"Free."

"Well, then shout: long live freedom!"

A joyful enthusiasm for life, which transcends the usual boundaries and ordinary order, a genuine, always temporary, rapture with the revelry of passions, which proceeds not from despair, but from an excess of strength, is possible, apparently, only when in the depths of the soul there is a living faith in some ultimate stability and inviolability of life. Just as a child rages and rages, proceeding from a sense of the unshakable firmness of parental authority, the calm comfort of his home, and becomes unchildishly serious and quiet in a strange environment, when his soul is full of anxiety and vagueness, so all of us, experiencing the shaking of the spiritual ground under our feet, have lost the ability to be childlike careless, to dare to exuberant joy — to what the Germans call the untranslatable beautiful word "Uebermut" [7]. To enjoy joyful intoxication, you need to have a home and be sure that you can sober up peacefully in it. Otherwise, only rampant despair is possible, that bitter, heavy drunkenness to which Marmeladov indulges, because he has "nowhere to go."

What we seek and yearn for is not freedom, but strength and stability, not chaotic wandering through endless distances, but peace in our home. We are carried to the sides by the turbulent waves of life, and we dream of setting foot on an unshakably solid shore. Or, more precisely, we are hanging in the air above the abyss, because we have lost the inner connection of our spirit, our personality with being, and we want to restore this connection, to lean on solid spiritual ground. We suffer not from an excess, but from a lack of spiritual strength. We languish in the desert, our soul seeks not a meaningless expanse of detachment from everything, but, on the contrary, a close, final merging with something unknown, which can once and for all fill, strengthen, and saturate it.

Our souls became impoverished and starving. The loss of faith is not an easy matter, the overthrow of the idols whom we and our fathers have worshipped so long and passionately is not child's play. Probably, it was just as terrible, desolate and dreary for our ancestors, the ancient Slavs, when Perun descended into the Dnieper along with the rest of the idols, and they did not know whom to serve now and from whom to ask for help in troubles. For the renunciation of idols is not an impudent betrayal, it is not a rejection of faith and falling into a frenzy of impiety: it is a sign of a change of faiths, and if a new faith has not yet been found, then the fall of the old is itself a sign of a passionate search for it, of a painful longing for it.

Blessed is he who, in this anguish, in this torment of spiritual hunger and thirst, has a near, kindred soul, no matter whether it be a friend, a mother, or a wife, before whom he can pour out his anguish, or with whom he can at least take a break from it, for often we are unable to fully express to the person closest to us, but even to ourselves, what torments us. And woe to the lonely!

However, we all have one native creature: it is the homeland. The more unhappy we are, the more empty our souls are, the more acutely and painfully we love it and yearn for it. Here, at least, we clearly feel: the homeland is not an "idol", and love for it is not an attraction to a ghost; The Motherland is a living, real being. We do not love it because of the "principle of patriotism," we do not worship its glory, or its power, or any abstract signs or principles of its existence. We love herself, our native, ancient, primordial mother; she herself is now unhappy, dishonored, sick with a serious illness, devoid of all greatness, of all conspicuous virtues and virtues indisputable to an outsider; She is spiritually ill along with all of us, her children. We can now love it only with that "strange love" in which the great, so spiritually close to us, yearning Russian poet, "a wanderer with a Russian soul persecuted by the world" [8] confessed.

This "strange love" is now for us the only genuine, simple love — that all-forgiving love for which "it is not good love, but good love." In the heat of political passions, those ostentatious passions, now imaginary for most of us, which we ourselves inflate in order to drown out the spiritual emptiness with them, and of which the same poet said so bitterly almost a hundred years ago: "And a secret cold reigns in the soul, when the fire burns in the blood" [9] — in this misty child we often forget our true love and involuntarily renounce the unfortunate mother, the only treasure. that remained on our earth.

We flaunt her shame, we grim maliciously at her sufferings, we even try to exaggerate both her sorrows and the depth of her moral fall, because we cannot reconcile ourselves to the false path she has taken. We lay upon others and on her very responsibility for her sins and misfortunes, which rests equally on all of us, her children, and we are often ready to identify her soul, so dear and dear to us, which, we know, is everlasting, with the outrage and abomination of her vicious child rapists, who now mock her. But all this happens in the superficial, ostentatious layer of our soul. Our true attitude is revealed not in words, not in conscious reasoning and evaluations, but in that anguish, in those tears of tenderness, with which we think of our native fields and forests, of our native customs, and listen to the sounds of our native song. Then we know that there is no country in the world sweeter and more beautiful than the motherland.

Any sorcerer you want Give me the beauty of robbery — Let him lure and deceive, You will not be lost, you will not perish, And only care will cloud Your beautiful features. Yes, we know: ... You are still the same - the forest, and the field, Yes, a patterned shawl up to the eyebrows. From the poem by A. A. Blok "Russia"

If only we could help our homeland to be resurrected, to be renewed, to appear to the world in all its beauty and spiritual power, it seems that we would find an outlet for our anguish, even if it was necessary to give our lives!

But it is here that we feel the hopelessness of our situation, the hopelessness of our dreams. And it is not at all because "the Bolsheviks are still holding out," that we do not know the means to overthrow them, and that there is no end in sight to their rule. Whoever still believes that the salvation of the motherland lies in the simple "overthrow of the Bolsheviks," that the "Bolsheviks" are some superficial, accidental evil, which it is enough to eliminate outwardly for truth and happiness to reign in Russia—who still lives by faith in this political idol, who is still intoxicated with revolutionary intoxication with the opposite content—does not know our anguish, and this is not why these lines are written. But unfortunately we know very well that it is impossible to help anyone, including one's homeland, if one is helpless oneself, that a beggar cannot enrich anyone, and that a sick person cannot become anyone's healer. We know that we ourselves are sick with the same disease as our homeland, no matter how different the symptoms of this disease are, and that we will be healed only together – if we are healed! We will not direct it to a new and right path until we have found it for ourselves. And because just as love for loved ones does not save us, which only softens, but does not quench our spiritual anguish, so does not save us the most sincere, most ardent and selfless love for the homeland. Faith in it itself, without which love is inconceivable, is rooted, we clearly feel, in some other, deeper and more all-embracing faith, in which we must still be strengthened, which we must find in our souls with indisputable and unshakable evidence, but which we do not yet have. Although love in itself does not need any justification, without this faith it is still devoid of any ultimate solidity, of any deepest justification. Were there not many peoples who perished, either from external misfortunes or from spiritual decay? In what way are we, Russians, better than others, and why can't we, too, disappear in this world earthquake? Maybe Russia is the same mirage as everything else that surrounds us? In our spiritual emptiness, we cannot find a convincing refutation of this nightmarish fantasy.

No, we feel it, without faith in something primary, fundamental, unshakable, without the ultimate, deepest stronghold on which our spirit could rest, no earthly inclinations and passions, no love and affection can save us.