Thus even Tolstoi, who believed himself to have been led by the mužiks and the sectaries to the discovery of true religion, disclosed in his The Power of Darkness the moral corruption of the mužik. It is enough in this connection to mention Čehov and Gor'kii!
Finally, if we were to believe the descriptions of the mužik which have been printed of late in clericalist organs, the Russian saviour and messiah has become an anarchistic hooligan.
In Smoke, Turgenev characterises the uncritical narodničestvo in the following terms: "The cultured Russian stands before the Russian peasant, makes a profound reverence, and says, 'Heal me, for I am perishing from moral corruption,' and the mužik makes a reverence no less profound, and rejoins, 'Help me, I am perishing from ignorance'."
As early as 1862, Turgenev justly indicated to Herzen the political conservatism of the mužik, insisting that beneath the sheepskin were concealed the germs of the same bourgeois spirit which Herzen had discerned in the western bourgeoisie. In his prose poem The Worker and the White Hand (1878) Turgenev depicts a workman who would like to have the luck-bringing halter wherewith a member of the intelligentsia who has gone down among the people has been hanged—hanged on account of his activities in the cause of the workers. Mihailovskii animadverted upon the "optimism" of Zlatovratskii. It must be admitted that the Russian peasant has changed of late, and has changed for the better, but the improvement is not due to the labours of the narodniki. The mir notwithstanding, the Russian village has since 1861 undergone rapid economic and social transformation; during this period the kulak (literally "fist," the name given to the village dealer or middleman) has acquired and enlarged his sinister reputation; the Russian village, as is conspicuously indicated by the great rise in prices, has been drawn within the vortex of capitalism.
The young narodniki recognise that Russia has already been capitalised and industrialised, and they recognise further that capitalism exhibits for Russia and releases for Russia energies that are not merely negative and destructive, but are in addition positive, organic and formative.
Thus the economic differences between the narodniki and
sexual decadence, such as a Merežkovskii could well have utilised in his accounts of the sectaries.
