LETTERS ABOUT THE WEST

HIEROMARTYR HILARION (TROITSKY)

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LETTERS ABOUT THE WEST

HIEROMARTYR HILARION (TROITSKY)

Letter One. Instead of a preface

You and I, my dear Friend, had to live in a difficult time, but at the same time in an extremely interesting and important time. Sometimes one is positively dizzy, especially when one imagines those grandiose world events of which we are destined to be contemporaries.

It is as if some new, special era in the life and history of our Russia is approaching. It is not enough, I think, only to observe and experience events; it is also useful to reflect on them. I hope that the current terrible war will be useful for Russian identity. Victory over the enemy in the present state of affairs is advantageous to the victors. But I am somehow not used to evaluating life phenomena from the point of view of profit. The ideological growth of the nation is dearer to me than economic growth and cultural success. And the growth of our national consciousness does not even depend on the outcome of the war; one clash with the West is enough. The impulse is given, and the thought is already working. In this letter I want to share with you, dear soul, my hopes for the future success of our Russian self-consciousness.

The most ardent of the Slavophiles dear to my heart, Konstantin Aksakov, exclaimed:

Always to superstitious Europe Will the Slavic race be chained? Most difficult is the spiritual captivity, There are no more painful spiritual wounds!

Is it not true that the Slavs, and in particular we Russians, are chained to Europe? After all, it is not only Griboyedov's girls who admire the West in our country. I will tell you, dear Friend, that I always felt somehow sad in my soul when I looked through the courses of "New Russian History" or the courses of "Russian Literature". "Why?" you ask. But because I caught their most general idea. Approximately this idea can be expressed as follows. Russia lived for a long time, but there was no sense in it. There was only darkness, ignorance, superstition. Finally, Peter the Great appeared. At first, he often traveled to the German Quarter, then "cut a window to Europe" and "transformed" Russia. Only with Peter did Russia see the light. In a word, "he was your god, Russia!" - as the flattering poets exclaimed. "Pre-Petrine Russia" - after all, this is already a common name. How ridiculed are the worldly ideals of our ancestors! "Domostroi" is something terrible for our Westerners. In general, without the Germans we are no good for anything and would remain forever in the darkness of ignorance. These are the thoughts that come to my mind when reading historical works. It is as if Russia has existed for only two hundred years, and what happened before can only be studied for the sake of curiosity or because it is necessary to study something. It seems to me, my friend, that the last two hundred years may be called the German period in Russian history. Through Peter's window, the Germans climbed into our hut and occupied the front corner in it. And the Russian people began to turn into Germans. At first, they threw off, and those who did not want to, forcibly took off their majestic clothes and put on a small German caftan. Ridiculous and strange clothes began to appear - camisoles, tailcoats - all of the kind of clothing that, in the words of Metropolitan Philaret, are not so much dressed as exposed. And after the clothes they began to change their souls, they began to live and think in German, they forgot even how to speak Russian. For two hundred years we worshipped the Germans. If the French were sometimes worshipped, it was again at the behest of the Germans. At that time, the German courts also listened to the tone set by the French Versailles.

Thus, my friend, we have fallen into shameful captivity. Prisoners are different. Some only think about how to escape from captivity, others cry like the Jews in the Babylonian captivity, and there are such captives that they forget their homeland and try not to remember it at all. The Russian people can be attributed to this last kind of captives. The Russians have forgotten Russian Russia. After all, you know, my friend, when Karamzin wrote "The History of the Russian State", they said about him that he discovered ancient Russia. Isn't that typical? But only a hundred years passed from ancient Russia to Karamzin. It is hardly possible to point to an example in the entire history of the world that only a hundred years ago the subject of discoveries was a past epoch!

Is not such a humiliation of all relatives deplorable? The national feeling, the national Russian consciousness seemed to have fallen asleep. Fell asleep, my friend, but not for everyone. It fell asleep above, in the "society", but it was awake below, among the people. If "society" considered itself only European, then the people thought and felt themselves first of all Russian. And so it seems to me that the split between the people and the so-called intelligentsia is nowhere more pronounced than in the attitude towards the West. The intelligentsia and the upper echelons of Russian society bowed down to the German, and the people always treated the German as if with condescension, always critically, distrustfully, and even ironically. After all, in the Russian language there is a completely literary word "German". And figure out what it means. In the popular dialect, all Western people are "Germans". Does not this very name, my Friend, seem to You to be condescending and ironic? After all, when a small child babbles incomprehensible, they say to him: "Ah, you are a German!" and then, how does a German appear in a folk song, in folk anecdotes? Certainly funny, stupid and cowardly. The Russian is a young man in front of him - both shrewd and brave.