextinction, though, was no easy task for his eldest son, William, who by nature was competitive, very bright, and, even as a child, eager for public acclaim. Yet Henry tried to convince William that the very qualities that society would applaud in him were qualities to be despised. Personal achievements did not impress Henry. Instead, he believed that each individual must find an outlet for the divine goodness within; this outlet-for him, was writing philosophical tracts and occasionally lecturing-would result in the individual’s living with moral integrity, in fulfilling what he called the “moral business.” In Jamesian terms, this “moral business” only partly referred to behaving ethically; more significantly, it meant behaving consistently with one’s true, divine nature. While his father demanded that his children simply “be,” William saw around him other young men who were busily engaged in becoming: physi-

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cians, lawyers, scientists. He was, predictably, uneasy, and, after a protracted vocational crisis during which William toyed with the idea of becoming a civil engineer, like one of his boyhood friends, he lit upon art as a career, largely because Henry, in his writings, had so exalted the idea of the artist-an ideal, non-practicing, theoretical artist, to be sure. But Henry protested violently: if William became a practicing artist, he would have to pander to popular taste; so William turned to science, which his father also championed, as long as a scientist did not do anything practical and so run the risk of becoming merely a technician. What was William to do? According to Henry, William could do no better than to emulate his own life’s work, writing abstract, theoretical, quasi-theological philosophy. In the 1860s, as he struggled to understand his identity, to make sense of his father’s demands, and to envision his future, James was drawn to thinkers who could help him to rebel against his father’s philosophy: Goethe and Carlyle, for example (and Wordsworth and Browning) who exalted the capabilities of the individual and the potential of genius. He read Alexander Bain and John Stuart Mill, who taught him that empiricism was a credible counter to his father’s monism. None of these thinkers, however, sustained him sufficiently against his father’s vigorous demand that he engage in the “moral business.” In 1870, James’s struggle over this moral business led to what he called “a great dorsal collapse”: “Today I about touched bottom,” he wrote in his diary, “and perceive plainly that I must face the choice with open eyes: shall I frankly throw the moral business overboard, as one unsuited to my innate aptitudes, or shall I follow it, and it alone, making everything else merely stuff for it?” He decided to follow it, hoping that the “moral interest” that he had never yet felt might become developed. “Hitherto,” he wrote, I have tried to fire myself with the moral interest, as an aid in the accomplishing of certain utilitarian ends of attaining certain difficult but salutary habits. I tried to associate the feeling of moral degradation with failure, and add it to that of the loss of the wished for sensible good end-and the reverse of success. But in all this I was cultivating the moral interest only as a means & more or less humbugging my self. Now I must regard these useful ends only as occasions for my moral life to become active.’

Then, on April 30, 1870, he entered in his diary a statement that appeared to signal an enormous change: I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s 2nd Essay, and saw no reason why his definition of free will-sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts-need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate I will assume for the present-until next

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year-that

it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.

(Houghton)

Inspired by Charles Renouvier, James vowed to cultivate a new habit: a sense of moral freedom, an abdication of the watchfulness and self-criticism in which he formerly engaged. He would will himself to refrain from brooding upon the defects of his personality and make sure that he read nothing that would compromise his new direction. Renouvier offered James something more than the British positivists: “The knowable universe is for him, as for the school of Mill and Bain,” James wrote, “a system of phenomena, and metaphysic is an analysis or inventory of the elements. But among these elements he finds the possibility, which British empiricism denies, of absolute beginnings, or, in other words, of free-will’’(ECR, p. 266). Absolute beginnings, for James, meant that he was not bound to a self inherited from his parents, determined by his physiology, or prescribed by society; he could create and define a new and potentially liberating self. Renouvier, as important as he was in James’s life, did not end James’svocational crisis. In 1869, he had earned a medical degree at Harvard, but decided that he would not practice. Although he stumbled into a teaching position at Harvard (his friend Henry Bowditch suggested that he take over a class in anatomy), he did not see teaching as his future. Yet Harvard expanded his social circle: he began to meet men who shared his concerns and who helped him discover new philosophical directions. In the early 1870s, for example, James joined a small philosophical club whose members included mathematician Charles Peirce, and the lawyers Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., John Fiske, and Nicholas St. John Greene. These men, all in their late twenties or early thirties, shared the anxiety of many intellectuals about the possibility of religious faith in a scientific age. Faced with mounting evidence of the plurality, randomness, and spontaneity of the universe, they sought a philosophy that embraced science, preserved their desire to believe in God, and offered a system to guide their moral and ethical decisions. Scorning abstraction and idealism, they called their group, ironically, the Metaphysical Club. James participated enthusiastically in their vigorous debates about Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. Teaching, moreover, proved more satisfying than he had anticipated; and because of his success, Harvard’s president Charles William Eliot offered James more challenging courses, including psychology, then taught in the philosophy department. By 1878, he had gained enough prestige in the Harvard community so that the publisher Henry Holt, wanting to add a psychology textbook to his list, asked James to write that text. James promised that it would be completed in a year or two; it took twelve, but during those twelve years James published much of

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The Principles of Psychology as articles, mainly in three journals: the American Journal of Speculative Philosophy, edited by the Hegelian William Torrey Harris; the French Critique Philosophique, edited by Charles Renouvier, whose works James championed in America; and the British journal Mind, established by Alexander Bain and edited by George Croom Robertson. Robertson, familiar with James’swork in Critique Philosophique and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, looked to James both to explain Renouvier to British readers and to inform those readers about American philosophical interests. “From what you know of the state of things in America,” Robertson asked James, “do you think it possible for any one to give us in England, in one article, a fair notion of what is being done in the way of philosophical study & work among your people?” (Corr. V 7). James, at the time, was more intent on arguing against the Spencerians and Hegelians among his “people” and in conveying his own ideas: his early essays introduced material he would include, often with little revision, in The Principles of Psychology and also served as preface to his later works on belief, pragmatism, and pluralism. These intellectual threads converged in his first signed article, “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence,” which appeared in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in January 1878. James’s initial enthusiasm for Spencer-he had assigned Spencer’s Principles of Psychology in his courses-had quickly waned. Spencer’s assertion that survival was the only motivation for an individual’s behavior seemed to him dangerously simplistic. He explained his position to his publisher Henry Holt: I think you have somewhat misapprehended the scope of my criticism of Spencer. . . . So far am I from leaving out the environment, that I shall call my text-book “Psychology, as a Natural Science,” and have already in the introduction explained that the constitution of our mind is incomprehensible without reference to the external circumstances in the midst of which it grew up. My quarrel with Spencer is not that he makes much of the environment, but that he makes nothing of the glaring and patent fact of subjective interests which cooperate with the environment in moulding intelligence. These interests form a true spontaneity and justify the refusal of a priori schools to admit that mind was pure, passive receptivity.” (C0rr.V: 24-25, November 22 [ 18781)

For James, survival was only one of many competing interests that influenced thought and behavior. Other interests included “social affections, all the various forms of play, the thrilling intimations of art, the delights of philosophic contemplation, the rest of religious emotion, the joy of moral self-approbation, the charm of fancy and of wit . . .” (Corr. V 12-13, to H.H.). These interests, for James, were “an all-essential factor which no writer pretending to give an account of mental evolution has a right to neglect” (Corr.V 1In, to H.H). Prior

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to his 1880 trip to Europe, James also published “Are We Automata?”in Mind, which expressed ideas similar to those in his piece on Spencer; “The Spatial Quale” in Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and “The Sentiment of Rationality” in Mind. In “The Sentiment of Rationality,” James asked philosophers to question their own motivation for and interest in constructing one philosophical system over another. In short, he asked philosophers to articulate what they saw as the consequences, for themselves as human beings, of their philosophical interests and affinities. Locating philosophy in individual interests and needs was, for James, a way to resolve what he saw as the current crisis in philosophy: Now our Science tells our Faith that she is shameful, and our Hopes that they are dupes; our Reverence for truth leads to conclusions that make all reverence a falsehood; our new Good, survival of our tribe, is the one thing certain to perish with our planet; our Freedom annuls our opportunities for lofty deeds; our Equality with our brethren quenches all tendency to be proud of their brotherhood; our Art, instead of intimating divine secrets, becomes an intellectual sensuality, revealing no secrets but those of our nervous systems; our craving for personal recognition at the heart of things is flatly contradicted by our persuasion that we none of us possess any independent personality at all. (ECR 357-358)

James expressed his concern about this crisis to his European colleagues and discovered that many-many more than he anticipated-shared his impatience with Spencer, his sense of the inadequacy of psychological research that began and ended in the laboratory, and his respect for Renouvier. The most fertile relationship that James established during this trip was with Shadworth Hodgson, with whom James had been corresponding. Like several other eminent thinkers whom James met (including Bain and Spencer), he had expected Hodgson to be both physically and intellectually intimidating. What he found was far different. Writing to his wife Alice, James described Hodgson as “that bashful & amiable philosopher charming in the extreme . . .[and] very modest about his opinions.” The two men discussed their current work, with James clarifying for Hodgson the ideas about effort and will that he expounded upon in “The Feeling of Effort.” James was delighted to learn that, even though Hodgson claimed to reject Renouvier’s tenets about the finiteness of the world and free will, still he believed Renouvier “the most important philosophical writer of our time-you can’t think how it pleaseth me,” James wrote to Alice, “to have this evidence that I have not been a fool in sticking so to R” (C0rr.V 108-109, June 27,1880). James returned home at the end of August 1880, energized and affirmed in his philosophical inclinations. Hardly a fool, as he apparently feared he would be considered, he was respected and applauded by his European colleagues.

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British Circles: 1882-1883

The trip that James began on September 1, 1882, had a single important purpose: to enable him to make significant progress on his Principles ofPsychology, then several years overdue. To prepare for what he saw as intense work, he spent the first part of his trip relaxing in Germany and Austria. In November, he arrived in Prague to confer with colleagues, among them Ewald Hering, who taught physiology in Leipzig, and the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, with whom James spent four hours walking and dining. “I don’t think any one ever gave me so strong an impression of pure intellectual genius,” he wrote to his wife. “He apparently has read everything & thought about everything, and has an absolute simplicity of manner and winningness of smile when his face lights up that are charming” (Corr.V. 285-286, November 2,1882). Despite his warm feelings toward Mach, it was German psychologist Carl Stumpf with whom James spent most of his time, and with whom, he said, he was likely to keep up a correspondence. Despite James’s initial feeling of awe toward his European colleagues, he came away from long hours of conversations with them feeling self-affirmed: “I found that I had a more cosmopolitan knowledge of modern philosophic literature than any of them, and shall on the whole feel much less intimidated by the thought of their like than hitherto,” he wrote to Alice (Corr. V: 286). He immediately asked Alice to forward to him copies of “The Feeling of Effort”; “The Sentiment of Rationality”; “Great Men, Great Thoughts and the Environment,” which he had published in the Atlantic Monthly and “Reflex Action and Theism,” which had appeared in the Unitarian Review. “Swapping one’s articles is the great way to get things early & surely from other men,” he told Alice. It was also the great way to get one’s ideas disseminated. Of the articles he sent for, “The Feeling of Effort” was especially important to James and to his European readers; Renouvier, for one, called the article “un petit chef d’oeuvre” (Corr.V 315, to AHJ, December 3 [ 18821). In this essay, James asserted that the feeling of effort was not limited to muscular exertion but applied as well to attention and will. The effort felt by one making a decision, he said, was identical to the effort felt by one executing a motor task, such as lifting an object or walking across a room. The feeling of volition, according to James, need not have any resultant movement in order to be felt as effort. Here, he gave the example of an amputee who testified to the intense feeling of effort felt by trying to lift the lost limb, even though no result could possibly be effected by this effort. Besides serving as one of James’searliest expositions on the will, the essay helped James to position himself among psychologists who looked primarily to laboratory results to understand the workings of the mind. As he wrote later in “On Some Omissions of Introspective

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Psychology” ( 1884), there were, in his estimation, “immense tracts of our inner life . . . habitually overlooked and falsified by our most approved psychological authorities” (EPs, p. 248). In December 1882, James was invited to attend a meeting of the Scratch Eight, a monthly convocation of eight British intellectuals, including George Croom Robertson, Shadworth Hodgson, Edmund Gurney, and Leslie Stephen. While he found the circle stimulating, he also regretted the time he had to spend in reading the members’ works, the better to participate in their conversations. Moreover, he felt little affinity to some of the members, notably Leslie Stephen. Robertson and Hodgson continued to be his closest British colleagues, and he exulted, too, in Edmund Gurney, “one of the first rate minds of the time . . . with an extremely handsome face, voice, & general air of distinction about him, altogether the exact opposite of the classical idea of a philosopher” (Corr. V: 332, to AHJ, December 16, 1882). Gurney served as bridge to another important group of intellectuals who took James up in the 1880s: the London Society for Psychical Research, newly established, and boasting a roster of eminent members, including some prominent academics (Henry Sidgwick, professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge, and physicist William Barrett, for example) and political figures, including Arthur Balfour, whose administrative experience as vice president perhaps served him later as prime minister of Britain. The Society for Psychical Research sought to bring to experiments in psychical research the same rigorous control that others brought to experiments currently underway in psychology laboratories throughout Europe. James needed no persuasion to support their efforts. In fact, after William Barrett staged a successful tour of America in 1884, James became one of the founding members of the American Society for Psychical Research. “Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena,” he wrote in “The Hidden Self” (EP5,p. 248). Such irregular phenomena included mediums, especially one Leonora Piper, who came to his attention in 1885; cabinet skances; demonstrations by hypnotists, and his own experiments in hypnotism conducted on willing students and colleagues; experiments in automatic writing, some of which were conducted in his own laboratory; and examinations of patients exhibiting mental pathologies. James published the results of his investigations in several articles in the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research: reports on hypnotism and mediumistic phenomena ( 1886);“Reaction-Time in Hypnotic Trace” (1887), “The Consciousness of Lost Limbs” (1887), “Notes on Automatic Writing” (l889),and “A Record of Observations of Certain Phenomena of Trance,” chronicling his sessions with Piper (1890) (all found in EPR). Although this interest in psychical research later became a source of

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contention for James in America, he found continued support among British, French, and Swiss colleagues. Doing Philosophy: 1889

By the spring of 1889, when James left home to attend the first International Congress of Physiological Psychology in Paris, he still had not completed his Principles, but he had published many of his most significant discussions from the manuscript. His readers, therefore, were familiar with his notion of the stream of thought, his consideration of instinct and habit, and even his odd theory of the emotions: “we are sorry because we cry, angry because we strike etc, instead of vice versa” (Corr. V: 475, to Thomas Davidson, December 20, 1883). Although in The Principles James gave due attention to the work of laboratory psychologists,by 1889 his readers also were aware of his doubts about scientific objectivity. In “On the Function of Cognition,”a talk James gave before the Aristotelian Society late in 1884 and published in Mind in 1885, James pointed to the limits of generalizing from laboratory data. For James, the complex emotional and intellectual context of each individual, including the scientist, was a crucial factor in shaping perception. An individual’s necessarily subjective perceptions served as the basis for inferences about the perceptions of others. “We see each other looking at the same objects, pointing to them and turning them over in various ways,” he explained, “and thereupon we hope and trust that all of our several feelings resemble the reality and each other. But,” he added, “this is a thing of which we are never theoretically sure” ( M T ,p. 24). Between external reality and one’s perception of that reality lies the interference of both subjective experiences and language. Yet communication about reality is possible, James argued, because “we believe our PERCEPTS are possessed by us in common. And we believe this because the percepts of each one of us seem to be changed in consequence of changes in the percepts of someone else” ( M T ,p. 30). In “What the Will Effects,” published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1888, translated for Renouvier’s Critique Philosophique the same year and incorporated into The Principles, James again underscored his dissatisfaction with the methodology and focus of “the new Psychology”: “To know how to handle a chronograph or a Bunsen cell, and to dissect out a frog’s sciatic nerve, even if not a dog’s, are beginning to be held as important requisites in a professor of mental science,”he noted (EP5, p. 216). They were not important requisites in his estimation. If in 1878 he enthusiastically had embraced the field of psychology, a decade later he confessed that he preferred a more philosophical context for asking psychological questions. The International Congress drew many philosophers who shared his predilection.

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Despite its proclaimed focus on physiological psychology, the meeting had a broader agenda. Psychical matters proved to be an important focus, as members of the congress considered hypnotic phenomena, telepathy, and hallucination. As in his earlier trip, James found the conference especially important because it enabled him to meet philosophers and psychologists with whom he felt a kindred intellectual bond; foremost among these men were Swiss psychologist Theodore Flournoy and the young German researcher Hugo Munsterberg. Flournoy, who taught psychology at the University of Geneva, shared James’s complaints about experimental psychology and also his interest in psychical research. He became a lifelong friend and correspondent of James’s, disseminating, defending, and publicizing his work. Unlike Flournoy, twenty-six-year-old Munsterberg was committed to experimental psychology. Although he had followed a career path similar to James’s-medical studies, physiological psychology, and philosophy-he was so enthusiastic about the potential for experimental psychology that, for want of university facilities, he set up a laboratory in his home. A few years after their meeting, James convinced Harvard’s president Eliot to recruit Miinsterberg to oversee the college’s psychology laboratory, a task that James found burdensome and irrelevant to his own interests. As Harvard’s first professor of psychology, James maintained that his goal was to “do philosophy all the same” (Corr.VI: 1283, to AHJ, November 3, 1889). Doing philosophy, for James, meant turning his attention to religious and moral questions-those questions that had so unwaveringly occupied his father. “It is a curious thing this matter of God!” James wrote to his friend Thomas Davidson. I can sympathize perfectly with the most rabid hater of him and the idea of him, when I think of the use that has been made of him in history and philosophy as a starting point, or premiss for grounding deductions. But as an Ideal to attain and make probable, I find myself less and less able to do without him.

For James, however, such an Ideal need not be the Creator of a monistic uni-

verse, such as his father had posited.

All I mean is that there must be some subjective unity in the Universe which has purposes commensurable with my own and which is at the same time large enough to be, among all the powers that may be there, the strongest. I simply refuse to accept the notion of there being no purpose in the objective world. . . . In saying “God exists” alI I imply is that my purposes are cared for by a mind so powerful as on the whole to control the drift of the Universe. This is as much polytheism as monotheism. (Corr. V 194-195, January 1,1882)

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This “matter of God” and its implications for knowledge, reality, and morality had for many years been subjects of intense discussions between James and his Harvard colleague Josiah Royce. Royce acknowledged these conversations in his introduction to The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, a book that James praised effusively in letters to friends and in an enthusiastic review in the Atlantic Monthly (1885). Royce’s questions, after all, were James’s as well: Does our thought of something represent the thing itself? Can two knowers know the same thing? Does reality exist apart from one’s thought of reality? And, most pressingly, does some transcendent Thought exist in the universe? In response to those questions, Royce posited the idea of one infinite, all-encompassing Thought that knows all truth. Although James easily rejected idealisms posited by other philosophers, Royce’s struck him as “suggestive of springtime” in its originality (ECR, p. 387). According to James, Royce offered a “new argument for monistic idealism, an argument based on the possibility of truth and error in knowledge.” An argument, James added, that was “one of the few big original suggestions of recent philosophical writing. I have vainly tried to escape from it. I still suspect it of inconclusiveness, but I frankly confess that I am unable to overthrow it” (Letters I: 265, to Carl Stumpf, February 6, 1887). James eventually would escape from Royce’s idealism, but his enthusiasm in 1885 points to his abiding concern over the threat of science to the faith that he deeply wanted to revive within himself. Religious Experiences: 1901 An invitation to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 gave James the chance to expand upon the arguments he presented in his essay “The Will to Believe” and to reflect, once again, on the relationship between faith and pragmatism. His audiences grew from lecture to lecture, until he was speaking before some three hundred scholars and students, far more than he had expected. Although James felt that the audience brought considerable “Christian prejudices” to his talks, he found his listeners generally interested and appreciative (VRE, p. 544, quoting letter to Charles Eliot Norton, June 26, 1901). Those lectures, published in 1902 as The Varieties of Religious Experience, reflected James’s goal of providing a compendium of material to support his assertion that the expression of faith is widely diverse; that faith can be experienced idiosyncratically, outside of an institutional community of organized religion; that some individuals, because of a subliminal openness, were more receptive than others to mystical experiences; and that the defining criteria for

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whether or not an experience was religious was its effect on the psychological or emotional well-being of the individual. As in his other works, James mined his own life and experiences for anecdotes and conclusions; supplementing this material, he drew upon a huge cache of data amassed by one of his students, who, for a research project of his own, had circulated throughout the Harvard community a questionnaire about religious practices. The sheer weight of these sources gave the book an appearance of scientific objectivity. James’s goal, however, was not to defend religion by scientific proof but to argue against naturalists, on the one hand, and philosophers whom James called (‘refined supernaturalists:’ on the other. James created for himself a special position as a “piecemeal supernaturalist” who felt no intellectual contradiction in accepting the reality of mystical or supernatural occurrences (VRE, p. 410). For James, any path to the subconscious offered a possible opportunity for the generation of faith. Mind cure movements, for example, incorporated “traces of Christian mysticism, of transcendental idealism, of vedantism, and of the modern psychology of the subliminal self” to persuade adherents of their “inlet to the divine” (VRE, pp. 88,93). In both the (‘healthy-minded and in what James called the congenitally pessimistic “sick soul:’ mind cure practitioners drew upon religious rhetoric and practices to change their clients’ perception of self, world, and possibility. The first step in transcending fear, pessimism, and worry was self-surrender: Surrender, that is, to the idea that there existed a higher consciousness able to infiltrate and influence subliminal mental states, resulting in meliorism-the conviction that life would and must get better-and, consequently, in physical well-being. To some readers, it seemed that James was willing to call any intense personal revelation a religious experience and to embrace the abnormal or the paranormal within his definition of religion. Such readers were offended by the sheer exuberance of James’s stance; but for many others-the readers who bought ten thousand copies of the book in its first year of publication-James offered a liberating definition of religion and faith. Abroad, James received warm assessments of his book from many of his colleagues, including Carl Stumpf and, not surprisingly, from Flournoy, who arranged for its translation into French. L’Expkrience religieuse: Essai de psychologie descriptive, translated by Frank Abauzit, was published in Paris in 1906. A Danish translation followed later in 1906, a German translation in 1908, and a Russian one in 1910. The Problem of Pragmatism: 1908

Pragmatism, James said, was nothing more than a new name for old ways of thinking, ways of thinking that preceded the separation of science from its

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origins in philosophy. This attempt to ensure the status of philosophy by drawing it closer to its scientific origins was shared by other philosophers, notably Charles Peirce, who, according to James, coined the term pragmatism as early as the 1870s. Philosophy and science, these men saw, essentially rely on the same methods: observing, comparing, classifymg, and formulating hypotheses. But philosophy, for at least three hundred years, had been focused on developing systems of thought that increasingly divorced it from the exigencies of real life. This inapplicability of philosophy to the many social and political problems of late-nineteenth-century America seemed to James regrettable. Pragmatism holds that the truth of an idea is inextricably connected to the consequences of that idea; that the personality and context of a thinker is inextricably connected to what is thought; and that transcendent abstractions do not suffice in describing reality. For James, the consequences of an idea meant the practical effects of holding that idea, the consequences for the individual in terms of a feeling of well-being or satisfaction, or the consequences for community in terms of cohesiveness and stability. Pragmatism invested each individual with the authority to determine truths; privileged what James called percepts over abstract concepts; and linked philosophical decisions to moral actions. James first used the term pragmatism rather late in his career, in a talk he delivered at the Philosophical Union in Berkeley, California, in 1898. In “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” James made two important points: first, that philosophical affinity was influenced by an individual’s temperament: a person’s needs and interests inspired attention to one philosophical question, or to one theory, rather than another. That personal impetus gave philosophy an immediate connection to an individual‘s everyday life. Second, one’s philosophy determined how one made ethical decisions and affirmed a sense of authority to take action, or not, in the face of moral dilemmas. Beliefs must make a difference and have perceptible consequences, or they are not worth arguing over. Although James called for “civic courage” in the face of concrete social problems, pragmatism, as he saw it, also could help one consider the most compelling unresolved philosophical problem: God’s existence first of all, and the question of whether God were One or Many. James suggested that individuals consider their personal stake in the answer to that question: what difference would it make if God were one Absolute? How would one’s daily life, behavior, and sense of well-being change? As he considered this issue in his works, notably Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth,James proposed a distinction between tough-minded and tender-minded thinkers, the tough-minded being empiricist and pluralistic, but pessimistic and fatalistic; and the tender-minded being rationalistic

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and idealistic, yet optimistic and “free-willist.”James posited pragmatism as a method of justifying religious belief no matter which perspective one took. The ideas presented in “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” were elaborated upon and extended in 1906, when James delivered a series of Lowell lectures in Boston, talks that he repeated at Columbia University the following year. Even as he worked on his Lowell lectures, James knew that among his colleagues in America and abroad, considerable doubts had surfaced about pragmatism as a theory of truth and as a justification of religious belief. One cause of objection was the term pragmatism itself, too easily confused with practicality or mere expediency. But when his fellow pragmatist, Oxonian Ferdinand Canning Schiller, suggested the more widely accepted humanism, James balked. That term, he believed, was too historically embedded in theological discussions and did not imply, as much as James wanted to, a focus on concrete consequences. Still, as much as they debated about the impact of pragmatism versus humanism, James and Schiller believed themselves allies in a war against intellectualism. In the last decades of James’s life, Schiller served as his most reliable and zealous supporter. As James worked to clarify his own ideas on pragmatism, pluralism, and radical empiricism, Schiller served as sympathetic respondent, urging James to push forward, despite criticism from his colleagues. Schiller understood that critics were upset that their own authority as philosophers, the elite status that they conferred upon themselves, was threatened by James. By insisting that any individual, and every individual, had the authority to recognize reality and identify truth, James undermined the very profession of philosophy. Besides Schiller, James found few wholehearted supporters, and he became discouraged by what he considered a persistent misunderstanding of his work. He was tired, he once admitted to Schiller, “of being treated as 1/2 idiot, 1/2 scoundrel” by such critics as Arthur 0. Lovejoy, John McTaggart, and George Moore (Scott 465 [January 1, 19081).James received a welcome boost during a three-month‘s trip to Europe in the spring of 1905. At the end of April, in Rome for the Fifth International Congress of Psychology, he went to the conference hall to register, “and when I gave my name,” he told Alice, “the lady who was taking them almost fainted, saying that all Italy loved me, or words to that effect.” His effusive admirer called in one of the officers of the congress, who, just as impressed, implored James to give a talk at one of the general meetings (Houghton, April 25, 1905). For his talk, he condensed-and speedily translated into French-his recently published “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?”’ Responding to the prevalent

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notions of mind-body dualism that he had questioned in The Principles, James argued that consciousness “as it is commonly represented, either as an entity, or as pure activity, but in any case as being fluid, unextended, diaphanous, devoid of content of its own, but directly self-knowing-spiritual, in short” was nothing more than “pure fancy.” What did exist, according to James, were “pure experiences” of objects, events, or people, that “succeed one another; they enter into infinitely varied relations; and these relations are themselves essential parts of the web of experiences.” That consciousness of experience is shaped by each individual’s past experiences, interests, memories, needs. Distinguishing between “subject” and “object,” “thing” and “thought,” therefore, was not philosophically useful. The knower and the known were inseparable components of any e~perience.~ “In my view,” James said, “self-transcendency is everywhere denied. Instead of it, and performing the same function, we have the continuity of adjacents. It is clear that too much attention cannot be brought to bear upon this n ~ t i o n . ” ~ James found many of his European listeners as puzzled by such assertions as his American audience. But one small contingent seemed to understand him fully-and not only to understand, to hail and herald: a group of Italian philosophers, led by twenty-four-year-old Giovanni Papini, called James their mentor. The group published a monthly journal, Leonardo, with writing that James found so clear and accessible that he wished American philosophers could use it as a model. Papini’s literary skill, especially his talent with adjectives and metaphors, seemed to James just what was needed to communicate his own ideas. He thought especially fruitful Papini’s definition of pragmatism as “a collection of attitudes and methods” that took a position of “armed neutrality in the midst of doctrines. It is like a corridor in a hotel, from which a hundred doors open into a hundred chambers. In one you may see a man on his knees praying to regain his faith; in another a desk at which sits some one eager to destroy all metaphysics; in a third a laboratory with an investigator looking for new footholds by which to advance upon the future. But the corridor belongs to all, and all must pass there. Pragmatism, in short, is a great corridor-theory” (EPh, p.46). In Papini, James recognized an iconoclast who believed, as he did, that philosophy should liberate the imagination. Papini and his compatriots had succeeded in countering James’s despondency about his potential contribution to philosophy. James spent the rest of his European holiday in Greece, Switzerland, England, and France, where he met with other men who encouraged his ideas: Schiller, Flournoy, and Henri Bergson. Yet as much as he was energized by conversations with these philosophers, James believed that he could and must clarify his ideas for a larger audience. When he returned home, therefore, he set to work on explaining the

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principles of pragmatism, pluralism, and radical empiricism that so thwarted his readers’ understanding. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking was published in 1907; A Pluralistic Universe (containing lectures that James delivered at Manchester College, Oxford in 1908-1909) was published in 1909; The Meaning of Truth reprinted articles from James’s career that helped to define and explain pragmatism and radical empiricism; and Some Problems of Philosophy, James’s last philosophical effort, was published posthumously in 1911. In 1882, James wrote to Renouvier, reflecting on the questions of free will, authority, and morality that occupied so much of their ongoing conversation. The excerpt seems an appropriate last word for this introduction to James’s thought: James’s poignant, somewhat wistful, statement of what he consistently willed to believe as his essential precepts: I believe more and more that free will, if accepted at all, must be accepted as a postulate in justification of our moral judgment that certain things already done might have been better done. This implies that something different was possible in their place. The determinist, who calls this judgment false, cannot consistently mean that so far as it actually was rendered, a truer judgment could have been in its place. Both falsity & evil are for him, in what concerns the past, entirely separated from that mental connexion with “what might have been” in which (to our ordinary consciousness,) lies the essence of their meaning. The only way in which he can save the rationality of the world to his own mind is by taking refuge in an absolute optimistic faith which says, the work as a whole is the richer and better for having had that error, that evil, in it at that particular place and time. Hence an absolute justification of all past fact, and consequently an absolute indifferentism to all future fact. For as long as languages contain a future-perfect tense, it will be possible for men in looking towards the future, to think of it as something that shall have been, and that consequently may be treated according to the law of the past. . . . It is in fact the religious view, and I feel strongly the attractiveness of it myself. Religion and morality, when radically treated, seem essentially opposed, in fact. But it seems to me that History decides sufficiently clearly between the two: Quietistic fatalistic optimism leads to antinomianism of one sort or an other and some sink of corruption always lies practically at the end. So, for entirely practical reasons, I hold that we are justified in believing that both falsehood and evil to some degree need not have been.-I wish you would examine more closely than you have done the relations of deterministic rationality with optimism, and the enervating practical fruits of every absolute, (as distinguished from limited or moral) optimism. (Corr.V 260, September 28,1882)

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Notes 1. William James, Diary, February 1, 1870, Houghton Library (MS Am 1092.9 [4550]), Harvard University. Hereafter designated in the text as “Houghton.” 2. Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods (September 1, 1904):

477491. 3. “La Notion de Conscience.”:Translation; ERE, pp. 261-271. 4. Manuscript Lectures: p. 320.

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2 Adventures in Time and Space: Dostoevsky, William James, and the Perilous Journey to Conversion Robin Feuer Miller

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counter conversions, deconversions abound in Dostoevsky‘s fiction. Virtually all of them partake, in some way, of the motif of the journey. The road, the crossroads, the short cut, the bridge, the back alley, the detour, the threshold, the public square-these are the common locales of the Dostoevskian conversion. The road maps for these thoroughfares and byways have been charted by at least five generations of critics; Dostoevsky criticism now constitutes a combination atlas and guidebook, in which the travels and the stopping points of Dostoevsky‘s travelers have been logged, from Petersburg’s Izmaylovsky Bridge to the Siberian steppe, from the Crystal Palace to the damp, spider-ridden bathhouse. In “The Sick Soul,” the sixth and seventh of the Gifford lectures (1901-1902), James writes eloquently and at length of Tolstoy’s account in A Confession (1884) of the loss and recovery of personal faith that assailed the great Russian writer in the last decades of his life. He never mentions Dostoevsky, yet The Varieties of Religious Experience offers a means of understanding the Dostoevskian journey to conversion even more profoundly than it does the Tolstoyan one, for “Dostoevsky” (that self, semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional hero who appears in the story “Peasant Marei”) and his characters undergo experiences that resemble those of many of the mystics in James’s case studies. Some of Dostoevsky‘s characters (most notably Zosima and Alyosha) at their journey’s end eventually take on the qualities of saints, as described by James. Throughout Dostoevsky‘s fiction the experience of conversion is a frighteningly perilous one, for in it the movement toward God threatens, at virtually ONVERSIONS, PARTIAL CONVERSIONS,

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every moment, to change direction,to collapse into its opposite. Conversion hovers at the edge of perversion, while perversion may, by an infinitesimal shift of the kaleidoscope, by a minute rearrangement of identical elements, become conversion. For Dostoevsky the conversion experience includes another dimension as well. It is by now a commonplace to discern in Dostoevsky‘s work frequent moments of the fantastic-the fantastic as defined by Tzvetan Todorov-which the reader (and the character) experience temporally as a period of hesitation before exiting into an interpretation of the text as realistic or marvelous. Not surprisingly, then, the experience of conversion embodies a metaphysical apprehension of the fantastic, a fleeting but unforgettable sensation of “contact with other worlds.” By 1880, when he wrote The Brothers Kararnazov,this theme of “contact with other worlds” no longer resonated covertly, but instead was a full-bodied presence that announced itself repeatedly and with many variations. But reader and character alike can become fruitlessly enmeshed in the attempt to decide whether “what happened” was real or hallucinatory, and moreover, if they focus solely on trying to name, to classify, their experience, its essence, its authenticity, may begin to elude them. The brush with the essential, which occurs during a conversion, eludes classification. It is from this perspective that the ridiculous man speaks when he proclaims, “The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of happiness is higher than happiness-that is what we have to fight against” (“The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” p. 738). In these pages I shall be examining Dostoevsky’s ongoing fascination with those inward conversion journeys in which the paradigmatic and necessary shift of the locus of being from the head to the heart is effected by a process of transformation which, in one form or another, partakes of an uncanny journey through time and space. This journey may be simultaneously a journey from the known to the unknown and from the unknown to the known. A character’s journey to conversion may result in a genuine spiritual awakening. I use here William James’s definition of conversion as “the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong, inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right, superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities” (VRE, p. 157). But the journey to conversion may result in a perversion of such experience. Rather than the polarity between conversion and perversion that one might expect to find, there exists a troubling mutuality or symbiosis between them-a homeopathic rather than an allopathic relationship, if you will-that is, a relationship of like to like rather than one based on difference. X can resemble nothing so much as XI,but XI,is toxic, while X is life-giving. (For example, Dostoevsky’s ongoing exploration of the dreadful tension between God-man and Man-god-the Shatov/Kirillov dichotomy-embodies a homeopathic rather than an allopathic relationship.)

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The four key journeys to conversion in Dostoevsky‘s work that I consider here are accounts ranging from autobiography transmitted through the lens of fiction to fiction passed on through the lens of autobiography. As early as 1868, in The Idiot, Dostoevsky had demonstrated a sustained interest in representing the experience of conversion as a fantastic journey, but such conversion journeys become particularly prevalent in his work from 1876 on. My texts are “Peasant Marei,” “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” Ivan Karamazov’s nightmare encounter with the devil, and Alyosha Karamazov’s vision of Cana of Galilee. “Peasant Marei” (TheDiary o f a Writer, February 1876) offers a paradigm for the experience of conversion in Dostoevsky.l Whether we follow Joseph Frank and see in this work a profound visionary expression of Dostoevsky‘s turning to the people, or whether we follow Robert Louis Jackson and see a three-tiered recollection of a recollection expressing a religious profession de foi, we encounter in this work a quintessential example of conversion literature. Frank explicates Dostoevsky’s conversion experience and finds present in it the three key ingredients of the archetypal conversion, as defined by William James in his “still unsurpassed” (according to Frank) The Varieties of Religious Experience: “The sense that all is well with one. . . even though the outer conditions should remain the same . . . ;the sense of perceiving truths not known before . . . [and] an appearance of newness [that] beautifies every object” (Frank, p. 116).*These conditions prevail just as neatly in “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” and in Alyosha’s vision of Cana of Galilee, whereas their presence is, at best, experienced only fleetingly and partially by Ivan. In James’s first lecture in Varieties, “Religion and Neurology,” a title worthy of Rakitin or of Ivan Karamazov, he enumerates the qualities of a typical “religious leader” before he has undergone a conversion. James’s description reads like Dostoevsky’s notebook sketches for his heroes and anti-heroes alike: Even more perhaps than other kinds of geniuses, religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of an exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner life, and [have] had melancholy during a part of their career. They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fured ideas, and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological. ( VRE, p. 15)

Indeed, in James’s view the “two main phenomena of religion are melancholy and conversion,” and the successful conversion in Dostoevsky’s scheme also involves a journey from one state to the other. Subsequently, in discussing Tolstoy’s Confession, James breaks down the notion of melancholy into two key components that characterize the preconversion state. The attack of melancholy that can lead to religious

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conversion, states James, consists, first of all, of anhedoniaa passive loss of appetite for life’s values. Second, this melancholy casts the world in “an altered and estranged aspect” which eventually, in the desire for “philosophic relief,” stimulates a “gnawing, carking questioning” ( VRE, p. 126).3Interestingly enough, Dostoevsky‘s characters often exhibit a Jamesian anhedonia. The frequent tag phrase, that marker of existential despair, “nothing makes any difference,” uttered by Raskolnikov, Ippolit, Stavrogin, the ridiculous man, and Ivan, reflects nothing so much as an acute “loss of appetite for life’s values.” The sense of estrangement and the “gnawing questioning” of the Dostoevskian hero find expression (and relief) in the otherworldly journey to conversion, a journey brought about by melancholy and the desire to cast it off. This journey defamiliarizes the known. In all of Dostoevsky’s conversion scenes, memory-both that which is consciously remembered and that which is subliminal, literally beneath the threshold of memory-plays a key role. James observes that “the memory of an insult may make us angrier than the insult did when we received it”-that is, the power of ‘remoter’facts, often exerts greater force on our actions and beliefs than do actual, present material sensations (VRE, p. 51).4James points out that these subliminal memories are far closer to the conscious mind than the material present in the unconscious. Here, he seems to prefigure Bakhtinian ideas and even language when he observes, “Recent psychology has found great use for the word ‘threshold’ as a symbolic designation for the point at which one state of mind passes into another” (VRE, p. 115). That moment of crisis, in which the process of conversion may seem so rapid as to be instantaneous, is really the result, in James’s view, of lysis, an event composed of subliminal material. Writes James: “The older medicine used to speak of two ways, lysis and crisis, one gradual, the other abrupt, from which one might recover from a bodily disease. In the spiritual realm there are also two ways, one gradual, the other sudden, in which inner unification may occur” (VRE, pp. 152-153). He then classes Tolstoy and Bunyan as examples of “the gradual way.” Dostoevsky‘s characters, on the other hand, tend to experience conversion through crisis. Those memories, however, that reveal “whole systems of underground life . ..which lead a parasitic existence,” irrupt into consciousness with “hallucinations, pains, convulsions” (p. 191). Dostoevsky, to designate that threshold point of spiritual conversion where subliminal memory intersects with present despair, puts his characters into supernatural, fantastic, and mystical relations with time and space, that is, he uses the motif of the journey. The crucial element in James’s understanding of religious conversion is the fact that evil is not destroyed, undone, or rendered impotent, but it is incorporated, miraculously,into a sense of divine harmony. Indeed, at its very heart, the experience of conversion, in James’s view, exists as a paradoxical response

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to the problem of evil. “When disillusionment has gone as far as this, there is seldom a restitio ad integrum. One has tasted of the fruit of the tree, and the happiness of Eden never comes again. The happiness that comes, when any does come . . . is not the simple ignorance of ill, but something vastly more complex, including natural evil as one of its elements, but finding natural evil no such stumbling block and terror because it now sees it swallowed up in supernatural good. The process is one of redemption, not of mere reversion to natural health, and the sufferer, when saved, is saved by what seems to him a second birth, a deeper kind of conscious being than he could enjoy before” (VRE, p. 131). James carefully underscores the perilousness of this processthat “happiness” may not come; the sufferer is not always “saved.” In fact, the process can work the other way: “The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with. The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact,” he writes. This mental state accords with an example of counter conversion or perversion that James claims to have translated from the French but which is, in fact, a moving account of a devastating experience that took him unawares in April 1870. One evening “without any warning” he experienced “a horrible fear of [his] own existence.” Suddenly, “simultaneously” he remembers (ital. mine) a terrifymg, motionless epileptic he had seen in an asylum. “This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. . . .I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether. . . .It was like a revelation” (VRE, p. 134). James’s own work, given this veiled autobiographical account, itself expresses a profoundly moving longing for the kind of positive religious experience he describes in others. Like Ivan Karamazov, James experiences a demonic negative revelation, the minus instead of the plus.5 “Peasant Marei” With this Jamesian model for conversion in mind, let us return to “Peasant Marei.” In his compelling analysis of this work, Jackson makes three observations that can offer rich veins for the exploration of other moments of conversion in Dostoevsky‘s fiction. By finding in “Peasant Marei” a three-tiered structure of experience, vision, and recollection of a recollection, Jackson calls attention to three crucial matters: one about memory, one about conversion itself, one about the stunning economy of the power of dream language. Dostoevsky‘s visionary work is chiseled out of memory in all its formsconscious, liminal, subliminal, and above all, artistically transformed. Dostoevsky describes how, as a convict “[he] used to analyze these impressions,

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adding new touches to things long ago outlived, and-what is more important-[he] used to correct, continually correct them” (Diary of a Writer, p. 207). As he recalls, the “convict Dostoevsky” enters a trance-like state (like that described by James) where present misery is unexpectedly overtaken by memory. He journeys to a newly remembered, long-forgotten past. The “child Dostoevsky”journeys out of the ravine and into the bushes and hears a cry of “wolf!” The “convict Dostoevsky” is in the midst of his painful Siberian sojourn. The “great writer Dostoevsky” (the voice narrating the 1876 account) mentally journeys back to both times at once. Time becomes double time: a bright day at the end of August 1830 coalesces with the second day of Easter week in 1850. The glaring concrete present time of 1850 imperceptibly assumes the shimmer of the fantastic by containing within it a day from childhood in 1830: “This intoxicated, shaven and branded peasant.. . why, he may be the very same Marei” (p. 210). Jackson goes on to ask a crucial question, “When did the miracle take place?” In the summer of 1830, at the time of the childhood hallucination; in Easter week of 1850, when “without any effort of my will . . . [the memory of the wolf and the peasant Marei] came to my mind at the needed time” or in 1876,when Dostoevsky “recollected the recollection” (Jackson, p. 25). Indeed, this question of “precisely when” becomes a central one for the ridiculous man, for Ivan, and for Alyosha as well. It is a question which touches upon a constant paradox of conversion, one which James illustrates through a quotation of the words of the American philosopher Xenos Clark, who observed, “The truth is that we travel on a journey that was accomplished before we set out” (VRE, p. 30911). Although a conversion experience tends to be regarded as a discrete event after which one’s life is changed, the closer one tries to look at it, the hazier the borders of this event become. We cannot locate with certainty the actual moment of conversion for Dostoevsky, for the ridiculous man, for Ivan, or for Alyosha; we can only witness their journeys and watch their subsequent efforts to transmit their experience to others. The convict Dostoevsky‘s memory welled up in response to his horror of his fellow convicts. The child Dostoevsky ran in terror from the imaginary wolf to the motherly arms of the peasant Marei. Jackson discovers a compelling link between the two, one that is fully consonant with Freudian dream interpretation, in the fact that the Russian word for wolf, volk, is the German word, Volk,for “the people” (Jackson, p. 28). Dostoevsky‘s profession of faith, his intimate account of his turning to the people, thus hinges upon a radical semantic conversion: the terrifying “volk” somehow is reincarnated into the redeemed “ Volk.” Nothing in everyday reality changes, but Dostoevsky felt that “by some miracle, all the hatred and anger completely vanished from my heart” (p. 210). Curiously, as early as 1918, the Freudian psychoanalyst Alfred

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Adler had stumbled upon the psychological importance of this elusive wolf and had lectured on his findings. “This reminiscence is generally interpreted as if it characterized Dostoevsky’s bond with the peasantry. However, the important thing here is the wolf, the wolf that drives the writer back to man” (Adler, p. 287).6 But that wolf that drives Dostoevsky back to man exists within all men, even within Marei himself, the figure of safety toward whom the terrified child runs. This is the typical terror of the nightmare into which any ecstatic dream can instantaneously collapse. James Rice, following the lead of the Soviet scholar L. M. Rozenblium, discovers that immediately below the surface of the tender, motherly Marei himself lurks “peasant brutality and the potential for abrupt violence.” Rozenblium cites a manuscript passage for “Peasant Marei” that clearly derives from Raskolnikov’s dream of the horse in Crime and Punishment. “He has moments of inward impatience, and the Tatar within him bursts forth, and he starts beating his little mare, his ‘nurse and provider,’ across her eyes with his knout when she is stuck in the mud with the cart” (Zilbershtein and Rozenblium, p. 416; Rice, p. 258). In these manuscript pages, that terrifying yolk lurks within the iconic one-within Marei himself. The child Dostoevsky does not rush from the imaginary wolf to the welcoming embrace of the peasant. He rushes instead into the arms of a figure who himself embodies both polarities. Marei himself becomes a disturbingly liminal figure. The proximity, the mutuality, of good and evil is endlessly problematic. Did Dostoevsky remove this passage because he believed his readers would reject his profession de foi if it were included? Or does this excerpt offer us the very crux of the matter? Before leaving “Peasant Marei,” I would like to suggest certain nodules in the text which seem to possess a tangle of meaning that Dostoevsky would continue to rework, transpose, and p ~ n d e r First, . ~ in Dostoevsky‘s presentation of it, the journey to conversion, at whatever locale in time or space one decides to say it occurred, is located within a frame, a rhyme of sorts. The despairing convict Dostoevsky rushes out of his cell, his heart filled with anger and loathing of the peasant brutality around him. He then hears the words of the Polish convict, “Je hays ces brigands.” The story ends with Dostoevsky’s second encounter with the Pole and a repetition of the French phrase, but now, of course, all is changed. This framing recurs, with variations, for the ridiculous man, Ivan, and Alyosha at their critical moments as well. Second, at the core of “Peasant Marei” one finds a frightened child, the nine-year-old Dostoevsky. The suffering of a child also poses fundamental questions for the ridiculous man, Ivan, and Alyosha. Third, the convict Dostoevsky’s visions “used to begin with some speck.” We have here a suggestion of the trance-like state, most prominent in Stavrogin, of course, but evident too in the ridiculous

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man, Ivan, and even Alyosha. Fourth, Dostoevsky carefully gives the precise time of year when these important events occurred: the time of the auditory childhood hallucination is August, the end of summer, “a dry and clear day, though somewhat chilly and windy” (p. 207). Marei for an instant almost believes the frightened child; then he comforts him with assurances that it has been a dream, then gently reenters the world of delusion and assures him that “I shall not surrender thee to the wolf?” (p. 209). The memory remains hidden in Dostoevsky‘s soul, and then, without any intellectual effort, comes to the fore “at the needed time” during Easter week. The frame, the needy child, the trance, the precise description of the day on which the conversion occurs, the subliminal memories which re-surface “at the needed time”-all these elements function as mysterious talismans that, in one form or another, resurface in subsequent conversion scenes, almost as if Dostoevsky‘s individual stories and novels were themselves separate worlds, making mysterious contact with one another. The Ridiculous Man and DeQuincey’s Opium-Eater “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” a short story that impressed Mikhail Bakhtin by virtue of its “maximal universality,” “maximal terseness,” and its remarkable “artistic and philosophical laconism,” is a stunning and vexing tale-stunning, in that despite its laconism, it teems with sources, yet hauntingly original and vexing, in that it provokes strong disagreement among its readers over the question of whether the ridiculous man’s experience was one of conversion or of perversion. Bakhtin links this story to “the dream satire” and to “fantastic journeys” containing a utopian element (Bakhtin, p. 147): In the eighteenth-century French tradition, utopian works were most frequently called rtves (dreams), codes, robinsonades (Crusoe stories), or voyages imaginaires. In fact, one nineteenth-century French dictionary actually defined utopie as chimtre (Manuel, p. 6 ) .Thus, Dostoevsky knew full well that the title would immediately carry these utopian associations to any of his educated contemporary readers. Yet Dostoevsky‘s title and its utopian or dystopian connotations can easily deflect the reader from the story’s most authentic genealogical tie, for “The Dream’s’’ most intimate kinship lies with the conversion tale or the tale of visionary experience. Its structure and thematics particularly duplicate A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, although we can find echoes of some of Poe’s stories in “The Dream” as well. In “Peasant Marei” the words of the Polish convict, “Je hays ces brigands:’ framed the tale, and, by the different meaning they took on at the end, high-

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lighted the Jamesian concept that after a conversion, although outward circumstances may remain the same, such features are invested with new and radiant meaning. In “The Dream” the narrator’s knowledge of his own ridiculousness functions as a partial frame to the story. He knows that others find him ridiculous both before and after his conversion journey. Before his dream journey, the realization that he has “always cut a ridiculous figure,” along with his solipsistic belief that nothing makes any difference,brings him to the brink of suicide. His anhedonia (to use James’s term for “the sick soul”) is acute. After his conversion journey, however, this ridiculousness has become precious to him: “They still regard me as being as ridiculous as ever. But that does not make me angry any more. They are all dear to me now” (p. 717). Central to Dostoevsky‘s conversion accounts is the fear, suffering, death, or violation of a child. If in “Peasant Marei” Dostoevsky, through the agency of memory, journeyed back and forth through space and time so that he could exist in the story simultaneously as the child, vulnerable to injury, and the adult, capable of reconciliation, in “The Dream,” the child acts as the second key part of the frame for the ridiculous man’s journey through space and time. The ridiculous man rejects her plea for help at the beginning; he assures us that he has found her at the end. At the beginning, his unwilled pity for her-his discovery that he still, despite his melancholy and solipsism, has the capacity to feel-inspires his dream journey. His encounter with the little girl and his subsequent musings before falling asleep also underscore the difficulty of determining the precise moment when his conversion occurs. But the little girl, as the ridiculous man himself knows well, figures at the heart of the matter and at the center of his subsequent j ~ u r n e y . ~ This frame of the little girl, lost and then found, which punctuates the ridiculous man’s journey through time and space, calls to mind another visionary work that Dostoevsky knew well, De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. At the outset of his account, the ridiculous man tells how he did not help the child, but “the little girl, in fact had saved me” (p. 723). De Quincey’s experience with the child prostitute, Ann, is not dissimilar. “Then it was, at this crisis of my fate, that my poor orphan companion . . .stretched out a saving hand to me” (p. 51). He then loses her in the dreary expanse of London, and during the succeeding years searches repeatedly for her, wishing desperately to send her “an authentic message of peace and forgiveness. . . .Often, when I walk at this time in Oxford Street by dreamy lamp-light ...I shed tears. . . .But to this hour, I have never heard a syllable about her. This, amongst such troubles as most men meet in this life, has been my heaviest affliction” (pp. 52-53,64). Likewise, the gaslight afflicts the heart of the ridiculous man, but he finds the child (“And I did find that little girl,” [p. 7231) who has, for De Quincey, disappeared forever.

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In between these encounters with a child, each man’s flight through time and space occurs. For both men this passage of time, this journey is impossible to describe clearly. Expanse exists, but time cannot be the indicator of its measure. De Quincey describes the effects of opium: “I sometimes seemed to have lived for seventy or one hundred years in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time” (p. 103). His experiences are “wholly incommunicable by words. . . . The sense of space, and in the end, the sense of time, were both powerfully affected” (p. 103). The ridiculous man describes how certain details in dreams appear with “uncanny vividness . . . while others you leap across as though entirely unaware of, for instance, space and time. Dreams seem to be induced not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart” (p. 724). The ridiculous man dreams that he dies and is buried. He then flies with an unknown being on a flight whose stopping points are charted by desire. “I cannot remember how long we were flying, nor can I give you reason of the time; it all happened as it always does in dreams, when you leap over space and time and the laws of nature and reason and only pause at the points which are especially dear to your heart” (p. 726). He travels to that other earth, that prelapsarian repetition of our own, where he admires, loves, and eventually corrupts the innocent inhabitants of that other Greek archipelago. He longs for martyrdom and is expelled. They plant in him the seed of love and redemption, even as he is the cause of their Fall. “Like a horrible trichina, like the germ of the plague infecting whole kingdoms, so did I infect with myself all that happy earth” (p. 733). De Quincey’s Confessions ofan Opium Eater prefigure this burial, this journey through space and time, and, most important, De Quincey, too, becomes both the would-be deity and the victim on his visionary travels. “I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia. . . . I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was kissed with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles. . . . Over every form. . . brooded a sense of eternity and infinity that drove me into an oppression of madness” (p. 109). He then dreams of the lost Ann; her lost image-for a moment recovered in the dream-hovers at the end of his confession. Like the little girl whom the ridiculous man meets, Ann becomes an icon of redemption illuminated, not by a religious candle, but by a dreary urban lamplight: He remembers a time “seventeen years ago, when the lamplight fell upon her face,” and in his dream he is once more “by lamp-light in Oxford Street, walking again with Ann” (p. 112). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the mystical experiences produced by opium and anesthetics seemed to some to offer a legitimate and

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productive avenue for investigation of transrational experience. In his chapter on “Mysticism”in Varieties James cites numerous reports that reached him of such experiences. One of these bears a particularly striking resemblance to the ridiculous man’s dream: A great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was on a kind of lightning, as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway. The lightning was made entirely of the spirits of innumerable people . . . and I was one of them. He moved in a straight line. . . . Then I saw that what he had been trying to do with all his might was to change his course, to bend the line of lightning. . . . He bended me, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt . . . and at the acutest point of this . . . I saw. I understood for a moment things I have now forgotten. . . . The angle was an obtuse angle. . . . In that moment the whole of my life passed before me, including each little meaningless piece of distress, and I understood them . . . on waking, my first feeling was, and it came with tears, ‘‘Domine non sum digna.” (p. 31In)

The ridiculous man’s journey through time and space is drug free, yet its closest analogues lie in the visionary experiences of those, like De Quincey, who have made their spatial and temporal boundary crossings with the help of opium and ether. In fact, the preoccupation with the angles and pathways in space in James’s source also resembles Ivan’s interest in such details. Even as the ridiculous man conveys to us the miraculous leaping through time and space that is his dream, he is, at the same time, extremely careful, as is Dostoevsky in “Peasant Marei,” to locate his dream at a particular point in time: “I learnt the truth last November, on the third of November, to be precise” (“The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” p. 718).1° Indeed, Dostoevsky, throughout the entire span of his literary career, was always careful to locate that experience of a journey that occurs outside of everyday time and beyond the boundaries of known space within precise temporal and spatial markers. The result-an uncanny intersection between time and timelessness,between a specific place and a known but unreachable place-generates Dostoevsky‘s idiosyncratic mode of the fantastic, and is present in as early a work as The Double. Golyadkin, like the ridiculous man, wanders in Petersburg near the Fontanka on another November night. Both nights are wet, dismal, and cold; the ridiculous man remembers “a rain with a distinct animosity towards people” (p. 719); Golyadkin likewise is abroad on “a dreadful night, a real November night, dank, misty, rainy, and snowy. . . . It was raining and snowing all in one.” The dreadful weather “[cuts] into him from all sides . . . and [draws] him off his path and out of his mind” ( pp. 38-39). He enters a trancelike state and begins to stare fixedly into the canal’s black waters. It is in this atmosphere that he encounters his double. l 1

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The Brothers Karamazov and the Journey to Conversion The intersection of time with timelessness fittingly envelopes the uncanny aspects of the journey to conversion for Dostoevsky in “Peasant Marei“ and for the ridiculous man on his excursion. In The Brothers Karamazov, it figures importantly for Ivan in his encounter with the devil, and for Alyosha in his vision. Each man encounters something that is simultaneously familiar and unknown. Dostoevsky “remembers” a long-forgotten occurrence at the “needed time.” The ridiculous man visits a replica of our unfallen earth. Ivan encounters long-forgotten fragments of his own past thoughts; the gloomy night dredges up a doubling of his own ideas in a physical form that is alien and other: a devil. Alyosha’s vision combines recent events and memories with a personal experience of the biblical past. Ivan’s uncompleted journey to conversion-the night on which he makes his third and final visit to Smerdyakov and on which we witness his encounter with the devil-occurs, the narrator chronicler tells us precisely, at “the beginning of November. There had been a hard frost,” and “a dry and sharp wind was lifting and blowing the bits of snow about” (p. 486).’* This day has extended through books X and XI, and in chapter VIII, as Ivan approaches Smerdyakov’s house, the narrator refers to the morning weather which he had described a hundred pages previously, “the keen dry wind that had been blowing early that morning rose again, and a fine, thick dry snow began falling heavily. It did not lie on the ground, but was whirled about by the wind” (p. 486). The date and the weather thus strongly recall the night on which the ridiculous man had had his dream. In “The Dream” it is impossible to say whether or not the ridiculous man’s actual conversion occurred after his journey through space and time, during it, or before it, when he felt the first stab of pity for the little girl. In Ivan’s case, we cannot speak of a full-blown conversion or of a sharply defined journey, but he does, like the ridiculous man, sometime in the course of that windy, wet night at the beginning of November, undergo a profound, irrevocable change. He, too, has an encounter with a being outside of everyday space and time. Moreover, Dostoevsky once again demarcates a character’s spiritual change through the use of a frame, as he had done earlier in “Peasant Marei” and in “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.” But now this frame is more curiously displaced, although it bears a strong resemblance both to the Polish convict who utters “Je hays ces brigands” and to the little girl, who each appear twice in their respective stories. Ivan had earlier told Alyosha that he wished to send back his “entrance ticket” because he had rejected any universal system founded upon the unjustified tears of a child. Like the ridiculous man, he possesses a theory that al-

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lows him to reject God. But to underscore the change that is about to occurhis partial new acceptance of his membership in precisely such a universe where good and evil are mysteriously entwined-Dostoevsky does not have him meet a child on that cold November night. Instead, Dostoevsky offers up a kind of worst case scenario: Ivan encounters a disgusting, drunken little peasant, a figure much closer to Dostoevsky‘s fellow convicts in his repulsiveness. Like the Dostoevsky of “Peasant Marei,” Ivan feels a dreadful loathing and hatred for the peasant whom he meets on the way to his third and final interview with Smerdyakov. When the peasant lurches against Ivan, after having just sung his uncanny ditty, Ivan pushes him down on the frozen ground and thinks to himself, “He will freeze” (p. 588). When he leaves Smerdyakov, after the latter’s confession of murder, a spiritual regeneration has, at some indefinable point, already occurred for Ivan. “Something like joy was springing up in his heart” (p. 600). He then stumbles again against the freezing peasant. Although exterior circumstances remain the same, in a pattern typical of the conversion experience, their essence has changed for Ivan. He saves the peasant. The frame is familiar-a repeated meeting, whether with a Pole, a child, or a drunken peasant, encapsulates a religious transformation-but the use to which Dostoevsky will put it is vastly different. Ivan himself thinks he recognizes in his altruistic “frame” act a symbol of his regeneration, yet he simultaneously puts off going to the prosecutor to give him the money and to confess his role and Smerdyakov’s. He goes home instead, and “strange to say, almost all his gladness and self-satisfaction passed in one instant” (p. 601). Thus, instead of demarcating the boundaries in which, somewhere, sometime, a full conversion has occurred, this little frame tale of the drunken peasant underscores a failed conversion, a counter conversion, a perversion of sorts. He returns home; his eyes fasten “on one point,” and the devil appears (p. 601). In his interview with the devil, Ivan’s mysterious relations with time and space manifest themselves most strikingly. Liza Knapp, who has explored the scientific aspects of this relationship, hypothesizes that “Ivan was unable to accept the harmony of God’s universe because he understands the mystery of time-time being the ‘fourth dimension’ from which his three-dimension Euclidean mind barred him” (Knapp, p. 108).13Knapp shows convincingly that we may “crack the riddle” of Ivan through taking into account Dostoevsky’s excellent knowledge of mathematics and physics and his understanding of current theories about the potential relativity of time. My interest in Ivan’s relation to time and space is less scientific and more linked to the many possible “varieties of religious experience” as explored by William James. Certainly, Dostoevsky‘s use of time through his literary career has been consistently problematic. Dostoevsky, even as he has almost obsessively portrayed

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particular moments in time, has, as Jacques Catteau aptly observed, evinced an “allergy toward epic time.” Instead, he “sees and thinks about the world primarily in space rather than in time” (Catteau, p. 52; Knapp, p. 100). Nevertheless, his characters tend to experience their key moments of spiritual epiphany in terms of journeys-journeys to Siberia, to Europe and back, and, most markedly in the later stages of Dostoevsky‘sliterary career, in journeys through space and time, especially to the past. And these journeys do come to possess a kind of epic quality, for upon their completion, the traveler becomes an epic hero of sorts, ready to transmit an emblematic message to his people. Bakhtin has remarked upon Dostoevsky‘s avoidance of the more usual forms of chronotope. “In his works Dostoevsky makes almost no use of relatively uninterrupted historical or biographical time, that is, of strictly epic time [. . .but] concentrates action on points of crisis . ..when the inner significance of a moment is equal to a ‘billion years,’ that is, when the moment loses its temporal restrictiveness. In essence he leaps over space as well” (p. 149). Yet, as we have seen, Dostoevsky tends to demarcate these spatial and temporal leaps into the beyond by the use of frames that are strictly, rigidly rooted in the very time and space that are then briefly transcended. The point of departure and point of return to more limited apprehensions of time and space are as crucial to Dostoevsky‘s overall vision as are the uncanny journeys away. The devil’s appearance before Ivan necessarily forces the reader, along with Ivan, to try to classify the nature of this experience. The devil may simply be a hallucination, the product of Ivan’s deepening symptoms of brain fever.I4 If so, he reiterates an old concern of Dostoevsky‘s. In The Idiot, Myshkin wondered whether visionary experience that was the result of illness could still “count,”whether its lessons, its momentary glimpses of some higher harmony could be accepted, if they were merely the results of illness. Even earlier, in Crime and Punishment, Svidrigaylov similarly had mused about ghosts. James also had considered this question, but he dismissed it with the conclusion that all that matters is the unshakeable sense one has of having undergone an authentic experience. James, in fact, is close to Svidrigaylov in suggesting that perhaps illness brings with it a broader awareness of other realms.I5 Ivan himself makes no journey through space and time, but his devil does; he even catches cold along the way. Most important, the devil tells to Ivan Ivan’s own “legend about Paradise,” the story of the philosopher, who having rejected everything, after his death was sentenced to walk a quadrillion kilometers “in the dark.” Once this trek was completed, so the story goes, the Gates of Heaven were to open to him. This journey fable offers a prophetic key to the fact and the ultimate results of Ivan’s own visionary experience. The devil’s telling of Ivan’s own story also brings Ivan into intimate contact with the nu-

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minous.16 The numinous is most readily expressed in literature by images of darkness, silence, and empty distance. The philosopher’s quadrillion-kilometer walk in the dark thus becomes a nearly perfect expression of the numinous. “Empty distance,” writes Rudolf Otto, “remote vacancy is, as it were, the sublime of the horizontal” (Varnado, pp. 62-63).17 The point of the devil’s narrative and of Ivan’s long-forgotten anecdote is that, after lying there almost (ital. mine) a thousand years, the philosopher gets up and starts to walk. In reply to the devil, Ivan, desperately embracing the framework of Euclidean time, observes that the philosopher’s decision to embark upon this journey is irrelevant, for it would take a billion years to travel such a distance. The devil replies, “Much more than that, I haven’t got a pencil and paper, or I could work it out. But he got there long ago and that’s where the story begins” (p. 611). The story somehow has leapt over an infinity of time and space, and its real beginning occurs only after this cosmic leap. The devil slyly urges Ivan toward an irrational acceptance of this other kind of time. Ivan suddenly recalls that he himself had made up this anecdote at the age of seventeen. By discovering the devil’s plagiarism, he thus tries to reduce him to the status of a hallucination. But the devil is a mysterious practitioner of homeopathy. Ivan insists to the devil that he has not the “hundredth part of a grain of faith in [him].” “But,” replies the devil, “you have a thousandth of a grain. Homeopathic doses perhaps are the strongest. Confess that you have faith even to the ten-thousandth of a grain” (p. 612). It is here that we come up against a question more fundamental, more difficult, and more important to answer than whether or not the devil is a hallucination. Instead, Dostoevsky invites us to consider whether or not the devil is working to bring about Ivan’s salvation or his damnation. Throughout Dostoevsky‘s writings, there is a curious mutuality between the ways in which good and evil work in the world. Dostoevsky describes the power, the modus operandi, of each in disturbingly similar terms. This mutuality is expressed earlier on in The Idiot by Ippolit. He describes how one can plant the “seed of a good deed,” and “all the seeds planted by you, which you perhaps have forgotten, will take root and grow” (p. 424). This idea is congruent with the central motif governing The Brothers Karamazov. From its epigraph from John, to Zosima’s exhortations, to Alyosha’s actions throughout, to Iliusha’s death, to Dr. Herzenstube’s pound of nuts, this novel is about the way in which goodness and grace journey through the world. But, unfortunately, evil travels in the same way. In The Idiot, “the seed” of Ippolit’s last conviction-the desire to commit suicide-also takes hardy root, and while Zosima in The Brothers Kuramazov, can optimistically echo the novel’s epigraph and himself cite John xii, verse 24, he has a vision, equally powerful, of

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how evil seeds can also bear fruit. He warns of the effect of a passing, spiteful word on a child. “[Ylou may have sown an evil seed in him and it may grow” (p. 298). Thus, when Zosima goes on to say that “God took seeds from different worlds and sowed them on this earth . . .but what grows lives and is alive only through the feelings of its contact with other mysterious worlds”(p. 299), he may be referring, albeit indirectly, to evil seeds as well as to good.ls As James has observed, the mystical, saintly view includes evil in its overview; it cannot reduce or banish it. Thus, when the devil makes use of seed imagery for his own purpose, whether to convert or to subvert, he intensifies this disturbing symbiosis between good and evil. He wants to sow in Ivan a “tiny grain of faith” that “will grow into an oak tree” (p. 612). For what purpose, we ask. The devil, true to our view of him as wily and full of sophistry, lays out both possibilities. On the one hand, he would gain, by believing Ivan’s eventual fall, a greater trophy than a mere atheist (“we have our arithmetic” [p. 6131). On the other hand, the devil suggests that he might be a variation of Faust’s Mephistopheles, one who, by sowing a grain of faith in Ivan, claims to work in the service of God’s greater good. “Mephistopheles declared to Faust that he desired evil, but did only good. Well, he can say what he likes, it’s quite the opposite with me. I am perhaps the one man in all creation who loves the truth and genuinely desires good . . . I know that at the end of all things I shall be recovered. I, too, shall walk my quadrillion” (p. 614). Both possibilities exist. What is perhaps most interesting is that the devil claims to practice metaphysical homeopathy. Homeopathy is directly opposed to mainstream medicine, which is “allopathic.”Allopathic medicine makes use of remedies that produce effects different from those of the disease being treated. The science of homeopathy, both popular and discredited in the nineteenth century, maintained that illness was best cured by giving medicines that mimicked rather than masked the symptoms of disease. Its motto was: “Similiu similibus curentur (Let likes be cured with likes)” (Cummings and Ullman, p. 8). The symptoms of illness should be stimulated, according to homeopathic wisdom, for they are not part of the disease itself, but rather evidence of the body’s attempt to cure itself. Thus the devil’s practice of homeopathy upon Ivan may be understood as an attempt to “cure” his disease of atheism. Can we call his approach the devil’s variety of religious experience?“Knowing that you are inclined to believe in me, I administered some disbelief by telling you that anecdote. I lead you to belief and disbelief by turns, and I have my motive in it. It’s the new method, sir” (p. 612). The devil, whether he is a hallucinatory or a truly demonic double, homeopathically duplicates the symptoms of Ivan’s disease; he mimics and mocks Ivan’s own words, ideas, doubts. Thus, Ivan by recoiling from this toxic doubling of himself, might, according to the principles of homeopathy, begin to heal himself.

