Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

right. It was idle to rebel against them, or to protest against the

cruelties and injustices which they seemed to entail; to do so was

simply a sign of immaturity, of not understanding the necessity and

beauty of the rationally organised cosmos-to fail to grasp the divine

goal in which the sufferings and disharmonies of individual lives

must, if you understood them properly, inevitably culminate and be

resolved.

Hegel taught that the spirit evolved not continuously, but by a

'dialectical' struggle of 'opposites' which (somewhat, it seems, like a

diesel engine) moved by a series of sharp explosions. This notion

suited Bakunin's temperament well, since, as he himself was fond· of

saying, he detested nothing more than peace, order, bourgeois contentment. Mere bohemianism, disorganised rebellion have been discredited too often. Hegelianism presented its tragic and violent view of life beneath the guise of an eternal rational system, an objective

'science', with all the logical paraphernalia of reasoned judgement. First

to justify the need to submit to a brutal government and a stupid

bureaucracy in the name of eternal Reason, then to justify rebellion

with the selfsame arguments, was a paradoxical task that delighted

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Bakunin. In Moscow h e enjoyed his power o f turning peaceful

students into dervishes, ecstatic seekers after some aesthetic or metaphysical goal. In later life he applied these talents on a wider scale, and stirred some exceedingly unpromising human material-Swiss

watchmakers and German peasants-into unbelievable frenzies of

enthusiasm, which no one ever induced in them before or after.

During the period of which I am speaking, he concentrated these

sinister talents upon the relatively humble task of expounding Hegel's

Encydopedia, paragraph by paragraph, to his admiring friends. Among

these friends was another intimate of Stankevich, Nicholay Granovsky,

a gentle and high-minded historian who had studied in Germany and

there became a moderate Hegelian, and came back to lecture on

western medieval history in Moscow. Granovsky succeeded in making

his apparently remote subject into a means of inducing in his audiences

respect for the western tradition. He dwelt in particular on the

civilising effect of the Roman Church, of Roman law, and of the

institutions of feudalism, developing his theses in the fac-e of the

growing chauvinism-with its emphasis on the· Byzantine roots of

Russian culture-which was at this time encouraged by the Russian

Government as an antidote to the dangerous ideas of the west.

Granovsky combined erudition with a very balanced intellect, and

was not carried away by extravagant theories. Nevertheless he was

Hegelian enough to believe that the universe must have a pattern and

a goal; that this goal was slowly being approached, that humanity

was marching towards freedom, although the path was by no means

smooth or straight: obstacles occurred-relapses were frequent and

difficult to avert. Unless a sufficient number of human beings with

personal courage, strength, and a sense of dedication emerged, humanity

tended to subside into long nights of reaction, swamps from which it

extricated itself at terrible cost. Nevertheless, slowly and painfully,

but inexorably, humanity was moving towards an ideal state of

happiness, justice, truth, and beauty. Granovsky's lectures in Moscow

University in the early I 84os on the apparently recondite subject of

the late Merovingian and early Carolingian kings attracted a very

large and distinguished audience. These lectures were treated both by

the 'Westerners' and their nationalist Slavophil opponents as a quasipolitical demonstration of pro-western, liberal and rationalist sentiment: above all of faith in the transforming power of enlightened ideas, against mystical nationalism and ecclesiasticism.

I quote the example of Granovsky's famous lectures-passionately

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acclaimed by his friends, and attacked by the conservatives-as an

illustration of the peculiar disguises which in Russia (as to a lesser

extent in Germany) social and political liberalism had to adopt if it

was to find voice at all. The censorship was at once a heavy fetter

and a goad-it brought into being a peculiar brand of cryptorevolutionary writing, made more tortuous and more intense by repression, which in the end turned the whole of Russian literature

into what Henen described as 'one vast bill of indictment' against

Russian life.

The censor was the ofticial enemy, but unlike his modern successor,

he was almost wholly negative. The tsarist censorship imposed

silence but it did not directly tell professors what to teach; it did not

dictate to authors what to say and how to say it; and it did not command

composers to induce this or that mood in their audiences. It was

merely designed to prevent the expression of a certain number of

selected 'dangerous ideas'. It was an obstacle, at rimes a maddening

one. But because it was, like so much in old Russia, inefficient,

corrupt, indolent, often stupid, or deliberately lenient-and because

so many loopholes could always be found by the ingenious and the

desperate, not much that was subversive was stopped effectively. The

Russian writers who belonged to the radical intelligentsia did, after

all, publish their works, and published them, by and large, in an

almost undistorted form. The main effect of repression was to drive

social and political ideas into the relatively safe realm of literature.

