Peter Chaadaev. Military service and social activities

Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadaev

In 1836, the first letter from P.Ya. Chaadaev. This publication ended in a big scandal. The publication of the first letter, according to A. Herzen, gave the impression of "a shot that rang out on a dark night." Emperor Nicholas I, after reading the article, expressed his opinion: "... I find that the content thereof is a mixture of impudent nonsense, worthy of a lunatic." The result of the publication: the journal was closed, the publisher N. Nadezhdin was exiled to Ust-Sysolsk (modern Syktyvkar), and then to Vologda. Chaadaev was officially declared insane.

What do we know about Chaadaev?

Of course, first of all, we recall the poem addressed to him by A.S. Pushkin, which everyone learns at school:

Love, hope, quiet glory
The deceit did not live long for us,
Gone are the funs of youth
Like a dream, like a morning mist;
But desire still burns in us,
Under the yoke of fatal power
With an impatient soul
Fatherland heed the invocation.
We wait with longing hope
Minutes of liberty of the saint,
As a young lover waits
Minutes of true goodbye.

While we burn with freedom
As long as hearts are alive for honor,
My friend, we will devote to the fatherland
Souls wonderful impulses!
Comrade, believe: she will rise,
Star of captivating happiness
Russia will wake up from sleep
And on the ruins of autocracy
Write our names!

The commentary to this poem is usually the words that Chaadaev is Pushkin's oldest friend, whom he met in his lyceum years (in 1816). Perhaps that's all.

Meanwhile, 3 poems by Pushkin are dedicated to Chaadaev, his features are embodied in the image of Onegin.

Pushkin wrote about the personality of Chaadaev in the poem “To the Portrait of Chaadaev” as follows:

He is by the will of heaven
Born in the fetters of the royal service;
He would be Brutus in Rome, Pericles in Athens,
And here he is a hussar officer.

Pushkin and Chaadaev

In 1820, Pushkin's southern exile began, and their constant communication was interrupted. But correspondence and meetings continued throughout life. On October 19, 1836, Pushkin wrote a famous letter to Chaadaev, in which he argued with the views on the destiny of Russia, expressed by Chaadaev in the first “ philosophical writing».

From the biography of P.Ya. Chaadaeva (1794-1856)

Portrait of P.Ya. Chaadaeva

Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadaev - Russian philosopher and publicist, in his writings sharply criticized the reality of Russian life. IN Russian Empire his works were banned from publication.

Born into an old noble family. On the maternal side, he is the grandson of the historian M. M. Shcherbatov, the author of the 7-volume edition of Russian History from Ancient Times.

P.Ya. Chaadaev was orphaned early, his aunt, Princess Anna Mikhailovna Shcherbatova, raised him and his brother, and Prince D. M. Shcherbatov became his guardian, in his house Chaadaev received an excellent education.

Young Chaadaev listened to lectures at Moscow University, and among his friends were A. S. Griboyedov, future Decembrists N. I. Turgenev, I. D. Yakushkin.

He participated in the war of 1812 (including the Battle of Borodino, went to the bayonet attack at Kulm, was awarded the Russian Order of St. Anne and the Prussian Kulm Cross) and subsequent hostilities. Serving then in the Life Hussar Regiment, he became close friends with the young Pushkin, who was then studying at the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum.

V. Favorsky "Pushkin Lyceum student"

He greatly contributed to the development of Pushkin, and later to the rescue of the poet from exile in Siberia that threatened him or imprisonment in the Solovetsky Monastery. Chaadaev was then adjutant to the commander of the guards corps, Prince Vasilchikov, and managed to get a meeting with Karamzin in order to convince him to stand up for Pushkin. Pushkin repaid Chaadaev with warm friendship and greatly appreciated his opinion: it was to him that Pushkin sent the first copy of Boris Godunov and was looking forward to a review of his work.

In 1821, unexpectedly for everyone, Chaadaev abandoned a brilliant military and court career, retired and entered secret society Decembrists. But even here he did not find satisfaction for his spiritual needs. Experiencing a spiritual crisis, in 1823 he went on a trip to Europe. In Germany, Chaadaev met the philosopher F. Schelling, assimilated the ideas of Western theologians, philosophers, scientists and writers, got acquainted with the social and cultural structure of Western countries: England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy.

Returning to Russia in 1826, he lived as a hermit in Moscow for several years, comprehending and experiencing what he had seen over the years of wandering, and then began to lead an active social life, appearing in secular salons and speaking out on topical issues history and modernity. Contemporaries noted his enlightened mind, artistic sense and noble heart - all this earned him unquestioned authority.

Chaadaev chose a peculiar way of disseminating his ideas - he expressed them in private letters. Then these ideas became public knowledge, they were discussed as journalism. In 1836, he published his first "Philosophical Letter" in the Teleskop magazine, addressed to E. Panova, whom he calls Madame.

In total, he wrote 8 "Philosophical Letters" in French. , the last of these was in 1831. In his Letters, Chaadaev outlined his philosophical and historical views on the fate of Russia. It was this view of his that was not recognized by the ruling circles and part of contemporary public opinion, the public outcry was enormous. “After“ Woe from Wit ”there was not a single literary work, which would make such a strong impression, ”said A. Herzen.

Some even declared that they were ready, with arms in hand, to stand up for Russia, insulted by Chaadaev.

He considered a feature of the historical fate of Russia “a dull and gloomy existence, devoid of strength and energy, which did not enliven anything except atrocities, did not soften anything except slavery. No captivating memories, no graceful images in the memory of the people, no powerful teachings in its tradition... We live in the present, in its narrowest limits, without the past and the future, among dead stagnation.

The appearance of the first “Philosophical Letter” became the reason for the division of thinking and writing people into Westerners and Slavophiles. Disputes between them do not stop today. Chaadaev, of course, was a staunch Westernizer.

Minister of Public Education Uvarov submitted a report to Nicholas I, after which the emperor officially declared Chaadaev crazy. He was doomed to a hermitage in his house on Basmannaya Street, where he was visited by a doctor who reported monthly on his condition to the tsar.

In 1836-1837. Chaadaev wrote an article called "The Madman's Apologia", in which he decided to explain the peculiarities of his patriotism, his views on the high destiny of Russia: "I have not learned to love my homeland since eyes closed, with bowed head, with closed lips. I find that a man can only be useful to his country if he sees it clearly; I think that the time of blind love has passed, that now we are primarily indebted to our homeland for the truth ... I have a deep conviction that we are called to solve most of the problems of the social order, to complete most of the ideas that arose in old societies, to answer the most important questions, which occupy humanity."

Chaadaev died in Moscow in 1856.

"Philosophical Letters"

Philosophical Letters" by P. Chaadaev

First letter

Chaadaev was worried about the fate of Russia, he was looking for ways to guide the country to a better future. To do this, he identified three priority areas:

“First of all, a serious classical education;

the emancipation of our slaves, which is a necessary condition for all further progress;

an awakening of the religious feeling, so that religion might emerge from the sort of lethargy in which it now finds itself.