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The most controversial aspect of homeopathy is its fundamental belief that the most minute dosesralled the higher potencies, which are, in fact the must diluted-are the most powerful, the most capable of curing. “Most scientists believe that no medicine diluted to more than a 12c potency would have any biochemical effect, since it is improbable that any molecules of the original substance remain” (Cummings and Ullman, p. 17). Yet it is precisely these miniscule doses that homeopathy claims are most effective. It is, moreover, just such a miniscule dose of faith that the devil seeks to administer to Ivan by imitating Ivan’s own “symptoms” of disbelief. The question is, does it work? According to the predictions of the science of homeopathy, we would probably have to argue yes, although by the end of the novel Ivan’s “cure” as yet is not finished, but is, rather, still in progress. A homeopathic cure takes time; all the initial physical symptoms greatly worsen before they improve. In fact, their very worsening is supposed to be a sign of improvement, for the homeopathic cure works from the inside out. The internal parts improve first, while the exterior parts are supposed to worsen temporarily. This may be the case with Ivan; certainly by the end of the novel, he lies unconscious, the symptoms of that “brain fever” which had been encroaching for so long, since his homeopathic encounter with the devil, are now worse than ever. Yet, he had briefly, after his third meeting with Smerdyakov, felt a transient surge of healing joy. Has the devil’s small dose of highly toxic words stimulated the beginning of a more permanent healing process? Does Ivan’s confession in the courtroom indicate that he has already, like his philosopher, gotten up “from the road” and begun, in the dark, the journey toward belief? Certainly Ivan’s statement to the court possessed the most telling earmarks of an authentic Dostoevskian confession: Ivan utters his words publicly, and no one takes them at their face value. Dostoevsky himself had, as a patient, a firsthand experience with homeopathy. In 1837, just before he set off to engineering school, and a few months after his mother’s death, he had contracted a throat ailment that reduced his voice to a whisper. Dostoevsky‘s father had tried conventional remedies upon him; when they failed, he practiced, “against his own strictly allopathic professional convictions” a popular homeopathic technique on him (Rice, p. 50). In fact, Rice points out that this was “the only known therapeutic exchange” between Dr. Dostoevsky and his son. Although the homeopathic remedy he used was a popular one, it was also controversial, for it involved administering a slight dose of a toxic substance, “probably belladonna.” The treatment failed and “Dostoevsky never recovered the normal use of his voice” (Rice, p. 50). Shortly after this episode, in October 1838, a report presented to the Society of Russian Physicians concluded that homeopathy was unsound. Nevertheless, it continued to remain a popular form of treatment. Dostoevsky‘s

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early personal experience with homeopathy may well have informed this critical scene from the end of his literary career. If so, it could be an indication to us that the devil’s treatment won’t work. In fact, the notebook pages outlining the early plans for Ivan’s encounter with the devil are more peculiarly crammed with references to the devil’s medical problems than is the final text. Dostoevsky makes repeated reference to the devil’s wart, to his cough, to his catarrh of the respiratory canal. He also mentions sulfuric hydrogen gas, Hoffmann’s malt liquor, and honey with salt. In Dostoevsky’s jottings, the devil repeats several times that he has been vaccinated twice (Notebooks, pp. 2 19-225). Vaccinations could certainly be considered to be equivalent to homeopathic provings, for they innoculate against a particular disease by dosing the patient with a small amount of it. A miniscule toxic dose is thus used for curative purposes. Moreover, these notes suggest that Dostoevsky may have planned for the devil to innoculate Ivan through his words against atheism, or, what to my mind is less likely, to innoculate Ivan against belief. “You believe a small drop. Homeopathic. A little seed-oak. An oak grows up . . . Ivan. That’s to convert me” (Notebooks, p. 222). “The knife cuts both ways,” and it is left for the reader to decide whether the devil’s rendition of Ivan’s “legend about Paradise” operates to bring Ivan to belief or to drag him away from it. Could the devil be giving Ivan an onion?19At any rate, in the notes Ivan emphasizes the devil’s resemblance to him. “He’s terribly stupid. He is stupid like me. Exactly like me . . . I am looking at my portrait.” Thus, like is treated with like, according to homeopathic wisdom. There is also the curiously homeopathic statement: “Alyosha believed a little drop” (Notebooks, p. 222). In the text of the novel, Dostoevsky reduces the number of medical references, although they continue to play a role consonant with homeopathy. Ivan accuses the devil of being “myself, myself only with a different mug.” The devil agrees that he, like Ivan “suffers from the fantastic, and so I love the realism of earth” (p. 605). For him, this realism is epitomized in the pleasures of superstition and of “being doctored.” He tells Ivan how he has been vaccinated for smallpox, and how he suffers from rheumatism. He then offers up a striking misquotation from Terence. Ivan realizes that he himself has never thought of this misquotation before, and for a moment, Ivan believes in the devil. Seeing this, the devil immediately bursts out with a cynical dismissal of visionary experience: “Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion or anything, a man sometimes sees such artistic visions, such complex and real actuality, such events, even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy could not create . . . I am only your nightmare, nothing more” (p. 606). Ivan quickly realizes that the devil is dragging him

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back and forth between belief and disbelief. In reply, the devil promises to explain later the “special method” he has adopted “for today.” That special method is homeopathy. The devil thus ridicules the kind of visionary journey that the ridiculous man took in “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.” He chalks these “artistic visions” up to indigestion. But the devil shares the ridiculous man’s belief that our earth can be, in some unfathomable way, repeated elsewhere in time and space. “[0] ur present earth may have been repeated a billion times. Why, it’s become extinct, been frozen; cracked, broken to bits, disintegrated into its elements, again ‘the water above the firmament’; then again a comet, again a sun, again from the sun it becomes earth-and the same sequence may have been repeated endlessly” (611).Victor Terras suspects that this idea of “eternal palingenesis,” may have been one of Dostoevsky‘s preoccupations (Terras, p. 392).20Certainly, it offers us a further link between the visionary experience of Ivan and the ridiculous man. Indeed, in his efforts to cure the cold he caught flying through space in an evening suit, the devil practically tells us that he himself has resorted to homeopathic medicine, which had long been in disrepute in Russia, but had nevertheless remained so popular. He lambasts the establishment Russian doctors-“I’ve tried all the medical faculty; they can diagnose beautifully. . .but they’ve no idea how to cure you.” He makes fun of fancy European specialists-the one in Paris “who can only cure your right nostril,” the one in Vienna who “will cure your left nostril. What are you to do? I fell back on popular remedies” (p. 608). On the advice of a German doctor he rubs himself with honey and salt, and when that fails to cure him, he resorts to what seems to be homeopathy. He writes to Count Mattei in Milan. “He sent me a book and some drops, bless him, and only fancy, Hoff‘s malt extract cured me! I bought it by accident, drank a bottle and a half of it, and I was ready to dance; it took it away completely. I made up my mind to write to the papers to thank him” (p. 608). The devil’s gleeful foray outside accepted medical practice into the realm of popular remedies and drops from a Count in Milan suggest an antiestablishment resort to homeopathic practices. The devil’s experimentation in homeopathic medicine has an interesting parallel in the alternative medical procedures that William James continued to seek in curing his own ailments. As Linda Simon, William James’srecent biographer recounts, James, in his own efforts to cure himself of depression and numerous physical ailments, not only sought out the services of a “mind-cure ‘doctress,”’but tried hallucinatory drugs, galvanism, various kinds of folk healing and alternative medicine. To treat his bad heart, Simon reminds us, James had himself injected with a compound prepared from the organs of a goatlymph from the thoracic ducts, together with extracts from the lymphatic

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glands and brains (Simon, p. 21 1). James in his derision of establishment medicine and his attraction to what might be called crackpots and those who ventured into hallucinating states via drugs shares the irreverence of Dostoevsky‘s devil for conventional medicine and its fancy practitioners.21 I shall close with a brief look at Alyosha Karamazov’s moment of crisis and the fantastic journey which embodies his conversion-his vision of Cana of Galilee. Some of the conversion rhythms of “Peasant Marei” recapitulate here in a major key. The frame of the Polish convict and his ‘‘Je hays ces brigands” finds an echo in Alyosha’s conversations with Rakitin. In despair, Alyosha leaves the body of the decaying elder Zosima. Like the convict Dostoevsky, he rushes outside for relief. In his grief and doubt he lies “face downwards on the ground under a tree” (p. 319). Rakitin, the moral equivalent of the Polish convict, appears. Alyosha then goes with Rakitin to Grushenka, where he and Grushenka enact their mutual “onion-giving.’’ The meeting between Alyosha and Grushenka possesses the same suggestion of preconversion conversion that occurs in “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” where the main protagonist is somehow saved by the little girl even before he undertakes his fantastic conversion journey. Alyosha returns to Zosima’s cell where he will find himself on a visionary journey to the biblical past, but the actual moment of his conversion is impossible to locate. Later in the novel, as we have seen, Ivan’s lowest point-his third visit to Smerdyakov-had ended with his feeling “something like joy.” In all three cases, but particularly in Alyosha’s, it is possible that the fundamental shift to conversion has taken place even before the “conversion journey” through time and space begins. Rakitin taunts Alyosha as they return to the monastery. “So you see the miracles you were looking out for just now have come to pass!” (p. 336), but Alyosha, like the convict Dostoevsky with the Pole at the end of “Peasant Marei,” finds himself no longer vulnerable to Rakitin’s cynicism and hatred. Something has already taken place. He reenters Zosima’s cell and is overwhelmed by joy. He finds himself with Christ at Cana of Galilee. Zosima is there, too. Zosima, who calls him “dear one,” “my kind boy,” “gentle one,” treats him with a motherly affection reminiscent of Marei (p. 339). He raises Alyosha by the hand. Alyosha, like the child Dostoevsky in “Peasant Marei,” expresses his fear, and Zosima comforts him. Alyosha awakens and rushes outside to water the earth with his tears. “Something firm and unshakable” had entered his soul; he never forgets that moment. “‘Someone visited my soul in that hour,’ he used to say afterwards” (p. 341). This event, llke the nine-year-old Dostoevsky‘s encounter with Marei, occurs toward the end of August, at the close of a bright day. Alyosha lies on the earth amidst “the gorgeous autumn flowers” (p. 349). Again, Dostoevsky has carefully located a conversion-which involved a journey out of everyday

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time to a precious, living past-within a definite frame of setting and time: a monk’s cell and a garden at nine o’clock on an evening in late August. As in “Peasant Marei,”“The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” and Ivan’s encounter with the devil, recent events and memories converge with time long past; the subliminal becomes immanent; conversion occurs. The Dostoevsky of 1876 who wrote “Peasant Marei,” the ridiculous man who loses the knack for words but becomes a preacher anyway, and Alyosha who rises up from the earth “a resolute champion” have each completed a journey of conversion, from which they emerge with tears of joy to embrace an unchanged, but newly beautiful world. Their journeys now change direction. Instead of journeying inwardly through time and space to an infinitely precious, fully living past, they must each now travel on the road of everyday reality. They now transmit their message to others, knowing full well they will probably not be believed. To some degree, each has taken on the qualities of a saint. This is not to say they have become emblems or stock characters, or that they lose their individuality. Indeed, argues James, the saint is, above all, the champion of the individual. “ [W] ith their extravagance of human tenderness, [they] are the great torch bearers of [the belief in the essential sacredness of every person], the tip of the wedge, the cleavers of the darkness” (VRE, p. 285).” At the end of The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan is still writhing under the effects-potentially lethal, potentially redemptive-of the devil’s homeopathic experiment. When we last see him he remains in that uncloven darkness that Dostoevsky and James knew so well. Whether Ivan journeys to conversion or to perversion remains a mystery. Or can we assume that perhaps, like his philosopher, “he got there long ago”? Notes 1. For extended analyses, see Joseph Frank, pp. 116-127; Robert Louis Jackson, pp. 20-33; James Rice, pp. 46-49, and Robin Feuer Miller, “Dostoevsky,the Peasants and Problems of Representation.” 2. Frank has made an extraordinarily happy choice in the discovery of James’s Varieties as a model for describing the hallmarks of Dostoevsky‘s conversion experience, as he portrayed it in “Peasant Marei.” 3. Note James’s use of the word, “estranged,”as applied to Tolstoy in 1902,long before it was used by the Russian Formalists. See VRE,pp. 128-131 and 153-156, for James’s discussion of Tolstoy’s spiritual crisis. 4. Some years earlier Thomas De Quincey, another student of religious and mystical experience (and a writer, moreover, whose work Dostoevsky knew), asserted “of this, at least, I feel assured, that there is no such thing asforgettingpossibleto the mind; a thousand accidents may, and will, interpose a veil between our present consciousness

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and the secret inscriptions on the mind; accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains forever” (De Quincey, p. 104). 5. Compare Ivan’s refusal of a civilization founded upon the unjustified tears of a child to the James citation above. Like Ivan, as well, James refers to the “geological cataclysm.” He states: “To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic times is hard for our imagination.. . .Yet there is no tooth in any of those museum-skulls that did not . . . hold fast to the body struggling in despair of some fated living victim” (p. 137). 6. Adler also makes an observation that could have come verbatim from the pen of Bakhtin, “There is no image so often occurring in his work as that of a boundary” (Adler, p. 283). Adler’s essay teems with insights. I am grateful to Lewis S. Feuer for bringing this obscure article to my attention. 7. For an analysis of the close structural connection between “Peasant Marei” and a section of The Idiot,written earlier, see Robin Feuer Miller, “Dostoevsky, the Peasants and Problems of Representation.” 8. Bakhtin connects this work to Cyrano de Bergerac’s Histoire comique des ttats et empires de la Lune (1647-1650); to the menippea of Grimmelshausen, Derfliegende Wandersmann nach dem Monde; and to that of Voltaire’s Micromegas. We can also discover in this work ties to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and to Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality. See Robin Feuer Miller, “Dostoevsky‘s‘Dream of a Ridiculous Man’: Unsealing the Generic Envelope.” 9. We know of Dostoevsky‘s ongoing obsession with Rousseau’s Confessions. Rousseau asserted that the fundamental occasion for hi5 confession was the harm he had caused years earlier to a young girl. 10. James describes one Stephen H. Bradley who underwent a similar experience on November 2, 1829, after which, like the ridiculous man, he rushed to tell others of his vision: “--After breakfast I went round to converse with my neighbors on religion, which I could not have been hired to have done before this . . . and I now defy all the Deists and Atheists in the world to shake my faith in Christ” (VRE, p. 160). 11. The Idiot, the novel of Dostoevsky which is perhaps most preoccupied with the meaning of visionary experience, also curiously, opens on a wet, foggy morning, late in November, as the two main characters approach Petersburg by train. 12. Dostoevsky obscures the reference to the date by giving it much earlier, at the beginning of Book X, “The Boys.” Nevertheless, the same use of a precise location in time and place to encapsulate its opposite prevails. 13. Knapp has tackled with great success perhaps the most difficult moment in time to be found anywhere in Dostoevsky‘s canon. 14. It is well known that to prepare the description of Ivan’s encounter with the devil, Dostoevsky consulted with a doctor about the details of hallucinations and of brain fever. Hence, the narrator chronicler’s near-clinical description: “And so he was sitting almost conscious himself of his delirium, and as I have said already, looking persistently at some object on the sofa against the opposite wall” (p. 602). Yet, one cannot help but think the consultation with a doctor perhaps was superfluous, given Dostoevsky’s account of how as a convict his reveries used to begin with “some speck.” Golyadkin, as early as 1846, stares fixedly into the black water;

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Stavrogin can spend a sleepless night, “his eyes fixed on a point in the corner by the chest of drawers” ( T h e Possessed, p. 405), or he can describe how he lost count of the time while “looking at a tiny red spider on the leaf of a geranium” ( T h e Possessed, pp. 424-425). But time reenters with a jolt, “Suddenly I whipped out my watch,” he says. Twenty minutes pass; he waits another fifteen minutes, to give Matryosha more time to complete her dreadful act. It seems there is little a doctor could tell Dostoevsky about hallucinations and trances. See also, Miller, “Dostoevsky and the Homeopathic Dose” for an earlier version of this discussion about The Brothers Karamazov. 15. James discusses this very point in “Religion and Neurology,” the opening chapter of Varieties (pp. 11-29). This view tends to be echoed by those who want to engage serious discussion of visionary journeys and unearthly beings. Thus can the critic Jack Sullivan write that whether or not a ghost exists is unimportant, “what counts is the authenticity of the experience” (See Jack Sullivan, ‘“Green Tea’: The Archetypal Ghost Story,” in Messent [pp. 121-1241). Or, M. R. James, using an oddly Bakhtinian turn of phrase, can observe in 1927, “It is not amiss sometimes to leave a loophole for natural explanation, but I would say, let the loophole be so narrow as not to be quite practicable.” See M. R. James, “Introduction,” in Messent (p. vi.) As readers, we repeatedly return to the fantastic journey, the ghostly, and the otherworldly. For the duration of our reading we may become jelly in the hands of the poet, novelist, and critic alike. Even as we seek to name, to categorize, or to dismiss such fantastic material we may sheepishly crave “contact with other worlds.” 16. This word was coined by Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy, first published in 1917. The term “numinous” describes a feeling that is closely connected to the intellect, a nonrational sense of supernatural fear, wonder and delight (Varnado, p. 52). 17. Quoting Rudolf Otto The Idea ofthe Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 68-69. For Varnado, the words of Coleridge’sAncient Mariner, “Alone, alone, all, all, alone,” crystallize the feeling of the numinous. 18. Czeslaw Milosz points out that Dostoevsky‘s use of seed imagery, particularly the notion of God taking seeds from different gardens, may show the influence of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose works Dostoevsky read in the translations of A. N. Aksakov (see Milosz, pp. 129-144). Indeed, Milosz shows that Dostoevsky‘s ideas about ghosts, the fascination with that state between dreaming and wakefulness and particularly his interest in visionary travels to other worlds could all have been reinforced by his reading of Swedenborg. It is here that an interesting triangulation of Dostoevsky, Swedenborg, and, not William, but Henry James Sr., an avid Swedenborgian explicator, might be explored. See William James, “Introduction to ‘The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James,”’ in E M , pp. 3-63. 19. The reference, of course, is to the episode in the novel where Grushenka tells Alyosha the story of a wicked woman who is almost admitted to heaven because she once gave an onion from her garden to an old beggar woman. However, a display of selfishness at the last moment cancels the good deed. For a fuller discussion see Miller, The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel, pp. 84-86. 20. Terras also points out that many echoes of this idea of palingenesis occur in the Notebooks for ‘2Raw Youth.”

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21. Writes James in 1885: “Words cannot express my contempt for much of the medical legislation that is current, based as it is on a theoretic surmise, grafted on an insufficiently observed fact, generalised by pedantry, promulgated by love of dominion, and adopted by credulity as the rule of life” (quoted in Simon, p. 21 1). 22. James goes on to link the figure of the saint to the nineteenth-century utopian socialist. “In this respect the Utopian dreams of social justice in which many contemporary socialists and anarchists indulge are . . .analogous to the saint’s belief in an existent kingdom of heaven. They help to break the edge of the general reign of hardness and are slow leavens of a better order” (VRE, p. 287). Dostoevsky, too, was fascinated by that borderline generated between the saint and the utopian dreamer.

Works Cited Adler, Alfred. “Dostoevsky.” Lecture delivered in Zurich Town Hall, 1918, in The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology. Translated by P. Radin. London, 1923. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Catteau, Jacques. “Prostranstvo i vremia v romanakh Dostoevskogo.” In Dostoevskii: Materialy issledovaniia, edited by G. M. Fridlender. Vol. 3. Leningrad Nauka, 1978. DeQuincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Edited by Alethea Hayter. Middlesex, England Penguin Books, 1979. Dostoevsky, F. M. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Constance Garnett. Edited by Ralph E. Matlaw. New York W. W. Norton, 1976. . The Diary o f a Writer. Translated by Boris Brasol. Introduction by Joseph Frank. Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, 1985. .“The Double.” Translated by George Bird. In Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. New York Harper & Row, 1968. Pp. 1-144. . “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.” Translated by David Magarshack. In Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Pp. 715-738. . The Idiot. Translated by Henry and Olga Carlisle. New York New American Library, 1969. . The Notebooks for The Brothers Karamazov. Translated and edited by Edward Wasiolek. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. . The Possessed. Translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew. New York New American Library, 1962. Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. Jackson, Robert Louis. “The Triple Vision: The Peasant Marei.” In The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981. Knapp, Liza. “The Fourth Dimension of the Non-Euclidean Mind Time in The Brothers Karamazov, or Why Ivan Karamazov’s Devil Does Not Carry a Watch.” Dostoevsky Studies 8 (1987).

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Manuel, Frank E. and Fritzie P. Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. Messent, Peter B., ed. Literature of the Occult:A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 198 1. Miller, Robin Feuer. “Dostoevsky, the Peasants and Problems of Representation.” In Celebrating Creativity:Essays in Honour of JosteinBortnes. Eds. Knut Andreas Grimstad and Ingunn Lund. Bergen: University of Bergen Press, 1997. . “Dostoevsky and the Homeopathic Dose.” In American Contributions to the 12th International Congress of Slavists: Literature, Linguistics, Poetics, edited by Robert A. Maguire and Alan Timberlake. Bloomington, Ind: Slavica Publishers, 1998. . The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel. New York: Twayne Masterworks, 1992. .“Dostoevsky‘s‘Dream of a Ridiculous Man’: Unsealing the Generic Envelope.” In Freedom and Responsibility in Russian Literature, edited by Elizabeth Cheresh M e n and Gary Saul Morson. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1995. Pp. 86-104. Milosz, Czeslaw. “Dostoevsky and Swedenborg.”In Emperor of the Earth: Modes of Eccentricvision. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Pp. 120-144. Rice, James. Dostoevsky and the Healing Art: An Essay in Literary and Medical History. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1985. Simon, Linda. Genuine Reality: A Life of William James. New York Harcourt Brace, 1998. Sullivan, Jack. Literature of the Occult:A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1981. Terras, Victor. A Karamazov Companion: Commentary on the Genesis, Language and Styleof Dostoevsky’s Narrative. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981. Varnado, S. L. “The Idea of the Numinous in Gothic Literature.” In Literature of the Occult. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1981. Zil’bershtein, I. S., and M. Rozenblium, eds. “Neizdannyi Dostoevskii. Zapisnye knizhki i tetradi 1860-1881.” Literaturnoe nasledstvo 83 (1971).

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3 What Men Live By: Belief and the Individual in Leo Tolstoy and William James Donna Tussing Orwin

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HEN WILLIAM JAMES READ WARAND PEACEand Anna Karenina in the

summer of 1896, he declared them to be “perfection in the representation of human life” (Letters, 2: 48). Tolstoy subsequently became one of James’s favorite authors (Myers, p. 42), both as a novelist and as a religious thinker cited extensively in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Tolstoy, by contrast, showed little overt interest in James. True, as L. Kuzina and K. Tiunkin (p. 82) plausibly argue, the famous passage at the end of part I of Resurrection comparing individuals to rivers may refer to James’s idea (first expressed in The Principles of Psychology) of a stream of consciousness. Tolstoy, who closely followed debates about psychology in the journal Questions of Philosophy and Psychology in the 1890s, could not have been unaware of James, while Psychology: Briefer Course (the one-volume abridgement of The Principles ofPsychology) itself was published in Russian in 1896.Tolstoy’s borrowing, however, if it is that, may be polemical (Kuzina, Tiunkin, pp. 73-88).’ In any case, the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina had little to learn from James about the way consciousness flows, changes, and affects our perceptions of reality. James’s wildly appreciative 1896 reaction to these novels as perfectly representative of lifethat is, the dynamics of human psychology-suggests that he saw in them a prescient imaging of his own ideas. And in fact, as I shall argue in this chapter, James’sand Tolstoy’s psychology have common roots in transcendental philosophy as it affected both American and Russian culture. Age alone does not explain the enthusiasm of the younger man and the seeming indifference of the older one. Tolstoy viewed James as too intellectual, too “scientific.”The only two references to James in Tolstoy’s diary refer acidly -59-

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to James’s depiction of Tolstoy in The Varieties of Religious Experience2 and then to Tolstoy’s impression of the book “An inaccurate relation to the subject [i.e., religion]-scientific [ nauchnoe] .Oh, is it ever scientific!” (December 14, 1909; PSS, 57:188). James’s father, Swedenborgian and idealist Henry James Sr., whom Tolstoy read in March 1891,evoked a much more positive re~ponse.~ Tolstoy preferred the father’s religious disposition to the son’s science. Ironically, then, it was partly Tolstoy’s religiosity that drew William to him. In Tolstoy James found psychologizing as rigorous as his own, a yearning for belief as perfervid, and a capacity for mystical experience that he himself lacked. James confesses this failing at the beginning of his lectures on “mysticalstates” in The Varieties of Religious Experience: “[Mly own constitution shuts me out from their enjoyment almost entirely, and I can speak of them only at second hand” (p. 301). Yet James believes that religion is essential, and it is Tolstoy whom he quotes (from the title of a story written in 1881)as saying that “faith .. . is that by which men live” (VRE, p. 336). “Mystical states,”which James identifies in Varieties as “twice-bornness and supernaturality and pantheism,” are “absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.” Although others need not accept them uncritically, they cannot simply be discounted either. [Mystical states] break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness, based upon the understanding and the senses alone. They show it to be only one kind of consciousness. They open out the possibility of other orders of truth, in which, so far as anything in us vitally responds to them, we may freely continue to have faith. (p. 335)

Both Tolstoy and Jameswere psychologists and moralists, who, analyzing individual consciousness, concluded that human beings rely for moral guidance on beliefs that cannot be justified rationally. Today, when many scientists question the authority of “rationalisticconsciousness,”and the religion of progress through science has many fewer adherents than in the nineteenth century? the arguments of James and Tolstoy about the necessity of religious faith deserve a fresh look. So, too, do their agreements and disagreements. In what follows, I will discuss the role of belief in the writings of the two men, enlarge upon the significance of Tolstoy for James, and offer a comparison of the two. The Necessity of Belief in Tolstoy Tolstoy first explores the psychology of belief in otvochestvo (Boyhood 1853). The philosophizing adolescent arrives at a “skepticism”so complete that “be-

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sides myself I imagined no one and nothing existed in the whole world.. . . In a word, I concurred with Schelling in the conviction that not objects, but my relation to them exists” (PSS 2:57). Nikolenka doubts the objective existence not only of the physical, but of the moral world. He gives up old beliefs“which for the happiness of my life I ought never have dared to touch”-for new philosophic theories. If, as Tolstoy believed, philosophizing should always be directed toward good practices, then skepticism is unsustainable because it destroys the possibility of any practice. Extreme subjectivism is the intellectual expression of the self-centered world of adolescence. Tolstoy calls it “skepticism” because in the process of analyzing the world the overactive logical mind of his adolescent dismantles it until nothing is left, not even reason itself: “mind left reason behind [ urn za razurn zakhodill.” The Russian proverb neatly captures Tolstoy’s distinction between inadequate human reason-the “pitiful, meager spring of moral activity. . . the mind of man”-and divine Reason as the organizing principle of an external reality the existence of which he, like James, never seriously doubted. Boris Eikhenbaum distinguished the “moral instincts” by which Tolstoy lived from the “convictions” [ ubezhdeniia] which he despised (Lev Tolstoy, p. 216). These instincts are moral ideas that are thought as well as felt. This passage from Youth is typical: Those virtuous ideas that I would work over in conversations with my adored friend Dmitrii . . .were still pleasing only to my mind, but not to feeling. But the time came when these thoughts with such fresh power of moral discovery came into my mind that I would panic, thinking of how much time I had lost to no purpose; and immediately, that very same second, I wanted to apply these thoughts to life, with a firm resolve never to betray them (PSS 2: 79). (Emphasis mine)

The difference between moral ideas and the “convictions” that Tolstoy despised lies in their origins. Convictions are products of individual minds, and as such are both subjective and superficial; while moral ideas guide our actions even though our minds may not wholly grasp them. “How did I dare to think that one could know the ways of Providence. It is the source of reason, and reason wants to comprehend it . . . The mind loses itself in these abysses of wisdom.”: thus did Tolstoy as a young soldier in the Caucasus in 1851 formulate his relation to higher reason embodied in Providence (PSS 46: 61). In Youth moral ideas do not actually take hold in Nikolenka’s mind until they “come into” it with “fresh power of moral discovery”: the grammatical construction expresses the passivity of the individual in relation to these formative ideas. They are both feelings and ideas at the same time. In Youth, Christian tradition remains a repository of moral belief, but nature is more

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compelling. Chapter 32 (“Youth”) returns Nikolenka to his boyhood home Petrovskoe and especially to its garden, a metaphor for Eden. There Nikolenka communes with sources of belief not directly available to the mind. The rest of Youth chronicles the struggle in Nikolenka’s soul over conflicting impulses, and ends, significantly, with another “moral surge” and a promise to the reader to depict its consequences “in the next, happier half of youth.” The structure of Youth, with its peak of lyric intensity before the end (at “Youth”), and lesser peaks and valleys throughout, is meant to imitate the psychological process more closely than traditional novels built on linear plots.5 In War and Peace Tolstoy took a different approach.6 There the cycle of belief-action based on belief, crisis, then renewed belief and renewed action-became the “plot” around which he built the novel.7 Pierre Bezukhov, for instance, begins as an enthusiastic advocate of assassination if it is for the sake of “the rights of man, emancipation from prejudices, and equality of citizenship.” These conventional ideals crumble after Pierre actually wounds Dolokhov in an afaire d’honneur. Pierre is immobilized by the ensuing crisis of belief: he is obsessed with political injustices that his previous beliefs had rationalized. The mason Bazdeev revivifies Pierre by supplying him with a new set of ideas which will guide him until they too fail the test of reality. Each major character in the novel follows this pattern. Nikolai Rostov’s failure to get charges against his beloved Denisov dismissed, for instance, undermines his faith in the justice of the government. No intellectual, Nikolai elects to “do [his] duty, to fight and not to think” (book 5, chapter IS), but he will later resign his commission to take up the life of a gentleman farmer. War and Peace is a bildungsrornan with a difference, however. The education that characters undergo is cyclical, not linear, so that Pierre and Nikolai are poised at the end of the novel to slip out of their peaceful equilibrium into warlike states which will resurrect old passions in them. To this extent, Tolstoy retains the more “open” form of Youth which critics have praised as more lifelike and blamed as less artistically satisfying. In both works, belief in but not wholly of the mind, is “what men live by.” The Necessity of Belief in James James praised Tolstoy as a “[witness] testifymg to the worth of life as revealed to an emancipated sympathy”(Perry, 2: 273). By this he meant that Tolstoy’s writing lends credence to the essential assumptions of the individual about himself. Tolstoy and James, the one in art, the other in science, defended the ultimate worth of the individual against rational abstractions that devalued particularity. In Psychology: Briefer Course, James insists that “no psychology

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. ..can question the existence of personal selves. Thoughts connected as we feel them to be connected are what we mean by personal selves. The worst a psychology can do is so to interpret the nature of these selves as to rob them of their worth” (p. 141). For James, as for Tolstoy, this worth depended first and foremost on our understanding of ourselves as moral beings and both agreed that science, including the science of psychology, could not by itself validate this understanding8 For James, as earlier for Tolstoy,“emancipated sympathy” therefore led beyond science to metaphysics. Our sense of our “connectedness” and our worth depends upon freedom of the will. We cannot take ourselves seriously if we believe ourselves to be slaves either to impulse or to predetermined ideas. Will, according to James, “relates solely to the amount of effort of attention which we can at any time p u t forth” (PBC, p. 391). If this is determined solely by internal instinct or by the object under consideration (rather than by a self capable of choice), we are not free. Psychology cannot measure the extent of our freedom, and in any case, as a science, psychology can assume determinism. Free will, like the existence of the self, is a subject for philosophy, not science. If Tolstoy and James seem modern in their advocacy of individuality and freedom, they seem old-fashioned in their insistence on the existence of moral will and a moral order. They defined free will accordingly. In early philosophical jottings from the late 1840s, Tolstoy wrote of the “reasonable will”(razumnaia volia) as free (svobodnaia),unlike the lower wills of body and feeling9 In Psychology: Briefer Course, James calls for education to create habits and routines that will free “our higher powers of mind . . .for their own proper work.” To do this, one has to have a strong will; and he quotes J. S. Mill that “a character is a completely fashioned will,” that is, in James’s formulation “an aggregate of tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and definite way upon all the principal emergencies of life” (p. 136). For both writers, free will means specifically the “higher,” or “reasonable” will. As Tolstoy affirms in the Second Epilogue of War and Peace, furthermore, ethics requires something more than just freedom: “Man’s actions proceed from his innate character and the motives acting upon him. What is conscience and the perception of right and wrong in actions that follows from the consciousness of freedom? That is a question for ethics.”1° There has to be a good to choose, and science cannot supply this good any more than freedom can. James argues that in restricting itself to “facts that are actually tangible,” science cannot provide its own raison d’etre, let alone rules to govern human conduct. Science strives instead to be neutral, a posture which, James retorts, is “unrealizable,”because doubt as well as belief is a living attitude, which as such “involve[s] conduct on our part.” It is therefore absurd to hold dogmatically that “our inner interests [namely, our desire to be

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worthy by being good] can have no real connection with the forces that the hidden world may contain.” Even science has advanced due to “an imperious inner demand on our part for ideal logical and mathematical harmonies” (“Is Life Worth Living?” WB, pp. 50-51), which imply the existence of an ideal world to which science has no access. In the nineteenth century, James explains elsewhere, the chief criterion for saintliness is “social righteousness.” “Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true.” The “religious hypothesis” would be a “superfluity” if it were without consequences for action; but since belief alone makes morality possible, it must be defended (“The Will to Believe,” WB, p. 32, n. 4). Good deeds, as James explains in The Varieties of Religious Experience, depend upon ideas without sense-content and hence inaccessible to the very mind that embraces them. These include not only the Kantian “Ideas of pure Reason,” but moral ideas of “abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice. . ..Such ideas, and others equally abstract, form the background for all our facts, the fountain-head of all the possibilities we conceive of. They give its ‘nature,’ as we call it, to every special thing. Everything we know is ‘what’ it is by sharing in the nature of one of these abstractions. We can never look directly at them, for they are bodiless and featureless and footless, but we grasp all other things by their means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of classification and conception (VRE, pp. 53-54). Our most important moral ideas-including the existence of the self and free will, and our sense of the moral significance of life-dwell within us as beliefs. These James equates with personal religion as the necessary preconditions of conscience or morality. Tolstoy’s Place in James’s Thought

Whether or not he was acquainted with Tolstoy’s writings before he read War and Peace and Anna Karenina in the summer of 1896, James did not emphasize their importance for him until then. His actual allusions to Tolstoy’s writings are infrequent. To appreciate the significance of these allusions, it is necessary to move beyond them to the larger Jamesian drama in which they play a small but important role. Along with certain other thinkers, Tolstoy was useful in James’s attempt to reconcile the need for religious belief with the imperatives of science as he understood it. Tolstoy’s fictional representation of the psychological role of belief

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strikingly anticipates James’s theories. What differentiates Tolstoy’s style from James’s is Tolstoy’s seeming moral certainty, reflected in what Morson has called his “absolute language”(Hidden in Plain View, chapter 1).Tolstoy’s narrator will often speak from the perspective of unconditional truth. By contrast, James’s language is conciliatory: He writes in the tone of a man who knows that he can never achieve absolute certainty on even the most pressing metaphysical questions. According to his friend Theodore Flournoy, as a young man James rejected the two monisms dominant in his time: “the evolutionary naturalism of Herbert Spencer, and pantheistic idealism, brilliantly represented on the one hand by the Hegelian or absolutist school of Oxford (Green, the Cairds, Bradley), and on the other hand by Royce and others in the United States” (pp. 39-40). James’s tone may reflect his ambivalence toward philosophical justifications of the individual. If science threatens the individual by denying the existence of a self, so too the “intangible ideas” that confirm selfhood and morality may threaten him by impinging upon his freedom. In this way metaphysical idealism can be as deterministic as materialism and just as deadening. On this issue, James argues that no philosophy that is simply fatalistic can satisfy man, because “to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race. . . . Man needs a rule for his will, and will invent one if one be not given him” (“The Psychology of Belief,” p. 1053). James therefore questions Tolstoyan “fatalism” even as he embraces the “infallible veracity” of his prose (letter to Th. Flournoy, August 30, 1896; Letters, p. 48). Instead of fatalism he adopts pluralism as a metaphysical theory that allows for the existence of chance, and therefore moral choice, within an ordered universe. Given his emphasis on free choice, James’s avowed belief in universal order, and even in “Providence,” is striking-he combines the two openly in “The Dilemma of Determinism” (WB, pp. 138-141)-and leaves him open to charges of philosophic inconsistency. Tolstoy’s brand of fatalism based on moral “instinct” may have appealed to him as less deterministic than most. A letter to Benjamin Paul Blood, an important figure in James’s life, suggests a reason for James’s attraction to Tolstoyan certainty as he understood it. Have you read Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”? I am just about finishing it. It is undoubtedlythe greatest novel ever written-also insipid with veracity. The man is infallible-and the anaesthetic revelation plays a part as in no writer. You have very likely read it. If you haven’t, sell all you have and buy the book, for I know it will speak to your very gizzard. (Letters, p. 40)

It is no coincidence that James recommended Tolstoy specifically to Blood, nor are the terms of his recommendation arbitrary. James recognized a kinship between Blood and Tolstoy and, as we shall see, both of them contributed to his defense of belief against atheistic science and philosophy.

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The term “anaesthetic revelation” refers to Blood’s theory, first aired in the pamphlet The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy that, by taking nitrous oxide, one can gain access to metaphysical truths unavailable to the mind. In 1874, reviewing The Anaesthetic Revelation in The Atlantic Monthly, James praises it both for its explanation of the insufficiency of philosophy “to comprehend or in any way state the All,” and for its positive suggestion that the “secret of Being . . . is not in the dark immensity beyond knowledge, but at home, this side, beneath the feet, and overlooked by knowledge” (ECR, pp. 287-288). James corresponded with Blood for the rest of his life, and he visited him in 1895. His final essay for publication, “A Pluralistic Mystic,” is “actually a collage of Blood’s writings, interspersed with some passing commentary by James” (John J. McDermott, ECR, pp. xxxiv). Blood may have overestimated his influence on James when he claimed that his “anaesthetic revelation” contained “the secret of the world,” from which James’s “unlucky heart” barred him; but James himself, in a passage ultimately omitted from “A Pluralistic Mystic,” once called Blood’s pamphlet “one of the cornerstones or landmarks of my own subsequent thinking” (ECR,pp. 228-229). Unwilling to neglect any possible avenue to metaphysical truth, James himself inhaled nitrous gas. In his review of The Anaesthetic Revelation, however, he hedges his praise with reservations. He contrasts “laughing-gas intoxication” which “blunts the mind and weakens the will” with “the faith that comes of willing, the intoxication of moral volition” which possesses “a million times better credentials” (ECR, p. 287). The reference to will is of course significant. Beginning in the early 1860s, after his failure to become an artist and before he started to teach at Harvard, James underwent a lengthy crisis of passage. Afflicted with various mental and physical ailments, he flirted with suicide. He attributed his depression to a pessimism that could be avoided only “if one’s moral interests are real rather than illusory; but they cannot be real if there is no free will, because there is no sense in holding that we ought to do what we cannot do.” Thus does Gerald Myers summarize James’s understanding of his predicament at the time. Although he continued to suffer from nervous complaints, James stepped back from suicide in 1870 with the help of the essays of the French philosopher Charles Renouvier. Myers quotes from James’s diary of April 30, 1870: I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will-“the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts”need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present-until next year-that it is no illusion. My first act of free w ill shall be to believe in free will.”

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In Renouvier, James found a philosophical explanation of free will understood as intrinsically moral and connected to the reason. Renouvierian free will “consists, not of following our sentiments or our desires, but of controlling them through the use of our reason. The will is a regulating rather than a generating force for Renouvier; presented with choices, it can decide which to adopt. Far from yielding to the strongest motives, it decides which are the strongest” (Logue, p. 95). James, following Renouvier, began to fashion a silk purse out of a sow’s ear by treating the self-imposed narrow epistemological limits of positivism as a license to go beyond them in search of a new morality. If, as positivism asserts, we cannot know any ultimate truths, why not choose, at least provisionally, to embrace the ones that lend dignity-worthto human life? When James writes of the “faith that comes of willing, the intoxication of moral volition,” in his review of The Anaesthetic Revelation four years later, he is referring to the effect on him of Renouvier’s definition of free will as moral choice. Blood‘s discovery, according to James, opens a window on Nirwana, which “whether called by that name or not, has been conceived and represented as the consummation of life too often not to have some meaning” (“The Anaesthetic Revelation,” ECR, p. 287). The spelling Nirwana alerts the reader that James, along with the rest of the educated public, was reading the works of Arthur Schopenhauer (in German, in James’s case); and indeed, less than a year after the review of Blood’s pamphlet appeared in The Atlantic Monthly (November 1874), James explicitly associated the concept of nirvana with Schopenhauer. l 2 James first encountered Schopenhauer in the winter of 1858-1859, but apparently without contracting a case of angst (Allen, p. 53). In 1868, he acquired The World as Will and Idea in a Parisian bookstore (Perry 1:721). In 1870, as his youthful crisis neared a crescendo, he resolved in his New Year’s diary to read Schopenhauer along with many other writers (Allen, p. 162). Schopenhauer would have appealed to the young James because of both his emphasis on the will as the essence of each human being and his concern with compassion. l 3 For Schopenhauer, however, compassion and individual will, to which the young James was clinging for dear life, contradict one another. Schopenhauer rejects any possibility of a moral will such as that found in Renouvier. As individuals, we are slaves to our own desires, which will, being itself an irrational force, fuels rather than controls. Only with the death of desire can the compassion stemming from our common origin in one universal soul come into its own. This rejection of the personal self could not have sat well with James, though in his vulnerable state it may have troubled him. It was around this time, perhaps under the influence of Schopenhauer, that James experienced a panic attack, a “horrible fear of my own existence” that

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he recalled thirty years later in a disguised autobiographical passage of TheVarieties of Religious Experien~e.’~ By 1873 he was attacking pessimism as not “logically legitimate,” as “fatalism,”because it asserts that “there is no good upshot to the whole, that the good empirically existing is accidental and desultory, and not part of a system: and that it is useless to try to fix it or develop it” (Perry 1: 722). James eventually came to hate Schopenhauer so much that in 1883 he refused to contribute money for a memorial to the German philosopher: “I really must decline to stir a finger for the glory of one who studiously lived for no other purpose than to spit upon the lives of the like of me and all those I care But for all that he never simply turned his back on Schopenhauerian pessimism. Even in the letter just cited, he admitted that there was “a kernel of truth in Schopenhauer’s system”; and in Some Problems of Philosophy, published only posthumously, he lauded Schopenhauer as the first philosopher to tell “the concrete truth about the ills of life” (quoted in Perry 1:721). Indeed James came to think that “no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.” These words, significantly enough, were written to Benjamin Paul Blood, in a letter from 1896 in which James recalls his suicidal despair in 1870. As a young man trying to find his own path, suspecting alike the idealism of his father’s generation and the “monisms” of his own time, James found himself bereft of the moral certainties needed to live a meaningful life. He thankfully seized upon Renouvier but kept on looking for sturdier shelter against the moral chaos of life as envisaged by modern science and such doctrines as Spencer’s materialism and Schopenhauer’s pessimism. While never rejecting free will, he saw that the freedom to be moral could not by itself make life worth living. Ideals were necessary as well (“What Makes a Life Significant?” TT, pp. 163-164). In search of something more substantial than free choice, he came in 1874 upon Blood’s physiological road back to metaphysical idealism “at home, this side, beneath the feet, and overlooked by knowledge” (“The Anaesthetic Revelation” ECR, p. 288). In his final appreciation of Blood James sees him as teetering between Hegelian monism, according to which “‘each is all, in God. . . . The one remains, the many change and pass; and every one of us is the One that remains’”; and pluralism such as James himself came to advocate. The first alternative James associates with transcendental idealism, so much so that he comments that Blood’s prose echoes that of Emerson. With more assurance than James’s “unlucky heart” can muster, however, Blood’s pluralistic side yields truth and reason, but only as mysticallyrealized, as lived in experience. Up from the breast of man, up to his tongue and brain, comes a free and strong determination, and he cries, originally, and in spite of his whole nature and environ-

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ment, “I will.” This is the Jovian fiat, the pure cause. This is reason; this or nothing shall explain the world for him. For how shall he entertain a reason bigger than himself? . . . Let a man stand fast, then, as an axis of the earth; the obsequious meridians will bow to him, and gracious latitudes will measure from his feet. (Blood, quoted in ‘A Pluralistic Mystic,” EPh, p. 185) As James seems to have sensed, the biological coloring of Blood’s thought, as well as its irrational rationalism, links it to Tolstoy, whom historian of Russian philosophy V. V. Zenkovsky has called at once an empiricist and a mystic of the mind (“The Problem,” p. 30). The anaesthetic (and reasonable!) revelation wells up from the body, “up from the breast of man, up to his tongue and brain.” James may be alluding to the physiological cast of Blood’s inspiration when he wrote him that War and Peace“wil1speak to your very gizzard.” James himself “was always prepared to oppose sensing to thinking and to champion the former as the source of the profoundest insights into the differences between appearance and reality” (Myers, p. 86). In yet another striking coincidence between Tolstoy and James, Pierre-like Benjamin Paul Blood in James’s review of his pamphlet-is said therefore to have found the truth and significance of life “at his very feet” (book 15, chapter 5). Both Tolstoy and James trusted sensing more than thinking because the senses were less susceptible to error than the mind. Even more important, metaphysical idealism accessible through feeling and experience rather than the mind avoided the systematizing that both men abhorred as destructive of freedom. In “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” James wove War and Peace into the strands of his life and thought that I have picked out here. (The essay was written after he first read War and Peace in June 1896, and published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1899.) As an example of someone who “felt the human crowd . . . as an overwhelmingly significant presence” he quotes Walt Whitman from On Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. He then contrasts Whitman’s celebration of ordinary life with the ennui of Schopenhauer.

The eternal recurrence of the common order, which so fills Whitman with mystic satisfaction,is to a Schopenhauer,with the emotional anaesthesia,the feeling of “awful inner emptiness”from out of which he views it all, the chief ingredient of the tedium it instills.What is life on the largest scale, he asks, but the same recurrent inanities, the same dog barking, the same fly buzzing forevermore?Yet of the same kind of fibre of which such inanities consist is the material woven of all the excitements, joys and meanings that ever were, or ever shall be, in this world.16 To refute Schopenhauer, James turns to Tolstoy. One can escape Schopenhauerian ennui through a sense of the “unfathomable significance and importance” of the world, but this comes only from direct experience,“in mysteriously

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unexpected ways.” Tolstoy is “the great understander of these mysterious ebbs and flows. . . . They throb all through his novels.” As a n example James adduces the captivity of Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace. H e recounts Pierre’s experience, from his initial recovery of pleasure in satisfying the basic needs of the body to his subsequent ecstatic identification with nature. When at daybreak, on the morrow of his imprisonment, he saw [I abridge here Tolstoi’s description] the mountains with their wooded slopes disappearing in the grayish mist; when he felt the cool breeze caress him; when he saw the light drive away the vapors, and the sun rise majestically behind the clouds and cupolas, and the crosses, the dew, the distance, the river, sparkle in the splendid, cheerful rays; his heart overflowed with emotion. This emotion kept continually with him, and increased a hundred-fold as the difficulties of his situation grew graver. . . . He learnt that a man is meant for happiness, and that this happiness is in him, in the satisfaction of the daily needs of existence, and that unhappiness is the fatal result, not of our need, but of our abundance. . . . #en calm reigned in the camp, and the embers paled and little by little went out, the full moon had reached the zenith. The woods and the fields roundabout lay clearly visible; and beyond the inundation of light which filled them, the view plunged into the limitless horizon. Then Peter cast his eyes upon the firmament, filled at that hour with myriads of stars. “All that is mine,” he thought. “All that is in me, is me! And that is what they think they have taken prisoner! That is what they have shut up in a cabin!”-So he smiled and turned in to sleep among his comrades.

To this extract James appends the testimony of Emerson: The occasion and the experience, then, are nothing. It all depends on the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents absorbed by what is given. “Crossing a bare common,” says Emerson, “in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.” Life is always worth living [James comments] if one have such responsive sensibilities. (“On a Certain Blindness,” TT, pp. 145-146) Note that James does not say that Emerson created his own exhilaration. Rather Emerson’s state of soul allows what James earlier in the passage calls “the real a n d the ideal” in nature to enter a n d occupy him. For Pierre also, the return to “the real scale of life’s values” opens him to the real significance of everyday occurrences. James, Emerson, a n d Tolstoy all subscribe to a “prosaics,” a celebration of everyday life, which ultimately depends upon a n idealist interpretation of reality. They peer into the Goethean “reason behind everything that live^."'^

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Differences between Tolstoy and James The similarities in the thought of Tolstoy and James reflect convergences between Russian and American nineteenth-century culture. When Russians first read Psychology in the 1890s, they recognized in James a kindred spirit who shared their understanding of reality and human nature as broader than either philosophy or science could comprehend apart from the other.18 By the same token, James found Russian writers, including Tolstoy, congenial. As a beginning writer Tolstoy took the side of the so-called men of the ’40s against the militantly empiricist men of the ’50s in debates about the nature of consciousness. His own unique mix of idealism and biologism developed from his exposure in the mid-1850s to the metaphysical idealism of the 1830s and 184Os.l9 He may even have read the most important American transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, during these formative years.20In the 1860s and 1870s,while writing War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy joined Dostoevsky and Strakhov in a rearguard offensive against left-wing determinism. This was at the same time that the young William James was struggling to harmonize the transcendentalism that he had learned in his father’s house with positivistic science. For both men, Schopenhauer represented a dangerous challenge to their belief in a morality based on rational will. At the same time, Tolstoy responded to similar influences and situations differently from James. In “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” James used Pierre’s experiences as a prisoner of war to illustrate the connection between ordinary events and the metaphysical currents underlying each human life. It is therefore ironic that Tolstoy himself at exactly the same time as James, while he was finishing War and Peace in the late 1860s, began an encounter with Schopenhauer that unsettled his belief in the direct access of the individual to those currents. Prince Andrei’s awakening at death from the sleep of life already reflects the influence of Schopenhauer.21Like James, Tolstoy eventually repudiated Schopenhauer, at least in part. The way he did it, however, and what he retained from the encounter, suggest the difference between Jamesian pragmatism and Tolstoyan mysticism of the mind. Tolstoy’s correspondence with his friend the critic N. N. Strakhov reveals his complicated response to Schopenhauer. On January 8, 1873, Strakhov asked Tolstoy to explain his contention (from a previous letter) that the essence of life was the good. In claiming this, wrote Strakhov, Tolstoy proved himself an optimist, unlike the pessimistic Schopenhauer, whose thought “conduce[d] to the rejection of everything firm in morality” (Perepiska, p. 21). In a later exchange from 1876, Strakhov suggested that Tolstoy’s thought, if developed, would be “pantheism, the basis of which would be love, as in Schopenhauer it is will, and in Hegel-thought’’ (Perepiska, p. 87). In Anna

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Karenina, Levin provisionally adopts a Schopenhauerian metaphysics based on love rather than will, only to reject the result as too artificial,“a muslin garment without warmth.” At around the same time, however, Tolstoy in another letter to Strakhov credited Schopenhauer (along with Plato) with practicing the right philosophic method that included “everything that everything living knows about itself” (1 1/30/1875; PSS 62: 223). Perhaps most significantly, in 1877Tolstoy criticized the young philosopher Vladimir Solovyov for his attack on Schopenhauer. Then, how inaccurate and trivial is his [ Solovyov’s] attempt to refute Schopenhauer, [to suggest] that while pitying we promote the spectral false life of those whom we pity. Schopenhauer says that, giving ourselves to pity, we destroy the lie of isolation and give ourselves to the law of the essence of things, to unityand whatever comes out of that doesn’t matter. His ethics concur therefore with metaphysical principle [ nachalo].What more can one ask? **

Tolstoy’s reaction to Schopenhauer differed from James’s in two ways. Whereas James pitted antideterministic pragmatism against Schopenhauerian metaphysics, Tolstoy eventually countered it with determinist metaphysics of his own. Perhaps even more significantly, after reading Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, unlike James, partly turned against the celebration of individual life that James so admired in his earlier fiction. After a decade-long struggle to respond philosophically to Schopenhauer (during which he produced Anna Karenina), Tolstoy became, in James’s terminology in The Varieties of Religious Experience, the “morbid-minded’’ religious mystic of A C o n f e ~ s i o nJames, . ~ ~ by contrast, despite an ongoing struggle with depression, hoped to the end of his days that “our subjective natures, feelings, emotions, and propensities exist as they do because something in reality harmonizes with them; insofar as they are yearnings and longings, reality will ultimately fulfill them.”24 The later Tolstoy would not have sanctioned Jamesian optimism on this score any more than he could have approved of the “immortality of the substantial self” championed by the neo-idealists of the Moscow Psychological Society who voted James an honorary member.25In “The Problem of Immortality in L. N. Tolstoy” (1912), V. V. Zenkovsky castigates Tolstoy for his denial of personal immortality, and especially for his claim that Christ had denied it as well (33-35).26 The personal immortality for which Tolstoy had yearned his whole life he sadly rejected in his old age.27In War and Peace, one symptom of Sonia’s inferiority is her inability to join Natasha in imagining life before birth. The soul of Prince Andrei leaves his body before death; and despite her family happiness and her frequent pregnancies, Princess Maria’s face occasionally expresses “the lofty, secret suffering of a soul burdened by the body.” The characters of Anna Karenina are already more earthbound. The death of

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Levin’s brother Nikolai is “an unexplained mystery.” Already in the 1870s,Tolstoy made fun in Anna Karenina of the spiritualism that increasingly fascinated William James.28In Tolstoy’s late story Hadzhi-Murat, the soul inhabits the body until physical death occurs, and the narrator can tell us nothing about the consciousness of Hadzhi-Murat thereafter. Yet Tolstoy did not become less an individualist in his old age. On the contrary, he still perceived all morality and therefore all moral progress as originating in individual souls. To get to their own moral core, however, individuals had to reject their bodies and all bodily pleasure. They could do this by heeding “reasonable consciousness ( razumnoe soznanie),” which became the mechanism by which we control our lower, animal selves. Tolstoy himself saw Schopenhauer as his kinsman in this asceticism. Reading Schopenhauer’s Aphorisms in November, 1895, Tolstoy wrote in his diary that one would only have to substitute “service to G o d for “knowledge of the vanities of the world” for him to agree completely with Schopenhauer (PSS 53: 51). For Tolstoy in his old age, the way to morality led beyond the individual to God, from the many to the one. Tolstoy continued to defend free will. In The Kingdom of God Is within You (1894), for instance, he reasons in a way that strikingly resembles James. Everything that one does is in accordance with some truth that one recognizes, or because it is a habit derived from some previous recognition of a truth. So one may not be free with regard to one’s acts, which have a previous cause, but one is free in “the motive of one’s acts.” One can change one’s view of things and therefore change future acts that arise from that view. Some truths are accepted as faith through education and tradition, others are too vague for the individual really to grasp. But some are clear enough to require a choice, and it is in regard to these truths that one is free (pp. 351-352). In Psychology: Briefer Course, James makes similar arguments about the role of habit and belief. In the “stream of consciousness” chapter he too locates the possibility of freedom in a change of habit which will affect future behavior. He frames this argument, moreover, as Tolstoy might have done, as a response to Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer, who enforces his determinism by the argument that with a given fixed character only one reaction is possible under given circumstances, forgets that, in these critical ethical moments, what consciously seems to be in question is the complexion of the character itself. The problem with the man is less what act he shall now resolve to do than what being he shall now choose to become. (P. 158)

The difference between Tolstoy and James appears from the use to which each puts freedom of the will. Whereas in Psychology: Briefer Course James was

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concerned to defend the possibility of human freedom, in The Kingdom of God Is within You Tolstoy went further to name the purpose of freedom and thereby to limit it. The liberty of man does not consist in the power of acting independently of the progress of life and the influences arising from it, but in the capacity for recognizing and acknowledging the truth revealed to him, and becoming the free and joyful participator in the eternal and infinite work of God, the life of the world; or on the other hand for refusing to recognize the truth, and so being a miserable and reluctant slave dragged whither he has no desire to go. (pp. 354-355)

James is suspicious of revealed truths. In “Is Life Worth Living?” for instance, he explicitly rejects pantheism, or the religion of nature, as a justification for morality. “Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference, a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral universe” (WB, p. 43). In the same essay, however, he insists all the same on his “right to supplement it [the physical order] by an unseen spiritual order that we assume on trust, if only thereby life may seem to us better worth living again” (P. 49). As psychologists Tolstoy and James each challenged the assumptions about human nature of determinist science and philosophy. As thinkers they were unwilling to give up either of the ingredients-ideals and the freedom to pursue them-necessary for a meaningful life. Both reflect the commitment of their respective countries to the value and rights of the individual on the one hand, and the moral duties of that same individual on the other. Russian culture has been more prone to compromise the prerogatives of the individual in defense of social order and morality, while American culture has tended toward greater individualism at the expense of morality. The idealists and social activists who introduced James into Russia did so as part of their project to provide a theoretical foundation for individual dignity and rights that had never been part of Russian political culture; they needed to defend the individual against modern positivist and materialist scientific thought on the one hand, and political absolutism on the other (Poole, pp. 59-66). For his part, as a bridge between American transcendentalism and the rationalist thought that succeeded it, James saw Tolstoy as an ally in his battle to save the “two kingpins of Americanism, morality and individualism” (Bjork, p. 173). Tolstoy’s robust belief in an “unseen spiritual order” alarmed James and attracted him at the same time. It was both the source of the “fatalism” that James disliked in Russian writers, and a justification for the “emancipated sympathy’’that he so loved in Tolstoy.

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Notes 1. If this is so, however, the polemics do not revolve, as Kuzina and Tiun’kin maintain, around Tolstoy’s social determinism versus James’s belief in inner freedom. On the contrary, as I shall argue, James is drawn to Tolstoy in large part because of the latter’s demonstration in his fiction of the existence of inner freedom. James and Tolstoy ultimately part ways because of Tolstoy’s metaphysical determinism, something that Kuzina and Tiun’kin do not acknowledge. They do not, therefore, address the issue of what exactly constitutes the part of the soul that stays the same in Tolstoy’s opinion. Tolstoy himself, in 0 zhizni (About Life) (1888), explains that each individual‘s “character” is transcendental, originating outside of time and space. Only this, he says, can explain why people react differently to exactly the same circumstances (PSS 26: 401-406). 2. “[James says] that I’m a melancholic, close to mental illness” (December 13, 1909; PSS, 57:187). AU translations from Tolstoy, unless otherwise indicated, are mine. 3. PSS, 52:282. Tolstoy read the elder James in a posthumous edition prepared out

of filial piety by William (The Literary Remains ofthe Late Henry James). 4. For various implications, literary and otherwise, of the death of the idea of progress, see Morson’s Narrative and Freedom. Morson is a great admirer of William James. 5. See Gustafson (pp. 34-38) for a compelling discussion of Nikolenka’s “paradigmatic” return to Petrovskoe. In 1856, before the publication of Youth, Chernyshevsky (p. 423) praised Tolstoy as a writer who depicted the psychological process itself. Boris Eikhenbaum in The Young ToZstoy began the modern exploration of the “open form” that grew out of this concentration on the details of psychological life. 6. The deliberately undramatic structure of Youth made it unpopular with readers, who criticized it for being long-winded and too detailed. In a letter to V. P. Botkin, for instance, Tolstoy agreed with his astute friend that the work was “petty” (melko) (Gusev, p. 153). 7. It is suggestive that Tolstoy himself passed through several major crises of belief in the course of his life and career. See Eikhenbaum, “0 krizisakh Tolstogo” (On Tolstoy’s Crises). 8. Tolstoyan “pan-moralism”was typical of Russian thought as a whole, according to V. V. Zenkovsky (History, pp. 5-6). 9. “Otryvok bez zaglaviia” (Fragment without Title) (1847), PSS 1:233-236, esp. pp. 235-236. 10. The translation is by Aylmer Maude as corrected by George Gibian in the Norton edition of War and Peace. 11. Myers, p. 46. See also pp. 387-390. Myers considers Renouvier to have been the most important intellectual influence on James’s life after his father. Myers acknowledges, of course, that James’s crisis was not merely intellectual, nor was it resolved by intellectual means. 12. In a review of Edmund Pfleiderer’s Der moderne Pessimismus published in The Nation (October 7,1875). See Essays, Comments, and Reviews, p. 311.

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13. In his 1875 review of Pfleiderer, James may be referring to his own first impression of Schopenhauer (whom he calls “one of the greatest of writers”) when he says of Schopenhauerian compassion that it “will of course exert a spell over persons in the unwholesome sentimental moulting-time of y o u t h (ECR,p. 3 12). 14. Allen, pp. 165-166. According to Allen, James’s son put the date of this crisis as 1870. 15. Allen, pp. 268-269. Renouvier with his defense of free will helped James escape the moral collapse to which Schopenhauer may have contributed, so that it is not surprising that in 1893 James highly praised Renouvier’s own subsequent attack on “the badness of the will to live” in Schopenhauer (ECR,pp. 455-456). 16. TT, p. 144. James borrowed his characterization of Schopenhauer almost verbatim from his 1893 review of Renouvier’s essay. 17. The term “prosaics” is that of Gary Saul Morson, who developed it originally from his studies of the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin and has applied it to his interpretations of Tolstoy. See especially Hidden in Plain View, pp. 126-128,218-223. I am suggesting here that nineteenth-century prosaics, although a reaction against abstract philosophical systems, rests on metaphysical presuppositions that infuse the ordinary with meaning. Goethe was one of the creators of prosaics in this sense. On the influence of Goethe on Tolstoy see my T01stoyi Art and Thought, where I use the phrase “reason behind everything that lives” to describe the Goethean blend of realism and idealism. James and Emerson were also great admirers of Goethe, as, of course, was Herzen, whose Letters on the Study of Nature, much influenced by Goethe, helped shape realism in its Russian form. 18. James’s refusal to remain within the boundaries of either science or philosophy did not shock contemporary Russian readers. In Russia, Nikolai Grot’s 1890 review of The Principles of Psychology in Questions of Philosophy and Psychology identified James as a positivist who recognized the limitations of knowledge imposed by that philosophy even as he vowed to remain within them (Voprosyfilosofii i psikhologii, 21, book 5 [ 1890],90).A second, more extensive review of the book, by E. Chelpanov in 1892, picked up approvingly on James’s personal commitment to “spiritualism” (3:11, 72, 74, 76). When, eighteen years later, Chelpanov wrote James’s obituary for Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii and an article called “James as a Psychologist” (21:4 [ 19101, bk. 104,v-viii, 437-456), he stressed James’s breadth, his commitment to both science and philosophy, to both facts and the theories that make sense of them. 19. On this subject, see Orwin, TOlStOYk Art and Thought, especially chap. 3. Metaphysical idealism, according to Maurice Mandelbaum (6), “holds that within natural human experience one can find the clue to an understanding of the ultimate nature of reality, and this clue is revealed in those traits which distinguish man as a spiritual being” . . . in sum, the metaphysics of idealism finds man’s own spiritual nature to be the fullest expression of that which is to be taken as basic in reality.” 20. It has long been recognized that Tolstoy’s “absolute language” first made its appearance in his Sevastopol stories (Eikhenbaum, The Young Tolstoy, 102-105). Not coincidentally, the first outburst of the preacher in the first story is followed, in the third one, by the first infusion into Tolstoyan prose of Carlylian idealism. In Carlyle, Tolstoy discovered a justification for patriotism that carried him through War and Peace

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(Orwin, “Tolstoy and Patriotism”). He eventually left Carlylian metaphysics behind, but from 1884, when he read the essay Self-Reliance, he ardently admired Emerson, Carlyle’s disciple in America. Emerson became one of those sages whom Tolstoy quoted again and again in his tracts and his daily readers. Tolstoy may have read Emerson earlier (see Orwin, “Tolstoy and Patriotism,” 69n39; and Islamova, “Leo Tolstoy and Emerson” [Lev Tolstoi i Emerson]).Islamova argues that Emerson was more concerned with ideas and theories, while Tolstoy cared more for reality and action. This brings Tolstoy close to James, who shared a similar relation to Emerson; but whether from his youth he shared this direct link to transcendentalism with James, his education paralleled that of James in ways significant for this discussion. 21. On the relation of Tolstoy and Schopenhauer, see Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoi: Semidesiatye gody, pp. 95-97; McLaughlin; and Orwin, Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, pp. 150-1 64. 22. 12/17-18/1877; PSS 62:360. Solovyov’s Kritika otvlechennykh nachal ( A Critique of Abstract Principles) was published in Russkii vestnik (The Russian Herald) nos. 11, 12, 1877. 23. James quoted extensively from Tolstoy’s A Confession in the chapter called “The Divided Self” in The Varieties of Religious Experience, and, although he did not comment on other works of the older Tolstoy, he presumably read at least some of them. His writing occasionally echoed them, especially when Tolstoy was his subject. In a letter of 1908 to H. G. Wells, for instance, he compared Wells to Tolstoy as a practitioner of “contagious speech.” This peculiar turn of speech may well come from Tolstoy’s What is Art?, in which successful art is said to be “contagious”: the recipient catches the artist’s mood (Letters, 2: 316). It is important to observe too that James read the earlier Tolstoy only in 1896. This may help explain why, in the midst of his enthusiasm for Tolstoyan “veracity,” he was nonetheless struck by Tolstoy’s “fatalism and semi-pessimism’’ (Letters, 2: 45): these qualities, present but relatively subdued in Anna Karenina and even more subdued in War and Peace, would have leapt out at readers used to the grimmer fare served up by Tolstoy in his old age. James made his comment on August 4,1896, in a letter to Charles Renouvier, who, he could be sure, would oppose any kind of “fatalism” caused by metaphysical determinism. 24. Myers, p. 461. Myers goes on to comment that “no philosopher has ever proposed a more outrageous premise for faith than this. Because we want the world to be a certain way, our desire actually makes it so.” 25. See Poole, below. James himself did not seem that concerned about personal immortality, but he does make a very attentuated argument for it in his preface to the second edition of “Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine.” See Essays in Religion and Morality, pp. 75-76. 26. In the same publication, see also the article by Berdiaev, in which he claims that Tolstoy, unlike Dostoevsky in this regard, rejects individual souls for a World Soul, and therefore emphasizes law and the Old Testament over freedom and the New Testament. 27. Compare the diary entry from June 29,1852, when, just having read the Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard (from Rousseau’s Emile), Tolstoy joyfully proclaims that “the one thing I have extracted from it is a belief in the immortality of the soul” (PSS

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46:128) with numerous admissions in the diary of the 1890s that the individual personality (lichnost’) is not immortal and does not even remain the same in the course of one lifetime. See, for instance, entries for January 15,1890 (5l:lO-11); February 15, 1890 (51:19); March 13, 1890 (51:28); July25, 1890 (51:66-67), in which he explicitly distinguishes his own particular consciousness and character from the immortal part of his soul; May 27, 1891 (52:35); July 22, 1891 (52:45), in which he speculates that reincarnation is theoretically possible because time is infinite, and therefore the same combination of traits may reform to duplicate a personality; October 24, 1895 (53:62-63). 28. Kuzina and Tiun’kin point out that Tolstoy’s favorite psychologist from the pages of Questions of Philosophy and Psychology was the Dane Harald Hoffding, who, like Tolstoy, and in opposition to James, was an opponent of spiritualism and denied that the individual soul was substantial (pp. 74-75).

