Chapter VI

"I WANT A HOME BUT A HOME THERE IS NOT":

IN SEARCH OF A SOUL; A EUROPEAN

DIVERSION, AND RETURN TO RUSSIA

On July 2, 1823 Petr had written his brother from St. Petersburg to inform him of his plans. While in the capital and apparently still in a poor state of health, he had consulted a Dr. Miller who had explained that "everything was due to nerves, even the stomach weakness." Petr's "everything" included hemorrhoids and he informed Mikhail that he was sending him a book on the subject so that he "would see what it is to have a haemorrhoidal condition." Kuxhaven, a coastal town near Hamburg was to be Petr's first destination. There, following the orders of Dr. Miller, he would bathe in the sea.

Three days later at Kronstadt, Chaadaev suddenly changed his plans, and the whimsical, self-indulgent way in which he made his decision marked a trait of his character that would grow stronger during his European travels.

Seeing a nice English ship which was going directly to London, I could not restrain myself and decided to sail on it. Thanks to my credit, it is possible for me to go wherever I take it into my head. My ship is a dashing three-masted vessel. Its name is the Kitty . . . . On the Lubeck boat it would have been terribly bad, crowded, dirty and nothing to eat; the whole deck was cluttered with barrels and every kind of rubbish, and here to the contrary everything is good and comfortable . . . . You surely will ask what has happened to my baths in the sea. But does not England also have the sea?

There was a final bit of style which Chaadaev added to his journey; he took a servant named Ivan whom, apart from complaints, he rarely mentioned in his correspondence.

As the Kitty approached the coast of Denmark on July 19 Petr was in a good mood and wrote Mikhail to express his pleasure: "I do not merely admire the sea, I love it! So greatly, so passionately that it is impossible to explain my feelings; I especially dote upon a stormy night. Under the blackness the abyss growls, but the moon swims in the sky, and shines as if over meadows and peaceful valleys!" Petr's romantic description of the sea was probably motivated by his anticipation of a visit to Hamlet's castle which the boat was rapidly approaching. Late that night, his visit completed, he added a postscript: "Elsinore is a miraculous place, the sea shore is fascinating, but unfortunately it was too dark to stroll about . . . . I bid you farewell only because I have to sleep."

Yet, amid all his enthusiasm there crept in some doubts. After expressing his gratitude for the fact that Murav'ev-Apostol had seen him off, he added a lament: "Not one of my Petersburg friends came with me to say farewell. You see they do not like me. One likes my mind, another my outlook and a third, my spirit; but not one of them likes poor old me." This was not the complaint of a person psychologically and emotionally at peace with himself. Just who was "poor old" Chaadaev? Petr did not and would not really know until more than five years later, when he was able to transfer his doubts about his own identity to a searching critique of Russian cultural identity and, in so doing, to create for himself a viable identity of social critic and philosopher. Implicit in his admission to his brother were his own doubts about the integration of his "mind," his "spirit" and his "outlook." During the last days of July, as the Kitty was crossing the North Sea, it was overtaken by a very severe storm that forced it far to the north of London.

London

Early in August 1823 Chaadaev disembarked at Yarmouth and went on to London where he visited Westminster Cathedral and climbed to the "whispering gallery" that borders the rim of the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral. He informed Mikhail that the "most striking thing in London . . . [was] not its huge size but its wonderful parks, St. James Park, Green Park, Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens which are composed of several hundreds of acres of green space." Apparently Chaadaev did not desire either to become closely acquainted with London's history and traditions or to familiarize himself with its modern lire style, for he told his brother that he was in a hurry to get to Brighton and had left London just as soon as he had completed the necessary financial and passport transactions.

Brighton delighted Petr. He wrote his first letter from England to Mikhail on September first from Sompting, a small village just outside Brighton, and exclaimed: "I have to admit to you that this is the most pleasant town in the world." His living quarters in a country house, "several miles from Brighton," cost three guineas a week for food and lodging for himself and his servant. He considered this to be inexpensive, especially since the house was "entwined in ivy and grape vines" and had a garden with a rosebush that climbed right to the roof and was laden with flowers which rustled by his window. Abruptly Petr added: "You will ask, am I satisfied? I am afraid that I do not know." This indecisive answer derived from the same feeling of uncertainty as his complaint that none of his friends from St. Petersburg "liked poor old me." It was an admission that he did desperately wish to know how he could find peace of mind. Not being able to find a quick or easy answer, Chaadaev arrived at a temporary solution: he would postpone it by months of sightseeing which would in turn eventually become years.

While Petr was staying in his cottage near Brighton he received two letters from W. Alexander, a bookseller whom he had apparently met in Yarmouth. The first is dated August 22, 1823 and contains evidence of a renewed intellectual interest in a subject which would become more and more a major concern of Chaadaev --religion. Alexander declared:

From the very agreeable example I have had of your conversation, I am led to desire more of it. And should circumstances favor it, a renewal of our acquaintance would to me be very gratifying. At breakfast . . . I ventured to speak on a most important subject in which you did not appear disinclined to join me,--I mean religion. I spoke of Christian Unitarianism and . . . I request your acceptance and beg your perusal of the three small pamphlets which accompany this note. They give a just and a fair view of the few really important truths which are by many . . . zealots very harshly spoken against.

On September 15 Alexander wrote again to Chaadaev, informing him that he was sending some books which Petr had requested and outlining his attempts to contact a certain Mr. Browning whom Chaadaev wanted to meet. The "three small pamphlets" sent by Alexander were very likely among the first of a large number of religious books that Chaadaev began to gather while abroad--a collection that eventually would include "works of English and Scottish religious writers," "German church historians and Biblical scholars," and "Christian mystics."

Mikhail received Petr's letter and, on October 24, he started to write a reply. Discussing the joy which Chaadaev had experienced in walking along the seashore in Brighton, Mikhail noted:

With you this rarely occurs, but perhaps in a few years it will not be this way with you. Hypochondria! Melancholia! Why, when I read that you had openly expressed your joy, I was joyful. Thus, you have come to life or at least you will begin to come to life . . . . If from foreign lands you return here as sick and as bitter as you were, then it will be necessary to send you not to England but to Siberia. In the midst of all your worries you rush off into the arms of joy without a twinge of conscience and without retrospection--you will have what you are seeking. But the fact that somehow you are afraid of being suddenly healed of a moral and a physical illness,--somehow you are ashamed . . . .

Mikhail's letter draws a very revealing picture of the distressed psychological condition in which he had last seen his brother. It also shows that Mikhail believed that Petr was to some extent running away from the problems posed by his sudden retirement from the service. After all, a sick man could be excused if he could not face life on the same plane of achievement as his fellow man, and Chaadaev during the coming months would have an ample supply of illnesses.

At the beginning of the last week in October, Petr wrote his brother that "he would stay no longer in England." But before he could complete his preparations to go to Paris he "caught a chill" and when he recovered, he decided to stay on a while longer in London in order "to see the festival of the Lord Mayor." On November 8, 1823, several days after the festival, he wrote to Mikhail that he did not know why he was still in London and promised to go within a week. He tried light-heartedly to sum up his impression of what he had seen:

I have satisfactorily seen England although I could not say that I discerned it very well through the fog. About this fog--he who has never seen it cannot have a real understanding of it. In London, sometimes in the daytime they go about with lanterns and when it happens at night the people run along the streets and call to each other as though they were in a forest . . . .

He was still troubled by the emotional problems which had driven him abroad. Here they took the form of a sense of insecurity about his relationship with his brother. There was much that Petr wanted to tell Mikhail but he did not know how, and he blamed this on the fact that he had only just received Mikhail's first two letters. Petr declared that it was his brother's silence which made him afraid that it was his fault for not being able to communicate adequately. He complained: "It is strange and ridiculous. I scribble and correct as though I wrote to a loved one, I am afraid to write rubbish, but I do not know how to write seriously." Petr was tense and on the defensive when he wrote to Mikhail; his attitude was caused in part by his awareness that, as the result of his physical and emotional problems, he was enjoying a holiday which perhaps Mikhail thought he did not deserve.

