(This entry’s suggestive title Genius And Democracy begs to be associated in my reader’s mind with Pushkin’s “Genius and Villainy are two things incompatible,” in his "Little Tragedy" Mozart and Saglieri. Because I cannot be properly reassured that my reader will be ready to make such an association, I therefore have to resort to such a crude device as spelling out what was initially supposed to be just a little hidden playful hint.)
For every Russian soul, mine no exception, the name of Alexander Pushkin symbolizes everything which is the best in Russia, her free maverick spirit, her deepest philosophical wisdom, her radiant creative genius, her youthful tragic heroism.
Pushkin is the epitome of an original thinker, that rare delicate plant, whose gentle nurturing is, according to Nietzsche, the greatest and most sublime responsibility of any civilized society. He stood apart from the rest of society, while his noble conception of social and individual freedom may be rivaled by a few other geniuses, but never surpassed.
He lived during one of the most turbulent times in Russia’s history during the nineteenth century: the 1825 Decembrist Rebellion, which was a conspiracy of several liberal officers-noblemen to abolish autocracy in Russia, and to emancipate the serfs. The rebellion was ineptly conducted, especially since its leader Prince Trubetskoy changed his mind and at the critical moment dropped out of sight, while the designated regicide Peter Kakhovsky, despite killing two senior military officers of the Tsarist Establishment, on two separate occasions could not bring himself to shoot Tsar Nicholas I (although previously he had suggested himself for the mission with a considerable bravado), plus a wave of defections from the ranks of the conspirators further doomed the half-baked plot. Pushkin was not one of the conspirators, but he sympathized with their liberal ideas, and in the grim aftermath (five participants were hanged, many others were sentenced to hard labor or exiled to Siberia for life) of this bizarre and tragic affair, he pleaded for a relaxation of the punishment, and for the Imperial pardon, which never came.
In his classic Russian version of Horace’s Ode Exegi Monumentum, Pushkin sees his own immortal contribution to humanity in “arousing good emotions with my lyre, glorifying liberty in our worthless age, and pleading for generosity toward the fallen.” This man truly knew something about freedom and liberty, and not from all the books in the world, as much as from the inner pulsations of his great soul, which is of course the only genuine manner of acquiring such knowledge.
But freedom and democracy never meant the same thing to him. “With astonishment we saw democracy in its repugnant cynicism, in its cruel superstitions, in its unbearable tyranny,” he writes in an astonishingly clairvoyant article. The democracy he has in mind is not the refined, intellectually privileged Jeffersonian masterpiece, but that common, vulgar variety that grows everywhere outside the world’s gardens of Eden, like a raging wild weed ready to overwhelm any attempted transplant of the refined, assiduously cultivated species, which it regards as a foreign and unwelcome intruder in the vast primeval fields of the real world.
(“Friends of Syria,” beware!)
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