Works Cited Allen, Gay. William James: A Biography. New York Viking Press, 1967. Berdiaev, Nikolai. “Vetkhii i Novyi Zavet v religioznom soznanii L. Tolstogo” (The Old and New Testaments in the religious consciousness of L. Tolstoy). In 0 Religii L’va Tolstogo: Sbornik statei (On Tolstoy’s Religion: Articles), pp. 172-195. 1912. Reprint. Paris: YMCA Press, 1978. Bjork, Daniel. The Compromised Scientist. New York Columbia University Press, 1983. Blood, Benjamin Paul. The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy. Amsterdam, N.Y., 1874. Chelpanov, E. Nekrolog (Obituary [of William James]). Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii (VPF), 2:4, book 104 (1910), pp. vi-vii. -. Review of James’s Principles ofPsychology. VPF, 3:11, book 2 (1892), pp. 69-76. Chernyshevskii, Nikolai [Chernyshevsky].“Detstvo i otrochestvo. Soch. gr. L. N. Tolstogo Spb. 1856. Voennye rasskazy gr. L. N. Tolstogo.” (Childhood and Boyhood. The Works of Count L. N. Tolstoi). St. Petersburg, 1856. The war stories of Count L. N. Tolstoi. St. Petersburg, 1856). In Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 3: 421-431. Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1939-53. Eikhenbaum, Boris. Lev Tolstoi.Vol. 1.1928. Reprint, Munich Wilhelm FinkVerlag, 1968. -. Lev Tolstoi: semidesiatye gody (Leo Tolstoy. The Seventies). Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo “Khudozhestvennaia literatura,” 1974. . “0 krizisakh Tolstogo” (About Tolstoy’s Crises). In Skvoz’ literatury: Sbornik statei, pp. 67-72. 1924. Reprint. The Hague: Mouton, 1962. -. The Young ToZstoy. Translated and edited by Gary Kern. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1972. Flournoy, Theodore. T h e Philosophy of William James. 1917. Reprint. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Librairies Press, 1969. Grot, Nikolai. [Review of James’s Principles ofPsychology]. VPF2:1, book 5 (1890),89-90. Gusev, N.N. Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy: Materialy k biografii s 1855 PO 1869god (Materials for a Biography, 1855-1869). Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1957.

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Gustafson, Richard. Leo Tolstoy, Resident and Stranger. A Study in Fiction and Theology New York Columbia University Press, 1986. Islamova, A. K. “Lev Tolstoi i Emerson: 0 sviazi esteticheskikhsistem” (Leo Tolstoy and Emerson: On a connection of aesthetics systems). Russkaia literatura 1 (1989): 44-60. Kuzina, L, K. Tiun’kin. “Voskresenie” L. N. Tolstogo (Tolstoy’s “Resurrection”). Moscow: “Khudozhestvennaia literatura,” 1978. Logue, William. Charles Renouvier, Philosopher of Liberty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993. Mandelbaum, Maurice. History, Man e+ Reason. A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971. McLaughlin, Sigrid.“Some Aspects of Tolstoy’s Intellectual Development: Tolstoy and Schopenhauer.” California Slavic Studies 5 ( 1970): 187-245. Morson, Gary Saul. Hidden in Plain View. Narrative and Creative Potentials in “War and Peace.” Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987. . Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994. Myers, Gerald E. William James, His Life and Thought. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986. Orwin, Donna. “Tolstoy and Patriotism.” In Lev Tolstoy and the Concept of Brotherhood. Edited by Andrew Donskov and John Woodsworth. Ottawa: Legas, 1996. Pp. 51-70.

. Tolstoy’sArt and Thought, 1847 to 1880. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Perepiska L.N. Tolstogo s N.N. Strakhovym: 1870-1894 (The Correspondence of L. N. Tolstoy with N. N. Strakhov: 1870-1894). Tolstovskii Muzei. Vol. 2. St. Petersburg: Izdanie obshchestva tolstovskovo muzeia, 1914. Perry, Ralph Barton. The Thought and Character of William James. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1935. Poole, Randall. “Neo-ldealist Philosophy in the Russian Liberation Movement: The Moscow Psychological Society and Its Symposium, ‘Problems of Idealism.”’ A later 1995 version of a Kennan Institute Occasional Paper delivered in 1993. Tolstoy, Lev. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (CollectedWorks [PSS]).90 vols. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo“Khudozhestvennaia literatura,” 1928-1 958. . The Kingdom of God Is within You: Christianity Not as a Mystic Religion but as a New Theory of Life. Translated by Constance Garnett. 1894. Reprint. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. . War and Peace. Translated by Aylmer Maude, edited by George Gibian. 2d ed. New York Norton Critical Editions, 1996. Zenkovsky, V. V. A History of Russian Philosophy. Vol. 1. New York Columbia University Press, 1953. . [Zenkovskii].“Problema bessmertiia u L. N. Tolstogo” (The Problem of Immortality in L. N. Tolstoy). In 0 religii L’va Tolstogo: Sbornik statei, 27-58. 1912. Reprint. Paris: YMCA Press, 1978.

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“The Moral Equivalent of War”: Violence in the Later Fiction of LeoTolstoy Andrew Wachtel

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N HIS FAMOUS ESSAY, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” William James makes

the claim that no calls for the elimination of war will ever succeed unless they take into account the historical, ethical, and aesthetic reasons for its existence. While agreeing with the justice of the pacifists’ cause, James accuses them of a lack of imagination, an unwillingness or inability to understand their opponents’ point of view. “So long as the anti-militarists propose no substitutes for the disciplinary function of war, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation. . . . The duties, penalties and sanctions pictured in the utopias they paint are all too weak and tame to touch the military-minded.” As the only exception to this rule, James cites Leo Tolstoy, whose pacifism “makes the fear of the Lord furnish the moral spur provided elsewhere by the fear of the enemy”(ERM,p. 169). James does not mention which of Tolstoy’s works in particular he has in mind when referring to Tolstoy’s militant pacifism. We know that he was a great admirer of both War and Peace and Anna Karenina, but these two works, written before Tolstoy’s conversion of the late 1870s, do not contain a pacifist message. To be sure, some of Tolstoy’s early writings, The Sebastopol Stories and War and Peace in particular, contain some of the most pitiless and effective battle scenes in world literature. Indeed, in those literary works one precisely finds expressed both the horror of war as well as its attractive qualities (attractive to the defenders of war as a necessary human institution, anyway). And it is no accident that their author was ultimately capable of creating a sufficiently crusading pacifism to attract military types. After all, Tolstoy had - 81 -

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himself been a soldier in his youth, and he understood the military passion in far more than an abstract way. But, we repeat, it is not to these then and now well-known fictional works that James is referring in his essay. Rather, he has in mind the writings of the postconversion “sage of Yasnaia Poliana,” works like “Letter on Non-Resistance” or “The Kingdom of God Is within You.” That James should have focused on these tracts may come as something of a surprise. For by now, although one can still find occasional publications and discussions of Tolstoy’s religious philosophy, his literary works, including “The Death of Ivan Ilich,” “The Kreutzer Sonata,” “Father Sergius,” The Living Corpse, Hadji-Murat, and Resurrection, are considered the major contributions of the author’s later period. Such was emphatically not the case at the turn of the century. Indeed, it was widely felt that after Anna Karenina Tolstoy had essentially stopped producing imaginative literature, and his worldwide reputation (he was admired in this period by such diverse thinkers as Gandhi, Lenin, and Bergson, in addition to James) was based on his position as a social and religious thinker rather than as a fiction writer. The 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Tolstoy can be considered representative of contemporary views. The entry stretches to seventeen columns of small print, of which only one is devoted to Tolstoy the writer.’ By contrast, his religious views are given three full columns. But James was not attracted to Tolstoy the moral and religious thinker only because this work was available and famous. The two men seemed to be in substantial agreement, both in terms of their opinions and their positions in society. In particular, both were avowed pacifists whose reputation in part rested on their ability to denounce the bellicosity of their respective governments. And their pacifism was derived from the same source, the single Gospel passage which they took to be the key to all Christian conduct properly understood: “But I say unto you, Love your enemies” (Matthew, V: 43). Their glosses on this passage could have been written by the same hand: It is this recognition of the law of love as the highest law of human life, and the clearly expressed guidance for conduct that follows from the Christian teaching on love, applied equally to enemies and those who hate, offend and curse us, that constitutes the peculiarity of Christ’s teaching. The precise and definite meaning given to the doctrine of love and the guidance resultingfrom it inevitably involves a complete transformation of the established structure of 1;fe ([Emphasis mine. AW] Tolstoy, “The Law of Love and the Law of Violence,” A Confession,p. 174). Psychologically and in principle, the precept “Love your enemies” is not self-contradictory. It is merely the extreme limit of a kind of magnanimity with which, in the shape of pitying tolerance of our oppressors, we are fairly familiar. Yet if radically followed, it would involve such a breach with our instinctive springs of action as a whole, and the present world’s arrangements, that a critical

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point would practically be passed, and we should be born into another kingdom of being. (emphasis mine, [AW]; VRE, p. 229)

What is more, basic philosophical premises did not exist as abstract categories for Tolstoy and James. Rather, as public intellectuals, both men were willing to castigate their respective societies for breaking basic moral principles, even when doing so flew in the teeth of public opinion. This, for example, is how Tolstoy greeted the announcement of the Russo-Japanese War in his article “Stop and Think” ( 1904): War again. Again completely unnecessary, completely uncalled-for sufferings, again lies, again general hypnosis, and human beastliness. People, separated from each other by thousands of miles, hundreds of thousands of such people-on the one side Buddhists, whose religion forbids not only the killing of humans but even of animals, on the other, Christians who profess a creed of brotherhood and love-will search each other out, on land and on sea, in order to kill, torture and maim in the cruelest of fashions2 James, for his part, thundered in similar fashion against such American militaristic actions as the 1898 war in the Philippines, as in this letter to the editor of The Transcript “[Wle have all been swept away by the overmastering flood. And now what it has swept us into is an adventure that in sober seriousness and definite English speech must be described as literally piratical” (ECR,p. 155). More recent students of Tolstoy have, if they have written about this topic at all, tended to agree with James’s assessment of the Russian author’s views on violence in his later work. For example, based on a reading of twenty-five titles written by Tolstoy post-1880 as well as “the wealth of comment in the letters, diaries, notebooks, and in accounts of Tolstoy’s remarks in conversation,”Gary R. Jahn has concluded that the “distinctive feature of Tolstoy’s later views on war and related subjects was their theoretical rigidity and his absolute refusal to acknowledge the validity of any special case or the desirability of making occasional qualifications” (p. 118). This is said to be in marked contradistinction to Tolstoy’s earlier views according to which “war was madness and murder, but particular wars might be unjust or just depending on whether they were fought for aggression or defense” (p. 112). Although such claims do appear to hold true for Tolstoy’s post-1880 nonliterary work, a closer examination of his sporadic but nevertheless fairly extensive literary output from the same period yields a far more complex picture of Count Leo’s own struggles to express a moral equivalent of war. These works, including “The Kreutzer Sonata,” “The Devil,” The Power of Darkness, “Father Sergius,” and the novella Hadji-Murat, were for the most part unavailable to James (“The Kreutzer Sonata,” and The Power of Darkness had

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been published in Russian and in translation, but the others remained unpublished in any language during Tolstoy’s lifetime). They present violence in ways that, as we will see, directly contradict the principles Tolstoy laid out in his essayistic writing of the same period, ultimately calling into question the claim that the postconversion Tolstoy was always the militant pacifist whom James (and, following James, later scholars) took him to be. To be sure, one can find literary works in which the antiwar and antimilitaristic prescriptions of the essays are embodied directly. Such is the play And the Light Shineth in Darkness, for example. Here Nikolai Ivanovich Saryntsev (one of Tolstoy’s more autobiographical heroes overall) employs typically late-Tolstoyan logic to convince his daughter’s fiance to refuse the pledge of fealty to the tsar required of military officers. Buoyed by Saryntsev’s moral support, the young man goes to prison rather than take part in the state’s militarist structures, eventually ruining his life but presumably saving his soul. Even the heartrending pleas of the young man’s mother and the recognition that he will most likely die because of his refusal do not shake Saryntsev’s convictions. But works such as these alternate with others that display a far more ambiguous attitude to violence in general and war in particular. The first thing to be said is that for the literary oeuvre of an avowed pacifist, Tolstoy’s later fiction and drama contain a surprising number of scenes in which cruelty and violence play central roles. And in at least one work, the novella Hadji-Murat, one can say without exaggeration that war itself is glorified. Why this should be so and what it means will be the subject of the following short essay, but at the very least it is clear that for the later Tolstoy “do not do violence” did not mean “do not write violence.” As it happens, in most of the late works violence is related not to war but rather to sex: in this category one finds “The Kreutzer Sonata” (the narrator’s murder of his wife and her putative lover), “The Devil” (the narrator’s suicide, or his murder of his lover in the other variant), The Power of Darkness (Nikita’s murder of his illegitimate child), “Father Sergius” (Sergius’s selfmutilation). Although the murder in “The Kreutzer Sonata” has taken place in the past and is presented only in retrospective narration (which has the effect of diminishing its raw emotional power and allowing it to serve more as object lesson than as object), in the latter three works the act of violence happens in the narrative present. A scene from “Father Sergius” is perhaps the best place to begin our investigation of how scenes of aestheticized violence-by which I mean scenes in which a violent act is depicted in such a way as to encourage the reader to focus on the physical, visual, and aural particularity of the violent act as such, rather than on its moral or spiritual implications-function in Tolstoy’s later fictional work. Father Sergius has been living as a hermit for many years when,

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on a bet, a woman named Makovkina undertakes to seduce him. She arrives at his solitary cabin on a snowy night, forces him to admit her and then attempts to work her magic. Sergius, for whom life as a hermit is a long attempt to prove to himself and others that he is indeed a holy man, is obviously attracted to the woman. But his pride (rather than any true holiness) forces him to prove his sainthood to himself. So when she calls to him again he thinks: “I will go to her, but I will go like that holy father who put one hand on the harlot and the other in the fire. But there is no fire here”(PSS 31: 25). Sergius looks around for an acceptable substitute and then Tolstoy provides the following chilling scene: “I’ll come right now,” he said and, opening the door, without looking at her he walked by her to the door to the little room where he chopped wood. There he groped for the stump on which he chopped wood and the ax which was leaning up against the wall. “In a moment,”he said, and taking the ax in his right hand he placed the index finger of his left hand on the stump, raised the ax and struck himself just below the second joint. The finger flew up more briskly than would a piece of wood of the same thickness, flipped over, landed on the edge of the stump and then on the floor. He heard the sound before he felt any pain. But before he could be amazed that there was no pain, he felt a searing pain and the warmth of his flowing blood. He quickly picked up the severed finger with the hem of his robe, and pressing it to his thigh went back into the room. Having stopped in front of the woman and having lowered his eyes he asked quietly: “What do you want?”(PSS 31: 25)

What is immediately striking about this paragraph is the cold and clinical detail with which the amputation is presented. Although movies had not yet been invented, the impression of the description is cinematic, allowing us to see the finger coming off in close-up and in slow motion. In particular, the description of the flight of the severed finger itself is terrifying, because the analogy of live flesh with dead wood, perhaps a natural one for an uninvolved but experienced woodcutter, appears horribly detached from the thoughts we might expect Sergius to be having. Of course, the scene serves in the story to make a number of important points: it illustrates the distinction between right thinking and right action, shows in a graphic way that Sergius acts from pride and not true sainthood, and it serves as the starting point for Makovkina’s own conversion. But, and this is of central importance, in order to get these messages across, Tolstoy did not necessarily have to depict the scene so graphically, even if he had wanted to make the finger/phallus connection that is obvious here. The choice to present it narratively, and in such grisly detail,

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is precisely a choice, one that undoubtedly adds to the raw power of Tolstoy’s story, but is somewhat surprising. For we get the feeling that, in addition to making his points, the narrator is also taking pleasure in his ability to aestheticize the depiction of the violent act. In the end, it is the violence that tends to remain in the memories of readers, rather than any recollection of the moral lessons it was supposed to inculcate. This helps to prove the essentially aesthetic function of the scene. One can say something similar about the scene in The Power ofDarkness, in which a newborn baby is crushed to death. It is clear that Tolstoy needs to show just how far his character can fall in order to allow for the possibility of regeneration later. Nevertheless, this need does not explain why Tolstoy finds it necessary to depict the murder, carried out by crushing the infant, in such graphic detail (although not as graphic as the scene from “Father Sergius”).As Nikita recounts it: “An’ how its little bones crunched under me. Crr . . . Crr”(PSS 26: 21 1). Again, it is possible to say that Tolstoy meant the scene in question to illustrate the horror of violence, but the artistic success of his depiction of the moment of violence is so spectacular that it overshadows the moral point being made. In the end, then, Tolstoy’s ability as a writer overcomes his power as a moralist, and what we remember best in each of these works are not the moral points but rather the moments of horrific violence. Indeed, one gets the feeling that Tolstoy’s own fascination with the violence he had renounced causes him to aestheticize scenes of violence, even as he creates stories based on the overcoming of that very impulse. In all these later stories, however, violence is neither aestheticized nor glorified for its own sake. In each case, even if excessive description undermines Tolstoy’s moral position, the overall message of the work does not contradict his philosophy. Violence is an evil, even if it is a devilishly attractive one to characters, narrator, and readers. In the novella Hadji-Murat, the situation is more complicated. The story, certainly Tolstoy’s most neglected masterpiece, is about Hadji-Murat, Shamil’s chief lieutenant in the bloody rebellion against Russian rule of the 1840s and 1850s in the Caucasus. Like many of the mountaineers of this period, Hadji-Murat changed sides frequently in the conflict, now fighting on the side of the Russians, now against them, depending on a host of local conditions. In 1851, however, he went over to the Russians, promising to help them destroy Shamil. But when he was unable to force Shamil to hand over his family and unable to get Russian help in doing so, he tried to escape back to the mountains and was killed by Cossacks. Not surprisingly, given the subject matter, the novella is chock full of scenes of carnage and warfare, between Russians and Caucasian mountaineers as well as between the mountaineers themselves. What is surprising is that within the body of the story, when violence is described, we find a complete absence

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of the moralizing voice that would announce Tolstoy’s own disgust and revulsion. Furthermore, even the ultimate moral lesson provided by the aestheticized scenes of violence in the other late stories and plays is absent here. Instead, the most valued commodity in the story, and the ostensible reason for writing it, is an almost Nietzschean celebration of the life force itself. For the story is presented as a long analogy to the narrator’s own attempt to pick a flower called the “Tatar”-in the introduction the narrator/author talks about pulling out this flower which resists with all its might. After nevertheless succeeding, he comments: “But still, what amazing energy and life force . . . How bitterly it fought and how dearly it sold its life.” Hadji-Murat, from the story’s very beginning, is a one-man war. In chapter 4 he shoots at a group of fellow mountaineers who would stop him, and has dreams of fighting against and defeating Shamil. His biography, which is presented retrospectively in chapters 11 and 13, is a litany of blood feud, murder, and warfare. It includes the following cold-blooded description of HadjiMurat’s escape from captivity as told in his own autobiographical narrative: “When we approached, the path by the Moksokha river became narrow and on the right was a canyon about three hundred feet deep. I went over to the edge near the soldier on the right. He tried to stop me but I jumped over the edge and pulled the soldier after me. The soldier was killed, but I remained alive” (35: 58). The same clinical tone characterizes the scenes describing Hadji-Murat’s final days. In order to effect his escape from the Russians, Hadji-Murat murders one of his Cossack escorts, Nazarov, “the eldest son of an old believer family, who had grown up with no father and had supported his old mother along with three sisters and two brothers” (PSS 35: 111). Despite the fact that these virtues are snuffed out needlessly, overt narrative censure is absent. The thundering authorial voice that took Nicholas I to task for his cruelty only a few chapters earlier is strangely silent. Violent as they are, Hadji-Murat’s actions are evidently considered so natural that moral condemnation is inappropriate. Nor is it only violence perpetrated by Hadji-Murat that escapes narrative disapproval. Violence against him is presented with similar equanimity. Most spectacular is the scene in which Hadji-Murat’s death is announced (placed in the narrative before that same scene is actually described), a moment that rivals the finger-chopping scene in “Father Sergius” for naturalistic horror. In the presence of a number of officers and even of a woman, one Kamenev pulls an object out of a bag and asks “Do you recognize this?” The narrative continues dispassionately: “It was a head, shaven, with a prominent bridge above the eyes and a black, close-cropped beard and clipped mustaches. One eye was open and the other shut; the shaved skull was half cut open but not quite split, and there was a large blotch of clotted black blood on the nose. The neck was

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wrapped in a bloody towel. Despite all the wounds to the head, in the form of the bluish lips one could make out a good, childlike smile” (PSS 35: 109). The close-up, cinematographic quality of this scene is eerily reminiscent of the self-mutilation depicted in “Father Sergius.” There, however, the violence was in principle an illustration of Sergius’s negative qualities. In Hudji-Murut, on the contrary, it seems singularly appropriate and devoid of negative content. Indeed, like a kind of Medusa in reverse, Hadji-Murat, the man of perpetual violence, nevertheless remains a morally positive figure. The smile of goodness is a trait that has followed him throughout the story, for the first time he is seen by a Russian, the officer Poltoratsky, we are told “He (Poltoratsky) expected to see a morose, dry, and alien person, but before him was the simplest of men, who was smiling such a kind smile that he seemed not an alien but an old friend(PSS 35: 28). What can explain Tolstoy’s refusal to condemn violence perpetrated by and on Hadji-Murat, despite his adamant opposition to war and violence in his postconversion period? Before trying to answer this question, it needs to be recognized that the absence of moral condemnation is not universal in the story. Indeed, Tolstoy’s descriptions of Nicholas I are among the most acidly etched moral condemnations of his literary career. His depiction of Russian military actions in Chechnya also rings with denunciation against the senseless cruelty of war. Thus, after describing the destruction of a Chechen aoul (village), Tolstoy puts the following thoughts into the minds of the mountaineers: No one spoke about their hatred of the Russians. The sensation felt by all the Chechens, from young to old, was stronger than hatred. It was not hatred but rather a refusal to accept that these Russian dogs were human beings at all, and such revulsion, disgust, and perplexity at the absurd cruelty of these beings that the desire to destroy them, just like the desire to destroy rats, poisonous spiders and wolves, was as natural a feeling as the feeling of self-preservation. (PSS 35: 81)

But, although moral condemnation shows through clearly here, it is not presented in the absolute voice of the author, but rather from the more limited perspective of the Chechens. And exactly the same military action, when described through the consciousness of the officer Butler, takes on a completely different coloration: “His soul was energetic, calm, and joyous. The only side of war he saw was that he had placed himself in danger, even gambled with death, and in so doing he had earned awards and the respect of his comrades here and his Russian friends. The other side of war-death, the wounds of soldiers, officers, the mountaineers-, strange as it is to say, did not occur to him. He even unconsciously avoided looking at the dead and wounded in order to hold onto his

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poetic image of war” (PSS 35: 79). The implication, of course, is that this attitude is morally unacceptable, but Tolstoy’s absolute narrator avoids coming right out and saying so, being willing instead to forgive Butler’s youthful insouciance in the face of war’s evil. In his perceptive comments on Hadji-Murat, Harold Bloom says of Tolstoy’s last great fictional work “Perhaps Hadji-Murat can be read as the return in Tolstoy of the pure story-teller, who tells his story as a contest against death, so as to defer change, of which the final form must be death” (p. 2). He fails to develop this insight, however, instead going on to compare the novella to The Iliad in terms of its depiction of martial heroism. Seeing the work as completely unambivalent, however, is possible only if one believes that Tolstoy’s fictional texts are best read by and in themselves. Naturally, his great fictional works can be read in this way, but in general richer readings become possible if one recognizes that Tolstoy’s oeuvre is characterized by intergeneric dialogue such that a work in what appears to be a single genre is almost always countered and queried by a separate work in another genre. In this particular case, I would argue, the dialogue between Tolstoy’s pacifist essays and his martial fiction does not provide specific insight into the novella itself so much as it reveals certain facts about the author’s reasons for writing the work and his overall state of mind in his later years. Two related facts about the story can help us to understand why Tolstoy might have written it the way he did. The first is connected to the years 1851-1852, the time of the central occurrences in the finale of Hadji-Murat’s drama. These were precisely the years that Tolstoy spent in the Caucasus as a volunteer cadet in the Russian army. In the opening of War and Peace, set some fifty years before the work‘s composition, Tolstoy speaks of “the elegant French of our grandfathers” in order to set the scene. But in Hadji-Murat the events described brought Tolstoy back not to the time of his grandparents but to his youth. Thus, the entire story, and everything connected with it, was colored in Tolstoy’s mind by his own memories. As the author’s voice says at the end of the novella’s short introduction: “And I recalled a long-ago series of occurrences in the Caucasus, part of which I saw myself, part of which I heard from eyewitnesses, and part of which I imagined. Here are these occurrences as they have formed in my memories and imagination” (PSS 35: 6 ) . It is worth recalling that what ultimately became Tolstoy’s pseudoautobiographical “trilogy” (Childhood, Boyhood, Youth) was originally conceived of as a tetralogy to be entitled The Four Epochs ofDevelopment. In Tolstoy’s words at the time: “The 4 Epochs of Life constitutes my novel before Tiflis.” The Caucasus part was never written, however, and Tolstoy avoided the pseudoautobiographical form he had invented for the trilogy for the rest of his career. There is, however, ample evidence that Tolstoy saw Hadji-Murat as a kind of continuation of

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his youthful writing. One particular comment about the novella, made to A. B. Goldenveizer, stands out in this regard “I remember that long ago someone gave me a very convenient traveling candlestick.When I showed the candlestick to our Yasnaia Poliana carpenter he said: ‘That’s all youth.’ And that is my entire work now-it’s all youth” (PSS 35: 599). Just as had been the case with the trilogy? one of Tolstoy’s greatest difficulties in writing Hudji-Murat had to do with formal questions. As he said to a friend in 1902 after having embarked on his ninth rewrite of the novella: “I looked over all the variants of my tale, everything I had written earlier and everything I wrote now. I went on and on and I got all mixed up . . . and I don’t know what is better: that which was written earlier or that which was written now. Earlier the novella was in the form of an autobiography and now it is told objectively. Each version has its advantages” (PSS 35: 599). But Tolstoy’s situation at the turn of the century added a major new complication to his writing. When he was composing the trilogy, there was no great disjunction between the worldview of the characters and their author. The Tolstoy of the late 1890s, however, was a man of radically different principles from his youthful self. But the power of his own fictional voice was such that, when he began to write about that period, he could not view it objectively or separate from his global worldview in the 1850s. Tolstoy evidently realized this and was worried by it. As he wrote to his brother Sergei on July 30, 1902: “I am now occupied with writing a Caucasian tale and I’m ashamed of myself. And I think I’ll give it up” (PSS 37: 599). And yet, the aging author could not give up work on his tale that, and here Bloom’s insight is just on the mark, he seems to have seen as a kind of youth elixir, one he was simultaneously delighted and embarrassed to take. We can find strong evidence for this in the earliest draft for the work‘s prologue. This section,which is evidently based on the actual event in Tolstoy’s life that did indeed spur him to begin work on the story, is remarkably close to the final draft. One notable difference,however, is the presence of the followingpassage in the author’s voice just before the switch to retrospective historical narration: “That’s wonderful [referring to the flower’s resistance to human destructiveness],I thought. And a feeling of stimulation, energy, and strength came over me” (PSS 35: 286). In the final version these lines were removed, probably because Tolstoy did not want his personal reasons for writing the work to be foregrounded? but the tenacity with which he worked on Hudji-Murat (the writing itself stretched over ten years, and the research and time Tolstoy put into the novella rival what he spent on War and Peace and far surpass the attention and care he paid to his other postconversion fiction) testifies to the importance it had for him. It is now clear, however, why Tolstoy so adamantly refused to allow HudjiMurut to be published in his lifetime. He needed the story in order to fan the

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dying embers of his youthful self, to retain an integrated personal identity despite the chasm that had been opened by his conversion and subsequent public self-sainthood. Thus, whereas the story’s immense power to others lies in its awe-inspiring depiction of heroism, its power for Tolstoy was in its ability to keep a certain part of himself alive. In this sense, Hudji-Murut should be read as a kind of highly unusual autobiography. Indeed, given the extent to which Tolstoy clearly identified with both Father Sergius (another work Tolstoy refused to publish) and Hadji-Murat, it would not be too far-fetched to see the beheading of the latter and the self-mutilation of the former as directly related. Both fictional characters can be seen to be playing out Tolstoy’s own drama of his later years. On the one hand the adulation of all who surrounded him and the imputation of sainthood, and on the other the recognition of his own inability completely to give up his youthful pride and his youthful desires, both of which became incarnated in the decision to write (but not to publish) works of fiction despite his apparent scorn for the activity. Father Sergius’s eventual flight to the self-annihilation of the pilgrim, Hadji-Murat’s escape to heroic death, and Tolstoy’s own dramatic final days and death in 1910 then all stand as monuments to the immense personal cost of Tolstoy’s seemingly inflexible philosophical positions toward the end of his life. Clearly the pacifistic sage who was admired by William James, among so many others, was never entirely able to still his own hot blood. Writing fictional works that focus on violence in general and war in particular was perhaps what allowed Tolstoy’s militant pacifism to flourish in his nonfictional work. Taken together, these contradictory impulses, generically segregated, show us the war that raged within Tolstoy himself, completely hidden from the vast majority of his admirers. Notes 1. In this entry, remarkable for its lack of insight into Russian life and its willingness to use literary texts as biographical sources, the only postconversion works mentioned are The Power of Darkness, Resurrection, “The Kreutzer Sonata”and “The Death of Ivan Ilich” (26: 1053-2061). On p. 1059 we read of the post-Confession Tolstoy: “[Llike a dying lamp, his imagination again shone out in ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyitch and The Power of Darkness. Subsequently, with rare exceptions,his writings were overloaded with ethical reasonings.” 2. “Odumaitis’!”in Tolstoy, PSS, 36: 101. Translations throughout are mine unless otherwise noted. 3. As noted above, Tolstoy wrote in a diary entry for November 30, 1852, “The 4 Epochs of Life constitutes my novel before Tiflis. I can write about him because he is so distant from me” (PSS 46: 150-1 5 1). Since many of the facts of Irten’ev’s life do not

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coincide with those of Tolstoy’s, in what sense could Tolstoy call the work “mynovel?” It is significant, of course, that he did not say “my life.” The italicized “my” indicates that Tolstoy closely identified himself with his work and its hero. At the same time, the words “novel” and “him” indicate that Tolstoy was able to distance himself from his story, to accept it as a fictional construct. The obvious internal contradiction here is one that Tolstoy was evidently never able to solve. 4. Again, the desire to avoid a too close identification with autobiographical material is typical of Tolstoy. Recall his remarks when he saw Childhood in print for the first time. It turned out that Nekrasov had, for some unknown reason, published it under the title The Story of My Childhood. Tolstoy was furious and dashed off a letter to his editor (although he never mailed it) in which he said, “The very title The Story ofMy Childhood contradicts the sense of the work. Who cares about my childhood” (PSS 1: 332).

Works Cited Bloom, Harold. “Introduction.” Leo Tolstoy: Modern Critical Views. New York Chelsea House, 1986. Encyclopedia Britannica. 1 Ith ed. New York Encyclopedia Britannica Co., 1910. Jahn, Gary R. “Patriotism and the Military in Tolstoy’s Philosophy. Literature and War: Refections and Refractions. Edited by Elizabeth W. Trahan. Monterey, Calif.: Monterey Institute of International Studies, 1985. Tolstoy, Leo. A Confession and Other Religious Writings. Translated by Jane Kentish. London: Penguin, 1987. . [Tolstoi,L. N.] Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Completed Collected Works [ P S S ] ) . 90 vols. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1928-1 953.

Philosophers, Decadents, and Mystics: James’s Russian Readers in the 1890s Joan Delaney Grossman

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N THEMETAPHYSICAL CLUB:A STORY OF IDEAS IN AMERICA, Louis Menand

characterized William James as a thinker “for misfits, mystics, and geniuses-people who believed in mental telepathy, or immortality, or God” (p. 372). Menand was referring to James’s discomfort with the American cultural milieu just after 1900, a time when the country was “adjusting to life under industrial capitalism.” However, he might equally well have been addressing Russia in the 1890s, where young cultural rebels calling themselves decadents and symbolists were beginning to raise radical questions about art, the psyche, and the individual’s place in the universe. This audience was ready to find in the message offered by James and certain other unconventional thinkers, chiefly European, elements they eagerly sought to aid their search. William James emerged onto the Russian scene at a portentous moment in that country’s cultural history. Two powerful intellectual and cultural forces converged on the horizon around 1890. One of these was the “new art,” which came to Russia about a decade after it burgeoned in France and Belgium. This term was shorthand for a whole complex of aesthetic, spiritual, philosophical, and ideological issues that engaged a new and restless generation of poets, artists, and thinkers. These individuals together constituted the first wave of the modernist revolution in Russian culture, and it was among them that William James’s unorthodox ideas about the psyche and psychic phenomena resonated. These rebels believed that, while scientific discoveries in recent decades had opened vast perspectives for human exploration, science itself was poorly equipped to take best advantage of these. The natural sciences by their own

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definition were incapable of seeing beyond the material world that, under scientific probing, had already yielded so many secrets. The scientific mind was incapable of recognizing signals that beckoned from outside narrow scientific boundaries. The human spirit’s innate powers, they felt, were infinitely better prepared than was science for this challenge to further exploration and discovery, and the “new artists” were eager to undertake it. The other force in this equation was “la psychologie nouvelle,” to borrow a term used by the philosopher Alfred Fouillee (Fouillte, p. 811). This was a cluster of innovative approaches to the human mind that expanded traditional notions of consciousness and applied scientific principles to investigation of phenomena earlier relegated to the areas of superstition or fantasy. Among the works listed at the head of Fouillte’s 1891 article in Revue des deux mondes were Hippolyte Bernheim’s landmark Hypnotisme, suggestion, psychothtrapie, ttudes nouvelles, Henri Bergson’s Essais sur les donntes immtdiates de la conscience, and William James’s The Principles of Psychology. That, of the ten works mentioned, eight were in French confirms the lively state of contemporary research on these topics in France. Bernheim and the Nancy School, JeanMartin Charcot at the Salp6tritre Hospital, and a little later Charcot’s close disciple and associate Pierre Janet, whose study of multiple personalities in one individual William James found so significant, were the most prominent figures (Taylor, Consciousness, pp. 42-46). That James himself appeared in this company should occasion no surprise, since, as one James scholar says, “James was . . . known to the French as a Frenchman from the beginning of his career, and his acclaim in France . . . contributed in no small part to further renown in England and America” (Taylor, Consciousness, p. 27). By contrast, in 1891 psychology in Russia had barely begun to address the challenging task of defining itself as a discipline separate from philosophy.’ The chief interests of the above-mentioned experimental scientistshypnotism, automatism, dkdoublement, mediumism, hysteria-all centered on the mysteries of consciousness and the “I.” Once at the core of ancient myths and healing religions, these mysteries seemed more susceptible to penetration in an era when new methods of experiment and observation were available. At the same time, these scientific concerns overlapped substantially with those of proponents of the “new art,” who, needless to say, looked at them from a totally different point of view. Many of the latter regarded themselves as modern mystics, who as such held proprietary rights over approaches to man’s inner self. Nonetheless, some among them showed the liveliest interest in contemporary psychology’s explorations of the self. A few decades earlier, when the rift between science and art was not yet so pronounced, romantic writers like E. T. A. Hoffmann could imbibe inspiration from the magnetic experiments of Anton Mesmer. But in the intervening time, the line between the

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spiritual realm of artistic creativity and the realm of positivist science with its materialist underpinnings was sharply drawn. Yet, though the “scientific” approach of the new psychology and psychiatry might offend them, these modern creative artists had no qualm about appropriating scientific findings and adapting them to their own use. Beginning in the early 1890s in Russia, the new poets and artists declared themselves, unlike their immediate predecessors, totally free of any duty to be the voice of civic virtue or morality. As models they claimed certain writers of the recent past, Russian and other, whom they believed to have been most in conflict with, or at least to have stood aloof from, the values of their milieuxPoe, Hoffmann, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky. By following the promptings of their own souls instead of external dictates, these bold explorers and prophets had uncovered new reaches of the human spirit and of life itself. Following that example, the “new art” refused to do anything at all except to be art whose primary role was to reflect the soul of the artist and plumb the secrets to be revealed there. This cohort had grown up reading Darwin, Spencer, Marx, and Chernyshevsky. Never mind that they also read Dostoevsky and, a little later, the works of Edgar Allan Poe, translated in the 1890sby the young Symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont. The air they breathed was still infused with positivism and veneration for science. Patterns of thought formed in this milieu influenced them, even as they prepared to plumb decadent abysses or take flight in a world of symbols in search of the inner self or the world soul, or both. The impulse toward reconciling mysticism and scientific thought that came to the fore in early-twentieth-century thinkers like Pave1 Florensky may have had its beginnings here. The Principles of Psychology was the first of James’s writings to draw attention from Russians. The book was briefly reviewed in 1890 in the monthly Questions of Philosophy and Psychology, organ of the Moscow Psychological Society, by Nikolai Grot, the journal’s founder and editor. Grot put it forth as a strong candidate for early translation. His meeting with James at the International Congress of Physiological Psychology in Paris the previous year convinced him that here was a man of erudition and originality of thought who should be known in Russia. Without glossing over the fact (likely to discourage many members of the Moscow Psychological Society who were also idealist philosophers) that as a psychologist James identified himself as “a follower of the natural science method, an empiricist, and a positivist in the strict sense,” Grot offered a counterbalancing observation. James, he noted, asserted that the positivist method, though forcing him “to discard both the associationist and the spiritualist theory of the soul,” did not for him preclude the possibility of subjecting facts thus discovered to metaphysical critique in another arena. In

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any case, Grot was convinced that “for the progress of our spiritualist psychology and philosophy, translation of James’s work would be extremely important as firm ground for criticism” (p. 90). Another reviewer, writing two years later and equally positively, was less nuanced. William James, he declared, had “openly announced himself as a metaphysician of the spiritualist school” (Chelpanov, p. 76). Nonetheless, The Principles of Psychology was never translated.2 It was left to the one-volume abridgment a few years later to introduce James to Russia. One important facet of James’s professional interest left unmentioned by these reviewers was his involvement in research concerning psychic phenomena and related subjects. These activities, in the opinion of many, particularly in the English-speaking professional world, were among the more controversial aspects of his career. Many readers of Questions of Philosophy and Psychology in all likelihood would have agreed with their American opposite numb e r ~ Nonetheless, .~ at every opportunity James insisted on the importance of such research for the whole field of psychology. His interest in these matters began early. By the 1880s he was conducting experiments in hypnotism and automatic writing. In 1882 he became a member of the recently established English Society for Psychical Research, and in 1884 he helped found the American branch. In 1896 he was chosen president of the entire society. That same year, in the prestigious Lowell lectures in Boston, he summed up the results of nearly two decades of study on what he called “Exceptional Mental States.”Unpublished during James’slifetime, these lectures were reconstructed years later from his notes and other sources (Taylor, Mental States). Much of the material appeared unchanged or only slightly revised six years later in the Gifford lectures, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience. The topics treated in the eight Lowell lectures were: “Dreams and Hypnotism,” “Automatism,” “Hysteria,” “Multiple Personality,” “Demoniacal Possession,” “Witchcraft,” “Degeneration,” and, finally, “Genius.” Discussing these topics sequentially, James was able to place his own ideas on a psychology of the subconscious in the context of contemporary scientific research. At the same time, speaking to a broad, nonacademic audience, he addressed certain subjects of perennial and also topical public interest. The lectures, particularly the first four, were liberally studded with vivid illustrations from cases recorded by French and English colleagues that confirmed what James himself had come to believe were essential traits of the human personality: its complexity and its fluidity. Exploration of these aspects, he felt, had been woefully neglected by most scientists. James had already made this point in “The Hidden Self,” an 1890 reviewarticle of Pierre Janet’s L’Automatisme psychologique. There he quoted a scientific friend as saying: “The great field for new discoveries is always the Unclas-

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sified Residuum” (EPs, 247). And yet, he observed, science typically does not venture far into that cluttered field, especially one corner of it: No part of the unclassed residuum has usually been treated with a more con-

temptuous scientific disregard than the mass of phenomena generally called mystical. Physiology will have nothing to do with them. Orthodox psychology turns its back upon them. Medicine sweeps them out; or at most, when in an anecdotal vein, records a few of them as “effects of the imagination”. . . .All the while, however, the phenomena are there, lying broadcast over the surface of history. (EPs, p. 248)

Some hope was in sight, however, especially in France, with the work of Pierre Janet and Alfred Binet. James urged more energetic efforts: “A comparative study of trances and subconscious states is meanwhile of the most urgent importance for the comprehension of our nature” (p. 268). The same thought occurred in Principles toward the end of the chapter “The Consciousness of Self” and was repeated in the 1892 abridged version: “I am persuaded that a serious study of these trance-phenomena is one of the greatest needs of psychology, and think that my personal confession may possibly draw a reader or two into a field which the soi-disant ‘scientist’ usually refuses to explore” (PP, p. 375; PBC, p.190). Psychology: Briefer Course, which finally brought William James a Russian readership, was translated and published in 1896 at St. Petersburg University. It went through several editions in a short time. Incoming students in the fall of 1896 used it as the textbook in introductory psychology. Among them was Ivan Oreus, soon to be known as the poet Ivan Konevskoi, one of the so-called first-generation Symbolists or Decadents. His accidental drowning in the summer of 1901 terminated a brief career (he was then twenty-three) that, among his contemporaries, acquired a tragic aura. The image of the gifted young poet and searcher after esoteric truths who had gone further than most in his search, became an icon for some. Far from decadent in externals, Konevskoi in many ways embodied the outsized ambitions, thirsts, and anxieties of the generation of the 1890s. To break through the barriers, to find the answers, no matter what it took his goals were revealing, both for the intensity with which he pursued them and for a certain nalvetk-call it youthful brashness-he showed in doing so. Yet he found himself hindered by conflicting feelings and convictions about the possibility of reconciling the demands of art and mysticism with those of science and rational thought. He was, after all, like his fellows, being trained in neo-Kantian thinking. James spoke as a positivistic experimental psychologist, yet one who took seriously the possibility, even the probability, of another, transcendent sphere of being. As such his was a persuasive and possibly a reassuring voice.

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Konevskoi’s notebooks for that fall of 1896 give no evidence of his becoming an instant devotee of William James. His few pages of notes on James deal with the structure of the eye and ear (RGALI 259.1.11, pp. 12-14). Except for the insight into Konevskoi’s reading tastes, it is probably of slight significance that these notes are sandwiched between notes on Knut Hamsun’s novel Mysteries and quotes on somnambulism, consciousness, sleep, and dream from various sources (pp.14-18). Nonetheless, James’s brief for the importance of serious study of mediumship and possession coincided strikingly with the aspirations and inclinations of the cohort to which Konevskoi belonged and certainly of Konevskoi himself. Even closer to their preoccupations were James’s views set forth in the concluding paragraph of the chapter “The Self” (in Briefer Course only): “[TIhe notion either of a Spirit of the world which thinks through us, or that of a set of individual substantial souls, must be considered as prima facie on a par with our own ‘psychological’ solution, and discussed impartially. I myself believe that room for much further inquiry lies in this direction” (PBC,p. 191). These statements opened wide the possibility of a fruitful linkage between the new scientific “description and explanation of states of consciousness as such” and the new mystical art, devoted to exploring the human spirit’s links to the conscious principle believed to exist on a cosmic scale. The point to be noted here is not that a cult of William James was in the making among young Russians. It is, rather, a conceivably more interesting one. James’s students at Harvard had the opportunity of listening to a professor who frequently asked controversial questions and suggested equally controversial approaches to answering them. If some listeners were more attuned to his thoughts than others, at least they heard them against a background of assumptions, beliefs, and collective experience that they shared to a degree with their instructor. On the other side of the world, in St. Petersburg, at about the same time, students and readers were differently attuned. Though some of the same questions were rising in the minds of some, they arose out of a profoundly different cultural situation. It is fascinating now to discover what James’s Psychology meant in Russia of the 1890s and in particular to adventurous young readers like Ivan Konevskoi and his peers. Surely these were the sorts for whom James, all unknowingly, wrote in the final pages to his book that psychology so far was a “fragile science,” into which “the waters of metaphysical criticism leak at every joint” (PBC, p. 400). The fin de sitcle in Russia did not, on the whole, carry the connotations of decline and pessimism it bore in some countries. Rather, Russian Decadence was perceived by some of its spokesmen as the key to the future. Heavily influenced by Nietzsche as it was, the fin de sitcle’s leading characteristic was probably the extreme individualism that it found in his philosophy. It fol-

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lowed that Konevskoi and his fellows were profoundly interested in questions concerning the self and consciousness. However, their interest took a different shape from that of either those experimental psychologists who looked for the body-mind connection, or spiritualist philosophers, looking for the soul. Rather, they were eager to discover means by which consciousness and the individual ego might expand outward beyond the bounds of rational processes and the normal waking state-and downward, into primal depths that contemporary psychiatry and psychology had begun to call the unconscious. Here, many were convinced, lay the route into a deeper reality: the world soul or universal consciousness. Spiritism, pantheism, panpsychism, mystical trance, religious experience, sexual passion, drugs: all these appealed as means to this goal. If psychology and psychiatry could provide a more informative map of the territory, they too should be investigated. Ivan Konevskoi spent much of the summer of 1896, before entering the university, in the company of another student, Sergei Semyonov, a year older and deeply absorbed in philosophy. That fall Semyonov introduced him into a student circle where papers on current intellectual topics were read and discussed (Stepanov, p. 183). (The first meeting featured a paper “On Nietzsche.”) Semyonov’s name appears on the circle’s program more frequently than any other, and the titles of his papers likely reflected summer discussions with Konevskoi: “On Consciousness”; “On Art: Its Significance for Consciousness”; and “Analysis and Synthesis of the Two-in-One Principle of Panpsychism.” Konevskoi’s initial presentations dealt with esthetics (Konevskoi RGALI 259.1.17, pp. 63ob.-64) .4 However, he also reported on a small book then making the rounds in St. Petersburg: Der Spiritismus by Baron Carl Du Prel (Stepanov, p. 183). Du Prel, a Bavarian philosopher, natural scientist, and occultist, was the author also of Die Philosophie der Mystik ( 1884), which was translated into several languages, including Russian in 1895, and which gained considerable authority in spiritist and other mystically inclined circles in those years (see Grossman, “Alternative Beliefs”). In Der Spiritismus Du Prel took a line advanced also by other leading spiritists of the time: no chasm in fact exists between spiritism or mediumism and science, since both are branches of knowledge with links readily discovered by those not blinded by prejudice against so-called superstition (Russ. tr. Spiritizm, p. 9). James would hardly have gone so far or in just this direction, but Konevskoi and his comrades might well have been struck by the seeming coincidence of views between these two authorities. The summer of 1897 can be called Konevskoi’s summer of mystical initiation. Already a convinced pantheist, he had only begun to explore that creed’s implications. Speculations on mystical pantheism’s relation to art were an important part of his baggage as he embarked on his first trip to Western Europe.

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His itinerary took him through the Austrian Alps and into Bavaria, with Munich as his target, and then into the forests of Thuringia. Like most Russian visitors to Munich, Konevskoi assiduously visited museums and art galleries. The painter who made the greatest impression on him was the Swiss Arnold Boecklin, a large number of whose works hung in a special exhibition marking the artist’s seventieth birthday. Boecklin’s fame came relatively late. His appeal to the sensual decadent sensibility no doubt accounted in large part for his popularity in the 1890s,but for Konevskoi the attraction was his perceived pantheism and the mystery pervading some of his best paintings. The following year Konevskoi revisited Boecklin’s work and wrote an essay enlarging on the mystical elements he discerned there (Poems and Prose, pp. 160-169). A shorter essay, “Before the Paintings of Schwind,”written at the end of his first Munich visit, in 1897, shows Konevskoi preoccupied that summer with defining-for himself, as well as for his peers-what he called “modern artistic mysticism” (pp. 137-142). Moritz von Schwind (1804-1871) was noted in his day especially for his illustrations of legends and fairytales. After viewing his paintings in Munich‘s Schack Galerie, Konevskoi blithely dismissed Schwind and most of German romanticism: “How childish it seems . . . compared with the deep riddle and questioning of present-day mystical art.” German romantic medievalism seemed particularly shallow. “Contemporary mysticism,”he wrote, “tries to gaze more deeply into the unconscious depths of the medieval world view” (Poems and Prose, p. 137, emphasis mine). The link between art (particularly painting and poetry) and the unconscious or the subliminal consciousness had become central to Konevskoi’s understanding of both the “new art” and the “new mysticism.” The “new psychology” cast light into these murky depths, in particular as concerned the sources and nature of artistic inspiration. Had he been in Munich ten months earlier, Konevskoi (whose German was fluent) might have read press reports of discussions taking place at the Third International Congress for Psychology, held in Munich in August 1896. Echoes may still have been about when he arrived. In any case, a letter to his fellow student and comrade the artist Ivan Bilibin written in June 1897 shows him alert to recent reports on related subjects. To Bilibin he wrote: I read an article saying that the drawings of certain French artists on view at the exhibit “L’Art Mystique” in Paris are exactly like the drawings made by mediums during spiritistic seances. The source is one and the same: the unconscious depths of the human spirit unilluminated by the will, or, to make a metaphysical supposition, a direct manifestation, not yet crystallized in the conscious will, of the world soul. The drawings of the Dutch artist Jan Toorop evoke the same impression. (RGALI 259.3.18, p. 5)

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It is not clear where Konevskoi’s own comments begin in this passage, but, given his thinking and reading at that time, they probably start right after the word “seances.” The previous November in St. Petersburg he had visited (likely in company with Bilibin) an exhibit of contemporary Dutch artists, where Toorop’s recent drawings, featuring unearthly female figures with wavy outlines, obviously made their impression. The French critic’s remarks reinforced his growing conviction about the common source of artistic inspiration and mediumistic revelations. The mediumistic seance, treated by many observers and participants alike as a kind of spooky parlor game, was taken much more seriously by some, including Konevskoi’s circle and, as well, a fair number of serious and distinguished scientists in Europe and America, among them James himself. In Russia, the writings of Baron Carl Du Prel, mentioned earlier, were only one source of information available on what Du Prel called the “phenomenology of spiritualism.” Serious, even scholarly, articles and books appeared, and seances were common in the most intellectually sophisticated venues. Automatic writing was a common feature of mediumistic trance and thus an object of scientific study for James and his colleagues. For them, the drawing or writing issuing from the pen of a mediumistically sensitive person might cast light on the phenomenon of multiple personality or, more generally, the subliminal consciousness. From the spiritist point of view, these productions might contain messages from another world. Or, as Konevskoi wrote to Bilibin, they might be “a direct manifestation, not yet crystallized in the conscious will, of the world soul,” or their source might be “the unconscious depths . . . of the human spirit.” In any case, whatever discoveries the “new psychology” might offer about these phenomena were welcome. Konevskoi’s Munich stay was only the prelude to his real mystical initiation. This came in a Thuringian forest one July evening at dusk, an event carefully recorded in his travel notes and in at least one letter to his friend Semyonov. In his notes, later published as a short sketch, the event is described in mystical terms and provided with a setting straight from a canvas by Boecklin, or even Schwind: “My spirit was totally penetrated by the atmosphere of ancient fairy tales. . . . Then I began to chant loudly, like an invocation, the most prophetic verses of the poets” (Poems and Prose, p. 149). While in the best mystical tradition his spiritual preparation was carefully made, what followed seems fairly spontaneous. Describing the experience to Semyonov soon after, he was still bemused “I felt as if I had released in my soul some kind of invisible waters from behind a high dam. Would you believe me, I felt at once terrified and blissful as I heard the sounds of my own voice.. . . It was clear to me that it was not I who spoke, but someone else speaking through me.” In his essay-sketch the language was unabashedly mystical: the “something” that

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spoke through him was “all-seeing: night itself.” However, in the letter he adopted a more analytical tone: This, of course, was very close to a “mediumistic” state. But at the same time I felt not at all the powerless slave of the nature that enveloped me. No, it somehow instantly merged, formed one closed circle with the whole structure of my conscious being. More than at any other time, I felt powerful and deliberate in my motions. Never before have I experienced such an ecstatic condition. (RGALI 259.3.21, pp. 18-19)

In both the sketch and the letter Konevskoi stressed an element of first importance to him as he sorted out his pantheistic belief and worked to make it compatible with his equally staunch individualism. This was the issue of the independent “self.” In Psychology: Briefer Course, under “Mutations and Multiplications of the Self,” James noted: “In ‘mediumships’ or ‘possessions’the invasion and the passing away of the secondary state are both relatively abrupt, and the duration of the state is usually short” (PBC, p.189). This description fit Konevskoi’s experience exactly. However, another aspect of James’s discussion did not tally. The entranced medium, according to all reports, was usually unconscious of the other personality that had taken over his or her faculties, nor were trance events remembered in the waking state. Cases of multiple personality, where the subject moves sequentially from one personality to another, exhibited the same feature: one “personality” does not remember what happened to the previous one. Having no doubt learned of this from James’s text and perhaps from other sources, Konevskoi was at pains to show that his experience differed from these examples in at least one important way. His conscious “self” was never submerged in the encounter with the “other”; rather, it expanded to meet the larger “self” and form a unity with it. Here he seems to come close to what his letter to Bilibin called a “metaphysical supposition”: the “second personality” (in James’s terms) that emerged here, that other, larger “self” (in the essay-sketch “night itself”), could indeed be construed as a “direct manifestation . . . of the world soul.” A related concern of the “new artists” had to do with the nature and powers of artistic genius. Artistic inspiration itself could be, and was, taken by some as “a direct manifestation . . . of the world soul.” Konevskoi’s cohort was deeply interested in establishing the creative power of the artist as a means, perhaps the main means, of penetrating to the heart of reality and even of transforming it. They would not have taken much comfort in the reflections on “Genius” that James put forth in his final Lowell lecture. His efforts to show human nature ranging along a continuum stretching from idiocy to genius ran hard against their conceptions, rooted as these were in the romantic notion of genius. The romantic visionary dreamer, whose imagination, often enhanced by

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alcohol, drugs, or madness, reached into other worlds, continued to fascinate successive generations. However, that image came under intense discussion and criticism as the nineteenth century wore on. The Italian anthropologist and criminologist Cesare Lombroso’s widely translated and quoted L’uomo di genio, crude as its method was, provided ample ammunition to opponents of the new art. On their side, the Decadent-Symbolistsof the 1890s,perhaps making a virtue of necessity, gloried in being ostracized for their strange writings and often stranger behavior, flaunting these as evidence of “genius.” In his Lowell lecture James stated: “The prevailing opinion of our time supposes that a psychopathic constitution is the foundation for genius” (Taylor, Mental States, p. 149). However, it was not an opinion he shared. For him the crucial question stood as yet unanswered: what truly constitutes genius? In his textbook James maintained that genius basically “means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way” (PBC, p. 286). His Lowell Lecture notes further observed that “even within the artistic temperament there are immense differences of type” (Mental States, p. 162). In the same notes James cited another definition of genius, by one of his close friends, that would have been far more congenial to Konevskoi. F. W. H. Myers, a British pioneer in psychic research, explained genius as “‘an ‘uprush‘ of contents from the subliminal”’ (quoted from Mental States, p. 149). Or, as Myers himself put it, genius could be regarded as “a subliminal rush, an emergence into the current of ideas which the man is consciously manipulating of other ideas which he has not consciously originated, but which have shaped themselves beyond his will, in profounder regions of his being” (Myers, p. 45). During his career Frederic Myers researched and wrote extensively on the subjects that James treated in his Lowell lectures. One of the founders of the English Society for Psychical Research, he made a distinguished contribution to that field, and his influence on James was considerable. The chapter on “Genius” in his posthumously published work Human Personality and Its Survival ofBodily Death touches James’s lecture at various points. However, the goals of his and James’s works were quite different. James aimed to inject into the public discussion a note of reasonable common sense. He dismissed the thesis of Lombroso et al., arguing that almost any individual who has accomplished anything out of the ordinary is probably somewhat nervously unstable. His discussion concluded on a satisfied note: “One more lurid, picturesque and smoky idea [is now] gone” (Mental Stares, p. 163). Myers reached the same basic conclusions. But, writing the work that was his final testament, he was under no compulsion to temper his ideas for the general reader. He in fact proposed some hypotheses far more speculative than any that James put before his audience. What James called possible “instability” Myers described boldly as a “perturbation that masks evolution” (p. 60). In Myers’s

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conception, the ferment at the deepest levels of personality that produced what we call genius was in fact the foreview of a later, higher stage of human development. The idea was not unheard of at that time and possibly not incompatible with James’s published view. After all he had included genius among those extreme manifestations of human nature discussed in the Lowell Lectures. Later, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, James spoke of religious “genius” often residing in individuals of marked eccentricity, who “invariably. . . have been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility” (p. 15). However, Myers’s view was closer to the conception of creativity that circulated among Konevskoi’s contemporaries, a conception surely influenced by their reading of Nietzs~he.~ The name of Myers, like that of James, bore the aura of science, which, despite their protestations to the contrary, carried weight with the psychics and mystics of that generation. Most likely Konevskoi and his mediumistic friends had encountered Frederic Myers’s views, since they read and some of them (notably Valery Bryusov) even published in the journal Rebus, the journal of Russian spiritism, where reports on the activities of the Society for Psychical Research regularly appeared. But whether or not this was the case, the interesting point here is the sympathy of ideas-albeit imperfect-between such respected figures as James and Myers and a handful of young Russian mystics who flaunted their contempt for science as a means of penetrating the world’s secrets. Meanwhile, in Russia William James continued for some years to be known generally as an experimental psychologist, albeit a “good one, that is, one who acknowledged the limitations of his professional tools and willingly admitted that some questions belonged properly to other spheres, notably to metaphysics. In 1904, the Symbolist poet, critic, and novelist Andrei Bely wrote in the notes to his essay “0 granitsakh psikhologii” (About the Boundaries of Psychology) that “the talented American psychologist William James advocated that psychology be supplemented by metaphysics.” Yet while observing that “[James’s]later writings show increasing interest in questions of religion, mysticism, and occultism,” Bely concluded: “Nonetheless, James’s psychology is experimental psychology” (Bely, p. 474).6 Another Russian interpreter of James the psychologist was Ivan Lapshin, the translator of Psychology: Briefer Course. Lecturer in philosophy and psychology at St. Petersburg University (later professor and head of the department of philosophy), Lapshin provided his translation with an introductory essay entitled “The Philosophical Meaning of James’s Psychological Views.” A neo-Kantian at this stage of his career, Lapshin tempered James’s positivistic approach by tracing the affinity of his work with the Kantian critical tradition. The bulk of his essay was devoted to placing James’s psychological views in this context. Far from deprecating James’s position, Lapshin praised it, at the same time interpreting it from his own philosophical standpoint:

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Elevating to a principle the strict separation of directly studied data of consciousness from metaphysical postulates, and seeing in the transcendental idealism of critical philosophy the only way to correctly decide the basic problems of psychology, James is revealed as . . . (perhaps not fully consciously) the representative of scientific-philosophical criticism in experimental psychology.” (p. 3 5 )

In James’s final chapter “Psychology and Philosophy,” newly written for the abridged version, he admitted how little the natural science of psychology really knew about the human psyche. He could hardly have taken a position more attractive to readers of a philosophical or mystical bent, such as practitioners of the “new art” tended to be. Yet that statement did not cloak the conflict of goals between the “new psychology,” defining itself as a natural science, on the one hand, and the “new art,” with its mystical assumptions, on the other. For the latter, the human psyche was a gateway to another reality, the penetration of which promised to lead to yet deeper secrets, ultimately to the mysteries of the universe’s structure. For many of the new psychologists, the human psyche itself, now made available for scientific investigation, was challenge enough. For others, who, like James, extended their field of action to psychical research, the challenge was yet more complex. About one major feature of this new field Henri Ellenberger later wrote: “The advent of spiritism was an event of major importance in the history of dynamic psychiatry. . . . A new subject, the medium, became available for experimental psychological investigations, out of which evolved a new model of the human mind” (p. 85). During the 1890s, James pursued this line of investigation with increasing attention, in part, it may be supposed, for personal reasons, but certainly with the purpose of demystifying psychic phenomena and thereby expanding the scope of scientific investigation. Yet some colleagues saw him, with reason, as operating with a conception of scientific goals and procedure that differed radically from theirs. For his part, James shared the unwillingness of his friend the Swiss psychologist Thtodore Flournoy to leave psychical research to “theosophists, mystics, and occultists” (quoted by Simon, p. 225). Yet, despite their declared difference of goals and means, a curious kind of mirror relationship developed between James’s concerns on the one side and those of “theosophists, mystics, and occultists” on the other. At certain points James’s intuitions seemed actually to converge with those of persons of a quite different mental stripe. One of these points was panpsychism. The notion that the universe is psychically alive at every level was an idea that, for whatever reason, held a strong attraction for James, though he never decisively adopted it. In A Pluralistic Universe he wrote of “the great empirical movement toward a pluralistic panpsychic view of the universe, into which our own generation has been drawn” (pp. 141-42). Yet this apparent convergence of James and the

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young Russian thinkers of the 1890s seems less certain when their respective interpretations of panpsychism are examined. One writer who gathered and analyzed James’s scattered statements on the subject found them “tentative and metaphorical-but full of personal confidence” (Bush, p. 326). Others have interpreted his statements less positively, and no consensus has been rea~hed.~ James’s earliest substantial discussion of panpsychism appeared in the 1898 essay “Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine” and especially in the “Preface to the Second Edition,” in which he attempted to clarify his earlier arguments. Of the two “supposed objections,” the first and more weighty related to “the absolute dependence of our spiritual life, as we know it here, on the brain” (Emp. , 79). If spiritual activity is a function of the brain, what happens when, after death, the brain disintegrates? James answered this by expounding what he called the brain’s “transmissive function.” If consciousness preexists the brain in some other form and is merely transmitted by the brain during the subject’s lifetime, that difficulty would seem to be obviated. Critics were quick to point out that the preexisting “other form”-for which James resorted to poetic analogies and in one place spoke of “the absolute life of the universe” (p. 87)-gave every evidence of being the pantheistic world-soul. This notion, at least in its usual form, James rejected: “I am myself anything but a pantheist of the monistic pattern” (p. 75). In fact, the loss of individual identity was as unacceptable to him as to Konevskoi and his fellows. But James offered a compromise solution: [Tlhe mother-sea, from which the finite mind is supposed to be strained by the brain, need not be conceived of in pantheistic terms exclusively. There might be ...many minds behind the scenes as well as one. The plain truth is that one may conceive the mental world behind the veil in as individualistic a form as one pleases, without any detriment to the general scheme by which the brain is represented as a transmissive organ. If the extreme individualistic view were taken, one’s finite mundane consciousnesswould be an extract from one’s larger, truer personality, the latter having even now some sort of reality behind the scenes. ( E m , p. 76)

His conception required only that these ulterior minds “come from something mental that pre-exists, and is larger than themselves” (p. 89, n.5). Though he read English, this text was unlikely to have reached Konevskoi. All the more was this so of a late essay, “The Confidences of a ‘Psychical Researcher’” (1909), in which James at last enlarged on his notion of cosmic consciousness as it had taken shape over years of research and reflection. Indulging in the kind of poetic analogy that put off so many professional colleagues, he described how trees “commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom.

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Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness,. . . into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir” (EPR, p. 374). He then proceeded to lay out the quasi-scientific, quasi-metaphysical questions that to him not only justified his pursuits but also demanded to be taken as far as they might go. He had a strong suspicion that they led through panpsychism: Not only psychic research, but metaphysical philosophy and speculative biology are led in their own ways to look with favor on some such “panpsychic” view of the universe . . . .Assuming this common reservoir of consciousness to exist, . . the question is, What is its own structure? What is its inner topography?