He ended his letter with a discussion of the various problems of his serfs. These problems grew out of a division of their properties in Nizhnii Novgorod Province that Petr and Mlkhail had carried out in May, 1822. Khripunovo, the family estate of their parents, went to Mikhail who settled there in the summer of 1823. In his new role of country squire, Mikhail took a strong interest in running his estate and in bettering the living conditions of his serfs. Early in 1820 Chaadaev and Nikolai Turgenev had engaged in discussions that condemned serfdom; however, by the end of 1823 Chaadaev's views had changed. In the division of property carried out in May of 1822, he had received 3,000 desiatins of land and 456 male serfs. In addition, Mikhail, who apparently had received more than half of the properties in Nizhnii Novgorod, had agreed to pay him 70,000 rubles plus interest in periodic installments. Despite his apparently liberal views, there is no information to indicate that Petr had ever bothered to visit the village of Likhacha, which comprised the principal part of his property in Nizhnii Novgorod. He regarded his serfs and the farm and forest land only as a source of much desired income and, as long as he needed or believed that he needed this money, his abolitionist views became only empty rhetoric.

Mlkhail had written that the peasants of Likhacha had become discontented, and had offered to help correct the problem. Petr instructed his brother to take them under his "protection" and rather innocently, in view of his previous lack of concern, added: "I do not understand why they did not complain to me." Since Mikhail was to take over the management of Likhacha, Petr informed him that the peasants in question paid an obrok (quit rent) of 10,728 rubles and requested that 1,764 rubles from the sale of the estate's timber should be credited to his "activities" of "the past year."

Paris

Arriving in Paris early in December, Chaadaev ran around the city and looked for places that were familiar to him from his first visit in 1814. He was not able to find many and on January 1, 1824 (new style) he wrote to his brother.

Even from the beginning, it seemed to me that Paris was not so noisy, not so gay as before, but later I guessed that it was I and not Paris who had changed. I found here an old acquaintance, [Baron Aleksandr Kazumirovich] Meiendorf, and I am living with him. There are many Russians here, more than a hundred and I have met many of them, although I do not spend time with any of them . . . . It is not very pleasant to roam about the streets; they are terribly dirty. I am awaiting the spring impatiently. I live next to the Tuilleries Gardens and I will promise myself much joy from its greenery and shade. I will live here for the entire spring and at the end of May will go to Switzerland and spend the summer there. Here, meanwhile, are my plans. I understand, my friend, that my leave was given only for a year. But in a year, I will not succeed in doing everything, permit me a six month extension, something that will be enough for me to see Italy. More I do not ask.

But Petr would ask for more, and the additional six months would grow to eighteen. The length of his stay abroad and the money that it required quickly became a point of major contention between the two brothers. Chaadaev lamented that he had spent too much money in England and asserted that he "hoped to correct" his finances while in Paris. But he also realized that even though the most expensive part of his trip was behind him, the funds that he had remaining would not be sufficient. Consequently he asked Mikhail to send him a sum of money of which part had been earmarked for payment to a foundling hospital. Petr had also borrowed money from several persons before he left Russia. Now he instructed his brother on how two of the debts should be repaid and in a very cavalier manner told Mikhail that he should take on himself the responsibility for a third. He asked Mikhail not to condemn him for spending nearly all the money that he had taken and blamed his financial difficulties on the state of his health which would become a convenient scapegoat as his European travels continued.

On February 3, 1824 Chaadaev, quite distraught because he had not received any letters from his brother since two that had been written the previous August, complained to Mlkhail: "I will say nothing to you about my sadness. Of course you know how it is to live in a foreign land without any news from your relatives . . . . My grief is so great that I literally cannot find a word to describe it. The darkest thoughts occur to me." But Petr supposed that his brother had not met with "serious misfortune," because had this been the case he would have been informed. Nevertheless he pledged to sail for home if he did not hear from Mlkhail during March.

Not long before his self-appointed April deadline, Chaadaev finally received a letter from his brother. In a more cheerful frame of mind he began what became a lengthy reply that was not completed until March 28. He told Mikhail that his health had improved and asked whether it had been difficult to spend the winter at Khripunovo. And, as had been the case with one of his letters from London, he found it difficult to express his true feelings: "I scribble and recopy as though I were writing to a loved one. You will laugh at this and ascribe it to vanity, but I will . . . assure you that I began this letter a hundred times first in French and then again in Russian."

The reason for Chaadaev's difficulty soon became apparent, for now there began a resurgence of the strong tension in his relations with Mikhail that had become so noticeable during their correspondence of 1820. Mikhail had told Petr that he had written him a letter which had never been sent. Chaadaev immediately went on the defensive assuming that his brother had written that it was "shameful to knock about the world" while he left his "peasants without someone in charge of them." Faced with these accusations Petr could only ask for "indulgence" for the fact that he "was riven by a ridiculous pity of [his] personal existence."

Mikhail had reacted unsympathetically to his brother's desire to go to Italy, but Petr continued to plead for his consent and, in the process of asking his brother to be reasonable, made a revealing remark about his own character: "Everyone loves other persons in his own way. For example, my aunt loves to see them, for me it is the desire to be loved in return, and for you they are necessary in order to grumble at or to compare notes with on your properties." Chaadaev loved in order to be loved in return--this may be seen as a further admission of the insecurity that he felt in his personal relationships, an insecurity and estrangement that would later come to be reflected in his inability to relate to Russian culture or history. Other examples of this aspect of Petr's character can be offered. The most prevalent one is the way in which he signed many of his letters to Mikhail. "Farewell, be healthy and love me" he had written on July 19, 1823; "Vale et me ama, which means: always love me," he would write on April 1, 1824. As his relations with Mikhail grew more strained, his request became less frequent but still it would again appear in a letter of July 20, 1824 and another of September 14, 1825. "Accept me even though I know not who I am and cannot accept myself," Petr seemed to be saying.

While he was in Paris, Chaadaev had undertaken a series of visits to Dr. Franz-Joseph Gall, an anatomist and craniologue with an international reputation. Petr had asked Gall both for an opinion of his aptitudes and whether his physical illnesses were related to his mental state. Petr's second question showed an acute perception of a very likely source of some of his physical problems, and he unwittingly emphasized this knowledge towards the end of his letter when he warned Mikhail: "If you will be cruel to me then I will have to set off to Italy at a gallop and that, of course, could ruin my health." Finally, Chaadaev's query regarding his aptitudes revealed his continuing concern about his psychological make-up, his identity, his moral and spiritual purpose in life.

Schiller, Schelling and Bildung

At about this time, Petr began to search for intellectual answers to these problems. Certainly it is very probable that during the months after his retirement from the service he read many of the works of Schiller. Late in 1821 and again early in 1822 he was asking his cousin Ivan Shcherbatov for the works of Goethe. He would meet Schelling in 1825 and by the time that he came to write his Philosophical Letters he would be very familiar with the ideas of Herder. Also, it is possible that he was acquainted with the works of Shaftesbury, Pufendorf and Wieland. These men all had one thing in common: From their works there developed the concept of an individual ethical goal that came to be embraced by the German word Bildung. This "untranslatable" word is sometimes understood a~ "learning," "education" or "refinement." However, for the leading intellectual figures of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Weimar as well as for Chaadaev, Bildung came to be understood as a self-cultivation which had as its goal the perfection of the powers of the individual intellect.

