Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

Nicholas I.

The man who, more persuasively than anyone else in Russia,

taught the educated young men of the t 8Jos to soar above empirical

facts into a realm of pure light where all was harmonious and eternally

true, was a student of Moscow University called Nicholas Stankevich,

who, while still in his early twenties, gathered round him a circle of

devoted admirers. Stankevich was an aristocratic young man of great

distinction of mind and appearance, a gentle and idealistic personality,

and exceptional sweetness of character, with a passion for metaphysics

and a gift for lucid exposition. He was born in t 8 I J, and in the course

of his short life (he died at twenty-seven) exercised a remarkable moral

and intellectual ascendancy over his friends. They idolised him in his

lifetime, and after his death worshipped his memory. Even Turgenev,

who was not addicted to uncritical admiration, painted a portrait of

him in his novel Rudin under the name of Pokorsky in which there

is not a trace of irony. Stankevich had read widely in German romantic

literature, and preached a secular, metaphysical religion which for him

had taken the place of the doctrines of the Orthodox Church in which

neither he nor his friends any longer believed.

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H e taught that a proper understanding of Kant and Schelling (and

later Hegel) led one to realise that beneath the apparent disorder and

the cruelty, the injustice and the ugliness of daily life, it was possible

to discern eternal beauty, peace and hannony. Artists and scientists

were travelling their different roads to the selfsame goal (a very

Schellingian idea) of communion with this inner hannony. Art (and

this included philosophical and scientific truth) alone was immortal,

stood up unscathed against the chaos of the empirical world, against

the unintelligible and shapeless ftow of political, social, economic

events which would soon vanish and be forgotteil. The masterpieces

of art and thought were pennanent memorials to the creative power

of men, because they alone embodied moments of insight into some

portion of the everlasting pattern which lies beyond the ftux of the

appearances. Stankevich believed (as many have believed, particularly

after some great fiasco in the life of their society, in this case perhaps

the failure of the Decembrist revolution of 1 825) that in the place of

social reforms, which merely affected the outer texture of life, men

should seek rather to reform themselves within, and everything else

would be added unto them: the kingdom of heaven-the Hegelian

self-transcending Spirit-lies within. Salvation comes from individual

self-regeneration, and to achieve truth, reality, happiness, men must

learn from those who truly know : the philosophers, the poets, the

sages. Kant, Hegel, H�mer, Shakespeare, Goethe were harmonious

spirits, saints and sages who saw what the multitude would never see.

Study, endless study alone could afford a glimpse into their Elysian

world, the sole reality in which the broken fragments came together

again into their original unity. Only those who could attain to this

beatific vision were wise and good and free. To pursue material values

-social refonns or political goals of any kind�was to pursue phantoms,

to court broken hopes, frustration and misery.

For anyone who was young and idealistic in Russia between 1 830

and 1 848, or simply human enough to be depressed by the social

conditions of the country, it was comforting to be told that the

appalling evils of Russian life-the ignorance and poverty of the serfs,

the illiteracy and hypocrisy of the clergy, the corruption, inefficiency,

brutality, arbitrariness of the governing class, the pettiness, sycophancy,

and inhumanity of the merchants-that the entire barbarous system,

according to the sages of the west, was a mere bubble upon the surface

of life. It was all ultimately unimportant, the inevitable attribute of

the world of appearances which, seen from a superior vantage point,

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did not disturb the deeper harmony. Musical images are frequent in

the metaphysics of this time. You were told that if you simply listened

to the isolated notes of a given musical instrument you might find

them ugly and meaningless and without purpose; but if you understood the entire work, if you listened to the orchestra as a whole, you would see that these apparently arbitrary sounds conspired with other

sounds to form a harmonious whole which satisfied your craving for

truth and beauty. This is a kind of translation into aesthetic terms of

the scientific method of explanation of an earlier time. Spinoza-and

some among the rationalists of the eighteenth century-had taught

that if you could understand the pattern of the universe (some said

by metaphysical intuition, others by perceiving a mathematical or

mechanical order) then you would cease to kick against the pricks,

for you would realise that whatever was real was necessarily what

and when and where it was, part of the rational order of the harmony

of the cosmos. And if you saw this you became reconciled and achieved

inner peace: for you could no longer, as a rational human being, rebel

in an arbitrary and capricious fashion against a logically necessary

order.

