Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

He continues:

A man who went ior a walk in Sokolniki [a suburb of Moscow],

went there not just for a walk, but in order to surrender himself

to the pantheistic feeling of his identification with the cosmos. If,

on the way, he met a tipsy soldier or a peasant woman who said

something to him, the philosopher did not simply talk with them,

but determined the substantiality of the popular element, both in

1 32

B I RT H OF T H E R U S S I AN I N TE L L I G E NTSIA

its immediate and its accidental presentation. The very tear which

might rise to his eye was strictly classified and referred to its proper

category-Gemuth, or 'the tragic element in the heart'.

Herzen's ironical sentences need not be taken too literally. But

they show vividly the kind of exaltl intellectual mood in which his

friends had lived.

Let me now offer you a passage from Annenkov- from the excellent

essay called 'A Remarkable Decade', to which I referred at the outset.

It gives a different picture of these same people at the same period, and

it is worth quoting if only to correct Herzen's amusing sketch, which

may, quite unjustly, suggest that all this intellectual activity was so

much worthless gibberish on the part of a ridiculous collection of overexcited young intellectuals. Annenkov describes life in a country house, in the village of Sokolovo in 1 84 5, that had been taken for the summer

by three friends-Granovsky, who was a professor of history in the

University of Moscow, Ketcher, who was an eminent translator, and

Herzen himself, who was a rich young man of no very fixed profession,

then still vaguely in government service. They took the house for the

purpose of entertaining their friends and enjoying intellectual conversation in the evenings .

. . . only one thing was not allowed, and that was to be a philistine.

Not that what was expected were flights of eloquence or flashes of

brilliant wit-on the contrary, students absorbed in their own special

fields were respected deeply. But what was demanded was a certain

intellectual level and certain qualities of character . . . They protected themselves against contacts with anything that seemed corrupt

. . . and were worried by its intrusion, however casual and unimportant. They did not cut themselves off from the world, but stood aloof from it, and attracted attention for that very reason; and

because of this they developed a special sensitiveness to everything

artificial and spurious. Any sign of a morally doubtful sentiment,

evasive talk, dishonest ambiguity, empty rhetoric, insincerity, was

detected at once, and . . . provoked immediate storms of ironical

mockery and merciless attack . . . The circle . . . resembled an order

of knighthood, a brotherhood of warriors; it had no written constitution. Yet it knew all its members scattered over our vast country; it was not organised, but a tacit understanding prevailed.

It stretched, as it were, across the stream of the life of its time, and

protected it from aimlessly flooding its banks. Some adored it; others

detested it.

1 33

R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S

I X

The sort of society which Annenkov described, although it may have

about it a slight suggestion of priggishness, is the sort of society which

tends to crystallise whenever there is an intellectual minority (say in

Bloomsbury or anywhere else) which sees itself as divided by its ideals

from the world in which it lives, and tries to promote certain intellectual

and moral standards, at any rate within itself. That is what these

Russians from 1 838 to 1 848 tried to do. They were unique in Russia

in that they did not automatically come from any one social class,

even though few among them were of humble origin. They had to

be moderately well-born, otherwise their chance of obtaining an

adequate, that is to say western, education was too small.

Their attitude to each other was genuinely free from bourgeois

self-consciousness. They were not impressed by wealth, nor were

they self-conscious about poverty. They did not admire success.

Indeed they almost tried to avoid it. Few among them became successful persons in the worldly sense of that word. A number went into exile, others were professors perpetually under the eye of tsarist

police; some were poorly paid hacks and translators; some simply

disappeared. One or two of them left the movement and were regarded

as renegades. There was Mikhail Katkov, for example, a gifted

journalist and writer who had been an original member of the movement and had then crossed over to the tsarist government, and there was Vassily Botkin, the intimate friend of Belinsky and

Turgenev, who started as a philosophical tea-merchant and became

a confirmed reactionary in later years. But these were exceptional

cases.