This concept came to be important for Petr because it could promise him a set of philosophical guidelines for building a self-understanding and purpose in life that he knew he so sorely lacked. The writings of Schiller had taught him that a man could find self-fulfillment in the world of the inner spirit. During his European travels he was beginning to search for the means by which this self-fulfillment could be achieved. Goethe, whose works Petr had desired to read at the end of 1821, had asserted that each man had the responsibility "for his own inner development" and a duty "to make and remake himself." He had also declared that through personal study and observation of the Italian way of life and its arts he had been able to develop his inner capacities to a point of "great renewal" Goth's praise of Italy was possibly on Petr's mind when in his letter of March 20 he wrote to Mikhail:

If Italy does not present anything seductive to your imagination, then this is because you are a Philistine. Just because I do not think this way, why should you want to deprive me of the pleasure of seeing it? And why do you really want that, finding myself in Switzerland right next door to Italy and seeing from the Alps its beautiful skies, I should be kept from descending into this beautiful land which from childhood we have been accustomed to consider an enchanted country. Do you realize that besides the immediate pleasures that such traveling gives, there is still the aim of a supply of recollections and even your bitter philosophy agrees, I think, that it is good to be supplied with such recollections . . . .

In short, for Chaadaev, as for Goethe, the experience of Italy would be a step on the road to Bildung, to self-cultivation and renewal.

At this point a further elaboration of the development of the concept of Bildung will help to clarify the direction in which Chaadaev's intellectual interests traveled between 1823 and the time when he began to write his Philosophical Letters. Shaftesbury had been among the earliest theorists of the concept when he had asserted that by following virtue as exemplified in the lives of the Greeks a man would develop a moral sense that would be a sufficient guide to right conduct. Pufendorf had been the source of many of Shaftesbury's ideas. me former had declared it to be part of a man's duty to "aid an inborn social sense (socialitas) in man" by "cultivating his own mind and heart [in] a process of self-improvement" which he called "culture" or "Bildung." By the final third of the eighteenth century through the writings of Wieland, Bildung had come to be understood as the self-cultivation of a "moral sense" of "taste" and of "the requisite skills" for this, "rather than as abstract knowledge." Wieland had concluded that "man must, in a manner of speaking, become his own second creator." Both Goethe and Herder had asserted that each man had a duty to seek Bildung and to bring his own inner development ever closer to a state of perfection. Moreover Herder expanded the concept of Bildung to the point where it became for him the object of the development of a national culture.

But it was Schiller, who in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, carried the concept of Bildung to a higher stage where for Chaadaev it could open the way to Schelling's philosophy. Schiller asserted that man possessed a dual nature: physical and mental. The mental he called "the Person . . . the eternally persisting I," the ego. The physical, which he called "Condition," was that material which existed and could be sensed by the ego. Man's rational nature tells him that he must organize all that he apprehends "into a unit which has significance." But in this organization man is "impelled by two opposing forces," his "sensuous drive" or a craving for sensuous experience and a "formal drive," a pull or impulse towards the mental forming of experience. Although it is man's sensuous drive which alone can awaken and develop his potentialities, "it is also this drive which makes their complete fulfillment impossible. With indestructible chains it binds the ever soaring spirit to the world of sense, and summons abstraction from its most unfettered excursions into the Infinite back to the limitations of the Present." On the other hand the formal drive gives man the opportunity to affirm the priority of his ego in the face of all changes in his physical condition. When the formal drive "holds sway . . . we experience the greatest enlargement of being," and all the limitations of physical existence disappear. But the sensuous drive and the formal drive need not always be opposed. "To watch over these and to secure for each of these drives its proper frontiers is the task of culture" or "Bildung," for the cultivated man has developed both his "capacity for feeling" and "his capacity for reason."

Finally Schiller posits the existence of a third drive which operates when man takes pleasure in something only for its own sake, only as an end and not a means. For lack of a better expression he calls this in Letter 14 man's "playdrive." Declaring that the sense-drive deprives man of all freedom and that the form-drive deprives him of all dependence and passivity, Schiller concludes that both drives "exert constraint upon the psyche," the first a physical constraint, the second a moral constraint. But when the play-drive functions, both the sense-drive and the form-drive are brought together and act in accord. Acting equally on both physical and moral constraint the play-drive will annul both "and set man free both physically and morally." In Letter 15 Schiller shows that the play drive functions most fully when the ego is engaged in artistic creation and enjoyment. Thus it was when he became engaged in aesthetic activity that man became in the fullest sense human and achieved the ideal totality of self-cultivation, fulfillment and perfection.

These ideas of Schiller laid a foundation for Chaadaev's interest in the philosophy of Schelling. They also offer an important explanation of what Petr came to see as the goal and motivation of his travels: the storing up of experiences obtained through seeing first hand those places which had played major roles in the development of Western culture, of meeting famous intellectuals like Schelling with whom he could exchange ideas and knowledge of personal experiences and finally of obtaining books on philosophy and religious history which could offer more ideas and many of which would be unobtainable in Russia. All these activities would guide him towards the attainment of true self-cultivation or Bildung with its eventual goal of artistic creativity.

Chaadaev ended his March 20, 1824 letter to Mikhail with an account of his financial problems. He admitted that he had bought some books for 1,500 francs and some paintings for 1,000 francs; nevertheless, he blamed all his problems on the servant whom he "took along out of pity, [and without whom he] would not have spent more than half a kopeck beyond what was agreed upon." On March 27, in a postscript, Petr added a complaint that the money he had previously requested had not yet arrived and informed Mikhail that if the money for the foundling hospital was tied up by legal problems, more money should be obtained from the peasants of the village of Likhacha. Earlier he had tried to pacify his brother with the pledge that his European sojourn was his "last prank," and had promised that "after this there will be nothing more for me to do but to be as wise as you and to settle in the countryside." But it is doubtful that Mikhail felt that such a promise fully compensated for Petr's increasing demands.

When Chaadaev wrote to his brother again on April 1, he was still in Paris. Money was once more the major subject of the letter as he asked that funds which were to be sent to Switzerland be sent ahead to Paris. The only clue that he offered regarding his day-to-day activities was a complaint that while the weather was "cold and miserable," it was fortunate that it did not keep the theater from functioning and that he attended "the French theater most of all."

By May 14, 1824 Petr's financial problems had become more serious. "Send me money soon," he asked Mikhail. "Much has happened which I could not have foreseen. My saddle horse stumbled under me and I flew over its head not hurting myself, but the horse broke its leg and consequently I need the price of a horse. This incident cost me nearly 1,000 francs." After complaining that Mlkhail had not written him, Chaadaev expressed the guilt that he felt because of the demands that he made on his brother: "I cannot relax in view of the fact that I burden you piteously with my troubles, and I swear to you it would be inexcusable for me if, having returned to Russia, I did not hope by my conduct to redress a wrong." He would repeat this pledge again before he returned to Russia where he would find himself unable to-fulfill it--the resulting stress would become an important part of the circumstances which produced the crisis that led to the writing of the Philosophical Letters.

Between May and July 1824 Chaadaev ran completely out of money. On July 10 he wrote to his brother to thank him for eleven thousand rubles that he had just received from Mikhail and to describe his relief over the end of his financial crisis.

I have lived for a long time without money and have made ends meet only with difficulty, but at least the problem did not go as far as prison. Not having here a single acquaintance with whom I could stay, I did not know how I would survive. I sold my coat, books and various rubbish. Fortunately, the weather has been bad all summer, consequently it was not so disappointing to sit at home and there was no real reason to go to Switzerland. A week or two ago I met on the street a certain K. Gagarin; he offered me 1,000 rubles and I came back to life. And by that old saying that one good thing never comes without another, I foresaw that I soon would receive your letter and the money and so it happened. The weather since has been wonderful and I have visited the environs of Paris.

The problem had certainly been unpleasant for Chaadaev, but it is doubtful that he was ever in any serious danger of being imprisoned for his debts. If this had been the case, he would likely have written Mikhail several times during June to plead for money and he gave no indication of having done so in the above letter.