Chaadaev’s first and most famous letter is imbued with a deeply skeptical mood towards Russia: “One of the most regrettable features of our peculiar civilization is that we are still discovering truths that have become commonplace in other countries and among peoples much more backward than we are. The fact is that we have never walked with other peoples, we do not belong to any of the known families of the human race, neither to the West nor to the East, and we have no traditions of either. We stand, as it were, outside of time; the universal upbringing of the human race has not spread to us.

“What other nations have long entered into life,” he writes further, “for us is still only speculation, theory ... Look around you. Everything seems to be on the move. We all seem to be strangers. No one has a sphere of a definite existence, there are no good customs for anything, not only rules, there is not even a family center; there is nothing that would bind, that would awaken our sympathy, disposition; there is nothing permanent, indispensable: everything passes, flows, leaving no trace either in appearance or in yourself. We seem to be at home, in families as strangers, as if wandering in cities, and even more than the tribes wandering through our steppes, because these tribes are more attached to their deserts than we are to our cities.

Chaadaev describes the history of the country as follows: “First, wild barbarism, then gross superstition, then foreign domination, cruel and humiliating, the spirit of which national authority subsequently inherited - this is the sad story of our youth. The pores of overflowing activity, the ebullient play of the moral forces of the people - we had nothing like it.<…>Take a look around all the centuries we have lived, all the spaces we have occupied, and you will not find a single riveting memory, not a single venerable monument that would speak authoritatively about the past and draw it vividly and picturesquely. We live only in the most limited present without a past and without a future, in the midst of flat stagnation.

“What other peoples have is just a habit, an instinct, then we have to hammer it into our heads with a blow of a hammer. Our memories do not go beyond yesterday; we are, as it were, strangers to ourselves.”

“Meanwhile, stretching between the two great divisions of the world, between East and West, leaning with one elbow on China, the other on Germany, we should have combined in ourselves the two great principles of spiritual nature - imagination and reason, and unite history in our civilization the entire globe. This role was not given to us by Providence. On the contrary, it did not seem to concern our fate at all. Denying us its beneficial effect on the human mind, it left us completely to ourselves, did not want to interfere in our affairs in anything, did not want to teach us anything. The experience of time does not exist for us. Centuries and generations have passed fruitlessly for us. Looking at us, we can say that in relation to us, the universal law of mankind has been reduced to nothing. Lonely in the world, we gave nothing to the world, took nothing from the world, we did not contribute a single thought to the mass of human ideas, we did not contribute in any way to the advancement of the human mind, and we distorted everything that we got from this movement. . Since the very first moments of our social existence, nothing suitable for the common good of people has come out of us, not a single useful thought has germinated on the barren soil of our homeland, not a single great truth has been advanced from our midst; we did not take the trouble to create anything in the realm of the imagination, and from what was created by the imagination of others, we borrowed only deceptive appearance and useless luxury.

But Chaadaev sees the meaning of Russia in the fact that "we lived and now still live in order to teach some great lesson to distant descendants."

Second letter

In the second letter, Chaadaev expresses the idea that the progress of mankind is directed by the hand of Providence and moves through the chosen peoples and chosen people; the source of eternal light has never been extinguished among human societies; man walked along the path determined for him only in the light of the truths revealed to him by higher reason. He criticizes Orthodoxy for the fact that, unlike Western Christianity (Catholicism), it did not contribute to the liberation of the lower strata of the population from slave dependence, but, on the contrary, consolidated serfdom in the times of Godunov and Shuisky. He also criticizes monastic asceticism for its indifference to the blessings of life: “There is something truly cynical in this indifference to the blessings of life, which some of us take credit for. One of the main reasons that slows down our progress is the lack of any reflection of the elegant in our home life.

Third letter

In the third letter, Chaadaev develops the same thoughts, illustrating them with his views on Moses, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Epicurus, Homer, etc. He reflects on the relationship between faith and reason. On the one hand, faith without reason is a dreamy whim of the imagination, but reason without faith also cannot exist, because “there is no other reason than the mind of the subordinate. And this submission consists in serving the good and progress, which consists in the implementation of the “moral law”.

fourth letter

The image of God in man, in his opinion, is contained in freedom.

Fifth letter

In this letter, Chaadaev contrasts consciousness and matter, believing that they have not only individual, but also world forms. So "world consciousness" is nothing but the world of ideas that live in the memory of mankind.

sixth letter

In it, Chaadaev sets out his "philosophy of history." He believed that the history of mankind should include the names of such figures as Moses and David. The first "showed the people the true God", and the second showed "an image of sublime heroism." Then, in his opinion, comes Epicurus. He calls Aristotle "the angel of darkness". Chaadaev considers the goal of history to be the ascent to the Kingdom of God. He calls the Reformation "an unfortunate event" that divided the united Christian Europe.

seventh letter

In this letter, Chaadaev recognizes the merit of Islam and Muhammad in the eradication of polytheism and the consolidation of Europe.

Eighth letter

The purpose and meaning of history is the “great apocalyptic synthesis”, when a “moral law” is established on earth within the framework of a single planetary society.

Conclusion

Reflections...

In the "Apology of a Madman" Chaadaev agrees to recognize some of his former opinions as exaggerated, but caustically laughs at the society that fell upon him for the first philosophical letter out of "love for the fatherland."

So, in the face of Chaadaev, we see a patriot who loves his homeland, but puts love of truth higher. He contrasts the patriotism of the "Samoyed" (the common name for the indigenous peoples of Russia: the Nenets, Enets, Nganasans, Selkups and the already disappeared Sayan Samoyeds, who speak (or spoke) the languages ​​of the Samoyed group, which together with the languages ​​of the Finno-Ugric group form the Ural language family) to his yurt and the patriotism of an "English citizen". Love for the motherland often nourishes national hatred and "clothes the earth in mourning." Chaadaev recognizes progress and European civilization as true, and also calls for getting rid of "remnants of the past."

Chaadaev highly appreciates the activity of Peter the Great in introducing Russia to Europe and sees in this the highest meaning of patriotism. According to Chaadaev, Russia underestimates the beneficial influence that the West has had on it. All Slavophilism and patriotism are almost abusive words for him.

Year of birthPetraChaadaevanot exactly known. Longinov says that he was born on May 27, 1793, Zhikharev considers the year of his birth to be 1796, Sverbeev vaguely refers him to "the first years of the last decade of the 18th century." By his mother, Peter was the nephew of the princes Shcherbatovs and the grandson of a famous Russian historian. In the hands of this relative, he received an initial education, remarkable for that time, completed by listening to lectures at Moscow University.

Enlisted as a cadet in the Semyonovsky regiment, he participated in the war of 1812 and subsequent hostilities. Serving then in the Life Hussar Regiment, Chaadaev became close friends with the young Pushkin, who was then studying at the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum. According to Longinov, "Chadaev contributed to the development of Pushkin, more than all kinds of professors with his lectures." The nature of the conversations between friends can be judged from Pushkin's poems "To Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadaev". "To the portrait of Chaadaev" and others.