Turgenev was always regarded as a case somewhat betwixt and

between : a man whose heart was in the right place, who was not

devoid of ideals and knew well what enlightenment was, and yet not

quite reliable. Certainly he was vehement against the serf system, and

his book, A Sportsman's Sketchts, had admittedly had a more powerful

social effect upon the public than any other book hitherto published

in Russia-something like Uncle Tom's Cahin in the United States at

a later date, from which it differed principally in being a work of art,

indeed of genius. Turgenev was regarded by the young radicals, on the

whole, as a supporter of the right principles, on the whole a friend and

an ally, but unfortunately weak, flighty, liable to indulge his love of

pleasure at the expense of his convictions; apt to vanish unaccountably

I J4

B I RT H OF T H E R U SS IAN INTE L L I G ENTSIA

-and a little guiltily-and be lost to his political friends; yet still

'one of us'; still a member of the party; still with us rather than

against us, in spite of the fact that he often did things which had to

be severely criticised, and which seemed mainly due to his unfortunate

infatuation with the French diva, Pauline Viardot, which led him

to sell his stories-surreptitiously-to reactionary newspapers in order

to obtain enough money to be able to buy a box at the opera, since

the virtuous left-wing periodicals could not afford to pay as much. A

vacillating and unreliable friend; still, and despite everything, fundamentally on our side; a man and a brother.

There was a very self-conscious sense ofliterary and moral solidarity

amongst these people, which created between them a feeling of

genuine fraternity and of purpose which certainly no other society

in Russia has ever had. Herzen, who later met a great many celebrated

people, and was a critical and intolerant, often an exceedingly sardonic

and at times cynical judge of men, and Annenkov, who had travelled

a good deal in western Europe and had a variegated acquaintance

among the notables of his day-both these connoisseurs of human

beings, in later years, confessed that never in their lives had they

again found anywhere a society so civilised and gay and free, so

enlightened, spontaneous, and agreeable, so sincere, so intelligent, so

gifted and attractive in every way.

1 35

II

G E R M A N R O M A N T I C I S M

I N P E T E R S B U R G A N D M O S C O W

A L L-or nearly all-historians of Russian thought or literature, whatever their other differences, seem agreed upon one thing: that the dominant inRuence upon Russian writers in the second quarter of the

nineteenth century is that of German romanticism. This judgement,

like most such generalisations of its type, is not quite true. Even if

Pushkin is held to belong to an earlier generation, neither Lermontov

nor Gogo] nor Nekrasov, to take only the most notable writers of

this time, can be regarded as disciples of these thinkers. Nevertheless,

it is true that German metaphysics did radically alter the direction of

ideas in Russia, both on the right and on the left, among nationalists,

Orthodox theologians, and political radicals equally, and profoundly

affected the outlook of the more wide-awake students at the universities,

and intellectually inclined young men generally. These philosophical

schools, and in particular the doctrines of Hegel and Schelling, are

still, in their modern transformations, not without inRuence today.

Their principal legacy to the modern world is a notorious and powerful

political mythology, which in both its right- and left-wing forms has

been used to justify the most obscurantist and oppressive movements

of our own times. At the same time the great historical achievements

of the romantic school have become so deeply absorbed into the very

texture of civilised thought in the west that it is not easy to convey

how novel, and to some minds intoxicating, they once proved to be.

The works of the early German romantic thinkers- Herder, Fichte,

Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, and their followers, are not easy to read.

The treatises of Schelling, for instance-vastly admired in their dayare like a dark wood into which I do not, here at least, propose to venture-vtStigia terrent, too many eager inquirers have entered it

never to return. Yet the art and thought of this period, at any rate

in Germany, and also in eastern Europe and Russia, which were, in

effect, intellectual dependencies of Germany, are not intelligible

1 36

G E R M A N R O M ANT I C I S M

without some grasp of the fact that these metaphysicians-in particular

Schelling-caused a major shift in human thought: from the mechanistic categories of the eighteenth century to explanation in terms of aesthetic or biological notions. The romantic thinkers and poets

successfully undermined the central dogma of eighteenth-century

enlightenment, that the only reliable method of discovery or interpretation was that of the triumphant mechanical sciences. The French philosopher may have exaggerated the virtue, and the German romantics

the absurdity, of the application of the criteria of the natural sciences

to human affairs. But, whatever else it may have done, the romantic

reaction against the claims of scienti fic materialism did set up permanent doubts about the competence of the sciences of manpsychology, sociology, anthropology, physiology-to take over, and put an end to the scandalous chaos of, such human activities as history,

or the arts, or religious, philosophical, social, and political thought. As

Bayle and Voltaire had mocked the theological reactionaries of their

time, so the romantics derided the dogmatic materialists of the school

of Condillac and Holbach; and their favourite field of battle was that

of aesthetic experience.

If you wanted to know what it was that made a work of art; if

you wanted to know, for example, why particular colours and forms

produced a particular piece of painting or sculpture; why particular

styles of writing or collocations of words produced particularly strong