general-purpose intellectual, the philosopher’s traditional slot in intellectual
space, was taken by the journalist-critic, then increasingly with the expansion
of the market, by the novelist—all the more so because, under political cen-
sorship, fiction was the only mode in which general ideas could be expressed.
With commercialization and ties to the world market, Russia became an
importer of European culture; intellectually, it fell into the export zone for the
German universities, the dynamo of world intellectual production. To the
extent allowed under Russian conditions, German academic structures and
contents were imported, with some notable results in mathematics and science.
Emulation of German cultural production was of course not confined to
Russia, but it was especially pronounced there because, unlike in England or
France, there was little indigenous organization of intellectual production to
act as rival. Russian intellectuals sojourned in the West and became links in
the German network: most notably Bakunin (in the Schelling-Marx-Wagner
networks; see Figure 14.2) and the former Hegelian Herzen, a central node of
the Russian exile community since fleeing to the West in 1847. Turgenev,
educated in Berlin, depicted in his novel Smoke (1867) the Russian intellectuals
in Baden, with their mixture of German philosophy and political plots for their
homeland.
Each current of German philosophy was quickly taken up in Russia. Under
the ban on university teaching and the censorship of translations, texts ac-
quired by sojourners passed from hand to hand in student discussion circles.
This mode of organization maximized ritualism and emotional commitment
to the text; intellectual life itself became a form of political action, since the
penalty for illicit writing or even reading was imprisonment and exile to Sibe-
ria, frequently exacted upon intellectuals around midcentury. In the 1830s,
Schelling and Fichte came fanatically into vogue; in the 1840s, Hegel. German
cultural capital was adapted to the factions of Russian underground politics;
both Westernizers and nativist Slavophiles drew abstract justification from uni-
versalist or Romanticist strands of German Idealism. The materialist contro-
versy of Germany in the 1850s was transmuted into the Russian nihilism of
the 1860s. Drawing political implications undreamed of in the West, Cherny-
shevski and Pisarev mingled Feuerbach, Moleschott, and Büchner with British
reform Utilitarianism to conclude that morality means nothing beyond rational
egotism, and that the sacrifice of lives in political action, even terrorism, is
justified by the greater good of the future populace. Still later, as soon as
Marxism became established in Germany through the journals and publishing
houses of the Social Democratic Party of the 1880s and 1890s, Russian
intellectuals adopted the doctrine to their already existing style of underground
radicalism.
Dostoyevsky came from the student generation of the 1840s, with its Ide-
Writers’ Markets: The French Connection^ •^771