movement. May we not suppose that the left hand (passivity, shrinking from responsibility) knew what the right hand (energy, criticism, activity) was doing?
In historical perspective, Mihailovskii pictured the evolution of Russian literature as a transition from aristocracy through the stage of the "aristocrats doing penance" to the democratic literary movement of our own day. Analysing the spokesmen of the aristocratic epoch, and in especial the writers of the forties and the sixties, Mihailovskii found in their work a confirmation of his own historico-philosophical analysis of the age. Lermontov's Hero of our own Time is the spokesman of bezvremen'e (the word has the double meaning of bad weather and bad luck), the representative of an inert epoch. From Avděev's Our Society in the Heroes and Heroines of the Literature of the Fifties (1874), Mihailovskii cites the analysis of the types Čackii, Oněgin, Pečorin, Rudin, Bazarov, and Rjazanov; and Mihailovskii is doubtless right when he makes common cause with Avděev on behalf of Rudin as a representative of the sixties, suggesting that Rudin was by no means so passive and inert as is usually held. Turgenev already represented the coming of better days, and still more could this be said of Mihailovskii's favourite authors, but the bezvremen'e has by no means disappeared, as can be shown by a study, not only of Dostoevskii, but also of Tolstoi, and still more of Čehov and of the decadents.
Apropos of the term favourite authors, Mihailovskii is by no means a blind admirer. For example, in connection with the dispute concerning Nekrasov's true character, Mihailovskii recalls an early saying of Nekrasov's, that he had sworn not to die in a garret. Mihailovskii saw clearly enough that this proletarian wished to become a wealthy man.
In his criticism of philosophical and of social and political trends and currents (Mihailovskii speaks rather of "moral and political" trends and currents), Mihailovskii is concerned chiefly with the present day. Only in passing does he allude to the earlier movements, like those of the slavophils and of the westernisers, for he considers that both these trends belong entirely to the past.
He says very little, too, concerning his Russian predecessors in the critical fields, concerning Černyševskii, Herzen, and Bělinskii; but in the early days of his literary activity he is never weary of pointing out the exaggerations in the nihilist