Discussing in the remainder of his letter his plans for his return to Russia, Petr reacted favorably to Mlkhail's suggestion that he and their aunt Princess Shcherbatova settle in Khripunovo. He warned that he was not certain whether the Princess would be happy at having to leave Alekseevskoe, nevertheless he asserted that the most important thing was that he and Mikhail should live together. With this in mind Chaadaev remarked "let her visit Khripunovo and see what she says." However, he still feared that there would be problems since at Khripunovo "there are not enough amusements and distractions by means of which to pass the time" and something would be necessary for her "to keep occupied." Jokingly he concluded that the only way to find that "something" would be "to transfer to her the entire management of the estate." Of more importance, there was hidden in this statement Petr's fear that, having always lived a cosmopolitan existence, he himself might find life to be intolerable in Khripunovo, an isolated village more than 200 miles from Moscow.

But Petr was also motivated by the need to assuage the guilt that he felt as the result of the self-indulgence of his travels and his continual demands upon Mikhail for more money. Consequently, he would play his pranks today and atone for them tomorrow--this was his essential motivation when he asked Mikhail to begin to prepare the materials necessary to build him living-quarters at Khripunovo. Finally, having made this pledge against his future, Petr decided that it had won him the right to an extension of his European travels. Having silenced Mikhail's opposition to his seeing Italy, he added Germany to his itinerary, asserting that while Dr. Gall had cured him of his hypochondria, the springs of Karlsbad would be necessary to restore completely his health. To finance his continued travels he instructed Mikhail to mortgage Likhacha. He would settle accounts when he returned to Russia, for the present he would enjoy himself.

Less than two weeks passed before Chaadaev wrote again to Mikhail: money and his plans for his life after the end of his travels were again his major concerns. Uncertain about where he should live when he returned to Russia, he acknowledged the major problem with which he was confronted. "I want a home but a home there is not." Yes, there was Khripunovo he admitted but, living at Khripunovo, how could he see Iakushkin and his other friends? He posed the problem with which he was faced: "to be everywhere at once." For the present, he could provide no answer and he decided to change the topic to something more subject to quantification--his financial problems.

To provide more money for his travels he had taken a course of action which in the days before his retirement would have been anathema to the liberal circles in which he traveled: he had sold some of his peasants into the army as recruits. Now asking Mikhail if he thought it would be possible in the future to free the money that was invested in the foundling hospital, he demanded "the money from the recruits," which amounted to "nearly nine thousand" rubles.

Do not tell me that this is a dirty trick or that it is robbery. Of course, it is a dirty trick. But I hope to obtain from the peasants a pardon for myself and in the future to correct past misdeeds. God forgives sinners, will not you and the peasants forgive me? I would present several unforeseen instances in justification, but what for? You will say why did you get into this mess to begin with? The instance with the horse, what did that cost! At first, they agreed to settle for 650 francs, but then they brought suit and forced me to pay 800.

Here is my stupid, my exceedingly stupid letter. All about money, yes money . . . . When I come back I will surrender myself bound hand and foot wholly to your command.

Here is a clear example of what had become and would remain a consistent pattern during Chaadaev's travels: for the sake of his present enjoyment he would mortgage his future both financially and psychologically.

Lamennais and the Church of Rome

The end of Chaadaev's stay in France came about the first of August. He had written Mikhail on July 20, 1824 (August 1, new style) that he planned to be in Geneva within a week. However, on July 26 he was still in Paris recovering from a sudden illness which he described to his brother as "constipation" requiring "recourse to harmful murderous laxatives." He pledged to leave for Switzerland on the following day, informing Mikhail that he now believed that it would not be necessary for him to go to Karlsbad. Almost as an afterthought, he concluded with a familiar request: "Having settled everything here, I will leave without much money, and I hope that you will send help in time."

If Chaadaev's letters to his brother offer a fairly reasonable reflection of reality, Petr had lived in Paris for the duration of a rather empty eight months. His correspondence offers little hint of his reaction to living in the seat of the French culture which had so strongly influenced his own country. There is very little that would serve to indicate the direction of his intellectual interests and his day-to-day existence seems to have slipped by in a rather boring fashion. According to his correspondence he went to the theater and the Chamber of Deputies and did little else. However, Zhikharev attests that Petr told him many years later that he had made there the acquaintance of several well-known intellectuals: Wilhelm von Humbolt, the former Prussian Minister of Education and founder of the University of Berlin; Georges Cuvier, the French natural scientist and advocate of Schelling's Naturphilosophie, and Baron Ferdinand d'Eckstein, in 1824 a historiographer in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Chaadaev's relationship with d'Eckstein was the most important of these three acquaintances. Apart from the testimony of Zhikharev, there is only that of Chaadaev himself regarding this relationship. In a letter to A. I. Turgenev written more than ten years later Petr would declare: "I have received the pamphlet of Mr. Eckstein. I will tell you that I am very grateful for this philosophical gesture and that I shall write to him soon. You never talk to me about this man who has been the best of friends for such a long time." Born in 1790 in Denmark and raised as a Protestant, Eckstein completed his university studies in Germany and in 1807 went to Rome where he converted to Catholicism. In 1813 and 1814 he fought against Napoleon at Lutzen and in other battles. Having pledged his loyalty to Louis XVIII, Eckstein joined the French government service during the Restoration and was rewarded for his work with the title of Baron.

It is probable that Eckstein was in large part responsible for Petr's interest in the Roman Catholic Church, an interest which was not strongly apparent before Chaadaev's lengthy sojourn to Western Europe. Eckstein's explanation of the source of the Roman Church's attraction bears a striking similarity to the outlook with Petr would adopt. The former wrote:

I had joined the Catholic Church by a route foreign to a great many people, by the respect imposed upon me by the grandeur of its past, repelled as I was from Protestantism by its absolute lack of any historical trait in its core, of any vast system of doctrines.

Such an outlook would appear more than once in Chaadaev's discussions of the Roman Church in his Philosophical Letters. Finally, it is also possible that Eckstein introduced Petr to the works of the Catholic religious thinker and publicist Félicité de Lamennais. In 1824 the final volume of Lamennais' four-volume Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion had just been published, and, although it is not known whether Chaadaev actually met Lamennais while in Paris, Petr did buy a copy of this work and during the following years read it with enthusiasm.

Born in 1782 into a bourgeois family in Brittany, Lamennais grew up under the influence of his uncle who possessed vast library of eighteenth century literature. He became a teacher of mathematics in an ecclesiastical school and joined he Catholic priesthood only in 1816. In late 1817, he became a public figure with the publication of his first volume of his Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion: he was greeted as another Bossuet and even Hegel commented favorably on his work.

Lamennais asserted that all human actions were determined by doctrines or beliefs and that human depravity was the result of belief in erroneous doctrines. Surveying the history of Christianity, he saw there a doctrine "which had sanctified obedience, established true social relations, purified morals and often supplied laws." Furthermore, after the advent of Christianity, he believed that the unified world-view of the Catholic Church which he saw as "a constant fidelity to the fundamental principle of the Christian religion, had preserved Europe for fifteen centuries." According to Lamennais, the Reformation was responsible for the unleashing of a series of chaotic events of which the Napoleonic wars had only been the most recent. He complained that,

In spite of partial disorders and slight deviations, Europe was advancing to that perfection to which Christianity calls nations as well as individuals when the Reformation suddenly came to arrest its progress and to precipitate it into the abyss into which it is daily sinking . . . . How did this revolution come about? By a total change of doctrines. The principle of examination was substituted for that of authority . . . that is to say, human reason was put in the place of divine reason or man in the place of God. Man then became the enemy of man.

The Reformation had unleashed an anarchy which threatened society, or rather the social fabric that had been created by the Catholic Church.

This Catholic social fabric was the product of the Catholic system of order and unity that had rescued man's soul from the level of degradation to which it has sunk before the coming of Christianity. This same system had also given a new direction to the human mind which previously had drifted aimlessly "in an immense ocean of doubt and uncertainty. One of the causes of a resurgence of this uncertainty had been man's effort to raise his reason to a level of complete self sufficiency. Lamennais was no friend of the Enlightenment, which he considered "an abuse of reason." He asserted that "haughty reason" must be subdued "by forcing it to bend before an authority so lofty and so dazzling that its rights cannot remain unrecognized . . . . In a word, reason must, by recognizing the sovereignty of God, raise itself to the level of absolute obedience."

