Collapse of idols

Preface

The occasion for the compilation of this book was a speech delivered at a congress of Russian students in Germany, convened in Sarov near Berlin in May 1923 by the American Young Men's Christian Union (AMERICAN Y.M.S.A.).

This speech, largely improvised, met with a response among the students present at the congress. In the course of its written revision, it seemed to me necessary to significantly expand and supplement it, retaining, however, its main ideological content.

Like this oral speech, these lines do not contain any theory or philosophical system; and yet they do not pretend to be moral instruction or religious preaching. It is most correct to see in them a confession, but not a personal confession of the author — the author has neither sufficient humility nor sufficient self-conceit to confess publicly — but a confession, as it were, of a typical life and spiritual path of the modern Russian soul in general.

It seems to me that in the spiritual path of a thinking Russian person, who consciously lived through the last quarter of a century of our tragic, social and spiritual history and really learned something from it, there is something objectively valuable and, especially, necessary for the younger generation of Russian youth today. Moreover, it seems to me that, in spite of such a great difference both in the number and, mainly, in the content of the life experience of these two generations, not only is there no usual misunderstanding and mutual alienation between them, but there is, or at least is possible, some kind of deep inner solidarity between the worldview and the path of life. For the spiritual images of both generations were formed under the influence of one highly significant process, which began long before the revolution and found only its completion in its tragic experience. This process is the process of the birth of a living religious faith through the collapse or death of all the idols by which the soul of the Russian intellectual of the nineteenth century was seduced and by the worship by which Western European humanity still lives to a large extent. And I have tried to give to the best of my ability an objective — but at the same time, due to the nature of the topic, and inevitably subjective — description of this process. Maybe this review will benefit someone.

The exceptionally tragic character of the modern era, the unheard-of abundance of evil and blindness in it, the shattering of all the usual norms and foundations of life, make such excessively heavy demands on the human soul that it is often unable to cope with. The soul is subjected to a strong temptation either to renounce all sacredness and surrender to the emptiness and illusory freedom of cynical unbelief, or to cling with sullen persistence to the ruins of the dying old edifice of life and with cold hatred to turn away from the whole world and withdraw into itself. All the old, or rather recent, old foundations and forms of being perish, life mercilessly rejects them, exposing if not their falsity, then their relativity; and from now on it is no longer possible to build one's life on one's attitude towards them. Whoever is guided only by them runs the risk, if he wants to continue to believe in them, to lose his rational and living attitude to life, to become spiritually narrowed and ossified, and if he confines himself to denying them, to become spiritually corrupt and to be carried away by the turbid stream of universal meanness and dishonesty. The time is such that intelligent and lively people are inclined to be vile and renounce all spiritual content, while honest and spiritually deep natures are inclined to become stupid and lose a living attitude to reality. But in both inclinations there is revealed the perverse action of one great and essentially fruitful and healing spiritual process. Both cynical unbelief and frenzied, conscious idolatry and Old Believers manifest the loss of the former peace of mind, the impossibility of the former, good-naturedly naïve, unsophisticated faith and the need for true faith, the unconscious striving of the will towards something that would not be illusory, but would be the genuine, solid real basis of existence. I see the secret meaning of these dangerous and disastrous wanderings, as well as the way out of them, in the religious crisis in which all the idols of the half-hearted and superficial old humanitarianism perish, and in the depths of the spirit the ability to re-perceive the revelation of eternal and true life is ripening.

Germany. Ostseebad Zingst.

2 августа 1923 г.

С. Франк

I. КУМИР РЕВОЛЮЦИИ