144 RENAISSANCES

The antithesis between the Antaean and the Atlantean attitude has
been traced out in a Platonic dialogue, staged in a post-Marxian Russian
social setting, which is no less illuminating if it is myth than if it hap-
pens to be history.1

'In the summer of A.D. 1920 the two philosophers, M. Gershenson and
V. Ivanov, were living in the Convalescent Home for Scientific and
Literary Workers in Moscow. Each of them was installed in a corner of
the common room. From one corner to the other they exchanged twelve
letters about problems of the Philosophy of History-----

'The standpoint represented by Gershenson was one of an anarchic
hostility to Culture.

' "All the spiritual achievements of Mankind, [he wrote] all the
wealth of intuitions, factual knowledge and moral standards that has been
garnered and fortified in the course of the centuries—all this has latterly
become burdensome to me. It weighs on me like some throttling yoke,
like some dress that is excessively heavy and excessively warm.3 This
feeling has been distressing me for a long time past; but it used to descend
on me only occasionally, and even then never for long at a time, while
now it has become a chronic experience. As I see it, it would really be the
greatest possible blessing if one could plunge into Lethe and, in those
waters, flush out of one's soul, without leaving a trace, the recollection of
all religions and systems of philosophy, all factual knowledge, all arts and
all poetry, in order to step out on to the [farther] bank as naked as
Primaeval Man, and there—naked, unencumbered, and joyful—stretch
out one's bare arms, in freedom, till they touched Heaven. There would
be only one thought out of the Past that one would wish to retain in one's
consciousness, and that is: How burdensome, how oppressively hot, it was
in those [now discarded] clothes! How blissfully unencumbered one feels
without them!" '

We may pause at this point in our quotation to observe in parenthesis
that both the depression and the yearning which Gershenson has here

1 The dialogue, as reproduced here, is a translation from the German text of Ernst
Robert Curtius's Deutsche Geist in Gefahr (Stuttgart and Berlin 1932. Deutsche Verlags-
Anstalt), pp. 116—19. Professor Curtius records that he had extracted it from the journal
Die Kreatur, Jahrgang I, Heft 2 (1926). The passages here translated have been quoted
•with the permission of the author and the publishers.

z This inhibiting effect of the incubus of the Past has been noticed by Hume in his
essay Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Science?. In Hume's opinion, however, the
impositions of a dead antecedent civilization arc not so paralysing as those of sonic living
community in one's own world which has forged ahead of its neighbours and con-
sequently made an impact on them comparable to that of an alien culture.

'Perhaps it may not be for the advantage of any nation to have the arts imported from
their neighbours in too great perfection. This extinguishes emulation and sinks the
ardour of the generous youth. So many models of Italian painting brought into Kngland,
instead of exciting our artists, is the cause of their small progress in that noble art, The
same, perhaps, was the case of Rome when it received the arts from Greece, That multi-
tude of polite productions in the French language, dispersed all over Germany and the
North, hinder these nations from cultivating their own language, and keep them still
dependent on their neighbours for those elegant entertainments,

'It is true, the Ancients had left us models, in every kind of writing, which arc highly
worthy of admiration. But, besides that they were written in, languages known only to
the learned—besides this, I say, the comparison is not so perfect or entire between
modern wits and those who lived in so remote an age. Had Waller been born in Rome
during the reign of Tiberius, his first productions had been despised when compared to
the Hnished odes of Horace. But in this island the superiority of the Roman poet
diminished nothing from the fame of the English. We esteemed ourselves sufficiently
bappy that our climate and language could produce but a faint copy of so excellent *rt
original.