Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

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the- intellectual and moral freedom, and the aesthetic distinction, of

true aristocracy. But while refusing, unlike the ideologists of the left,

ro sacrifice excellence to equality, h� understood, with J. S. Mill,

something which has only become dear in our own day: that the

common mean between these values, represented by 'mass societies', is

not the best of both worlds, but more frequently, in Mill's words, an

aesthetically and Nhically repellent 'conglomerated mediocrity', the

submergence of the individual in the mass. With great conviction and

in a language as vivid and committed as Herzen's own, Berlin has

perceived and conveyed to the English reader the originality of

Herzen's belief that there are no general solutions to individual and

specific problems, only temporary expedients which must be based on

an acute sense of the uniqueness of each historical situation, and on a

high degree of responsiveness to the particular needs and demands of

diverse individuals and peoples.

Berlin's exploration of the self-searching of Russian thinkers includes studies of two writers-Tolstoy and Turgenev. These studies refute a widespread misconception about the relations between Russian

writers and thinkers: namely, that in Russia literature and radical

thought form two distinct traditions related only by mutual hostility.

Tolstoy's and Dostoevsky's well-known aversion to the intelligentsia

is frequently quoted to emphasise the gulf between Russia's great

writers, who were concerned with exploring men's spiritual depths, and

the intelligentsia, materialists concerned only with the external forms

of social existence. In his essays on Tolstoy and Turgenev Berlin

shows that their art can be understood only as a product of the same

moral conflict as that experienced by the radical intelligentsia. The

essays have a dual significance: as works of criticism they offer insights

which should make a fundamental difference to our understanding of

two of Russia's greatest writers; as studies of conflicts between two

opposing visions of reality they are a significant contribution to the

·

history of ideas.

In his famous study of Tolstoy's view of history, 'The Hedgehog

and the Fox', and in the less well-known essay, 'Tolstoy and Enlightenment', Berlin shows that the relation between Tolstoy's artistic vision and his moral pread:.ing may be understood as a titanic struggle

between the monist and pluralist visions of reality. Tolstoy's 'lethal

nihilism' led him to denounce the pretensions of all theories, dogmas

and systems to explain, order or predict the complex and contradictory

phenomena of history and social existence, but the driving force of this

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nihilism was a passionate longing to discover one unitary truth,

encompassing all existence and impregnable to attack. He was thus

constantly in contradiction with himself, perceiving reality in its

multiplicity but believing only in 'one vast, unitary whole'. In his art

he expressed an unsurpassed feeling for the irreducible variety of

phenomena, but in his moral preaching he advocated simplification,

reduction to one single level, that of the Russian peasant or the simple

Christian ethic. In some of the most psychologically delicate and

revealing passages ever written on Tolstoy, Berlin shows that his

tragedy was that his sense of reality was too strong to be compatible

with any of the narrow ideals he set up; the conclusions articulated in

Herz.en's writings were demonstrated in the tragedy of Tolstoy's life:

his inability, despite the most desperate attempts, to harmonise opposing

but equally valid goals and attitudes. Yet his failure, his inability to

resolve his inner contradictions, gives Tolstoy a moral stature apparent

even to those most mystified or repelled by the content of his preaching.

Few writers would seem to have less in common than Tolstoy, the

fanatical seeker after truth, and Turgenev, a writer of lyrical prose, the

poet of 'the last enchantments of decaying country houses'. But in his

essay on Turgenev Berlin shows that though by temperament he was a

liberal, repelled by dogmatic narrowness and opposed to extreme

solutions, he had been deeply inRuenced in his youth by the moral

commitment of his contemporaries and their opposition to the injustices

of autocracy. He fully accepted his friend Belinsky's belief that the

artist cannot remain a neutral observer in the battle between justice and

injustice, but must dedicate himself, like all decent men, to the search

to establish and proclaim the truth. The effect of this was to tum

Turgenev's liberalism into something quite distinct from the European

liberalism of that time, much less confident and optimistic, but more

modem. In his novels, which chronicled the development of the

intelligentsia, he examined the controversies of the middle years of the

nineteenth century between Russian radicals and conservatives,

moderates and extremists, exploring with great scrupulousness and

moral perception the strengths and weaknesses of individuals and

groups, and of the doctrines by which they were possessed. Berlin

emphasises that the originality of Turgenev's liberalism lay in the

conviction which he shared with Herzen (even though he thought that

Herzen's populism was his last illusion) as against Tolstoy and the

revolutionaries (even though he admired their single-mindedness), that

there was no final solution to the central problems of society. In an age

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when liberals and radicals alike were complacent in their faith in the

inevitability of progress, when political choices seemed mapped out in

advance by inexorable historical forces-the laws governing economic

markets, or the con8ict of social classes-which could be made to

assume responsibility for their results, Turgenev perceived the hollowness of the certainties invoked by liberals to justify the injustices of the existing order, or by radicals to justify its merciless destruction. He thus

anticipated the predicament of the radical humanist in our century,

which one of the most morally sensitive political thinkers of our time,

Leszek Kolakowski, has described as a continual agony of choice

between the demands of Solltn and Stin, value and fact:

