writers who have been fascinated especially by the new 

 artistic theory of Schelling."65 Actually the matter was 

 entirely different. Pushkin's agreement to participate in 

 the "Moscow Herald," as seen from his letter to Ugazemskin 

 and Tumanskii, did not exclude completely his negative view of 

 the ideas of this newspaper's managers. Pushkin declared, for 

 example, in his letter to Delvig of March 2, 1827, that: 

 "You blame me for the 'Moscow Herald,' and for German 

 metaphysics. God sees how I hate and despise it; but what can 

 I do? Hot-headed boys have gathered, they are straight; the 

 priest or the Devil with them. I say: Gentlemen, do you want 

 to take from the empty and pour into the more empty? All 

 that is good for the Germans, who are already saturated with 

 positive knowledge, but we . . . the 'Moscow Herald' people, 

 sit in a hole and ask: What faith is that?" 66 



Regarding the idealism of German Naturphilosophie, the 

 foremost Russian thinkers opposed the materialistic under- 

 standing of natural conditions, including processes taking 

 place in the human organism. Fighters for the materialistic 

 ideology, in particular, came from the environment of the 

 participants in the December uprising. 



Among the Decembrist members of the Northern Society, more 

 than others with similar materialistic and atheistic ideas, 

 Ivan Dmitrievich Yakushkin was distinguished. He was the author 

 of the well known "Memorandum" and a philosophical treatise 

 hand-written in the 1830s in Yalutorovsk and kept in the 

 archives of the Yakushkin family. 67 



65. cited in the book PUSHKIN IN THE MEMOIRS AND 

 STORIES OF CONTEMPORARIES, Gospolitizdat (1936), 

 Government-Literature Issue (1936) , p. 462. 



66. See B. Heilach, "Pushkin and Russian Romanticism," ISSUE 

 OF THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE USSR (1937), p. 177. 



In this article there also were given evidences of the 

 negative relation of Pushkin to German philosophy. 



67. This treatise carries the title, "What Is Man?," 

 published in the paper VOPROSY FILOSOFII (Questions 

 of Philosophy) (1949, No. 3), pp. 291 - 298, again in 



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