At this juncture he paused to give credit to his late respected colleague in psychic research Frederic Myers: “This question, first squarely formulated by Myers, deserves to be called ‘Myers’s problem’ by scientific men hereafter.” But in his own right he carried the matter further: What are the conditions of individuation or insulation in this mother-sea? To what tracts, to what active systems functioning separately in it, do personalities correspond? Are individual spirits constituted there? . . . How permanent? How transient? And how confluent with one another may they become? What again, are the relations between the cosmic consciousness and matter? (EPR, p. 374)

This line of questioning is uncannily reminiscent of Ivan Konevskoi’s search some dozen years earlier for answers about the “world-structure.’’ Konevskoi obviously was not equipped at his stage of maturity to formulate such questions. They were also unlikely to occur in the then-prevailing philosophical reasoning to which he had access. In its underpinnings his own panpsychism or pantheism and that of his coevals was in fact much closer to the pantheism of the earlynineteenth-century Romantics. They looked to Tiutchev, and Konevskoi looked especially to Shelley, who wrote in his “Mont Blanc” (Stanza 3): The wilderness has a mysterious tongue That teaches doubt or faith so mild So solemn, so serene, that man may be, In such a faith, with nature reconciled.

During his mystical experience in the Thuringian forest, it may be remembered, he sensed another life coinhabiting his being with-but not overpowering-his own: night itself. The attraction to the moist earth and water that figures in early essays and in some of Konevskoi’s poetry, while it suggests adolescent erotic fantasies, was bound up also with his determination to get to the essence of things, to explore that “continuation of cosmic consciousness” that James called the “mother-sea.’’

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The seeming convergence of James and these young Russian thinkers in their attraction to panpsychism appears less certain when James’s interpretation of the term is examined more closely. The point of divergence comes with James’s discovery of pluralism. In the declaration concerning his generation’s “great empirical movement towards a pluralistic panpsychic view of the universe” the words “empirical”and “pluralistic”are not to be overlooked. That declaration, targeted at “neo-Kantian philosophers” (rendered “Oxford men” in the authoritative edition, PU, p. 329), was part of his attack on the idealistic monistic view of reality-the view of the universe as “one great all-inclusive fact outside which is nothing”-that informed A Pluralistic Universe (p. 21). James’s conclusions in “Human Immortality” (the preface to the second edition) explicitly accommodated the position held by Konevskoi and the decadents, who held “the extreme individualisticview” mentioned by James ( E R M , p. 76). They would have interpreted his statement to mean that the individual personality, while retaining its individuality, could indeed be coextensive with the seamless universe. What they could not factor in was the development in James’s thinking that led to A Pluralistic Universe, including the growing attraction between James and Bergson. During the spring of 1898, his second year at the university, Konevskoi found himself floundering in a sea of diverse philosophical currents. The dominant position at St. Petersburg University was neo-Kantian, but students read and discussed everything that came into their hands and tried to make sense of it all. That spring Konevskoi wrestled with the notion of personal limitation imposed by the conditions of life in time and space. While struggling to reconcile Kant and Schopenhauer with ideas drawn from the new physiological psychology, as well as with his personal mystical experiences of the previous summer, he reread James’s Psychology (RGALI 259.1.6, p. 52). As already noted, in concluding that work James had candidly admitted that, however much psychology presently aspired to be a natural science,“into [it] the waters of metaphysical criticism leak at every joint” (PBC,p. 400). Readers like Konevskoi saw nothing here to deprecate. Some indications of his latest reading of James appear in an unpublished, unfinished essay from that spring entitled “The Cornerstones of My World View.” In this piece Konevskoi tried to show-or to convince himself-that time and space, being merely subjective constructs, did not militate against the limitless expansion of the self that he and his fellow individualists envisioned. In the process, he attempted to reconcile Kant with selected readings in modern psychology and physiology, thereby establishing a position that he himself might find tenable. He mentioned James’s name specifically in connection with his argument that consciousness of the surrounding world necessarily is present in some form from the moment of birth. “I fully subscribe to the psychologist James’s view that, from the infant’s first

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sensation he already senses the same that every adult organism calls spatial sensation” (RGALI 259.3.9, p.12 ob., and note). That is, the infant’s spatial awareness is not dependent on gradual exploration of its surroundings; it is inborn. He thus used James’s psychology to prove to his own satisfaction the self’s dominance over time and space. While he did not refer directly to James’s discussion of multiple personalities, hypnotic trance, and other psychic phenomena in Psychology: Briefer Course, the argument he sought to construct for the self’s unlimited existence seems closely related to the one that James later employed in his argument for immortality. In somewhat tortured syntax that probably reflects his half-completed thought, Konevskoi wrote: [ Elven if we did not have so much experimental evidence or examples of its action, we would have to postulate this consciousness [that overcomes the limitations of time and space]. This consciousness and will constitute the nature that acts in prophetic dream, in visionary experience, in action and speech over distance. The extent to which this consciousness dominates over time appears in examples that show its capacity of memory. Such examples are the sudden recalling in trance of words in languages the speaker does not understand, but which he accidentally heard long ago. . . . [Or] dreams in the course of which the dreamer relives almost an entire second life. (pp. 15ob-16)

In the end Konevskoi did not succeed in his project of constructing a satisfymg worldview on a philosophical-psychological foundation. Nonetheless, he did not abandon the attempt totally. Rather, he turned more and more to the “contemporary mysticism” that, as he wrote in the essay “Before the Paintings of Schwind,”probes the “unconscious depths of the medieval worldview,” seeking for “something that is organically linked to the most penetrating research of contemporary science” (Poems and Prose, p. 137). There is little question, however, that at bottom the concerns of James and Konevskoi and the parties they represented led in different directions. Where James undertook a genuinely descriptive study of the human “self” with the healing and betterment of humankind and the enrichment of science as his goals, Konevskoi and his fellows pursued a mystical understanding of the self and the universe and the relation of the two, with the presumption that they were potentially coextensive. At the same time, in their own ways and for their own ends, both parties looked toward a reconciliation of scientific thinking with a transcendental worldview. Baron Carl Du Prel, whose name carried such authority among Konevskoi’s generation, wrote in his Philosophy ofMysticism: “ [PIhilosophy and science are urged from different sides toward one point, where their union will establish a sure basis for further investigation of the world problem (1: lo).” True, Du Prel believed that this union would be achieved only when natural science has evolved to the point of admitting its

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limitations. I n the epilogue to his Psychology: Briefer Course James also admitted this: “[Als soon as one’s purpose is the attainment of the maximum of possible insight into the world as a whole, the metaphysical puzzles become the most urgent ones of all” (p. 329). Perhaps, then, James (who disclaimed any mystical powers of his own) a n d the modern Russian artist-mystics of the 1890s in certain ways were closer than any of them knew. Notes 1. See the unsigned article “Psychological Societies in Russia (Psikhologicheskie obshchestva v Rossii),” Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, St. Petersburg: Brokgauz-Efron, vol. 25, bk. 50 (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz-Efron 1898), p. 677. 2. I am indebted to Gennady Obatnin for pointing out that the Obolenskii translation of 1902, which came out under the name “Nauchnye osnovy psikhologii” (Scientific Bases of Psychology) and is often taken to be The Principles of Psychology, was in fact a reprinting of the 1896 translation of the abridged, one-volume version. As far as this writer can ascertain, there has been no other translation. 3. The debate over mediumism roiled the intellectual atmosphere in Russia during the seventies, eighties, and nineties especially. (See Grossman, “Alternative Beliefs,” pp. 119-121.) The “first-generation Symbolists” were divided on its validity, its main advocate being Valery Bryusov, a pioneer in this as in other regards. 4. In March 1898, Konevskoi presented a paper coauthored with Iakov Erlich: “Dogma mnozhestvennykh sostoianii soznaniia, kak glavnoe osnovanie kriticheskoi teorii poznaniia”( The Dogma of Plural States of Consciousness as the Chief Foundation of the Critical Theory of Cognition) (RGALI 259.1.6.1.48ob). 5. See Edith W. Clowes, “The Nietzschean Image of the Poet in Some Early Works of Konstantin Bal’mont and Valerii Brjusov,” Slavic and East European Journal 27, no. 2 (summer 1983): 68-80. 6. See the discussion of Bely’s article in Gennady Obatnin‘s article in this volume. Only three years younger than Konevskoi, Bely was likely introduced also to James’s PsychoZogy as a student at St. Petersburg University. In his interest in James Konevskoi anticipated by a few years interests of some second-generation Symbolists, though his application of James’s ideas was necessarily different. 7. Gerald E. Myers, in his William James: His Life and Thought, summarizes views of various Jamesian scholars (pp. 612-613). Myers himself concludes: “I believe that the Jamesian metaphysics was well on its way to panpsychism, propelled . . .by Berkeley’s view of physical things” (p. 574).

Works Cited Belyi, Andrei. Simvolizm (Symbolism). Moscow: Musagetes, 1910. Bush, Wendell T. “William James and Panpsychism.” Studies in the History of Ideas 2(1925): 315-326.

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Chelpanov, E. [Rev. of The Principles of Psychology by William James]. Voprosyfilosofii i psikhologii (Questions of Philosophy and Psychology) (VFP) “Book Reviews” 11(1892): 69-76. Diuprel’, D-r. Karl (Du Prel, Baron Carl) Spiritizm (Der Spiritismus). Translated by M. S. Aksenov. Moscow: I. N. Kushnerev and Co., 1904. . Philosophy of Mysticism. Translated by C. C. Massey. 2 vols. London: George Redway, 1889. Ellenberger, Henri F. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York Basic Books, 1970. Fouillke, Alfred. “Les grandes conclusions de la psychologie contemporaine.” Revue des deux mondes 107 (1891): 788416. Grossman, Joan Delaney. “Alternate Beliefs: Spiritualism and Pantheism among the Early Modernists.” Vol. 3, Russian Literature in Modern Times. Christianity and the Eastern Slavs. Edited by Boris Gasparov, Robert P. Hughes, Olga Raevsky Hughes, and kina Paperno. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. G [Grot, N. Ia.]. [Rev. of The Principles of Psychology by William James]. VFE “Reviews.” Bk. 4-5 (1890): 89-90. Konevskoi (Oreus), Ivan. Russkii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art [RGALI]). Fond 259 (Papers of Ivan [Oreus] Konevskoi). Op (list). 1. ed. khr (item).l7 (“Notebook No. 4, 18961897”) F. 259.3.18 (Letters to Ivan Bilibin and other). F. 259.3.21 (Letters to S. P. Semenov). F. 259.1.6 (Notebooks dated 1894[3?]-1901). F. 259.3.9 (“Kraegol’nye kamni moego mirovozzreniia” [Cornerstones of My World View]) . Stikhi iproza (Poetry and Prose). Moscow: Scorpio, 1904. Reprint: Gesammelte Werke. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1971. Lapshin, Ivan. “Filosofskoe znachenie psikhologicheskikh vozzrenii Dzhemsa” (Philosophical Meaning of James’s Psychological Views). Introduction to Psikhologiia by William James. St. Petersburg: P. P. Soikin, 1896. Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club. A Story of Ideas in America. New York Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2001. Myers, Frederic W. H. Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. Edited and abridged by S. B. and L. H. M. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1935. Simon, Linda. Genuine Reality. A Life of William James. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998. Stepanov, N. L. “Iz statei ‘Ivan Konevskoi. Poet mysli”’ (From the Article ‘Ivan Konevskoi. Poet of Thought’). Edited by A. E. Parnis. Aleksandr Blok Novye materialy i issledovaniia. Edited by G. P. Berdnikov et al. Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 92, bk. 4. Moscow: Nauka, 1987. Pp. 179-202. Taylor, Eugene. William James on Exceptional Mental States. New York Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982. -. William James on Consciousness beyond the Margin. Princeton, N.7.: Princeton University Press, 1996.

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James and Viacheslav lvanov at the “Threshold of Consciousness” Gennady Obatnin

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LLIAM JAMES, AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER and pioneer psychologist, and Viacheslav Ivanov, critic, thinker, Symbolist poet, and major figure in the unfolding of Russian modernist culture, came to the study of the human psyche from nearly opposite points of the cultural compass. Yet their respective approaches to that psyche’s complexity exhibit startling moments of convergence. For example, psychological concepts like “stream of consciousness” and “threshold of consciousness,” now nearly synonymous with the name of James, also figure prominently among the concepts and images important to Ivanov’s poetry and thought. James’s penchant for poetic imagery, often on view when he dealt with psychological and metaphysical matters, was especially useful to him in probing the mystery of consciousness. The fascination that drew both James and Ivanov to certain problems, and in particular the means they found to explore them, raise intriguing questions about cultural intersection, even though the Jamesian pluralist approach was far distant from the Russian Symbolist vision. Before entering on our investigation, some preliminary remarks touching on the specifics of the discourse of Russian Symbolism and the founding role therein of Viacheslav Ivanov, perhaps its outstanding theoretician, are in order.’ It is a commonplace observation that synthesis was one of the principal points of the program of the second generation of Russian Symbolists, and that the search for synthesis-according to the declarations of the Symbolists themselves-was a driving force of their intellectual and artistic activity. On the level of ideas, this turned into a continual appropriation of seemingly disparate concepts and into attempts at unifjmg them in a single fundamental

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conception. Ideally this conception was to provide an absolute answer to all questions concerning both the world and mankind. It is natural that such an approach deliberately lumped together various spheres of human spiritual activity, among which complex relationships arose, mutual influence was exerted, and change took place. In the language of the Symbolists, what is described is a complex agglomerate that has a fully independent existence and is not reducible to a mere combination of fragments of multifarious cultural discourses. On the level of discourse, such a treatment of ideas looked like the ‘‘con&sion of tongues” at the tower of Babel. To speak of literature in the language of philosophy, of philosophy in the language of psychology, of psychology in the language of mysticism, of mysticism in the language of physics, etc.-all this is a somewhat simplified description of the task of the “speech” that is particular to Symbolism. Ivanov, who had returned to Russia from abroad in 1905, stands at the source of the creation of the Symbolist discourse of the younger generation, and the particularities just enumerated are especially true of it. For example, he immediately and materially enriched Symbolist “speech” with the language of classical philology and ethnography, thus achieving a place among the authorities whose appraisals and judgments became definitive for the ideology of Russian Symbolism. The Ivanovs’ famous salon (The Tower), where the elite of the artistic, scientific, and political intelligentsia gathered, realized in its cultural activity the task of such a “confusing” of languages, thus becoming the laboratory for working out and articulating the new language of Symbolism.2 The science of psychology was undergoing intensive development at the turn of the century, a fact that did not escape the attention of the Russian Symbolists. However, the complexity of their relationship to psychology was partially conditioned by the fact that at the end of the nineteenth century in Russia, as in many other places, psychology was perceived as a part of philosophy. Papers on philosophy-Vladimir Solovyov’s among them-were presented in such a respectable organization as the Moscow Psychological Society, whose president at one time was Nikolai Bugaev, mathematician and philosopher, and father of another leading Symbolist poet and theoretician, Andrei Bely. The very title of the chief Russian philosophical periodical of the time, Questions of Philosophy and Psychology, is significant. Second-generation Symbolism’s reflections on the nature of psychology developed, therefore, within a framework of the opposition between science and nonscience. It is to this that Andrei Bely’s instructive article entitled “About the Boundaries of Psychology,”written in 1904 (but published only in 1909), is in part devoted. This article demonstrated not only an interest in the subject but also an acute understanding of the dangers of the dissolution of the science of psychology

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in metaphysics and mysticism. In it Bely declares decisively in favor of the conception of psycho-physical parallelism, apparently having in view the ideas of G. T. Fechner: “The parallelistic doctrine in psychology is the most sober doctrine” (Bely, p. 38). It is precisely this doctrine, based on empirical psychology, that leads to gnosiological research and leaves beyond its scope any “problems about the aim of life, about the immortality of our ‘I: of our soul.” On the other hand, what in the first instance attracted Bely to empirical psychology was its concentration on “the dark chaos of primary feelings and the unconscious” (Bely, p. 47). Thus, empirical (or experimental) psychology scientifically substantiates interest in the unusual in human consciousness. Replete with metaphors borrowed from Tiutchev’s “The Swan,” the article concludes with a sympathetic meditation on the conception of “universal consciousness” (apparently based on Fechner’s thinking). Ivanov’s views of the new psychology can be situated in this framework. In his article entitled “The Crisis of Individualism” (1905), devoted in part to the problem of describing all manifestations of human individuality, Ivanov writes: Whatever our experience has been, we have nothing to say about ourselves personally: the credulous barque of our epos will be engulfed by the Scylla of sociology or the Charybdis of psychology-one of the two monstrous stomachs that are designated to perform the function of digestion in the collective organism of our theoretical and democratic culture. (1: 838)

Ivanov appraises with skepticism the attempts to reduce any manifestation of individuality to what is typical. However, two years later, and once again in speaking about the crisis of individualism in contemporary culture, in his article “Thou art,” he adduces directly a concept of William James’s: “[S]cience no longer knows what the I is as a constant quantity in the stream of consciousness” (3: 263). In a different way, Bely rejects psychology as a whole: Psychology, which has toppled all the buttresses of our representation of self, has turned out to be a Chimera that has for a moment troubled our sleep. The barque of consciousness, which was almost engulfed by Chaos, almost dipped into the turbid wave of madness, is now only a bird-a swan spread out against the sky. . . in the azure sky of universal consciousness. (p. 48)

These two approaches demonstrate two important points in the reception of the discoveries of the new psychology: on the one hand, psychology is denied global significance;and on the other, it is perceived as a science whose data must be taken into consideration, and its conceptions accommodated intensively to a system of personal views.3

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Such an attitude toward another’s creative work might be described by the formula of recognition of “the self in the other.” In comparing Ivanov’s and James’s views on the structure of human personality, one is struck in the first instance by the similarity of their general approach. As is the case with James, Ivanov sees man as a complex, mysterious phenomenon, and this is contrasted to the simplistic positivist view of “individualism”in the preceding century. One of Ivanov’s basic metaphors for man is a labyrinth. His poem “Obvious Secret” speaks directly of the “spiritual labyrinth” (3: 561; compare the cycle of poems devoted to his own childhood “Songs from the Labyrinth”).For Ivanov, Dostoevsky, who more than anyone else drew attention to the multidimensionality of the human personality, is “a gloomy and far-sighted guide in our spiritual labyrinth”; this metaphor continues further as he calls Dostoevsky “the greatest of the Daedaluses, builders of the labyrinth.. . . [Alrchitect of the subterranean labyrinth” (Ivanov 4: 402,403). The article “Nietzsche and Dionysus” speaks of “the uncharted inmost recesses of the spiritual labyrinth” (1: 718), and so forth. Among the diverse philosophical and occult concepts employed by Ivanov for designating the secret aspect of human consciousness, his repeated use of the term “the unconscious (bessoznatel’noe)”is striking. Thus, in “Crisis of Individualism” Ivanov several times refers to “the unconscious depths [of personality], accessible to the m i n d (I: 833,834), and the list may be continued. Eduard von Hartmann’s “philosophy of the unconscious”may be regarded as the source of this term? but its use as applied to human consciousness is borrowed from the terminology of William James (who himself did not deny the link between his usage of the phrase and Hartmann’s). This is only the most general instance of the influx of the terminology of the new movements of Western psychology into the discourse of Symbolism. Once there, the terminology altered somewhat its initial sense and participated on an equal footing with others in Symbolism’s ideological engendering of meaning. A more particular example of this is Ivanov’s poem entitled “Threshold of Consciousness”: Like a lighthouse, the inquisitive mind Scans with its orb the deserted sea Of the nocturnal soul singing in a united choir Of the futile anguish of its partings. Inaccessible to its burning gaze Is the remote boundary on the rippling expanse,

Whence, in the internecine quarrel of forces, Billows race to the surrounding sands. And from the heights, a misty ray caresses

Both the shining bed of the sandy shore

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And the cradle of the restless elements. Thus does a light other than reason penetrate Beyond the borders of consciousness And lower its net into the limitless font. (111: 562) The poem was written in December 1917, according to Olga Deschartes’s commentary. In 1930 it was dedicated to Emil Medtner, the proprietor of the publishing house Musagktes, and a patient, disciple, and translator of C. G. Jung (111: 845). Medtner’s biographer, Magnus Ljunggren, links the dedication of this “psychoanalytic”poem to the publication of Medtner’s review of a German translation of Ivanov’s earlier article “On the Russian Idea” (p. 144). The title of the poem represents the term which G. T. Fechner had employed in his Elemente der Psychophysik ( 1860). Fechner describes psycho-physical activity in the human consciousness with the metaphor of a wave, the rising and falling of which constitutes the form and evolution of consciousness. In this action the height of the wave must at times exceed a certain limit of awareness, which Fechner calls the “threshold of consciousness.”This notion was taken up by James,and it was possibly through him that it came into Ivanov’s ken. Nothing is known of Ivanov’s knowledge of Fechner’s work (just as we know nothing of the existence of any Russian translation of this work by the German psychologist), but James’s “Human Immortality” was translated into Russian ( 1901).5 In it James cites extensively from work of Fechner’s dealing directly with the notion of “threshold of consciousness” ( E M , pp. 90-92). Besides the similarity of the basic water metaphor for consciousness in Ivanov’s poem and in Fechner’s work, yet another convergent feature commands attention. Ivanov’s sea/consciousness exists independently of the life of the mind/lighthouse, which endeavors unsuccessfully to illuminate the “nocturnal soul”: Inaccessible to its burning gaze Is the remote boundary on the rippling expanse,

Whence, in the internecine quarrel of forces, Billows race to the surrounding sands.

Something is afoot (“the internecine quarrel of forces”) in the “nocturnal” consciousness, it is continually at work, is as alive and ever-changing as the sea. This feature of Fechner’s theory was specially emphasized by James: “All psycho-physical activity being continuous ‘below the threshold,’ the consciousness might also become continuous if the threshold sank low enough to uncover all the waves” ( E M , p. 92). The difference in Ivanov’s point of view is that he never even considers the task of “lowering the threshold,” that is, the task of discovering subconscious existence or of bringing it to the level

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of consciousness. This position is not surprising, given other connotations present in the poem. Ivanov’s sealsubconscious sings of “the futile anguish of its partings.” From what has it been separated? The answer to this question must be sought in other texts by Ivanov. In its descriptive and statuesque qualities, the poem resembles a description of some symbolic painting: the sea, a lighthouse, and a ray of light from above. In an article of 1906, “The Idea of the Non-Acceptance of the World,” Ivanov describes Raphael’s “Transfiguration”: “The Vatican’s ‘Transfiguration’ is a New Testament subject, like all of Raphael’s work. In it the non-acceptance of the world is expressed with a bitterness that pierces the heart, yet a ray of new hope breaks through, but how cold and white it is, how otherworldly!” (3: 85). The ray of light falling from above is a ray of hope for transfiguration, in our instance for a transfiguration of consciousness, and not without purpose is the “sea” of consciousness in the final stanza transformed into a baptismal “font,” and the “net” is associated with Christ’s self-characterizationas a “fisher of men.” It is contrasted to the ray of the lighthouse (“a light other than reason”) and is capable of what the mind of man is powerless to do (“penetrate beyond the borders of consciousness”).It is clear that what is at stake is the divine presence in human consciousness, and that the nocturnal consciousness is separated from God. In the event, there is no place here for the involvement of subconscious existence in the sphere of the conscious that is so dear to positivistic optimism. In The Varieties ofReligious Experience, James expands the meaning of the notion of “threshold of consciousness”: “Recent psychology has found great use for the word ‘threshold’ as a symbolic designation for the point at which one state of mind passes into another. Thus we speak of the threshold of a man’s consciousness in general, to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer stimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all” (VRE, p. 115). It is clear that for Ivanov (as well as for Bely) the understanding of this term in the sense meant by Fechner is basic: as the threshold between consciousness and the unconscious. However, the interpretation advanced by James must also be considered in a reading of the poem, in the sense of the nocturnal soul’s threshold of understanding. Thus, Fechner’s and James’s term is used by Ivanov in a certain generalized (Ljunggren’s “psychoanalytic”) sense, one which is not directly correlate with its sources, while still linked to them. In addition, the central metaphor of the poem “Threshold of Consciousness” is a staple of Ivanov’s writings. The sea as a symbol of depth and mystery is constant in Ivanov’s poetry. In the poem “Voice of the Sea,” he addresses the elements: Is it thy summons I hear, o Sea? Is it thine, o Eternity, this summons? (1: 597)

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One of the cycles of the poet’s third collection has the title “Runes of the Breakers.” The symbol of the sea from Leopardi’s “L’infinito,’’ as translated by Ivanov, is enlisted repeatedly to designate subconscious impulses (“And sweet to me is shipwreck in this sea,” 1: 743). Ivanov addresses his wife with the rather straightforward definition: “Thou art the sea,” and the poem also emphasizes the mystery of the human essence (“all thy depths invisibly exert their will,” 1: 762-763). The poems surrounding “Threshold of Consciousness,” according to the laws of symbolist cyclization, also play variations on the theme of the sea and the human soul (“the barque of the soul” from the poem entitled “Sleep”; “voyage . . . Eternity” from the poem “Naked I Return” [3: 561, 5631). Besides Fechner’s and James’s term “threshold of consciousness,” Ivanov employs another of James’s terms-see, for example (in the article “Thou Art,” mentioned earlier), “science no longer knows what the I is as constant quantity in the stream of consciousness” (3: 263). The notion of “stream of consciousness” was introduced by James in his basic book The Principles of Psychology to describe the continuity of human experiences: Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as “chain” or “train” do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A “river” or a “stream” are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafier, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective l$e. (p. 233)

As James remarks, in such a view it is impossible to operate with the concept of the “I,” if what is understood by it is any immutable part of the personality. He devotes a subchapter in “The Pure Self or Inner Principle of Personal Unity” (pp. 324-352) to separating himself from the philosophers and psychologists who subscribe to such an understanding of the “I.” James confesses that in the given instance he is writing only as a psychologist: For my own part I confess that the moment I become metaphysical and try to define the more, I find the notion of some sort of an anima mundi thinking in all of us to be a more promising hypothesis, in spite of all its difficulties, than that of a lot of absolutely individual souls. Meanwhile, as psychologists, we need not be metaphysical at all. (p. 328)

It is important to remark that in using the concept of stream of consciousness, in the case when he sets metaphysical tasks for himself, James comes close to the idea of a “world soul,” the universal consciousness of mankind. Therefore in his book A Pluralistic Universe, despite all his skepticism, James adduces the extravagant views of Fechner on the existence of “the soul of the

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world,” “the soul of plants,” and other such “monistic” conceptions of which he is so critical. Though “he Principles of Psychology never appeared in its entirety in Russian translation, several editions of the abridged, textbook version, Psychology, were published under various titles. This was sufficient for James’s basic notional and conceptual innovations to have a lasting impact on the period’s discourse. Therefore, even if we cannot say with certainty that Ivanov ever read any version of James’s work on psychology, we can point to the fact of his correct use of the concept of “stream of consciousness,”and also to remark in his thought the existence of the implications of that concept in his notion of the “world soul.” In the early Ivanov, the “world soul” was linked with the idea of Dionysian “breaching the limits of self,” with the loss of individuality in a changing state of consciousness, in an erasing of the boundaries between “I” and “Thou.” This idea found its allies in various philosophical and mythological systems. One such example is a poem of 1904, “Dryads,” in which Ivanov links these problematics with the existence of a kind of anima naturae: Of neither boundaries, nor time, nor the faces of “Thou”and “I” Divinely is [the soul] aware, And [she] drinks the nectar from the heart of existence undiluted, And recalls no one. And is not aware of “Thou”and “I” as separate. (1: 746) The conception of a single universal soul casts additional light on the symbol of the ray in “Threshold of Consciousness.”According to the thought expressed in the poem “Sacrum sepulcrum,” which is included in the same cycle as “Threshold of Consciousness,” this idea does not contradict the Christian interpretation of personality:

. . . . . . . . . . .

The heavenly, o guest of iridescent Earth, Is reflected out of dark hiding-places. And every ascent into the sky Is a descent into kindred depths; And a ray from the heavens is resurrection from the grave. That ray is thou. Ever do we create One soul, the universe. When in the self

Thou senseth all, o soul, the Bridegroom is with thee. (3: 564)

During his entire early Russian period of conceptual activity (before 1907), Ivanov meditated on the phenomenon of a religious ecstasy that breaches the

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limits of individual consciousness. The obvious set of philosophers, consisting of Nietzsche with his idea of Dionysian madness, Schopenhauer with his buddhistic conception of “ t a t twam asi” (“thou art”), and Solovyov with his metaphorics of the Eternal Feminine, must be supplemented, though not so obvious at first glance, by ideas from the new psychology of Fechner and James. Moreover, as in the case of “threshold of consciousness,”“stream of consciousness” enters Ivanov’s metaphorical system with no difficulty (both notions are linked, incidentally, with water symbolism), For example, in the dramatic dialogue in verse “Night in the Desert,” from Ivanov’s first collection, one of the collocutors is Stream. He is persuading Man to put his trust in him, but Spirit warns against this step: The yoke of solitary consciousness Wilt thou cast from willing shoulders: W e are the banner of fraternal embrace; To be called the I, a sword is needed. (1: 530)

Stream symbolizes the faceless, natural essence of the world, as contrasted to human individuality. In the complex philosophic poem of 1907 entitled “The Dream of Melampus,” mysterious Eternity is represented as a combination of two streams of causality: from the past into the future, and vice versa:

. . . all eternity is not one,

Seas move within the profound sea, some toward dawns, some toward sunsets; On the surface the waves strive to midday, below-to midnight: Many are the varied-flowing streams in the obscure deeps, And submarine rivers roll in the purple ocean. (2: 295)

The examples are numerous, but it is already clear that James’s metaphor has easily found a place in Ivanov’s system? In point of fact, the article “Thou Art” poses once again the question, among others, that concerned James in The Principles of Psychology, the question of the self-identity of the human personality. The continuity of human self-identification was described by him in similar expressions: “Each pulse of cognitive consciousness, each Thought [for James this is a synonym of consciousness: G. 0.1,dies away and is replaced by another. The other, among the things it knows, knows its own predecessor, and finding it ‘warm,’ in the way we have described, greets it, saying: ‘Thou art mine, and part of the same self with me”’ (p. 322). In Ivanov’s thinking, the “thou art” man speaks to the divine part of his “I,” thus realizing his own divine nature (“in the filial hypostasis,” 3: 266). On the

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other hand, Ivanov also extends this mechanism of self-identification to human relationships. In speaking of Dostoevsky‘s “realism,” he resorts to the same formula for the description of Dostoevsky‘s relationship to the world, to human beings, and to his heroes: This is not a peripheral extension of the boundaries of individual consciousness, but rather a certain movement in the very centers that determine its usual coordination; and the possibility of this shift opens up only in internal experience, and-to be precise-in the experience of genuine love for mankind and for the living God; and in the experience of self-renunciation in general, which comes about in the very pathos of love. The symbol of such a penetration lies in the absolute affirmation, with one’s whole will and whole understanding, of another’s existence: “thou art.” . . . [I]t is accomplished in the mystical depths of consciousness. (“Dostoevsky and the Novel-Tragedy,”4: 419) As the citation makes clear, love also establishes the identity of various human consciousnesses-the consciousnesses of those in love. Thus, ecstasy (Dionysian madness), internal religious experience (transfiguration), a feeling of love unusually comprehensible, dissolution in the “soul of nature” (which is the same as the “world soul”)-such is a brief list of the altered states of consciousness whose identity is of interest to Ivanov. The discussion above brings us to the next level in our comparison of the views of James and Ivanov, and here we are concerned with an essential aspect of the American psychologist’s activities, his study and interpretation of paranormal states of consciousness. This phase is crowned by his summary work

The Varieties of Religious Experience.

The London Society for Psychical Research, of which James was an early member and later president, attracted attention in Russia as early as the end of the nineteenth century. An abridged translation of Phantasms of the Living by Edmund Gurney, Frederic W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore was published in 1893, with an introduction by Vladimir Solovyov, whose visionary experiences were to be canonized by the second-generation symbolist^.^ In 1904 Russian readers were provided with a translation of James’s account of the achievements of the Society for Psychical Research, included as the last chapter in his The Will to Believe. Works of other psychologists close to the movement were also translated (for example, Boris Sidis, The Psychology of Suggestion, with introduction by William James, St. Petersburg, 1902). A volume of James’s materials concerning paranormal phenomena, published in 1911, the year after the Russian translation of The Varieties of Religious Experience appeared, was dedicated by its editor, the well-known Russian occultist P. A. Chistiakov, “to the memory of the Russian mystical philosopher and spiritualist Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov” (Dzhems [James].“Vozmozhno li,” p. iii).

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The interest displayed by Russian occultists in this aspect of James’s activities is entirely understandable. Without dwelling in detail on this matter, we would simply refer to James’s enthusiastic acceptance by Theosophy, a movement popular among the Russian Symbolists. For example, P. D. Uspensky, the well-known popularizer of Theosophy, greeted The Varieties of Religious Experience as the first attempt in the West to establish the laws of the appearance of “the Hindu yogis’ state of Samadhi” (Uspensky, p. 16). The subject of “James and Theosophy” came up at a meeting of the Religious-Philosophical Society in 1909 that was devoted to a search for points of contact between the Russian theosophists and modernist philosophers and writers. In the discussion following a paper on the subject delivered by Anna Kamenskaya, Ivanov also implicitly compared Theosophy and the new psychology: [A] theosophical society is either just a society, like, for example, a psychological society, for the study of the truths of spiritual life, or a theosophical society is a community uniting all mankind and one that possesses knowledge of the truth . . . . [I]n the first instance belonging to it is compatible, in the second incompatible, with belonging to the Christian church.8 (“Theosophyand God-Building,”p. 83)

Thus, despite the general similarity of the psychological teachings (for example, in “Thou art” Ivanov employs the theosophical conception of human consciousness more than any other, despite his use of “stream of consciousness”), Ivanov gives preference to viewing psychology as a mere science, not as a whole worldview. So far as we know, there is no evidence that Ivanov read James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. It is known that the editor of the Russian edition, S. Lurye, offered it for translation to E. K. Gertsyk, the critic and translator who was at one time very close to I v a n ~ vHowever, .~ even beyond all this, the book surely would have come into Ivanov’s ken and would have drawn his attention. The reasons for this were both public (the Russian translation went through five printings in the first year alone and was the subject of heated discussion in the periodical press) and private in nature. The essence of the latter is that after the death in the autumn of 1907 of his second wife, L. D. Zinovieva-Annibal, an extended period of mystical visions began in his life. This biographical experience played a large role in his creative work.1° As was usually the case with Ivanov, the new experience was easily accommodated within a conceptual framework already tested-in this case so easily that it appears as if, even before the autumn of 1907, Ivanov was expecting a “mystical experience” of this sort. The mystical experiences that James examines in The Varieties ofReZigious Experience were, from the point of view of experimental psychology, compatible

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with such paranormal experiences as hypnosis, telepathy, automatic writing, and so forth. These experiences are unified in that they all belong to a category of altered states of consciousness. What for James was a theoretical postulate (despite his experiments on himself) had vital significance for Ivanov: intermittently over a period of fifteen years, in automatic writing, the poet noted down his auditory hallucinations. In various periods of his life, Ivanov interpreted his paranormal experiences in various ways. The most powerful interpretant for him was, of course, the Symbolist myth of the Eternal Feminine and the (anthropo-) theosophical conception of “the initiated one,”but he shared with Jamesthe readiness to regard paranormal phenomena as mystical phenomena. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James approximates to what we can call Ivanov’s approach: Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its farther side, the “more” with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life. . . . In the religious life the control is felt as “higher”; but since on our own hypothesis it is primarily the higher faculties of our own hidden mind which are controlling, the sense of union with the power beyond us is a sense of something, not merely apparently, but literally true. (p. 403)

Further on, he expresses himself even less equivocally: “I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal” ( V R E , p. 406). This admission of James’s (slightly altering what was perceived as his severely skeptical position) did not pass unnoticed in Russian criticism. “The conviction that authentic higher reality is open to the ‘subconscious I’ is the completely unpredictable personal belief of James himself, but one that he openly admits,” wrote Semyon Frank in his review of The Varieties of Religious Experience (Frank, “James’s Philosophy of Religion,” p, 160). Still another feature brings together the positions of the representatives of the Russian philosophical renaissance (including Ivanov) and James. The American psychologist-philosopher’s“radical empiricism” serves as the basis of this approach: The conviction that personal experience contains within itself the proof of reality. James wrote all of his studies of psychology and religion from such a position. This too was noted by Frank in another paper: The “method of radical empiricism,” which he advances in The Varieties of Religious Experience, comes down to an indication that is as simple as it is brilliant and daring: a religious experience is as direct and convincing to the one who undergoes it as is any other experience, and as little subject to refutation by any sort of a priori considerations. (“William James,”p. 219)

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In the present instance, this method may be compared best of all with Ivanov’s “realism,” a philosophical and aesthetic conception that reflected his personal paranormal experience. Just as with “radical empiricism,” Ivanov’s “realism” is called upon in the first instance to record uncensored the new experience, whatever unusual character it may possess. The philosophical connotations of Ivanov’s “realism” do not negate “naive realism.” In this sense, in Ivanov’s thinking, the artist is engaged in simple mimesis; this in some way resembles the recording of paranormal phenomena by the members of the Society for Psychical Research. Thus, their initial positions-the idea of human nature’s complexity, the set of terms for designating this complexity, a certain conceptual and methodological unity-all bring significant features of Ivanov’s and James’s systems close together, however differently these may be explored and realized. Finally it should be said that the relationship examined here is not one of direct influence, and even less is it one of borrowing. Rather, we are dealing here with two figures, each of major stature in his own culture and areas of specialization, and each active in a discursive field of some density at the opening of the twentieth century. Notes Translated by Robert €? Hughes 1. This work was supported by the Research Support Scheme of the OWHESP, grant No. 630/1996. 2. Plato’s Symposium was for good reason one of the cultural models for the Tower’s pursuits. For greater detail, see A. Shishkin, “Le banquet platonicien et soufi a la ‘Tour’ peterbourgeoise. Berdjaev et Vjai-eslav Ivanov,” Cahiers du Monde Russe. Un maitre de sagesse au XXe sitcle. Vjaieslav Ivanov et son temps 35 (1-2) (1994). 3 . It should be remembered that Ivanov devoted almost a third of his life to a scholarly career and that Bely graduated from the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Moscow University. 4. It is interesting to note that only an incomplete translation of von Hartmann’s Die Philosophie des Unbewussten ever appeared in Russia (Sushchnost’ mirovogo protsessa ili Filosofiia bezsoznatel’nogo. Moscow, 1873). Hartmann’s book on spiritualism was also translated and published in St. Petersburg in 1887. 5. Let us note that Fechner was the subject of a seven-column article plus bibliography in the scholarly Encyclopedic Dictionary (Brokgauz-Efron, vol. 35, 1902), known to virtually all well-educated Russians. It was certainly known, for example, among the Russian theosophists. A translation of his Buechlein vom Leben nach dem Tod was published by the theosophical publishing house “Novyi chelovek” (Fechner 1915). Although the translation was done from German, it is possible that interest in the book was encouraged by the American translation of 1904, for which James had written an

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introduction ( E M ,pp. 116-19). The notion of “threshold of consciousness”(rendered in Russian as “porogsoznan’ia”) is also referred to in Bely’s article cited above (p. 32). 6. It is possible that the very metaphor of the “stream” came to James by analogy with the Swedenborgian notion “Spiritus Fluid,” as suggested by Armi Varila (Varila, pp. 97-99.) 7. Phantasms of the Living was translated as: E Gernej, F. Majers i F. Podmor. Prizhiznennye prizraki i drugie telepaticheskie iavlenii. 8. James was mentioned specifically by Dmitri Merezhkovsky in his speech at the same meeting (“Theosophy and God-Building,’’ pp. 86-87). For more information on this meeting, see Maria Carlson, “Nu Religion Higher Than Truth”: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1975-1 922. (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press), pp. 162-163. 9. Gertsyk reports this to the poet in a letter dated February 19, 1909 (OR RGB [Manuscript Division, Russian State Library], f. 109, kart. 15., ed. khr. 79). 10. The first attempt at outlining this influence was made in Michael Wachtel, “From Aesthetic Theory to Biographical Practice,”in Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia ofRussian Modernism, edited by Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994). Concerning the influence of this experiment on Ivanov’s literary and aesthetic views, see Gennady Obatnin, “ViacheslavIvanov i smert’ L. D. Zinov’evoi-Annibal” (V. I. and the Death of L.D. Zinov’ev-Annibal)in Modernizm i postmoderninn v russkoi literature (Modernism and Postmodernism in Russian Literature), edited by P. Pesonen, Iu. Heinonen, and G. I. Obatnin, Helsinki, 1996. Below are Russian texts of the chief poems by Viacheslav Ivanov cited in the above article: “Threshold of Consciousness”; selections from “Dryads,” “Sacrum sepulcrum,” “Night in the Desert,” and “Dream of Melampus.”

HyCTblHHOe 0

6

~ OKOM 0 ~Mope ~

WLUU, HOYHO ~ ~ noloueii

Eecnnowym

B

cnuToM xope

P ~ J ~ Y CBOMX K TOCK~.

He~ocTumuMroprweq 3par~y rnyxoii npenen Ha 3 b 1 6 n e ~ npomope, o~

OTKyna cun B ~ e m s o y c o 6 ~cnope, 0~ Banbi 6eryr K py6exnohq neclcy.

James and Viacheslav lvanov at the “Threshold of Consciousness”

A C BblCOTbI-’fyMaHHb1fi

JlaCKaeT

kI o T M e n H n o c H u q m nomenb, kI M R T e X e f i CTnXHfiHbIX

KOJlbl6eJIb.

(M3 ((Sacrum sepulcrum~)

... He6ecnoeYo r o c n 3 e ~ n np ~ p ~ ~ ~ i i , O T P a X e H O U 3 TeMHblX TaGHMKOB.

M

K a m O e H a He60 B 0 3 H e C e H b e

Coluecrme

B

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p o ~ ~ yry6nwy; lo

M JlyY C ~ e 6 e -c H 3 rpo6a B O C K p e C e H b e .

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BceneHcKylo TBOPHM. KOrAa ~ 0 6 0 ~ 1 Bcex O l l l ~ H U l b ,

- >KeHNxC ~ 0 6 0(3: ~ )564).

O6oco6ne~~oro C03HZiHbX Tbl C 6 p o C k i m b HrO C BOJIbHbM IIJleV: MbZ - 3HaMR6paTcK01-0 n 0 6 3 a H b X ;

9 ~ 0 ~6 B

~ T ~fly C nXo ~ p e 6 MeY e~

(1 : 530).

(Pi3 &OH MenaMpan)

P a 3 H O - T e K y u l X IIOTOKOB HeMaJIO B TeMHOB IIyY1IHe,

Works Cited Bely, Andrei. Simvolizm. Kniga statei (Symbolism.Articles). Moscow: Musagetes, 1910. Fechner, Gustav Th. Zhizn’posle smerti (Life after Death). St. Petersburg: “Novyi chelovek,” 1915. Frank, Semen. “Filosofia religii V. Dzhemsa” (William James’s Philosophy of Religion). Russkaia mysl’2( 1910). -. “V. Dzhems.” Russkaia mysl’ 11(1910). Ivanov, Viacheslav. Sobrunie sochinenii (Collected Works). Brussels: Foyer Oriental Chrktien, 1971-1 987.

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Ljunggren, Magnus. The Russian Mephisto. The Study of the Life and Work of Emilii Medtner. Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell International, 1994. Sidis, Boris. Psikhologiia vnusheniia (Psychology of Suggestion). Introduction by Wm. James. Translation by Dr. M. Kolokolov. St. Petersburg, 1902. “Teosofiia i bogostroitel’stvo” (Theosophy and God-Building). (Stenographic report of meeting of the Religious-Philosophical Society, 24 November 1909). Vestnik teosofii (Theosophical Herald) 2( 1910). Uspenskii, I? D. lskaniia novoi zhizni. Chto tukoe ioga (The Search for New Life: What Yoga Is). St. Petersburg, 1915. Varila, Armi. The Swedenborgian Background of William James’ Philosophy. Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedenkatemia, 1977.

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7 William James in the Moscow Psychological Society: Pragmatism, Pluralism, Personalism Randall A. Poole

W

an honorary member of the Moscow Psychological Society in 1901, thereby becoming formally associated with the main center of the remarkable accomplishments in philosophy that helped make the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the “Silver Age of culture.”’ Already praised in Russia for his seminal Principles of Psychology, James was on the verge of producing his other major works, notably The Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism, and A Pluralistic Universe. These works, which developed ideas raised earlier in The Will to Believe and Human Immortality, were seen as highly relevant to the tasks confronting the Moscow Psychological Society as it sought to advance the development of Russian philosophy. Founded in 1885 at Moscow University, the Society owed its name “Psychological” to its founder, M. M. Troitsky (1835-1899), an empirical psychologist. Although the society did sponsor significant psychological research, its greater importance in the history of Russian philosophy began to emerge by 1888, when Nikolai Ia. Grot (1852-1899) took over its direction. In 1889 the Psychological Society began publication of Russia’s first regular specialized philosophical journal, Questions of Philosophy and Psychology. Published five times a year until 1918, the journal was invaluable in promoting the growth of philosophy in Russia. Grot characterized its prevailing direction as idealist or, “in respect to method, metaphysical” (“More on the Tasks of the Journal,” p. i). In 1910, when the Psychological Society celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary, one of its officers could evaluate the society as a “profoundly significant fact in the life of Russian society, where in general philosophical questions could beILLIAM JAMES WAS ELECTED

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come the object of free and, to the extent possible, objective discussion only relatively recently” (Vinogradov,pp. 26 1-262). In pursuit of its goal of the free development of philosophy, the Psychological Society needed to mount an effective theoretical challenge to positivism. It met this need through advancing a distinctive neoidealist critique. As a general outlook, positivism was remarkably pervasive in Russia from the middle of the nineteenth century. In its popular naturalistic and scientistic forms, positivism asserted that philosophy had no special methodology and thus no legitimate right to exist as its own type of scientific (nauchnyi or wissenschafilich) discipline. Empirical sciences were the only sciences; philosophy could serve, at best, as a field that systematized empirical research. The measure of reality was empirical experience: positively given, external sense data. Against these reductionist claims, Psychological Society idealists sought to defend the autonomy of philosophy by arguing that the positivist criterion of reality was far from exhaustive, and that what it did not exhaust comprised the special domain of philosophy. This domain was human consciousness itself, to the extent it could be shown to be irreducible to sense experience (the positivist sphere). Beginning with this defense of the autonomy of philosophy, the Psychological Society proceeded to make, by the end of its activity in 1922, perhaps the most important contributions thus far to the history of Russian philosophy. This legacy has come down to us as Russian neoidealism. In 1890, the same year it was published, Nikolai Grot wrote a short review of James’s The Principles of Psychology for Questions of Philosophy and Psychology. Grot believed James’s work could further, in its comprehensive coverage of the state of the field abroad, the “progress of our spiritualistic psychology and philosophy” (p.90). He appealed (unsuccessfully,as it turned out) for the necessary funds for the Psychological Society to undertake a translation. Two years later, Principles was reviewed at greater length by Georgy I. Chelpanov (1862-1936), the society’s leading experimental psychologist and an idealist in philosophy.2 Chelpanov claimed that James himself was a spiritualist in his philosophical views on the nature of the soul (i.e., that he accepted the idea of the substantiality of the soul), even though he kept such views out of psychological research, which he thought should be strictly positivistic (in the methodological, antimetaphysical sense) (p. 72). Most of all, Chelpanov valued James’s work for discrediting the widespread opinion that empirical psychology leads inevitably to (naturalistic) positivism and materialism. It is true that James thought materialism an “impertinent” conclusion from the available evidence (Myers, p. 56), but clearly Chelpanov goes too far in claiming that “James, using all the data of current experimental and physiological psychology . . . openly declares himself a metaphysician of the spiritualist school” (p. 76). Obviously Chelpanov was eager to appropriate James, not

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only for the philosophical critique of positivism but also for the strong spiritualistic current within Russian neoidealism. The problem of how James fit that current would resurface in the Psychological Society. Apart from reviews and some further consideration by Chelpanov, James received no significant attention in the Psychological Society until after the appearance of Pragmatism in 1907.3However, when both Pragmatism and The Varieties of Religious Experience appeared in Russian in 1910,William James’s name became the center of intense discussion and debate. His death that August was announced in Questions of Philosophy and Psychology by an obituary placed prominently at the front of the September-October issue, and a special commemorative meeting of the Psychological Society was held. Two of the society’s most significant figures delivered papers on this occasion: Chelpanov, now deputy chair, spoke on “James as Psychologist,” while Sergei Andreevich Kotliarevsky ( 1873-1939), a leading social philosopher and liberal theorist, addressed the topic “James as Religious Thinker.”4Among the society’s prominent philosophers, Sergei Kotliarevsky was James’s greatest admirer. He wrote about James and pragmatism in two additional essays, “Pragmatism and Tolerance” (1910) and “On the Relative and the Absolute” (1912), the latter appearing in a Festschrifr for Lev Lopatin (1855-1920), chair of the Psychological Society from 1900 until 1919.5Lopatin, himself very interested in James, helped turn the society’s attention toward him. Lopatin, Kotliarevsky, and Chelpanov closely related James to the development of neoidealism in the Psychological Society. Lopatin and Kotliarevsky, in particular, embraced pragmatism because it offered a much broader conception of experience than did positivism, and so could be enlisted in the neoidealist defense of the autonomy of philosophy. They thought that the pragmatist approach to the truth-value (in the general sense of “truth-bearing”) of the full range of human experience, including morality and religion, could advance the search for an integral and balanced worldview, one that helped meet the needs of the whole person and the deeper self. The articulation of such a worldview had been an important goal of the neoidealist program ever since Grot announced the task in the first issue of Questions of Philosophy and Psychology. Lopatin: The Crisis in Philosophy and Its Pragmatic Solution At the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of the Psychological Society in March 1910, Lev Lopatin delivered a major address, “The Present and Future of Philosophy.” On this important occasion in the life of Russia’s first philosophical society, Lopatin called James one of today’s greatest thinkers and declared

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that the future of philosophy belonged to pragmatism. Surveying the overall direction of contemporary European philosophy, Lopatin finds philosophical thought to be suffering a prolonged and deep crisis. He sees in pragmatism an exit from its current moribund state. Philosophy, according to Lopatin, is in crisis because it has subordinated itself to science, which it wants to make its own foundation and model of development. It has largely renounced the possibility of any distinctive object or method of philosophical knowledge. True, philosophy has taken up epistemology as its own special task, but this has generally amounted only to the justification of scientific knowledge. Perhaps never before has philosophy been so deprived of autonomy, and this at a time when the positive sciences are reexamining their own epistemological premises. In short, the way philosophy presently relates to science is hardly normal (“Present and Future,” pp. 4-6). In his account of philosophy’s internal reaction to the extraordinary success of science, Lopatin may well have had in mind James’s words in Pragmatism, a work he knew well (as he makes clear later in his essay). Referring to man’s diminished sense of importance in the enlarged material universe of modern science, James wrote, “The result is what one may call the growth of naturalistic or positivistic feeling. . . . Ideals appear as inert by-products of physiology; what is higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of ‘nothing but’-nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort” (P, p. 15). This was precisely the type of reductionism that pragmatism tried to resist. As early as 1889, Grot observed that the outstanding progress of the natural sciences had led to an exclusive emphasis on one source of knowledge, sense experience, to the neglect of the other, internal experience. Redressing this imbalance is the task of philosophy, he announced in setting the agenda for Questions ofPhi2osuphy and Psychology (“On the Tasks of the Journal,” pp. viii-ix). Twenty years later, Lopatin clearly thought that, whatever progress Russian philosophy had made, European philosophy had failed at this task. The source of the continuing crisis is positivism’s claim that all knowledge must be based on verifiable sense experience. In Lopatin’s definition, positivism strictly confines the sphere of real knowledge to the limits of the precise sciences (“Present and Future:’ p. 9). Positivism tends, moreover, to conflate the concept of experience itself with its external, empirical sphere; inner experience, rejected as subjective feeling, cannot provide adequate grounds for knowledge. It is already clear how pragmatism, by overcoming positivist restrictions on what counts as valid experience and by ascribing truth-value to types of experience that positivism dismisses, could be seen as a solution to the crisis in philosophy and a defense of its autonomy. And this is just the approach Lopatin (and Kotliarevsky) took. James gave a concise formulation of

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it in his second chapter, “What Pragmatism Means”: pragmatism’s “only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience’s demands, nothing being omitted” ( P , p. 44). Positivism, in its scientistic and reductionist forms, is monistic, a tendency which Lopatin identifies as a main characteristic of the contemporary philosophical outlook (“Present and Future,” p. 7). This suggests an important connection to James, through his famous critique of monism in A Pluralistic Universe. The matter is, however, more complicated: Lopatin, himself a convinced monist, thought that either the truth is in monism, or it is nowhere. “It is possible to search for philosophical truth only in monistic systems,” he asserted (“Spiritualism,” p. 449). But monism comes in different forms, only one of which can be true. Lopatin called the true form “spiritualistic monism” and never missed an opportunity to champion it as his own philosophical system. (In “Monism and Pluralism” he wrote that spiritualistic monism “alone contains philosophical t r u t h [p. 891.) James, too, used spiritualism to describe his own Weltanschauung, although in a more general sense than the ontological focus it had for Lopatin and other Psychological Society neoidealists. James and Lopatin also shared a commitment to ethical personalism, the belief that human beings are persons because they are morally responsible agents, “endsin-themselves’’in Kant’s terminology (Myers, pp. 375-376, Zenkovsky, p. 651). (Lopatin’s personalism was not only ethical but also explicitly ontological in its affirmation of the substantiality of the soul, a step James was reluctant to take.) But James thought “pluralistic” was the best designation for a spiritualistic universe of free persons, although he admitted that spiritualism contained a monistic element in its premise (which he accepted) of the internal uniformity of all reality (see below, “The Varieties of Spiritualism”). Lopatin’s criticism of the main currents in European philosophy is not so much that they are monistic, but that their monism takes the form of immanentism, that is, the reduction of being to consciousness. Lopatin’s spiritualistic monism is distinctive in that it recognizes the principle of transcendence: although all being may be spiritual in essence, the forms of being are not all reducible to, or contained in, one another. Lopatin thus affirmed an external reality which is (in other words) transcendent to human consciousness. This was unusual among contemporary monists in Europe, who were generally immanentists. Lopatin singles out neo-Kantianism as most prone to this tendency, but he is careful to distinguish Kant’s selfproclaimed successors from Kant himself (“Present and Future,” pp. 8-9). The immanentists have dispensed with Kant’s thing-in-itself (noumenal being, transcendent to consciousness), and so are in a position to contend that “there is nothing apart from what is given in experience” (p. 11). This

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makes possible their claims to absolute knowledge. Of the positivist thesis that everything is accessible to science, Lopatin remarks: “This is a fully natural conclusion from the rejection of any independent reality outside our cognizing mind and from the characteristic identification of all our experience with the content of science. As a result positivists have unexpectedly assumed the position of the metaphysician-idealists at the beginning of the last century” (pp. 11-12). The monism of absolute idealism consists in the connaturality of all being and the human mind, while the monism of positivism consists in the connaturality of all being and empirical experience. Both cases share an essential immanentism, which accounts for what James called “intellectualism,” in the rejection of which he and Lopatin fully agreed. Not surprisingly, therefore, Lopatin declares that the renewal of philosophical thought is to be found in the new movement of pragmatism (its “great names” from contemporary philosophy include both James and Bergson). He sees pragmatism as a fresh breeze blowing new life into the long-stagnant intellectual atmosphere (“Present and Future,” p. 35). First, Lopatin contrasts positivism (immanentist and intellectualist) to the general pragmatist understanding of science. For pragmatism, the empirical generalizations of natural science are relative and approximate. They predetermine nothing in the metaphysical sphere. “The great guarantee of the emancipation of philosophical thought, in all its quests and eternal problems, lies in the serious understanding of this t r u t h (p. 34). Science and philosophy, Lopatin writes, act on different planes and cannot replace each other (p. 35). This aspect of the pragmatic defense of the autonomy of philosophy, which is related to but distinct from affirming the possible truth-value of nonempirical forms of experience, develops one dimension of Jamesian pluralism. Lopatin (and even more so Kotliarevsky, as we shall see) stressed that in an integral and balanced worldview, science and philosophy had to coexist and acknowledge each other’s separate domain of inquiry. This respect for the autonomy of parts and delimitation of boundaries is a type of pluralism. James generally used pluralism in a metaphysical, not an epistemological, sense. But in one contrast between empiricism and rationalism, he described as pluralistic the empiricist way of explaining wholes by parts (PU,p. 9), of starting from parts to make a whole of the collection (P, p. 13). Lopatin and Kotliarevsky shared this sense of pluralism when they urged that an integral worldview required careful delineation of the equal rights of science and philosophy. Their defense of the autonomy of philosophy was thus both pragmatist and pluralist: pragmatist in that it relied first of all on an expansive idea of truthful experience, pluralist in that it could then resist the monistic pretensions of scientistic positivism.

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James’s critique of monism (in both absolute idealist and positivist forms) was that its intellectualism displaces experience (in the widest sense) as the best guide to truth and that its determinism constrains personal moral endeavor. Lopatin, in the last part of his essay, turns in more detail to these ideas, first to James’sgeneral conception of truth and then to his approach to morality and religion. The exposition relies largely on Pragmatism and The Will to Believe. Lopatin wants to defend pragmatism against accusations of skepticism, easy American “practicism,” crude and superficial utilitarianism, and even of complete contempt for truth (p. 36). To support his contention that pragmatists believe in positive truth no less than their opponents do, he concentrates on the view of knowledge held by James, “who in all justice can be called the most subtle and profound of psychologists and one of today’s most outstanding thinkers” (p. 37). For James, the measure of the truth of an idea is its adequacy to the fullest possible range of human experience. As Lopatin puts it, “What we accept as truth satisfies us more fully, the more broadly it answers every living aspiration of our spiritual make-up.” It cannot flagrantly contradict either moral feeling or theoretical understanding, but must strive to harmonize the various ways we experience reality. “Only that truth captures us which satisfies the whole person in all his vital motives” (p. 37). Empirical generalizations are working hypotheses, not infallible truths. They must not constrict our experience of the diversity and inexhaustible richness of reality. In this connection Lopatin refers to the pragmatist idea of the infinite plasticity of reality: the more open we are to reality, the more it reveals (p. 38). The British pragmatist F. C. S. Schiller used this idea to convey the creative potential in our search for truth, a process in which a cooperative reality to some extent realizes in itself our ideals and our human image, if only we look for them. For this reason, Schiller called his theory of truth, “humanism.” James explained it with the help of Rudolph Hermann Lotze, whose ideas in fact much influenced Lopatin (Zenkovsky, p. 646). Reality, we naturally think, stands ready-made and complete, and our intellects supervene with the one simple duty of describing it as it is already. But may not our descriptions, Lotze asked, be themselves important additions to reality? And may not previous reality itself be there, far less for the purpose of reappearing unaltered in our knowledge, than for the very purpose of stimulating our minds to such additions as shall enhance the universe’s total value. (P, p. 123)

Reality responds to our search for an ever more adequate truth, one in accordance with our fullest and deepest experiences. Therefore, pragmatism is not merely an epistemological matter: “it concerns the structure of the universe i t s e v (p. 124).

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If so, our choice of worldview is a rather important one. Among various worldviews (naturalism or spiritualism, atheism or theism, determinism or free will), if no alternative has the clear logical or theoretical advantage-to grant the best-case scenario for naturalism-then our choice ought to be guided by moral consciousness, which itself gives rise to the great weltanschaulich search for meaning in life. In general, Lopatin writes, truth is determined here by what most fully meets all the demands of spiritual personhood [dukhovnaia lichnost’] (pp. 39-40). Moral rationality was, he stresses, a decisive consideration for James. (Here Lopatin paraphrases James’s argument in Pragmatism [pp. 60-611 and “The Dilemma of Determinism” from The Will to Believe [p. 1151.) This was emphatically so in the case of his approach to theism, which alone guarantees an ideal, everlastingworld order. “Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes,” James wrote; “spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope” (P, p. 55, “Present and Future,” p. 41). And yet James did not maintain that belief in God was only a moral postulate; inner personal experiences provided immediate testimony. Lopatin hails The Varieties of Religious Experience as producing a profound transformation in the psychology of religious feeling (p. 42). James’swork shows that certain irreducible religious and mystical experiences are indubitably convincing to those who have them. “And James himself thinks that the only probable explanation of the relevant facts consists in the hypothesis of actual contact between the deepest layers of our spiritual life and the real divine world” (p. 43, cf. VRE, pp. 406-407). In Jamesian psychology of religion, it was most clear that pragmatism expanded our ideas of experience far beyond the positivist domain, and so gave new life to philosophy. Pragmatism might not be the last word in philosophy, Lopatin cautions, but Psychological Society philosophers could take encouragement from James’sbelief that “a new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers” (p. 44; P, p. 10).

The Varieties of Spiritualism Seven years after “The Present and Future of Philosophy,”Lopatin returned to the pragmatic approach to religious experience in a second major review of the contemporary philosophical scene, “The Urgent Tasks of Present-Day Thought,” which also functions as a statement of his own philosophy of “spiritualistic monism.” The essay was read at Moscow University in January 1917, in the midst of the Great War and on the threshold of revolution. The world war had heightened Lopatin’s sense of grave crisis in European culture and philosophy (pp. 1-3). He saw the war as a direct consequence of the internal

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crisis in philosophy and was especially critical of German philosophical culture (pp. &9), echoing Vladimir Ern’s notion that a straight line could be drawn “From Kant to Krupp.”6As in his 1910 essay, Lopatin stresses the scientistic character of the current philosophical outlook. The main problem remains the illegitimate identification of knowledge as such with the contents of empirical science. “Empirical knowledge and philosophy have very different objects, or, at least, investigate completely different aspects of reality” (p. 15). The tendency of contemporary thought (“especially in Germany”) is, however, to declare that the only reality is the world we perceive in sense phenomena, immanent to consciousness (p. 16). Lopatin, we know, valued pragmatism for its resistance to this type of reductionism. In the 1917 essay, he makes the pragmatic case for spiritualism as a philosophical worldview that best meets the full range of human experience. James emphasizes that religious feeling and experience are the source and subject of religious philosophy and theology, which are intellectual “over-beliefs’’ and as such “secondary products” of the experiential basis (VRE, p. 341). Our intellectual constructions do, however, affect the quality of the primary experience and even more do they determine how that experience is interpreted and evaluated (pp. 341-342,404405). Lopatin makes these same points, especially the influence of philosophical outlook on religious experience and its meaning (“Urgent Tasks,” pp. 74-76). His account clearly draws on James (although without acknowledgment). “Some philosophical views broaden and deepen religious experiences, and are themselves internally enriched by them,” Lopatin suggests. “Others, on the contrary, restrict and constrain them, relegate them to the unconscious sphere, and distort and impoverish them” (p. 75). This determines the “main significance”of spiritualism: it affords free and unimpeded access to religious experience and creativity, and so brings out features of the world (external and internal) which other philosophical views leave obscure and incomprehensible. Here, once more, is the pragmatist idea of the plasticity of reality. “It is necessary to recall,” Lopatin writes, “that contemporary pragmatists have pointed to an important truth: reality is plastic . . . in the sense that we discover in it only what we seek, and, on the contrary, it is closed off to us precisely to the extent we turn away from it” (p. 77). Lopatin’s pragmatist justification of spiritualism is the conclusion to an essay devoted mainly to detailing the spiritualistic worldview itself. The central tenet of spiritualism is that “all reality, in us and outside us, is in its inner essence spiritual. . .. In our soul, in the immediate experiences and acts of our inner self. . . authentic reality is revealed to us” (p. 23). Spiritualism is monistic because it asserts that all reality is internally, ontologically uniform in its spiritual foundations. Spirit is the absolute reality that gives everything its being. Lopatin believes that the monistic principle solves the problem of how

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consciousness can know anything at all about the outside world, about something not-self or other (pp. 25-26, “Spiritualism,”pp. 451-456). How can anything transcendent to consciousness be at the same time an object of consciousness?Spiritualism answers that transcendent being is itself mind-like or spiritual, and that this inner ontological similarity to the self enables it to be perceived by consciousness. Otherwise, the world would not exist for us, but would be completely other. In its very capacity for perceiving and knowing, the self seems to reflect the ontological nature of the rest of the world. The differences between Lopatin’s metaphysics and James’s should not be minimized, but neither should the similarities. Both are spiritualistic and personalistic. James specifies his spiritualism in A Pluralistic Universe. He first makes the generic distinction between spiritualism and naturalism or materialism, then distinguishes two types of spiritualism: theism, which is dualistic in separating man and God, and pantheism, which is monistic or “more intimate,” in that it identifies man and God. James declares that only pantheism is worthy of attention, “the vision of God as the indwelling divine rather than the external creator, and of human life as part and parcel of that deep reality” (p. 19). He then distinguishes two types of pantheism, one “more monistic,” the other “more pluralistic”: the first is the philosophy of the absolute (or absolutism), and the second is “radical empiricism,” James’s own preference. He leaves no doubt that the similarity between the two types of pantheism consists in their spiritualism, “in that both identify human substance with the divine substance” (p. 20). That is a significant area of agreement with Lopatin (whether or not it means James accepted the substantiality of the soul). James calls the absolute type of pantheism the “all-form,’’ while his own type is the “each-form.’’In the “all-form,’’reality becomes fully divine, or realizes its ultimate potential as spirit, only in the form of totality, while the “eachform” is willing to believe “that the substance of reality may never get totally collected, that some of it may remain outside of the largest combination of it ever made” (p. 20). James’s defense of the “each-form’’ is based largely on a stringent ethical personalism that feared that any conception of the absolute limited man’s freedom and opportunity for personal moral endeavor. The result is a pluralism of persons in which God is no longer absolute (i.e., God) but finite, “only one of the eaches,” primus inter pares (PU, p. 26, P, 143). For some reason, James thought this a necessary condition of a universe open to possibility and real cooperation with the divine in one’s own salvation and in the world’s. For James, not only do human persons not require an absolute God (in whom, theists typically contend, personal substantiality ultimately consists), but such a God might even infringe on human personhood. Thus, James’s personalism tended toward his well-known interest in polytheism.