The same question recurs repeatedly, in different versions: how can

we prevent the alternatives of Sollm-Stin from becoming polarizations of utopianism-opportunism, romanticism-conservatism, purposeless madness versus collaboration with crime masquerading as sobriety? How can we avoid the fatal choice between the Scylla of

duty, crying its arbitrary slogans, and the Charybdis of compliance

with the existing world, which transforms itself into voluntary

approval of its most dreadful products? How to avoid this choice,

given the postulate-which we consider essential-that we are never

able to measure truly and accurately the limits of what we call

'historical necessity'? And that we are, consequendy, never able to

decide with certainty which concrete fact of social life is a component of historical destiny and what potentials are concealed in existing reality.

Kolakowski's formulation of this dilemma of our time is surely

valid. Yet Turgenev, a thinker of a very different type, faced it over

a century ago. Before proponents of one-sided visions, conservative

or Utopian, possessed the technological equipment for experiments on

limidess human material, it was not so difficult as it is now to defend

the view that one or other extreme vision, or even a middle way between

them, was the whole answer. Isaiah Berlin has shown that, at a time

when liberals, as well as the ideologists of the left, were still confident

of the sufficiency of their systems, Turgenev had attained a more

complex vision and had embodied it in his art.

There is no doubt with which of the three figures with whom he

deals in most detail Berlin's greatest sympathies lie. He shows us that,

for all Tolstoy's moral grandeur, his blindness at those moments when

he relinquishes the humane vision of his art for a domineering dogmatism is repellent; and that Turgenev, for all the clarity of his vision, xxii

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his intelligence and sense of reality, lacked the courage and moral

commitment which he so much admired in the radical intelligentsia:

his vacillation between alternatives was too often a state of 'agreeable

and sympathetic melancholy', ultimately dispassionate and detached.

It is with Herz.en that Berlin has the greatest affinity (although he

points out that there was substance in Turgenev's assertion that

Herzen never succeeded in ridding himself of one illusion- his faith i n

the 'peasant sheepskin coat'); he ended his Inaugural Lecture, 'Two

Concepts of Liberty', with a quotation from an author whom he did

not identify: 'To realise the relative validity of one's convictions and

yet stand for them unRinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilised man

from a barbarian.' Herzen, who, as he shows, had the subtle vision of a

Turgenev together with a self-sacrificing commitment to the truth

which was the equal of Tolstoy's, was in this sense both brave and

civilised. In his understanding that 'one of the deepest of modern

disasters is to be caught up in abstractions instead of realities', he

possessed to a very high degree that consistent pluralism of outlook

which for Berlin is the essence of political wisdom.

It is often said of the Russians that their national peculiarity consists in

expressing in a particularly extreme fashion certain universal characteristics of the human condition; and for many the historical significance of the Russian intelligentsia derives from the fact that they embodied the human thirst for absolutes in a pathologically exaggerated

form. Berlin's essays present us with a very different and much more

complex interpretation of the intelligentsia's 'universality', showing

that for a variety of historical reasons they embodied not one, but at

least two fundamental, and opposing, human urges. The urge to assert

the autonomy of the self through revolt against necessity continually

clashed with their demand for certainties, leading them to sharp

perceptions of moral, social and aesthetic problems which in this

century have come to be regarded as of central importance.

That this aspect of their thought has aroused so little attention in

the west is due in some measure to the glaring intellectual defects of the

writings of most members of the intelligentsia. The repetitiousness, the

incoherence, the proliferation of half-digested ideas from foreign

sources in the writings of men like Belinsky, together with the political

disasters for which they are held responsible, have led the majority of

western scholars fervently to echo Chaadaev's famous pronouncement

that if Russia has some universal lesson to give to the world, it is that its

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example is at all costs to be avoided. But with an acute instinct for

quality, helped by a total absence of that condescension which is the

frequent concomitant of historical hindsight, Isaiah Berlin has discerned behind the formal shortcomings of the intelligentsia's writings a moral passion worthy of attention and respect. The essays in this book