Dostoevsky, Grigor'ev, and Native Soil Conservatism

Native soil was a mid-nineteenth-century Russian reaction against materialism and positivism. It emphasized the need for people to live their lives and develop themselves naturally, so that class difference might be reconciled, the achievements of the West fused with the communalism and Christian fraternity preserved by the Russian peasant, and the Russian nation united in the pursuit of common moral ideals. The metaphor 'Russia and the West' summarized much of the intellectual and political deb