The authority of the Catholic church had helped to direct man's reason to this end of obedience and in so doing had helped to build a more unified society than any heretofore attained. This unified society also emphasized social demands at the expense of individual rights, for the Church feared that the unified fabric of society would be destroyed if the direction and daily concerns of men's lives were to be shifted from the group to the individual. Religion as a doctrine must emphasize the group above the individual and in so doing would preserve society. For he who would "overthrow religion would overthrow the foundation of all human society." It was Catholicism which more than any other faith had united man in society and could help him achieve these goals.

Lamennais wrote with a conviction, with a feeling of certainty that his Catholic faith had given meaning to his life and had enabled him to understand the forces behind what to others seemed only chaotic social development. His was a well-defined well-ordered world view. He was a man who knew who he was and where he was going. This order and decisiveness appealed to Chaadaev who, in trying to bring a greater degree of order and self-understanding into his own life, would condemn his own society for being cut off from the unified Catholic social fabric that had given sustenance to Lamennais. In his First Philosophical Letter, Chaadaev would borrow his perception of the role of the Catholic Church in the development of a unified Western European society directly from Lamennais. Describing Europe prior to the Reformation, he would assert that:

Everything was animated by the life-giving principle of unity. Everything came out of it and everything converged into it. The whole intellectual movement of those times tended to build up the unity of human thought, and all motivation had its roots in this powerful need to attain the universal idea [presumably that of the Catholic Church] which is the genius of modern times.

Petr would be indebted to Lamennais for a large part of his description of the role of the Catholic Church in nurturing the development of what both regarded as a unified and healthy society. Chaadaev's emphasis on the "social" role of Christianity, his idea of "truth placed by God in man and transmitted through an uninterrupted [historical] tradition" would also be the fruits of the influence of Lamennais. However, he would find little in Lamennais that would contribute directly to his critique of Russian culture.

France to Switzerland

Chaadaev went from Paris to Geneva where he arrived in the latter part of August, 1824. From that time until late October virtually nothing is known about how he passed his time. Then suddenly he received a letter from Mikhail who accused him of thinking that his brother existed only to fulfill his demands. On October 28, Chaadaev answered his brother's attack, complaining that he had written "a cruel letter," but admitting that he had "deserved it." However, a few words later, Petr stopped his apologies and began to offer a justification of his actions, assuring Mikhail that he had not "been guilty of a single frivolity." Mikhail had also refused him the money that he had asked for in Paris. To this development Petr retorted defiantly: "I assure you, however, that not sending the money does not present any kind of problem. I can live in Berne without money and without boredom pass much time."

Three weeks passed and Chaadaev received a new letter from his brother who in a state of depression had written that he was "ravaged, sick, and tormented." On November 18, he wrote Mikhail of his concern and anguish but gave no indication of any genuine willingness to cut short his travels and return at once to Russia, declaring that while a journey by sea would take too long, he did not "have the health" to travel by land. Yet he admitted that for the present, his health was good. Apparently part of Mikhail's problems had resulted from Chaadaev's demands for money to finance his travels. For in this same letter Petr hung his head like an overly indulgent schoolchild and replied:

I examined myself and saw that I am no good for anything, but should it be that I do not deserve pity? I wrote to you a mean letter filled with foul egotism, but you should know that I had no understanding of your situation and imagined from your first letters that you were living well and happily in Khripunovo and that it was possible to hurry you [for the money] without trouble. On top of all this I did not ask for money but only wanted to know precisely when I would receive it, for with such assurance I could then set out for Italy . . . .

After this last bit of tortuous reasoning Chaadaev rambled on-- in one sentence giving the impression that he would soon return to rescue his brother from his problems, and in the next sentence returning to an undecided position. He concluded that he would leave Geneva within a week, but his conclusion was ambiguous for it gave no hint of whether Petr's destination would be home or merely Berne which he had planned as the next stop on his itinerary.

From Geneva, Chaadaev did go to Berne and to Milan from whence he could have set out for Venice, Vienna and home. However, such a route was hardly the most direct one from Geneva to Brest-Litovsk and, during the coming weeks, he showed little sign of being in a hurry. Arriving in Berne in early December 1824, Petr met another of his cousins, the nineteen-year-old Prince Fedor Aleksandrovich Shcherbatov. Soon afterwards Shcherbatov introduced him to Dmitrii Nikolaevich Sverbeev, an attache of the Russian legation in Berne. Not having lived in Russia for several years Sverbeev recalled that: "by his talk about Russia, Chaadaev gave me a basic understanding of the dislike of the government felt by all the young officers of the army, of the outrages of Arakcheev, of the mystic apathy of the Emperor Alexander and so on." Sverbeev also described the social circle into which he introduced Chaadaev.

I had then the habit of dining everyday at a small table in the company of our friends: Furmann, Guigerd who was deaf, an Englishman named Story, Baron Kriudner [the Russian diplomat] and later on Berg [attaché of the Russian legation]. These dinners were organized at the quarters of an old lady of Berne who wore the costume of a Swiss peasant and whom we called Mrs. Nops. Despite the fact that they were not very good and at three francs were very cheap, we named the dinners "Carousel and Feast''. Into this circle I brought the handsome Chaadaev who struck all with the unapproachable importance and the irreproachable elegance of his manners, his dress and his mysterious silence.

This is virtually the only description of an appearance in "society" by Chaadaev since he had left St. Petersburg in June 1821. He had maintained his brilliance and his dashing appearance and would probably have been very pleased if he could have read Sverbeev's description of the impression that he made. Sverbeev's memoirs also offer a fascinating account of Chaadaev's expression of a critical attitude toward Russian culture, an attitude that in December, 1824, Petr had only begun to formulate and one which he began to develop seriously only after his return to Russia. Many of Petr's evenings in Berne were spent in discussions at Sverbeev's living quarters.

[There] Chaadaev . . . expressed his complete indignation (negodovanie) against Russia and all Russians without exception. He did not hide . . . his deep scorn toward our entire past and present, and he had only despair for our future. He called Arakcheev a scoundrel, the highest powers of the state and military--bribe takers, the nobility--foul slaves, the clergy--know-nothings and all the rest--people who had groveled in slavery and been made stagnant by it. Once, indignant at such exaggerations, I reminded him of the glory of our fatherland war and our victories over Napoleon and asked for mercy on the Russian nobility and our military in the name of his own participation in these events-. "What are you telling me! All this depended on chance, and our heroes then, as was the case much earlier, became famous and were rewarded only by chance or by their influence." Saying this, Chaadaev became extremely agitated and got up from his place . . . . "Gentlemen I will give an example of one who became famous because of his bravery and his patriotism," and then he hesitated: "Well, for example, my father. During the reign of Catherine in the war against Sweden both he and Chertkov were staff officers in the Guards and only because during a fierce battle they hid themselves behind a rock they received the George Cross. Some favorite had protected them because for some reason it was necessary to return two colonels of the Guards, to Petersburg with manifest decorations for bravery."

Sverbeev had exaggerated or been wrong in some of what he had written previously about Chaadaev. In view of this, the above description must be looked at with some skepticism. Having been written long after the publication of Chaadaev's First Philosophical Letter in 1836, Sverbeev's memoirs may have been influenced by Chaadaev's later bitter alienation and pessimism. In December 1824 it is hard to imagine that Petr had become as bitter and as pessimistic as Sverbeev indicates. However, it seems equally unlikely that Sverbeev would have completely fabricated such a detailed description. The probable truth is that in Berne in December, 1824 Chaadaev, who did not feel at home in his native land and who was trying to adopt the lifestyle of a cultivated European gentleman, did speak out in a way which foreshadowed his criticism of Russian culture in his First Philosophical Letter.

