excellent, if not the most excellent, philosophy of the sound human understanding, as incorporating the true wisdom of life. Subsequently the customs and the economic institutions of the peasantry were looked upon as the embodiment of the best possible social institutions. Finally, for the intellectuals, the mužik came in addition to represent the religious ideal.
Yet Ilja of Murom, the Russian hero, was nothing but a serf. The aspirations of the humanitarians Radiščev and Pnin, the hopes of the decabrists and of the liberal thinkers, writers, and statesmen during the reign of Nicholas I, were not realised until 1861. Ilja's fetters were not struck off until long after his western congeners had been free men.
The new Russian literature reflects the growing interest in the mužik's fate. Beginning with Puškin, modern Russian authors have depicted an idealised rural life, and from the sixties onwards an increasing number of writers have dealt with all the activities of the peasants. Allusion was made to this literary development in connection with our analysis of the liberation of the peasantry and of the agrarian crisis.
"C'est la campagne qui fait le pays, et c'est le peuple de la campagne qui fait la nation." These words of Rousseau in Emile are the creed of the narodničestvo, in so far as that movement is simply an expression of the fact that Russia is preeminently agrarian, and that therefore all thoughts concerning Russia and Russia's destiny turn upon the mužik. Government and administration are busied with thoughts of the mužik; art and literature, history and the social sciences, centre in the mužik; the mužik constitutes an important section of every political program.
The narodničestvo, therefore, was likewise the basis of Russian socialism, the mir and the artel becoming the hope of Russian communism. Beginning with the slavophils, the narodničestvo recurs in Herzen, in Bakunin, in Černyševskii and his successors; the secret societies of the revolutionaries and the terrorists raise the war-cry, Land and Freedom.
The narodničestvo is not a unified doctrine, and was never advocated by a single leading authority, as socialism was advocated by Marx. Groups of various shades of opinion, and at a later date various political parties, have endeavoured after their respective fashions and in divers domains to expound the fundamental ideas of the narodničestvo.
Of political importance in the beginning of the seventies