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Lopatin was also a personalist. He called his spiritualism “concrete” to designate its strong personalism and to distinguish it from absolute idealism, which he criticized for “abstract” immanentism (Positive Tusks, 11: 3 11-317). Like James, Lopatin derived his personalism from ethics, but goes further than James in directly drawing ontological conclusions from moral experience. His argument is straightforward: only spiritual substance has the capacity for selfdetermination, which we experience in ourselves as free will. Human beings are therefore persons in the metaphysical sense, that is, substantial souls.7 Lopatin did not, of course, see any incompatibility between personalism and the absolute God of traditional theism. In a 1913 essay, “Monism and Pluralism,” he combined a (sometimes) generous characterization of James with criticism of his eclectic pluralism (pp. 76-80). Still, as we have seen, there remains a large area in which the differences between Lopatin and James on monism and pluralism are mostly semantic. Both thinkers were ultimately concerned to defend the absolute value and dignity of the person. James feared it would be crushed under the weight of a monistic metaphysics, while Lopatin feared it would be fragmented without a higher philosophical unity. Lopatin’s strong personalism has even led to classification of his spiritualism as “pluralism,” despite his own insistence that it was a type of monism (Zenkovsky, pp. 648-652,655-656). In any event, Lopatin himself admitted a “relative justification of the pluralistic principle,” in view of the idea of creation: it is God’s nature as love to create, and this fact introduces an infinite diversity into reality (“Urgent Tasks,” p. 45). The substantiality of the soul was a main tenet of the spiritualistic current in Russian neo-idealism, which included not only philosophy but also psychology (for Lopatin, Grot, and Chelpanov). Whether or not James ever accepted the idea of the substantial soul in his metaphysics, he did not think it was a useful hypothesis in psychology, let alone a possible object of psychological research.8 His psychological method was phenomenalistic: psychology was a positive science about the phenomena of consciousness. Such phenomena do not inform us about personal identity, unity, or substantiality. Lopatin resolutely opposed James on these points. One of his most cherished ideas was that the soul, in all its substantiality, was directly accessible in introspe~tion.~ His 1917 essay “The Urgent Tasks of Present-Day Thought” criticized phenomenalism in psychology (without, however, naming James) and recommended a “spiritualistic psychology” (pp. 51-52).1° Georgy Chelpanov was also a spiritualist in psychology and philosophy.” Like Lopatin, he disputed James’s exclusion of the idea of the soul from psychology. In “James as Psychologist,” he suggests that this exclusion is paradoxical in view of James’s own account that consciousness is spontaneous, causal, goal-directed, selective, and a single entity, not a composite of simpler parts

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(of, for example, “mind-stuff or “mind-dust”). For Chelpanov, these properties (especially the last) mean that “James is a defender of the spiritualistic position regarding the nature of the soul” (pp. 439-446). Yet James tried to explain the self without recourse to the hypothesis of the soul by treating it as a generalization from successive states of consciousness (pp. 449-45 1 ) . l 2 Chelpanov thinks James has fallen into a clear contradiction: “on the one hand, he describes consciousness as only a spiritualist can; on the other hand, he in every way rejects the ‘soul”’ (p. 45611.). The contradiction results from what Chelpanov nonetheless sees as James’s main significance as a psychologist: the fact that he approached psychology as a science in its own terms (the science of the phenomena of consciousness) and furthered its autonomy vis-a-vis metaphysics as well as other sciences. This autonomy must, however, be relative, keeping constant sight of psychology’s interest in perennial philosophical questions about human nature. And in this respect Chelpanov says that perhaps no contemporary psychologist had done more than James to affirm that psychology is a philosophical science (p. 456). Such a science is inevitably spiritualistic, according to Chelpanov’s logic: Those who acknowledge in one way or another the existence of the soul, as James does and as it seems anyone must in thinking about the mind, “acknowledges its substantiality as well, if not directly, then indire~tly.”’~ Although James had little use for a spiritualistic psychology, in religion and metaphysics he took a different approach, one that bears a certain similarity to Lopatin’s formulation of the idea that, in the soul, true reality is revealed in its spiritual foundations. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James writes that science, necessarily general and impersonal, operates only with symbols of reality, while personal experience can have contact with reality itself (p. 393). This is especially true of religious experiences. “By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to g u a r d (pp. 394-395). What is the nature of this reality? In religious experience, we become conscious of a higher part of the self and discover that it is “conterminous and continuous with a MORE of the same quulity, which is operative in the universe” (p. 400). This “MORE” is true reality. It is spiritual because it is “of the same quality” as the self. For this reason, James also speaks of the “MORE” as a “wider self,” with which the conscious person is continuous (p. 405). In psychological terms, he describes the “MORE” as connected to us through the subliminal consciousness, a concept he used to help account for religious, mystical, and “psychical” experiences. Lopatin thought that the “whole enormous sphere of so-called mystical facts” (in the occult or parapsychological sense) deserved serious a t t e n t i ~ n ,while ’~ Chelpanov devoted considerable space to James’s interest in the idea of the subliminal consciousness and in “spiritism” (or mediumism), as well as to his

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closely related transmission theory of consciousness (“James as Psychologist,” pp. 451-455). Kotliarevsky: Jamesand Russia

Sergei Kotliarevsky embraced even more of James’sthought than did Lopatin. Like Lopatin, Kotliarevsky valued pragmatism for restoring an expansive idea of human experience in place of monistic constrictions, and thus for helping to meet our need for a balanced and integral worldview. Both philosophers saw the best example of this restoration in pragmatist openness to religious experience, in “religious pragmatism.” But Kotliarevsky and Lopatin differed somewhat on Jamesian pluralism. While Lopatin felt obliged to criticize it as metaphy~ics,’~ Kotliarevsky was content to concentrate on its implications in social philosophy (including the place of religion in society), where he found it quite congenial to his own ideas. “James as Religious Thinker” is the paper Kotliarevsky delivered before the Psychological Society’s meeting memorializing James in October 1910. For Kotliarevsky, pragmatism is most interesting in its religious dimensions, when placed in connection with the answers James gave to the perennial questions about the eternal and its relation to man. These answers deserve attention not only as material for the intellectual biography of this “great American thinker,” whose spiritual outlook is so attractive in its freshness but also because they are organically tied to the great currents in religious-philosophical thought. “They have there a past and, it is to be thought, a future” (p. 697). James’s originality consists in his pragmatic method, applied most characteristically in The Varieties of Religious Experience, but defended in his other works as well. His approach is based not on abstract deduction from metaphysical premises, but on experience and observation, although not as they exist in the preconceptions and prejudices of those who pretend to the strictest empiricism (p. 698). Pragmatism is a method, not a theory, and it strenuously resists pretentious rationalism and dogmatism. Kotliarevsky, like Lopatin, defends pragmatism against charges of crude utilitarianism, charges which are, he said, far removed from its true spirit (p. 702). In James, that spirit was the fruit of many years of psychological research that combined, in Kotliarevsky‘s words, exactitude with a brilliant intuition for reconstructing mental life (p. 698). Nowhere is this genius more evident than in James’s reconstruction of the varieties of religious experience. It is no accident, Kotliarevsky suggests, that James has generated so much attention and interest in Russia (p. 717). This is not just another case of Russian susceptibility to the latest trend in Western philosophy and science. Jamesian

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pragmatism appeals to certain peculiarities in Russian intellectual development. Russians might take a certain satisfaction in, for example, never having been overburdened by the type of scholastic intellectualism that James found so constraining. (It is true, Kotliarevsky admits, that Russia’s freedom from scholasticism may have been a consequence of inadequate logical training and too little interest in purely epistemological problems, of not clearly separating the sphere of theoretical reason from practical reason.) Kotliarevsky even thinks that points of contact could be established between James and Slavophilism. But the best and most precious traditions in Russian higher learning include its attraction to natural science, its high estimation of empiricism, not in the sense of philosophical pretensions, but of fruitful use of experience and observation. And here, Kotliarevsky writes, Russians are inevitably drawn to James’s own constant striving to avoid encumbering empirical science with metaphysical hypotheses (p. 717). It has not been long, however, since the monistic tendencies of scientism were ascendant, when the Russian traditions of true empiricism were apparently in eclipse and in need of recovery. Kotliarevsky refers to the recent dominance of so-called philosophical realism, a partly materialistic, partly positivistic worldview. By the end of the nineteenth century, Russian neoidealism had emerged as a powerful critique of this worldview. “The defense of idealism was then in itself a certain act of courage, a defense of freedom against hardened dogmatism. Now idealists no longer need to prove their rights to existence-they are generally recognized” (p. 718). But, Kotliarevsky asks, does external recognition mean internal assimilation? People who sincerely value the progressive movement of idealism could not but be experiencing profound doubt and heavy disappointment now, when victory over one-sided empiricism is too often taken to mean freedom from any scientific methodology and even from elementary logic (p. 718). James strikes the necessary balance. He manages to combine freedom and responsibility, the greatest tolerance with the greatest exactingness. “We are accustomed to neither,” Kotliarevsky writes, “but do we not distinctly sense that here James comes very close to the most urgent problems of our contemporary culture?” (pp. 717-718). Kotliarevsky played an important role in the idealist revival he describes here as only partially successful. The comparison he wants to draw between pragmatism and Russian neoidealism is that both approaches, as I have argued in the case of Lopatin, seek to delimit science and philosophy (and religion as well) to their own respective spheres of experience and inquiry. The conflation of these distinct spheres, or the hypostatization of one at the expense of the other, is monism. Respect for their mutual autonomy, recognition of their legitimate rights to coexistence, is pluralism (in one important di-

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mension of the concept). This side of Jamesian pragmatism received special emphasis by Kotliarevsky,who closely related it to the liberal principles of tolerance and freedom of conscience. Monism, “True Realism,” and the Quest for an Integral Worldview In “James as Religious Thinker,” Kotliarevsky declared that James’s struggle with monism, which is “so pernicious for both religious and scientific freedom,” constitutes by itself his great cultural contribution (p. 716). Earlier in 1910, a few months before James’s death in August of that year, Kotliarevsky described the psychology of monism in another essay, “Pragmatism and the Problem of Tolerance.” The article was written in response to the “indisputable fact” of contemporary interest in pragmatism (p. 368), and appeared in the same issue of Questions of Philosophy and Psychology as Lopatin’s speech, “The Present and Future of Philosophy.” Lopatin, we know, was a monist in philosophy. Kotliarevsky was therefore obliged to observe, before beginning his critique, that “unity of substance can be combined with an infinite multiplicity of attributes and modes in which the world appears” (p. 373). But most monists are not this subtle. Their monism consists rather in thinking that natural scientific methods apply to all fields of knowledge. In practice, this often amounts to no more than taking verbal metaphors for fruitful scientific analogies. Such monists see themselves as true realists. Their “naive objectivism” has become very widespread, thus reinforcing their sectarian cast of mind (p. 374). Kotliarevsky was concerned to defend the autonomy not only of science and philosophy but also of religion. Monism characteristically collapses science and religion into one system (Ernst Heinrich Haeckel and Auguste Comte are Kotliarevsky‘s examples). With this, scientific truths take on a supra-empirical character: science becomes a religion. But “the impossibility of an external unification of science and religion is obvious to anyone who has passed through the school of scientific criticism and who is capable of sensing the absolute autonomy of any religious conviction” (p. 376). Such unification always reproduces, in one form or another, the medieval idea of philosophy as the maidservant of theology, and it is always achieved at the cost of a great loss of spiritual and intellectual freedom. Our sense of an irreducible difference between the empirical and religious aspects of the world cannot be suppressed by verbal formulas. Nor can religious needs ever be satisfied by the claims and promises of a monistic orthodoxy [pravoverie].Kotliarevsky refers here to the example of contemporary Social Democracy, which economic determinism has infected with the “virus of atheism.” Neither this virus nor promises of the

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kingdom of freedom have prevented the emergence of religious searchings among Social Democrats, much to the chagrin of the would-be keepers of orthodoxy.16 In these searchings, Kotliarevsky sees a healthy protest against monistic attempts to limit the rights of the human spirit (p. 377). Against monistic orthodoxies of all types, Kotliarevsky values pragmatism for what he called its liberating role, mentioning in particular James’s ideas about free will and the plasticity of the world. Instead of finished dogma, pragmatism presents the image of ongoing intellectual and spiritual work. No single link in this process can pretend to absolute or exclusive significance, for each embodies the absolute striving of the human spirit forward to its eternal ends. In this, Kotliarevsky writes, it is clear that the pragmatist understanding of life cannot be reduced to biology, as James himself made clear in the significance he attached to religion (p. 378). If philosophy is experiencing a deep crisis, as Lopatin indicates (Kotliarevskyrefers to him in concluding his essay), then it could do no better than to stop chasing after “scholastic virtuosity” and return to the broader path along which people have always sought answers to the perennial questions. This is the path of living instinct, of pragmatism, and of renewal (p. 379). (I will return below to Kotliarevsky‘s development of a pragmatic basis for tolerance). Several years earlier, soon after neoidealism had become a movement in Russian social thought but before pragmatism was enlisted in the service of defending the autonomy of philosophy, Kotliarevsky went further in analyzing the type of monism James opposed. In 1904, a group of leading Russian positivists published a manifesto of sorts, Essays in the Realist Worldview. Kotliarevsky reviewed the volume in an essay entitled, “On True and False Realism,” which critiques positivistic monism as a false realism. His argument shows why he would soon find James so congenial a thinker. Kotliarevsky’s review essay is a forceful statement of the neoidealist principle of autonomy and delimitation. “Conflict beween science and metaphysics, as between science and religion, begins only when mutual usurpation begins” (p. 627). Such usurpation is the mark of positivist realism. Kotliarevsky and his Psychological Society colleagues often used the term (or, when not the term, the concept) “contraband” to describe the distortion and muddling that result when elements from one area of thought (ethical, metaphysical, or religious) are smuggled into or usurped by another (empirical or natural scientific).” Kotliarevsky’s criticism of the realist worldview is that, as a worldview, it has not been consciously (i.e., philosophically) constructed and is full of contraband. Realists fail to recognize that constructing a worldview is itself a metaphysical project (p. 627). No less than everyone else, they cannot help asking metaphysical questions, only they do not do so squarely and honestly. Metaphysics thus enters their thinking on an unconscious level, leading to dis-

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tortion and conflation. Realism presents itself as a true worldview in its claim to be an empirical one, free of the old superstitions of metaphysics. But an empirical worldview is an impossible contradiction, for any worldview inevitably goes beyond the bounds of empirical data and includes metaphysical elements. Recognizing this is the first requirement of “true realism.” Meanwhile, monism, as it is usually understood, is based on a false conception of human nature, in which natural, irreducible disharmonies exist. Religious, aesthetic, and ethical ideas cannot be reconciled by the criteria of empirical knowledge. To create harmonious personhood from this disharmony comprises the greatest task of Bizdung (vospitanie), for both the individual human being and the human species as a whole. But such harmony is not at all created by the artificial stretching of our nature on the Procrustean bed of monism. (p. 634)

The attempt results in “spiritual amputation,” and in this monism resembles not the spirit of true realistic science at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, but rather the spirit of medieval theocracya frequent analogy for Kotliarevsky, and an allusion to the history of churchstate relations in Russia, a history characterized by its own type of monistic conflation. It is the nature of the human mind, Kotliarevsky argues, to transcend each of the relatively distinct areas of its activity and aspire to an ever higher unity. This aspiration is metaphysical, an aspiration to a worldview. Failure to acknowledge it leads to contraband, to the conflations and distortions of monism, to false realism. At the same time, an integral and balanced worldview requires the free expression and development of each side of our intellectual and spiritual nature. Metaphysical speculation cannot replace scientific work, any more than science alone can satisfy our ideal of a transcending unity. “In delineating the functions of the human spirit, in giving each of them full scope for development, and in not trying to reduce to unity the organically irreducible, we obtain the totality of man’s relations to the whole, which are reflected in his consciousness as a worldview” (p. 642). This is Kotliarevsky’s conception of true realism. It is already cast in terms of the pragmatic conception of truth as adequacy to the widest possible range of human experience, not as fidelity to a part which mistakes itself for the whole. In his 1904 review essay, Kotliarevsky dwells on monism as a consequence of lack of philosophical clarity about our inherent aspiration toward a worldview, but he does not mention pragmatism as a way toward self-lucidity. Not until 1912, in an essay entitled “On the Relative and Absolute,” does he specify pragmatism as an approach that squarely faces the metaphysical needs of reason and thus brings greater self-consciousness to the task of constructing a

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worldview (the idea implicit in his 1910 essays). Though Kotliarevsky does not, of course, deny the value of specialized philosophical research, he does see pragmatism as a way of once again bringing philosophy to bear on the most profound problems of life. Pragmatism can help work philosophy into a general worldview, “to the extent that the pragmatic method flows from the deepest, most fundamental requirements of the mind, and to the extent that any person, as a participant in life, is a pragmatist. The significance of philosophical pragmatism thus lies most of all in recollecting the root properties of our spirit” (p. 98). One of these properties is the mind’s natural striving to find a proper balance between the relative and the absolute. Kotliarevsky proposes to examine these categories from the perspective of pragmatism. First of all, he suggests that the very presence of these categories is something remarkable. They are basic to all experience and thought. Without them, we could not begin to describe consciousness itself. To evaluate (in the broadest sense) means to distinguish between the absolute and relative. Freedom and moral life presuppose these categories (p. 99). Kotliarevsky stresses the necessary interdependence of the two categories: they need each other to be what they are. Pure relativism is thus an impossibility, since it would have no awareness of itself as relative. Even within the category of the relative, we distinguish between degrees (in the sense of “more” or “less” relative): “but what could give this perspective, if not recognition of the absolute” (p. 100). Relativism, which Kotliarevsky thought was then enjoying great popularity, contains in itself at least a latent consciousness of the absolute. By making this clear, pragmatism, Kotliarevsky hoped, could facilitate the recovery of the absolute from relativism, help restore the proper balance between the categories, and arrive at the equilibrium of a true realism. In this, pragmatism can also draw, following James, on religious experience, the essence of which is experience of the absolute (p. 101). An integral worldview, in its self-consciousness about the relative and absolute, avoids the creation of false absolutes (or idols), characteristic of monistic orthodoxies. For Kotliarevsky, this has special relevance to social philosophy, where relative means (electoral laws, parliamentarianism, proportional representation, the state itself, etc.) must not be taken as absolute ends, opening the doors to the kingdom of freedom and perfect social justice (p. 105). Social and legal means must rather be sanctioned by that which is truly absolute, in religion and morality. This does not imply, of course, that the value of religion and morality consists only in their ability to provide such sanction. “The value of religious-moral principles,” Kotliarevsky writes, “depends entirely on their real value in themselves, on the fact that they carry their own sanction.” He makes this point to contrast pragmatism with utilitarianism, which does reduce religion and morality to instruments for maintaining so-

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cia1 order (p. 103). The sanctioning power of the absolute comes from its greater degree of autonomy over the relative. Since it is the absolute which is the source of the higher significance of everything relative (which is also why nothing is merely relative), the relative must not be made into its own absolute. As Kotliarevsky puts it,“the world of the relative must be decisively secularized, freed from the conflation of spiritualia and temporalia, which (to be sure, not quite in medieval form) so often comes back to life in science and art, politics and the social sphere, in all branches of human activity” (p. 106). Keeping the right balance between the relative and the absolute can also inspire our everyday work. In this hint at an idealist work ethic, Kotliarevsky suggests that in the light of the absolute, everyday work does not stand on its own but is invested with higher (ultimately transcendent) purposes. Here Kotliarevsky speaks of the pragmatic value of a combination of realism and idealism (p. 107)-the combination of an integral worldview. The Distinctiveness of Religious Experience The nature of religious experience was the main subject of Kotliarevsky‘s essay “James as Religious Thinker.” Here he pursues the argument that Jamesian psychology of religion expands the concept of experience beyond positivistic limits. Throughout the essay, he stresses the distinctiveness of religious experience and thus its resistance to false monistic unities. This distinctiveness is largely the result of the individuality of religious experience, conveyed in James’s famous definition (which Kotliarevsky quotes) of religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (“Jamesas Religious Thinker,” p. 698, VRE, p. 34). Religious experiences, according to James, have their bases in psychology and physiology, as does all mental life. This should not influence our evaluation of such experiences,which need to be assessed on their own terms. James was not at all afraid to recognize the relative value of what he called “medicalmaterialism.” But, as Kotliarevsky observes, he thought such materialists were naive in imagining that they dispense with St. Paul by explaining his vision on the road to Damascus as an epileptic seizure (p. 699, VRE, p. 20). James’s analysis of these conversion experiences comprises, in Kotliarevsky‘s estimation, an outstanding contribution to religious history (p. 700). The mystery of conversion consists not in the psychological process behind the experience but in the result, in the spiritual state called saintliness. James’s description of this state makes perfectly clear the difference between religious and ethical experiences, between exalted inspiration and Kant’s categorical imperative (p. 701). It is this distinctiveness that Kotliarevsky wants to emphasize.

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For all the pragmatic value James attached to saintliness, he did not neglect the basic question of all religious philosophy: on what is the recognition of religious truth based? Kotliarevsky dwells on his answer: mystical experience determines religious truth (p. 705). Mystical states are absolutely authoritative for those who have them, but this certainty is subjective. “Yet,”as James wrote, “the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of nonmystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe” (VRE, p. 338). This type of testimony against reductive positivism was what Kotliarevsky and Lopatin most valued in James, especially in their defense of the autonomy of philosophy. In A Pluralistic Universe, James himself linked the “great awakening of a new popular interest in philosophy” to religious demands. Jamesian radical empiricism, Kotliarevsky notes, is a more natural ally of religion, and so ultimately of philosophy, than is any dialectic, which only constricts the scope of experience (pp. 706-707; PU, p. 142).18Rationalism and intellectualism, abstract and symbolic, do not have immediate access to reality. The individuality of religious experience makes it invulnerable to science and opens it to ultimate reality. James’s argument (which I outlined in connection with Lopatin) impressed Kotliarevsky (pp. 708-709). The essence of religious experience is prayer, through which we enter into communion with the spiritual world. “Therefore,” Kotliarevsky writes, “in the final account the truth of religion depends on whether consciousness in its prayerful state is deceptive or not” (p. 707; cf. VRE,p. 367). The relevant test is a pragmatic one, and here it cannot be denied that prayer releases energy that causes real changes in the world. James’s pragmatic approach to religion strives for criteria of truth based on unimpeded receptivity to the fullest range of experience. “It clears the barriers which stand before the creative energy of the believer” (p. 715). Kotliarevsky, as an astute student of religion in society, was interested in James’s place within the historical context of religious life in America. l 9 Referring to Alexis de Tocqueville and James Bryce, he highlights the exceptional importance of religion in American society and democracy. The most striking characteristic of American religious life is its great diversity. But there is a certain unity in this diversity, not least of all because the dogmatic element is overshadowed by the moral and social influence of religion on the country. “These traits have made possible a development of tolerance, in an atmosphere of indestructible moral unity, incomprehensible to old Europe. . . .Even Catholicism . . . shows a surprising capacity to harmoniously fit the new environment of mutual tolerance and social cooperation” (pp. 710-71 1). In this Kotliarevsky suggests an association among pragmatism, pluralism, and liberalism, an important topic to which we will return. Meanwhile, he shows how James drew on the American tradition of “distinctive religious syncretism” (Kotliarevsky sees Ralph Waldo Emerson and

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William Ellery Channing as two of the greatest representatives of this syncretism). First, the emphasis within this tradition on morality at the expense of dogma does not mean poverty of religious experience. America could teach James about the social-pragmatic function of religion, but it was his own “incomparable psychological insight” that enabled him clearly to distinguish religious from purely moral experiences. “Faith is capable of being a source of enormous moral energy and of fruitful work in the transformation of the surrounding world, and even here lies the highest guarantee of its truth. But it preserves its autonomy as a perfectly distinctive experience” (p. 712). As we know, James’s deep interest in mysticism helped convince him of this distinctiveness. His proximity to the Unitarians, representatives of the spirit of free thought in Christianity, did not, Kotliarevsky continues, lessen his intimate understanding of the stern mysticism of the Puritans. But then James’s appreciation of the diversity of religious experience reflected the overall harmony of American religious culture. Although firmly rooted in American society and culture, James had a mastery of European religious-philosophical thought. Among major contemporary religious thinkers, Kotliarevsky compares James to Albrecht Benjamin Ritschl, who opposed intellectualism as the path “leading to the greatest distortion of religion, which can only be a matter of faith, not knowledge.” For Ritschl, religion belonged to the sphere of practical, not theoretical, reason, and in this Kotliarevsky suggests he took a step in the direction of the pragmatic interpretation of religion (p. 713). Kotliarevsky also refers to Ritschl in his earlier essay, “Pragmatism and the Problem of Tolerance,” where his great service is said to have consisted in the attempt to establish the limits of the sphere legitimately belonging to rationalism, and in the defense of the autonomous content of religion outside that sphere (p. 377). Another comparison he draws is to Friedrich Schleiermacher, who sensed in the diversity of religious experience not the slightest diminution of faith, but rather the presence of the infinite in the finite (“James as Religious Thinker,” pp. 713-714). But most of all Kotliarevsky likes to compare James to Catholic modernism, “which apparently must be recognized as the most significant and outstanding phenomenon in contemporary religious life” (p. 7 14). Modernists seek to reconcile the authoritarian spirit of the church with the rights of individual self-determination and modern cultural values. Like James, they reject dogmatic intellectualism, strive to make immediate internal experience the basis of faith, interpret church dogma in a symbolic sense, and entertain the idea of the immanence of the natural and supernatural. Thinkers like Edouard Le Roy and Maurice Blonde1 might understand better than anyone the religious potential in pragmatism (pp. 714-715). Kotliarevsky re-

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turns to the parallel between James and modernism in his 1912 essay“0n the Relative and the Absolute.” The point of comparison here is to the individuality of religious experience that James describes. This individualism does not at all lead to the complete religious atomization of society. Nor does it, Kotliarevsky insisted, exclude a uniformity of experiences, a solidarity arising from this uniformity, or, finally, a feeling of profound tolerance toward differences and the form of their expression. “Catholic modernists hope to create from this solidarity and tolerance a new bond among members of the church” (pp. 101-102). And in “Pragmatism and the Problem of Tolerance,” Kotliarevsky declares that modernists are kindred in spirit to pragmatists and advocates of tolerance in a milieu-Catholicism-not known for these principles. He thinks (or hopes) it is still too early to predict the outcome of the struggle between modernism and Pope Pius X, but in any event he believes that modernists such as Le Roy, George Tyrrell, and Alfred Loisy have already written a “brilliant chapter in the history of contemporary religious thought” (p. 379). Truth, Tolerance, Liberalism “Pragmatism is first of all a call to tolerance,” Kotliarevsky proclaims in “Pragmatism and Tolerance” (p. 369). But it provides a very different basis for the defense of tolerance than do skepticism and nihilism, with which pragmatism is often associated. Kotliarevsky refers to Dostoevsky‘s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” to show that in itself skepticism does not provide favorable ground for tolerance. “Disbelief in objective truth can very easily turn into complete contempt for it, which no longer leaves a place for respect for the spiritual freedom of others” (p. 372). This is an important point for Kotliarevsky, which he repeats at the end of this essay. Skepticism, providing no criteria for the superiority of one truth-claim over another, leads to sheer indifference, “where freedom of thought, as a natural right of the human person, does not represent any special value” (pp. 378-379). The opposite danger is fanaticism,where intolerance is the result, in Kotliarevsky‘s words, of an incorrect evaluation of truth and error, not of plain indifference to them. The “incorrect evaluation”consists, of course, in attributing the forces of good to truth and the forces of evil to error. The superiority of truth over error is obvious (apart from the fact that rarely do fanatics possess even this superiority), but it does not follow that someone who is in error is also wicked. Error is all too easily transformed into moral and social heresy. “In this is the special psychological danger of monism” (p. 373). Pragmatism removes the ground from intolerance in the case of both skepticism and fanaticism. It is, Kotliarevsky says, the golden mean between them (p. 379).

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What is the actual positive link between Jamesian pragmatism and tolerance? What is the pragmatic basis of the respect for truth which, according to Kotliarevsky, promotes tolerance? First, Kotliarevsky believes that the best allies of tolerance are religious inspiration and living faith. In “James as Religious Thinker,” he sees every possibility for the establishment of an “authentic tolerance” in the growing diversity of religious experience, which he calls an undoubted fact of contemporary spiritual life (p. 716). To support this connection, he draws on the historical development of tolerance (“Pragmatism and Tolerance,” p. 370), especially in America (“James as Religious Thinker,” pp. 710-712). His argument for a pragmatically based tolerance is clearly that pragmatism esteems dynamic spiritual life (as skepticism does not), and that it is diverse religious experience that, in turn, engenders respect for truth and, as Kotliarevsky puts it, higher spiritual values (“Pragmatism and Tolerance,” p. 370). These values emerge from the process of free interplay in a pluralistic diversity of religious experience, so respect for them increasingly commits one to tolerance and freedom of conscience. One of these spiritual values is the absolute worth and dignity of the human person, the (personalist) cornerstone of the liberal worldview. With this we have the foundation stones underlying what can be called Kotliarevsky’s pragmatic defense of liberalism. Like several of his Psychological Society colleagues (Pave1Novgorodtsev and the brothers Sergei and Evgenii Trubetskoy, in particular), Kotliarevsky was convinced that liberalism grew from the demands of religious consciousness and that a liberal civic culture had its foundations in free spiritual life. Monistic forms of religion were, in this sense, illiberal. They did not provide enough space for the emergence of the spiritual premises of a viable democracy. Catholicism was Kotliarevsky’s favorite example, but he clearly had Russia in mind as well. Subordination of church to state in modern Russian history was its own type of monism, the reverse side of theocracy (Kotliarevsky‘s usual image). It had led to the atrophy of religious life, the rebirth and free development of which required a pluralistic separation of church and state. The prospects of Russian liberalism depended, in other words, on freedom of conscience, an important principle of neoidealist social philosophy in the Moscow Psychological Society, where it took on broad meaning. Freedom of conscience concisely formulated the idea of respect for the autonomy of parts that enables the balanced and integrated development of the whole. This principle is not limited to church and state, but extends to the various distinct spheres of human consciousness and experience (science, philosophy, and religion, for example). These spheres are legitimate in their own domain; one cannot be substituted for any of the others; they are relatively autonomous parts of a whole in which each has its own place. We have seen how this principle

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underlies Kotliarevsky‘s critique of “false realism.” He stressed the autonomization of religion in particular from false monistic unities because the religious sphere was, he thought, the ultimate source of respect for liberal values. After the Revolution of 1905, Russia was experiencing, as Kotliarevsky saw it, a national renaissance. He wondered, at the same time, whether the necessary spiritual basis was being created for this renaissance (“James as Religious Thinker,” p. 718). Religious interests, so long dormant in Russian society, were beginning to awaken, as could be seen even in the readership James has found in Russia.20But “it cannot be regretted enough” that these religious searching run up against the “fatal mistake”-of which Kotliarevsky apparently found the Russian church most guilty-of failing to distinguish between the eternal and its relative (he said, in fact, “decrepit [ obvetshalyi]”) form (p. 719). An integral religious unity can be achieved only through pluralistic diversity, not monistic imposition from above. “But then what remains is faith in human nature, which is capable of ascending, through infinitely many paths, to the divine” (p. 716)?l This faith is the spiritual basis of democracy, as Kotliarevsky emphasizes in another essay, “The Premises of Democracy” (1905). Describing the type of religious consciousness that promotes the development and deepening of liberalism, he writes there: Its binding force consists in the feelings of piety and worship that are inherent in man before the Unfathomable, the Divine. And these feelings are sufficiently powerful, sufficiently rich in creative force, to generate an infinite diversity of symbols and forms. The spiritualization of human lifehere is the true premise of the principle of the “kingdom of freedom.” It is impossible to imagine without religion,forging a link between the terrestrial and celestial. (pp. 126-127 It is not surprising that the author of these lines had a special appreciation for the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience. Five years later, concluding his remarks before the Psychological Society, Kotliarevsky defined James’s main strength in his fearlessness before life, with its infinite diversity and also its infinite possibilities, “to the realization of which man is called by the feeling of his link with a higher world, at the edge of which he stands.” It was this outlook which attracted Kotliarevsky and his colleagues,“for in it we sense the germs of faith, which can indeed move mountains” (“James as Religious Thinker,” p. 7 19). Notes

The author wishes to express special thanks to George Kline for his assistance with this chapter.

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1. On the Moscow Psychological Society, see Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, Sergei N. Trubetskoi: An Intellectual among the Intelligentsia in Prerevolutionary Russia (Belmont, Mass., 1976), pp. 63-80; Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal and Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, eds., A Revolution of the Spirit. Crisis of Value in Russia, 1890-1924, trans. Marian Schwartz (NewYork, 1990), pp. 16-22; and RandallA. Poole, “The Moscow Psychological Society and the Neo-Idealist Development of Russian Liberalism, 1885-1922” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 1996). The term “Silver Age” has been widely adopted as a term of convenience, though its origins and appropriatenesshave been disputed. See Omry Ronen, The Fallacy of the SilverAge in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature (Amsterdam, 1997). 2. Chelpanov took a very active role in the PsychologicalSociety after 1907, upon his move from Kiev to Moscow University, where he was to serve as professor and chair of philosophy until 1923. In 1912 he established the Institute of Psychology at Moscow University. He became deputy chair of the Psychological Society in 1909. 3. In 1909 Questions of Philosophy and Psychology published an overview (see Balaban) of pragmatism (focusing on James’s Pragmatism and F. C. S. Schiller’s Studies in Humanism), presumably with a view to preparing readers for the more interpretive essays which were to follow. Balaban was not a significant figure in the PsychologicalSociety (the overview was his only essay to appear in the journal). 4. Kotliarevsky defended four dissertations at Moscow University: on the Franciscans (1901), Lamennais and modern Catholicism (1904), constitutional law (1907), and the rule-of-law state and foreign policy (1909). In 1909, he became professor of state law at Moscow University. He also lectured at the Higher Women’s Courses (1908-1917). He played a leading role in the Russian Liberation Movement, which culminated in the Revolution of 1905. He was a member of the central committee of the Constitutional-Democratic (Kadet)party and was elected to the First State Duma. He became a member of the Psychological Society in 1898. 5. Lev Mikhailovich Lopatin was the senior philosophy professor in the Psychological Society. He became coeditor of its journal in 1894 and editor in 1905. His major work is the two-volume Polozhitel’nye zadachifilosofii (The Positive Task of Philosophy) (1886 and 1891). 6. On Ern’s paper, delivered in 1914, see Scherrer, pp. 338-340. Krupp industries of Essen were major suppliers of German armanents, mostly famous cannons. 7. Positive Tasks, 11, especially pp. 213-224, for the section entitled, “The concept of substance and the concept of causation in the strict sense of the word.” 8. He often criticized the idea. However, see Meyers, p. 362. 9. (The Method of Introspection in Psychology) “Metod samonabliudeniia v psikhologii” VFP 13: 2, kn. 62 (1902): 1031-1090; “Poniatie o dushe PO dannym vnutrennego opyta” (The Concept of the Soul on the Evidence of Inner Experience) VFP 7: 2, [kn. 321 (1896): 264-298. 10. Also see, for example, his “Spiritualizm kak psikhologicheskaia gipoteza” (Spiritualism as a Psychological Hypothesis) VFP 8: 3, kn. 38 (1897): 486-534. 11. The second unit of his Introduction to Philosophy bears the title, “The Ontological Problem,” and includes a chapter on spiritualism. Chelpanov states, in the form of his own conclusions, that the self is substantial, that the ontological basis of all reality

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is spiritual and comprised of monads, and that spiritualism, so conceived, is a type of monism (cf., Lopatin’s spiritualistic monism) (198-200). In his “Survey of Contemporary Theories of the Soul,” the substantiality of the soul is the defining criterion of spiritualism (3 19). 12. Chelpanov also outlined James’s argument (which denies personal identity) in “Survey,” pp. 320-321. 13. “Survey,” p. 333. Chelpanov made the straightforward argument that unity of consciousness and identity of self presuppose substantiality (pp. 31 7-3 19). James’s Principles ofpsychology was listed here among recent psychological works that assume the existence of the soul. In another essay, “On the Relation of Psychology to Philosophy,” Chelpanov defined psychology as the science of the soul, argued that the soul is an inevitable concept in psychology, and criticized the recent “psychology without a soul” movement (without mentioning James). 14. “Urgent Tasks,” pp. 70-73. His account clearly draws on James (without mentioning him), as does part of his discussion of immortality (p. 67). According to Korelina (p. 116), Lopatin was himself attracted to “spiritism” and participated in seances. 15. V. M. Khvostov (1868-1920) was the main Russian representative of pluralism in metaphysics, which he took to mean the reality of good and evil as cosmic forces. Since these forces were in themselves irrational, optimism and pessimism were equally untenable monisms. Overcoming evil and cosmic dualism was the goal of human activity, but the outcome was not predetermined. The free struggle with evil was the source of the “ethics of human dignity,” as Khvostov entitled one of his books ( 19 12). The conclusion to his essay, “The Pluralist Worldview,” adduced James’s understanding of religious experience in support of pluralism, so conceived (Khvostov, pp. 391-394). 16. Here and above Kotliarevskii apparently meant the Marxist ideology underlying the “Russian Social-Democrat Workers Party” of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. By “religious searchings” he likely referred to the God-building (bogostroitelstvo) movement within Bolshevism. 17. Lopatin appears to have introduced the concept in the first volume of The Positive Tasks of Philosophy. He wrote there that the inevitability of metaphysical suppositions needs to be acknowledged and justified. “Why not call things by their names?” Otherwise, metaphysical ideas can figure in thought only as contraband, distorting it on an unconscious level and preventing clear and precise discourse. “Is it desirable to perpetuate such contraband of reason? . . . Every case of lack of consciousness in the scholarly (nauchnyi) sphere leads only to confusion of concepts, to ambiguity, and to lies” (Positive Tasks, I, 434). 18. Kotliarevsky mistakenly placed this passage in The Varieties ofReligious Experience. 19. His first essay in Questions of Philosophy and Psychology was, appropriately enough, “Religion in American Society,” a review essay of Henri Bargy, La religion duns la socittt aux Ihts-Unis (Paris, 1902). James, “a purely American genius,” was discussed in connection with his ideas on the relationship between society and the individual (pp. 16-18).

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20. Kotliarevsky gave this example in another essay, “The Philosophy of the End,” a review of E. N. Trubetskoi’s two-volume study of Vladimir Solovyov (1913). The essay argued that, since 1905, Russia had been on the path of genuine cultural reorientation, especially in the waning of utopianism (the reference to James is on p. 318). 21. Kotliarevsky denied that, for James, this aspiration to unity with the divine has anything to do with identity of substance. In this connection, he called James’s tendency toward polytheism a “strange admission,” probably a symbol of his aversion to monism (pp. 709-7 10).

Works Cited (“ VFP” designates Voprosyfilosofii i psikhologii.) Balaban, Aleksandr. “Pragmatizm (Pragmatism).” VFP 20: 4, kn. 99 (1909): 574-618. Chelpanov, G. I. Vvedenie vfilosofiiu (Introduction to Philosophy). Kiev, 1907. .“Dzhems, kak psikholog (James as Psychologist).” VFP 21: 4, kn. 104 (1910):

437-456.

. “Ob otnoshenii psikhologii k filosofii” (On the Relation of Psychology to Philosophy). VFP 18: 4, kn. 89 (1907): 309-323. . [Review of William James, The Principles of Psychology]. VFP 3: kn. 11

(1892): 69-76.

.“Ocherk sovremennykh uchenii o dushe” (Survey of Contemporary Theories of the Soul). VFP 11: 2, kn. 52 (1900): 287-333. Grot, N. Ia. “Eshche o zadachakh zhurnala” (More on the Tasks of the Journal). VFP 2: 2, kn. 6 (1891): i-vi. . “0 zadachakh zhurnala” (On the Tasks of the Journal). VFP 1, kn. 1 (1889): V-XX.

. [Reviewof William James, The Principles ofPsychology]. VFP 2: 1, kn. 5 (1890):

89-90.

Khvostov, V. M. “Pliuralisticheskoe miroponimanie” (The Pluralistic World View). VFP 22: 4, kn. 109 (1911): 361-394. Korelina, N. P. “Za piat’desiat let” (Vospominaniia o L.M. Lopatine) (Twenty-Five Years [Reminiscences of L. M. Lopatin]). Voprosyfilosofii no. 11 (1993): 115-121. Kotliarevsky, S. A. “Dzhems, kak religioznyi myslitel” (James as Religious Thinker). VFP 21: 5, kn. 105 (1910): 697-719. .“Ob otnositel’nom i absoliutnom” (On the Relative and the Absolute). Filosofskii sbornik. L’vu Mikhailovichu Lopatinu k tridtsatiletiiu nauchno-pedagogicheskoi deiatel’nosti. Ot Moskovskogo Psikhologicheskogo Obshchestva. 1881-191 1. Moscow, 1912. Pp. 97-107. . “Ob istinnom i mnimom realizme” (On True and False Realism). VFP 15: 5,

kn. 75 (1904): 624-644. . “Filosofiia kontsa” (The Philosophy of the End). VFP 24: 4, kn. 119 (1913): 313-338.

. “Pragmatizm i problema terpimosti” (Pragmatism and the Problem of Tolerance). VFP 21: 3, kn. 103 (1910): 368-379.

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. “Predposylki demokratii” (The Premises of Democracy). VFP 16: 2, kn. 77 (1905): 104-127. . “Religiia v amerikanskom obshchestve” (Religion in American Society). VFP 15: 1, kn. 71 (1904): 1-33. Lopatin, L. M. “Monizm i pliuralizm” (Monism and Pluralism). VFP 24: 1, kn. 116 (1913): 68-92. An English translation of this essay can be found in Readings in Russian Philosophical Thought, ed. Louis J. Shein. The Hague: Mouton, 1968. Pp. 159-174. . Polozhitel’nye zadachi filosofii (The Positive Tasks of Philosophy), 1, Oblast’ umozritel’nykh voprosov (The Sphere of Speculative Questions). 2d. ed. Moscow, 191 1 (1st ed., 1886). . Polozhitel’nye zadachi filosofii (The Positive Tasks of Philosophy), 2, Zakon prichinnoi sviazi, kak osnova umozritel’nogo znaniia deistvitel’nosti (The Law of Causality as the Basis of Speculative Knowledge of Reality). Moscow, 1891. . Nastoiashchee i budushchee filosofii (The Present and Future of Philosophy). Moscow, 1910. Also published in VFP21: 3, kn. 103 (1910): 263-305. . “Spiritualizm, kak monisticheskaia sistema filosofii” (Spiritualism as a Monistic System of Philosophy). VFP 23: 5, kn. 115 (1912): 435-471. . “Neotlozhnye zadachi sovremennoi mysli” (Urgent Tasks of Contemporary Thought). VFP28: 1,kn. 136 (1917): 1-80. Myers, Gerald E. William James. His Life and Thought. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986. Scherrer, Jutta. Die Petersburger religios-philosophische Vereinigungen. Die Entwicklung des religiosen Selbstverstandnisses ihrer Intelligencija-Mitglieder ( 1 901-1 917). Berlin, 1973. Vinogradov, N. D. “Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk deiatel’nosti Moskovskogo Psikhologicheskogo Obshchestva za 25 let” (A Brief Historical Sketch of the Moscow Psychological Society’s Activity over Twenty-Five Years). VFP 21: kn. 103 (1910): 249-262. Zenkovsky,V. V. A History of Russian Philosophy. Vol. 2. Translated by George L. Kline. New York Columbia University Press, 1953.

Lev Shestov’s James: “A Knight of Free Creativity” Brian Horowitz

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1911 THE PHILOSOPHER LEVSHFSTOV,already known for his writings on Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, registered the death of his esteemed American colleague William James. “Logika religioznogo tvorchestva (Pamiati Villiiama Dzhemsa)” (The Logic of Religious Creativity [In Memory of William James]) is one of the seminal essays in the early reception of James in Russia (Shestov, Great Vigils, pp. 291-314). It is of fundamental importance, as well, in signalling a key idea that would recur in Shestov’s works. For in analyzing aspects of the thought of William James, Shestov sets forth the fundamental paradigm that he would employ over the next two decades in his interpretations of St. Paul, Tertullian, Martin Luther, Blaise Pascal, Sejren Kierkegaard, and other religious leaders and thinkers. For all the attention that Shestov’s critical writings have received, this key essay has been bypassed by critical regard. Lev Shestov (Lev Shvartsman, 18661938) is one of the most prominent philosophers twentieth-century Russia has produced. In his own time his writings were praised by Lucien Levy-Bruhl, D. H. Lawrence, Martin Buber, and Edmund Husserl. Since his death he has been celebrated by Albert Camus, William Barrett, and D. S. Mirsky. The reason for this acclaim comes from the books of philosophical inquiry written from 1898 until his death. Among the most famous are: Dobro v uchenii gr. Tolstogo i F. Nitssche (The Good in the Teaching of Count Tolstoy and F. Nietzsche), 1902; Dostoevskii i Nitsshe (filosofiia tragedii) (Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy), 1903;Apofeoz bezpochvennosti (Opyt adogmaticheskogo myshleniia) (AllThings Are Possible: An Experiment in Adogmatic Thinking), 1905; Na vesakh lova (In Job‘s Balances), 1929; and Afiny i Ierusalem (Athens and Jerusalem), 1939. N

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In his works Shestov led a sustained attack on positivist philosophy and the idea that reason alone could provide answers to metaphysical questions. He explored the relations of ideas to reality, expressing the conviction that only faith can provide answers to the most vital questions facing individuals: the meaning of life, death, love, and artistic creation. Furthermore, Shestov took logic and its use in Western philosophy as his primary target of disdain. In his view, philosophy should not consist of a group of abstract propositions the aim of which is to be universally valid in all places at all times; rather, it should be a free and creative description of the individual’s search for his own religious salvation. Shestov was attracted to James most likely because he saw underlying affinities between his own thought and James’s. For example, they both were committed anti-Kantians, who wanted to “dethrone” abstract reason from its privileged position in Western culture. Both were attracted to existentialism, as it was taking shape in the early years of this century, and both were sensitive to the importance of subjective experience as a primary source of knowledge. Finally, in the oeuvre of each philosopher one finds a receptivity to such varied kinds of cognition as mystical experience, intuition, madness, and parapsychology. Shestov was in Coppet, in francophone Switzerland, when he wrote his essay on James. These seemed like perfect days in his life, since he lived in comfort with his family in a ten-room villa, often entertaining friends from Russia. Yet the idyll was broken by two key events of the period: the death of Leo Tolstoy and that of William James (Baranoff-Chestov, 1:112). There cannot be any doubt as to the significance in Shestov’s intellectual evolution of Great Vigils, the volume of essays in which the article on James appeared. It was written at a pivotal time, when he was about to engage entirely new philosophical concerns. Natalia Baranoff-Chestov, the philosopher’s daughter, writes in her two-volume biography of her father: “[GreatVigils]completes the first period of Shestov’s creativity, when questions primarily of a literary, rather than a philosophical, character interested him” ( 1:113).Shestov himself spoke of the tremendous import of the volume, but for different reasons. In a letter of May 1909 to his parents, he lamented that he published it at all, since he considered the ideas therein to be merely the seeds of future work rather than finished ideas realized in their own right. He wrote: “Regarding your comment about Glreat] Vligils],that I should write less, I understand that you mean that [it] did not fully satisfy you or, perhaps, did not satisfy you at all. You are probably right. . . . After all, it is the beginning of a larger work. . . . It would have had meaning and significance, had the other parts been ready. I should have waited until the whole thing was finished (Quoted in BaranoffChestov 1: 101).

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Shestov’s essay on James, the final one in this collection, concentrates solely on The Varieties of Religious Experience and Pragmatism. He begins his examination by posing a general question: how should religious faith be defined? Should one base its validity on irrational and ineffable experience, or should one rely on rational arguments? Leaving aside for a moment the answer to that question, Shestov asks about James himself: “What was he? A scientist? No doubt about it.” But he quickly counters, “Was he an enemy of science? No doubt about that either.. ..Was he a believer? It appears so: one would be hard put to find among contemporary scholars anyone else who would strive with such passionate intensity to break through the limits placed on acceptable interests by positive philosophy. But sworn defenders of positive religion have considered him to be an atheist” (p. 291). In Shestov’s view, the answer to the issue of James’s preference for science or religion lies not in a psychological investigation of James himself, nor in a study of his ideas. Rather, it takes us farther afield, to the prior question about the essence of religious faith, for the fundamental problem concerns the relation of religion to philosophy. Contrary to commonly held notions, religion and philosophy are antagonistic. While philosophy, or even theology, attempts to discover universal, objective, and verifiable laws, faith does the opposite. It does not strive to be universal, but aligns itself with the subjective and unverifiable. Faith, Shestov claims, results from a personal revelation or spiritual transformation. Therefore, while philosophy offers one truth for everyone, faith is infinite in possibilities. Turning to William James as to an ally, Shestov claims that “if [James] were asked what the fundamental flaw of all philosophical and theological constructs might be, he would probably reply: their incessant striving to force all of life to submit to a single idea. Thales committed philosophy’s original sin by attempting to find a universal source of being” (pp. 292-293). But the Greek philosopher (640-546 B.c.E.) was not alone in his error. The history of philosophy knows many Thaleses. Shestov mentions, for example, the medieval philosophers who staged the defeat of faith by surrendering it to philosophy’s control. He writes that in the Middle Ages “philosophy was the servant of theology. But this was merely an illusion. In fact, rather than reign and govern, religion itself swore a vassal’s oath of unconditional fidelity-to none other than that same Thales, philosophy’s Adam” (p. 293). In Shestov’s discussion, Thales represents reason, the individual’s urge toward universal intelligibility, absolute definition, and certainty. Against the omnipotence of reason, Shestov asserts a belief in a supernatural power that decides the fate of all individuals. Paradoxically, however, this faith in such a power provides no readily apparent utility and thus results in making a person

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feel insecure and anxious. Nevertheless, he considers such belief to be humanity’s most elevated spiritual act. Setting James aside briefly, Shestov continues his discussion of faith and reason by disclosing the hidden rationalism of the greatest Christian leaders. He claims that, while their faith had its original source in an irrational and unverifiable personal experience, Paul, Tertullian, and Martin Luther relinquished the particularity of revelation for the universality of reason, using impersonal, abstract arguments in their proselytizing. For example, Shestov sees a reliance on reason in Paul, whose attitude to logic he describes as analogous to that of Socrates. He considers both to be disciples of Thales: What utility, Paul asks, was there in struggling with the beasts in Ephesus, if the dead are not resurrected. It is impossible to argue with him-impossible and unnecessary. Perhaps, in fact, he would not have fought the wild animals, had he not trusted in resurrection. Perhaps, had he learned that with death we cease to exist, he would have abandoned his lofty mission and surrendered to the pleasures of the body. However, not everyone reasons in this manner-far from it. Recall Socrates before his judges. Socrates admitted the possibility of the soul’s immortality, but he did not refute the alternative. Nevertheless, he was convinced that in either case the good remains the good; food and drink could in no way seduce or tempt him. If the apostle Paul were to encounter Socrates, on this one point alone they would be irreconcilable. What should one do with auctoritar (authority) and ratio (reason), i.e., with objective truth? Are the dead resurrected or are they not? And, most important for us here, on one point Socrates would likely have agreed with St. Paul: of the two statements, only one is true-either the dead are resurrected or they are not. Tertium non datur (No third choice is given)-Thus Thales would have received his due in full by both the greatest of the pagans and the greatest of the Christians. (pp. 298-299)

For Shestov, the parallel between Paul and Socrates inheres in their need for a firm, immutable, and eternally valid philosophy. They could not tolerate doubt, insecurity, or change, even in light of altered circumstances. Paul was certain resurrection is assured, while Socrates held that the good rests unchanged for eternity. In Shestov’s view, it is reason that engenders this feeling of security and comfort, while religious faith creates the opposite: insecurity, diffidence, fear, and despair. Moreover, faith emerges from experience, from a singular, intimate and continuous search for self-knowledge. In this connection, Shestov emphasizes the opposition between reason and faith, or, as he puts it here, wisdom and madness (aligning religious faith with madness, while joining wisdom with universality, objectivity, and utility). In Christian history, he claims, successful proselytizers chose utility over useless faith, spreading religion with the help of wisdom, that is, logic.

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Returning now to James, Shestov apparently considered him above this dichotomy. He admired the American’s attempt to overcome “the opposition between madness and wisdom,” by “refuting the ideal of the rationalists and speaking with contempt about the tasks set by positive philosophy” (p. 3 11). While acknowledging James’s good intentions, Shestov here switches sides, complaining that James actually forged a path similar to his rationalist predecessors when he valorized usefulness and practical value in religious experience. He calls this desire for utility, “the gnosiological teaching” of pragmatism and contends that the ideas in Pragmatism clash with those found in The Varieties of Religious Experience. He poses the problem this way: “Living human truth is contaminated and perishes in the atmosphere of pluralism (mnozhestvennost’). Truth must choose between two alternatives: either to rule over the people and for that purpose to conform to ‘societal’demands, thus ceasing to be itself; or to remain true to itself and to be rejected by mankind as ‘madness”’ (p. 310). In Shestov’s view, confronted with the choice between power without faith (utility) or faith without power (madness), James preferred utility and therefore repudiated his apotheosis of faith, which is a basic premise of The Varieties of Religious Experience. Shestov’s view of madness differs radically from James’s. While both agree that humans possess a distinct religious need, Shestov identifies religion with madness, a concept he contrasts with utility. Taking his cue from Romanticism, he interprets faith and utility as a conflict between the individual and society. Claiming that society is organized by a rational doctrine, he defines any deviation away from reason, even faith, as madness, for which society will take revenge by isolating and ridiculing that person. For James, the dichotomies of faith and reason, madness and utility, individual and society, do not hold. Rather, he believes that what we call reason rarely occurs, since all rational thought is buttressed by emotions and nonrational religious faith. In addition, faith is not in conflict with reason, since the two become integrated to create belief or conviction. The argument on the origin of religion in The Varieties of Religious Experience underscores this unity: “When, however, a positive intellectual content is associated with a faith-state, it gets invincibly stamped in upon belief, and this explains the passionate loyalty of religious persons everywhere to the minutest details of their so widely differing creeds. Taking creeds and faith-state together, as forming ‘religions,’ . . . we are obliged, on account of their extraordinary influence upon action and endurance, to class them amongst the most important biological functions of mankind” (pp. 398-399). Just as faith and reason are not in conflict for James, so too madness and utility and the individual and society are not antipodes. Social nonconformity or madness for James is not an inherent element of faith, as it is for Shestov. Rather, for James, madness has

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clinical and legal implications, referring to types of antisocial behavior, such as criminality. Furthermore, James has a different idea of utility from Shestov. James considers utility as an essential value of selfhood. For example in Pragmatism he writes, “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief; and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons” (p. 42). Taking utility as a positive affirmation of subjectivity, and not as a sign of submission to society, James would not have agreed with Shestov’sview that utility is the opposite of faith/madness. He also would have protested Shestov’s assertion that the idea of utility, which serves as the premise of pragmatism, is in contradiction with the idea of faith in The Varieties ofReligious Experience. Rather, utility in Jamesian terms refers to individual conscience and choice, and therefore is associated with the pluralistic essence of “truth and “faith-utility coheres with faith. Nevertheless, Shestov accused James of inconsistency, attributing his contradictions to the influence of an English tradition, which frightened the American, prompting him to reject madness, and encouraging him to defend social utility. Shestov describes the influences operative on James as follows: Let a person freely create, and each creative act is always its own justification; logical and gnosiological limits have no basis in reality-this is how James began, I say. And the beginning had much promise. It seemed that James would not yield, would not give in, would not return to the old positions. But James did not call himself a student of [John Stuart] Mill by chance. Anglo-Saxon, if you will, European, influences revealed themselves. In the final analysis, a knight of free creativity, James yet demanded approval, society’s acknowledgement, of his idea of “madness.” In other words, not realizing it himself, from the very start he set off with the idea that he would create a finished theory of knowledge that would subordinate public opinion and become universally accepted and obligatory. (p. 31 1)

Lamenting James’s desire to create a “universal, obligatory” theory of h o w l edge, Shestov accused him of returning to the established philosophical tradition, of complying with accepted intellectual norms. “[James] began to sort ‘madness’ into categories and departments and selected only those that were socially useful. And he raised these selective, useful madnesses to the rank of truth. . . .The same old story was repeated” (p. 3 11). He compared James’s simultaneous employment and criticism of positivism to the procedures of the ancient sceptics, who, themselves dogmatic, led a vicious battle against the dogmatists. “The sceptics did not desire to recognize any single theory, any single truth, and they disputed the right of those who hold any convictions whatsoever. They allowed only themselves to be right, they permitted only themselves to theorize” (pp. 31 1-312).

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The paradigm of a thinker trying, but failing, to overcome rationalism, of one making an unsuccessful attempt to return theology to its origins in revelation, would recur in Shestov’s writings after Great Vigils. For example, in Sola Fide, written between 1911 and 1914, Shestov treats the young Martin Luther in similar ways. He discovered that the early Luther, relying on an intense emotional revelation, attempted to purify the church in harmony with the ideals of pure faith. Unable to translate his personal vision into reality, however, Luther descended from his mystical heights and transmitted his ideas by appealing to universal, verifiable truth and common sense. Shestov writes: “Luther was carried to those extreme limits of human life where the brightest light of reason was not strong enough clearly to illumine the outline of a new reality. There was no choice there-one had to accept darkness as the natural condition of existence, or renounce life itself” (p. 245). Nonetheless, Shestov writes that Luther was transformed, turning away from revelation to reason. “Luther himself created the teaching (doctrina),created it according to the rules worked out by his eternal nemesis Aristotle. Here, then, was the lowly monk‘s earthly triumph: by merging with Aristotle, he acquired that strength that empowered him to wrestle with Catholicism. An authority was found on which people might lean for support, a cliff onto which all his students and followers have hurriedly scrambled-right down to contemporary liberal theologians, who proclaim, with Adolph Harnack as their mouthpiece, that there is no faith without authority” (p. 274). The ironic use of “earthly” and the comparison with Aristotle serve as indications that, for Shestov, Luther was mistaken in relying on reason; Luther descended from the spiritual or heavenly realm down to the earthly. Similarly, in Potestas Clavium (mast’kliuchei [The Power of the Keys]), also written largely between 1910 to 1914,Shestov criticized a myriad of artists and philosophers who hide difficult and esoteric truths under a veneer of rationality. Those who elicited Shestov’s initial admiration and subsequent disdain were the Greek philosophers Plato and Plotinus and the nineteenth-century Russian writers Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy. Despite this unusual grouping of names, the themes are the same as those outlined in the article on James: the utility of universal reason versus the madness of the individual’s search for truth. Shestov ends part two of Potestas Clavium this way: He who wants to capture truth, to seize it with his rough human hands, in a word, to “embody” it-so that later he can show it everywhere, always and to everyone-is doomed either to experience eternal disappointment or to live with illusions: all embodied truths are only embodied delusions. Perhaps one will say that humanity has only benefited from this-but after all that is not important: does truth really have to be useful? Did pragmatism not die the day after its birth? (Works 1: 184)

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Despite great changes in his life following the October Revolution of 1917-Shestov left Russia for France and years of penurious existence-his writings reveal a fmed consistency in his thinking. In essay after essay on Blaise Pascal, Edmund Husserl, and Scaren Kierkegaard, Shestov employs the dichotomy between reason and faith he formulated with regard to James. In fact, the entire essay on Pascal, written in 1923, has as its focus the loss of reason and the affliction of madness, which gives no profit. Shestov emphasizes Pascal’s alienation from others: “What commonly assuaged others aroused a great anxiety in him and, on the contrary, what usually frightened others gave birth to great hopes in him. And the longer he lived, the more such an attitude toward life grew in him. Consequently he became a more and more alien and frightening figure” (Works, 2: 281). Pascal’s alienation from others emerges from his sense that salvation demands that we live in accordance with faith; people should not live in a state of spiritual unconsciousness. “The final judgment is not on earth, but in heaven. Therefore people should not sleep, no one should ever sleep” (2: 282-283). Although tempted to recant, Pascal held his faith. He even came to love his madness, his retreat from common truths and disagreements with philosophy. “He no longer fears, as others fear, and as he himself feared, to appear a fool, he mocks a virtue that is happy with itself and the loyal inhabitants of its stable. We recall how he retreated from the single and nonmaterial truth proclaimed by the renaissance, how he hated Descartes and despised the summum bonurn of the ancient philosophers” (2: 315). Shestov’s sympathy is clearly on Pascal’s side. His use of the grotesque “loyal inhabitants of its stable” and his identification with Pascal’s preferences show his solidarity. Since he never returns to the “stability” or “solidity”of reason, Pascal differs from the majority of Shestov’s heroes. Nevertheless, Shestov’s use of the familiar dichotomies-reason versus faith, utility versus madness4isplays the unending influence of this paradigm. For contemporary scholars reading Shestov’s interpretation of James, it is obvious that Shestov reduces and manipulates James’s ideas. Since the portrait created only vaguely resembles James, and only in isolated places, one wonders at Shestov’s motivation. What was his purpose? Shestov often relates the ideas of other thinkers as a contrast to his own, to aid him in articulating his own philosophy. His first two works are exemplary in this regard. For example, Shestov read Shakespeare by reacting against the critic Georg Brandes, and he interpreted Dostoevsky through Friedrich Nietzsche. In a similar way, He appropriates James, and not only James, lumping James with Thales, Socrates, Paul, and Harnack-all supposedly hidden rationalists. Where James studies madness sympathetically, Shestov passionately advocates its appropriation; where James praises utility, Shestov denounces it as the victory of reason. By contrasting his own thought to James’s, Shestov forcefully illuminates his own

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position on religion, society, reason, and madness. Nevertheless, he overestimates James’sreliance on and attraction to reason, especially in The Varieties of Religious Experience, and ascribes to James a dichotomy of madness versus utility that does not neatly fit James’s position in Pragmatism. “The Logic of Religious Creativity” appears to be more about Shestov and his ideas than it does about the American who, it seems, merely served as a convenient mirror. Analysis of the article on William James points to recurrent features in all of Shestov’s writings. We note first the ahistorical aspect of Shestov’s thought. Thales, Plato, Luther, and William James are compared and contrasted as if they were contemporaries. We are also aware of Shestov’s evaluative criteria. Philosophies come in two, and only two, types: either they are based on faith and are therefore good, or they are based on reason and are therefore wrong. There is no middle ground. Furthermore, he distorts the ideas of his adversaries, applying the Shestov grid with which to lambast their deficiencies. We see such a self-serving appropriation in his examination of James. Therefore, what is most surprising about Shestov’s work at the time of and after Great Vigils is less the shift away from literary interests to philosophical ones, as Natalie Baranoff-Chestov concedes, than the discovery of a paradigm that Shestov would apply across the board to an understanding of the life and thought of artists and philosophers. Beginning with Great Vigils, and, in particular, with his analysis of William James, Shestov asserted that thinkers confront a choice, either of exploiting the experience of revelation or of relying on reason. They may either accept madness and its accompanying illumination, or be considered normal by propagating logical reasoning and expressing ideas that already bear the world’s approval. His final comment on James reveals Shestov’s ultimate disappointment. He wrote: “In the final analysis can one reproach James for turning away from ‘madness’ and heading in the direction of wise utility? Hardly. But surely pragmatism does not avoid the common fate of those who pay heavily for Thales’s fall from grace” (Great Vigils, p. 3 14). According to Shestov, in the end James chose utility and the advantages derived from abstract, universal reason. Therefore, he belongs, not with the philosophers reaching back to faith for the basis of their thought, but with the long line of philosophers, starting from Thales, who deified reason rather than revelation.

Works Cited Baranoff-Chestov, Natalie. La Vie de Lton Chestov. 2 vols. Paris: La Presse Libre, 1983. Shestov, Lev. Velikie kanuny (Great Vigils). Vol. 6 of Sobranie sochinenii (Collected Works). St. Petersburg: Shipovnik, 1911.

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. Sochineniia (Works). 2 vols. Moscow: Nauka, 1993. . Sola Fide. Tol'ko veroiu: grecheskaia i srednevekovaia filosofiia, Liuter i tserkov'

(Sola Fide. By Faith Alone. Greek and Medieval Philosophy, Luther and the Church). Paris: YMCA, 1966.