Italy

In mid-December, 1824 Chaadaev traveled from Berne to Milan, where on December 18 he wrote to Mikhail: "I arrived here with the intention of making my way through Venice to Vienna and from there homeward. But I see here that in two months it is possible to travel all over Italy . . . ." Petr's concern for his brother's health had suddenly receded into the background. Meanwhile, he was greatly upset about the severe floods which had struck St. Petersburg during the autumn. Pleading for news about the safety of his friends he informed Mikhail that "I cried like a child while reading the newspapers."

While still in Milan on January 8, 1825 Chaadaev wrote to Iakushkin who, according to Mikhail, wanted him to purchase a 400 ruble watch in Geneva for his wife. Petr explained that the most expensive lady's watch in Geneva sold for only 200 rubles and inquired if this would suffice for what he had in mind. After asking for news of Iakushkin's family and their mutual friends, Petr mentioned his brother's distress and requested Iakushkin to investigate the situation and report to him. Declaring that he had intended to return home by way of Venice and Vienna, he confessed that, having arrived in Milan, he had decided to see Italy: "The final ugly deed, precisely an ugly impermissible deed. At home there is not a single glad soul and I gad about and make merry; but tell me how it is possible having been within two week's travel of Rome not to visit it?" It was almost as though by confessing to his guilt Petr hoped that he could justify his indulgence.

Arriving in Florence by mid-January, 1825, Chaadaev soon found out that Nikolai Turgenev, who in April, 1824 had left Russia for a European holiday, had recently been in Florence and was now enroute to Naples and Rome. Petr at once wrote to his old friend informing him that he was "knocking about the world without any aim" and suggested that they meet in Rome in about six weeks time.

While in Florence Chaadaev chanced to meet a man, the English Methodist missionary Charles Cook, who had attained the ability to live the kind of serene and contemplative life that Petr so strongly desired. Cook was a self-cultivated man, a man who possessed Bildung and who, despite the fact that he was not a Catholic like Lamennais, was possessed by the same driving, all-abiding spiritual passion that made the writings of Lamennais so confident and self-assured and, therefore, so attractive to Chaadaev. Long after he had returned to Russia Chaadaev recalled their meeting:

I passed several hours with him; they were . . . hours so pleasant and so relaxed. He . . . lived, it seemed, at a mission station in the south of France. When I became acquainted with him, he had recently returned from Jerusalem. What was striking in him was a marvelous mixture of liveliness and his burning zeal for the supreme object of all his thoughts: in other words for religion --for all else he had only indifference and a cold neglect. In the Italian galleries great forms of art did not arouse his soul, but the little sarcophagi from the first centuries of Christianity for no apparent reason attracted him. He examined and investigated them with a frenzy; he saw in them something sacred, touching, deeply instructive and he buried himself avidly in the meditations which were aroused by them.

Chaadaev and Cook also discussed England where Cook suggested that Petr return in order to acquaint himself further with the sources of its prosperity so that he might have the possibility of applying some of these sources to Russia at a later time. With this in mind, he gave Chaadaev a letter of introduction to a friend, Thomas Marriot-of London. While Petr never returned to England, he did keep Cook's letter which was taken from him at Brest in the summer of 1826 by the Russian police. Being extremely suspicious about the means of betterment that Chaadaev intended to apply to Russia, they demanded an explanation to which Petr replied:

Since all his thought and the whole sphere of his activity was inclined toward religion, all my conversations with him related to this subject. The well-being of England he ascribed in general to a widespread spirit of faith. For my part, I told him with sorrow about the shortcomings of faith in the Russian people, especially in the higher classes. On hearing this, he, by chance, gave me a letter to a friend of his in London so that the friend could acquaint me further with the moral disposition of the English people.

Thus one of the reasons why Chaadaev was attracted to the Englishman's ideas was that, like Lamennais, Cook perceived Christianity as a doctrine which could not only serve as a route to man's salvation but also serve to further the progress of society during man's life on earth. Believing the Russian Orthodox Church to be far more concerned with eventual human salvation than with present social progress, Chaadaev would condemn it in his First Philosophical Letter and would describe his understanding of the benefits which European development had gained from the Catholic Church.

What clear illumination burst forth . . . out of the apparent darkness which had enclosed Europe! . . . But we were isolated . . ., and nothing that was happening in Europe reached us . . . . The eminent qualities with which religion had endowed modern people and which, from a healthy intellectual point of view raises them as high above the Hottentots and Lapplanders; the new forces with which religion had enriched human intelligence and the customs which submission to an unarmed authority had rendered just as mild as they had formerly been brutal --all that passed us by . . . . In a word the new destinies of the human race were not accomplished in our land. Though we were Christians the fruit of Christianity did not mature for us.

Chaadaev was still in Florence when early in March 1825 he received from Nikolai Turgenev a reply to his invitation that they meet in Rome. Writing from Naples, Turgenev informed Petr that he would leave for Rome in mid-March and would stay in the Domona Inn. He looked forward to meeting his old friend and suggested, since it appeared that Petr was suffering from the same disease as he, that he should go to Karlsbad during the summer to take a cure in the springs. Finally, almost as an afterthought, he testified to his own estrangement from the official life of St. Petersburg: "You write that you have no news from Petersburg. In some respects, it is possible to consider this advantageous for a traveling Russian. Each letter from Petersburg, although it is filled with news, . . . depresses me. Living there we became accustomed to everything but here the atrocious nature of such folly is very striking."

Having received this letter from Turgenev, Petr set out immediately for Rome where he rented a room on the Via della Croce. From there on March 7 he wrote to his brother, complaining that he had not written, and asking that "when the money is available" it be sent to him "in the usual manner." Chaadaev warned that he would remain in Rome until he received an answer.

Petr enjoyed Rome immensely. Several weeks later he wrote to Mikhail: "Rome is an extraordinary place--there is nothing like it; it exceeds everything I ever expected or imagined." He visited St. Peter's Cathedral and was pleased by its architecture which stirred his emotions in the same way as had cathedrals constructed in the Gothic style.

When at twilight you roam under its huge vaults and deep shade has already filled the nave and the windows of the dome burn with the rays of the setting sun, you are more surprised than charmed by its superhuman dimensions. These dimensions show you that once to the human creature it was given to surpass nature itself for the glorification of God.

This was how he would recall the experience after his return to Russia and it is interesting to note that it is Western church architecture and not Russian which made such a deep and lasting impression on him.

Nikolai Turgenev arrived in Rome about a week after Petr and the two friends spent almost a month together before Turgenev continued on to Florence where on April 12, he wrote to Chaadaev. He informed Petr: "I regretted that I had parted with you, esteemed friend; that I did not add to those unforgettable days in your company several more . . . . I am deeply grateful to you for this meeting." Chaadaev had told him of his financial difficulties and of his brother's apparent reluctance or inability to come to his aid. To this Turgenev replied that he was glad to be able to help a friend and informed Petr that he had told Bori, his banker, to pay him 5,000 rubles on demand and hoped that it would enable Petr to reach Karlsbad where Turgenev planned to spend the summer.

Just before he left Rome in mid-May of 1825, Chaadaev received a letter from Iakushkin which told him a great deal about the economic situation in Russia and the problems with which his brother was consequently faced. Assuring Petr that Mikhail had exaggerated in claiming that he was ruined, Iakushkin concluded: "I do not think that it is possible to call a person ruined who has a debt of 100,000 on an estate of almost a million. Your brother cannot receive an income this year, but this is the common fate of almost all Russian landowners . . ., [for] almost nowhere can the peasants pay their obrok . . . ." Iakushkin went on to give Chaadaev news of no less than eleven of their mutual friends, including Pushkin, who had been forced to exchange the exile of southern Russia for that of his father's estate. Finally, he concluded with the suggestion that Petr continue his journey and advised him not to be unduly worried by his brother's plight. Since Petr had also recently received a long overdue letter from Mikhail who informed him that his health was good and that he was despondent no more, he banished any lingering feelings of guilt and left Rome for Karlsbad.

