Though he sought strength and aid in intercourse with monks and believers, he was never able to rid himself completely of the sting of doubt.
Doubtless Kirěevskii experienced a change of views, becoming more conservative, but he exhibited no intolerance towards those who held opinions he had discarded, and he maintained freedom of judgment vis-à-vis his slavophil associates.[1]
Above all Kirěevskii demanded that there should be unity, not only in philosophical views, but likewise in personal and social life. Upon the foundation of a defective philosophy of cognition borrowed from German idealism he established a psychological, epistemological, and historical, dualism which was to give expression to the contrast between Russia and Europe. His consistent application of this dualism to historical evolution is a quite creditable performance, but his history and philosophy of history constitute rather a deductive artifact than an empirical demonstration of actual occurrences.
In his analysis of European dualism Kirěevskii laid bare the errors and the defects that had characterised the dichotomisation of Russian development since the days of Peter; but the errors and defects which he perceived in Europe had in fact forced themselves on his attention in regard to Russia and in regard to himself. It cannot be denied that this dichotomisation exists in Russia and in Europe, but Kirěevskii erred when he objectivised his own life ideals, when he transferred them to the philosophico-historical plane and to Old Russia. His mistake was the one made by all European romanticists since the days of Rousseau, when they sought the ideal for the future in the past, some among the ancient Teutons and Gauls, others among the ancient Slavs, and yet others in the age of the apostles. Kirěevskii transferred Schelling's church of the future to the third Rome or discovered it in the Russian mužik.
He strongly idealised the third Rome, and this idealisation of Old Russia and of Orthodoxy was in reality a severe criticism of extant Russia. The literary henchmen of Tsar Nicholas were well aware of this, condemning as "quite peculiarly
- ↑ A characteristic utterance was one to Granovskii: "I am closely akin to you in healing, but I am far from sharing all your intellectual convictions; in faith I am with our friends, but differ from them greatly in other respects." To Homjakov he wrote in 1844: "You perhaps regard me as an arch-slavophil. Let me tell you that only in part do I share the slavophil's outlook, and that from the remainder of their opinions I am as remote as from the most eccentric of the views of Granovskii."
