administrative exile in the remoter provinces of European
Russia.

For a time there was little overt revolutionary or even radical
activity. The dissolution of Herzen's circle was followed by a
temporary loss among Moscow intellectuals of interest in the
French progressive thinkers. German philosophy and romantic
fiction and poetry, particularly the writings of the Gothic
Terror school, now became the fashion; the young students
and littérateurs spent their time discussing the metaphysical
tortuosities of Fichte and Hegel, and this tendency was encour-
aged by the Tsar and his advisers, under the illusion that
anything emanating from the Berlin academies must neces-
sarily be favourable to the kind of absolutism they wished to
maintain.

But the ferment of intellectual rebellion set going by the
Decembrists was by no means dead, and any current of thought
from the West was assimilated and transformed in the minds
of these restive young men until it served their need to formu-
late a creed of criticism and resistance. Hegelianism became
the fashionable philosophy, and, while some Russians, like
Katkov and the Slavophils, eventually followed Hegel's own
path to the justification of autocracy, the more energetic
spirits, like Bakunin and Belinsky, merely found that it gave
an impetus to their iconoclastic urges. Belinsky became the
first great Russian critic and, throughout the 1840's until his
death in 1848, wrote literary criticism into which he contrived
to instil a biting commentary on the existing social structure
of his country. Herzen, returning from exile in 1840, once
again contributed the matured scepticism of his French
philosophy, while this decade also saw the beginning of the
great exodus to the West. Bakunin departed to Germany, and
only returned home fettered and as a dreaded revolutionary in
1849; Turgenev was for a time his travelling companion and
remained under the influence of Western radical thought;
Stankevitch, one of the finest characters of this Russian renais-
sance, died in Italy, having exhausted a great talent in the
uncongenial atmosphere of autocratic Moscow.

The tide of thought that was to produce the outstanding
outburst of great literature and revolutionary endeavour in
nineteenth-century Russia was thus well under way by the

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