isaac-deutscher-the-prophet-armed-trotsky-1879-1921

THE PROPHET ARMED
Mephisto, Faust, Hamkt, Othello, artistically embodying definite
"moments" of the human soul. .. .' The symbolist school,
however, he held, was trying to elevate the means into an end
in itself and, so, was degrading the symbol from an intensified
expression of human experience into a means of escaping from
that experience.
His interest in European letters was as intense as was his
reaction against the national sclf-centredness of official, and in
part also of .Narodnik, Russia. He ridiculed the boast of the
Slavophiles that they had no need to learn from the West and
that the Russians themselves made all the great discoveries
and inventions-'the Russian land can rear its own Platos and
quick-witted Newtons'.' This 'westernizing', then common to
all Marxists and liberals, did not imply any repudiation of the
Russian spiritual heritage of the nineteenth century-Russia's
great literary tradition did not go back any farther. Most of
Russia's thinkers and writers had been rebels, and the revolutionary
intellectual was steeped in their works. It was the influence
of the literature of rebellion that helped Bronstein to cut
himself adrift from his own childhood and adolescence in which
there had been so little experience likely to make of him a
revolutionary. He had been, we know, profoundly impressed by
Gleb Uspensky. In 1902, when Vspensky died insane, Bronstein
quoted with self-revealing approval Cspcnsky's remark that
there had been almost no link between his adult life as a rebel
and his childhood and adolescence, and that he had had 'to forget
his own past' before he could form his new identity. This was,
of course, even truer of the writer of the obituary. '\Vi th terrible
suicidal perspicacity', he wrote, 'Uspensky grasped life such as
it was and he burned himself out in the craving for life such as it
should be. He searched for truth and found the lie; he searched
for beauty and found ugliness; he searched for reason and found
unreason.' 2
In the other leaders of the literary revolt, Belinsky, Dobrolyubov,
and to a lesser rxtent in Hcrzen, Bronstein admired their
identification with the oppr!'ssed, their indiffercncl' to worldly
' L. Trotsky, Sochinmya, vol. xx, pp. 116-18, the satirical article on 'The
Russian Darwin' published in :'./o,·embcr 1901.
:i Bronstein wrote two obituary essays on C!\pr.nsky, one for the Eastern Rtview
and another for Nauchnoyt Obo