This had already occurred in Germany, and it did so on a much

larger scale in Russia.

Yet it would be a mistake to exaggerate the role of the government

repression in compelling literature to become political in character.

The romantic movement was itself an equally potent factor in creating

'impure' literature, in filling it with ideological content. Turgenev

himself, the 'purest' of all the men of letters of his rime, and often

taken to task for this sin by censorious preachers like Dostoevsky or

the 'materialist' critics of the 6os, did, after all, at one time, contemplate an academic career-as a professor of philosophy. He was dissuaded from this; but his early Hegelian infatuation proved a lasting inftuence on his whole view of life. Hegel's teaching drove some to

revolution, others to reaction; in either case it emancipated its adherents

from the over-simplified classifications of men by the eighteenthcentury pamphleteers into the virtuous and the vicious, the benighted or the enlightened, of events into good and bad, and from the view

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of both men and things as intelligible and predictable i n terms o f clear,

mechanically conceived, causal chains. For Turgenev, on the contrary,

everything is compounded of characteristics in a perpetual process of

transformation, infinitely complex, morally and politically ambivalent,

blending into constantly changing combinations, explicable only in

terms of flexible and often impressionistic psychological and historical

concepts, which allow for the elaborate interplay of factors that are

too many and too fleeting to be reduced to scientific schemata or

laws. Turgenev's liberalism and moderation, for which he was so

much criticised, took the form of holding everything in solution-of

remaining outside the situation in a state of watchful and ironical

detachment, uncommitted, evenly balanced-an agnostic oscillating

contentedly between atheism and faith, belief in progress and scepticism, an observer in a state of cool, emotionally controlled doubt before a spectacle of life where nothing is quite what it seems, where

every quality is infected by its opposite, where paths are never straight,

never cross in geometrically regular patterns. For him (this is his

version of the Hegelian dialectic) reality for ever escapes all artificial

ideological nets, all rigid, dogmatic assumptions, defies all attempts

at codification, upsets all symmetrical moral or sociological systems,

and yields itself only to cautious, emotionally neutral, scrupulously

empirical attempts to describe it bit by bit, as it presents itself to the

curious eye of the morally disinterested observer. Herz.en, too, rejects

cut and dried systems and programmes: neither he nor Turgenev

accepted the positive Hegelian doctrines, the vast cosmological fantasy

-the historical theodicy which unhinged so many of their contemporaries. Both were profoundly affected by its negative aspect-the undermining of the uncritical faith in the new social sciences which

animated the optimistic thinkers of the previous century.

These were some of the more prominent and celebrated among

the avant-gardt young Russians of the late 30s and 40s-and there

were many members of this group whom there is not room to mention­

Katkov, who began as a philosopher and a radical and later became a

famous and influential reactionary journalist; the philosopher Redkin,

the essayist Korsh, and the translator Ketcher; the actor Shchepkin;

wealthy young dilettanti like Botkin, Panaev, Sazonov, Ogarev,

Galakhov, the great poet Nekrasov, and many lesser figures whose

lives are of interest only to literary or social historians. But over all

these towers the figure of the critic Vissarion Belinsky. His defects

both of education and taste were notorious; his appearance was

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unimpressive, his prose style left much to be desired. But he became

the moral and literary dictator of his generation. Those who came

under his influence remained affected by it long after his death ; and

whether for good or ill it transformed Russian writing-in particular

criticism-radically, and, it would seem, for ever.

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III

V I S S A R I O N B E LI N S KY

I N I 8 s6 I van Aksakov' one of two famous Slavophil brothers, who

had no sympathy for political radicalism, wrote an account of one of

his tours of the provincial centres of European Russia. The tour was

conceived by him as a kind of nationalist pilgrimage, intended at once

to draw comfort and inspiration from direct contact with the untouched

mass of the Russian people, and to warn those who needed warning

against the horrors of the west and the snares of western liberalism.

Aksakov was bitterly disappointed.

The name of Belinsky is known to every thinking young man [he

wrote], to everyone who is hungry for a breath of fresh air in the

reeking bog of provincial life. There is not a country schoolmaster

who does not know-and know by heart- Belinsky's letter to Gogo!.

If you want to find honest people, people who care about the poor

and the oppressed, an honest doctor, an honest lawyer not afraid of

a fight, you will find them among Belinsky's followers . . . Slavophil