It fell to Chaadaev to save Pushkin from exile in Siberia that threatened him or imprisonment in the Solovetsky Monastery. Upon learning of the danger, Chaadaev, who was then adjutant to the commander of the Guards Corps, Prince. Vasilchikov, managed to get a meeting with Karamzin not at the appointed hour and persuaded him to stand up for Pushkin. Pushkin repaid Chaadaev with warm friendship. Among the "most necessary objects for life" he demanded that a portrait of Chaadaev be sent to Mikhailovskoye. Pushkin sends him the first copy of "Boris Godunov" and is keenly interested in his opinion about this work; he also sends a whole message from Mikhailovsky, in which he expresses his passionate desire as soon as possible in the company of Chaadaev "to honor, judge, scold, revive freedom-loving hopes."

— Chaadaev's famous letter is deeply skeptical towards Russia. “For the soul,” he writes, “there is a dietary content, just like for the body; the ability to subordinate it to this content is necessary. I know that I repeat the old saying, but in our country it has all the advantages of news. miserable peculiarities of our social education, that truths long known in other countries and even among peoples who are in many respects less educated than we are, are just being discovered with us. to one of the great families of mankind, neither to the West nor to the East, we have no traditions of either. We exist, as it were, outside of time, and the universal education of the human race has not touched us. This wondrous connection of human ideas through the ages, this the history of human understanding, which has brought it to its present state in other countries of the world, had no influence for us.What other peoples have long entered into life, for us until now is only philosophizing, theories.... Look around you. Everything seems to be on the move. We all seem to be strangers. No one has a sphere of a definite existence, there are no good customs for anything, not only rules, there is not even a family center; there is nothing that would bind, that would awaken our sympathy, disposition; there is nothing permanent, indispensable: everything passes, flows, leaving no trace either in appearance or in yourself. At home, we seem to be staying, in families as strangers, as if wandering in cities, and even more than the tribes wandering through our steppes, because these tribes are more attached to their deserts than we are to our cities "...

Pointing out that all peoples "have a period of strong, passionate, unconscious activity", that such epochs constitute the "time of the youth of peoples", Chaadaev finds that "we have nothing of the kind", that "at the very beginning we had wild barbarism, then gross superstition, then cruel, humiliating domination, the traces of which in our way of life have not been completely erased to this day.This is the sad story of our youth ... There are no enchanting memories in the memory, there are no strong instructive examples in folk traditions.Take a look through all the centuries we have lived, all the space of the earth occupied by us, you will not find a single memory that would stop you, not a single monument that would tell you the past vividly, strongly, picturesquely ... We appeared in the world as illegitimate children , without inheritance, without connection with the people who preceded us, did not learn for themselves any of the instructive lessons of the past. Each of us must himself bind the broken thread of the family, by which we were connected with the whole of humanity. We owe a hammerto drive into the head what has become a habit, an instinct for others ... We grow, but do not mature, we move forward, but along some indirect direction that does not lead to the goal ... We belong to nations that do not seem to still constitute a necessary part of mankind, but exist in order to teach some great lesson to the world over time ... All the peoples of Europe have developed certain ideas. These are the ideas of duty, law, truth, order. And they make up not only the history of Europe, but its atmosphere. It is more than history, more than psychology: it is the physiology of the European. What will you replace it with?...

The syllogism of the West is unknown to us. There's more to our best minds than flimsiness. Best Ideas, from a lack of connection and consistency, like barren ghosts numb in our brain ... Even in our glance, I find something extremely indefinite, cold, somewhat similar to the physiognomy of peoples standing on the lower rungs of the social ladder ... According to our local position between East and West, leaning one elbow on China, the other on Germany, we should combine in ourselves the two great principles of understanding: imagination and reason, we should combine the history of the whole world in our civic education. But this is not the destiny that has fallen to our lot. Hermits in the world, we gave him nothing, took nothing from him, did not attach a single idea to the mass of ideas of mankind, did nothing to improve human understanding and distorted everything that this improvement told us ... Not a single useful thought increased in our barren soil, not a single great truth has arisen among us. We did not invent anything ourselves, and from everything that was invented by others, we borrowed only a deceptive appearance and useless luxury ... I repeat again: we lived, we live, as a great lesson for distant posterity, who will certainly use it, but in the present tense, which no matter what we say, we constitute a gap in the order of understanding. " Having pronounced such a sentence on our past, present and partly future, Ch. carefully proceeds to his main idea and at the same time to an explanation of the phenomenon indicated by him. The root of evil, in his opinion, lies in the fact that we accepted the "new formation" from a different source from which the West perceived it.

"Driven by evil fate, we borrowed the first seeds of moraland mental enlightenment from the corrupted Byzantium, despised by all peoples," they borrowed, moreover, when "petty vanity had just torn Byzantium away from world brotherhood," and therefore "they accepted from her an idea distorted by human passion." Hence all that followed .

"Despite the name of Christians, we did not budge, while Western Christianity majestically walked along the path outlined by its divine founder." Ch. himself raises the question: “Are we not Christians, is education possible only according to the European model?”, And he answers this way: “Without a doubt we are Christians, but aren’t the Abyssinians Christians?

Aren't the Japanese educated?.. But do you really think that these miserable deviations from divine and human truths will bring heaven down to earth?". In Europe, everything is permeated with a mysterious force that reigned autocratically for a number of centuries." This thought fills the entire end of the Philosophical Letter. “Look at the picture of the complete development of the new society and you will see that Christianity transforms all human benefits into its own, replaces the material need everywhere with the moral need, excites in the world of thought these great debates, which you will not find in the history of other epochs, other societies.. You will see that everything was created by him and only by him: earthly life, and social life, and family, and fatherland, and science, and poetry, and intelligence, and imagination, and remembrance, and hopes, and delights, and sorrows " . But all this applies to Western Christianity; other branches of Christianity are barren. Ch. does not draw any practical conclusions from this. It seems to us that his letter caused a storm not by his own, although undoubted, but not at all pronounced Catholic tendencies - he developed them much deeper in subsequent letters - but only by severe criticism of the past and present of Russia.