9 James and Konovalov: The Varieties of Religious Experience and Russian Theology between Revolutions Alexander Etkind

W

HEN WE SPEAK OF THE MIGRATION of

ideas into another culture, we ordinarily refer to the process as assimilation, transformation, or distortion. However, concerning the ideas of James, it is more interesting to consider, not how accurately another culture perceived them, but rather what use it made of them, what were their consequences, what responses they evoked. This approach to the intellectual history of pragmatism fits in exactly with its own theoretical premises. I am interested in the fate in Russia of the philosophical and psychological ideas of James, from his Psychology: Briefer Course (Russian translation, 1896), which includes his paradoxical theory of the emotions, to The Varieties of Religious Experience (Russian translation, 1910). To quote a contemporary, at the turn of the century the atmosphere in Russian universities tended “to exclude all spiritual culture” (Fedotov, p. 175). Political and social history had crowded the history of culture out of university curricula. The study of religion was left to the theologians, who had been trained and who now taught in church-sponsored institutions, the so-called theological academies. In the new atmosphere of religious inquiry that marked the revolutionary moods of the first years of the century, such specialization had ceased to meet the demands of the public. The efforts of James’s popularizers contributed to the great change that had taken place in the academic milieu by the beginning of the 1910s. Interest in religious questions had acquired the status of a scholarly discipline and had been legitimized under the guise of the study of folklore, ethnography, or psychology. The tradition of mysticism proved to be an area for new research in the work of historians, in collective “journalistic” volumes, and in the new art. - 169 -

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The situation was similar in Russian philosophy, the fundamental branch of which was under the influence of neo-Kantianism. The historical wealth of James’s examples had revealed that the Kantian categories describing human experience were both incomplete and uninteresting. The philosopher Ivan Lapshin, the translator of James’s Psychology: Briefer Course, in a 1905 essay referred to The Varieties of Religious Experience as “a book surprising in its profundity and richness of content.” According to his analysis, mystical experience does not fit the Kantian categories of subject-object, space-time, etc. Trying to find a compromise between James and Kant, the Russian philosopher rejected any “literal interpretation” of mystical phenomena and called them “metaphors.” In Lapshin’s view, mystical phenomena are significant not in themselves, but as literary tropes that enable us to describe more ordinary spheres of life. By aestheticizing James’s philosophy, Lapshin reduced its emotional content (Lapshin, 1905, 1911). The philosopher Semyon Lurye, editor of the 1910 translation of The Varieties of Religious Experience, in his introduction once again contrasted James and Kant, but he insisted on the literal reality of Jamesian phenomena: The “I” must be taken, not in the separate . . . sphere of its rational consciousness, but in all the fullness of its conscious and unconscious life. But in this case .. .the transcendental “I” turns into an abstraction without content, and the only measure of being remains the individual .. .with his mysterious transformations and marvelous raptures. (“Foreword,”p. 10)

Marvelous raptures are characteristic of the individual as such, and not of his literary reflections. On this basis Lurye accused his contemporaries of turning real life into lifeless literature. Ideas should be judged by the consequences to which they lead, but the consequences of these ideas are only literary, Lurye repeated in his 1908 reviews of works by Russian philosophers. Jamesian influences combined in Lurye with a sincere desire to escape the limitations of traditional literaturocentrism. The desired sociopolitical changes required transformation of society’s religious life. Therefore, Lurye, following James, insisted that ideas and projects in the spiritual sphere must be judged by their consequences in real life, not just aesthetically. Another possible answer was, on the contrary, ahistorical: religious life is given by divine revelation, embodied in the unchanging institutions of the church, and as such is not subject to critical analysis. This dilemma was famously embodied in the collectivevolume Signposts. Criticizing the Russian followers of Marx and Nietzsche, Nikolai Berdyaev asked disapprovingly,“Who knows what philosophy will become fashionable with us tomorrow-perhaps the pragmatic philosophy of James and Bergson?” (p. 28).’ But to oppose to all this the philosophical system they sought-integrated, Christian, and nationalistic-proved

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a more difficult matter than the authors of Signposts had hoped. In his essays in Russian Thought and by the very publication of a translation of The Varieties of Religious Experience Lurye was trying to contrast the Protestant Reformation and American pragmatism with those versions of Orthodox traditionalism that were visible behind the liberal faGade of Signposts. He was not alone in this effort. Peter Struve, the editor of Russian Thought and one of the authors of Signposts, in a private letter proclaimed, “I feel myself a Protestant.” The doctrine of the Orthodox Church is directed toward “reviving eschatologicalbelief that has been overcome by Protestantism,” Struve wrote, explaining the conflict between this belief and those individualistic, pro-capitalist tendencies that he hoped to instill in Russian thought (cited from M. A. Kolerov, p. 269. See also Pipes, Liberal on the Right). In its search for a basis of religious reform, the intellectual elite looked for support in sects that had existed among the Russian common people for a long time (see Etkind, Khlyst). According to Dmitri Merezhkovsky, when two religious movements, one among the intellectuals and the other among the common people, unite into one, a revolution will take place that will outdo the Protestant Reformation and will become the realization of apocalyptic prophecies (Merezhkovsky, p. 30). As Nikolai Minsky wrote, the Petrine reforms had prevented a reformation in Russia; but the best forces of the people, which form its core and heart, with clear thought and buoyant conscience continued . . . the great cause of religious reform. This huge . . . movement is known under the name of Russian sectarianism. . . . Our protestantism,though less profound in thought than the European one, greatly surpasses the latter in the boldness and directness of its aspirations. (“The People and the Intelligentsia,”p. 105) Missing for a Russian Reformation was any unity between the popular masses and their possible leaders from the intelligentsia. In search of such leaders, Minsky collaborated with Lenin in 1905 and in 1909 proclaimed Leo Tolstoy the Russian Luther (On Social Themes, p. 253). In fact, the peasant sectarians themselves, even without the intelligentsia, seemed ready to fit the latest notions of European thought. Such were the most radical of the Russian sectarians, the so-called Khlysts, who, “in affirming the supreme rights of any religious ‘I’went to the limit and became something like autodidact Nietzscheans. . . . The proud claims of the European aermensch our peasants actually realized” (“The People and the Intelligentsia,” p. 106). What people were talking about in Europe had already been realized in the Russian peasantry. This logic of intellectual populism had been repeated many times in Russia in relation to Fourier, Marx, and now Nietzsche. It is easier, of course, to understand such conjectures as working in the opposite direction: The intellectuals

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time and again interpreted a peasant faith that was strange to them in accordance with their favorite books. If Minsky was enraptured by the results of his own invention, another writer from Merezhkovsky‘s circle, Dmitry Filosofov, employed an analogous construction to denounce the sects. Analyzing the St. Petersburg society of “brethren,” who abstained from alcohol (this sect maintained a stable existence from 1894 until the 1930s), Filosofov identified its leader, Ivan Churikov, as a Nietzschean irberrnenschand condemned his cult as anti-Christian. But in fact it was an entirely mundane affair: A peasant healer cured people of drunkenness, using methods appropriate for this purpose. In condemning him on dogmatic and aesthetic grounds, Filosofov did not notice his divergence from James, whom he cited with respect (p. 69). The influence of pragmatism is palpable in the Signposts article of Mikhail Gershenzon, whose philosophy made use of the opposition between consciousness and the “subconscious” precisely in the sense given these terms by James. According to Gershenzon, elemental mystical forces operate everywhere, even in the souls of Russian intellectuals. Those intellectuals, however, refuse to recognize them or make contact with them, and therefore “we have become cripples, with a deep gulf between our true ‘I’ and our consciousness” (p. 84). The only salvation would be a radical change of consciousness, which Gershenzon called rebirth (Jamespreferred an even more radical term, second birth). In essence, this religious transformation is of a Protestant type: sudden, the result of an inner crisis and of direct communion with God, without intermediaries. Almost all the examples Gershenzon cited were Protestant.2 Critics were not slow in dwelling on this peculiarity of Gershenzon’s article, which thus differed markedly from the Orthodox nature of the other articles in Signposts. “The chronicle of Russian sectarianism is rich in sharp transitions to a new way of life,” wrote K. K. Arseniev in his review of Signposts. But in contemporary cultivated society, he noted with irony, usually nothing comparable happens. For James religion is not a social institution, but a direct experience; not a historical tradition, but a psychological state; not a routine ritual, but mystical ecstasy; not dependence on authority, but sudden (though perhaps repeated many times) primal discovery. Evidently the variety of religious experience that James dealt with and to which he directed his readers’ attention was limited to particular historical forms. Like his contemporary Max Weber, James summed up the Protestant tradition to which he himself belonged and which he sincerely believed to be the apogee of mankind’s religious hi~tory.~ James’s philosophical substitution of the particular for the general and of Protestant experience for religious experience was subjected to criticism immediately, as soon as it became popular among representatives of another confession. In 1911 a book by N. Shemelin appeared in Kharkov entitled The

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Religious-PhilosophicalViews of W James in Connection with the Mystical Currents of Contemporary L+, an Orthodox critique of The Varieties of Religious Experience. Orthodox mysticism recognizes only divine revelation,which is given not to individuals but to the whole society of believers, who constitute the church, affirmed Shemelin. Therefore, the Orthodox Church‘s opinion is the highest authority and more important than any revelations received directly. Religion as a social institution is more important than religion as spiritual experience. In these arguments the Kharkov theologian followed the local bishop, Antony of Volyn (who is gratefully acknowledged in the book). A member of the Synod and a man of extreme views, Antony played a key role in slowing church reform on the eve of the revolution. The cause to which Antony dedicated his life was the strengthening of monasticism, which he saw as the chief support of the old order. According to the version of Orthodox doctrine set forth by Shemelin following Antony, mystical states in themselves contain no evidence as to whether their source is evil or good. To distinguish among good and evil spirits, mystics of the Eastern church must have a spiritual director, without whom they cannot undertake anything. The greatest feats of asceticism, if imposed on oneself by one’s own will, have no value. Demons mask themselves as angels, and the greatest misfortune is to enter into communion with demons. For recognizing them there are no distinguishing features accessible to the individual; therefore Orthodox mystics, even anchorites, have never broken their connection with the Orthodox Church. Of all this, in the opinion of the Orthodox critic Shemelin, “James is absolutely ignorant.” James is not such an empiricist and pragmatist as he would like to appear: he has a religious system of his own, which is inimical to Orthodoxy. It is for this reason that he is so popular among the Russian intelligentsia, which from the beginning of its historic existence has broken its “vital connection with the Orthodox Church” (pp. 81,85,98). In the twentieth century, as in the sixteenth, every attempt at religious reform first of all involved conflict with the ecclesiastical hierarchy. A special organ of the Russian Orthodox Church, the so-called Internal Mission (Vnutrenniaia missiia) concentrated its efforts on the struggle with the peasant sects. In distinction from their colleagues who were engaged in propagating Orthodoxy among Muslims and the “heathen,” agents of the Internal Mission worked with Christian schismatics and sects among the Russian peasantry. These agents were priests or monks who had a theological education and read learned publications, professionals who had a position in a bureaucratic hierarchy. In this sense the Internal Mission was one of the specialized institutions of control over the private feelings of people, a phenomenon characteristic of the later nineteenth ~ e n t u r yOn . ~ the other hand, the work of the Internal Mission reminds one of earlier historical epochs, of the Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation. Phenomena separated by centuries in the

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history of Western civilization in Russia were laid one on top of the other, creating a sort of historical fold. Within this fold colorful and contradictory events took place, combining in one synchronic segment the peculiarities of different eras. A curious example of this phenomenon is the fate of Dmitry Konovalov (1876?), a historian of the Russian sects. The philosophy and psychology of James, I believe, had an important influence on his views. In the 1910s, Konovalov was a well-known hi~torian.~ After graduating from the Moscow Theological Academy, he did not succeed in obtaining ecclesiastical authorization to do fieldwork on the sects, but he did manage to obtain access to the archives of the provincial courts and ecclesiastical consistories. In his methodology he followed in the footsteps of the British “armchair anthropologists,” who constructed their narratives by collecting and systematizing dubious sources, such as accounts by missionaries or administrators. The British writers, to be sure, were concerned with far-off colonies; Konovalov, on the other hand, was revealing the customs and mores of people who spoke his language and from all indications belonged to the population of the metropolis. In its content Konovalov’s approach was also different from anthropological constructions fashionable at the end of the nineteenth century, the crowning achievement of which was The Golden Bough of Sir James Fraser. Konovalov’s conception could rather be described as psychological. According to his own testimony, work with cases in the archives convinced him that to study the sects a theological education was insufficient; he therefore enrolled in the medical faculty of Moscow University,working there in the clinic for nerve diseases and in the psychiatric clinic. In 1905 it was decided to establish at the Moscow Theological Academy a new chair for the history and analysis of Russian sectarianism. The council of the academy accepted the candidacy of Konovalov for the position, but he did not yet have a higher theological degree. On October 24,1908, he successfully defended at the academy a dissertation entitled “Religious Ecstasy among Russian Mystical Sects.” At the defense Konovalov defined the concept of religious ecstasy as “a peculiar agitation of the spirit, a species of neuro-psychic excitation, evoked by artificial religious exercises, prepared for by a strict ascetic regime and conditioned . . .by the psycho-physical constitution of the sectarian ecstatics themselves” (“Psychology,”p. 628). In accordance with accepted procedures, Konovalov’s dissertation had been published before the defense (ReligiousEcstasy): Actually, as the title page indicated, the published version was on1y“Part 1, Issue 1” of the proposed investigation. The author explained at the defense that what was presented was the part of the work devoted to a description of the “corporal manifestations of sectarian ecstasy in their sequential development.”

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The sectarians’ ecstasy as a ritual observance was described symptom by symptom, just as a psychiatrist, or rather a neuropathologist, would describe morbid conditions: excitation of the circulatory system, glandular secretions, digestion, and especially respiration; movements of various kinds; and finally, excitations of the functions of speech. The sectarians identify their ecstatic experiences as actions of the Holy Spirit. As they approach the Holy Spirit, individuals become “living gods” and fulfill in the community the functions of leaders. Therefore, social mechanisms in the life of the community are connected with the phenomenon of ecstasy. On the basis of this analysis the author undertook to delve into unresolved problems of the origin of the Russian sects. But the unique quality of his book was the abundantly documented array of data on the bodily symptoms of religious ecstasy. In hundreds of eloquent examples the sectarians sigh, pant, and snort; yawn and hiccup; weep and laugh; utter various kinds of groans, cries, and wails. With no less detail the sectarians’ movements during the ritual are described: local movements (eyes, lips, tongue, and head; arms and shoulders; stretching, getting up, stamping, kneeling); larger movements (walking, running, jumping, and galloping); and, as a basic part of the ritual and a combination of its other elements, whirling (which the Khlysts engaged in, very much like the American Shakers). All this colorful picture was described with the aid of classificatory graphs, formed according to medical models. For example, all changes in breathing were described as respiratory spasms and divided into simple, mixed, or complex. “Complex spasms” were further classified according to speech markers: they included either unintelligible sounds or fragmentary words and sentences. The scholarly investigator did not aim to medicalize religious phenomena and proclaim the sectarians psychopaths or degenerates (which some of his predecessors in the study of Russian sects had already done, in particular the Kiev psychiatrist Sikorsky). In distinction from the psychiatry of his time, Konovalov interpreted the phenomena he described so as to enable the reader to understand the meaning his subjects themselves ascribed to them. Thus respiratory symptoms were more important than other bodily functions because respiration was symbolically connected with the Holy Spirit. Missionary theology, with its conception of a dogmatic norm, was akin to psychiatric medicine with its rigid model of health and its prescriptions for all violations of the model. But Konovalov was trying to get away from value judgments (and the enforcing actions that directly followed from them) and reach the promised land of academic knowledge, of pure description. For this epistemological exercise, however, he had chosen an exotic and very dangerous field. The distinction in principle between his psychological approach and that of the psychiatrist was understood with difficulty by his contemporaries. One of

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the official opponents at the defense, Professor P. P. Sokolov, who taught psychology in the Moscow Theological Academy, said in his response: In itself this scheme is not new: Mr. Konovalov evidently borrowed it from the psychiatrists, from their usual clinical picture of “la grande hystkrie.” ...Until now no investigator of Russian sectarianism has possessed the range of knowledge that Mr. Konovalov commands: psychiatrists, with few exceptions, did not know the sects, and sect scholars did not h o w psychiatry. (Minutes of the Meetings, p. 423) One can easily imagine the surprise of readers who until then had known of the customs and beliefs of the Russian sects only from the works of the missionaries of the Orthodox Church. The missionaries’ exposition was usually limited to criticism of the sectarians’ doctrines of the Trinity, the incarnation, and marriage. In Konovalov’s treatment scholarship concerning the sects was transformed from ideological propaganda into scientific description; from murky theological arguments into ethnographic examples bolstered by hundreds of documentary references; from exclusive interest in content into almost equally exclusive interest in the form of religious experiences. The Moscow missionary I. G. Aivazov reproached Konovalov for the same things that the Moscow psychologist Sokolov praised: Mr. Konovalov’s view of all the external manifestations of religious ecstasy among the sectarians as consequences of a particular condition of their organisms is profoundly mistaken. . . . In studying psychiatry, Mr. Konovalov has become its slave, . . but the spirit of the sectarians the author neglects entirely. Yet that is where a theologian must direct his attention. It is not for research into “belches” that the Academy awards the degree in Theology. (p. 6) Aivazov then introduced into the discussion a topic that scarcely seems relevant to the debates among the respected faculty of the academy: “What sort of ‘religious ecstasy’ are Messrs. Konovalov, Sokolov, and others talking about . . . , when their moral understanding knows only one ecstasy, that of turning somersaults for the sake of Jewish gold!”(Ibid.)’ A case can be made alleging that the source of Konovalov’s new approach was William James’stheory of the emotions and his pragmatic approach to the history of religion. Following James,Konovalovwas more interested in extreme and shockinglyvivid examples than in moderate ones. In the historical development of ritual, bodily sensations change form, become individualized, but are never crowded out of religious experience. In this respect James’s psychology of the emotions was in accord with his history of religion, and his Russian follower made use of both. Also entirely unfamiliar to Russians was Konovalov’s comparativist perspective. On the same page he described analogous phenomena (convulsive contraction of the facial muscles at the moment of ecstasy) among

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South Russian Khlysts, American Shakers, hysterical French women, the prophet Mohammed, and even Katerina from Dostoevsky‘s story “The Landlady.” Following James, Konovalov stressed, not the unique character of any particular religious group (which his material on the Russian sects would have made very easy),but on the contrary, the universality of the mechanisms he was describing. Whirling, approximately in the forms found among the Russian Khlysts, was familiar to him in Protestant sects (early Quakers, Shakers, Pentecostals), and beyond Christianity among shamanists, dervishes, and Sufis. The constant comparisons between Russian and Protestant sects, along with the less frequent juxtapositions with heathens and shamanists, as well as analogies with the psychiatric clinic-all this surprised Russian theologians and even ethnographers. But Konovalov cites James only among hundreds of other authors. The problem of influence is made more complicated by the fact that Konovalov’s work was written before the publication of the Russian translation of The Vurieties of Religious Experience (although Konovalov cites the English edition), and also by the fact that philosophical ideas essentially similar to James’spragmatism were known already at the beginning of the century under other names. Ernest Gellner faced a parallel problem in relation to the celebrated Polish, later British, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Noting the similarity in the approaches of Malinowski and James, Gellner maintained that Malinowski had derived his “functionalism” not from James’s pragmatism but from the empiriocriticism of Ernst Mach, about whom Malinowski had written his dissertation in 1910.8In fact, at approximately the same time a “kinship” between the pragmatism of James and the empiriocriticism of Mach was being discussed in Russia (Frank, p. 113). For this reason, a hypothesis about the dependence of Konovalov’s Religious Ecstasy on James’s Varieties of Religious Experience would be too easy to disprove. We will be on firmer ground if we descend from the philosophical level to a floor below, to the level of psychological speculations. James’s theory of the emotions had been known in Russia as early as 1896 with translation of his Psychology: Briefer Course. It had become popular chiefly because of its conclusions, which were associated with materialism and even with nihilism. In 1914 the Odessan psychologist Nikolai Lange noted that James’s theory of the emotions was “so well known that we can limit ourselves to a very brief exposition of it” (pp. 286-288). And in truth, James’s famous paradoxes were carried from one psychology textbook to the other: we weep not because we are sad, but we are sad because we weep; we fear not because we are frightened, but we fear because we tremble. This idea was subjected to obligatory criticism. Lange reproached James for “narrow radicalism” precisely because of his theory of the emotions, and twenty years later Vygotsky was still writing about its “radical” and “false” character (Vygotsky, Coll. Works 6: 113, 133).

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It was precisely James’s theory of the emotions that was the basis for Konovalov’s radical research concerning the sects. If the sectarians thought they were groaning, trembling, and whirling because in their ecstasy they were seeing the Holy Spirit, Konovalov turned their argument around. According to Konovalov, the sectarians experienced ecstasy because they groaned, trembled, and whirled in a special way. This was precisely the way James reversed the logic of human emotions. In his chapter “Excitation of the Digestive System,” Konovalov related Certain sectarian mystics say that at moments of ecstatic excitation they feel some sort of trembling in the stomach or the womb, which supposedly is produced in them by the Holy Spirit. . . . For example, Praskovya Pershenkova at an investigation in 1851 declared . . . : “Agap Aleksandrov is my father confessor [dukhovnik],he and I were joined in the spirit a year ago, because we both felt trembling in the stomach. . . . This I know because I feel it in myself, and as for him, I see him trembling.” (Religious Ecstasy, p. 45) Unlike his subjects, Konovalov does not believe that trembling in the stomach is the work of the Holy Spirit, but, like the sectarians, he believes in the trembling as a physical fact. The sectarians excite themselves to the point of religious ecstasy, which is a special process of their bodies manifested in concrete, physically palpable symptoms. Feeling with their usual sensory organs the ecstatic trembling of their own stomachs or that of their partners, they interpret these phenomena as evidence of the presence in their bodies of the Holy Spirit. By the combined effect of religious indoctrination, ascetic life, and group pressure, the sectarians develop in themselves particular sensitivity to bodily states of this kind. James would say that in this case their organs were working as resonators of their religious feeling. Along with James’s theory of the emotions, an important influence for Konovalov was his treatment of the classic problem of the relation between sexual and religious feeling. It was just in this connection that Konovalov cited The Varieties of Religious Experience (p. 72). With regard to the Khlysts this problem was especially important in view of the charges that their ecstatic ceremony concluded with ritualized group sex-“communal sin” [ sval’nyi grekh].The history of these accusations begins as early as the seventeenth century, was developed by the labors of Orthodox missionaries, and reached its highest point just at the time Konovalov’s book was published: The enemies of Grigory Rasputin attributed his reputed debauchery to his alleged connection with the Khly~ts.~ In just those years Russian thought was undergoing the influence of psychoanalysis, which offered its own understanding of the relation between sex, culture, and religion. In the first chapter of Varieties James argued against the treatment of religion as a product of the sexual instinct,

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with no mention of Freud’s theories; only elsewhere in the book, in a different context and among half a dozen other psychologists, did he mention Freud (p. 191). Semyon Lurye, editor of the Russian translation, provided this latter passage with an extended commentary: The school of Freud . . . has been attracting more and more attention. Of the therapeutic effectiveness of Freudian “psychoanalysis” only medical specialists can judge, but that the theoretical significance of the new school’s doctrines is great, and that it has brought a breath of fresh air into the study of the psyche there can hardly be any doubt. (Editor’s note to James [Dzhems] 1910, 192fn.)

Against the background of the many facts that demonstrate Freud’s popularity in Russia of the 1910s, that editorial note testifies to the direct influence of psychoanalysis on the circle of Russian Thought (see Etkind, Eros of the lrnpossible). As for Konovalov, in a key question of his work, the relation between sexual and religious feeling, he followed, not Freud, but James. Metaphors referring to breathing, moving, and eating are no less important in descriptions of mystical experience than metaphors of erotic passion, James maintained, and his Russian follower agreed with him (VRE, pp. 17-20). For example, Konovalov cited the following colorful description by Archpriest Zotikov of the life of a Transcaucasian sect: “In assemblies of the Leapers [pryguny] . . . the female sex, as if being raped by the spirit of the abyss, wriggle their bodies, extending the same now forwards, now backwards, in the manner of the actions of harlots.”1° The possibility of interpreting this ritual as a substitute for sexual gratification seems self-evident. Let us note, however, that this understanding would coincide with the way the customs of Russian sectarians were regarded by their fiercest enemies, the missionaries. Konovalov compared the movements of the Leaper women with classic French descriptions of hysterical attacks in which it was easy to see a reproduction of the sexual act. But he at once rejected this interpretation, which his readers would undoubtedly have regarded as Freudian. Instead, he precisely followed James’s rule, which required one “in the end [to] look at the immediate content of the religious consciousness” (VRE, p. 19n). According to Konovalov: In view of the absence in the report of Archpriest Zotikov of evidence of erotic hallucinations and real sexual arousal on the part of those sectarian women who performed seductive movements of their hips during a prayer service, there is absolutely no basis for considering these movements to be voluptuous. (Religious Ecstasy, p. 79)

The problem immediately underwent further discussion. The Saratov psychiatrist N. I. Starokotlitsky in a 1911 article gave a detailed exposition of James’s

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theory of religion, Freud’s theory of hysteria, Konovalov’s materials, newspaper reports on Rasputin, and, finally, his own observations of the “religio-erotomanic psychosis” of one of his patients, a sectarian Khlyst. James and Konovalov are wrong, Starokotlitsky maintained. Sexual metaphors are more important than others because they point directly to the general source of all religious experience (“On the Question,” p. 284). The radically oriented psychiatrist was troubled by those mysticoerotic diversions that, as he wrote, had supplanted the “liberation movement” of the recent past. The sexual theory of religion seemed to him a means of fighting these dark influences. Konovalov’s dissertation was subjected to furious criticism from quite another direction. Not a week had passed since the day of its defense when, on October 30, 1908, the “annual assembly” of one of the influential organizations of the extreme right sent the following telegram to the Ober-Procurator of the Most Holy Synod: The Russian Monarchist assembly in Moscow, having learned of the award of the degree of Master of Theology to Docent Konovalov . . . finds in [his] work no theology at all, mockery of Orthodoxy, and temptation for the faithful, and respectfully requests . . . that the entire case be summoned . . . and once again reviewed. (Moscow News November 2, 1908)

The dissertation of a virtually unknown theologian was then linked to the noisiest artistic scandals of the day. Together with its telegram to the Synod about Konovalov, the Monarchist assembly expressed gratitude to Prime Minister Stolypin for removing from the stage the “blasphemous play” of Oscar Wilde, SalomR and petitioned for the prohibition of Gorky’s novel Ispoved’ (A Confession). The extreme rightists began a newspaper campaign against Konovalov. The missionary Aivazov wrote half a dozen articles denouncing his dissertation. In Kolokol (The Bell), the paper of the Internal Mission, there appeared a letter from Nikon, bishop of Vologda: “The names of gentlemen like Mr. Konovalov . . .will appear as dark spots on the pages of the history of theological education in our Church (June 19, 1909). The chief blow was dealt by Bishop Antony of Volyn, who wrote a huge report on Konovalov’s dissertation (The Bell, June 18, 1909). He discovered in it “scientific nihilism” and “naked enumeration of well known phenomena with an enormous quantity of completely useless references.” Moreover, Antony accused Konovalov and his defenders at the Moscow Theological Academy of being “professional enemies” of the Orthodox faith. For our purposes it is more important that Antony perceived in Konovalov’s work the influence of pragmatism as he understood it: “If Christianity developed from the self-delusions of ecstatics, if there is no God and no future life, then of course there is no difference between good and

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evil, honor and dishonor . . . and the fashionable current of thought which now prevails in the academic milieu recognizes only the concepts of profitable and unprofitable.” Compare the latter formulation with the denunciation of pragmatism a year later by the Orthodox philosopher Semyon Frank in Russian Thought: “‘Pragmatism’ , . . has quickly merged with a religious and religio-philosophical movement and as such has undertaken to reform the entire soul of humanity, declaring as prejudice and evil what had formed the basis of the contemporary worldview, namely, the scientific conscience” (p. 9 1). On June 16,1909, the following decree was issued by the Most Holy Synod “Taking into consideration the statement of Bishop Antony” that Konovalov’s dissertation includes “alluringly blasphemous” judgments, the Synod revoked the decision of the Moscow Academy concerning the award to Konovalov of a higher degree (Journals, p. 232). Furthermore, on August 31 the Synod removed the rector of the academy, the bishop of Volokolamsk, from his post. At the same time Konovalov was asked “to submit within a month‘s time a resignation from the service.” Konovalov most humbly asked that he be allowed to remain in his position while writing a dissertation on a new subject, but for that he was dismissed (Minutes, pp. 225, 233). Thus was realized in practice the standard of giving the collective judgment of the Orthodox Church priority over the personal experience of one of its members. Of course, Konovalov had his defenders. The Theological Herald published a letter from the well-known historian Elpidifor Barsov, a collector of Old Russian writings: It is striking that a strictly scholarly work, accepted by a learned symposium, has been reevaluated by the knights of journalistic pandemonium. . . . Locked in my cell, standing apart from all political moods and personal agendas, I consider it my duty to say my own dispassionate word. . . .After reading with understandable pleasure Konovalov’s book, I see with satisfaction that he is the first and only investigator of sectarianism who has done the job right. (pp. 655657)

Golos Moskyy (Voice of Moscow) published a letter from a working missionary who read to some Khlysts selections from Konovalov’s book, and who reports that it produced on them a “staggering impression” (April 12, 1908). The paper reported the withdrawal of Konovalov’s degree “with feelings of extreme and profound perplexity,” regarding the decision as juridically improper, since the Holy Synod itself had assigned the awarding of master’s degrees as a matter to be finally decided by the councils of the seminaries ( Voice,November 19,1909).The Historical Herald published a survey by V. Trotsky of what had taken place, concluding that “[alll the noise generated by Konovalov’s book may be explained by the unfamiliarity . . . of his method. . . . Manifestations of sectarian ecstasy

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Konovalov regards . . . as a physiologist or medical psychiatrist would: for him religious experiences are not separate from the human body, but are closely connected with it” (pp. 1201-1203). Russian Thought published an article by the young Mikhail Prishvin, later a well-known nature writer, who was beginning his career with studies of the sects. Konovalov’s work had been accomplished “with remarkable knowledge of the subject,” Prishvin believed, and he condemned energetically the decision of the synod (pp. 43-53).” The respectable Moscow Weekly published an article by the psychologist Sokolov, Konovalov’s colleague at the academy, entitled “The Power of Darkness.” The article characterized the synod’s decision as a “crying moral misdeed” and used language suggestive of the approaching revolution: “In its nature . . . this event lies beyond the boundaries of the chief currents of Russian life, but it reflects so graphically the incredibly monstrous conditions under which we live at the present time that it is impossible to remain silent about it” (p. 29). Between 1911 and 1917 Dmitri Konovalov taught at the Moscow Higher Women’s Courses.12 In 1930 he was a member of the university Institute of History, where his field of research was defined as “history of religions, religious movements” (Scientific Workers, p. 138). Apparently Konovalov’s relations with Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, who in the 1920s held a monopoly in this field, never developed favorably (see Etkind, “Russian Sects”). During the entire Soviet period of his life the author of the book on sectarian ecstasy published nothing.13 However, the material and ideas of Konovalov, intersecting with the material and ideas of James,became the source of a quite unexpected development. The third and last part of his dissertation examined manifestations of religious ecstasy in the functions of speech. Citing many examples from the life of Russian and Western sects, the author distinguished the following phenomena of ecstasy: automatic speech (coherent enunciation of distinct sounds); automatic writing (of words or senseless combinations of letters); glossolalia (automatic enunciation of incomprehensible words); speaking by the sectarians in languages unknown and incomprehensible to them. Konovalov cited dozens of examples of glossolalia among the Khlysts, a major part of which consisted of totally senseless combinations of sounds.14 These “words” were uttered with a particular rhythm, and sometimes it happened that the sectarians “spoke for hours on end in rhyme.” Konovalov was not the first discoverer of Khlyst glossolalia; before him the sect scholar, official, and writer P. I. Melnikov (Pecherski) had written about it. But, as in other instances, Konovalov had collected an unparalleled quantity of material and had subjected it to unusually calm analysis. “Prophetic ecstasy, like poetic inspiration, evokes automatic operation of the function of speech and in general has

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a tendency to be expressed in rhymed verses,” Konovalov concluded (Religious Ecstasy, pp. 249,251). Criticizing James and making use of Konovalov’s material, the Orthodox theologian P. Strakhov in 1910 took up an interesting question connected with the literature of the time. According to James, one of the characteristics of mystical states is their ineffability, the impossibility of expressing them in words. Strakhov asked, “Is not this the cause of all the efforts, sometimes even extremely grotesque ones, to put together completely incomprehensible combinations of words, which we encounter not only among sectarian mystics, but even in the ‘Symbolist’literature of our recent past?” (Strakhov, p. 136.).15 The bold juxtaposition of Russian Symbolism with Russian mystical sects was made by Strakhov in the very same year that Andrei Bely’s novel The Silver Dove appeared, which dramatized the same idea.I6 In the 1915 edition of his essay Strakhov developed the comparison, expanding his sentence as follows: “in the ‘Symbolist’literature of the recent past and in non-jocular futurism” (p. 136). Thus in 1915 the Moscow theologian Strakhov hypothesized a similarity between the glossolalia of the Russian sectarians and the “trans-sense language” [zaum’]of the Russian futurists. This idea became central to a 1916 article by Viktor Shklovsky, “On Poetry and Trans-Sense Language.” The purpose of this article, one of the first by the future leader of the Formalist school, was to explain the recent experiments by the Russian Futurists with trans-sense verses consisting of meaningless sound combinations. This is not nonsense and not music, Shklovsky explains; it is genuine poetry, only purer. In order to describe the paradoxical nature of nonverbal “sound speech,” Shklovsky referred to William James’s psychology of the emotions. In fact, this theory was evidently an important methodological model for the Formalist school. If the essence of emotions lies in the form of their expression, is that not also the essence of art? Though he was not yet ready for such formulations, Shklovsky did make a still more unexpected move: As we have already noted, trans-sense language rarely appears in its purest form. But there are exceptions. Such an exception is the trans-sense language of the

sectarian mystics. Here the effect is enhanced by the fact that the sectarians identified their trans-sense language with glossolalia, with . . . the gift of speaking in foreign tongues.” (p. 55)

Many times Shklovsky refers here to the “splendid book” by Dmitry Konovalov, which was close to him both in material and in method. Indeed, almost ten years before the first works of the Formalist school Konovalov had analyzed the form of mystical experiences in conscious isolation from their content. On several pages citing examples of Khlyst trans-sense language taken

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from Konovalov, Shklovsky was ready to take very far the analogy he had discovered: In all these models there is one thing in common: these sounds are trying to become speech. Their authors precisely consider them some sort of alien language . . . most frequently, the language of Jerusalem.It is interesting that the Futurist authors of trans-sense poetry have assured us that they had attained all languages in a single minute and were even trying to write Hebrew. It seems to me that there was a modicum of sincerity in this. (p.58) Shklovsky is proclaiming here a direct succession between the old experiments of the Khlysts and the new experiments of the Futurists. However, he did not assert that the fathers of Russian Futurism were themselves Khlysts or even that they were themselves personally acquainted with the Russian sectarians. Rather, the Futurists became acquainted with their predecessors in the sphere of meaningless sound-speech by reading about them, just as Shklovsky did, in Konovalov’s book. When Aleksei Kruchenykh in his 1913 manifestos took the Russian sectarians as models, calling them “people of exceptional integrity” who spoke the language of the Holy Spirit in pronouncing meaningless sounds, his confirmation consisted of examples taken from Konovalov’s dissertation (Kruchenykh in Lawton, pp. 65-66,69-78). Having with extraordinary effectiveness historicized images of folk ecstasy, practical heterodoxy, and bodily Protestantism, Konovalov concluded his investigation by returning to literary associations. It was this section that was most appreciated by his contemporaries. Neither James nor Konovalov had claimed that their historical works served aesthetic aims, or that they would prove useful as metaphors of avant-garde art, literary tropes in relation to other literary tropes. But fruits are more valuable than roots, wrote James. The wind bloweth where it listeth, the sectarians loved to say. Ideas are important not for their origin, but for their usefulness. Their authors may remain silent, but their ideas live if people make use of them. This use, however, may prove to be quite different from what their authors intended. Notes Translated by Hugh McLean 1. In 1911, however, Berdyaev called The Varieties of Religious Experience a “renowned book” (Berdiaev, Filosofiia svobody. Smysl tvorchestva. [Philosophyof Freedom. The Meaning of Creative Work]).Moscow: Pravda, 1989, p. 244). 2. Gershenzon’s central example, the English Puritan John Bunyan, also plays an important part in The Varieties of Religious Experience (Lectures 7-8). As a Pushkin

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scholar, Gershenzon had been interested in this figure for other reasons: Pushkin’s poem “The Pilgrim (Strannik)”is considered a translation from The Pilgrim’s Progress. The resemblance between Pushkin’s poem and a religious conversion fitted Gershenzon’s deepest interests. “The savage, Calvin, and Pushkin-what united them in their triumphant understanding of the world?” Gershenzon asked in Mudrost’ Pushkina (Pushkin’s Wisdom), cited from Pushkin v russkoi fiZosofskoi kritike (Pushkin in Russian Philosophical Criticism) edited by R. A. Gal’tseva (Moscow: Kniga, 1990), p. 219. The latter formulation is clearly borrowed from The Varieties of Religious Experience. 3. On the personal context of Weber’s “Protestant ethic” see Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1985). 4. I refer, of course, to the conclusions of Michel Foucault. See The History of Sexuality, 1: An Introduction. (New York Vintage Books, 1990). 5 . An article on Konovalov in the Novyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (New Encyclopedic Dictionary), vol. 22, n.d., identifies him as a “writer,” which is curious in itself, since he was the author of a single book. 6. Parts of the same work were also published in Bogoslovskii vestnik (Theological Herald) for 1907-1908. 7. Konovalov’s defenders were also not abstemious in their language. Sokolov described Aivazov as “an ignorant, free-and-easy young man who speaks Russian poorly” (“The Power of Darkness,” p. 36). 8. On Mahowski’s connection to James, see Edmund Leach, Man and Culture (London: Firth, 1957), p. 121; refutation of this hypothesis appears in Ernest Gellner, Culture, Identity, Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chap. 4. 9. On the role of these accusations in prerevolutionary discourse see Alexander Etkind, “Discourse and Revolution (Diskurs i revoliutsiia),” Revue des e‘tudes slaves 1 (1997): 223-248. 10. Konovalov, p. 77, citing a report in Tserkovnyi vestnik (Ecclesiastical Herald) 30 (1889): 256. 11. On Prishvin’s interest in Russian sects see Alexander Etkind “Khlysty, dekadenty, bol’sheviki: Nachalo veka v arkhive Mikhaila Prishvina” (Khlysts, Decadents, Bolsheviks: The Beginning of the Century in the Archive of Mikhail Prishvin), Oktiabr’ 11 (November 1996): 155-176. 12. Information from the annual issues of Vsia Moskva (All Moscow) from 1911 to 1917. 13. Soviet bibliographies do not mention Konovalov. See Ia. Glan, Anti-Religious Literature over 12 Years 1919-1929 (Moscow: Bezbozhnik, 1930); Works of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences, USSR 19361945. Bibliografiia (Moscow, 1968). 14. For example, Konovalov found in the archives of speeches by the seventeenthcentury Moscow Khlyst Sergei Osipov: “rentre fente rente finitrifunt.” Khlyst-Leapers in 1901 near Kiev expressed their ecstasy as follows: “Abdol sir fu mla konal seir chika.” Tambov Khlysts in 1904 prayed: “Khristos nekrata ne tan fan tan fatison” (Konovalov, Religious Ecstasy, pp. 167-169). 15. Strakhov’s 1910 article was entitled “Pragmatism in Science and Religion (Apropos W. James’s Book Varieties of Religious Experience).”

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16. The Symbolists were acquainted with Konovalov’s work. Blok‘s library contained a copy of it along with Prishvin’s review: see Biblioteka A. Bloka: opisanie (Library of A. Blok Inventory). Leningrad: Biblioteka AN SSSR, 1984,2: 35. On the sectarian prototypes for The Silver Dove see Etkind, “Brave Lads: From ‘The Golden Cockerel’ to The Silver Dove and Back to Petersburg” Molodtsy: Ot Zolotogo petushka k Serebriannomu golubiu i obratno v Peterburg.” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 36 (1995): 5-48. 17. A reference to the linguistic experiments of the Russian sectarians known as “shtundists” is found in an even earlier article by Shklovskii, “About Poetry and the Zaum Language,”in his Gamburgskii schet, and in “Voskreshenie slova” (Resurrection of the Word), ibid., p. 41. The influence of Konovalov on Kruchenykh and the circle of the Cubo-Futurists of the 1910s is mentioned by Charlotte Douglas, “Beyond Reason: Malevich, Matiushin and their Circles” in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1895-1985 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum ofArt, 1986),pp. 185-199, esp. p.187; and by Gerald Janacek, Zaum. The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism (San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1996), pp. 28-31.

Works Cited Aivazov, I. G. K dissertatsii Konovalova “Religioznyi ekstaz v russkom sektantstve” (About the Dissertation of Konovalov “Religious Ecstasy among the Russian Sectarians”). Moscow: Russkaia pechatnia, 1909. Arsen’ev, K. K. “Puti i priemy pokaianiia” (Ways and Means of Repentance). [Rev. of Vekhi.] In Intelligentsiia v Rossii (The Intelligentsia in Russia). St. Petersburg: Zemlia, 1910. Barsov, Elpidifor. [Letter to the Editor.] Bogoslovskii vestnik (Theological Herald) 3 (1908): 655-657. Berdiaev, Nikolai. “Filosofskaia istina i intelligentskaia pravda” (Philosophical Verity and the Intelligentsia’s Truth). In Vekhi. Iz glubiny (Signposts. From the Depths). Moscow: Pravda, 1991. Etkind, Alexander. Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 1997. . Khlyst: Sekty, literatura i revolutsiia; nachalo 20-go veka (Khlyst: The Sects, Literature and Revolution; Beginning of the Twentieth Century). Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1998. . “Russkie sekty i sovetskii kommunizm: proekt Vladimira Bonch-Bruevicha” (Russian Sects and Soviet Communism: Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich‘s Project). Minuvshee (The Past) 19 (1996): 275-319. Fedotov, G. P. Rossiia, Evropy i my (Russia, Europe, and Us). Paris: YMCA Press, 1973. Filosofov, D. V. Neugasimaia lampada: Stat’i PO tserkovnym i religioznym voprosam (The Unextinguishable Lamp: Articles on Ecclesiastical and Religious Questions). Moscow: I. D. Sytin, 1912. Frank, S. L. “Pragmatizm kak filosofskoe uchenie” (Pragmatism as a Philosophical Teaching). Russkaia mysl’ (Russian Thought) 5 (1910): 90-120.

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Gershenzon, M. Tvorcheskoesamosoznanie (Creative Self-Knowledge).In Vekhi.Iz glubiny. Moscow: Pravda, 1991. Glan, Ia. Antireligioznaia literatura za 12 let (1917-1929) (Anti-Religious Literature over 12 Years [ 1917-19291). Moscow: Bezbozhnik, 1930. Kolerov, M. A. Ne mir, no mech. Russkaia religiozno-filosofskaiapechat’ ot “Problem idealizma” do “Vekh,” 1902-1909 (Not Peace, but the Sword The Russian ReligiousPhilosophical Press from “Problems of Idealism” to “Signposts,” 1902-1909). St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 1996. Konovalov, D. G. Religioznyi ekstaz v russkom misticheskom sektantstve (Religious Ecstasy in Russian Mystical Sectarianism).Pt. 1, no. 1. Fizicheskie iavleniia v kartine sektantskogo ekstaza (Physical Phenomena in the Picture of Sectarian Ecstasy).Sergiev Posad, 1908. .“Psikhologiia sektantskogo ekstaza” (The Psychology of Sectarian Ecstasy). Bogoslovskii vestnik 3 (December 1908). Lange, N. N. Psikhicheskii mir: Izbrannye psikhologicheskie trudy (The Psychic World Selected Psychological Works), edited by M G. Iaroshevskii. Moscow: “Institut prakticheskoi psikhologii,” 1996. Lapshin, I. I. “Misticheskoe poznanie i ‘Vselenskoe chuvstvo”’ (Mystical Cognition and ‘Universal Feeling’). In Sbornik v chest’ X I. Lamanskogo (Collected Essays in Honor ofV. I. Lamanskii). St. Petersburg: Akademiia nauk, 1905. Pp. 1-93. . Vselenskoe chuvstvo (Universal Feeling). St. Petersburg: 0.Vol’f, 191 1. Lawton, Anna, ed. Russian Futurism through Its Manifestos, 1912-1 928. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988. Lur’e, S. V. “Religioznaia mistika i filosofiia” (Religious Mysticism and Philosophy). Russkaia mysl’4 (April 1908): 41-56. . “Reliognye iskaniia v sovremennoi literature” (Religious Searchings in Contemporary Literature). Russkaia mysl‘ 10 (October 1908): 44-67. .“Predislovie” (Foreword). In V. Dzhems (W. James), Mnogoobrazie, 1910. Merezhkovskii, Dmitrii. “Revoliutsiia i religiia” (Revolution and Religion). Russkaia mysl’3 (March 1907): 17-34 (2nd num.). Minskii, Nikolai. Na obshchestvennye temy (On Social Themes). 2d ed. St. Petersburg: “Obshchestvennaia pol’za,” 1909. . “Narod i intelligentsiia” (The People and the Intelligentsia). Russkaia mysl’ 9 (September 1909): 99-110 (2nd num.). Nauchnye rabotniki Moskvy (Moscow Scientific Workers). Moscow: AN SSSR, 1930. Pipes, Richard. Liberal on the Right, 1905-1944. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. Prishvin, M. “Religioznyiekstaz” (Po povodu dissertatsii D. G. Konovalova) (Religious Ecstasy [Concerning the Dissertation of D. G. Konovalov]). Russkaia mysl’ 10 (October 1909): 43-52 (2nd num.). Shemelin, N. Religiozno-filosofskievozzreniia V Dzemsa v sviazi s misticheskimi techeniiami sovremennoi zhizni (The Religious-Philosophical Views of W. James in Connection with Mystical Currents in Contemporary Life). Kharkov: 19 1 1. Shklovskii, V. “0poezii i zaumnom iazyke” (On Poetry and Trans-Sense Language). In Gamburgskii schet: Stat’i-vospominaniia-esse (The Hamburg Reckoning: Articles-Reminiscences-Essays). Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990.

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Sokolov, P. P. Zhurnaly Sobranii Soveta Dukhovnoi Akademii za 1909 (Minutes of the Meetings of the Council of the Theological Academy for 1909). Sergiev Posad, 1910. . “Vlast’ t’my” (The Power of Darkness). Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik (Moscow Weekly) November 15,1908. Starokotlitskii, N. I. “K voprosu o vozdeistvii polovogo instinkta na religiiu” (v sviazi s opisaniem sluchaia religiozno-erotomanicheskogo pomeshatel’stva) (On the Question of the Influence of the Sexual Instinct on Religion [In Connection with the Description of a Case of Religious-Erotomaniac Insanity]). Zhurnal nevropatologii i psikhiatrii im. S. S. Korsakova (S. S . Korsakov Journal of Neuropathology and Psychiairy) 2-3 (191 1). Strakhov, P. Nauka i religiia (Science and Religion). Moscow: Kushnerev, 1915. Trotskii, V. [Review of Konovalov affair], Istoricheskii vestnik (Historical Messenger) 3(1909): 1201-1203. Trudy Institut istorii A N SSSR (Works of the Institute of History, AS USSR), 1936-1945: Bibliografiia. Moscow: Nauka, 1968. Vygotskii, L. Sobranie sochinenii (Collected Works). 6 vols. eds. A. V. Zaporozhets et al. Vol. 6, edited by M. G. Iaroshevskii. Moscow: Pedagogika, 1982-1984. .Psikhologiia iskusstva (PsychologyofArt), ed. M. G. Iaroshevskii.Moscow: Pedagogika, 1987.

10 Gorky and God-Building Barry I? Scherr

M

GORKY HAD THE OPPORTUNITY of actually talking with William James on at least two occasions during his visit to the United States in 1906. The first of these meetings occurred in Cambridge on May 31. Gorky‘s trip had already been marred by the scandal surrounding his companion, the actress Maria Andreeva. When he arrived in the United States that April, he was still legally married to Ekaterina Peshkova, the mother of his children, since divorce was hardly an option in Orthodox Russia. However, he had parted from Peshkova over two years earlier, had been with Andreeva for some time, and probably did not give the arrangement much thought until, with the assistance of a Russian government trying to undermine Gorky‘s efforts to gain financial and political support for the Bolshevik cause, one of the New York newspapers broke the news about this affront to American morals. Gorky and Andreeva were evicted from the hotel in which they were staying, and many of the public appearances that had been arranged for Gorky in April and May were canceled or postponed. Gorky’s talk in Boston took place later than originally planned; he apparently did not appear in public during a brief trip in mid-April, just after the scandal broke, and in early May a crowd had already gathered at the railroad station to greet him, only to learn of yet another postponement. On May 30 he lectured there on “The Tsar, the Duma and the People” (the topic of talks in other cities as well) and the following day he visited Harvard University, where, among other things, his initial meeting with James took place (Chronicle, pp. 605-613). Gorky saw James again around the end of August, while he was staying in the Adirondacks at a summer estate which belonged to John and Prestonia AKSIM

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Martin, well-to-do Fabian Socialists who had provided Gorky and Andreeva a place to live at their Staten Island residence after three consecutive hotels had evicted them. Here, working both in the elaborate main log house and in a more modest annex, he finished one of his most overtly political plays Enemies, and also wrote the bulk of his most propagandistic novel, Mother, before setting sail for Italy in October. The Glenmore Summer Institute of the Cultural Sciences, founded by Thomas Davidson, was located near the Martins’ Adirondacks complex. John Dewey had a summer house nearby as well, and both he and William James lectured on occasion at Glenmore. The Russian writer does not appear to have made enough of an impression on James to rate a mention in either his letters or formal writings, but Gorky refers to their meetings on several occasions. He was not particularly taken with most of the lecturers at Glenmore or with American psychologists in general, whom he mentions rather satirically in letters back to Russia, but he praises James as “a wonderful old man,” adding the qualifier “but he is also an American” (Selected Letters, p. 115). Writing at about the same time to Ekaterina Peshkova, who had just informed him of the death of their younger child, he again praises James, this time noting that he “is revered here as a star of the first magnitude” (Selected Letters, p. 118). References to his Cambridge meeting, during which he seems to have had a conversation with James at some length (through an interpreter), occur mostly well after the event but are more detailed in what they say about James. Thus Gorky concludes his article “0 pisatcliakh-samouch-kakh” (On Self-Taught Writers), published in 191 1, with a quotation, of somewhat dubious authenticity, which portrays James as expressing amazement at the phenomenon of ordinary Russian peasants becoming poets. In a footnote Gorky goes on to suggest that James’s questions and remarks indicated a good knowledge of Russian literature and also mentions the impressive Russian holdings at Harvard’s library (SS 24: 136-137). In a letter of October 12, 1912, to V. I. Anuchkin, who wrote on a variety of topics related to Siberia, Gorky says that James had expressed an interest in shamanism and had asked about Russian materials dealing with it. James, states Gorky, had begun a work on the topic, using English-language sources, but was not able to complete the project before his death (SS 29: 258).’ That Gorky was impressed by and liked James is clear; the question of influence on Gorky‘s thought is harder to determine. Much later, in a 1933 letter, he says that William James had advised him to meet Helen Keller (who was to make an unpleasant impression on Gorky), and that the “miracle” (Gorky‘s quotes) of Keller was somehow linked by James to his own philosophy. Gorky goes on to say that he later found James’s words elaborated in The Varieties of Religious Experience, “a book which is excellently written, yet ‘muddled’ in a typically American manner and which in essence-although none too

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deftly-‘sanctifies’ his own country’s experience of a dreadfully hypertrophied capitalism” (Selected Letters, p. 346).2It is of course necessary to read this negative reference to James in light of the date and circumstances. In the early 1930s Gorky‘s public pronouncements were vehement in their anti-Western bias. Here, writing to the head of a Soviet institute which could boast of its own “Helen Keller” (Olga Skorokhodova, who, deaf, dumb, and blind after a childhood case of meningitis, had learned to read, write, and speak at the institute), Gorky clearly reveals his public persona even if the occasion is a personal letter, and he cannot let a hint of admiration for anything Western, be it Helen Keller or James’s writing, peek through. But The Varieties of Religious Experience was not the first of James’s works to catch Gorky‘s attention. In a 1903 letter to his colleague Konstantin Piatnitsky, Gorky asks about obtaining James’s The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, which he and Piatnitsky had discussed (Archive4: 135) and which had just been published in Russian. Thus his awareness of and interest in James predated his visit to the United States, and one can speculate that he met James, not just as one well-known individual being formally introduced to another, but out of a desire to converse with the famous philosopher and psychologist, whose works he had already read. A brief comment from the mid-l920s, when Gorky was still living in Italy and not yet so dogmatic in his support of the Soviet Union, is also revealing. In a letter to the economist Dalmat Lutokhin, Gorky denies any link to Bergson but says that “I can accept a kinship with James, albeit with many reservations” (Archive 14: 397). Gorky may not have been willing to call himself a Bergsonian, but James himself had no hesitation about admitting an affinity with Bergson, and in fact the two men expressed a great deal of admiration for each other. Along with the many important differences between them, there existed significant points of convergence, including the notions that reality is immediately given in experience, that thinking, with its analytical quality, is opposed to the flow of existence, and that the dualism of subject and object or of mind and body can be overcome by emphasizing a concrete reality that contains these antipodes (Perry 2: 603). Why would Gorky admit to a kinship with James and not with Bergson? The answer may well involve Gorky’s advocacy of God-building, the effort to combine socialism with religion by several leading Bolsheviks during the half-decade that immediately followed the abortive 1905 revolution in Russia. Lenin’s implacable opposition to mythmaking and religion eventually won out, but for several years the ultimate direction of Russian Marxist thought hung in the balance. During this period, in both his nonfiction and fiction, Gorky developed certain ideas that were nascent in some of his writings over the previous several years. While his chief inspiration clearly came

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from other sources, it is not unreasonable to suppose that he gleaned some kindred ideas from the essays in The Will to Believe. When he did come across the 1910 translation of The Varieties of Religious Experience, which must have occurred only after his ideas about God-building were well formed (and possibly even after he had moved beyond his enthusiasm for the notion), that work, for all its “American muddle,” in reflecting many of the concepts also found in The Will to Believe may well have resonated with Gorky’s thoughts about religion. Now James, influenced by such traditions as Kantian idealism, British empiricism, and American Protestant religious thought, would seem very far removed from the followers of Hegel who, along with Nietzsche, had the most direct influence on the various Marxist theoreticians who were close to Gorky during the years of God-building. Indeed, not only was James’s thought opposed to that of the Hegelians, but so too was his very method of writing, which, with its clarity, and his tendency to compose lectures or essays aimed at a broad audience, was far removed from the abstract, dense, and frequently obscure manner of the German metaphysicists. In the following pages, however, two arguments will be put forward. First, as has been noted by various scholars (e.g. Read, p. 77; Williams, p. 3), God-building does not refer to a single coherent movement; while the major figures all shared somewhat similar concerns and often went back to the same sources, each emphasized different aspects of the general problem of belief. Thus when Gorky‘s own writings are examined separately,a distinct version (or actually several versions, since Gorky‘s own ideas were constantly evolving) of God-building can be discovered. He adopts several of the major features found in the writings of his cohort but does so in a less systematic and more literary form. The second major contention is that several interesting points of contact between God-building and James’s thought occur in Gorky’s writing, which shows certain resemblances to James not just in its content but also in the manner of presentation. Before turning to Gorky’s writings on God-building it will be useful to review the broader movement. George Kline has cited three chief sources for the ideology behind “God-building”: nineteenth-century Russian radical thought, the efforts by the “young Hegelians” to transform theology (the philosophical study of God) into a philosophical study of man, and the Nietzschean notion of a perfected mankind in the future (Religious and AntiReligious Thought, pp. 103-108). In his article “‘Nietzschean Marxism’ in Russia” and also in a piece devoted to arguably the most Nietzschean of the group, Stanislav Volsky, Kline has described links between the seemingly antagonistic Nietzsche and Marx: both are oriented toward the future of mankind rather than toward the past, and both are concerned with aspects of the individual in that world. While the very interest in Nietzsche was a factor that united all

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these revolutionaries in opposition to Lenin at the time that God-building was coming to the fore, they too were hardly monolithic in their thought. In dealing with free will and creativity, the Nietzschean Marxists differed over whether those phenomena should take on collective or individual forms (“‘Nietzschean Marxism’ in Russia,” p. 170). Thus it is possible to divide the Nietzschean Marxists into “collectivists” and “individualists,” with the latter somewhat closer to Nietzsche than the former. God-building, according to Kline, is more Nietzschean than Marxist (p. 177). As a result, Anatoly Luncharsky, whom Kline describes as more “individualist” in his orientation, turns out to be a major influence on “God-building’’ among the Russian Marxists. Aleksandr Bogdanov, whose theoretical writings made him the most prominent of these figures in his day and the major opponent to Lenin among the Bolsheviks right after 1905 (Williams, pp. 34-41), was more of a “collectivist,” even though certain concepts found in his writings are also important for suggesting a link between God-building and the thought of William James. To gain an understanding of the lines of thought that led to the emergence of God-building it is important to look, albeit briefly and only partially, at some of the actual writings of Bogdanov and Lunachar~ky.~ In Religion and Socialism Lunacharsky makes the claim that religion is fundamental to human endeavor and creativity: “the first steps of religion are inextricably linked to the first steps of science and poetry” (1: 37). Shifting more into a Marxist mode of thought, Lunacharsky goes on to say that religion arises naturally through the efforts of humans to explain the contradictions between their needs and what life gives them (1: 54-55). The critical leap in his thinking is the notion that religion normally (but not always, admits Lunacharsky) provides not just an explanation and an ally for coping with the world as it is but also a justification for that world; thus it becomes a tool that the ruling classes can use to maintain the status quo (1: 62-64). But Lunacharsky, Marxist that he is, hardly sees the individual as necessarily remaining a passive recipient of what life brings. He says that people need to act on nature in a rational way, that their acting on it will eventually prove so powerful that the individual will move from self-defense to the attack, and that in modern times, with the advancement of science, belief in magic has been replaced by belief (or faith) in labor and in the individual’s own capabilities. At this point people, restless in the pride of their accomplishments, want still more, to rule over nature (1: 38-41). In essence, then, God-building seeks to replace conventional religion, based on fear of the unknown and submission, with a religion that exalts science and the individual. The religious impulse remains, but in Lunacharsky‘s highly optimistic and human-centered view it resolves the contradictions between the human needs and what life provides by conquering the elements through labor and technology.

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This faith in the ultimate power of the individual to triumph has a strongly Nietzschean element. Lunacharsky himself refers to Nietzsche more than once in his book, and it is interesting to note how many of the recent discussions of God-building take place in the context of discussing Nietzsche’s influence in Russia (see, e.g., Clowes, Kline, Loe, Tait). But, as central as Nietzschean ideas were to God-building, it is important not to leave out the “collectivist” view, which is more evident in the writings of Bogdanov. Looked at as a whole, Bogdanov’s thought is most notable for its emphasis on systems and on organization. There is something very modern in his marxism, with its emphasis on science and the leading intellectual trends of his day? While Bogdanov lacked Lunacharsky’s interest in religion (and thus is not central for God-building proper), some of the concerns found in his writings enter into Gorky’s comments on the topic. As Bogdanov himself notes, he was frequently attacked for a central formulation in his thought: “Mankind, in its labor and cognition, organizes the world for itself” (3: 47). Bogdanov goes out of his way to stress that he does not mean that people create the world but that they perceive its natural laws in an objective fashion, and that objectivity is not obtained by the individual, but by the organized, laboring collective (3: 50). Despite his emphasis on the collective rather than the individual, Bogdanov is heading in the same direction as Lunacharsky, with his idealistic glorification of the power of labor. He may be less interested in religion per se, but, as Williams notes, for him “collectivism was a religion, and even promised a triumph over death.. . . [ Clollectivism would provide a surrogate ‘victory over death‘ in which the individual would live on through the memory of the collective. It would also be an ideology, an organizing form of experience that would shape the socialist view of the masses” (p. 39). By the 1920s, Bogdanov was to become more sensitive to the oppressive possibilities of the collective, but he continued to believe, in his utopian manner, that a heightened cultural awareness and scientific progress would prevent the collective from encouraging passivity and would also prevent the emergence of an “organizational elite” within it (Sochor, “A. A. Bogdanov,” pp. 304-305). The key point, though, highlighted by Bogdanov’s emphasis on mankind (chelovechestvo) rather than Lunacharsky‘s (individual) man (chelovek), is ultimately the glorification of the collective above the individual. Bogdanov is also notable for working out the notion that he termed Empiriomonism. The set of ideas that came to be called Empirical Criticism (or Empiriocriticism) had arisen in Central Europe under the influence of (the non-Marxists) Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius, among others. Their key belief was that knowledge of the world could be gained only through immediate experience, which consists of ”neutral” elements, whether physical or mental, that are scientifically knowable. Science does not therefore deal with

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the discovery of some abstract “truths,” but with the creation of hypotheses, which improve as the study of experience improves. To Lenin, the whole point was the discovery of absolute truth based on evidence, but to Mach and his followers, science is relative in its truth. Bogdanov, like several of his cohort, was attracted to the scientific aura of Empirical Criticism, but he felt that the movement was too descriptive and accepting of the status quo. Bogdanov instead tried to offer a historical (Marxist) explanation to find relationships between the physical and mental elements, thereby replacing Mach‘s dualistic approach with a monistic one, hence “Empiriomonism” (Boll, pp. 41-46). This is a specific instance of his more general theory; he asserted that all experience could be approached through a single principle, which centered on the notion of “organization.” The elements that comprise experience do not appear singly but in various combinations which exhibit organized features; he went on to claim that a universal organizational process applies to all phenomena on all levels, ranging from the sphere of the atom to that of society (Bogdanov 3: 30-33). Both Bogdanov’s collectivism and his emphasis on direct experience were to prove important for the development of Gorky’s ideas on God-building. As for Gorky, his profound interest in religion made him closer to Lunacharsky in many respects, although Gorky’s particular reading of Nietzsche and an admixture of elements that would appear to have come from (or via) Bogdanov caused him to move in directions very much his own. Raimund Sesterhenn, whose study of God-building is the most complete to date, takes pains to point out that Gorky should not be seen as a pupil of Lunacharsky “first of all because of the discernible differences between the two, but also because many of Gorky’s ideas about God-building were in place before he would have come across Lunacharsky’s own ideas on the topic (pp.135-139). In part to justify this point of view, Sesterhenn undertakes an exploration of Gorky’s work going well back into the 1890s, to note just how prevalent some of the Nietzschean elements, critical for Gorky’s version of God-building, were in the early work (cf. Loe). In some cases (“The Story of the Siskin Who Lied and of the Woodpecker, a Lover of Truth” [ 18931 or “The Reader” [ 18981) it is possible to find direct echoes from Nietzsche, especially his Thus Spuke Zurathustra. In other cases, the individual figures or the story lines simply provide strong hints of an influence. For all that Gorky was later to be hailed as the inspiration of socialist realism, it is not difficult to find in the work of his early period such Nietzschean elements as a glorification of the strong, an emphasis on the need for courageous and bold action, a sense that those in the future will benefit from the deeds of the best individuals in the present, and the qualities of freedom, creativity, and power that emanate from his rebels against society, most notably the

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“vagabonds” (or b ~ s i a k i )This . ~ focus on the power of the individual, on the human being’s capability for creating anything (including, by implication, God) comes out clearly during Satin’s famous speech from Act IV of The Lower Depths ( 1902; hence pre-God-building): Everything is in mankind, everything is for mankind! Only man exists; everything else is the product of his hands and his mind. M-a-n! How magnificent! How proud that word sounds! M-a-n! (PSS, 7:177)

It was Nietzsche as well who pointed out that in his own day a religious feeling or sensibility was on the rise, even as theism itself was on the wane (Kline, Religious and Anti-Religious Thought, p. 108). That this was broadly true in Russia at the turn of the century is evidenced by the very appearance of a concept such as God-building among Russia’s Marxists. It was also true of Gorky himself, who seems to have been inspired by a religious impulse throughout much of his life. The topic appears sporadically throughout his work and appears to have become particularly intense in the period just preceding the emergence of God-building. Particularly notable in this regard is his 1906 novel, Mother. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that this work is built on an unresolved and at times problematic tension between its overt political emphasis and its undercurrent of religious belief (see Scherr, especially pp. 36-40). Indeed, the chief interest from the modern reader’s viewpoint probably lies in the novel’s explorations of its characters’ spiritual yearnings rather than in the work‘s inflated revolutionary rhetoric. Sesterhenn suggests a revealing contrast between the protagonist, Pavel, as the representative of reason, and his associate Andrei Nakhodka, as the representative of feeling (pp. 238-250). Both, significantly, are associated with religious imagery. He also points to the figure of Rybin, who wants to start a new religion among the peasantry. This character states at one point that it is necessary to “invent a new faith ...create a God who is a friend of the people” (PSS, 8: 56-57). Gorky had not yet come up with the precise word, but this brief utterance already contains much of what he was to mean by God-building. This emphasis on religious feeling appears as well in what, in retrospect, can be seen as Gorky‘s programmatic statement on religion, his 1907 response to a questionnaire on the topic that had been sent out by the journal Mercure de France.6 Here he states that “religious feeling is joyful and proud in its consciousness of a harmonic link that unites Man and the Universe” (p. 593) and talks as well of “Man’s joyous feeling of inner freedom” and of his hopes for the future, when people will know a harmonious development of their capabilities and will experience an inner unity (contrast the split between reason and feeling represented by the two chief male figures in Mother). In his expo-

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sition, religious feeling is presented as a dynamic force; it expands the consciousness of the individual and creates a sense of pride and joy. There is also a future-oriented historical dimension to Gorky‘s sense of religion; he sees a spiritual perfection which will lead to the emergence of a new psychological type (a “new man”) who, in living up to his full potential, will make continual advances in the arts and science (Sesterhenn, pp.161-162). The optimism with which the future is regarded, the faith in endless progress, and the conviction that there are no limits to human potential also resonate with more conventional marxism and foreshadow notions that were to be expressed in much pro-Bolshevik fiction of the 1920s as well as socialist realist writings of the subsequent decades. While largely agreeing with Gorky‘s pronouncements on religion, Lunacharsky took him to task on one point. That disagreement, expressed in his article “The Future of Religion,” is instructive. He notes that there are really two religious feelings being described by Gorky, not one. He labels the harmonic link between man and the universe as “cosmism”and contrasts it to another element, variously called humanism, anthropologism, historicism, and economism (11: 31). Cosmism, according to Lunacharsky, was a (the highest) form of “naturalist religion,” or a religion which submits to the forces of nature (11: 36). But the socialist,the person with a religion of labor, can worship only what is human (11: 42). To insist on a harmonic link of man and the universe would be to create a dualism in socialist thought and, what is more, in approaching nature more as conventional religion does, would open the door to mysticism. The phrase that launched Lunacharsky‘s attack seems to reflect in part the process of translating from Russian into French and then back into Russian; Gorky’s own phrasing referred not to the universe but to “the spirit of all life” (Archive 14: 22). Still, in his letter responding to Lunacharsky‘s article, Gorky went on to reassert an ultimate harmony: “I am inclined to look upon nature’s imperfections and its enmity toward me as imperfections in my own cognitive mechanism, i.e., as something which my descendants will overcome” (Selected Letters, p. 126).While Lunacharsky‘s objections to Gorky’s casual phrase could seem excessive (and he seems to be apologizing for making so much of so little in his own article), his comments and the reply do hint that Gorky is not limited by socialist strictures in his approach to religion, and that he is not afraid to allow something of the mystical to creep into his writings on the topic. The fictional work in which Gorky writes about God-building most directly, indeed the work in which he coins the very term, is his 1908 novel, A Confession, in which even the title, which refers specifically to the church rite, points to the profoundly religious nature of the work. The protagonist, Matvei, is an

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orphan who wanders about Russia as a kind of spiritual pilgrim, somebody who is in his own way seeking God. He goes to various monasteries, but finds the monks to be no better than people on the outside. Having decided to go to Siberia, he is resting by the road when an old man named Iegudiil comes by. Iegudiil, a former priest and monk, bears a certain resemblance to Zarathustra in his enthusiasm for life and impious attitude toward formal religion (Clowes, p. 213). His lack of ties and his interest in creating a new religion also, of course, hint at a connection to Rybin in Gorky’s Mother. His various utterances, spread over a single long passage in the latter part of the novel, comprise a coherent vision of God-building and perhaps the most effective summary of Gorky’s own religiosity. He talks of faith as a great and creative feeling, which “arises from an abundance of the life force in man; this force is enormous and always badgers a youthful human intellect, goading it into action” (PSS, 9: 340). And he goes on to say that God is not created out of human weakness, but out of an abundance of strength: God lives within us, not outside. People, meanwhile are divided into the eternal God-builders and those who are slaves of the drive to gain control over the God-builders; the latter have distorted the true meaning of Christ (PSS 9: 341). The God-builders are the common people, who are immortal and who comprise life’s essence (9: 342). The people, he says, understand that the law of life is not in exalting a single individual but in raising everyone to a higher level, and that this spirit of equality is expressed through the figure of Christ, who is a child of the people (9: 348). After parting with Iegudiil, Matvei goes on to work at a factory where he feels a union of strength between himself and his fellow workers. In a scene of religious fervor at the end of the novel a sick girl is able to walk again because of the mass spirit of the workers. The view of God-building in the novel marks a departure for Gorky in several ways. If the earlier works put a greater emphasis on the strong figure, here individualism is attacked in Iegudiil’s description of life’s law, and it is the masses, not a single person, who heal the child. And yet Matvei is the individual seeker, and Iegudiil, the prophet of the new religion, is presented as someone without permanent links to others, almost an older if more spiritual version of the bosiak the new religion is still very much made up of individuals. Throughout, Gorky emphasizes the corruption and evil in the existing order, pointing to the need for an entirely new type of religious feeling. The figure of Christ as a revolutionary not only sympathetic to the people but also of them, the human incarnation of God, is significant in this vision. And the very need to believe, to find significance in one’s life, motivates Matvei’s actions throughout. A quite different view of the individual’s transformation appears in Gorky’s essay “Destruction of the Personality” (1909). Due to Lenin’s objec-

