It is not here a question of these men, but of those hommes de lettres from whom we would expect a perfectly healthy attitude in the face of literary and social phenomena, even if they are covered with the conciliating veil of death.
These reflections have led us to dedicate a few words to the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche, recently deceased, and in particular to the aspects of his doctrine that concern his concepts concerning and judgments of society, his sympathies and antipathies, his social criticism, and his societal ideal.
In our literature Gorky and Nietzsche have often been compared. At first sight such a comparison might seem strange: what can the bard of the humiliated and offended, of the least of the least, have in common with the apostle of the superman? To be sure the difference is enormous, but the relationship between the two is much closer than one would at first believe.
Nietzsche wants everyone, before being classed among the chosen, to answer the question: Are you one of those who has the right to escape the yoke? But he did not give, cannot give objective criteria for answering this question. The positive or negative response thus depends on the good will and rapacious talents of each.
Even though he revaluated all values this revolutionary of morality considers the traditions of the privileged classes with much respect and takes pride in descending from a Count Nietzky, a pedigree which is in any case highly doubtful. This famous individualist nourishes the most tender sympathy for the French Ancien Rgime in which individuality had little place. The aristocrat, the representative of quite precise social sympathies, always dominated in him over the individualist, the announcer of an abstract principle.
It is time to conclude, all the more so because our study has gone on far longer than foreseen. We obviously make no claim to an exhaustive critique of the fantastic creations of Frederick Nietzsche, philosopher in poetry and poet in philosophy. This is impossible within the framework of a few newspaper articles. We only wanted to describe in broad strokes the social base which has shown itself to be capable of giving birth to Nietzscheism, not as a philosophical system contained in a certain number of volumes and for the most part explicable by the individual particularities of its author, but rather as a social current attracting particular attention because we are dealing with a current of the present time. It seemed to us to be all the more indispensable to bring Nietzscheism down from the literary and philosophical heights to the purely earthly basis of social relations because a strictly ideological attitude, conditioned by subjective reactions of sympathy or antipathy for the moral and other theses of Nietzsche, results in nothing good. Mr. Andreyevich[28] gave us a recent example in giving himself over to excesses of hysteria in the columns of Jizn.
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