There are three letters in all, but there is reason to think that in the interval between the first (printed in the "Telescope") and the so-called second, there were more letters, apparently irretrievably lost. In the "second" letter (we will give further quotations in our translation) Chaadaev expresses the idea that the progress of mankind is directed by the hand of Providence and moves through the chosen peoples and chosen people; the source of eternal light has never been extinguished among human societies; man walked to the path determined for him only in the light of the truths revealed to him by higher reason. “Instead of obsequiously accepting the senseless system of mechanical improvement of our nature, so clearly refuted by the experience of all ages, it is impossible not to see that man, left to himself, always walked, on the contrary, along the path of endless degeneration. If there were epochs from time to time progress in all peoples, moments of enlightenment in the life of mankind, lofty impulses of reason, then nothing proves the continuity and constancy of such a movement.True forward movement and the constant presence of progress is noticed only in that society of which we are members and which is not the product of human hands. We undoubtedly accepted what was worked out by the ancients before us, took advantage of it and thus closed the ring of the great chain of times, but it does not at all follow from this that people would have reached the state in which they now find themselves without that historical phenomenon, which is unconditionally has no antecedents, is beyond any dependence on human ideas, beyond any necessary connection of things, and separates the ancient world from the new world. It goes without saying that Ch. is talking here about the rise of Christianity. Without this phenomenon, our society would inevitably perish, as perished all the societies of antiquity. Christianity found the world "perverted, bloodied, lied about." In ancient civilizations, there was no solid beginning lying inside them. "The profound wisdom of Egypt, the charming beauty of Ionia, the strict virtues of Rome, the dazzling splendor of Alexandria - what have you become? Brilliant civilizations, nurtured by all the powers of the earth, associated with all glories, with all heroes, with all dominion over the universe, with the greatest sovereigns that the earth has ever produced, with world sovereignty - how could you be swept off the face of the earth? What was the work of the ages, the wonderful deeds of the intellect, if new peoples, who came from nowhere, not in the least connected with these civilizations, were to destroy all this, overturn the magnificent building and smell the very place on which it stood? "But not the barbarians destroyed ancient world. It was already "a decomposed corpse and the barbarians scattered only its ashes to the wind." This cannot happen to the new world, for European society constitutes a single family of Christian peoples. European society "for a number of centuries rested on the basis of a federation, which was torn apart only by the reformation; before this sad event, the peoples of Europe looked at themselves only as a single social organism, geographically divided into different states, but constituting a single whole in a moral sense; between these peoples there was no other public law than the decrees of the church, wars were presented as internecine strife, a single interest inspired everyone, one and the same tendency set the whole European world in motion.

The history of the Middle Ages was in the literal sense of the word the history of one people—the Christian people. The movement of moral consciousness was its foundation; purely political events stood in the background; all this was revealed with particular clarity in the religious wars, that is, in the events that the philosophy of the last century was so horrified by. Voltaire very aptly notes that wars over opinions occurred only among Christians; but it was not necessary to confine oneself to merely stating a fact, it was necessary to rise to the understanding of the cause of such a unique phenomenon. It is clear that the realm of thought could not establish itself in the world otherwise than by giving the very principle of thought a full reality. And if now the state of things has changed, it was the result of the schism, which, having destroyed the unity of thought, thereby destroyed the unity of society. But the foundation remains and now everything is the same, and Europe is still a Christian country, no matter what she does, no matter what she says ... In order for real civilization to be destroyed, it would be necessary that the whole Earth flipped upside down to repeat the flip like that who gave the earth its true form. To extinguish to the ground all the sources of our enlightenment, it would take at least a second global flood. If, for example, one of the hemispheres were swallowed up, then what would be left on the other would be enough to renew the human spirit. The thought that is supposed to conquer the universe will never stop, will never perish, or at least will not perish until it is commanded by the One who put this thought into the human soul. The world was coming to unity, but this great cause was prevented by the reformation, returning it to a state of fragmentation (desunité) of paganism. "At the end of the second letter, Chaadaev directly expresses the idea that only indirectly made its way in the first letter. "That the papacy was a human institution, that the incoming elements in it are created by human hands - I readily admit this, but the essence of panism comes from the very spirit of Christianity ... Who does not marvel at the extraordinary fate of the papacy? Deprived of its human brilliance, it only became stronger because of it, and the indifference shown towards it only strengthens and ensures its existence even more... , being sealed with a seal of a heavenly character, hovers over the world material interests". In the third letter, Ch. develops the same thoughts, illustrating them with his views on Moses, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Epicurus, Homer, etc. Returning to Russia and to his view of the Russians, who "do not belong, in essence, to any of the systems of the moral world, but their social surface is adjacent to the West", Ch. recommends "to do everything possible to prepare the way for future generations." "Since we cannot leave them what we ourselves did not have : beliefs, a mind brought up by time, a clearly defined personality, developed by the course of a long, animated, active, rich in results, intellectual life, opinions, then let us leave to them at least a few ideas, which, although we did not find them ourselves, being handed down from generation to generation will have more of a traditional element and therefore more power, more fruitfulness, than our own thoughts. In this way, we will earn the gratitude of posterity and will not walk the earth in vain. Chaadaev's short fourth letter is devoted to architecture.

Finally, the first and a few lines from the second chapter of Chaadaev's "Apology of a Madman" are also known. Here the author makes some concessions, agrees to recognize some of his former opinions as exaggerations, but laughs angrily and caustically at the fall upon him for the first philosophical letter from "love for fatherland" society. "There are various kinds of love for the fatherland: a Samoyed, for example, loving his native snows that weaken his eyesight, a smoky yurt in which he spends half his life crouching, the rancid fat of his deer, surrounding him with a nauseating atmosphere - this Samoyed, no doubt, loves homeland differently than the English citizen, who is proud of the institutions and high civilization of his glorious island, loves his homeland ... Love for the fatherland is a very good thing, but there is something higher than it: love of truth. Further, Chaadaev sets out his opinions on the history of Russia. Briefly, this story is expressed as follows: "Peter the Great found only a sheet of paper and with his powerful hand wrote on it: Europe and the West."

AND great person did a great job. "But now, a new school (Slavophiles) has appeared. The West is no longer recognized, the work of Peter the Great is denied, it is considered desirable to return to the desert again. Forgetting everything that the West has done for us, being ungrateful to the great man who civilized us, to Europe, who formed us, renounce both Europe and the great man. In its ardent zeal, the latest patriotism declares us the most beloved children of the East. Why on earth, says this patriotism, shall we seek light from the Western peoples? home of all the germs of a social order infinitely better than the social order of Europe?Left to ourselves, our bright mind, the fruitful principle hidden in the bowels of our mighty nature and especially our holy faith, we would soon leave behind all these peoples, stagnant in error and lies. And what should we envy in the West? Its religious wars, its pope, its chivalry, its inquisition? All these things are good, there is nothing to say! And is the West really the birthplace of science and profound wisdom?