The transposition of this into aesthetic terms is the dominant

factor of the Gennan romantic movement. Instead of talking about

necessary connections of a scientific kind, or oflogical or mathematical

reasoning to be employed in the unravelling of these mysteries, you

are invited to use a new kind of logic which unfolds to you the

beauty of a picture, the depth of a piece of music, the truth of a

literary masterpiece. If you conceive of life as the artistic creation of

some cosmic divinity, and of the world as the progressive revelation

of a work of art-if, in short, you are converted from a seientific to

a mystical or 'transcendental' view of life and history, you may well

experience a sense of liberation. Previously you were the victim of

unexplained chaos, which rendered you indignant and unhappy, a

prisoner in a system which you vainly tried to reform and correct,

with the result that you only suffered failure and defeat. But now you

..cquired a sense of yourself willingly and eagerly participating in the

cosmic enterprise : whatever befeil necessarily fulfilled the universal,

.md thereby your own personal, design. You were wise, haFPY• anci

:ree : for you were at one with tile purposes of the universe.

Under the conditions ofiiterary censorship then prevalent in Russia.

where it was difficult to give open expression to political ami sociai

ideas, where literature was the ';ln)y vehicle in which �uch ideas

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could, however cryptically, be conveyed, a programme which invited

you to ignore the repulsive (and, after the fate of the Decembrists,

perilous) political scene, and concentrate upon personal-moral,

literary, artistic-self-improvement, offered great comfort to people

who did not wish to suffer too much. Stankevich believed in Hegel

deeply and sincerely, and preached his quietist sermons with an

eloquence which sprang from a pure and sensitive heart and an unswerving faith which never left him. Such doubts as he had, he stilled within himself; and remained until his early end an unworldly saint

in whose presence his friends felt a sense of spiritual peace which

flowed from the beauty of his singularly unbroken personality, and

the feminine delicacy and charm with which he used to bind his

gentle spell upon them. This influence cea8ed with his death : he left

a few graceful, faded poems, a handful of fragmentary essays, and a

bundle of letters to his friends and to various German philosophers;

among them moving avowals to the most admired of his friends, a

young playwright and professor in Berlin in whom he discerned

something akin to genius, a disciple of Hegel whose very name is

now justly forgotten. From this scanty material it is scarcely possible

to reconstruct the personality of this leader of Russian Idealism.

His most gifted and impressionable disciple was a man of very

different cast, Mikhail Bakunin, at this time an amateur philosopher,

and already notorious for his turbulent and despotic character.

Bakunin had, by the late I 8Jos, resigned his commission in the army

and was living in Moscow largely by his wits. Endowed with an

exceptional capacity for absorbing other people's doctrines, he expounded them with fervour and enthusiasm as though they were his own, and in the course of this changed them somewhat, making them,

as a rule, simpler, clearer, cruder, and at times more convincing.

Bakunin had a considerable element of cynicism in his character, and

cared little what the exact effect of his sermons might be on his

friends-provided only that it was powerful enough; he did not ask

whether they excited or demoralised them, or ruined their lives, or

bored them, or turned them into fanatical zealots for some wildly

Utopian scheme. Bakt• nin was a born agitator with sufficient scepticism

in his system not to be taken in himself by his own torrential eloquence.

To dominate individuals and sway assemblies was his mltin-: he

belonged to that odd, fortunately not very numerous, class of persons

who contrive to hypnotise others into throwing themselves into causes

-if need be killing and dying for them-while themselves remaining

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coldly, dearly, and ironically aware o f the effect o f the spells which

they cast. When his bluff was called, as occasionally it was, for example,

by Herzen, Bakunin would laugh with the greatest good nature, admit

everything freely, and continue to cause havoc, if anything with greater

unconcern than before. His path was strewn with victims, casualties,

and faithful, idealistic converts; he himself remained a gay, easygoing, mendacious, irresistibly agreeable, calmly and coldly destructive, fascinating, generous, undisciplined, eccentric Russian landowner to the end.

He played with ideas with adroitness and boyish delight. They came

from many sources: from Saint-Simon, from Holbach, from Hegel,

from Proudhon, from Feuerbach, from the Young Hegelians, from

Weitling. He would imbibe these doctrines during periods of short

but intensive application, and then he would expound them with a

degree of fervour and personal magnetism which was, perhaps,

unique even in that century of great popular tribunes. During the

decade which Annenkov describes, he was a fanatically orthodox

Hegelian, and preached the paradoxical principles of the new metaphysics to his friends night after night with lucidity and stubborn passion. He proclaimed the existence of iron and inexorable laws of

history, and indeed of everything else. Hegel-and Stankevich-were