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tions, and despite Bogdanov’s support, the essay, originally submitted to the Bolshevik newspaper Proletarian at the beginning of 1908, was initially rejected and then published in a 1909 collection entitled Essays on the Philosophy of Collectivism. The title of the collection turns out to be significant; if A Confession displays Gorky in a more Lunacharskian (or at least individualistic) approach regarding the path toward God-building, then here he is more Bogdanovist, or colle~tivist.~ The Russian title, “Razrushenie lichnosti,” most often translated as here, can also mean something like “Disintegration of the Individual,” which is in fact largely the point of the essay. It consists of two parts, a shorter and more theoretical introduction, followed by an analysis of developments from the nineteenth century up to the time of the article, leading to a focus on the Russian intelligentsia and particularly its need to battle against philistinism. For present purposes, most of the key passages are to be found in part 1. Gorky starts out with an assertion about the creative power of the mass over the individual: “In myth and the epos, as in language . . .it is the collective creativity of an entire people that is expressed, not the individual thinking of a single person” (PSS 24:26). The “I” is said to have emerged out of the need for specializationwithin the larger community. Though at first the “I” maintained its close link with the collective,eventually,in order to preserve their position, individuals had to limit the creativity of the collective,thereby narrowing and distorting its tasks. The collective does not have to seek immortality, because the masses already possess it; the individual, however, needs to create an immortal God and to make the masses acknowledge the god-like qualities of the “I.” But as the “1”’s power grew, it came into conflict with the immortal God created by the individual. In killing off that God, the individual also killed off the external source of its own creativity; contemporary individualism is attempting to resurrect the notion of God in order to regain its lost strength (PSS 24: 30-31). Here, and at numerous places elsewhere in the essay, Gorky develops the notion that individuals can express their full creative potential only when they are imbued with the spirit of the collective; as soon as that link is weakened or lost, or when the individual tries to assert authority over the collective, the creative impulse withers. At the end of part 2 Gorky finally comes to express a kind of God-building without God: “Our earth will one day appear in the universe as the place where life has conquered death, as the place where the free art of living for art, of creating the magnificent, will arise! The life of mankind consists of creativity, of striving for victory over the resistance of lifeless matter, of the desire to conquer all its secrets, and makes its forces serve the will of the people to bring them happiness” (PSS 24: 78-79). It is not difficult to discern here the direct influence of Bogdanov; in addition to the greater emphasis on the collective, Gorky is moving away from

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some of the religious motifs found in A Confession. And yet the similarities are equally striking: there, too, the individual gained strength through his link to the collective; in both there is almost a mystical sense of the power that can arise through the will of the masses, and here too there is a distinction between the old religion (that which needs to create an immortal God) and the new, where the formal church plays no role and the collective gives rise to immortality. While much of what has been described would seem to bear little relationship to the James of The Varieties of Religious Experience, various kinds of parallels do exist. Even in the absence of any direct link to Gorky, it would be worth noting that James was treated hardly any better in Soviet publications than were the “deviations” of the Nietzschean Marxists. In discussions of James, a modern political note often appeared: in brief biographical descriptions he was regularly labeled, not only “subjective,”but also “reactionary” and “imperialist.”More relevant to God-building, within Soviet philosophical circles James’s pragmatism was attacked as related to the ideas of Nietzsche, Mach, and Avenarius (i.e., some of the major influences on Bogdanov circa 1905), among others.8 James himself is specifically taken to task for, among other things, his reduction of reality to pure experience (which was seen as a rejection of objective reality) and for his pragmatic approach to the notion of “truth.” Both cornerstones of his thought were seen as presenting an American (capitalist) outlook supporting the status quo and ignoring laws of social development (Ryder, pp. 357-377). The political context aside, a similarity exists between Soviet criticisms of James and the reasons for Lenin’s harsh rejection of Bogdanov: the emphasis on experience, be it Empiriomonism or Radical Empiricism, is, from a philosophical or political point of view, “agnostic.” If truth is to be gleaned through experience, which is seen as neutral and not coming with any necessary values attached to it, then there is little room for the Leninist-Marxist notion of “scientific,” with its insistence on the inherent social significance of knowledge or historical processes. On the other hand, by going back to classical marxism, it could be argued that a Jamesian “will to believe” underlies Marx’s views on the issue of class (Gavin, “Dewey, Marx,” pp. 21-27); some modern (non-Soviet) commentators have even seen points of affinity between James’s idealistic pragmatism and the social idealism of the early M a n (Gavin, “Some Marxist Interpretations”). To turn more specificallyto Gorky and God-building, it is of course necessary to keep in mind that Gorky would have been well along on the path that led to God-building even before his discovery of James. The Nietzschean elements, it will be recalled, were present even from the early 1890s, while The Lower Depths, with its praise of “Man” and its presentation of a spiritual wan-

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derer in the figure of Luka predates the Russian publication of The Will to Believe. Even so, several of the concepts presented by James could well have strengthened and directed Gorky‘s efforts to work out a religious philosophy of his own. The second essay in that collection, “Is Life Worth Living?”asks the reader to imagine a person who is contemplating suicide due to a pessimistic outlook on life. James asserts that this kind of pessimism is “an essentially religious disease,” rooted in “the contradiction between the phenomena of nature and the craving of the heart to believe that behind nature there is a spirit whose expression nature is.”9 (Note the approximate similarity to Lunacharsky’s description of the manner in which religion originates.) The two ways out of this pessimism, says James, are either that the need to read the facts religiously could cease, or “supplementary facts may be discovered or believed in” (WB,pp. 3 9 4 1 ) . The answer that James himself works toward in this essay is quite modest: “Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact” (p. 56).’O In arguing that it is perfectly acceptable to believe, he asserts that even scientific “truth” starts not so much with fact as with an inner need to gratify the human desire for establishing a harmonious and logical universe. However, he says, those who experience a different inner need, that of believing the natural world to be “a sign of something more spiritual and eternal than itself,” find that their demand is just as strong as that of those who seek scientific laws of the universe. “To trust our religious demands means first of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if the invisible world they suggest were real,” and, if we are not certain, so be it, for even “the world of physics is probably not absolute” (pp. 51-52). While Gorky does not take on scientific thought with the boldness of James, he does, first of all, in characters such as Matvei in A Confession (to say nothing of several figures in The Lower Depths), deal with similar states of desperation on the part of his figures to understand the world: they are trying to satisfy a need that lies outside the answers provided by “science.” Second, the notion that belief itself can overcome pessimism and make life worth living runs throughout Gorky’s work at this time and is an essential component of God-building, which is short on specifics but long on the power that arises from the ability of people to believe in themselves. “Is Life Worth Living?” while implying that belief is a necessary step for overcoming pessimism, says relatively little about the directions in which belief should go. Two other essays in the collection are more important in this regard. First, “Reflex Action and Theism” represents an effort by James to argue that theism “satisfied the demands of practical rationality” and that through it “lay deliverance from debilitating melancholy” (Levinson, pp. 42-43). In a famous passage, James says that he does not want to argue about the existence of God, but to show that, if He does exist, He “would form the

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most adequate possible object for minds framed like our own to conceive as lying at the root of the universe. . . .Anything short of God is not rational, anything more than God is notpossible” ( WB,p. 93). “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” goes on to consider, among other things, the demands placed on the believer. Here the notion is not so much that belief gives comfort or solace, but that “God is an energizing force in life, supporting our own strenuous efforts” (Vanden Burgt, p. 20). The last section of the essay uses words such as “strenuous,”“strong,” “energy,”“endurance,”and “courage”to describe the qualities incumbent upon the person who believes in a God; once the imperative ideals are given the significance of representing an accepted world order, then it becomes necessary to do battle on their behalf: “The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or traditional grounds for believing in God, men would postulate one simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest” ( WB,p. 161). Again, neither Gorky nor Lunacharsky focuses on the “God” who is to be “built”; their concern is more with the power and the significance that is to incur to those doing the building. While both tend to frame their discussions more in social than in moral terms, Gorky, both at the end of A Confession and also in his answer to the Mercure de France questionnaire, looks toward religious feeling as an energizing force, which expands the capabilities of the individual and gives them the power to make their lives better. The rationale for God, not really stated by Gorky, is by implication similar to that given by James: such a being is necessary to make sense of and to give both order and direction to the universe. James uses God as psychological and philosophical construct; Gorky uses the notion more for a social and historical purpose. In both, though, God becomes more human-centered; belief is important not because it can explain the actual order of things (though according to James a belief in God might be an accurate representation of the way things are), but for the manner in which it expands human capabilities. In the title essay of the collection James offers yet another rationale for belief. Here, as in “Reflex Action and Theism,” he argues that the mere fact that we do not absolutely know faith to be “true” does not give us grounds for rejecting it. In fact, he specificallyemphasizes the opposite: that there is an inner will to believe, and that he would “forfeit [his] sole chance in life of getting on the winning side” if he were not willing “to run the risk of acting as if my passional need of taking the world religiously might be prophetic and right” ( WB, p. 31). D. M. Yeager has argued that James is not giving license to belief in all cases; if one knew that submitting to this passional need were wrong, then one should not do so. But in the absence of such proof, then relying on this need offends neither intellect nor duty (pp. 481,474). In essence-and this could

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well have been a critical point for Gorky in his presentation of such characters as Matvei, as well as in his emphasis on the sense of harmony arising from religious feeling-James is saying that the need for belief is inherent, and that unless the need turns out to be pernicious, then not to believe is cutting off the possibility for a profound fulfillment. James does, of course, go on, especially in The Varieties of Religious Experience, to talk about the nature of God in much greater detail, and in a manner that has evoked controversy. Some (e.g. Vanden Burgt, p. 145) would go so far as to say that his conception of God is the weakest aspect of his religious philosophy. As we have seen, James starts with the notion that God is at least a reasonable hypothesis of the human mind (Alexander, p. 311). His God is specifically finite, simply a greater and more inclusive being than humans; otherwise he would exist on a totally different plane (Vanden Burgt, p.105). Furthermore, if God were omnipotent and perfectly good, then that concept would clash with the reality of evil and would leave people with no role to play in deciding the fate of the universe (Cooper, p. 272; cf. James, VRE, pp. 112-113). This concern with evil (and with the battle against it) is central to James; in his earlier essays he already defined belief in God as causing the individual to work more strenuously toward the improvement of the world: “James’s God is psychologically real to the individual and induces that individual to participate more vigorously in the actualizing of life’s possibilities” (Alexander, p. 3 12). Note that this God need be only “psychologically real”; in James’s formulation, God is not a metaphysical being but simply a way of talking about experience. Since according to his pragmatism any idea that helps deal with reality or its belongings is “true” of that reality, then the notion of God represents the (or rather “a”) truth; viewed in this way, truth is not just epistemological but also social and historical (Bruns, pp. 315-316). It is perhaps not too great a reach to argue that, had Gorky paid more attention to the notion of God, he would have found something very close to James’s view to meet the needs of his God-building: a God who is finite, who represents the best of the human race (and not something totally different or beyond it), who induces people to fight against the evil in the world and to strive toward a greater good, and who ultimately represents not a theological entity but instead a useful way of talking about and modeling reality. In this regard Gorky‘s references to Christ-as a figure more on the human level, who inspires people toward good actions-comprise something close to certain aspects of James’s concept of God. In the lectures that comprise The Varieties of Religious Experience, James, in another oft-quoted passage, defines religion for his purposes as “thefeelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (p. 34).

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His emphasis is on the individual, and furthermore on the more extreme cases that embody intense experiences. He then goes on to group the individual testimonies in chapters with titles such as “The Sick Soul,” “The Divided Self,” “Conversion,” “Saintliness,”and so forth. When Gorky read these lectures he could well have come across some familiar concepts. For instance, the notion of conversion, as presented in James, is less a purely religious phenomenon per se than an acceptance of belief that allows the individual to overcome the divided self (or to heal the sick soul). The sick soul, meanwhile, is worthy of respect since it recognizes the existence of evil more profoundly than do the “healthy-minded’’(Moore, 58). Gorky’s Matvei is just such a sick soul, who is able to overcome his condition (indeed, the novel probably could have been called The Conversion) when he accepts the God-building notions of Iegudiil. Surprisingly, James’s remarks on saintliness turn out to be particularly appropriate. As John E. Smith points out in his introduction to The Varieties, the lectures on saintliness deserve more attention than they have received, for it is precisely here that James makes a comprehensive effort to ascertain the worth of religion “in terms of human nature, the social order, and the course of history” (VRE, p. m i ) . Such negative features of religion as bigotry and religious persecution result from the efforts of religious institutions to impose their will upon others; in contrast, firsthand individual religious experience is innocent (p. mix).Those who are genuinely saintly are able to serve as a positive force in society by encouraging reform and pointing to the dangers of purely material comfort; they thus play a crucial role in enabling society and then the world to become a better place (xli). Earlier, in one of his essays in The Will to Believe, “Great Men and Their Environment,” James had talked as well of the interaction between the individual and the community, noting that the latter stagnates without the impulse of the individual, while the individual will not have an effect if that impulse cannot gain the sympathy of the community ( W B , p. 174). In other words, James’s outlook on religion, along with its focus on the individual, included as well an awareness of the larger group (not quite the Marxist collective, but at least the community) and, more important, he thought in terms of societies as evolving toward what would presumabiy be a better future (Levinson, pp. 79-81). There are some pitfalls in this insistence on extreme experience, on saintliness, and on the role of great men. James has been accused of “elitism” precisely because of his emphasis on private emotions that are experienced only by the few (Lash, p. 88). In a spirited defense of James, William Spohn (1994) nonetheless finds that, to the extent James reflects mainstream American Protestantism, a degree of elitism can indeed be detected in his approach to religion. Yet, according to Spohn, James’s own focus on action, his faith in democratic procedures, and his focus on the individual can also be said to

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have “endorsed the most common American spirituality of the time while jettisoning its outmoded doctrinal baggage” (Spohn, p. 41). Be that as it may, it needs to be kept in mind that for all of James’sefforts to avoid linking his ideas to a specific religion, his instances often bear the traces of the world that he knew best. During two of his later lectures on religious experience James dealt with another controversial topic, mysticism. Here too James has been criticized, primarily for focusing on intense experiences that are not necessarily at the core of Christian mysticism (cf. Jantzen). And yet James himself purposefully lists examples from several traditions (VRE, pp. 317ff.). He is less interested in the narrow specifics of mystical experiences in any one tradition than in their general consequences (Hood, pp. 2 14-2 15). Mysticism, in giving people a direct, unreflective union with the “more” that James sees to be at the center of his inquiry, provides an experience that is different in kind from the religious experience of the person who is simply aware of a continuity with a wider self (VRE, pp. 402-405). Since mystical experience is so intensely private and unreflective, it cannot be investigated in the way that other religious experiences can, and yet it still needs to be considered in any general discussion of religion (Levinson, pp. 145-146). Gorky on the one hand would have been opposed to mysticism as such (and this topic is just one of several that could have caused his mixed response to the lectures), and yet it is worth noting that his wandering holy men (Luka, Iegudiil) seem to have experienced religion in precisely that way: they have attained a direct, unreflective knowledge that others struggle to reach, if they can reach it at all. Several other points that can be made about James’s investigations of religion are also of particular significance for Gorky. First, to strike a biographical note, much of the impetus for James’s interest in religion came from his own crises and his own bouts with “melancholy,”or depression (Perry 2: 324; Johnson, pp. 114-115). Indeed, in Varieties (pp. 134-135) he offers a direct account of his own experience, disguising his source by claiming that the “original” is in French. Gorky, who attempted suicide in 1887,was also not without his moments of melancholy, and it could reasonably be argued that his own intense interest in religion, which after all put him in a distinct minority among the Marxists with whom he was associated by the time of God-building, reflected an inner need of his own. Second, James’s approach is, if anything, pluralistic, in that it allows for the wide variety of experiences. And yet that very pluralism can be seen as reflecting a monistic outlook; as Wesley Cooper notes: “Ultimately the world is not dualistic but monistic; there are no minds and bodies . . . but rather a pluralistic monism of pure experiences in all their variety, in the various stages of organization that give us the experience of a more or less ordered cosmos” (p. 265). Compare Gorky’s comment in his letter to

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Lunacharsky,quoted above, in which he insists on an ultimate harmony and denies the charge of dualism to Gorky, for whom it was important to maintain a monistic system. Later in that same letter he excitedly refers to a notion he heard from Bogdanov: “And if there is unity of matter and force, that means monism is the basic law of the universe, and that means harmony!” (Selected Letters, p.126). The interest in physics serves as a reminder that Gorky tried to frame Godbuilding in scientific terms. Interestingly, James’s entire approach to religion is notable specifically because in making religion a hypothesis rather than a dogma he does not “require anti-scientific premises that are beyond belief for modern minds” (Cooper, pp. 276-277). Gorky‘s claim that immortality can be found within the collective, which he derived from Bogdanov, was meant as a way of dealing with one of the basic fears that causes people to turn to religion. James is less concerned with notions of immortality as such, but he too talks of the individual attaining deliverance by gaining the awareness that the higher part of the self is continuous with some “more,” some unseen world, that is of the same quality as the self (VRE, p. 400). Religion, James felt, was only one of the ways to attain a united self, but it results in a sense of well-being that replaces fear and emptiness (Levinson, p. 112), much as Godbuilding gives solace to Matvei. Finally, equally important to both is the role that “feeling” plays in religious experience; it is feeling, more important than thought in this regard, which contains the impulses and hints that ultimately lead to religious conduct and the development of religious ideas (Moore, pp. 37-38). In Gorky, it is, as noted above, feeling which leads to the sense of a link between the individual and the universe. To be sure, this analysis has turned James into a God-builder (or Gorky into a Jamesian) while gliding past the profound differences that separate the two: Gorky begins with the social and historical aspects of the issue, while James starts with the psychological and philosophical; even when writing most directly about individual experiences Gorky has in mind the collective as primary, while for James it is precisely the individual’s relationship with the “more” offered by religious experience that lies at the heart of his investigation; although James does talk about improvements in society that result from individuals acting on belief, he is much less oriented toward the future than is Gorky; James has much to say about the subconscious and the inner motivations of individuals, but Gorky rarely explores these in depth, even in fictional accounts. Just as the analysis of similarities between James and Gorky could be expanded beyond what has been given here, so too could this list of differences. But the point is not to arrive at a balance sheet. Rather, the previous pages have been devoted to showing that there are enough affinities between James’sthought and God-building so that Gorky‘s reading of the essays in The Will to Believe might well have shaped the direction he took in his own think-

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ing about religion. Some years later, when he came across James’s writings again, it could well have been that certain passages in The Varieties of Religious Experience reminded him of his own thoughts at the time of his concern with God-building. One final similarity needs to be highlighted. James, especially in The Varieties, but also in the “popular” philosophical essays of The Will to Believe, is remarkable for the manner in which he manages to engage his audience and to reach a broad readership while discussing enormously complex ideas. Part of the effect results from his reliance on actual case histories (which comprise more than half the text in The Varieties),but also it results from his tendency to operate in a number of different ways more or less simultaneously while discussing religious experience (Nmager, pp. 63-65). As Troels Nnrager goes on to note, the consequent “polyphony” may work better as a rhetorical device than as a research strategy (p. 65), but James’s ability to reach and to influence his reader cannot be denied. In a sense, then, James is at his most successful when he is at his most literary. Gorky as well, of course, is at his most effective when he allows his literary powers full sway; hence, he presents God-building more convincingly in the course of A Confession than in his letters or essays. But the resemblance runs still deeper. Just as James relies both on the sheer accumulation of striking examples and on his power to describe, so too does Gorky achieve his goals through his talent in presenting specific scenes and incidental but memorable characters (Iegudiil, after all, appears for only a relatively brief portion of the novel). Gorky, like James, ultimately creates a whole out of the most disparate parts, but for both it is these very parts, these seeming asides, and their rhetorical skill in conveying them, that engage the reader’s attention and enable each of them to convey so forcefully his own notion of just what comprises religious experience. Notes 1. It is not clear exactly what Gorky had in mind; James’s interest in religion extended into mysticism and a range of practices, so it is possible he asked Gorky about shamanism in Russia. However, no work by James on that topic appears among the unfinished pieces that have since been published in his collected works. 2. Gorky would have read The Varieties only after it had been translated into Russian in 1910. 3. Note that these are not the only Russian sources for the ideas linked to Godbuilding. In her fine discussion of the “collectivist myth” in the early twentieth century, Edith Clowes cites the Marxist critic Andreevich (Evgeny Andreevich Solovyov) as an important influence on Gorky and a forerunner of the ideas that resulted in God-building (The Revolution of Moral Consciousness,pp. 200-209).

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4. For a summary of Bogdanov’s version of Marxism, see chap. 3 (“Bogdanovism”) in Sochor’s Revolution and Culture. 5. Sesterhenn emphasizes the role of the prose poem “Chelovek” (1904) in this regard (pp. 163-174) and also analyzes several other items. Loe, examining an overlapping but different set of works, points to the Nietzschean elements already evident in Gorky’s very first published story, “Makar Chudra” (1892). 6. Gorky’s response, translated into French, appears in Mercure de France 66 (1907): 592-595. Lunacharsky translated the piece back into Russian near the beginning of his article “Budushchee religii” (10: 5-7). A thorough analysis of Gorky’s remarks can be found in Sesterhenn (pp. 43-55). 7. Not surprisingly, Bogdanov himself (3: 127-128) preferred this work to the God-building thrust of A Confession. 8. Interestingly, Mach himself sent a letter to James, praising the book and comparing religion and science: “Religious inspiration is certainly very similar to the scientific inspiration which one feels when new problems first present themselves in a form which is not yet fully clear” (quoted in Perry 2: 341). 9. The need for religious belief as a way out of pessimism pervades The Varieties of Religious Experience as well; thus Roger Johnson (pp. 115-1 16) describes three kinds of “melancholy” that lead to the drive for religion: depression, a sense that life is meaningless, and a fear of the universe. 10. The emphasis in this passage belongs to James, as does that in subsequent quotations from his works.

Works Cited Alexander, Gary. “The Hypothesized God of C. S. Peirce and William James.” The Journal of Religion 67, no. 3 (1987): 304-321. Arkhiv A. M. Gor’kogo (A. M. Gor’kii Archive) 4: Pis’ma k K.P Piatnitskomu (Letters to K. P. Piatnitskii). Moscow: GIKhL, 1954. . 14: A. M. Gor’kii. Neizdannaia perepiska (Unpublished Correspondence). Moscow: Nauka, 1976. Bogdanov, A. A. Neizvestnyi Bogdanov (The Unknown Bogdanov). 3 vols. Moscow: AIRO-XX, 1995. Boll, Michael M. “From Empiriocriticism to Empiriomonism: The Marxist Phenomenology of Aleksandr Bogdanov.” Slavonic and East European Review 59, no. 1 (1981): 41-58. Bruns, Gerald L. “Loose Talk about Religion from William James.” Critical Inquiry 11, no. 2 (1984): 299-316. Clowes, Edith W. The Revolution of Moral Consciousness: Nietzsche in Russian Literature, 189&1914. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1988. Cooper, Wesley E. “James’sGod.” American Journal of Theology Q Philosophy 16, no. 3 (1995): 261-277. Gavin, William J. “Dewey, Marx, and James’‘Will to Believe’.”Studies in Soviet Thought 28, no. 1 (1984): 15-29.

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.“Some Marxist Interpretations of James’ Pragmatism: A Summary and Reply.” Studies in Soviet Thought 29, no. 4 (1985): 279-294. Gor’kii, M. Sobranie sochinenii (Collected Works [SS]). 30 vols. Moscow: GIKhL, 1949-1956. . Polnoe sobranie sochinenii: Khudozhestvennye proizvedeniia (Complete Collected Works: Artistic Writings [PSS]). 25 vols. Moscow: Nauka, 1968-1976. Gorky, Maksim. Selected Letters. Tr. and ed. by Andrew Barratt and Barry P. Scherr. Oxford Clarendon Press, 1997. Hood, Ralph W., Jr. “The Soulful Self of William James.” In The Struggle for SeF A Companion to William James’s “TheVarietiesof Religious Experience,” edited by Donald Capps and Janet L. Jacobs. Newton, Kans.: Mennonite Press, 1995. Pp. 209-219. Jantzen,Grace M. “Mysticism and Experience.” Religious Studies25, no. 3 (1989):295315. Johnson, Roger A. “Varieties of Helplessness and Religious Experience.” In The Strugglefor SeF A Companion to William lames’s “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” edited by Donald Capps and Janet L. Jacobs. Newton, Kans.: Mennonite Press, 1995. Pp. 107-1 17. Kline, George L. “Changing Attitudes toward the Individual.” In The Tranformation of Russian Society: Aspects of Social Change since 1861, edited by Cyril E. Black. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960. Pp. 606-625. . Religious and Anti-Religious Thought in Russia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. . “‘Nietzschean Marxism’ in Russia.” Boston College Studies in Philosophy 2 (1969): 166-183. .“The Nietzschean Marxism of Stanislav Volsky.” In Western Philosophical Systems in Russian Literature: A Collection of Critical Studies, edited by Anthony M. Mlikotin. University of Southern California Studies in Slavic Humanities, No. 3. Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1979. Pp. 177-195. Lash, Nicholas. Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge ofGod. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1988. Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva A. M. Gor’kogo (Chronicle of the Life and Works of A. M. Gorky). Vol. 1. Moscow: AN SSSR, 1958. Levinson, Henry Samuel. The Religious InvestigationsofHenry James. Chapel H i k University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Loe, Mary Louise. “Gorky and Nietzsche: The Quest for a Russian Superman.” In Nietzsche in Russia, edited by Bernice Glazer Rosenthal. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986. Pp. 251-73. Lunacharskii, A. V. “Budushchee religii” (The Future of Religion). Obrazovanie 10 (1907): 1-23 and 11 (1907): 30-67. . Religiia i sotsializrn (Religion and Socialism). 2 vols. St. Petersburg: Shipovnik, 1908-191 1. Moore, John Morrison. Theories of Religious Experience: With Special Reference to James, Otto and Bergson. New York Round Table Press, 1938. Nsrager, Troels. “Blowing Alternately Hot and Cold: William James and the Complex Strategies of the Varieties.” In The Strugglefor S e v A Companion to William James’s “The Varietiesof Religious Experience,” edited by Donald Capps and Janet L. Jacobs. Newton, Kans.: Mennonite Press, 1995. Pp. 61-71.

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Perry, Ralph Barton. The Thought and Character of William James. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1935. Read, Christopher. Religion, Revolution and the Russian Intelligentsia 1900-1912: The Vekhi Debate and Its Intellectual Background. London: Macmillan, 1979. Ryder, John. “Soviet Studies in American Thought, Part 11: Pragmatism and Naturalism.” Transactions of the Charles s. Peirce Society 24, no. 3 (1988): 349-394. Scherr, Barry P. “Shadow Narratives and the Novel: The Role of Rybin in Gorky‘s Mother.” Twentieth-Century Russian Literature: Selected Papers from the Fifth World Congress of Central and East European Studies, edited by Karen L. Ryan and Barry P. Scherr. London: Macmillan, 2000. Pp. 25-41. Sesterhenn, Raimund. Das Bogostroitel’stvo bei Gor’kij und Lunai-arskij bis 1909: Zur ideologischen und literarischen Vorgeschichte der Parteischule von Capri. Munich: Otto Sagner, 1982. Sochor, Zenovia A. Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988. . “A. A. Bogdanov: In Search of Cultural Liberation.” In Nietzsche in Russia, edited by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1986. Pp. 293-3 11. Spohn, William C., S.J. “William James on Religious Experience: An Elitist Account?” American Journal of Theology Q Philosophy 15, no. 1 (1994): 27-41. Tait, A. L. “Lunacharsky: A ‘Nietzschean Marxist?”’ In Nietzsche in Russia, edited by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1986. Pp. 275-292. Vanden Burgt, Robert J. The Religious Philosophy of William James. Chicago: NelsonHall, 1981. Williams, Robert C. The Other Bolsheviks: Lenin and His Critics, 1904-1914. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Yeager, D. M. “Passion and Suspicion: Religious Affections in ‘The Will to Believe.’” The Journal of Religion 69, no. 4 (1989): 467-483.

11 James and Vocabularies of Post-Soviet Russian Spirituality Edith W Clowes

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INCE THE DEMISE OF THE SOVIETUNION there has been a small but noteworthy resurgence of interest in the thought of William James. This reception, limited though it may be, so far points to a pattern of concerns in contemporary thought that deserves further probing. The first major event in the post-Soviet reception of James was the 1993 reprinting in a scholarly edition, with a new afterword by the philosopher P. S. Gurevich, of the Russian translation of The Varieties of Religious Experience first published in 1910. This was the first of James’s works to be republished in post-Soviet times.’ What is of interest to his Russian readers is James’s particular approach to religion. In his afterword, “Grumblings of the Soul and Mystical Experience,” Gurevich singles out four points that relate James’s concerns closely to those currently discussed in Russian intellectual circles. They have to do with the notion of pragmatism, the high valuation of intuition in James’s thought, his interest in mystical experience, and his strong emphasis on personal feeling and insight. Gurevich expresses a strong appreciation of James’s positive, “pragmatic” emphasis in his treatment of religion: James is more concerned with the uses of religion for living and finding meaning in one’s life than he is with traditional theological questions about God’s existence and true nature (p. 413). Gurevich calls James’s approach a “phenomenology of religion,” highlighting its orientation toward the clear, sensitive description of religious consciousness unencumbered by theoretical frameworks2 This point will resonate with other Russian writings on religion in which personal use and experience take precedence over institution, doctrine, and ritual.

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On James’s strong endorsement of intuition as a way of knowing that is on a par with, and even more fundamental than, reason and logic Gurevich remarks: “In James’s opinion, direct, intuitive conviction resides in the depths of our spirit, and logical arguments are but its superficial manifestation” (p. 416). This point of view is in keeping with a long-lived Russian resistance to Western rationalism and systematicity that values logical, reproducible, observed knowledge over revealed, associative, “subjective” knowledge. Despite this claim, however, it is interesting to note that Gurevich takes the opportunity to juxtapose James and the famous nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov,who relies heavily on rationalism in his thought, calling into question Solovyov’s belief that “the content of the absolute can and should be proven true through the reflection of our reason and brought into a logical system.” James, in Gurevich‘s view, would argue that “Intuition is in no way an exhaust valve for the cognizing mind. It serves as a completely independent and self-sufficient medium for perceiving the world” (p. 4 18). James’s positive emphasis on mystical experience comes to Gurevich as a welcome relief after decades of single-minded (Soviet) scientific thinking: Today after decades of being isolated from world culture, we realize that mysticism is by no means just a collection of naive illusions and blind beliefs that darken the blinding light of reason. . . . [Mysticism] possesses a solid predictive potential [and] philosophical perspicacity. Mysticism is the foretaste of a productive religious epoch. (pp. 419-420)

Gurevich hastens to address his contemporaries’ scepticism about mystical insight, pointing out that scientists and scholars-physicists, psychologists, students of culture-have found that their own discoveries often share insights similar to those in ancient texts whose authors had no access to modern empiricist theories (p. 420). This interest in mystical experience will be a continuing theme among leading Russian thinkers and writers concerned with questions of spirituality in a secular, scientific world. Gurevich‘s final point concerning the significance of personal religious experience is relevant because it resonates so well with overriding issues in lateand post-Soviet religious thought. He finds James’s attention to individual, personal experience to be the very finest aspect of The Varieties of Religious Experience: “The chief value of this book,” he writes, “lies in its exposure of the phenomenon of religion as a concrete personal relation between the individual and the Divinity.” Gurevich also notes the relation of religious experience to the psychic subconscious: “Written in those years when, as the philosopher notes, ‘the word “subconscious” still grate[d] on one’s ears,’ he articulates the supposition that the ‘something’ with which we interact in religious experience is the subconscious continuation of our conscious life” (p. 423).

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Here, too, the emphasis on individual experience will point us toward a major concern in post-Soviet religious thought: the move away from the mass “homo sovieticus,” who serves the Soviet state, to an interest in the spiritually integrated personality. And here we can see a slight, but still a possible, impact of American pragmatism. In his edited volume of European existential writings, The Phenomenon ofMan (1993), Gurevich takes up a position against Michel Foucault’s forecasting in The Order of Things of the death of the self. Parodying Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God in Thus Spuke Zuruthustru, Foucault announces the late-twentieth-century “death of man.” What is meant is the loss of the notion of the integral self as the object of human knowledge in the modern era. In contrast, in his introductory article, “The Renaissance of Anthropology” Gurevich sees the emergence of a “philosophical anthropology” that is based on the “philosophy of pragmatism” and contemporary sociobiology and focuses attention on human nature and personal experience (p. 13). Beyond these slender references to James and pragmatism there would appear to be little direct response specifically to James in late-Soviet and postSoviet t h ~ u g h tOccasionally .~ a usage of a term will bring James to mind. For example, in his fictionalized novel-essay, “The Teaching of Yakov Abramov” (199 l), the cultural critic Mikhail Epstein criticizes the word “pluralism” that is central to James’svocabulary. “Pluralism” suggests to the American philosopher the strong differences between individuals in the realm of personal experience. A more immediate, contemporary usage of “pluralism” is probably the relevant one for Epstein’s discussion: along with “democracy,” “parliament,” and, later, “privatization,”“pluralism” was also one of the key words of the last years of Soviet rule. Epstein focuses on the superficiality of the pluralist notion of “difference,”of variety of thought, point of view, experience, and opinion, suggesting that he is responding chiefly to the popular Russian usage of the term in the 1980s. Another circumstance to keep in mind when we discuss contemporary responses to non-Russian philosophers is the fervent and rapid republication and reappropriation of Russia’s own religious and philosophical heritage. A predominant event for many intellectuals in the 1990s was the return to print of the rich corpus of prerevolutionary religious philosophy. Major efforts have been made and are still under way to republish works of Solovyov, Florensky, Frank, Shestov, Rozanov, Berdyaev, as well as the religious-philosophical criticism of Merezhkovsky and many others. These figures are at the center of attention in philosophical circles, and it is their thought that is frequently the point of departure for thinkers like Gurevich and Epstein. In addition, there is a strong centripetal tendency to treat these and other Russian writers and thinkers as the originators of a tradition. As Gurevich remarks

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about Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in his essay “The Renaissance of Anthropology,” “ [ T]he generation of Heidegger and Gadamer were brought up in large part on the ethical works of Tolstoy [and] on the artistic intuition of Dostoevsky that opened up the limitless world of human subjectivity. From its beginnings [thinkers in] the personalist tradition in Russian philosophy have been distinguished as pathbreakers” (p. 16). In this atmosphere of national rediscovery there is little likelihood that foreign philosophers will garner much attention. Despite these reservations, important parallels between James’s thought and the historical Russian concern with what might be called the religious subconscious do exist and bear discussion. The personalism and ancillary notions of healthy spirituality-the suffering spirit, sanctity, and mysticismdeveloped in The Varieties of Religious Experience share common ground with quasi-religious Russian experiences, from Pisarev’s cult of science in the early 1860’s to the God-seekers’ and God-builders’ mystical search for ecstasy and enthusiasm in the early years of the twentieth century. The considerable affinity between James’s own religious disposition and those of his Russian nineteenth- and twentieth-century counterparts Dostoevsky and Tolstoy has been well illuminated in this volume by Orwin, Wachtel, and Miller. Thus we are justified in drawing on The Varieties of Religious Experience and Gurevich‘s exposition of some of its main points as markers for mapping out a part of the territory of recent Russian religious thought. Our next step is to examine the religious writings of three thinkers whose religious sensibility is in some way comparable to James’s. They are the religious essayist Grigory Pomerants, the well-known novelist Andrei Bitov, and the cultural theorist Mikhail Epstein. It is interesting to note that the lives of these three men span the whole Soviet era and are witness to the fact that serious religious sensibility, though driven underground, remained vital. The oldest of the three is Pomerants, born in 1918 in M o s ~ o wPomerants .~ is an Indologist by training and one of the first people to reintroduce Eastern thought into post-Stalinist intellectual discourse. He is best known as a personalist and pluralist thinker who rebuked Solzhenitsyn in the 1970s for his attempt to impose new absolutist values. The second writer is also the best known to Western readers. Andrei Bitov was born in 1937 in Leningrad and became famous for his latter-day modernist novel Pushkin House, which first appeared in tamizdat (unofficial publication outside the borders of the Soviet Union) in 1978 and in English translation in 1987. Mikhail Epstein, who was born in 1950 in Moscow and has now emigrated to the United States, was very active in the glasnost era among younger intellectuals experimenting with cultural limits. He has since become best known for his critical “culturology” and his semi-fictional, semi-critical essays probing religious sensibility.Among his most creative works is “The Teaching of

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Yakov Abramov,”in which a number of followers of the philosopher and teacher Abramov try to write down what their mentor said in his conversations. Some of the major issues with which these thinkers are associated are those we have identified in Gurevich‘s discussion of James: religious need in a secular, scientific culture, the truth value of mystical insight, and the need for a concept of selfhood that validates personal, subjective perception. Like Gurevich, both Pomerants and Bitov criticize a scientific culture based only on observable, reproduceable evidence. In his early writings from the 1960s (published only in the 1990s in a volume entitled Coming Out of the Trance [ 1995]), Pomerants does not accept science as absolute truth and argues that our concept of “reality” is shaped through religious experience as well as by scientific observation. In “The Survival of an Abstraction” (1953-1959), a dialogue between three students written as early as the 1950s (when empirical, as well as “Marxist,” science had a firm hold on truth), a literature student Nikolai and a science student Viktor argue about which discourse, poetry or science, has the greater validity. Nikolai has chosen to study literature in order to “learn to be human” (Coming Out ofthe Trance, p. 14). At the time, world philosophy was largely closed to students. He claims that physics creates as many myths as religion does: “[Wlhere has science gotten to? . . . We have a mound of facts that blow the model to bits. Words are left-atom, vacuum. . . . The concept of an atom is interpreted in contemporary science as loosely, as far from its original meaning, as the concept of the seven days of creation is in Jesuit theology” (Coming Out of the Trance, p. 24). Scientific thinking, in Pomerants’s view is not as completely segregated from religious thinking as its proponents have claimed. Pomerants’s thinking resembles that of the earlytwentieth-century physicist and philosopher Pave1 Yushkevich in his emphasis on the strong underlying mythopoetic tendency in scientific writing, despite concerted efforts to erase “subjective,”“irrational” thinking5 For all the differences between the two thinkers, Pomerants’s efforts to justify individual, subjective perception can be compared to James’s thought near the end of Varieties: Individuality is founded in feeling: and the recesses of feeling, the darker,blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done. Compared with this world of living individualized feelings, the world of generalized objects, which the intellect contemplates, is without solidity or life. As in stereoscopic or kinetoscopicpictures seen outside the instrument, the third dimension,the movement, the vital element, are not there. (p. 395) Although both validate a notion of subjective selfhood, they differ in the ways they treat science. In James’sview, scientific generalization is lifeless, while for

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Pomerants science is discredited by its unexamined tendency to create myth around its discoveries. For James science simply cannot satisfy the need for personal religious experience. As Pomerants sees it, science denies religious need but contradicts itself by serving the religious need for mythic meaning. Andrei Bitov is likewise concerned with the limits of scientific thinking. In his most recent work, The Monkey Link (1995), Bitov also probes a scientific way of thinking. In the first of three main sections of the book, entitled “Birds” (written in the 1960s), the first-person writer and narrator, who remains nameless, is on the Kurish Spit in the Baltic Sea. He is visiting an ornithologist-naturalist friend, humorously known as Doctor Doctorovich, who is studying the behavior patterns of birds. The two talk about the relative merits of poetic and scientific thinking, during which conversations the narrator mounts a serious critique of scientific discourse. Doctor Doctorovich himself has needs and desires that are real but cannot be addressed through his scientific approach to reality. He loves, for example, to speculate and play with the possibilities available in existence, something that science with its narrow attachment to “fact”does not allow. In scientific discourse there is a gap between the specific detail and the whole theoretical picture. In his conversations with the narrator Doctor Doctorovich is “seduced” by a more unfettered kind of thinking, so that “his [scientific] imperative weakened.” The narrator continues: “I think that it was not I who persuaded him-these thoughts had been pining away in him for a long time now” (p. 44). In addition, although he loves to poke fun at myths, he is often caught spinning his own metaphors. On the other hand, Doctor Doctorovich does admit that science, if it is rigorously practiced, as it should be, is narrow and spiritually unsatisfying. There is no place here for speculative thinking: [A] certain narrowness is indeed characteristic of science, which concerns itself less with world problems than with things that can be precisely established. . . . A brilliant idea that we cannot prove or confirm by experiment is considered unprofessional. It is dilettantism, or at best, a leisuretime activity. A beautiful thought taken on faith can lead one far and irretrievably in the wrong direction. There must be a certain sluggishness in the ethical character of a genuine scientist who has buckets of ideas. It’s true in our thinking there is a gap between the one and the many. (p. 42)

Although scientists would seem to be very honest about their limitations and admirably rigorous about their definition of the truth, as a group they share certain problematic values. For example, they tend to discount the importance of the irrational in human nature, and, by extension, the role of nature and the environment in our lives. Doctor Doctorovich and Pave1 Petrovich, an icon painter who appears in the second of the book‘s three sections, fol-

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low this line of thinking into a debate about the relative value of faith in God and in the theory of evolution and still further to political beliefs and criticism of Soviet ideology. Finally, Doctor Doctorovich admits that all the constructions of the Soviet era with its “scientific,” hyperrational cast of mind have, for example, waged a “more effective war [on the environment] than war itself” (p. 169). To the resolutely and arrogantly empirical methods of science the narrator contrasts a mystical approach to knowing reality. For James, mystical insight is at the heart of the religious experience. It involves the sensation of uniting with some higher power by going beyond oneself and one’s limited consciousness, bounded by words and logic, to a state of ecstasy. One key to mystic experience for James, as for Bitov, is the sense of the failure of words to convey deeper layers of experience. This inadequacy of words James calls “ineffability” (VRE, p. 380) or “neizrechennost”’(Mnogoobruzie [Rn. tr. VRE], p. 297). He further describes the state of mind of the person undergoing a mystical experience: “The subject of [the mystical state of mind] immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others” (VRE,p. 302). In The Monkey Link Bitov’s narrator experiments with going beyond words to a different consciousness of reality. Here the narrator has a quasi-mystical experience: He literally feels himself drawn out of himself, losing his own “small ego” and his particular take on things. Living on the Kurish Spit he seeks to overcome the verbal abstraction, what we might call the “virtual reality,” that he sees in our bookish, unnatural culture. He seeks to unite word with thing and then through pure perception to dispense with the word. The narrator steps for a moment as if outside of himself into the idyllic landscape of the sanctuary. Once again this idyll is translated into a fresh, revivifying relationship between words and things: “Here everything was reserved in this reserve-including the geography; sea, bay, dunes, shorelines, woods, grasses, and sky, and birds were not just close to hand but they answered the innermost fantasies that we have when we pronounce these words with our eyes closed: bay, woods, birds. . . . The concretization of concepts, the realization of the dictionary” (pp. 25-26). For a moment he feels that he has overcome the intellectual’s handicap of knowing the words without having any experience of the things to which they refer. What has been demoted to virtual reality of a writer’s text is now reinstated as the “real.” The narrator eventually comes to a different consciousness, a sense of the essential nature of things and the epiphenomena1 character of words. He goes walking on the dunes and then sits, looking to sea and the horizon: “My feet in the sand as if rooted, I leaned back against the dune. There was no name for

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what I saw. I saw the water, I saw a fish, I saw the sky, I saw a bird . . . none of them had a name. I did not know that this was called water, sky or b i r d (p. 41). Words become transparent, a kind of veil cast over things: Words were finally empty as very light chitonous shrouds mingled together with the sand. Indeed that is what they are-empty. I became separated from my tongue grumbling inside me that the world exists, that it is at every step of the way, that here it is. And, as always, I sighed, I tore my back from the dune through whose eyes I had looked before me for a second, I dragged my feet out of the sand one at a time: the fish was a fish and was called a bream, the bird was not the sky but a seagull, before me stretched out not a fish but water called a bay, and then the sky-air, itself an ocean of air. (p. 41)

Bitov as a writer can use words more freely to speculate about the ways in which language takes control of our consciousness. Torn away from this fleeting sense of oneness with nature, alienated, the narrator then draws his conclusions about language and its tendency to take control of our consciousness of things: The sky alone had no horizon, beyond it was who knows what, by the way, also layered by someone into spheres and terms, but these words live only in a textbook since we can still look up into the sky sometimes in this mute sense of vision. I was troubled at the nominal quality of everything, by this sense of being fastened by a knowledge that was in no way contained in the things that I see. What do we see: the things or the words that name them? It is at least clear that the world that we cognize has no way to answer our knowledge. Even if it reflects the world exactly. It merely reflects it. But the world does not look into this mirror. (p. 42)

Bitov’s works are full of frustrations with language, seemingly the only means we have to communicate with one another: frustration at the wrongness and distortions that language visits on the things and people in the world; frustration at the automatized way in which we are led to frame our thoughts, our stories, and our feelings. Bitov calls on his readers occasionally to take a moment to remark on the contingent relationship between words and things, something that science is powerless to do because it is locked in the world of words. While Bitov shares with James an interest in what one can know and experience in a transverbal sense, his orientation is somewhat different from James’s. James is simply asserting the value of inexpressible, unique mystical experience as against scientific empiricism. Bitov is a person brought up in a country commanded by a hyperrationalist, scientific ideology, seeking simply to go beyond words and their power to limit our perception. Bitov is a man

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looking for mystical experience, whose seeking is justified tangentially by James’s pluralistic view of truth and reality. Probably the writer whose religious sensibility is closest to James’s is Mikhail Epstein. Ranging from straight cultural criticism oriented toward the question of religious sensibility (Faith and Image, 1994) to fictionalized criticism (“The Teaching of Yakov Abramov,” 1991; The New Sectarianism, 1993), Epstein’s writing is most unusual for an academic. Epstein shares with James a similar approach to religion and a similar solution to reconciling the secular and the religious. The first area in which James and Epstein overlap is a concern for linking scientific, secular, academic knowledge with religious, revealed knowledge. James ends his study with a long lecture on the uses of philosophy for religion. While philosophers wiU always place themselves above their subject, trying to liberate religion from its irrational qualities, religion is ultimately a matter of living faith. Philosophy is powerless to add anything to its authority. The great contribution of philosophy, James argues, is to bring moderation and tolerance to our religious drives. Philosophy can be a moderator between science and religion. James rejects metaphysics and decides that the most productive relationship between the two is a kind of “religious studies”-an analysis and critique of historical dogma that can juxtapose individual religious sensibilities with the findings of natural science. The main weakness of James’s approach is his assurance that philosophers can shed the personal, the subjective, and the fortuitous from their interpretations. In Faith and Image Epstein takes the idea of concrete analysis of religion a step further and usefully analyzes religious sensibility as it is expressed in Russian modernist art and literature (from Malevich to Mandelshtam and Pasternak) as well as in late Soviet conceptualist art (particularly Ilya Kabakov). Another aspect of Epstein’s work is his description of a variety of religious predispositions set forth in “The Teaching of Yakov Abramov.” Here each follower of Abramov is trying to reconstruct the “true” version of Abramov’s thought.6 Since Abramov never wrote his thought down, this task is impossible, even at the level of recording his utterances. Epstein’s tale is a clever, postmodernist or de-totalizing reversal of Plato’s record of Socrates’ conversations or the record of Hegel’s lectures accumulated by his students. Each person’s version evinces a different religious sensibility.’ Despite its character as a parody of “scientific” academic writing, The New Sectarianism, subtitled Types of Religious-Philosophical Mentalities in Russia, is perhaps the closest to James’s notion of religious studies. Purportedly written for the “Institute of Atheism” of the Soviet Academy of Sciences as a secret document on intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s, this book lists a number of “sects,” such as “food sanctifiers” (pishchesviartsy),“thrifty domestics”

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(dornovitiane),“mindless fools” (duriki),“provs” or “provincials” (provy),and so forth.8 The narrow-minded or obsessive mentality of each group is then described and explained. All of these books may be seen as examples of what Epstein calls “culturology.” As Anesa Miller-Pogacar has shown, this culturology cannot really be compared to Western culture studies, which have their roots in the Marxist sociology of the British Manchester School and the German Frankfurt School (p. 346). While culture studies are concerned with cultural, ideological, and social difference and diversity, Epstein’s culturology is concerned with spirituality and religious psychology and ultimately with “transculture,” a cultural and spiritual synthesis that can be attained only by standing outside one’s own cultural heritage. Culturology can be usefully seen as an admixture that includes something like James’s religious studies, in which the subject of analysis is a cultural situation in which religious practice has been repressed or denied. The second area shared by James and Epstein is their approach to a psychology of religion, using a non-Freudian perspective. While Freud emphasizes the role of the superego (the authoritative presence of divinity), James and Epstein both emphasize the subliminal need, the level of feeling, personal experience, and personal voice. Neither is concerned with the metaphysical question of the existence of a divinity or its nature. In the short Russian summary at the start of the Russian translation of The Varieties ofReligious Experience, James’s approach to religion is characterized as the “intrusion of the subconscious into daily life” (Mnogoobrazie, p. 2, see also p. 372). Epstein starts his study of religious sensibility in twentieth-century Russian (secular) culture, Faith and Image, by setting forth his own concept of the “religious unconscious.” He justifies this departure from the traditional Freudian approach by saying that religion and religious institutions and practice were physically repressed during the seventy years of Soviet rule, so that, indeed, religion was pushed into the realm of the unconscious (p. 5). In the body of his three works on religious sensibility he focuses particularly on the attitudes and feelings that inform religious practice. In “The Teaching of Yakov Abramov” Epstein brings out a wide variety of spiritual dispositions and orientations. While not precisely “psychological” in James’s or Freud’s sense of the term, Epstein’s characters bring out theological, philosophical, and philological approaches to Abramov’s doctrine that are informed by a definite religious need. In The New Sectarianism Epstein also emphasizes a religious need for ritual and meaning in life, however trivialized or narrow-minded that may be. In conclusion, we must ask ourselves what the “vocabularies of spirituality” that have emerged at the end of Soviet rule might be. Bitov’s original title for The Monkey Link was the old Russian word “oglashennye,” a word that refers

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to pagans who have newly accepted Christianity. This is an old religious term the sense of which, in the post-Soviet context and the context of the book itself, is not entirely clear. What is clear is Bitov’s call to be sensitive to our spiritual needs and values. Gurevich speaks in terms of a new “philosophical anthropology.” Everywhere we find a concern with “lichnost’,” with a generalized, spiritual notion of selfhood and a move away from the Soviet mass man. Epstein adds the most to our understanding of post-Soviet spirituality with his concepts of “poor religion,” “difference,” and “transculture.” “Poor religion” refers to exactly that need for religious faith that people generally experience, now in the post-Soviet era stripped of all traditional trappings of ritual and dogma. In his 1991 newspaper article “The Way in the Desert,” Epstein points out that there are many former Soviets who simply “believe” without knowing exactly what they believe in and without belonging to a particular faith or knowing anything of traditions that formerly gave meaning to religious practice. Here is the kind of mentality that gives plausibility to the “sects” described in The New Sectarianism. The concept of “difference” (razlichie) set forth in “The Teaching of Yakov Abramov” can be compared in some ways to James’s notion of pluralism. While both acknowledge the variety of justified experience and perspectives on any given object, Epstein suggests that difference functions only on the phenomenal level. Everything, in Epstein’s view, emanates from an original unity (“Teaching,”p. 232).9 Finally, Epstein’s concept of “transculture” includes the results of religious studies and cultural studies, focusing on the subliminal religious tendencies in secular culture. In his essay, “Culture-Culturology-Transculture,” Epstein relates the term “transculture” to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “vnenahkodimost”’ or being located beyond any particular mode of existence or cultural milieu (After the Future, p. 298). As he puts it in his response to a 1995 forum on “Russian Critical Theory and Postmodernism” in Slavic and East European Journal, transculture “attempts not only to recognize the equal rights and inherent value of each culture, but also to demonstrate the incompleteness of each culture and its basic need to enter into dialogue with others” (“Response,”p. 365). This concept arises from a very deep religious need to address and overcome the terrible abyss of twentieth-century experience in which many individuals have been torn from their cultural traditions, are in a state of “not-belonging,” and now can come together outside national, ethnic, racial, and sexual divisions. While James’s thought is ancillary and clearly “other” to certain major aspects of Russian contemporary thought-for example, the Russian emphasis on primal spiritual unity-recent spiritually oriented fiction and criticism can be read with benefit in the light of James’s insights into religious

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experience. James lends another voice breaking through the seemingly unassailable hold on “ t r u t h in the old Soviet Union. There is a clear sympathy between positions of James and Bitov that affirm the value of mystical experience. Epstein’s sensitivity to religious undercurrents in a secular culture answer James’s call for religious studies. The presence of “poor” religionthat expression of naked religious need in the years after the end of the Soviet Union-is a strong affirmation of James’s personalist, pluralist approach to religion in a secularized society. James’s sympathetic approach to religion and matters of faith lends theoretical support to these searching Notes 1. James’s The will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, first published in Russian translation as Zavisimost’ very ot voli i drugie opyty populiarnoi filosofii (literally: The Dependence of Belief on the Will and Other, etc. Spb. 1904) was reprinted in 1997 with the title more accurately translated as Volia k vere i drugie ocherki populiarnoi filosofii (Moscow: “Respublika”). The volume also contains Pragmatism and several essays. All translations from Russian in this chapter are mine. 2. This characterization of James’s approach to religion brings Gurevich in line with some American views, for example, James Edie’s in “William James’s Phenomenology of Religious Experience,” in his William James and Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987),pp. 49-64. 3. The work of Vladimir Belov, a young philosopher at Saratov University, has just very recently come to my attention. Belov works on what he calls “ordinary life philosophy” (obydennaiafilosofiia), which he sees as a philosophical answer to the growing pessimism and mysticism current in Russian thought. His recent work makes use of American pragmatism and particularly Pierce, Dewey, and James. One late title is Obydennoe soznanie i chelovecheskoe bytie (St. Petersburg: 1997). 4. I would like to express special thanks to Mikhail Epstein for sharing his rich store of information about Pomerants with me. 5. Thanks to Ruth Rischin for this insight. 6. It is curious that the initials of Abramov’s name and surname, “A“ and “Ya,” suggest a kind of totality only in reverse: the totality of the Russian alphabet in which “a” is the first letter and “ya” is the last. 7. Ruth Rischin has suggested that “The Teaching of Yakov Abramov” may also continue the Talmudic tradition of anecdotes, stories, and sayings that comment on sacred scripts or transmit the teachings of a given Jewish sage, hence, a midiash. 8. This work is semi-fictionalized but based on actual field trips into the provinces sponsored by Moscow State University in the 1970s and 1980s. 9. Miller-Pogacar gives a helpful treatment of Epstein’s concept of “difference” in “Varieties of Post-atheistic Spirituality in Mikhail Epstein’s Approach to Culturology.” She sees it as the “undefinable potential to differ” (p. 350).

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Works Cited Bitov, Andrei. Oglashennye (The Monkey Link). Moscow: Drugie berega, 1995. Epstein, Mikhail N. After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture. Translated by A. Miller-Pogacar.Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. . Novoe sektantstvo; Tipy religiozno-filosofikikh umonastroenii v Rossii (The New Sectarianism: Types of Religious-Philosophical Mentalities in Russia). Holyoke, Mass.: New England Publishing Co., 1993. .“Put’ v pustyne” (The Way in the Desert). Novoe russkoe slovo 10, no. 2 (June 13, 1991): 10.

. “Response: ‘Post’ and Beyond.” Slavic and East European Journal 39: 3 (fan

1995): 357-366.

. “Uchenie Iakova Abramova” (The Teaching of Yakov Abramov). Logos

(1991): 211-254.

1

. Vera i obraz: Religioznoe bessoznatel’noe v russkoi kul’ture 20-go veka (Faith and Image: The Religious Unconscious in Twentieth-Century Russian Culture). Tenafly, N. J.: Hermitage Publishers, 1994. Gurevich, Petr S. “Antropologicheskii renessans” (The Renaissance of Anthropology). In Fenomen cheloveka (The Phenomenon of Man). Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 1993, pp. 3-23. . “Roptaniia dushi i misticheskii opyt: Fenomenologiia religii U. Dzheimsa” (Grumblings of the Soul and Mystical Experience: W. James’s Phenomenology of Religion). In William James, Mnogoobrazie religioznogo opyta, pp. 41 1-424. McDermott, John J., ed. The Writings of William James. Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1977. Miller-Pogacar,Anesa. “Varieties of Post-atheistic Spirituality in Mikhail Epstein’s Approach to Culturology.” Slavic and East European Journal 39: 3 (fall 1995): 344-356. Pomerants, Grigorii. Vykhod iz transa (Coming Out of the Trance). Moscow: Iurist, 1995.

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Afterword: William James in Contexts, Plural David Joravsky

L

ET JAMES’S ANALYSIS OF THE EMOTIONS bring

out the paradoxes that animate his writing, keeping it alive with different meanings for different audiences during a century of intellectual fragmentation, of endless frustration for seekers of coherent vision. James has been a unique figure of resistance to such splintering, for he acknowledges its irresistible force yet refuses to give in, and wins respect for that defiant inconsistency. He is the only founding father of academic psychology who won and held a general readership by dwelling on the self-defeat of the would-be science, the paradoxes and antinomies that other academic psychologists learn to evade within the blinkered pretensions of sequestered schools. His chapter on the emotions in The Principles ofPsychology (1890) spotlights this strange achievement, for it has often provoked puzzlement. Why does a notorious spiritualist seem here to be a materialist? Now the general causes of the emotions are indubitably physiological. . . . Common-sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. . . . [Tlhe more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. (PP,pp. 1065-1066)

That seems to explain emotions as functions of neuro-glandular-muscular systems, and “functionalism”is the label routinely applied to James in histories of psychology written by devotees of the would-be science.’ Its task, he seems to be saying, is to explain emotions by reduction to their functions, short-term in the physiology of body-mind, and long-term in natural -22s -

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selection of body-minds that tremble and weep, fight and flee, struggling to survive and reproduce. One can see why John B. Watson began his chapter on the emotions, in the blustery manifesto Behaviorism (1924), by declaring James “the most brilliant psychologist the world has ever known.” And one can see why a disciple of Bekhterev, the prophet of Soviet “reflexology,”drew on James for his theory of the emotions.2 Yet James was not content with functional explanation. He showed its inadequacy, which provoked Watson to add criticism after praise, and made James’s analysis of consciousness central to Lev Vygotsky‘s rallying of Soviet psychologists against “refle~ology.”~ Watson was incensed by James’suse of introspection to mock efforts at totally objective analysis of emotions-“tedious” at best, James called such science, possibly “a sham”-in contrast to the expressive knowledge achieved through fictive art: “As emotions are described in novels, they interest us, for we are made to share them” (PP, p. 1064). Shared feeling, James insists, is crucial to modern understanding of emotions. [ I]f I were to become corporeally anaesthetic, I should be excluded from the life of the affections, harsh and tender alike, and drag out an existence of merely cognitive or intellectual form. Such an existence, although it seems to have been the ideal of ancient sages, is too apathetic to be keenly sought after by those born after the revival of the worship of sensibility,a few generations ago. (PP, p. 1068)

That is not only keen historical analysis: Romantic revolt emerged together with mechanistic science in the age of Enlightenment. It is also a confession-one of many-that this advocate of psychology as a natural science knows he is trapped within the polarized mentality of the age, the tension between mechanistic explanation of ourselves as natural objects and expressive knowledge of ourselves as persons. Even the notoriously scientistic Zola, James notes in “The Dilemma of Determinism,” is a disappointed heir of Rousseau, “the first great prophet [of] the romantic school [that] began with the worship of subjective sensibility and the revolt against legality” ( W B , p. 133).4 James, in short, joins psychological science and philosophical inquiry within the imagination of a romantic writer, each element of the complex union constantly challenging and provoking the other. In philosophical inquiry his writing weaves back and forth among opposed traditions, showing their contradictory appeals both to pure reason-an anaesthetic function even in minds that rebel against anaesthesia-and also to the emotional types of person that he famously classified as “tender-minded”and “tough-minded.’’Tough-minded thinkers surrender to the limited, patchy, inconsistent hodgepodge we call knowledge. The tender-minded grasp at grand visions, yearning to be whole beings, whether essential mind or essential body or mind-body at one with a universe that includes

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human consciousness. In illustration of that type James liked to quote Whitman at length, and he was himself capable of an occasional prose poem that rings with Whitmanesque music. In “The Emotions,” for example: “Our whole cubic capacity is sensibly alive; and each morsel of it contributes its pulsations of feeling, dim or sharp, pleasant, painful, or dubious, to that sense of personality that every one of us unfailingly carries with him” (PP, pp. 1066-1067). But such exhilaration is not a characteristic mood, as it is in Whitman. In James it is an occasional leap, a startling display of how it would feel to believe without doubt, whether in euphoric psychophysical unity or in some universal “More,” rescuing the “sick-souled person from its anguished sense of unjustified existence, whether old-fashioned sinful (as in John Bunyan) or modern pointless (as in Leo Tolstoy). Analytic irony sets the usual mood, lending poignancy to the occasional leap of joyous belief or, more characteristically, the defiant refusal to seek refuge in some quiet chamber of blinkered believers. Listen to this judgment-in a textbook of psychology, remember-on the experimental way to a science of mind, which he was conscientiously importing from Germany into the higher learning of America: This method taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot. . . .[T]he method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried; the Mind must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. (PP, p. 192)

Standing among the besieging forces James cannot believe in any of the outcomes he hears them debating, that “Mind” will be reduced to matter, or proven to be some irreducible “mind-stuff,’’ or some psychophysical inbetween. He shows the contrary beliefs to be unprovable and irreconcilable, and asks: What shall we do? Many would find relief at this point in celebrating the mystery of the Unknowable and the “awe” which we should feel at having such a principle to take final charge of our perplexities. Others would rejoice that . . . contradictions [are] about to lead us dialectically upwards to some “higher syrthesis” in which inconsistencies cease from troubling us and logic is at rest. It may be a constitutional infirmity, but I can take no comfort in such devices for making a luxury of intellectual defeat. They are but spiritual chloroform. Better to live on the ragged edge, better gnaw the file forever! (p. 179).

Such defiant exclamations point up the melancholy that dogged a life which James could not justify, though he yearned for justification of human existence as deeply and persistently as-which Russian author?