Karlsbad

From Florence on May 13, Chaadaev wrote a rather cool reply to Mikhail's long overdue letter. His answer was filled with such comments as: "I received a letter from Iakushkin, there is no comparing you two, heaps of every kind of endearing details--it is a pity that you do not know how to write such letters." Petr spent two weeks in Florence before departing for Venice where he witnessed the city's carnival of antiquity. From Venice, he went to Verona, through the Tyrol to Munich and finally arrived in Karlsbad in June, 1825.

When the summer was almost over and he had received no word from Mikhail, Chaadaev grew impatient and on August 16 wrote a long letter to his brother. He began with an interesting insight into some possible psychological origins of his tendency toward hypertension and the physical problems it produced. "Here . . . the doctors . . . say every thought [about a personal problem] is harmful, that it will cause the bile to come on you before you know what is happening and that you then might just as well forget the entire cure. Therefore, tried not to think about you, but I could not do this for long!" This said, Petr did make a short query about Mikhail's well-being before reminding his brother of his ever-present need --money. He complained that he had not heard from Mikhail in six months and assured his brother that his grief was not merely due to the fact that he had also received no money during this time. Nevertheless, he did need additional money to finance his return to Russia and he informed Mikhail that if he sent too little or waited too long that this would only delay his return.

There followed a revealing reference to the psychological toll exacted by his strained relations with Mikhail: "If I were to receive here during my treatment one such letter as you wrote during the beginning of my travels, then be assured that many of the symptoms of my illness would disappear at once . . . ." Finally, offering a detailed description of the symptoms of his illness which included severe trouble with his bowels, "various fits" and "attacks which you come out of completely exhausted," Chaadaev declared that he would leave Karlsbad shortly for Dresden where he would undergo an additional six weeks of medical treatment before returning to Russia.

Eight days later, having found out that a letter for him from Mikhail had been received in Florence and returned to Russia, Petr wrote to his brother and pleaded that he write again. He complained that he had heard from Mikhail only twice in the past ten months. Declaring that his treatment had been "quite satisfactory" and seemed "successful" Chaadaev concluded by pleading for Mikhail to find money and send it to him in Dresden. He pledged to remain in Dresden "only six weeks or perhaps two months" and then to go directly back to Russia, "if the money sent is satisfactory." It seemed that Petr had stretched his travels nearly as far as it was possible, but it is difficult not to think that he was trying to give himself an escape clause in his pledge to return by making it contingent on the receipt of a sum of money, the size of which he never specified. In any case, it turned out to be not a mere two months but more than a year before Chaadaev reached Khripunovo and was reunited with his brother.

But Petr's stay in Karlsbad was not confined to his medical treatments, for it was here that he was introduced to the renowned Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. "He had the benefit of often conversing with [him] on subjects of philosophy and [Schelling] did him the honor of telling him that [he] found pleasure in communicating his thoughts" to him. In a letter to Schelling which he would write seven years later, Petr explained that the philosopher had told him in Karlsbad that he "had modified his ideas on several things" and had suggested that he wait for the appearance of the work on which he was laboring before he became thoroughly acquainted with his philosophy. But Petr did not wait and began avidly to devour Schelling's works, claiming by 1833 to have read all his works with the exception of that crucial one on which Schelling had said he was working in 1825. Asking for news of this missing work and for an explanation of how Schelling's thought had changed, Petr went on to explain why he had found Schelling's philosophy attractive.

I am permitted to tell you, I believe, that the study of your work has opened a new world for me; that with the light of your spirit, there have been partly opened regions in the realm of thought which had previously been completely shut . . . . I have often thought . . . that a religious philosophy would one day grow out of your system. Now I cannot tell you how happy I have been to hear that the deepest thinker of our times has actually arrived at this great idea of a fusion of religion and philosophy. [Schelling had apparently not developed this fusion to any extent when he met Chaadaev in 1825 but Petr went on to explain that] from the first moment when I began to philosophize this idea presented itself as the guiding light and aim of all my intellectual work . . . . Each new thought that occurred to me seemed to be something that had significance only in its relationship to this first idea. And with each new thought I would help to build a temple where all men could now join together to worship, in perfect recognition, God manifest.

Chaadaev's retrospective statement covered an indefinite period and it is not possible to ascertain the exact time of the coming to maturity of this outlook which he depicted for Schelling in 1833. Certainly Petr had attained it by the time that he completed his Philosophical Letters. In any case, Chaadaev's intuition that a religious philosophy would grow out of Schelling's system was the source of his strong attraction for the philosopher in Karlsbad in the summer of 1825. Petr saw in Schelling's thought a possible way to reconcile the idea of Bildung that had been expressed by Schiller and others with the religious outlook of Lamennais who was sharply critical of the philosopher and his trade. For his part, Schelling himself was strongly impressed by Chaadaev. According to Zhikharev Prince Gagarin later asserted that Schelling once told him he considered "Chaadaev to be one of the most remarkable people of our time and certainly the most remarkable of all the Russians" whom he had ever met.

Chaadaev arrived in Dresden in the first days of September 1825 and almost immediately received a letter and monetary draft from his brother. In a reply to Mikhail which he began on September 14 he asserted that he had begun making plans to return as soon as he had received Mikhail's letter, but mysteriously soon after this he fell ill: "I did not stay in bed, but I was dizzy both day and night and my stomach would not digest;" and "now I see that I will not be strong enough to leave for a month, and that God willing!" Chaadaev suffered from mixed emotions. He did not want to return at once, but Mikhail had written that he really was not interested in whether Petr would return at all. This wounded Chaadaev's feelings and he snapped back that it was "shameful" for Mikhail to write such a thing and declared that perhaps he would set out even though he was sick. This said he put the letter aside; three days later on September 17 he decided to finish it. He informed Mikhail that he now realized it would not be possible to leave for another month, for he had found that he had rheumatism. Asking for his brother's patience until his return he wrote: "then I hope to prove how I value your love." Finally, almost as an afterthought, Chaadaev asked for more money.

Little is known about Chaadaev's activities in the last three months Or 1825. He was still involved with straightening out his financial affairs and was very worried about a debt was about to come due to an acquaintance from his days at the University of Moscow, Vasilii Alekseevich Perovskii. Having written to Perovskii to explain his troubles, Petr eventually received a reply dated October 5, 1825 in which Perovskii reassured Chaadaev that he did not need the money for the present. "You can rest assured that never would I find myself in a situation where I would regret the service that you would have given me in the same circumstances as willingly and eagerly as I have done it for you." Advising Chaadaev not to return before he recovered his health Perovskii concluded with a reassurance of his friendship for Petr.

Nikolai Turgenev was spending the autumn of 1825 in Paris, and from there he wrote twice to Chaadaev. His letter of October 15 contained some observations on political conditions in France and some news of his health. Aside from this, Turgenev was also in no hurry for Chaadaev to end his travels: having mentioned that he was going to England he invited Petr to join him there and, if this did not work out, he hoped that he would find Chaadaev back in Karlsbad by the summertime. Finally, on November 20, he informed Chaadaev that certain of Petr's books which had been sent to Moscow had been returned by Russian customs officials first to Warsaw and then to Frankfurt. He concluded with advice on how Petr might have the books sent from Frankfurt to his address in Dresden.

By December Chaadaev's health had suffered a relapse and on January 1, 1826 (new style) he wrote to Mikhail: "It is necessary to tell you that I have become worse,--I am now sitting at home and the doctor says that this is perhaps a crisis,--meanwhile I am running a fever and I am dizzy both day and night,--but since moments of health occasionally return, there are hopes that I am not lost." He asked Mikhail's forgiveness for the fact that he had not already returned and now would be unable to return before May. Finally, instructing his brother to send him more money even though he admitted that he did not know where Mikhail could obtain it, Petr pleaded: "Do me the kindness not to be angry--I give you my word that all my guilt, whatever there is, I deserve--only let me return to health and to you. Chaadaev's begrudging admission of guilt offers a revealing glimpse into his emotional state of mind. He knew that while abroad he had behaved in an extremely self-centered selfish way, always demanding more and more from his brother. Yet he could, or would not bring himself to change this behavior--his only solution to relieve the guilt that he felt in the present was to pledge that in the future he would return to his brother and by reforming his conduct would become worthy of all grief he had caused Mikhail.