Everyone knows that the birthplace of all this is the East. Let us return to this East, with which we are in contact everywhere, from where we once took our beliefs, our laws, our virtues, in a word, everything that made us the most powerful people on earth. The Old East is passing into eternity, and aren't we its rightful heirs? His wonderful traditions must live among us forever, all his great and mysterious truths, the preservation of which was bequeathed to him from the beginning of centuries ... You now understand the origin of the storm that has recently burst over me and you see that a real revolution is taking place among us, a passionate reaction against enlightenment, against Western ideas, against that enlightenment and those ideas that made us what we are, and the fruit of which was even the real movement itself, the reaction itself. "The idea that in our past there was nothing creative, Chaadaev apparently wanted to develop in the second chapter of the Apologia, but it contains only a few lines: "There is a fact that dominates our historical movement in all its ages, passing through our whole history, containing in a certain sense the whole philosophy, manifesting itself in all epochs our social life, which determines its character, which is at the same time an essential element of our political greatness, and true reason of our intellectual impotence: this fact is a geographical fact." The publisher of Chaadaev's works, Prince Gagarin, says the following in a note: "Here the manuscript ends and there are no signs that it will ever be continued." After the incident with the "Philosophical Letter" Chaadaev lived almost without a break in Moscow for 20 years.Although he did not show himself in any special way during all these years, but - Herzen testifies - if Chaadaev was in society, then "no matter how dense the crowd was, the eye would immediately find him. " Chaadaev died in Moscow April 14, 1856

Coming from the family of Mikhail Shcherbatov, the author of the 7-volume History of Russia from Ancient Times, Petr Yakovlevich Chaadaev was born for a brilliant public career. Before the war of 1812, he attended lectures at Moscow University for 4 years, where he managed to make friends with several representatives of secret societies that were gaining strength, future members of the Decembrist movement - Nikolai Turgenev and Ivan Yakushkin. Chaadaev actively participated in the hostilities against Napoleon, fought at Borodino, near Tarutino and Maloyaroslavets (for which he was awarded the Order of St. Anne), took part in the capture of Paris. After the war, this “brave, shelled officer, tested in three gigantic campaigns, impeccably noble, honest and amiable in private relations” (as a contemporary described him) met the 17-year-old Alexander Pushkin, whose views had a significant impact.

In 1817, he entered the military service in the Semyonovsky regiment, and a year later he retired. The reason for such a hasty decision was the harsh suppression of the uprising of the 1st battalion of the Life Guards, to the participants of which Chaadaev was very sympathetic. The sudden decision of a promising young 23-year-old officer caused a considerable scandal in high society: his act was explained either by being late for the emperor with a report on the rebellion, or by the content of the conversation with the king, which caused an angry rebuke from Chaadaev. However, the biographer of the philosopher M. O. Gershenzon, referring to reliable written sources, gives the following explanation in the first person: “I found it more amusing to neglect this mercy than to seek it. I was pleased to show disdain for people who neglect everyone ... It is even more pleasant for me in this case to see the anger of an arrogant fool.

Be that as it may, Chaadaev leaves the service in the status of one of the most famous characters of the era, an enviable groom and the main secular dandy. One of the philosopher's contemporaries recalled that “with him it was somehow impossible, it was embarrassing to indulge in daily vulgarity. When he appeared, everyone somehow involuntarily looked around morally and mentally, tidied up and prettier. The most authoritative historian of Russian culture Yu. M. Lotman, describing the features of Chaadaev's public foppery, remarked: "The area of ​​extravagance of his clothes consisted in a daring lack of extravagance." Moreover, unlike another famous English dandy, Lord Byron, the Russian philosopher preferred restrained minimalism and even purism in appearance. Such a deliberate disregard for fashion trends very favorably distinguished him from other contemporaries, in particular, the Slavophiles, who associated their costume with ideological attitudes (wearing a beard indicatively, recommending that ladies wear sundresses). However, the general attitude to the title of a kind of "trendsetter", a model of a public image, made Chaadaev's image related to his foreign dandy colleagues.

In 1823, Chaadaev went abroad for treatment, and even before leaving, he made a donation for his property to two brothers, clearly intending not to return to his homeland. He will spend the next two years in London, then in Paris, then in Rome or Milan. Probably, it was during this journey through Europe that Chaadaev became acquainted with the works of French and German philosophers. As the historian of Russian literature M. Velizhev writes, “the formation of Chaadaev’s “anti-Russian” views in the mid-1820s took place in a political context associated with the transformation of the structure and content of the Holy Union of European Monarchs.” Russia, following the results of the Napoleonic wars, undoubtedly thought of itself as a European hegemon - "the Russian tsar is the head of the tsars" according to Pushkin. However, the geopolitical situation in Europe almost a decade after the end of the war was rather disappointing, and Alexander I himself had already moved away from the previous constitutional ideas and, in general, had somewhat cooled to the possibility of spiritual unity with the Prussian and Austrian monarchs. Probably, the joint prayer of the victorious emperors during the work of the Aachen Congress in 1818 was finally forgotten.

Upon returning to Russia in 1826, Chaadaev was immediately arrested on charges of belonging to secret societies of the Decembrists. These suspicions are exacerbated by the fact that back in 1814 Chaadaev became a member of the Masonic Lodge in Krakow, and in 1819 he was admitted to one of the first Decembrist organizations, the Welfare Union. By an authoritative decree, three years later, all secret organizations - both Freemasons and Decembrists, without considering their ideology and goals, were banned. The story with Chaadaev ended happily: having signed a paper about the absence of attitude towards freethinkers, the philosopher was released. Chaadaev settled in Moscow, in the house of E. G. Levasheva on Novaya Basmannaya, and began work on his main work, Philosophical Letters. This work instantly returned to Chaadaev the glory of the main oppositionist of the era, although in one of the letters to A.I. Turgenev the philosopher himself complains: “What did I do, what did I say so that I could be ranked among the opposition? I do not say or do anything else, I only repeat that everything strives towards one goal and that this goal is the kingdom of God.

This work, even before its publication, actively went on the lists among the most progressive part of society, but the appearance of "Philosophical Letters" in the magazine "Telescope" in 1836 caused a serious scandal. Both the editor of the publication and the censor paid for the publication of Chaadaev's work, and the author himself, by order of the government, was declared insane. It is interesting that many legends and controversies have developed around this first known case in Russian history of the use of punitive psychiatry: the doctor who was supposed to conduct a regular official examination of the “patient” said to Chaadaev at the first meeting: “If not for my family, wife and six children, I would show them who is really crazy.”

In his most important work, Chaadaev significantly rethought the ideology of the Decembrists, which he, being a “Decembrist without December”, shared in many respects. After a careful study of the main intellectual ideas of the era (in addition to the French religious philosophy of de Maistre, as well as Schelling's work on natural philosophy), the conviction arose that the future prosperity of Russia is possible on the basis of world enlightenment, the spiritual and ethical transformation of mankind in search of divine unity. In fact, it was this work of Chaadaev that became the impetus for the development of the national Russian philosophical school. His supporters would later call themselves Westerners, while their opponents would call themselves Slavophiles. Those first "damned questions" that were formulated in the "Philosophical Letters" were of interest to Russian thinkers in the future: how to bring to life a global universal utopia and the search for one's own national identity, a special Russian path, directly related to this problem.

It is curious that Chaadaev himself called himself a religious philosopher, although further reflection of his legacy formed into a unique Russian historiosophy. Chaadaev believed in the existence of a metaphysical absolute Demiurge, who manifests himself in his own creation through the games of chance and the will of fate. Without denying the Christian faith as a whole, he believes that the main goal of mankind is "the establishment of the kingdom of God on Earth", and it is in Chaadaev's work that such a metaphor of a just society, a society of prosperity and equality, first appears.