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The obvious response-Tolstoy or Chekhov-is contradicted by their scorn for psychology as a natural science; fictive art was their way to psychological understanding, conceived as expressive knowledge of persons, not as explanation of the nerve systems that make persons possible. But Russian specialists in psychology and philosophy seem even less appropriate as counterparts of James, most obviously because they lacked the broad audience that he had, then or since. His enchanting literary style is often noted by psychologists of our time as a corrupt reason for his unique appeal-and as their scientific reason to brush him aside, along with the unresolved philosophical issues that he would not let go of, and the expressive knowledge of persons that his writing insists upon. And thatenduring illumination of psychology as expressive personal knowledge charged with philosophical perplexity-makes comparison with Tolstoy or Chekhov quite appropriate after all, though James did not use avowed fiction, as they did, and tried, as they did not, to make psychology a natural science. You may object that audience appeal, the size and duration of an author’s readership, is as poor a gauge of intellectual merit as sex appeal is of beauty. To use it as a sign of James’s similarity to great storytellers, and of difference from his academic counterparts in Russia, may be to take a pollster’s way in the history of the intellect. I may be falling into “exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS,” as James famously named “our national disease” and the “moral flabbiness” that it bring^.^ The objection is quite serious, since it points past me to James’s philosophy, or at least to his name for it. In many contexts “pragmatism” has become a term of approval for a shallow mind-set that James considered a disease. He suffers another defeat in apparent victory when his “sick-souled’’ illumination of religious experience is lumped with “depression,”a neurochemical disorder rather than a thoughtful appraisal of the human condition. But first, “pragmatism” as proof of thought through action: how is his own version of it to be distinguished from worship of the bitch-goddess, whose devotees pursue varied practices but always with an eye to the main chance, striving to be the winners, not the losers, of their time and place? Dale Carnegie quoted James as an inspiration for the how-to-succeed writer, and showed James how by selling millions of copies in over thirty languages of How to Win Friends and Influence People.6 If you are inclined to smile benignly at such mass-pop claims of high-culture sanction for American-style hucksterism, consider the pose of philosophic dignity that Mussolini struck in Europe, boasting of inspiration from William James as well as Nietzsche. Is not fascism faith in action as the test of thought? (Myers, pp. 414-415).7 Stalin gave similar mass-pop insult to the analogous Marxist philosophy of praxis by insisting that practice is the supreme criterion of truth, as interpreted by the

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Central Committee, himself in the chair (see Joravsky, pp. 31 lff.).And now in Russia as everywhere “pragmatism” is a common term of approval for the supposed end of ideology, that is, the end of any faith but worship of winners and scorn for losers. Such triumphs of James’s term signal humiliations of his philosophy, which cannot easily regain its honor, since its central insistence on action as the test of thought hobbles thought about standards for such tests in all times and places. That way lies metaphysical speculation on the True, the Good, the Beautiful, from which pragmatism was supposed to liberate us with a call to useful action, a challenge to prove what is true and good and beautiful in practice, not to waste our lives in speculative definition of what it is that we should try to prove when we rise from the armchair of preliminary thought. Within that circular labyrinth, where modern thinkers struggle to avoid mere philosophy while philosophizing, historical search discovers not only James but also his academic counterparts in Russia. They shared the yearning for self-knowledge that would be deistvennyi (practicable) for humanity at large; they did not intend to be what they were becoming, namely, specialists making careers in little manufactories of esoteric ephemera. Their journal, Problems of Philosophy and Psychology, opened in 1889 with insistence on a broad appeal to a general public, and a consequent pledge of attention to Tolstoy as well as psychological science (Grot, pp. v-xx). Tolstoy instantly disliked the narrow academic mentality that he perceived in the magazine, despite its contrary protestation, but personal friendship with the editor drew him into writing for it (See Joravsky, pp. 116-118). He did a subversive essay, “On the Famine” (PSS 29: 86-1 16), blaming the social system of Russia for the famine of 1891, which provoked the censors to ban the offensive issue, and later he used the journal to throw a different kind of bombshell, What Is Art?, which insisted that art must serve the good of the people. Neither of those essays has the permanent hold on thoughtful readers that Tolstoy embodied in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” as James did in The Varieties of Religious Experience, one writer using fiction, the other science, as the way to understand the sick-souled condition. The problem is to find what qualities give those works enduring appeal to thoughtful readers, in contrast to the yellowing pages of academic esoterica in the Russian journal of philosophy and psychology, and also in its German models. Authorial intention does not solve the problem, since the academics creating the “New Psychology”-whether in Russia or the United States or its German homeland-did not intend to write specialized ephemera; all sought to build an integrative discipline of cumulative self-knowledge for an educated public at large. They wished for a science apart from philosophy but still conversant with it, and with neurophysiology and other branches of biology, and

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with Tierpsychologie (subhuman psychology), and with Volkerpsychologie (cultural anthropology), and with religious studies. That grandiose “new science” won celebrity for founding father Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), who piled up ponderous works in all those fields, was widely translated, and who had a considerable readership round the world, outside the academy as well as in it, in his time. Now he is read neither by an educated public at large nor by the academic discipline that ritualistically names him chief among its founding fathers and counts his founding of a research institute in 1879 as its conventional birthday. Such rituals fail to revive Wundt, either as an author of books people read or as an author of methods and theories that are integral to a cumulative natural science. In 1979 a centenary celebration was opened-by Eliot Hearst, an unusually self-critical psychologist-with a long quote, not from Wundt but from William James, the famous confession of frustration that ends his one-volume textbook of psychology (Hearst, pp. 1-2). Hearst used more than the vivid phrases that are often quoted-“a string of raw facts; a little gossip and wrangle about opinion; . . . This is no science, it is only the hope of a science”-but he omitted “the waters of metaphysical criticism [that] leak at every joint,” and the prediction that the future Galileo and Lavoisier of psychology as a natural science will have to be “‘metaphysical”’ (PBC, pp. 400401). Within the would-be science of psychology public intercourse with philosophy is now taboo, especially in the style of William James, which makes shocking display of “negative capability,” as Keats named the art of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Of course James does such reaching after fact and reason, and he shows its frustration, the grasp falling short of the reach, illuminating his project with negative capability. The end of his textbook, “Epilogue: Psychology and Philosophy,” is poetry of that sort, a fusion of viewpoints that are incompatible when stated as prosaic propositions. I will now murder to dissect, paraphrase the poetry in prosaic clunks to diagram the “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts” that James discovered in the project for a natural science of the mind. It is not, he says, a genuine natural science, as physics is, but it must become such a science. That will happen when future discoverers show causal relationships that James can only gesture toward, since “we don’t even know the terms between which the elementary laws would obtain if we had them.” The closest “we” come to knowing the terms of such imagined laws is this: “something definite happens when to a certain brain-state a certain ‘sciousness’corresponds” (p. 401). (James’sart delights in modernist astonishments like “sciousness,” an amputation of “consciousness”--cutting con [with] away from scire [knowing]-to evoke the unjustified sense of a knower that comes with the process of knowing, of an expres-

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sive person that comes with brain-processes, of a mental being unnameable in a natural science.) Laws of correspondence between “sciousness” and brainstates will be established, James predicts, by great scientists who will do for psychology what Galileo did for physics and Lavoisier for chemistry. Such discoverers will have to be “metaphysical,” a proposition that James cannot spell out without removing the ironic quote marks from “metaphysical”and asking speculative philosophy to do the job that will be done by a natural science not yet existent, according to this textbook of that science. In short, psychology as a natural science is a project caught in a vicious circle, and James takes students into the circle with the defiant promise that a future Galileo or Lavoisier will break free. At a centenary celebration of the science Eliot Hearst showed himself to be an unusually thoughtful psychologist by recalling James’s confessional bravura-minus metaphysics, with or without ironic quote marks. Hearst was sufficiently aware of the vicious circle to step away from it, reporting “serious doubt whether psychology is a field that will ever see the emergence of truly global principles of the h n d that Galileo or Lavoisier identified or that Darwin bequeathed to biology” (p. 2). In such comment I sense quiet frustration, which is fairly widespread in the profession, though it is ignored by a celebrant of progress who simply counts the numerical increase of professional psychologists since Wundt and James, ignoring issues of intellectual coherence in the busywork of their scattered labs and clinics.* Either way, quietly frustrated or suavely complacent, the profession averts its gaze from the failed goals and abandoned methods that it celebrates James and Wundt for establishing. Gerald Myers, a philosophically astute analyst of James’s influence in the discipline, shows that an impressive array of diverse trends and schools took inspiration from James, ranging from behaviorism to phenomenology, but that happened long ago, while efforts at philosophical appraisal were still alive within the discipline. Nevertheless, James is still read, as Wundt is not, for reasons that each perceived. Wundt on James’s Principles “It is literature, it is beautiful, but it is not psychology” (quoted by Bjork, p. 12). And James on Wundt: “Cut him up like a worm, and each fragment crawls; there is no noeud vital in his mental medulla oblongata, so that you cannot kill him all at once” (quoted by Bjork, p. 141). But time could bury Wundt’s writing while sparing James’s, thanks to the negative capability that is lethally absent in the one, vibrantly present in the other. I am pointing beyond the guild of professional psychologists to thoughtful readers at large. Of course they are few in comparison, say, to consumers of how-to-succeed manuals. James’s readers tend to share his revulsion against “worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS,” combined, however inconsistently, with his love of winning acclaim and getting well paid for offering practically useful knowledge to a democratic society. Here is another

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cluster of vital inconsistencies that give enduring appeal to James: a would-be democrat working at a would-be science of mind for a thoughtful public, while he and it were going under in commercialized mass pop. He boosted professional expertise in the science of mind, the founding claim of the psychotherapy industry, while subverting its potential arrogance, the scientific claim to know the minds of patients better than they do, as physicians know their bodies. James admired the “mind-cure’’movement and sought a basis for it in science, while opposing the move to license its practitioners as if the truly scientific ones can already be distinguished from mere empirics and quacks (see Simon, p. 211 pass.). His insistence on psychology as a natural science was a confession of difidence-he made a point of thatsince the foundations of such a science, lawful correlations between brain and mind, were so hard to establish that they might forever baffle the expert. Laboring at such a science over many years, he worked his way out of the grand claims of nineteenth-century positivism. From praise of Herbert Spencer James moved to mockery of his inanity. James longed for such a grand vision as Spencer boasted, but his commitment to hard science rather than soft burst the gasbag of Spencer’s pretensions to know cosmic evolution as explanation and justification of our human selves. Specialists who grind out real knowledge, of more and more about less and less, commanded respect from toughminded William James,while his tender-minded quest for a unifjmg vision of nature, human and inhuman as one, generated Varieties of Religious Experience, his work that has been most widely and persistently read by a thoughtful public. James’s scholarly commentators tend to break his thoughts apart, diverse specialists according to their diverse predilections. At one extreme are devotees of scientific psychology who ritualistically hail James as a founding father, while toiling at diverse trends and schools without philosophizing, though haunted by an uneasy sense of persistent failure to achieve a coherent and cumulative body of knowledge, as a science is supposed to do. At another extreme are admirers of James as a poetic writer, who place him in a tradition running from Emerson to Wallace Stevens, and virtually ignore his writing on psychological ~cience.~ In between are philosophers who pick at James’s varied legacies, some dwelling on his kinship with phenomenology or existentialism, others focusing on positivist elements in his thought, brushing off such notions as “sciousness,”which sound like hopeless inconsistencies in an unpoetic logic-chopping brain wired to a tin ear.1° Off to another side are historians, political philosophers, and would-be public intellectuals, who try to place James in major trends of modern thought, mostly American. Pragmatism becomes such an elastic term for such diverse types of thought, or for resistance to serious thought, that I for one

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prefer to avoid it. Who, I insist on asking, reads the lessons of practice, in which time and place, according to what standards? Most simply: cui bono? Such questions entangle philosophy in history, which torments efforts to see, beyond history, an ideal social system that would harmonize the good of one and all. James ventured into such issues only rarely, most notably when revulsion against U.S. imperialism made him confront the viciousness of a system that lacks a “moral equivalent of war,” that can energize self-sacrificing action only for conquest and killing. (The theme appears in Varieties [pp. 292-2941, before the separate essay calling for “The Moral Equivalent of War.”) Usually James shared the basic assumption of the comfortable classes in a leading country of “the West,” who take it for granted that “we” are the vanguard of human progress, that “our” practice is the model for all societies. In Russian contexts James could hardly be read with that comfortable assumption. The quickest way to perceive that is to note two significant Russian dismissals of James: Comrade Lenin’s in 1908, Father Zenkovsky‘s in 1948. Opposite ends of the Russian ideological spectrum claimed practice as the criterion of truth, but neither one in James’s sense of the concept. Lenin dismissed James’s pragmatism as part of an age-old effort to cut the nerve of revolutionary practice by skepticism, by doubting that knowledge is a realistic guide to action. Some Marxist intellectuals had been claiming kinship between Marx’s vision of praxis and philosophies such as Mach‘s and James’s, and Lenin was angry. Revolutionaries must be certain that reality is knowable, that one can know what to do, “chto delat’,” in situations as terrible as backward Russia’s in an age of total war.” At the other end of the spectrum an Orthodox priest, V. V. Zenkovsky, opened his History of Russian Philosophypublished in Western exile, 1948-with a brush-off of James. “Activity in the world” has been the distinctive concept of Russian thought, but it “must not be interpreted in the spirit of that primitive pragmatism which has been expressed with such seductive nalvett by William James” (I: 5).’* Zenkovsky‘s “activity in the world was opposed to Lenin’s, focused on religion instead of political economy, but neither could take for granted the kinds of religion or political economy that James did, and both shared a hunger for certainty in knowledge, which James felt at ease to disturb by skeptical questioning. Tolstoy’s dismissal of James’s Varieties, which was mentioned in a preceding essay, may seem another case in point, but examination shows Tolstoy closer than he imagined to the American scholar’s “sick-souled,’’sceptical way to religious faith. The Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated Tolstoy when he was acting the public intellectual on a world stage, in a Russian peasant costume advertising a claim of wisdom that defied any traditional church, any compartmentalized restriction of thought, any authority but his intuitive mind ranging ecumenically and critically, sick of its own self-centered motives. Diary

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entries on Wundt show acceptance of the basic premise-we are natural objects, fit for scientific analysis-along with insistence that the mind or soul expresses something more, which must be central to knowledge of ourselves (see PSS 52: 25-26; 54: 15, 18).13This is close to James’s vision, though Tolstoy was content with hasty intuition for beliefs that the American academic labored to refine and justie. Efforts to reduce the soulful “more” to brain functions provoked brush-off from Tolstoy, as when he glanced at the analysis of himself in Varieties ofReligious Experience, saw diagnosis of “anhedonia” or depression, and read no more. A bit of that is in the book, but so is Dr. James’s near-confession of the malady in himself, and, beyond such diagnosis of the “sick-souled”temperament, an argument that the “sick-souled” are deeper than the “healthyminded in understanding the human condition. Tolstoy left most pages of Varieties uncut, and he did not see its derision of “medical materialism,”its argument for a soulful “more” emerging from the dominant metaphysic of our age, naturalism (57: 393-394, 187-188).14 That metaphysic was at work in Tolstoy himself, who used psychiatric diagnosis against the mania that celebrated the Franco-Russian alliance with denial of militarist reality and smiling avowal of peace (39: 27-80). Reading a classification of Russians with Zulus on a racist scale of human beings, Tolstoy was “very grateful to Darwinism” for showing that love of the whole species was bred into us by natural selection (52: 14). When he read Russian philosophers of the soul and its “activity in the world,” whom Zenkovsky‘s History would admire, Tolstoy bristled dismissively. Their writing “shows that in philosophical jargon you can prove whatever you want, and therefore nothing can be proved” (PSS 53: 109). James showed similar disrespect for reason detached from “the will to believe.” He brushed past theology as willfully as Tolstoy, with a similar intuition: Religion is experience of illumination, connecting one’s inadequate person with something more. Both knew that experience mostly by its absence in themselves, with misery resulting. Observing people who had such experience, anxious to have it themselves, both felt wretched. The sense of “more” would not come on command. This discord is not only a biographical fact, evidenced in private writing. It finds expression in the public works of both authors, whether presented as science or fiction or essayistic in-between, and is, I think, a major source of the enduring appeal their writing has in an age when many readers take the naturalist metaphysic for granted, along with a sense of alienation, anomie, or Entzauberung, which mocks purposeful striving and undermines “the meaning of life.” That combination resonates in James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience and in much of Tolstoy’s writing, before and after the willful conversion that he advertised in A Confession (banned in Russia, published abroad in 1884).

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In a famous story of 1886 Tolstoy used the question he had heard from a real-life dying brother, which he described in a letter of 1860: A few minutes before he died he dozed off, then suddenly came to and whispered with horror: “Du chto zhe eto tukoe?” [Well, what is this?] He had seen it, this

swallowing up of oneself into nothingness.And if he found nothing to grab hold of, what should I? Even less.15(PSS 60: 357-358)

In 1860 Tolstoy erupted angrily at any religious reassurance: The condition in which someone has put us is the most horrible deception and crime, for which we would not find words (we liberals) if a man put another man in that condition. Praise Allah, God, Brahma. Some benefactor. . . .As soon as a man reaches a higher level of development and ceases to be stupid, it is clear to him that everythingis nonsense, deception, and that the truth which he loves most of all is a horrible truth. As you come to see it properly, clearly, you will wake up and say with horror: “Du chto zhe eto tukoe? (Well,what is this?).”(Ibid.) Animal existence goes on inertially-“while to shit you shit”-and so does

there is the desire to eat you eat,

the unconscious, stupid desire to know and speak the truth.. . .That is the one thing of the moral world that has been left to me; higher than that I could not stand. It’s th: one thing I will go on doing, only not in the form of your art. [He was writing to the poet Fet, who published the letter in 1890.1 Art is a lie, and I can no longer love a beautiful lie. (Ibid.)

By the time he wrote “The Death of Ivan Ilyich Tolstoy had made public confession of conversion: he would imitate simple working people who believe without intellectual questioning. Some commentators read “Ivan Ilyich as such a testament-to light and joy and release from death that come with anguished dying-which causes some to exclaim “glory be,” others to mutter “spoiled art.”16 Off to a side are clinicians, as I would name the readers who find only the anguish of long-drawn-out painful dying, relieved at the final moment by surrender of mind-body to extinction of body-mind-of perishing “sciousness” to perishing “brain-state,” James might have said, smiling at the concealment of ignorance in pretense of psychological science. Clinicians without philosophical bent praise the story as an accurate picture of the psychological stages they have catalogued in “terminal” patients: denial and isolation, anger, depression, acceptance, hope, even hallucination of light.” Much sic et non analysis of such contrary views might resolve their differences-or might find that lack of resolution inheres in the story, whether or not the author intended that. Lack of resolution is the side I

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favor. Tolstoy was a rigorous artist in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”; he repressed the ideologist’s temptation to tell what his fictive imagination could not show, and so brought literary naturalism to an anguished point of transformation into modernism, with disturbing violation of traditional closure. Tolstoy set his intellectual self an impossible task when he ordered it to have the faith implicit in the behavior of people who accept without questions or complaints the labor and the death that fall to their lot. He set his art an insoluble problem when he tried to prove such faith by showing how it comes to a man tortured by the lack of it, as extreme physical pain and imminent death bring him to awareness of “his horrible isolation, the cruelty of people, the cruelty of God, the absence of God.” Psychological surrender begins with the thought, “One can, one can do ‘that’ (Mozhno, mozhno sdelat’ ‘to’)”and the instant question: “But what is ‘that’ (Chto zh ‘to’)?’’No answer, and no answer again when the question recurs. In one translation the pronoun “to (that)” is rendered as “the right thing”; in another “to” becomes “the real thing,” and both drop the quote marks that emphasize the mystery of “that” which a dying man is deciding to do. The translators are straining for a reassuring response to the question that Tolstoy heard from his dying brother and passed on to Ivan Ilyich. Deciding to do “the right thing” implies moral action: at the very end one can retroactively justify one’s life. Deciding to do “the real thing” implies the metaphysics of free will: it is possible to do as a self-willed person what is being done to oneself by an irresistible force of nature.’* Perhaps, as a critic has argued, this story exhibits “the most distinctive trait of Russian fiction”: testing extreme theoretically possible elements of the human condition. That argument can fit with another: the story approaches nihilismthe absence of justifiable values-and struggles to overcome it by act of wd, as Nietzsche does in his expressive essays. And yet another: Tolstoy’s story foreshadows Kafka’s nightmare of an average man seeking to justify his ordinary life, who finds that any notion of a justified life is mocked by the ultimate human choice between suicide and exec~tion.’~ AU such arguments taken together recall the surrealist cathedral scene in The Trial, in which the priest and Joseph K debate the meaning of the parable, “Before the Law.” Avowed fictions serve as scripture to thoughtful minds possessed by a naturalist metaphysic. So does Dr. James’s scientific text, with its comic taxonomy of religious experience:“sick-souled”persons agonize over the justification of life, in contrast to the unconcerned multitude of superficial people leading unexamined lives. They are “healthyminded”-philistines [ meschane] like Ivan Ilyich before cancer tore him up. The difference in modes of expression-lecture-essays in Varieties vs. novella in “Ivan Ilyich-is less significant than the difference in tone-Jamesian geniality vs. Tolstoyan anguish-which points up the contrast Robert Frost would put as a mocking question:

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How are we to write The Russian novel in America As long as life goes so unterribly?(“New Hampshire,” p. 167)

Frost was mocking clichts on both sides. Slow death by cancer occurs in the American way of life-more frequently than in developing countries, as development makes more old people-and American authors who see through smug clichts can be grim. James, for example: “We divert our attention from disease and death. The slaughter-houses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is” (VRE,pp. 80-81). Such passages in Varieties recall Tolstoy on art as a beautiful lie, or his judgment on Ivan Ilyich‘s life: “quite common and ordinary and quite horrible” ( P S S 26: 68). Yet the tone is on the whole quite different. When James confesses his own faith, “embraced on non-mystical grounds, in the exercise of our individual freedom,” notes of self-raillery appear. When Tolstoy preaches imitation of imagined unintellect in the imagined peasant, no slightest sign of self-satire disturbs the agony. He was trying too hard to be the prophet in a country of longstanding, accumulating discontent, expressed at the top by rulers determined to catch up with the advanced powers, at the bottom by non-Tolstoyan lower-class revolt, and in-between by intellects that would not cease from mental fight until they might build Jerusalem-in “the dark realm (temnoe tsarstvo),” as many of them described their native land.20 The distinctively Russian features of Tolstoy’s quest for salvation were ignored by James, who was analyzing the sick-souled experience in any time or place. “Uneasiness” is its basic feature, “a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand,” and “a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.” A hint of selfconscious absurdity lurks in James’stalk of such powers as “the MORE,” a projection from within the sick soul onto the universe, which a man “can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck (VRE, p. 400).21I hear a voice like Mark Twain’s in such writing, darkly comic, self-mocking, anticipating Frost’s, different from Tolstoy’s. But such differences in tone became less significant than similarities of substance, as the nineteenth-century crisis of religious faith turned into modernist expressions of anguish and absurdity. Emergent modernism was increasingly cosmopolitan. If “The Death of Ivan Ilyich anticipated The Trial, James’s talk of “the MORE” foreshadowed Waiting for Godot.

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Academic culture has also been increasingly cosmopolitan, within sequestered chambers of increasingly specialized learning, each chamber denying encroachment on others. That fragmentation has accommodated cosmopolitan specialists within varied political systems and their attendant ideologies, even the Marxist party-state. Shifting views of James illuminate the accommodation, beginning with a Russian “spiritualist” reading of his Principles in the 1890s and coming back in the 1990s to a reprint of The Varieties of Religious Experience.22 An especially tantalizing moment in the process was the 1920s, when the Communist regime was mounting a campaign for marxism in all the human sciences, and L. S. Vygotsky (1896-1934) drew on James for a defense of pluralist freedom. Recognition of disorder in the would-be science of psychology, he argued, was the first step toward ultimate order, which would encompass all schools, Freudian as well as experimental and philosophical. No school could properly claim marxism for itself, Vygotsky reasoned, since marxism was not a particular science but a general Weltanschauung, and psychology was ‘(no science but the hope of a science.” James’s confession of frustration was still an accurate analysis, including the insistence on “metaphysics,” which pointed to the level where marxism becomes relevant, for it is a general methodology, not a special science. “Our science will become Marxist to the degree that it will become true, scientific; and we will work precisely on that, transforming it into a true science, not on its agreement with Marx’s theory” (Vygotsky, 1 [ 19821: 434-435).23

If Vygotsky perceived the analogy between Marx’s praxis and James’s pragmatism, he did so silently, as he did Lenin’s brusque rejection of the analogy. Such evasion was typical of Soviet Marxist philosophers in the 1920s, even when they criticized p r a g m a t i ~ mMarxists .~~ of that kind were abruptly cast into outer darkness during Stalin’s “revolution from above” in the early 1930s, when a new kind of “partyness” (partiinost’ ) justified any tyranny in any field of thought that an ideological bureaucracy might choose to enter. Vygotsky‘s major book, The Historical Meaning of the Psychological Crisis, which argued at length for Jamesian openness to contrary viewpoints, was not published in full until 1982. By that time Russian psychologists were no more capable than fellow specialists in other countries of giving serious attention to Vygotsky‘s “historicocultural” project for a unified human science. The school that called itself Vygotskian had shrunk into studies of brain damage and of child development, and Western psychologists had independently retreated from debates over rival philosophies, basic principles, and grand projects of unification. If James is becoming once again a living thinker for Russians, it is among humanist scholars and a comparatively small general readership, attracted mostly to The Varieties of Religious Experience.

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James is an exceptional survival, as Freud is, of a time when psychological science was supposed to connect with the knowledge of ourselves that is expressed in imaginative literature. One might expect Anton Chekhov to be another such exception, for he too was trained in medical science, was also enthralled by Herbert Spencer’s scientistic scheme of “synthetic philosophy,” seriously enough to test it as self-knowledge by trying it out in fiction. And there, deflating Spencer’s claim of science by imagining stories rather than philosophizing about it, Dr. Chekhov lost respect for psychological science of any kind. He declared it “a fabrication Cfiktsiia), not a science, something like alchemy, which it’s time to put in the archives” (Pis’ma 3: 207). In “The Black Monk” (1894) Chekhov explored megalomania as the driving force of an academic psychologist, culminating in hallucinations of communion with eternal truth. I like to imagine that James might have inspired Chekhov to try a different analysis, of a psychologist struggling with the paradoxes of naturalistic subjectivity, trying to project “MORE” out of the sick soul’s need for it. But Chekhov did not read Principles, and tuberculosis killed him before Varieties appeared in Russian. Yearning for “MORE,” in vain, is shown so often, so poignantly, in Chekhov’s stories and plays that critics called him pessimist or “whiner” (nytik),to his intense annoyance. He had won fame with farcical anecdotes; he took absurdity into expression of personal knowledge charged with philosophical perplexity. A story that began as “My Name and I,” a comic contrast of persona and person, turned into Chekhov’s version of “Ivan Ilyich.” “A life thought through (osmyslennaia) without a definite world view,” he wrote to his publisher, “is not a life but a burden, a horror” (PSS 7:671, Letters 3: 234). He changed the title to “A Dreary Story” (1889), and he closed with a typical parody of dialogue, people talking past each other. The dying man is with the one person he is fond of, trying to tell of his misery, but she can express only hers, as an actress aware of her mediocrity and her lack of love. Neither can comfort the other. Some critics may say that a vision of absurdity has dissolved comedy and tragedy into modernistic art, turning literary naturalism, the supposed bridge between science and literature, into a wobble between representation of a reality too bleak for any art and subjective expression for its own sweet sake, who cares of Let us call that aestheticism, elevation of authorial self and worshipful reader into art as the transcendent realm-“the MORE”-and recognize that Chekhov mocks it. His demonstrations of human frustration in quest of transcendence include the authorial self. In The Seagull, for example, the writer is presented as two types, each acknowledging self-defeat in a different way. In “Tumbleweed” (1887), one of the few stories that identify the narrator with the author, the narrator shares a monastery room during a

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pilgrimage with a Jewish convert, who tells of his nerve-wracking wandering in search of a schoolteacher’s position, to escape the humiliation of a person cut off from the family whose religion he has abandoned, unwelcome among the strangers whose religion he has nominally accepted. As the narrator goes to sleep, “no more than a yard away from the drifter,” he reflects on “the multitude of such tumbleweed people, seeking where things might be better, tramping now along highways and byways or, waiting for dawn, dreaming in waystations, inns, hotels, on the grass in the open. . . . [sic] Falling asleep, I imagined how astonished and maybe even gladdened they would be, if the mind and the tongue were found that could prove to them that their life was as little in need of justification (opravdanie) as any other” (p. 263).26 That is, I think, paralipsis, implying the opposite of what it says: The reassuring mind and tongue have been found, in this story. It shows Sisyphus smiling, in defiance of the gods (or of nature) who (or which) condemn us all, whether writer or drifter, to a vain search for justification of our lives. I like to imagine that William James would have recognized a kindred spirit here, but both of them were dead before Chekhov was acknowledged as a modernist master. Notes 1. See most notably Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (New York Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1950), pp. 514-517. 2. See V. P. Osipov, “0 fiziologicheskim proiskhozhdenii emotsii” (On the Physiological Provenance of Emotion) in V. L. Omelianskii, ed., Sbornik posviashchennyi 75letiiu Akademika I. P: Pavlova (Collection Honoring the 75th Birthday of Academician I. P. Pavlov) (Leningrad, 1924). 3. See his landmark presentation to the Psychoneurological Congress in January 1924: L. S. Vygotsky, “Soznanie kak problema psikhologii povedeniia” (Consciousness as a Problem of the Psychology of Behavior), in Psikhologiia i rnarksizrn (Moscow, 1925),p. 197. For a detailed account, see D. Joravsky,Russian Psychology: a Critical History (New York 1989), pp. 258ff. 4. The essay was originally published in The Unitarian Review, 1884. 5. Quoted and interpreted differently by Gerald E. Myers (William lames, p. 415) and by Linda Simon (Genuine Reality, p. xvii). Simon, I think, is closer to the gritty reality of James’s intellectual career, and to the difficulties of pragmatism as a social philosophy or an ethics. 6. See Donald Meyer, The Positive Thinkers: Religion as Pop Psychology from Mary Baker Eddy to Oral Roberts (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 185; and Richard M. Huber, The American Idea of Success (New York McGraw-HiU, 1971), pp. 237-238 et pass. 7. Blowhard Mussolini had not actually read James.

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8. See Raymond D. Fowler, “A Centennial Note: What Would William James Say about the American Psychological Association Today?” in Margaret E. Donnelly, ed., Reinterpreting the Legacy of William James (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1992). To be sure, other essays in this volume reveal far more sensitivity to substantive issues. 9. See, e.g., Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); and Frank Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens (Madison, 1988). 10. For an effort to correct that tin-ear tendency, see Andrew Bailey, “The Strange Attraction of Sciousness: William James on Consciousness,” Transactions ofthe Charles S. Peirce Society, 34, no. 2( 1998): 414-434. 11. Lenin, Materialism and Empiriocriticism. The dismissal of James is in chap. 6, Sect. 4. 12. The translator, George Kline, rendered “ne nuzhno” as “need not.”“Must not,” I think, is closer to Zenkovsky‘s meaning. See his Istoriia russkoifilosoji, 1: 17. 13. My brief generalization ignores the different tone of Tolstoy’s comments on the human sciences following his conversion. The substance is unchanged. 14. Note Tolstoy’s amusement at the opposed interpretations of his thought in James’s diagnosis of “a melancholic, close to mental illness,” and in a reactionary Russian paper, which denounced him as “a materialist, who denies everything soulful.” 15. PSS 6 0 357-358. I have adapted the translation of R. F. Christian, ed., Tolstoy’s Letters, 2 vols. (New York Scribner, 1978), 1: 142. Unless otherwise specified, all translations are the author’s. 16. For “glory be,” see, e.g., Richard Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger (New York Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 159 et pass. For “spoiled art,” see John Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel (New York Viking Press, 1967), pp. 89 et pass. A surreptitious spiritualist, V. Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (New York: Harcourt Jovanovich, 1981), pp. 236-243, combines “glory be” with praise of emergent modernism in Tolstoy’s “most perfect achievement.”A secular kind of “glory be”-death of oneself transcended by life’s progress in others-has been repeatedly read into the story, e.g., by Arsenii I. Vvedenskii, Obshcheswennoe samosoznanie v russkoi literature (Social Self-Consciousness in Russian Literature) (Saint Petersburg: Izd. M.P. Mel’nikova, 1900), pp. 208-226. 17. Philippe Arihs, The Hour ofOur Death (New York Knopf, 1981), 563ff, sets Tolstoy’s story in the context of “death denied by “medicalization,”as in Elisabeth KublerRoss’s “how-to-die’’manual, On Death and Dying (New York Macmillan, 1969). 18. Aylmer Maude translates as “the right thing,” Margaret Wettlin as “the real thing.” For the original, see Tolstoy, PSS 26: 112. 19. The three critics are, in order, Edward Wasiolek, Lev Shestov, and Philip Rahv. Cf. Jan van der Eng, “The Death of Ivan Il’ic,” Russian Literature 7 (1979): 159-192. 20. “The dark realm,” originally Nikolai Dobroliubov’s phrase, passed into common use. I put it into Blake’s famous line, in place of “England’s green and pleasant land,” to emphasize the difference that context makes in dreams of an ideal society. 21. Cf. Jason Gary Horn, Mark Twain and William James: Crafting a Free Serf(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996).

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22. See G. I. Chelpanov in Voprosyfilosofii i psikhologii, 1892, 11: 69-76. Cf. Mnogoobrazie religioznogo opyta (Moscow, 1992). 23. The translation in Vygotsky, Collected Works, 3 (1997): 341, turns the meaning upside down by omitting “not”: “. . .We will work precisely on making it truthful and to make it agree with Marx’s theory.” 24. See, e.g., V. F. Asmus, “Alogizm Uil’iama Dzhemsa,” Pod znamenem marksizma 7-8 (1927): 53-84. 25. I have summarized here the extended analysis of Chekhov in Joravsky,“Know-

ing Ourselves: Literary Art versus Social Science,” in Dorothy Ross, ed., Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 91-127. 26. The story “Perekati-pole (putevoi nabrosok)” is in Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii 6 (Moscow, 1983-1988): 253-267. Constance Garnett translated it as “The Uprooted,” in The Tales of Chekhov, vol. 7, 13 vols. (Ecco Press, 1984-1987).

Works Cited Bjork, Daniel. The Compromised Scientist: Willliam James in the Development of American Psychology. New York Columbia University Press, 1983. Chekhov, A. P. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete Collected Works), 18 vols. Moscow: “Nauka,” 1983- 1988. Frost, Robert. The Poetry ofRobert Frost. New York Holt, 1969. Grot, N. Ia. “ 0 zadachakh zhurnala” (On the Journal’s Tasks). Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii, no. 1 (1889): v-xx. Hearst, Eliot, ed. The First Century of Experimental Psychology. Hilldale, N.J.: Erlbaum Associates, 1979. Joravsky, David. Russian Psychology. A Critical History. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1989.

Myers, Gerald E. William James. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986. Simon, Linda. Genuine Reality: A Life of William James. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998.

Tolstoi, L. N. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii” (PSS) (Complete Collected Works). 90 vols. Moscow: Gos. izd. khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1928-1958. Vygotsky, L. S. Sobranie sochinenii (Collected Works).6 vols. Edited by A. V. Zaporozhets et al. Moscow: Pedagogika, 1982-1954. Zenkovsky,V. V. A History of Russian Philosophy. New York Columbia University Press, 1953.

Wi IIiam James Bibliography

Works All references to William James’s works in the text are to the following Harvard University Press annotated editions, except where otherwise noted. James, William. Essays, Comments, and Reviews [ECR]. Introduction by Ignas K. Skrupskelis, 1987. .Essays in Philosophy [EPh].Introduction by John J. McDermott, 1978. . Essays in Psychical Research [EPR].Introduction by Robert A. McDermott, 1986. . Essays in Psychology [EPs]. Introduction by William R. Woodward, 1983. . Essays in Radical Empiricism [ERE]. Introduction by John J. McDermott, 1976. . Essays in Religion and Morality [ERM]. Introduction by John J. McDermott, 1982. .Manuscript Essays and Notes [MEN].Introduction by Ignas K. Skrupskelis, 1988. . Manuscript Lectures [ML].Introduction by Ignas K. Skrupskelis, 1988. . A Pluralistic Universe [PU].Introduction by Richard J. Bernstein, 1977. . Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth [P] [MT]. Introduction by H. S. Thayer, 1978. . The Principles of Psychology [PP]. 3 vols. in 1. Introduction by George A. Miller, 1983. . Psychology: Briefer Course [PBC]. Introduction by Michael M. Sokal, 1984. . Some Problems of Philosophy [SPP]. Introduction by Peter H. Hare, 1979. . Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals [TT]. Introduction by Gerald E. Myers, 1983. . The Varieties of Religious Experience [VRE].Introduction by John E. Smith, 1985. -243 -

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WilliamJumes Bibliography The Will to Believe [WB]. Introduction by Edward H. Madden, 1979.

. “The Psychology of Belief.” In William James: Writings 1878-1899. Edited by

Gerald E. Myers. New York The Library of America, 1992, pp. 1021-1056.

Published Correspondence The Correspondenceof William James. Eds. Ignas Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. 5 vols. (13 vols. projected). Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992- . Letters of William James. Ed. Henry, James 111.2 vols. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1926. Selected Unpublished Correspondence. Ed. Frederick J. D. Scott. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986.

Russian Translations of William James’s Works in Order of Publication: Please note: This list is not definitive. It is only as complete as present bibliographical information permits. The editors thank Gennady Obatnin for his assistance in the compilation. Note: “James” appears as “Dzhems” or “Dzheims”; “William” as “Uill’iam” or “Vill’iam.” Psikhologiiu (Text Book of Psychology). Translation and Introduction by I. I. Lapshin. 66 illus. Zupiski istoriko-filologicheskogofukul’tetu Imp. S. -Peterburgskogo universitetu (Transactions of the Historical-Philological Department, the Imperial St. Petersburg University). Vol. 39. St. Petersburg: Soikin, 1896. 0 chelovecheskom bessmertii (Human Immortality). Translated from 2d English edition by 0.A. S. Moscow, 1901 Nuuchnye osnovy psikhologii (Scientific Bases of Psychology). Anonymous translator. Edited by L. E. Obolenskii. 63 illus. “S.-Peterburgskaia Elektropechatnia.” 1902 [NB: A new translation (not a revision of the 1896 Lapshin version) of Psychology: Briefer Course, not Principles of Psychology.] “Predislovie” (Foreword). In Boris Sidis, Psikhologie vnusheniiu (The Psychology of Suggestion). St. Petersburg, 1902. Zuvisimost’ very ot voli i drugie opyty populiurnoi filosofi (The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy). Translated by S. I. Tsereteli. St. Petersburg: M. B. Pirozhkov, 1904. Mnogoobruzie religioznogo opytu (The Varieties of Religious Experience). Translated by V. G. Malakhieva-Mirovich and M. V. Shik. Edited by S. V. Lur’e. Moscow: Russkaia mysl’, 1910. Prugmutizm. Translated by Iushkevich Pave1 Solomonovich. St. Petersburg: “Shipovnik,” 1910.

William James Bibliography

245

Vselennaia s pliuralisticheskoi tochkoi zreniia (A Pluralistic Universe). Translated by V. Osipov and 0. Rumer. Edited by G. G. Shpet. 1911. “Vozmozhno li soobshchatsia s umershimi?” (Is it possible to communicate with the dead?) From the Proceedings of the London Society for Psychological Research. Introduction by 0. Lodge. Translated by A. I. Bobrova. Moscow, 1911. “Sushchestvuet li soznanie?” (Does ‘Consciousness’Exist? [ E R E ] ) .Tranlated by Margarita Grinval’d. In Novye idei vfilosofii 4 (1913): 102-127. Mnogoobrazie religioznogo opyta. Moscow, 1992. Mnogoobrazie religioznogo opyta. Moscow: Nauka, 1993. “Chto takoe pragmatizm” (What Pragmatism Means). Chap. 2 of Pragmatism, from the 1910 translation of Pavel Iushkevich. In Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta: ser. 7, Filosofiia 1993: 82-91. Volia k vere (The Will to Believe). Based on translation by Tsereteli, 1904. Moscow: Respublika, 1997. Pragmatizm. The 1910 translation by Pavel Iushkevich with minor emendations. In Volia k vere. Moscow: Respublika, 1997. “Chelovecheskaia energiia” (The Energies of Men [ E M ) .Translated by L. E. Pavlova. In Volia k vere. Moscow: Respublika, 1997. “Pragmaticheskii vzgliad na istinu i ego nevernye tolkovaniia” (The Pragmatic Account of Truth and Its Misunderstanders [ M U ) . Translated by L. E. Pavlova. In Volia k vere. Moscow: Respublika, 1997. “Sushchestvuet li soznanie?” Based on translation by Grinval’d. In Volia k vere. Moscow: Respublika, 1997. “Mir chistogo opyta” (A World of Pure Experience [ERE]). Translated by L. E. Pavlova. In Volia k vere. Moscow: Respublika, 1997. Vvedenie vfilisofiiu (Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy). Moscow: Respublika, 2000.

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Index

Adler, Alfred, 38-39, 54n6 America: capitalism, James attacked as representing, 2,200; Catholicism in, 153; diversity of religion in, and James’s place in, 150-51; imperialism, 223 (see aZso the Philippines); Protestantism, James as representative of, 204-5; Protestant Reformation and American pragmatism, compared to Russian religious renaissance, 170; religion in, 204-5 “Anaesthetic Revelation” (rev.), 66-67, 69. See also Blood, Benjamin Paul anhedonia, melancholy, 35-36,41,234. See also “the sick soul” “Are We Automata?” 20 Asmus, V. F., 7, 13n3 Avenarius, Richard, 5,200. See also Mach, Ernst Bakhtin, Mikhail, 36,40,46,54n8,221; center of Nevel-Vitebsk group, 7. See also Emerson, Caryl Baranoff-Chestov, Natalie, 160, 167

Baudelaire, Charles, 95 Belov, Vladimir, “everyday philosophy,” 222n3 Bely, Andrei, 104, 114-15, 118. See also Russian sectarians Berdyaev, Nikolai, 5, 10, 170 Bergson, Henri, 7,29, 82,94, 108, 136, 170,191 Bernheim, Hippolyte, 94 Bilibin, Ivan, 100-101 Binet, Alfred, 97 Bitov, Andrei, 214-18,220-21,222; The Monkey Link, 216-18,220; The Pushkin House, 214 Blok, Alexander, 186n16 Blondel, Maurice. See Modernism Blood, Benjamin Paul, 65-66,67,68-69 Bloom, Harold, 89-90 Boecklin, Arnold, 100 Bogdanov, A. A., 193-94,199,206; attacked by Lenin (compared to attack on James), 200; empiriomonism, 194-95; influence on Gorky, 199-200 Bolsheviks, 191 Bryusov, Valery, 104, 110n3

- 247 -

248

Index

Bugaev, Nikolai, 114 Bunyan, John, 36,184n2 Carlyle, Thomas, 38,76771120 “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” 69-71 Channing, William Ellery, 151 Charcot, Jean Martin, 94 Chechnya, Russian military action in, 88 Chelpanov, Georgy I., 132-33,141-43, 155n2, 155-61110, 1561113; “James as Psychologist,” 133, 141-43 Clark, Xenos, 38 Clowes, Edith, 207112 “The Confidences of a ‘Psychical Researcher’,’’ 106-7 consciousness: paranormal states of (seepsychic phenomena; mysticism); Philosophy of the Unconscious (Hartmann, Eduard von), 116; the religious subconscious, 214; Russian philosophers on James’s theories of, 132,139,140,141-43,147, 170,172; scientific study of expanded states of, by James and others, 94,98, 99, 104; “sciousness,” 230-31,235; stream of, 59,113,115,119-20,121, 123; the subconscious, 26,96,97, 117-18,172,212,220; subliminal consciousness, 25,26,37,101,103,142; threshold of, 113,119 (seealso Fechner, Gustav); the unconscious, 99,113,115, 116,118,139,170; universal consciousness,98,115. See also mysticism; world soul “The Consciousness of Lost Limbs,” 22 conversion, 204; as homeopathic process, 34; James’s definition of, 34; perversion, as obverse of, 34,37,40, 48,53 culturology, 214,220. See also Epstein, Mikhail Darwin, Charles, 18,95 decadence, 97,98,108

De Quincey, Thomas, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 71,4042 determinism, 63,71,72,74 Dewey, John, 3,8, 13114; lecturer, along with James, at Glenmore Summer Institute of the Cultural Sciences, 190 Dionysian madness, 120, 121, 122 “Does Consciousness Exist?” 10,28 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 4,71,95,116,122, 152, 159, 165,214; The Brothers Karamazov, 3 4 3 7 , 4 4 5 3 ; Crime and Punishment, 39,46; The Diary of a Writer, 35,38; The Double, 43; “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” 34,35, 40-44,53; The Idiot, 46,47,63; “The Landlady,” 177; “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” 152; “Peasant Marei,” 33,35,37-40,44,53 Dostoevsky, Dr. Michael (father), 49 Du Prel, Baron Carl, 99, 101, 109-10; Die Philosophie der Mystik, 99, 109; Der Spiritismus, 99 Edie, James, James’s approach to religion, 222112 Eikhenbaum, Boris, 61 Einsteinian physics, 5 Ellenberger, Henri, 105 Emerson, Caryl, 12-1 3112, n4 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 68,70, 71, 77n20,150-51 empiriocriticism (empirical criticism), 177, 19495. See also Avenarius, Richard; Mach, Ernst empirio-symbolism, 5. See also Yushkevich, Pave1 Solomonovich “The Energies of Men,” 10 Epstein, Mikhail, 12,213-15,219-22; After the Future, 221; Faith and Image, 219; The New Sectarianism, 219-20,221; “The Teaching ofYakov Abramov,”213-19,220,221; “The Way in the Desert,” 221 Essays in the Realist Worldview (1904), 146. See also positivism

Index “Exceptional Mental States” (Lowell lectures, unpublished), 28,96; fatalism, Tolstoyan, 65,74 Fechner, Gustav T., 114; on threshold of consciousness, in Elemente der Psychophysik, 117-20,121; on threshold of memory, 36 “The Feeling of Effort,” 20,21 Filosofov, Dmitry, 172 Florensky, Pavel, 95 Flournoy, Theodore, 24,26,29,65, 105 Foucault, Michel, 185n4,213 Fouillee, Alfred, 94 Fourier, Charles, 16, 171 Frank, Joseph, 55 Frank, Semyon, 5-6,10,124,181 free will, inner freedom, 16, 17-18, 30, 63,64,65,66-67,68,73-74,75nl, 146,236,237 Freud, Sigmund, 38, 178-79, 180,239; James’s and Mikhail Epstein’s departures from, 220 “On the Function of Cognition,” 23; Gandhi, Mahatma, 82 Gellner, Ernest, 177 genius, 102-4. See also Lowell lectures Gershenzon, Mikhail, 172,184-85n2 Gifford lectures. See The Varieties of Religious Experience glossolalia, 182. See also the “new art”; Russian sectarians God-building, 191-207,214; Nietzschean influence on, 192-96. See also Gorky, Maxim God-seekers, 5,2 14 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 17,70, 76n17 Gorky, Maxim, 3-4,189-207; antiWestern bias in 1930s, 190-91; and Marxist “collectivism,” 199-200; meetings with James, 189-91; Nietzschean roots, 195-96; on religion, 196-97

249

Gorky, Maxim, works oE “Chelovek (Man),” 208115; A Confession, 180, 197-98,201,207; “Destruction of the Personality (Razrushenie lichnosti),” 198-99; Enemies, 190; Essays on the Philosophy of Collectivism, 199; The Lower Depths, 196,200,201; “Makar Chudra,” 203n5; Mother, 190,197; “On Self-Taught Writers,” 190; “The Story of the Siskin Who Lied and of the Woodpecker, a Lover of Truth,” 194 “Great Men and Their Environment,” 204; first published as “Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment,” 2 1 Great Soviet Encyclopedia on James, 8 Grot, Nikolai, editor of Questions of Philosophy and Psychology, 3,95-96, 131,132,133,134,141 Gurevich, P. S., 10,211-15,221; “Grumblings of the S o d and Mystical Experiences,”211; The Phenomenon of Man (edited), 213; “The Renaissance of Anthropology,” 214 Gurney, Edmund, 22. See also Myers, Frederic W. H. Harnack, Adolph, 165, 166 Hartmann, Eduard von. See consciousness, the unconscious Hearst, Eliot, 230-3 1 Hegel, G. W. F., 71 Hegelian school of thought, 65,68 Herzen, Alexander, 76 Hibbert Lectures (Oxford), 15 “The Hidden Self,” 22,96 Hodgson, Shadworth, 20,22 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 94,95 “Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine,” 106, 117; “Preface to the Second Edition,” 106 Husserl, Edmund, 159, 166 idealism, 3, 25, 26, 68, 69, 70, 74; idealistic monism, 108;

250

Inidex

metaphysical idealism, 65,68, 76; neo-idealism, 72 International Congress of Physiological Psychology, 3,23-24 Ivanov, Viacheslav, theorist, poet, critic, 6, 113-25; “The Crisis of Individualism,” 115, 116; “Dostoevsky and the Novel-Tragedy,’’ 122; “The Dream of Melampus,” 121,128; “Dryads,” 120,127; “The Idea of the Non-Acceptance of the World,” 118; “Naked I Return,” 119; “Nietzsche and Dionysus,” 116; “Night in the Desert,” 121, 128; “Obvious Secret,” 116; “On the Russian Idea,” 117; “Runes of the Breakers,” 119; “Sacrum sepdcrum,” 120, 127-28; “Sleep,” 119; “Songs from the Labyrinth,” 116; “Theosophy and God-Building,” 123; “Thou Art,” 115, 121,123; “Threshold of Consciousness,” 116-17, 120, 126-27; “Voice of the Sea,” 118 Jackson, Robert Louis, 34,37-38 James, Henry Sr., 16-17,60 James-Lange theory of the emotions, 3, 23, 176, 177, 178,225; professional reactions to James theory, 226; Nikolai Lange on, 177 James, William: Soviet rejection of James’s writings, Stalin and Cold War years, 2,7-9; post-Soviet reappearances of, & l o , 21 1. See also specific titles of works Janet, Pierre, 9 4 , 9 6 7 Joravsky, David, 3 Jung, Carl G., 117 Kant, Immanuel, 108,135,139,170; critical tradition of, 104; idealism, 192; Kantian ideas, 64; Shestov and James as anti-Kantians, 160. See also neo-idealism; neo-Kantianism Kelly, Aileen, 6-7

Khlysts. See Russian sectarians Khvostov,V. M., 156n15 Kierkegaard, Ssren, 159,166 Kline, George, 192 Knapp, Liza, 45 Konevskoi, Ivan (Ivan Oreus), 97-102, 107-9; “Before the Paintings of Schwind,” 100, 109; “The Cornerstones of My World View,” 108-9 Konovalov, Dmitry, 174-84, 185nn5,14, 1861116 Kotliarevsky, Sergei, 133, 134, 136, 143-54,155n4,156n16,156n19, 157n21; “James as Religious Thinker,” 133,14546,149-52,153-54; “Pragmatism and the Problem of Tolerance,” 133,145-46, 151-52,153; “The Premises of Democracy,” 154; “On the Relative and the Absolute,” 133,14749,152; “On True and False Realism,” 146-47 Kruchenykh, Aleksei, 184 Lapshin, Ivan, 1045,170 Lenin,V. I., 5,82, 171, 191, 198-99,233; attack on James’s pragmatism, 200, 241nll. See also Bogdanov, A. A. Le Roy, Eduard. See modernism “Is Life Worth Living?”64,74,201 Ljunggren, Magnus, 117,118 Lombroso, Cesare, 103 Lopatin, Lev, 12, 13344, 150, 155n5, 156n14,156n17; “Monism and Pluralism,” 135, 141; Positive Tasks, 141; “The Present and Future of Philosophy,” 133-35; “The Urgent Tasks of Present-Day Thought,” 141 Lowell lectures (“Exceptional Mental States,” unpublished), 28,96 Lunacharsky, Anatole, 193,201,202, 205-6; “The Future of Religion,” 197; Religion and Socialism, 193 Lurye, S.V., 123, 170, 179 Luther, Martin, 162, 165

Index Mach, Ernst, 5,21, 177,208118. See also empiriocriticism Malinowski, Bronislaw, functionalism, 177 Marx, Karl, 95, 170, 192,200 Marxism, 5, 7,8; Nietzschean, 192-94, 199; propagated in the social sciences, 238; Russian, 191, 196 materialism, 65,68,74, 132, 138, 140, 149,177 The Meaning of Truth, 27,30 medicine, 97: alternative, Dostoevsky‘s and James’s personal experience of, 51-2; homeopathic, 47-51; homeopathic vs. allopathic, 34 mediumism, 94,98, 101, 102, 104, 142. See also Du Prel, Baron Carl; spiritism melancholy, 205; as religious phenomenon. See anhedonia Melnikov-Pechersky,P. I., 182 Menand, Louis, 93 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, 171, 172 Mesmer, Anton, 94 Metaphysical Club, 18; The Metaphysical Club. See Menand, Louis Mill, John Stuart, 17, 18,63, 164 Miller-Pogacar,Anesa, 220,222n9 Milosz, Czeslaw, 55n18 Minsky, Nikolai, 171 Modernism, French Catholic, affinities with James’s thought, 151-2 monism, 106, 108, 135, 137, 139, 141, 145-7,148,152,1534,205 “The Moral Equivalent of War,” 81,233 “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” 201-2 Morson, Gary Saul, 65,76n17 Moscow PsychologicalSociety, 4,72,95, 114,131-54 Moscow State University, 9, 11,222n8 Moscow University, 131,138 Munsterberg, Hugo, 24 Myers, Frederic W. H., 1034, 107. See also Phantasms of the Living...

25 1

Myers, Gerald E., 66,231,240n3 mysticism, 10, 11,26,93,95,97,99, 100, 105,115,169,197,205,214; artistic mysticism, 100, 110; capacity for, Tolstoy’s compared to James’s, 60; mystical art, 98; mystical experience, drug-induced, 43; mystical experience, states, 60,71,72,100, 101-2, 128, 142-43,150,160,211,212,217,

218-19; mystical phenomena, 97,170, 173,183. See akio psychic phenomena mystics, modern (Russian),94, 104,109; Viacheslav Ivanov, mystical experience, 123-24; Ivan Konevskoi, 99-102. See also Du Prel neo-idealism, 132,133,141,144,146, 153-54 neo-Kantianism, 97,104,108,135,170 neopositivism. See positivism the “new art,” 93,94,95, 101, 102, 105, 169; Formalism, 183-84; Futurism, trans-sense language (zaum), 183-84; Symbolism and sectarianism, 183 the “new psychology” (the French scientific approach to study of mental phenomena), 95,101,105, 115-16, 121, 123. See also “la psychologie nouvelle” the “New Psychology” (experimental, developed in Germany), 23-24, 229-30. See also Wilhelm Wundt Nicholas I, 88 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 99, 104, 116, 121, 142,166,170,171,213,236; Thus Spake Zarathustra, 195, 198 “Notes on Automatic Writing,” 22 pacifism, 81-82,83,89,91 panpsychism, 99,104-8 pantheism, 60,71,74,99-100,106-7, 140 Papini, Giovanni, 29 Pascal, Blake, 166 Paul, St., apostle, 149, 162, 166

252

Index

Peirce, Charles, 18,27 personalism, ethical, 135, 141 personality, Ivanov’s and James’s views of, 116, 119-20, 121-22; James’s theories of, 96 Peter the Great, 6 Phantasms of the Living (Edmund Gurney, Frederic W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore, Russian introduction by Vladimir Solovyov), 122 the Philippines: James’s attitude toward 1898 war in, 83 “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” 27-28. See also pragmatism philosophy, spiritualist, 132, 135, 138-43 philosophy vs. science, 132, 134, 136, 144,145,146

pluralism, 28,30,65,68, 108, 113, 135, 136,141,143,150,153,154,156n16, 205,221-22; as redefined by Mikhail Epstein, 213 “A Pluralistic Mystic,” 66-69 A Pluralistic Universe, 1, 12,30, 105, 106, 108,119,135,140,150

Podmore, Frank. See Myers, Frederic W. H. Poe, Edgar Allan, 95 Pomerants, Grigory, 214-16; Corning Out of the Trance, 2 15 “poor believers.” See Epstein, Mikhail positivism, 67,74, 132-33, 133-37, 146, 160, 164,232; neopositivism, 3,5; opposed to artistic creativity, 95; positivistic science, 71 “The Pragmatic Account of Truth and Its Misunderstanders,” 10 Pragmatism, 2,5,6,8, 10, 11,27,30, 161, 163, 164; Lev Lopatin’s arguments based on, 134, 137-38; Russian translation of, 4, 10-1 1, 133; “What Pragmatism Means,” (ch. 2) 11, 135 pragmatism, 25,26-30,72, 133-38, 139, 143,144-45,146,147-48,150, 151-52,169,170,172,177,180,191, 211,213,228-29,232-33; analogy

with Marx’s praxis, 233,238; debate over, in Russia, 6, 10, 11; first use by James, 27; interpreted by Dale Carnegie and Mussolini, 228-29 Jamesian, 200,203. James’s definition of, 26,27; rejected by Lenin, 238 See also Lenin, V. I. The Principles of Psychology, 3, 19,21, 23, 29, 59,71,96,97, 119, 121,238;

James’s introduction in Western Europe and Russia, 94,95 Prishvin, Mikhail, 182 Protestantism, 171-72 psychic phenomena, 22,24,94,174; automatism, automatic writing, 96, 101; dtdoublement, multiple personality, 94, 101, 102; hypnotism, 94, 109; James’s research on, 22-23, 96,105,199; trance phenomena, 97-99. See also Lowell lectures; mysticism psychoanalysis, 179 “la psychologie nouvelle,” 94. See also the “new psychology” “The Psychology of Belief,” 65 Psychology: Briefer Course (Psychology),

3,59,62-63,71, 73-74, 120, 169, 170, 177,230; introduction, early interpretation in Russia, 96,97,98, 102,104-5,108-9,110; “Psychology and Philosophy,” 105

“The Pure Self or Inner Principle of Personal Unity,” 119 Pushkin, Alexander, 184-85n2 Putnam, Hilary, 2

Questions of Philosophy and Psychology,

4,60,95, 114, 131, 132, 133, 134, 145

radical empiricism, 124-5 Rasputin, Grigory. See Russian sectarians; Khlysts “Reaction-Time in Hypnotic Trance,” 22 “realism,”Ivanov’s (akin to James’s “radical empiricism”), 125

Index Rebus, journal of Moscow spiritism, 104 “A Record of Observations of Certain Phenomena of Trance,” 22

“Reflex Action and Theism,” 21,201 Religious-Philosophical Society, 123 “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence,” 19 Renouvier, Charles (editor, Critique philosophique), 17-18,20,23,30, 66-67,75nll Rice, James, 39 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 54n9 Royce, Josiah, 25,65 Rozenblium, L. M., 39 the Russian idea, 6-7; The Rebirth of the Russian Idea, 6; revisionist version, 7; Slavophile-Westernizer debate, 6; as title of works by Vladimir Solovyov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Nikolai Berdyaev, 6 Russian Orthodox Church, 10, 171, 173, 233; Antony, archbishop of Volyn, 173, 180-81; Internal Mission, 173,180;Most Holy Synod, 181 Russian philosophers, post-Soviet republication of, 2 13 Russian psychology, twentieth century, 226,238 Russian religious renaissance, post 1905, 4-5,171-72 Russian Revolution of 1905, 154 Russian sectarians, 171, 174, 178-84; “communal sin,” 178; Khlysts, 171, 175-76, 180,284; Khlysts, ecstatic speech, 182-83,185n14; leapers, 179, 180; mystical (ecstatic) sects, 174; The Silver Dove (Andrei Bely), 182; shtundists, 186n17. See also American sectarianism; glossolalia Russian Thought, 5, 171, 179, 181, 182 Russian universities and academies: intellectual atmosphere at the start of the twentieth century, 169; Moscow Higher Women’s Courses, 182. Moscow Theological Academy, 174,

253

176, 180-81. See also Moscow University; St. Petersburg University Russo-Japanese War, 83 St. Petersburg University, 97,98, 104 Scanlan, James P., 6, 10 Schelling, F. W. J., 61 Schiller, Ferdinand Canning, 28-29 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 7,67-68,69-70, 71-73,76n13, n15,108,121 Schwind, Moritz von, 100 Sedgwick, Henry, 46 the “self,” 63,65,67,94,95,96,99, 102, 109 Semyonov, Sergei, 99,101-2 “The Sentiment of Rationality,” 20,21 Sesterhenn, Raimund, on God-building, 195,196 shamanism, James’s reported interest in, 190 Shemelin, N., 173-74 Shestov, Lev (Lev Shvarstman), 5, 159-67; All Things Are Possible: An

Experiment in Adogmatic Thinking, 159; Athens and Jerusalem, 159; Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy, 159; The Good in the Teaching of Count Tolstoy and E Nietzsche, 159; Great Vigils, 159,

160, 165; inferiority of reason to faith: central thesis of, 160; Job’s Balances, 159; “The Logic of Religious Creativity (in Williams James)” (In Great Vigils), 159; The Power of the Keys, 165; Sola Fide, 165 Shklovsky,Viktor, 183-84,186n 17 “the sick soul,” 26,41,227,228,229,236, 239 Sidis, Boris, 122 Signposts, 170-7 1 Simon, Linda, 1,2,88,24On5 Slavophile-Westernizer debate. See the Russian idea Society for Psychical Research, English (London), 22,96,103,104,122,125; American branch, 22,96

254

Index

Socrates, 162, 166 Solovyov,Vladimir, 6,72, 114, 121,212. See also Myers, Frederic W. H. “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psycholo&’ 2 1-22 Some Problems of Philosophy, 30,68 “The Spatial Quale,” 20 Spencer, Herbert, 18,20,65,68,95,232, 239

spiritism (sometimes called “spiritualism”), 73, 99, 105. See also mediumism spiritualist school of philosophy, 96 Strakhov, N. N., 71-72 Struve, Peter, 10, 171 Stumpf, Carl, 21,26 suicide, James’s flirtation with, 66,68 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 16,55n18,60, 167

symbolism, Russian, 113. See also decadence; the “new art” “tender-minded and “tough-minded,” Jamesian emotional types, 27-28, 226-7,232

Terras, Victor, 5 1 Thales, 161-2, 166 theism, 201,222,225,227 theosophy, 123 Tiutchev, Fyodor, 107,115 Tolstoy, Leo, 4, 33, 35-36, 50, 59-74,

159,160,166,214,228,233-37, 2411114; About Lqe, 75nl; And the Light Shineth in the Darkness, 83; Anna Karenina, 59, 64, 71-73, 81, 82; Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, 89; Boyhood, 103; Youth, 61-62; A Confession, 120, 136,234; “The Death of Ivan Ilich,” 82,229, 235-37; “The Devil,” 83,84; “On the Famine,” 229; “Father Sergius,” 83, 84-86,87-88,91; “Fragment without title,” 63; Hadzhi Murat, 73, 82,83,86-91; The Kingdom of God

is Within You, 73; “The Kreutzer Sonata,” 82, 83; “Letter of NonResistance,” 82; The Living Corpse, 82, 83; “The Power of Darkness,” 83, 84, 86; Resurrection, 59, 82; The Sebastopol Stories, 81; “Stop and Think,” 83; War and Peace, 59,62, 63, 64, 65, 69, 70-72, 73, 81, 89, 90; What Is Art?, 229

“tough-minded.’’ See “tender-minded.’’ The Tower (the Ivanov salon), 114 transcendentalism, transcendental idealism, 59,68, 71, 74 the unconscious. See consciousness Uspensky, P. D., 123

The Varieties of Religious Experience, 25,64,67-68,118,122-24,171,173,

178, 190, 192,200, 203,207, 220, 229,232; attraction for post-Soviet readers, 10, 238; in conservative

Orthodox battle against Konovalov, 171, 172, 173, 178; on conversion, 33,35,204; Kotliarevsky on James’s originality as shown in, 143, 149, 154; Lev Lopatin on effect on modern religious feeling, 138, 142; on mystical and paranormal states, 43, 60, 96, 1 0 2 4 ; Russian translation and publications of, 2,

4-5,10,133,170,211,212,214-15;

Shestov’s essay on, 161-62, 163-64; Tolstoy and, 59-60, 72,233,234, 236-37

“Vozmozhno-li soobshchat’sia s umershimi?” 122 Vygotsky, Lev, 177,226,238,240n3, 241n23

Watson, John B. (Behaviorism).See James, William, theory of emotions Weber, Max, 172,185n3 “What Makes a Life Significant?”68

Index

“What the Will Effects,” 23 The Will to Believe, 2, 10, 1 1 , 122, 137-38,191,192,201-2,206-7; “The Dilemma of Determinism,” 65, 138, 158, 226; “The Will to Believe,” 25,64 “A World of Pure Experience” 10 world soul, 95,98,99, 100, 102, 106, 119-20,122

255

Wundt, Wilhelm, 230,231,234. See also the “New Psychology” Yushkevich, Pave1 Solomonovich, 5, 10, 215 Zenkovsky, V. V., 69,72,233 Zinovieva-Annibal,L. D. (second wife of V. Ivanov), 119,123

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About the Contributors

EDITH W CLOWES is Professor of Russian and Slavic Literatures at the University of Kansas. She is author of The Revolution of Moral Consciousness: Nietzsche and Russian Literature 189e-1914, 1988; translated and published in Russian, St. Petersburg: “Academic Project,” ( 1999) and Russian Experimental Fiction: Resisting Ideology after Utopia (1993). She is presently completing a book-length study of philosophical discourse in Russia. ALEXANDER ETKTNDis Professor of Humanities at the European University in St. Petersburg. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the Bekhterev Institute in Leningrad in 1985 and a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Helsinki in 1998. He has taught at Georgetown and New York Universities and was a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington and the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin. His books include The Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia ( 1996) and Khlyst. Sects, Literature and Revolution (1998). JOAN DELANEY GROSSMAN is Professor Emerita of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California at Berkeley. Her work on Russian modernism includes Valery Bryusov and the Riddle of Russian Decadence (1985) and Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, edited with Irina Paperno (1994). Her 1973 Edgar Allan Poe in Russia: A Study in Legend and Literary Influence recently appeared in St. Petersburg in Russian translation.

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About the Contributors

BRIANHOROWITZ, Associate Professor of Modern Languages and Judaic Studies at the University of Nebraska, author of The Myth of A. S. Pushkin in Russia’s Silver Age: Mikhail Gershenzon, has published widely on Russian Silver Age philosophy and culture. The recipient of various fellowships, including a Fulbright, an Alexander Humboldt, and a Yad Yanadiv Fellowship from Hebrew University, he has published most recently on S. Ansky and Lev Levanda, and he is presently at work on a book, Acculturation, Nationalism, and the Jewish Diaspora in Tsarist Russia. DAVIDJORAVSKY, Milton H. Wilson Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University, has authored several books on twentieth-century Russian intellectual history, including Russian Psychology:A Critical History (1989), and numerous articles on science and philosophy and history of literature and culture. He is at work on a comparative study of the emergence of modernist fiction in France, Germany, and Russia. ROBINFEUER MILLERis the Editha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities at Brandeis University where she teaches Russian and Comparative Literature. She served as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis, 1994-2000. Her books include Dostoevsky and “The Idiot”: Author, Narrator, and Reader (1981) and The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel (1992), and a coedited volume with Malcolm Jones, The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel (1998). GENNADY OBATNIN has focused his work on the Russian Symbolist poet Viacheslav Ivanov. He is author of Ivanov-mistik: okkul’tnye motivy v poezii i proze Viacheslava Ivanova (Ivanov-Mystic: Occult Motifs in the Poetry and Prose of Viacheslav Ivanov) (2000). He received his Ph.D. from Helsinki University and is presently a visiting lecturer at that institution. DONNATUSSING ORWINteaches Russian literature at the University of Toronto. She is author of Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847-1880 (1993), coeditor with Robin Feuer Miller of Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace by Kathryn Feuer (1996), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy (2002). She is also editor of Tolstoy Studies Journal.

RANDALL A. POOLEis Assistant Professor of Social Science and History in the College of General Studies, Boston University, where he is also a Faculty Fellow of the International History Institute. He has held a number of research fellowships, most recently at the Remarque Institute, New York University, and the Institute €or Advanced Studies in Princeton. His research focuses on nine-

About the Contributors

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teenth- and twentieth-century Russian intellectual history and philosophy. He has translated, edited, and introduced Problems of Idealism: Essays in Russian Social Philosophy (2003). RUTHRISCHIN has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature and culture and has pioneered study of Pavel and Semyon Yushkevich, who, like William and Henry James, joined the worlds of science and letters. Her works in progress include essays on William James and Pavel Yushkevich, “Riding to Cripple Creek Pragmatism, a Mediating Text” and “At Lenin’s Great Wall: The Yushkevich Challenge to Marxist Orthodoxy,” a book on Semyon Yushkevich and collected essays of Pavel Yushkevich in English. BARRY P. SCHERRis Professor of Russian at Dartmouth College and Provost. His areas of research include Russian verse theory, Russian prose of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and twentieth-century Russian poetry. Maksim Gorky: Selected Letters (1997), which he coedited and cotranslated with Andrew Barratt, is the latest of several studies devoted to that writer. His other publications include Russian Poetry: Meter, Rhythm, and Rhyme (1986); and A Sense of Place: Tsarskoe Selo and Its Poets (1993, coedited with Lev Loseff). LINDASIMON,Professor of English at Skidmore College, is the author of Genuine Reality: A Life of William James (1997), A Life of Alice B. Toklas (1977, 1991), and the editor of Gertrude Stein Remembered (1994) and William James Remembered (1996). Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, The American Scholar, the Journal of American History, the New York Times Book Review, and Prairie Schooner, among many other journals. ANDREW WACHTEL is Herman and Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professor

in Literature, Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Director of the Program in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Russian and South Slavic literatures, cultures, and societies. His most recent book is Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (1998).

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