Thus criticism in Russia became a question of camps, and the question arises, what were these camps? From the dawn of the age of pure literature, Russia was divided into two great camps: The Slavophiles and the Propagandists of Western Ideas.
The trend towards the West began with the influence of Joseph Le Maistre and the St. Petersburg Jesuits. In 1836, CHAADAEV, an ex-guardsman who had served in the Russian campaign in France and travelled a great deal in Western Europe, and who shared Joseph Le Maistre's theory that Russia had suffered by her isolation from the West and through the influence of the former Byzantine Empire, published the first of his _Lettres sur la Philosophie de l'Histoire_ in the _Telescope_ of Moscow. This letter came like a bomb-shell. He glorified the tradition and continuity of the Catholic world. He said that Russia existed, as it were, outside of time, without the tradition either of the Orient or of the Occident, and that the universal culture of the human race had not touched it. "The atmosphere of the West produces ideas of duty, law, justice, order; we have given nothing to the world and taken nothing from it; ... we have not contributed anything to the progress of humanity, and we have disfigured everything we have taken from that progress. Hostile circumstances have alienated us from the general trend in which the social idea of Christianity grew up; thus we ought to revise our faith, and begin our education over again on another basis." The expression of these incontrovertible sentiments resulted in the exile of the editor of the _Telescope_, the dismissal of the Censor, and in the official declaration of Chaadaev's insanity, who was put under medical supervision for a year.
Chaadaev made disciples who went further than he did, PRINCESS VOLKONSKY, the authoress of a notable book on the Orthodox Church, and PRINCE GAGARIN, who both became Catholics. This was one branch of Westernism. Another branch, to which Belinsky belonged, had no Catholic leanings, but sought for salvation in socialism and atheism. The most important figure in this branch is ALEXANDER HERZEN (1812-1870). His real name was Yakovlev; his father, a wealthy nobleman, married in Germany, but did not legalize his marriage in Russia, so his children took their mother's name.