This does not happen often: a voice from the middle of the 19th century sounds like we are listening to a live broadcast. Actually, that's what happened. At the First Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR, which remains the peak of domestic parliamentarism, a competition in civic courage unfolded. Having reached the podium, each speaker tried to impress the audience with a ruthless exposure of the regime. Yevgeny Yevtushenko shouted that the Soviet State Planning Committee was like "a giant atelier for minor repairs to a naked king's dress." Yuri Afanasiev accused the congress of having formed a "Stalin-Brezhnev Supreme Soviet".
But Chaadaev won with a clear advantage. Most strong man of the planet, Yuri Vlasov, who drifted from a weightlifter to an intellectual, repeated his bitter words from the podium: “We are an exceptional people, we belong to those nations that, as it were, are not part of humanity, but exist only to give the world what some terrible lesson. And he summed it up: there should be no more “terrible lesson”.
And one more observation. Few of the deputies, having stepped onto the Ivanovskaya Square of the Kremlin, did not hold their eyes on the Tsar Bell and the Tsar Cannon. Once upon a time, Chaadaev also looked at them, whose thought Herzen preserved for posterity: “In Moscow, Chaadaev used to say, every foreigner is taken to look at a big cannon and a big bell. A cannon that can't be fired, and a bell that fell off before it rang. amazing city, in which the sights are distinguished by absurdity: or perhaps a large bell without a tongue is a hieroglyph expressing this vast silent country. By the way, the author of "The Past and Thoughts" was also a good aphorist. “Why is there such a frightening silence in Russia?” he asked. And he himself answered: “Because the people are sleeping or because they are painfully hit on the heads of those who have woken up.” Chaadaev, who woke up earlier than others, experienced this for himself.
On one of the last sunny days, I decided to realize a long-standing plan: to find in the necropolis of the Donskoy Monastery the graves of Chaadaev and the romantic girl Avdotya Sergeevna Norova, who was in love with him.
At the time of their acquaintance, he was 34 years old, she was 28. Smart, who did not part with books, Dunya loved him selflessly. There was no passion in her feeling - only tenderness and care. She cooked cherry syrup for him, knitted warm stockings for the winter. He generously allowed this worship to her, and sometimes spoiled her, saying: “My angel, Dunichka!” The 49 letters of her preserved in Chaadaev's archive amaze with their reckless devotion. “Does it seem strange and unusual to you that I want to ask you for your blessing? she wrote to him one day. “I often have this desire, and it seems that if I decide on this, I would be so pleased to accept it from you, on my knees, with all the reverence that I have for you.” And even more poignantly: "I would be afraid to die if I could assume that my death could cause your regret."
Some researchers consider Norova, with her dreamy look and long arches of eyebrows, the prototype of Tatyana Larina. Perhaps this comes from the "hint" of Pushkin, who wrote: "The second Chadaev is my Evgeny." And what is Onegin without Tatyana? And yet this version is unlikely to be true. There is only one rapprochement between them: both were the first to confess their love to their idols.
Dunya was weak from childhood, often got sick, and when, before she reached 37, she quietly faded away (many believed - from love), her relatives did not blame Chaadaev. But he himself, having survived Norova by two decades, was shocked by her death. After his death, on April 14, 1856, it turned out that in Chaadaev’s will “in case of sudden death”, the second number was a request: “Try to bury me in the Donskoy Monastery near the grave of Avdotya Sergeevna Norova.” He couldn't have given her a better gift.

There is no equality in the cemetery
These are the two graves on the old Donskoy churchyard that I wanted to find. At the reference stand, I quickly found the name of Chaadaev in the list of the buried, who was assigned the number 26-Sh. But Norova, apparently, seemed to the administration a figure too insignificant to be included in the list of VIP dead. Nevertheless, I found a place of rest for both of them, buried near the Small Cathedral. Chaadaev's grave is covered by a cracked slab. And at its head rise two modest granite columns a meter and a half high, set above the ashes of Dunya and her mother.
I grabbed a camera to take a picture of this inconspicuous corner, having previously laid scarlet roses on Dunya's grave. They would simply blaze against the background of a gray cemetery landscape. But it turned out that flowers in the Donskoy Monastery are not for sale - only candles.

Fire that can blind
You can’t apply the famous Nekrasov line about Dobrolyubov to Chaadaev: “As a woman, he loved his Motherland.” We will talk more about Chaadaev's attitude to his homeland. The ladies who always surrounded this tall, slender handsome man with gray-blue eyes and with a face, as if carved from marble, he tried to keep at a distance. In part, this coincided with the advice of his wise friend Ekaterina Levashova: “Providence has given you a light too bright, too blinding for our darkness, isn’t it better to introduce it little by little than to blind people, as it were, with the Tabor radiance and make them fall face down on the ground?” For those who have not looked into the Bible for a long time, let me remind you: on Mount Tabor near Nazareth, the transfiguration of Christ took place, after which His face shone like the sun.
But there was another reason as well. Historian and philosopher Mikhail Gershenzon in the monograph Chaadaev. Life and Thought," published in 1907, delicately summarized it in two lines of footnote: "There seems to be reason to believe that he suffered from congenital atrophy of the sexual instinct." Dmitry Merezhkovsky spoke with equal restraint: “Like many Russian romantics of the 20s and 30s, Nikolai Stankevich, Konstantin Aksakov, Mikhail Bakunin, he was a “born virgin”.
To appreciate how far the inquisitive thought of researchers has advanced since then, I will refer to the book by Konstantin Rotikov “Another Petersburg”, dedicated to the gay culture of the city on the Neva, among the representatives of which he ranked Chaadaev. Closing the topic, I would like to note that Olga Vainshtein, the author of the major study Dendy, strongly disagrees with Rotikov. In her opinion, such coldness towards women was typical of the first generation of dandies, starting with the legendary George Brummal, who never had mistresses, preached strict masculinity and, being a trendsetter, gave humanity a black tailcoat. The one that no one knew how to wear as elegantly as Chaadaev, Russia's first dandy.
He looked no worse in a hussar uniform. At the age of 18, Chaadaev participated in the Battle of Borodino and fought his way to Paris. He fought near Tarutino and Maly Yaroslavets, participated in the main battles on German soil. For the battle near Kulm he was awarded the Order of St. Anne, and for the difference in the campaign - the Iron Cross.
The first meeting with Europe had a radical impact on Chaadaev's worldview. Russian officers, many of whom, like himself, knew French better than their own, discovered something new in Paris.

