of Novikov, and he endeavoured to combine them in harmonious unison with those of Šiškov. The appearance in "The European" of Kirěevskii's essay The Nineteenth Century cost Aksakov his office as censor. He was not blinded by his friendship with Gogol, and would not accept without qualification the fallacies of Gogol's religious mysticism. His sons were less unprejudiced in their relationship to Gogol. Konstantin compared Gogol with Homer, and ascribed to him a position above all the writers of Europe. Bělinskii, champion of Gogol as literary artist, found it necessary to dissent from this view, and at length in 1880, at the Puškin festival, Ivan Aksakov hailed Puškin the greatest of the truly Russian poets. Prior to this the slavophils had given that place to Gogol.
But Gogol was no slavophil, nor was Ostrovskii. The relationships of both to the Moscow slavophils were those of personal friendship rather than of doctrine. Tjutčev, on the other hand, may be counted among the slavophils, and so may Jasykov. Homjakov and the two younger Aksakovs expounded their views in philosophic poems and dramas rather than directly. Apollon Maikov had strong classical leanings; the Greek and Latin elements in his work are too numerous for us to classify him as a slavophil poet. Nevertheless, he was seduced by the slavophil Byzantine-Russian outlook, with its essential contradictions (see his lyrical tragedy, Two Worlds; or the Two Romes), into the strange aberration of writing an apotheosis of John the Terrible. Kohanovskaja (1825–1884) had likewise close literary relationships with the slavophils (Konstantin Aksakov), and exemplified slavophil ideas in her novels.
Dostoevskii, last of all, had imbibed the ideas of Kirěevskii and the other slavophils, and may himself be termed slavophil if religious messianism and the philosophico-historical outlook be admitted as principles of slavophilism. But Dostoevskii developed his views towards religion and the church independently, following a different route from that taken by the slavophils. To put the matter paradoxically, Dostoevskii is too slavophil to be reckoned among the slavophils—there is nothing in him of the Old Slavic sentiment which Homjakov and Ivan Aksakov combined with the religious philosophy of Kirěevskii.
Early slavopliilism was a modification of the Russist or Old Russist tendency that had been previously displayed by Boltin, Ščerbatov, and Šiškov. Philosophically the slavophils