During the winter and early spring of 1826, Chaadaev was almost continuously sick. In January he received the news of Tsar Alexander's death and the failure in St. Petersburg of the insurrection of December 14, 1825, news which could have hardly been expected to benefit his health. He must have realized at once that the failure was a disaster which would set back the cause of political and social liberalization within Russia for decades. However, it is doubtful that he immediately recognized the full magnitude of the catastrophe which enveloped nearly all of his friends and which would be the cause of his arrest and lengthy detainment at Brest-Litovsk that summer.

Chaadaev's earliest surviving evaluation of the Decembrist revolt may be found in his First Philosophical Letter, in the passage: "another great Prince . . . led us victoriously from one end of Europe to the other: upon our return from this triumphal march across the most civilized countries in the world, we brought only evil ideas and fatal errors that resulted in an immense calamity which set us back a half a century." This certainly was a strong condemnation of the results of December 14, 1825. However, it is difficult to imagine that Chaadaev meant his condemnation to apply to the entire movement of ideas which led up to the insurrection, a movement in which he and many of his closest friends had been involved to varying degrees. It is true that he spoke of "evil ideas" and "fatal errors" which had been brought back from the Napoleonic campaigns. But he was a pragmatist: these were evil ideas and fatal errors only because they led to an insurrection which failed and in so doing brought about an even more repressive atmosphere in Russia. Chaadaev was no enemy of an insurrection or a revolution per se and the key to this attitude may be found in his March 25, 1820 letter to Mikhail where he gave his unqualified approval to the recent bloodless revolution in Spain which had forced the king "to sign the constitutional act of 1812. He condemned the Decembrist revolt only because it was not bloodless and because it failed. Its failure resulted in greater repression which, in his opinion, set Russia back "a half century."

As the first signs of spring began to appear in Dresden, Petr received a letter from Mikhail and a bank draft for 4,000 rubles. On April 13, 1826, three days after he received the money, Chaadaev sent an acknowledgment to Mikhail in which he asserted that he had not written "for so long" because he "was sick" and had "grown worse everyday." Claiming that even with the 4,000 rubles he did not know how he would be able to pay his doctors, he promised to set out for Russia early in May.

But on May 3 Petr informed his brother:

The weather here has become such that I cannot leave by the date which I had arranged, that is not many days from now. Besides a stomach illness I suffer from catarrh; therefore, in cold weather I cannot set off on the road. By this time it should already be warm; they say that they cannot remember such weather as this in the month of May,--pouring rain and terribly cold.

He still was plagued by financial troubles. Having informed Mikhail that, since the rain could not last longer than two more weeks, he would leave in three weeks without fail, he added: "I still have not obtained the money, I hope that this will not delay me.'' By now, Chaadaev had demanded so much of Mikhail that, even though he lacked enough money to pay his debts and return to Russia, he also lacked the nerve to ask his brother directly to provide more. Ten days later Petr wrote again and this time there was a tone of desperation in his letter. "I have not found the money,-- they promised but did not give any . . .,-- having paid the doctors, hardly a penny remains . . . . I was quite prepared to go, for with the warm air my fever disappeared--now I will have to remain--do not curse me." Petr could do nothing else but place himself in Mlkhail's hands; this time he was very explicit: "When will you send the money? Where will you get it?" he demanded. "If you think that I am worth any kind of pity, then write me [to tell me] when you hope to have the money and how much," he pleaded. Finally, he offered Mikhail a promise which showed both his present troubled mental state and the importance that he attached to reforming himself in the future in order to atone for his conduct during his European travels: "I have a premonition that when I have returned, I shall be worthy before you of all the chagrin which I have caused you,--without this premonition I would go out of my mind." Chaadaev offered here a promissory note against his future psychological stability. His failure to keep this pledge when he returned to Russia was to become one of the causes of the crisis which would be resolved only by the writing of the Philosophical Letters.

While Chaadaev was awaiting the resolution of his financial problems, Sergei Ivanovich Turgenev, the younger brother of Aleksandr and Nikolai Turgenev, arrived in Dresden. On May 25 Petr wrote to Nikolai Turgenev, who was in England, and informed his friend of Sergei's safe arrival. However, by June 3, Sergei, whose physical health was very poor, had gone into a state of depression and had asked Petr to write to Aleksandr Ivanovich in St. Petersburg. Chaadaev suggested that Aleksandr come at once to Dresden to help his brother straighten out his emotional problems which were complicated by a love affair with the twenty-five year old Ol'ga Alekseevna Pushkina. Petr thought it likely that both 0l'ga and her mother, Elena t Grigor'evna, would be favorably disposed towards Sergei's proposal of marriage; nevertheless, he urged Aleksandr to come at once. Only two days later he wrote again to Aleksandr informing him that Sergei's state had improved, in part as a result of "the sad news of the death of Karamzin." This news had produced an emotional catharsis out of which Sergei had emerged "just about perfectly reestablished." Even so, Petr still urged Aleksandr to come to Dresden as soon as possible.

Russian Return

By the end of June either Mikhail had finally sent Chaadaev the money- for which he had pleaded or Petr had been able to obtain funds in Dresden sufficient to finance his return to Russia. On June 30, 1826 he set out for Warsaw, arriving there-early in July.

Although he did not realize it, many people far more important than his brother were interested in his return, for he was suspected of playing an important role in the events which led to the insurrection of December 14, 1825. Apart from the suspicions that had been aroused at the time of his retirement, the government's indictment of Petr's activity came from two sources. First of all, during his interrogation in the Peter Paul Fortress, Iakushkin had stated: "in 1821, according to the instructions given me at the conference I accepted into the society . . . General Passek and the retired . . . . Captain Chaadaev." And secondly, Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich, Governor General of Poland and brother of Nicholas I, having seen Chaadaev on friendly terms with all three Turgenev brothers during his visit to Karlsbad in 1825, had also observed Petr in heart-to-heart discussions with Nikolai Turgenev, who was considered by the authorities to be one of the most dangerous leaders of the Decembrist movement. On July 7, 1826 the Grand Duke reported to Nicholas I that the Warsaw police had informed him of Chaadaev's arrival in the city.

As soon as he reached Warsaw, Petr became ill and was forced to remain in the city for two weeks. However, since "nothing had been undertaken against him which might lead him to think that he was under suspicion," on about the sixteenth of July Chaadaev left for the Russian border checkpoint at Brest-Litovsk arriving there about a day later.

Chaadaev returned to his native country in the summer of 1826 with most of the problems with which he had left more than three years earlier still unsolved. He had in prospect no role or career which could give meaning to his life or help him establish a firm understanding of just who he was and where he was going. With the repressive post-Decembrist atmosphere that then enveloped Russia, any return to Government service would have been personally distasteful and unlikely to be approved in view of his past involvement with the liberals who were now marked as criminals. Besides this, he had virtually committed himself to returning to live with his brother at Khripunovo. But for Chaadaev, who in Russia had never lived far from Moscow or St. Petersburg and who had just spent three years touring the major cities of Europe, the isolation of a small Russian village was a most unpleasant prospect. Although his travels had done nothing to improve his self-centered personality, they had greatly increased his knowledge and opened many new intellectual vistas. However, these new interests were but one more reason why he desired the intellectual contacts and stimulation that only Moscow or St. Petersburg could provide. Nevertheless, he had promised Mikhail that he would go straight to Khripunovo where he knew that he would have to attempt to adapt to a rural existence for at least as long as it would take to put his financial affairs in order. With these thoughts in mind, he approached the Russian frontier where only bad news and further troubles awaited him.