Rendezvous with Europe
“We were young upstarts,” Chaadaev later wrote in his sarcastic manner, “and did not contribute to the common treasury of peoples, be it some tiny solar system, following the example of the Poles subject to us, or some inferior algebra, following the example of these non-Christian Arabs. We were treated well because we behaved like well-bred people, because we were courteous and modest, as befits beginners who have no other right to general respect than a slender frame.
The defeated French were cheerful and open. Prosperity was felt in their way of life, the achievements of culture were admired. And the sign on one of the houses - the memory of the revolution - amazed: "Street of Human Rights"! What could representatives of a country where the word "personality" was invented by N. M. Karamzin only in the 19th century know about this? And in Western Europe this concept, along with “individuality”, turned out to be in demand five centuries earlier, without which there would be no Renaissance. Russia skipped this stage. Once at home, the victors of Napoleon saw their homeland with new eyes - an effect that Soviet soldiers would also face in a century and a half. The picture that awaited them at home turned out to be difficult: mass poverty, lack of rights, arbitrariness of the authorities.
But back to the hero of our story. Count Pozzo di Borgo, a Russian diplomat originally from Corsica, once said: if he were in power, he would force Chaadaev to constantly travel around Europe so that she would see "a completely secular Russian." It was not possible to implement this project on a full scale, but in 1823 Chaadaev went on a three-year trip to England, France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany. Pushkin, who was languishing in Chisinau at that time, complained: "They say that Chaadaev is going abroad - my favorite hope was to travel with him - now God knows when we will meet." Alas, the poet until the end of his life remained "restricted to travel abroad."
The purpose of the tour made by Chaadaev was quite accurately defined in the letter of recommendation given to him by the English missionary Charles Cook: "To study the causes of the moral well-being of Europeans and the possibility of its instillation in Russia." Consideration of this issue formed an essential part of the "Philosophical Letters" that Chaadaev still had to write, there will be eight of them in total. He left with the firm intention of not returning. Speaking four languages, Chaadaev easily made acquaintance with leading European philosophers and enjoyed an intellectual feast. However, it turned out that his connection with Russia is stronger than he thought. And Pyotr Yakovlevich decided to return. “Chadaev was the first Russian, in fact, who ideologically visited the West and found his way back,” writes Osip Mandelstam. - The trace left by Chaadaev in the minds of Russian society is so deep and indelible that the question involuntarily arises: is it not a diamond that has been drawn over glass?

"Philosophical writing" and its consequences
Chaadaev belonged to the circle of people who were called "Decembrists without December." He was a friend of almost everyone who came out on December 14, 1825 on Senate Square, and he himself was a member of the Welfare Union, but formally: he did not take a practical part in the affairs. The news of the drama that took place in St. Petersburg caught him abroad, and he was acutely worried about this misfortune. The bitterness that settled in him forever was reflected in the Philosophical Letters, which became the main work of his life.
And it all started with a trifle - with a letter from Ekaterina Panova, a young advanced lady who was interested in politics and even allowed herself - scary to say! - "pray for the Poles, because they fought for freedom." She liked to talk with Chaadaev about religious questions, but it began to seem to her that he had lost his former disposition towards her and did not believe that her interest in this subject was sincere. “If you write me a few words in response, I will be happy,” concluded Panova. An impeccably correct person, Chaadaev immediately sat down to write a reply letter, if in the age of text messages 20 pages of dense text can be called that. It took a year and a half, and, putting an end to the letter, he decided that it was probably too late to send it. Thus was born the first and most famous "Philosophical letter" of Chaadaev. Pyotr Yakovlevich was pleased: it seemed to him that he had found a natural, unconstrained form for presenting complex philosophical issues.
What was revealed to readers in the long-suffering and repeatedly thought-out thoughts that he tried to convey to them? According to Mandelstam, they turned out to be "a strict perpendicular restored to traditional Russian thinking." It was indeed a completely new view of Russia, "perpendicular" to the official point of view, a harsh but honest diagnosis. Why do we not know how to live intelligently in the reality that surrounds us? Why do we have to “hammer in the head with a blow of a hammer” what has turned into instinct and habit among other peoples? Comparing his country with Europe, Chaadaev, who called himself a "Christian philosopher", paid special attention to the role of religion in the historical development of Russia. He was convinced that it “was torn out, secluded by Christianity, taken from an infected source, from corrupted, fallen Byzantium, which had renounced the unity of the church. The Russian Church has become enslaved to the state, and this has become the source of all our slavery.” The willingness of the clergy to submit to secular authority was a historical feature of Orthodoxy, and one must try very hard not to notice that this process is taking place even today.
Here is one of the most powerful and bitter passages in the Philosophical Letters: “The ideas of order, duty, law, which make up, as it were, the atmosphere of the West, are alien to us, and everything in our private and public life is accidental, fragmented and absurd. Our mind is devoid of the discipline of the Western mind, Western syllogism is unknown to us. Our moral sense is extremely superficial and shaky, we are almost indifferent to good and evil, to truth and falsehood.
In all our long life, we have not enriched humanity with a single thought, but only looked for ideas borrowed from others. So we live in one narrow present, without a past and without a future - we go nowhere without going anywhere, and we grow without maturing.
The "letter" published in the 15th issue of the "Telescope" magazine under the innocent heading "Science and Art" was greeted, according to Chaadaev, with "an ominous cry." The abuse heaped upon him could be included in an anthology of the highest achievements of this genre. “Never, anywhere, in any country, has anyone ever allowed themselves such audacity,” said Philipp Wiegel, vice-president of the Department of Foreign Faiths, a German by birth, a patriot by profession. “The adored mother was scolded, slapped on the cheek.” Dmitry Tatishchev, the Russian ambassador in Vienna, turned out to be a no less ferocious critic: “Chadaev poured out such terrible hatred on his fatherland that could only be instilled in him by hellish forces.” And the poet Nikolai Yazykov, who became close to the Slavophiles at the end of his life, scolded Chaadaev in verse: “Russia is completely alien to you, / Your native country: / Its legends are holy / You hate everything in full. / You renounced them cowardly, / You kiss the shoes of dads. Here he got excited. Chaadaev, who highly valued the social principles in Catholicism, its close ties with culture and science, nevertheless remained faithful to the Orthodox rite.
The students of Moscow University, who reminded me of the class vigilance of modern "Nashists", came to the trustee of the Moscow educational district, Count Stroganov, and declared that they were ready to stand up for offended Russia with weapons in their hands. The consciousness of the youth was assessed, but no weapons were issued to them.
Chaadaev's letter also gained international resonance. The Austrian ambassador in St. Petersburg, Count Ficquelmont, sent a report to Chancellor Metternich, in which he announced: “In Moscow, in a literary periodical called Telescope, a letter was printed written to a Russian lady by a retired colonel Chaadaev ... It fell like a bomb in the midst of Russian vanity and those principles of religious and political primacy, to which the capital is very inclined.
The fate of Chaadaev, as expected, was decided at the top. Emperor Nicholas I, of course, did not finish reading his essay, but drew a resolution: “After reading the article, I find that its content is a mixture of impudent nonsense worthy of a lunatic.” This was not a literary assessment, but a medical diagnosis, very similar to the one that the autocrat honored Lermontov as well, having leafed through A Hero of Our Time. And the car turned over. An investigative commission was created, and although no traces of a conspiracy were found, the measures turned out to be decisive: the Telescope was closed, the editor Nadezhdin was exiled to Ust-Sysolsk, and the censor Boldyrev, by the way, the rector of Moscow University, was dismissed from his post. Chaadaev was officially declared insane. It is noteworthy that Chatsky in the comedy "Woe from Wit" - in the manuscript Griboyedov called him Chadsky - had the same fate: rumor considered him crazy, And the play, by the way, was written five years earlier than the royal diagnosis sounded. Real art overtakes life.
The decision of the sovereign-emperor turned out to be truly Jesuit. According to his instructions, Benckendorff, chief of the Third Department, sent an order to the Moscow governor, Prince Golitsyn: “His Majesty commands that you entrust the treatment of him (Chaadaev) to a skilled physician, making it his duty to visit Mr. Chaadaev every morning, and that an order be made, so that Mr. Chaadaev does not expose himself to the influence of the current damp and cold air. Humane, isn't it? But the subtext is simple: do not leave the house! And a year after the removal of supervision from Chaadaev, a new instruction followed: “Do not dare to write anything!”
General Alexei Orlov, who was considered the favorite of the emperor, in a conversation with Benckendorff asked him to put in a good word for Chaadaev, who was in trouble, emphasizing that he believed in the future of Russia. But the chief of gendarmes waved it off: “Russia's past was amazing, its present is more than magnificent. As for its future, it is higher than anything that the wildest imagination can imagine. Here, my friend, is the point of view from which Russian history should be considered and written. This optimistic thesis seemed vaguely familiar to me. And although not immediately, I remembered: this is the official concept, a squeeze from the discussion that has made a noise not so long ago about what a textbook on the history of Russia should be like.
Chaadaev gave his detractor an answer full of dignity and civic courage: “Believe me, I love my fatherland more than any of you ... But I don’t know how to love with my eyes closed, with my head bowed, with mute lips.”

