By "chaos" Mihailovskii means the philosophical and literary confusion attendant upon the unclarified and gloomy situation, but we must remember that the Russian word smula likewise signifies "riot." In his historico-philosophical scheme he describes the period of transition from the eccentric to the subjective anthropocentric epoch as anarchy and false individualism, and likewise speaks of it as revolution and as scepticism, The ultimate stage of the eccentric epoch has deindividualised and therefore dehumanised man. Faust, Wagner, and-the stock exchange speculators, have broken the shackles of religious and political absolutism without being able to throw off economic shackles. The regime of arbitrary force continues, and in the tiniest village no less than in the capital the usurer satisfies his avarice with the aid of the state police. In the west, liberal constitutionalism and parliamentarism, the monarchy and the republic, serve the bourgeois vampire; whilst in Russia, absolutism, with its bureaucracy academically trained on the European model, serves the bourgeois.
Mihailovskii's analysis of the chaos lays bare its various elements. In the theoretical field the leading factor is the indefiniteness and dilettantism of metaphysics, the negative philosophy of the spiritual and political slaves who have been awakened by Voltaire and the enlightenment.
Morally, the enlightened slave, the bourgeois, now freed from his dread of the old authorities, reveals himself in his pornographic literature. Mihailovskii does not hesitate to condemn, as far as Russian developments are concerned, Zola's theoretical talk concerning the alleged naturalistic positivism; and with all the energy of which he is capable he censures such writers as Nemirovič-Dančenko who have devoted their pens to a literature which has sunk to the level of the Parisian "Journal des Cochons." Mihailovskii is especially fierce in his denunciation of the lesser bourgeoisie of the third republic. By their wealth they were removed from the necessity of labour; they had abandoned clericalism and even Catholicism without finding anything to replace it which could minister to the mental and moral life; thus had it come to pass that the "Journal des Cochons" was the catechism of these philistines. Pornography has always existed, but not until to-day has it been raised to the level of a public system.
