ds the West began with the influence of Joseph Le
Maistre and the St. Petersburg Jesuits. In 1836, CHAADAEV, an
ex-guardsman who had served in the Russian campaign in France and
travelled a great deal in Western Europe, and who shared Joseph Le
Maistre's theory that Russia had suffered by her isolation from the
West and through the influence of the former Byzantine Empire,
published the first of his _Lettres sur la Philosophie de l'Histoire_
in the _Telescope_ of Moscow. This letter came like a bomb-shell. He
glorified the tradition and continuity of the Catholic world. He said
that Russia existed, as it were, outside of time, without the
tradition either of the Orient or of the Occident, and that the
universal culture of the human race had not touched it. "The
atmosphere of the West produces ideas of duty, law, justice, order; we
have given nothing to the world and taken nothing from it; ... we have
not contributed anything to the progress of humanity, and we have
disfigured everything we have taken from that progress. Hostile
circumstances have alienated us from the general trend in which the
social idea of Christianity grew up; thus we ought to revise our
faith, and begin our education over again on another basis." The
expression of these incontrovertible sentiments resulted in the exile
of the editor of the _Telescope_, the dismissal of the Censor, and in
the official declaration of Chaadaev's insanity, who was put under
medical supervision for a year.

Chaadaev made disciples who went further than he did, PRINCESS
VOLKONSKY, the authoress of a notable book on the Orthodox Church, and
PRINCE GAGARIN, who both became Catholics. This was one branch of
Westernism. Another branch, to which Belinsky belonged, had no
Catholic leanings, but sought for salvation in socialism and atheism.
The most important figure in this branch is ALEXANDER HERZEN
(1812-1870). His real name was Yakovlev; his father, a wealthy
nobleman, married in Germany, but did not legalize his marriage in
Russia, so his children took their mother's name.

Herzen's career belongs rather to the history of Russia than to the
history of Russian literature; were it not that, besides being one of
the greatest and most influential personalities of his time, he was a
great memoir-writer. He began, after a mathematical training at the
University, with fiction, of which the best example is a novel _Who is
to Blame?_ which paints the _genie sans portefeuille_ of