Woe to the mind
For Pyotr Yakovlevich, who was five years older than Pushkin and was considered his mentor, it was especially important to find out the opinion of a friend about the article in Telescope, and he sent him a print of it. At one time, the poet dedicated three poetic messages to Chaadaev - more than to anyone, including Arina Rodionovna. And in a Chisinau diary he wrote about him: “I will never forget you. Your friendship has replaced happiness for me - my cold soul can love you alone ”(Rotikov, mentioned above, could have strained at this point).
Pushkin found himself in a difficult position. He could not offend his friend, about whom he wrote: “At the moment of death over the hidden abyss / You supported me with an unsleeping hand.” And now Chaadaev is hanging over the abyss. He nevertheless wrote a letter to him, but he brought out on the last page: “A crow will not peck out a crow’s eyes,” after which he hid three sheets in a desk drawer. In many ways, Pushkin agreed with his friend, but not with his assessment of Russian history. “I am far from delighted with everything that I see around me ... but I swear on honor,” he wrote, “that for nothing in the world I would not want to change my fatherland or have a different history. In addition to the history of our ancestors. The way God gave it to us." What can I say - high spirit, high words!

Valery Jalagonia

Echo of the Planet, No. 45

Chaadaev Petr Yakovlevich (May 27 (June 7), 1794, Moscow, - 04/14/26/1856, ibid.) - Russian thinker, philosopher and publicist, was born into a noble family (mother is the daughter of the historian Prince M. M. Shcherbatov).

Chaadaev's maternal grandfather was the well-known historian and publicist Prince M. M. Shcherbatov. After the early death of his parents, Chaadaev was raised by his aunt and uncle. In 1808 he entered Moscow University, where he became close to the writer A.S. Griboedov, the future Decembrists I.D. Yakushkin and N.I. Turgenev and other prominent figures of his time. In 1811 he left the university and joined the guard. Participated in Patriotic War 1812, in the foreign campaign of the Russian army. In 1814 in Krakow he was admitted to the Masonic Lodge.

Without blind faith in abstract perfection, it is impossible to take a step along the path to perfection realized in practice. Only by believing in the unattainable good can we approach the attainable good.

Chaadaev Pyotr Yakovlevich

Returning to Russia, Chaadaev continued his military service as a cornet of the Life Guards Hussar Regiment. His biographer M. Zhikharev wrote: “A brave, shelled officer, tested in three gigantic campaigns, impeccably noble, honest and amiable in private relations, he had no reason not to enjoy the deep, unconditional respect and affection of his comrades and superiors.” In 1816, in Tsarskoye Selo, Chaadaev met the lyceum student A.S. Pushkin and soon became a beloved friend and teacher of the young poet, whom he called "a graceful genius" and "our Dante." Three poems by Pushkin are dedicated to Chaadaev, his features are embodied in the image of Onegin. Pushkin characterized the personality of Chaadaev with famous verses To the portrait of Chaadaev: “He is by the supreme will of heaven / Born in the fetters of the royal service; / He would be Brutus in Rome, Pericles in Athens, / And here he is an officer of the hussars. Constant communication between Pushkin and Chaadaev was interrupted in 1820 due to Pushkin's southern exile.

However, correspondence and meetings continued throughout life. On October 19, 1836, Pushkin wrote a famous letter to Chaadaev, in which he argued with the views on the destiny of Russia, expressed by Chaadaev in the Philosophical Letter.

In 1821, Chaadaev, unexpectedly for everyone, abandoned a brilliant military and court career, retired and joined the secret society of the Decembrists. Not finding satisfaction in this activity for his spiritual needs, in 1823 he went on a trip to Europe. In Germany, Chaadaev met with the philosopher F. Schelling, with representatives of various religious movements, among which were adherents of Catholic socialism. At this time, he was experiencing a spiritual crisis, which he tried to resolve by assimilating the ideas of Western theologians, philosophers, scientists and writers, as well as getting acquainted with the social and cultural structure of England, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy.

In 1826, Chaadaev returned to Russia and, having settled in Moscow, lived for several years as a hermit, comprehending what he had seen and experienced during the years of wandering. He began to lead an active social life, appearing in secular salons and speaking out on topical issues of history and modernity. The enlightened mind, artistic feeling and noble heart of Chaadaev noted by his contemporaries earned him unquestioned authority. P. Vyazemsky called him "a teacher from a mobile chair."

Chaadaev made private letters one of the ways to spread his ideas: some of them went from hand to hand, read and discussed as publicistic works. In 1836, he published his first Philosophical letter in the Telescope magazine, work on which (the original was written in French in the form of an answer to E. Panova) began back in 1828. This was Chaadaev's only lifetime publication.

In total, he wrote eight Philosophical Letters (the last in 1831). Chaadaev outlined his historiosophical views in them. He considered a feature of the historical fate of Russia “a dull and gloomy existence, devoid of strength and energy, which did not enliven anything except atrocities, did not soften anything except slavery. No captivating memories, no graceful images in the memory of the people, no powerful teachings in their tradition... We live in the present, in its narrowest limits, without past and future, in the midst of dead stagnation.