task was to break and destroy absolutism; for this end, he was now willing to unite with the liberals. Whereas some years earlier he had condemned terrorism, he now favoured terrorist methods. For a moment he even believed in the possibility of negotiating with absolutism and its official representatives. I am thinking here of the episode with Pobědonoscev's "Holy Retinue."
Lavrov closed his political career as editor of clandestine literature. Throughout life he was a writer and a man of learning, but sacrificed his learned leisure and his opinions for political ends. This must not be taken as implying that he was weak of character. Whilst he temporarily accepted political and revolutionary methods, his fundamental aim ever remained to bring about a moral modification of society, for this change seemed to him of more decisive importance than any socio-political transformation.[1]
The judgment of the most competent of his contemporaries, of those whose personal knowledge of the man especially entitled them to an opinion, was that Lavrov's greatest and most far-reaching influence was exercised by his Historical Letters, by the effects which this book produced upon the rising generation then awakening to revolutionary ideas.
Lavrov's influence upon his contemporaries and successors was greatly restricted because he became what I may term an absolute westerniser. I mean that in his books he concerned himself little about his Russian predecessors and contemporaries, writing like an Englishman or a Frenchman who knew nothing of Russian literature and Russian thought. For example, he accepted the Comtist developmental scheme; his thought was devoted to western Catholicism and Protestantism, to European philosophers and their systems. The Russian church and its development, Russian sectarians, and Russian thinkers, seemed for him practically non-existent. Čaadaev had renounced the Russian church, but we feel that this renunciation cost him much. Lavrov desired to be a revolutionist, a revolutionary leader, but he wished to play this part with a positivist ataraxia which made him his own
- ↑ His adversaries continually recur to the fact that prior to the publication of his program in 1873 he had drawn up two other programs of a more radical character. In 1895, Lavrov explained this apparent vacillation by saying that in the two earlier programs he had attempted to establish at least a modus vivendi with his Bakuninist adversaries, and had therefore partially suppressed his own views.
