Tsar Nicholas I was an intermediary in the long (and now stale) encounter between intelligentsia and praxis. Around 1840, at the start of the “important decade 1838–1848” (as Pavel Annenkov baptized it), the Russian authorities felt it appropriate for those young men wanting to go to the West to be directed toward the German universities rather than to Paris, a place of corruption and revolution. It was thought that Germany still kept some vestige of decency, under the mystical despotism of Friedrich Wilhelm IV. But if the purpose, according to the ominous words of the minister Uvarov, really was to delay Russia’s intellectual development by fifty years, then history had once again taken its cue from a shrewd deceit on the part of the police and the rulers in order to turn it into an absurdhty. Certainly, in Berlin, barricades and insurrections were abominated. But nor did the city have the lurid charm of the dissipated life, “la vie moderne,” the edgy chroniques in the newspapers, it lacked the volatile blend of fever and cynicism that Baudelaire breathed each day. It lacked the hidden presence of the Faubourg Saint-Germain or the overt presence of the grisettes. Snobbery had not yet infiltrated its crude substance. Germany lacked something: it hadn’t lived long enough. So much more virulent was the energy associated with ideas, more glamorous and alluring was the exotic vision of an “action,” of a “praxis” into which to transform it. The young Engels, already an excellent chronicler of events, put it like this: “Ask anybody in Berlin today on what field the battle for dominion over German public opinion in politics and religion, that is, over Germany itself, is being fought, and if he has any idea of the power of the mind over the world, he will reply that this battlefield is the University, in particular Lecture-hall No. 6, where Schelling is giving his lectures on the philosophy of revelation.”⁵¹⁵ In that lecture hall a young Russian aristocrat, Mikhail Bakunin, was seen wildly applauding the philosopher. He had arrived in Berlin in 1840 as if to the “New Jerusalem,” with money given by his friend Aleksandr Herzen. In the vast land from which he came, his fellow countrymen were already talking tumultuously about Schelling and Hegel, even in the farthest districts. Signs of this could be seen as early as 1830 in Ivan Kireyevsky’s letters from Berlin, and every post-Hegelian pamphlet was being read by too many. Nothing is more fertile than misunderstanding. What in Germany was the restless urge to move on to “action,” which naturally assumed those professorial, pedantic, aloof features that Marx and Engels would ridicule from The Holy Family onward, became in Russia the natural legacy of the “superfluous men,” impoverished and humiliated aristocrats, consumed by rêverie, geometric loci for subtle psychic dissociation—the Russian disease and, later on, the Russian novel! These, in short, were the most prized materials of the intelligentsia. For these people, hopelessly extraneous to all academic solace, “action” was the only Fata Morgana capable of channeling their immense latent violence in one direction, without it being lost in the whirling abjection of personal life.